In the Summertime (6 page)

‘I know.’ Jess picked up a pebble and aimed it at a rock a few yards away. ‘We used to sit here for ages moaning about our folks and making plans that would only give them grief. Remember Andrew’s party?’

‘I do! Poor Andrew, what we did to him. He thought he was just getting
you
round for the evening when Celia and Archie were away for the night and you pretended you’d thought he was having a proper party. We invited
everyone
– talk about bad. He looked quite bewildered.’

‘We did clear up after, though.’

‘No we didn’t! You and I went off to Truro for most of the day and came back when it was nearly all done. I think my mum did a lot of it. She said your brother was very handy with a vacuum cleaner.’ She thought of the elegant Milo with his slender wrists and his floppy blond hair. He was the one person she’d ever seen who made smoking a cigarette look like some kind of ballet move. She used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror at Creek Cottage after they’d been to the beach, practising his smoking style with her toothbrush between her fingers. It wasn’t as if she even wanted to smoke. She just wanted to copy his pretty mannerisms.

‘Well, Andrew was in no fit state to be useful, was he? That was the hangover from hell he’d got. Also, I don’t think he’d been near a domestic appliance in his life. Celia would have considered it
unmanly
. The family still
own the house, you know, but I haven’t seen anyone there in all the time I’ve lived in the village. There’s sometimes a car, but no sign of life, though I did see a cleaning company’s van last week.’

‘I wonder what he did with the photograph we sent him.’ Miranda giggled suddenly. ‘I thought you were brilliant, doing that. Such a crazy thing to do.’

‘Topless in a photo booth – what the hell was I thinking of? The things you do … Poor Andrew. It was a bit unkind, winding him up like that. I know he couldn’t see my face in the shot but I kept thinking he’d be sure to know it was me who sent it. Not nice of me. I’m not proud of it.’

‘Hey, don’t beat yourself up – I’m sure it gave him hours of fun!’

‘Eeeuw!
Don’t!
Hey, that sun’s getting hot.’ She put her hand up and untied her scarf, pulling it off and scratching her head.

‘Wow, that’s
short
,’ Miranda said, looking at Jess’s coppery inch of fuzzy hair. ‘You always did do mad things with your hair. I like it – it suits you.’

Jessica smiled at her. ‘Ah, well, it wasn’t a choice thing. Chemo did it for me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I had a mastectomy just after we moved here. All OK now, though. I’m fine. And it’s growing back.’

Miranda stared at Jess’s chest. ‘Growing
back
?’

Jessica hit her on the leg with the folded newspaper. ‘My
hair
, you loon, not my breast. If only! You know, I’d
give a lot to see that stupid little photo I sent to Andrew. It’s probably the only one of me that exists with my tits out and now here I am with only one of them, or rather one plus a reconstruction. They kind of match, the two of them, more or less, and I’m grateful not to be dead or anything, but it’s all a bit awful really. Maybe it’s karma for the photo. I try not to think of it that way, but sometimes in the middle of the night when I was halfway through the treatment I couldn’t help thinking it.’

‘Jeez, I’m sorry, Jess. You’re so young to have gone through that. Not on your own, I hope?’ She wanted to ask about Lola’s father but Jessica hadn’t mentioned a partner. Would it be tactless to ask? Jess hadn’t asked her about Bo and Silva’s father either, come to think of it.

‘Pretty much on my own. Dad came down and stayed and took care of Lola, made sure she got to school and ate properly. Milo came down too – for a week. But he pined for his boyfriend so I sent him back to Hoxton.’ She laughed. ‘He’s a bit too exotic a flower for Cornwall these days. Man-bags and those tight ditsy trousers that stop short of your bare ankles aren’t really the thing here. One of the yachty lot made kissy faces at him in the pub and Steve bundled him outside and gave him a lecture about homophobia, but it turned out the bloke did actually fancy him, just had a clumsy way of going about things.’

‘Steve? Who is …?’

‘Oh, you remember Steve!’ Jess said. ‘Or you should do. Didn’t you and he …?’

