Away From It All

by Judy Astley

  The train was running more than an hour late. In a world-weary voice, the conductor announced over the PA that the train ahead had run into some cows that had strayed onto the line. Noel couldn’t decide whether his tone of mild amusement was down to the train being one that belonged to a rival company, or whether he just thought it laughable that cows were daft enough to stroll under a train and get themselves killed.

  Long stops at remote stations had smokers leaving their seats to light up together on the platforms by open doors and make amiable grumbling conversation. Hot, dusty, country air wafted in, bringing the scent of nearby slurry and the sleepy cooing of wood pigeons. The barely populated stations reminded Noel of posters from the 1950s advertising days out by rail. But where there would have been lovingly tended flower beds and busy, chuffing engines, now there were only abandoned sidings filled with plumes of purple loose-strife, spindly but thriving in the parched ground.

  As they dawdled through central Cornwall, Noel entertained himself watching a lone female passenger trying to look as if she was above being interested in the macabre sight of the dead cows, but taking frequent furtive glances out of the window on the north side of the train, waiting to glimpse the gory trackside clean-up operation. She was two rows along, facing Noel across the aisle, and he found himself fascinated by the sight of her bare legs beneath the table as she flexed her ankles. He watched the long calf muscles tense and untense. Was she fending off DVT, he wondered? She had kicked off her high-heeled strappy shoes, which looked far too narrow to accommodate her splayed toes and made her feet look like miniature diver’s flippers. Up and down and round and round went the slim ankles, and the gold nail polish on her toes flashed up and down with them.

  She was in her late twenties, Noel guessed, and she had long loose thick dark hair and skin tanned to an almost unfashionable depth, giving her limbs the kind of swarthy look that might, he thought, also be due to an excess of hair. He liked that – there was something feral and heated and rude about it. Alice, lovely as she was, was very fair and only sparsely fuzzed and far too zealous (for his tastes), in the depilation department. It had been one of the things he’d liked (now firmly past tense) about Paula – when looking in her mirror she clearly turned a blind eye to a faint but definable moustache. He found himself wondering if the girl’s naked toes were furry too (for surely there weren’t (yet) women in the nation who waxed their toes? Were there?) and he tried to focus on them as she exercised her legs.

  He couldn’t decide if she was actually that attractive – it would be easy enough to put his feelings of comfortable randiness down to the movement of the train. It reminded him of school-bound bus journeys years ago on which he could rely on having constant erections. He’d got one now that his schoolboy self would have called a real boner. He’d have to start thinking about something else soon or he’d have to tote his bag in front of him when he stood up to get off at Redruth. Eventually the girl caught him staring. He lifted his gaze from floor level and found himself looking into long green slanted eyes. She was laughing at him and he could tell that she could tell what was going on in his trousers.

  ‘You going all the way?’ she asked, almost suppressing a giggle. The voice was Australian, or possibly New Zealand. Noel wasn’t going to make the mistake of guessing.

  ‘All the way . . . ? Oh, to Penzance. No, Redruth. You?’

  ‘Me too. We could share a cab maybe?’

  Oh God, thought Noel, what was this? A proposition. For the second time in a fortnight was this a chance for extra-curricular nookie? Unlikely, there was too much of a knowing tease in her voice.

  ‘Possibly. Are you heading south from there, to the coast?’

  ‘Some back-end place called Tremorwell,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go to a defunct old hippy commune to make a feature. Television.’

  ‘Aha, Penmorrow . . .’

  ‘. . . Penmorrow, you’re only a day away. And a bloody long one it’s been so far, I’d say.’

  If Aidan wasn’t going to mention it, then the grown-up thing to do was to forget it and carry on as if nothing had happened. Alice, driving him, Grace, Theo and the twins towards St Ives, decided he’d probably only kissed her because he felt sorry for her. And he was drunk at the time as well. They both were, come to that. She and Aidan had stayed at the pub till closing time and eaten only a bag of smoky bacon crisps and two packs of dry roasted peanuts to soak up the drink. Alice was pretty much astounded at herself, being the kind of woman who hardly ever had more than a couple of white wine spritzers and could always be counted on to be capable of driving home legally from a party.

