ELVIS WAS IN Sainsbury’s again, browsing in the cat-food aisle. He’d been there the previous Wednesday too, but in the café that time, eating fried eggs with baked beans and reading the Daily Mail.
Alice Perry, who had lost her virginity to a French exchange boy called Marcel on the day the real Elvis had died, shoved a twelve-pack of Felix Fish Favourites into her trolley, watched him pick out two boxes of Go Cat (chicken and tuna flavours) and put them in his basket. He looked like a man who lived alone: unkempt, tatty round the edges, uncared for. His studded denim jacket had been bought when he’d been many kilos lighter and his pointy black cowboy boots had unevenly worn-down heels, as if he’d been struggling to strut the famous Elvis swagger and had angled uncomfortably to the right. Arthritis in his knees, Alice guessed. This Elvis had come a long hard way down from the Vegas glory-days; it would be hard to imagine him thrusting his creaky pelvis at anything more gruelling than a British Legion karaoke night.
She wondered about a suitable cat for him – perhaps a huge, white, bad-tempered creature, extravagantly fluffy and sporting a leopard-print collar spangled with chunky rhinestones. She hoped its fur was in better nick than its owner’s lank, thinning hair. No-one else in the store seemed to have noticed him, as if long-dead stars often strolled the aisles of the Richmond Sainsbury’s doing their celestial shopping. Possibly John Lennon was sometimes in, checking the sell-by dates on the fresh pasta sauces, and maybe Jimi Hendrix could frequently be spotted filling a trolley with frozen pizzas and herbal tea.
‘S’not really ’im.’ A skinny teenage shelf-stacker, hanging up flea collars, was eyeing Alice with blatant scorn. He nodded in the direction of Elvis who was now making his way towards the frozen peas, adjusting his aviator sunglasses and scratching his ear.
‘He’s in most weeks. He’s a nim-per-son-a-tor.’ The boy pronounced the word clearly and slowly, as if Alice might be unaccustomed to words of several syllables.
‘Yes. I thought he probably was.’ Alice gave him a bright, broad smile, one that usually gave people an impression of a thoroughly nice woman, and left the boy to his pet products. She heard him mutter ‘Stupid cow’, not quite under his breath.
‘Mum! Can we go? Like, now?’ Alice’s daughter Grace, who’d been stocking up at the Pick ‘n’ Mix, caught up with her by the breakfast cereals. She stood close, shimmying in between her mother and the Weetabix, making sure she was the sole object of attention. Her pale bare arms had a typical London lack of muscle tone. That afternoon Grace should have been at the school sports day, psyching herself up to win the 400m hurdles, not trudging round a supermarket. She could certainly do with the exercise and fresh air, Alice thought guiltily. Like so many London children, especially the cosseted, ferried-everywhere-by-car ones, she looked pallid and limp like a plant raised in dim light.
‘What’s the rush?’ Alice asked. ‘Is your headache coming back?’ It was a sly question, they both knew it. Grace rarely had headaches but when she did they neatly coincided with school events that she wanted to avoid, such as today’s end-of-year grand athletics finale. Alice on her own would have been hard on her, told her to take a couple of paracetamol, go to school and see how she felt later. But the girl had deliberately and speedily got to Noel as he was leaving for work, knowing quite well he was a far softer sympathetic touch. Alice raised her hand, aiming at Grace’s forehead to check her temperature and Grace stepped quickly backwards, just beyond reach, leaving her mother looking as if she was hailing a Nazi leader.
‘I’m OK. It’s just freezing in here. And I’m mega bored.’ Grace was gazing round with an expression of astonished disappointment, as if she’d expected the shelves to be stacked exclusively with items desirable to a fourteen-year-old girl of sophisticated tastes.
‘Well you didn’t have to come. You could have stayed at home and made cups of tea for Mrs Pusey.’
