Away From It All Read online

  Sometimes, when she’d made it safely back to bed and was thanking the gods for that small survival, she thought of old lovers. Counting through them, trying to remember their names in the right order was her version of counting sheep, and she sent up more thanks to her spirit gods for the long-ago delights they’d given her in that same soft, high bed.

  Alice gave the risotto a final stir, scattered chopped flat-leaf parsley over the top of it then cursed her forgetfulness. She should have left the parsley separate in its bowl for those who wanted it to help themselves. Now they’d have to endure the sight of Theo picking all these green bits out and laying them in a neat circle round the edge of his plate. When he’d got them all (and he’d spend a good while poking around with his fork to make sure), he’d move them round and shuffle them apart till they were as perfectly equidistant from each other as his mathematical eye could judge.

  ‘Possibly a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder?’ Alice had once suggested to Noel after Theo had arranged tomato seeds in groups of five on the black ash table so they looked like a row of domino faces. Noel’s eyes had gone narrow with anger and he’d denied, with curses and vehemence, the possibility of any such thing in his family. For Theo was his son, not Alice’s, just as Grace was Alice’s but not Noel’s. Noel’s wife Helen had died in a car accident when Theo was nine. Alice’s former husband lived in Los Angeles with a tiny blonde ex-gymnast who gave pet-bereavement counselling and either knew better than Alice had how to avoid being thumped around when the mood took him, or feisty LA-style, gave back as good as she got.

  Alice, in her recently remodelled steel and cherry-wood kitchen, ignored the phone when it rang. Beyond the door she could hear the usual scramble as both Theo and Grace leapt to answer it. If the call was for Alice a cross weary voice would inform her of the fact, as if the phone was teen territory, out of bounds to grown-ups. Both teenagers spent hours tapping out text messages on their own mobile phones, sometimes to each other in the same room. Alice occasionally wondered if the conversation skills of an entire generation would eventually atrophy and die.

  ‘It’s for you Mum; it’s Harry.’ A flash of Grace’s face and hair appeared and disappeared from the doorway. Information imparted, she wasn’t about to miss a second of The Simpsons.

  Alice picked up the kitchen extension. ‘Harry! How’s everything down there? Weather good?’

  ‘Same as ever when the wind’s easterly. Bloody freezing. Mist. Can’t see the end of the beach.’

  ‘I suppose I shouldn’t tell you we’ve got a bit of a heatwave here then!’ Alice always felt compelled to display excessive jocularity when talking to her brother, as a way of counteracting his habitual low-key semi-gloom. She thought it made her sound faintly ridiculous: Noel had once said that in conversation with Harry she sounded like a children’s TV presenter.

  ‘Joss isn’t well.’ Harry, quickly bored with the social niceties and mindful of his telephone bill, stated this bluntly. ‘The doctor thinks she’s had a mild stroke.’

  Alice, shocked, grasped the edge of the translucent blue glass worktop. ‘What happened? Is she in hospital? I’ll come down . . .’

  ‘No, she’s fine. She’s here at Penmorrow. There’s no panic, but maybe you could come and stay for a while? Mo’s finding it tough. And there’s The Ghost, this man from some publisher, writing her life story and getting in the way. We could use a hand.’

  Alice thought quickly. ‘Well Grace and Theo have only got another ten days of school. I could come then, and bring them. We’ve not booked for Italy till late August . . .’

  ‘Can’t you come sooner?’ Harry sounded more angry than disappointed.

  Alice counted to five and gathered her thoughts. Her mother was ill. Perhaps she was dying – perhaps all those years of drink, cigarettes and hippy-trippy drugs had caught up with her. Joss wouldn’t admit to feeling scared, worried or needing anyone’s company but she might be terrified inside.

  ‘OK, I’ll come tomorrow. I’ll bring Grace and then Theo can join us at the end of term – I doubt Noel will want him missing school. Have you got room for us or shall I try and get into a hotel?’

  ‘We’ve got room. There’s no-one in Gosling – the cooker’s only got two rings working so we’re not booking it out.’ Alice bit her lip: Gosling was a crumbling, draughty, tumbledown cottage close to the beach path. The salt spray had rotted most of its thatch over the years and the only heating was a sulky log fire that blew smoke into the sitting room at the slightest breeze. Noel thought it merited nothing more than immediate demolition but Alice remembered it from her childhood when Arthur Gillings had lived there, creating his mad (but world-famous) sculptures and telling her stories of Cornish wreckers and his own (not entirely invented) smuggling adventures. With enormous patience, he’d helped her to read the whole of Peter Pan out loud, waiting while she struggled with difficult words and as delighted as she was by how much she learned on the way through the long volume.

