Away From It All (11 page)

So there had been some rules, Alice thought as she emerged from beneath the bed and sat up, her head spinning slightly. She could feel cobwebs in her hair, sticky with long-dead insect carcasses. Harry was at the doorway, rock-still, arms folded, just watching. She wondered how long he'd been there and why he hadn't said anything.

‘Harry, do you remember if there were any house rules actually written down for this place? About who could do what and about housework and food shopping and stuff? I've always thought of it as being completely anarchic but it can't really have been. And do you remember Milly being punished for lighting candles? It seems strange that she couldn't be trusted to decide for herself what was safe and what wasn't.'

Harry came in and started collecting up the card mounts, piling them tidily in size order on top of the
mattress. He took his time thinking before saying, ‘There were all those meetings where anyone who wanted to speak had to wait their turn to sit on that huge squashy suede bag thing. There was a special name for it, but I can't quite . . .' He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead hard with his thumb knuckle, looking as if he was trying to knead out the memory.

‘The beef bag! That was it!' Harry, pleased with his technique, grinned at his upturned thumb as if it was solely responsible for the recalled memory.

‘Oh yes, that was it. If you had a complaint or wanted to change how the domestic set-up worked, you had to line up to take your turn on it at one of the house meetings.' Alice laughed. ‘When I was little I used to think it was called that because it was actually stuffed with old meat. And it was a sort of dirty maroony red colour which I thought was from blood. It scared me a lot.'

‘A lot of things scared me.' Harry was looking pensive now, wary even.

‘What sort of things?' Alice asked him quietly. He shrugged and the thumb went back up to his head.

‘People coming and going all the time, I suppose. That feeling that you weren't really very safe.'

‘What did you not feel safe about?'

Harry sat down on the mattress, which creaked grumpily at being disturbed. He picked up a piece of torn cardboard and started tearing tiny, evenly spaced rips into it. ‘Dunno. Nothing particular, just a feeling. Like . . .' he hesitated, scrabbling for the right words. ‘You didn't know who to get close to because then they'd just go. Especially if Joss had a row with them. There was that music bloke, the American rock star she took up with for a bit. All velvet and leather. I liked him, we played beach cricket for hours. We had
a laugh. Then one day he'd just gone. No goodbye, no nothing.'

Alice remembered. ‘Ah yes, Jamie. Sat in the polytunnel playing his guitar and singing to the chickens. I wonder what happened to him.'

‘See, that's what I mean. Once people went beyond the far gate and out of the village it was like they'd died or something.'

‘Perhaps he had. We could ask Joss.'

Harry laughed. ‘Yeah and you know what she'll say? It'll be, “Oh darlings, so many people, such a long time, you can't expect me to remember every waif and stray who fetched up here.”'

‘Or she'll do that looking-into-the-distance thing and say, “Best forgotten sweetie, best forgotten.” Still,' Alice said, ‘I suppose she thinks of them as
her
collection of memories, not really anything to do with us. That's probably why she hadn't bothered to tell me about this autobiography. Probably didn't want to think we'd have anything relevant to add.'

‘But we were here. So of course it was to do with us,' Harry pointed out as he gathered up the unwieldy heap of cardboard and stuffed it in Alice's binbag. ‘And that's what pisses me off about her bloody book. These should be our memories too, well everything after we were born, anyway. Perhaps they
would
have been if her bloody ego hadn't swooped them all up and claimed them for Jocelyn's Corner.' He picked up the bulging bag and stamped out through the door, calling back to Alice, ‘I'll take this lot down by the sheds and burn it. Best to be rid.'

Grace was lying on her raffia mat on the beach, about to start reading the first chapter of Jocelyn's sole oeuvre,
Angel's Choice
. She'd found a drawerful of the
books in the big chest in Joss's bedroom when she'd been looking for scissors to trim her fringe. She hadn't been snooping around, she'd asked Joss about the scissors and been told to help herself, to look wherever she thought that scissors might possibly be. There hadn't been any in the bathroom. She'd searched the damp cupboards beneath the basin where the shelves had been crammed with little brown bottles of dried-up ancient herbal remedies, fat glass jars of aspirin which must have pre-dated all kinds of modern packaging regulations, and rolls and rolls of grubby crêpe bandages with their ends neatly secured in place with curved nappy pins. Grace couldn't help thinking, as she tried to read the faded labels, that her own mother would have had a fit: all medicines in the Richmond house were locked away in a sparkling chrome and glass cupboard high out of reach of any visiting human under five feet tall. Alice even bought paracetamol in packs of no more than twelve, as if she anticipated Theo and Grace pulling such a terminal sulk after a minor spat that they'd be sure to wolf the lot.

