Careless In Red (26 page)

“Is she eating properly?” Sally Joy had demanded from the bowels of Africa, where a decent connection on a telephone line was, apparently, something akin to the spontaneous transmogrification of tabby cat into two-headed lion. “Is she still praying, Father Penrule?”

“She’s—”

“Has she gained any weight? How much time is she on her knees? What about the Bible? Does she have a Bible?”

Jaysus in a sandwich, Selevan thought. Sally Joy made his bloody head swim. He said, “I told you I’d watch over the girl. That’s what I’m doing. ’S there anything else, then?”

“Oh, I’m tedious. I’m tedious. But you don’t understand what it’s like to have a daughter.”

“I had one myself, didn’t I? Four sons as well, if you’re interested.”

“I know. I know. But in Tammy’s case—”

“You either leave her to me or I send her back, woman.”

That got through. The last thing Sally Joy and David wanted was their daughter back in Africa, exposed to its hardships and believing that she could single-handedly do something about them.

“All right. I know. You’re doing what you can.”

And better than you did, Selevan thought. But that was before he’d caught Tammy on her knees. She’d fashioned herself what he called a prayer bench—she’d referred to it as a pree-something but Selevan was not one for fancy terms—in her bitsy sleeping area in the caravan and he’d thought at first she meant to hang her clothing from the back of it, the way gents did with their suits in posh hotels. But not long after breakfast, when he’d gone in search of her in order to drive her in to work, he’d found her kneeling in front of it with a book open on its narrow shelf, and she was reading studiously. This he’d discovered too late—the reading—because the first thing he’d assumed was that the girl was at her God damn beads again, and this despite the fact that he’d already removed two sets of them from her belongings. He’d pounced and hauled her back by her shoulders, saying, “We’ll none of this nonsense,” and then had seen that she was merely reading.

It wasn’t even a Bible. But it also wasn’t much better. She was soaking up some saint’s writing. “St. Teresa of Avila,” she revealed. “Grandie, it’s just philosophy.”

“If it’s some saint’s scribbles, it’s religious muck,” was what he told her as he snatched up the book. “Filling your head with rubbish, you are.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, and her eyes became moist.

They’d driven to Casvelyn in silence, afterwards, with Tammy turned away from him, so all he could see was the curve of her stubborn little jaw and the sheenless fall of her hair. She’d sniffed and he’d understood she was crying and he’d felt…He didn’t know how he felt because—and he cursed her parents soundly for sending her to him—he was trying to help the girl, to bring her to whatever senses she had left, to get her to see she was meant to be living her life and not spending it caught up in reading about the doings of saints and sinners.

He felt irritated with her, then. Defiance he could deal with. He could shout and be rough. But tears…He said, “They’re lezzies, you know, the lot of them, girl. You got that, don’t you?”

She said in a small voice, “Don’t be stupid,” and she cried a little harder.

He was reminded of Nan, his daughter. A ride in the car and Nan in this same position, turned away from him. “It’s just Exeter,” she’d said. “It’s just a club, Dad.” And his reply, “We’ll be having none of that nonsense while you’re under my roof. So dry your eyes or feel my palm, and it won’t be drying them for you.”

Had he really been so hard with the girl when all she’d wanted to do was go clubbing with her mates? But he had, he had. For clubbing with mates was how things started, and where they ended was in disgrace.

All of that seemed so innocent now. What had he been thinking in denying Nan a few hours of pleasure because he’d had none when he was her age?

The day passed slowly, with Selevan’s internal skies quite clouded. He was more than ready for the Salthouse Inn by the time the appointed hour rumbled round for his embrace of the sixteen men of Tain. He was also ready for some conversation, and this would be provided by his regular companion of the spirits, who was waiting for him in the smoky inglenook of the Salthouse Inn’s public bar when he arrived late in the afternoon.

This was Jago Reeth, and he sat with his regular pint of Guinness cupped in his hands, his ankles hooked round the legs of his stool, and his back hunched over so that his spectacles—repaired at the temple with a twist of wire—slid to the end of his bony nose. He was wearing his usual getup of crusty jeans and sweatshirt, and his boots were, as always, grey with the dust of carved polystyrene from the surfboard maker’s workshop where he was employed. He was beyond the age of a pensioner, but as he was fond of putting it when asked: Old surfers did not die or fade away; they merely looked for regular jobs when their days of riding waves were finished.

