Away From It All (3 page)

Alice wiped her hands on the tea towel and flung it onto the worktop. ‘Look Noel, I wasn't asking permission. I'm going to Cornwall tomorrow and I'm taking Grace with me, stuff school. I'm happy to take Theo too but if you think he'll miss some vitally
important maths lesson or something, well
you
can sort out arrangements for looking after him. OK? Now I'm off to pack.'

Noel, conceding defeat, gave her the lopsided grin that had first secured her attention at a school parents' meeting six years before. It was a long way from an Elvis-leer but was equally calculated to attract. Alice thought of the man she'd seen in Sainsbury's that morning. He and Noel couldn't be more different. Noel had a decidedly well-tended look, sleek and scrubbed and ever-ready for inspection, like someone who lives in the perverse hope of being run over, purely for the opportunity to be given top marks for their pristine underwear by ministering medics. For his whole life, first by his adoring mother and then by his two wives, he'd been as carefully nurtured as a specimen orchid. Perhaps a short time home alone would remind him, Alice thought, that even a lifelong Golden Boy, maybe even Elvis in his day, sometimes has to carry the garbage out to the bins.

ALICE HAD BEEN
born on Penmorrow's front verandah steps on a searingly hot June night at the beginning of the 1960s. Jocelyn, after many hours of dire pain, felt she had turned into a she-wolf, howling at the moon. The current four adult females of the household had attended her, one of whom irritated her enormously by groaning along in sympathy throughout the labour. She had viciously punched another who'd been insistent that squatting over a mushroom ring on the lawn would soothe the agony and bestow magical fairy qualities on the baby. Jocelyn had also felt cheated to find that in spite of lavish doses of raspberry leaf tea and months of protracted daily yoga, as per instructions in an ancient tome on natural remedies, she did not feel anywhere near as harmonious with Mother Nature as she had anticipated. Nature and God, too pleased with themselves after putting Adam together, had completely bodged the job of creating Eve and had left her with obvious design faults. She would happily have agreed to being whisked off to the local cottage hospital for a major input of pain-busting drugs if the menfolk of Penmorrow hadn't been banished in the only functioning car to do their ritual waiting in
the Mariners pub around the headland in Chapel Creek, well out of speedy summoning distance.

That long hot night, across the small sandy bay, the residents of the village of Tremorwell had turned up the volume on their televisions to drown out Jocelyn's primitive keening and had wondered anew about the sanity of those who lived up at Penmorrow. One or two crossed themselves and offered up prayers for the survival of mother and child. An ambulance was called (it was never discovered by whom) and a midwife arrived in time to find Jocelyn drinking celebratory elderflower wine, and her birth companions anointing baby Alice's head with a concoction of sage and comfrey for health, happiness and wisdom. Contrary to local rumour, the placenta had not been cooked in a pie and eaten (along with the fairy mushrooms). It was buried beneath the sunny strawberry patch where it would, if a fox hadn't scrabbled it out of the ground and stolen it, have enriched the land and symbolically completed the circle of life for that small community.

Penmorrow was accepted locally as both a rich source of gossip and as a harmless enough household of assorted Bohemians and artistic oddballs, and villagers relished casual name-drops when a well-known artist or musician was seen at the pub. Although a nervy few twittered amongst themselves about ‘goings-on', generally the Penmorrow folk were welcomed as long as they didn't get offensively drunk on the beach, indulge in unwelcome molesting or feel the need to know where the stocks of French-labelled spirits behind the counter in the shop came from.

The cast of characters living at Penmorrow was an ever-changing one, and Alice's childhood was punctuated by departures and arrivals. Arrivals delighted her. When someone new was about to join the
household there would be a big cleaning session in whichever room or cottage was currently spare. Jocelyn would bring in great bunches of wild flowers from the garden, or long fronds of pussy willow and cherry blossom. Milly, a frail and edgy painter who brooded about the faithless husband she'd left behind in Liverpool, would donate a couple of moody compositions that had proved unsellable, and Arthur Gillings (the one person, other than her mother, that Alice remembered as being there for her entire childhood) would wheel in, on a porter's trolley, his elegant bronze statue of a sly-faced Pan that always greeted new inhabitants. ‘It's only on loan,' he would warn as they were shown to their quarters, as if in the night they might up and off to London with it and enter it into a speedy, profitable auction.

