Away From It All (24 page)

Mo pulled one of the fish out for a closer look. She could see it was some kind of carp. She'd been
thinking about carp, too; she was sure she'd even mentioned it in passing, though not expecting to get any. She'd thought she'd have to make do with whatever the fish van in Chapel Creek had got left over. This was a fancy creature, just like a kid's pet goldfish but as big as, if not bigger than, a good-size bass. Bony things, these, she thought, and not what most people would choose. But they were tasty, if her memory from childhood didn't let her down. She remembered her mother cooking some that her father had caught, remembered the catchy reek of vinegar that had gone into the water she'd soaked them in to get rid of any lingering muddiness in the flesh. She'd got her mother's recipe somewhere among the old cookery books piled at the back of the larder. If Harry hadn't seen fit to tell her, then Mo wasn't going to ask where they'd come from, the same as she hadn't asked when she'd found three brace of pheasant hanging on the porch next to the wind chimes last October, or when Harry had brought home a ragged hunk of blood-soaked deer the night there'd been a new dent in the car's bumper. With these, she'd just have to consider their presence as a miracle. Not enough of a fish miracle to feed five thousand, but more than enough for this house full of Jocelyn's creepy-crawly disciples.

Mo could hear Jocelyn in the sitting room holding court with her film-crew people and getting overexcited, laughing too loudly at something Patrice was saying. The right and generous thing to hope would be that she wouldn't get too giddy and push her blood pressure up and out of control, but Mo, guiltily, could bring herself to hope for no such thing. It would be a handily quick and pain-free way (all round) for Joss to go, Mo thought, trying to square her wayward conscience. If Jocelyn simply dropped down dead,
overcome by the delight of having so much squirmingly obsequious attention, then taken all round and looking back after the initial shock and sorrow of it, and after planting her in the orchard alongside Arthur, it mightn't be such a terrible tragedy.

I never used to think like this, Mo reminded herself as she pulled the rest of the fish out of the freezer, laid them on the draining board and counted them. She looked back at her young self as a grateful little mouse, only too willing to muck in and do Joss's bidding for the privilege of living with her and being part of this house. This house. Mo sighed as she began to unwrap the clingfilm from the fish. This house that wasn't her house. This house that was fast outstripping its owner in the race to be decrepit and demanding. The way things were going it would fall down long before Jocelyn did. She'd found four more roof tiles that had crashed to the back terrace this morning and it was barely even breezy. God only knew what ravages another stormy autumn would bring. There was a chimney that looked distinctly askew. Whether it was any worse than the year before, she really didn't like to guess. And the hot weather brought out the worst in the drains – well certainly a smell that didn't seem right, not if the septic tanks were functioning properly. When, oh when would she and Harry and the boys get to escape to live in a nice snug place somewhere on a milk round, a twice-an-hour bus route and only a short hop from Sainsbury's? Never, would be the answer to that one if Alice with her well-meaning arty-room makeovers got her way. She'd keep Penmorrow limping on till they and the collected sodding premises were all worn to dust and splinters.

‘A beach barbecue! Oh yes, super idea. Such a lovely day for it,' Mo overheard Joss enthusing loudly to
Patrice. The voice was getting nearer, accompanied by the unctuous tones of Patrice himself as the two of them came into the kitchen.

‘Mo – just the person.' Jocelyn came up beside her and squeezed her arm fondly. ‘Oooh look at those beautiful fish! Are they for tonight's supper? How clever of you to find something so gorgeously glittery for us.'

Mo smiled and began washing the first of the fish, slicing it along its belly with expert speed and letting its insides flop out into the bowl in the sink, very close to Patrice.

‘Ugh.' Patrice wrinkled his nose and stepped smartly backward.

‘Shouldn't you be filming this, Patrice?' Mo asked, giving him a look of sly challenge. ‘If you want the authentic Penmorrow experience, that is . . .'

‘Well I suppose I might if Joss was doing it.' Patrice crept a little closer to take a cautious look, though making sure he stayed outside innards-splashing range. The stench from even the smallest drip would linger horribly in denim.

