Away From It All Read online

  ‘I’m getting old,’ he thought as he wrapped a towel round his waist and stared at himself in the long mirror on the inside of his wardrobe door. He must be getting old, he thought, for he was feeling a new need to rush into some kind of change in his life before it was all too late. It wasn’t going to be other women, not if the dull lunch with Paula had been anything to go by. Retirement could be less than five years away if he so wanted. Whatever was he going to fill his life with? Plenty of golf, for sure, but what else? Not gardening. Not pottering about on the Thames pretending he was A Sailor as so many in the district did, and definitely not self-improving cruising in the Med, being lectured to about the Treasures of Venice.

  Noel wandered around the bedroom mussing up the cushions on the sofa (Mrs Pusey always stood them to strict triangular attention) and then sat on the bed. He flicked on the TV and half-heartedly watched a tennis match in which a pair of staggeringly muscular women battled it out with frightening intensity. Female players no longer, it crossed his mind, wore even slightly attractive knickers. The thick taut thighs held no interest for him any more. He remembered when he was a young teenager, gawping through the fence at the local tennis club tournaments just to catch a glimpse of underwear frills and a broad, stretched gusset. He couldn’t imagine Theo, self-contained, surly Theo, sneaking glimpses of sporty knickers. He probably didn’t need to, Noel thought, he probably had girls queueing up to peel off their low-cut thongs for him. He felt the absence of his son suddenly like a harsh chest pain. He reached for the phone, dialled the number for railway information and made a list of the train times to Truro.

  Harry sat on a lopsided stool at the end of the polytunnel furthest from the path, smoking a fat spliff. It was left over from last year’s crop (Passion No. 1) and had held its potency well. This variety gave quite a tranquillizing effect and he felt that the late afternoon, when Joss and the others came back from their swanky lunch, would be better faced if he was mellow and calm. He didn’t like Joss when she’d been drinking at lunchtime. She’d be all over Aidan, giving him little fond touches and smiles full of memories of old seductions. She could be very caustic too, very above herself and grand. Harry had never been able to stand up to her – she had a way of making you feel that you’d barely lived and so hadn’t any opinion worth considering. It was all a long way from when he was little and adored, and she’d called him ‘my cherub Ariel’ and hugged him tight. Alice had wriggled away and been the one for escaping into the village with her friend Sally and anyone of her age who happened to be staying at the house. She rounded up all the children who were old enough and led them to the beach where she had them writing little stories and making up bits of ‘news’ that she put together into a weekly magazine. He was too young for wandering – a plump toddler left behind with Jocelyn, who gathered him to her whenever she needed comfort and tickled the back of his neck till he squealed.

  It was all right for Jocelyn: by the time she was thirty she’d travelled the world, talking to literary gatherings at festivals everywhere about her one book. Painters adopted her as their muse, smart journals snapped up her opinions, clothes designers had her in mind when their thoughts turned to ‘Bohemian’. Nothing scared her, she had the complete perfect faith in herself that whatever she did, whatever she said, someone would be looking, listening and admiring. He should have broken away years ago and made his own way, but had been unnerved by his lack of any kind of education. People who could give you a job asked you questions about that sort of thing. Just lately though he’d started wondering about moving on, thinking that maybe he could get work on a farm or in a nursery. You didn’t need certificates for that and he’d got all the experience and skill they’d be needing. But then there was Penmorrow. What would happen to it? Would his mother hang on like a sailor set adrift in a rickety old boat, waiting for it all to collapse around her?

  There was a scuffling sound outside and Harry held the spliff behind his back and stubbed it out on the edge of the stool. Sam and Chas pushed open the flap of the tunnel and came in, bringing with them the fishy scent of the beach. That was depressing. There hadn’t been time for them to go to the shore if they’d come home on the school bus. And they’d definitely got on it that morning – he’d taken them down to the village stop himself to make sure. He knew their tricks – one of them would have said, halfway up the hill, that he felt a bit sick. The driver would have stopped and almost thrown them out, keen to preserve a clean, odourless bus.

