Away From It All

by Judy Astley

  ‘Grown-up isn’t the thing I do best when I’m with Jocelyn,’ she told Aidan. ‘She brings out the stroppy kid in me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d have minded you being a stroppy kid. I thought she was well into rebellion.’

  Alice laughed. ‘But mine took such a contrary form: lying on the beach for hours reading books about boarding school and normal families, worrying about whether Harry and the other kids had properly balanced meals or were all going to perish from lentil overdose. All those secret exams.’

  ‘So when other kids your age were sneaking out to all-night parties and smoking spliffs out of their bedroom windows, you were swotting up on quadratic equations?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Alice agreed. ‘That’s about the size of it. She wouldn’t have minded at all about the other stuff but maths and history, that was what any old ordinary child did. We were supposed to be “different”.’

  ‘Arty sort of different?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely. The minute we were big enough to hold a brush we were practically drowned in vats of poster paints. That little room by the back door where Harry keeps the potato sacks and racks of vegetables, that must have been a boot room or something originally, well that was full of kit – enough to stock a decent-sized art supply shop. We had all sorts of paper, every size of brush, oil paints, watercolours, tubes and tubes of gouache, lino-cutting stuff, screen-printing equipment, anything we could need. I think Jocelyn must have been given a Winsor and Newton catalogue to choose from and simply said, “OK, get me the lot.” And Milly taught us all to draw, you know, properly. Those were the only really formal lessons I remember. At one time there were six of us kids in Gosling every afternoon, all silent with easels and a life model, for hours and hours.’

  ‘Were you any good?’ Aidan asked.

  Alice considered for a moment. ‘Absolutely useless when it came to drawing, but I loved playing with colour. I’m the same now. Give me a rack full of Sanderson shade cards and I’m as happy as . . .’

  ‘. . . Cheese and onion, a couple of steaks, two chicken and leek and a mushroom one.’ Grace flumped down onto the sand with her bag of hot pasties. Alice, startled and with her mind still on colour wheels, imagined a row of mushrooms lying with their undersides showing, all in delectable shades of pinky fawns like the tummies of piglets.

  The boys were coming out of the water, running up the sand yelling and laughing and playing some game that involved jabbing their bodyboards at each other’s feet. All the earlier sullen silence had vanished. Alice peered down the beach, checking that it wasn’t just the twins making all the noise, but they seemed to be including Theo quite cheerily in their joshing about. It was the first time she’d seen Sam and Chas behaving like ordinary, relaxed kids. As they approached they became quiet, moving close together, glancing covertly at the adults and obviously talking plans and secrets that she and Aidan weren’t intended to hear.

  The beach-browsing seagulls, attracted by the scent of the pasties, collected close to Alice’s picnic rug. Theo hurled bits of pasty far beyond them to make them move away but they were soon back, squawking and jostling and seeming to dare each other to grab food from human hands.

  ‘Don’t feed them Theo, you’re only encouraging them,’ Alice warned him, but he exchanged glances with Sam and Chas and the three of them spluttered into crumb-strewn giggles which had the big fearless birds pecking right around their feet.

  ‘Here, use this.’ Chas put his hand into his bag and pulled out his catapult.

  ‘I don’t think that’s . . .’ Alice began, then stopped as Theo fired a pastry missile far out towards the sea. Amazingly a couple of the birds flew after it.

  ‘Too far,’ Sam muttered.

  ‘Yeah! I’ll go for halfway,’ Theo said, reloading.

  ‘Down to where they’re flying,’ Chas pointed to gulls wheeling over the holidaymakers, selecting the ones with food. ‘And aim it high.’

  Theo fired again and a bird caught the morsel of pastry in its mouth, then dived down to the sea. Sam and Chas cheered loudly.

  ‘Let me!’ Chas grabbed the weapon and loaded it with something from a small plastic box that he’d taken from his bag. Alice couldn’t see what was in it, but was suspicious that he’d carefully put it on the side of him that was hidden from her. Whatever he was firing, the gulls seemed to like it and swallowed piece after piece whole.