  ‘That cooker’s needed replacing for ten years!’ Alice said to Harry. There was silence and she could have bitten her tongue for the lack of tact: Penmorrow’s finances had been bordering on desperate for so very long. There was no way that Harry, Mo and Jocelyn could do what she had so casually done: simply flick through luxury kitchen brochures with a specialist designer and pick out the best of everything, scarcely stopping to check on prices.

  ‘Gosling will be fine,’ Alice said, making a mental note to take extra duvets. ‘I’ll see you very soon. Love to Joss and Mo and your boys.’

  ‘Look, why don’t I take Theo with me as well tomorrow, seeing as there’s only a few days of term left?’ Alice suggested to Noel after supper. She’d sent the children to watch TV so that she could discuss her trip with him. He sat silently at the table, refilling his wine glass and looking disgruntled. She picked up Theo’s plate and took it to the dishwasher, pausing to rinse away the tidy garland of parsley that she’d predicted he’d leave. ‘And it’s not as if they do much during the last week of term.’

  ‘It’ll make them unsettled. They’ll think it’s all right to take off from school on a whim . . .’ And this, she thought, was the man who’d only that morning so easily accepted Grace’s ‘headache’.

  ‘A whim? My mother is ill, Noel! A stroke, even a mild one, is a very serious thing.’

  He said nothing, but raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘And don’t look like that!’ She was angry now. ‘You know Joss would be the last person to fuss about nothing. It could be that things are worse than she’ll admit. She must at least be pretty shaken, she’s not even that old. I think she saw herself going full steam into serious old age, like a true grande dame, and then simply dying on the bench in the afternoon sun under the old beech tree.’

  ‘People who smoke as much as she does don’t often see old age. Frankly she’s lucky to have got this far.’ Noel drained his glass and started pouring another.

  ‘Neither do people who drink as much as you do,’ Alice warned, shoving knives hard into their dishwasher slots. ‘Anyway, apparently there’s a man staying there, asking her about her life. He’s doing her autobiography. Harry’s worried that it’s all too much for her.’

  ‘Autobiography, my arse!’ Noel’s voice was full of scorn. ‘She only ever wrote one book!’

  ‘Yes but what a book. Angel’s Choice was a ground-breaker. The film is probably still showing, somewhere.’

  ‘I know, I know, it’s had more TV showings than The Great Escape. A cult classic, book and film both,’ Noel interrupted, sounding as if he was reading from a review of all-time cinema hits. ‘And of course there’s the Penmorrow hippy-commune aspect. I expect the great British public will love that. Lots of salacious free-love revelations there.’

  Sometimes, just sometimes, Alice could understand her mother’s early objections to Noel. The first time she’d brought him to Penmorrow, Joss had taken one amused look at him and declared, her voice rasping with mirth and Marl
boros, ‘Darling you can’t possibly marry him! A man with a tie!’ It hadn’t been the best of introductions. Noel, used to the effortless charming of women, had kept a cool and rather disapproving distance after that and so it remained, five years on.

  Alice wiped her hands on the tea towel and flung it onto the worktop. ‘Look Noel, I wasn’t asking permission. I’m going to Cornwall tomorrow and I’m taking Grace with me, stuff school. I’m happy to take Theo too but if you think he’ll miss some vitally important maths lesson or something, well you can sort out arrangements for looking after him. OK? Now I’m off to pack.’

  Noel, conceding defeat, gave her the lopsided grin that had first secured her attention at a school parents’ meeting six years before. It was a long way from an Elvis-leer but was equally calculated to attract. Alice thought of the man she’d seen in Sainsbury’s that morning. He and Noel couldn’t be more different. Noel had a decidedly well-tended look, sleek and scrubbed and ever-ready for inspection, like someone who lives in the perverse hope of being run over, purely for the opportunity to be given top marks for their pristine underwear by ministering medics. For his whole life, first by his adoring mother and then by his two wives, he’d been as carefully nurtured as a specimen orchid. Perhaps a short time home alone would remind him, Alice thought, that even a lifelong Golden Boy, maybe even Elvis in his day, sometimes has to carry the garbage out to the bins.

