by Judy Astley
Through the kitchen doorway, behind Liz, Clare could just see Eliot, leaning on the wooden footbridge. He and his dog were looking down into the shallow water as the tide started to make its slow way up the channel. Just then he looked up and saw her, and started waving the bottle of ‘plonk’ (which was actually Bollinger), at her. Clare bit her lip to stop herself from giggling, as Eliot danced up and down and made faces at the back of Liz. He pointed to the bottle, made a disappointed face at Clare and shrugged, then whistled to his dog and strolled back the way he had come. Another time, make it another time, Clare wanted to shout after him. Liz went and sat on the grass under the pear tree and irritatedly pulled at the daisies.
‘He’s always complaining that just because he works from home no-one takes him seriously and we want him to keep joining in with things,’ Liz grumbled. ‘It’s supposed to be his idea of a holiday, coming here. It certainly isn’t mine.’
Liz was looking sulky and very young. Her immaculate white linen shorts were about to be covered in grass stains and her silk blouse was going to get snagged on the pear tree bark. Clare felt rather sorry for her, she was as out of place in a country village as a camellia in a cornfield.
‘I remember when Jack used to work from home,’ Clare said. ‘It was difficult for any of us to treat it as work, especially, and I don’t mean to be disloyal, as he wasn’t selling very much of it. Everyone used to visit and stay for coffee or assume that if he was at home he could go out and play tennis, or golf or look after everyone else’s children. He had friends who’d want him to go out and get drunk at lunch time and he’d be unable to pick up a brush for the rest of the day.’
Clare was only depressing herself. Was this what she had to come again, second time round, with bigger, more expensive children to support? Was this what he would be doing while she was out temping with twenty-year-olds?
‘It’s horrid here,’ Liz said, in a little-girl voice. ‘There’s nowhere to get my hair done. I like to have it cut and all that at least once a fortnight.’
Clare watched Liz run her fingers through her shoulder-length streaked hair. The roots were showing through a rather dull mouse-brown, and Clare guessed Liz would never allow herself to be seen like that in public in London.
‘You could always find somewhere in Truro,’ Clare suggested.
‘Heavens no, I couldn’t. I have to have Alphonse,’ Liz said, shocked. ‘I miss so many things here. I miss the club, it’s got proper toning tables. For the thighs, you know,’ she said, stretching out a slender limb for Clare to admire. ‘I go there every day and have lunch with my friends. Or Harvey Nichols. I saw Celia there once.’
Clare imagined Liz in an Armani suit and velvet headband, squealing over bagfuls of Sloane Street booty with a gaggle of girlfriends.
‘And though the garden here is much better than ‘London, I haven’t got Conchita to do the flowers.’ Liz was almost whining now.
‘Isn’t that the sort of thing you were taught at finishing school?’ Clare asked Liz briskly.
‘Oh no, we did Art Appreciation. Lots of time in the Louvre. Oh and cooking.’
Liz trailed dejectedly after Clare back to the kitchen when Clare took the cups back inside. Clare left them in the sink and watched Liz staring round the room. I know what she’s thinking, Clare thought. She’s wondering how a family of five exist with such a small space. Clare followed Liz’s gaze round the room – everything was hanging on the wall: pans; plate rack; children’s drawings; notice board covered with years of holiday photos; dried herbs; even the cutlery hung from hooks. The entire ground floor of this cottage would fit into Liz and Eliot’s kitchen. Clare’s kitchen was about the size of the Lynch laundry room. Clare felt a sudden longing for the space and freedom of the Barnes house. Just a couple more weeks, she thought.
‘That party of Andrew’s,’ Clare said, breaking into Liz’s thoughts. ‘He’s going to get hell from Archie and Celia when they get back from the Scillies. I wouldn’t mind being a fly on their wall. I’m sure they’ll blame me as much as him, I said I’d keep an eye on him. But you don’t expect a boy of that age to need a babysitter do you? I wouldn’t have imagined Andrew could get up to anything like that.’