  ‘Good day at school, boys?’ he asked, certain he should at least make the effort to pretend he thought they’d been there.

  ‘S’all right.’ Sam sniffed.

  ‘Just usual,’ Chas agreed. The two boys looked solemn, standing in front of him in their crazy combination of tidy school clothes and manically wild hair, unsure what to say next and kicking their feet on the ground like impatient ponies.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ he asked. ‘Were you looking for me?’

  The pair of them shrugged, grinning. ‘Not specially, just, you know, looking round for stuff to do.’

  Harry sighed, even more depressed. They knew, these canny, sly lads of his, they knew exactly what he was growing. He’d be lucky this year if by the time it came to harvest this little lot, they hadn’t been in already, stripped the plants and had the potent buds up to dry, ready for a schoolful of eager, paying customers.

  Six

  ALICE WAS LYING stretched flat out on her front on a dusty wooden floor, clearing a heap of long-discarded cardboard picture mounts from under a bed in one of the biggest upstairs bedrooms. She moved carefully, wary of splinters and the possible presence of desiccated mouse bodies. The contrast between the under-bed conditions here and at her own home could hardly have been more extreme. Beneath the Richmond bed no dust lurked, no ancient hair clips (fourteen picked up so far, where had they come from?), no matty clumps of spider nest, only a large white storage box on wheels (mail order, from the Holding Company). This stored Alice’s out-of-season clothes and currently contained a collection of dry-cleaned, moth-zapped, tissue-folded cashmere sweaters, each one in its own air-drained polythene casing. Grace, whose idea of being careful with her clothes was to heap them on the bed rather than the floor, accused her mother of near-fetishism over her biannual storage rituals. But, as Alice pointed out, if you’d been brought up dressed in purple crochet (unravelling) and folksy recycled patchwork, you tended to treasure everything pattably delicate, costly and above all brand new.

  Jocelyn had decreed that this was the room Patrice was to have when he and his crew came to film her. It hadn’t been part of the bed and breakfast set-up for, although it overlooked the beach and was in relatively good condition, it was the room next to Jocelyn’s own and, as she put it, she didn’t want to wake at night and hear strangers indulging in noisy sex.

  ‘I’ve had years and years of erotic sound effects,’ she’d declared over supper, adding, ‘a very good many of them my own,’ which made Theo and Grace and the twins giggle and splutter into their fish pie. ‘And besides,’ she added, ‘that bed won’t take much more activity. We must consider it retired.’

  ‘Are you going to tell Patrice that?’ Aidan had asked her, looking cheeky.

  ‘Certainly not, Aidan my sweet.’ Joss had reached across and patted his cheek like a fond grandma with a treasured infant. ‘You are.’

  The crumpled cardboard that Alice was retrieving must have belonged to miserable Milly, way, way back when this had been her room. She’d both slept in here and used it as her studio. Perhaps that accounted for her sorrow, Alice guessed as she burrowed about among the dust. Perhaps it was all that breathing in of oily fumes and pungent solvent thinners – it couldn’t do anyone any good. Milly had preferred to drape material from her walls rather than to paint them, so there were no gaudy exuberant splodges here, simply a still-delicate washed-out dirty pink like the colour of a plaster that’s stayed too long on a cut. There also remained hooks all round the walls at
ceiling height, from where the lengths of soft silky sari fabrics had been hung to look like long slim flags, using garden canes as curtain poles.

  The fabrics had been collected from Milly’s wandering days in India and Afghanistan. They were multicoloured, hung randomly so that some clashed, some blended. Alice remembered them clearly: purple with gold thread, pinks with navy and silver embroidery, sharp cool green with lemon stars, tiny chips of icy beads stitched with scarlet thread onto sky-coloured silk, borders of swirling gold and orange. The hangings had drifted gently, wafted continuously by the permanent draughts in the house. Alice remembered thinking the effect was as if the walls were swaying all the time, and had loved it in the shadowy half-light when Milly lit candles around her easel in the centre of the room. There’d been a row about that, she recalled now as she dragged the last piece of distorted cardboard out from beneath the saggy mahogany bed. It had been the only time Jocelyn had been furious about candle-burning.

