Away From It All (28 page)

Grace felt caught out. How clever of Jocelyn to have noticed she wasn't entirely comfortable. Joss was difficult to fob off and Alice often commented that she was a great mind-reader.

‘Let me guess.' Jocelyn put a hand each side of Grace's head, resting her fingers lightly on her temples. Grace could feel her cool rings against her skin.

‘You like it here, don't you?' Joss smiled at her, knowing she didn't need an answer.

‘I'd say you don't really want to leave. You don't want to go to Italy or back to London.'

Grace almost laughed. ‘How did you know that? That's amazing!'

‘It's not amazing at all, child.' Jocelyn removed her hands and took hold of Grace's. ‘I can see you living here, it would suit you – you're a creature of nature and good, clean air. Look at these hands.' Here she turned Grace's hands palm upwards. ‘You've too much gentleness in you for the tough ways of a city existence. Do you enjoy your school?'

Grace bit her lip and looked at the ground. ‘A bit. I like Sophy and some of the others and some of the work but it's all so . . .
competitive.
Everything you do, everything you have, there's always someone sneering at you, just that little bit, you know? People look at your shoes. They look at how you have your hair. They look at your mum's car. And there's all the little in-crowds. There's the anorexia girls and the pony girls and the shopaholics and the witch girls . . .'

‘Witch girls?'

Grace laughed. ‘Oh they're no good. They don't do any of it right. They just do stuff to get boys and stick pins in Play-Doh models of girls they hate . . .'

‘Dangerous,' Jocelyn commented, frowning. ‘They'll find it'll backfire.'

‘I told them that but they didn't believe me. I'm not one of their group so it's like I couldn't know,' Grace said, then went on, ‘and there's the girls who ski at Christmas and come home showing off about it and the girls who go to Barbados and come home showing off about scuba-diving.'

‘Apart from that, everything's fine then,' Jocelyn said, teasing her.

‘Mmm! That's about it.'

‘It mightn't be any different here, you know,' she warned.

‘It's got to be. Nothing could be as up itself as the rich bits of London.' Grace felt exhausted. Where had all that come from? Jocelyn must have put a secret little spell on her when she touched her head. The spell had made her empty out all that she'd been feeling about school, all that build-up that had started on the day at the end of term when she just couldn't, wouldn't, face the gruesome ritual of sports day. She needed to talk about something else now though, before Joss started probing any further and making her ask questions about
Angel's Choice
.

‘What was it you wanted me to do?' Grace remembered she'd been brought to the woods for a reason.

‘Ah yes. I was going to ask you to help me with a small task but your need is the greater.' Jocelyn leaned heavily on her stick and rose to her feet. ‘Come with me, I know just the place to find a big, fat, white mushroom. I can tell you just what you need to do to help get what you want.'

Her own charm-making would have to wait, Joss thought as she headed for the fallen beech where the best fungi grew. And besides, perhaps it was unfair
to involve Grace. Concocting a remedy for revived youthfulness shouldn't really involve stealing from one who already had it. As with Grace's school witch girls, things could backfire.

The scent of harvest was in the air around Tremorwell. Alice, driving round the headland to buy lobsters in Chapel Creek, watched a massive combine harvester working the big field at the top of the hill. There was no-one to be seen among the wheat, no-one to make any ‘sacrifice' of the last of the crop to thank the land for its generosity. The combine resembled an alien space city moving across, but not really connecting with, the land. When she'd been a child, she and all the children of the village had been caught up in the excitement of harvest time; farmers then were still – just – doing their own combining, not yet booking in faceless contractors from miles away.

She remembered being allowed to ride with Sally and her schoolfriends on top of a truckload of hay as it was taken to be stored in the big Dutch barn at the side of the farm, just over the hill. And after the wheat harvest, back then, fields were set on fire to scorch away the last of the stubble which would then be ploughed back in to enrich the earth for the next crop. That had been thrilling, watching the lines of flames licking their way across the field, blackening the blond stumps, the last of the poppies and (best not thought of) a frantic collection of trapped wildlife. Soon after, it became illegal to burn stubble. Bales became industrial super-size, wrapped in green plastic like garden rubbish bags.