Liz grinned, ‘I don’t think Andrew quite imagined it either according to Jessica.’
‘No,’ Clare said, rinsing the cups and peering round to the Aga for a tea towel. Liz obviously wasn’t intending to dry anything. ‘Andrew seems too innocent for that kind of planning, so old fashioned, and “good”.’
Clare felt slightly confused about whether to side with Celia and Archie when they got back, be all grown-up and say ‘oh dear, how dreadful’ or be ready to make excuses for Andrew.
‘I hope he gets away with it,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose he gets much fun. Anyway, let’s just go next door and see if he’s feeling any better, he looked dreadful this morning.’
Clare wanted Liz to go home. She thought that by moving her on, away from her own premises she would be helping Liz on her way. Perhaps Liz for once would like to take all the younger children to the beach, so she could be left in peace to think about the missing pages from Miranda’s diary.
‘Are you feeling any better?’ she asked Andrew as she and Liz walked through his garden gate.
‘A bit,’ Andrew mumbled, shielding his pained eyes from the sun as he tried to look at the two women.
‘Do you think the parents will have to know?’ he added hopefully.
‘I’m not going to tell them,’ Clare said, ‘But half the village will so you’d better get in first. Just say you had a few people round and it got out of hand. They can hardly blame you then.’
They’ll blame me though, she thought.
Liz couldn’t help wrinkling her little nose. The aroma of unwashed boy was too apparent. She wanted to be kind, offer him a swim in her pool, a sort of restorative taking of the waters, but she’d rather he took a shower first.
‘Would you like to come and swim later?’ she asked, ‘After tea perhaps?’
‘Er, no thanks, I’ll just take the Laser out for a while when the tide gets a bit higher. Clear my head,’ Andrew said. It wouldn’t do to face Jessica for quite a while. He’d have to do his swimming in the cold river.
‘I’ve got an awful feeling that Celia and Archie aren’t going to be speaking to me for some time,’ Clare said to Liz as they left Andrew’s garden.
‘You can’t take all the blame, you couldn’t have known.’
‘Well you and I know that, but they’re older. I think of everyone over fifty as properly grown-up, a hangover from school I expect. I imagine I’ll be told off.’
Liz thought of everyone over thirty as grown-up, however often they proved not to be.
‘I know,’ Clare said. ‘We’ll have a tea party for them, the real old-fashioned out-in-the-garden sort that Celia would appreciate. They won’t refuse to come, there are too few of us here to bear grudges for long. End of next week, give them a chance to get back, inspect the damage and get all their grumbling over and done with.’
Clare led Liz firmly towards the wooden bridge and the path home and smiled sweetly at her: ‘You can cook, you can make a lovely big cake. It will give you something to do.’
ELEVEN
BY NOW, MID-AUGUST, the village was at its most crowded. Every rentable bed, bunk and cot was occupied, the tiny cottages overstuffed with families, dogs, babies, prams, surfboards and beach mats. Swimsuits and towels hung dripping from the little balconies every evening, flying over the main street like bright celebration flags.
Those locals who had returned from their Mediterranean fortnights (‘That’s it for this year then’ was frequently heard in the post office), continued to service and clean the amenities, fighting a losing battle with sand trodden into carpets, their very survival depending on the goodwill of the up-country trippers.
Those who owned their cottages basked in the heat and felt smug about their investments, the crippling second mortgages,
sadly devoid of tax relief. Each good British summer brought back from abroad those who’d suffered last-minute surcharges, airport delays and lager louts and swore they’d never go through all that ever again. There were, in spite of the recession, plenty willing to buy into the second home market, prices eventually could only go up. And although no one would have dared say it, not even at a happy-hour drinks party, when people were usually in a mood relaxed enough to chance their most reactionary opinions on people of their own sort, the high prices that so pleased them also ensured the exclusivity of the village. In fact, so exclusive was it that there was no longer any chance that the local Cornish people could hope to afford the cottages their ancestors had built, not without a pools win anyway. There was a nagging worry that soon there would be barely enough local characters left to keep the village picturesque. In another ten years, as Jack pointed out to Eliot, it would have all the rustic charm of Putney.
