Hens Dancing (11 page)

Felix gazes at the larder wall.

‘We should bother. We need jam,' he says firmly. Increasingly, Felix is taking over the running of the household. Am not quite sure who his role model is, but am determined that he shall be mine.

The strawberry field is empty of pickers but full of flamboyant scarecrows. The farmer is a big fan of
B-movies, and every strawberry season he adorns his field with mannequins in nylon bikinis and skimpy dresses from charity shops. Giles runs ahead, but stops short at the entrance.

‘Look, Mum,' he yells, ‘they've hung one.' The gate is guarded by a mannequin dangling on a rope from a vast oak tree, this one clad more in the style of a Brueghel peasant than Raquel Welch.

‘I like the wedding one, she must have kept the birds away. I'm going to pick near her.' Giles grabs a punnet and makes his way towards the centre of the field where a fabulous blonde is positioned, with a vast confection of transparent polythene on her head and trailing down her back. Despite her green bikini, there is no question that she is a bride, and I make a mental note to tell the handbag gang to come down and photograph their wedding collection here instead of in my bathroom. Ten pounds of strawberries later we are home, and to my relief the recipe book says, ‘Leave to steep in sugar for twenty-four hours.'

Miles the photographer is on a ladder outside the bathroom window, looking in at The Beauty in the bath with a handful of chicks he has scooped out of their run. There is no handbag visible in this shot, and when I mention this oversight, Miles rolls his eyes and says kindly, ‘The product has a voice, you know, it kind of speaks through this sort of set-up.'

What a nonce, as Giles would say.

July 22nd

Jam-making commences at dawn. Utterly forgot the steeping strawberries yesterday, so have committed cardinal sin of leaving them lying around for two days. Kitchen quickly begins to resemble Willie Wonka's factory, with bubbling pink mess on the Aga and ruby droplets on small saucers and indeed the floor. Felix is not helping. He is lying in bed reading the
Beano
and is no longer my role model. Am scraping old labels off jars with my fingernails and listening to a practical pig-keeping report on
Farming Today,
when there is an ominous gushing sound followed by billowing black smoke. The Aga hotplate vanishes beneath a black mass, like sticky volcano lava, as more and more syrupy jam froths out of the pan.

‘Bastard, bloody, sodding jam. God, I hate the Aga. Why is this happening? What do I do?' Wailing and weeping self-pitying tears, I wage war on my strawberry jam.

July 23rd

Ten jars, and it has set, and is delicious. Aga still thick with incinerated jam. David arrives for house-sitting instructions and is clearly impressed. Felix is not: ‘Last
year's was better,' he insists at teatime. No time to argue though, I must pack for the longed-for holiday.

July 25th

Have arrived in Cornwall after gruelling two-day journey in the car, including sleepless night at Welcome Break hotel on the M4. My mother, who refuses to sit in the front, has kept her eyes shut almost all the way and has been no help at all, so Giles has assumed role of navigator. Hurtle down the final winding roads, shoving the car into the bank as vast Jeeps and Mercedes cruise towards us full of families returning sandy and sun-kissed from the beach. Every village and indeed every house is called Tre-something, which confounds Giles, and we sweep up a rough track and arrive at Trefogey, a low white cottage in which a family of total strangers are having tea.

‘No, Mummy, ours is called Trepanning, and the village is Tredition,' hisses Giles, ducking his face low as the family, all wearing pink polo shirts, converge by our car and stare at us with mild contempt.

‘Sorry, you're the wrong people,' I shout out of my window, in what I hope is a hearty and jolly fashion, and we spin back down the track, a cloud of dust billowing in our wake.

Tredition is enchanting. A clutch of cottages clings to three criss-crossing lanes which plunge down to the cliffs between meadows and tiny golden cornfields. Where the lanes meet there is a village green with a mini shop on the corner, and a squat church whose delicate spire pierces the sky. Trepanning is at the end of a terrace with roses straggling up the walls and evening primrose nodding yellow beneath blue window frames. Lila has already arrived, and is standing on a chair in the garden fiddling with her mobile telephone.

