by Judy Astley
Alice had arrived to bring Arthur a lobster she’d been given down by the shore. It had a claw missing and so wasn’t sellable and she’d thought, as he’d always loved lobster, that he might like her to cook it for him. He hadn’t been eating very much for a long while but had dismissed any suggestion of doctors or treatment. Joss had moved into Gosling to be close to him and try to help him out of the depths of doomy depression that kept overtaking him, but even she, with enough energy for the pair of them, had had to admit that he had given in and seemed ready to be moved on, passively surrendering, from one world to whatever came next.
Alice, unable to wake him and perfectly aware why not, had nevertheless raced to the house and called an ambulance. Then she and Joss had gone back to Gosling and sat beside his body, all the windows and doors open so his soul had, as Joss put it, every choice of exits and no excuse to hang around resentfully haunting over the years. Smoke from the fire, caught up by the surfeit of draughts, had swirled around the room like Aladdin’s lamp genie and made her wonder if it was only partly smoke and partly the mists of departing soul. When he’d been taken away, Alice, feeling in need of something to do, had plumped up the sofa cushions and handed Jocelyn the purple velvet one with the long silver fringes on which his head had been resting. It had been just slightly warm. It was still kept close to Jocelyn, in the peacock chair by the hexagon window, as if the last of Arthur’s spirit had permeated into its fabric and feathers.
Noel was still staring at the ceiling, wide-eyed and now wide awake. It was way past midnight. Alice wondered what he was thinking about.
‘Do you want to give it up? The job?’ she asked.
‘Only the commuting part,’ he said after a pause. ‘Only the mindless office banter and the greedy clients.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes then,’ she said, lying down and snuggling into his shoulder. ‘Can you think of something else to do instead?’
‘Golf. A vineyard in Australia. Asking Catherine Zeta Jones if she’d like to swop her old man for another one the same age. Nothing that would make any cash. I can’t collect on the pension for another couple of years and running those kids and our life isn’t cheap. No, I’ll just keep going. So what about you? Have you decided when you’re coming back?’
Jocelyn woke up and sniffed the air. She could smell cannabis in the house. Harry must be having an early morning smoke up in the attic bedroom. She knew he indulged most mornings just to get himself mellowed out a bit to face the day. She realized her feelings were somewhat hypocritical, for over the years there wasn’t much in the way of organic mind-enhancing substances that she hadn’t made use of on occasions, but she rather wished he wouldn’t, especially now those boys of his were getting to a tricky age. Times were different now. The twins were the type who’d be sure to try anything and everything and wouldn’t stop at the more natural substances, especially if they knew that was the day-to-day potion of choice of their father. Teen years were for rebellion, for having something to get you to feel different from the generation before. Harry was making it hard for the boys to be anything less than dangerously extreme in the area of chemical experimentation.
Smoking the stuff also made Harry vague and dozy, so that he went through the day only half-finishing jobs that he’d started. If he wanted to smoke he’d do better to keep it till the end of the day, when there was time to relax. Things weren’t getting done that needed to be done. Harry had made a start on fixing the boarding on the verandah months ago and seemed to have forgotten all about it, leaving a big hole where he’d removed the planks under the hexagon window. Small animals were living underneath and using the gap as a handy doorway. Jocelyn could hear them scurrying about at night. They were probably rabbits, the whole headland was overrun with them, but it could be foxes taking advantage of the unusually big space and digging themselves a cosy earth under the house. It would be impossible to get them out and before you knew it they’d be chewing their way up through the floorboards and into the house itself, biting through flimsy electricity cables and dislodging essential pipes as they tried to get to food supplies.
There were, she was sure, old rat traps in one of the sheds – they might be big enough for a fox. She would get the twins to put a couple down, see what turned up. They’d enjoy that and it would give them something useful to do for once. Perhaps they could then finish fixing the boarding – a sense of achievement might provide an incentive to help their parents a bit more – in the old days all Penmorrow children took on practical jobs. Even a toddler would understand which were the ripe tomatoes to pick and put in a bowl; Alice was in charge of growing mung beans and alfalfa at only five.
