by Judy Astley
‘Why be so careful with her?’ Jack asked. ‘Why not just ask her straight out what’s bugging her and point out that she’s upsetting you.’
‘If I start asking her then she’ll never tell me, she never has told me what’s been wrong with her before, I’ve always had to guess even when she’s had things like tonsillitis. ’
‘Well perhaps nothing much does go wrong for her. You can’t expect people to produce problems just so you can have the satisfaction of sorting them out.’
‘She’s sixteen Jack, she must have some insecurities. I always thought we’d made it so easy for her to talk to us about anything at all, providing just the right atmosphere, not like our parents’ generation.’
‘We’ve been too careful, that’s the problem,’ Jack murmured.
The traffic was slowing to a crawl, there’d be a queue for the Tesco’s car park.
‘Perhaps she’s unhappy about someone,’ Clare mused.
‘Or maybe it’s her exam results, they’re due soon,’ Jack countered.
‘Perhaps she’s on the pill and it’s making her feel ill.’
‘More likely she’s just bored in the village.’
‘It’s bound to be sex, it’s her age.’
‘God, Clare, for someone who’s gone off sex, you sure do sound obsessive. She’s not telling you anything because there’s nothing to tell. She doesn’t need you, she’s growing up. I’m sorry if it sounds cruel.’
Clare stopped the car in the traffic queue.
‘Suppose she’s pregnant?’ she persisted.
‘And now you’re being ridiculous.’
Go on, say it, she thought, ‘They’re not all like you were’.
An old lady backed her car very carefully out of a parking space and Clare pulled into it briskly. Jack wrapped his paintings in polythene and cradled them protectively against the drizzle. As he stalked off to the framers Clare reflected that once again she was left with the domestic side of things to organize while he went off to play. She was being deliberately unfair, she knew, to make herself feel aggrieved. This was after all now his job. But when he did it on holiday too, it was hard not to think of the painting as a hobby. You had to make as much money as Eliot did, she thought, for something that most people do as a hobby to count as a proper job.
Clare put Jack completely out of her mind as she entered the fray at Tesco’s. There was too much to think about buying. Shopping for Amy’s birthday party, Clare was overtaken by a comfortable, doing-the right-thing sort of feeling. She started to feel quite good-motherish as she ignored the ready-made icing and instant cake mixes, choosing instead wholemeal flour, molasses, jelly to make into animal shapes, additive-free sausages to put on sticks. Her children didn’t often get the chance to experience what she thought of as real children’s parties, she thought. They were all too sophisticated, too young. Clare was going to give Amy a real party, with musical chairs, pass the parcel, hats and crackers, They could whine all they liked for a puppet show or a magic man, they could get all that at other peoples’ parties back at home. Parents had started renting discos for eight-year-olds. Bit much, Clare thought, if you can’t entertain a few children for a couple of hours in your own home without resorting to outside help and an entertainment agency. To hell with the mess on the carpet. Children didn’t need all that stuff, just good old-fashioned games and a well-filled going-home bag.
Clare was just reaching for a pack of balloons when she spotted Liz wheeling a trolley down the aisle towards her. Clare didn’t like meeting people she knew in supermarkets. She didn’t like the leaning on the trolleys, each eyeing what the other had bought, trying hard not to express surprise that someone like that would actually buy frozen oven chips, and in turn suppressing the urge to explain that the children just couldn’t exist without tinned tomato soup, comfort food. And then there is the continuation of the trek around the store, you say goodbye and then keep meeting up again with nothing else to say except exchange little inane remarks about the price of cheese, and the awful furtive reaching up for the sliced white bread just as the wholemeal and lentils friend creeps up from behind the cat food.
But Liz had seen Clare, and Clare saw that her trolley was shamelessly stuffed with ready-made chilled food.
‘Are you still speaking to me after Eliot’s dreadful exhibition?’
‘Yes of course. Anyway he was quite fun, livened the village up a bit. I suppose the rain is the reason this place is so crowded today. I’m just getting all the food for Amy’s party. Your two are coming aren’t they?’
