Careless In Red (14 page)

“Accepted. So tell me.”

She couldn’t. Too much hung in the balance to speak: too much seen and too much experienced for too many years. To explain it all to Alan was beyond her. He needed to take her word as the truth and he needed to act accordingly.

That he had not done so, that he was going to continue his refusals to do so rang the death knell over their relationship. Kerra told herself that, because of this, nothing that had happened that day actually mattered.

Even as she thought this, though, she knew that she was lying to herself. But that was something that also didn’t matter.

SELEVAN PENRULE THOUGHT IT was rubbish, but he joined hands with his granddaughter anyway. Across the narrow table in the caravan, they closed their eyes and Tammy began to pray. Selevan didn’t listen to the words although he caught the gist of them. Instead, he considered his grandchild’s hands. They were dry and cool but so thin that they felt like something he could crush simply by closing his own fingers roughly over them.

“She’s not been eating right, Father Penrule,” his daughter-in-law had told him. He hated what she called him—“Father Penrule” made him feel like a renegade priest—but he’d said nothing to correct Sally Joy, since speaking to him at all was something that she and her husband hadn’t bothered with for ages. So, he’d grunted and said he’d fatten the girl up. It’s being in Africa, woman, don’t you know that? You cart the girl off to Rhodesia—

“Zimbabwe, Father Penrule. And we’re actually in—”

Whatever the hell they want it to be called. You cart her off to Rhodesia and expose her to God only knows what and that would kill anyone’s appetite, let me tell you.

Selevan realised he was taking things too far at that point, because Sally Joy said nothing for a moment. He imagined her there in Rhodesia or wherever she was, sitting on the porch in a rattan chair with her legs stretched out and a drink on the table next to her…lemonade, it would be, lemonade, with a dash of…what is it, Sally Joy? What’s in the glass that would make Rhodesia go down a trick for you?

He harrumphed noisily and said, Well, never mind then. You send her along. I’ll get her sorted.

“You’ll watch her food intake?”

Like a peregrine.

Which he had done. She’d taken thirty-nine bites tonight. Thirty-nine spoonfuls of a gruel that would have made Oliver Twist lead an armed rebellion. No milk, no raisins, no cinnamon, no sugar. Just watery porridge and a glass of water. Not even tempted by her grandfather’s meal of chops and veg, she was.

“…for Your will is what we seek. Amen,” Tammy said, and he opened his eyes to find hers on him. Her expression was fond. He dropped her fingers in a rush.

He said roughly, “Bloody stupid. You know that, eh?”

She smiled. “So you’ve told me.” But she settled in so that he could tell her again, and she balanced her cheek on her palm.

“We pray before the bloody meal,” he groused. “Why d’we got to bloody pray at the bloody end as well?”

She answered by rote, but with no indication that she was tiring of a discussion they’d had at least twice a week since she’d come to Cornwall. “We say a prayer of thanks at the beginning. We thank God for the food we have. Then at the end we pray for those who don’t have enough food to sustain them.”

“If they’re bloody alive, they have enough bloody food to bloody sustain them, don’t they?” he countered.

“Grandie, you know what I mean. There’s a difference between just being alive and having enough to be sustained. Sustained means more than just living. It means having enough sustenance to engage. Take the Sudan, for example—”

“Now you hang on right there, missy-miss. And don’t move either.” He slid out from the banquette. He carried his plate the short distance to the caravan’s sink as a means of feigning other employment, but instead of beginning the washing up, he snatched her rucksack from the hook on the back of the door and said, “Let’s just have a look.”

She said, “Grandie,” in a patient voice. “You can’t stop me, you know.”

He said, “I know my duty to your parents is what I know, my girl.”

He brought the sack to the table and emptied its contents and there it was: on the cover a young black mother in tribal dress holding her child, one of them sorrowful and both of them hungry. Blurred in the background were countless others, waiting in a mixture of hope and confusion. The magazine was called Crossroads, and he scooped it up, rolled it up, and slapped it against his palm.

“Right,” he said. “Another bowl of that mush for you, then. Either that or a chop. You can take your choice.” He shoved the magazine into the back pocket of his drooping trousers. He would dispose of it later, when she’d gone to bed.

