Away From It All Page 3

  ‘There’s nothing lucky about being uneducated,’ Alice reminded Grace, as she did every time her daughter came out with this envy-statement. ‘I longed to go to school. I didn’t even know what it was till I was about eight and worked out where all the village kids disappeared to in the daytime. And once I’d found out I wanted the whole thing, a uniform, dinner money, homework, playtime milk, skipping rhymes, the lot.’

  ‘Yeah but no exams,’ Theo sighed. ‘Awesome. No SATs, no GCSEs, no having to decide between chemistry and biology when you hate them both. No pervy games teacher nudging your arse in the showers.’

  ‘Do they?’ Alice gave Theo an enquiring look by way of the rear-view mirror.

  ‘No they don’t. He just says that because it’s the kind of thing parents take notice of,’ Grace said sharply, turning round and glaring at her stepbrother. She wasn’t glad he was coming with them, not one bit. Theo (and Noel) treated the whole Penmorrow set-up as if it was a huge joke, as if Joss and Harry and all of them were ridiculously thick for not living their lives the fast urban way, like they did. When they visited the house, Noel and Theo picked silly, pointless faults all the time. Once, Noel had said loudly in front of everybody that Penmorrow was exactly the kind of house where it would be a terrific idea to say yes to anyone who rang up offering a deal on naff PVC windows. He’d say things to Harry like ‘That grass could do with a good cut’ when it was obvious Joss just didn’t care about that sort of thing. Long grass in London meant you were really carefully growing a wildflower meadow that you’d read about in some Sunday colour supplement. In London you did it, Alice had told Grace jokingly, the expensive way, sending away to smart nurseries to get all the plants delivered ready-grown in special little biodegradable pots. Joss got better results without trying and the whole thing looked right, all overgrown and woven through with cornflowers and ox-eye daisies and ragged robin and little bee orchids. Everything at Penmorrow grew plump and luscious, like the apple trees in the orchard, where their branches came right down to the ground and you could hide away underneath them with a book. The solitary apple tree in their Richmond garden had been pruned and shaped so drastically it looked like a depressed, amputated thing. And it only produced about six scabby apples a year.

  Last time they’d all been to Penmorrow, for a few freezing days after Easter (typically, the heating oil had run out), Grace remembered there’d been a row about money. Noel was keen on money, she’d noticed: he was always talking about ‘financial arrangements’, which made her think of vases of flowers. He had chosen to catch Joss at a bad moment, just as they were finishing supper and the grown-ups were all a bit pissed, and told her it was high time she should ‘sort out her affairs’. Grace had laughed because she thought it sounded as if Joss should make lists of all her lovers – and she knew there’d been plenty of them; at bedtime when Grace was little, Joss used to tell her tales of her past loves the way other grandmothers would read Beatrix Potter and Winnie the Pooh.

  ‘I take it this is solicitor-speak for “make your will immediately and be sure not to leave the moolah to a cats’ home”,’ Joss had mocked. Noel had smirked at her and said that surely she didn’t want to donate her property to a system of government she’d never supported, and that it was a good idea to be prepared.

  Joss had snarled, blown a cloud of blue cigarette smoke over him and enquired loudly and slowly, ‘Good for whom exactly?’

  Grace had thought she sounded like royalty. Another bottle of wine later she’d called Noel a ‘bourgeois cretin’, flung an overripe mango at him (a sticky mess on his shirt) and told him to fuck off. She’d informed him all lawyers were shit and the fact that he’d married her daughter didn’t make him an exception. Noel had sniggered in a really patronizing way as if she was just an arrogant old peasant, too dim to understand that his Cambridge degree meant that what he said must be right. Grace wondered now how Joss would be when she and her mother turned up with Theo, whom she considered a dopy clone of his father. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind. Most likely she’d have forgotten. She might even be too ill to notice who was in the house, or who they were. It was a sad thought – she loved the powerful, stroppy Jocelyn just the way she was.

