Summertime Read online

  Wander into the garden to inhale balmy scent of spring and to seek inspiration for my cardigan commissions. Am instead assailed by dreadful old sock and sick aroma. The tent is, of course, still here. Bass and Siren have not been seen since they were piled into a motorbike sidecar and driven at speed from the wedding party. Their camper van is also here, and has become a new second home to The Beauty and her coterie of dolls and dogs.

  It does not take more than thirty seconds of suspicious sniffing to realise that the tent is the source of the disgusting smell. Why or how I do not care, I just want it to go. Even though the tent is in the field and not technically my responsibility, I cannot wait for someone else to get round to removing it, the smell is too bad. Open the gate to the field and half-heartedly tug at a guy rope for a moment before deciding that I must call a team of demolition men to do the job for me. Go inside to consult the Yellow Pages, but am diverted by the telephone ringing.

  It is Hedley Sale. Having the same thought about the tent.

  ‘Venetia, hello, I wondered if you’d got rid of that tent yet on my field, mmm?’ He sounds a little irritable, but I decide to try being blithe.

  ‘Well, put it this way, Hedley, I don’t suppose you know how to take a tent down, do you?’

  He laughs. ‘Well, it shouldn’t be too difficult, although those people of yours who brought it should really take it down. It’s their property on my property, you see. I’ll come by later and have a look.’ He gives a little yip of laughter and rings off.

  The Beauty and I are engaged in some very engrossing role-playing when Hedley arrives. I have been tucked up in the camper van bed, and am being given my medicine as I am, according to her diagnosis, ‘Streemly ill.’

  Hedley’s blaring voice reaches us in our van from the other side of the house. ‘For Christ’s sake, Venetia, what the hell are you and those hippies playing at? This tent is ancient. And rotten. It probably dates from the Crimean War, for Christ’s sake. It’ll take a crane to get those poles down, or at least a tractor. That long-haired fellow must have been as strong as an ox to get this lot up. I haven’t got time to deal with it now, but you should get rid of it fast. The grass is rotting underneath it and apart from the smell, I want to put my bloody sheep back on this field.’

  The Beauty and I cower in our bed, not liking to interrupt the lava flow of fury. The Beauty begins to whimper, and presses her hands over her ears, and I remember from the end of my marriage to Charles how much children loathe shouting voices.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in there?’ Hedley is peering in through the door of the camper van at us. ‘Honestly Venetia, you are an ass. Why didn’t you tell me you were having trouble with the guy who owns it? I can sort him out.’

  Don’t really like the familiar way he calls me ‘Venetia’, although I don’t know how else I want him to address me. ‘Duchess’, perhaps, or if that’s too bovine, ‘Ma’am’ would do.

  ‘I didn’t think of getting in touch with you. Why would I?’ I mutter, but he is not listening. Beckoning crossly, he marches us over to the field. The Beauty lags, pausing to crouch over a snail. This increases his pent-up rage. Suddenly lose patience with him and snap, ‘Look, I don’t see why you need to be so angry, you don’t have to live with the smell.’ His brow shoots up to meet his hairline and he shuts up for a moment, then sighs and stomps away around the tent, occasionally slowing to kick a flap of canvas. He returns, monobrow now diving down between nose and forehead.

  ‘Where are the imbeciles who put it up anyway?’ he demands. ‘They must come and take it down. It’s too bad, it really is.’

  ‘I can’t get hold of them, so I thought I’d leave it on the side of the road for them when it’s deflated,’ I reply, trying to soothe him. ‘I’m sure they’ll collect it at some point, they’ll need it for another party soon. But someone said they’ve gone in a convoy to Madagascar for the summer, so it’s possible it could stay here for months.’

  An expression of pain crosses his face; he seems to be taking the tent’s continuing presence as a personal slight. Wish I had not asked him to help, but now that our initial shock has passed, The Beauty and I are able to ignore his tantrums, allowing the catalogue of complaints and irritations to flow over us. The Beauty wanders off to play, and I lean on the wall, inhaling the first heady wafts of this summer’s honeysuckle on the afternoon air. After another flurry of clucking, brought on when he realises the camper van belongs to the hippies too, Hedley jumps into his truck and zooms away, only to reverse at full rev back up to the house because he has forgotten his dog.

