Away From It All

by Judy Astley

  Mo was looking glassy-eyed now. Harry glanced at her wiry, prematurely greying hair and wondered why, when she was a couple of years younger than Alice, she looked as if she was almost as old as Joss. That was what happened, he thought – considering this, by way of the dope’s effects, to be a deep piece of philosophical insight – when you modelled yourself on someone from the wrong generation. Mo had arrived at Penmorrow so full of admiration for Jocelyn, eager to be a free spirit like her, and to please her. She’d made a lifetime habit of emulating her with even the smallest things, like all that rustly velvet clothing and the heavy amber beads and crystals and keeping her hair long. She should get it properly cut and coloured and conditioned back to youthful smoothness, Harry thought, surprising himself. She should decide that she was herself, not some second-hand faded old hippy. And she should do it fast, before she too became debilitated and started thinking about the approach of the end of her life, rather than the good-time middle bits that they were surely allowed to have sometime soon.

  Alice turned the car out of the winding Tremorwell lane and joined the main road west, pulling into a long slow line of traffic heading for Penzance. It wasn’t even ten yet but the Sunday motorists were out in force, and they all seemed to be making for the far tip of the county. At the side of the road, just past the garage, was a hitch-hiker. Alice, her car slowed to a crawl by the sheer traffic volume, thought of how she used to hitch everywhere when she was a young teenager. A night out in Truro would involve herself and Sally taking turns to hide in a ditch so that motorists would think the hitcher was all alone and either feel worried for their safety or hopeful that they were wanting more than a car ride.

  ‘It’s Aidan!’ Grace interrupted Alice’s thoughts.

  ‘We’ll have to stop, he’ll see us.’ Alice pulled over, reluctantly, sure that Grace would resent this unexpected companion on their trip.

  ‘Course we will. Anyway, Aidan’s cool.’ Grace already had the window down, waving to him. Alice pulled into the layby where Aidan waited, and stopped the car.

  ‘What happened to your own car?’ she asked as he climbed in.

  ‘Bit of starter-motor trouble,’ he said, settling himself into the back of the Galaxy behind Grace. ‘I don’t think it likes the sea air. It’s happier with pure North London fug.’

  Alice looked back at him by way of her mirror.

  ‘So where are you heading? Where do you want us to drop you?’ She’d sounded abrupt without meaning to. It wasn’t very fair of her but she’d prefer to spend the morning with just Grace. Or with just Aidan. She could see him smiling at her. He looked very boyish with his chic glasses and hair tweaked up in that slightly Tintin way that all youngish men seemed to like. Theo spent ages tweaking his into shape in front of anything with a slightly mirrored surface. In her opinion it made them all resemble birds with titchy crests, like soft little finches caught in a breeze.

  ‘I’ve got a day off from Jocelyn’s magnum opus,’ he told her, ‘so I’m going to see a film. They’re showing Blue Juice as a one-off down in Penzance so I thought I’d see it, check out the surf scene. Or at least as it used to be.’

  ‘Yeah right, and Catherine Zeta Jones,’ Grace teased him.

  ‘Yeah, well, OK, she’s a babe. Back then anyway. She’s looking too Hollywood for me these days.’

  Alice wondered if that was polite-speak for ‘older’ but decided against commenting. She’d only be inviting a flurry of embarrassing cover-ups, verbally.

  The car slowed again as traffic joined the road from a junction, a steady crawl of a long line of cars.

  ‘Why are there so many people on the road? Are they all going to Land’s End?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Who knows? Perhaps they’re all going to their various churches,’ Alice said.

  ‘Do you think so?’ Aidan looked surprised. ‘I had this down as pagan country.’

  ‘That’s spending too much time with Jocelyn,’ Alice laughed. ‘She’s convinced you the whole county is a hotbed of spells and heathen festivals. You’re forgetting all the Cornish Methodists.’

  ‘She does that, your mother,’ Aidan told her. ‘She winds you in like a spider with silk so that you end up thinking her world is the only one that exists. It’s good for the book but a bit much when you’re back on planet Reality.’

  ‘I like that,’ Grace commented. ‘I like her world.’

