Just For the Summer Read online

  About the Book

  Every July, the lucky owners of Cornish holiday homes set off for their annual break. They close up their desirable semis in smartish London suburbs – having turned off the Aga and turned on the burglar alarm – and look forward to a carefree, restful, somehow more fulfilling summer.

  Clare is more than usually ready for her holiday. Her daughter, Miranda, is hitting adolescence big time, and her husband Jack is harbouring unsettling thoughts of a change in lifestyle. No wonder that Clare is contemplating a bit of extra-marital adventure, possibly with Eliot, the successful, heavy-drinking author in the adjoining holiday property.

  Unexpected disasters occur, revelations are made and, as the summer ends, real life will never be quite the same again.

  Contents

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Also by Judy Astley

  Copyright

  Just for the Summer

  Judy Astley

  With much love to the

  Townshend, Nicholls, Chilvers and Vyvyan families,

  none of whom, I promise, are in this book.

  And to Jon, Zelda and Layla,

  who are in everything I do.

  ONE

  MIRANDA, AGE SIXTEEN and never been more than kissed, was getting pregnant on the beach. It was what her step-father, an art lecturer, would have called a cross-cultural encounter. Her partner was a nineteen-year-old fisherman, son of her mother’s cleaning lady, whereas Miranda was the middle-class daughter of affluent and liberal 1970’s parents who enjoyed the guilt of owning two homes. If this couple on the beach had been completing application forms for a dating agency, all that could have been found that they had in common was their current and momentary lust.

  Miranda was celebrating the end of her GCSEs. Somehow she felt she was adding to her list of life’s qualifications; you didn’t, at her school, go into the sixth form with your virginity. She had certificates for a wide range of achievements already, in common with others of her class, grade 5 piano, Senior Grade ballet, gymkhana rosettes. She’d been collecting these tokens of tribal membership since the age of three, when joining the Penguin Club at Putney pool she had been given a badge for ducking her head under the water. Of course you didn’t get a certificate for having sex, but Miranda felt she would be quite certain whether she’d passed or failed.

  Doing it with Steve had been quite irresistible. A secretive person, Miranda was glad she hadn’t chosen someone from the party circuit at home, someone who might discuss it with their friends, or worse still, expect her to do it again some time. She quite liked it, but then she quite liked maths. She certainly didn’t expect to have to repeat her maths exam. This time next year, she thought, as she lay in the sand shielding her eyes from the sun. she would probably be taking her driving test.

  While Miranda was crossing off another item on life’s shopping list, Steve, a less calculating soul, was simply celebrating having an afternoon off on a hot day. Later, the two of them would sail away out beyond the harbour to collect his lobster pots and that night Miranda would confide to the diary she kept under the mattress and thought nobody read, that it had been the most romantic experience anyone, anywhere could have ever had, although not one to be devalued by repetition.

  In a few weeks time when Miranda had learned that familiarity breeds babies, and that yes, all those talks at school on contraception, AIDS and abortion did actually apply to her as well. she would think of both fishing trips and sex as messy, smelly pastimes best left to the grown-ups.

  Miranda’s mother Clare was also celebrating. In her tiny garden beside the creek in one of the most photographed villages in England, she dozed on a sun lounger beneath the pear tree, drinking her way through a jug of Pimms, the Wimbledon commentary murmuring on her radio. Although concerned at the depletion of the ozone layer, Clare remained unconvinced that milk-white thighs would ever be a hot fashion item in any summer and pulled off her dress, flinging it down in a careless heap on the grass. She pulled the straps of her swimsuit down as far as was decent and wished the cottage was not so overlooked, both from the opposite bank of the creek and from the nearby wooden footbridge.

  Clare was celebrating all the things she didn’t have to do: collect children from school; cook dinner; wear tights; listen to Jack complaining about another day of in-fighting among the polytechnic staff or telling her she was drinking too much. This three day break was supposed to enable Miranda to wind down after her exams. Clare needed to wind down too. She felt she’d just taken all nine subjects herself, and in a sense she had. When Miranda had gone palely to school on exam days, Clare had willed her own brain along into the school hall with her. She had spent the days padding nervously round the house, doing routine, thought-freeing things like ironing and floor-washing so she could keep an eye on the clock and think, ‘Now she’ll be just starting French/now she’ll be halfway through/ just going into lunch.’ Clare had lurked in the hallway when Miranda was due home, ready with something to eat, available to hear how dreadfully or brilliantly she felt she had done, accommodating herself to whatever mood Miranda had brought home with her.

  ‘Why don’t you just let her get on with it herself?’ Jack had asked petulantly as Clare had made laborious notes about the role of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and had sat up half the night trying to recall the technique for dealing with quadratic equations.

  ‘But I’m her mother!’ Clare had retorted. ‘That’s what I’m here for!’ Jack had no reply to that one, for he was not Miranda’s father. Clare-and-Miranda had come as a matched pair when he had met them, take one, take both. He had taken both, and loved both as far as he was allowed to. For Clare had, by the time Jack came along, already grown too accustomed to gazing down fondly at her sleeping toddler and thinking, ‘I’m all she’s got.’ Several years later, when Amy and Harriet were little. Clare would say to Jack. ‘Aren’t they lucky? They’ve got each other,’ which to Jack’s relief and probably that of the little girls, excused Clare from the intense intimacy she had invested in Miranda’s upbringing and left them more free to muddle through in peace.

  Clare, dozing in her garden, thought she was probably feeling very happy. She would quite have liked, as she had planned, to have taken Miranda to Newlyn to look at an exhibition, or have had her around to share the repainting of the kitchen, so they’d have time to talk to each other without the rest of the family scrabbling for attention.

