In the Summertime Page 2

  ‘I bet you did before you were fifteen.’ Silva scowled. ‘And nobody will know. We’re supposed to be on holiday. Nobody knows us here.’

  No, they didn’t. Not this time anyway. Miranda glanced up and could see her mother giving her a strange, speculative look. You could almost see the memory cogs starting up. Had this been a good idea? They could have stayed somewhere a few miles away, somewhere with no memories for them at all, and simply visited the beach here for a day just to do the ash-scattering then gone away again, barely touching the surface of the past. Still, too late now. She got up and started putting mugs into the dishwasher and then poured water into a bowl for the cat even though he would ignore it and – as at home – only drink out of the loo or the bath. It would be all right, being here. There wouldn’t be anyone left here who remembered her, definitely not. All those teen-years holiday friends were long dispersed. And Steve, one of the very few permanent village residents they’d even spoken to, would have moved away as nearly all the local young did. He wouldn’t still be running the ferry and taking his dad’s lobster pots out in the boat these days. And he certainly wouldn’t be showing silly, smitten sixteen-year-old girls what sex was like under the low-hanging trees on scorching lazy afternoons on Dolphin Beach. No. He’d be long gone.

  TWO

  ‘I don’t remember this path being so steep,’ Clare said as she and Miranda walked down the lane from the house towards the centre of the village and the creek. ‘And we have to come back up it later. We should have brought a torch. I mustn’t think like that – it’s a bit old-lady and I’m not there yet.’

  ‘Leave it out, Mum; you’re fitter than most of my friends. And don’t worry about falling over in the dark; it’ll probably still be light when we come back but in case it isn’t I’ve got a little torch on my key ring.’

  Miranda was hungry and in need of a big glass of wine but she managed – just – to keep up a jollying tone towards her mother, trying as always to keep Clare’s fragile spirits from collapsing. She’d got her computer set up in her room and checked emails in case there was a work crisis somewhere that needed dealing with from this distance but she hadn’t unpacked a single item yet, apart from the box of essential food supplies that she’d crammed fast and haphazardly into the fridge and cupboards. She was conscious of Jack’s urn still in the boot of the car and that no one was mentioning it. Still, on the plus side the evening was warm and sunny, the candlelike spikes of pink valerian and generous clumps of ox-eye daisies were massed on the warm dry-stone wall along the lane, brushing against their limbs as they walked along the narrow path the way they had all those years ago, and the children seemed happy, which had to be a massive bonus. She could hear them shouting and laughing together – a rare sound these days since Bo had taken up silence and Silva had discovered the power of mood swings. The two of them had walked on ahead and Miranda guessed they’d now be as far as the footbridge over the creek where years ago she had teased her little sisters that the trolls lurked waiting to pounce. Just as she was thinking how lovely it was that they seemed to be enjoying themselves at last, a loud splash told her first that the tide was up – rather than reduced to low-ebb mud – and second that someone had fallen in the water. The girly shriek that followed told her it was Silva. Bo would have simply sworn, loudly.

  ‘Jesus, the little sods – now what have they done?’ Miranda left Clare and sprinted the last few dozen yards past the clump of gone-to-the-wild rhododendrons to the little wooden bridge where Bo was leaning under the rail with his hand stretched out, hauling out someone who wasn’t his sister. Miranda ran to him, even now her feet automatically skipping over the bridge’s fourth plank, the one that always used to feel softer than the others, as if it was about to give way. Replaced now, she quickly noted.

  ‘What happened? Did you slip off the bridge? Are you all right?’ Miranda asked the soaking, giggling girl. She was about Bo’s age and as she emerged from the water Miranda could see she was wearing a black wetsuit, so falling in probably wasn’t something too unexpected or calamitous. Her long light brown hair stuck to the neoprene like pondweed and the smell of the muddy creek was already wafting from her. She didn’t seem at all bothered by her ducking.

  ‘I was walking along the top of that wall over there,’ she said, pointing back to the cottage by the bridge, still laughing. ‘I’m getting really good at it.’

  ‘Not that good.’ Silva sneered. ‘Do you fall in every time?’

  ‘Only when I’m not concentrating.’ The girl smiled, but only at Bo, who stared at his shoes.

  Clare caught up with them and looked in the direction the girl had pointed. ‘That’s Creek Cottage: our house,’ she said. ‘Are you staying there?’

