Away From It All Read online

  ‘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 . . .’

  ‘I think I can imagine.’

  Alice smiled to herself, feeling Noel’s shudder from almost three hundred miles away. ‘Why don’t you come down for a while? Maybe a long weekend?’ she asked.

  ‘Er . . . well I don’t think I’d better take any more time off, not with Italy at the end of August.’

  ‘Oh yes. Italy . . .’ Alice checked her mirror and drove fast towards the exit, where, as she knew it would, the phone signal gave out and Noel was consigned mid-sentence back to his London desk and his profitable divorces. She felt as if she’d rudely slammed a door in his face, but there wasn’t anything else she wanted to say to him. He’d been right of course, it was completely unlike her not to have already made carved-in-stone arrangements for returning home. It was how she was. She washed her hair every Monday and Friday, went to the Holmes Place gym three times a week, worked on her current book from ten till two thirty from Monday to Thursday and on Fridays had lunch with her friends Mags and Rebecca in Pasta Mama in Richmond. On Saturday evenings (whether they were socially out or not) she slinked around wearing stockings and suspenders beneath a shortish skirt for the later delight of Noel, plus on Wednesday evenings he favoured a sexy session that was genuinely steamy, in their capacious walk-in shower. Even her mild bouts of premenstrual tension were regular.

  Alice stopped at the double roundabout and waited for an Asda truck to lumber past on its way to Falmouth. The villa in Italy – close to Siena – had been booked months ago. Alice liked to get the summer holiday organized as soon as New Year was over and the children had gone back to school. She and Noel took a short break in late February to somewhere warm (Dubai that year, Portugal the one before), which she fixed up each September when the school year started. Alice had never in her grown-up life made an arrangement that she’d later cancelled. The thought that she might even remotely be considering not going to Italy made her hands tremble on the steering wheel and she almost ran into the back of a Volvo that had slowed to take the left turn towards Mylor.

  Of course they would go, as arranged, she told herself as she made an effort to concentrate. Why would they not? But there was so much to do here at Penmorrow. When Harry had asked her for help he surely hadn’t just meant with Joss, who, although she wasn’t quite her usual bossy and energetic self, certainly didn’t require round-the-clock nursing. He meant the house. Each room needed to be gone through, cleaned thoroughly, redundant junk ruthlessly chucked out. Only when she and Mo and Harry had stripped the house back to its bare walls and furnishings would they be able to see if it would be possible simply to patch things up and rearrange, or if the whole dilapidation process had got so far out of hand that they would be forced to sell up.

  ‘I only asked you down here to help sort out Joss, not to take the place apart,’ Harry had grumbled to her over toast and coffee in the Penmorrow kitchen that morning. �
�I know what needs to be done – I’ve lived with it, remember. There just isn’t the cash to do it with, that’s the bottom line.’

  ‘I don’t have any spare either,’ Alice told him.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Harry looked genuinely surprised. ‘We were all under the impression . . .’

  ‘Two teenagers in private schools. Noel’s obsession with pension funds, house maintenance, two cars, these are serious outgoings,’ Alice told him.

  ‘Private schools!’ Harry almost spat the words. ‘What’s wrong with the regular sort? Kids don’t go anyway, wherever you send them. Sam and Chas hardly ever do. We didn’t.’

  ‘We didn’t go because Joss got away with claiming she’d set up some kind of alternative school and that we were being home-taught.’

  ‘Well we were. We had lessons most mornings. Usually.’

  ‘We learned to read and write and do some basic sums. And that was down to Arthur and Milly, not Joss. We learned how to grow alfalfa, how to gut fish and how to make a more or less edible stew out of any given vegetables and half a hen. Anything else we had to pick up for ourselves. Keeping us isolated out here was practically child abuse.’

  ‘Joss didn’t believe in formal education. Inhibited minds, she said we’d end up with, if we went to school.’

  ‘Couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed and take us there, you mean. It was all right for her, she’d had her own education. It wasn’t right not to let us have ours.’