In the drawer in Joss's giant oak chest, there must have been well over thirty copies of the book, all carefully piled up and covered with tissue paper. Grace had looked through them, interested to see that there were several different covers. The dates of publication varied and the latest ones just had the words: ‘First published in 1959'.

She knew about the book of course; she'd always known that Jocelyn had written something years before that had been hugely famous. There'd been a film of the book too, but although she knew that, she hadn't thought to check whether they'd got it down at Blockbusters, any more than she'd thought of looking in Waterstones to see if
Angel's Choice
was on the
shelves. Once, at school, the morning after her mother had been to an open evening, Mrs MacDonald who taught English had been weird in a class and kept looking at her. At the end of the lesson Old MacDonald had kept her behind and been creepy, saying things like ‘your eminent grandmother' and ‘seminal classic'. It had all been a bit unintelligible for a twelve-year-old and had made Grace and Sophy giggle because they were pretty sure ‘seminal' was a rude word.

From Joss's collection in the drawer, Grace had taken what looked like the latest copy of the book, a paperback dated only a few years ago and with a cover that had a blurry oil painting of a mostly blue girl looking at herself in a bedroom mirror, her hands together as if she was praying, though with the fingers splayed out. The painting, it said, in tiny letters on the back cover, was by Melissa Thorpe-Appleby. The room the painted girl was standing in looked dismal and cramped, as if she'd grown too big for it but couldn't escape. Reflected in the mirror was a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling and books, like strewn homework, lying on a bed that was a saggy brass one, a lot like Jocelyn's own. Also on the back of the book it said:

Grace wondered now why she hadn't read it before. It hadn't even been offered to her, which was a surprise, as her mother was always on at her to read more. There wasn't a copy of
Angel's Choice
in the Richmond house, that was for sure. Alice's Gulliver
School books were lined up proudly in order on the bookshelves in the sitting room where Noel thought they looked a bit silly – like toys among antiques, he'd said. Grace had read all those – Alice gave her the manuscripts as soon as she'd finished them so that Grace could check them over for dated vocabulary and unlikely clothes. She was pretty good though, her mum, and hardly ever got anything much wrong. Which was worrying. It meant she kept a close ear and eye on Grace and her friends, listened perhaps a bit too hard in the car on the school run when Grace thought she was well into some dull thing about money or education on Radio Four. But as for this book, Grace had always known Joss had written one (she knew that was how Penmorrow had been bought), but had assumed it was some dull old thing about really old grown-up people. But it wasn't. It was about a girl of fifteen. Her age. Well, her age soon enough, anyway.

Grace rolled onto her side and groped into her bag for the sunscreen. If she was in for a long afternoon's read she wanted to get a gorgeous even tan doing it, not a seared-meat look. A few yards away, across at the beach café, she could see some of the surfer boys looking in her direction. Theo was probably there – he'd taken to hanging out with them and was putting in lots of practice on a borrowed surfboard. She hoped he'd tell her if she looked minging in her red bikini. He hadn't commented at all. Either he just didn't bother to look, or he thought she wasn't worth looking at. Or he was being stepbrotherly and kind and just avoiding saying that her tummy hung out over the front in a really, like, offputting way, or that she needed a bit more up top to carry off a halter neck. Grace quickly smeared factor six over her legs and the bits of her back that she could reach and lay down on her front.
She shoved her old and fraying straw hat on and pulled it down low so that the shadow of its brim fell across the pages, and started to read.

Jocelyn wasn't supposed to react like this. What was there about this refurbished kitchen that was not likeable? Alice just didn't get it. All that work, from scrubbing out murky corners that no rubber-gloved hand had approached with a J-cloth for years, to painting a wash of pale aqua paint all over the walls and ceiling. What had been the bloody point?