“I’ve had enough,” she said. “Truly. Grandie, I eat enough to stay alive and well, and that’s what God intended. We’re not meant to carry round excess flesh. Aside from being not good for us, it’s also not right.”

“Oh, a sin, is it?”

“Well…it can be, yes.”

“So your grandie’s a sinner? Going straight to hell on a plate of beans while you’re playing harps with the angels, eh?”

She laughed outright. “You know that’s not what I think.”

“What you think is a cartload of bollocks. What I know is that this stage you’re in—”

“A stage? And how do you know that when you and I have been together…what? Two months? Before that you didn’t even know me, Grandie. Not really.”

“Makes no difference, that. I know women. And you’re a woman despite what you’re doing to make yourself look like a twelve-year-old girl.”

She nodded thoughtfully, and he could tell from the expression on her face that she was about to twist his words and use them against him as she seemed only too expert at doing. “So let me see,” she said. “You had four sons and one daughter, and the daughter—this would be Aunt Nan, of course—left home when she was sixteen and never returned except at Christmas and the odd bank holiday. So that leaves Gran and whatever wife or girlfriend your sons brought round, yes? So how is it that you know women in general from this limited exposure to them, Grandie?”

“Don’t you get clever with me. I’d been married to your gran for forty-six years when the poor woman dropped dead, so I had plenty of time to know your sort.”

“My ‘sort’?”

“The female sort. And what I know is that women need men as much as men need women and anyone who thinks otherwise is doing their thinking straight through the arse.”

“What about men who need men and women who need women?”

“We’ll not talk about that!” he declared in outrage. “There’ll be no perversion in my family and have no doubt about that.”

“Ah. That’s what you think, then. It’s perversion.”

“That’s what I know.” He’d shoved her possessions back into the rucksack and replaced it on the hook before he saw how she’d diverted them from his chosen topic. The damn girl was like a freshly hooked fish when it came to conversation. She flipped and flopped and avoided the net. Well, that would not be the case tonight. He was a match for her wiliness. The cleverness in her blood was diluted by having Sally Joy for a mother. The cleverness in his blood was not.

He said, “A stage. Full stop. Girls your age, they all have stages. This one here, it might look different from another girl’s, but a stage is a stage. And I know one when I’m looking it in the eyes, don’t I.”

“Do you.”

“Oh aye. And there’ve been signs, by the way, in case you think I’m blowing smoke in the matter. I saw you with him, I did.”

She didn’t reply. Instead, she carried her glass and bowl to the sink and began the washing up. She scraped the bone from his chop into the rubbish, and she stacked the cooking pots, the plates, the cutlery, and the glasses on the work top in the order in which she intended to wash them. She filled the sink. Steam rose. He thought she was going to scald herself some night, but the heat never seemed to bother her.

When she began to wash but still said nothing, he picked up a tea towel for the drying and spoke again. “You hear me, girl? I saw you with him, so do not be declaring to your granddad that you have no interest, eh? I know what I saw and I know what I know. When a woman looks at a man in the way you were looking at him…That tells me you don’t know your own mind, no matter what you say.”

She said, “And where did this seeing take place, Grandie?”

“What does it matter? There you were, heads together, arms locked…the way lovers do, by the way…”

“And did that worry you? That we might be lovers?”

“Don’t try that with me. Don’t you bloody try that again, missy-miss. Once a night is enough and your granddad isn’t fool enough to fall for it twice.” She’d done her water glass and his lager pint, and he snatched up the latter and pushed the tea towel into it. He screwed it around and gave it a polish. “You were interested, you bloody were.”

She paused. She was looking out of the window towards the four lines of caravans below their own. They marched towards the edge of the cliff and the sea. Only one of them was occupied at this time of year—the one nearest the cliff—and its kitchen light was on. This winked in the night as the rain fell against it.

“Jago’s home,” Tammy said. “We should have him over for a meal soon. It’s not good for elderly people to be on their own so much. And now he’s going to be…He’ll miss Santo badly, though I don’t expect he’ll ever admit it.”