‘Yes they’re looking forward to it. After I’ve paid for this lot I’m going off to get her a present. You’re so brave having a proper party. You’ve got tons of food in there,’ Liz said, peering into Clare’s trolley. ‘I hope the weather comes back for you,’ she continued. ‘When the twins were six we just took a dozen of their friends to see Cats, and then the Hard Rock Café afterwards, it saved an awful lot of effort.’
Liz sailed off with her trolley full of expensive delicacies. Clare, quickly calculating the horrendous total cost of the Lynch twins’ birthday treat, venomously wished a manky wheel on Liz’s trolley, and pulled a can of coke from hers for an instant reviving drink.
Outside in the car park, Clare trundled her goods towards her car and saw a woman trying to hang a bulging carrier bag from the handlebars of an ancient bicycle. The woman looked about Clare’s age, in jeans, her hair grown rather too long, making her thin face look longer than it had to. She wore a faded Fair Isle sweater. In her other hand she held a big silver helium-filled balloon which struggled to get away in the wind.
Dealing with the bike and the shopping was all too much and the balloon escaped. The woman stared at it for a moment, the long face drooping like a disappointed child’s. How old do you have to be, Clare wondered, as she stacked the slippery bags of shopping into the back of the Volvo, before you were grown-up enough not to mind losing your balloon? She watched the woman to see what she would do. She was too old, perhaps too busy, to go back into the store and ask for another one. Clare wanted to go and get one for her, to lie and say ‘it’s for my daughter’, but it was too late. Clare had finished loading the car and others were queueing for her space. The woman, who perhaps hadn’t minded that much at all, climbed on to her bike and pedalled slowly away into the traffic.
FOURTEEN
MIRANDA STOOD IN front of the mirror, a full-length one on the inside of her wardrobe door. She zipped herself into her jodhpurs and tried to work out whether they felt tight because she was a year older and bigger than the last time she had worn them or if she was already starting to expand with pregnancy. Beyond the mirror inside the wardrobe she could see all the clothes that she wouldn’t be able to wear soon if ‘the situation’ as she now called it in her head, continued. All those little thirties dresses with their neat waists, the skirts whose buttons she had had to move to stop them sliding down her narrow hips. She’d have to move them all back again. The riding boots still fitted, did that mean that her feet, and presumably the rest of her, had now stopped growing? Could God let you start growing. another person inside you before you’d stopped growing yourself? It didn’t happen with plants, it didn’t seem natural. Miranda took off her riding gear and inspected her flat stomach. She was still so thin she could almost see right through to her insides. What was going on in there? She looked inside the wardrobe and chose a pale pink cotton dress, one of the smallest she had. Might as well wear it while she could.
‘Ought to be doing some physical jerks,’ Archie said to Andrew. ‘Should have joined the CCF at school, no need for all this equipment, that’s for poncey bodybuilders and the like.’
Over the top of his Telegraph, from his comfortable seat under the rowan tree, Archie watched Andrew work out with his weights.
‘It’s not poncey, Dad, boxers use them, and weightlifters and such.’
‘Perhaps so,’ said Archie, ‘But if you want real sport, it should be related to surviva
l, that’s how it all came about, being out there in the wild. Pentathlon stuff. Now there’s an event, run after your quarry, over the obstacles, throw your spear at it, that sort of thing. Sense of purpose. What’s the point of lifting all those weights if you can’t do all the running and jumping as well.’
Andrew lifted the twin weights rhythmically up and down. ‘I’m doing my pectorals,’ he said, ‘Then when I’ve speared my wild boar I’ll be able to pick it up won’t I?’
‘I suppose it’s useful for sailing,’ Archie conceded, folding The Telegraph for the crossword. Andrew did after all have rather a puny body still. He’d look a lot more manly with a bit of muscle. At least flabbiness didn’t run in the family. There was nothing worse: flabby body, flabby mind.
‘Not going out on the water today?’ Archie asked.
Andrew straightened up, put down his weights and consulted his instruction book.
‘Milo’s gone into Truro and the others are going to help supervise Amy’s birthday party over at Clare’s. I could ask you the same thing.’
Archie filled in twenty-three across with his fountain pen.
‘Your mother’s making buns or something for Clare,’ he said. ‘You and I could take the Laser round the point later, look for a mackerel or two if you like.’