  As they headed west on the A303, Grace looked round to check that Theo was safely under his headphones, out of hearing range. His head was nodding to some tick-a-tick beat.

  ‘Mum? Is Joss really very ill?’ she asked Alice. She didn’t want Theo to hear the reply. If it was yes, he’d start on about who was going to inherit Penmorrow, just like his dad did. It was obscene, talking of people only in terms of their cash value. You expected it from Noel; Alice laughed it off and said it was just a habit from his job. Theo was different though – at sixteen, what was his excuse?

  ‘She’s had a stroke and she’s a bit confused and upset, but she might completely recover and be perfectly all right. Or at least, that’s what Harry said.’ Alice didn’t sound too convinced. Grace wasn’t surprised. Harry sometimes didn’t seem to be part of the world at all, as if life was a sort of circle game like a hokey-cokey and he was still waiting for someone to notice him standing by the wall, to take his hands and show him how to join in. He reminded her of a troll or a gnome, someone who lived a completely parallel existence, finding it a perpetual struggle to pretend to be a real live human. Grace remembered when Alice had first taken Theo and Noel to Penmorrow and they’d met Harry who hadn’t spoken at all for two days. He’d smiled a lot at his sister’s new people but hadn’t shown any curiosity or even polite interest about them. Theo, about twelve at the time and used to a vocal babble as a background to his life, had asked Alice what was wrong with him, why was Harry ‘like that’?

  ‘He’s not “like” anything,’ Alice had snapped rather defensively. ‘He’s just himself. An individual.’ Noel had chuckled and commented, ‘Well he’s certainly that.’

  The day was hot and dusty and the windscreen was splattered with dead insects. With the sunroof open, Alice could smell a mustardy mixture of oilseed rape and recently cut silage. Remembering the old festivals that Penmorrow had celebrated, she worked out that they were two weeks past Litha, the summer solstice. She wondered if on that day, Joss had still hung her quartz crystal necklace in the hexagon window to harvest the peak of the sun’s power. She’d be needing that extra strength, now that she’d reached a frail point in her life.

  Alice drove on past fields full of something that was a soft, hazy lavender blue. Lupins, she guessed, wondering at how little she knew about what the countryside currently grew. In her early teens she could have identified every crop between Tremorwell and Plymouth and named a dozen breeds of sheep. She’d hardly travelled beyond Cornwall then, although at the age of nine she’d spent a couple of months with Joss and Harry in a primitive mountain cottage on Ibiza, at a time when the drug culture there had nothing to do with all-night clubbing. Harry, who was five, had caught measles very badly and Jocelyn had wanted to come home, fast. It was the only time Alice had seen her mother close to real fear and panic, as at the airport the check-in girl had noticed that his name was ‘Ariel’ on his mother’s passport and not the ‘Harry’ that Arthur Gillings, who had organized their trip, had put on the tickets. It had been Alice who had stayed calm, explaining to the girl about the confusion over names, lifting her feverish brother’s tee shirt so that the livid scarlet spots and the urgency of the problem could be seen. This had secured them a section to themselves on the plane and an ambulance waiting at Heathrow to take them to Ashford Hospital for Harry to be checked over.

  It had been then that Alice had realized that if she wanted a completely responsible, unfalteringly capable person in her life, she herself would have to be that person. She had relished, at that time, Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree books. Like her, the fictional children were allowed to roam out of sight of home all day and enjoy whatever fanciful adventure happened to come their way. What made her ache with envy was that her own mother was nothing like the comfortable home
body in the books. Joss was no roly-poly, aproned figure forever concocting delectable family meals in a clean, bright kitchen. Some of the time she wasn’t on the premises at all but was away, either with a thrilling new lover or being interviewed, airing her controversial opinions on child-rearing, on men and relationships to any radio, TV show or magazine that asked her. Her children were left, as per her personal creed, in the care of whichever adults happened to be in the house at the time, for Joss believed that essentially humans were group animals, and that women, left to nature, would live like lionesses, communally raising their cubs and mating with whoever took their fancy as and when hormones decreed.

