Away From It All

by Judy Astley

  ‘Oh dear oh dear. So you’ve had a fall,’ he said, misjudging Joss’s tolerance of affability and unwittingly causing her to look as if she was thinking of the worst curse to put on him, and to reply, ‘How clever of you. I’d better warn you that my brain cells didn’t fall out in the process.’

  Alice had groaned quietly. Whatever would Jocelyn be like in a hospital ward? She’d probably be thrown out for complete lack of co-operation.

  ‘By mid-morning that Mrs Rice at the shop will have spread it around that I’m about to snuff it,’ Joss grumbled after the doctor had checked her over and left, conceding only that she would lie on the sofa, although she’d been adamant she was quite capable of climbing the stairs back to her own bed.

  ‘It was lucky,’ she whispered to Alice while the others were getting stuck into the medicinal brandy, ‘that I’m what Harry would call “completely out of it”. Makes you so very relaxed.’

  Alice wasn’t so sure. Would Jocelyn have even contemplated wandering down to look at the stars if she’d been entirely in her right mind? She didn’t think so. And she’d feel worse in the morning when the bruises came up, however much arnica and paracetamol she’d had. Who’d be there for her when she was living alone in Cygnet, Penmorrow sold and Harry and Mo far away off the premises?

  There was a loud scuffling from outside and Theo and Chas raced in looking frantic. Alice wondered where they’d been – probably down to the pub with the surfers, although it was now close to midnight. Chas and Sam weren’t thirteen yet – had Mo and Harry even known they were out of the house? Was she, she then wondered guiltily, so much better – assuming but not checking that Grace was safely tucked up in her own bed with her cat, or camping, as she sometimes did, in Sam and Chas’s den here in the main house?

  ‘Where’s Grace and Sam? Are they here?’ Theo looked round as if expecting to see them emerge from under a chair. He didn’t seem to notice Jocelyn, or that everyone – apart from Noel who’d been fast asleep fully clothed on Gosling’s sofa when Mo came to tell them about Joss’s accident – was dressed for sleeping.

  ‘Aren’t they with you?’ Stupid thing to say, Alice realized as the words came out. ‘Were they with you? Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Shit. They’re not back.’ Chas slumped into the peacock chair and stared out of the window. The wind was getting up and plump black clouds were now scudding across the moon.

  ‘Theo – just tell me, where have you been and where did you leave Grace?’ Noel cornered his son by Joss’s statue. Theo stuffed his hands deep in his pocket and stared at the floor.

  ‘We were being chased,’ he admitted. ‘Grace and Sam went one way, we went the other. We came back . . .’

  ‘Back from where?’

  ‘Um . . . she’d dropped her watch somewhere. We were just helping her find it. Then there was this man and the dog. I think the others must have . . .’

  ‘They’re in the cave. I just know they’re in the cave.’ Chas leapt out of the chair and went close to the window, leaning his forehead against the glass and peering into the darkness as if he could actually make out his twin and his cousin in the dank hole in the rocks. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Twelve thirty, near enough,’ Noel told him. ‘Why on earth would they be in a cave? Why don’t they just come home?’ He moved close to the boy, looking, Alice thought, as if he wanted to shake information out of him. She stood next to Noel, frightened, taking his hand.

  ‘Because they can’t get out.’ Chas said the few words in a chilling whisper. ‘It’s about an hour to high tide. It’s a spring tide.’

  ‘We’re stuck, aren’t we?’ Grace looked down at the sea, watching the waves rise up close then pull far away again. In the dark the vast water looked like a huge creature that was trying to reach for her but couldn’t quite get there. It didn’t look as if it was going to give up trying, either.

  Sam didn’t say anything. He stood beside her on the ledge, pointing his torch up at the cliffs. She could see he was worried. She began to get scared.

  ‘It’s high tide now, isn’t it? How long till it goes down enough for us to get home?’

  Again, Sam said nothing. Why not?

  ‘Sam? Are you listening to me? It’s so cold.’ She wrapped her arms round herself, wishing she was wearing more than a thin towelling hoodie and her V-Dolls cut-offs. She pulled the hood up over her head and huddled her hands up her sleeves.

