Away From It All (23 page)

‘Maybe we should have just applied the cammo when we got to the place?' Theo tentatively suggested. ‘I mean suppose someone clocks us, that woman from the shop, people at the pub.'

‘We're
going
round the
back
road.' Sam didn't even look at him, leaving Theo in no doubt that his ideas input was superfluous. Grace grinned at him, which made him feel better. She surely didn't take it seriously, all this fake SAS army-manoeuvres-type stuff? She looked like she was well into it, eyes shining, no whingeing about her shoes hurting, going along with whatever these mad cousins of hers said.

‘Where's the stuff?' Grace asked as they crossed to the road at the bottom of the track and set off up the
lane towards the back of the village and Hamilton Hall's main entrance.

‘Under the hedge. We stashed it earlier,' Chas replied tersely.

They were fifty feet or so from the official entrance to Hamilton House and the coveted fishpond. Dusk was falling fast now, and through gaps in the high drystone wall Grace could see down to where the village lights were flicking on, and out to where freight liners and holiday yachts glittered on the sea. It was her favourite time of day at Penmorrow, when she could hear wildlife in the dense undergrowth stirring for a session of busy foraging. Monty would be out there, stalking mice and voles and doing all that lion-like cat stuff that he so loved. In Richmond, apart from a quick dash to dig holes in next door's garden, he mostly spent his evenings lying on the carpet under her bedroom radiator, sleeping and hiccuping as he digested his tinned dinner. Here, he indulged his wild side, hunting and chasing and lurking under bushes to see what could be ambushed. I'm being like him, Grace thought to herself as Sam and Chas pushed her and Theo into a thicket to avoid being caught in an approaching car's headlights. I'm being, she thought, a wild person, back to something more primitive. Catching food. She tried not to think of the theft aspect. That was where Monty came out top; he wouldn't end up in a Young Offenders place for what he was doing.

‘OK, in here.' Sam pulled a piece of wire netting aside and climbed through a picket fence, disappearing almost instantly into Hamilton House's shrubbery.

‘And try not to rustle too much,' Chas whispered to Theo. ‘You don't want to scare roosting birds into flying up.'

‘Is there a gamekeeper or anything?' Grace hugged her arms around her body, suddenly nervous.

‘Gamekeeper?' Chas hissed. ‘Don't be stupid! It's a garden, not a grouse moor! Now come on, keep close and keep up!'

Sam picked up a roll of binbags and a keep-net from where he'd hidden them earlier under a rhododendron. Chas was carrying a child's blue plastic beach bucket. In it, he boasted, there was enough stuff to kill a huge great lakeful of fish. ‘It's the shells,' he'd explained to Grace and Theo up by the fire at the cave. ‘You burn them really hot and they give off lime that poisons the fish.'

‘But won't that poison us too? When we eat the fish?' Theo had asked.

‘No. And if we don't put too much in, not all the fish either,' Sam had said. ‘We only want about six. There's loads in the pond – they won't even notice these have gone.'

Grace wasn't so sure, now that they'd reached the pond's edge. She lay on her tummy looking down as the long gold and silver creatures slid back and forth lazily. It was hard to tell how many there were. The pond looked deep and further down only shimmery shapes could be seen in the half-dark. She wondered if they ever slept, properly sleeping with their eyes shut at the bottom of the pond, all curled up together. They looked like pet goldfish that a giant might keep, sleek and curvy and big-scaled and with horrible, huge gobbly mouths. Sam had scattered the lime on the top of the water and some of the fish had come up to grab it as if it was best fishfood. The twins looked uncertain, as if it was only now that they wondered if their plan would work. They all lay still for what seemed like ages, silently waiting. The moon rose
behind massive oak trees and cast milky shadows on the grass beyond the pond site.

‘Bad night for it,' Sam commented, shaking his head.

‘No choice though,' Chas added.

Nothing was happening. The fish still ambled around and Grace was beginning to feel chilled and stiff. Then, just as she was about to ask if there was any point waiting any longer, there was a violent splashing in the water. She jumped out of the way as cold drops landed on her legs.

‘Get down!' Sam ordered, looking past her anxiously.

