In the Summertime (3 page)

The old mix of thatched cottages and slate-roofed houses was the same (give or take the odd extension, and some fancy new windows) but every so often there’d be something different that jarred. The old red phonebox across the creek from ‘their’ cottage was still there but there was no phone in it now. Someone had put a metre-high garden gnome inside it and its fat plaster face grinned out at passers-by, looking a bit evil. The one village shop had been updated and extended and the old racks of postcards that used to hang by the door and the tatty plastic bins crammed with cheap beach mats had been replaced by chic wooden crates of vegetables. A promise that these were both local and organic was chalked up on a slate. A glance through the door showed more chalked signs offering home-baked bread, local cheese and a top selection of wines. Miranda wondered what had become of the previous stock. Had anyone actually bought up the old never-changing display of tinned mince and evaporated milk? Or maybe they were still there, defiantly surviving among the bantam eggs and balsamic vinegar. She’d find out in the morning.

‘Do you remember Harriet organizing a mass shoplifting?’ Clare asked as they passed. ‘They were banned from the shop for the rest of the summer. We were mortified.’ A small smile was on Clare’s
face and Miranda’s spirits lifted a bit at the sight of it.

‘For Amy’s birthday party, yes. No one was allowed to buy presents, Harriet ordered all her guests to steal them, as a sort of dare.’

‘They were such silly little things, doing just as Harriet said. You’d think they’d just get their mums to buy things and then pretend, wouldn’t you? The parents of the village ones wouldn’t speak to us after that. It’s one reason Jack and I decided to sell up. The second-homers were always despised as outsiders as it was, without being extra hated for corrupting the village infants. It wouldn’t be something the locals would forget in a hurry.’

Miranda laughed. ‘Harriet wasn’t to be messed with. Even at eight.’ She wasn’t now, either. What Harriet wanted, she got. Right now she wanted
not
to be involved with her mother’s grief or with her father’s final send-off and had refused to come down to Cornwall even for a weekend. ‘Jeez, Manda, we’ve had the friggin’ funeral. It’s over; why drag it out?’ All heart, that girl.

Not much had changed outside the Mariners pub either. The hanging baskets and the half-barrels by the door still had the same eye-watering colour mixes of orange geraniums and purple petunias with a few pink and white hanging fuchsias thrown in. The wooden picnic tables were still lined up along the creek edge and holidaying family groups were out early, bagging tables
in the fading sun and trying to round up children to choose from the chalked-up menu before they ran off down the slipway to the water’s edge to catch little crabs. Here and there, moody teenagers sat sullenly with their parents, picking lichen off the benches and glaring at soft drinks, desperate to be with someone they could actually talk to but too shy to make eye contact.

‘What are those kids
doing
with the crabs?’ Silva asked, staring at three little boys bending over the tiny creatures they had tipped out of plastic buckets on to the slipway.

‘Racing them,’ Miranda told her. ‘We used to do that too. Harriet always seemed to get the biggest, fastest ones. I had to help Amy find some that could beat her.’

‘Yuck. That’s like well gross? They’ve been in like,
mud
?’ Silva said as they chose a table near the water’s edge and sat down. But Miranda could see she was looking at the smaller children with something more than curiosity. A little bit of envy, possibly? She was willing to bet that as soon as they’d eaten, Silva would be down on the slipway, up to her knees in the water with the younger ones. Miranda had felt the same at her age, caught between being too old to play like a child and a longing still to be one. Her sisters were much younger than her, so she’d taken on a bit of a nanny role at times, like the crab-fishing or the sand-castle building, and been able to enjoy it without feeling nervous she’d be sneered at by passing groups of cool girls.

‘You see?’ Clare said to Miranda, following Silva’s gaze. ‘You should have taken them on English seaside holidays as we did with you. They’ve missed out.’

‘How can you say they’ve missed out? They’ve been all over France and Italy and to Florida and … well, loads of places.’ Miranda felt annoyed. ‘And don’t you remember the endless rain? That Cornish thing … what’s the word?’

