Away From It All (10 page)

What he really wanted, Noel thought as Paula at last shimmied across the restaurant (and oh no, oh God, big swivel of the head and she'd stopped to gawp at Ringo Starr. Surely she knew you just Didn't Do That?), what he really wanted was to be with Alice and Theo and Grace. He wanted them to be there as usual when he came home from work. He missed the silly tick-tick-tick noise of Grace and Theo texting all their unseen mates, missed Alice in her Saturday night suspenders. He missed the smell of her clean hair and the way, when she was in her study working on a book, her fingers flew over the Mac keyboard as she raced to get the story out of her head and into the world. It was a bit like a birth, she'd told him, and stupidly he'd laughed, been dismissive. He wished he hadn't now. He wished he'd thought for more than a millisecond about what she was saying and made an effort to understand what she was getting at. After all, if she'd said it, it was because she'd thought it through carefully and chosen the words she really needed. You didn't get mindless flannel with Alice.

Paula, as expected, was delighted to take the rest of the afternoon off. Noel sent her off in a taxi in the direction of Knightsbridge and prayed she wouldn't spend a fortune in Harvey Nicks underwear department on something she guessed he'd enjoy. If she was hoping for an enthusiastic licking she'd do better to get the Beasley dog a new collar.

Noel walked down past the Ritz and decided he too would abandon the office for the day and take the tube straight home to Richmond. There was time for a spot of golf. At the thought of it, at the idea of
deep-breathing fresh air on the edge of Richmond Park, he very nearly stopped walking and took a practice air-swing right there on Piccadilly. But Green Park station was closed. Thwarted travellers milled about on the pavement and the transport official, who looked bored at having to keep repeating the same explanations, sighed, ‘Suspect package,' in the tone that Noel remembered from his prep school that suggested that this hurt him more than it hurt anyone else. Noel looked at his watch. Three o'clock – not really much point in going back to work anyway – he wouldn't get much done and wine at lunchtime always left him at less than full mental strength. He hailed a taxi and slumped comfortably in the corner with a former passenger's abandoned
Evening Standard
.

There was the usual depressing summer reading: strikes at airports, a row about a Wimbledon umpire, rain predicted to disrupt the next Test series and a flurry in suburban house sales. ‘That's good news anyway,' Noel found himself commenting aloud, and then immediately wondered
why
it was of any relevance to him at all. He and Alice weren't planning to move, hadn't considered it. They'd had the house renovated to an incredible level of personal comfort exactly to suit their needs and tastes. And yet . . . as Noel entered the hallway of his silent immaculate home, he felt for a moment as if it belonged to someone he'd never met before. He ran quickly upstairs, flung off his clothes and walked into the shower to try to wash in a more familiar mood.

‘I'm getting old,' he thought as he wrapped a towel round his waist and stared at himself in the long mirror on the inside of his wardrobe door. He must be getting old, he thought, for he was feeling a new need to rush into some kind of change in his life before it
was all too late. It wasn't going to be other women, not if the dull lunch with Paula had been anything to go by. Retirement could be less than five years away if he so wanted. Whatever was he going to fill his life with? Plenty of golf, for sure, but what else? Not gardening. Not pottering about on the Thames pretending he was A Sailor as so many in the district did, and definitely not self-improving cruising in the Med, being lectured to about the Treasures of Venice.

Noel wandered around the bedroom mussing up the cushions on the sofa (Mrs Pusey always stood them to strict triangular attention) and then sat on the bed. He flicked on the TV and half-heartedly watched a tennis match in which a pair of staggeringly muscular women battled it out with frightening intensity. Female players no longer, it crossed his mind, wore even slightly attractive knickers. The thick taut thighs held no interest for him any more. He remembered when he was a young teenager, gawping through the fence at the local tennis club tournaments just to catch a glimpse of underwear frills and a broad, stretched gusset. He couldn't imagine Theo, self-contained, surly Theo, sneaking glimpses of sporty knickers. He probably didn't need to, Noel thought, he probably had girls queueing up to peel off their low-cut thongs for him. He felt the absence of his son suddenly like a harsh chest pain. He reached for the phone, dialled the number for railway information and made a list of the train times to Truro.