Miranda smiled. ‘Yes. Y’know, just for a few weeks. Not long. I mean, I was only sixteen. Silly sixteen.’ She looked along the beach to where the sand piled close to the small cave near the headland. That had been the spot. A sunny afternoon, a bottle of local cider, a gorgeous, desirable older boy telling you how beautiful you are – what more did it take to persuade a girl to part with her virginity? ‘So he’s still around then?’ she asked, trying to sound completely don’t-careish. She was surprised how hard her heart was thumping. It had no reason to – it must be the coffee. She put her hand up to feel it beating, half expecting her ribs to be the actual soft spot that she kept for that first lovely boyfriend.

‘He is. I heard he’d been away for years but came back to take over the family business. It’s all expanded and he not only owns the ferry operation but the fish side supplies posh restaurants from here to London. He’s done OK, your Steve.’

Miranda laughed. ‘Not
my
Steve! But hey, I’m glad. Hope he’s happy. A bit like you with Andrew, I was pretty ashamed about how I treated him. It was just a holiday thing for me, just something to do, but then one night he said he loved me. I was vile – I laughed, mostly because I was too embarrassed to know how to react. Thinking about it now, I remember how sweet he
was, but I’m sure he ended up thinking I was a nasty little up-country snob.’

‘He probably thought we all were. Most of the locals thought that about us second-homers. You couldn’t blame them really, the way we all swanned down here in the holidays and took over the place but never took any interest in things like local politics unless we wanted some councillor to back a planning application or something.’

Miranda watched as a family who seemed to be entirely clothed from the Boden catalogue came and set up camp on the spot where she’d had sex with Steve. A sudden feeling that she might cry surprised her. She turned her face away from the wind and wiped the ridiculous moisture from her eyes.

Jess shivered. ‘Shall we go back to the house? The children will either have become best friends for ever or be killing each other by now. Lola can be tricky so I wouldn’t like to call it, frankly.’ She reached to pick up her newspaper and it fell further down the rock towards Miranda, who glanced at the big photo on the front page.

‘Oh, bloody hell! Look at this footballer being chucked out of a club; he’s my sister Harriet’s boyfriend. She lives with him,’ she said, feeling cold. It looked like an all too usual story – Premier-League player staggering drunk out of a club, draped over a well-stacked, very young blonde wearing more hair extensions than clothes. Poor Harriet.

‘Ooh, give us a look. Ha! So your little sis is a WAG? And there’s me still thinking of her with plaits and a chocolatey face. Wow, she’s foxy-looking.’ Jess scrambled across to peer at the page, ‘Eeuw, nasty,’ she commented, reading the first few lines of the story.

‘Ah, no. This girl he’s with,’ Miranda said as they set off back up the path to the top of the cliff, ‘she isn’t Harriet.’ Just then the phone in her pocket beeped and she took it out to read a text that had been sent half an hour before. Down on the beach beneath the cliff there had been no signal.
Coming down on plane tonight. Meet me at Newquay? H
.

‘Well, you’ll see for yourself about the plaits and the chocolate-face,’ Miranda said. ‘Harriet’s coming to stay.’

Miranda made up the bed for Harriet in the room next to hers and put a vase with a mixed bunch of sweet peas, cornflowers and ox-eye daisies from the garden on the table next to the bed. She wanted to leave a selection of books out for her too but, looking on the shelves in the sitting room at the selection that other holidaymakers had left behind, she found it hard to choose something that would be neither tactless (there were quite a lot of fun romantic comedies) nor depressing (someone had been keen on gloomy Scandinavian crime). Harriet was a great one for abundant tears and the boyfriend situation was looking bad enough without Miranda’s accidentally setting her off. In the end she chose a book of the Mitford sisters’ letters and Keith Richards’s autobiography. Surely either of those would be an absorbing distraction if Harriet were afflicted with misery-filled sleepless nights.

‘I am
homeless
,’ she had wailed down the phone, adding with maximum Dickensian drama, ‘You must take me in!’ Miranda had offered her the keys to her Chiswick house, thinking perhaps Harriet might prefer the distractions of London to the quiet of Cornwall, but she had started howling again. ‘But I need to be with
you
! I need my
family
!’ So of course Miranda agreed to collect her that night from Newquay airport. Somehow, on the drive back to Chapel Creek, she was going to have to persuade Harriet that however desolate she was feeling, it might be an idea to give some thought to their mother. Being dumped by a wayward faithless boyfriend whom she had only recently moved in with wasn’t really up there with Clare’s loss of her husband. Harriet might have to think a bit before claiming that every single bit of life’s unfairness had landed on her and her alone. But all the same, it could be good to have an ally in the house. Maybe Miranda could even start to feel a bit more like relaxing, more as if this were actually a pleasurable break, if she had someone else to share Clare with. Harriet was a persuasive sort – she might even manage to get their mother to deal with Jack’s ashes sooner rather than later. It would be such a relief to get whatever ceremony Clare wanted out of the way so they could get on with trying to make this a proper holiday. In the meantime, still in her capacity of team leader and default dogsbody, Miranda had to think about food for them all. Bo had gone off with Lola to
Jess’s house, leaving Silva trying to look as if she didn’t care in the slightest about having chosen to stay behind.

