Free Just For the Summer by Judy Astley Page A

the Sunday papers, the frivolous ones with all the scandals, the ones she would never let anyone in Barnes see her reading. She looked at the moist steamy earth in the beds of pinks and nasturtiums and read idly, gradually losing the suspicion that she had made rather a fool of herself. She just wished Miranda’s bursts of growing up would coincide with her own readiness for them.
    Clare looked up at the window above from where she could hear Jack asking the smaller children to be quieter, please, Mummy’s resting. Just let him say, just once, ‘It’s probably your age.’ Just let him dare, that’s all, Clare fumed quietly.
    Upstairs, Jack piled socks and teeshirts into the chest of drawers. He fished a lily of the valley scented sachet out from the back and dropped it among Clare’s underwear, not knowing that it would clash with a honeysuckle one that already nestled there. He looked out of the window at the busy creek, the gulls, the children, the overhanging thatch and felt that at last, he was home, something he felt nowhere else. All he had to do now was find a way of telling Clare.

SIX
    IT TOOK ONLY a few hot days for it to become one of those summers where people keep telling each other how lucky they are with the weather.
    Eliot, with typical hangover pessimism, complained to Jack that next year you wouldn’t be able to move in the village for all the blasted trippers, all those Costa Plenty tourists who were being told on their return, ‘I don’t know why you bother to go abroad, there’s nothing like England in a good year.’ They’d realize that a good tan wasn’t something you had to qualify for by spending eighteen hours being delayed at Gatwick. Jack and Clare, in their tiny cottage, stuffed their duvet into a dusty cupboard and stretched, hot, under sheets instead. The heat made them feel sexy, but their sweaty bodies glued together and made slapping noises like seals clapping. Worried that the children might hear, they pulled apart thankfully, rolling to cool islands on the far sides of theold brass bed. It was, Clare felt, weather for outdoor sex, which she knew, resignedly, that she was unlikely to get. On the one evening she had managed to lure Jack out alone for a walk in the bracken on the headland, he had complained that ferns were possibly carcinogenic and paid more attention to his sketchbook than to her. The only excitement he had expressed had been at the purity of the light.
    In London, in the tubs and patios and the smart Versailles planters of the absent two-home families, petunias, lilies and fuschias wilted and died in the dust-dry heat, neglected by cleaning ladies or careless schoolgirls who had promised they wouldn’t forget. Only garish brazen geraniums flaunted themselves and blazed salmon pink and lobster red against the dust.
    Down in Cornwall, Clare, Liz and Archie worried in the pub about a possible water shortage and the banning of hose pipes. On their terraces the tubs and pots and borders were full and thriving. Liz watered her lilies in the evenings when she could savour their delicious scent, but left the rest of the garden to the man whose job it was. Clare nurtured her cottage garden of lavender, larkspur and snapdragons. She watered them virtuously with water from the washing-up bowl, so the plants tended to be draped with limp spaghetti and bits of potato peel. She let the children plant their calendulas round the corner where they wouldn’t clash, and where they flourished wonderfully,watered by the potent, stinking liquid from the old rainwater butt.
    The good weather meant that time spent crammed damply into the cottage was minimal. In search of some cool air, Jack and Clare wandered up to the local craft centre to look at the things real tourists looked at, but the second-homers usually avoided.
    ‘I’ve heard some of the stuff in here is really quite good,’ Jack said to Clare as they paid their 50p entrance fee. Clare was looking doubtful. She and Jack