by Judy Astley
He was very tanned, she thought, contrasting him with his town-pallid father. He also looked unusually comfortable with his body for a change. Back at home he tended to slouch around as if he was too self-conscious to unfold himself properly. She’d commented on it once and Grace, more sensitive to a teen boy’s feelings than she obviously was, had warned her not to do it again. Noel, lacking any sensitivity at all, had said loudly in front of Theo and a room full of their dinner-party guests, ‘He shuffles about with his hands in his pockets and all hunched over so his trousers don’t fall down.’ Then he’d increased Theo’s embarrassed misery by adding, with toe-curling jocularity, ‘If they drop much further we’ll all be able to see if he takes after his dad.’
Even Alice had winced at that one, but she’d suspected Noel might not be far wrong – Theo and all his friends went around with their trousers slung so far down they looked in danger of an imminent and calamitous debagging. Grace and her girly friends at least had hips, albeit skinny ones, to hold their clothes up. There was a girl quite close to Theo at the café now, Alice realized, perched a little way along the same rail, all long legs and bare brown middle. She couldn’t see from that distance if he was actually talking to her. Probably not. Conversation was another of those things teenage boys didn’t do a lot of, she’d discovered, along with getting up in the mornings without protest and remembering their games kit for school.
Noel and Harry had bagged a stretch of beach by the rocks against the sea wall which would be in the sun till the very last rays warmed the sand. They’d gone ahead of the others, loaded with coolboxes and picnic baskets and barbecues, and had joined forces to get a driftwood fire going. Noel had sunk bottles of wine deep into the chill damp sand and the two of them had had a chat about cricket and got a couple of beers down before everyone else joined them. Alice, Mo and Aidan could see them as they reached the lane that led towards the shop and the pub.
The shop looked busy – people were bustling in and out and a number of villagers had collected outside the door by the phone box for what looked like a pretty intense gossip. Who, Alice wondered idly, was their picked-over victim this time? It was a long time now since Penmorrow .had been the main focus of collective curiosity, though Jocelyn’s illness and the presence of Aidan had revived ripples of interest. In a brash (though futile) attempt at finding out what his role in the household was, Mrs Rice had cheerily ventured to suggest the term ‘toy boy’ to Harry but had had no luck there: unworldly Harry had simply come back to the house and asked Mo if the woman had been talking about some robot that was going to be that Christmas’s must-have toy, and if so were the twins about to hanker after one.
‘So you’ve been relegated to the second division of Joss’s favourites,’ Alice teased Aidan as the two of them approached the gathering outside the shop.
Aidan sighed. ‘Certainly looks like it. Just when the book was going well, she suddenly doesn’t want to talk about herself – well not to me anyway; she doesn’t have any trouble with Patrice. “Publishers can wait. Television can’t,” she said to me yesterday when I told her it was time we moved on towards the 1980s.’
‘She’s just revelling in the attention,’ Alice reassured him. ‘This time next week when they’ve gone she’ll be all yours again, you’ll see.’
‘So what am I supposed to do? I’ve done as much as I can for now. I might as well go home for a few days, see if she’s back down to earth after they’ve gone.’
Alice laughed. ‘Down to earth is probably the last thing Joss will ever be.’ She hoped he wouldn’t go. Sometimes Aidan seemed to be the one sane link holding the household together. She’d told him as much that morning, as she’d sat on his bed, telling him what she remembered about Arthur’s burial in the orchard, while he took notes at his desk by the window.
He’d frowned and looked a bit worried. ‘It goes with the job,’ he’d said, shrugging off her comment as if afraid that it would lead to her dragging him under his duvet. ‘I’m just supposed to be normal and pleasant and nice to everyone concerned, like a sort of blank neutral thing – get them to trust me enough for complete hundred per cent confiding. You get told, well you sort of find out . . .’ and here he’d hesitated, looking at the floor. ‘Well you sometimes find out a lot more than is destined for the actual book.’
