Away From It All (30 page)

Jocelyn frowned. Alice realized she was rushing her, and of course there was the question of cash. Even though Harry could do most of the work, he'd need professional help with relocating electricity sockets and relaying some of the flooring.

‘Let me look. Don't talk for a moment, just let me get the feel of it.'

Joss slowly wandered from room to room, saying nothing but inspecting intently.

‘Wonderful views,' she said, looking out through the French doors towards the shore. ‘It's a good little house and I can feel a happy soul to it. My kelims would suit this floor too. I didn't know the boards were so dark – they'll polish up well. Arthur's Pan statue would settle happily over here by the fireplace.'

Alice was amazed – something she was doing seemed to be getting approval at last.

‘I don't want paying renters stamping about on my rugs though,' Joss said, then looked at Alice intently as
she came out with her bombshell decision. ‘I'd have to be the one who lives here.'

‘You?'
Alice exclaimed. ‘Why?'

Joss sank down onto the crackled leather sofa. ‘Stairs, in a word. Dilapidation in another; both Penmorrow's and mine. The house and me, we're falling together into a state of terminal disrepair. And there's Mo and Harry. I'm not a fool, Alice, I know they don't want to struggle along with all this any more. They do what they can but it's too much now and it's driving them insane. For them Penmorrow is a millstone.' She laughed briefly. ‘Just as according to your Noel it's a goldmine.'

‘But what would . . . would you sell it? Just keep Cygnet?'

Joss looked out of the window. Across the orchard was Penmorrow's back door, next to which more roof tiles had splintered on the path. ‘Cygnet
and
Gosling, so you'll all have somewhere to stay. These are new thoughts. I haven't said anything to Harry yet. Now might be the time for a change. And this little house would suit me very well.'

The table was now a gloriously decadent postprandial mess, piled high with discarded lobster shells and empty wine bottles, fat brown crumbs from the chocolate brownies and dollops of cream that had missed the plates as everyone got drunker. Joss had said it resembled the cover photo of
Beggars Banquet
and had claimed, truthfully or not, for who could say, that she'd been there at the time for that particular shoot.

Mo was pleased with herself. The cooking had gone well, everyone had had a jolly evening and no-one had picked a fight. That was the best thing about marijuana
– it blunted that edge of nastiness that made itself felt when people were drinking a bit too freely. Joss had been rather quiet – and later she'd be quieter still, having eaten three of the brownies. If she woke in the night with a panic attack, Mo thought, it would serve her right for being greedy. Even Noel had seemed quite jovial and had had only two tentative digs about the house falling to bits. He'd mentioned the chimney needing repointing (as if they hadn't noticed, it had been on the list for years), and had suggested the horror word ‘subsidence' as the reason why the downstairs loo door wasn't shutting properly. Both comments had failed to get Jocelyn even mildly provoked. It was as if she'd given up. Only Patrice had seemed low-key and had an air of disappointment – Nick had kept the camera running for the entire meal, mostly, she could see, in the hope of a display of foul-mannered truculence. She was surprised there hadn't been a sneaky bit of whispering to Katie, telling her to stir things up by having a grope at Aidan or Noel, or to start flinging food about. In the event it could have been any old genteel dinner party of the sort (Mo imagined) that Alice and Noel were used to. Even the children had behaved well – they were still in the kitchen now, loading the dishwasher and clearing up, generously bribed by Alice.

Mo had hidden the rest of the special chocolate brownies at the back of the larder in the Princess Diana cake tin. She'd been careful to make sure that what the children had eaten did not contain any of the harvest – Chas and Sam were quite wild enough, and she didn't want to be the one responsible for giving Theo and Grace a taste for mind-altering substances. It was the sort of thing London parents might sue you for
later, when they were trying to come up with the funds for expensive Arizona rehab clinics.

Mo went out onto the porch and helped herself, on the way, to another of the rather sickly violet and almond sweets that Alice had handed round with the coffee in the sitting room. They seemed a bit of a peculiar contribution, in her opinion. Why on earth hadn't she just bought some of the fancy overpriced chocolates from the shop in Chapel Creek when she'd been over there the day before? And so eleborately packaged, too. It was as if she was trying to pass them off as having been bought from some swanky specialist confectioner. If so, that was one hell of a failure. Perhaps she should warn her for another time: the Tupperware box was a bit of a giveaway.