  Two

  ALICE HAD BEEN born on Penmorrow’s front verandah steps on a searingly hot June night at the beginning of the 1960s. Jocelyn, after many hours of dire pain, felt she had turned into a she-wolf, howling at the moon. The current four adult females of the household had attended her, one of whom irritated her enormously by groaning along in sympathy throughout the labour. She had viciously punched another who’d been insistent that squatting over a mushroom ring on the lawn would soothe the agony and bestow magical fairy qualities on the baby. Jocelyn had also felt cheated to find that in spite of lavish doses of raspberry leaf tea and months of protracted daily yoga, as per instructions in an ancient tome on natural remedies, she did not feel anywhere near as harmonious with Mother Nature as she had anticipated. Nature and God, too pleased with themselves after putting Adam together, had completely bodged the job of creating Eve and had left her with obvious design faults. She would happily have agreed to being whisked off to the local cottage hospital for a major input of pain-busting drugs if the menfolk of Penmorrow hadn’t been banished in the only functioning car to do their ritual waiting in the Mariners pub around the headland in Chapel Creek, well out of speedy summoning distance.

  That long hot night, across the small sandy bay, the residents of the village of Tremorwell had turned up the volume on their televisions to drown out Jocelyn’s primitive keening and had wondered anew about the sanity of those who lived up at Penmorrow. One or two crossed themselves and offered up prayers for the survival of mother and child. An ambulance was called (it was never discovered by whom) and a midwife arrived in time to find Jocelyn drinking celebratory elderflower wine, and her birth companions anointing baby Alice’s head with a concoction of sage and comfrey for health, happiness and wisdom. Contrary to local rumour, the placenta had not been cooked in a pie and eaten (along with the fairy mushrooms). It was buried beneath the sunny strawberry patch where it would, if a fox hadn’t scrabbled it out of the ground and stolen it, have enriched the land and symbolically completed the circle of life for that small community.

  Penmorrow was accepted locally as both a rich source of gossip and as a harmless enough household of assorted Bohemians and artistic oddballs, and villagers relished casual name-drops when a well-known artist or musician was seen at the pub. Although a nervy few twittered amongst themselves about ‘goings-on’, generally the Penmorrow folk were welcomed as long as they didn’t get offensively drunk on the beach, indulge in unwelcome molesting or feel the need to know where the stocks of French-labelled spirits behind the counter in the shop came from.

  The cast of characters living at Penmorrow was an ever-changing one, and Alice’s childhood was punctuated by departures and arrivals. Arrivals delighted her. When someone new was about to join the household there would be a big cleaning session in whichever room or cottage was currently spare. Jocelyn would bring in great bunches of wild flowers from the garden, or long fronds of pussy willow and cherry blossom. Milly, a frail and edgy painter who brooded about the faithless husband she’d left behind in Liverpool, would donate a couple of moody compositions that had proved unsellable, and Arthur Gillings (the one person, other than her mother, that Alice remembered as being there for her entire childhood) would wheel in, on a porter’s trolley, his elegant bronze statue of a sly-faced Pan that always greeted new inhabitants. ‘It’s only on loan,’ he would warn as they were shown to their quarters, as if in the night they might up and off to London with it and enter it into a speedy, profitable auction.

  The Penmorrow furniture was originally heavy and old and gloomy – massive Edwardian wardrobes and chests of drawers the colour of treacle toffee, all salvaged cheaply by Jocelyn as a job lot from a clearance warehouse. Residents were encouraged to decorate any available surfaces, to leave their mark on their rooms in whatever way they wanted for as long as they occupied them, so over the years the treacly furniture gained layer upon layer of thick oily paint.

  ‘So very Bloomsbury,’ Jocelyn had once said to her daughter, twirling round in a room that had walls clumsily daubed with massive tulips and fat parrots. Alice, ten years old and hypercritical, hadn’t liked it at all – it didn’t look finished. The artist had run out of red paint for the flowers and had given up halfway along one wall, leaving the rest covered with scrappy splodges of green. The parrots were too big and had silly smirks on their faces. No-one ever painted the ceilings in the house, either: they were too high and too big and there wasn’t a proper ladder. Alice minded this: the ceilings didn’t match and in a household where disorder was the rule she very much preferred things that did. There’d be exciting walls painted with big primary-coloured shapes, or midnight black with galaxies of silver stars or covered with pale mauve hessian, but above would be a sad, cracked, buff-coloured expanse of old plaster patchily stained from nicotine and long-ago oil lamps, and with untidy chunks flaking off.

