by Judy Astley
Grace sat on the bench and looked out across the bay. The lights on the Penmorrow porch made the place look a bit like a ship’s deck with its rigging all festively lit. The Big Shepherd statue on the grass in front of the house was a looming silhouette, surely enough to frighten off anyone who thought they’d go burgling at the house. She could see someone moving about so she raised her binoculars to view what was happening over there. The Australian woman, Katie, was sitting on the swing seat, one long leg crossed over the other. The binoculars were good ones – Joss used them for bird-watching up at the Hayle estuary and had told her that through them she could make out the brands of shampoo on bathroom window ledges half a mile away. Katie had her shoe hanging off, dangling from her foot. Grace had liked the shoes. They were London ones, high and long and pointy, the sort her mother wore for parties and Sophy’s mum wore any old time. Noel came into view just then and sat next to Katie on the swing seat. Grace watched him hand her a glass of wine. Then, mystified, she watched him take hold of Katie’s foot, place it on his lap and start massaging it.
Katie didn’t look very comfortable, Grace thought, with her leg crossed high up and hauled across to Noel. She didn’t feel completely comfortable now either, as she realized that this was something she maybe shouldn’t be watching. Then Noel released the foot and ran his hand slowly up Katie’s leg. What the hell did he think he was doing, Grace wondered, and where was her mum? The hand didn’t stop when it got to the edge of Katie’s skirt either, but disappeared beneath. Katie was lying back in the seat, her long hair draped over the back of it. Instead of clamping her knees together and brushing Noel’s hand away, she was sprawled out like a relaxed cat, enjoying herself, enjoying him.
Quickly Grace moved the binoculars to another part of the house. She focused on the sitting-room window, the hexagonal one with the all-round view. Jocelyn was there, standing like one of Arthur’s statues, watching Noel and Katie. Grace knew she’d never tell what she saw; Jocelyn wouldn’t either, but she’d make sure Noel knew what she knew.
Nine
ALICE WAS DOWN in the kitchen early, making herself a pot of tea really quietly so that she didn’t disturb Theo. Noel was all right, he was so deeply asleep that only a screaming Harrier jet from the nearby naval base would stir him. Grace too was comatose, stretched across her bed with one foot poking out from beneath the duvet and the plump tabby body of her cat sprawled on top of her. The white patch of fur under Monty’s chin had a pinkish tinge to it. Blood from a recently devoured mouse, Alice guessed, seeing as he hadn’t leapt up and raced down the stairs ahead of her in crazed anticipation of a tin being opened.
In the sitting room Alice could see Theo snuggled deep into his pillows with his mobile phone, like a comfort toy, propped up on the arm of the sofa bed. For a teenager he was a relatively light sleeper, and Alice tiptoed around the kitchen hoping he wouldn’t wake up and decide that this was a good time to do some talking. Knowing that she’d been so furious with him over the seagulls, his way of getting back into favour would be to sit with her and chat, on the basis that few adults can resist a teenager who is making an effort to connect. He’d noisily munch toast and marmalade (having picked out any bits of peel and heaped them up like kindling for a miniature fire) and chatter away about almost anything that came into his head, rambling on about football or music, about his exams and which universities he should apply to, all to make her feel that he needed her and cared about her opinions. He might be a moody teenager, he’d be telling her, but as a special concession he could do the thing called ‘conversation’ when necessary.
Normally she would – as intended – find this flattering as well as enlightening, but today, less than an hour after waking, she was already feeling exhausted at the thought of the week ahead, of Jocelyn swanning around glorying in the flattering attentions of Patrice, and of Mo feeling even more harassed and hard-done-by but stubbornly hanging onto her martyr’s role as chief overworked domestic dogsbody. Harry had admitted that it had been bad enough when Aidan (whom he’d at least stopped calling The Ghost) had arrived. Joss had gone supremely grand, he’d grumbled, barely deigning to light her own cigarettes, and had, at mealtimes, sat haughtily at the head of the table waiting like an empress for her food to be served, scorning to carry so much as a single dish.