Jocelyn didn’t feel right. She’d had fearsome fatigue ever since the barbecue on the beach. At first she’d assumed it was the effects of the sun and the wine and having to concentrate on what Patrice wanted from her. He kept urging her to talk about how much Penmorrow was a story of faded glamour, and had pushed her towards discussing its tatty present when she wanted to tell stories of its vibrant past. What was it he wanted from her? Nobody wanted to watch a programme about an old run-down house. They wanted to know, surely, about the better times.
The exhaustion should have gone by now, after a few fairly restful days. She had talked Patrice through the final years of the commune and about how she rarely, these days, was called upon for opinions and comment. The last one had been a year or so ago, a piece for The Times’ ‘Been There, Done That’ column, about being an artist’s muse. All those years with Arthur had been reduced to eight hundred facile words and a telling-off from the features editor for mentioning only in passing the many other artists Joss had sat for and whom (in the editor’s not-humble-enough opinion) the current readership would consider more fashionable and more amusing. ‘You surely can’t have meant to leave out any mention of the Thorpe-Appleby portrait?’ had been said in a tone of whispered incredulity, as if hesitating to hint that Jocelyn must be losing a grasp of her memory. No, Joss had insisted, she had meant to leave it out. She did not want to give daft, mopy Milly the chance to think being painted by her had been some kind of life highlight, or that she was in the least impressed that Milly was now Dame (if you please) Melissa Thorpe-Appleby. Not so much as a Yule card for ten years, after all the help, support, nurturing, tear-mopping . . .
Jocelyn clambered slowly out of her bed and walked across the plaited rug (the chalk power circle hidden beneath it wasn’t proving as effective as she’d hoped) to spend a few moments leaning on the window ledge and looking out across the bay to the far headland, waiting for the initial stiffness of her joints to stop throbbing. All those years of yoga and now, since her illness, she couldn’t manage a proper sun salute without her balance giving out. Instead she greeted the day by watching it awaken from her window and taking in every tiny change.
Leaves on the beech and oak trees weren’t quite changing colour yet, but had a dry look to them, as if they were becoming too tired to take in nourishment. She felt very much the same. Some vital energy was failing inside her but all her senses felt especially acute, as if she was an animal in the woods on full alert for a fatal predator. And that was just what she was, really. The predator was death, creeping ever closer. She could almost pick out footsteps padding on the ground as she and her maker cheated each other by turn. What she needed was another spell, one with a special ingredient, she thought as she opened the bedroom door and ran her fingers over the dried-out verbena wand on her way out. She would get Grace to help, so that she could add that elusive element of youth. It would also be an opportunity to pass on some useful tips to the girl. It might be best, perhaps, if Alice didn’t know about it.
Patrice was pacing the orchard muttering urgently into his phone. Alice and Aidan sat on the bench by the table, drinking coffee and shelling undersized broad beans that Harry had brought in from his vegetable garden. Noel had gone off to Clowance to play golf with a retired accountant that he’d met in the Mullion clubhouse, where they’d mad
e an impact on a bottle of Scotch and discussed the Ryder Cup.
‘He’s having trouble with the commissioning people,’ Aidan whispered. ‘I heard him complaining to Nick that they’re talking about cutting these “Whatever Happened To . . .” programmes down to fifteen minutes a slot and that it’ll now be late night. The kind of very late night that only ancient insomniac intellectuals watch.’
‘About three people then. Poor Joss, I think she was under the impression this would be a prime-time thing, something on a level with The South Bank Show. I could see her imagining that it would lead her on to things like Start the Week, so she could harangue Jeremy Paxman and tell him he had suburban morals.’
‘Well lucky I’ll be long gone by the time it’s on, then. I wouldn’t want to be around for a full-scale fury demonstration!’
‘I’ll be gone too, I expect,’ Alice told him. ‘We’re supposd to be going to Italy.’
‘Family holiday. Nice,’ Aidan said, smiling. She wondered what he was really thinking. He’d sounded sardonic but it was hard to tell – his chic narrow glasses had photochromic lenses and as he was facing the sun they’d gone inscrutably dark.