  ‘What are they up to?’ Aidan murmured to Alice. ‘They’ve got a devil look about them.’

  Alice thought so too, but all she could make out was that they were simply enjoying firing the catapult to feed the gulls.

  ‘Theo, you’re not using . . .’ Grace began, looking worried.

  ‘Using what?’ Alice chipped in. ‘You’re not using poison of any sort, are you?’

  Sam looked at her in a pitying way. ‘Poison? Where would we get poison?’

  ‘Slug bait, rat poison. I bet Harry’s got both those in one of the sheds.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be slug stuff, he’s or-gan-ic.’ Sam’s expression could hardly have been more condescending. As Alice was still looking at him, wondering what great entertainment these boys were finding in supplying food to greedy gulls, there was a minor but distinct explosion further down the beach. Small children started screaming. Alice heard shouts and swearing from a party of sunbathers. A girl stood up, her pale blue swimsuit splattered with what looked like blood.

  ‘Result!’ Sam chuckled, grabbing pellets of what looked like bread from the box beside Chas and quickly firing them into the air.

  Another explosion, closer this time, sent a gull hurtling down onto the family closest to them. The Nigel Pargetter man turned and stared at Alice, puzzled and suspicious, before emptying a box of tissues to wipe down his wailing children.

  ‘Jesus, what the fuck . . . ?’ Aidan said, leaping up to see what had happened. ‘That poor gull plummeted down like a bomb!’

  Sam, Chas and Theo were now rolling about on the sand, helpless with laughter.

  ‘It works! It works!’ Sam spluttered joyously.

  ‘Oh you are sooo juvenile,’ Grace told them, gathering her clothes, towel, book and bag together.

  Two more gulls crashed dead to the sand and the three boys cheered each one loudly. A third bird blew up in mid-air, falling to the ground, at the same time scattering its remains across a barbecue of nearly cooked sausages.

  ‘Best yet!’ Sam yelled, dancing triumphantly up and down on the sand.

  ‘Sit down, you evil child!’ Alice hissed at him, aware that the boys’ antics were drawing attention to their party. Whatever had they done to those poor birds? All heads on the beach seemed to be turning their way to where Chas stood waving his catapult for everyone to see and bowing as if to acknowledge his achievements.

  ‘OK, that’s it. Get your stuff, we’re going. Now.’ Alice had her rug folded and clipped neatly into place within seconds and she shepherded the still-laughing boys up the steps to the road. Aidan and Grace followed.

  ‘You vicious little brats, all of you,’ she said as she bundled the boys, sandy wet bodyboards and all, into the car. ‘We’ll be lucky if no-one’s followed us to get the car number and report you to the RSPCA. What in hell do you think you’re playing at? And what did you kill those birds with?’

  ‘Sodium bicarb and stuff from their school lab.’ Theo managed to get the words out through his giggles.

  ‘Only wrapped a ton of it in bread didn’t we?’ Sam bragged. Alice was appalled – the boy was delighted with himself and had no concept of the cruelty of his acts. Was the child a psychopath in the making? Were all three of them?

  ‘When they go in the sea and get water,’ Chas was now explaining calmly, as if narrating a valid experiment, ‘the stuff swells up in their gullet and goes bang. Simple.’

  ‘Not simple, wicked. Downright wicked.’ Alice glared at them by way of the rear-view mirror as she drove fast out of the town.

  ‘Wicked’s right,’ Theo chuckled.
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  ‘Not your meaning of wicked. I mean evil, sinful, vicious, immoral, mean, foul, atrocious . . .’

  ‘You know a lot of words, Alice.’ Sam looked quite awe-struck.

  ‘It’s her job. She writes,’ Grace told him.

  Fuming, Alice sped through Hayle and hurtled as fast as she could back to Tremorwell, convinced every time she looked in the mirror and saw a pale car following that the police were on her tail. Grace slumped into a corner staring out at the fields, and the boys and Aidan lapsed into silence. Thank God, she thought, as she turned up the Penmorrow driveway and could see that no car was in pursuit. On Monday she would take Theo and Grace back to London, away from these lawless, wild brothers.