Harry sat on a lopsided stool at the end of the polytunnel furthest from the path, smoking a fat spliff. It was left over from last year's crop (Passion No. 1) and had held its potency well. This variety gave quite a tranquillizing effect and he felt that the late afternoon,
when Joss and the others came back from their swanky lunch, would be better faced if he was mellow and calm. He didn't like Joss when she'd been drinking at lunchtime. She'd be all over Aidan, giving him little fond touches and smiles full of memories of old seductions. She could be very caustic too, very above herself and grand. Harry had never been able to stand up to her – she had a way of making you feel that you'd barely lived and so hadn't any opinion worth considering. It was all a long way from when he was little and adored, and she'd called him ‘my cherub Ariel' and hugged him tight. Alice had wriggled away and been the one for escaping into the village with her friend Sally and anyone of her age who happened to be staying at the house. She rounded up all the children who were old enough and led them to the beach where she had them writing little stories and making up bits of ‘news' that she put together into a weekly magazine. He was too young for wandering – a plump toddler left behind with Jocelyn, who gathered him to her whenever she needed comfort and tickled the back of his neck till he squealed.

It was all right for Jocelyn: by the time she was thirty she'd travelled the world, talking to literary gatherings at festivals everywhere about her one book. Painters adopted her as their muse, smart journals snapped up her opinions, clothes designers had her in mind when their thoughts turned to ‘Bohemian'. Nothing scared her, she had the complete perfect faith in herself that whatever she did, whatever she said, someone would be looking, listening and admiring. He should have broken away years ago and made his own way, but had been unnerved by his lack of any kind of education. People who could give you a job asked you questions about that sort of thing. Just lately though he'd started
wondering about moving on, thinking that maybe he could get work on a farm or in a nursery. You didn't need certificates for that and he'd got all the experience and skill they'd be needing. But then there was Penmorrow. What would happen to it? Would his mother hang on like a sailor set adrift in a rickety old boat, waiting for it all to collapse around her?

There was a scuffling sound outside and Harry held the spliff behind his back and stubbed it out on the edge of the stool. Sam and Chas pushed open the flap of the tunnel and came in, bringing with them the fishy scent of the beach. That was depressing. There hadn't been time for them to go to the shore if they'd come home on the school bus. And they'd definitely got on it that morning – he'd taken them down to the village stop himself to make sure. He knew their tricks – one of them would have said, halfway up the hill, that he felt a bit sick. The driver would have stopped and almost thrown them out, keen to preserve a clean, odourless bus.

‘Good day at school, boys?' he asked, certain he should at least make the effort to pretend he thought they'd been there.

‘S'all right.' Sam sniffed.

‘Just usual,' Chas agreed. The two boys looked solemn, standing in front of him in their crazy combination of tidy school clothes and manically wild hair, unsure what to say next and kicking their feet on the ground like impatient ponies.

‘What are you doing in here?' he asked. ‘Were you looking for me?'

The pair of them shrugged, grinning. ‘Not specially, just, you know, looking round for stuff to do.'

Harry sighed, even more depressed. They knew, these canny, sly lads of his, they knew exactly what
he was growing. He'd be lucky this year if by the time it came to harvest this little lot, they hadn't been in already, stripped the plants and had the potent buds up to dry, ready for a schoolful of eager, paying customers.

ALICE WAS LYING
stretched flat out on her front on a dusty wooden floor, clearing a heap of long-discarded cardboard picture mounts from under a bed in one of the biggest upstairs bedrooms. She moved carefully, wary of splinters and the possible presence of desiccated mouse bodies. The contrast between the under-bed conditions here and at her own home could hardly have been more extreme. Beneath the Richmond bed no dust lurked, no ancient hair clips (fourteen picked up so far, where had they come from?), no matty clumps of spider nest, only a large white storage box on wheels (mail order, from the Holding Company). This stored Alice's out-of-season clothes and currently contained a collection of dry-cleaned, moth-zapped, tissue-folded cashmere sweaters, each one in its own air-drained polythene casing. Grace, whose idea of being careful with her clothes was to heap them on the bed rather than the floor, accused her mother of near-fetishism over her biannual storage rituals. But, as Alice pointed out, if you'd been brought up dressed in purple crochet (unravelling) and folksy recycled patchwork, you tended to treasure everything pattably delicate, costly and above all brand new.

