In the Summertime by Judy Astley Page A

about the plaits and the chocolate-face,’ Miranda said. ‘Harriet’s coming to stay.’

FIVE
    Miranda made up the bed for Harriet in the room next to hers and put a vase with a mixed bunch of sweet peas, cornflowers and ox-eye daisies from the garden on the table next to the bed. She wanted to leave a selection of books out for her too but, looking on the shelves in the sitting room at the selection that other holidaymakers had left behind, she found it hard to choose something that would be neither tactless (there were quite a lot of fun romantic comedies) nor depressing (someone had been keen on gloomy Scandinavian crime). Harriet was a great one for abundant tears and the boyfriend situation was looking bad enough without Miranda’s accidentally setting her off. In the end she chose a book of the Mitford sisters’ letters and Keith Richards’s autobiography. Surely either of those would be an absorbing distraction if Harriet were afflicted with misery-filled sleepless nights.
    ‘I am homeless ,’ she had wailed down the phone, adding with maximum Dickensian drama, ‘You must take me in!’ Miranda had offered her the keys to her Chiswick house, thinking perhaps Harriet might prefer the distractions of London to the quiet of Cornwall, but she had started howling again. ‘But I need to be with you ! I need my family !’ So of course Miranda agreed to collect her that night from Newquay airport. Somehow, on the drive back to Chapel Creek, she was going to have to persuade Harriet that however desolate she was feeling, it might be an idea to give some thought to their mother. Being dumped by a wayward faithless boyfriend whom she had only recently moved in with wasn’t really up there with Clare’s loss of her husband. Harriet might have to think a bit before claiming that every single bit of life’s unfairness had landed on her and her alone. But all the same, it could be good to have an ally in the house. Maybe Miranda could even start to feel a bit more like relaxing, more as if this were actually a pleasurable break, if she had someone else to share Clare with. Harriet was a persuasive sort – she might even manage to get their mother to deal with Jack’s ashes sooner rather than later. It would be such a relief to get whatever ceremony Clare wanted out of the way so they could get on with trying to make this a proper holiday. In the meantime, still in her capacity of team leader and default dogsbody, Miranda had to think about food for them all. Bo had gone off with Lola toJess’s house, leaving Silva trying to look as if she didn’t care in the slightest about having chosen to stay behind.
    ‘Are you sure you didn’t want to go with them?’ Miranda asked when she came back from the beach and found Silva floating on a pink inflatable crocodile in the pool, her iPod plugged into her ears.
    ‘Like, no ?’ The emphatic negative told Miranda that Silva was indeed regretting her decision. She looked lonely, a bit lost, and was possibly heading for a full-day sulk. When Clare offered to take her over on the ferry to St Piran, Miranda was absolutely not going to let her say no.
    Miranda locked up the house, texted Bo to tell him where she’d hidden a spare key in case he came back, and set off to the village shop. She was hoping to do some serious stocking up and decided that using the village shop would be far more interesting than a trip to the nearest supermarket, nine miles away. She needed quite a lot of supplies and wasn’t sure if the shop did deliveries (where was Ocado when you needed it?), but there was an old-fashioned wicker shopping trolley being decoratively chic in the hallway so she took the umbrellas out of it and almost laughed as she considered how she wouldn’t be seen dead with such an item back home on the Chiswick High Road. The shopping trolley of shame, she thought, practising manoeuvring it on the path and doing a little dancewith it, thinking along the lines of Fred Astaire