  ‘Oh don’t get me wrong.’ Aidan leaned forward to reassure Grace. ‘It’s just that it’s so far removed from my personal reality.’

  ‘Which is?’ Alice asked, signalling to a carful of holiday family to join the traffic queue in front of her.

  ‘Oh you know, the usual.’ He was smiling – looking as if he missed his home. ‘Manky flat in Kentish Town, beer cans everywhere, pizza boxes under the bed, you know, usual sad-bloke-on-his-own stuff.’

  ‘Sounds like Theo.’ Grace was laughing at him. Alice thought so too – it sounded laddish, juvenile, non-responsible. All the things that she and Noel simply weren’t. She pictured vividly the things Aidan left out: a zebra-print thong scrunched up at the far end of the duvet, cast off in sexual abandon by a lithe, taut-skinned girlfriend; an unsavoury heap of boy-smelling clothing desperate for someone to launder it; photos Blu-Tacked to the wall of drink-sodden party debris and girls in strappy little dresses, with sleek long hair, clutching each other lovingly and pulling daft expressions, cigarette in one hand, a sickly drink concoction in the other. Aidan’s world, a pre-settled, youthful world.

  ‘So you weren’t a church-goer then?’ Aidan asked Alice.

  ‘What’s this? More research?’

  ‘I suppose so. Joss is very vague sometimes. I’m having to pull this book together from all sources. You don’t get that with a footballer’s memoirs.’

  ‘Suppose not,’ Alice conceded. Her mother was a woman much given to reinterpreting events of the past. Or, at least, to leaving out the bits that were more or less humdrum. If Alice had been a devout Christian and had insisted on being baptized and confirmed, Joss would probably have skipped over that and mentioned some Beltane extravaganza she’d hosted instead.

  ‘Actually, when I was Grace’s age I sometimes used to go to the Sunday morning service at the Tremorwell village church with my friend Sally.’ Aidan had his electronic recorder out again and was pecking at its works, reminding her of Theo and his phone. Aidan even had the tip of his tongue out between his teeth as Theo did when he concentrated. What was I thinking of? Alice asked herself, feeling mildly mortified that she still found this young man so attractive. One day, she thought, not too far on from now, she’d turn into a caricature: she’d be accosting strangers like the two ‘Oooh! Young man!’ harridans on the Harry Enfield show.

  ‘What did Jocelyn think of you taking up conventional religion?’ Aidan asked. It was a professional question, she recognized. She could sense the deep lack of real interest.

  ‘I didn’t tell her,’ Alice replied truthfully. ‘She disapproved of all organized religions. She believed, still does, that they’re systems by which the poor – and especially the female poor – were kept in guilt-ridden terror of eternal damnation.’

  Behind her she heard the recorder being switched off. He simply didn’t want to know any more and was now, she could see, staring out of the window, his knee jigging up and down impatiently, waiting like a child for the next thing. The film he wanted to see.

  Alice remembered the church outings. She’d enjoyed having this secret from Jocelyn. She had loved the hymn-singing and had been enormously envious of Sally, who told her that they sang a hymn every morning at her school assembly. Alice had added this to her grievance list of things she minded missing out on from not going to school. She sang well – Sally said she’d have been a dead cert for the school choir. Sometimes, to annoy Jocelyn, she would belt out her favourites while she was doing jobs around Penmorrow, shelling peas in the kitchen or sweeping leaves from the verandah. ‘Fight the Good Fight’ went down particularly badly:
Joss couldn’t resist clucking over what she called the ‘offensive paternalism’ of the words, though contrarily even she was quite fond of ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’ and in a good mood might be tempted to join in.

  At the beginning of the summer season, Alice remembered, the vicar would greet unfamiliar faces in his holiday-swollen flock and would welcome this year’s ‘swallows’, smiling graciously round at them and expressing the unctuous hope that they wouldn’t fly away too soon. Everyone would laugh politely, the locals pretending they hadn’t heard this annual analogy before. On the Sunday after the August bank holiday he would return to his metaphor, usually in his sermon, trusting the summer swallows would find spiritual sustenance in their winter quarters till their safe return the next year.

