Never Mind Miss Fox

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H
ey, Mum? Guess what.”

“You know I'll never guess,” said Martha. “What?”

Eliza swung her rucksack onto one shoulder and pulled her ponytail over the other. “My new piano teacher knows you,” she said, “and she knows Dad too.”

Clive was undressing when Martha told him.

“The oddest thing,” she began. “You'd never guess in a thousand years.” Then she went back to cleaning her teeth and he heard brushing, spitting, rinsing and sluicing.

Clive pulled off his trousers and sat on the corner of the bed. He waited, yawning, and then called after her into the bathroom. “For God's sake—what?”

Martha came to the bedroom door and looked down at him. In one hand she held a reel of dental floss. “Eliza's got a new piano teacher,” she said, “and it's Eliot Fox.”

C
live fell in love with Martha at Oxford, in the final days of their last spring term. Realizing her worth—afraid to leave her unattended—he begged her to join his family's annual Easter trip to France. “It's very relaxed,” he lied. “We can do what we like and”—the trump card—“my parents will pay for everything.”

Martha agreed at once: “I love France, and I love families.” She was studying French and Arabic, and had no family of her own. “I do have a father,” she told Clive. “Aiden Doyle? He's a writer.” Clive shook his head but because he loved her he searched through shelves of second-hand books until he found one—
Wild Bird Calling
—to take on holiday.

Martha's reputation—she was described by various sources as a “stroppy cow,” “a slag” and “a laugh”—had kept Clive at a distance. In the end she had dealt with the matter herself: she had kissed him in a pub corridor, between the toilets and the bar, and pressed him against the wall with a glorious, winning confidence.

To her evident surprise the kiss had been both revelatory and full of promise. She had pulled away and stared at his face in delight, as if she had not really looked at it before—as perhaps she had not. “Well I never,” she had murmured, smiling. She had let her hands rest on his shoulders and leaned her hips against his until he would have done anything—anything—to keep her there.

Clive had never been in love before and he soon discovered that its terrors were at least as numerous as its pleasures. He could not bear to surrender this precious treasure over the Easter break, and he would have told her a pack of lies to make her come away. As it turned out, she was willing to come for something near enough the truth.

Peter and Val Barkes had discovered their “adorably backward” French seaside town in the first years of their marriage and returned every year since. Their two sons, Clive and Tom, had played on the beach with buckets and spades, learned to swim in salted, lapping shallows and wobbled their bicycles along quiet lanes which wound between shifting, whispering dunes. It was only in recent years—since a budget airline had pounced on the local airport—that the resort had begun to be saturated by holidaymakers of a different type, whom Peter christened “the hordes.” These visitors, oafish and insensitive, had spoiled everything.

The whole place was pronounced “ruined” but Peter and Val continued to visit, coming at Easter to avoid the summer crowds. “We won't be chased away,” they said. “We found it first.” This year, however, a heat wave brought an unexpected tide of tourists and the couple would not be consoled: first the town and now the climate had turned against them.

“It's global whatsit,” said Val, fanning herself with a laminated menu. “It's too hot; it's not right.”

“What did your parents talk about in the old days?” Martha asked Clive. “Before climate change and mass tourism?”

Tom and his friend Eliot both laughed when they heard this but Clive was embarrassed. He was frightened of Martha's judgment and began to see his parents with a keen, peeled gaze. No longer were they “Mum and Dad” but now, “Peter and Val.” What he saw—what he thought Martha saw—made him shrivel. “My parents are being awful,” he apologized. “I don't know what's got into them. They're not normally as bad as this.”

“They're not awful,” said Martha in surprise. “They're lovely. Your mum is such a
Mum
—she's like the one in the ad for Fairy Liquid.”

Clive did not know whether this was a good or bad thing. In reply to something she might have meant he said, “It's not short for Valerie, by the way. It's short for Valentine.”

When she heard this Martha laughed at him and said, “You are funny.”

Clive had not meant to be funny. Worry made him tense; tension—or perhaps a bad oyster—made him sick. He lay in bed, wretched, clutching his knotted stomach.

“Are you ill?” asked Martha, looking down at him in the bed as she rubbed sunscreen into her face. She did not seem sympathetic; Clive wondered if she had heard him in the bathroom, during the night.

