In the Summertime (7 page)

‘Cheryl?’ he said. ‘I just dropped off your order out back. Three dozen oysters, ten lobsters ready cooked-off and five more kilos of langoustines.’ Miranda hung back behind a party of browsers who’d gone silent, possibly mesmerized by the £3.50 price tag on the small lumpy loaves of sourdough bread. ‘They’re in the left-hand fridge. Anything else, just give me a bell.’ The girl – Cheryl – looked up and smiled. ‘Thanks, Stevie, babe,’ she said, almost purring at him.

So it
was
him. That unsettling, briefly glimpsed lookalike from the pub really
was
Steve – or
Stevie babe
. Yuck. Miranda, from behind the stocky frame of the fish-finger-seeking holidaymaker (now grumbling about the lack of white sliced bread), had a good stare as he fondly tweaked the girl’s thick, untidy blonde plait and went through to the back of the shop again. He’d aged well, she’d give him that. Twenty years certainly hadn’t given him a paunchy middle or cost him his hair, which was still quite long but in a cool Johnny Depp sort of way, not lank and neglected. His broad smile at Cheryl showed gleaming teeth, bright against the tanned face she remembered from way back. Still curious (OK, frankly nosy), Miranda crossed to the shop’s doorway and peered out, hoping to take in some more of how he was looking without his seeing her, but
as she stepped outside a white van with a big blue curly fish painted on the back was already pulling away. Damn.

‘Oy! Excuse
me
!’ The sharp, accusing voice of Cheryl cut across the shop and Miranda could almost feel it whamming into the back of her head. She turned round. ‘Yes, you, lady over there with your wheelie basket full of
our
goods. Don’t think I haven’t been watching you!’ Cheryl was now coming round from behind the deli counter to the shop floor and heading Miranda’s way, looking furious and determined and as if she didn’t intend to stop till she’d got close enough to give her a smack in the mouth. Miranda backed away, alarmed in case she did plan exactly that. She felt a small longing for the peaceful anonymity of Waitrose on the Chiswick High Road, where nobody would ever storm across the shop floor to show you up in front of your fellow customers. ‘Don’t you even
think
of buggering off out of here without paying!’ Cheryl’s face was close enough to Miranda for her to smell minty chewing gum and see that beneath heavily applied foundation her chin had a lumpy little outcrop of spots. The entire shopful of customers had parted to make way for small, bustling Cheryl and every one of them was staring as she reached into the shopping trolley and started pulling out Miranda’s vegetables.

‘I wasn’t stealing them! I was only … I was just
looking outside for … something,’ Miranda protested feebly as she moved away from the door and hauled what was left of her basket of supplies back inside, trailing behind Cheryl to the check-out queue, feeling mortified. No
way
had she been about to shoplift, but she got the impression that any further denial wouldn’t be accepted.

‘You use these next time, right? Or you’re barred!’ Cheryl pointed to a pile of baskets cutely wrought from chicken wire and bamboo. Miranda had assumed they were for sale: the shop had all sorts of similar goods on offer – mugs (not Miranda’s designs, she noted), tea towels with local scenes, kitchenware, scented candles, standard gift-shop items.

‘OK. Sorry.’ Miranda wondered how much more contrite she was expected to be and was getting an unbanishable picture in her head of Cheryl in bed with Steve later that night, the two of them laughing together about stupid thieving grockles.

Cheryl went back behind the counter, pulled on some latex gloves with the firm snapping movement of a therapist about to undertake a tricky colonic irrigation and continued deftly putting together a crab sandwich for a woman in the skinniest white jeans Miranda had ever seen. Miranda, too embarrassed now to line up to ask the girl to make her a sandwich for later – not to mention frightened of what might ‘accidentally’ find its way into it if she did – quickly unloaded her food at
the check-out and shakily groped in her bag for her credit card.

‘Some people just have to try it on, don’t they? Can’t trust anyone …’ Cheryl was still grouching at full volume to the rest of the shop as she handed over the crab sandwich.

‘I’m not bloody surprised.’ The sliced-bread woman’s northern voice rang clearly through the shop. ‘At these prices, love, I’d say it’s you lot committing daylight robbery, not your customers.’