Ah. There. The name had been said. Selevan could talk about the boy freely now. He said, “You’ll claim it was nothing, won’t you. A…what d’you call it? A passing interest. A bit of flirting. But I saw and I know you were willing. If he’d made a move…”

She picked up a plate. She washed it thoroughly. Her movements were languid. There was no sense of urgency in anything that Tammy did. She said, “Grandie, you misconstrued. Santo and I were friends. He talked to me. He needed someone to talk to, and I was the person he chose.”

“That’s him, not you.”

“No. It was both. I was happy with that. Happy to be…well, to be someone he could turn to.”

“Bah. Don’t lie to me.”

“Why would I lie? He talked, I listened. And if he wanted to know what I thought about something, I told him what I thought.”

“I saw you with your arms linked, girl.”

She cocked her head as she looked at him. She studied his face and then she smiled. She removed her hands from the water and, dripping as they were, she put her arms around him. She kissed him even as he stiffened and tried to resist her. She said, “Dear Grandie. Linking arms doesn’t mean what it might have meant once. It means friendship. And that’s the honest truth.”

“Honest,” he said. “Bah.”

“It is. I always try to be honest.”

“With yourself as well?”

“Especially with myself.” She went back to the washing up and cleaned her gruel bowl carefully, and then she began on the cutlery. She’d done it all before she spoke again. And then she spoke in a very low voice, which Selevan might have missed altogether had he not been straining to hear something quite different from what she next said.

“I told him to be honest as well,” she murmured. “If I hadn’t, Grandie…I’m rather worried about that.”

“YOU AND I BOTH KNOW THAT YOU CAN ARRANGE THIS IF YOU want to, Ray. That’s all I’m asking you to do.” Bea Hannaford raised her mug of morning coffee and watched her ex-husband over the rim of it, trying to determine how much further she could push him. Ray felt guilty for a number of things, and Bea was never beyond a session of button pressing in what she considered a good cause.

“It’s just not on,” he said. “And even if it was done, I don’t have those kinds of strings to pull.”

“Assistant chief constable? Oh please.” She refrained from rolling her eyes. She knew he hated that, and he’d score a point if she did it. There were times when having experienced nearly twenty years of marriage with someone came in very handy, and this was one of those times. “You can’t intend me to take that onboard.”

“You can do with it what you will,” Ray said. “Anyway, you don’t know what you’ve got yet, and you won’t know till you hear from forensics, so you’re jumping the gun. Which, by the way, you’re very good at doing if it comes down to it.”

That, she thought, was below the belt. It was one of those ex-husband kinds of remarks, the sort that lead to a row in which comments are made with the intention of drawing blood. She wasn’t about to participate. She went to the coffeemaker and topped up her mug. She held out the glass carafe in his direction. Did he want more? He did. He drank it as she did—black—which made things as simple as they ever could be between a man and a woman divorced for nearly fifteen years.

He’d shown up at her door at 8:20. She’d gone to answer it, assuming the courier from London had arrived far earlier than expected, but she’d opened it to find her former husband on the step. He was frowning in the direction of her front window, where a three-tiered plant stand displayed a collection of pot plants going through the death throes of the sadly neglected. A sign above them was printed with the words: “Fund-raiser for Home Nurses/Leave Money in Box.” Clearly, the poor home nurses were not going to benefit from Bea’s attempt to add to their coffers.

Ray said, “Your black thumb, I see, has not become greener recently.”

She said, “Ray. What’re you doing here? Where’s Pete?”

“At school. Where else would he be? And deeply unhappy at having been forced to eat two eggs this morning instead of his regular. Since when is he allowed cold pizza for breakfast?”

“He’s lying to you. Well…essentially. It was only once. The problem is, he has an unfailing memory.”

“He comes by that honestly.”

She returned to the kitchen rather than reply. He followed her there. He had a carrier bag in his hand, and he placed this on the table. It comprised the reason for his call upon her: Pete’s football shoes. She didn’t want him leaving the shoes at his dad’s house, did she? Nor did she want him to take them to school, yes? So his father had brought them by.

She’d sipped her coffee and offered him one if he wanted. He knew where the mugs were, she told him.

But she’d made the offer before she thought about it. The coffeemaker squatted next to her calendar and what was on this calendar was not only Pete’s schedule, but also her own. Given, her own was cryptic enough, but Ray was no fool.