Just For the Summer

Every July, the lucky owners of Cornish holiday homes set off for their annual break. They close up their desirable semis in smartish London suburbs – having turned off the Aga and turned on the burglar alarm – and look forward to a carefree, restful, somehow more
fulfilling
summer.

Clare is more than usually ready for her holiday. Her daughter, Miranda, is hitting adolescence big time, and her husband Jack is harbouring unsettling thoughts of a change in lifestyle. No wonder that Clare is contemplating a bit of extra-marital adventure, possibly with Eliot, the successful, heavy-drinking author in the adjoining holiday property.

Unexpected disasters occur, revelations are made and, as the summer ends, real life will never be quite the same again.

Contents

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

About the Author

Also by Judy Astley

Copyright

 

With much love to the

Townshend, Nicholls, Chilvers and Vyvyan families,
none of whom, I promise, are in this book.

And to Jon, Zelda and Layla,
who are in everything I do.

MIRANDA, AGE SIXTEEN
and never been more than kissed, was getting pregnant on the beach. It was what her step-father, an art lecturer, would have called a cross-cultural encounter. Her partner was a nineteen-year-old fisherman, son of her mother's cleaning lady, whereas Miranda was the middle-class daughter of affluent and liberal 1970's parents who enjoyed the guilt of owning two homes. If this couple on the beach had been completing application forms for a dating agency, all that could have been found that they had in common was their current and momentary lust.

Miranda was celebrating the end of her GCSEs. Somehow she felt she was adding to her list of life's qualifications; you didn't, at her school, go into the sixth form with your virginity. She had certificates for a wide range of achievements already, in common with others of her class, grade 5 piano, Senior Grade ballet,
gymkhana rosettes. She'd been collecting these tokens of tribal membership since the age of three, when joining the Penguin Club at Putney pool she had been given a badge for ducking her head under the water. Of course you didn't get a certificate for having sex, but Miranda felt she would be quite certain whether she'd passed or failed.

Doing it with Steve had been quite irresistible. A secretive person, Miranda was glad she hadn't chosen someone from the party circuit at home, someone who might discuss it with their friends, or worse still, expect her to do it again some time. She quite liked it, but then she quite liked maths. She certainly didn't expect to have to repeat her maths exam. This time next year, she thought, as she lay in the sand shielding her eyes from the sun. she would probably be taking her driving test.

While Miranda was crossing off another item on life's shopping list, Steve, a less calculating soul, was simply celebrating having an afternoon off on a hot day. Later, the two of them would sail away out beyond the harbour to collect his lobster pots and that night Miranda would confide to the diary she kept under the mattress and thought nobody read, that it had been the most romantic experience anyone, anywhere could have ever had, although not one to be devalued by repetition.

In a few weeks time when Miranda had learned that
familiarity breeds babies, and that yes, all those talks at school on contraception, AIDS and abortion did actually apply to her as well. she would think of both fishing trips and sex as messy, smelly pastimes best left to the grown-ups.

Miranda's mother Clare was also celebrating. In her tiny garden beside the creek in one of the most photographed villages in England, she dozed on a sun lounger beneath the pear tree, drinking her way through a jug of Pimms, the Wimbledon commentary murmuring on her radio. Although concerned at the depletion of the ozone layer, Clare remained unconvinced that milk-white thighs would ever be a hot fashion item in any summer and pulled off her dress, flinging it down in a careless heap on the grass. She pulled the straps of her swimsuit down as far as was decent and wished the cottage was not so overlooked, both from the opposite bank of the creek and from the nearby wooden footbridge.

Clare was celebrating all the things she didn't have to do: collect children from school; cook dinner; wear tights; listen to Jack complaining about another day of in-fighting among the polytechnic staff or telling her she was drinking too much. This three day break was supposed to enable Miranda to wind down after her exams. Clare needed to wind down too. She felt she'd just taken all nine subjects herself, and in a sense she
had. When Miranda had gone palely to school on exam days, Clare had willed her own brain along into the school hall with her. She had spent the days padding nervously round the house, doing routine, thought-freeing things like ironing and floor-washing so she could keep an eye on the clock and think, ‘Now she'll be just starting French/now she'll be halfway through/ just going into lunch.' Clare had lurked in the hallway when Miranda was due home, ready with something to eat, available to hear how dreadfully or brilliantly she felt she had done, accommodating herself to whatever mood Miranda had brought home with her.

‘Why don't you just let her get on with it herself?' Jack had asked petulantly as Clare had made laborious notes about the role of the nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
, and had sat up half the night trying to recall the technique for dealing with quadratic equations.

‘But I'm her mother!' Clare had retorted. ‘That's what I'm here for!' Jack had no reply to that one, for he was not Miranda's father. Clare-and-Miranda had come as a matched pair when he had met them, take one, take both. He had taken both, and loved both as far as he was allowed to. For Clare had, by the time Jack came along, already grown too accustomed to gazing down fondly at her sleeping toddler and thinking, ‘I'm all she's got.' Several years later, when Amy and Harriet were little. Clare would say to Jack. ‘Aren't they lucky? They've got each other,' which to Jack's relief and probably that of
the little girls, excused Clare from the intense intimacy she had invested in Miranda's upbringing and left them more free to muddle through in peace.

Clare, dozing in her garden, thought she was probably feeling very happy. She would quite have liked, as she had planned, to have taken Miranda to Newlyn to look at an exhibition, or have had her around to share the repainting of the kitchen, so they'd have time to talk to each other without the rest of the family scrabbling for attention.