‘Are you sure you didn’t want to go with them?’ Miranda asked when she came back from the beach and found Silva floating on a pink inflatable crocodile in the pool, her iPod plugged into her ears.

‘Like,
no
?’ The emphatic negative told Miranda that Silva was indeed regretting her decision. She looked lonely, a bit lost, and was possibly heading for a full-day sulk. When Clare offered to take her over on the ferry to St Piran, Miranda was absolutely
not
going to let her say no.

Miranda locked up the house, texted Bo to tell him where she’d hidden a spare key in case he came back, and set off to the village shop. She was hoping to do some serious stocking up and decided that using the village shop would be far more interesting than a trip to the nearest supermarket, nine miles away. She needed quite a lot of supplies and wasn’t sure if the shop did deliveries (where was Ocado when you needed it?), but there was an old-fashioned wicker shopping trolley being decoratively chic in the hallway so she took the umbrellas out of it and almost laughed as she considered how she wouldn’t be seen dead with such an item back home on the Chiswick High Road. The shopping trolley of shame, she thought, practising manoeuvring it on the path and doing a little dance
with it, thinking along the lines of Fred Astaire with a cane, before she headed off down the hill. Although maybe back home among the thousands of fit young fashion-forward mummies pushing top of the range baby buggies it would count as retro enough to look kind of edgily ironic.

The shop was busy. It had been extended a long way back from how Miranda remembered it and was no longer gloomily dark-shelved, tatty and a bit forbidding but all light wood fittings, smart rubber flooring and pale turquoise paint. A big heap of wicker picnic baskets was down by the deli counter, each of them name-labelled for customers. The place seemed to be doing a tremendous trade, making up gourmet picnic lunch orders for those who were too holiday-relaxed to want the bother of putting together a sandwich or two for the beach. Good call, whoever had thought of that. Children hovered around their parents, scooping up extras in terms of fancy crisps (no Monster Munch here) and heritage apples displayed in wooden trugs. Someone was also being very enterprising with ready-cooked food and the shop’s freezer was crammed with home-made, hand-labelled lasagne, fish pies, organic chicken casseroles and aubergine moussaka.

‘Bloody ’ellfire, they see you coming, here,’ a northern-accented voice commented to the shop in general. A stout woman in a navy and white striped top
peered into the freezer cabinet and held up a pack of monkfish goujons. ‘Would you look at the price of these, and they’re not even Bird’s Eye. I didn’t expect to have to take out a bleedin’ mortgage for a packet of fish fingers.’

Miranda couldn’t see any wire baskets so used her shopping trolley to collect what she needed, piling in an extravagant few packs of ready-cooked frozen boeuf bourguignon that they could have the next day. For tonight, she chose a fish pie for Clare and the children, realizing she’d be off doing the airport run for most of the evening and wouldn’t be home for supper. She grabbed brown paper bags and loaded them with tomatoes, mixing up a chic selection of red, stripy and yellow ones, plus knobbly pink fir apple potatoes, a stack of grubby-looking mixed salad leaves, avocados, chicory and some dark, crinkly
cavolo nero
which she was pretty sure Silva would eat so long as the word ‘cabbage’ wasn’t mentioned. Just as she was studying the deli counter in search of ingredients for a sandwich she could eat in the car on the way to Newquay, a man came in from the back of the shop and spoke to the assistant, whom Miranda recognized as the rude blonde girl who’d snapped about ‘bloody trippers’ at the pub the night before. And he was the one she’d thought resembled Steve. She edged away to a safe distance to get a good look without his noticing her. If it wasn’t Steve, it was someone incredibly closely related to him. It if
was
him, she didn’t particularly want him to see her, not just yet anyway. In fact, to be honest, not without fair warning and a good go at her make-up.