Away From It All (19 page)

Alice steered the Galaxy into a space in the Safeway car park. Just beside the store was the railway, and she watched as a train hurtled past on the first stretch of
the journey to London. Penzance station was a small, pretty seaside terminus. She remembered the many times she'd got on the train there, wearing sand-filled flip-flops and old scruffy shorts and clutching a straw bag and a rucksack. Then the shock of arriving at Paddington where everyone raced about in neat city suits (Smart Lady attire) and high heels and carrying elegant little handbags. Almost two worlds, she thought as she approached the supermarket door, where a notice requested that customers make sure they were suitably attired and not enter the stores bare-footed and bare-chested. She somehow didn't imagine she'd be seeing Elvis in the cat-food aisle in here. But if she did, she'd smile at him and say a quick hello. A Cornish Elvis wouldn't stare through her as if she didn't exist or give her that look that Londoners did, as if you were the loony they dreaded sitting next to on the tube. Maybe Grace had a point, perhaps they should give it a try, living down here where no-one checked out your handbag to see if it was (oh the shame) last year's Prada, and you could get change out of £50 for a lobster supper.

As she wheeled her trolley towards the bakery section, she imagined herself and Noel living full-time in Tremorwell. This was the first time for many years that she'd really felt as if she was part of the place again and not a short-term guest. What would it be like for Noel if they stayed on? If they gave up on Richmond? Perhaps he'd be a happy retiree at first and would roam the county playing golf. But soon he'd be bored and would start thinking he could make an enthusiastic new-blood difference to the local parish council. Women would vote for him, certainly. Next thing you knew he'd be bigging it up in local politics and become a bar-room lecturer on boundaries and
by-laws. As for living at Penmorrow, that would be hopeless – like putting two tigers in a box. Mentally, he and Jocelyn would rip each other to shreds along with everyone else's nerves. A terrible scenario, completely hopeless.

She hoped Aidan would enjoy his film. Somehow she felt she could be reasonably certain that he wouldn't be thinking of her as he watched Catherine Zeta Jones strutting about in her bikini.

YOU
'
D THINK GOD
had turned up for a visit, Harry thought, as Patrice and Jocelyn hugged theatrically on the Penmorrow verandah and the wind chimes jangled like mad wedding bells from each side of the porch. There wasn't even a camera running yet, but Jocelyn was going full out for dramatic effect. She was wearing what she called her rainbow elf outfit: multicoloured hand-painted silk trousers beneath a matching long jagged-hemmed coat with dangling pointy sleeves like a medieval maiden. It had been made for her by Ossie Clark as a generous thank-you for hospitality many, many years ago, and was kept as a treasure in tissue paper and a dark wardrobe. Too surprised to refuse, Katie had been roped in after lunch, to interweave a matching rainbow of slender braids into Joss's plait to perfect the co-ordinated look she wanted.

‘It's really
now
!' Katie had exclaimed, admiring the delicate swirls of colour on the fabric. ‘This old hippy gear's
sooo
this summer.' It was a comment that on any other occasion might have gone down less than well with Jocelyn (or indeed with anyone), but Jocelyn was too pleased with herself and too excited at the prospect of being centre stage to find fault or offence.

Harry met Mo's eye across the pathway and they exchanged a mutual lip-curl at the mwah-mwah kissing. Patrice was impressively surrounded by silver flight cases full of equipment which Katie, along with Nick the cameraman, had unloaded from Patrice's Discovery. Jocelyn was gazing at all this heaped-up kit, as enraptured as if they were lavish presents gift-wrapped especially for her. Harry, by contrast, distrusted all this flashy paraphernalia, associating it with the kind of show-off men who drove low-slung cars with personalized number plates.

Greetings and introductions over, Patrice took Joss's hand and jumped back down the verandah steps, pulling her with him, keen to inspect the Big Shepherd statue and the pair of angrily snarling bronze sheep that made up his depleted flock on the front meadow. Harry feared for her balance, but the attention of Patrice seemed to inject new vitality into her.

‘Are these the only sheep left?' he asked. ‘I heard there were at least six, including two of them,' and he lowered his voice only slightly to stage-whisper, ‘
in flagrante
.'

