Away From It All (12 page)

Joss brought food down from the house, cooked rice and steaks for him and spent the nights curling her younger, stronger body round his, whispering reassurance about the sounds and sights outside. They were shadows of trees, not giant goblins, she'd tell him when he woke in the dark and the moon cast eerie shapes on the sloping ceiling. It was for his fears that she'd made the curtains, so that as the darkness of winter afternoons came on and he wanted a cup of tea, he wouldn't stand for hours trembling at the door between the kitchen and sitting room, trying to make out whether the shapes on the walls were devils' dancing limbs or simply waving birch twigs.

Arthur had built the kitchen cupboards. He'd said it was what men did when they were cast away from real life and had to fashion their own dwellings. Had he been mad at this point? She couldn't really remember. Jocelyn wandered into the sitting room and sat heavily on the tired old sofa. Alice followed, offering a mug of tea. Joss waved it away, bracelets jangling. Arthur had said he was a man content to be adrift, no longer part of life's mainstream. If he was
mad
, it didn't show in his handiwork. She'd watched him planing the wood, expertly cutting the joints for the drawers. At least bloody Alice hadn't taken her paintbrush to all that. Jocelyn could see she'd tightened up the hinges, made the doors hang straight, lined up the edges. It wasn't drastic, perhaps it was even practical, but Jocelyn found herself resenting even that, as if Alice had dared to smarten up the memory of Arthur himself. The cupboard handles had gone, though. Joss tried to tell
herself they'd just been scrappy bits of wood, but she'd watched Arthur chiselling their shapes by hand from bits of oak chopped out of the firewood that had come from the basket by the hearth.

‘You've thrown away the kitchen handles. Arthur's handles.'

‘They were falling to bits, Joss,' Alice told her in an irritating, ‘let's-be-practical' way. ‘Half of them were missing anyway and the others were ingrained with filth. You can't expect the renters to put up with that. I wouldn't, no-one would.'

‘But they're getting art,' Joss snapped. ‘Or they were.' In their place were now silvery things shaped like starfish. Not even sensible either – the sharp ends would catch on jacket pockets, pull holes in loose shirts. Joss looked at them with disdain. ‘I suppose you think
those
are “contemporary”. Amusing even. Well you're wrong.' She hauled herself out of the sofa, leaning on her stick for support. ‘What have you done upstairs? I'd better look. If you've painted over the mural in the bathroom . . .'

‘I haven't done anything up there. I haven't had time,' Alice said, adding, not quite far enough under her breath, ‘yet.'

Jocelyn walked slowly up the stairs, holding tight to the rail and feeling depressed at the lack of her former easy balance. She glanced into Alice's room on the left of the small landing. It was so tidy you'd hardly know it was in use. How, Joss wondered, had she managed to produce such a prissy, neat housewife of a daughter? Grace's room, opposite, was far more cheering. The bed was a messy nest of duvet, strewn-about clothes and magazines with Monty the cat sprawled sleeping across the rumpled pillows. That was more like it.

Bloody sodding hell, Alice muttered to herself as she strode down the path to the village, snapping twigs off branches as she went. Bloody fucking sodding lousy hell. What was the point?

She was in need of a drink and the anonymity of being alone in a crowded pub surrounded by the convivial conversations of people she didn't know. It would be busy, the car park was packed and families with crisps and cans of drink overflowed from the garden into the street and across to the beach.

‘You're talking to yourself, Alice.' Aidan was at a table by the pub wall, looking through a pile of manuscript. So the book was coming along then.

‘Oh hi Aidan. Sorry, I was miles away. I just fancied a drink – what are you having? I'll get you one.'

The bar was crowded with holidaymakers. Conscious of her rudeness but feeling that her need was greater, Alice shimmied her way to the bar, past groups in sailing gear who were being indecisive about what they wanted to drink. On an impulse she ordered a bottle of chilled cava and carried it with a pair of glasses back to Aidan.

‘Hmm. Sparkly stuff – what are we celebrating?'

