Away From It All (22 page)

‘You ate
socks?
' Theo's face was scrunched up in disgust.

Alice laughed. ‘No! But I remember coming into the kitchen one day and there was a saucepan steaming away on the Aga. It was nearly suppertime so I thought, oooh good, someone's remembered to cook. The smell wasn't great but then it often wasn't, especially if it involved pulses. Anyway I took the lid off and there they were. Socks. A big heap of horrible grey ones.'

‘Rank.' Grace shuddered, appalled.

‘What
did
you get for supper, then?' Theo asked.

‘Oh the usual, I should think! Probably brown rice with leftover chicken stirred in, oh and there'd have been tinned peas. There were always tins of peas and usually half a cold chicken on a plate in the larder. We might have had a garden full of fresh vegetables but someone had to remember to pick and prepare them. Didn't always happen.'

‘Makes the socks sound quite tempting,' Noel said. ‘You should tell all this to Patrice – give him a view of the other side of paradise.'

‘Alice! All of you! Come here darlings, you're needed!' Jocelyn's voice carried easily from the far end
of the orchard, where she and the crew were gathered in a huddle.

‘Ah. The Arthur moment,' Alice murmured as they made their way through the straggly dry grass. Grace, who knew what was coming, caught hold of her hand.

Katie was looking big-eyed and pale, as if she'd had a bad shock. Alice smiled at her but Katie – and Nick as well – just gazed back blankly. Patrice and Jocelyn were staring at the ground where a dense clump of aged rosemary was blooming prolifically.

‘OK Nick, keep it running!' Patrice turned back to Jocelyn. ‘So the illustrious sculptor Arthur Gillings is actually buried right
here
in the Penmorrow orchard?' He pointed to the ground, somewhere in the centre of the rosemary.

Noel breathed in sharply behind Alice. She nudged him to be quiet. Even the boys had fallen silent, though Sam was flicking at the end of his catapult as if he could hardly bring himself not to be loading and firing it at the birds that swooped between the trees.

‘Oh yes, this is Arthur's grave,' Jocelyn said, in the kind of tone that suggested that surely all private gardens contained human graves. ‘We marked it with rosemary for remembrance. He didn't approve of funeral furnishings. He died in Gosling cottage you see, simply fell asleep on the sofa in front of the fire. Look, you can still just see . . .' and she pointed up to the silver birch where high up a few scraps of fabric were blowing raggedly in the breeze. ‘Prayer flags to help his spirit on its way. We hung the whole tree with them at the time, wonderful bright colours. They could be seen from parts of the village so of course everybody knew.'

‘And so . . .' Patrice looked excited and flustered. ‘Who conducted the service?'

‘We all did. Milly was still here of course. That's Melissa Thorpe-Appleby, the painter, you know.'

‘Gosh, yes of course!'

‘Kelpie came back with her young family. We had a couple of songwriters and three young folks on their way to India. And Alice and Harry as well of course. Alice wrote a poem, didn't you darling?'

Nick swung the camera round to face her. ‘I did, yes I remember. It wasn't terribly good. I remember thinking I'd rather have read some Keats or Byron, something much better than I could do.' Alice could feel Noel and Theo's boggling curiosity as if it was a dagger of heat. They were going to want to know details and why she hadn't mentioned before that there was a dead body lurking under the Penmorrow turf.

‘And quite a few villagers and all Arthur's fishing and drinking friends came too,' Joss went on. ‘Though he'd become reclusive over the last months and hadn't wanted to see people. We had a party, lots of booze out here where we'd put him. It was raining I remember, but it seemed such awfully bad manners to go indoors, it would have been like abandoning the guest of honour.'

‘Um . . .' Patrice looked desperate. ‘Was it strictly legal?'

‘The party? Oh I'd have thought so, more or less,' Joss said. Alice couldn't help grinning. Joss being disingenuous was a rare sight.

‘The burial,' Patrice said calmly. ‘Don't you have to register deaths? And I thought . . .'