  ‘It’s not quite high tide.’ He said it so quietly she could hardly hear, and it took her a few moments to realize what he meant.

  ‘There must be another way out,’ she said, frantically jumping up to see if there were handholds up on the cliff. ‘We could climb up to the top.’

  ‘Too dangerous, too slippery, too steep,’ he told her. ‘Come back inside, come and help me make a fire.’

  ‘Oh great, so we’ll die warm then.’ Grace was close to terrified tears but followed Sam to his fuel pile at the back of the cave and started to help him carry kindling to heap up on the ledge.

  ‘It’s for a signal. Someone might see. And anyway Chas should guess where we are. We’ll be OK.’

  Grace wanted to scream, wanted to yell ‘No we won’t!’ at him, but he was being so calm, so controlled, that she could only get on with what he told her to do.

  ‘If we had room the best thing would be to have three fires. That’s an international distress signal,’ Sam told her as he carefully stacked the sticks. ‘But we haven’t got space or enough wood so it’ll have to be one. Someone might see us. They must.’

  It was the middle of the night. There were the red lights of a couple of helicopters moving across the sky out in the distance, miles and miles away on the horizon. Harry had said they were from the naval base, doing night manoeuvres. They weren’t much use manoeuvring so very far away. Grace, close to panic, wanted to sit in the cave’s mossy back corner and weep quietly with her thumb in her mouth, waiting for whatever fate decided. She could feel the little bag with the charm in it inside her top, and she reached under and touched the piece of silk. She’d wished she could stay in Cornwall, that she wouldn’t have to go back to live in London. It looked as if she was about to be granted just what she’d wanted. She imagined her mother staring down at her sea-bloated body in a cold grey mortuary. Would she be in one of those big fridge drawers like they had on TV programmes? She and Sam would be stacked away like a pair of frozen pies.

  The fire lit with the first match. Sam watched his little stack of dry leaves and kindling crackling into life. Grace wondered how long it would last before the sea spray killed it off again and then crept up the rocks to claim her and Sam as well.

  Ropes. Harry knew exactly where to find them. He kept a collection of them at the back of the ruined shed where the little tractor was parked. They were neatly coiled and hung on a row of hooks, just in case. There hadn’t actually been an emergency ‘just in case’ before, that he could think of, and he hoped the damp air hadn’t rotted the fibres away to dangerous uselessness.

  Even Patrice was coming with them. There’d be plenty of people to get the kids out. Noel knew about climbing techniques, or so he said: he’d done all his rock-climbing way back in his university days. Harry tried not to feel doubtful about this, telling himself that it might have been a long time ago but rocks and ropes don’t change a lot over the years.

  Alice ran on ahead with Theo, Aidan and Chas, racing down to the village and up the side of the far hill, fear and dread combining to give her the strength and speed to keep up with the young ones. She could see the glow from the small fire that Chas pointed out. At least it confirmed where Sam and Grace were, and, presumably, that one or both of them were still alive: if the fire kept burning the sea hadn’t yet got to the ledge.

  ‘No helicopter yet.’ Chas looked disappointed. Alice had called the coastguard, concerned that they should be prepared with a back-up rescue route. It wasn’t that she didn’t think Noel could get to the children, but suppose they were injured?
Suppose they were just too frozen with exhaustion and fear to be able to haul themselves up the rope?

  They’d reached almost the top of the cliff, the best place, Noel was certain, for him to go down with a rope and collect Grace and Sam. Alice saw a flicker of something white on the grass beside a copse of trees and for a moment thought Grace had managed to get out, but it flashed away into the bushes. Grace’s white rabbit. At least that had survived.

  Noel was going down the rock by himself, secured at the top by the other six. Patrice was the last of them, the anchor if all the others mysteriously fell over or dropped into a dead faint. Noel hadn’t been very keen on Patrice, but if he turned out to be the one person who kept him from falling into the heaving sea he’d probably feel like asking him to move in and set up home with the family.

  ‘You have to go first. Noel’s nearly here,’ Sam said to Grace, looking up the rocks as Noel slithered his way down with the double rope.

