Away From It All (7 page)

‘Er . . . catapults, big fuck-off state of the art ones. Some nutters at school have got them to pick off the pigeons on the gym roof. Wait till I get back down
there . . .' Theo set off, running and sliding on the downward path.

Grace thought about Joss and about Alice and how differently they'd react. Joss would congratulate the boys on being crack shots. Alice would tell them they could have had someone's eye out.

ALICE STUFFED THE
stained old kitchen curtains into the binbag. As she'd taken them down from the window the fabric had given way in her fingers and threads had parted and frayed away into holes. You didn't need curtains here, she thought as she looked out through the newly cleaned window into what should have been Gosling's garden. There was no-one living close enough to peer in and enough overgrown spiky shrubbery had spread across the paths to deter any casual passers-by. Maybe for winter some blinds might help to keep out the worst of the easterly winds – rough sailcloth in a deep oatmeal colour would look good, especially if the walls were painted. A quick brush round with some pale blue (Designers Guild Aqua came to mind) would lighten the whole mood – all that dull yellow ochre looked like a mustard-factory explosion.

Now that Alice had made a start on the cleaning of the cottage, its many good points and the possibility of simple but effective improvements were beginning to suggest themselves. If Gosling could be pulled back up to a more twenty-first century level of comfort, it could only be good for Penmorrow's holiday rental
business. People who'd booked it once might actually want to come again another year, instead of racing home to tell their friends (in a tone of hugely amused incredulity) about the holiday cottage from hell. Perhaps that would make the dour-faced Mo smile a bit for a change.

Mo had seemed distinctly underwhelmed by Alice's efforts in the kitchen at Penmorrow itself, sensing criticism as Alice heaped out-of-date tins and jars into rubbish bags. Many of them had to be prised from where they'd welded themselves to the sticky marble larder shelves, and some of the tins had swollen with age and looked dangerously close to exploding.

‘It'll take more than a bit of Mr Muscle and bleach to turn this place round,' Mo had grunted. ‘Folks don't want to come staying where there's no power showers or Sky telly.'

‘Well a freshen-up and a clear-out will give us a chance to see what's left that's most needed to be done, won't it?' Alice had cringed at her own overbright tone. She was doing the kids' presenter voice again and sounded as if she was jollying along a cross toddler. Mo had never much liked her, she knew that. Whenever she visited Penmorrow Mo would be sniffy about her clothes with comments like ‘You won't want to wear those shoes down the muddy cliff path,' or ‘Real silk is it, that shirt? Won't keep the draughts out here.' And if she asked about Alice's work she'd say, ‘How're those kiddy books of yours going?' as if she refused to believe anyone in their right mind could make any kind of living writing about children at a boarding school. Alice tried not to take it personally – she guessed Mo would be just as scornful towards J.K. Rowling. Noel had claimed Mo was simply envious,
but Alice knew it was about more than coveting material goods.

Mo had joined the Penmorrow commune as an infatuated teenager with romantic notions about art, having met Jocelyn when she'd given a talk on the life and work of Arthur Gillings to Mo's art A-level class at a north coast school. Joss had chain-smoked pungent, skinny roll-ups throughout and told her audience that underwear was unhealthy (‘let your genitals
breathe
or they'll wither and
die
!'). With her long grey-blonde hair in a hundred beaded plaits (thanks to a Grenadan potter spending a few months at the house) and uninhibited revelations about the late Arthur's bed prowess, she had completely enchanted Mo.

Mo had then turned up at Penmorrow after her exams, bringing with her little more than her painting materials and total trust that the Penmorrow magic would conjure up for her a definitive and mould-breaking artistic style. But the decline of the commune had already begun. Several rooms were empty and their gaudily painted furnishings were collecting a dull coat of dust. Joss was moody and fretting, trying and failing to write a long-overdue follow-up to
Angel's Choice
and to get back into the public limelight and credit at the bank. Mo found it hard to decide in which direction her talent should take her – for surely, with a grade A at A level, she
had
talent? She first opted for washed-out watercolours that everyone, encouragingly, agreed could well be landscapes, and later angry bright acrylic still lives with paint applied so thickly they tended to chip and look clumsy.