  There were plenty of candles in the house, kept for various seasonal festivities. Candles were on the go every evening on the long dining-room table, burning in tall intricately twisted ceramic holders abandoned by a resident who’d left in a hurry, fleeing a paternity order. They were often sickly scented with patchouli which Harry had grumbled about, complaining that they stank and put him off his food.

  Joss had told Milly she wasn’t allowed candles in her room because of all the fabrics and because of her oil paints. For some unknown reason she wasn’t even allowed to smoke in the house (though others were) and used to sit out by herself on the front porch at night, puffing guiltily like a schoolgirl. Jocelyn had stormed into her room one evening and found Milly on her green velvet floor cushion, reading Alice and Sally and a pair of visiting American children a ghost story by candlelight. They had reached the scariest point in the story. The effect of Jocelyn flinging open the door, silhouetted against the landing light with her cascade of wild yellow hair and her flowing purple kaftan decorated with tiny glinting mirrors, had pitched the children – and Milly too – into shrieking hysterics.

  After that for a while there’d been an atmosphere of disappointed anger – Alice remembered it could be felt all over the house. Thinking back, it was hard to tell if that feeling filtered through from all the residents, or if it was just that Joss’s own moods dominated and affected everyone. Milly had been punished – at a special House Meeting the residents had voted that she should clean out the chicken shed, repaint it and mend the broken catch on the door. She’d chosen to do it on a chill and windy day, with vicious rain ripping into her hair and clothes, making her look even more bedraggled and tragic than ever.

  So there had been some rules, Alice thought as she emerged from beneath the bed and sat up, her head spinning slightly. She could feel cobwebs in her hair, sticky with long-dead insect carcasses. Harry was at the doorway, rock-still, arms folded, just watching. She wondered how long he’d been there and why he hadn’t said anything.

  ‘Harry, do you remember if there were any house rules actually written down for this place? About who could do what and about housework and food shopping and stuff? I’ve always thought of it as being completely anarchic but it can’t really have been. And do you remember Milly being punished for lighting candles? It seems strange that she couldn’t be trusted to decide for herself what was safe and what wasn’t.’

  Harry came in and started collecting up the card mounts, piling them tidily in size order on top of the mattress. He took his time thinking before saying, ‘There were all those meetings where anyone who wanted to speak had to wait their turn to sit on that huge squashy suede bag thing. There was a special name for it, but I can’t quite . . .’ He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead hard with his thumb knuckle, looking as if he was trying to knead out the memory.

  ‘The beef bag! That was it!’ Harry, pleased with his technique, grinned at his upturned thumb as if it was solely responsible for the recalled memory.

  ‘Oh yes, that was it. If you had a complaint or wanted to change how the domestic set-up worked, you had to line up to take your turn on it at one of the house meetings.’ Alice laughed. ‘When I was little I used to think it was called that because it was actually stuffed with old meat. And it was a sort of dirty maroony red colour which I thought was from blood. It scared me a lot.’

  ‘A lot of things scared me.’ Harry was looking pensive now, wary even.

  ‘What sort of things?’ Alice asked him quietly. He shrugged and the thumb went back up to his head.

  ‘People coming and going all the time, I suppose. That feeling that you weren’t really very safe.’

  ‘What did you not feel safe about?’

  Harry sat down on the mattress, which creaked grumpily at being disturbed. He picked up a piece of torn cardboard and started tearing tiny, evenly spaced rips into it. ‘Dunno. Nothing particular, just a feeling. Like . . .’ he hesitated, scrabbling for the right words. ‘You didn’t know who to get close to because then they’d just go. Especially if Joss had a row with them. There was that music bloke, the American rock star she took up with for a bit. All velvet and leather. I liked him, we played beach cricket for hours. We had a laugh. Then one day he’d just gone. No goodbye, no nothing.’