  ‘No you’re the youngest, you go,’ Grace argued. She didn’t much want to go up the cliff. She was terrified but she also knew they had no choice. The sea had just started to lap at the lip of the ledge. The spray had put the fire out. She and Sam were both soaked and shivering.

  ‘No you go first, really. I’ll be OK.’ Sam was grinning at her. She couldn’t think why. What was there to smile about? Noel scrabbled down the last few feet and dropped onto the ledge beside Grace. On a tearful impulse she hugged Sam close to her. ‘I’ll see you at the top.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Look. I’m waiting for my lift.’ He pointed across the bay. A helicopter was approaching, its sound almost drowned by the noise of the sea.

  ‘Luckeeee,’ Chas and Theo, hair blasted in the gale blown up by the helicopter’s rotor blades, agreed as they lay on the top rock up by Grace’s bench, the place from where they could best see Sam’s dramatic rescue that was about to take place below. Grace was safe, tied to the double rope and half-hauled, half-climbed up to the top. Sam, though, that was something else.

  ‘Hope he remembers about the static,’ Chas said, half-expecting a big blue flash as Sam got hold of the winch sling. No flash came, but after a few moments, whirling up fast through the air, came the helicopter. The door was still open and they could just see, waving and grinning at them in the first sunlight of the day, the brazenly cheery face of Sam.

  ‘Aidan gave me this last night just before that mad supper. I forgot to give it to Grace.’ Noel, bringing a cup of tea up to Alice the next morning, put Grace’s watch down on the window ledge. ‘He found it lying on the verandah. The catch is broken. I’ll see if I can fix it and then give it to her later, after she’s had a chance to sleep off last night.’

  He sat down on the bed beside Alice and handed her the tea.

  ‘Thanks, Noel,’ she said, taking a reviving sip. ‘I should be the one bringing tea for you. Hero!’ She leaned across and kissed him. She felt close to tears, remembering not only how close she’d come to losing Grace, but how determinedly, selflessly, Noel had taken it on himself to get the girl to safety. It was what you did for your own flesh and blood, the sort of spontaneous bravery that you got in real families. Like theirs, if only she’d realized it.

  ‘Look, Alice, I’m not bothered about Italy,’ he said. ‘We can go any old time. Some things are more important.’

  ‘Would you really not mind? I’m sorry but I think I should stay with Joss for a bit. She’s made some decisions.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Do whatever you need to. Grace and Theo will be happy to stay on, they seem to love it here. And you, you’re not the same as back home.’

  ‘Which one do you prefer?’ Me here or me there?’

  ‘Either. Both.’ He laughed and hugged her. ‘Bring this version of you home as well when you come back!’

  ‘Unless . . . unless I don’t come back?’ No, that sounded wrong. Noel looked as if she’d hit him with a brick. ‘Not coming back? But why?’

  ‘No, no I didn’t mean it like that!’ She slid her arms round him. ‘I was just thinking, now that Joss has made the decision to sell Penmorrow. What’s really so great to go back for? For any of us?’

  Grace sat on the battered red leather beanbag beside Jocelyn’s peacock chair. The beanbag was so dried out and faded, it looked like mummified skin that she’d seen in a museum on a school trip.

  ‘Did you think you were going to die?’ Jocelyn asked her.

  Grace thought for a moment. ‘A bit. Well no. Not really. Because Sam didn’t. He was sure Chas would get something sorted.’ Actually she hadn’t thought about the actual dying process. She’d thought about getting wet, about being in the sea and being tossed around on the rocks and about how it would hurt. She’d thought about being cold and sodden in her clothes and about the taste of too much salt, but drowning and what it would feel like hadn’t crossed her mind at all. She didn’t know whether that was a failure of imagination or not.

  ‘You’re young, you’re still blessed with that certainty that you’ve got all the years you need. You stick with that.’

  ‘What about you? Are you all right? I heard you fell down the stairs. Did you think you were going to die?’

  ‘Heavens no! There wasn’t time! My fall simply illustrates the dangers of overindulgence.’ Joss sighed. ‘Learn something from that. Though of course you probably won’t, you’ll make your own errors, as you should.’