‘Bugger all. I'm doing compensating. Just had a run-in with my mother. I can't get anything right. I mean what's the point of Harry dragging me all the way down here to help out and then complaining when I try to improve things a bit?' Alice wrenched the top off the bottle, anger giving her a burst of extra strength.

‘Maybe that's the point: it was Harry doing the dragging, not Jocelyn. Perhaps she doesn't want anything changed.'

‘She wants the rest of her life to be comfortable though, doesn't she? So how's that going to work if
Penmorrow collapses around her ears? What will they all live on? The way it's going, the council will be round one day, digging through the binbags and clutter to find her dead under a mountain of memorabilia, surrounded by empty bottles and gnawing rats.'

Aidan laughed. ‘Harry and Mo won't let it come to that.'

‘Harry and Mo want out. Well Mo does, you can just tell. I mean, who'd want to live all their grown-up life under the thumb of a demanding mother-in-law anyway? I think Mo's been a saint to put up with Joss all these years as it is, but . . .'

‘But?'

‘Mo's different this time. She's got a resentful look about her, all the time.' Alice stopped and took a deep sip of her drink. She could feel its coolness trickling down inside her, soothing. ‘Hey, you don't want to hear about this. I feel like a silly teenager who's grumbling that their mother's a cow and doesn't understand.'

Aidan topped up their glasses. ‘Was it like that when you
were
a teenager?'

‘What's this, research? Aren't you off duty?'

‘No, not really. If it's relevant, don't expect me to leave it out. But I'm interested, whether or not.'

‘My teen rebellion took the form of reading geography books, doing maths and English O level by secret postal tuition and climbing out of my window to spend nights on the beach with a bunch of French exchange students.'

Aidan laughed. ‘What, you mean you wouldn't have been allowed to? Like a normal kid?'

‘Huh, no such luck. Jocelyn would probably have set up a womb blessing or something to speed me on my merry sexual way. It wasn't the climbing out that
was rebellious, it was the keeping my love life to myself!'

It was getting late and the clientele in the pub garden had altered – families with children had been replaced by older teenagers and holidaymakers in search of pub food. Alice realized then that she hadn't eaten since her lunchtime tuna sandwich and the drink had gone to her head. She hoped Grace and Theo had had the sense to forage for supper in the Penmorrow larder. Neither of them lacked basic cooking skills. The Richmond kitchen was often heaped with evidence of late-night feasting, with stuck-on pasta in saucepans and cheese carelessly grated onto the floor and into the cat.

Alice noticed a curvaceous blonde girl looking slightly lost in the garden, glancing round as if for someone she'd mislaid. Eventually, the girl caught sight of Aidan and made her way to them. She placed both hands on the table and leaned forward, showing a cavernous cleavage and the edges of a frilled pink bra. ‘Do you have an escort?' she asked Aidan, her voice barely more than a sexy whisper.

Aidan smiled politely, looking unsure. ‘Er, well I'm with this lady actually, but thanks for the offer.'

The girl looked blank for a moment, then stood up and laughed, ‘God no! I meant in the car park! The blue Escort – it's blocking me in!'

‘Oh. Sorry, a bit confused there. Um, no. No car here at all, sorry!'

Alice could barely stop giggling. ‘Escort! Imagine if she'd been really offering a service, here in Tremor-well!'

‘She'd hardly have picked me for the ideal paying companion anyway.' Aidan put on a mock-glum expression.

‘Oh I don't know, you're not so bad,' she said before she thought about it. Now that she
did
think about it, she wondered if he'd misinterpret. But it wouldn't matter if he did, would it. She must be, what, at least seventeen years older than him? And she was firmly, solidly, very committedly married to Noel. Wryly, she thought how irrelevant these details would have seemed to her own mother. How very different she was from Jocelyn.

NOEL DIDN
'
T USUALLY
go in for surprises. They were so hard to get right. Alice had never liked them, not even in the form of presents, although he was pretty sure even she wouldn't turn her nose up at an unexpected diamond necklace. She had hated it when he'd tried to whisk her away for a mystery weekend. There he'd been, dancing round the bedroom, triumphantly brandishing air tickets that he wouldn't let her see and feeling slightly foolish, but, instead of swooning with appropriate delight, she'd gone into an immediate panic-flap.