‘She ordered Mo to go and mix her another gin and tonic once, exactly as if she was some useless servant,’ he told Alice. ‘She’d poured the first one straight onto the floor in disgust, all over the rug can you believe, and complained the ice was “off”. How can ice go off? It’s always fresh – God knows she gets through enough of it.’
‘What did Mo do? Didn’t she tell her to get lost?’
‘She was so amazed, she just went and did what Joss said.’
‘Well I suppose Joss wasn’t quite herself then, don’t forget. Perhaps feeling ill affected her taste buds,’ Alice reminded him. ‘I’m sure Mo was just being kind.’ Privately, Alice considered it had been a bad move on Mo’s part. Jocelyn had always been rather imperious but now that she was heading fast into being less robust, it would be a mistake to give in to any foot-stamping episodes. They’d only get worse. On the other hand, Alice calculated, Mo, in her current mood, might enjoy having plenty to grouch about.
‘Huh. I might have known you’d see it from her side,’ Harry said. ‘You always did take the opposite view.’
‘Sorry. Only trying to keep a balance.’
And was it always such a good thing, this effort to see everything from both sides, Alice asked herself as she poured a virtuous non-fattening cereal and some semi-skimmed milk into a bowl. She’d tried doing that in her first marriage, only finding out too late that being constantly placatory and reasonable was one of the things that drove Paul, Grace’s father, absolutely crazy, to the point of violence and beyond. Now she was in danger of doing it again with Noel. When she’d noticed him eyeing Katie in a blatantly lusting way, she’d put it down to a few weeks’ lack of sex, as if it was all her own fault that he’d got a heightened libido level. On the other hand (there she went again . . .) she hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to divert his sexual attention back to herself. That, and in her imagination the agony aunts of her teen years wagged their massed fingers, was probably a big marital mistake. What nagged her was that she’d done for once what suited only her, not the sensible thing, not what pleased somebody else. It was something at which she wasn’t too practised.
Alice took her cereal and tea out through the kitchen door and sat in the sun at the old marble table in the scrubby little neglected garden. Fat-flowered hydrangeas fought for air and space with dense camellias. Lemon balm had taken over what used to be a herb patch. Plant-wise, it was a true example of the fittest surviving. She reached down and pushed back some of the stems, delighted to reveal a row of stones set into the ground on which Arthur had carved a series of mouse families to amuse her and Harry many years before. He’d made up funny little stories about them as he worked, she remembered. Around and among these, fronds of chervil had colonized the cracks in the paving and where tough perennials used to flourish, bindweed had twined itself around the ferns and the wild geraniums and strangled most of the vitality out of them.
It wouldn’t actually take much, Alice calculated as she looked around, to make this garden a stunning little gem. Worn-out city holidaymakers (paying holidaymakers) would surely love to sit here and relax in the sun, just as she did. Hacking back much of the shrubbery and the gloomy laurels would reveal a wonderful view out towards the sea. Clearing back the weeds would give struggling plants a chance to breathe and bloom again. The problem for Mo and Harry was that this ‘not much’ that it would ‘take’ was only one more item on the long, long list.
Alice went back into the kitchen and brought out her notebook and pen and started to make a list of her own. She would get Noel and Theo started on clearing this small patch of garden this morning, and they could mend the broken bench that was slumped lopsided like
a collapsed drunk against the kitchen wall. Theo, after yesterday’s debacle, wouldn’t dare refuse and Noel would want to spend time with his son. She could use that little wheeled cart that Grace had rediscovered and fetch some of the big old pots that were abandoned near the chicken sheds and plant thick clumps of agapanthus in them. If Jocelyn objected to this just as she had with the painted kitchen, well it could all be abandoned to grow back to chaos in its own good time. For now though, Alice tipped the last third of her cereal down into the drain. She was pretty sure that the cardboard box it came in couldn’t have tasted more dreary. She would go out later, find a proper supermarket and shop for food she really liked, starting with a big fat pack of butter-stuffed chocolate croissants.
