WELL HE DIDN’T have to go with them, but he knew what they’d say if he didn’t: ‘Oh Andrew they’ll think it’s so odd’ or worse, ‘Aren’t you well?’ His mother would put an enquiring hand to his forehead, checking for fever. He didn’t want to be touched, not by her, not by anyone now. They’d want a good reason for his absence, and Celia could smell out an untruth like a labrador after a dead pheasant. He was pretty sure that the photos were of Jessica, even though he couldn’t see her face behind the scarf. She must have known he’d know too, he didn’t actually know that many girls after all, and certainly not with tits like that. And that scarf looked like the kind of silky paisley type of thing that Miranda sometimes wore, which made it worse, they were in it together, mocking him. He could imagine them by the photo booth, giggling, saying ‘He’s going to love this!’, and Jessica posing quickly, half-naked, while the lights flashed, then struggling back into her tee shirt while Miranda kept terrified look-out the other side of the curtain. It had to be them, the envelope had a Truro postmark. It certainly wasn’t Beryl from the pub. She had much bigger, darker nipples, he’d seen them outlined against her thin blouse as she reached up to change the gin bottle on the row of optics. He’d thought the nipples rather frightening, but fascinating. She’d seen him looking and winked, shamelessly. It had been yet another of those times when he’d wished he didn’t blush.
He would have to go to Clare’s, and he’d have to act as if nothing had happened. Then with any luck they’d think the dreadful package had got lost in the post, or been re-routed to Surrey along with the telephone bill and the council tax stuff. Andrew felt he had quite enough to cope with already, what with Celia’s tight-lipped hurt silences, and Archie’s bluff commiseration, ‘Bad luck getting caught old boy!’ as if by having the party Andrew had turned into a man at last and now they could be chums. It even seemed he didn’t mind about the Chivas Regal. Chip off the old block, that kind of thing. This was not what Andrew wanted at all. All he had wanted was to get his leg over, as the rugby players at school put it. Funny thing to say, he thought, surely they don’t just mean one leg?
Andrew also thought that he and Milo had cleared up rather well, but every time Celia moved furniture she managed to find just one more cigarette end. There had been a used and dusty condom under her bed, and the dustmen had refused to take all the sacks of empty bottles and cans at one go, so the garbage sat there outside the cottage reproaching Andrew for his misdemeanours for a whole extra week. The wages of sin had been a good telling-off and a hangover. Andrew therefore resolved to forget about sex and concentrate on his sailing, perhaps getting seriously fit, with a physique worth showing off. Then next time it would be Jessica damn well propositioning him. In the meantime Andrew couldn’t quite bring himself to tear up the little strip of photographs and hide them at the bottom of the rubbish bin, as he had with the Marks and Spencer knickers. He thought he should really, but destroying them would have felt like mutilating Jessica herself, and she looked so vulnerable, so ‘offered’. So he took them upstairs and opened the shameful box of-secrets in his wardrobe, intending to incarcerate them for ever beneath the collection of erotica. All this lot too, he thought, was part of the sin for which he was being punished, and he decided he’d have no more of it. But just unlocking the box, just handling the photos of Jessica, was having the usual effect. No-one was home. Andrew rifled through the box and its rather obscene contents. He giggled quietly at his own small joke, the idea of handling himself with kid gloves, a pair of which he had bought from a junk shop near the school. They were so thin and delicate and did not detract from the sensation like heavier ones did. They felt like skin, someone else’s, not his own sweaty impatient hand. Well maybe just this once, he thought, after all Jessica had sent him a gift.
Clare was in the kitchen. She hated icing cakes and did not need Miranda hanging around and picking at the sandwiches.
‘Leave them alone Miranda, they’re for later.’
‘Sorry. Who’s coming?’
‘Just the usual, Eliot and Liz, Celia and Archie, and all the kids probably, unless you’re all off to the beach?’
‘No, well I’ll be here anyway.’
Miranda was slouching against the doorway, looking bored and moody. She was kicking rhythmically at the chipped skirting board, driving Clare mad. ‘Miranda if you can’t be useful, please go away.’
‘Sorry,’ said Miranda, not moving. Clare bustled across to the oven and got out the scones. Please, she thought, don’t let this be the moment that she wants to talk, I’m too busy.
‘Do you want anyone else to come too?’ Clare asked, aware that her subtlety was rather heavy-handed. (As, she thought, were also her scones.) She rinsed the icing funnel under the tap so she wouldn’t have to be looking at Miranda. No wonder Roman Catholics like those confession boxes, she thought, so much easier not to see each other.
‘No. Why should I?’ Miranda said, and then flounced out of the kitchen. Clare wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed with herself for alienating Miranda yet again by her clumsiness or be glad to have her out of the way. Like Scarlett O’Hara she decided to think about it tomorrow. She still had to butter the scones.
