Careless In Red (13 page)

“No. It was for all of us. I’d had enough of Truro as well. You know that.”

“You would have stayed in Truro forever.”

“That’s not the case, Dellen.”

“And if you’d had enough—which I don’t believe anyway—it hadn’t to do with you. Or Truro. Or any town. I can feel your loathing, Ben. It smells like sewage.”

He said nothing. Outside, a gust of wind hit the side of the building, rattling the windows. A fierce storm was brewing. Ben knew the signs. The wind was onshore. It would bring in heavier rain from the Atlantic. They were not yet out of the season of storms.

“It’s myself,” he said. “We had words. I said some things—”

“Oh, I expect you did. You saint. You bloody saint.”

“There’s nothing saintly about following through. There’s nothing saintly about accepting—”

“That’s not what things were about between you and Santo. Don’t think I don’t know. You’re a real bastard.”

“You know why.” Ben set his mug of tea on the bedside table. Deliberately, then, he switched on the lamp. If she looked at him, he wanted her able to see his face and to read his eyes. He wanted her to know that he spoke the truth. “I told him he needed to take more care. I told him people are real, not toys. I wanted him to see that there’s more to life than seeking pleasure for himself.”

Her voice was scorn. “As if that’s how he lives.”

“You know that it is. He’s good with people. All people. But he can’t let that…that skill of his lead him to do wrong by them or to them. But he doesn’t want to see—”

“Doesn’t? He’s dead, Ben. There is no doesn’t.”

Ben thought she might weep then, but she did not. He said, “There is no shame in teaching one’s children to do right, Dellen.”

“Which means your right, yes? Not his. Yours. He was supposed to be made in your likeness, wasn’t he? But he wasn’t you, Ben. And nothing could make him in your likeness.”

“I know that.” Ben felt the words’ intolerable weight. “Believe me, I know that.”

“You don’t. You didn’t. And you couldn’t cope with it, could you? You had to have him the way you wanted.”

“Dellen, I know I’m to blame. Do you think that I don’t? I’m as much to blame for this as—”

“No!” She rose to her knees. “Do not dare,” she cried. “Don’t bring that back to me just now because if you do, I swear if you do, if you even mention it, if you bring it up, if you try to, if you…” Words seemed to fail her. Suddenly, she reached for the mug he’d placed on the floor and she threw it at him. Hot tea stung his chest; the rim of the mug struck his breastbone. “I hate you,” she said and then louder with each successive word, “I hate you, I hate you. I hate you.”

He dropped off the bed and onto his knees. He grabbed her then. She was still shrieking her hate as he pulled her to him, and she beat on his chest, his face, and his neck before he was able to catch her arms.

“Why didn’t you let him just be who he was? He’s dead and all you ever needed to do was just to let him be. Was that too much? Was that asking too much?”

“Shh,” Ben murmured. He held her; he rocked her; he pressed his fingers to her thick blonde hair. “Dellen,” he said. “Dellen, Dell. We can weep for this. We can. We must.”

“I won’t. Let me go. Let. Me. Go!”

She struggled, but he held her firmly. He knew he couldn’t let her leave the room. She was on the edge, and if she went over, they all would go with her and he couldn’t have that. Not in addition to Santo.

He was stronger than she, so he began to move her even as she fought him. He got her to the floor, and he held her there with the weight of his body. She writhed, trying to throw him off.

He covered her mouth with his. He felt her resistance for a moment and then it was gone, as if it had never been. She tore at him, but it was clothing now: She ripped at his shirt, at the buckle of his belt; she pushed his jeans desperately over his buttocks.

He thought, Yes, and he showed no tenderness as he pulled her sweater over her head. He shoved up her bra and fell on her breasts. She gasped and lowered the zip on her trousers. Savagely, he slapped her hand away. He would do it, he thought. He would own her.

In a fury, he made her naked. She arced to accept him and cried out as he took her.

Afterwards, both of them wept.

KERRA HEARD IT ALL. How could she help it? The family flat had been transformed as inexpensively as possible from a collection of rooms on the hotel’s top floor. Because it was needed elsewhere, very little money had gone into the insulation of the walls. They weren’t paper thin, but they might as well have been.

