Authors: Judy Astley
‘You don’t have to share with Bo,’ Miranda told her daughter, making her voice low and calm and hoping it was both soothing and authoritative. Also catching. ‘There are five bedrooms; you and Bo have got the two up in the attic. Turn left at the top of the stairs and up the next flight. You have to share a bathroom but then you manage that at home.’
Silva gave her a look that told her a luxury suite and her own rainstorm shower had been what she’d expected at the very least. Spoiled brat, Miranda thought as her children hauled their bags up the stairs. She headed for the kitchen, from where she could hear the sound of Clare dealing with a kettle. Tea: perfect. Maybe after that she’d rally for the next round of jollying them all along.
‘It’s changed, hasn’t it?’ Clare said, rooting about in the cupboards, looking for mugs. ‘Liz had it all country pine and pretty Provençal prints in here. Now look – all glass and granite. No soul. Where is
colour
?’ She sat down heavily at the long pale wooden table on one of the Perspex chairs (Philippe Starck’s Ghost chairs, Miranda recognized) and stared out of the window, but Miranda could see that she wasn’t really taking in the view with any interest. In the distance the sea glinted in
the sunlight, swift little flashes like fire-sparks. The leaves on the hillside trees that ran down to the river had a midsummer brightness to their shades of green, not yet gone over into their richer near-autumn maturity. Years ago, Clare would have had her oil pastels out and be making sketched notes about colours, then later sorting yarn samples for a piece of knitting and discussing designs with Miranda. But her knitwear business had been sold soon after Jack’s dreadful diagnosis, and these days all that was left to show for her past success were her initials on the labels of garments now produced in bulk in Korea.
‘Oh, but I love it! It’s all fresh and sleek,’ Miranda said, feeling hugely relieved that for the massive amount of money she’d laid out for this holiday the house had moved on from Liz’s frilled chintz and dust-trap Austrian blinds to acres of walnut flooring, rough linen curtains and soft shades of bluey-greys on the walls she’d seen so far. On the rental company website there’d been photos of this kitchen, the sea view from the sitting room and a bedroom that looked blissfully like something from a swanky boutique hotel, but the lack of more detail had made her suspicious about what
wasn’t
shown. Liz had liked rich earthy tones but also the surfeit of fabric that had been fashionable at the time: blinds
and
curtains, fancy tie-backs, throws on every sofa and chair in a losing bid to protect them from Eliot’s tatty mongrel and the twins, who weren’t allowed
into the house at all unless their shoes were off and lined up by the back door. Miranda had a quick flashback to that last summer when she’d been only sixteen, when she and Eliot’s daughter Jessica had stumbled in after drinking cider with Paul from the boatyard and had tripped over the collection of shoes and gone sprawling and giggling into the utility room’s baskets of colour-coded laundry. Was that before or after she’d stopped being pregnant, Miranda wondered. Probably after. She wouldn’t have laughed so long, so freely and so plain girlishly if it hadn’t been. Nor would she have been able to smell cider, let alone drink it, without being horribly sick.
‘Anything to eat? Starvin’. When’s food?’ Bo swayed into the kitchen and slumped on to a chair as if the effort of coming down the stairs and walking a few paces was all too exhausting. The transparent chair looked too delicate for his apparent bulk but Miranda knew most of it consisted of baggy, fashionably falling-down jeans and oversized hoodie and that beneath was a long wiry body, heartbreakingly slender. His fingers clutched the edges of the hoodie’s pulled-down cuffs as if afraid of having nothing to hold on to. She felt all tender inside. Her beautiful boy was adrift in that uncertain, awkward stage between child and adult, forever finding his judgement about the space he now took up to be that little bit out so that he stumbled, banged into things, jarred his skinny hip bone on edges and ledges.
No wonder he spent so long sitting still with computers and music – simply crossing a room was a complicated matter of spatial guesswork and hazards.
‘OK, supper,’ she said, feeling suddenly exhausted but determined, seeing as she was essentially the troop leader, not to flag. ‘Shall we go to the pub? I’m not sure I can face cooking, not after driving nearly three hundred miles.’
‘Pub! Yes! Can I have wine?’ Silva appeared in the doorway, clutching the bewildered-looking cat.
‘
May
I have wine,’ Clare corrected her.
‘May or not, no, of course you can’t,’ Miranda said, pouring Go-Cat into Toby’s bowl and putting it on the floor for him. ‘Even with food, I think the law says it’s not allowed till you’re fifteen.’ She watched Toby eyeing his bowl suspiciously. He sniffed at the food for a bit and then tucked in, heartily scattering chunks of the biscuits across the floor as he ate.
‘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.
‘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.