by Judy Astley
‘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 equ
ipment 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?
‘You won’t throw up in the car will you Randa?’ Amy had kept saying anxiously, worried about having to travel uncomfortably with a Smell.
‘I bet she does before Okehampton,’ Harriet said cheerfully, ‘I bet you 20p Amy.’
‘Nah, I think Bodmin,’ Amy had answered, and then added worriedly, ‘But let’s find a bag for it to go in.’ Clare didn’t want Miranda’s grumpiness with her in the cottage. She wanted to regain her mood of secret anticipation, and most of all she wanted to know whether Eliot had arrived yet. Bringing in boxes of Sainsbury’s food from the car, she wondered how soon she could decently stroll up the road, drop in at the converted coach house and wish Eliot, Liz and the family a happy summer. She’d send Miranda instead, she decided, it would give the girl something to do and an opportunity to cheer up a bit .
‘Why don’t you go and get some fresh air, Miranda,’ Clare asked her casually. ‘You could wander up to the Lynchs’ house and see if Jessica and Milo are here yet.’
‘No point,’ Miranda growled, heading for the door. ‘They’re not coming till tomorrow. I rang Jess last night to ask.’ It was quite a relief really, Clare thought later as she unrolled fresh honeysuckle drawer liners into the old pine chest in her bedroom. It gave her an evening for slopping around and arranging herself for his arrival. It also gave her a chance to see she was being rather silly. I’ve got everything. I want, she thought, looking through the window at her three daughters, sitting in a row on the creek wall at the end of the garden. When the phone rang, and Jack was asking her about the journey, Clare was able to say, with some honesty, ‘Yes, I wish you were here as well.’
At 6.45 a.m. the next morning Eliot Lynch drove his new Range Rover off the train at Penzance. How, he wondered, could a journey so expensive be so uncomfortable? He felt unrested, unshaven, jet-lagged and hungry. Liz and the twins shivered in the pale chill air, somehow looking pitifully out of place in their Knightsbridge clothes among the cars and the crowd, the Cornish mail sacks and the stacked newspapers. They all crushed into the car, Eliot opening the window to disperse Liz’s cloud of Poison perfume. The twins squashed in the back seats along with the luggage, the golf clubs, fishing gear and new bits of sailing equipment, Eliot’s new toys from Harrods, bought to tempt his son Milo into being his playmate for one more summer. Milo was now eighteen, and the time he spent with Eliot was now governed by his own choice and not by the long ago custody arrangements made with Wife no 1. The deal had been that Eliot got Milo and Jessica for the summer, and the Cornwall house was where Eliot would continue to be each year while Jess and Milo still wanted to stay with him. The problem was that now Milo was old enough to match Eliot’s skill at sports, he wanted to spend more and more time with his friends. Milo could be bribed by the new equipment only until its novelty wore off. This year Eliot was even more pessimistic. How could he look forward to spending time with Milo and Jessica when he hadn’t got further than chapter six and had an October deadline?
All this pressure, all these children, for he had a total of four, and these wives (two) to support. They all brought Eliot many moments of panic and sometimes he felt close to abandoning ship. Often he ran away to foreign places with his passport in his pocket and an overnight bag, phoning home on the way to the airport and calling it work.
Liz, clipping their six-year-old twins firmly into their seat belts, was thinking about the practicalities. Someone had to. Milo and Jessica would be arriving by plane from Heathrow that afternoon, so someone would have to drive over to St Mawgan. She couldn’t trust them to get a taxi, they’d probably rush off to Newquay and not come home till 3 a.m., wanting £200 to pay the driver who they would keep waiting for hours. There was the steak for the barbecue to be organized for the next evening, and had she ordered enough food? Miranda Miller might have friends staying, Andrew Osbourne probably hadn’t.