She heard their voices first—her father’s soft and her mother’s rising—then the shrieking, which she could not ignore, and then the rest. Hail the conquering hero, she thought.

Dully, she said to Alan, “You need to go,” although part of her was also saying, Do you understand now?

Alan said, “No. We need to talk.”

“My brother has died. I don’t think we need to anything.”

“Santo,” Alan said quietly. “Your brother’s name was Santo.”

They were still in the kitchen although not at the table where they’d been sitting when Ben had joined them. With the rising noise from Santo’s bedroom, Kerra had shoved away from the table and gone to the sink. There she’d turned on the water to fill a pan, although she had no idea what she would do with it.

She’d remained there after she’d turned off the taps. Outside, she could see Casvelyn, just the top of it where St. Issey Road met St. Mevan Crescent. An unappealing supermarket called Blue Star Grocery sprawled like a nasty thought at this V-shaped junction, a bunker of brick and glass that made her wonder why modern conveniences had to be so ugly. Its lights were still on for evening shopping, and just beyond it, more lights indicated cars moving carefully along the northwest and southeast boundaries of St. Mevan Down. Workers were heading home for the evening, to the various hamlets that for centuries had popped up like toadstools along the coast. Smugglers’ havens, Kerra thought. Cornwall had always been a lawless place.

She said, “Please go.”

Alan said, “Do you want to tell me what this is about?”

“Santo”—and she said his name with deliberate slowness—“is what this is about.”

“You and I are a couple, Kerra. When people—”

“A couple,” she cut in. “Oh, yes. How true.”

He ignored her sarcasm. “When people are a couple, they face things together. I’m here. I’m staying. So you can choose which thing you’d like to face with me.”

She shot him a look. She hoped he read in it derision. He wasn’t supposed to be like this, especially not now. She hadn’t taken him on as her partner only to have him reveal a side of himself that proved he was someone she didn’t actually know. He was Alan, wasn’t he? Alan. Alan Cheston. Bit of a weak chest, so winters were tough on him, often cautious to a maddening extreme, churchgoing, parents loving, unathletic, sheep not shepherd. Respectful as well. And respectable. He was the sort of bloke who’d said May I…? before he’d tried to hold her hand. But now…this person just now…This was not the Alan who’d never missed a Sunday dinner at his mum and dad’s since he’d left university and London Bloody School of Economics. This was not the floppy-haired and white-skinned Alan who practised yoga and served meals-on-wheels and was never known to dive into the Sea Pit, just above St. Mevan Beach, without sticking his toes in first to test the temperature of the water. He wasn’t supposed to be telling her how things were going to be.

Yet he stood there doing it. He stood there in front of the steel-fronted fridge and he looked…implacable, Kerra thought. The sight of him made her veins feel icy.

He said, “Talk to me.” His voice sounded firm.

The firmness undid her. So what she said in reply was, “I can’t.”

Even this wasn’t what she intended to say. But his eyes, which were generally so deferential, were compelling at the moment. She knew that came from power, knowledge, and lack of fear, and where that had come from was what made Kerra turn from him. She would cook, she decided. They were all going to have to eat eventually.

“Fine,” Alan said to her back. “I’ll talk, then.”

“I have to make a meal,” she told him. “We all have to eat. If we lose our strength, things will get worse. In the next few days, there’s going to be so much to do. Arrangements, phone calls. Someone has to call my grandparents. Santo was their favourite. I’m the oldest of the grandkids—there’re twenty-seven of us…isn’t that obscene, what with overpopulation and that sort of thing?—but Santo was their favourite. We spent time with them, Santo and I. Sometimes a month. Once nine weeks. They need to be told and my father won’t do it. They don’t speak, he and Granddad. Not unless they have to.”

She reached for a cookbook. She had a collection of them, all kept in a stand on the work top, the product of cookery classes she’d taken. One of the Kernes had to learn how to plan nutritious, inexpensive, and tasty meals for the large groups who’d book into Adventures Unlimited. The Kernes would hire a cook, of course, but they’d save money by having the meals planned out by someone other than an executive chef. Kerra had volunteered for the job. She wasn’t interested in anything having to do with a kitchen, but she knew they couldn’t rely on Santo, and relying on Dellen would have been ridiculous. The former was a passable cook on a small scale, but easily distracted by everything, from a piece of music on the radio to the sight of a gannet flying in the direction of Sawsneck Down. As for the latter, everything about Dellen could alter in a second, including her willingness to participate in matters familial.