  Communal areas, the sitting rooms, kitchen and hallways, were painted in rich glossy purples, orange, deep jade green and the brown of bitter chocolate, and stayed much the same forty years on. Visitors would occasionally comment (daringly) that a few coats of magnolia would brighten the place up, but Joss liked her moody jewel colours. A wide-ranging collection of artworks hung everywhere. One of Joss’s lovers, in spite of being rejected, had given her an Alfred Wallis painting. Peter Blake had stayed for a while and left behind his early sketch ideas for the Beatles Sergeant Pepper cover. There were works by Cornwall painters John Miller and Patrick Heron. Bernard Leach pottery was scattered about on the kitchen dresser, one jug holding a flourishing collection of biros, and an abandoned page of David Bowie’s handwritten song lyrics languished in a drawer.

  On the days new people joined their household, Alice would hang about in the hallway and sit on the stairs for hours, ears alert for the sound of tyres on gravel, hoping for a new friend of her age, someone she could make camps with in the wood, read school stories (secretly) with and who would join her in building pretend sand-cities on the beach below. When a car pulled up, she’d run to lurk shyly behind the coatstand and peep out from under Arthur’s musty black velvet cloak, breathing in the scent of old cigars and a hint of rum. Sometimes a family in a ramshackle van would arrive, but more often it would be a disappointingly solitary person in the station taxi. Once she’d heard a big argument as the cab driver had tried to charge too much extra for having to transport a loom and two sacks of assorted yarn. She’d been afraid then, only six years old, thinking this new person was fierce and monstrous. She’d never seen anyone really angry, not shouting mad. Penmorrow was full of people smilin
g; grown-ups claimed all the time that they adored children, revered them for being truly natural beings with secret knowledge from pre-birth. Sad Milly called Alice the ‘prettiest child of the flowers’ which terrified and alarmed her. The prettiest flowers were the ones you picked in the gardens, taking them from their plant families and sticking them into vases, deprived of fresh rain and air and true sunlight, where they died too quickly and were forgotten and thrown out to rot on the compost. She didn’t want that to happen to her.

  Alice took a last loving look into her impeccable sitting room and felt like giving it a goodbye hug. Four shades of meticulously selected white (Kelly Hoppen range from Fired Earth) made up the walls and paintwork, and the subtle nuances of depth and tone gleamed in the early morning light at their most delectable. All the buttery yellow sofa cushions were plumped up and ready to be collapsed into. On the long low glass coffee table Elle Decoration and World of Interiors magazines sat temptingly waiting, as yet unread. The table by the window held a fresh and lavish arrangement of scented stocks, lupins and delphiniums. Such comfort and composure wasn’t something Alice was overeager to trade for her mother’s collapsing Cornwall domain. The kitchen there would make a health inspector apoplectic and on her last visit only one of the four lavatories in the main house had been working – something had lodged in a crucial pipe.

  ‘Harry will fix it, in due course,’ Jocelyn had said airily and carelessly when Alice had suggested calling a plumber. She’d given her that old slow smile, as if Alice was a confused heretic questioning the household’s essential tenets. Alice knew what Harry’s version of ‘due course’ was. It would be when he’d figured out that the idle policy of long-term ‘wait and see’ wasn’t going to improve the situation and would probably cost more in the long run.

  ‘You were so lucky that you didn’t have to go to school.’ Grace stowed the two cat baskets into the back of Alice’s Ford Galaxy and stroked the noses of the occupants – one fat old tabby cat, one white rabbit. The cat miaowed crossly and the rabbit snapped at her finger. ‘Behave!’ Grace warned them and then climbed into the front seat beside her mother. Theo was sprawled across the back seats. Noel had decided (overnight) that in spite of missing school, an absent Theo was a lot more convenient than one on the premises. Theo would need to have his picky but enormous appetite regularly stoked; he would need to be prised from his bed each morning and would push his luck over drink and squalor in his room and have hordes of huge, noisy, grubby friends tramping in and out. With Theo many miles away Noel would be free to play golf in the sunny early evenings and do something about getting his handicap down to the competition level he’d need to be at if his retirement days were going to have any edge to them. He could also take Paula, the firm’s recently employed receptionist, to Le Caprice and try to persuade her that her feckless eternal-student husband didn’t deserve her. The preamble to seduction was a skill for which he liked to keep in practice, and which he considered very much on the same relaxing and battery-charging par as Alice’s visits to her aromatherapy masseuse.