Away From It All

by Judy Astley

  ‘Oh, given away, drifted away, wandered as sheep do,’ Jocelyn told him airily. ‘Larry Olivier had one, and poor Jimi had one in London to take back to the States with him. But then of course he died, poor love, as so many did . . .’

  ‘Jimi? Heavens! We must have all this in shot at some point!’ Excitedly, Patrice wheeled Jocelyn round and placed her beside Big Shepherd, alongside whose mottled greeny-brown bulk she looked extraordinarily delicate and slender in her floaty silks.

  ‘Isn’t this thrilling?’ Patrice asked the assembled company. Harry trusted that he didn’t expect an honest reply. It didn’t seem thrilling at all to him or to Mo; more disruptively unwelcome and likely to lead, when this motley entourage had left, to a long, tedious period of Joss being grumpily discontented. She’d be like a child after too many ice creams: bad-tempered, unmanageable and wanting more. And where was Alice? Where had she vanished to so early in the day, leaving Noel, when he’d come trailing up to the house in search of her, looking like a complete spoon. A complete abandoned spoon.

  ‘So nobody’s seen her?’ Noel had asked rather bemusedly, accepting a slice of compensatory toast from Mo. There’d been a bit of an awkward silence in the kitchen then while each of them speculated on why Alice would have vanished without bothering to tell Noel, till Katie had proffered the suggestion that Alice might have popped out to get a newspaper.

  ‘In the car?’ Sam had added an extra lashing of scorn to his usual amount. ‘Don’t be schtoopid, the shop’s only down the lane!’ Mo had reached out and cuffed him across the head, like a mother lion. Joss had frowned and tutted, disapproving deeply of physical discipline, although, Harry reflected, it could probably sometimes be a lot less painful all round than the emotional sort.

  ‘And of course you will show me absolutely everything? For the full Penmorrow flavour?’ Harry heard Patrice saying, the level of enthusiasm rising ever higher in his voice. He hoped, sincerely, that Jocelyn wouldn’t show him quite everything. If his special-project polytunnel got any kind of TV exposure Harry would be making his escape from Penmorrow faster than he’d anticipated, by courtesy of something custodial dished out by Truro Magistrates Court.

  ‘So where did you go? And why didn’t you wake me? We could have all gone out together somewhere.’ Noel was on the Gosling terrace surrounded by discarded sections of newspaper when Alice and Grace came back. He had read every word of the Sunday Times and even had a shufti at the Appointments section, mainly to tut-tut at the mega salaries offered for jobs that didn’t seem to have any real meaning, such as Transaction Valuation Analyst. What the buggery, he’d thought, was that when it was at home? Was it a jumped-up term that really meant ‘Counting the money in the shop till’? Or was he getting old and out of touch?

  ‘We just dashed out to Penzance – did a bit of supermarket stuff, you know. Sorry – we were a bit longer than we thought we’d be.’ Alice sat beside him and opened a bottle of beer for each of them. She was looking pleased with life, quite radiant really in her new windblown sort of way. He should, Noel thought, have made more effort with her last night. She might have been more persuadable than she’d let on. He would have done if he hadn’t drunk so much of Jocelyn’s port after supper. The foray into that Oz girl’s underwear had come to nothing when she’d laughed and swatted him away. Insulting really. She’d said, and her very words still stung, ‘If I’d fancied a clumsy fumble I’d have gone for your schoolboy son, matey.’ She’d taken her time saying it, though – he’d got his hand close to a nest of warm, damp pussy first. Decidedly not a girl who went in for the full Brazilian waxing, thank the Lord.

  ‘We went to the shell shop and bought these,’ Grace told him, holding out a Safeway bag to show him her booty. ‘I’m going to make a shell mirror for my room here.’

  ‘Your room? I thought Gosling was part of the great Penmorrow holiday rental empire.’

  Alice gave him a sharp look as Grace went back into the house, which he felt mystified about interpreting other than to realize he’d said the wrong thing. When, here, he thought with irritation, did he ever manage to say the right thing?

  ‘She just wants to do something creative, Noel. Who knows, it might fit in with one of her GCSE Art projects when the time comes.’

  ‘Good, good, whatever she wants.’ He raised his glass, conciliatory, then added, ‘I see someone’s been touching up that tatty old mural in the bathroom. The mermaid’s got her tail fin back.’