Alice, pretty sure that he was no longer talking about Joss, had left quickly after that, pleading urgent Cygnet-renovation ideas to note down before, as she imagined he might, he backed so far out of what he might consider to be her lust-crazed grappling range that he fell out of the window. He’d sounded slightly unpleasantly calculating, as if he had no real interest in any of them beyond his professional capacity. Perhaps he hadn’t. After all, as soon as the book was finished he could erase it and all of them from his mind, get started on whatever was next. Possibly he’d be moving on to a rock star with memory problems, a sportsman resentful of speedier upcomers. Who knew?
Still, she was glad he’d found the Arthur story really poignant. She’d been truly delighted that he’d not expressed the slightest hint that he considered it absurd to bury someone on home ground in a handwoven willow coffin. If he went, she’d be left with Joss’s fawning suitor Patrice and the steamy pouting Katie. Mo sulked and fumed, Harry was miles away, anaesthetized from reality by the effects of whatever crop he’d been sampling, and Noel was restless, jumpy and out of place. Only Grace, Theo and Aidan – and of course Jocelyn – seemed comfortably settled, perfectly contented and relaxed as if Penmorrow was an absolutely wonderful place to be. And it was. Or could be, a year’s worth of building work permitting . . .
The attention of the small crowd by the phone box was suddenly diverted as two police cars squealed down the hill and whizzed up the dust as they swished into the pub car park.
‘Murder at the vicarage?’ Aidan suggested, laughing as four policemen, as if personally exhausted by the speed at which they’d driven, lumbered heavily out of the cars.
‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ Mo replied dourly. ‘Everyone’s off the vicar since he went all happy-clappy.’
‘So the Sign of Peace is more of a battle cry here?’ Aidan ventured.
‘So they say,’ Mo said, allowing herself a rare and, Alice thought, rather pretty smile.
The twins hadn’t, as far as Alice could see, brought their catapults to the beach, so the Tremorwell seagulls should be safe for a while. She wasn’t too surprised – Sam and Chas were hardly likely to misbehave so dreadfully on home territory. Even Jocelyn, who had encouraged the thrifty collecting and cooking of roadkill back in the commune days, wouldn’t approve of pointless cruelty to inedible birds.
As Alice spread her trusty plastic-backed blanket on the sand she could see the boys watching her stealthily from the far side of Harry. They were quite unnerving, with their intense blue gazes and stolid expressionless faces. She wondered if she was the only one who imagined unknown thought processes going on in their heads and passing without speech between the two of them. It wouldn’t be unusual with identical twins, but these two weren’t identical and yet managed to give the impression that they shared a single, highly active, mischief-seeking spirit.
‘Been a robbery in the village, Mo,’ Harry called from the rock he was sitting on beside Noel. The two men were looking very companionable, Harry puffing deeply on something pungent from a small pipe and both of them drinking beers from cans. Alice guessed they were on at least their second, possibly third, for Noel was no longer looking as awkward as a catalogue model decked out in hyper-clean leisurewear. Patrice was fussing with Nick and the camera, muttering about sand getting everywhere, and Katie was sprawled with her eyes shut on a towel in a red bikini, oiled up to a mirror-like sheen against the weak late afternoon rays.
‘Robbery? Where?’ Mo called back to Harry.
‘Up at Hamilton House, you know the one with the gardens?’
Grace slid silently down from her perch on a rock and went to make herself unobtrusively busy, po
uring more wine for Joss who was sitting on a low, folding wicker chair and waving an empty glass in the direction of the coolboxes. Grace was very quiet today, Alice thought. Probably missing her friends. She’d talk to her about it later, see if she’d changed her mind about having Sophy down to stay for a few days.
‘That’ll be what they’re all nattering about then, up at the shop. Well at least we know now,’ Mo said, pulling her foil parcels out of their box. Alice had made a big bowl of salad in the Gosling kitchen, keeping well out of Mo’s way. Couscous and herbs. She’d told Mo she’d got the recipe from Jamie Oliver’s book. Mo wasn’t sure about that young man – he seemed a bit flash and cocky on the telly, though the food looked good and tasty enough. As far as she was concerned you couldn’t beat the old dignitaries: Elizabeth David and Robert Carrier or her special favourite, Jane Grigson. None of those did thrown-together things with couscous. Still, the herbs were from the Penmorrow garden and would be fresh and tasty. She just hoped the couscous stuff wouldn’t get stuck in Harry’s crumbling molars.