Mo had told Alice that Joss wanted a version of a Lammas harvest supper the next night, mostly for Patrice's benefit.

‘We'll need a corn dolly or something, won't we? And shouldn't we have a cake made with the first of the flour? Not that we've got our own corn . . .' Alice had suggested, writing a shopping list at the Penmorrow kitchen table.

Mo had looked quite jolly for once, she'd thought. ‘Don't worry about that,' Mo told her. ‘I'll be making some chocolate fudge brownies; we can have them with clotted cream.'

‘We always used to have gingerbread men,' Alice said, reminiscing. ‘And do you remember . . .'

‘The ones Milly and Kelpie made?' Mo started laughing. ‘I do! They made sure we could see they were
men
!'

‘Anatomically perfect! I remember all the men wincing when we bit them.'

Chapel Creek was packed with trippers and it was hard to find somewhere to park. Eventually she tucked the Galaxy in between a silver-blue Porsche and a big Audi estate. They reminded her of cars from back home. In fact it wouldn't surprise her if she ran into one or more of her London neighbours here, for Chapel Creek was almost entirely owned by affluent second-home yachties to the point where the place was virtually shut down in winter months. It boasted a gift shop and gallery and a busy little food store which sold all the delicatessen exotica that Tremorwell village post office couldn't begin to contemplate. There was an impressive cheese selection, frozen upmarket supper dishes for smart self-caterers, organic smoked garlic and other vegetables (some of them Harry's), but you would not find a can of Bob the Builder pasta shapes or aerosol-canned UHT cream brazening it out on the shelves.

The small harbour was crammed with gleaming,
white-hulled boats among which a small group of rusted old fishing vessels looked like an invasion of hard-core bikers at a society ball. Family groups ambled along the lane carrying oars and life jackets, fuel cans and ropes and other nautical essentials. Absolutely everyone seemed clean and affluent and well fed and as if, Alice was amused to note, they'd been dressed for a shoot for the Boden catalogue. It was exactly how she usually looked, it occurred to her, but somehow she'd lost her freshly ironed, slick, co-ordinated style over the last few weeks. For a moment she had to glance down at her own clothes, remind herself what she'd put on that morning.

She seemed to have acquired a peculiar assortment of not-Alice outfits and today was wearing Grace's candy-pink tee shirt with the word ‘Doll' picked out on the front in purple sequins. This had teamed itself with grubby trainers and a full white skirt splodged with mauve and yellow roses that she'd found hanging in Gosling's wardrobe. She had no idea whose it had been, or how long it had been there. Presumably a holidaymaker had left it behind, possibly even abandoned it as either dated or simply a bad buy. It looked, now that she thought about it, like just a mad old skirt. But if she ran into friends from London who'd judge her outfit to be a sign of diminishing sanity, she'd only have to claim it was ‘vintage' for the garment to be acclaimed with smiles, admiration and compliments on her cleverness at such a find.

The shellfish van was parked down at the end of the slipway beside the pub. Alice bought a dozen live lobsters and parted with an amount of cash that back home would have paid for only a quarter of what she now carried away in a polystyrene box.

‘Are you intending to do the murdering yourself?'
Alice found Aidan waiting for her on the pub terrace at the top of the slipway, a pint of beer in his hand.

‘Mo said she'd do that bit,' Alice told him. ‘I think she suspects I'm likely to get squeamish and start thinking of them as pets. As it is, I'm sure Grace won't eat any, not if she hears them moving about in their box. We'll have to hide them in the larder.'

Aidan put his drink on a table and took the box from her. ‘Have you got time for a drink?' he asked. ‘I could do with the company.'

‘Yes, OK, that would be good. Just a Coke though, I've got the car. Are you still feeling a bit of a spare part?'

Aidan laughed. ‘Just holding out till that idiot Patrice has gone. He told me he's off after tomorrow, so perhaps I can persuade Jocelyn to sit down and get on with the book again. I've reworked what's already there. It's close to the end now.'