‘Mizzle; rain so fine you hardly know it’s there,’ Clare supplied. ‘It was all part of the charm. We’d simply put the waterproofs on and go for a walk; use a bit of initiative. Anyway, it wasn’t always wet. Remember that last summer we were here? It was blazing. And it’s pretty fabulous now, isn’t it? We’re going to get a wonderful sunset.’ She put her face up to the soft, late rays of the sun and looked, Miranda thought, the most content she had since, ten months before, Jack had first become properly ill.

‘Food!’ Bo’s voice boomed out from beneath the eternal hoodie. ‘Have we ordered? Can I have the T-bone steak?’

‘You can. Mum and Silva, have you decided?’ She glanced at the menu that was hung on the outside of the pub, behind them.

‘The lemon chicken thing for me, please,’ Silva said.

‘Great. OK, I’ll go and put the order in. And drinks? A bottle of red for us, Mum?’

‘A bottle? But there’s only the two of us.’

Miranda had an urge to say, ‘Yes, and …?’ She could do with more than one glass, that was for sure. ‘Tell you what, I’ll order a bottle and we can take what’s left back to the house with us. OK?’

‘If you like. I’d like the lamb kebab, please, Miranda.’ Clare was sounding defeated again. This was hard work.

The inside of the pub was dark by comparison with the brightness of the evening sun reflected from the glinting water. As her eyes adjusted and she gradually focused properly, Miranda looked around at the customers by the bar, wondering if she would recognize anyone. It was quite crowded, mostly with bemused-looking holidaymakers trying to make sense of the food-ordering system and getting small, tired children to choose something more than just chips. Over in the far corner a bunch of hefty-looking sailing types, men and women with Henri Lloyd jackets and voices that were used to making themselves heard from stem to stern, laughed and yelled to each other. She couldn’t see anyone who looked even remotely familiar, but then twenty years on everyone would have changed so much. Some of the older villagers would surely be dead, others bald, aged, grey, run to fat or run away from the place altogether. What, she wondered, had happened to Steve’s mother Jeannie, who used to be the cleaner at Creek Cottage? She’d been Liz and Eliot’s cleaner too and Clare had been grumpy about this and furious that Liz undermined the balance of the local economy by
paying her at London rates, though, Miranda considered now, why wouldn’t she? It was a competitive market, and finding someone you could trust with a key during your long absences wasn’t easy. She remembered there used to be stories (exchanged in horrified whispers) of cleaners who’d run a secret little rental scam using the owners’ properties without their knowledge. Celia once told Clare that a woman in the village had turned up from London unexpectedly and found a couple cooking supper in her kitchen and the washing machine on. All the grown-ups had seemed so
old
to Miranda back then, but the chances were that that had simply been the typical view from any self-obsessed sixteen-year-old and Jeannie could well still be energetically cleaning holiday cottages on changeover days and stashing all those abandoned half-bottles of shower gel, washing-up liquid and gin into her old shopping bag like so much well-earned swag.

Miranda ordered the food, drinks for the children and a bottle of Australian Merlot from the barman, handed over her credit card for later payment and headed back to the terrace, still thinking about that long-ago summer and almost knocking into a man and woman in the doorway, on their way in.

‘Sorry!’ she called as she passed.

‘Bloody trippers,’ she heard the woman mutter. Miranda turned briefly to look at her, shocked by the rudeness. The back of the girl, all long lemony hair, a
short denim skirt and tanned bare legs, vanished into the pub and the man, flicking his car key to lock a convertible Mercedes in the car park, gave Miranda a brief apologetic grin before quickly following his companion into the bar. Miranda took a deep and rather shaky breath and went back down the steps to rejoin her family on the terrace. She hoped this wasn’t going to happen every time she came across local strangers in this village: this unsettling certainty – as she’d had with the woman at Creek Cottage – that she’d known them before. Especially this one.

Andrew knew it had been too much to hope for, that he’d get to go to his parents’ cottage on his own with Freddie. Geraldine had said it would be all right, or at least he’d thought she had. You could never quite tell with Geraldine. What she’d actually said was yes, of course he could take Freddie to Cornwall. She’d also added, in her full-strength headmistress voice, that in fact it was about time, wasn’t it, and why had he waited till now, when Archie and Celia were about to sell it? So he hadn’t been wrong to think that had been a definite yes, and in spite of wanting to argue that he’d been asking to take Freddie there for the past four years but she’d insisted they all do the Mark Warner holidays and Center Parcs instead, he’d been happy and excited at the prospect of showing off to his son the village that had been part of his young life. And yet now, instead of being back in Esher tidying up her garden to within a
centimetre of its terrified life, Geraldine was in the car with them, barking instructions about which route to take and how many miles it was till Truro. She knew quite well how many years his folks had had this cottage and that he knew the way. She’d never even crossed the Tamar in her life and couldn’t tell Bodmin Moor from Dartmoor. He’d told her he could drive it blindfold and that, of course, had been a mistake.