  Alice remembered. ‘Ah yes, Jamie. Sat in the polytunnel playing his guitar and singing to the chickens. I wonder what happened to him.’

  ‘See, that’s what I mean. Once people went beyond the far gate and out of the village it was like they’d died or something.’

  ‘Perhaps he had. We could ask Joss.’

  Harry laughed. ‘Yeah and you know what she’ll say? It’ll be, “Oh darlings, so many people, such a long time, you can’t expect me to remember every waif and stray who fetched up here.”’

  ‘Or she’ll do that looking-into-the-distance thing and say, “Best forgotten sweetie, best forgotten.” Still,’ Alice said, ‘I suppose she thinks of them as her collection of memories, not really anything to do with us. That’s probably why she hadn’t bothered to tell me about this autobiography. Probably didn’t want to think we’d have anything relevant to add.’

  ‘But we were here. So of course it was to do with us,’ Harry pointed out as he gathered up the unwieldy heap of cardboard and stuffed it in Alice’s binbag. ‘And that’s what pisses me off about her bloody book. These should be our memories too, well everything after we were born, anyway. Perhaps they would have been if her bloody ego hadn’t swooped them all up and claimed them for Jocelyn’s Corner.’ He picked up the bulging bag and stamped out through the door, calling back to Alice, ‘I’ll take this lot down by the sheds and burn it. Best to be rid.’

  Grace was lying on her raffia mat on the beach, about to start reading the first chapter of Jocelyn’s sole oeuvre, Angel’s Choice. She’d found a drawerful of the books in the big chest in Joss’s bedroom when she’d been looking for scissors to trim her fringe. She hadn’t been snooping around, she’d asked Joss about the scissors and been told to help herself, to look wherever she thought that scissors might possibly be. There hadn’t been any in the bathroom. She’d searched the damp cupboards beneath the basin where the shelves had been crammed with little brown bottles of dried-up ancient herbal remedies, fat glass jars of aspirin which must have pre-dated all kinds of modern packaging regulations, and rolls and rolls of grubby crêpe bandages with their ends neatly secured in place with curved nappy pins. Grace couldn’t help thinking, as she tried to read the faded labels, that her own mother would have had a fit: all medicines in the Richmond house were locked away in a sparkling chrome and glass cupboard high out of reach of any visiting human under five feet tall. Alice even bought paracetamol in packs of no more than twelve, as if she anticipated Theo and Grace pulling such a terminal sulk after a minor spat that they’d be sure to wolf the lot.

  In the drawer in Joss’s giant oak chest, there must have been well over thirty copies of the book, all carefully piled up and covered with tissue paper. Grace had looked through t
hem, interested to see that there were several different covers. The dates of publication varied and the latest ones just had the words: ‘First published in 1959’.

  She knew about the book of course; she’d always known that Jocelyn had written something years before that had been hugely famous. There’d been a film of the book too, but although she knew that, she hadn’t thought to check whether they’d got it down at Blockbusters, any more than she’d thought of looking in Waterstones to see if Angel’s Choice was on the shelves. Once, at school, the morning after her mother had been to an open evening, Mrs MacDonald who taught English had been weird in a class and kept looking at her. At the end of the lesson Old MacDonald had kept her behind and been creepy, saying things like ‘your eminent grandmother’ and ‘seminal classic’. It had all been a bit unintelligible for a twelve-year-old and had made Grace and Sophy giggle because they were pretty sure ‘seminal’ was a rude word.

  From Joss’s collection in the drawer, Grace had taken what looked like the latest copy of the book, a paperback dated only a few years ago and with a cover that had a blurry oil painting of a mostly blue girl looking at herself in a bedroom mirror, her hands together as if she was praying, though with the fingers splayed out. The painting, it said, in tiny letters on the back cover, was by Melissa Thorpe-Appleby. The room the painted girl was standing in looked dismal and cramped, as if she’d grown too big for it but couldn’t escape. Reflected in the mirror was a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling and books, like strewn homework, lying on a bed that was a saggy brass one, a lot like Jocelyn’s own. Also on the back of the book it said: