by Judy Astley
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.
Silently thanking the sun and the earth, the rain and the good Cornish air for the gift of this crop, Harry took his secateurs and started to cut down the branches from the first of his plants. He piled them up on the old trestle table in the middle of the polytunnel and, when he’d amassed a good-sized heap, sat on his old wooden stool and started the careful process of plucking off all the fan-shaped leaves, which he’d stack in binbags. It was a shame, he thought, as he faced this comfortably repetitive task, that he couldn’t ask the boys to help him. Mo said they shouldn’t be involved, for how could she expect them to stay on the straight and narrow if their own father recruited them into illegal goings-on. Perhaps in a few years . . . or perhaps not, perhaps they’d have all moved on to somewhere and something else. It would all turn out all right one way or another, he thought. Unless that was the smoke talking.
Well she could hardly have expected to get dried violet petals. Even considering the classy, urban tastes of the sophisticated Chapel Creek residents, the shop wasn’t likely to be stocked with out-of-season flower heads. There had been packs of nasturtium, pansy and borage flowers, all ready to be mixed into salads. At a push the pansy would have done, but she didn’t have time for the proper drying process. She didn’t think it would matter too much though – Joss had always said the success or failure of these things was all in the level of sincerity. She couldn’t be accused of lacking in that.
In the Gosling kitchen, Alice weighed out a pound of icing sugar and stirred in the ground almonds, then mixed in the violet cashews that she’d whizzed to powder in the spice grinder that had come from the Penmorrow kitchen. She hoped she’d given the grinder enough of a clean first – it wouldn’t be any use if Patrice and Katie took one sniff of the sweets, scented a hint of ground cumin and didn’t so much as take a bite. The mixture was looking a pleasing pale purple now, and Alice started to add small amounts of warm water. She hoped she’d remembered the recipe properly. She was
using one for peppermint creams that she’d made when she was a child with Jocelyn and Milly. They’d used baking sessions to teach the household children about weights and measures, giving them sums to do based on the combined weights of all the ingredients and getting them to work out averages, while cakes and biscuits they’d made baked in the oven and warm delicious aromas filled the room.
When she’d finished rolling out the paste, Alice used a little heart-shaped candy-cutter that she’d been delighted to find in Mo’s cluttered drawer full of ancient baking sundries, and cut out a couple of dozen shapes. Another thing that could do with a good clear-out, Alice had thought as she’d rummaged through broken birthday-cake candles, ancient icing syringes, flan tins and cake tins and crumpled baking parchment. Another lucky find in the drawer was a little packet containing small silver paper cases – perfect for sweets and almost as if, she thought, they were waiting there specially for this one occasion.
Alice lined a blue plastic food container with red card and laid the sweets neatly inside it, making four layers, each separated by more red card. That, she thought, should be plenty, even if everyone was feeling particularly greedy. Finally, she wrapped the box in silver tissue gift wrap (also clearly a must-have in Chapel Creek), tied a purple ribbon round the box and turned her attention to the sheet of red paper on which the names of her two targets were written. She cut the names out and placed them side by side on the worktop, then sat the silver package on top of them. An hour or so, Alice thought, that should be enough. After that it was only a matter of getting the inscribed slips of paper into their rooms and hidden somewhere in their beds. Hmm, she wondered, where did ‘only’ come into it?
Fifteen
GRACE LIT THE scarlet candle that Joss had put on the desk by her bedroom window. Lighting candles represented the focusing of the sun’s energies. It was early in the morning and there would have been plenty of natural light if Joss had opened the curtains, but she had insisted they must be sure all the ritual details were carried out. ‘It doesn’t do to be sloppy and cut corners,’ Jocelyn said. ‘Especially the first few times you do these things – later you can decide for yourself what to include and what to leave out.’
Grace felt exhilarated and gleeful. The school witch girls would be so jealous if they knew. They were so ignorant and just thought having candles was part of making a spooky atmosphere. Of course, if this worked, the witch girls would never get to hear about it anyway, that was the best, most brilliant thing, because she’d have got what she most wanted and would never see them or the school again. She’d miss Sophy, but then she could always come down and visit. Grace imagined Sophy tottering down the cliff path in the Prada boots she’d wangled away from her mother, simply by dropping one teeny, well-timed hint that her legs looked a bit broad in them. She hoped Sophy would come; she’d tell her all about the surfer boys who hung out at the café. That should do the trick.
Grace, under Joss’s scrutiny, painstakingly inscribed the short rhyme into the flesh of the soft pinky-brown mushroom that she and Joss had found in the woods, using the sharp end of an embroidery needle.
‘Take it really carefully and slowly.’ Jocelyn was looking over her shoulder, supervising. ‘You need to get all the words on, as evenly as possible so they have equal importance.’
Grace concentrated hard. She felt as if she was engraving something incalculably precious.
‘There!’ she said when she had finished, admiring her work. ‘Look, you can read it really easily. Grant to me as this flesh tires, my dearest wish and heart’s desires. What do we do now?’
‘Breathe on the words. A few times, just to make sure.’