  Hardly able to see for fury, Alice slewed the Galaxy into the turning place at the front of the house, setting the wind chimes clanging. A taxi was just pulling away. The sainted Patrice, she assumed, but then in the front doorway there, unexpected, unannounced and, she realized with shocked disloyalty, unwelcome, was Noel.

  ‘Alice. Darling, hello!’ he greeted her, opening the car door and helping her out. ‘Have you all had a lovely day?’

  Eight

  JOCELYN LIT THE four purple candles that she had lined up on her window ledge in small plain silver holders. The scent of lavender drifted onto the air, which Jocelyn wasn’t too keen on. It was a scent which from childhood she’d associated with old ladies and she certainly didn’t intend to count herself among their number, not for a long time yet. And if the day did arrive when she was ready to concede she had achieved glorious ancientness, she wasn’t going to be a cardiganed bundle with cauliflower hair, tartan slippers and that sickly decay-masking scent. Still, it was the colour that was important here and she’d been lucky to find these candles in the cupboard under the stairs where, among the dusters, floor mops and brooms, boxes of plain household candles were stored for the frequent times of winter power failure.

  Many years ago she’d kept a special shelf crammed with fat, waxy church candles, multicoloured candles with spicy scents, short chubby black and red ones for celebrating the autumn and spring festivals of Samhain and Imbolg, along with the slender gold ones that were lit for Yule. She missed having a houseful of people for these seasonal celebration times. Lammastide had just passed with no ceremony to mark it. Perhaps, while the family were there, she’d do something about that. There would be Patrice and his crew as well – it would be good to lay on something special for them. The spirit of the passing season wouldn’t mind too much about a bit of mistiming.

  Next, she rolled back the oval plaited rug that lay between her bed and the window. Kelpie had made this, thirty, probably closer to forty, years before, braiding together long swathes of silky fabrics in nightshade purple and applemint green and acorn brown. There’d been an argument, she remembered, when Milly had accused Kelpie of stealing some of the lengths of material that hung from her wall in order to finish the project. Small, skinny Milly had slapped Kelpie’s face and Kelpie, a solidly built tall woman, had swatted Milly aside like a cat flicking away a wasp and sent her flying against a door frame, where she’d cut her head open right across her eyebrow.

  Jocelyn sat on the bed, puffed from rolling the heavy rug. She remembered Kelpie offering to stitch the cut herself using her finest patchwork needle, and Milly locking herself in the downstairs cloakroom, shrieking, bleeding and terrified that she’d be held down and forcibly sewn up. In the end Arthur and a visiting playwright from New Zealand had driven her to the nearest Casualty department, and after her treatment calmed her down with enough cider at a Falmouth pub to knock her into a coma for the night.

  The floorboards beneath the rug were darker than those that surrounded it, not being bleached out by the morning sun streaming in through the window. The colours of the rug too were drained away to flat tones of murky swamp shades, reminding Jocelyn of moss on a damp stone wall. Grave colours, she thought. Sombre and earthy and dank. She didn’t want a grave, she’d decided. They reverted to scrubby neglect too quickly and she didn’t agree with making a fetish of the dead, mawkishly tending nasty, marble chipped plots with gaudy flowers in jars that became slimy with algae and spattered muddy rain. She would be cremated and then her ashes would be scattered on Arthur’s grave. She’d told Mo where her funeral instructions were, though she wasn’t sure she trusted her to carry them out – she might think her request to have the Rolling Stones ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ played as her coffin was committed to the flames was merely a joke. It wasn’t – she was fond of the memory of their poor dear doomed guitarist Brian Jones sitting on the Penmorrow porch in late afternoon sun, gently playing his sitar, his blond hair gleaming like the last of the day’s rays.

  Ideally she’d be burned high on a blazing driftwood pyre at sunset on Tremorwell’s beach and the entire village would turn out for a good send-off party with mead and marijuana all round, but this was a more legally cowed age than in her youth and she’d have to make do with the crematorium over at Truro. How many people would come, she wondered. Would her obituary be gratifyingly prominent in the newspapers? She had composed four versions (one for each of the broadsheets) and she kept them updated when there was anything significant to add. These days there rarely was, but with her biography and Patrice’s programme, she – or Aidan, for surely this could be delegated to him – should be able to add a few more relevant lines.