  Whistling and swearing conjures a nasty-looking lowlife mongrel from behind the wall where the dustbins live. I refrain from commenting on the yogurt pot the cur is carrying and wave him off.

  May 9th

  Cannot get out of the garden gate on the school run because a large tractor and trailer are parked there, and a doughy man is sitting at the wheel eating sandwiches. He waves one at me.

  ‘Elevenses,’ he mumbles.

  ‘How can you have elevenses at seven forty-five?’ muses Giles, before shouting out of the window, ‘You mean sevenses.’

  All this knife-edge wit does not get us to school, and the man appears to be in no hurry to move his tractor. Giles gets out to look, but is back in moments, his face lit with amusement.

  ‘The tractor is completely stuck, Mum. We can’t get out. That guy says someone’s coming in a minute with a pulley thing.’ Indeed, closer scrutiny reveals that the trailer is wedged across the gateway.

  Claustrophobia in me combines with great sympathy for the tractor driver. I achieved the same position in a multi-storey car park a few weeks ago, and the door panels of my car are still a buckled testament to my attempts to free myself. Giles and Felix dance about in front of the tractor chanting, ‘We can’t go to school, we’re prisoners in the garden.’

  I mentally run through the list of things I was going to do once they were safely at school and The Beauty ensconced at nursery. Am just writing today off as a dead loss and planning a hike over the tractor and on to the village green, when blaring car horn on the other side of the mechanical barricade announces salvation. It is Hedley. Of course, this must be his tractor. He has sent someone to take the tent down. Cannot feel grateful, as it has all gone wrong already. They should have driven straight into the field from the road rather than trying to fit through my garden gate. Hedley starts steaming away about incompetence from behind the trailer, then goes strangely silent. Giles and Felix throw down their school bags and scramble up on to the tractor and over towards the road.

  ‘Don’t vanish, boys, we may be on our way any minute.’ I remain in hopeful anticipation of a biblical moment, with the mountain of tractor being moved by a simple act of faith. Odd grunting and sighing, and Hedley emerges in front of me having crawled under the tractor and trailer to get to me. He hands me the keys to his car, huffing and brushing gravel and leaves from his jersey.

  ‘Here you are, you can take the kids to school in my car. You just have to go under the tractor.’

  ‘No fear.’ Gracelessness at his chivalrous instinct is unavoidable; nothing would induce me to crawl under a vast agricultural vehicle, particularly now I have come to terms with skiving today. In fact, am looking forward simply to hanging out with my family, and not bothering to do any of the weekday things I should be doing. Naturally, do not tell Hedley any of this.

  ‘We’ll wait until you get it out, thank you. Giles and Felix can help you as long as they don’t get run over.’

  I mount a retreat into the house with The Beauty, promising cups of tea which I have no intention of delivering. Something tells me that Hedley is not qualified for the mathematical and spatial concepts involved in unjamming my gateway, and I do not wish to stand around watching and being maddened by him. The whole point of not being married is not having to deal with moments like this.

  May 12th

  Have not seen my mother since the wedding, so greet her w
ith huge pleasure when she appears for tea wearing a big straw hat to protect her pallor from the perfect May sunshine. The Beauty is wallowing in her paddling pool, so we have tea outside, but spend several minutes carrying the table and two chairs around the garden to find the best spot. Finally settle in the lee of a south-facing wall where the view of yellow, slimy field beyond is uninterrupted, but the breeze is kept off. My mother puts on her glasses and squints at the vast rectangle of rotted grass. ‘Goodness, what’s happened over there? Is it genetic engineering, or GM crops, or have they had a chemical accident? It might be poisonous, you know. We should wear masks.’ She pulls the collar of her coat up over her mouth, gasping dramatically.

  ‘It’s the tent.’

  Cannot believe that she has already forgotten its existence. She is standing now, giving what promises to be a long speech. ‘I am against the use of chemicals. Apart from washing-up liquid, which is extremely useful—’ She suddenly interrupts herself. ‘The tent? What do you mean, the tent? Oh, the tent.’ She nods in satisfaction, then looks suspiciously round the garden. ‘Where is it, then?’