‘We should take flowers,’ Jessica had said to Milo. They were collecting ox-eye daisies from the hedgerow along the lane, dawdling on their way to Clare’s.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ Milo said, ‘I honestly never thought you’d do it.’
‘I had to, after you’d dared me,’ Jessica said. ‘The worst bit was hanging around outside the booth waiting for the photos to come out of the little slot. There was a man there who’d gone in just after us and he was watching for his own pictures to come out. In the end Miranda got so frantic to distract him that she started asking him all sorts of stupid questions about his horrid little dog. He had one of those tiny beige terriers with a hair-ribbon, the sort people carry. Miranda had to keep stroking it and saying isn’t it sweet, and asking what it liked to eat and such.’
‘I’d love to have seen Andrew’s face when he opened the envelope,’ Milo said. ‘I hope Celia and Archie weren’t around.’
‘Suppose they open his mail?’ said Jessica, suddenly horrified.
‘Surely not, and anyway they wouldn’t know it was you.’
‘Neither will Andrew, I hope. I do feel extremely stupid. Can’t we go home?’
‘No of course not, you’ll have to face him sometime. If he does think it’s you, we’ll know by the bulge growing in his trousers.’ Milo and Jessica started giggling.
‘I won’t be able to look,’ Jessica said, ‘Too dreadful to think of. Let’s go home.’ She set off, back up the lane, flowers trailing.
‘Not, a chance,’ Milo said, catching her and hauling her back again. ’I’ll look after you, and anyway let’s just be nice to him, the poor sod.’
So they arrived at Clare’s, arm in arm, carrying huge bunches of daisies, smiling radiantly at the group assembled on the lawn. How lovely they look, everyone thought, what a picture of filial affection.
Archie and Celia arrived rather late, as if they were regally aware that the tea-party was in their honour. Even in the heat, Celia had a cardigan draped round her shoulders, which she pulled protectively a little tighter as she caught sight of Eliot, grinning at her across a champagne bottle. He noticed the reflex gesture of defence, which set up thoughts of a challenge idly flicking across his mind. Nice legs on Celia, he thought, but hips a bit spiky, could do damage. Only Liz, idly picking buttercups from the dry grass, knew that this was the second bottle he was pouring, the other one had mostly gone into himself and the empty bottle was in her kitchen bin. She’d abandoned the idea of collecting bottles for the bottle bank in Helston, so as to protect Milo and Jessica from the appalling truth about how much their father was capable of drinking. The family could, she thought, probably qualify for the installation of a council bottle bank of their own, right outside the back door.
Clare had noticed Celia’s expression of disapproval at Eliot and immediately took her off to admire the penstemons, asking her advice about blackfly on the nasturtiums. Jack overheard her and wondered if she had remembered to hide the can of (ozone and bee friendly) pesticide in the shed. Clare knew perfectly well what to do about bugs in the garden. Obviously, he realized, they were to spend the afternoon talking about anything but the awfulness of teenagers and their destructive social lives.
Archie, benign and cheerful, said that he was not averse to champagne at any time of the day and settled comfortably into a deckchair next to Liz, at the same time sneaking an admiring glance at her tanned legs as he sat down.
Liz noticed and hoped Eliot had too, it was time he realized, she thought, that other people found her extremely attractive. Wouldn’t do him any harm. She hitched her silk skirt up a little higher and recrossed her legs to make a more flattering arrangement and then offered her best smile to Archie.
‘So how was your trip to Tresco? I love travelling by helicopter, don’t you?’
‘Well actually we didn’t, we went by boat. We’re not very adventurous I’m afraid,’ Archie said.
So he won’t be flashing anything more than a smile at you my dear Liz, Eliot thought, watching.
‘The gardens were wonderful,’ Celia said, coming to sit next to Archie and overcoming her reluctance to drink Eliot’s champagne. ‘And in spite of the water shortage too, I don’t know how they manage to keep the plants so well.’
‘I hope this drought doesn’t go on much longer,’ Clare said. ‘I remember a couple of years ago, syphoning the bath water out of the window, and feeling guilty because I knew we shouldn’t really even be having baths.’
‘I couldn’t exist without a bath,’ Liz said languorously, ‘That would be just too uncivilized.’ She couldn’t believe anyone would go to all that trouble with bits of piping for a few plants. One could always buy new ones the following spring.
Jack, smiling to himself at the thought of Liz in a flowered bath cap and nothing else said ‘Showers use a lot less water, you know, far more ecologically sound.’
‘You’re teasing me,’ Liz giggled. ‘Showers are too much like after games at school. There’s always bits of you that don’t get wet enough and warm enough and it’s so unrelaxing.’
‘Yes that’s true,’ Celia said. ‘A shower doesn’t do a lot for the old bones after gardening.’