  Jocelyn clutched the side of the bed as she bent to draw a circle on the floor with blue chalk. She stretched her arm out as far as she could and hoped it wouldn’t be a problem that some of the circle extended under the bed. Her joints and muscles still felt lithe and pliable, thanks to years of daily yoga, but her balance was no longer to be trusted and she was conscious that her frame was weak and her breath was short. She felt her bones being dried out and becoming brittle, like old wood that’s been too long in the wind and sun. When she looked down at the floor, things took a while to focus, as if her eyesight was having trouble keeping up to speed with her head. It was like being drunk. In fact that was exactly what it was like, she thought as she dusted the blue chalk from her fingertips, it was the same as being mildly and unpleasantly drunk but with no chance of recovery, and none of the lovely anything-possible recklessness about it. She would happily endure the worst-ever hangover just to get her old strong sense of self back again.

  Perhaps this would do it. This charm to nourish the wits and renew the powers was well worth a shot. Jocelyn put a small dish containing sprigs of lavender soaked in oil in the centre of her blue circle. Alongside she placed stalks of blue vervain collected that morning from the herb garden outside the kitchen, and a long length of black silk cord that had once been threaded through the hood of Arthur’s black velvet cloak. Then she stepped into the circle, sat cross-legged on the floor and with the chalk wrote around the circle’s circumference while murmuring the words:

  Verbena hastata, Quattuor elementa, Quattuor loco, Hasta verbena, Viam monstra.

  She tied the vervain stalks together, using the cord, and dipped the ends into the oil. With this wand she retraced the chalk circle. From downstairs she could hear people arriving, people talking in loud urban voices. Patrice? Already? She tried hard not to be distracted as she gently covered the oiled, inscribed floor with the rug again. No-one must know what she’d done. If they found the circle, Mo and Alice knew enough of spellcraft to recognize from this that she’d felt vulnerable, had needed help from the powers to top up her vital wisdom. Slowly and with great care, clutching the door frame tight as she stepped onto a firm wooden chair, she climbed up and hung the vervain wand high above her door, on the inside where no-one could see it to speculate on what it meant. It was a shame, she thought, as she stepped back down to the floor, that Alice hadn’t passed a working knowledge of these natural arts on to Grace. The girl should have spent more time at Penmorrow. She should have been educated in more useful skills than any so-called education system could give her. At least, she hoped they were useful: she would
see over the next weeks if her health and energy were restored.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’ Noel was saying it in that teasing way that was confident of getting an exuberant ‘Of course, darling!’ by way of a reply. He was unpacking his bag and trying to find space for shirts in the tiny wardrobe in the Gosling bedroom. Alice was slamming about with the chest of drawers, moving her clothes around so he’d have room for his. He seemed to have brought quite a lot, though whether that was because he’d moved in for the summer’s duration or because in the west side of England you could need to cater for at least three seasons’-worth of weather per weekend, she couldn’t work out. She didn’t want to ask him. She was already ashamedly conscious that her fury with the boys had made her grumpy and unwelcoming – she’d barely said hallo to the over-jolly, large-scale young woman in the short slinky dress and strappy high shoes who’d arrived with Noel. If she now asked, ‘How long are you staying?’ in her current mood, he could only interpret it as, ‘How soon are you going?’

  The drawers in the chest had swollen from years of damp air and were sticking. Noel thought privately that Alice was being unnecessarily violent with them – surely she only needed to manipulate them gently to get them to budge. Shoving hard wasn’t the way to results.

  ‘Here, let me,’ he said, taking hold of her hands and moving her aside. She snatched her arms away from him.

  ‘Noel, I can do this. I’m quite capable.’

  He backed off, hands raised. ‘OK, OK, look, I know. And I know you hate surprises so would you rather I just went back to London? Only it was a bit of a slow service today and if you don’t mind I’d rather get a night’s sleep before I get back on the train again.’