by Judy Astley
‘Hermit crabs,’ Amy said, shoving a bucket at her that seemed to contain nothing but sticky stones. ‘You can’t see them though, because they hide under things and don’t want to be seen.’
‘Like real hermits, Clare said.
‘What is a hermit?’ Amy asked, puzzled.
‘A person who likes to hide away from the world and live all alone, very privately,’ Clare explained, pushing aside the stones in the bucket with her finger to try and see the crabs.
‘Don’t prod them then,’ Amy said suddenly. ‘Not if they won’t like you looking at them.’
Miranda looked up suddenly and grinned at Clare.
‘Yeah, Mum, don’t invade their space,’ she said, and Clare was left wondering if she had imagined the hint of a challenge in Miranda’s voice.
In the post office Clare collected milk, eggs, a packet of Special K for the diet and a WI cake in case someone called in for tea. She pretended she herself wouldn’t eat it. In the shop there were sunburnt families choosing postcards, small children clutching their mothers’ skirts and wailing for ice-creams. A rental family were trying to order The Guardian. ‘It just doesn’t seem to get this far, it isn’t worth us ordering it. We can get you The Times, Telegraph or Independent. Usually.’ The customer, with two children and a spaniel all clamouring to get to the beach, said yes all right, The Times, but his wife wouldn’t like it. Clare smiled at him in apparent sympathy, but inside she thought, who needs news in summer? Why not take a holiday from all the little routines, all the world’s problems. But perhaps they were addicted to the crossword. Perhaps it was the only time they got to do it.
As Clare walked she watched the bright umbrellas going up over the terrace tables outside the bungalows. Clare had not, yet, at the summer drinks parties, met any of the retired couples who lived on the hill, but she assumed they were the ones who drank late at the sailing club in the afternoons, and who kept the golf club and the village shop just about functioning in winter. Celia had told her once that she had visited in November. ‘The place was closed,’ she had said, as if she was talking about Harrods on a Sunday.
Clare walked further on through to the edge of the village, quickly passing through the little streets and heading out towards the cliff. Out at the harbour entrance Clare could see the makeshift raft that Eliot had been talking about. It wasn’t at all pretty, or idyllic or romantic as she had imagined, more like something from Huckleberry Finn, precarious, rickety and incongruous in the elegant harbour. A squatter among the clean smart sailing boats and business-like fishing boats. It looked like a giant duck’s nest that had gone adrift. The raft seemed to be planks, poles and oil cans held together with frayed ropes and with a grubby teepee perched on top making the whole structure look terrifyingly top-heavy. Clare wondered what would happen in bad weather, where it had come from (and how) and who lived on it. They didn’t seem to have a dinghy, unless someone was already out in it, so how did they shop?
‘The man across the creek from us has lost his cat,’ Archie, Daily Telegraph in hand, stopped next to Clare, on his way to the pontoon.
Clare followed Archie’s gaze out towards the raft. ‘You have to butter a cat’s paws,’ Clare told him, ‘then they don’t leave home.’
‘Bloke out there has probably buttered its paws, and its legs and its body,’ Archie said, still looking suspiciously at the raft. ‘Cut off its head, could easily taste like rabbit. Bit of garlic, and some thyme …’
Clare turned and stared at him. ‘Archie, you don’t think it’s been eaten, do you, not seriously?’
Is this what growing older really means, she thought, lining up with the old guard and acquiring ludicrous prejudices?
‘Well you hear such stories, you never really know, do you?’ he said, grinning at her.
‘Archie, you’re sending me up!’ Clare said, laughing, ‘You are, aren’t you?’ she suddenly added, just to check.
Archie gave her a cheerful wave, and went out to join Celia in their boat. Clare continued her walk, down past the Mariners pub and towards the boatyard.
She could see the boys down there, hanging around the pontoon and pretending they were working. They showed off to a couple of holiday-making girls with loud Midlands accents, heading for a hire-boat and dressed in identical turquoise shorts, cut high to show as much leg as possible. They giggled and wobbled their chubby thighs along the walkway, tripping on their too-high heels and staggering, shrieking, into the boat.