  It had been one of those nights where the moon and stars hadn’t turned up at all, and the glow from Tremorwell’s solitary street lamp petered out long before the path up through the trees to Penmorrow. It had felt like walking in a black vacuum and Alice and Aidan had giggled and stumbled, holding onto each other tight for fear of being gobbled up by an invisible bottomless ravine. They’d been in sight of Gosling (and possibly of Grace at her window, a thought which made Alice’s insides flicker) when they’d tripped awkwardly over some tangled tendrils and fallen against an oak tree, still clutched together. That was when Aidan had kissed her, pressing her body hard between himself and the tree. He’d tasted salty from the peanuts, and the unexpected spontaneity of it all had given her a searingly fierce sexual rush.

  Sex with Noel, which she would have ticked on a customer-survey card as ‘very good’ (between ‘excellent’ and ‘satisfactory’) suddenly seemed almost coldly regular and formulaic, prebooked and reduced to the level of twice-weekly games of tennis with a comfortable friend. Last night she hadn’t been the one who’d pulled away, she remembered now, and she imagined, blushmakingly, what might have happened if Aidan hadn’t shifted his foot onto a dry branch which had broken with such a loud snap that it had sounded like a sharp telling-off.

  It wasn’t entirely my fault, Alice thought as she turned onto the main road at Lelant and headed for St Ives town centre. It was just one of those silly moments and she should be way past having them. She trusted that Aidan didn’t get any juvenile notions that she was likely to want to repeat the experience. Not that he’d want to, she reasoned to herself. Not that he was likely to find her particularly stunning in the bright light of day, not in anything but the deepest pitch dark and through an extra blur of alcohol, not a woman so many years older than him. If they’d been back in London, say in a crowded after-work bar, he’d have been spoilt for choice among the glossy twenty-something girls. He’d surely have ignored Alice, would have dismissed her as a middle-aged, middle-class, off-duty mum boringly likely to start talking house prices and school reports. Still, nagging at the back of her brain was an article she’d read in one of the Sunday papers, about how unattached men around the age of thirty or so prefer to have flings with older women because they’re not desperate to find a partner for reproduction purposes but can be unashamedly casual in sexual matters. Not that this was a sexual matter. Not at all. Chill, as Grace would say, it was only a snog. Nothing to get rattled about.

  ‘You want Porthmeor. By the Tate?’ Chas volunteered from the far back of the car as Alice drove down the hill towards the town centre. She could see him scowling at her in the rear-view mirror. It was the first thing he’d said to her all day. Sam hadn’t spoken either, though both had clambered into the car eagerly enough after helping Theo tie the surfboards onto the roof rack. What a cheery day out this was going to be. It was Saturday – a comparatively quiet day with so many holidaymakers jammed bonnet to bumper either on their way home or on their way down to Cornwall, leaving more space on the beach for local residents.

  It had seemed the best thing all round – to take all the children and disappear for the day, get well out of Jocelyn’s way and give her some quiet time to herself. She didn’t imagine Joss would spend any of it mulling over the disagreement they’d had. Her mother didn’t go in for self-doubt – once she’d declared a thing to be
so, then so it was. Instead she’d probably harass Mo, make her sort through all the pillows in the house to find the ones with the plumpest feather content for the grand arrival of Patrice. She would follow her into his room, checking that she’d gone right into the corners with the floor polisher and that the freshly washed curtains had been ironed so they hung without creases. She would make Mo hang a big feathered and beaded dream-catcher at the window and get Harry to bring in the Pan statue from her own room. If she was only half as fussy for the B. & B. visitors who paid cash, some of them might be tempted to make return visits and recommend the place to friends. In fact if she’d only send the Pan statue to Christies, she wouldn’t need to take in paying guests for several years to come.

  ‘Sloping off?’ Harry had asked Alice when she’d arrived to collect the twins in the middle of the morning. He was busy stringing together bulbs of garlic to sell in the village shop. She was tempted to suggest they hang them in the kitchen doorway to ward off the worst aspects of their mother.

  ‘Most useful thing I can do. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that I’m interfering and superfluous,’ Alice had replied.

  ‘But you’re not,’ he’d protested.