There was an understanding, though not mentioned outside one’s own family, that owning a holiday cottage was actually a ploy to keep one’s wayward teenage children off the dangerous urban streets. Back at home, in the long school holidays, bored kids drifted around looking for entertainment, getting into trouble. They were too old to be supervised, too young to be responsible. In shopping centres, parks and all along the banks of the Thames, teenagers congregated on warm summer nights, just to hang around in large intimidating groups. They mooched at night in shop doorways, drinking cider, smoking and filling their bodies with junk food, littering the street with cans and wrappers. Youth-orientated entertainment had long ago been closed down by local councils, in deference to the votes of those who counted. So parents feared for the health of their children, their safety and their accents. It was almost impossible to persuade one’s child that they might enjoy seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream yet again in Regents Park when they had just discovered a talent for racing abandoned supermarket trolleys through empty shopping precincts at night. Parents feared the influence of peer groups, of good old sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, just as their own parents had.
So along with their second homes, they bought a period of extended childhood for their sons and daughters. They bribed them with picnics and barbecues and boats and riding and sleeping-bags all over the house for all their visiting friends. Each summer they knew they just had to get them into the car, drive over the Tamar and it would all be all right. They had bought them a better class of street life. One day they would refuse to come, just please God, let it be when the child had got to the age of reason, or at least to a good university. The biggest disadvantage to having teenagers spending the summer in Cornwall, was that there had to be an adult willing, in an evening, to stay sober enough to collect them from the far outposts of local social life. There was no public transport, a reason why the lanes of Cornwall, in summer, are congested with London seventeen-year-olds trying to do three-point turns into farm gateways.
Jack always felt he was one of the luckier ones. The cottage inherited from his grandparents did not carry with it the burden of a mortgage, so although he could only just afford what minimal maintenance that was done, money worries had never been a barrier to his appreciation of his surroundings. With the money from the London house, he thought perhaps they could extend the attic and make another bedroom, maybe build a conservatory out into the side of the garden. He loved the peace of the place, he only had to walk away from the village, through the woods beyond reach of the tired and lazy legs of the trippers, to wind down from the irritations of his work which built up, term by term during each academic year. Working in education, he noticed how many of his colleagues had gone straight from school, to college and then straight back into teaching. They seemed to speak only in the jargon of the profession, quite unaware of the real world out there. The petty squabblings of the staff, most of whom were on shaky contracts that could be quickly terminated, increased as each year progressed, until by July the teaching members of the college seemed, to Jack, to be marginally less mature than the students.
Now that Jack had no intention of returning, he waited to feel the exquisite relief of freedom. It hadn’t arrived yet, partly because he’d managed to tell Clare only half of the plan. He wanted to give her time to absorb and accept that he wasn’t going back to the college before suggesting that they all come to live permanently in Cornwall. He was also finding Clare’s concern with Miranda stifling in the small cottage. She was constantly watching the girl, wondering where she was going, what she was doing and too carefully not asking the questions she obviously wanted to know the answers to. The moment that the vague and dreamy Miranda noticed, there’d be an almighty confrontation, he could feel it coming. And Jack hated confrontation, which was why he phoned London estate agents to find out about the current housing market while Clare was safely at the beach.
Jack had taken to going out early in the mornings, walking up on to the headland behind the village just to sit in the peace and stillness of the early morning mists, watching the sky clear to pale cerulean blue. He took with him his sketch book and had started to make a series of drawings of the village from different points on the cliff behind it. He thought perhaps he would use his new water colours for this too, as well as for the elusive hydrangeas, and put together a fairly speedy collection for the craft centre.