‘But I don’t have old bones,’ Liz pointed out, rather cattily.
Clare started handing round scones rather frantically.
‘Does anyone remember that thing about putting a brick in the loo cistern so it flushed less water?’
‘It usually meant that it didn’t quite flush enough,’ Archie recalled. ‘Then you had to flush twice. Pointless I thought at the time, defeats the object.’
Jack said, ‘I remember a man, after it rained for three months that autumn, writing to The Times and asking if he was allowed to take his brick out now.’
Clare thought the conversation was getting a bit lavatorial for a Sunday tea-time. She had a look towards the smaller children playing by the swing. They’d go into hysterical giggles if they heard the grown-ups talking like that, they were at that stage.
‘When we had baths at school,’ Celia was saying, ‘we had to wear these cotton smocks so we wouldn’t be able to see our bodies and be corrupted. Nuns, you see. So much was unmentionable then.’ She looked rather wistful.
‘Different things are unmentionable now, even if we can talk about our bodies,’ Eliot said. ‘Americans, they’re always asking how much you earn, soon as you meet them. We British wouldn’t even tell our best friends.’
‘Like asking how you vote,’ Archie said. ‘It’s very bad form.’
‘You can always lie,’ Eliot said. ‘But no-one would even have to speculate how you vote, Archie. It would be beyond the imagination to take you for other than a true blue Tory.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Archie said, smiling.
‘I’d be absolutely bloody amazed,’ Eliot said, opening another bottle.
The popping of the cork made tourists on the opposite bank of the creek look across to the garden. How decadent we must look, Jack thought.
It was turning into yet another long boozy afternoon. The humidity, and the slowly looming clouds made everyone languid and rather tetchy. Clare noticed that even the older children were being unusually quiet. She could just make out Milo and Andrew talking about cricket, in that test-match commentator drone that men have when they talk about the game. No-one looked very relaxed, just exhausted, perhaps it was the effort of not mentioning Andrew’s party, presumably another unmentionable. Amy and Harriet were not, for once, squabbling, but waiting with unnatural grace for their turn on the swing. Miranda was pushing one of the Lynch twins, while Jessica sat alone on the grass making daisy chains. A few villagers could be seen gardening on the hillside. The locals knew better than to go out for walks in such solid heat. No-one was mowing, the grass was no longer growing enough to need it, so the village was silent in the sunshine.
Clare was getting pleasantly drunk and soon she decided would be in no state to care about anything, not about Miranda’s moodiness, or Jack’s lack of a job, or the appalling feeling she was getting that she was at a cocktail party in Wimbledon when here she was supposed to be getting back to nature, away from it all. That was the minus side to drinking champagne in the afternoon. It made you not care about the important things, and then it made you depressed and weepy later about the things that didn’t matter at all.
Deep grey storm clouds were starting to gather over the hills and the light had that intensity that made the greens of the fields and trees so much more vivid, sharp-edged and brilliant against the sky. Across the creek in another cottage garden a tired man was slowly clearing weeds from his terrace, shoving them firmly into a black plastic sack.
From the idleness of their deckchairs, Clare and the others watched him.
‘He’s wasting his time. The bin men won’t take any of that,’ Jack said.
‘Perhaps he’s going to take it all to his compost heap,’ Celia said.
‘Don’t know why he bothers anyway, I’m sure he’s only renting the place.’ Clare added, ‘At least I haven’t seen him around before this week.’
As they watched, the man picked up the full bag and strolled down to the creek.
‘Jeez, he’s not-going to put it in the river is he?’
‘Well wouldn’t you?’ said Clare. She put a few weeds in almost every day. Added up over a week they’d probably come to almost a bagful. ‘I do sometimes,’ she confessed. ‘Not many of course,’ she added cravenly.
‘Yes but you live here,’ Celia said.
‘Does that matter?’ Jack asked. ‘It’s the same foliage whether we’re here or elsewhere.’
‘We pay our council tax,’ Archie said.
Jack got up and started clearing plates. The argument was ridiculous, they all sounded like smug children. The heat was getting to them. He went into the kitchen. The whole afternoon was ridiculous. Tea, Eliot’s case of champagne, sticky cakes, all unnecessary, just so Clare could soothe her conscience over an issue no-one was ever going to mention, ever again. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to say to Celia: ‘Sorry your house got messed up but that’s what happens when you leave kids of that age on their own.’ So they’d all had to play tea-parties while he could have been painting.
By the time Jack came back from the house the others were watching Eliot confront the poor gardening man across the creek. All the kids were lined up by the wall gleefully encouraging Eliot while Clare, Celia and Archie were still trying to pretend nothing was happening. Liz had her eyes shut, looking as if it was only what was to be expected.
As Jack approached he could hear what Eliot was shouting: ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, putting all that garbage into the pissing creek. Don’t you realize all that shit floats round blocking up the channel, getting round propellors?’