‘You see, that’s why I can’t possibly let Freddie go with you unaccompanied,’ she’d snapped. ‘Not when you say things like that. You have a reckless streak.’

Andrew did
not
have a reckless streak. Anything but. He was caution personified. Everything he’d done in his grown-up life had been with careful thought and a considered weighing up of pros, cons and consequences. Except for one time: that colleague’s wedding nearly sixteen years ago when after the toasts he’d gone looking for the gents and somehow ended up in the bride’s sister’s room having tumultuous, glorious sex on a pink chaise longue with the woman he’d been seated next to at the lunch and whose cleavage he’d been so longing to put his tongue into that he’d found himself dribbling champagne down his chin as he’d absent-mindedly licked at the glass on its way to his lips. Oh, those fleshy, plump mounds that so lived up to what the low-cut frock had promised. The almost shockingly oversized nipples. The fist-deep rolls of lustrous softness around her capacious hips. And then, a few months later came
the sudden call with the revelation of pregnancy and an order that Andrew (plus substantial maintenance) was to be part of the child’s life but only on her, Geraldine’s, terms. Andrew, for Freddie’s first years, had felt like those old-school aristocratic parents who are only shown their children for an hour of supervised stilted conversation over formal tea each day. Geraldine would invite him to her little house in Esher and allow him to bring a new toy (
not
plastic) and play with and read to Freddie who, Andrew was thrilled to find, really took to his part-time dad and seemed keen to love him in spite of Geraldine’s strictures.

As he drove very carefully down the steep narrow lane into the village, Andrew had a flashback to his teenage years when he’d so longed to seduce pretty, smiley Jessica. Her family had sold up long ago, sadly. But as he pulled up outside Rose Quay’s garage, he was appalled to realize that his body was also remembering his crush on her and that old familiar excitement was making itself very much felt. He waited for a few moments, hoping things would subside. He didn’t want Geraldine to notice – and she
would
notice, as nothing got past her – and get ideas. Absolutely not.

Miranda thought about her ex-husband as she tidied her bedroom the next morning and hung up the last of the clothes she’d brought with her. Even ten years after they’d split up, she sometimes thought about how
living with him had been, mostly to remind herself that, in spite of how hard it had been to raise the children on her own at the same time as working to establish her design business, she’d taken the right path. If Dan were here now, he’d be lolling in bed flicking through the TV channels, at the same time diddling about on his iPad and asking in the ickle-baby voice – which he wrongly thought she’d ever found cute – if any coffee was on the go. His clothes from the night before would be in a heap on the floor where most of them would stay, added to the next night and the next till she could stand it no longer and reminded him where the laundry basket was. That would trigger him to accuse her of being an old nag. What he really meant was that dealing with his dirty clothes was
her
job, just as it had been his doting mother’s and, at his hugely smart boarding school, presumably Matron’s. Poor Dan – it had been hard for him, slowly realizing during the time they lived together that slobbing about like someone too used to being pampered and waited on while she ran an increasingly demanding business and raised two small children was not an acceptable option for a grown-up. But it was no longer her problem. He’d gone back to his fond mama, who was thrilled to be proved so right: a woman who thought a man should be capable of a bit of basic housework could not be considered proper wife material. The clues had been there right from the first time Dan had taken her to meet his family. His mother
had taken Miranda into her utility room and demonstrated the proper way to iron a shirt. Miranda had watched and smiled politely then said thanks but she didn’t actually possess an iron. That would be why there’d been three among the wedding presents. Dan would have gone to work this very morning wearing a shirt his mother had meticulously pressed for him and socks that she had lovingly paired up before she put them in his drawer. If he ever found another woman to live with it would be over his mum’s dead body, and even then it would have to be one who’d never heard of equal rights.