As for lovers, Mo found no equivalent of the eminent Arthur, only Harry who served pasties in his café in the daytime and took Mo out to drink cider among the tourists in the Blue Cockle at night. If the
mood took him, on the way home he'd grab her hand and pull her down the sea wall and they'd have fumbled, fully clothed sex on the damp sand beneath a beached dinghy, which she rather enjoyed. Paul, Alice's glamorous new American husband at the time, told Alice that Mo was a ‘disappointed star-fucker who'd had to downgrade to the roadie'. Mo could have left Penmorrow but she'd exhausted her reserves of rebellion when she'd walked out on her bewildered parents and her comfortable Padstow home. After a few years she no longer had the energy to move on and settled, as helplessly as a wheel-less car abandoned in a swamp, into her role as Penmorrow's housekeeper and later as mother of Sam and Chas.

Recently, in the early half-waking moments, Mo had hatched a new dream. She looked forward to the day when she and Harry could flog the lot and move to a modern executive Truro townhouse. She dreamed of commonplace urban facilities that Penmorrow – and even Tremorwell – didn't possess: of gas-fired central heating and mains sewerage and street lights. She wanted an en suite bathroom with his and hers basins set in a peach Corian vanity unit, a kitchen with a stainless steel self-cleaning Teflon-lined oven and a small fenced-in garden with manageable bedding plants that assured her they were ‘dwarf' varieties on their labels. She never wanted to see an Aga again, or single-glazed windows or a set of drain rods. But none of this could happen if Jocelyn took too long over the slow business of giving up her steely grip on Penmorrow, and if interferring bloody Alice intended to spruce it all back up to the standards of a going concern.

Out in Gosling's garden Alice could see that only gangly clumps of evening primrose, some ragged
lavender and a single woody rock rose remained of the flower bed that faced the window, though its brick outlines were still just visible beneath a matted spread of speedwell and wild campanula. Gorse and wild montbretia had sneaked up the hillside from the sea edge and taken over from the agapanthus and day lilies that used to be flowering in July when Arthur Gillings had lived in the cottage. Alice remembered pulling petals off ox-eye daisies to chant, ‘He loves me, he loves me not' out in the scorching sunlight on the front step while Arthur worked away inside. Now, scrubbing a J-cloth round the sink, she could almost smell the moist earthy scent of his clay, could almost hear him softly whistling as he worked.

As soon as she'd found out that other children tended to have people called ‘fathers' in their lives, Alice had wondered if Arthur had been hers. Her friend Sally in the village lived in a house with only two other grown-ups whom she called Mummy and Daddy. Alice, at five, thought these were their names and hadn't understood why everyone had laughed when she'd shouted ‘Daddy, look at the blue butterfly!' while she'd been playing in Sally's garden.

Alice had rushed home full of curiosity, telling Joss, ‘Sally's got a mummy and daddy. Have I?' Joss had been in the garden at the time, tying up bean plants to their wigwam.

‘I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later,' she had commented wryly. She'd taken Alice's hand and sat down with her on the swing seat on the Penmorrow porch and explained, ‘I am your mummy, it's just that you call me by my name. You call me Jocelyn the same way I call you Alice and not “Daughter”, do you see?'

Alice only sort-of-saw. Sally's mummy didn't call
Sally ‘Daughter'. Nobody she'd ever met was called that, not so far.

‘And what about my daddy? Who is my daddy?'

‘Oh not everybody has a daddy! You don't need one of those!' Jocelyn had told her.

‘Sally's mummy Brenda says everyone has a daddy otherwise you can't be made.' Further than that, faced with a wide-eyed five year-old, Brenda hadn't been willing to explain and had copped out with ‘You just ask Jocelyn, she'll tell you.'

‘Well you were,' Joss had told her, laughing. ‘You were knitted out of scraps of wool and stuffed with old socks.'

‘Old socks?' Alice had been horrified. She'd seen plenty of old socks in Penmorrow. Old socks went smelly and had holes in them. People threw them away in the rubbish. She'd seen Milly put some of Arthur's on the compost heap.

‘And what about Harry? Is he knitted too?' Harry was only a year old then. Alice was more willing to believe that he was a soft toy – he looked round and soft and squashy like her favourite teddy.

