Free Away From It All by Judy Astley Page A

towards the exit, where, as she knew it would, the phone signal gave out and Noel was consigned mid-sentence back to his London desk and his profitable divorces. She felt as if she’d rudely slammed a door in his face, but there wasn’t anything else she wanted to say to him. He’d been right of course, it was completely unlike her not to have already made carved-in-stone arrangements for returning home. It was how she was. She washed her hair every Monday and Friday, went to the Holmes Place gym three times a week, worked on her current book from ten till two thirty from Monday to Thursday and on Fridays had lunch with her friends Mags and Rebecca in Pasta Mama in Richmond. On Saturday evenings (whetherthey were socially out or not) she slinked around wearing stockings and suspenders beneath a shortish skirt for the later delight of Noel, plus on Wednesday evenings he favoured a sexy session that was genuinely steamy, in their capacious walk-in shower. Even her mild bouts of premenstrual tension were regular.
    Alice stopped at the double roundabout and waited for an Asda truck to lumber past on its way to Falmouth. The villa in Italy – close to Siena – had been booked months ago. Alice liked to get the summer holiday organized as soon as New Year was over and the children had gone back to school. She and Noel took a short break in late February to somewhere warm (Dubai that year, Portugal the one before), which she fixed up each September when the school year started. Alice had never in her grown-up life made an arrangement that she’d later cancelled. The thought that she might even remotely be considering not going to Italy made her hands tremble on the steering wheel and she almost ran into the back of a Volvo that had slowed to take the left turn towards Mylor.
    Of course they would go, as arranged, she told herself as she made an effort to concentrate. Why would they not? But there was so much to do here at Penmorrow. When Harry had asked her for help he surely hadn’t just meant with Joss, who, although she wasn’t quite her usual bossy and energetic self, certainly didn’t require round-the-clock nursing. He meant the house. Each room needed to be gone through, cleaned thoroughly, redundant junk ruthlessly chucked out. Only when she and Mo and Harry had stripped the house back to its bare walls and furnishings would they be able to see if it would be possible simply to patch things up and rearrange, or ifthe whole dilapidation process had got so far out of hand that they would be forced to sell up.
    â€˜I only asked you down here to help sort out Joss, not to take the place apart,’ Harry had grumbled to her over toast and coffee in the Penmorrow kitchen that morning. ‘I know what needs to be done – I’ve lived with it, remember. There just isn’t the cash to do it with, that’s the bottom line.’
    â€˜I don’t have any spare either,’ Alice told him.
    â€˜Don’t you?’ Harry looked genuinely surprised. ‘We were all under the impression . . .’
    â€˜Two teenagers in private schools. Noel’s obsession with pension funds, house maintenance, two cars, these are serious outgoings,’ Alice told him.
    â€˜Private schools!’ Harry almost spat the words. ‘What’s wrong with the regular sort? Kids don’t go anyway, wherever you send them. Sam and Chas hardly ever do. We didn’t.’
    â€˜We didn’t go because Joss got away with claiming she’d set up some kind of alternative school and that we were being home-taught.’
    â€˜Well we were. We had lessons most mornings. Usually.’
    â€˜We learned to read and write and do some basic sums. And that was down to Arthur and Milly, not Joss. We learned how to grow alfalfa, how to gut fish and how to make a more or less edible stew out of any given vegetables and half a hen. Anything else we had to pick up for ourselves. Keeping