  It was in the church when she was fifteen, Alice remembered, that she’d first thought about leaving Penmorrow. It had occurred to her that she too could be a swallow. At the end of the summer with Marcel, he’d asked her to go to France with him. She’d told him she couldn’t and he’d simply shrugged and said, ‘But you could,’ setting free the whole of the rest of the world for her. She hadn’t wanted to go then, because she hadn’t wanted to stay with him, but from then onwards she had it in mind that one day she could leave the village and return in a new guise as a visitor, a whole-summer one or just for occasional weekends. It was a few years more before she actually left – but it was enough at the time to have absorbed the exhilarating notion that flight was possible.

  Grace was now being silent – Alice assumed the burst of early-morning energy had been sapped away and that she was about to lay her head against the car window and doze off again. She turned off the main road and drove along by the sea through Marazion and past St Michael’s Mount, purely for the pleasure of being so close to the water and seeing clutches of family visitors setting up their windbreaks and toddler tents, pitching in for a long, leisurely day in the sun. Aidan got out here, happy to walk along the seafront, as the tide was out, into Penzance.

  ‘We missed out on all that, really, didn’t we?’ she commented to Grace as they slowed to let a heavily equipped family haul their coolboxes and beach toys across the road.

  ‘What? Missed out where?’ Grace snapped back to life.

  ‘Ordinary English seaside holidays, like all these people. Staying in rented cottages and hanging out on the beach all day. Sandwiches and flasks of tea.’

  ‘God Mum, you sound like those people who go on about the good old days. Anyway, we always came to Penmorrow. Why would we need to rent somewhere?’

  ‘Yes but . . . well to me it was a sort of home visit, not a holiday. We didn’t often spend whole days going to the beach, because it was always just there, down the path. And then we’ve always gone to Greece or Florida or . . .’

  ‘Italy like later. Mum?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Alice was negotiating the roundabout now and watching the Isles of Scilly helicopter taking off from the Penzance heliport.

  ‘Do we have to go to Italy? Can’t we just stay here?’

  ‘Well it’s all booked. And what about Theo and Noel?’

  ‘What about them? They can still go if they want to.’

  Alice gave her a sharp look. Grace had rover done this before – split herself and her mother away from the other two. That hadn’t been the idea when she and Noel married: living separately, each was a lone and lonely parent bringing up a solitary child. Together they formed a family – something so very much cosier. Or so she’d always thought.

  ‘Why don’t you want to go?’

  Grace shrugged. ‘Dunno. I’m just OK here. Actually, I don’t even much want to go back to London.’ She shuddered. ‘Traffic, everyone going on about what they’re wearing all the time and all that homework just so the school can creep up the league table. Netball, ugh.’

  ‘It probably isn’t that different down here,’ Alice said, smiling at her.

  ‘But it might be. We should try it.’ Grace was quiet for a moment, then she said, ‘I read Jocelyn’s book.’

  ‘I know. I saw you with it at St Ives. What did you think of it?’

  ‘Not sure. Brilliant I suppose but . . . was Angel actually Joss? Did all that stuff happen to her?’

  ‘That’s what everyone’s been asking ever since she wrote it, especially as she never wrote another. No-one got any sense out of her about it. Sometimes she’d say it was someone she knew but mostly she said she’d just made it up. I never met any of her family so who knows? If it was her it would come out in Aidan’s book, I’d expect.’

  ‘But didn’t you want to know? Didn’t you ask her yourself years ago? And why didn’t you see any grandparents or aunts and uncles?’ Grace sounded quite fierce, frustrated by Alice’s apparent indifference.

  ‘Of course I asked! But what can you do if she keeps changing her mind? One thing she did say, though, was that it was almost worse in her family to have made it all up. Her family were devout Christians and thought she was an irredeemable sinner for having so much as imagined it all. She did say she’d have got less grief if it had all been true, which is pretty damning, wouldn’t you say? And she was an only child of quite old parents. I might have met them when I was tiny, but I think they’re long dead.’