‘Oh, given away, drifted away, wandered as sheep do,' Jocelyn told him airily. ‘Larry Olivier had one, and poor Jimi had one in London to take back to the States with him. But then of course he died, poor love, as so many did . . .'

‘Jimi? Heavens! We
must
have all this in shot at some point!' Excitedly, Patrice wheeled Jocelyn round and placed her beside Big Shepherd, alongside whose mottled greeny-brown bulk she looked extraordinarily delicate and slender in her floaty silks.

‘
Isn't
this thrilling?' Patrice asked the assembled company. Harry trusted that he didn't expect an honest reply. It didn't seem thrilling at all to him or to
Mo; more disruptively unwelcome and likely to lead, when this motley entourage had left, to a long, tedious period of Joss being grumpily discontented. She'd be like a child after too many ice creams: bad-tempered, unmanageable and wanting more. And where was Alice? Where had she vanished to so early in the day, leaving Noel, when he'd come trailing up to the house in search of her, looking like a complete spoon. A complete abandoned spoon.

‘So nobody's seen her?' Noel had asked rather bemusedly, accepting a slice of compensatory toast from Mo. There'd been a bit of an awkward silence in the kitchen then while each of them speculated on why Alice would have vanished without bothering to tell Noel, till Katie had proffered the suggestion that Alice might have popped out to get a newspaper.

‘In the
car
?' Sam had added an extra lashing of scorn to his usual amount. ‘Don't be
schtoopid
, the shop's only down the lane!' Mo had reached out and cuffed him across the head, like a mother lion. Joss had frowned and tutted, disapproving deeply of physical discipline, although, Harry reflected, it could probably sometimes be a lot less painful all round than the emotional sort.

‘And of course you will show me absolutely everything? For the full Penmorrow flavour?' Harry heard Patrice saying, the level of enthusiasm rising ever higher in his voice. He hoped, sincerely, that Jocelyn
wouldn't
show him quite everything. If his special-project polytunnel got any kind of TV exposure Harry would be making his escape from Penmorrow faster than he'd anticipated, by courtesy of something custodial dished out by Truro Magistrates Court.

‘So where did you go? And why didn't you wake me? We could have all gone out together somewhere.' Noel was on the Gosling terrace surrounded by discarded sections of newspaper when Alice and Grace came back. He had read every word of the
Sunday Times
and even had a shufti at the Appointments section, mainly to tut-tut at the mega salaries offered for jobs that didn't seem to have any real meaning, such as Transaction Valuation Analyst. What the buggery, he'd thought, was that when it was at home? Was it a jumped-up term that really meant ‘Counting the money in the shop till'? Or was he getting old and out of touch?

‘We just dashed out to Penzance – did a bit of supermarket stuff, you know. Sorry – we were a bit longer than we thought we'd be.' Alice sat beside him and opened a bottle of beer for each of them. She was looking pleased with life, quite radiant really in her new windblown sort of way. He should, Noel thought, have made more effort with her last night. She might have been more persuadable than she'd let on. He would have done if he hadn't drunk so much of Jocelyn's port after supper. The foray into that Oz girl's underwear had come to nothing when she'd laughed and swatted him away. Insulting really. She'd said, and her very words still stung, ‘If I'd fancied a clumsy fumble I'd have gone for your schoolboy son, matey.' She'd taken her time saying it, though – he'd got his hand close to a nest of warm, damp pussy first. Decidedly
not
a girl who went in for the full Brazilian waxing, thank the Lord.

‘We went to the shell shop and bought these,' Grace told him, holding out a Safeway bag to show him her booty. ‘I'm going to make a shell mirror for my room here.'

‘
Your
room? I thought Gosling was part of the great Penmorrow holiday rental empire.'

Alice gave him a sharp look as Grace went back into the house, which he felt mystified about interpreting other than to realize he'd said the wrong thing. When, here, he thought with irritation, did he ever manage to say the right thing?

‘She just wants to do something creative, Noel. Who knows, it might fit in with one of her GCSE Art projects when the time comes.'

‘Good, good, whatever she wants.' He raised his glass, conciliatory, then added, ‘I see someone's been touching up that tatty old mural in the bathroom. The mermaid's got her tail fin back.'