Jago’s had concluded because of Parkinson’s, and Selevan always felt a gruff sympathy for his contemporary when he saw how the shakes had come into his hands. But any expression of concern was always brushed aside by Jago. “I had my day,” he was fond of saying. “Time to let the youngsters have theirs.”

Thus he was the perfect confessor for Selevan’s current situation, and once Selevan had his Glenmorangie in hand, he told his friend about his morning skirmish with Tammy in answer to the question, “How’s tricks?” which Jago asked as he raised his own glass to his mouth. He used two hands to do it, Selevan noted.

“She’s going over to the lezzies,” Selevan told him as a conclusion to his tale.

Jago shrugged. “Well, kids’re meant to do what they want to do, mate. Anything else and you’re buying trouble. Don’t see any point to that, do I.”

“But her parents—”

“What do parents know? What did you know if it comes down to it? And you had, what? Five yourself? Did you know your arse from a pickle when you dealt with them?”

He hadn’t known his arse from a pickle when he’d dealt with anything, Selevan had to admit, even when he’d dealt with his wife. He’d been too caught up in being cheesed off at having to cope with the bloody dairy instead of doing what he’d wanted to do, which had been the navy, seeing the world, and getting the hell away from Cornwall. He’d made a dog’s dinner of his role as father and husband, and he hadn’t done much better with his role as dairyman.

He said, but not in an unfriendly fashion, “Easy for you to say, mate.” For Jago had no children, had never had a wife, and had spent his youth and his middle age following waves.

Jago smiled, showing teeth that had seen hard use and little maintenance. “Too right,” he admitted. “I ought to keep it plugged.”

“And how’s a duffer like me supposed to understand a lass anyway?” Selevan asked.

“Just keep’m from getting stuffed too soon, ’n my opinion.” Jago downed the rest of his Guinness and pushed away from the table. He was tall, and it took a moment for him to untangle his long legs from the stool. While Jago went to the bar for another drink, Selevan considered what his friend had said.

It was good advice, except it didn’t apply to Tammy. Getting stuffed was not her interest. What hung between men’s legs had not so far beguiled her in the least. Should the girl ever come up pregnant, there’d be cause for celebration, not the general outcry one might assume would normally rise from outraged parents and relations.

“Never been a lezzie in my house,” he said when Jago returned.

“Why’n’t you ask her about it, then?”

“Now how the hell am I s’posed to put it?”

“‘Like the bush better’n the prong, my sweet? Why would that be?’” Jago offered, and then he grinned. “Look, mate, you’re meant to keep the doors open between you by pretending what’s in front of your face i’n’t in front of your face. Kids’re different to what they were like when we were young. Get started early and don’t know what they’re about, do they. You’re there to guide them, not to direct them.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Selevan said.

“It’s the how of it, man.”

Selevan couldn’t argue with this. He’d mucked up the how of it with his own children and now he was doing the same with Tammy. In contrast—he had to admit—Jago Reeth did have a way with the youngsters. Selevan had seen both of the Angarrack young people come and go from Jago’s hired caravan at Sea Dreams and when the dead boy—Santo Kerne—had dropped by to ask Selevan’s permission for beach access from his property, he’d ended up spending more time with the ancient surfer than in the water when that permission was given: waxing Santo’s board together, setting its fins, examining it for dings and imperfections, sitting in deck chairs on the patch of scrub grass next to the caravan and talking. About what? Selevan wondered. How did one talk to another generation?

Jago answered as if the questions had been asked aloud, saying, “’S more about listening than anything else, not speechifying when all you itch to do is make a speech. Or give a lecture. Bloody hell, how I want to give a lecture. But I wait till they finally say to me, ‘So what d’you think?’ and there’s the opening. Simple as that.” He winked. “But not easy, mind you. Quarter hour with them and the last thing you want is having your youth back. Trauma and tears.”

“That’d be the girl,” Selevan said wisely.

“Oh, aye. That’d be the girl. She fell and fell hard. Didn’t ask for my advice in the befores. Didn’t ask for my advice in the afters. But”—here he took a hefty swig of his stout and sloshed it round his mouth which was, Selevan thought, probably his only bow to oral hygiene—“I broke my own rule at the end of the day.”

“Speechifying?”