While Aidan was getting the drinks, Alice sat on the pub's low wall and watched a family on the pontoon loading up their dinghy and preparing to row out to their boat. Since she'd been grown-up, she hadn't really had much to do with boats, barely anything more than sunset trips round the bay in Antigua, a bit of rowing on the Serpentine with Grace and visits to a friend's barge for supper in Chelsea Harbour. Keeping a little day-boat on the Thames had never appealed – the river in summer was crowded and busy and was a tame version of sailing compared with how she remembered the sea expeditions in Arthur's old boat. Cornish weather changed fast and although they might leave the harbour on a fine warm day, they could easily end up sailing back on a spitefully choppy grey sea with leaden clouds threatening above and the wind scudding vicious gusts.

Aidan came back and sat beside her on the wall. Alice said, ‘I'm glad they're going soon, Patrice and Katie.'

‘Is it because of what I said? About what Patrice said about Jocelyn's book?'

‘No. It's because of something I saw.' I shouldn't be telling him this, Alice thought to herself, but continued all the same. ‘I saw Noel from the window in Cygnet. He was . . . well there's no better expression than the old cliché – he was making a pass at Katie.'

‘Was he?' Aidan sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Whatever for? He must be mad.'

Alice laughed. ‘Why? She's incredibly attractive. Don't you think so?'

Aidan screwed up his face as if acting at hard thinking. ‘Well in a mucky sort of way, I suppose so. How much did you mind? A lot? Or is that a stupid question?'

Alice considered for a moment. Did he really want to know, she wondered, or was he doing that professional thing he did of simply asking the right question so that you got the chance to confide all? Whichever it was, she didn't much mind. It gave her a chance to try out what she thought. After another moment or two she said, ‘I think I mind Noel being so predictable. As soon as I saw Katie I knew he'd find it hard to resist having a bit of a go.' Even as she spoke she felt that perhaps she could have made more effort to keep Noel from being distracted. She'd been too distant. Too distracted herself. Mostly by Aidan. Ridiculous, and serve her right.

‘I'm surprised she and Patrice aren't an item,' Aidan said.

‘Perhaps they have been.'

‘Nah – you can tell with exes, there's always a bit of
giveaway sniping from the hurt party, even if it's been over for years. No, I think it's an event waiting to happen. As my girlfriend always says, “I'd put folding money on it.”'

Girlfriend? The word had slinked in smoothly like vodka over ice. Alice looked at him quickly. He was staring out at the boats, unfazed, watching the tripper-loaded ferry crossing the estuary. He hadn't mentioned a girlfriend before, or at least she thought he hadn't. In fact he hadn't mentioned anything personal about himself at all, as if he'd only brought his working self with him to Penmorrow. Well of course he had; what else should he do? He could hardly discuss all his own life baggage at every writing job he undertook. Of course he had a girlfriend – attractive young intelligent man like him, interested (or at least slickly excellent at making you feel he was interested) in everything: such an apparently selfless, well-practised listener. Alice revised her previous imagining about the interior of his Kentish Town flat. She replaced the squalor with gorgeously rich, toning fabrics, with a huge sofa meant for sex and sprawling. She mentally cleared up his kitchen and added a shelf-full of cookbooks by the current batch of TV chefs.

Alice sipped her drink and felt something in her brain whirring into action. It felt like a slow old computer trying to retrieve a long-deleted file. She could do a little something about Katie and Patrice – she'd done it before, long ago, with French Marcel and it had worked. All she needed were the right ingredients. That fancy Chapel Creek village shop was exactly the place to find them.

Harry opened the box of surgical gloves and pulled out the first pair. He chuckled to himself as he put them
on, wondering if they counted as a legitimate business expense. For that, of course, you'd need a legitimate business.

The first of the crop was ready. The tiny white pistils on the flower buds of the upper stems had turned a sultry tobacco brown, and it was time to cut them down and get on with the harvest. The empty room next to his and Mo's up in the attic was all ready. He'd put up a dozen strings like washing lines along the length of the room and had rigged up a bit of old white cloth at the window, so that the sun wouldn't overheat the drying branches.

Just before he started, Harry rolled a fat joint with the crumbled bud from the first branch he was to cut. It wouldn't be the best smoke; it would be far too resinous and sharp, but it was a tradition he liked to keep up, to sample the very first of it as he worked. It made him feel the growing process was then complete.