Away From It All

by Judy Astley

  ‘A timeless rite-of-passage tale of the hazards of honesty, of painful decisions and family strife. The accomplished artistry and the enduring relevance of Angel’s Choice effortlessly survive the passing decades.’

  Grace wondered now why she hadn’t read it before. It hadn’t even been offered to her, which was a surprise, as her mother was always on at her to read more. There wasn’t a copy of Angel’s Choice in the Richmond house, that was for sure. Alice’s Gulliver School books were lined up proudly in order on the bookshelves in the sitting room where Noel thought they looked a bit silly – like toys among antiques, he’d said. Grace had read all those – Alice gave her the manuscripts as soon as she’d finished them so that Grace could check them over for dated vocabulary and unlikely clothes. She was pretty good though, her mum, and hardly ever got anything much wrong. Which was worrying. It meant she kept a close ear and eye on Grace and her friends, listened perhaps a bit too hard in the car on the school run when Grace thought she was well into some dull thing about money or education on Radio Four. But as for this book, Grace had always known Joss had written one (she knew that was how Penmorrow had been bought), but had assumed it was some dull old thing about really old grown-up people. But it wasn’t. It was about a girl of fifteen. Her age. Well, her age soon enough, anyway.

  Grace rolled onto her side and groped into her bag for the sunscreen. If she was in for a long afternoon’s read she wanted to get a gorgeous even tan doing it, not a seared-meat look. A few yards away, across at the beach café, she could see some of the surfer boys looking in her direction. Theo was probably there – he’d taken to hanging out with them and was putting in lots of practice on a borrowed surfboard. She hoped he’d tell her if she looked minging in her red bikini. He hadn’t commented at all. Either he just didn’t bother to look, or he thought she wasn’t worth looking at. Or he was being stepbrotherly and kind and just avoiding saying that her tummy hung out over the front in a really, like, offputting way, or that she needed a bit more up top to carry off a halter neck. Grace quickly smeared factor six over her legs and the bits of her back that she could reach and lay down on her front. She shoved her old and fraying straw hat on and pulled it down low so that the shadow of its brim fell across the pages, and started to read.

  Jocelyn wasn’t supposed to react like this. What was there about this refurbished kitchen that was not likeable? Alice just didn’t get it. All that work, from scrubbing out murky corners that no rubber-gloved hand had approached with a J-cloth for years, to painting a wash of pale aqua paint all over the walls and ceiling. What had been the bloody point?

  ‘You just don’t understand, do you Alice?’ Joss looked at her daughter with an expression of resigned despair. ‘You never have. You can’t just leave things alone, let them lie, let them rot away if their time has come.’

  Jocelyn considered that Alice was looking very pleased with herself. In fact she was annoyingly bouncy, like a puppy who’s just so cleverly retrieved a thrown ball. What she didn’t realize was that in this case, to Jocelyn, it was as if she’d returned carrying a trophy that was shocking and foul – a severed hand came to mind.

  ‘I thought that was what I was here for – to help stop things rotting away.’ Alice was smiling, still sure of herself, showing off her efforts. Joss ran her fingers along the scrubbed wooden worktop, then along the smooth, newly painted window ledge. It felt too clean, too silky, too not-hers.

  ‘Where did it come from, Alice, this urge to organize and meddle, to list things, to polish things up, make them into the shiny gleamy things that they simply weren’t and were never meant to be?’

  She gazed at the sleek blue walls and breathed in the acrid scent of new paint and dedicated cleaning activity. Alice could scrub a place down till its very soul was beaten into submission and drowned in Flash. She was standing there, slender and urban – quite the Smart Lady, looking as trim and tidy as this kitchen, her hair all glossy and her cream linen trousers so damn clean. She wasn’t saying anything now. That was wise. Right now that was the only thing Joss was pleased about, that her daughter still knew better than to attempt to resort to reason in the face of her mother’s fury, to leap in trying to justify, ‘But Joss . . .’

  ‘You were just the same as a child,’ Jocelyn continued, grim-faced, picking at a tiny bubble of paint just on the edge of the door frame. ‘You were always wanting your room organized, putting your dolly tidily to bed each night in a nasty plastic toy cot that Sally’s mother – what was her name? Beryl . . . no . . . Brenda – had given you on your birthday.’ Alice started a slow smile, remembering. Jocelyn glared. Alice mustn’t mistake this moment for one of cosy reminiscence.

  ‘“She’s my baby. And babies sleep in cots.”’ Joss mimicked the child-Alice being pretend-mummy. ‘When had you ever seen a baby in a cot? Cots are baby-prisons complete with bars.’

  All Penmorrow babies slept in their parents’ beds and when they grew too big, they curled up with other toddlers on the big mattress in the playroom. They looked like kittens, sprawled and snuggled together, milky, warm and soft.

  ‘And where are my daisy curtains?’ Joss demanded, banging the rubbish bin (New, gaudy chrome. Why? From where?) open and poking about with her hand.

  ‘I binned them, of course. Last week. When I took them down they just fell apart. Do you know, I’m surprised that people who’ve rented this place haven’t reported you to the trading standards office. It was barely habitable. People are used to . . .’

  ‘I know what people are used to . . .’ Jocelyn waved her hand, dismissing Alice’s opinion. ‘They come here for something different.’

  ‘Well they sure as hell get that here,’ Alice snapped. ‘And I don’t think you do know what people are used to – Penmorrow is a mad time warp. What people like on holiday is fresh, clean accommodation that isn’t like some slum compared to their own homes. They want drawers that open easily and aren’t stuck shut by years of grease. They want shelves that aren’t skid-marked with rusty metal stains from the bottoms of damp pans.’ She turned back to the sink, in which for the first time she could see a reflective shine.

  ‘Now do you want some tea? And the chance to inspect the mugs, note that all the stains have been bleached out from the bottoms of them?’ Alice ran the water for the kettle (another shiny new chrome item), banging it down hard on the worktop.

  Joss looked at the stark, bare kitchen window and felt tears salting up and threatening to overflow. She’d made those curtains herself, stitching their hems by hand as she and Arthur sat by the cottage fire (smoky and unreliable even then), listening to the winter wind hurtling round the trees. Arthur had just started on his remote phase, heading for death, though neither of them knew it. He’d moved out of the main house and shut himself away down here in Gosling which had, till then, been his studio. He no longer wanted to be part of the shifting Penmorrow population and rejected communal living as wholeheartedly as he’d once welcomed it. He wanted only to see Joss, no-one else. He didn’t want to work any more, didn’t want her to tell him if galleries had called, if commissions came in. He’d come to the end, he’d said. Life’s work done. He would live from now as a rich retiree, as entitled to call a halt to production as if he’d been an assembly-line factory worker.

  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 fr
om 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.

  Seven

  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.