Summertime - Hardcover

Barker, Raffaella

 
9780375503870: Summertime
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375503870 ISBN 13: 9780375503870
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

When her boyfriend's job takes him away to the Brazilian rain forest, Venetia Summers finds the trials and tribulations overwhelming as her life begins to unravel and she deals with suddenly single motherhood, children, ecentric new neighbors, and family. By the author of Hens Dancing. 20,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Raffaella Barker is the author of Hens Dancing. She contributes regularly to Country Life, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Telegraph. She lives in Norfolk, England, with her husband and three children.

Aus dem Klappentext

For a year, Venetia Summers has been buffered from single motherhood by her boy-friend, David, but when work takes him to a Brazilian rain forest, things begin to unravel. Phone lines crackle, e-mails languish unanswered, and long-distance love proves to be a bewildering experience. Meanwhile, Venetia s children and dogs run wilder than ever, brother Desmond s outrageous wedding takes over her home, and her relationship with an eccentric new neighbor gets off to an unfortunate start. Still, there are the everyday rewards, not least among them the dazzling beauty of the changing Norfolk seasons.

How is Venetia to cope alone with an army-style camping holiday, a foul-mouthed Amazonian parrot, and the demanding, if endearing, personalities of three exuberant children? Her burgeoning fashion career, creating outlandish garments for a London boutique, provides much-needed diversion. But when a moonlit walk takes an unexpected turn, she finds herself with a real dilemma on her hands.

With Summertime, Raffaella Barker, whom Publishers Weekly called a postmodern Erma Bombeck, gives us another sparkling comedy of English rural life, sure to delight fans of her first novel, Hens Dancing, and new readers alike.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

March 13

Mother’s Day begins badly. No one has remembered, and Lowly, the weirdo dog, has found one of The Beauty’s dirty nappies in the rubbish bin in the bathroom and has disemboweled it. Glistening white beads of indestructible gel are sprayed like polystyrene snow across the carpet, and there is a malodorous whiff in the air. Instead of lying in bed receiving trays of breakfast, heaps of compliments, kisses, and lovely flowers like every other mother, I spend the first part of the morning vacuuming and spraying air freshener in a hygiene frenzy.

It is eleven o’clock, and none of the children is visi- ble or audible. This can mean only one thing—the Nintendo machine. Sure enough, I unearth a full complement of offspring in the playroom, their noses pinned to the television screen. Giles, aged eleven, should be old enough to know better by now but in fact is the child most on the edge of his seat and is air-punching exultantly: “Yessss, forty of them as dead as dodos, and we’re on to the next level.”

Felix, who is nine, will never be old enough to know better—it simply isn’t his way. He is draped elegantly along the back of the sofa, a line of squat metal lumps stretched like vertebrae before him to the other end of the sofa back. These are his army men, a cohort of Deathmasters and elves with whom he is locked in a War Hammer bloodbath. Perched next to him, and wearing her beloved purple tutu with red frill over her pajamas, is The Beauty. She is just three and doesn’t need to know better as she is convinced that she always knows best.

“Mummy, sit down. Look! It’s Dinosaur Death Run. Such fun,” she urges in her mad Enid Blyton way. Squalor in the playroom is extreme. Even though the curtains are drawn, I can see strewn orange peel and sweet wrappers all over the floor, and also my eagle eye detects that Giles’s toenails need cutting. Glorious sunshine has been barricaded out, but through the gap between the curtains I glimpse our two remaining Bohemian pigeons swooping on a spring breeze, and a twig of cherry blossom scratching at the windowpane. The perfection of outside increases my rage one thousandfold. On the television screen some foul-looking dinosaurs are hopping about. Their bloodcurdling roars are nothing like as frightening as mine.

“Will you turn that thing off. You know it’s banned until after dark. You know I hate it. And it’s Mother’s Day.”

Sit down on a small pink chair, squashing one of The Beauty’s tiny tea parties, which are set up all over the house, and burst into tears. Felix rushes to embrace me and Giles hastily removes all Nintendo equipment from within arm’s reach—he is used to this scene, and knows that I may hurl vital components into the bin, or the fireplace, at any moment.