  Is there any point in explaining to her?

  ‘It’s been taken down, but it has rotted the grass.’ I kneel beside The Beauty, assisting her as she performs some mermaid manoeuvres along the bottom of her paddling pool and comes up grinning and blowing bubbles. My mother is most impressed.

  ‘Gosh, isn’t she aquatic,’ she says admiringly. ‘Mind you, I suppose you might have been the same at her age, but I can’t remember. You did spend a lot of time sitting outside in saucepans of water, though. So did Desmond.’ Her face takes on a faraway, arrested expression. ‘I still can’t believe Minna actually married him,’ she says. ‘It’s a miracle. When do they get back from their honeymoon?’

  ‘Next week, I think.’

  She darts a beady look at me. ‘You never said what happened to David. Why didn’t he come to the wedding? He was supposed to be best man, and if he had been, we wouldn’t have had to have that absurd friend of Desmond’s.’

  Find her aggrieved tone a bit much. I am the one suffering from David’s absence, not her. Say so. A mistake. My mother is able to deliver a smart retort.

  ‘Well, I think it’s high time you settled down like your brother and Minna. I am in favour of marriage,’ she says, then abruptly changes the subject before I have a chance to say, so am I.

  May 15th

  Spring is racing ahead and has almost become summer without my getting to grips with anything. Particularly the garden. Cannot possibly go to the Chelsea Flower Show this year, as the excursion would only highlight the fact that I have achieved almost nothing since last year. I still have numerous packets of sample seeds in a tin in the barn, awaiting the ideal time for sowing, and along with them, a whole notebook full of scribbled ideas, none of which have been carried out.

  Telephone Rose to tell her I will not be joining her, even though she has got tickets for the VIP day, and she is resigned.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t come. You don’t ever come to London now,’ she says, irritating me, as I like to think of myself as someone who nips to London on a whim and fits in immediately, becoming cultured and stylish.

  ‘Nonsense, I’m always coming to London. I was there when you were on that awful regime of yours.’

  Rose hoots with laughter. ‘That was ages ago. What a mistake. I’m doing Pilates now. It’s the most brilliant form of exercise – but I meant to say to you, I bumped into someone who came to your brother’s wedding the other day, a girl called Sophie who makes wedding cakes. Anyway, she said she’d commissioned you to make a cardigan. Is this true?’

  Nettled by the amused astonishment in her voice, I decide to be nonchalant rather than thrilled.

  ‘Oh yes, didn’t I tell you? I thought it might be amusing as a sideline.’

  ‘You know you could do really well if you organised yourself,’ says Rose. ‘Send me some things you’ve done and I’ll see if I can get this shop I know interested. They do a lot of one-offs. It would be so brilliant if it worked.’

  Catch her enthusiasm. ‘I know, no more brochures. A new life as a fashion designer. I can’t wait.’

  Rose is first down to earth, as always.

  ‘Well, you had better get on with making the garments then.’

  Decide that I must seize the moment, and spurred on by the thought of the brochure I should be writing to sell advertising on Heavenly Petting’s deaddog?.com web site, I decide to start right away with Sophie’s order. Experience not a qualm as I raid my own wardrobe for the basic garment, and select an old pink cardigan I have never worn as the sleeves were much too short.

  ‘Sophie will think it the height of chic,’ I tell myself, and set to embellishing it with some tiny silver coins I found in the playroom in a toy treasure chest of Felix’s. Fold up cardigan, having christened it ‘Treasure Trove’, and attach hefty invoice. This after yet another conversation with Rose.

  ‘Come on, you’re trying to start a business here. In London that sort of thing goes for hundreds of pounds. She’ll think it’s a bargain, I promise you. And don’t you dare do it for less. I’ll check up on you.’

  Dispatch my first attempt at becoming a rag-trader, having wrapped it in pink tissue paper and cravenly added a lavender bag made by Giles as a kind of bribe to force Sophie to accept the invoice. Determined not to think about it again for a week. Put notes on the fridge, by the telephone and on the calendar to this effect.