‘All completely above board, darling, averse though I am to officialdom.' Joss reached forward, plucked a twig of the rosemary and sniffed it fondly. ‘He was properly registered dead and this . . .' she waved her
hand across the plants, ‘became a lawful burial site. Just for Arthur – so far. Anyone can be buried on home ground, you know, as long as you have it all written down in your burial book as per legalities.' Patrice looked slightly disappointed. Presumably, Alice guessed, because he wasn't recording an admission of some kind of crime. He'd have enjoyed that, she realized, exposing this old eccentric as a shameless lawbreaker. Joss continued, loudly and clearly, ‘Guinevere Partridge wove the coffin. Arthur had had it made months before – she'd kept it for him in her workshop. Now that was quite a shock, him having been so prepared.'

‘
Wove
?' Noel's incredulous voice broke through. ‘What's he in, a bloody rug?'

‘Cut!' Patrice roared. ‘We'll have to go again on that.' He turned to Noel. ‘Do you mind? Sorry and all but we were on a roll here.' He moved past Joss and shoved his face close to Noel's. ‘Did you think I was really going to let that pass? I know what I'm doing.'

‘Sorry!' Noel called. ‘But come on, it's just that . . .'

‘OK, OK. But you guys know all this stuff already?' Katie tried to calm him down.

‘Not me!' Noel put his hands up, backing away ‘It's all news to me.'

‘And me.' Theo stood next to his father, supportive. Alice and Grace exchanged mildly guilty glances.

‘I mean most people just bury their dead pets, not their . . .'

‘Right, on we go.' Patrice waved Noel aside. ‘Just say the last bit again, Joss my love, about the Guinevere person.'

Jocelyn repeated her previous sentences without further interruption from Noel and continued, ‘It was a wicker coffin. Arthur ordered it secretly. He'd been
measured up just as calmly as if it was for a suit and she'd made it for him. It was so beautiful, a true, loving art-piece and an awful shame to consign it to the ground.' Joss looked misty-eyed into the distance, remembering, then continued brightly, ‘Of course it was rather unusual at the time to be buried in wicker, but it wouldn't be now, would it? Not in these days of cardboard coffins and burials in sustainable woodland.'

Patrice then called a halt to the filming and wrapped a cotton bandanna round his sweating head. Mo appeared at that moment, carrying a trayful of mugs and the biggest brown teapot to the lichen-tufted table at the top end of the orchard. Grace's cat Monty bounced around her feet threatening to trip her, and she gently toed him out of the way.

‘Why did you never say anything about it? Why was it news to me that there's a . . . a rotting corpse under your mother's garden?' Noel hissed to Alice as they made their way towards the hugely welcome refreshments.

Alice shrugged. ‘It never came up, did it? Penmorrow has never exactly been your favourite topic. Anyway, what else was Joss supposed to do with Arthur? He was scared about dying. She'd promised him he wouldn't ever have to leave.'

‘He could have been cremated and then scattered here. That would be the choice of the rational, I'd have said, wouldn't you?'

Alice breathed evenly, remembering what Milly had taught her in the Penmorrow yoga sessions out on the front meadow.

‘He was afraid of the flames. Joss had promised and she kept her promise. I don't see a problem. And neither should you – it was years ago.'

‘Bloody bunch of old hippy lunatics. And prayer flags in the trees!'

‘Oh big deal.' Alice laughed, trying to lighten Noel's mood. ‘Down at Predannack there's a tree hung all over with teapots!' Noel ignored her, saying, ‘And Grace knew, I could see by her face. She'll be getting ideas.'

‘Is that such a bad thing?'

‘What?' Noel almost barked the word.

‘Ideas. I hope she does “get ideas”. You make it sound like an unpleasant disease.'

Alice took a mug of tea from the tray and wandered away from the table towards the herb garden near the house. She wondered where Aidan was. He should really have been there to get Jocelyn's horse's-mouth description of Arthur's burial. She'd talk about that episode to him later, she decided, just to make sure he'd got it down. Jocelyn seemed to have assumed so much of her odd life was perfectly normal that it was possible it hadn't even come up. Thinking about it for the first time since Arthur's death, it now seemed rather a lovely ending, to be buried by and among those you most love. So much better than having your corpse wrapped in black plastic and hauled away by strangers, like an embarrassing spillage. As Joss had promised, Arthur hadn't had to leave the premises. Alice admired the way she'd stuck to that. She remembered Arthur lying in his wicker casing laid out on the big dining table. He was wrapped in his musty black velvet cloak and lay in a nest of cedarwood shavings and fronds of ivy. Eighty-two white candles, one for each year of his life, had burned, and when the last of them expired on the third day, Joss had decreed it was time for him to be buried.