“Telling her what I’d do in her place.”

“Which was?”

“Kill the bastard.” Jago spoke casually, as if Santo Kerne were not as dead as a Christmas goose on the table. Selevan raised both eyebrows at this. Jago went on. “That not being possible, ’course, I told her to do it like a symbol. Kill off the past. Wave it good-bye. Make a bonfire of it. Toss in everything that bore on the two of them together. Diaries. Journals. Letters. Cards. Photos. Valentines. Paddington bears. Used-up condoms from their very first shag if she’d been feeling sentimental at that juncture. Everything. Just get rid of it all and move along.”

“Easy enough to say,” Selevan noted.

“Truth there. But when it’s a lass’s first and they’ve gone the full mile, it’s the only way when things go bad. Clean house of the bloke, you ask me. Which she was finally on her way to doing when…well…when it happened.”

“Bad, that.”

Jago nodded. “Makes it worse for the girl. How’s she supposed to see Santo Kerne in a real light now? No. She’s got her work cut out, getting over this. Wish it hadn’t happened, none of it. He wasn’t a bad lad, but he had his ways, and she didn’t see that till too bleeding late. By that time the locomotive was steaming out of the station, and all that was left to do was step out of the way.”

“Love’s a bitch of a thing,” Selevan said.

“It’s a killer, that,” Jago agreed.

LYNLEY LOOKED THROUGH THE GERTRUDE JEKYLL BOOK, AT the photos and drawings OF gardens that were vibrant with English springtime colours. Their palettes were soft and soothing, and gazing at them he could almost feel what it would be like to sit on one of the weathered benches and let the pastel blanket of petals wash over him. Gardens, he thought, were meant to be like these. Not the formal parterres of the Elizabethans, planted with careful displays of constipated shrubbery and clipped vegetation, but rather the exuberant mimicry of what might occur in a nature from which weeds were banished but other plant life was allowed to flourish: banks of colour tumbling unrestrained onto lawns and herbaceous borders bowing onto paths that themselves wandered, as a path would in nature. Yes, Gertrude Jekyll had known what she was about.

“Lovely, aren’t they?”

Lynley looked up. Daidre Trahair stood before him, a small stemmed glass in her extended hand. She made a moue of apology as she gave a glance in its direction, saying, “I’ve only sherry for an aperitif. I think it’s been here since I got the cottage, which would be…Four years ago?” She smiled. “I’m not much of a drinker, so I don’t actually know…Does sherry go bad? I can’t tell you if this is dry or sweet, to be honest. I suspect sweet, though. It said cream on the bottle.”

“That would be sweet,” Lynley said. “Thank you.” He took the glass. “You’re not drinking?”

“I’ve a small one in the kitchen.”

“You won’t allow me to help you?” He nodded in the direction from which domestic sounds had been coming. “I’m not very good at it. Truthfully, I’m fairly wretched at it. But I’m sure I could chop something if something needs to be chopped. And measuring also. I can tell you unblushingly that I’m a genius with measuring cups and spoons.”

“That’s comforting,” she replied. “Are you capable of a salad if all the ingredients are set out on the work top and you’ve no critical decisions to make?”

“As long as I don’t have to dress it. You wouldn’t want me wielding…whatever it is one wields to dress a salad.”

“You can’t be that hopeless,” she told him with a laugh. “Surely your wife—” She stopped herself. Her expression altered, probably because his own had altered, she thought. She cocked her head ruefully. “I’m sorry, Thomas. It’s difficult not to refer to her.”

Lynley rose from his chair, the Jekyll book still in hand. “Helen would have loved a Gertrude Jekyll garden,” he said. “She used to deadhead our roses in London because, she said, it encouraged more blooms.”

“It does. She was right. Did she like to garden?”

“She liked to be in gardens. I think she liked the effect of having gardened.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“I don’t know for sure.” He’d never asked her. He’d have just come home from work to find her with secateurs in hand and a pail of clipped and spent roses at her feet. She’d look at him and toss her dark hair off her cheek and say something about roses, about gardens in general, and what she’d say would force him to smile. And the smile would force him to forget the world outside the brick walls of their garden, a world that needed to be forgotten and locked away so it didn’t intrude on the life he shared with her. “She couldn’t cook, by the way,” he told Daidre. “She was dreadful at it. Completely appalling.”