‘Oh don't ask me, sweetie.' Jocelyn moved away, reaching for her cigarettes from the dresser shelf. ‘Mo is the expert when it comes to cooking. I couldn't begin to compete.'

‘No, really it's all right! If you want to do some of this I'll save you the last two. It's only a matter of slit and scoop.' Mo offered the bloodied knife to Patrice but, to his obvious relief, Joss's attention had skipped ahead.

‘Mo, darling, will these fish be all right to barbecue?' she asked. ‘Patrice wants us all on the beach later this afternoon for a few shots and a bit of a chat about the time we played cricket on the sand with the
Attenboroughs. He wants the whole family this time, at about five when the trippers have gone for their caravan teas and the light is still good.'

Mo decided that barbecuing seemed as good a way of cooking these fish as any. She would, she thought, adapt her mother's old recipe, wrap them whole in foil parcels with some of Harry's shallots, plenty of pepper and a splash or two of white wine. They weren't the type of fish you could even begin to fillet. It was only to be hoped that Jocelyn wouldn't be so busy being a star for Patrice that she forgot about being careful to avoid the bones.

Grace had lost her little gold watch. Noel had given it to her on her birthday two years before and although it wasn't what she'd have chosen for herself (she should have hinted for a purple Baby G or a chunky Animal one) she wouldn't want to hurt his feelings by having to admit she'd been careless enough to let it fall off.

Where
the watch had fallen off was the big problem. Grace sat on the Gosling sofa with Monty purring on her lap while she bit the skin around her right thumbnail and worried about where it could be. She'd had it before the weekend, she was sure. She'd had it all the time she'd been reading
Angel's Choice
– she remembered looking at it late in the afternoon when she'd finished the book, and being surprised that it was nearly six o'clock and still so hot on the beach. She was almost certain she'd had it when they'd climbed up the rocks to Sam and Chas's cave and when they'd made the fire for the shells.

There was one scary possibility that she was going to have to think really hard about. Suppose, just suppose, it was up the hill in that garden by the
fishpond? She wished she could remember exactly what she'd done there. She remembered putting her hand into the water to see if she could catch a fish the other way that Sam had been telling her about, ‘tickling' he'd called it, by keeping really still till one of the fish sort of sat over her hand and then scooping it out. It would have been her right hand that she'd put in. She wore her watch on her left wrist. She couldn't at all remember if she'd put both hands in the water. All she recalled was that she'd given up very fast on trying to catch a fish that way – just in case the stuff the twins had put in the water was so toxic that she'd get gross skin blotches and some fatal foul disease.

Grace put Monty onto the cushions beside her and went upstairs to search through the clothes chaos on her room floor again. The watch must be somewhere. If it wasn't in the house this time, she decided, she'd go up to Hamilton House on a day when it was open to have a look round by the pond. If it
was
there, she wanted to be the one to find it. Otherwise, someone else might pick it up and hand it in to someone who'd decide it was evidence. They'd have no trouble finding her, her mother, of course, had had her full name, in accordance with school regulations, engraved on the back.

After hot days when holidaymakers had almost fought for space on the beach and trampled each other's territory with ball games and giant sandcastles, the shore became quiet again soon after five in the afternoon. The trippers folded the windbreaks, packed away the beach toys and left to bath and feed their tired and hungry children. This was the time the boy in the car park stopped charging for any car with a
local number plate and a roof rack full of surfboards. The surf shack became busy with local custom, the bodyboarders and surfers arriving to catch the last of the afternoon's waves before the evening calm descended on the sea. Theo had taken to hanging out with them and joining in, well able to talk the surf talk even if his competence in the sea lacked their years of practice. Alice, walking down the path from Penmorrow with Mo and Aidan, could see him now, sitting on the café's front rail sipping something from a can and watching a couple of experts choosing the waves.