The Penmorrow furniture was originally heavy and old and gloomy – massive Edwardian wardrobes and chests of drawers the colour of treacle toffee, all salvaged cheaply by Jocelyn as a job lot from a clearance warehouse. Residents were encouraged to decorate any available surfaces, to leave their mark on their rooms in whatever way they wanted for as long as they occupied them, so over the years the treacly furniture gained layer upon layer of thick oily paint.

‘So very Bloomsbury,' Jocelyn had once said to her daughter, twirling round in a room that had walls clumsily daubed with massive tulips and fat parrots. Alice, ten years old and hypercritical, hadn't liked it at all – it didn't look finished. The artist had run out of red paint for the flowers and had given up halfway along one wall, leaving the rest covered with scrappy splodges of green. The parrots were too big and had silly smirks on their faces. No-one ever painted the ceilings in the house, either: they were too high and
too big and there wasn't a proper ladder. Alice minded this: the ceilings didn't match and in a household where disorder was the rule she very much preferred things that did. There'd be exciting walls painted with big primary-coloured shapes, or midnight black with galaxies of silver stars or covered with pale mauve hessian, but above would be a sad, cracked, buff-coloured expanse of old plaster patchily stained from nicotine and long-ago oil lamps, and with untidy chunks flaking off.

Communal areas, the sitting rooms, kitchen and hallways, were painted in rich glossy purples, orange, deep jade green and the brown of bitter chocolate, and stayed much the same forty years on. Visitors would occasionally comment (daringly) that a few coats of magnolia would brighten the place up, but Joss liked her moody jewel colours. A wide-ranging collection of artworks hung everywhere. One of Joss's lovers, in spite of being rejected, had given her an Alfred Wallis painting. Peter Blake had stayed for a while and left behind his early sketch ideas for the Beatles
Sergeant Pepper
cover. There were works by Cornwall painters John Miller and Patrick Heron. Bernard Leach pottery was scattered about on the kitchen dresser, one jug holding a flourishing collection of biros, and an abandoned page of David Bowie's handwritten song lyrics languished in a drawer.

On the days new people joined their household, Alice would hang about in the hallway and sit on the stairs for hours, ears alert for the sound of tyres on gravel, hoping for a new friend of her age, someone she could make camps with in the wood, read school stories (secretly) with and who would join her in building pretend sand-cities on the beach below. When a car pulled up, she'd run to lurk shyly behind
the coatstand and peep out from under Arthur's musty black velvet cloak, breathing in the scent of old cigars and a hint of rum. Sometimes a family in a ramshackle van would arrive, but more often it would be a disappointingly solitary person in the station taxi. Once she'd heard a big argument as the cab driver had tried to charge too much extra for having to transport a loom and two sacks of assorted yarn. She'd been afraid then, only six years old, thinking this new person was fierce and monstrous. She'd never seen anyone really angry, not shouting mad. Penmorrow was full of people smiling; grown-ups claimed all the time that they adored children, revered them for being truly natural beings with secret knowledge from pre-birth. Sad Milly called Alice the ‘prettiest child of the flowers' which terrified and alarmed her. The prettiest flowers were the ones you picked in the gardens, taking them from their plant families and sticking them into vases, deprived of fresh rain and air and true sunlight, where they died too quickly and were forgotten and thrown out to rot on the compost. She didn't want that to happen to her.

Alice took a last loving look into her impeccable sitting room and felt like giving it a goodbye hug. Four shades of meticulously selected white (Kelly Hoppen range from Fired Earth) made up the walls and paintwork, and the subtle nuances of depth and tone gleamed in the early morning light at their most delectable. All the buttery yellow sofa cushions were plumped up and ready to be collapsed into. On the long low glass coffee table
Elle Decoration
and
World of Interiors
magazines sat temptingly waiting, as yet unread. The table by the window held a fresh and lavish arrangement of scented stocks, lupins and delphiniums. Such comfort
and composure wasn't something Alice was overeager to trade for her mother's collapsing Cornwall domain. The kitchen there would make a health inspector apoplectic and on her last visit only one of the four lavatories in the main house had been working – something had lodged in a crucial pipe.