But Miranda had taken to wandering off by herself and Clare tried hard to come to the conclusion that this small sign of Miranda's independence was a good thing. A nagging little witch at the back of her mind told her that she should get in the car and go by herself to the gallery, and that it didn't take two to choose a paint colour. Instead she tried to pretend that it didn't matter at all, was too hot to go anywhere, it was wonderful to have time to herself and that she wasn't really just sitting around waiting to be needed.

Clare closed her eyes and thought of Eliot. In a few weeks, when the school terms ended, he too would be here with his beautiful, vacant wife, his two sets of children and his dreadful dog. Clare would make sure that by then she would be tanned, fit from her twice weekly exercise class, and ready for him. She left Jack and her own children conveniently out of her fantasy. In daydreams no-one gets caught and no-one gets hurt.
In Clare's fantasy there was opportunity, best knickers, clean teeth and less fat around her thighs. Clare hadn't just taken up this daydream as an escapist hobby: there had been the necessary spark to kindle the fire. On one of the breezy Easter walks out on the headland, Clare and Eliot had taken a different path from the others, searching for his foul and wayward dog. They'd crashed through the ferns and trees back towards the path and quite without any signal of intent, Eliot had pushed her roughly against an oak tree and kissed her. The excitement of the unexpected. He'd tasted of whisky and Gauloises. Jack only kissed her when he tasted of toothpaste, never out in the open air, never in the car or in the street. Clare felt ravished and she loved it. And she was spending her spare fantasy-time waiting for it to happen again.

Down in the village Steve's mother Jeannie was cleaning a tidemark from someone else's bath. She went into the rented cottages on the tenants' changeover days to clear up and prepare for the next batch of clients. She had long since stopped being amazed by the mess they left. They seemed to think it was included in the rent, to leave the house as they'd never dream of leaving their own. In the kitchen, she briskly scoured away with a piece of steel wool, removing dried-on muesli from a dish, wondering to herself at the cack-handedness of those who, used to leaving a dishwasher to handle such stuff,
had stubbornly refused to become adept with a sink and a dishcloth. You'd imagine, she thought crossly, that all those who went on and on about how much more hygienic a dishwasher was, would take the trouble to chip out the bits of dried-on egg from between the fork prongs. They never dried their dishes either. but left towering piles of crockery which had to be gently disentangled like a large-scale breakable game of pick-up-sticks.

No-one left anything extraordinary behind either, a constant disappointment to Jeannie, who no longer expected to find interestingly feathered condoms under the beds, or exotic leather underwear along with abandoned laddered tights. Jeannie would come in and idly open the kitchen cupboards, taking out the half-empty packets of breakfast cereal, the jars of instant coffee and put them, the perks of the job, in her shopping trolley. Then she'd go out to the back yard (described as ‘sun-trap patio' in the brochure) and pluck a forgotten swimsuit from the washing line, to put with all the others for the autumn jumble. She never went short of washing-up liquid or tea bags during the summer. Jeannie's working tour of the cottages was often more fruitful and certainly cheaper than a trip to Tesco's.

Rented cottages were much easier to clean than those of Jeannie's other clients – second-homers such as Clare and Eliot's wife Liz, because they were only stocked with essentials, no personal or decorative extras. Those who
rented out their homes soon learned that one swish of a labrador's tail could knock a pretty basket of dried flowers to a heap of powdered fragments. Tapestry cushions could have their stitches unpicked by little fingers in less time than it takes to watch
Blue Peter
, and such items joined all the owner's personal stuff in the inevitable locked cupboard, from which, maddeningly, an inaccessible telephone would occasionally ring. The rented houses may be a bit spartan, Jeannie thought, but people would rent anything in this village, give them a bed and a view and a smell of the sea.

Jeannie didn't mind the trippers, they came for a week or two, spent a lot of money and were virtually the only real source of income to the village, now fishing was all a tangle of EEC regulations. Those she really loathed were the ones whose second homes were in the village, who thought it delightful as a place to visit, but so inconvenient and out of the way as a place to live, like some seaside leisure park. On these people, like Eliot and Liz, and like Clare and Jack, Jeannie placed the full responsibility for the closing of the school, the dreary emptiness of the village in winter and the outrageously high price of property, so far beyond the reach of the locals.

Jeannie folded her apron and her big yellow duster and packed them away among the booty in her shopping trolley. She pulled the front door of the cottage shut behind her and put the key under the flower pot ready for the next clients, due to arrive some time after 3.30
p.m. that afternoon. Out across the harbour she could see Steve's little boat scudding across the water to the lobster pots, Miranda's lemon hair streaming out in the wind like blonde seaweed. Jeannie didn't approve. It'll all end in tears, she thought pessimistically, and I don't suppose for one minute they'll be little Miss Miranda's either.

The village had already prepared for the summer, but Clare, used to school holiday bustle, thought she'd arrived out of season.

‘There's nobody here,' she had complained to Jack on the phone, the night she and Miranda had arrived. But the next morning, strolling round the village she could see that it had, like a fete, already been opened and everything was set out and waiting for customers. The hanging baskets were up outside the post office and bakery, the sailing club had a freshly-painted tariff of (increased) mooring fees, and there were barrels of budding geraniums getting in the way of the cars outside the Mariners pub. Old people, young couples and families with small babies had been coming and going for their low-season breaks, avoiding the school holidays. Only the houses of the second-homers were still empty, and as Clare's friends were all among those people she noted only their absence, not the presence of anyone else.