  ‘Well you’re the only one who thinks that way,’ Alice said. ‘I’m thinking about going back home. I’ll wait till Monday when the roads are quiet.’

  ‘But you can’t! What about all these film people? They’re coming this afternoon. Mo’s tearing her hair out as it is.’

  ‘Look – I can’t stay for ever – for one thing we’re off to Italy in a few weeks. And after what Joss said yesterday, I might as well go sooner than later. She likes things exactly the rotting and mouldering way they are. You and I and Mo think things should be spruced up a bit. But guess who wins? Guess who always bloody wins? So there you go. As Grace would put it, I’m outa here.’

  ‘She doesn’t know how much it takes for things to be “the way they are”. It’s a losing battle.’ Harry lit a skinny roll-up and inhaled hard. From the smell of it he was smoking a blend of something more than pure tobacco.

  ‘Then give in. Stop fighting. Tell her if she wants to afford to keep Penmorrow, even the way it is, she’ll have to sell some of Arthur’s work. There’s enough of his stuff here to keep her in gin and fags for the rest of her days. And you and Mo as well.’

  ‘There might not be that many days.’ Harry looked mournful and what was left of Alice’s patience completely evaporated.

  ‘Well that would mean problems were over all round then, wouldn’t it?’ she snapped, feeling bad immediately after. She crossed her fingers quickly to ward off the evil spirits her outburst must have called up.

  ‘Sorry – I shouldn’t have said that. Still, just mention it, Harry. The statues. I know they represent her memories but they’re also solid lumps of hugely useful cash. And you know, if they’re seen in the background of this TV programme, it would only take one enterprising thief to work out that we’ve zilch here in the way of proper security. One big hire van and a few strong blokes and they could be gone overnight.’

  ‘Couldn’t you tell her?’ Harry sat down on the old rocking chair and picked at the tobacco falling from the end of his cigarette.

  ‘Yes Harry, I could. But I’ve told her most of it before. I think it’s time it came from you. Perhaps the surprise element might shock her into action.’

  Miraculously there was a vacant space in the car park above Porthmeor. The beach wasn’t as overpopulated as Alice had expected, with just a few families and bunches of teenagers at well-mannered distances from each other. ‘Out of sniping range’ Noel would say, convinced that it was one of life’s laws that any family group on a British beach would become a miniature war zone before the first hour is up, with squabbles about sand in sandwiches, unfairness about ice creams and anxious nagging over hats and sunblock. Alice trusted that her little gathering would manage to get through the hours without bickering – on the day’s form so far they’d be lucky if any of the kids actually spoke.

  The two families nearest to where Alice’s group had settled didn’t look like the loud, arguing types either: each consisted of tidy two-parents, two-infants set-ups with full-scale backpacked picnic equipment, sensible bags of various sunscreens and a selection of new sand toys for the children. One patient father tried fending off the many fat, greedy seagulls that worked the beach in search of scraps and soft-touch humans, and were sneaking up on a toddler’s sausage roll. Alice watched, amused, as he politely suggested to the birds that they go away, as if they were importunate buskers on the London underground. He had a gentle, hyper-posh voice of the sort that is hardly ever heard any more and reminded her of Nigel Pargetter from The Archers. The gulls gazed at him, as possibly many humans did, as if he was an obsolete old fossil.

  Padding at the sand like a cat, Grace selected a patch that pleased her and quickly peeled her dress off down to her pink bikini. She unrolled her mat, lay down on her tummy, squirmed into a comfortable sandy dent and unpacked Jocelyn’s book from her bag. Aidan and Alice settled themselves onto Alice’s plastic-backed tartan Marks & Spencers picnic rug. Alice sat primly at the far edge, fingers laced together around the front of her legs. The rug was double-bed sized, but not king-size. She felt suddenly shy of stripping to her swimsuit and lying down beside Aidan. Ridiculous, she reasoned to herself. It would be nothing to do with any intimacy, for what else were you supposed to do on a beach?

  Several surfers were in the water, stretched like big sleek otters on their boards and paddling gently out towards the line-up point where the best waves could be picked up. On the far side of Grace, Chas and Sam and Theo silently clambered into wetsuits, grabbed their bodyboards and tramped off to the section of the sea that seemed to be reserved for their particular skill.