  When Alice wandered back to Penmorrow at the end of a day on the sunny beach or in her camps in the woods, she used to make fervent wishes, hoping that whoever’s name was down on the rota to do the cooking that day had managed to get something edible organized. She and the other Penmorrow children never actually went hungry, but unlike the lucky Blyton children, she was more likely to be met by an unappetizing grey-green lentil bake and a failed goat’s-milk yogurt experiment than a rib-sticking casserole followed by apple crumble with lashings and lashings of cream.

  Harry and Mo’s twin sons, Chas and Sam, were waiting on the doorstep of the rundown Gosling cottage as Alice drove up the rocky track to Penmorrow. They lurked under the porch, half hidden behind honeysuckle that had made its way almost across the doorway. Alice felt mildly annoyed: Harry had known they were coming, been insistent that they did. If he hadn’t even hacked a way in, did that mean the cottage’s interior was equally unprepared to greet them?

  ‘God, look at the state of them. Neanderthals,’ Theo commented, glaring out of the window at the two boys. Alice smiled and waved at them, privately agreeing with Theo that they looked very much as if they’d come straight from filming Lord of the Flies. Their hair had grown long and matted, as if they’d been aiming for dreadlocks but someone had insisted they comb it out now and then but not too often. They were wearing torn tee shirts that had once been white but which had been smothered with mud and moss to make a pretty good imitation of the camouflage pattern that Grace had on one of her Topshop skirts. The two boys scowled as the car stopped and Alice wondered why, if they felt that hostile to the presence of their cousin and aunt, they were bothering to hang about.

  ‘Hello you two!’ she said cheerily. ‘How are you both?’

  ‘Awright,’ Sam grunted. Chas said nothing, but stared past Alice to watch Grace taking her pet baskets from the car boot.

  ‘Another rabbit?’ he asked, his lip curled into a sneer.

  ‘Yeah. What of it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Sam said swiftly, then asked with some eagerness, ‘is it for letting go?’

  Grace hesitated, looking for support from Theo, who still lazed in the back of the car as if waiting for a lackey to open the car for him.

  ‘It is for letting go. I always let them go. You shouldn’t keep pets in cages.’

  Grace had been buying a pet-shop rabbit each summer since she was seven, entirely for the purpose of being able to take them to Cornwall and set them free. The hills and woods of Tremorwell and beyond had become well populated with interbred bunnies, a motley mixture of grey, black and white fur, some with ears that flopped down and some with dense reddish coats. Secretly, Alice was pretty sure the newly liberated animals wouldn’t survive much longer than it took to mate with the nearest wild rabbit. Pet-shop animals, cage-bred over countless generations, wouldn’t have much nature knowledge to contend with wily foxes and sharp-eyed hungry buzzards.

  ‘Harry doesn’t like it,’ Chas said. ‘He says there’s too many already. They eat the food he grows. He might shoot it.’

  ‘So I’ll let it go up the hill on the other side of the bay then. OK?’ Grace told him, swinging the basket past him as she pushed her way into the porch. The rabbit’s feet skittered on the newspaper in the basket. Alice caught sight of the twins exchanging sly grins and she wondered what kind of scam they had going.

  ‘Mo says to come up for some dinner at seven,’ Chas told Alice. ‘And she says Joss is having a rest.’

  ‘Sodding great,’ Alice said under her breath as the boys strolled off up the path to the main house. ‘You drive all this way, summoned like it’s some kind of mad emergency, and you have to wait for a royal command. A cup of tea would have gone down well.’

