Summertime Read online

  ‘Hello, Hedley.’

  His one brow rises quizzically as he notes the trappings of antiquity I am surrounded by. ‘Venetia, what are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, I’m listening to contemporary rock and throwing a few shapes on my kitchen dance floor,’ I reply, as Don MacLean’s most soppy chocolate-box song, ‘Starry Starry Night’ drifts out of the radio. ‘What are you doing?’

  Startled, and nervous, he shifts from foot to foot, fumbling in the pocket of his sagging trousers for a folded page of newspaper.

  ‘Well, I thought you might like to watch the stars. Here, I’ve got an article about them. There’s a comet exploding somewhere miles away, and we are in for a glorious shooting star show in about an hour.’

  ‘Ohh, that must be why they’re playing this song,’ I remark, very pleased with my sleuthing. Hedley puts his bottle of wine down on the table and holds out the article for me to read. Bottles of wine and shooting stars. What next? Have never been pursued in this textbook fashion before, and am nonplussed. Does he think I am encouraging him? What about Lucinda from the school fête? Or maybe that is more in her mother’s dreams than in any reality. That overheard conversation has certainly made me think of Hedley with new respect. But the monobrow … the temper … the thinly disguised dislike of small children …

  On the other hand, here I am, working my fingers to the bone over a hot needle, with a mental list of chores a mile long for which a man is needed, and I’m sitting alone at the height of summer with just the radio and a parrot to keep me company. What sort of life is that?

  Sneak a surreptitious glance at Hedley, who is fiddling with a corkscrew, lips pressed together, trying to yank the cork out of the bottle without removing the foil first. Perspiration beads on his forehead and upper lip, and his jaw is tensed in concentration. His combination of choleric temperament and small, hairy and dark physique may not be ideal, but I’m sure he is quite kind, as well as cross, and his house is big enough to escape from him in anyway. But most importantly, he is here. Now.

  ‘Have you had any supper?’ Immediately wish I had. Summon an X-ray vision of what lies behind my fridge door, and it is not good. Half a tin of tuna-flavoured cat food, rejected by Sidney the cat, a cucumber, three dough sculptures made by The Beauty and Felix, and some sinister-looking sausage rolls. Luckily, Hedley has eaten. I, however, have not. Gulp down the glass of wine he passes me as if it is orange squash and have a head-rush of intoxication and recklessness. With it comes a weird sense of being outside my body, and it is from above that I see myself throwing back my head to maximise a ripple of laughter when Hedley says something extremely unwitty, along the lines of, ‘It’s time to watch the shooting stars now, according to the radio.’ I drink another glass, this one in slower, smaller sips, thank God, but the damage is done. From far above, I look down on the top of my head, much too close to Hedley’s, which has a reddish bald patch like a monk’s tonsure. I try to warn myself about this bald patch, but the news is mere cannon fodder in the face of an arsenal including a summer night, a battery of shooting stars and too much alcohol. As inevitable as any wish, the monobrow looms in front of my eyes, swimming closer, and then I am in Hedley Sale’s arms, kissing him as the first star bursts over the water meadows and is followed by seeping indigo stillness until the next.

  July 14th

  Dawn. And with it, crumb-headed sobriety. Am now fully back in my body where self-loathing and an air of defiance are at war. I sent Hedley home before anything X-rated happened, but I still kissed him. For hours; it was the middle of the night when he left, and it took all my will-power to make him go. Just could not face the idea of any of the children finding him here. Now I don’t know what will happen. It really wasn’t too bad. I enjoyed kissing him. (Why am I sounding so surprised?) And I very much appreciate his enthusiasm for me and for doing whatever I want him to. In fact, it reminded me of Lowly, as did the longing look in his eyes when he kissed me goodbye.

  ‘I’ll ring you later, Venetia,’ he murmured, and I feigned great yawns as I put the glasses into the dishwasher, to avoid having to say anything. If he had a tail, he would have wagged it.

  As soon as he left, I sprang to life. Not sleepy, I made tea in the kitchen where the clock was ticking in its friendly way, and Sidney was curled up in his favourite warm spot in the fruit bowl on top of three lemons and a pineapple. It was all as usual, and I was not. I took teapot on tray up to bed to think, tiptoeing in the hope that The Beauty would not hear me and come and interrupt.