‘It doesn't work here, and Angelo was meant to ring to tell me his train times.' Heart sinks: Angelo is Lila's seventeen-year-old nephew by marriage, spoilt and disagreeable no doubt, like her children. My mother manages to extract The Beauty from her car seat where she has been embedded in biscuit crumbs, segments of orange and smeared raisins. We stand around for a few minutes while Lila teeters on the chair, waving her telephone above her head.

Felix and Giles rush round from the other side of the house.

‘Can we go surfing after tea? Is the tide right? Can we buy some T-shirts at the beach and an ice cream afterwards?'

The tide is right, and I am amazed that they can remember the routine, as our last Cornish holiday was three years ago, with Charles at his most sergeant
major-ish due to having invited his business partner, Henry Loden, and family to come with us.

My mother is worn to a shred by back-seat driving and elects to Beauty-sit. Leaving her in charge of a bumper bottle of gin and a few miniature tonics, we all squeeze into Lila's red convertible VW Beetle and roar up the road to Treboden and the beach.

Lose my head utterly in the surfing shop and find that I have purchased wetsuits for both the boys and am unable to resist a miniature one for The Beauty. ‘It's all right, they're second-hand,' I whisper over and over to myself. Usual nasty moment behind the curtain in the hire hut, when I am convinced that I no longer fit into the size M wetsuit. Struggle to pull wet, sandy neoprene over thighs, while out of the corner of eye observe Lila sliding into a red short-legged version, which is dry and therefore much easier to get on. Final test is to thrust arms in and heave ever-tightening suit over shoulders. This is like peeling a banana in reverse. It is on, and, as always, have sudden conviction that I am a
Baywatch
star and have perfect figure and posture.

Felix and Giles are hopping excitedly on the steps to the beach, and I follow them down. We break into a perfect beach-bum canter as we hit the sand, dodging between every size and shape of wet-suited surfer to head for the surf. Can never get over how well neoprene suits everyone. Portly gentlemen in their sixties, liquorice-stick-limbed
children and pear-shaped mummies are all glorious, fit and healthy: perfect cereal-packet people. In the sea, seal-like bodies are everywhere, rising gleaming wet and black on waves and tumbling from bright boards into the spray.

Immediately lose sight of children who hurl themselves onto waves and come riding in effortlessly every time, black shiny exclamation marks, perfectly upright on their boards. Flat on my own boogie board, in the beginners' area, I dither, hoping to catch the elusive big wave, but unsure how to. My face is full of sea; inhale it, trying not to think about number of people who have entered the water and found that they needed a pee. Perfect crested sea horse approaches; leap onto it and forget sanitation worries in a flash.

July 27th

The cottage has become little more than dormitory and wardrobe. Cushions pieced together like a jigsaw form Felix's bed in the sitting room, and Giles occupies the sofa. Diptych has been relegated to a small cot mattress and a few pillows under the window. Upstairs, Angelo sleeps in the top bunk of a room no bigger than a paper hanky, and Calypso and seven Barbies are in the bottom
one. My mother and Lila have a twin-bed room, and The Beauty and I have the dubious pleasure of sleeping in a double bed together. Every inch of space not occupied by bedding is covered with clothes, and these garments are all sprinkled with sand and are mainly damp. There is nowhere to dry anything, as it has rained almost ceaselessly. The wetsuits have not been dry since we obtained them, and the path from the cars to the back door is strewn with every size of suit, thrown on the ground and left like deflated rubber dolls in a heap next to ice-lolly pink, blue and green slabs of surfboard.

Angelo has increased our street cred in Tredition no end, and a stream of long-limbed youths and exquisite girls with silver trainers and braids in their hair make their way to Trepanning each day to sit in the garden and smoke with him. His arrival, twenty-four hours later than expected, was greeted with shrill relief from Lila. ‘Oh, Angelo, thank God you're here, I was dreading telephoning your mother to find you.' Angelo, king of cool in big-pocketed flapping trousers, shades and a camouflage Michelin-man jacket, was aghast.

‘Never telephone my mother, she is the last person to know where I am. I have been down at the campsite with some friends.'