  ‘No it’s not, it’s mine! Well, my mum’s and mine, that is. It’s not yours.’ The girl was frowning now, looking a bit worried.

  ‘It’s OK, she meant it used to be ours,’ Miranda explained. ‘But it was a very long time ago, way before you were even born. When we had the house and I was about your age, I used to walk along that wall too, playing circuses, pretending it was a tightrope.’ And climb over it too, she remembered. She’d go up the stone steps and over the wall late at night rather than using the gate with its noisy latch, to slide silently into the garden and in through the side door when Steve brought her back from the beach or the pub in his boat. The night would be so quiet you could hear every drop of water as it rolled from his oars when they dipped in and out of the stream. He could row so stealthily, without splashing; essential when you were being all secret. He’d told her it was an inborn skill, handed down through a long line of Cornish smugglers, and in the romance of the moment she’d pretty much believed him. Swans would loom out of the blackness from behind moored boats, their heads level with hers. Miranda was scared of their orange beaks which could snap at her face at any minute, but she never dared admit it to Steve. He’d had her down from the start as a spoiled town girl, ripe for teasing, and he wasn’t wrong.

  ‘Maybe you’d better go in and get dry,’ Clare told the girl, who was now wringing her long hair out, the water splashing on to Bo’s trainers. He didn’t seem to mind. It occurred to Miranda that if Silva had done this he’d have had plenty to say.

  ‘Lola! Have you done it again? You are a total pain! Come back here right now!’ A woman was leaning out from an upstairs window, her hair tied up in a green scarf and a paintbrush in her hand.

  ‘That used to be my bedroom,’ Miranda said, almost to herself. She wondered what colour the girl’s mother (who she assumed this must be) was painting it. It used to be a sort of pale straw shade, the same colour as her hair, which had been long, almost to her waist. She put her hand up to the in-between length she had now, half expecting to feel that an extra half-metre had magicked itself back.

  ‘Yes, you’d better go in – you’ll catch your death,’ she told the girl, realizing this was the first time she’d ever said that actual phrase. ‘You’ll catch your death’ was something only a mother said. She was a mother, and had been for nearly fifteen years, but right now she felt as if she’d been one for absolutely ever. That was about the urn full of ashes and Clare being so needy and about being the one who, for this trip, was the organizer, the coper, the one whose job it was to lead the cheers to gee up the team. It all made her feel as if she’d skipped, in one day, to a new level on the grown-up chart. Possibly to an age older than her own mother. These three weeks were going to be hard work. Why on earth had they chosen to come here for so damn long? A weekend could have done the job and then they could have flown off to France and rented somewhere near her sister Amy, as they had last year.

  The woman at the window waved in a vague sort of way at them and for a second Miranda felt she knew her. But then she vanished back into the house, the moment passed and the girl, Lola, turned to go, calling back to Bo with another sparkling smile, ‘Thank you for pulling me out. See you around, maybe?’ He grunted at her, shoved his hands deep in his pockets
and set off towards the pub.

  ‘She was only ripping the piss, you know. She thinks you’re well butters,’ Silva called to the back of her brother as she scurried along to catch up with him. He turned briefly but didn’t say anything and Miranda could see a pleased smirk on his face. Good, she thought, feeling a surge of love for her tall, gawky boy.

  Every inch of the walk through the village to the Mariners pub was familiar to Miranda and yet also not, rather as the woman at the window had been. Across the creek, next to their old cottage, Celia and Archie’s house looked much as it always had with its immaculate garden still full of roses. What had happened to their solitary son Andrew, Miranda wondered. Had he long grown out of his gawky awkwardness and worked out how to fit in with the world or was he still slightly out of place and finding the whole experience of life completely bemusing? She hoped he’d carried on with all the sailing he so loved. It had been the one area in which he looked perfectly comfortable and competent. She’d ask around, she decided, see if anyone knew if the family still visited.