‘Oh he's patchwork!' Joss had said breezily. And then Alice had known for sure none of this was true. She knew about patchwork. In Penmorrow there was a woman called Kelpie who was always doing it. Everywhere she went tiny bits of material fell around her. She sat by the hexagon window and sewed all day, putting together tiny flower prints and making star shapes that her friend Morgan quilted on a big frame and sent to London to be sold.

Alice knew about knitting too because Cathy and Mike who lived in the room across the landing from where she and the other young children slept, and who played music really loudly, had shown her how
they made balls of wool by spinning hunks of fleece. They dyed long strings of it in a rusty old boiler that was rigged up in one of the sheds where she wasn't ever allowed to go by herself. They made huge hairy coats out of squares of wool, in diamond patterns with bobbles hanging off them and heavy mats of fringing round the collars. The colours were dark and smudgy, like being outside in the woods on a wet day.

None of these people made babies when they worked. Joss had made a mistake that day, she'd relied quite wrongly on the supreme credulousness of small children. Alice recognized then that Joss and other grown-ups didn't always tell the truth. She had been told she
always
had to tell the truth. But was
that
true?

Jocelyn sat smoking in her peacock chair in the hexagon and prepared her mind for the afternoon session with Aidan. She was enjoying having her life documented like this, it gave her a boost to be reminded just what an icon she'd once been – Aidan was flatteringly reverent – and it was just as well to do it now while she still could. Every single episode from her crowded past was as clear as ever, but sometimes she felt that the present days were blurring into one another in a mushy, undefined way, as if there was so little difference between them that her memory was no longer bothering to register them properly.

Sixty-eight, she thought, was not for her a good age to be, not when she was feeling suddenly weakened like this. It was a pity that it had turned out to be true, this thing about cigarettes and alcohol causing more than a bit of wear and tear round the edges. She'd been certain she was different, that she'd got away with it and would become one of those fit, lithe centenarians who confound the medics by putting her healthy
longevity down to a lifelong indulgence in wine and tobacco. Even so, even given her current frailty, she wouldn't go back and change anything – she'd had too good a time. But all the same, sixty-eight was a sad time to find her vitality petering out. It had neither the grandeur of wise old age nor the ripe-fruit quality of the middle years.
Nineteen
sixty-eight on the other hand had been a very good year. This afternoon she would tell Aidan all about it.

‘So. How's it going? When are you coming back?' Noel's voice sounded very crisp and businesslike. He was in the office with a lot to do. He wasn't going to waste time asking Alice how she was or telling her he missed her. Alice was outside the Truro Homebase loading paint cans and various bits of essential hardware into the back of the car. She quickly rechecked her list as, one-handed because of the phone, she put them in – chrome handles to brighten up the kitchen cupboards, two screwdrivers, white eggshell paint for the woodwork, soft greeny-blue matt vinyl for the kitchen walls, three brushes, a bottle of white spirit, small paint buckets, a pack of drop cloths to protect the worktops and floor. She'd assumed there'd be old sheets at Penmorrow to use but as Mo had said grouchily, ‘What do you think are on the bloody beds?'

At the other end of the phone she could hear Noel tapping his fingers on his desk – a sure sign that he expected a fast and decisive reply.

‘Back? I can't come back just now, there's too much to do here. Why? Are you lonely without us? Are you missing me?'

‘Yes of course I am.' Still brisk, she noted, still in time-is-money mode. ‘It's just that usually when you go to Cornwall you leave a definite return date in the
house diary and this time you haven't. And what about the children? Is Theo behaving?'

‘Theo is fine. I hardly see him or Grace – they've taken to hanging around on the beach by the surf shack.' She laughed. ‘They're starting to look a bit less smooth and London-ish. By the end of the summer . . .'

‘
End
of the
summer
? Is that how long you're . . .'

‘I don't know.' Alice slammed the boot shut, quickly climbed into the driving seat and started the car. ‘I haven't made any coming-back plans. I just thought I'd stay for a bit longer and see what I can do to try and get the house in some kind of order. You should see it Noel, it's really got rundown and . . .'