Just For the Summer (2 page)

While Miranda spent her few days drifting off into the village, Clare tidied her garden. She weeded out
the casualties of neglect, the arum lilies that had given up the struggle to survive without help, the magnolia stellata that had been smothered by an enthusiastic hebe. Shamed by the perfection of Archie and Celia's garden next door, Clare rushed to the local nursery and filled her car boot with instant garden: nicotianas on the point of flowering; large and expensive clumps of dianthus; a pair of huge daisy bushes for each side of the door. She rushed back and arranged her garden like a stage set, an artfully casual mix of flowers, all of which she hoped would last long enough for the extravagance to be justified. It was very satisfying to have found the plants she needed at the village nursery. She liked to take part, show willing and fit in with village life. She supported the village shop, in spite of the expense and went to all available bazaars and coffee mornings to do her bit towards the church roof. All the second-homers were tolerated by the locals for their cash input and were allowed to win occasional prizes for crafts and flower arranging at the village fete, though not of course for their cakes or runner beans. They took part in the regatta in exchange for the exorbitant mooring fees they were charged down at the boatyard. They even, like Eliot Lynch, had been allowed to attend a few Parish Council meetings, just to make sure that the place was being kept up to standard. The locals were rightly sceptical of this fervour for village participation. It went straight back to London at the start of each
school term. Their own part in this was to service this up market holiday camp until the summer ended. Then the local population held its own celebrations, their own thanksgiving rituals with a proper garden produce show, a harvest festival, and of course the counting of the money.

CLARE AND MIRANDA,
their break over, returned to London to wait for the end of term. There were just a few weeks left before the annual family exodus to Cornwall, and Clare used this time wisely.

She inspected her hair for signs of grey, and, to be on the safe side, coloured it a gentle auburn. She inspected the flab on her upper arms and told herself it looked better now the sun had softened its lardy pallor. She toured the sales and bought softly blowsy frocks in rich jewel colours, and long loose skirts generously gathered so she could feel her body moving comfortably beneath the folds. Excited by the anticipation of seeing Eliot again, Clare behaved fondly with her family, attending speechdays and sportsdays without her usual reluctance. Jack was relieved: he still had weeks of work ahead and Clare wasn't usually so eager to take on the packing, sorting and preparing that this annual pilgrimage
entailed. It gave him a small glimmer of hope for a plan that had recently been forming quietly in his head, that one day, soon he hoped, the packing, sorting and preparing would be for a permanent move out of London.

The school holidays started and the journeys were beginning. The suburbs emptied, milk was cancelled. Neighbours were feeding each other's pets and forgetting already to water the plants. Videos had been disconnected so that burglars would not be invited in by the little green light (winking in the night like the green light at the end of Daisy's dock in
The Great Gatsby
). Dishwashers had been propped open to discourage smells, only to be shut firmly by cleaning ladies who took a professional pride in achieving a symmetrical line of kitchen units, never mind the pong by September. Agas were turned out, and by the end of August heating engineers would be earning overtime fitting in extra calls to those of the helpless middle-classes who had trouble with the annual relighting ceremony. In many a car, halfway to Exeter, people would be questioning ‘Did you remember to lock the conservatory door?' Clare, Miranda, and the two smaller children, Amy and Harriet, sped past the fields of poppies and ox-eye daisies. Clare felt a tiny pang of regret that she would be missing the best of her lilies. By September only a few straggly nicotianas, irritatingly pink when they were supposed
to have come up a tasteful if invisible lime green, and persistent geraniums, would be left. But she smiled quietly at the thought of her creekside bower, waiting with its heady fragrance to enhance whatever scene of summer romance was in store for her.

‘What are you grinning at?' Miranda interrupted CIare's thoughts abruptly.

‘Nothing much,' Clare replied, smiling more broadly at such an inappropriate description of the substantial bulk of Eliot.