Clare and Silva walked along the pontoon to the ferry and boarded the boat to cross the estuary to St Piran. Clare accepted a steadying hand from a stocky boy in board shorts and a cap. ‘Three quid, return. Each,’ he said, adding a grudging, ‘Please,’ as if he’d just remembered the rest of the training manual script.

‘Three pounds? Good grief, it used to be about fifty p,’ Clare told him. She handed over the cash, and as they went to sit down on the long side bench she murmured to Silva, ‘I wish I hadn’t said that. I sound like one of those people from my mother’s generation who say things like, “In my day it was sixpence in old money and you’d still have change for a bag of chips.”’

But Silva was leaning over the side and staring down into the sea. ‘Fish,’ she said. ‘Look at these fish, Gran. The water’s so weird.’

‘Is it?’ Clare turned and looked down at the sea as the
boat started to pull away. It was just … sea, surely? ‘What’s weird about it?’

‘When you look at it from the shore, it’s all grey and brownish, pretty much like the Thames at home. But here where you’re right on top of it and looking straight down, it’s like abroad-sea, all turquoise and different shades where the rocks are and really clear. I don’t get it.’

‘It’ll be something to do with refracted light,’ Clare said.

‘And that is …?’

‘I haven’t a clue, darling,’ she said, laughing.

‘You’re laughing, Gran,’ Silva pointed out as the boat revved up and pulled away across the water.

Clare looked at her, smiling. She could feel her hair being blown back from her face and bits of it whipping round again to hit her. Tears came into her eyes but for once they weren’t the crying sort, just from the breeze.

‘I am, aren’t I? It’s being here, I expect. It’s something in the air.’

‘I’m glad. And Gran?’

‘Yes, Silva?’

‘You mentioned chips. Please can we get some?’

‘I don’t see why not. But let’s look around a bit first, yes? I was reading something about a new gallery and I want to find it if we can. I’d like to see what kind of paintings are selling down here. How did you and Bo get on with that Lola girl? Do you think you’ll be friends?’

‘Dunno.’ Silva shrugged. ‘She winds me up. She winds Bo up too but in a different way. I think she thinks I’m just a kid and not worth the hassle, you know? Bo fancies her.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘He smiled. Bo
smiled
. It was totes sick-making. He smiled at everything she said, like she was saying amaze stuff he’d never heard before. It was like,
so
embarrassing. I had to go back in the house.’

Clare wanted to hug her, but with Silva’s tolerance level for embarrassment being clearly pretty low she thought better of it. All the same, she felt enormous sympathy for the girl, who was seeing herself potentially becoming sidelined by her brother during this holiday while he followed this Lola around. She remembered Miranda at the same age, or maybe a bit younger, being rather lost in the village till she met Jessica, Milo and Andrew. Her little sisters were way too young to be proper companions and she’d sometimes seemed to Clare still to be the only child she had been for her first eight years. Bo and Silva were very lucky to be close in age, really, she thought. But she also knew better than to point this fact out to Silva right now.

‘It’s changed a lot over here,’ she said as the two of them ambled between the shops and cafés on the St Piran beachfront. ‘There didn’t use to be much, just holiday homes, a few retired people in bungalows, some run-down shops and the one big old pub with
rickety metal tables outside. Now look, the shops are all arty and bright and the pub’s gone all boutique hotel and bistro. Your mum used to come over here some nights in a boat with her friends.’

‘Did she?’ Silva, not that interested in what went on long before she was born, stopped to look at a window display of surfwear and wetsuits. Its customers streamed in and out – a file of confident and fit-looking boys in board shorts and flip-flops, swishy-haired girls with deep-tanned long legs in cut-off shorts or tiny dresses. Local, Clare would guess, not tourists. Or the locally detested second home owners as she’d once been, coming down here every summer and taking over, cluttering up the narrow lanes with big cars towing boats. This was one of the places that made it into the outraged press each summer, when over-privileged children partied late at night in the sand dunes with too much drink and too much noise. Town-boy holidaymakers were lurking on the beach looking awkward and out of place in old trainers and the falling-down jeans they all wore up-country. The girls kept their city-pale legs covered, wearing black leggings under tiny shorts and surely sweltering horribly. She felt a bit sorry for them – all their street-smart was no use here. You needed water skills: surfing, sailing, even just basic bodyboarding, to fit in, and you needed, even if only by moving a few yards up the beach, not to be lumbered with your parents.