They looked back at the boys and grinned, posing, but the boys had lost interest and were looking for more entertainment, someone else to show off to. It was Steve who steered the hire boat out of the little marina.
He saw Clare and waved. Clare waved back, relieved that she would not have to talk to him. She saw too, the girls in the boat, whispering together and looking speculatively at Steve. Anyone would, really, Clare thought.
It must be the hot weather, and missing Jack that was making her feel like this. The boys on the pontoon weren’t going to look twice at her: Clare couldn’t remember the last time someone had even whistled at her. Probably when they did she’d been angry, wishing she had a piece of politically-charged wit ready for a stinging reply, seeing it all as part of Women’s Oppression. But feelings like that were for London, where the sweet seductive scent of mown grass has the suspicion of dog shit about it, and only the most determined insomniac is awake at the time when the pure glory of birdsong is untainted by traffic noise.
Here in the fresh, rich air, Clare felt as if she’d been turned inside out, all her senses on the outside, exposed and alert, too easily responsive and too easily bruised.
FIVE
JACK WAS A teacher of art and he was tired. He felt that art, more perhaps than any other subject, represented the old saying, ‘Those who can’t, teach.’ Students applying for his course, coming to interviews, had become less cowed by the grandeur of the building, the once-famous names of their interviewers and had started asking why they couldn’t see examples of Jack’s work so that they could understand the viewpoint from which he was inspecting theirs. He hadn’t got any creative work left to show them, hadn’t for years, for his job was to channel their creativity and in doing so had contrived to frustrate his own. It was possible he thought, relaxing with his feet on the seat on the earliest possible train out of Paddington, that the only reason he would ever pick up a paintbrush again was to slap another coat of Dulux on the sitting room ceiling. Hardly the Sistine chapel. Jack had listened wearily as one after another the tedious candidates, eager and hopelessly unoriginal had talked about the implications of one-sided judgement, the politics of landscape and such, straight from the sixth-form common-room culture magazines. Jack was greying, into his mid-years, an ageing hippy who now worried that his contributions might not add up to a decent pension. He had got old enough to be content in a secure and proper job, which his late mother-in-law would have loved, but deep inside there was a growing urge to get back to what he had always thought he wanted to be: a fine artist.
Summers in Cornwall were like a relic of a freer past when he had hitch-hiked with most of suburban youth to be thrown out of St Ives and sleep in the fields. Then he had pretended to be an artist, now he pretended he had been one. Inheriting money and a second house had been a blow to his politics, but the increasingly comfortable life-style had eased him from angry young communist to a casual liberal, surprising himself with occasional intolerant leanings towards the right. He had credit cards, practically a full set, a Volvo, he thought about private education with a growing amount of approval.
After each frustrating year of trying to organize the chaotic creativity of his students, each batch of which turned out to be as tediously conventional in their gestures of rebellion as he had been in his time, Jack was ready for nothing more energetic than to sleep in a deckchair, an emotionless snooze with only the rhythms of the home, the tides, opening hours and the weather to disturb him. He didn’t want to think any more about whether
or not he should be dissuading the students from spending an entire term on an art installation project that involved taking radiators off the corridor walls and lying them in a straight line. He was unfashionably unconvinced by that kind of art, but had quirks of conscience that he might be wrong, depriving the world of a great thinker. Problem was, he knew and they didn’t, that every year some kid straight off a foundation course had exactly the same idea.
Jack was looking forward to doing nothing in the sun, he liked watching Clare and Miranda changing colour, bronzing in the sun like cakes through a glass oven door. He watched his little daughters growing, playing and fighting. He liked to watch Liz Lynch with her tight slim body and he wondered why she bothered to keep it all so well organized for the drunken and unappreciative Eliot. She was like a meticulous herbaceous border for him to crash through. Women in shorts, swimsuits, the heat, all gave Jack a comfortable summer randiness that he could normally use to advantage, keeping Clare happy, and if Clare was happy the family was happy. Summers were so easy.