  Jocelyn was alone, sitting at the end of the huge oak table that might once have graced a monastery. The chairs had come from a church and were complete with slots in the back for hymnbooks. Alice remembered those as every Penmorrow child’s crafty repository for sneakily spat-out food. Joss was looking, Alice thought, like an aristocratic character in a TV costume drama who dresses for dinner every night and keeps a full complement of serving staff in defiant face of reduced circumstances. There was no outward sign of her recent illness. Jocelyn, on first glance, was looking much as she always did, wearing her dark green Moroccan dress with pink embroidery round sprinklings of tiny mirrors, and her usual rather heavy burgundy lipstick. The table was already laid for nine and Joss, sitting behind an opened bottle of red wine, was fiercely polishing a fork using a turquoise paper napkin, her long white plait hanging over her shoulder and flicking backwards and forwards on the table top as she rubbed at the stubbornly tarnished surface. She was, Alice noticed, wearing her quartz crystal necklace.

  ‘Hello Joss,’ Alice said quietly, approaching her mother. Jocelyn looked up with a broad smile and started to push her chair back.

  ‘No don’t get up. I’ll join you.’ Alice sat down beside her mother. ‘Mo says supper’s nearly ready; the kids are just bringing the plates through.’ She leaned forward and took her mother’s hand. She was wearing her full quota of heavy silver rings with gems of topaz and opal and aquamarine. Almost tearful with concern, Alice asked, ‘Now how are you?’

  Jocelyn’s welcoming smile vanished. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she snapped tetchily, drawing back her hand. ‘I’d feel a lot better if people didn’t keep asking me that. I expected better from you and you’re just the same: that hushed tone, the implication that I’m keeping a deep secret pain all to myself and that if you press all the right buttons I’ll blurt it out and weep copiously.’ Joss stabbed the fork into the table top with enough force for it to stand for a second or two, swaying under the blow.

  ‘Bloody kids. I remember when all you children used to fight for the job of polishing the silver. Now look at it.’ She flicked her hand at the tarnished cutlery. Alice noticed that the skin on her knuckles was stretched tight and thin, like ancient worn-out linen sheeting. Her finger ends, by contrast, were thick-skinned and plump, stained a shiny tawny like ripe acorns by over half a century of nicotine.

  ‘We only fought to clean the silver because it was better than going out in the freezing rain to clean out the chicken shed or wash the slugs out of a pile of lettuces.’

  ‘At least everyone got their turn at the good and bad jobs. Chas and Sam, they don’t seem to . . .’ Joss sighed then conceded to Alice, ‘You’re looking well, anyway. Very London, that haircut, very “Smart Lady”.’ They both giggled. ‘Smart Lady’ was a long-ago Penmorrow term, applied to any occasion when it was necessary to dress up to face officialdom and appear suitably neat and tidy. Being summoned to the education authority, a bank manager or a lawyer meant rifling through the communal dressing-up basket in which was kept a supply of neat city clothes. There were a couple of dull grey suits for men, with plain white shirts and an assortment of junk-shop ties. For the women there were plain court shoes in a selection of sizes into which it was always a struggle to force broad splayed feet that were more used to open-toed sandals, and a couple of plain soberly coloured dresses. Best of all by far was the sky blue Chanel suit. This was Alice’s favourite. Its skirt was knee-length (though unflatteringly mid-calf on sad Milly) with a low fan of pleats at the back which made it swing jauntily and shift about provocatively on the wearer’s hips. The jacket had a n
ipped-in waist with a slender navy leather belt that could be knotted tight. Alice at eleven, had coveted this Smart Lady outfit more than anything and yearned to be grown-up enough to wear it before it succumbed to moths and was banished to the jumble bag. Of course by the time she was, she wouldn’t have been seen dead in it.

  ‘Supper’s ready! Sit down everyone!’ Mo came bustling through from the kitchen carrying a tray on which sat a pair of plump cooked chickens. She looked fussed and flustered – her lank, prematurely greying hair was stuck in steamy wisps around her face. Harry followed with his hands full of vegetable dishes. Sam and Chas, joshing and nudging each other, shambled in behind their parents and sat together at the far end of the table. Grace and Theo emerged from the opposite doorway, from the sitting room, and stood together looking uncertain.