He could hardly read what he’d written, the ink spread over the newspaper, however carefully and lightly he wrote. He couldn’t bring himself to use a Biro, a gentleman used a proper pen. Inheriting his father’s old pen had made him hope for the sharp cryptic brain that had gone along with it, to help with the more difficult crossword clues. Andrew’s lips moved as he read the weightlifting instructions, Archie noticed. That brilliant brain of his father’s must have got well-diluted by the time it got to Andrew, he thought. Funny too how little actual writing one did these days, he wasn’t going to wear out the old Parker just signing his name occasionally and filling in half the clues in The Daily Telegraph.
‘Be careful with that icing Miranda,’ Clare said. ‘It would be a shame to spoil that dress, it’s bound to need dry-cleaning.’
‘It’s only cotton Mum,’ said Miranda. ‘I’ve washed it before by hand. And I’m being careful. Did you remember the Smarties?’
‘Two big boxes,’ Clare said. ‘And some of those little boxes to put in their going-home bags. They’ll be sick to death of them by tomorrow. And there’re blue ones, I don’t know about those, they look the wrong colour for food.’
Miranda spread the pink icing carefully over the cake, and then licked the spoon.
‘Don’t lick it!’ Clare shouted.
‘Didn’t think you were looking,’ grinned Miranda. ‘Anyway who’s to know? I’m not infectious.’
‘You know quite well it’s unhygienic, and anyway you might have a cold coming.’
‘We should have got some of those cake tins that are letter shaped,’ Miranda said. ‘It’s only three letters after all and I bet we could have hired them in Truro.’
‘It’s quite enough making one cake, let alone three,’ Clare said. They moved around the tiny kitchen, organizing their different party contributions. Clare cut pretty circular sandwiches, marmite and apple, cheese and celery, tuna and tomato. They’d probably rather have jam, she thought, but she had to try. Miranda ran her finger round the bottom of the cake where some of the icing was beginning to trickle on to the plate.
‘Do I put the smarties on now or wait till it sets?’ she asked.
‘Wait till it’s half set, when it’s decided to stop sliding down the cake. otherwise if you make a pattern with them it will be all over the place.’ Clare looked at the piles of sandwiches. ‘I wish I knew exactly how many were coming,’ she said, ‘They just go round the village dredging up everyone who looks the right age.’
Miranda laughed. ‘I think that’s what Milo did with Andrew’s party, that Celia said should Never Have Happened.’
Clare laughed too, rinsing knives under the tap. ‘Now I won’t hear a word against Celia, she’s making buns for the party. Blast there’s the phone.’ Miranda turned back to the cake and started opening Smartie packets.
‘If it’s anyone for me,’ she said, ‘please will you tell them I’m not here.’
Anyone must mean Steve, Clare thought, she couldn’t possibly not want to speak to Milo or Jess or friends from London. So whatever it is is over, that must be what Jeannie wanted to talk about. But there was obviously nothing to discuss. Good.
Eliot had got to the part in his story where the hero had got to do something erotic with the beautiful spy. He faced the word processor and the screen stared back at him, daring him to make its controls smoulder with some highly original sexual athletics. Ellot was floundering at this point. This was the bit where he always got stuck, for although he was a man much given to sexual infidelities, and considered himself highly experienced, his tastes were fairly traditional. On a good day, a straightforward bonk was quite adequate, he had found. He rather liked, if he thought about it, red French knickers. Liz had some and he’d always thought them pretty rude. Women who thought about their underwear, not just flinging on the nearest, most practical Marks and Spencer stuff, they must give those underneath bits of their bodies a lot of thought too. Though he wasn’t sure if this was true in Liz’s case. She thought about her body the whole time, it seemed to him. It was all very highly polished, like a table you were scared to put anything hot on to in case you made rings.
Of course what he really needed to do, Eliot decided, was to go out and look for some inspiration. It was no good looking at Liz, lying out there by the pool with sunblock on her nose and her nipples. He needed to look at more ordinary women, overheated young mothers on beaches, with swimsuit straps falling down, showing those endearing white bits of flesh where the sun couldn’t reach. He switched off the word processor.