‘Nice? Is it? Which bit?’ she asked.
‘Nice family, nice holiday; you choose!’ he teased, leaving her none the wiser.
‘I don’t actually want to go,’ she said suddenly, surprising herself. She’d arranged it. Of course she wanted to go.
He shrugged and raised his glasses so she could see his eyes. He was definitely teasing her. ‘Well don’t. You’re a grown-up, you choose.’
‘It’s not that simple. What about the others?’
‘Just tell them . . . hey, I know, make it like school: tell them you can’t go, you’re feeling a bit icky and you’ve got a note from your mum!’
Alice punched his arm. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I didn’t go to school! I’ll have to go. I don’t do copping out. It’s all fixed.’
Patrice flipped his phone shut and came to slump onto the collapsing Lloyd Loom chair opposite Aidan and Alice. He crossed one long denim-clad leg over the other and his cream deck shoe dangled from his tanned foot. ‘Bloody wankers,’ he grunted, shaking a cigarette out of its pack, lighting it and inhaling impatiently. ‘Nothing ever goes right in this fucking business. Nightmare.’ He inhaled again, fast and furious. Alice noticed his hand was trembling.
‘Work not going to plan?’ she said, cheerily glib.
Patrice gave her a sharp look. ‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ he said. ‘You know what it’s like. Or rather, of course,’ he flashed her a superior grin, ‘you don’t.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Aidan cut in.
‘Don’t know what?’ Patrice challenged.
‘You don’t know that Alice doesn’t know. You were being patronizing.’
‘Aidan, man, it doesn’t matter . . .’
‘Alice might be an executive producer at Tiger Aspect for all you know. She might buy and sell people like you between lunch and a sundowner any old day.’
‘Do you, Alice?’ Patrice stubbed his cigarette out hard on the grass, leaned forward and stared intently into her face. It was almost possible to imagine, that for the sake of his programming schedule, he hoped her answer would be yes.
‘No, but . . .’ It wouldn’t do him any harm to know that her work, if not his, rated mainstream TV slots and hugely healthy viewing figures.
He wasn’t in a listening mood. ‘Well there you are then.’ He got up and strode away.
‘That was naughty, Aidan.’ Alice giggled. ‘We wound him up.’
‘He deserved it. He’s a tosser. And worse, he’s a creepy hypocrite.’
‘Is he? In what way?’
Aidan hesitated. ‘Just something I heard him saying to Katie down on the beach the other day. He . . . well he was a bit disparaging about Joss.’
Alice gathered up the empty bean pods and shoved them into their Tesco’s bag. Her hands were muddy and her nails were green-grimed from the beans. She used to be, only weeks ago, the sort of person who’d either do this job in stout Marigolds or buy beans ready-prepared from M & S. ‘So what did he say?’ she asked. Aidan shrugged.
‘You wish you hadn’t mentioned it now, don’t you?’ she prompted. ‘Go on, tell me. I’ll get it out of you.’ Regretfully, she recognized she now no longer wanted to do it by wrestling him to the floor so that they rolled together shrieking with giggles like grappling teenagers. The girlishly silly crush had vanished: it could be the last one she ever had. Rather sad.
‘I know you will. OK. It wasn’t much, just that he’s not quite so fawningly devoted to Joss’s great oeuvre as he pretends to be. He was telling Katie that she shouldn’t bother reading Angel’s Choice, that it was a dated little unimportant book and nothing special. And now I really wish I hadn’t told you. Sorry.’
‘Hmm. No don’t worry about me, it’s fine. I’m glad to have it confirmed that he’s just a smarmy sod who got what he wanted by doing his homework. The old me would probably say good for him – he knows what it takes.’
‘Does that mean there’s a new you?’ Aidan asked. ‘Where did she come from? Did I meet the old one?’
Alice didn’t even know where what she’d said had come from. She thought for a moment, then said, ‘I think the old me came down here from London a few weeks ago but sort of decamped again after day one. I’ve changed a bit. A lot. It’s being here. I feel like part of Penmorrow again. This is the first time since I left at seventeen that I’ve felt like more than a swift visitor, and the place has got to me. I’d never ever normally think of cancelling a major family holiday.’ Nor would she, she didn’t add, think of passionately (though drunkenly) kissing a stranger in the woods and wishing that it (and more) would happen again. Poor Noel, it wasn’t his fault, she thought guiltily.