Travelling from Paddington however, earlier in the day than was bearable, this year Jack was a dissatisfied man. This year he had to find the moment to tell Clare that he wanted to change all their lives, give up teaching, take his last chance at doing what he should be doing: painting. He had spent an uncomfortable week alone at home, with only his brooding thoughts for company. There had been no secretive dinners in unfamiliar restaurants with a willing and attractive colleague, no adulterous deeds in the sacred marital bed, and no guilt to nurture and feel smug about. There had only been the usual staff-room bickering, the unexceptional interviews and lonely pizza suppers watching depressing TV repeats of twenty-year-old comedy shows. None of his colleagues was particularly attractive, and they were very unlikely to be willing, but Jack was a man whose capacity for fantasy was still as intact as a fourteen-year-old’s, and he had felt like an excited teenager wanting to issue whispered invitations to a secret party: parents away, house empty.
But it hadn’t even felt like his own home. Clare’s preparations for going away had taken no account of his being left behind. Miranda had turned off the Aga on her way out, leaving behind only an electric kettle, plugless microwave and the rusting barbecue. Someone had let themselves into the house as Jack was dressing one morning, to feed the fish. It was as if he wasn’t expected to function as a human being in his own home. On the phone, Clare hadn’t said, ‘Dying to see you tomorrow.’ Instead she had said, ‘Don’t forget to put the cleaning stuff down the loo.’
In such disgruntled and unsettled mood did Jack arrive at Truro in the drizzle to find Clare enthusiastic, (did she really call him ‘darling’?), Miranda petulant and the younger ones bored and squabbling.
Clare drove fast, talking about nothing, to Falmouth for a late Sunday lunch which she had booked to please Jack.
‘A proper Sunday lunch, we don’t get many of those in summer do we?’ she said, smiling round the car as if, Jack thought, they were all five years old.
Jack wasn’t very hungry. He was full of British Rail’s cheese and ham toasted special. The thought of roast anything made him feel rather queasy, especially at the speed the Volvo was weaving along the narrow lanes.
Clare waited patiently for Jack to relax, to be pleased to see her. She’d made this special effort for him. She felt responsible, holding the family together with her arrangements for them. She waited like a dog to be patted and praised and appreciated. It would, after all, have been much easier to have had a sandwich and Sunday papers lunch back at the cottage. This lunch, traditional Sunday symbol of family harmony, was important to her: she could, she thought, use the occasion to re-establish Miranda as her friend and confidante, Jack as the object of her affections, rebalance the family. She would be motherly at the table, passing round potatoes, celebrating the Family Unit.
The hotel matched Jack’s mood more than Clare’s. It was dismal, typically 1930’s seaside architecture painted in faded ice-cream colours, with some tacky plate-glass additions from the mid-fifties to accommodate games areas and a pool. It was crowded with bored and wandering residents who wondered what they were supposed to do in the rain. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something which gave the place an atmosphere as appealing as a chiropodist’s waiting room. The staff looked fraught, expecting their guests to go out, not hang about and get in the way.
In every public space and lounge children sat wriggling, old people shifted their walking sticks and their arthritic feet, clutching handbags and macks, victims of the weather. They kept looking out of the window at the drizzle, the shades of grey of the sea, sky and cliffs. It didn’t look like the postcards.
Clare couldn’t wait any longer:
‘Well, aren’t you pleased to see us?’ she said to Jack as she marched her uneasy family through to the empty restaurant
Jack, wishing he could only doze on the squishy old sofa in front of a log fire, said, ‘Yes of course I am, but you didn’t need to go to all this trouble.’
‘It’s not trouble, it’s a pleasure, isn’t it everyone?’ Clare said brightly, refusing to take up the hint of apathy in Jack’s voice. ‘After all, it’s less effort than having to cook isn’t it? I think we all forget sometimes that this is supposed to be a holiday.’ Clare bit her lip and regretted her words. Both she and Jack knew from years of experience that there was no way ‘this is supposed to be a holiday’ could be said without it’s being an accusation, whoever said it just had to be having a subtle whinge. Still, better that Jack should think she was lusting after a different kind of holiday than lusting after a different man.