It occurred to him that they did not know each other well enough for bouts of vomiting and diarrhea in the same small space. “I'll be better in an hour or so,” he said. “You go on, to the beach.”

When she had gone he dragged himself to the
pharmacie
but could not bear to mime his symptoms and make himself understood. He returned to the hotel bathroom and hunched over the toilet to retch and weep.
This is not fair,
he thought afterwards, blowing his nose and gargling Listerine. He curled up on the floor around the bidet and remained there in a doze, waking now and again to wonder if anyone was missing him.

He was roused by a knock at the door and a shrill voice: Eliot's. “Your mum sent me to find out whether you're ill. Are you? Clive? Hello?” She barged in and saw him on the floor. “Shit,” she said. “You look awful.”

Tom had said of Eliot, “I'm bringing a girl but she's not my girlfriend, just my friend.” It was obvious he loved her, but not that she loved him. “You can put us in the same room, Mum,” Tom had said in a gloomy voice. “She won't even snog me. I've tried everything.”

Val's zipped-purse mouth almost disappeared when she heard this. “May I remind you,” she said, “that it's not only drinking and smoking you and your
friend
are too young for. You may think you're very grown-up but in my eyes—not to mention the eyes of the law—you're both children.”

“It's ironic really,” Tom mused to Clive. “Most of the girls at my school are slags—much slaggier than the ones at the comp—but this one won't even kiss me for a fiver.”

“Too bloody rich,” was Martha's comment.

Tom had won a scholarship to school in London, a fact which never ceased to irritate Clive. “Why do you care?” Martha said to him. “Public school is for dickheads.”

“Slags and dickheads,” corrected Tom.

Now Eliot peeled Clive off the bathroom floor and marched him to the chemist. “You've got to sort yourself out,” she said. “It's not sexy to be ill—especially with bum-related stuff.” In a torrent of schoolgirl French she demanded medicine and swapped Clive's money for two packets of pills. “One's for the squits,” she said, “and the other's for constipation. You can do the fine-tuning.”

Clive took the paper bag from her and returned to his room.

He got up late in the afternoon and judged himself recovered enough to go to the beach. One of the landmarks of ruination noted by Peter and Val was a brand-new (“monstrous”) concrete toilet block, squatting beside the Café du Soleil. Today it might make itself useful.

Standing on the sand, wobbly and alone, Clive looked at the happy scene before him and realized with a sinking heart that those few short hours in bed had cost him his place in the group. Martha, Eliot and Tom were fooling around like three young kids; his parents were shepherding them with indulgent good humor. Adult conversation had been replaced by offers of ice cream and reminders about sunscreen; the kids—“You kids!”—did nothing but giggle, cheat at
pétanque
and try to push each other over on the sand.

Clive hovered at the edge of the game, uncertain. Martha had last night been his ally but this person before him, laughing with Tom, was a stranger. Her bare, sandy legs were planted wide apart on the beach and a rope of hair swung on her back. She looked as assertive, unguarded and free as a pony turned loose in a field.

Clive felt abandoned and out of his depth. He did not approve of giggles, which did not sound to him like laughter, but when she saw him Martha said, “Clive! You're better!” in such an artless, cheerful voice he thought it must be all right.

“Just about,” said Clive. “I feel pretty awful.”

He knew that Eliot was right and that while fortitude was sexy, illness was not. He knew what he should have said: “Much better! Can I join in?” But he did not wish to be thought recovered. He watched Martha drop her hand and turn away, and he felt the pleasant, seeping satisfaction of the victim.

“Rotten luck,” his father sympathized. “I expect it was an oyster. The sea's not as clean as it used to be, back in the day.”

“That's such crap, Dad,” called Tom. “You don't know what you're talking about. We used to swim through shoals of floating turds, me and Clive, when we were kids.”

Peter pretended not to have heard and Val said, “Please, Tom,” in a faint voice.

Clive stood for a little longer and then sideways, crablike, approached his mother's folding chair and crouched beside it. “Tomorrow,” he said, “why don't we all do our own thing? You and Dad could go and look at a château or something—get away from us lot for the day.”