‘God no, anything but that,’ Grace groaned, reaching across behind her mother’s head for a pack of Pop Tarts. ‘But why couldn’t we have gone somewhere more fun than here? There was a skirt in Warehouse I wanted to try on.’
‘I always do the shopping on Wednesday afternoons. It gives Mrs Pusey a clear run at the cleaning. If I’m in the house she spends hours telling me about her latest cancelled hospital appointment.’
‘You always say that. “I always do this, I always do that.”’ Grace glared at her mother.
‘And besides,’ Alice said, ‘you’re supposed to be ill.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Grace started rooting through the contents of the trolley. ‘Have you got the Monster Munch?’
‘If they were on the list,’ Alice told her, looking through the selection of muesli in search of one without added sugar.
‘List! That’s another thing you always say: “Is it on the list?” like the world would end if you bought something you hadn’t actually written down.’ Grace was now bored to exploding point. ‘Why can’t you just grab what you think we’d all like and be . . . oh . . . thing . . . like you do things just when you feel like it . . . for bloody once! You always have to plan your whole life out on paper, like you can’t even breathe without a book of instructions!’
‘Spontaneous. That’s the word you were looking for,’ Alice told her, at the same time acknowledging how rarely that word could be applied to herself. Alice’s near-paranoid reliance on routine and order was a frequent source of domestic teasing – ‘Oh look, it’s ten thirty, Mum will be having camomile tea and one rich tea biscuit’ – but this wasn’t the time to argue about it. Two elderly ladies, who’d been discussing the unfamiliar array of creatures offered on modern-day fish counters, suspended their debate to stare brazenly at Grace and Alice, anticipating a good loud row that they could talk about later in the coffee shop.
‘Leave it, Grace, OK? I’ve just got to get the bread then we can go.’
‘Five loaves of organic wholemeal, two French sticks, one pack of crumpets, potato cakes and . . .’ Grace chanted in a sing-song voice, not needing to look at Alice’s list.
‘Yeah I know, and a partridge in a pear tree,’ Alice added, accepting her daughter’s mockery.
‘Not if it isn’t on the list. Your kind of shopping is just sooo boring.’ Grace grinned.
‘Oh I don’t know, didn’t you notice Elvis Presley back there?’
‘What?’
‘El . . . Oh never mind, just someone I saw,’ she said, thinking suddenly of French Marcel, sharp beach pebbles digging into her back and the cool tingle of his fingers sliding down across her naked stomach. ‘He was a long, long time ago.’
Nearly three hundred miles away, close to the far end of Cornwall, in what an estate agent with fingers desperately crossed for a sale would describe as a mature rambling garden, Alice’s brother Ariel Lewis (who had long preferred to go by the less whimsical name of Harry) was in the biggest of his three poly-tunnels mending a tear in the fabric. He didn’t much mind about the elements gaining access to his plants, or the ever-encroaching nettle jungle taking root inside. He didn’t even mind foxes wandering in for some night-time warmth, but that side of the tunnel was visible from the footpath down to the cove and he didn’t want nosy, law-conscious hikers peering in and identifying the thriving crop as top quality guaranteed-female cannabis. This year he was trying two varieties: Durban Poison and Trance, twenty plants of each. If the local Plod copped knowledge of this little lot, Harry could be looking at the wrong end of a five-year stretch, however much he pleaded (not entirely untruthfully) that it was grown for the relief of his mother’s arthritis.