  And which bed was it she couldn’t be arsed to get out of? Alice remembered, after Arthur had died, Jocelyn had made a point of sleeping in every room in Penmorrow and with whoever was in it. She said that grief made her restless, unsettled, that she needed the comfort of warm skin against hers and the exhilaration of the procreative force. Alice had been fourteen – an age of acute curiosity and observation, of keeping close tabs on what your surrounding adults get up to, having realized for the first time that they are flesh and blood and as unruly of thought and deed as sly teenagers could be. She’d been reading D.H. Lawrence at the time, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and was completely absorbed in the notion that sex could be thrilling for being kept secret. Sex wasn’t any kind of secret at Penmorrow. Joss had always maintained that monogamy was drearily provincial and creatively stifling and had no place in her household. Several of the residents during Alice’s childhood had arrived as couples but always one or the other of the pair would find themselves drifting into another’s bed. Looking back, Alice suspected that much of the nocturnal visiting had been more to do with maintaining a credible Bohemian stance than with any real urge for sexual experiment. It must have been the cause of a lot of secret grief, one way or another. And all done to impress the commanding iconic presence of Jocelyn.

  Grace was sitting high up in an oak tree in the woods behind Penmorrow, keeping watch on Chas and Sam. She was delighted they had no idea she was there as it showed they didn’t know everything about woodcraft. They should have heard her creeping through the brambles, heard twigs snapping in spite of her being so careful to avoid them. They thought they knew it all, but they didn’t know enough to imagine anyone might want to be spying on them.

  The two boys were wearing dark green tee shirts and their boxer shorts and had daubed mud all over their arms and faces. There were leafy twigs stuck in their hair. They should have been at school. Grace knew this because she’d seen Mo send them off in their grey and blue uniforms with lunch boxes early that morning. They’d run down the track past Gosling and when they got to the road, instead of making for the school bus stop outside the shop, she’d seen them dart back along the coast path round the hillside and out of sight of Penmorrow. Harry had said they hardly ever went to school, she’d heard him. He didn’t seem to think it was a big problem, just something else to grumble about like the state of the drains or the birds pulling up his onion plants.

  No-one skived off at Grace’s school, which might have been partly down to having to wear a bright purple jacket. She could just imagine herself and her friends getting caught, a small posse of purple bodies, coming across an unexpected mother shopping in Warehouse. Mothers in these circumstances made you feel so guilty – it was their speciality, less crassly confrontational than simply shouting and getting cross. They’d say they were ‘disappointed’. Posh London parents were always saying that, as if they’d been looking forward to some wonderful event but had been really badly let down. Alice had been ‘disappointed’ a few months earlier when Grace had been brought home early from Sophy’s fourteenth birthday party because she’d drunk half a bottle of Sophy’s mum’s sherry and been sick on their stairs. It wasn’t just her, she’d told Alice (who’d claimed she was also ‘mortified’, a whole league up from ‘disappointed’), they’d all had a go at the drinks cupboard. Sophy had keeled over in the garden and her brother Olly, who’d kept all the vodka to himself, had thrown a chair through the conservatory window. Sophy’s mother had been ‘disappointed’ as well. Very.

  The two boys had folded their school sweatshirts and trousers and hung them over a low branch. Their empty lunch boxes were lying open on the grass, displaying screwed up crisp packets and crumpled drinks cartons and abandoned bits of thick sandwich crust. They’d got a small fire going in a clearing in a copse of young oak saplings, and a thin wisp of smoke drifted up through the trees. That was how easy it had been for Grace to trace them. She wanted to know what they did with their days. There wasn’t much point in asking them straight out as they didn’t say much at Penmorrow, just grunted now and then and stared in a dazed sort of way if anyone asked them a question, which made Theo smirk and mutter ‘Neanderthal’ under his breath.

