Away From It All (20 page)

‘What?
What
?'

‘Mum wants something
different
,' Chas said. ‘She hardly ever gets her own way. Sometimes she should, that's all.'

‘So you see, for us, carp isn't just
fish
,' Sam added. ‘Carp is a
mission
.'

Grace looked at Theo, wondering if he actually got the point of this, if there was one. It would be helpful, she thought, if he'd enlighten her.

‘Aha – like hunter-gatherers,' Theo said, a smile spreading slowly as he looked at Hamilton House's locked gates.

Oh, a boy thing, Grace thought, relieved. Well that let her off the hook, then. When
her
mum wanted some weird food that was a bit different she just went to a new deli or something. That was the point of living in a town. If Alice wanted Thai stuff she went to the oriental supermarket on the Kew Road. If she wanted authentic Asian spices she drove over to Southall. For an ace Chinese takeaway she just rang up The Good Earth and they delivered. Easy. That's what evolution was about, surely. In fact it wasn't only women who'd found these modern things called shops; even Noel sometimes came home with a bag from Harrods food hall with something gorgeous that someone else had concocted for an unfamiliar meal.

‘So what we're going to do first is we're going to the beach.' Sam and Chas looked at each other in a way that Grace could tell meant they'd made a big decision. ‘And we're going to give you two a lesson in your
hunter-gatherer survival techniques. That's if you're up for it.'

Grace sighed. Survival techniques. Right. This sounded like the trek you had to do in the sixth form if you wanted to get the Duke of Edinburgh's silver award. Stuff about being careful you didn't prod the roof of your tent or the rain would get in. Instructions to wee downstream of where you want to drink the water (which sounded fine in theory, so long as there wasn't another D of E group camping two hundred yards
up
the hill), and to collect only bits of kindling that were dry and upright on the forest floor, not lying in soaking mud. And of course, as Sophy would say, always keep your vodka in a mineral-water bottle so no-one suspects.

Sam and Chas led the way to the beach and then up to the rocks at the far end, intent on carrying out the first stage of their ‘mission'. Theo and Grace followed, trailing a bit and wondering what they were in for. Grace decided that on balance she was quite pleased to be included and it wasn't as if there was anything else to do. You could have a bit too much time alone for reading and lying in the sun, she thought, though she'd like to have been wearing shoes more suitable than flip-flops for climbing if they were going to be scrambling up the cliffside.

‘You don't say anything, right? Not to anyone?' Sam warned at the foot of the rocky hillside, just past where a small headland jutted out to the sea's edge.

‘OK,' Theo agreed.

‘Sure, but what's the big mystery?' Sam ignored Grace's question and began to climb the rocks, which were damp and claggy with seaweed.

‘Up there, in that cave. We've got the stuff ready. You got any matches?' Chas asked Theo.

Theo clambered across the rocks, his feet in their fat-soled trainers slipping awkwardly. ‘I've got matches. Is that it? You kids come up here to smoke gear?'

‘Er, like we'd need to?' Sam said, shaking his shaggy head at Theo in scorn. ‘We can do all that at home.'

Grace skidded on the rocks and she was lagging behind, trying to find less precarious places to put her feet. She slid into a rock pool and slimy weed tangled itself round her ankles, but at last she reached the small ledge at the front of the murky, damp cave that Sam and Chas seemed to have made their headquarters. There was a mothy brown blanket hanging from a jutting rock, one of their school lunch boxes was lying open on the floor and a heap of soft-drinks cans glinted in the gloomy far corner next to an old rusty bucket that stank horribly of dead sea-life. There were two heaps of wood close to the cave's entrance, one of fairly thick branches and another of twigs and smaller sticks. There'd been a fire on the ledge before – she could see pale grey scuffings of ash on the rocks. She thought of the clearing in the woods where she'd watched the boys doing their bizarre ritual trap-setting. Did these two have dens all over the village? Were they turning into feral children?

‘Doesn't the sea get up this far?' she asked. ‘I mean, if you keep stuff in here . . .'

‘Only at spring tides, most times not even then,' Chas told her. ‘It's neaps just now.' Then he gave her a lordly grin. ‘I don't suppose you know what that is, townie girl.'