Kerra flipped open the book she’d chosen at random. She began leafing through pages to find something complicated, something requiring every bit of her attention. The list of ingredients needed to be impressive, and what they didn’t have in the kitchen, she would send Alan out to purchase at Blue Star Grocery. If he refused, she would go herself. In either case, she would be busy, and busy was what she wanted to be.

Alan said, “Kerra.”

She ignored him. She decided on jambalaya with dirty rice and green beans, along with bread pudding. It would take hours, and that was fine with her. Chicken, sausage, prawns, green peppers, clam juice…The list stretched on and on. She’d make enough for a week, she decided. The practice would be good, and they could all dip into it and reheat it in the microwave whenever they chose. And weren’t microwaves marvelous? Hadn’t they simplified life? God, wouldn’t it be the answer to a young girl’s prayers to have an appliance like a microwave into which people could be deposited as well? Not to heat them up, but just to make them different to what they were. Whom would she have shoved in first? she wondered. Her mother? Her father? Santo? Alan?

Santo, of course. It was always Santo. In you go, brother. Let me set the timer and twirl the dial and wait for someone new to emerge.

No need for that now. Santo was decidedly altered now. No more will-o’-the-wisp, no more tripping without a care in the world along the paths that opened up before him, no more thoughtless chase of if-it-feels-good-do-it. There’s more to life than that and I suppose you know it now, Santo. You knew it in the final moment. You had to know it. You crashed towards the rocks without a last-minute miracle in sight and in the precise instant before you struck bottom, you finally knew that there were actually other people in your world and that you were answerable for the pain you caused them. It was too late then to amend yourself, but it was always better late than never when it came to self-knowledge, wasn’t it.

Kerra felt as if bubbles were rising inside her. They were hot, like the bubbles of water boiling, and just like boiling water they burned to get out. She hardened herself against letting them escape, and she grabbed a litre of olive oil from another cupboard, above the work top. She turned to scoop up measuring spoons, thinking, How much oil…? and the bottle slipped from her fingers. It hit the floor just right—as it naturally would—and broke in two neat pieces. The oil pooled out in a viscous mess. It splashed the cooker, the cupboards, and her clothes. She leapt to one side, but she didn’t escape.

She cried, “Damn!” and she finally felt the threat of tears. She said to Alan, “Would you just please leave?” She snatched up a roll of kitchen towels and began to unspool them into the oil. Completely unequal to the task at hand, they were soaked to mush the instant they touched the liquid.

Alan said, “Let me, Kerra. Sit down. Let me.”

She said, “No! I made the mess. I’ll clean it up.”

“Kerra—”

“No. I said no. I don’t need your help. I don’t want your help. I want you to leave. Go.”

On a stand near the door a dozen or more copies of the Watchman had been piled. Alan reached for this. He put Casvelyn’s newspaper to good use. Kerra watched the oil soak into the newsprint. Alan did the same. They stood at opposite sides of the pool. She considered it a chasm but he, she knew, saw it as a momentary inconvenience.

He said, “You don’t need to feel guilty because you were angry at Santo. You had a right to anger. He may have thought it was irrational, even stupid of you to care about something that seemed silly to him. But you had a reason for what you felt and you had a right. You always have a right to whatever you feel, if it comes down to it. That’s how it is.”

“I asked you not to work here.” Her voice was expressionless; her emotion was spent.

He looked puzzled. It was a remark, she realised, coming from out of nowhere as far as he knew, but at the moment it summed up everything she was feeling but could not say.

“Kerra, jobs aren’t falling from the sky. I’m good at what I do. I’m getting this place noticed. The Mail on Sunday? There’re bookings coming in every day as a result of that piece. It’s tough out here, and if we mean to make a life in Cornwall—”

“We don’t,” she said. “We can’t. Not now.”

“Because of Santo?”

“Oh come on, Alan.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid. I’m never afraid.”

“Bollocks. You’re angry because you’re afraid. Anger is easier. It makes more sense.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”