‘But I
have
to know where we're going!' she'd wailed. ‘How will anyone know where to get hold of us in an emergency? What do I take? Hot place or cold? City, country, coast?' All the spontaneity of the gesture had fizzled away like bubbles from stale champagne, so that in the end he'd simply given in and shouted, frustrated and thwarted, ‘OK then, it's bloody Venice. Happy now?'

And she had been. Perfectly. Easy as that. And they'd had a wonderful time. He should have known better really; Alice was simply one of those people who need to feel they have complete control over
everything they're doing. And, as she'd pointed out when they'd explored just about every last alleyway in the entire city, the whole trip could have been ruined by taking the wrong shoes.

Noel sipped bitter coffee in his first-class seat on the train and wondered what Alice would say when he turned up at Penmorrow. She probably wouldn't appreciate his impulsiveness. She might accuse him of trying to catch her out, though at what Noel couldn't begin to imagine. If Alice was going to have a torrid affair she'd be certain to jot down a note of her plans for passionate trysts in the kitchen diary. And Tremorwell village was hardly the adultery centre of England – who would dare try to keep an extramarital dalliance secret from those all-seeing demon keepers of the post office? On the other hand Alice might simply be delighted to see him. Surely after weeks in the company of her demanding mother, crabby sister-in-law and spookily silent brother she was just about certain to be.

The train was running more than an hour late. In a world-weary voice, the conductor announced over the PA that the train ahead had run into some cows that had strayed onto the line. Noel couldn't decide whether his tone of mild amusement was down to the train being one that belonged to a rival company, or whether he just thought it laughable that cows were daft enough to stroll under a train and get themselves killed.

Long stops at remote stations had smokers leaving their seats to light up together on the platforms by open doors and make amiable grumbling conversation. Hot, dusty, country air wafted in, bringing the scent of nearby slurry and the sleepy cooing of wood pigeons. The barely populated stations reminded Noel of
posters from the 1950s advertising days out by rail. But where there would have been lovingly tended flower beds and busy, chuffing engines, now there were only abandoned sidings filled with plumes of purple loose-strife, spindly but thriving in the parched ground.

As they dawdled through central Cornwall, Noel entertained himself watching a lone female passenger trying to look as if she was above being interested in the macabre sight of the dead cows, but taking frequent furtive glances out of the window on the north side of the train, waiting to glimpse the gory trackside clean-up operation. She was two rows along, facing Noel across the aisle, and he found himself fascinated by the sight of her bare legs beneath the table as she flexed her ankles. He watched the long calf muscles tense and untense. Was she fending off DVT, he wondered? She had kicked off her high-heeled strappy shoes, which looked far too narrow to accommodate her splayed toes and made her feet look like miniature diver's flippers. Up and down and round and round went the slim ankles, and the gold nail polish on her toes flashed up and down with them.

She was in her late twenties, Noel guessed, and she had long loose thick dark hair and skin tanned to an almost unfashionable depth, giving her limbs the kind of swarthy look that might, he thought, also be due to an excess of hair. He liked that – there was something feral and heated and rude about it. Alice, lovely as she was, was very fair and only sparsely fuzzed and far too zealous (for his tastes), in the depilation department. It had been one of the things he'd liked (now firmly past tense) about Paula – when looking in her mirror she clearly turned a blind eye to a faint but definable moustache. He found himself wondering if the girl's
naked toes were furry too (for surely there weren't (yet) women in the nation who waxed their toes? Were there?) and he tried to focus on them as she exercised her legs.

He couldn't decide if she was actually
that
attractive – it would be easy enough to put his feelings of comfortable randiness down to the movement of the train. It reminded him of school-bound bus journeys years ago on which he could rely on having constant erections. He'd got one now that his schoolboy self would have called a real boner. He'd have to start thinking about something else soon or he'd have to tote his bag in front of him when he stood up to get off at Redruth. Eventually the girl caught him staring. He lifted his gaze from floor level and found himself looking into long green slanted eyes. She was laughing at him and he could tell that she could tell what was going on in his trousers.