‘You look like you've got a secret,' Miranda said, turning in her seat to inspect her mother's pinkening face. Clare did some concentrated fiddling with the Volvo's dashboard controls and tried to control her blatant exhilaration. There were some things you couldn't discuss with your daughter, which seemed rather an unfair bargain, when Clare had spent so many careful years making sure that Miranda never felt there was anything she couldn't discuss with her mother. And it wasn't that she didn't love Jack, it was just that it was difficult to feel a constant sexual thrill for someone whose idea of foreplay, lately, had been to switch off the TV. Thankfully, Clare became distracted by manoeuvreing the car into the crowded car park of a Little Chef.

‘Time for a break,' she announced to her daughters. In the car parks of Little Chefs all down the A303, estate car tailgates were raised and left open to allow a breath of
air to the drugged and basketed family cats. Dogs were walked briskly up and down the grass verges, while their owners looked round guiltily, hoping that this counted enough as open country not to have to scoop the poop. Clare herded her children into the cafe and waited in line for a table to become available.

‘Smoking or non-smoking?' a harrassed waitress said.

‘Non-smoking please,' Clare told her, watching Miranda's face as it turned an ominous grey-green.

‘Can't stand the smell, sorry.' Miranda bolted for the exit and through the window Clare could see her leaning against the doorpost taking great gulps of fume-laden air in the car park.

Amy tugged at Clare's sleeve. ‘Is Miranda going to be sick?' she asked loudly.

‘Probably,' Harriet two years older and therefore at nine the voice of authority, said. ‘Probably all over the step and then no-one else will want to come in.' Clare dithered, wondering if she should go to Miranda, but afraid of losing her place in the queue. It wasn't like Miranda to get car-sick. In fact it hadn't happened since the time Clare had let her eat oysters when she was three.

‘I expect she'll come back in when she feels better,' Clare said vaguely, making her way, at last to a vacant table.

All around her, families ate cholesterol-filled fry ups. Clare could hear them ordering ‘an American style breakfast please' in too-loud, clipped voices as if
speaking in a foreign language, and then braying to their embarrassed children, ‘Isn't this a treat, darling?' to show how rare it was for them to be in such a place eating such a thing. It was part of the celebration of getting away from things at home, especially all that careful muesli. Clare looked through the menu and listened to the din around her, reminded that Jack had once commented in similar circumstances, ‘No wonder so many people die on holiday.'

Clare's Cornwall neighbours, Archie and Celia Osbourne were also on the A303, along with their son Andrew. They were proud that they never had to resort to renting out their cottage, so much would have been spoilt. There were two bedrooms, thatch, an immaculate creekside garden and an inadequate bathroom. Celia had filled the little house with embroidered cushions, pressed-flower pictures and family photos in silver frames. She and Archie visited often, towing their sailing dinghy behind the Rover like some faithful old hound on a lead. They spent most of the summer sailing sedately up the river and back, visiting favourite little quays and coves where they could tie up the boat and sit in the sun reading detective novels.

Celia used to tell the villagers, ‘Of course we'd live here all the time if it wasn't for the boy.' But that wasn't really true, for the boy had been at boarding school for several years and it didn't really matter at all where they
lived. Surrey was so much more convenient. Celia could travel up to town on a train later than the ones used by commuters and quite cheaply too with an off-peak Saver. She could tour Liberty's and the National Gallery and still be home in plenty of time to arrange supper. Quite soon she could look forward to qualifying for a senior citizen‘s railcard.

If everyone has an age to which they feel they are more suited than to any other, Celia's had to be the graceful latter end of life. From too young, she felt, she had been a person who liked bridge, golf and gardens and occasions which needed rather formal hats. She felt she would make an excellent Old Lady. She only wished the Goverment provided a senior citizens' Lunch-at-Harvey-Nichols card to perfect her days out.

In Cornwall Celia did not like to be considered ‘just a weekender'. She thought that sounded rather vulgar. She felt that she and Archie, with their membership of both golf and sailing clubs, qualified for slightly higher status than say, their neighbours Jack and Clare who only visited the village in school holiday time.

Celia was sure that Andrew was more than happy on his own while his parents went off sailing. He had been an unexpected child of their late middle age, having been born long after they'd become accustomed to filling their lives with shared interests. It was a relief now not to have to find ways of entertaining him, as they had dutifully done when he was small, with all
those games of Junior Scrabble, and helping him glue together model aircraft, taking him to museums and on holiday finding him suitable companions on the beach. They thought boarding school only sensible for an only child, and besides Celia had felt dreadfully out of place waiting at the local infant school gate with all the glossy young mothers. People kept asking her if she was Andrew's granny.

