Summertime (21 page)

‘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 aunt 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.'

Vile, vile, vile. Revenge shall be mine.

July 25th

Revenge was indeed mine, and I am collecting it now from the trophy shop. Felix has won a cup for outstanding genius of some sort. None of us was listening when it was awarded, so we don't know what it is for precisely, but it is his. He won it. All by himself. Giles has won one too. I think for cricket, but maybe music. Actually, I don't care what they are for. I am brimming with ignoble triumph. My children have two cups. And Bronwyn Butterstone's children have none. Ha ha. Must stop gloating now, or a mishap might befall me.

July 26th

Allow myself another quick gloat today when polishing Felix's already gleaming cup. It is more or less an Oscar, being for drama. Am so pleased that I forget that I hate David, and try to ring him. A female answerphone says that David is away for the weekend. He has run away with the electronic voice simulator, I knew it.

July 27th

Horror. The children are on summer holiday now and do not go to school again for more than fifty days. They gleefully inform me of this during a pillow fight this morning. When the pillow fight is over, Giles slumps on the floor, still in his pyjamas, and groans, ‘Mum, I'm really bored, can we go to Norwich?'

‘What for?'

‘Oh, I dunno, just to look around at the shops and stuff. It's just so dull here. There's nothing to do.'

Horrible little ingrate, how can he be so unspeakable? Exasperation flares and I have to leave the room to
prevent myself from kicking him as he rolls about at the bottom of the bed, yanking sheets down over himself in a welter of boredom. Shut the door behind me, and take a series of deep, yogic breaths, trying to do the ones which bypass your nostrils and feel as though your throat itself is breathing (much easier than it sounds). In … and … out… in … and … out…

Into my silent and tranquil space falls Felix's voice, agreeing with Giles. ‘Yeah, it's so boring. It's totally chod. Let's ask Mum if we can play Nintendo if we can't go to Norwich.'

Inner calm departs and temper rises to breaking point in seconds. Outside it is already hot. We have a garden, a cricket bat, streams and water meadows around us. We have bicycles and dogs, a tree house and those sodding Tarzan vines. It isn't raining, in fact it's hot enough to make ice creams an imperative. How can they be like this? Will I survive for fifty days? Must stop looking at it like this, it is reminding me of Noah in his ark, and he only had forty days with mad animals. Decide that most dignified course of action is to ignore the children, so depart to the garden to pick roses and sweet peas. Put on a straw hat and wafty shawl for this, as wish to become Vita S. W. for a while, as she was certainly unfazed by irritating children.

Am fully in character and wondering if I should become a lesbian, when Hedley and Tamsin appear on bicycles. Abandon lesbian fantasies, as Tamsin's brave little face reminds me that dumping children for love is not on. Suppose I could take mine with me to lesbian love nest, but doubt they would come.