Harry tried not to think of his mother as he sealed the polythene split with gaffer tape. Jocelyn Lewis wasn’t at all well. The doctor hadn’t seemed too fussed about it, but it was all right for him – he didn’t have to deal with any of it. He’d said she’d only had a minor stroke (‘only’? Where did ‘only’ come into it?) and that with a bit of care and attention she’d be fine, might never have another, could live another thirty years. But she might not. She might drop dead tomorrow, or she might have stroke after disabling stroke and dwindle away to a helpless shell of a human. Joss would need watching: she could have another at any moment, that was the bottom line. And a much more serious one, a real life-cruncher for all of them. The whole business was making him jumpy. Harry’s wife Mo wasn’t much help: she kept saying things like, ‘Well she’s on the downward slope now,’ and other such cheerless comments that set him thinking along the depressing lines of stairlifts, waterproof mattress covers, small pale meals on trays and the creeping stench of gradual bodily decay. Mo had had an unfamiliar stubborn, set look on her face these last days since Jocelyn’s brief episode of faintness and disconnection, as if she too sensed the same deteriorations on the way and would viciously mutilate anyone who dared to suggest that any of the resulting burdens should fall on her.
‘You should get Alice to come down, see for herself what’s happening to the mad old bat. Take a bit of the load off. It’s all right for her, swanning about in London in her swanky house with her posh-school kids, scribbling silly children’s stories and calling it work. She should try skivvying for the sodding B and B trade down here in this rotting, run-down dump as well as chasing around for your mother.’
Harry had been shocked to hear Mo speak so fiercely. She’d never expressed anything so combative before. She tended to drift around Penmorrow in slow mellow calm with little sound but the swish and rustle of her velvet skirts. She was usually smiling in a mildly amused, mysterious way, as if she had secret inner powers that let her mind bypass trivial day-to-day problems, such as were there enough towels without holes in them for next week’s visitors.
What she’d said was true though, the house was crumbling more than a bit and not just around the edges. The top windows desperately needed replacing, especially in Harry and Mo’s bedroom where the splintering wood was so patched with filler that you daren’t let out a trapped butterfly in case the whole rickety casement fell out and landed in the pond. And the pond too, that was choked with weed and the stench of putrid mud, and the slope down from there towards the beach was eroding, so the tree roots were up and arching over the path. His twin sons, nearly thirteen and pretty much strangers at their school, seemed to be running wild and beyond his control, like honeysuckle that’s grown too far into a rambling rose. And then there was The Ghost, as he and Mo called him, Jocelyn’s resident writer, Aidan (‘helping me put my own words in the right order’), ensconced without charge in the best Bed and Breakfast room, the only one with a decent en suite. Jocelyn didn’t consider that ‘an expense’.
‘He’s needed. My publisher is getting impatient,’ she insisted grandly. ‘How else am I to put together my autobiography?’ Harry lacked the necessary spirit to suggest that as she had been famous as a novelist (just the one book, long, long ago), she could reasonably be expected to scribble down her life story herself. He’d be countered with many good reasons as to why not. Joss had a limitless supply of justifications for whatever she chose to do – it seemed to come with the territory, a lifetime of being the one in charge, with years of practice at getting her own way.
Harry sighed to himself and tried to concentrate on hunting out stray snails from among his plants. It didn’t do to get too deeply into considering the dilapidations of the place. It was a thought train with no terminus and too many branch lines. Every single problem led to a host of others, and you could only do what you could do. For him and for Mo this meant keeping the pair of cottages (Cygnet and Gosling) along the lane in a condition just about passable for undemanding holidaymakers who put Location way above Luxury. Those few who booked a room ahead of their holiday were attracted by the once-famous element of Penmorrow, too. They wanted a piece of its past hippy wackiness, the whiff of notoriety. They wanted to see the Arthur Gillings statuary – Big Shepherd on the front lawn (with his few remaining sheep), Jesus Erect in the hallway, the silver shark leaping from the pond. Visitors liked to go home and tell of the many paintings, wall-hangings, pottery and sundries left behind by the former illustrious house-mates. There were unexpected things: the delicate Andy Warhol flower sketches, Joe Orton’s underpants, Marc Bolan’s pink feather boa (both items adorning Jesus to salvage his modesty), the Bailey prints of Jocelyn young, pregnant and naked in the orchard with storm clouds looming in the vast sky around her.