Grace had finished Angels’ Choice before she went to sleep and it had made her feel quite strange and emotionally bruised. The book had left her with a lot of questions, but one which didn’t spring to mind was why hadn’t her mother encouraged her to read it before now. Grace would have been surprised if she had – this wasn’t at all a comfortable read. Grace couldn’t have even begun to understand it a couple of years before, not like she had with Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Wuthering Heights.
The basic story was simple enough: Angel is fifteen and lives with her parents not far from her much more affluent uncle and aunt. Uncle Gordon is a top-level high court judge with an important career – her father is a struggling electrician. Angel babysits for her relatives’ children and afterwards Uncle Gordon drives her home and rapes her in the back of his car. When she’d reached this point in the book Grace had felt like hurling it across the room, furious with Angel for not making enough effort to stop him. For God’s sake, Grace wanted to shout at her, you don’t get meekly into the back of a car in a dark alley (which also happened to be terrifyingly miles off the home-bound route) just because your uncle tells you to. And you fight him off! Angel didn’t even try; she just lay there on the cold leather seat in her ripped clothes, mentally disconnected but physically almost compliant, passively waiting for it to be over. Jocelyn had gone full out with an almost sick-making sex scene here, all pig-like snorts and smells and greasy, heavy, pushing flesh. The uncle had blunt, stubby fingers, sweaty and waxy like fat crayons. Grace could almost feel them denting her own tender skin as she read. She had had to read these bits twice, make sure she was feeling revolted because that was how it was meant to be, not just because it was her own grandmother who’d written it. And then stupid dumb Angel had kept quiet about what had happened. So of course it all happened again. Big surprise, you stupid girl, Grace had thought. You just want to shake people like that, for being so wet and cowardly.
It was only when she read further that she started to understand how back then there were things too shameful to talk about. Social disgrace was a seriously fearful prospect. These days, it occurred to Grace, Angel would have not only dragged Uncle Gordon through the courts but also through the tabloid press and probably ’fessed up on something like Kilroy as well. When Angel realized she was pregnant and at last told who did this to her, she was simply not believed and was beaten by her father for incriminating his sainted, successful brother and accused of being a whore. Grace’s fury at Angel turned then to outrage at her parents. Why would they think she was lying? Hers wouldn’t. And then Angel was ordered to lie, to keep Uncle Gordon’s career from being publicly wrecked and the comfortable family from being destroyed. That was Angel’s ultimate choice – to bring shame and ruin to his (and her own) family, or to let herself be condemned and shunned as the local slut.
Some things astonished Grace about what it must have been like for a girl in Angel’s position back in those days, especially the fact that in rape trials everyone got to know the victim’s name as well as that of the person accused. She was also amazed by the stigma of unmarried pregnancy and the emotional price people were expected to pay to maintain even the most fragile, dishonest respectability. For her, it was like reading a social history book. And then there was the incest thing. Grace, brought up when child abuse was the bogeyman buzz-phrase of every newspaper and an early-evening storyline on EastEnders, found herself having to imagine a time when it was the last thing anyone would even think of daring to mention. No wonder, she thought, that the book was such a sensation in its day.
The problem with having read the book was that Grace now saw Jocelyn in a different light. From being a lovably eccentric woman with a wacky, star-studded and occasionally notorious past, Jocelyn had overnight turned into a person with issues and complications that Grace really didn’t want to dwell on. Suppose Jocelyn was Angel? Suppose this had really all happened to her and she’d only been able to get her anger out by writing it down as fiction? Was that why she only wrote the one book? Some stuff you really didn’t want to know, even though you were dying to ask. You weren’t meant to know, not one generation to another. That morning when she pushed Monty off her legs and climbed out of bed, Grace needed a bit of time to think before she faced Jocelyn again. She wouldn’t be able to help looking at her in an uncomfortably questioning way. There was also the horrible thing she’d seen Noel getting up to as well, with his hand snaking up Katie’s skirt and Katie lying back enjoying it. She had no wish to see him either, in case something about his attitude made her want to tell her mother what she’d seen. Angel wasn’t the only one with tricky decisions.