Alice laughed. ‘Don't tell Joss, for God's sake. She made me promise not to touch it. I interpreted that as “Don't paint over it” and just filled in bits that had faded or gone missing. At least now it doesn't look downright shabby. I brightened up the mackerels' stripes and the clownfish too, where the orange had chipped off, and I put some of the silvery flashes back on the seaweed. I'm pretty sure she painted it herself, though if she finds out what I've done she'll tell me it was Picasso, the day before he died or something.'

‘Whole place needs gutting, if you ask me. Start again, get the builders in. There's really no point fannying about dabbling at bits and bobs and hoping it'll look like something anyone would actually pay serious money to take a holiday in.'

Alice frowned at him. ‘Not everyone wants show-home standard when they get away. Some people who come here are looking for an atmosphere, a history.' Even as she spoke, Alice recognized that she'd thought along similar lines to Noel only a few weeks ago. She could hardly believe what she'd just said, she who
kept her spice jars in alphabetical order and had been considering changing her fabulous blue glass work-top for charcoal granite purely because a few smeary fingerprints tended to show up on it. She who bought a new front doormat every March 1st (the same day that every curtain in the house went to the dry-cleaners) and reminded Mrs Pusey to dust the light bulbs. Even the lavender hedge lining her front garden path stood tidily to attention, there was never a stray crisp packet crackling about under the seats in her car and every one of the white Egyptian cotton sheets in the airing cupboard had a size label (S, D, K) for easy identification.

‘We could go out now if you want, all four of us, drive somewhere by the sea and have an early supper somewhere?' Alice suggested to Noel. Where, she wondered, had the day gone? She wasn't really hungry – she and Grace had sat on the bench by the Penzance harbour car park eating chips out of a paper bag and licking ketchup off their fingers. Her Richmond persona didn't do that sort of thing, she'd told herself as she'd chucked a couple of lush, fatty morsels to a persistent gull, but then in Richmond you couldn't get chips as good as these.

‘Mum said she wanted to cook fish for all these poncey people at the house. Something special, something they wouldn't get up country,' Sam was saying. He, Chas, Theo and Grace sauntered up the hill behind the village sucking ice lollies, catching the drips with their tongues as they melted fast in the late afternoon sun.

‘So?' Theo said. ‘Let her. Wossa problem?'

‘Yeah but then she said trouble was, you could get anything anywhere. She said that cooking man from Padstow had told everyone on telly how to cook
everything Cornwall's got,' Sam went on. ‘So I got this idea. Carp. Most expensive fish in the world.
Exclusive
, is the word.'

Theo looked at him, puzzled. ‘So what do we do, get a boat and go out and catch them or what?'

Chas sighed, despairing. ‘It's a freshwater fish, right?' Theo scowled, feeling he was being pointed out as the idiot in the bunch. Sam joined in, pointing down towards the bay. ‘And look, Theo, even you townies can see that the big wet stuff out there is seawater. Salt water is what's out there, not fresh.'

‘Or not,' Sam said with a devilish grin. He jumped up onto a wall outside the square-fronted three-story city-dweller's dream of a four-square Georgian country house, and peered through the fuchsia hedge into a densely foliaged garden. Grace read the sign on the wall by the gate: ‘Hamilton House. Gardens open Tuesday and Friday. It's closed, we can't go in.'

Sam gave her a pitying look. ‘Course we can't go in. Not on those days, you have to pay and it's full of grockles. Some old bloke takes ancient trippers round in poncey groups and tells them what the plants are. Palms and stuff. It's really big, goes all the way down to the seafront, nearly. There's a great aerial runway in there too and ropes and stuff for little kids to play on.'

Theo looked at him blankly. ‘So? Do you two wanna sneak in there and play?'

Chas jumped up on the wall next to Sam. ‘They've got the carp in there, I've seen them. The pond's huge, practically a lake. The fish are big ones, massive even. It's deep though and carp are sly bastards.'

Grace looked mystified. ‘So what's the big deal? Can't Mo just cook something else? What's wrong with cod or something? Plaice, sole, monkfish, jellied
bloody eels? Why's it have to be carp? Are you sure she'd want them?'

Chas and Sam stared at her, silently and intently. Why wouldn't they say something, she wondered, they were so quiet and . . . twin-like.