‘I'm getting
wet
,' she explained, watching horrified as the splashing died down and one by one a good dozen of the magnificent fish floated to the surface.

‘Shit. Too many,' Chas muttered, reaching for the net. He leaned out and hauled in the first one. Theo helped him land it, shoving it quickly into a binbag.

‘They're quite heavy too. How many shall we take?' Theo asked.

‘Have to get all the dead ones out,' Chas told him, pulling another from the pond and letting it slither into the bag. ‘Otherwise they'll know something's happened.'

‘There's no way they're not going to know!' Grace pointed to the silvery corpses. ‘There's loads of them!'

‘It's probably not as many as it looks. We'll get what we can, chuck some in the bushes if there's too much and then the others will look like . . .'

‘What?' Grace demanded furiously. ‘Natural bloody causes?'

‘Look, it's not a precise thing. We had to take a guess. Maybe they're not all dead, just a bit . . .' Sam started a snorting laugh.

Chas joined in, sniggering. ‘A bit slightly ill. They might get better. If we leave them.'

Eventually they took ten fish divided between three bags. They were bulky and soft and Grace was glad she wasn't asked to carry one. Instead she accepted the net and the bucket. Only two dead fish remained floating in the middle of the pond, out of reach. So this was a true survival skill, she thought. Appalled as she was at the shocking shiny deaths, it had been quite exciting really. And if there was a war sometime she might need to know this kind of thing. All the same, if Mo ever really did cook these fish, Grace thought she might just opt for a cheese omelette.

HE WAS SURE
to collide with the wrath of Mo for this, but Harry was willing to take the chance. Needs must, he thought as he made his way to Cygnet, going the long way round past the polytunnels and keeping his head down. There was a mild but alluring scent of dope on the air from his crops which were now, triggered by the slight shortening of the day length, forming prolific, sticky flower heads. It was going to be a good year. A profitable year. Even so, that particular sideline wasn't going to wipe out their cash-flow problems all by its illegal little self. Whatever Mo said, holiday letting was still the business they were supposed to be running. Keeping the punters happy went with the territory. If they couldn't at least try to do that they'd soon be left with no territory at all. Flogging a few courgettes and lettuces to the organic farm shop, collecting the surf-shack rent and undercutting the local dope dealers with a batch of quality home-grown wasn't going to keep the twins in trainers.

Alice was already there, waiting in Cygnet's open doorway with a notebook and pen in her hand. She was looking pretty much loosened up compared with how she'd been when she'd arrived at Penmorrow, he
thought. She'd stopped doing that ridiculous thing with the collars of those horrible stripey shirts she seemed to like, turning them up high as if she was trying to keep a gale out of her ears. Instead she'd picked up some tight little tee shirts from the surf shops in St Ives and looked about five years younger. She wasn't wearing those navy tasselled deck shoes either that smart people from London always chose as appropriate seaside wear, and was roaming about everywhere either barefoot or in cheap little pink rubber flip-flops with glittery beads across the front.

‘Have you had a look round yet?' Harry asked, peering back over his shoulder guiltily, half-expecting Mo to leap out of the bushes and pounce on him. Cygnet was a long, single-storey timber-framed cottage (‘not unlike staying in a big garden shed' had been one of the sniffier visitors'-book comments): Mo could show up at any of the windows, glancing in and catching him and Alice colluding about lampshades.

‘I have. It's actually not nearly as bad as Gosling was. At least everything in here works.'

Harry almost pushed her into the cottage and quickly shut the door after them both. Aware of Mo's hostility, Alice wasn't too surprised and continued, ‘The bedroom windows haven't been leaking so the paint isn't all discoloured. All the way through you could get away with stripping out the carpets, polishing and staining the floorboards and hanging some unlined calico curtains. Those hideous old maroon Dralon things in the sitting room will have to go, and definitely the baggy-knicker blinds in the second bedroom. They're full of spider nests. I don't think anyone's touched them in years.'

‘The furniture though. What about that? It all looks like something your granny might have thrown out.'

‘If we'd ever
had
a granny. What's the opposite of “extended family”?' Alice laughed. Harry said nothing. Interpreting their upbringing wasn't his idea of time well spent. Silently, but with gloomy dread, he followed Alice past the bathroom and into the first of two bedrooms, where the tarnished brass bed took up much of the available space.