Clare settled herself in a seat by the window, overlooking the sodden crazy golf and the children’s playground.
‘Where is everyone?’ she said, looking round the empty room. ‘The hotel is full of people and hardly anyone is having lunch.’
‘Perhaps they know something about the food here that we have yet to find out,’ said Jack pessimistically, looking round for a waiter and needing a drink. At a table near them sat a family of four neat holidaymakers. Jack looked at them and then at his own family, noting the contrast.
Amy had not brushed her hair, probably for several days and its fairness had a greeny tinge to it and a look of brittleness, like doll’s hair, presumably from the chemicals in the Lynchs’ pool. She was wearing green dungarees, rainbow wellington boots and had spilled something down her front that wasn’t breakfast. At least Jack couldn’t think of anything red that she ate for breakfast, unless she’d taken to adding tomato ketchup to Shreddies. Miranda was in a tangle of old silk and ribbons, shivering in the unnecessary air conditioning. She looked beautiful but remote. Jack wondered what she was thinking about, probably, like him, about being absolutely anywhere but here.
The other family had neat, well brushed children and soberly dressed parents. Jack felt suddenly self-conscious, in his ancient jeans and a sweater that was a colourful and large version of the ones Clare had made for the children. He looked, he suspected, rather like a Playschool presenter. The little girl on the next table had shining plaits and silver hair-slides. How on earth, Jack thought, do people produce children who can find matching hair-slides in time for Sunday lunch when they’re on holiday? They must bring a special pre-bagged selection of stuff labelled ‘clothes for special occasions, plus matching accessories’. The girl’s little brother, only about nine-years-old, wore a proper suit and tie, a little version of his father, all pressed and polished.
Jack felt sudden affection at the contrast with his own children. He softened towards them, appreciating the signs of them taking their own chances, choosing their own personalities. He wished sometimes they were a little less noisy and a little more considerate. Harriet was touring the many empty tables with Amy following her, rooting among the decorative china vases of flowers for a carnation with a stalk long enough to thread through her hair. Clare was watching them, defiantly withholding discipline under the disapproving gaze of the other family. When
she had been their age she had gone into hotels only for weddings and special anniversaries, where she had sat quietly in her best frock among unfamiliar cousins, trying to Remember her Manners, as her mother had told her. She was proud now of her children’s lack of reverence, that they didn’t know what it was to feel intimidated. Only Miranda frowned at them, wondering how they were allowed to get away with making such a mess, she was sure she wouldn’t have at their age. Disgruntled, she fiddled with her cutlery and kicked off her shoes under the table.
‘What are we doing here?’ she said loudly in the direction of either parent. ‘We never go to places like this. If you wanted to go out we could’ve had lunch at the sailing club.’
‘We can have lunch there any time,’ Clare muttered. ‘I thought this would make a change.’
‘It’s a change all right.’ Miranda scowled, glaring across at the neat family, who stared back, interested. And not one for the better.’
‘I expect you’re hungry Miranda, you’ll feel better when you’ve eaten.’
‘Not hungry,’ Miranda mumbled crossly.
Across the restaurant another family was settling. There were two sets of parents, each with a small baby and an assortment of young children. It took several minutes just to seat them all, and the children fidgeted as soon as they were on their chairs, impatient for the end of this ritual meal when parents would be too mellow to notice how noisy they were all getting. The children eyed Amy and Harriet enviously, while the parents fussed over the babies, sorting their collections of equipment: buggies; bags; bottles; clip-on baby seats that fitted to the edge of the table suspending the baby in uncertain insecurity. So much paraphernalia for such small animals. One baby cried and the mother leaned across, concerned.
‘No you stay there, Jane,’ said the relevant father. ‘You’re on holiday.’
Clare and Jack, listening, smiled at each other.
‘Guaranteed to make the poor woman feel thoroughly guilty,’ Clare said, pouring wine.