  I often set my alarm clock for very early, like four in the morning, thinking it would be so nice to do precisely this, and to absorb the unique golden loveliness of the dawn, but natural sloth-likeness always causes me to turn it off, so I miss these moments of tranquillity. Dunk a digestive, defiantly, and think: What am I playing at?

  What will happen next? I am out of practice at this sort of thing. David became a part of our lives so easily, none of us could imagine him not being there from the very beginning. Anyway, David and I went away on holiday together and he moved in when we came back, so the children got used to the idea of us together in our absence.

  But now, the children don’t know we’ve split up. They are in touch with David every day, they adore him. But that is no basis for a relationship. Am becoming deeply anxious about what to do next, and in desperation, try to sleep. Just as I have almost managed to relax and doze and dawn is streaking the sky outside my uncurtained window, The Beauty totters into my bedroom, her hair tousled and fluffing over sleep-smudged blue eyes. She peeps at me, pushing back her hair with a Marilyn Monroe flourish, and says breathlessly, ‘It’s a lovely day, darlink. I’d like a pink drink.’ Guilt becomes white hot, bed fills with sharp pins and we have to get up, even though it is only five-fifteen.

  July 15th

  Heatwave. The Beauty and I spend the whole day lying alternately in the hammock and the paddling pool. Much silent agonising and metaphorical moon-howling has strengthened my instinctive resolve to be an ostrich. If I tell no one, and make Hedley promise never to refer to the interlude again, surely I can pretend it never happened and get on with my life as a mother of three with no plans.

  July 16th

  Too hot to sew. I ring Vivienne to ask her to come and advise me on how to make fake turf look like vibrant living grass around a narrow skirt I am planning to make from one leg of the plus fours. After our conversation, I put the telephone down and congratulate myself for revealing nothing. Have become really discreet at last. Hooray.

  July 18th

  Vivienne appears. Before we have even sat down with cups of tea to look at the fringing, I have confessed. In fact I confess about one second after she passes through the front door, saying politely, ‘So how are you?’ She listens in silence, then bursts into peals of laughter.

  ‘Oh, sorry Venetia. I know I shouldn’t laugh. I told you he was after you, didn’t I?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes, ages ago. The only reason he’s been having that stepdaughter of his to stay is to entice you over there with Giles.’

  ‘Oh, my God, I’m so stupid.’ Vivienne nods in agreement, I grab her wrist. ‘No, I mean really stupid. We’re going camping when the holidays start, and I’m afraid I’ve got Tamsin excited about coming with us.’

  Vivienne rolls her eyes and sighs. ‘Well, you won’t have any choice about what to do next unless you’re secretly hoping that David will jump on a plane and come home now, will you?’ She reaches for the tweed and threads a needle. ‘Anyway, Simon and I both think Hedley might be rather good for you. We thought something might happen.’

  Have to point out that very little has happened, but she appears to think we are as good as engaged. Anyway, have only mentioned the campfire to Tamsin, so maybe she will not tell Hedley.

  Ring Rose to tell her all my news, wishing to contrast her reaction with Vivienne’s, but she is preoccupied with having her house feng shuied and refuses to react at all.

  ‘
I’m sorry, Venetia, I’ve got to keep a calm aura in the house to preserve the positive energy forces. I think I’m going to have to get rid of the telephone, in fact. And Theo isn’t allowed to have tantrums in here now, he has to have them outside the front door on the steps up from the street.’

  Am temporarily sidetracked by this new flight of madness. ‘What does Tristan think?’

  ‘He’s really thrilled. He says he’s been trying to get me to live like this for years, but I’ve resisted. You should try it, Venetia, it might help to simplify your life. Is Hedley the guy who speaks Latin, with one eye?’

  ‘One eyebrow,’ I reply crossly. ‘You’re making him sound like Cyclops.’

  ‘You’d better get on a plane and go and fetch that David right back here,’ says Rose, suddenly crisp and forceful. ‘You can’t mess him around. He’s gorgeous, and he loves you.’