  Alice laughed. ‘Don’t tell Joss, for God’s sake. She made me promise not to touch it. I interpreted that as “Don’t paint over it” and just filled in bits that had faded or gone missing. At least now it doesn’t look downright shabby. I brightened up the mackerels’ stripes and the clownfish too, where the orange had chipped off, and I put some of the silvery flashes back on the seaweed. I’m pretty sure she painted it herself, though if she finds out what I’ve done she’ll tell me it was Picasso, the day before he died or something.’

  ‘Whole place needs gutting, if you ask me. Start again, get the builders in. There’s really no point fannying about dabbling at bits and bobs and hoping it’ll look like something anyone would actually pay serious money to take a holiday in.’

  Alice frowned at him. ‘Not everyone wants show-home standard when they get away. Some people who come here are looking for an atmosphere, a history.’ Even as she spoke, Alice recognized that she’d thought along similar lines to Noel only a few weeks ago. She could hardly believe what she’d just said, she who kept her spice jars in alphabetical order and had been considering changing her fabulous blue glass work-top for charcoal granite purely because a few smeary fingerprints tended to show up on it. She who bought a new front doormat every March 1st (the same day that every curtain in the house went to the dry-cleaners) and reminded Mrs Pusey to dust the light bulbs. Even the lavender hedge lining her front garden path stood tidily to attention, there was never a stray crisp packet crackling about under the seats in her car and every one of the white Egyptian cotton sheets in the airing cupboard had a size label (S, D, K) for easy identification.

  ‘We could go out now if you want, all four of us, drive somewhere by the sea and have an early supper somewhere?’ Alice suggested to Noel. Where, she wondered, had the day gone? She wasn’t really hungry – she and Grace had sat on the bench by the Penzance harbour car park eating chips out of a paper bag and licking ketchup off their fingers. Her Richmond persona didn’t do that sort of thing, she’d told herself as she’d chucked a couple of lush, fatty morsels to a persistent gull, but then in Richmond you couldn’t get chips as good as these.

  ‘Mum said she wanted to cook fish for all these poncey people at the house. Something special, something they wouldn’t get up country,’ Sam was saying. He, Chas, Theo and Grace sauntered up the hill behind the village sucking ice lollies, catching the drips with their tongues as they melted fast in the late afternoon sun.

  ‘So?’ Theo said. ‘Let her. Wossa problem?’

  ‘Yeah but then she said trouble was, you could get anything anywhere. She said that cooking man from Padstow had told everyone on telly how to cook everything Cornwall’s got,’ Sam went on. ‘So I got this idea. Carp. Most expensive fish in the world. Exclusive, is the word.’

  Theo looked at him, puzzled. ‘So what do we do, get a boat and go out and catch them or what?’

  Chas sighed, despairing. ‘It’s a freshwater fish, right?’ Theo scowled, feeling he was being pointed out as the idiot in the bunch. Sam joined in, pointing down towards the bay. ‘And look, Theo, even you townies can see that the big wet stuff out there is seawater. Salt water is what’s out there, not fresh.’

  ‘Or not,’ Sam said with a devilish grin. He jumped up onto a wall outside the square-fronted three-story city-dweller’s dream of a four-square Georgian country house, and peered through the fuchsia hedge into a densely foliaged garden. Grace read the sign on the wall by the gate: ‘Hamilton House. Gardens open Tuesday and Friday. It’s closed, we can’t go
in.’

  Sam gave her a pitying look. ‘Course we can’t go in. Not on those days, you have to pay and it’s full of grockles. Some old bloke takes ancient trippers round in poncey groups and tells them what the plants are. Palms and stuff. It’s really big, goes all the way down to the seafront, nearly. There’s a great aerial runway in there too and ropes and stuff for little kids to play on.’

  Theo looked at him blankly. ‘So? Do you two wanna sneak in there and play?’

  Chas jumped up on the wall next to Sam. ‘They’ve got the carp in there, I’ve seen them. The pond’s huge, practically a lake. The fish are big ones, massive even. It’s deep though and carp are sly bastards.’

  Grace looked mystified. ‘So what’s the big deal? Can’t Mo just cook something else? What’s wrong with cod or something? Plaice, sole, monkfish, jellied bloody eels? Why’s it have to be carp? Are you sure she’d want them?’

  Chas and Sam stared at her, silently and intently. Why wouldn’t they say something, she wondered, they were so quiet and . . . twin-like.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘Mum wants something different,’ Chas said. ‘She hardly ever gets her own way. Sometimes she should, that’s all.’