This place was far busier than Clare remembered. The gift shops, the new galleries and the chic cafés brought a constant stream of holidaymakers pouring off the ferry, looking for something to entertain them, something to buy. Young girls sat queuing on the harbour wall for henna tattoos and hair-braids while their parents sat on benches munching pasties and trying to fend off the greedy seagulls.

But it was the galleries that interested Clare. ‘Your granddad used to sell paintings here when he first decided to give up teaching,’ she told Silva as they walked up a narrow lane just off the seafront. ‘It was here he decided he wanted to be a full-time artist, while …’ she hesitated, ‘while he still could.’

‘Was he ill right back then as well?’ Silva asked. ‘That was years ago, wasn’t it?’

‘No, he wasn’t ill then,’ Clare told her, ‘but he made a big decision the last summer we were here. He’d got to a point where he thought that if he didn’t give up teaching and do full-time painting
now
he never would. So he did. It was a risk, but I’m so glad he took it. You always regret passing up on what you really want. Remember that, if your teachers ever push you to give up subjects you really like best.’

‘Good choice,’ Silva agreed, nodding as if she knew. Perhaps she did, Clare thought. At nearly fourteen you can’t imagine
not
having all the options in the world.

‘It was. He did well at it. But his first sales after that decision were for hardly any money. They were typical seaside scenes and he had an exhibition at a little gallery in Chapel Creek. When we drove past it yesterday it looked as if it had turned into a tea room.’

‘There’re a lot of dogs,’ Silva suddenly said, moving out of the way of a black spaniel, pulling at its lead. ‘Everyone here’s got a dog.’ She sounded grumpy and a bit bored. Clare took hold of her arm and pulled her across the road to a gallery where the window was full of bright harbour scenes.

‘But that’s the thing about a holiday that isn’t abroad. You don’t have to worry about leaving the dog. And people do worry. Even you’ve brought your cat.’

‘Only cos he’s old. Mum didn’t trust the cattery.’

‘Aha, now this is the place I wanted to see,’ Clare said. ‘Tell you what, Silva, why don’t you go and bag us a table at that Sail Loft café by the ferry so we can have some lunch and I’ll catch up with you in about ten minutes? Order yourself a drink while you wait for me, yes?’

‘OK.’ Clare watched as Silva sauntered off down the road, her hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her denim shorts. Jack had loved her very much, this child of Miranda’s, to whom he was no blood relation. And now he’d never see her grow up, not be there to give her a hug and a cash bonus for exam success, not go to
her graduation – if she chose to go to university, that is. He wouldn’t be able to help teach her to drive as he had Miranda. Silva and Bo had always been called him Granddad. But Miranda hadn’t called him Daddy; Clare hadn’t ever suggested she did. He’d always been Jack to her, at first because Clare hadn’t known whether the relationship would last, and by the time they’d actually decided it would, and they’d married, the habit was ingrained. How ridiculous, she thought now. The man who’d raised her daughter since she’d been three and she’d denied him and Miranda that small measure of closeness. She’d never know if it had made a difference. Too late now.

She waited till a few browsers left the gallery and then went inside. There was something she had to do. It wasn’t only Jack’s mortal remains that needed to be set free. She had twenty-three of his early Cornish paintings that needed a home. And this gallery was where she hoped they’d find one.

Silva walked back to the harbour-front and had another look in the beachwear shop. She’d clocked the surf-crowd earlier and envied how they all knew each other and wished she were part of a group of friends like that. If Bo went off and hung with the Lola girl she’d be mostly mooching about by herself for three whole weeks, which was like
for ever
.
Not
fun. Her best friend Willow had gone to Florida for a month to stay with a
bunch of cousins and she kept putting up all these photos of beach party fun on Facebook and in most of them there was a boy with his arm round her. You couldn’t not be envious. Silva wasn’t the only one – every single one of their mates had been madly clicking on ‘Like’ under the pictures. She imagined Willow on a beach at sundown, out of sight of her parents, snogging the boy’s face off. He didn’t actually look all that but at least she’d have something to tell when they got back to school. What was Silva going to have?
It was great. I hung with my mum, my aunt and my gran
. Not that she didn’t love her family, but the summer you become fourteen you want it to have something a bit more … memorable.