  May 16th

  The white froth of may blossom on the hedgerows has turned pink, and new life is everywhere, sprouting and budding like mad. However, I am reassured to see that some farmers, like me, are a bit behind. It is the sugar beet that seems to have missed the boat. There are whole fields in which ranked rows of two-leaf or at best three-leaf plants do their best to look large in the midst of vast weed-free stretches of earth. Must ask Simon when I next see him how they keep four-hundred-acre fields weedless when I have just a quarter of an acre and it is bursting with them.

  May 19th

  Glorious morning, and having dropped the boys at school, The Beauty and I go in search of elderflower cordial ingredients. These are not difficult to assemble, although the tartaric acid can cause remarks in the chemist, as some pharmacists suspect mother and toddler duos of being drug dealers wishing to buy this innocuous powder to mix with other noxious ones. I avoid questioning this year, though, and we are about to depart to a hedgerow near home for the flowers when I notice a vigorous elder tree in the supermarket car park. Warmed by the sun on the south-facing brick wall behind it, this is a prize specimen with flower heads as big as plates. Most pleasing. The Beauty stands on the bonnet of the car and I pass her the creamy blooms, breathing deep the sweet heavy scent as tiny petals scatter from the thousands of mini flowers clustered on each head. We pile them all into her car seat gently as if they are glass, and drive home swimming in the smell of summer.

  May 20th

  Half-term begins at lunchtime, and by 3 p.m. no one is speaking to anyone and we have all been sent to our rooms. Being nominally in charge, I do not really have to go to my room, but it is a good place in which to sulk and consider my failings as a mother. Unfortunately, The Beauty is also in my room, so sulking has to be put to one side. She has an oven glove, and is collecting small change in it.

  ‘Mummy, can I have ten pounds?’ she demands breathily, clinking her ill-gotten gains. Luckily her idea of ten pounds is any coin from any country, so slip a one-hundred lire coin into her collection pouch, while regretting that her recent trip to church seems to have inspired her as a consumer rather than a believer. Must speak to Rev. Trev about The Beauty’s faith. In fact, he might be able to sort out all the children and set them on a path of righteousness once again. Telephone him to book a spiritual guidance meeting as soon as possible.

  After an hour in our rooms, which I spend wracked with guilt at having screamed, ‘You sodding little philistine swine,’ while throwing half thei
r Nintendo into the fire, we reconvene. Giles still poker-faced and not looking at me when speaking, Felix now happy and chatting, even though it was at him that I screamed, ‘You are driving me insane’, to which he replied, ‘But you’ve always been like this, Mummy.’

  How can I expect them to behave when my own performance is on this level?

  Am wondering whether to take everyone to Le Moon, our favourite Chinese restaurant for conciliatory supper, when mad terrier barking announces Hedley Sale. Open the front door, quaking inwardly, wondering what we have done wrong this time. However, he is looking bashful on the gravel.

  ‘I’m off to listen to the nightingales on the heath,’ he announces, his voice carrying on and on and echoing through the garden as if he is proclaiming classes at a gymkhana.

  ‘I wondered if you would all like to come with me. I’ve got Tamsin in the car too.’

  Am rather impressed by this, and should love to listen to nightingales. The boys, chastened by the earlier battle, agree meekly that they too would love to hear nightingales, and we pile into Hedley’s purple and yellow truck.

  As we bowl along, crammed in, with Hedley and Giles discussing the merits of ferreting over shooting as an effective method for disposing of rabbits, I try to imagine what a nightingale can possibly sound like. Do not wish to reveal ignorance of something I am sure everyone should know, so anxiety mounts as we approach the heath. Cannot help fearing that I may have heard the liquid voice of the nightingale before, and been too insensitive and tone deaf to realise. After all, it is a common English bird. Or is it? Irritatingly, the children, who can usually be relied on to make animal noises and to be fountains of information on any subject at virtually no provocation, do not attempt to make nightingale noises or to discuss them at all. Instead they all sing along to a song on the radio which seems to be called ‘A Little Bit of Erica’. Surely that can’t be right? No one is called Erica – it is a truly dreadful name.