  ‘Well, he should come back here and prove it,’ I return, and flouncing, put the telephone down. Have never known Rose to be so unsupportive. Although I suppose I should have told her I’ve split up from David. Anyway, she is useless. Perhaps she is having a mid-life crisis, or another baby.

  July 19th

  Light-headed with lack of sleep from another night with Hedley, ending when I sent him home at about three in the morning. Cannot believe I am entering into an illicit affair with a man I don’t really fancy, and am sure I didn’t ask him to come over last night. Am a bit worn out by the amount of Latin translating he seems able to do after intimate moments, but am determined to look on the bright side. I never knew that the word ‘ululate’ comes from Aeneid Four, where Aeneas meets Dido and their liaison is apparently accompanied by nymphs. Ululating all over the place.

  In fact, am not sure I have ever heard the word ululate before, and still don’t know what it means, but never mind. I think Hedley is trying to compare our romance to that of Dido and Aeneas, and can’t get that excited as Dido ends up on a funeral pyre. On the other hand, am a pushover for being fancied, and Hedley does his best to convey how he feels.

  ‘Venetia, your skin is as soft as rabbit skin,’ is not my compliment of choice, but makes such a pleasing change from ‘Where’s my cricket bat/toothbrush/socks, and can you send me my binoculars,’ that I find myself carried along on a tide of Hedley’s making. Have never felt so detached from anything. It’s like watching a soap opera of my own life.

  July 20th

  The post brings an ambient candle from Rose. It is called ‘Dirt’, and sure enough, when lit, gives off a faint aroma of wet dogs and dustbins. The card she sends with it has a picture of a sheep with dreadlocks on one side and the words Get Real on the other. Burn stupid card immediately, increasing the dirt smell one hundredfold.

  July 21st

  Dawn. Crisis. Hedley was here once more. It was a beautiful fragrant night, and we went out to smell the night-scented stocks. Tum-te-tum. All very lovely and fun, although I do wish he had two eyebrows and that he would whisper sweet nothings in English rather than Latin. But you can’t have everything. Anyway, I must have fallen asleep, and worse, so must he. I wake with a start, with a horrible feeling of being watched, and discover The Beauty standing next to the bed, glaring at Hedley’s rather hairy shoulder on the pillow behind me.

  ‘What’s that, Mummy?’ she asks crisply, then wrinkles her nose, adding, ‘Yuck, Mummy. It’s gross and gosting.’ My heart is pounding, dare not move in case Hedley wakes. On cue, Hedley wakes. The Beauty suddenly loses her sang-froid and bursts into tears. ‘Oh nooo, Mummyyy, nooo,’ she sobs, never taking her eyes off him as he scrambles out of the bed and into his clothes, but shaking her head and repeating, ‘Oh nooo,’ through her tears. I pull her on to the bed and try to cuddle her, but she is frozen, glaring at Hedley. When dressed, Hedley comes over and crouches in front of her. She redoubles her screaming.

  ‘Go away, you are a baaad man, a baaad man.’ I attempt a reassuring smile over her head at Hedley, meant also to convey my desire for him to vanish immediately, and Hedley steals out of the door, ashen and shaking.

  As soon as he has gone, The Beauty stops crying, pushes her hair back from her face and says with satisfaction, ‘It’s all right now, he’s gone. Shall we have Coco Pops right now?’

  We do so, and, judging to perfection my all-engulfing desire to curry favour with her, she asks for, and achieves, ice cream with them. While The Beauty consumes several bowlfuls of this ambrosial breakfast, I try to decide what to do.

  Unsuccessful. Have to admit that despite this morning’s trauma, I do not wish to banish Hedley from my life. Cannot say that he lights it up especially, but confidence is flooding back, and I can remember again that there should be more than just domestic drudgery and honest toil. I deserve more, and Hedley can give me more. What I can offer Hedley is a mystery, but that’s his concern.

  Come back down to earth to find The Beauty gazing at me, nodding her head emphatically, because I am nodding mine. Nodding speeds up for both of us as I decide that I shall see Hedley. And I shall make my own decisions. Yes indeed.