He was very tanned, she thought, contrasting him with his town-pallid father. He also looked unusually comfortable with his body for a change. Back at home he tended to slouch around as if he was too self-conscious to unfold himself properly. She'd commented on it once and Grace, more sensitive to a teen boy's feelings than she obviously was, had warned her not to do it again. Noel, lacking any sensitivity at all, had said loudly in front of Theo and a room full of their dinner-party guests, ‘He shuffles about with his hands in his pockets and all hunched over so his trousers don't fall down.' Then he'd increased Theo's embarrassed misery by adding, with toe-curling jocularity, ‘If they drop much further we'll all be able to see if he takes after his dad.'

Even Alice had winced at that one, but she'd suspected Noel might not be far wrong – Theo and all his friends went around with their trousers slung so far down they looked in danger of an imminent and calamitous debagging. Grace and her girly friends at least had hips, albeit skinny ones, to hold their clothes up. There was a girl quite close to Theo at the café now, Alice realized, perched a little way along the
same rail, all long legs and bare brown middle. She couldn't see from that distance if he was actually talking to her. Probably not. Conversation was another of those things teenage boys didn't do a lot of, she'd discovered, along with getting up in the mornings without protest and remembering their games kit for school.

Noel and Harry had bagged a stretch of beach by the rocks against the sea wall which would be in the sun till the very last rays warmed the sand. They'd gone ahead of the others, loaded with coolboxes and picnic baskets and barbecues, and had joined forces to get a driftwood fire going. Noel had sunk bottles of wine deep into the chill damp sand and the two of them had had a chat about cricket and got a couple of beers down before everyone else joined them. Alice, Mo and Aidan could see them as they reached the lane that led towards the shop and the pub.

The shop looked busy – people were bustling in and out and a number of villagers had collected outside the door by the phone box for what looked like a pretty intense gossip. Who, Alice wondered idly, was their picked-over victim this time? It was a long time now since Penmorrow .had been the main focus of collective curiosity, though Jocelyn's illness and the presence of Aidan had revived ripples of interest. In a brash (though futile) attempt at finding out what his role in the household was, Mrs Rice had cheerily ventured to suggest the term ‘toy boy' to Harry but had had no luck there: unworldly Harry had simply come back to the house and asked Mo if the woman had been talking about some robot that was going to be that Christmas's must-have toy, and if so were the twins about to hanker after one.

‘So you've been relegated to the second division
of Joss's favourites,' Alice teased Aidan as the two of them approached the gathering outside the shop.

Aidan sighed. ‘Certainly looks like it. Just when the book was going well, she suddenly doesn't want to talk about herself – well not to me anyway; she doesn't have any trouble with Patrice. “Publishers can wait. Television can't,” she said to me yesterday when I told her it was time we moved on towards the 1980s.'

‘She's just revelling in the attention,' Alice reassured him. ‘This time next week when they've gone she'll be all yours again, you'll see.'

‘So what am I supposed to do? I've done as much as I can for now. I might as well go home for a few days, see if she's back down to earth after they've gone.'

Alice laughed. ‘Down to earth is probably the last thing Joss will ever be.' She hoped he wouldn't go. Sometimes Aidan seemed to be the one sane link holding the household together. She'd told him as much that morning, as she'd sat on his bed, telling him what she remembered about Arthur's burial in the orchard, while he took notes at his desk by the window.

He'd frowned and looked a bit worried. ‘It goes with the job,' he'd said, shrugging off her comment as if afraid that it would lead to her dragging him under his duvet. ‘I'm just supposed to be normal and pleasant and nice to everyone concerned, like a sort of blank neutral thing – get them to trust me enough for complete hundred per cent confiding. You get told, well you sort of find out . . .' and here he'd hesitated, looking at the floor. ‘Well you sometimes find out a lot more than is destined for the actual book.'

Alice, pretty sure that he was no longer talking about Joss, had left quickly after that, pleading urgent Cygnet-renovation ideas to note down before, as she
imagined he might, he backed so far out of what he might consider to be her lust-crazed grappling range that he fell out of the window. He'd sounded slightly unpleasantly calculating, as if he had no real interest in any of them beyond his professional capacity. Perhaps he hadn't. After all, as soon as the book was finished he could erase it and all of them from his mind, get started on whatever was next. Possibly he'd be moving on to a rock star with memory problems, a sportsman resentful of speedier upcomers. Who knew?