‘We’re going to be really informal with this, everybody. Just carry on as if we weren’t here.’ Patrice called them all to attention to talk about the shots he wanted. Katie had put on a sarong and was ready for duty. Nick and Dez were at last satisfied with the level of natural light.
‘He shouldn’t have said anything,’ Aidan whispered to Alice. ‘I think we’d forgotten he was here.’
‘Now we’ll all be looking sideways at the camera every time we say anything,’ she giggled.
‘Perfect!’ Patrice called across to her. ‘That’s the kind of thing I want, just casual chatting amongst yourselves! I’ll start with Noel and Harry attending the barbie. OK Harry? Let’s roll!’
The foil parcels of fish were stacked around the edges of the barbecue, out of direct flames. Mo handed Noel a bunch of skewers on which were part-cooked pieces of corn on the cob. ‘Give them something to chew on while they’re waiting,’ she told him, happy to hand over outdoor cooking to him. She didn’t trust barbecues. They were unreliable and uncontrollable and nothing ever came out as perfect as it could if it had been put in an oven, even with an Aga as variable in temperament as the one at Penmorrow.
Joss was getting fidgety and quite hungry. Patrice was supposed to be talking to her about beach parties of old but instead was zapping about getting what he called ‘background’. What did he need that for? He’d said the programme would end up only about forty minutes long. She’d got a lot more than forty minutes’ worth she could tell him. Surely he could just sit with her and they could chat, as they did up in the hexagon window in the sitting room. He was a very good interviewer – he just had to remind her with a key word or two and her memory was off like a greyhound from a trap. Only that morning they’d talked about Angel’s Choice as a potential contemporary West End stage revival, and whether Marianne Faithfull could offer anything new to the part of the mother. She’d be an excellent casting, having played Angel herself quite exquisitely in the first stage version. Joss had had some further thoughts on that, and she wouldn’t mind airing them while they were fresh in her mind.
Harry didn’t look comfortable being the focus of attention like this. He was a very private man and hadn’t even been asked if he minded being centre stage in shots for this documentary. Joss was starting to feel a little like making something of a scene, just to rescue the poor chap. There he was, awkwardly poking at the coals with a knife that would probably start to melt in the heat any minute, while Noel wittered on and on about the sea view from the golf course over at Mullion.
‘I think this lot is ready!’ Noel called, brandishing a spatula on which rested a steaming foil parcel.
‘Plates, Alice,’ Mo said, directing Alice towards a frayed but once-grand picnic basket that was incongruously stacked with paper plates, paper napkins and plastic forks. Alice handed them round, noticing that Theo had chosen exactly the right moment to extricate himself from the surfers and join the party. He wasn’t alone either: two of the bulky policemen were striding over the sand alongside him. They had a look of important purpose about them. Harry, catching sight, shoved sand quickly into his pipe and stowed it behind his rock.
‘Evening everybody.’ The first of them, who Alice thought resembled Fred Flintstone, removed his hat and greeted them all. Patrice looked flustered but signalled to Nick to keep the camera going as everyone mumbled a reluctant hello at the two men and Noel, ever polite, offered them a drink.
‘Er, very kind but no, thank you,’ the Flintstone said. ‘Just wondered if you’d heard the news.’
‘About the robbery at Hamilton House? My son just mentioned it,’ Jocelyn said. ‘Was much taken?’
‘Only about fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of koi carp, madam.’ The two men were at an almost caricature level of officiousness: arms folded, no hint of a smile, though Alice guessed they were finding it hard to suppress their delight at telling about a juicy, expensive crime in such a quiet holiday village. No-one said anything, but the twins started up into spluttery laughter. She sympathized with them; it was almost beyond a joke that anything living in a pond could be worth that much.
Mo had arranged hunks of fish, steaming and sumptuously wafting, on a large plate with lemons and wedges of bread that she’d baked that morning. Harry had freed them from the foil and given the skins a flaring at the end so they were crisp and slightly blackened, just enough. She was on the point of handing them round and obviously it would be courteous to begin with the unexpected guests.