  ‘Is it segregation for practical reasons, do you think, or is it a status thing?’ Aidan asked, shading his eyes with his hand as he stared out to sea.

  ‘What? Sorry, I was miles away,’ Alice replied, processing his question quickly. ‘It’s practical. The bodyboarders are closer to shore and there’s lots more of them. Mostly they’re just holiday kids fooling about. The surfers would come ploughing through the middle and half-kill them.’

  ‘If they’re any good. Most of them seem to fall off after a couple of yards.’

  ‘Well they all have to learn. Theo told me that all the best ones are up at Newquay this weekend at the Rip Curl contest. Perhaps you should have gone there.’ Alice bit her lip, she’d sounded so rude. The second time today too. This wasn’t like her.

  ‘Mum! That was a bit full-on.’ Grace looked up from her book and glared at her.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . What I meant was it might have been more entertaining.’ This didn’t sound much better.

  ‘Oh I don’t know . . .’ Aidan grinned at her and she felt herself going pink and confused. She glanced across at Grace to see if she was watching them but Grace was now deep in concentration with her mobile phone, muttering and cursing quietly.

  ‘Mingin’. There’s no signal down here. I’m going up to the road – need to text Sophy. Anyone want anything from the caff? I’m getting hungry.’

  Alice delved into her bag and found her purse. ‘You could get some pasties for you and the boys,’ she said. ‘They must be famished by now. Aidan? Want one?’

  ‘Mmm. Sounds good. Anything but vegetarian for me. They always overdo the swede. Want me to come up and give you a hand?’

  Grace looked at him with that lip-curled, over-puzzled incredulity that Alice recognized as a teen specialty.

  ‘Er, no?’ Grace said. ‘Like I can’t carry six pasties?’

  ‘Fine, no worries.’ Aidan shrugged and grinned at her, just as Alice was about to retaliate for Grace’s comment about her own rudeness.

  Grace stalked off across the sand, her lower half wrapped in a scarlet translucent sarong dotted with starfish and her long fair hair flicking around her head in the breeze. She had lost her London
pallor and much of the skinny tonelessness that had been the result of so little activity. Here, she swam in the sea every morning, taking up a Penmorrow tradition that Jocelyn had only recently relinquished. Groups of boys stared after her as she passed. Alice felt as if one more strand of the plaited threads that bound her daughter to her had loosened and come adrift. Nearly fifteen. She’d be going soon, just a few more fast years and then all the remaining threads would unravel at once and drop free onto open ground between them.

  ‘Beautiful girl,’ Aidan commented. ‘You don’t mind me saying that, do you?’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ Alice couldn’t look at him, didn’t want him to notice her brimming eyes.

  ‘Because it’s just an observation. I’m not into perving after teenagers. I bet you looked just like that at her age. Which reminds me, has Joss said anything to you about photos for the book? Are you the keeper of the family albums or is she in charge of that too?’

  Alice laughed. ‘What do you think? Have a guess? Actually I’m not sure what she’s done with photos. Joss tended to be photographed by people who wanted to keep the shots for their own uses, magazine articles and that. I don’t really know how much she’s kept for herself. I don’t remember ever seeing her with a camera when Harry and I were kids. Arthur used to take some of all of us together sometimes, on the beach and round the garden and things.’ Alice thought for a moment, then added, ‘Besides, is she likely to want to put in any that aren’t just of her? Sorry. That sounded catty.’

  ‘Yes it did rather. I’ll put it down to you still feeling a bit hard-done-by from yesterday, shall I?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. And as Grace would say, “Get over it”.’

  ‘That would be the grown-up thing to do.’

  It was possible he wasn’t just referring to Joss, but Alice chose to assume he was. She pushed her hand into the warm sand and let it trickle through her fingers. Only inches beneath the dry heat the grains were damp and cold. She wondered if female turtles, clambering up the Caribbean beaches, understood their eggs would be cooked and killed if they didn’t lay them deep enough. How brilliant it must be to be a creature that came complete with such inborn wisdom and why did humans, who assumed they were so clever, seem to be born with none at all?