‘Course I do, stupid. I live by the Thames, we know about tides too.'

‘Well good. Anyway, what we've got to do is this. First we light the fire. Matches, Theo.'

Chas and Sam built a small wigwam of dry twigs, scattered dried-out grasses pulled from the hilllside over it, and Theo tried unsuccessfully to light a match.

‘They're damp,' he said, adding a third one to the kindling.

‘Give us it here.' Chas took the box from him, removed a match and started rolling it in his hair.

‘What are you doing? Are you mad?' Grace was amazed, almost expecting to see Chas's head burst into flames.

‘Electricity in your hair, it dries it out.' He struck the match and it flared. ‘Simple!'

Sam handed drinks round while they waited for the fire to glow hot and fierce, then, when it had burnt down to scorching embers, he brought the bucket from the back of the cave and tipped a mixture of seashells and snail shells over the coals.

‘We'll give it a while. Come back after dark and collect them when they're ready and cooled down,' Sam said.

‘Yeah but ready for
what
?' Theo asked. ‘It looks like some kind of spell or something. The kind of thing Joss might do.' He sniggered and Grace glared at him. She didn't want him slagging off Jocelyn. However crazy her grandmother might be, she knew stuff. Useful stuff. Like how to get a boy to fancy you by doing things with herbs and oils. Half her class at school liked to think they were witches. Her mum said it was a craze, too much watching
Sabrina
and
Buffy
, a typical girls'-school thing, and she even put a bit of it in the books she wrote. They got together in cliquey groups, lighting candles and concocting spells and carrying bits of painted cloth to represent people they wanted to control or get revenge on. They were completely, stupidly ignorant of the Law of Threefold
Return, by which they were for sure going to get back three times the power that they'd hexed on others. Then they'd feel it where it hurt. Joss knew all this for real, not just for playing with, from way back. Grace wasn't going to diss her: she was sure she was going to need plenty of that kind of knowing to help her on her way to being a grown-up.

‘Just think of this as fishfood.' Sam scuffed his foot over the coals so that they died down on the scorching shells. ‘I'll say no more.'

‘We should have brought the children,' Alice said to Noel as she drove down the quayside at Porthleven. ‘It wasn't very fair just to leave a note, especially for Theo – he'll be wanting to spend time with you.'

‘Well they should have been there,' Noel countered. ‘We could have waited in all evening for them to turn up and ended up starving. They'll be all right; when they get back from wherever they've been they can get a bit of lentil pie or whatever else Mo is boiling up in her cauldron.'

Alice backed the Galaxy into a space alongside the harbour, carefully keeping a good safe distance from the sheer edge. If she was too close, Noel would be stepping down twenty feet, splatted into the muddy low-tide water. And how horrid am I, she asked herself as she switched off the engine, to wonder if that would be such a bad thing? ‘You're very unfair to Mo,' she told him. ‘She's a brilliant cook, especially given the vagaries of the Penmorrow people's various diet requirements that she's had to put up with over the years. She can do anything from all-out vegan to the Atkins all-protein by way of Raymond Blanc. Plus nearly all the veg is home-grown and organic.'

‘I know, I know. It's just that it's hard to feel you're
getting the full gourmet experience from someone who looks like she's still cooking in a cave.'

Alice bit her lip to keep herself quiet. She was tempted to ask him why on earth he'd come to see them at all if he was going to be so bloody supercilious about absolutely bloody everything. She looked him over closely as she locked the car and crossed the road to the restaurant. Noel didn't ‘do' casual clothes terribly successfully, just as he didn't ‘do' Penmorrow in a terribly good mood. At this moment he reminded her of Tony Blair, having the same slightly gauche air about him and looking as if he wasn't quite sure what to do with his hands. He was wearing jeans but they were hyper-clean, fresh from Mrs Pusey's fearsome ironing. His dark blue polo shirt had good-boy creases on the sleeves and the cream cotton sweater was so symmetrically draped round his shoulders it looked as if he'd spent time in front of a mirror pinning it into place. He was no more comfortable in his surroundings than he was in his clothes, even though Alice had chosen the Smokehouse restaurant as being the closest to a contemporary urban eaterie for him. He stopped in the doorway and peered round suspiciously as if he expected it to be full of either hooray yachtsmen taking up too much space with their massive yellow Henri Lloyd jackets, or fishermen smelling of trawlers and smoking pipes stuffed with evil sour tobacco.