  The old mix of thatched cottages and slate-roofed houses was the same (give or take the odd extension, and some fancy new windows) but every so often there’d be something different that jarred. The old red phonebox across the creek from ‘their’ cottage was still there but there was no phone in it now. Someone had put a metre-high garden gnome inside it and its fat plaster face grinned out at passers-by, looking a bit evil. The one village shop had been updated and extended and the old racks of postcards that used to hang by the door and the tatty plastic bins crammed with cheap beach mats had been replaced by chic wooden crates of vegetables. A promise that these were both local and organic was chalked up on a slate. A glance through the door showed more chalked signs offering home-baked bread, local cheese and a top selection of wines. Miranda wondered what had become of the previous stock. Had anyone actually bought up the old never-changing display of tinned mince and evaporated milk? Or maybe they were still there, defiantly surviving among the bantam eggs and balsamic vinegar. She’d find out in the morning.

  ‘Do you remember Harriet organizing a mass shoplifting?’ Clare asked as they passed. ‘They were banned from the shop for the rest of the summer. We were mortified.’ A small smile was on Clare’s face and Miranda’s spirits lifted a bit at the sight of it.

  ‘For Amy’s birthday party, yes. No one was allowed to buy presents, Harriet ordered all her guests to steal them, as a sort of dare.’

  ‘They were such silly little things, doing just as Harriet said. You’d think they’d just get their mums to buy things and then pretend, wouldn’t you? The parents of the village ones wouldn’t speak to us after that. It’s one reason Jack and I decided to sell up. The second-homers were always despised as outsiders as it was, without being extra hated for corrupting the village infants. It wouldn’t be something the locals would forget in a hurry.’

  Miranda laughed. ‘Harriet wasn’t to be messed with. Even at eight.’ She wasn’t now, either. What Harriet wanted, she got. Right now she wanted not to be involved with her mother’s grief or with her father’s final send-off and had refused to come down to Cornwall even for a weekend. ‘Jeez, Manda, we’ve had the friggin’ funeral. It’s over; why drag it out?’ All heart, that girl.

  Not much had changed outside the Mariners pub either. The hanging baskets and the half-barrels by the door still had the same eye-watering colour mixes of orange geraniums and purple petunias with a few pink and white hanging fuchsias thrown in. The wooden picnic tables were still lined up along the creek edge and holidaying family groups were out early, bagging tables in the fading sun and trying to round up children to choose from the chalked-up menu before they ran off down the slipway to the water’s edge to catch little crabs. Here and there, moody teenagers sat sullenly with their parents, picking lichen off the benches and glaring at soft drinks, desperate to be with someone they could actually talk to but too shy to make eye contact.

  ‘What are those kids doing with the crabs?’ Silva asked, staring at three little boys bending over the tiny creatures they had tipped out of plastic buckets on to the slipway.

  ‘Racing them,’ Miranda told her. ‘We used to do that too. Harriet always seemed to get the biggest, fastest ones. I had to help Amy find some that could beat her.’

  ‘Yuck. That’s like well gross? They’ve been in like, mud?’ Silva said as they chose a table near the water’s edge and sat down. But Miranda could see she was looking at the smaller children with something more than curiosity. A little bit of envy, possibly? She was willing to bet that as soon as they’d eaten, Silva would be down on the slipway, up to her knees in the water with the younger ones. Miranda had felt the same at her age, caught between being too old to play like a child and a longing still to be one. Her sisters were much younger than her, so she’d taken on a bit of a nanny role at times, like the crab-fishing or the sand-castle building, and been able to enjoy it without feeling nervous she’d be sneered at by passing groups of cool girls.

  ‘You see?’ Clare said to Miranda, following Silva’s gaze. ‘You should have taken them on English seaside holidays as we did with you. They’ve missed out.’

  ‘How can you say they’ve missed out? They’ve been all over France and Italy and to Florida and … well, loads of places.’ Miranda felt annoyed. ‘And don’t you remember the endless rain? That Cornish thing … what’s the word?’

  ‘Mizzle; rain so fine you hardly know it’s there,’ Clare supplied. ‘It was all part of the charm. We’d simply put the waterproofs on and go for a walk; use a bit of initiative. Anyway, it wasn’t always wet. Remember that last summer we were here? It was blazing. And it’s pretty fabulous now, isn’t it? We’re going to get a wonderful sunset.’ She put her face up to the soft, late rays of the sun and looked, Miranda thought, the most content she had since, ten months before, Jack had first become properly ill.

  ‘Food!’ Bo’s voice boomed out from beneath the eternal hoodie. ‘Have we ordered? Can I have the T-bone steak?’

  ‘You can. Mum and Silva, have you decided?’ She glanced at the menu that was hung on the outside of the pub, behind them.