  July 23rd

  Still not managed to install the horrible snake vines in any tree. They are dangling out of the boys’ bedroom windows and are being used by them as alternative stairs. While I am delighted that they have learnt to abseil, I wish they would wear helmets and also that there was something more satisfactory than their beds to tie the ends on inside the house.

  On top of this anxiety, there is the emotional turmoil I am now dwelling in, and I have no hat for speech day, which begins in three-quarters of an hour and which I am attending with my mother, as Charles is in Brittany with his twins.

  ‘Mummy, you don’t need a hat,’ counsels Giles. ‘It would be much better if you could just melt into the background. Like Mrs Dellingpole.’

  Mrs Dellingpole is the worthy and extremely nice mother of the captain of the rugby first fifteen. She is of indeterminate age, her car is clean inside and out, and she has a small navy-blue handbag which always has a clean tissue in it. Am offended and perturbed that she should be a role model in Giles’s eyes. I thought he would like having a glamorous mother with a devil-may-care attitude. I put this to him. Apparently not. And there is worse.

  ‘Anyway, you aren’t glamorous like Mrs Butterstone,’ Giles says, narrowing his eyes to look at me before adding with hideous precision, ‘You’re more weird-looking. You never clean your shoes. And why do you always have to wear patterns and fur? You look like the Flintstones.’ He looks me up and down, sighs, and then changes his mind. ‘Actually, today you look like a Beanie Baby.’

  Goaded, I begin to deny the shoe slander, but a glance at my feet silences me. There is a trim of mud, as if I have recently pulled my feet out of drying concrete, around my favourite ponyskin mules, chosen for speech day to complement the pale pink suit with bunny tail on the bottom and furry ears sticking out of the breast pocket I have selected for today.

  ‘Well it’s too late to find any Sta-Prest Crimplene skirts, or to have my hair set,’ I snarl at him as my mother’s car roars into the yard.

  He tries to make amends. ‘Here, give me your shoes, I’ll clean them for you. But couldn’t you at least cut the tail off your skirt, it’s so embarrassing,’ he moans, and scurries round in search of a shoe brush. He thus misses the splendid sight of my mother issuing from her car with a hat like a Mr Whippy ice cream madly askew on her head.

  By the time she has fully extracted herself and her various scarves from the car, her audience includes me, Felix and The Beauty. Noticing the intent collective stare, she sticks her chin a little higher in the air.

  ‘Felix said he wanted me to wear a hat,’ she says defensively, putting up a tentative hand to readjust the angle of the giant ice cream. ‘Minna’s aunt brought it to the wedding, and in the end chose that dull blue one she wore, do you remember? Anyway, she hasn’t been to collect it, and I thought it needed an outing.’

  When arranged in the school hall it quickly becomes clear that Minna’s a
unt had the interests of others close to her heart in rejecting this hat. Much tutting and umbrella-shuffling greets our arrival into the rows of chairs. As the hall fills up, I look around to see if anyone is wearing anything nice and find that all the seats behind and around us are empty, even though there is standing room only on the other side of the hall. No one wants to be near us. We are pariahs, and in a moment, Giles and Felix will come in with their classmates and see, and Giles will be justified in calling me weird.

  The headmaster and governors file on to the platform, and children begin to pour in through the double doors, jostling one another as the inevitable speech-day rain cloud bursts. Total humiliation is imminent, and unfair, as I have made a special effort to blend in and have even exchanged the ponyskin mules for a pair of dreary sandals I found in the car where they had been left as the unwanted part of a bag of stuff I got from a jumble sale. Might as well have myxomatosis and mad cow disease, as still no one comes anywhere near us.

  Bacon is saved in the most annoying fashion possible. Bronwyn Butterstone, wearing a perfect lion-coloured suede sheath dress, which matches both her hair and her skin, leads a whole column of cross-looking parents over to the seats behind us. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she says to my mother, blinking apologetically. ‘You’ll have to remove the hat. No one can see, and we’ve got several more to seat.’

  She leans over me as she speaks to tickle The Beauty playfully, then titters conspiratorially while speaking as loudly as she can, ‘Venetia, I didn’t know you had been a bunny girl. What fun you must have had in the seventies.’