‘I’m going out for a walk with the dog,’ he called out to Liz, ‘Don’t want to come do you?’
‘No thanks Eliot. Don’t forget you said you’d collect the twins from Clare’s, it’s Amy’s party. About sixish, don’t be late.’
‘I won’t, in fact I’ll be early and then she’ll have to give me a drink,’ he called cheerfully. He put cigarettes in his pocket and collected a cold beer from the fridge. Might as well have some refreshment down on the beach, it was a long time till 6 p.m. Now Clare, he thought, there was an erotic lady, so constantly anxious, all her feelings up there at the top. Quite a thought, and good for the novel.
‘Where did all these kids come from?’ Jack asked, looking around at the gathering in his garden. ‘Who on earth do they all belong to?’
‘Renters’ kids of course,’ Clare said. ‘Our two go fishing with them, you’ve seen them. They’ll all be gone in a week or two. They all brought presents, isn’t that sweet of them?’
They had too, a funny little assortment from the village, which had corresponded most satisfyingly with the list Harriet and Amy had drawn up in the post office. All were unwrapped, just handed over like an entrance. fee from grubby little fingers. The only wrapped gift had come from the Lynch twins, a lavishly packaged painting set wrapped in Pooh Bear paper, inside a Pooh Bear carrier bag, with a Pooh Bear tag and about twelve feet of yellow ribbon (Pooh Bear coloured, presumably, thought Clare), done up in bows.
‘Liz doesn’t worry too much about packaging being a waste of trees then,’ Miranda had observed.
‘Never mind,’ said Jack, taking her too seriously. ‘We’ll make sure it goes in the paper bank.’
The children were all out on the cottage lawn, fighting over the swing. ‘We’ll have to start playing games with them soon,’ Clare said to Miranda.
Jessica came in from the garden, ‘By the way Clare, there are fourteen of them, in case any go wandering off, I thought you might need to know.’
‘Thanks Jess, but to be honest I don’t think it makes much difference seeing I don’t even know their names. The tide’s out and they can’t even fall into the creek. Still it’s only f
or a couple of hours, what can happen.’
Clare went into the sitting room to collect cushions for musical chairs. Miranda drifted around looking elegant but useful, carrying trays of lemonade, bowls of jelly and paper plates to the sheet spread out picnic style under the cherry tree. Little children dashed about shrieking, and Clare came out to look at them anxiously, aware that there was usually one who was shy, couldn’t join in, and might even need to be returned to its parents, wherever and whoever they were. This was not like the parties back home, she thought.
‘Do you think they’ll eat this stuff?’ Jack asked, coming out of the kitchen with a bowl of mixed nuts and dried fruit.
‘All that dried fruit? They’ll love it!’ Clare said. ‘Ours do, and besides it’s much better for them than crisps.’
Miranda and Jessica supervised the games, with such skill and tact that nobody had to fight for prizes, and the children sat down under the tree for tea.
‘See, they are eating it,’ Clare said to Jack, watching the children tackle the dried fruits and the wholemeal sandwiches.
‘True, but if you listen carefully,’ Jack said as he pulled the cork from a bottle of wine, ‘you can hear the words “Monster Munch” and “bat-crisps”.’
‘Amy’s so lucky,’ Miranda said to Jessica as they lazed on the wall by the creek. ‘She gets to have her birthday down here. Mine’s November and I always have to share it with the street firework party.’
Jessica rolled over on the wall to brown her back. ‘Well think of poor Milo, his is at Christmas, so he only gets half the annual presents, but they are usually rather good to make up for it. Usually better than mine anyway,’ Jessica added.
Miranda sucked the sweetness from a stem of clover, ‘You two never seem to be short of anything, if you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, smiling at Jessica and wondering if she had maybe gone too far.
‘All that sports equipment do you mean?’ Jessica laughed and Miranda nodded. ‘Dad’s got a thing about it. He says you can’t do sports the way they’re supposed to be done unless you’ve got state of the art equipment, best tennis raquet, newest Nikes, etc. But what he really means is that he can’t do them, not us. Having all the right gear is to psych the opposition. And besides he likes shopping. It gets him away from that word processor he’s so scared of. He’ll do anything not to work.’