‘It’s biodegradable,’ shouted the gardener smugly.
‘Don’t care if it’s best bullshit,’ Eliot roared, playing now to a larger audience, a party of hikers gathering on the bridge halfway across the creek, reluctant to cross over and look as if they were taking sides. They were joined by a couple of families returning from the beach.
‘You fat-arsed evil little bugger!’ Eliot was yelling, waving his arms.
‘Oh God,’ groaned Liz, ‘This really is the end.’
All the children were shrieking with laughter, the little ones delighting in the fact that Eliot was too big to have a mummy to tell him off but knowing quite well that that was what he needed.
Clare started to giggle quietly, turning away to hide from the children. Archie poured another drink and appeared to be enjoying himself hugely, as did even Celia, Jack noted, so much for being a goody-goody.
‘You’re disgusting, you’re a disgrace to the planet. You people come here renting our property and think you can do any damn fucking thing you like …’ Eliot was ranting.
The man stared back, amazed. ‘It’s my cottage. I bought it last week,’ he said. So these were the neighbours, Jack could almost hear him thinking.
‘Doesn’t make any difference. You’re still a podgy ignorant bastard cretin. And you ought to know better,’ Eliot slurred. Then he picked up the nearest empty champagne bottle and hurled it across the creek. It fell far short of its target and floated down towards the pub.
‘This is appalling,’ Celia murmured to Jack. ‘Now that we know he’s a neighbour, how will we ever live it down?’
‘Didn’t you think it mattered then, if he was just a renter?’ Jack asked her, gathering up empty glasses.
‘Oh well I suppose so,’ she said unconvincingly, ‘but we don’t have to live with them.’
‘And you can all fuck off too, it isn’t a circus.’ Eliot gestured rudely to the group on the bridge. Some of them gestured back, laughing, but most of them turned away, embarrassed and continued their walk.
‘If this was Barnes, the police would be here by now,’ Miranda said to Andrew.
‘That’s just it,’ Milo said. ‘As we’re all on holiday Eliot thinks it doesn’t count. He thinks he can do what he likes. And of course he can, you see.’
‘Well it certainly brought everyone together,’ Clare was saying later as they washed up in the kitchen. ‘At least Celia and I are friends again. It only takes someone else to behave badly and they’ve all got something else to talk about.’
‘That’s a terrible way of looking at it,’ Miranda said. ‘What about that poor man? It was quite funny at the time, but really Eliot humiliated him. I think it’s awful.’
‘No-one would have cared if he’d been a renter,’ Jack said. ‘And if he’d been a real local you’d all have asked him how his garden was doing and said the weeds were good for encouraging fish. Double standards. Worse, triple standards.’
He was a summer visitor like themselves, that man, Jack thought. He’d have to be socialized with. He would, on the other hand, once he’d become part of the tea and drinks and barbecue circuit in the village, be able to dine out on Eliot’s appalling behaviour for weeks to come, Eliot being famous and having been on Wogan. There wasn’t that much that was available to form topics of imaginative conversation in the summer, so perhaps they should all be grateful.
It was a quiet evening up at the Lynchs’ house. Eliot took Liz straight to bed, leaving Jessica to take care of the twins. Liz was feeling quite excited, Eliot had been so wonderfully dreadful, just as he had been when she had first met him, hitting a journalist who was trying to conduct an interview. She’d thought him powerful and wild, a primitive man who could say and do exactly as he wanted, whereas she had been brought up to do almost exactly the opposite. She only hoped, that evening, that his sexual stamina would survive all the champagne.
The storm started round about ten. The evening light had turned a murky yellowy-grey, the trees silhouetted and blowing black and stark against the billowing sky. The rain and the lightning began together and Jessica, terrified, crept out of bed, along to Milo’s room.
‘It isn’t just the thunder,’ she said, climbing into bed with him, ‘I’ve got a secret and I want you to have it too. It’s too big for me.’
Milo put his arm round her, the only girl he could tolerate the idea of being in bed with.
‘It’s Miranda,’ Jessica said. ‘She’s told me she’s pregnant. And she doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.’
Oh these women and their unpredictable bodies, Milo thought.
‘Well we can’t do anything,’ he said. ‘Can’t you persuade her to tell Clare? Perhaps she could have an abortion.’
‘She doesn’t believe in it.’
‘She’ll feel differently when she gets back home, things aren’t the same down here, it’s all happy-ever-after time in the summer isn’t it? Why don’t you just snuggle down and go to sleep?’
Jessica put her thumb in her mouth and Milo stroked her naked back, thinking vaguely of Oliver, until they both slept, curled together like kittens. In the morning Liz, cheered by a night of passion, came to wake Milo and wondered if this little scene was something sent by the gods to replace all the worrying she did about Eliot.