Away From It All (32 page)

Grace sat on the battered red leather beanbag beside Jocelyn's peacock chair. The beanbag was so dried out and faded, it looked like mummified skin that she'd seen in a museum on a school trip.

‘Did you think you were going to die?' Jocelyn asked her.

Grace thought for a moment. ‘A bit. Well no. Not really. Because Sam didn't. He was sure Chas would get something sorted.' Actually she hadn't thought
about the actual dying process. She'd thought about getting wet, about being in the sea and being tossed around on the rocks and about how it would hurt. She'd thought about being cold and sodden in her clothes and about the taste of too much salt, but drowning and what it would feel like hadn't crossed her mind at all. She didn't know whether that was a failure of imagination or not.

‘You're young, you're still blessed with that certainty that you've got all the years you need. You stick with that.'

‘What about you? Are you all right? I heard you fell down the stairs. Did
you
think you were going to die?'

‘Heavens no! There wasn't time! My fall simply illustrates the dangers of overindulgence.' Joss sighed. ‘Learn something from that. Though of course you probably won't, you'll make your own errors, as you should.'

‘If you're going to overindulge, make sure you do it in a safe place.' Grace sounded as if she was reciting from a book. ‘See, I did learn something.'

Grace was fidgety with excitement. She was not going back to London. Even Noel was excited about the idea. Alice was in full hyper-organization mode, doing her favourite thing with notebooks, making lists. There were builders to be talked to, schools to be checked out, agents found to handle the house sale in London. Penmorrow was going to be home. Mo was in a thoroughly happy mood. Some of the money from selling the Richmond house was going to buy them a bed and breakfast place in St Ives – something manageable, size-wise. Mo was going to have time to paint again – she could think of no better place to do it. Gosling Cottage would be hers and Harry's to visit whenever they wanted and so that Harry would
carry on with his vegetable-growing. The home-grown cannabis movement would, he'd decided, have to carry on without him. Those long scarlet peppers were the thing, those and stripy yellow and green courgettes. Pretty food sold well. Arrange a multicoloured selection of those, with red and white onions and a long vine of cherry tomatoes, and punters would almost knock you over in the rush to hand over silly money.

‘When I was in the cave,' Grace told Joss, ‘I thought about that charm I'd made with the mushrooms. I'd asked it if I could somehow not go back to London. That was the only bit when I thought I
might
die – when I thought the charm had worked and that I was getting what I wanted but not
how
I wanted it.'

Joss shook her head and smiled. ‘Ah, but that's the trick. It's just as well you're going to be staying close to me,' she said. ‘You've a lot to learn yet. There's a knack to it. Lesson one is: be careful, very careful, what you wish for.'

Almost a year later Jocelyn's book (
Angel's Flightpath
) had made its way into the shops and onto the review pages in the smarter Sunday papers. It had only been out a couple of weeks but was reported to be doing well. Several journalists had ventured (on expenses, enjoying the May sunshine) to Penmorrow to interview Joss, and she was revelling in her new, though possibly brief, go at fame. Libby Purves had been gratifyingly sweet on
Midweek
. The
Sunday Times
‘Day in The Life' piece had been startlingly well received. It was only with reluctance she'd turned down Graham Norton on the grounds that it clashed with Grace's school play:
A Midsummer Night's Dream
in which, as Titania, she'd worn Joss's Ossie Clark rainbow elf outfit.

Jocelyn had a dozen copies of
Angel's Flightpath
lined up on the top bookshelf in Cygnet. Alice had caught her looking through each of them in turn, as if one might prove to have something different in it from the others, something that even Joss hadn't known about herself. Aidan's name featured in almost insultingly small print, she noticed. A hard, thankless job, ghosting, Alice had thought, seeing how little credit he'd got. No wonder he'd given so little of himself away. Why should he? No-one was paying him to spill out his personal life to strangers.

The family were all together now, gathered in the sitting room at Penmorrow waiting for Patrice's programme to begin. The roof had been the first priority and while the scaffolding was up the windows had been replaced with the perfect hardwood replicas that Alice had insisted on, much against the opinion of Mrs Rice and the other two dragons in the shop. ‘You want nice polyurethane replacements,' she'd advised. ‘You'll never need the painters in again.'

Alice had smiled and nodded politely, just managing not to point out that ‘not painting' was fine if you were content only to live with white for evermore. She'd gone for a paler, subtler version of Joss's original purple and very fine it looked, in her and the family's opinion. What the village thought, she didn't much care. In the rest of the house, too, she'd been surprised at herself for not choosing her usual shades of putty and cream. One bathroom was to be John Oliver's vivid Kinky Pink, another was to be a Caribbean mix of turquoises. Penmorrow, the house, was almost making its own choices, and they were vibrant and exciting.

The builders had been on site for a good seven months now, for five of which and a damp cold winter,
Alice, Grace and Theo had stoically continued to live in Gosling while Noel worked out his notice and dealt with the sale of the Richmond house. On Penmorrow's middle floor, three bedrooms and one of the bathrooms were now finished enough to be habitable and the kitchen was a designer's wet dream, though with the revamped green Aga proudly reigning over the chic improvements, like an ancient dowager over a collection of frisky young debutantes.