The bedrooms and bathrooms in the main house were kept more or less functioning for the bed and breakfast trade, who were often so glad to have found somewhere not sporting a smug ‘No vacancies’ sign that they didn’t take much notice of the shredded carpets, chipped tiles and the blue water stains in the bath. There was neither time nor money left over for the rest of it. And there was such a very, very big rest of it.
Jocelyn Lewis sat in her old cane peacock chair close to the hexagonal alcove window that looked out over her terrace and down through the trees towards the beach. She liked to look down, pretend she was viewing the world from a far-off tower. She loved seeing how people moved, the shapes they made with their bodies as they picked their way over wet sand and shingle, how they arranged themselves into their family groups, setting up little personal territories bounded by windbreaks and lilos and chairs and cool-boxes. They behaved so differently on the beach. No woman of late middle years would ever normally hitch up her skirt in front of strangers and sit right down on the ground in the middle of a crowd. But on the sand below Penmorrow she saw chubby pale thighs being exposed, underwear tumbling to the sand beneath skimpy beach towels, plump breasts being hauled unhurriedly back into place after escaping from unreliable bikini tops. Altogether, beach scenes amused her. The clumsiness of humans on sand reminded her of seals lumbering on shore. Man’s natural elements were now only ones he’d constructed himself: the shopping mall, the street, the sofa. Given a purely natural landscape to deal with, people could only struggle.
Beside Jocelyn in her hexagon sat her own solid image in the form of a life-size bronze statue, gazing out at the sea like a companion spectator. This bronze Jocelyn, immortalized by Arthur Gillings over forty years previously when she’d been in her mid-twenties, was forever lithe and slender, naked and half crouched as if picking up shells, her head up and smiling as if she listened to the seabirds, or to a lover calling. More than one male visitor to the house had been caught thinking he was alone, stooping to stroke the smooth gleaming figure, running a curious hand over the strong thigh, finding his fingers inevitably exploring between the rigid legs as if magically the sculpted folds there might feel soft and tenderly damp.
Jocelyn patted the statue’s cold hard head. If the young bronze Jocelyn could have turned to look up at her older self, she wondered what her thoughts would be: perhaps, ‘Who is this worn-out creature beside me?’ Or, ‘Poor woman, why does she look so pathetic?’
For Jocelyn did feel seriously under-strength. This was new to her, this sensation of mild but perpetual difficulty. Never before, except in the most pleasurable ways, had she been so aware of her body. Its new limitations, the unpredictable unsteadiness, the unreliability of the legs, made themselves clear at every pre-dawn waking. The nightly trek to the bathroom to deal with an ever-weakening bladder had to be thought through carefully. She’d lie in the middle of the sagging mattress on the tarnished brass bed and contemplate negotiating the high drop to the floor. First she had to switch on the bedside light (there could be shoes to trip over, a cat to tread on). Then she had to sit – slowly so the blood didn’t get a chance to rush, next to swing her legs over the bedside, then place her right hand in the very centre of the marble table beside her to get her balance ready to drop down to the floor. She had to hope that light bulbs had been replaced (Harry was hopeless, you had to tell him a dozen times at least), that the two creaking steps to her bathroom wouldn’t have fatally succumbed to rot.
Sometimes, when she’d made it safely back to bed and was thanking the gods for that small survival, she thought of old lovers. Counting through them, trying to remember their names in the right order was her version of counting sheep, and she sent up more thanks to her spirit gods for the long-ago delights they’d given her in that same soft, high bed.
Alice gave the risotto a final stir, scattered chopped flat-leaf parsley over the top of it then cursed her forgetfulness. She should have left the parsley separate in its bowl for those who wanted it to help themselves. Now they’d have to endure the sight of Theo picking all these green bits out and laying them in a neat circle round the edge of his plate. When he’d got them all (and he’d spend a good while poking around with his fork to make sure), he’d move them round and shuffle them apart till they were as perfectly equidistant from each other as his mathematical eye could judge.