  Grace could see a book open on the ground – Sam seemed to be reading it, running a finger along the page, mouthing the words and concentrating hard. Chas was doing something with a length of thin wire and she leaned down, hardly breathing as she gently parted the branches to get a closer look.

  ‘How wide, Sam?’ Chas turned to his brother, holding the wire bent in his hand.

  ‘It says about a fist-width.’ Sam looked up and frowned. ‘This stuff doesn’t look thick enough to me.’

  ‘It is. Any thicker and they’d see it. They’re not stupid.’

  ‘They are. Especially the cross-breeds. No wild cunning.’

  The two boys laughed softly, sharing a joke Grace didn’t get.

  Chas was pulling the wire into place and Grace could see that he’d made a loop like a noose. Sam, consulting a diagram in the book, bent one of the saplings over so that Chas could attach the wire to it with a piece of webbing, then together they secured their contraption into place using forked sticks.

  ‘Dangle,’ Chas said, standing back to admire his work.

  ‘Strangle.’ Sam joined his brother beneath Grace’s tree, looking down at the tense wire.

  She watched, amazed and just a bit frightened, as the two boys started circling their fire, chanting, ‘Dangle, mangle, tangle, strangle,’ at first moving slowly, chanting with a slow rhythm, then speeding up, faster and faster till they stopped on one extra fierce fast, ‘Dangle-mangle-tangle-STRANGLE!’ and collapsed on the ground laughing manically.

  ‘Woss time?’ Sam asked, sitting up and brushing grass and burrs off his tee shirt.

  ‘Bus time, just about. Better go. Check this out tomorrow.’ Grace watched as the two boys scooped up loose earth and moss with their hands and piled it onto the fire, treading it down so that it was compressed and smothered. Then they changed back into their school clothes, stowing their tee shirts in a brown canvas bag which Sam stuffed into a narrow hollow at shoulder-height up a tree. Looking as close as these two could get to resembling normal schoolboys, they collected their lunch boxes, looked around one last time and set off back along through the woods towards the path and Penmorrow.

  Grace gave them five minutes to get well ahead of her, then, feeling stiff and cold, clambered down her tree. Warily, she moved close to the wire thing they’d been making. She took hold of
a long stick and prodded the forked twigs away from it. The bent-over sapling sprang upright, taking the wire noose with it. A trap, she realized. The boys had set a trap for a smallish animal, a rabbit or a fox. Or, it occurred to her with horror, a cat. Monty could come up here hunting. She imagined him, wriggling and terrified, thrashing about to escape and only making the noose fatally tighter. To the scene in her head she added heavy rain and a hungry fox. The imagined Monty was now soaked to sad feline skinniness and being chewed to certain death. Now she also knew what Chas and Sam had meant about ‘cross-breeds’ – they’d been laughing about her rescued rabbits, sure they’d easily catch one.

  Grace shivered, then turned to the tree where the canvas bag was hidden. She pulled it out, removed the pair of tee shirts and placed them carefully in the noose, propping it up on the sapling so that its cloth prey hung down and drifted eerily in the breeze. ‘Dangle, mangle, tangle, strangle!’ she sang as she stuffed the bag back in the tree and picked her way out of the clearing and back to the path.

  Five

  IT WASN’T AS if Mo hadn’t been invited. There was no need for her to sulk. All morning she’d been like a child who’d said no to a bag of sweets out of stubborn pique and then regretted it. But Mo wasn’t a child and Alice wasn’t going to play coaxing games with her. As she drove Jocelyn and Aidan away from Penmorrow’s purple paint-flaked front porch she waved goodbye to Mo and told herself she had no need to feel guilty. All the same, as she steered carefully down the deeply rutted track she could feel Mo staring after them, a scowl like a deep curse etched on her face, her hands gripped white-tight round a soggy tea towel. A casual passer-by would speculate that she might be about to strangle someone with it.

  ‘I’m taking Joss and Aidan out for lunch at the Tresanton in St Mawes to talk about the book,’ Alice had said after breakfast that morning. ‘Would you and Harry like to join us?’