Away From It All Read online

  Alice left the bags of shopping with Mrs Rice, who’d promised that her grandson Jason would deliver them later on his moped.

  ‘It’s good to see the traditional village-shop service still going,’ Aidan commented as they left the shop and turned off along the seafront towards the beach café.

  Alice laughed. ‘I think it’s more a case of old traditional curiosity,’ she told him. ‘Penmorrow has always been a great source of gossip. I bet you’ll still hear the words “hippy commune” if you hang out long enough.’

  ‘That’s what I need for Joss’s book – the locals’ perspective,’ Aidan said. ‘Joss has got plenty of fantastic stories about her own life but I need to fill in more background. I need to know how the outside-world part of this village fitted in. Can you help me with that while you’re here? Would you mind?’

  Alice thought for a moment, stopping to lean on the sea wall and staring out at the incoming waves. ‘No I don’t mind,’ she told him. ‘Obviously I don’t remember the early years – I was only born six months after Joss bought Penmorrow and she’d already had her book published and got the most out of being famous. But I can remember what growing up here was like.’ She frowned and turned to Aidan. ‘I bet Joss made it all sound completely idyllic.’

  Aidan smiled. ‘Yes she did, rather. Lots of waving her arms around and accusing me of having a stifled upbringing, just because I had two parents, one ordinary home and regular schooling. Apparently, I need to be “freed from my imprisoning demons”, whatever that means.’

  ‘I think it means “lie back and chill”,’ Alice told him. ‘Which is all very well but you’ve got a job to do and probably a deadline to meet.’

  ‘And a publisher who’s terrified Joss will die and I won’t even be halfway through.’ He shuffled a bit. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned the “D” word, not tactful of me.’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s time I stopped thinking of her as immortal – though she’s fairly young really, compared with most who get ill. If it wasn’t for all the smoke she’s inhaled over the years . . .’

  ‘Not all of it the stuff you can buy at the village shop, I’d guess,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Now that reminds me – something I thought of this morning. Come down to the café and I’ll tell you,’ she said, leading the way to the few steps down to the sand.

  The beach café, was a long timber shack painted to resemble someone’s idea of a Caribbean roadside bar. Dancing figures holding cans of drink cavorted on the sun-faded blue paintwork, with fronds of exotic blooms swagged above them beneath the overhanging rusted tin roof. Outside, sun-paled wooden tables and chairs were filling with a mixture of families and tanned young surfers enjoying the warming sun. It was going to be a good day, profit-wise, Alice guessed. Joss had bought the café years before to thwart the council’s proposal to pull it down, and Harry had been installed as manager. These days his only involvement was collecting the annual rent from whoever had applied to take on the lease for the current season, as well as hanging out with the boys who ran the adjoining surf school in the hope that their youth and vitality would rub off on him.

  Aidan fetched two mugs of coffee and sat beside Alice facing the sea.

  ‘Surf’s a whole culture down here, isn’t it?’ he commented, watching a girl riding her board effortlessly across the bay. ‘It’s a language and dress code miles away from up-country cities.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know – Grace and her friends wear a lot of stuff made by surf companies. Though I suppose some of them might not realize it. I mean look at you – surf-label man.’

  Aidan looked down at his clothes with mild surprise. ‘Hey, the cream of St Ives this lot, bought on a sad conformist urge to fit in.’ He sipped his coffee and looked at her intently. ‘Tell me what you remembered. Do you mind if I use this?’ He produced a tiny chrome gadget from his jeans. ‘It’s a tape recorder, except it’s electronic, no tape, too clever.’

  ‘No, go ahead. I haven’t got anything profound to tell you though. It’s just . . . well this morning when a mouse jumped out of the fridge . . .’

  ‘They’re everywhere up there, aren’t they?’ Aidan cut in. ‘I saw Mo step over one, really politely, in the kitchen yesterday.’

  ‘I’ll sneak in a few humane traps. Anyway . . . I said something about mushrooms growing in the fridge and I remembered a time when Joss and Milly cooked some that none of us kids were allowed to eat. We thought they were mad – especially as they didn’t eat them either, they just strained off the juice and made a kind of tea with it. All the grown-ups drank it. But we had a cat called Brian who sneaked onto the table and wolfed down some of the cooked mushrooms. All the next day he was seen out in the village, sitting under cars, howling and growling to himself and getting spooked by shadows – poor thing was obviously hallucinating. I think that’s where all the rumours of witchcraft started. The poor cat was never the same again, damaged and paranoid for evermore.’