In the kitchen, rinsing dregs of wine from the glasses before putting them in the dishwasher, Grace watched as Chas and Sam devoured yet another chocolate brownie each. She couldn't eat another thing. She was getting impatient – the boys had said they'd come out with her, sneak back into the garden of Hamilton House and look for her watch. She'd have preferred to go in the daytime, doing it the easy way by paying to get in, but the twins liked to turn everything into some kind of adventure. She didn't mind too much, just so long as they got it together soon. She wanted to be back quickly, to get into bed with her little red silk bag of dried-mushroom spell. The sooner she tried it, the sooner the charm could start to work.

‘Go on, Grace, have one of these. They've got a special ingredient: Harry's Wholesome Harvest.' Sam giggled, crumbling cake on the table and picking up bits on a licked finger.

‘I had some for pudding,' Grace said, ‘and nothing's
happening to me.' She closed her eyes. Nothing was whirling about, nothing felt any calmer or spacier.

‘She gave us the plain ones. I saw her hide these away where she thinks we won't know.'

‘Go on then, I will.' Theo crammed a whole brownie into his mouth and spluttered out crumbs.

‘Don't waste it!' Chas yelled at him.

‘Why not?' Grace said. ‘I've seen how much of the stuff he's grown in that tunnel. There's not what you'd call a shortage round here. You've got the European dope mountain out there. Your dad's got years inside if he's caught.'

Grace was feeling restless. Noel had commented that she'd got a pale band on the skin of her wrist where her watch had been. It just had to be in the garden of Hamilton House, down where she'd been lying by the pond. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced she'd taken it off that night to put her hands in the water. She'd thought about it so much that she was no longer sure what was real and what she was inventing. The police had been in the village again. Noel had said he was amazed they hadn't got anything more serious to worry about, but Alice had gone all sensible and reminded him that theft was a major crime wherever it was and whatever was stolen. Noel, she'd said, was always the first to complain back home when the police got a bit casual about robberies and break-ins.

‘Look, are we going to look for my watch or not? Because if not, I'm going back to Gosling to watch telly.' Grace headed for the back door.

‘No, it's OK, we'll come,' Sam said, taking the Princess Diana tin back to its shelf in the larder. Theo dusted crumbs off his tee shirt and nodded. ‘And me.'

It was a night that was too bright again. In the sky as
they walked Grace could easily pick out the Milky Way.

‘There'll be shooting stars. It's that time of the year,' Chas said, gazing upwards and tripping over a stone on the path.

Grace didn't feel as scared this time, climbing quickly through the gap in the Hamilton House fence and half-crawling across to the shelter of the shrubs. They weren't going to do anything very illegal tonight, and you didn't get prison for a bit of trespassing. They hadn't even bothered to camouflage their faces. Silently, they followed the track to the pond, moving fast as if they were comfortably familiar with it now. Chas handed her his torch. ‘I've turned it down so it only has a pencil beam. Point it down, where you think you dropped the watch. Don't wave it about.'

‘I'm not stupid,' Grace hissed at him, crouching so the beam fell brightly on its tiny circle of focus. For a while the four of them crawled round by the pond's edge. Eerie pale shapes came and went on the surface of the water, the remaining fish apparently no worse for their brief poisoning. There was a low rumbling noise nearby. Grace, assuming it was a badger or fox, took no notice, but beside her she felt Sam's body go stiff and he clutched her wrist in a way that told her she had to keep rigid and silent.

The growling sound came closer, then turned to rustling and a ferocious barking.

‘Run!' Chas yelled. Sam grabbed Grace's hand and hauled her after him as they raced through the garden, down past the children's playground towards the fence at the bottom of the hill. Some way behind them, Grace could hear the dog and the panting voice of its handler shouting, ‘Hey you little bastards! Stop!'

Grace thought she was going to be sick. She'd never
run so hard or so fast in her life. Perhaps that was the way to get reluctant girls like her to excel on the school athletics field – set vicious guard dogs on them. Even when she and Sam scrambled over the fence and dropped down to the road, it wasn't over. She couldn't see Theo or Chas but was scared to slow down in case the dog and the man leapt over the fence. Sam kept running and so did she, panting and stumbling towards the village and the beach.