‘There's just too much clutter in here,' Alice said, running her finger across the top of the chest of drawers. ‘It looks musty and crowded – all those twiddly china ornaments and dusty little lace mats. Get rid of everything except the bed. There's plenty of shelf space in that huge alcove cupboard.' She looked round the walls. ‘Put up some reading lights on the wall over the bed and they can put their glasses of water and their books on the window seats each side. In fact actually . . .' Alice opened the cupboard door and tapped the wall at the back.

‘Actually what?'

‘Hang on a minute . . .' Alice went into the next room, opened the corresponding wardrobe in the adjoining alcove, then returned to Harry. ‘I thought so,' she said to him, ‘this isn't really a wall at all, just a plasterboard partition thing. What I'd do, if I was in charge of this, would be to take out this whole wall, knock the two rooms into one big airy bedroom. You could easily do that in a couple of days, then paint the whole lot white, trade white though, not the brilliant one. It's softer. Forget about catering for a family and go for the urban-couple market.'

Harry laughed. ‘And what are they, when they're at home?'

‘When they're “at home” they are the folks with the cash. The empty-nesters, young pre-family pairs, gay couples, pensioners who like a bit of space, anyone
who wants to come out of season and look at gardens and the Eden Project. They're everything but the bucket and spade brigade. You could do weekend breaks for that lot and charge almost as much as a full week. People who take their main holidays in hot places still like to do long weekends in this country.' Alice jotted down a few notes then went on, almost buzzing with enthusiasm, ‘You could make this place look like a fabulous Long Island beach house. If cash was no limit I'd suggest you take the ceilings off, open it all up and line the roof with limed planks, put in tiny spotlights, all that. It could look truly gorgeous.'

Harry shoved his hands into his pockets and shifted about, looking uncomfortable. Unfortunately cash
was
a limiting factor. ‘Sounds astronomically expensive. Mo reckons all this doing-up isn't worth it, in fact her words were “pissing in the wind”.' He remembered that, it had been one of her new repertoire of astonishingly blunt phrases and had quite shocked him.

Alice sat down on the bed and shut her notebook. ‘It would be worth it in the long run. It's more a question of chucking stuff out than buying anything in,' she said. ‘But . . . I've got a feeling Mo isn't interested in Penmorrow as a “long run” any more. Am I right?'

‘If we're talking long run then we'd go for Truro, Newquay, Penzance at a push, maybe St Ives. That's what Mo's hankering after. Sometimes I see her, looking through the business ads in the
West Briton
, checking out the B. & B.'s for sale. Manageable places, not like this,' Harry admitted, perching on the window seat and peeking out into the garden, sure that Mo must be within listening distance.

‘But what about you?' Alice asked. ‘And the boys? Surely you don't want to leave Penmorrow? You've
been here all your lives.' That sounded patronizing, she realized as soon as the words were out. What better reason for wanting to move on, the fact that you'd never experienced the adventure of being somewhere else? Why ever shouldn't Mo and Harry want to do that?

In spite of this train of thought, it was still a surprise to Alice when Harry shrugged. She'd expected him to laugh and say something like, ‘Don't be daft, where else would we go?' but instead he simply said, ‘The boys would love to live in a town, especially now they're coming up to their teenage years. An out-of-the-way little village like this isn't going to be their idea of fun in a year or two. I wouldn't mind, but . . .' Harry grinned and gave her a sly look. ‘I'd miss my polytunnels,' he admitted. ‘And we're stuck really, while Joss is still around. We should have gone years ago but back then we didn't want to. Now we can't go anywhere because Joss won't be able to manage all this by herself. Having no choice is what really gets up Mo's nose.'

Well at least she wouldn't have to wonder what to cook. Mo stared at the unexpected bounty in the freezer and tried to count the fish that were bundled in untidily as if by someone in a hurry, each one wrapped neatly in clingfilm. Their eyes were still quite bright, so they must have been frozen immediately after being caught. Mo assumed Harry had put them there but was surprised he hadn't mentioned them. Usually when he came home with an edible bargain, courtesy of a villager in the pub, he was more than eager to let her know.