‘Harry will fix it, in due course,' Jocelyn had said airily and carelessly when Alice had suggested calling a plumber. She'd given her that old slow smile, as if Alice was a confused heretic questioning the household's essential tenets. Alice knew what Harry's version of ‘due course' was. It would be when he'd figured out that the idle policy of long-term ‘wait and see' wasn't going to improve the situation and would probably cost more in the long run.

‘You were so lucky that you didn't have to go to school.' Grace stowed the two cat baskets into the back of Alice's Ford Galaxy and stroked the noses of the occupants – one fat old tabby cat, one white rabbit. The cat miaowed crossly and the rabbit snapped at her finger. ‘Behave!' Grace warned them and then climbed into the front seat beside her mother. Theo was sprawled across the back seats. Noel had decided (overnight) that in spite of missing school, an absent Theo was a lot more convenient than one on the premises. Theo would need to have his picky but enormous appetite regularly stoked; he would need to be prised from his bed each morning and would push his luck over drink and squalor in his room and have hordes of huge, noisy, grubby friends tramping in and out. With Theo many miles away Noel would be free to play golf in the sunny early evenings and do something about getting his handicap down to the competition level he'd need to be at if his retirement days were going to have any edge to them. He
could also take Paula, the firm's recently employed receptionist, to Le Caprice and try to persuade her that her feckless eternal-student husband didn't deserve her. The preamble to seduction was a skill for which he liked to keep in practice, and which he considered very much on the same relaxing and battery-charging par as Alice's visits to her aromatherapy masseuse.

‘There's nothing lucky about being uneducated,' Alice reminded Grace, as she did every time her daughter came out with this envy-statement. ‘I
longed
to go to school. I didn't even know what it was till I was about eight and worked out where all the village kids disappeared to in the daytime. And once I'd found out I wanted the whole thing, a uniform, dinner money, homework, playtime milk, skipping rhymes, the lot.'

‘Yeah but no exams,' Theo sighed. ‘Awesome. No SATs, no GCSEs, no having to decide between chemistry and biology when you hate them both. No pervy games teacher nudging your arse in the showers.'

‘Do they?' Alice gave Theo an enquiring look by way of the rear-view mirror.

‘No they don't. He just says that because it's the kind of thing parents take notice of,' Grace said sharply, turning round and glaring at her stepbrother. She wasn't glad he was coming with them, not one bit. Theo (and Noel) treated the whole Penmorrow set-up as if it was a huge joke, as if Joss and Harry and all of them were ridiculously thick for not living their lives the fast urban way, like they did. When they visited the house, Noel and Theo picked silly, pointless faults all the time. Once, Noel had said loudly in front of everybody that Penmorrow was exactly the kind of house where it would be a terrific idea to say yes to anyone who rang up offering a deal on naff PVC windows. He'd say things to Harry like ‘That grass
could do with a good cut' when it was obvious Joss just didn't care about that sort of thing. Long grass in London meant you were really carefully growing a wildflower meadow that you'd read about in some Sunday colour supplement. In London you did it, Alice had told Grace jokingly, the expensive way, sending away to smart nurseries to get all the plants delivered ready-grown in special little biodegradable pots. Joss got better results without trying and the whole thing looked right, all overgrown and woven through with cornflowers and ox-eye daisies and ragged robin and little bee orchids. Everything at Penmorrow grew plump and luscious, like the apple trees in the orchard, where their branches came right down to the ground and you could hide away underneath them with a book. The solitary apple tree in their Richmond garden had been pruned and shaped so drastically it looked like a depressed, amputated thing. And it only produced about six scabby apples a year.

Last time they'd all been to Penmorrow, for a few freezing days after Easter (typically, the heating oil had run out), Grace remembered there'd been a row about money. Noel was keen on money, she'd noticed: he was always talking about ‘financial arrangements', which made her think of vases of flowers. He had chosen to catch Joss at a bad moment, just as they were finishing supper and the grown-ups were all a bit pissed, and told her it was high time she should ‘sort out her affairs'. Grace had laughed because she thought it sounded as if Joss should make lists of all her lovers – and she knew there'd been plenty of them; at bedtime when Grace was little, Joss used to tell her tales of her past loves the way other grandmothers would read Beatrix Potter and
Winnie the Pooh
.