‘Run into the waves a bit,' he shouted back to her. ‘Put it off our scent.' They were on the sand now, racing towards the far cliff. Grace glanced back. She could see some movement under the lights outside the Blue Cockle pub but couldn't hang around to see if it was the man with the dog or not. They'd reached the rocks now and Sam wasn't stopping, so she followed. She would never know where her strength came from to haul herself up the slippery rocks after him, too close to the waves and dangerously near to being swept into the water as they crashed close by then ebbed, sucking back powerfully. At last they made it to the ledge and the twins' cave and collapsed inside, fighting for breath.

‘Made it,' Sam gasped, flinging himself to the floor and reaching out to the back to retrieve a can of Coke. ‘Grace? Fancy a drink?'

It had been hard enough to get to sleep. Mo had put too much stuff in those chocolate cakes and Jocelyn's brain had been racing with strange fancies. For what felt like hours she'd lain awake, thinking about past travels, past lovers. Far too much past, in fact. It was time to think about the future, while she still had one.

Eventually she'd managed to sleep, but too soon she was woken by the sounds from Patrice's room.
For a few moments she thought she was still dreaming, still reliving, deliciously vividly, one of her more passionate encounters from long ago. But the noises were on the far side of the wall: the all too clear sound of unconstrained passion. So, she thought, Alice's little charm (for she recognized that violet-candy ruse) had worked only too well. Patrice was evidently doing a thoroughly good job of pleasuring Katie in the bed that Joss had so recently deemed retired.

It wouldn't do to stay around and listen. It only led to regret that such times for herself were now in the past. Joss climbed carefully out of bed and wrapped herself in the long purple knitted coat (made from Tremorwell wool, all gathered from hedgerows and fences and supplemented by thefts from live sheep) that had been given to her by a grateful houseguest many years before. She would go, she decided, out into the garden and look at the sky. This was the season when the Meteors of Perseus could best be seen, and on a clear night like this she'd have a spectacular view of the shooting stars. The cannabis was still in effect; she could feel it softening her thoughts and she wanted to watch the universe's miracles in a state of mild hallucination.

Joss fumbled for the landing light switch but the bulb had blown again. She'd tell Harry in the morning, she thought, as, clutching her stick, she felt her way to the stairs. She was more than halfway down when the long, heavy coat tangled round her foot and tripped her. The noise she heard as she fell seemed oddly distant. With the protective mental detachment of one who is about to be horribly injured, she wondered: was it herself screaming? Or was it Katie yelping her way (at last) through an orgasm?

IF HE SAYS
what I think he's going to say, I'll bloody divorce him, Alice thought to herself as she watched Noel pouring brandy into the glasses lined up on the tray. This would be the moment, if he was going to say it. It was all too horribly likely that he wouldn't be able to wait, wouldn't be able to resist pointing out the obvious, as if it had only just crossed his mind, that Penmorrow was getting too much for Jocelyn – as if no-one else had noticed. She could just hear him being persuasive, reasonable. ‘Staying here, you're only going to be a danger to yourself . . .' It would sound as if he was so very concerned. Joss wouldn't be fooled, she'd know quite well that he'd been on the point, ever since he'd first seen her using a stick to help her get around, of suggesting that she move into something more – how would he put it – secure. Sheltered housing was the phrase in his head – Alice could see it all brightly thought out, as if his mind was a fridge door covered in magnetic letters. She would tell him, very soon, that Joss had already made plans of her own.

‘Medicinal purposes,' Noel said, fortunately for him, and very much surprising Alice, as he handed glasses
to Mo, Katie, Aidan, Harry and Patrice. Alice didn't want one. She was still feeling a peculiar woolliness in her head from the stuff Mo had cooked into the chocolate brownies. She shouldn't have done that, she thought. It was dangerously irresponsible to let people unwittingly munch drugs, however tiny the amount. It was on the same risk level as spiking a drink by adding an extra shot or two of vodka. Suppose one of them had had to drive to Truro? Suppose the doctor had managed to persuade Joss that she needed a stay in the hospital? She could just imagine the scene. ‘Sorry – it'll have to be a taxi or an ambulance, I'm completely (as Theo would put it) off me 'ead.'