It transpires that Angelo has spent several holidays in this part of Cornwall, can surf standing up and has a large retinue of followers. He is indeed the King of Cool,
and Giles and Felix are delighted to have him in the house. He treats me and Lila with the usual amused contempt that teenagers save for adults, but is so respectful to my mother that I begin to think he has confused her with a Mafia leader or a member of the royal family. My mother loves him. They even share nail polish. Angelo is very taken by my mother's poison-green, and in exchange offers her Party Time dark purple for her toes. My mother is blessed with an invitation to the Ploughman pub for local groovers. Am jealous and at the same time relieved not to be asked; too demoralising to be crushed by throng of lithe and lovely young, when all my clothes are crumpled and have something wrong with them, nose has somehow become sunburnt despite weather, and one shoe is missing after today's surfing.

July 28th

Weather gloomy, but we are not put off trip to rocky beach with magical green pools. Angelo leads the way, carrying The Beauty on his shoulders and followed by his friend Lowdown whom we found on the sofa next to Giles this morning, and who has not yet removed his wraparound sunglasses. Path to perfect beach meanders through wild flowers, about which flutter butterflies as
small and vivid as confetti. My mother and I are beasts of burden behind Lila, who has managed not to carry any of the picnic, but is skipping ahead with the young, pausing to pat cows and sniff at flowers. Drag the wicker basket over a final mound, vowing in future to forfeit style in favour of comfort. Picnics shall come in plastic bags from now on.

Arms of rock reach out from either side of beach, embracing waves rolling and thundering in. Sun makes grand entrance and beams hotly, and The Beauty dons her exotic red bathing suit and yellow floral hat and sits happily in a rock pool, picking seaweed and catching transparent shrimps. My mother and I spread rugs, after much shuffling around the beach looking for the best spot, and lay food out. Rags hears the rustle of tin foil on sandwiches and bounces over, briny, sandy and wet from the sea. She puts her paw in a treacle tart and is hurled away back into the sea, but not before she has shaken herself briskly and wetly over the pile of towels. Egor is exemplary by contrast, his fear of the sea ensuring that he does not move from the boulder behind my mother.

‘Why did we bring that little beast?' howls Lila, emerging from the sea. ‘You should be able to control her, Venetia.' Am about to apologise, when Calypso, who has taken against The Beauty because she wants to be the youngest, runs up to her and jumps deliberately in the rock pool, startling The Beauty who is in a trance of
pleasure making sand pies, and causing her to bellow.

‘And you should be able to control your children,' I snarl back. This is the wrong thing to say. Lila sniffs and pulls herself up very tall.

‘Come, Calypso,' she says with magnificent hauteur, ‘come, Diptych, we shall find a more peaceful picnic spot for ourselves.'

Diptych is furious. ‘No way, Mum, Giles and I are going to look for the conger eel; we've got fish fingers for it. Anyway, I hate those bean curd sandwiches you make us eat. I'm having a pasty.'

Lila stamps her foot and flares her nostrils like a small bull preparing to charge. My mother leaps up to create a diversion, clearly not having thought of what to say, but doing the haughty bit with great élan.

‘Lila, Venetia, that will do!' She pauses and glares at us both. ‘Now why don't we all go and look for the conger eel?'

The kindergarten approach is successful. When Calypso grabs The Beauty's cup and swigs her juice, her black eyes fixed defiantly on my face, I am able to rise above it with my own version of magnificent hauteur.

‘Venetia, stop looking like a lemon,' whispers my mother, back on her rug, with no intention of looking for conger eels, and preparing to read the newspaper in the sun with the help of a pair of dark green plastic lenses attached lopsidedly to the front of her specs. Affect
deafness and move away to seek out the children, clambering over steep, sleek rocks, shiny with sea spray, with The Beauty clinging like a marmoset to my shoulder. We find the boys perched like statues on individual ledges protruding from a deep, still pool, gazing at the water in silence. Felix has a packet of fish fingers on his rock, and, breaking one, he lowers a large lump into the water. We continue to stare at shadows, and after a while become bored. Just as I am about to return to the picnic spot, Felix gasps and points. At the back of the pool, where shadows meet cavernous rock behind, a streak of lapis blue flashes. The fish finger vanishes, there is a confusion of teeth and jaws and a vast eel glides away, as unstoppable and smooth as an express train, back to his cave.

‘Cool,' whispers Giles with enormous satisfaction.

‘Yesssss,' yells Felix, leaping up and stabbing the air as if he has scored a winning goal. Diptych grabs the fish-finger packet and tosses the rest into the pool, and waits again, his camera poised for the return of Jaws.