Grace held the mushroom in front of her mouth and puffed gently onto it. She could smell woodland and damp and the delicate scent of the fragile fungus. She handled it with great tenderness, fearful that she’d damage it and wreck her charm. Only she and the mushroom knew her secret wish, though she suspected Joss had a pretty good idea.
‘Now you need to chop up the mushroom into very tiny bits, put them on an oven tray and simply pop it in the bottom oven of the Aga to dry out,’ Jocelyn told her.
Grace giggled. ‘You sound like Delia Smith,’ she said.
Jocelyn went to the vast old chest of drawers and started rummaging among brightly coloured fabrics till she found a piece of red silk.
‘Can you sew?’ She held out the fabric to Grace.
‘A bit. Buttons and hems and stuff.’
‘What you need to do is use this to make a tiny drawstring bag. I’ve got thread here . . .’ Joss opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a box of embroidery silks, selecting one that most closely matched the scarlet fabric. ‘When the mushroom pieces are all dried out, you crumble them and put them into the bag and wear it next to your heart every night till your charm has worked.’
‘Is that it?’ Grace asked. It seemed so simple, seeing as she was asking for so much.
‘That’s it!’ Jocelyn told her. ‘It might take a while, so don’t lose faith. Focus on what you’ve asked for and be patient.’
Suppose it didn’t work for ages; she could end up at university still wearing a red bag round her neck every night. Or trying to explain it away to a boyfriend who complained it got in the way.
‘Did . . . does Mum know all about this sort of stuff?’ Grace asked. Her mother’s Penmorrow life was something she didn’t know nearly enough of. Mostly it was just something she’d grumbled about, like when she complained about having no education and that their lives were all so disorganized. It was weird to think that maybe when other kids her age were in school doing French verbs and the rainfall distribution of central Africa, her mother might have been learning all this stuff instead.
‘She didn’t take much interest, really,’ was Jocelyn’s disappointing response. ‘Once when she was a teenager she said it was dangerous to “meddle with the occult” as she put it. That gave me hope at the time: I took it to mean she wasn’t a complete non-believer. Anyway,’ she said, brightening, ‘you can keep the old traditions going instead. Now what comes next?’
‘Er? Don’t know?’
‘You blow out the candle. Never forget that.’
Patrice, Nick and Katie were out. They’d gone to the shore for a few stock shots of the holidaymakers on the beach. Alice had watched from the Gosling kitchen window as they walked together down the cliff path. Nick and Katie were in front and Alice almost cricked her neck trying to see if Patrice, following, was watching Katie’s swaying bottom (encased snugly in tight lilac trousers) with any particular interest.
Quickly, she took the two slips of scarlet paper with their names written on and ran up the lane to the main house. No-one seemed to be about. The front door stood wide open as it usually did and she slipped inside and ran fast and silently up the stairs. Someone was talking in Jocelyn’s room – as she came closer she recognized Grace’s voice. There was no time to speculate on what they were talking about. Perhaps Grace had at last decided to ask Joss about Angel’s Choice. Possibly Grace would be the one person Joss entrusted with a full and honest reply.
Katie’s room was at the end of the corridor. It was a small, rather dark space with walls painted in a murky shade of mauve, a shade the Victorians might have accepted as ‘half-mourning’, and was, Alice considered, thoroughly dismal. One of Mo’s spidery blue and white dream-catchers hung at the window and in contrast to the gloom of the walls, the air was fragrant with the lightly floral scent of Katie’s skincare products. She wasn’t a tidy woman – lacy thongs were scattered across the floor and a pink and white polka dot bra hung from the inside door handle. Her small suitcase hadn’t been properly unpacked and shoes and tee shirts spilled out from it. How can people do that, Alice wondered briefly, rather appalled. Wherever she stayed, even for a night, she always made a point of unfolding clothes, fluffing them out and hanging them up. She might have changed a bit in these few weeks, but she had some standards that she was sure would never slip.
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br /> Speedily, Alice took hold of the pillow and shoved the scrap of red paper inside the flap. That would have to do. The paper would fall out when Mo came to change the bedlinen and she’d probably guess what it meant, especially when she found the corresponding piece in Patrice’s room. It didn’t matter. Mo would assume that sensible, sceptical Alice would be the least likely person to have put it there.
Jocelyn had put out the orange tablecloth and the yellow candles for the Lammas supper. She arranged them on the table, spacing the five fat candles evenly along its length. She wasn’t going to make a big ceremony out of it, even though Patrice was insisting on doing some filming during the meal. As he really seemed so keen to know how these things were done, she’d be sure to include the bit where he had to press his hand onto nettle leaves and get thoroughly stung. She was liking him less and less, somehow sure that he was, in some way, laughing at her and intending to make her look a fool. That wasn’t comfortable and it meant that all the time he’d been cheating. It had started with her showing him Arthur’s grave – she’d seen that cynically amused look. She could tell that in that moment he’d decided his take on her was going to be of a faded, failed, run-down minor icon who should never have become one in the first place. Soon he’d be gone – she wasn’t going to waste her powers on dealing with him. Others were doing that for her: for what could he get across to viewers in a matter of only fifteen minutes?