  ‘So you see, for us, carp isn’t just fish,’ Sam added. ‘Carp is a mission.’

  Grace looked at Theo, wondering if he actually got the point of this, if there was one. It would be helpful, she thought, if he’d enlighten her.

  ‘Aha – like hunter-gatherers,’ Theo said, a smile spreading slowly as he looked at Hamilton House’s locked gates.

  Oh, a boy thing, Grace thought, relieved. Well that let her off the hook, then. When her mum wanted some weird food that was a bit different she just went to a new deli or something. That was the point of living in a town. If Alice wanted Thai stuff she went to the oriental supermarket on the Kew Road. If she wanted authentic Asian spices she drove over to Southall. For an ace Chinese takeaway she just rang up The Good Earth and they delivered. Easy. That’s what evolution was about, surely. In fact it wasn’t only women who’d found these modern things called shops; even Noel sometimes came home with a bag from Harrods food hall with something gorgeous that someone else had concocted for an unfamiliar meal.

  ‘So what we’re going to do first is we’re going to the beach.’ Sam and Chas looked at each other in a way that Grace could tell meant they’d made a big decision. ‘And we’re going to give you two a lesson in your hunter-gatherer survival techniques. That’s if you’re up for it.’

  Grace sighed. Survival techniques. Right. This sounded like the trek you had to do in the sixth form if you wanted to get the Duke of Edinburgh’s silver award. Stuff about being careful you didn’t prod the roof of your tent or the rain would get in. Instructions to wee downstream of where you want to drink the water (which sounded fine in theory, so long as there wasn’t another D of E group camping two hundred yards up the hill), and to collect only bits of kindling that were dry and upright on the forest floor, not lying in soaking mud. And of course, as Sophy would say, always keep your vodka in a mineral-water bottle so no-one suspects.

  Sam and Chas led the way to the beach and then up to the rocks at the far end, intent on carrying out the first stage of their ‘mission’. Theo and Grace followed, trailing a bit and wondering what they were in for. Grace decided that on balance she was quite pleased to be included and it wasn’t as if there was anything else to do. You could have a bit too much time alone for reading and lying in the sun, she thought, though she’d like to have been wearing shoes more suitable than flip-flops for climbing if they were going to be scrambling up the cliffside.

  ‘You don’t say anything, right? Not to anyone?’ Sam warned at the foot of the rocky hillside, just past where a small headland jutted out to the sea’s edge.

  ‘OK,’ Theo agreed.

  ‘Sure, but what’s the big mystery?’ Sam ignored Grace’s question and began to climb the rocks, which were damp and claggy with seaweed.

  ‘Up there, in that cave. We’ve got the stuff ready. You got any matches?’ Chas asked Theo.

  Theo clambered across the rocks, his feet in their fat-soled trainers slipping awkwardly. ‘I’ve got matches. Is that it? You kids come up here to smoke gear?’

  ‘Er, like we’d need to?’ Sam said, shaking his shaggy head at Theo in scorn. ‘We can do all that at home.’

  Grace skidded on the rocks and she was lagging behind, trying to find less precarious places to put her feet. She slid into a rock pool and slimy weed tangled itself round her ankles, but at last she reached the small ledge at the front of the murky, damp cave that Sam and Chas seemed to have made their headquarters. There was a mothy brown blanket hanging from a jutting rock, one of their school lunch boxes was lying open on the floor and a heap of soft-drinks cans glinted in the gloomy far corner next to an old rusty bucket that stank horribly of dead sea-life. There were two heaps of wood close to the cave’s entrance, one of fairly thick branches and another of twigs and smaller sticks. There’d been a fire on the ledge before – she could see pale grey scuffings of ash on the rocks. She thought of the clearing in the woods where she’d watched the boys doing their bizarre ritual trap-setting. Did these two have dens all over the village? Were they turning into feral children?

  ‘Doesn’t the sea get up this far?’ she asked. ‘I mean, if you keep stuff in here . . .’

  ‘Only at spring tides, most times not even then,’ Chas told her. ‘It’s neaps just now.’ Then he gave her a lordly grin. ‘I don’t suppose you know what that is, townie girl.’

  ‘Course I do, stupid. I live by the Thames, we know about tides too.’