‘But when you go home you’ll soon get back to your normal self, won’t you?’ Aidan asked.
Alice thought for a moment. ‘Probably. But I’m not sure I want to. I quite like this being my normal self.’
She could hear the sound of her car tyres on the driveway, traced the swish of them as they rounded the bend past Big Shepherd’s patch of meadow and then the silence as the engine was switched off. Noel was back from his golf. He’d be looking for her, looking for her decision about whether they were to pack up and leave the next day or not.
‘Sam, can I ask you some things?’ Grace found her cousin round at the back of Harry’s polytunnels, attaching bits of wire to a long slim branch.
Sam looked up at her, suspicious. ‘What things?’
‘Nothing bad, just family things.’
Sam sighed and grinned at her. ‘I thought you were going to ask me stuff I might have to keep quiet about,’ he said. ‘I’m good at lying but I think you might be good at knowing when I am.’
Grace laughed. ‘I’m flattered! I think. Do you mean you thought I was going to ask you about what Harry’s growing in there?’ She pointed to the plastic tunnel where the elegant leafy plants had grown almost as high as the roof and the smell could have attracted nostalgic ex-hippies from miles around. ‘Because I’m not stupid. You wouldn’t have needed to lie. I wouldn’t run off to the police.’
‘No, s’pose you wouldn’t. Specially after the carp . . .’ He sniggered.
‘Did you know they were worth that much?’ Grace asked, watching carefully for signs of non-truth.
‘Course not!’ Sam looked indignant. ‘They was fish! It’s a bit like going out to catch a rabbit and then finding you’ve brought home the only solid silver bunny in the whole world! If we’d known, me and Chas would’ve just gone round to Chapel Creek and nicked a few lobsters from the tank at the back of the Mariners pub instead. What did you want to ask me?’
‘Well . . . it might sound stupid but have you got any more family? Aunts, uncles, any other grandparents?’
Sam screwed up his eyes, concentrating. ‘Yeah. Mo’s got a dad over in Padstow. Sometimes we go and see him. We call him Grand
ad, not Jim. Joss said that was . . .’
‘Commonplace.’ Grace supplied the word for him.
‘That’s the one. Commonplace. So it is. For most people, just normal. Nothing wrong with normal.’
‘She always says “commonplace” is the worst thing you can say about anyone. I was just asking, because I don’t seem to have anyone else. My dad’s folks are in America and Mum doesn’t have any contact with them, so it’s just Harry and Jocelyn and you and Sam. You’re the whole of my family.’
‘Aah! Bless!’ Sam teased. ‘You’ve got Theo and Noel,’ he pointed out.
‘Not really, we’re not related. And they’ve got a whole fleet of relations of their own, enough to make a football match. You should see Theo’s birthday cards, all Aunty this, Aunty that. Mum says that Joss says that when you’re born, you’re the future. You shouldn’t go looking back or sideways. Doesn’t stop you wanting to know things about what you’re coming from.’
‘Suppose not.’ Sam had gone back to his stick and wires now.
‘Stopped Mum wanting to, though,’ Grace continued, suspecting Sam had lost interest. ‘She’s not got the titchiest bit of curiosity about where she comes from.’
‘That’s because she comes from here,’ Sam said, threading a piece of cord down the loops along his stick.
Grace laughed. ‘Yeah, that’ll be it. Here makes you weird. Er, Sam? What are you making exactly?’
He tied a slip knot in the end of the cord, leaving a loop about a foot deep. ‘A running noose,’ he told her, holding it up. ‘You creep up to a place where the birds are roosting,’ here he stood up and demonstrated on a nearby plum tree, ‘at dusk, then you sneak this in through the leaves, get the loop round a bird’s neck and PULL!’ He tugged the cord and a plum fell to the grass. ‘See?’ he said, delighted with his handiwork.