Grace crept to the stairs, peeking into her mother’s room. Only Noel was there in the bed, breathing slowly and heavily, just short of snoring. He hadn’t been a bad stepfather, she conceded, or at least she’d thought he hadn’t. Suppose he did hands-up-the-skirt stuff with women all the time? And what a sodding pain that she had to think about this.
Grace found Alice out on the scruffy, overgrown little terrace. ‘Hi Mum, is anything happening today? What time’s that film man coming?’ She almost whispered her question, afraid that the cottage would spring into life behind her with Noel bounding down the stairs eager to get on with the day. He might suggest (oh grim) they all go out and do something together As A Family. No way, no thanks, she thought.
‘I hadn’t got anything planned, just a bit of garden stuff,’ Alice said, smiling up at her daughter. ‘There’s a couple of things I’d like Noel and Theo to do here but you and I could go out on our own if you like, though I want to get back in time to be here for when Patrice arrives and I told Mo I’d do supper, even though she was a bit sulky about the idea. Why, what do you fancy doing?’
Grace grinned at her. ‘You never say that. Not at home.’
‘Never say what?’
‘You never say, “I haven’t got anything planned.” Stuff you do is always planned. All your days are written down. Now that you’re here you’re going all different.’
Alice pushed her hair back, twisted it up and secured it with a camellia twig. ‘Just chillin’, as you kids say. Anyway you haven’t answered the question. What shall we do? Are you too old for the Seal Sanctuary?’
Grace wrinkled her nose up. ‘Well, yeah, I suppose.’ She was fidgety, jumping about on the chervil stems. ‘Let’s just go out, OK? Decide where once we’re on the road.’ She glanced inside the cottage, where all was still quiet. ‘Let’s go now, quick.’
‘Well let me finish my cup of tea, and you must have some breakfast too.’
‘I’ll grab some on the way. Come on, Mum, please.’ Grace hauled Alice out of her chair and sent her up the stairs to dress. Grace flung on her favourite Quiksilver baggies and a tee shirt, snatched a hooded fleece top and raced back down the stairs and out to the car. She hadn’t even cleaned her teeth so she reached into the Galaxy’s glove compartment to find chewing gum. Just for once, that would have to do.
Harry and Mo sat silent and peaceful on rickety cane chairs in the polytunnel with mugs of mint tea and the luxury of a spliff each for once, not a shared one. Harry was very pleased with his plants this year. There’d been plenty of sun and they were growing tall and bushy. The buds were forming well and were already
sticky with resin, and the big fan leaves were just starting to fade to yellow. Soon it would be time for the harvest. The stems were sturdy and deeply ridged all the way up their length, like fat stalks of angelica. In their room at the top of the house Harry had a foot-long length he’d kept from one of his best-ever stems. At the broadest end it was nearly five inches in diameter, and its hollow dried-out inside flesh was a pale primrose colour. He’d thought of making a pipe from it, or an instrument of some kind like a recorder, but as with many things, he hadn’t got round to it. The stem sat on the mantelpiece, alongside bits of strange-shaped pebbles from the beach, old shells that Mo kept saying she’d make into mobiles and the big box of chicken feathers that were used when she made dream-catchers. One day, he thought, he’d get a binbag and simply sweep the lot into it and chuck it out for the binmen to take. It was going to be the only way to sort things, in the end, just give up and let go. If only Jocelyn would do the same with the rest of the house. And maybe even with the house itself.
Mo, he thought, was looking tired and dejected. She didn’t say much these days, not to him anyway, and when she did speak she was snappy. She seemed caught up in faraway thoughts of her own and he hadn’t been invited to share them. He didn’t know what to say to her that would please her. When she’d complained about the care of Penmorrow being too much for them he’d done his best, getting Alice down from London. In fact, now he took a deep toke on the spliff and recalled in a heady blur of smoke, that had been Mo’s idea. ‘Alice should do her bit’ – those had been her very words. The mood she was in these days, she’d deny it for sure. She seemed to resent Alice’s presence even more than she’d resented her absence. Who could know with anyone, even the person who was supposed to be closest to you, how to get it right?