Perhaps she could ask Clare to make a salad. Liz hoped Archie wouldn’t be pedantic about the wine this time, a barbecue was a casual thing after all. Vast bottles of plonk would do, surely, or something fizzy. Although, she thought as she looked sideways at Eliot, some of us seemed to need an awful lot of Scotch these days. Then there were the beds., Liz wondered how Jeannie always managed to put the wrong duvet covers on. Surely she could tell which colours had been chosen to go with which rooms? Did she do it on purpose? The garden lights needed checking too and the swimming pool. The gardener could never believe that anyone would want to go to the expense of heating a pool to over 80 degrees. Too much like getting into a hot bath, might as well take the soap in there with you. Eliot complained too that it was tepid, but Liz didn’t want him to have a heart attack diving into cold water and his many over-indulgences made it fairly likely. Liz was too young to be a widow, even a rich one, and besides, she thought callously, nobody invites lone women to dinner parties.
Liz watched the hedgerows reaching out their scratchy branches to attack Eliot’s precious new car. He was silent and preoccupied just now, but she knew how furious he’d be when he saw the damage later on. Then she would remind him yet again that there were lots of nice wide roads in the South of France, they didn’t have to come here. She wished she could still rely on him to do what she used to think were ‘men’s things’ around the house, but he was usually too irritable to be asked and she had promised to leave him alone to work on his new book. It was, after all, how the money, such a comforting lot of it, was earned.
THREE
THE TEMPORARY RESIDENTS brought with them to Cornwall more than their luggage. Along with all the expensive sports equipment, boating paraphernalia and such they packed their little snobberies, the means by which to reassure each other that they may be roughing it in a village, but they certainly knew what was what.
‘At the shop today,’ Liz was saying, ‘I asked for walnut oil and they actually had it, isn’t that marvellous? A few years ago you couldn’t even get a decent extra-virgin olive, now there’s all sorts. Just like home.’
‘Well I suppose the foodie culture had to get here eventually,’ Clare said. ‘I brought some beers, I thought the boys might like some.’
The village was now full. The summer residents were re-establishing their flimsy part-time friendships with people they lived only a few miles from in London but only socialized with on holiday.
Clare had spent a long time getting ready for Liz and Eliot’s annual start-the-holiday barbecue, and Miranda had been bangi
ng on the bathroom door, impatient to get at her make-up. Clare, looking in the mirror had caught Miranda staring at her in astonishment.
‘Mum, you don’t need to dress up, you never usually do here.’
‘Makes a nice change,’ Clare had mumbled, caught without an excuse. Miranda squeezed past her, reaching across to the window ledge for her make-up bag.
‘It’s not your colour you know,’ she had said to her mother, inspecting Clare’s green-painted eyes in the mirror. Clare had picked up a black and gold scarf, wondering if it would be going just too far over the top to tie it round her hair. It would look good against the black linen dress. Or at least it would if she was going to a formal dinner party.
‘What, the green? I always wear it, it matches my eyes,’ she said to Miranda, still deciding about the scarf.
‘Too stark, now you’re getting a tan. You should be wearing grey or bronze.’ Well, Miranda thought, she couldn’t let the poor old thing go out like that. ‘This is all the wrong way round,’ Clare said. ‘How come my daughter knows more how I should look than I do?’
‘Anyway,’ Miranda continued, ‘Why are you all dressed up?’
Clare closed her eyes to wipe off the green goo, ‘Well I’m just looking forward to seeing Liz again, it’s been so long.’
Miranda’s eyes were wide and incredulous: ‘But you always said she was a dumb broad, with a fish for a brain.’
‘Rubbish,’ Clare lied briskly, avoiding Miranda’s exquisitely made-up eye in the mirror. ‘And anyway I don’t get much adult conversation, surrounded by you infants all day and Jack still in London. I’m looking forward to a party.’
‘Party! Fish-brain Liz, drunken Eliot and boring old Celia and Archie! You’re wasting your lovely frock!’ She was probably right, Clare thought, scrabbling in the crumbed depths of her handbag for a lipstick. It would probably be another of those well-behaved parties where there are just enough people so the conversation did not run out, but not so many that anyone could slope off without the others noticing. The opportunity to behave uncharacteristically dreadfully only arose at a vast gathering where only one’s own partner kept an eye on what one was up to and could easily be lied to later. Not that Clare had any practice at this, but she did read a lot.