  ‘The lemon chicken thing for me, please,’ Silva said.

  ‘Great. OK, I’ll go and put the order in. And drinks? A bottle of red for us, Mum?’

  ‘A bottle? But there’s only the two of us.’

  Miranda had an urge to say, ‘Yes, and …?’ She could do with more than one glass, that was for sure. ‘Tell you what, I’ll order a bottle and we can take what’s left back to the house with us. OK?’

  ‘If you like. I’d like the lamb kebab, please, Miranda.’ Clare was sounding defeated again. This was hard work.

  The inside of the pub was dark by comparison with the brightness of the evening sun reflected from the glinting water. As her eyes adjusted and she gradually focused properly, Miranda looked around at the customers by the bar, wondering if she would recognize anyone. It was quite crowded, mostly with bemused-looking holidaymakers trying to make sense of the food-ordering system and getting small, tired children to choose something more than just chips. Over in the far corner a bunch of hefty-looking sailing types, men and women with Henri Lloyd jackets and voices that were used to making themselves heard from stem to stern, laughed and yelled to each other. She couldn’t see anyone who looked even remotely familiar, but then twenty years on everyone would have changed so much. Some of the older villagers would surely be dead, others bald, aged, grey, run to fat or run away from the place altogether. What, she wondered, had happened to Steve’s mother Jeannie, who used to be the cleaner at Creek Cottage? She’d been Liz and Eliot’s cleaner too and Clare had been grumpy about this and furious that Liz undermined the balance of the local economy by paying her at London rates, though, Miranda considered now, why wouldn’t she? It was a competitive market, and finding someone you could trust with a key during your long absences wasn’t easy. She remembered there used to be stories (exchanged in horrified whisp
ers) of cleaners who’d run a secret little rental scam using the owners’ properties without their knowledge. Celia once told Clare that a woman in the village had turned up from London unexpectedly and found a couple cooking supper in her kitchen and the washing machine on. All the grown-ups had seemed so old to Miranda back then, but the chances were that that had simply been the typical view from any self-obsessed sixteen-year-old and Jeannie could well still be energetically cleaning holiday cottages on changeover days and stashing all those abandoned half-bottles of shower gel, washing-up liquid and gin into her old shopping bag like so much well-earned swag.

  Miranda ordered the food, drinks for the children and a bottle of Australian Merlot from the barman, handed over her credit card for later payment and headed back to the terrace, still thinking about that long-ago summer and almost knocking into a man and woman in the doorway, on their way in.

  ‘Sorry!’ she called as she passed.

  ‘Bloody trippers,’ she heard the woman mutter. Miranda turned briefly to look at her, shocked by the rudeness. The back of the girl, all long lemony hair, a short denim skirt and tanned bare legs, vanished into the pub and the man, flicking his car key to lock a convertible Mercedes in the car park, gave Miranda a brief apologetic grin before quickly following his companion into the bar. Miranda took a deep and rather shaky breath and went back down the steps to rejoin her family on the terrace. She hoped this wasn’t going to happen every time she came across local strangers in this village: this unsettling certainty – as she’d had with the woman at Creek Cottage – that she’d known them before. Especially this one.

  THREE

  Andrew knew it had been too much to hope for, that he’d get to go to his parents’ cottage on his own with Freddie. Geraldine had said it would be all right, or at least he’d thought she had. You could never quite tell with Geraldine. What she’d actually said was yes, of course he could take Freddie to Cornwall. She’d also added, in her full-strength headmistress voice, that in fact it was about time, wasn’t it, and why had he waited till now, when Archie and Celia were about to sell it? So he hadn’t been wrong to think that had been a definite yes, and in spite of wanting to argue that he’d been asking to take Freddie there for the past four years but she’d insisted they all do the Mark Warner holidays and Center Parcs instead, he’d been happy and excited at the prospect of showing off to his son the village that had been part of his young life. And yet now, instead of being back in Esher tidying up her garden to within a centimetre of its terrified life, Geraldine was in the car with them, barking instructions about which route to take and how many miles it was till Truro. She knew quite well how many years his folks had had this cottage and that he knew the way. She’d never even crossed the Tamar in her life and couldn’t tell Bodmin Moor from Dartmoor. He’d told her he could drive it blindfold and that, of course, had been a mistake.