  ‘If you’re going to overindulge, make sure you do it in a safe place.’ Grace sounded as if she was reciting from a book. ‘See, I did learn something.’

  Grace was fidgety with excitement. She was not going back to London. Even Noel was excited about the idea. Alice was in full hyper-organization mode, doing her favourite thing with notebooks, making lists. There were builders to be talked to, schools to be checked out, agents found to handle the house sale in London. Penmorrow was going to be home. Mo was in a thoroughly happy mood. Some of the money from selling the Richmond house was going to buy them a bed and breakfast place in St Ives – something manageable, size-wise. Mo was going to have time to paint again – she could think of no better place to do it. Gosling Cottage would be hers and Harry’s to visit whenever they wanted and so that Harry would carry on with his vegetable-growing. The home-grown cannabis movement would, he’d decided, have to carry on without him. Those long scarlet peppers were the thing, those and stripy yellow and green courgettes. Pretty food sold well. Arrange a multicoloured selection of those, with red and white onions and a long vine of cherry tomatoes, and punters would almost knock you over in the rush to hand over silly money.

  ‘When I was in the cave,’ Grace told Joss, ‘I thought about that charm I’d made with the mushrooms. I’d asked it if I could somehow not go back to London. That was the only bit when I thought I might die – when I thought the charm had worked and that I was getting what I wanted but not how I wanted it.’

  Joss shook her head and smiled. ‘Ah, but that’s the trick. It’s just as well you’re going to be staying close to me,’ she said. ‘You’ve a lot to learn yet. There’s a knack to it. Lesson one is: be careful, very careful, what you wish for.’

  Almost a year later Jocelyn’s book (Angel’s Flightpath) had made its way into the shops and onto the review pages in the smarter Sunday papers. It had only been out a couple of weeks but was reported to be doing well. Several journalists had ventured (on expenses, enjoying the May sunshine) to Penmorrow to interview Joss, and she was revelling in her new, though possibly brief, go at fame. Libby Purves had been gratifyingly sweet on Midweek. The Sunday Times ‘Day in The Life’ piece had been startlingly well received. It was only with reluctance she’d turned down Graham Norton on the grounds that it clashed with Grace’s school play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which, as Titania, she’d worn Joss’s Ossie Clark rainbow elf outfit.

  Jocelyn had a dozen copies of Angel’s Flightpath lined up on the top bookshelf in Cygnet. Alice had caught her looking through each of them in turn, as if one mig
ht prove to have something different in it from the others, something that even Joss hadn’t known about herself. Aidan’s name featured in almost insultingly small print, she noticed. A hard, thankless job, ghosting, Alice had thought, seeing how little credit he’d got. No wonder he’d given so little of himself away. Why should he? No-one was paying him to spill out his personal life to strangers.

  The family were all together now, gathered in the sitting room at Penmorrow waiting for Patrice’s programme to begin. The roof had been the first priority and while the scaffolding was up the windows had been replaced with the perfect hardwood replicas that Alice had insisted on, much against the opinion of Mrs Rice and the other two dragons in the shop. ‘You want nice polyurethane replacements,’ she’d advised. ‘You’ll never need the painters in again.’

  Alice had smiled and nodded politely, just managing not to point out that ‘not painting’ was fine if you were content only to live with white for evermore. She’d gone for a paler, subtler version of Joss’s original purple and very fine it looked, in her and the family’s opinion. What the village thought, she didn’t much care. In the rest of the house, too, she’d been surprised at herself for not choosing her usual shades of putty and cream. One bathroom was to be John Oliver’s vivid Kinky Pink, another was to be a Caribbean mix of turquoises. Penmorrow, the house, was almost making its own choices, and they were vibrant and exciting.

  The builders had been on site for a good seven months now, for five of which and a damp cold winter, Alice, Grace and Theo had stoically continued to live in Gosling while Noel worked out his notice and dealt with the sale of the Richmond house. On Penmorrow’s middle floor, three bedrooms and one of the bathrooms were now finished enough to be habitable and the kitchen was a designer’s wet dream, though with the revamped green Aga proudly reigning over the chic improvements, like an ancient dowager over a collection of frisky young debutantes.