In the back of the Rover Andrew was thinking about the possibility of a sexual encounter in the village this summer. He knew he looked better than last year, the braces were off his teeth and he'd got contact lenses, though they still hurt a bit sometimes especially when the wind blew the dust in. He'd grown too, and not just in height, he was broader, less scraggy. When he looked in the bathroom mirror and practised what to do with his hair, he thought he didn't look too bad, a bit school-boyish perhaps, but then some women were supposed to like that, particularly older ones, he'd heard.

Andrew's summer fantasy woman was equipped with page three breasts and legs that went right up to here and she would do all those unspeakable things to him that he read about secretly in the
Penthouse
letters page, which he kept under his mattress at school. Andrew posted some Mozart into his Walkman and dreamed away the hours on the comfortable back seat of the Rover. Perhaps this year Jessica Lynch would have turned into a creature of sensual allure, pouting lips and
rose-pink nipples to which clung a damp translucent tee-shirt. A golden-hearted whore at sixteen. Andrew's fantasies whiled away the time and as the car pulled up at the cottage, he had to fight down his usual enemy, an ever-rising penis, which he knew would have to be dealt with before he could do any serious unpacking.

Andrew hauled a couple of cases up to his room and set about the urgent unpacking of his essential equipment. He cleared his desk surface and thought about what could be left lying around and what would be best locked away in his special box in the wardrobe. He had a notebook, personal stereo and a stop-watch and of course a ruler. The tape in the Walkman was blank to record personal reactions and in addition he had a small collection of magazines. These had been scientifically chosen, each one representing a different form of stimulation. There was
Playboy
,
Whiplash
,
Thrust
,
Spanking
(monthly) and a very old copy of
Forum
,
Leather Boys
and
Fetish
as well as a particularly disgraceful copy of
Hustler
smuggled in by a friend at school. He thought these were obviously best kept out of sight, along with the gloves, one each of silk, leather and string together with a pair of Marks and Spencers 100% cotton knickers with a blue floral pattern which he had stolen from the Lynchs' laundry room last Easter. He hoped they were Jessica's and he hoped the slight element of doubt would not cause any problems: he felt quite different and depressingly unexcited when he imagined that they
might belong to Liz. Perhaps a bra would have been better, but he wasn't sure Jessica bothered to wear one. He would have a jolly good look to find out.

Ideally, as he was conducting a form of scientific experiment, he should be doing this at the same time each day, with no incidental interference to the essential equipment in between. He could think about that later. Right now he was eager to fill in the chart on page one of his virginal notebook. He wrote above the ruled columns some neat headings: time of day; which hand (a boy at school had said that doing it with your left hand was almost as good as having someone else doing it to you. Andrew wished he had the experience enough to compare, and frequently wondered if he ever would).

He also wrote another column for which glove (if any). Andrew's chemistry teacher would have been delighted at the thoroughness with which he prepared everything, if not quite so impressed with the experiment itself. While Andrew's mother, downstairs, fussed with the things in the kitchen and his father unloaded boxes of Surrey-grown vegetables from the car, Andrew locked himself into the little bathroom. Thankful that it didn't really make you blind, Andrew opened yesterday's
Sun
to page three and put on a rubber glove. Must buy baby oil, he thought, as he placed his stop-watch on the window ledge.

It was amazing, Clare thought, just how musty and damp a house could get after just a few weeks' non-use. She bustled round, opening all the windows (wasn't Jeannie supposed to have come in this morning and done that?) and propping open the back door with a stone hedgehog. ‘Come on Miranda, join in a bit,' she called breezily towards the sitting room, where Miranda had flopped lazily on to the ancient floral wreck of a sofa. Miranda hadn't been sick, but had moodily evaded all Clare's attempts at solicitous enquiries: ‘Was it something you ate? Bad period?' Clare was, she thought, a mother who could be told things, so why wasn't Miranda telling?