“We're not here to do our own thing,” said Val in surprise. “We're here on a family holiday—and anyway I love ‘you lot.' That wicked little Eliot makes me laugh, and your girlfriend's bottom is doing wonders for your father—do look, Clive, he's gone absolutely scarlet.”

But Clive did not look; he could not laugh; he would not relax.

Before dinner he lay on his hotel bed and listened to his brother and Eliot chattering to each other on their balcony. Martha was in the shower and Clive did not want her to hear them. Something had gone wrong, something untraceable, and it made him get to his feet and slide shut the balcony door.

Martha came back into the room naked, rosy and hot. Her hair was bundled up in a towel. “It still stinks in there,” she said. “Why have you shut the door? It's so hot.”

“The other two were making a racket.”

Martha pulled the towel off her head and turned herself upside down to rub at her wet hair. “Are they shagging?” she asked.

“Shagging?” said Clive, shocked. “No, they're talking.”

“Talking!” Martha uprighted herself and mocked him. “How outrageous!”

“It was the smoke,” said Clive. “The cigarette smoke was coming in. I'm feeling ill, remember?”

“How could I forget,” she teased, coming over to the bed and clambering up beside him.

Clive felt a flash of hot temper. “Get off, will you?” he said. “I'm not in the mood.”

Martha stopped where she was, prowling across the coverlet to reach him, and sat back on her heels. “Now that you mention it,” she said, “neither am I.” She retreated off the bed, got dressed, and left the room without another word.

Clive decided that if only Eliot would get off with Tom, he and Martha would be all right again. He tried to encourage the romance the next day.

“I do love Tom,” said Eliot, cycling along the sea road beside Clive, “but not like that. It's not going to happen; I've told him a million times. Anyway, I'm in love with Mr. Lennox.”

“Who's he?”

“My piano teacher. Really—I'm not joking: I love him.”

“You're being ridiculous,” said Clive. “That's not going to happen.” Her crush distressed him.
Perhaps,
he thought,
I am protective of Tom.
“Your teacher won't think of you like that,” he tried to persuade her, “trust me.”

“You underestimate my feminine wiles,” Eliot replied. “You don't know what it's like: sitting next to each other at the piano, all cooched up and cozy, nothing but music, him telling me where to put my hands…” Sticking her nose in the air she pedaled away from him, laughing.

Clive watched her go—salted hair sticking straight up, a smut of freckles across her nose, torn-off denim shorts of Tom's and sandy feet in plimsolls—and he wondered.

“What does she want to happen?” he asked Martha. “Sex? With her piano teacher?”

“Not sex,” said Martha. “Love.”

This was right; Clive believed her. Eliot did not want to have sex with Mr. Lennox but she wanted him to love her best—more than he loved his wife, his children and his job. So much, in fact, that he would abandon everything and risk imprisonment: run away with her like Humbert Humbert, to live in a bedsit in a rainy town beside the sea.

The fantasy was absurd and Clive was prepared to bet that if any part of it had encroached on her reality Eliot would have been frightened and revolted. She loved and she longed to be loved, but the real thing when it came—Tom's wholehearted gift of himself, inside and out—was unattractive. She wanted something more painful and vicious: someone who did not want her.

Peter and Val admired Martha but they adored Eliot. She bowled them over. “That girl,” chuckled Peter, “is a real charmer. She's got pizzazz.”

Val was protective. “I hope she's going to be all right.” To Tom she said, “You must look out for Eliot, Tom. She's just the type to get mixed up in silly nonsense; she doesn't take care of herself.”

“She cares about her hands,” said Tom.

This was true. “They're the only part of me that's any use,” Eliot said, looking down at them.

One night she played the piano for them in the lobby. She stood in front of them and announced, “This is a sonata in D major by Scarlatti. You can clap at the end, but not in the middle.” She frowned—serious, for once—and then sat down and lifted her hands.

Afterwards she boasted to Tom, “Now I can make your parents do anything I want, you watch.” It was true: before they could gather their wits she had persuaded Val and Peter to get up the next morning at the crack of dawn and drive the whole party—yawning like kittens—to a town famous for its
marché aux puces.

The outing was like an unexpected day off from school due to flooding or snowfall. The structure of the group disintegrated—to Clive's relief—and for the duration of the morning they were not a family but a gathering of six runaways.