‘What time's it start?' Sam asked for the fourth time.

‘It said eight thirty,' Theo told him, stretching his long self out on the floor in front of the new scarlet velvet chesterfield. Sam and Chas looked years older than in the previous summer. They'd grown inches and taken to a short-cut hairstyle, with the same Tintin flicked-up front bits that Aidan had had. Theo had lost his London flabby pallor, partly, Alice was sure, because he'd spent all winter careering about with his new schoolfriends on Tremorwell's hills risking his life on a skateboard, and as soon as the weather warmed up practically lived in the sea on a surfboard.

‘A few bits of wood and polystyrene,' Noel had remarked one day. ‘If only I'd known that's all it would take to keep him amused.'

‘I've put the pasties in the Aga to warm up, Alice,' Mo said, bustling into the room with a tray of glasses. ‘Where do you want the champagne?'

‘Inside me, please,' Jocelyn demanded from her peacock chair. Alice had tried and tried, but Jocelyn had insisted that the ugly, unravelling cane chair stay in the hexagon where it had always lived. ‘It fits there, sweetie. You keep it,' Joss had said, patting Alice fondly as if she was bestowing a priceless gift. Joss, of course, had treated herself to a stunning Matthew Hilton leather chair to take pride of place in the
revamped Cygnet and spent her afternoons in that instead, peering down her new telescope at the beach and the opposite headland, and reporting back gleefully whenever she saw an adulterously active couple up to no good in the copse by Grace's favourite bench. Mo, well occupied with the new business in St Ives and recently converted to the delights of a nearby beauty parlour and hairdresser, commented that Joss should have better things to do than to go spying on villagers. ‘Why doesn't she take up voluntary work?' she suggested. ‘Or get on with another book?'

Alice poured champagne for everyone and turned up the volume as an advert for cat food faded away. Patrice, she hoped, had done right by Jocelyn in the editing of this life appreciation. It wouldn't, she thought, look good for him if he hadn't: Joss was, for the moment, something of a national treasure again, an admired survivor of mad times and excessive living. How long for, nobody knew. But then, Alice recalled, thinking of Grace and Sam trapped in the cave a year ago, who knew how long anyone had?

The programme started with the titles rolling across a view of Tremorwell Bay. Surfers bobbed on the water and there was the muffled sound of holidaymakers calling to each other and whooping through beach-cricket games.

‘Oh look! Me and Big Shepherd!' Joss commented, pointing delightedly at the screen. Patrice loomed into shot, smiling at the view across the orchard, towards Arthur Gillings's grave. ‘And here, for over forty years, an icon of her own, and succeeding generations . . . a muse, a symbol, a rebel, an inspiration . . .'

Alice caught Harry's eyes raised to the ceiling and smiled at him. ‘She'll go all big-time after this,' he whispered to her.

‘Yes, but what's new?' Alice said.

Grace watched the scenes of her new home as if it was another place and from another time. She lived here now – she was going to be the one who took over when Joss moved on. Exactly
what
she'd take over, she wasn't yet sure. All she knew was that she was now happy, at home and at her new school. And she was learning things here, things that the school witch girls wouldn't have the smallest clue about. Joss was a brilliant tutor, reading and instructing every weekend, sitting with Grace on the fabulous new rope swing chairs on the Cygnet terrace. Grace now knew the proper significance of each of the year's important festivals and about the part played by the gods and goddesses of the earth and planets and elements. Most importantly, she had her own special crystal that Joss had given her on her birthday. This Litha, Midsummer Day a few weeks from now, she would hang it up for the first time in the hexagon window and draw down the power from the sun for the protection and safekeeping of all at Penmorrow.

THE END

Judy Astley was frequently told off for day-dreaming at her drearily traditional school but has found it to be the ideal training for becoming a writer. There were several false-starts to her career: secretary at an all-male Oxford college (sacked for undisclosable reasons), at an airline (decided, after a crash and a hijacking, that she was safer elsewhere) and as a dress designer (quit before anyone noticed she was adapting
Vogue
patterns). She spent some years as a parent and as a painter before sensing that the day was approaching when she'd have to go out and get a Proper Job. With a nagging certainty that she was temperamentally unemployable, and desperate to avoid office coffee, having to wear tights every day and missing out on sunny days on Cornish beaches with her daughters, she wrote her first novel,
Just for the Summer
. She has now had ten novels published by Black Swan.

Also by Judy Astley

JUST FOR THE SUMMER

PLEASANT VICES

SEVEN FOR A SECRET

MUDDY WATERS

EVERY GOOD GIRL

THE RIGHT THING

EXCESS BAGGAGE

NO PLACE FOR A MAN

UNCHAINED MELANIE

and published by Black Swan

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk

AWAY FROM IT ALL

A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552999519
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446437827

First publication in Great Britain

PRINTING HISTORY

Black Swan edition published 2003

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Copyright © Judy Astley 2003

The right of Judy Astley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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