‘Possibly a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder?’ Alice had once suggested to Noel after Theo had arranged tomato seeds in groups of five on the black ash table so they looked like a row of domino faces. Noel’s eyes had gone narrow with anger and he’d denied, with curses and vehemence, the possibility of any such thing in his family. For Theo was his son, not Alice’s, just as Grace was Alice’s but not Noel’s. Noel’s wife Helen had died in a car accident when Theo was nine. Alice’s former husband lived in Los Angeles with a tiny blonde ex-gymnast who gave pet-bereavement counselling and either knew better than Alice had how to avoid being thumped around when the mood took him, or feisty LA-style, gave back as good as she got.
Alice, in her recently remodelled steel and cherry-wood kitchen, ignored the phone when it rang. Beyond the door she could hear the usual scramble as both Theo and Grace leapt to answer it. If the call was for Alice a cross weary voice would inform her of the fact, as if the phone was teen territory, out of bounds to grown-ups. Both teenagers spent hours tapping out text messages on their own mobile phones, sometimes to each other in the same room. Alice occasionally wondered if the conversation skills of an entire generation would eventually atrophy and die.
‘It’s for you Mum; it’s Harry.’ A flash of Grace’s face and hair appeared and disappeared from the doorway. Information imparted, she wasn’t about to miss a second of The Simpsons.
Alice picked up the kitchen extension. ‘Harry! How’s everything down there? Weather good?’
‘Same as ever when the wind’s easterly. Bloody freezing. Mist. Can’t see the end of the beach.’
‘I suppose I shouldn’t tell you we’ve got a bit of a heatwave here then!’ Alice always felt compelled to display excessive jocularity when talking to her brother, as a way of counteracting his habitual low-key semi-gloom. She thought it made her sound faintly ridiculous: Noel had once said that in conversation with Harry she sounded like a children’s TV presenter.
‘Joss isn’t well.’ Harry, quickly bored with the social niceties and mindful of his telephone bill, stated this bluntly. ‘The doctor thinks she’s had a mild stroke.’
Alice, shocked, grasped the edge of the translucent blue glass worktop. ‘What happened? Is she in hospital? I’ll come down . . .’
‘No, she’s fine. She’s here at Penmorrow. There’s no panic, but maybe you could come and stay for a while? Mo’s finding it tough. And there’s The Ghost, this man from some publisher, writing her life story and getting in the way. We could use a hand.’
Alice thought quickly. ‘Well Grace and Theo have only got another ten days of school. I could come then, and bring them. We’ve not booked for Italy till late August . . .’
‘Can’t you come sooner?’ Harry sounded more angry than disappointed.
Alice counted to five and gathered her thoughts. Her mother was ill. Perhaps she was dying – perhaps all those years of drink, cigarettes and hippy-trippy drugs had caught up with her. Joss wouldn’t admit to feeling scared, worried or needing anyone’s company but she might be terrified inside.
‘OK, I’ll come tomorrow. I’ll bring Grace and then Theo can join us at the end of term – I doubt Noel will want him missing school. Have you got room for us or shall I try and get into a hotel?’
‘We’ve got room. There’s no-one in Gosling – the cooker’s only got two rings working so we’re not booking it out.’ Alice bit her lip: Gosling was a crumbling, draughty, tumbledown cottage close to the beach path. The salt spray had rotted most of its thatch over the years and the only heating was a sulky log fire that blew smoke into the sitting room at the slightest breeze. Noel thought it merited nothing more than immediate demolition but Alice remembered it from her childhood when Arthur Gillings had lived there, creating his mad (but world-famous) sculptures and telling her stories of Cornish wreckers and his own (not entirely invented) smuggling adventures. With enormous patience, he’d helped her to read the whole of Peter Pan out loud, waiting while she struggled with difficult words and as delighted as she was by how much she learned on the way through the long volume.