  ‘Well good. Anyway, what we’ve got to do is this. First we light the fire. Matches, Theo.’

  Chas and Sam built a small wigwam of dry twigs, scattered dried-out grasses pulled from the hilllside over it, and Theo tried unsuccessfully to light a match.

  ‘They’re damp,’ he said, adding a third one to the kindling.

  ‘Give us it here.’ Chas took the box from him, removed a match and started rolling it in his hair.

  ‘What are you doing? Are you mad?’ Grace was amazed, almost expecting to see Chas’s head burst into flames.

  ‘Electricity in your hair, it dries it out.’ He struck the match and it flared. ‘Simple!’

  Sam handed drinks round while they waited for the fire to glow hot and fierce, then, when it had burnt down to scorching embers, he brought the bucket from the back of the cave and tipped a mixture of seashells and snail shells over the coals.

  ‘We’ll give it a while. Come back after dark and collect them when they’re ready and cooled down,’ Sam said.

  ‘Yeah but ready for what?’ Theo asked. ‘It looks like some kind of spell or something. The kind of thing Joss might do.’ He sniggered and Grace glared at him. She didn’t want him slagging off Jocelyn. However crazy her grandmother might be, she knew stuff. Useful stuff. Like how to get a boy to fancy you by doing things with herbs and oils. Half her class at school liked to think they were witches. Her mum said it was a craze, too much watching Sabrina and Buffy, a typical girls’-school thing, and she even put a bit of it in the books she wrote. They got together in cliquey groups, lighting candles and concocting spells and carrying bits of painted cloth to represent people they wanted to control or get revenge on. They were completely, stupidly ignorant of the Law of Threefold Return, by which they were for sure going to get back three times the power that they’d hexed on others. Then they’d feel it where it hurt. Joss knew all this for real, not just for playing with, from way back. Grace wasn’t going to diss her: she was sure she was going to need plenty of that kind of knowing to help her on her way to being a grown-up.

  ‘Just think of this as fishfood.’ Sam scuffed his foot over the coals so that they died down on the scorching shells. ‘I’ll say no more.’

  ‘We should have brought the children,’ Alice said to Noel as she drove down the quayside at Porthleven. ‘It wasn’t very fair j
ust to leave a note, especially for Theo – he’ll be wanting to spend time with you.’

  ‘Well they should have been there,’ Noel countered. ‘We could have waited in all evening for them to turn up and ended up starving. They’ll be all right; when they get back from wherever they’ve been they can get a bit of lentil pie or whatever else Mo is boiling up in her cauldron.’

  Alice backed the Galaxy into a space alongside the harbour, carefully keeping a good safe distance from the sheer edge. If she was too close, Noel would be stepping down twenty feet, splatted into the muddy low-tide water. And how horrid am I, she asked herself as she switched off the engine, to wonder if that would be such a bad thing? ‘You’re very unfair to Mo,’ she told him. ‘She’s a brilliant cook, especially given the vagaries of the Penmorrow people’s various diet requirements that she’s had to put up with over the years. She can do anything from all-out vegan to the Atkins all-protein by way of Raymond Blanc. Plus nearly all the veg is home-grown and organic.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s just that it’s hard to feel you’re getting the full gourmet experience from someone who looks like she’s still cooking in a cave.’

  Alice bit her lip to keep herself quiet. She was tempted to ask him why on earth he’d come to see them at all if he was going to be so bloody supercilious about absolutely bloody everything. She looked him over closely as she locked the car and crossed the road to the restaurant. Noel didn’t ‘do’ casual clothes terribly successfully, just as he didn’t ‘do’ Penmorrow in a terribly good mood. At this moment he reminded her of Tony Blair, having the same slightly gauche air about him and looking as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his hands. He was wearing jeans but they were hyper-clean, fresh from Mrs Pusey’s fearsome ironing. His dark blue polo shirt had good-boy creases on the sleeves and the cream cotton sweater was so symmetrically draped round his shoulders it looked as if he’d spent time in front of a mirror pinning it into place. He was no more comfortable in his surroundings than he was in his clothes, even though Alice had chosen the Smokehouse restaurant as being the closest to a contemporary urban eaterie for him. He stopped in the doorway and peered round suspiciously as if he expected it to be full of either hooray yachtsmen taking up too much space with their massive yellow Henri Lloyd jackets, or fishermen smelling of trawlers and smoking pipes stuffed with evil sour tobacco.