Jocelyn had decreed that this was the room Patrice was to have when he and his crew came to film her. It hadn't been part of the bed and breakfast set-up for, although it overlooked the beach and was in relatively good condition, it was the room next to Jocelyn's own and, as she put it, she didn't want to wake at night and hear strangers indulging in noisy sex.

‘I've had years and years of erotic sound effects,' she'd declared over supper, adding, ‘a very good many of them my own,' which made Theo and Grace and the twins giggle and splutter into their fish pie. ‘And besides,' she added, ‘that bed won't take much more activity. We must consider it retired.'

‘Are you going to tell Patrice that?' Aidan had asked her, looking cheeky.

‘Certainly not, Aidan my sweet.' Joss had reached across and patted his cheek like a fond grandma with a treasured infant. ‘You are.'

The crumpled cardboard that Alice was retrieving must have belonged to miserable Milly, way, way back when this had been her room. She'd both slept in here and used it as her studio. Perhaps that accounted for her sorrow, Alice guessed as she burrowed about among the dust. Perhaps it was all that breathing in of oily fumes and pungent solvent thinners – it couldn't do anyone any good. Milly had preferred to drape material from her walls rather than to paint them, so there were no gaudy exuberant splodges here, simply a still-delicate washed-out dirty pink like the colour of a plaster that's stayed too long on a cut. There also remained hooks all round the walls at ceiling height, from where the lengths of soft silky sari fabrics had been hung to look like long slim flags, using garden canes as curtain poles.

The fabrics had been collected from Milly's
wandering days in India and Afghanistan. They were multicoloured, hung randomly so that some clashed, some blended. Alice remembered them clearly: purple with gold thread, pinks with navy and silver embroidery, sharp cool green with lemon stars, tiny chips of icy beads stitched with scarlet thread onto sky-coloured silk, borders of swirling gold and orange. The hangings had drifted gently, wafted continuously by the permanent draughts in the house. Alice remembered thinking the effect was as if the walls were swaying all the time, and had loved it in the shadowy half-light when Milly lit candles around her easel in the centre of the room. There'd been a row about that, she recalled now as she dragged the last piece of distorted cardboard out from beneath the saggy mahogany bed. It had been the only time Jocelyn had been furious about candle-burning.

There were plenty of candles in the house, kept for various seasonal festivities. Candles were on the go every evening on the long dining-room table, burning in tall intricately twisted ceramic holders abandoned by a resident who'd left in a hurry, fleeing a paternity order. They were often sickly scented with patchouli which Harry had grumbled about, complaining that they stank and put him off his food.

Joss had told Milly she wasn't allowed candles in her room because of all the fabrics and because of her oil paints. For some unknown reason she wasn't even allowed to smoke in the house (though others were) and used to sit out by herself on the front porch at night, puffing guiltily like a schoolgirl. Jocelyn had stormed into her room one evening and found Milly on her green velvet floor cushion, reading Alice and Sally and a pair of visiting American children a ghost story by candlelight. They had reached the scariest point in
the story. The effect of Jocelyn flinging open the door, silhouetted against the landing light with her cascade of wild yellow hair and her flowing purple kaftan decorated with tiny glinting mirrors, had pitched the children – and Milly too – into shrieking hysterics.

After that for a while there'd been an atmosphere of disappointed anger – Alice remembered it could be felt all over the house. Thinking back, it was hard to tell if that feeling filtered through from all the residents, or if it was just that Joss's own moods dominated and affected everyone. Milly had been punished – at a special House Meeting the residents had voted that she should clean out the chicken shed, repaint it and mend the broken catch on the door. She'd chosen to do it on a chill and windy day, with vicious rain ripping into her hair and clothes, making her look even more bedraggled and tragic than ever.