The Smokehouse was a bright modern fun place with pale wood-strip flooring, a big open bar area with chrome stools, plain wooden tables and lots of white and turquoise paint. The staff and customers were young, tanned and sun-bleached, as if they'd just come in from a hot day in the surf. A Beach Boys hits compilation was playing in the background to complete the ambience. The whole feel to the place
was warm, casual and somewhat Antipodean, she thought – in which case Noel should like it, seeing as he'd shown so much interest in that Katie girl over dinner the night before. She watched him as he slid onto the restaurant's scarlet bench against the wall and looked around with amusement at their fellow diners.

‘What do you fancy to eat?' she asked, accepting a menu from a pretty young waitress dressed in a tight pink skimpy tee shirt with ‘Good Girl' picked out in rhinestones, and scuffed jeans so low-slung the words ‘Calvin Klein' could be clearly read at the top of her pants.

‘Hmm. Not sure,' he said, frowning at the list of choices but glancing not covertly enough at the waitress's bare, blonde-fuzzed tanned tummy. ‘I definitely
don't
want a pizza.'

‘Me neither,' Alice agreed abruptly. ‘I'm going to have the mussels with the tomatoey stuff and chips.' More chips, she thought, stroking her own stomach. She'd put on pounds if she didn't watch it.

‘Chips?' Noel's left eyebrow went up. Alice gave him a straight, unsmiling gaze back.

‘Yes, chips,' she told him brightly. ‘You get potatoes, see, cut them into long thin wedges and cook them in boiling fat. Preferably twice.'

He laughed, which annoyed her even further. ‘I know what they
are
, my darling, it's just that I don't think I've ever seen you actually
eat
one. It must be something to do with the climate down here.'

Maybe it was, she thought. Or maybe, and a small regretful cloud passed over her conscience, maybe I don't at the moment much like the pettily snobbish man I married.

The moment passed, leaving her feeling cooled. It reminded her of Arthur Gillings. Towards the end of
his life he'd had moments of sudden intense silence, staring into the distance as if there was something out there that he was trying hard to see. Sometimes he would shudder as if a chill had blown on him from somewhere. ‘Just a goose on my grave,' he'd say if anyone commented. These moments were more and more frequent as his last inactive months went on, and soon no-one commented on the shudders and the silences. Although he stopped mentioning the geese, Alice, who was just fourteen, could sense their ominous presence and could somehow feel them gathering and stamping hard on some distant patch of ground.

‘. . . the villa should be easily big enough if they want to.' Alice became aware that Noel was speaking and that she hadn't been listening.

‘Sorry. I was miles away for a moment, what were you saying?' The waitress arrived at their table and opened a bottle of champagne that Alice hadn't noticed Noel ordering. The cork exploded noisily and hit the ceiling.

‘Not really properly chilled,' Noel admonished the girl and reached out to touch the bottle. ‘I suppose it'll do though.' The girl smiled broadly at him, showing a flash of a gold tongue stud. Looking pained, for Noel loathed body piercings, he turned back to Alice. ‘I was just saying, if Grace and Theo want to bring a friend each, there'd be room. In Italy. At the villa?' Alice realized she must be looking crazily blank.

‘Ah Italy. Sorry, I'd almost forgotten we were going.' She felt exhausted at the thought of venturing as far as Truro, let alone the great open world beyond Heathrow. She was beginning to understand how Mo and Harry managed to stay so resolutely untravelled. What, after all, was the point? Why leave such a
beautiful place with its fabulous view just to go and look at another place with a fabulous view?

‘I can see that.' Noel drank half his glass of champagne in one swift gulp. ‘It was your idea in the first place to book it, remember. Don't you want to go now?'

Alice hesitated. Probably, she thought, she was just feeling lazy about packing up and moving off again. It was a feeling that was hard to shake off, as if an invisible spider with the finest invisible silk had started binding her up without her noticing.