‘That cooker’s needed replacing for ten years!’ Alice said to Harry. There was silence and she could have bitten her tongue for the lack of tact: Penmorrow’s finances had been bordering on desperate for so very long. There was no way that Harry, Mo and Jocelyn could do what she had so casually done: simply flick through luxury kitchen brochures with a specialist designer and pick out the best of everything, scarcely stopping to check on prices.
‘Gosling will be fine,’ Alice said, making a mental note to take extra duvets. ‘I’ll see you very soon. Love to Joss and Mo and your boys.’
‘Look, why don’t I take Theo with me as well tomorrow, seeing as there’s only a few days of term left?’ Alice suggested to Noel after supper. She’d sent the children to watch TV so that she could discuss her trip with him. He sat silently at the table, refilling his wine glass and looking disgruntled. She picked up Theo’s plate and took it to the dishwasher, pausing to rinse away the tidy garland of parsley that she’d predicted he’d leave. ‘And it’s not as if they do much during the last week of term.’
‘It’ll make them unsettled. They’ll think it’s all right to take off from school on a whim . . .’ And this, she thought, was the man who’d only that morning so easily accepted Grace’s ‘headache’.
‘A whim? My mother is ill, Noel! A stroke, even a mild one, is a very serious thing.’
He said nothing, but raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘And don’t look like that!’ She was angry now. ‘You know Joss would be the last person to fuss about nothing. It could be that things are worse than she’ll admit. She must at least be pretty shaken, she’s not even that old. I think she saw herself going full steam into serious old age, like a true grande dame, and then simply dying on the bench in the afternoon sun under the old beech tree.’
‘People who smoke as much as she does don’t often see old age. Frankly she’s lucky to have got this far.’ Noel drained his glass and started pouring another.
‘Neither do people who drink as much as you do,’ Alice warned, shoving knives hard into their dishwasher slots. ‘Anyway, apparently there’s a man staying there, asking her about her life. He’s doing her autobiography. Harry’s worried that it’s all too much for her.’
‘Autobiography, my arse!’ Noel’s voice was full of scorn. ‘She only ever wrote one book!’
‘Yes but what a book. Angel’s Choice was a ground-breaker. The film is probably still showing, somewhere.’
‘I know, I know, it’s had more TV showings than The Great Escape. A cult classic, book and film both,’ Noel interrupted, sounding as if he was reading from a review of all-time cinema hits. ‘And of course there’s the Penmorrow hippy-commune aspect. I expect the great British public will love that. Lots of salacious free-love revelations there.’
Sometimes, just sometimes, Alice could understand her mother’s early objections to Noel. The first time she’d brought him to Penmorrow, Joss had taken one amused look at him and declared, her voice rasping with mirth and Marlboros, ‘Darling you can’t possibly marry him! A man with a tie!’ It hadn’t been the best of introductions. Noel, used to the effortless charming of women, had kept a cool and rather disapproving distance after that and so it remained, five years on.
Alice wiped her hands on the tea towel and flung it onto the worktop. ‘Look Noel, I wasn’t asking permission. I’m going to Cornwall tomorrow and I’m taking Grace with me, stuff school. I’m happy to take Theo too but if you think he’ll miss some vitally important maths lesson or something, well you can sort out arrangements for looking after him. OK? Now I’m off to pack.’
Noel, conceding defeat, gave her the lopsided grin that had first secured her attention at a school parents’ meeting six years before. It was a long way from an Elvis-leer but was equally calculated to attract. Alice thought of the man she’d seen in Sainsbury’s that morning. He and Noel couldn’t be more different. Noel had a decidedly well-tended look, sleek and scrubbed and ever-ready for inspection, like someone who lives in the perverse hope of being run over, purely for the opportunity to be given top marks for their pristine underwear by ministering medics. For his whole life, first by his adoring mother and then by his two wives, he’d been as carefully nurtured as a specimen orchid. Perhaps a short time home alone would remind him, Alice thought, that even a lifelong Golden Boy, maybe even Elvis in his day, sometimes has to carry the garbage out to the bins.