He would have been outraged at this idea a few years ago: fast art for holiday sales, seaside tourist painters. The sophistication of his art school training had kept him well out of range of that kind of commercialism. It was only one step away from greetings cards. Now he was older and less naive he realized how restful it was going to be simply to paint what he liked because he liked it, even if it was only scenes of boats, or flowers or whatever, without having to express anything controversial. It was hard enough these days to think about having strong opinions on anything, without having to paint them as well. He could leave behind the heavy-handed abstracts of his youth, his former floppy attempts to convey some deep sentiment that he hadn’t really felt. He just liked handling paint, liked the mechanics of using brushes made from the finest sable, liked new fresh tubes of colour, the smell and the texture. He decided he was probably a landscape man and there was nothing wrong with that, it was good enough for Van Gogh. It was development, not defeat. If he’d had any students to go back to, he would have quoted from Henry Miller, ‘Paint as you like and die happy’.
As he strolled up the cliff path, he planned life without teaching at all. Clare could find something more lucrative to do, they could share both child care and making a living. They could sell the London house and live down here in the village, interest rates being as they were they wouldn’t have much trouble surviving. Miranda could go to the local sixth-form college. It wouldn’t be any less secure than being on a contract which could be terminated by a policy-decision whim of a government minister or a hostile head of department.
Down below the cliff the river glimmered in the rising mist. It was going to be hot yet again. In the creeks the water would be still and steamy, the tide rising imperceptibly across the mud and creeping up on the feeding gulls. A few early morning boats were heading out to sea, gently rocking the hippy raft which still loitered by the harbour, occasionally shifting from one creek to another. The residents barely bothered to comment any more, bored with watching gleefully for signs of it sinking. Jack felt a small pang of regret that he now saw no romance in that way of life and wondered when he had become so much more concerned with sensible practicalities like constant water supplies, lavatories in working order, warmth at night and something always waiting in the fridge. There could hardly, he thought, looking out at the raft, be a less convenient site on which to pitch camp.
Jack sat down on a log to sketch, enjoying the aloneness of the time of day. There were no eager hikers, no gawky boys with ghetto blasters, no blustery dog-walking women with headscarves and green wellingtons, no-one jogging with that Sony Walkman blankness and the tinny invasive thump thump of Dire Straits.
Clare called the wearing of a Walkman the grown-up equivalent of sucking a dummy, though she had been less dismissive since she discovered that the dustman in Barnes was using his to teach himself Russian as he worked.
Jack could smell the ferns but no traffic fumes, pine resin but no aircraft fuel.
Just as he was starting to draw, Jack heard something crashing around in the woods behind him. The unexpectedness of it alarmed him briefly, then more logically he reasoned that it must be a deer, expecting the same degree of privacy that he hoped for himself. He peered carefully through the branches thinking he could tell Harriet and Amy later and maybe the next day they’d come out together to see. But then he realized it was a man, muttering and stumbling through the bracken. Jack moved to a tree so that he would not be seen. He didn’t want to have to make polite good-morning conversation and anyway the person seemed to be talking to himself. Who was it, a loon? a drunk?, someone chatting to their dog? or a murderer staggering along with a stone-dead corpse? Used to nothing more sinister than sedate dog-walkers on Barnes Common Jack’s imagination grew lurid, and he shrank back against the tree, away from the shambling man and his mutterings. ‘Put him in Bombay’ Jack heard, ‘Make him large, blond and a bit older than the usual ones. Might be better to have an anti-hero … drinks … not too much or brain won’t work. IRA connection …’ It was Eliot. Jack knew it was too late to come out and show that he’d been there listening to the poor man who seemed to have flipped at last and should at least be allowed to do so in private. But as Eliot got nearer Jack could see he was talking to a small tape recorder, not to himself. So after all they had something in common, a need to get out there in the trees and the solitude to work. Jack hadn’t thought of Eliot as a man who needed to get closer to nature in order to pursue his art, especially as, just to be polite, he had actually read one of his lurid books. Just shows, Jack thought, you never can tell.