‘You just don't understand, do you Alice?' Joss looked at her daughter with an expression of resigned despair. ‘You never have. You can't just leave things alone, let them lie, let them rot away if their time has come.'

Jocelyn considered that Alice was looking very pleased with herself. In fact she was annoyingly bouncy, like a puppy who's just so cleverly retrieved a thrown ball. What she didn't realize was that in this case, to Jocelyn, it was as if she'd returned carrying a trophy that was shocking and foul – a severed hand came to mind.

‘I thought that was what I was here for – to help stop things rotting away.' Alice was smiling, still sure of herself, showing off her efforts. Joss ran her fingers along the scrubbed wooden worktop, then along the smooth, newly painted window ledge. It felt too clean, too silky, too not-hers.

‘Where did it come from, Alice, this urge to organize and meddle, to list things, to polish things up, make them into the shiny gleamy things that they simply weren't and were never meant to be?'

She gazed at the sleek blue walls and breathed in the acrid scent of new paint and dedicated cleaning
activity. Alice could scrub a place down till its very soul was beaten into submission and drowned in Flash. She was standing there, slender and urban – quite the Smart Lady, looking as trim and tidy as this kitchen, her hair all glossy and her cream linen trousers so damn clean. She wasn't saying anything now. That was wise. Right now that was the only thing Joss was pleased about, that her daughter still knew better than to attempt to resort to reason in the face of her mother's fury, to leap in trying to justify, ‘But Joss . . .'

‘You were just the same as a child,' Jocelyn continued, grim-faced, picking at a tiny bubble of paint just on the edge of the door frame. ‘You were always wanting your room organized, putting your dolly tidily to bed each night in a nasty plastic toy cot that Sally's mother – what was her name? Beryl . . . no . . . Brenda – had given you on your birthday.' Alice started a slow smile, remembering. Jocelyn glared. Alice mustn't mistake this moment for one of cosy reminiscence.

‘“She's my baby. And babies sleep in cots.”' Joss mimicked the child-Alice being pretend-mummy. ‘When had you ever seen a baby in a cot? Cots are baby-prisons complete with bars.'

All Penmorrow babies slept in their parents' beds and when they grew too big, they curled up with other toddlers on the big mattress in the playroom. They looked like kittens, sprawled and snuggled together, milky, warm and soft.

‘And where are my daisy curtains?' Joss demanded, banging the rubbish bin (New, gaudy chrome. Why? From where?) open and poking about with her hand.

‘I binned them, of course. Last week. When I took them down they just fell apart. Do you know, I'm surprised that people who've rented this place haven't
reported you to the trading standards office. It was barely habitable. People are used to . . .'

‘I
know
what people are used to . . .' Jocelyn waved her hand, dismissing Alice's opinion. ‘They come here for something different.'

‘Well they sure as hell get that here,' Alice snapped. ‘And I don't think you
do
know what people are used to – Penmorrow is a mad time warp. What people like on holiday is fresh, clean accommodation that isn't like some
slum
compared to their own homes. They want drawers that open easily and aren't stuck shut by years of grease. They want shelves that aren't skid-marked with rusty metal stains from the bottoms of damp pans.' She turned back to the sink, in which for the first time she could see a reflective shine.

‘Now do you want some tea? And the chance to inspect the mugs, note that all the stains have been bleached out from the bottoms of them?' Alice ran the water for the kettle (another shiny new chrome item), banging it down hard on the worktop.

Joss looked at the stark, bare kitchen window and felt tears salting up and threatening to overflow. She'd made those curtains herself, stitching their hems by hand as she and Arthur sat by the cottage fire (smoky and unreliable even then), listening to the winter wind hurtling round the trees. Arthur had just started on his remote phase, heading for death, though neither of them knew it. He'd moved out of the main house and shut himself away down here in Gosling which had, till then, been his studio. He no longer wanted to be part of the shifting Penmorrow population and rejected communal living as wholeheartedly as he'd once welcomed it. He wanted only to see Joss, no-one else. He didn't want to work any more, didn't want her to tell him if galleries had called, if commissions came
in. He'd come to the end, he'd said. Life's work done. He would live from now as a rich retiree, as entitled to call a halt to production as if he'd been an assembly-line factory worker.