Alice finished her tea and took the tray of mugs into the kitchen, then went out again through the front
door. She found Aidan and Theo sitting on the front steps, talking, looking serious, talking intently. Theo was picking up scraps of gravel and aiming them at Big Shepherd's furthest sheep, the stones pinging off the bronze each time he scored a hit.

‘Have they finished?' Aidan looked up and asked her. ‘Did I miss much?' He looked, Alice thought, like a schoolboy who'd nipped out to the bike sheds for a cigarette. Why
wasn't
he there? she wondered. Surely if he was ghosting the complete life of Jocelyn he should take a thorough interest while he was actually on site, so to speak.

‘Come and sit with us. Theo and I were just having a Tony Hawks moment,' Aidan explained as he shuffled along the step to make room for Alice and leaned back against the splintery wooden pillar that held up the verandah in front of the doorway. His hyper-chic glasses had gone dark from the sunlight.

Theo was looking completely awestruck, Alice recognized, which puzzled her: she hadn't had Theo down as a reader, and certainly hadn't seen him with a Tony Hawkes book.

‘Aidan's got through all of game two and that's the best.' He could hardly get the words out for gasping admiration. ‘He's gone into Spiderman, even into the secret levels, even the Helidrop and all of Skate Heaven. Jeez, that's just cool as.' Theo shook his head, overwhelmed by something about Aidan that Alice couldn't quite fathom. Tony Hawkes? This sounded like one of his books she hadn't read.

‘Has Tony Hawkes got a new book out?' she asked. ‘I've read the one about going round Ireland with a fridge, and – oh what's that other one –
Playing the Moldavians at Tennis
? Wasn't that it? I think he's excellent.'

Aidan took off his glasses and looked at her, smirking rather off-puttingly. ‘Um – I think there's some wires that are crossing themselves here,' he said, slowly and precisely as if to a non-comprehending infant. ‘We were actually talking about, um, Tony Hawks Pro-Skater? PlayStation games? One to three?' The questioning upward lilt didn't hold any hope at all, Alice was mortified to realize, of her being expected to understand what they were talking about.

‘PlayStation Two? Games?' Theo was almost adding insult to injury by repeating. Oh good grief, Alice thought, completely tingling with the realization of her own middle-aged foolishness, Aidan was just so utterly, so remotely, young. How on earth could she have daydreamed away any kind of sexual energy on someone who still played with toys? She felt like getting up and flouncing indoors in an embarrassed huff. Quite why, she wasn't sure. Why on earth should it matter that at her age (or any age come to that) she knew lots about current books and absolutely nothing about daft computer games?

Chas and Sam had smeared their faces and much of their clothing with mud. It made their blue eyes, Grace thought, look overbright and scary. ‘You'll have to do it too. And your hair. It's too yellow. We'll be seen,' Sam told her, leading her off the path into the gloom of the trees. The evening was damp and chilly and Grace shivered. Theo didn't seem bothered, he hunkered down by the rotting beech stump and rubbed earth into his face as if he was (and so unlikely this, Grace thought) giving it a good wash. His hair had got quite long now, she noticed, and he'd stopped bothering to get it to stick up in all the right places like he did at home. In fact at home, she thought, he was forever
looking in mirrors, at shop-window reflections and other people's wing mirrors on the streets to tweak at his hair. Now he didn't seem to care at all, which was good. It crossed her mind that she wasn't obsessing about her appearance, either. Well you couldn't, she reasoned, when you spent half your time in the sea. Plus there was no Sophy to compete with, no crew of smart girly mates going for the Most Gorgeous stakes.

‘Put this on over your hair.' Sam handed Grace a torn khaki baseball hat. She looked at it and he grouched, ‘That's if you want to come with us. If you don't want to stay at home and paint your nails?'

‘No, I'm coming.' She twisted her hair up, secured it with a piece of stick and crammed the hat on top of it. If only Sophy could see me now, she thought as she rubbed earth into her face, reminding herself at the same time that mud was supposed to be good for the skin.

‘Heads down at the village,' Chas ordered, leading the way down the hill.