“We’ve got a surprise for you,” Felix soothes, patting my shoulder kindly. The Beauty hovers anxiously at his side, proffering a small white handkerchief, either in truce or to blow my nose on.

“Cheer up, Mum,” says Giles. “At least you aren’t forty yet.”

Hadn’t even thought of worrying about that milestone, but can now add it to my list of near-future neuroses.

The Beauty squats in front of me, peering interestedly. “Don’t cry. Blow your nose. And get off my cuppa tea,” she commands, ramming the handkerchief into my face. I have an overpowering sense of panic. I have forgotten how to manage my children on my own.

For the past year I have been mollycoddled and buffered from single motherhood by the presence of my lovely handsome tower-of-strength boyfriend, David. Before he moved in I must have managed somehow. The children’s father, Charles, used to have them for the odd weekend, and still does when he can fit them into his ghoulish schedule running a chain of pet cemeteries and, more recently, setting up an animal fu-neral service on the Internet called deaddog.com. More than two years on, I now quite like the poisoned dwarf Helena, and am indeed grateful to her for luring him away from our unhappy life together. Less sure about Holly and Ivy-Eff, the petri dish twins, as they may jeopardize my own children’s position. Their role so far has been gurgling and toddling, but last year’s Christmas card from Charles and Helena (not, of course, sent to me, but shown me by a well-wisher) had Giles and Felix sitting cross-legged on the grass with The Beauty, the twin blobs propped between them. The Beauty’s expression of disdain spoke volumes, as did the larger than usual alimony check, which arrived for me in lieu of the frightful card. Charles always sends more money when he does something underhand: it is his saving grace.

It was on Christmas Day, when David and I borrowed a boat and chugged across the basin of sea at the head of the creek to Alborrow Sands for a bonfire and picnic, that we decided we would go away, just the two of us, in March. The children were with Charles, my first ever Christmas without them, and David made sure there was no time for me to brood. Up and out on an ice gray morning to catch the tide, wearing a scarf as soft and pink and warm as midsummer rose petals, which he wrapped round me saying, “First Christmas present of the day,” when we reached the harbor. The second present was a bailing bucket, and scooping water from the floor of the leaky boat kept me warm as we crossed. The sun came out and sent dancing golden rays to race ahead of us on the still water and up onto the shore. “Elevenses,” said David, and pulled a bottle of champagne out of the basket he had brought and wouldn’t let me look into.

Fueled by a cold glass, drunk with our arms round each other, looking out at the horizon, we gathered wood to build our fire, on which we cooked steak and baked potatoes. He had even brought a Christmas pudding, and we lit it, holding it up to see the purple-pink sky through the smoky flame, then we ate it fast, with spoonfuls of brandy butter, before the sun went down and we returned to the twinkling fairy lights of the harbor town. And David shouted above the boat engine and the roar of the sea, “Today was perfect. Let me take you away somewhere like this but warmer. Let’s go at the end of winter. I’ll organize it, I’ll ask your mother to have the kids. All you will have to do is pack.” He cut the engine, and we floated into the jetty. He climbed out and held out his hand to me. I jumped off the boat and he pulled me into his arms, and the skin of his cheeks was so cold it almost felt hot against mine. “I promise it will happen. It’s your Christmas present,” he whispered.

Huh! is all I can say. The end of winter came, and David got a brilliant job in Bermuda. An old friend of his was out there doing a fashion shoot and set it up. Now David is staying in a house called Pointy Fingers on Banana Patch Road, and will be there for weeks, no doubt. He is building a library for a bloated old screenplay writer, and now he’s been asked to do a colonnade too. Actually, for all I know the scriptwriter may be a lissome twenty-two-year-old, but I prefer to keep my mental picture very hideous. David’s job makes me alternately paralyzed with envy and incandescent with rage. Colonnades and libraries and kidney-shaped pools are a million miles from the scene here and now. Norfolk is charmless in March, soggy, gray, and mud-ridden. My life has shrunk to a monotonous routine of school run, washing clothes, and digging drainage ditches. Cannot bear to think of David lolling next to turquoise swimming pools and sipping cocktails with film stars and moguls. Because he is working flat-out, or so he says, I am not able to visit...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375503870
ISBN 13 
9780375503870
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
326
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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