  But Miranda had taken to wandering off by herself and Clare tried hard to come to the conclusion that this small sign of Miranda’s independence was a good thing. A nagging little witch at the back of her mind told her that she should get in the car and go by herself to the gallery, and that it didn’t take two to choose a paint colour. Instead she tried to pretend that it didn’t matter at all, was too hot to go anywhere, it was wonderful to have time to herself and that she wasn’t really just sitting around waiting to be needed.

  Clare closed her eyes and thought of Eliot. In a few weeks, when the school terms ended, he too would be here with his beautiful, vacant wife, his t
wo sets of children and his dreadful dog. Clare would make sure that by then she would be tanned, fit from her twice weekly exercise class, and ready for him. She left Jack and her own children conveniently out of her fantasy. In daydreams no-one gets caught and no-one gets hurt. In Clare’s fantasy there was opportunity, best knickers, clean teeth and less fat around her thighs. Clare hadn’t just taken up this daydream as an escapist hobby: there had been the necessary spark to kindle the fire. On one of the breezy Easter walks out on the headland, Clare and Eliot had taken a different path from the others, searching for his foul and wayward dog. They’d crashed through the ferns and trees back towards the path and quite without any signal of intent, Eliot had pushed her roughly against an oak tree and kissed her. The excitement of the unexpected. He’d tasted of whisky and Gauloises. Jack only kissed her when he tasted of toothpaste, never out in the open air, never in the car or in the street. Clare felt ravished and she loved it. And she was spending her spare fantasy-time waiting for it to happen again.

  Down in the village Steve’s mother Jeannie was cleaning a tidemark from someone else’s bath. She went into the rented cottages on the tenants’ changeover days to clear up and prepare for the next batch of clients. She had long since stopped being amazed by the mess they left. They seemed to think it was included in the rent, to leave the house as they’d never dream of leaving their own. In the kitchen, she briskly scoured away with a piece of steel wool, removing dried-on muesli from a dish, wondering to herself at the cack-handedness of those who, used to leaving a dishwasher to handle such stuff, had stubbornly refused to become adept with a sink and a dishcloth. You’d imagine, she thought crossly, that all those who went on and on about how much more hygienic a dishwasher was, would take the trouble to chip out the bits of dried-on egg from between the fork prongs. They never dried their dishes either. but left towering piles of crockery which had to be gently disentangled like a large-scale breakable game of pick-up-sticks.

  No-one left anything extraordinary behind either, a constant disappointment to Jeannie, who no longer expected to find interestingly feathered condoms under the beds, or exotic leather underwear along with abandoned laddered tights. Jeannie would come in and idly open the kitchen cupboards, taking out the half-empty packets of breakfast cereal, the jars of instant coffee and put them, the perks of the job, in her shopping trolley. Then she’d go out to the back yard (described as ‘sun-trap patio’ in the brochure) and pluck a forgotten swimsuit from the washing line, to put with all the others for the autumn jumble. She never went short of washing-up liquid or tea bags during the summer. Jeannie’s working tour of the cottages was often more fruitful and certainly cheaper than a trip to Tesco’s.

  Rented cottages were much easier to clean than those of Jeannie’s other clients – second-homers such as Clare and Eliot’s wife Liz, because they were only stocked with essentials, no personal or decorative extras. Those who rented out their homes soon learned that one swish of a labrador’s tail could knock a pretty basket of dried flowers to a heap of powdered fragments. Tapestry cushions could have their stitches unpicked by little fingers in less time than it takes to watch Blue Peter, and such items joined all the owner’s personal stuff in the inevitable locked cupboard, from which, maddeningly, an inaccessible telephone would occasionally ring. The rented houses may be a bit spartan, Jeannie thought, but people would rent anything in this village, give them a bed and a view and a smell of the sea.

  Jeannie didn’t mind the trippers, they came for a week or two, spent a lot of money and were virtually the only real source of income to the village, now fishing was all a tangle of EEC regulations. Those she really loathed were the ones whose second homes were in the village, who thought it delightful as a place to visit, but so inconvenient and out of the way as a place to live, like some seaside leisure park. On these people, like Eliot and Liz, and like Clare and Jack, Jeannie placed the full responsibility for the closing of the school, the dreary emptiness of the village in winter and the outrageously high price of property, so far beyond the reach of the locals.

  Jeannie folded her apron and her big yellow duster and packed them away among the booty in her shopping trolley. She pulled the front door of the cottage shut behind her and put the key under the flower pot ready for the next clients, due to arrive some time after 3.30 p.m. that afternoon. Out across the harbour she could see Steve’s little boat scudding across the water to the lobster pots, Miranda’s lemon hair streaming out in the wind like blonde seaweed. Jeannie didn’t approve. It’ll all end in tears, she thought pessimistically, and I don’t suppose for one minute they’ll be little Miss Miranda’s either.

  The village had already prepared for the summer, but Clare, used to school holiday bustle, thought she’d arrived out of season.

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ she had complained to Jack on the phone, the night she and Miranda had arrived. But the next morning, strolling round the village she could see that it had, like a fete, already been opened and everything was set out and waiting for customers. The hanging baskets were up outside the post office and bakery, the sailing club had a freshly-painted tariff of (increased) mooring fees, and there were barrels of budding geraniums getting in the way of the cars outside the Mariners pub. Old people, young couples and families with small babies had been coming and going for their low-season breaks, avoiding the school holidays. Only the houses of the second-homers were still empty, and as Clare’s friends were all among those people she noted only their absence, not the presence of anyone else.

  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.

  TWO

  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.