  Alice steered the Galaxy into a space in the Safeway car park. Just beside the store was the railway, and she watched as a train hurtled past on the first stretch of the journey to London. Penzance station was a small, pretty seaside terminus. She remembered the many times she’d got on the train there, wearing sand-filled flip-flops and old scruffy shorts and clutching a straw bag and a rucksack. Then the shock of arriving at Paddington where everyone raced about in neat city suits (Smart Lady attire) and high heels and carrying elegant little handbags. Almost two worlds, she thought as she approached the supermarket door, where a notice requested that customers make sure they were suitably attired and not enter the stores bare-footed and bare-chested. She somehow didn’t imagine she’d be seeing Elvis in the cat-food aisle in here. But if she did, she’d smile at him and say a quick hello. A Cornish Elvis wouldn’t stare through her as if she didn’t exist or give her that look that Londoners did, as if you were the loony they dreaded sitting next to on the tube. Maybe Grace had a point, perhaps they should give it a try, living down here where no-one checked out your handbag to see if it was (oh the shame) last year’s Prada, and you could get change out of £50 for a lobster supper.

  As she wheeled her trolley towards the bakery section, she imagined herself and Noel living full-time in Tremorwell. This was the first time for many years that she’d really felt as if she was part of the place again and not a short-term guest. What would it be like for Noel if they stayed on? If they gave up on Richmond? Perhaps he’d be a happy retiree at first and would roam the county playing golf. But soon he’d be bored and would start thinking he could make an enthusiastic new-blood difference to the local parish council. Women would vote for him, certainly. Next thing you knew he’d be bigging it up in local politics and become a bar-room lecturer on boundaries and by-laws. As for living at Penmorrow, that would be hopeless – like putting two tigers in a box. Mentally, he and Jocelyn would rip each other to shreds along with everyone else’s nerves. A terrible scenario, completely hopeless.

  She hoped Aidan would enjoy his film. Somehow she felt she could be reasonably certain that he wouldn’t be thinking of her as he watched Catherine Zeta Jones strutting about in her bikini.

  Ten

  YOU’D THINK GOD had turned up for a visit, Harry thought, as Patrice and Jocelyn hugged theatrically on the Penmorrow verandah and the wind chimes jangled like mad wedding bells from each side of the porch. There wasn’t even a camera running yet, but Jocelyn was going full out for dramatic effect. She was wearing what she called her rainbow elf outfit: multicoloured hand-painted silk trousers beneath a matching long jagged-hemmed coat with dangling pointy sleeves like a medieval maiden. It had been made for her by Ossie Clark as a generous thank-you for hospitality many, m
any years ago, and was kept as a treasure in tissue paper and a dark wardrobe. Too surprised to refuse, Katie had been roped in after lunch, to interweave a matching rainbow of slender braids into Joss’s plait to perfect the co-ordinated look she wanted.

  ‘It’s really now!’ Katie had exclaimed, admiring the delicate swirls of colour on the fabric. ‘This old hippy gear’s sooo this summer.’ It was a comment that on any other occasion might have gone down less than well with Jocelyn (or indeed with anyone), but Jocelyn was too pleased with herself and too excited at the prospect of being centre stage to find fault or offence.

  Harry met Mo’s eye across the pathway and they exchanged a mutual lip-curl at the mwah-mwah kissing. Patrice was impressively surrounded by silver flight cases full of equipment which Katie, along with Nick the cameraman, had unloaded from Patrice’s Discovery. Jocelyn was gazing at all this heaped-up kit, as enraptured as if they were lavish presents gift-wrapped especially for her. Harry, by contrast, distrusted all this flashy paraphernalia, associating it with the kind of show-off men who drove low-slung cars with personalized number plates.

  Greetings and introductions over, Patrice took Joss’s hand and jumped back down the verandah steps, pulling her with him, keen to inspect the Big Shepherd statue and the pair of angrily snarling bronze sheep that made up his depleted flock on the front meadow. Harry feared for her balance, but the attention of Patrice seemed to inject new vitality into her.

  ‘Are these the only sheep left?’ he asked. ‘I heard there were at least six, including two of them,’ and he lowered his voice only slightly to stage-whisper, ‘in flagrante.’