Just For the Summer by Judy Astley

Author:Judy Astley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446487471
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 1994-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

THAT AFTERNOON, WITH nothing to do till the sheets were ready for collection in Helston, Clare sat in her garden, thinking that with Jack and all the children out the cottage felt just the right size for her. Tempting fate, she imagined herself widowed, divorced, the children away at school or college. Imagining, she arranged for herself just the necessities for a single life (with the addition of new bathroom, kitchen, central heating, just those things that the cottage needed right now, never mind waiting for the payout of life insurance policies). But deep down, she knew she wouldn’t make a cosy village widow. There was a goldfish bowl feeling about living alongside the creek, everyone knowing what everyone else was doing. She felt brave, that afternoon to be out at all – everyone seemed to know that she was the one who should have been in charge of Andrew and his social life the night before. She hadn’t dared, alone, go to the village shop for the newspaper, but had cravenly sent Harriet instead. Harriet had reported back that the man in the shop had said, ‘I bet your Mum’s in for a busy day.’

If it was this bad in summer, when the village population was so diluted by trippers, imagine, she thought, what it must be like in winter, nothing but gossip. Strange how much more private one could be, living in over-populated suburbia. If Jack really didn’t go back to the Poly and they sold the Cornish house, the only thing she’d miss about summers would be Eliot and the opportunity for a good deal of lustful fantasy. Guiltily, she abandoned the idea of being alone with the cottage, and offered up a quick prayer for the safe return of Jack and Miranda from Truro.

Clare sat under the pear tree, with her back to the creek and the rest of the village so she couldn’t see if she was being stared at. Virtuously, she knitted multicoloured bobbles to sew on a sweater, trying to keep her fingers in the shade as she worked, so they wouldn’t get sticky and hot and ruin the silk. She felt she ought to give some serious thought to Jack and his work problems, rather than to thinking how good an opportunity it would be for Eliot to be making an inpromptu visit. Today she didn’t want him, her hands still reeked of disinfectant (as did Celia’s entire house), and she didn’t feel that Eau de Domestos was at all a seductive scent.

Clare knew quite well that Jack also knew quite well that selling the cottage would not generate anywhere near enough money for them to live on. She would have to get a job, though what as she couldn’t imagine. Expanding the knitwear business would take investment and a college course, neither of which they would now be able to afford. It rather looked as if, in order for Jack to give up working at a job that no longer interested him, Clare would have to start working at one which did not particularly interest her.

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