  ‘Magic mushrooms then.’

  ‘Exactly, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s only years later you can make sense of things. I always thought he was a witch-cat too and for months I wouldn’t eat mushrooms because we’d been so firmly told not to that day! I suppose any memories I can give you are likely to be tainted by grown-up knowledge. All that naivety has long gone.’

  ‘Well it’s an autobiography so they’re Joss’s words,’ Aidan said, raising his fingers in the air to indicate quote marks. ‘I get the feeling she’s still living in wonderland.’

  ‘That’s why she called me Alice. Disappointing for her though – I turned out to feel far more at home with reality.’

  Up on the cliff path, Grace hauled the wheeled cart along behind her and wondered if it had been such a good idea. The path was narrow and stony and the poor rabbit was huddled at the back of his carrier looking as if he was feeling severely sick. Theo was being no use at all. He was skulking along yards behind her with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his floor-trailing jeans, as if he didn’t want to be seen to be part of this plan.

  ‘We should have left it till the evening,’ she called back to him. ‘It wouldn’t be so hot.’

  ‘Well you can change your mind if you want but I’m not coming back up here.’

  ‘What? Cos it’s a bit steep? Wassup you wuss, too much for you is it?’ she taunted him. It was true, it was a steep and rocky climb, but at the top was one of her favourite places in the whole of Tremorwell – a grassy headland with a small glade of gale-bent trees that sheltered a bench overlooking the sea, the village and across to Penmorrow up the hill on the far side of the bay. Ever since she was little she’d found it a good place to run off to when she felt torn between Jocelyn’s more extreme notions of free living and Alice’s counterbalancing sensible ones.

  Joss would say, ‘If you rig up a long rope to the walnut tree, you can swing right down the cliff to the east beach.’ At which Grace would be straight out to the sheds plaiting old bailer twine.

  Then Alice would get her on her own and it would be, ‘Don’t even think of doing it – half the cliff has crumbled away since Joss last swung on a rope. One slip and it’s fifty foot onto rocks.’

  At the top of the cliff Grace stopped to catch her breath and wait for Theo. The old bench was still there and the surrounding thick patches of thrift showed that not many people had spent long sitting on it, scuffing the ground. That was good. It meant that Grace could still claim it as her own refuge. Chas and Sam wouldn’t be up there either, or Harry in pursuit of her rabbit with his shotgun. With luck the animal would be OK – there were plenty of rabbit droppings around so he’d have a chance to make his own free-range rabbit family.

  ‘OK? Let him out yet?’ Theo staggered up the last of the path and slumped down beside her. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jeans and lit one, cupping his lighter carefully against the sea breeze.

  ‘Good view,’ he commented, looking out towards the sea and across to Penmorrow’s perch on the
opposite hillside.

  ‘Glad you like it,’ Grace said, wishing that hadn’t come out sounding so sharp and sarky. She really was glad he liked it. Sometimes they got on well, sometimes not. She enjoyed the good days – then he was like a real brother. She wanted him to like Cornwall too though, not just ordinary home things like lying around on the sitting-room floor and watching Malcolm in the Middle together.

  Grace got up to scatter some rabbit food under the trees, then pulled the plastic pet-box off the truck and sat it on the bench beside her.

  ‘Here we go bunny, freedom for you.’ She opened the door and took out the bemused creature who sat for a moment on her lap, stretching his cramped legs.

  ‘Have a lovely life, rabbit. Off you go.’ She put him gently on the ground. The white rabbit looked around, choosing his direction, then, after a few tentative hops, gave a big kicking leap and bolted off into the bushes.

  ‘He should be all right. Safe from Chas and Sam and Harry anyway,’ Grace said, putting the empty box back on the wheeled truck.

  ‘Shit! What was that?’ Theo put his hand to his face and then looked at it, his fingers covered with blood. ‘I’ve been shot or stung or something! That hurt!’

  ‘Let’s look.’ Grace inspected his face. There was a small cut just below his eye. ‘I don’t think there’s a bullet in there somehow,’ she told him. There was a distant whooping below them. Chas and Sam were doing a mad dance down on the beach, waving some kind of weapon over their heads.

  ‘It was them! They’re watching us up here! What’ve they got? Can you see Theo?’

  ‘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.

  Four

  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 remai
ned 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.’