‘Nice piece of fish, gentlemen?’ she offered to the two policemen. Alice handed them paper plates, forks and napkins and smiled as they gave in to their appetites and accepted eagerly.
‘And do be careful of the bones, won’t you?’ Mo reminded them. ‘We wouldn’t want you to choke.’
Thirteen
‘YOU COULD COME back home now, couldn’t you?’ Noel suggested to Alice as they lay in bed in Gosling, listening to the owls hooting to each other up in the woods behind the village. Alice always wondered why the countryside was ever described as ‘peaceful’. At night you could barely get to sleep for the sounds of wildlife murdering, mating or generally shambling about in the undergrowth. She turned her attention from the conversing owls back to Noel, who was saying, ‘There doesn’t seem to be much wrong with Jocelyn. I’d say she was pretty much on form again. Why don’t we drive back together the day after tomorrow? You’ll need time to get yourself together for Italy.’
Alice wasn’t so sure. She murmured a non-committal ‘Hmm’ to show that she’d at least heard what he’d said and then lay silently staring at the blotchy ceiling, thinking about what ‘home’ involved. It seemed an incredibly long way away. It was as if the longer she spent at Penmorrow the more distant the house in Richmond became. At the moment it felt about as far away as Alaska. If she stayed much longer the idea of travelling back would be as mind-bending as a trip to a far planet. And what was there that she was missing so much?
She thought about London’s traffic grime, tube strikes and bad-tempered drivers, about unexpected, scary shoutings in the streets at night. On the mornings after major rugby matches in nearby Twickenham every main street in the borough had its patches of dried-out vomit, shredded plastic glasses and drifts of fast-food litter. She thought about the school-run mothers in their massive (and very clean) off-roaders who scurried here and there for manicures and Pilates classes, courses on Container Planting for Colour and cliquey little reading groups. Did she really want to go back to those supper-party discussions that she’d had time and time again about whether it would be a wily move to send the children to a sixth-form college so that they’d be able to claim to be State-educated for the purpose of biased university entrance? And did she want to hear one more person loudly declaiming that Ikea’s suede rag rug, Artist shelving unit and Pelto table were design classics to rival anything by Philippe Starck?
Alice also thought about her work. She could choose now,
and it hadn’t occurred to her till she left her routine behind at the far end of the M3 that she had the choice, whether to carry on with her Gulliver School books or simply stop and either write about something else or take up another occupation. Instead of writing a turgid boarding-school version of EastEnders, she could leave her fictional pupils exactly where she most loved them, forever suspended on the verge of the chaos of their teen years. Lately, she’d felt more sense of achievement in choosing the perfect shade of blue for Gosling’s kitchen than she had from banking the cheque for her last lot of TV rights. Overprivileged, that’s what I am, she told herself, quite aware that if anyone else was whingeing this much to her she’d want to give them a good shake. How many people would almost kill to swop places with her?
‘I wouldn’t mind giving it a bit longer here, just to see if there’s anything else I can do to help. Harry and I made some tentative plans for Cygnet that might be worth pursuing. He won’t do anything unless I gee him up,’ Alice said eventually. Beside her Noel sighed, out of a drift towards sleep in which he’d assumed he was going to be left unanswered. ‘You could go back though,’ she told him. ‘If you want to, that is. I mean, what about work?’
‘Work.’ Noel sighed again, deeper this time. ‘Oh yes, let me see, that’s the thing I have to get up at six for every morning and travel to, crammed in with bun-munching, coffee-swigging hordes like a pig in an abattoir truck.’
Alice sat up abruptly and looked down at him. She’d never heard him express anything remotely resentful about his work routine. His face was staring up to the ceiling, expressionless, an eerie greeny-gold colour with the moonlight shining on him. He’ll look like that when he’s dead, she thought, with a vivid flashback to Arthur Gillings and the way she’d found him, lying stretched out on the Gosling sofa as if for an after-lunch doze, his velvet cloak around him and pulled up to his chin so only his pale, creased face was exposed. She’d sensed a lack of life as soon as she’d come into the room; there’d been something unnervingly tense and frozen about the air in the cottage, even though the log fire had been blazing away.
