Just For the Summer Read Online Free

Miranda’s grumpiness with her in the cottage. She wanted to regain her mood of secret anticipation, and most of all she wanted to know whether Eliot had arrived yet. Bringing in boxes of Sainsbury’s food from the car, she wondered how soon she could decently stroll up the road, drop in at the converted coach house and wish Eliot, Liz and the family a happy summer. She’d send Miranda instead, she decided, itwould give the girl something to do and an opportunity to cheer up a bit .
    ‘Why don’t you go and get some fresh air, Miranda,’ Clare asked her casually. ‘You could wander up to the Lynchs’ house and see if Jessica and Milo are here yet.’
    ‘No point,’ Miranda growled, heading for the door. ‘They’re not coming till tomorrow. I rang Jess last night to ask.’ It was quite a relief really, Clare thought later as she unrolled fresh honeysuckle drawer liners into the old pine chest in her bedroom. It gave her an evening for slopping around and arranging herself for his arrival. It also gave her a chance to see she was being rather silly. I’ve got everything. I want, she thought, looking through the window at her three daughters, sitting in a row on the creek wall at the end of the garden. When the phone rang, and Jack was asking her about the journey, Clare was able to say, with some honesty, ‘Yes, I wish you were here as well.’
    At 6.45 a.m. the next morning Eliot Lynch drove his new Range Rover off the train at Penzance. How, he wondered, could a journey so expensive be so uncomfortable? He felt unrested, unshaven, jet-lagged and hungry. Liz and the twins shivered in the pale chill air, somehow looking pitifully out of place in their Knightsbridge clothes among the cars and the crowd, the Cornish mail sacks and the stacked newspapers. They all crushed into the car, Eliot opening the window to disperse Liz’s cloud ofPoison perfume. The twins squashed in the back seats along with the luggage, the golf clubs, fishing gear and new bits of sailing equipment, Eliot’s new toys from Harrods, bought to tempt his son Milo into being his playmate for one more summer. Milo was now eighteen, and the time he spent with Eliot was now governed by his own choice and not by the long ago custody arrangements made with Wife no 1. The deal had been that Eliot got Milo and Jessica for the summer, and the Cornwall house was where Eliot would continue to be each year while Jess and Milo still wanted to stay with him. The problem was that now Milo was old enough to match Eliot’s skill at sports, he wanted to spend more and more time with his friends. Milo could be bribed by the new equipment only until its novelty wore off. This year Eliot was even more pessimistic. How could he look forward to spending time with Milo and Jessica when he hadn’t got further than chapter six and had an October deadline?
    All this pressure, all these children, for he had a total of four, and these wives (two) to support. They all brought Eliot many moments of panic and sometimes he felt close to abandoning ship. Often he ran away to foreign places with his passport in his pocket and an overnight bag, phoning home on the way to the airport and calling it work.
    Liz, clipping their six-year-old twins firmly into their seat belts, was thinking about the practicalities. Someonehad to. Milo and Jessica would be arriving by plane from Heathrow that afternoon, so someone would have to drive over to St Mawgan. She couldn’t trust them to get a taxi, they’d probably rush off to Newquay and not come home till 3 a.m., wanting £200 to pay the driver who they would keep waiting for hours. There was the steak for the barbecue to be organized for the next evening, and had she ordered enough food? Miranda Miller might have friends staying, Andrew Osbourne probably hadn’t.
    Perhaps she could ask Clare to make a salad. Liz hoped Archie wouldn’t be pedantic about the wine this time, a barbecue was a casual thing after all. Vast bottles of