Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “Did Jago say Madlyn went mental?”

  Cadan thought about this, not so much whether Jago Reeth had actually said that about his sister but rather why his father was asking that of all possible questions. It seemed such an unlikely choice of queries that Cadan said, “You were looking for her, right? I mean that’s what I told Ione. Like I said, she was here with the girls. Pizza.”

  “Ione,” Lew said. “I’d forgotten the pizza. I expect she left in a state.”

  “She tried to ring you. Your mobile…?”

  “I didn’t have it on.”

  The milk steamed on the cooker. Lew got his Newquay mug and spooned Ovaltine into it. He used a generous amount, then he handed the jar over to Cadan who’d got his own mug down from the shelf above the sink.

  “I’ll ring her now,” Lew said.

  “It’s after midnight,” Cadan told him unnecessarily.

  “Believe me, better late than tomorrow.”

  Lew left the kitchen and went to his room. Cadan felt an urgent need to know what was going on. This was part curiosity and part a search for a reasonable means of calming himself without questioning why he needed calming. So he climbed the stairs in his father’s wake.

  His intention was to listen at Lew’s door, but he found that wasn’t going to be necessary. He’d barely reached the top step when he heard Lew’s voice raise and could tell the conversation was going badly. Lew’s end consisted mostly of, “Ione…Please listen to me…So much on my mind…Overloaded with work…Completely forgot…Because I’m in the middle of shaping a board, Ione, with nearly two dozen more…Yes, yes. I am sorry, but you didn’t actually tell me…Ione…”

  That was it. Then silence. Cadan went to the doorway of his father’s room. Lew was sitting on the edge of the bed. He had one hand on the phone’s receiver, which he’d just replaced in its cradle. He glanced at Cadan, but he didn’t speak. Instead, he got up and went for his jacket, which he’d thrown over the seat of a ladder-back chair in the corner of the room. He began to put it on. Apparently, he was going out again.

  Cadan said, “What’s happening?”

  Lew didn’t look at him as he replied with, “She’s had enough. She’s finished.”

  He sounded…Cadan thought about this. Regretful? Tired? Heavyhearted? Accepting of the fact that as long as one remained unchanged, the past would accurately predict the future? Cadan said philosophically, “Well, you cocked things up. Forgetting her and everything.”

  Lew patted his pockets as if looking for something. “Yes. Right. Well. She didn’t want to listen.”

  “To what?”

  “It was a pizza dinner, Cade. That’s all. Pizza. I could hardly be expected to remember a pizza dinner.”

  “That’s cold, isn’t it,” Cadan said.

  “It’s also none of your business,” Lew told him.

  Cadan felt his belly grow tight and hot. He said, “Right. Well, I guess it isn’t. But when you want me to entertain your girlfriend while you’re out…out doing whatever…then it is my business.”

  Lew dropped his hand from the search of his pockets. He said, “Christ. I’m…I’m sorry, Cade. I’m on edge. So much is going on. I don’t know how to explain myself to you.”

  But that was just it, Cadan thought. What was going on? True, they’d heard from Will Mendick that Santo Kerne was dead—and yeah that was unfortunate, wasn’t it?—but why would the news throw their lives into chaos if chaos was indeed where they were?

  THE EQUIPMENT ROOM OF Adventures Unlimited had been constructed in a former dining hall and the former dining hall had itself once been a tea-dancing pavilion in the heyday of the Promontory King George Hotel, a heyday that had occurred between the two world wars. Often when he found himself in the equipment room, Ben Kerne tried to imagine what it had been like when the parquet floor wore a gloss, the ceiling glittered with chandeliers, and women in frothy summer frocks floated in the arms of men wearing linen suits. They’d danced with a blissful lack of awareness then, believing that the war to end all wars had actually ended all wars. They’d learned otherwise, and far too soon, but the thought of them had always been soothing, as was the music Ben imagined he heard: the orchestra playing as white-gloved waiters passed finger sandwiches on silver trays. He considered the dancers—nearly saw their ghosts—and felt a poignancy about times that had passed. But at the same moment he always felt comfort. People came and went from the Promontory King George, and life continued.

  In the equipment room now, however, the tea dancers of 1933 didn’t enter Ben Kerne’s mind. He stood in front of a row of cabinets, one of which he’d unlocked. Inside this cabinet, climbing equipment hung from hooks, lay neatly in plastic containers, and coiled on shelves. Ropes, harnesses, slings, belay and camming devices, chock stones, carabiners…everything. His own equipment he stored elsewhere because he didn’t like the inconvenience of coming down here to sort out what he wanted to take with him if he had a free afternoon for a climb. But Santo’s kit had a prominent place, and above it Ben himself had proudly fixed a sign that said “Do Not Take From This.” Instructors and students alike were to know those pieces of gear were sacrosanct, the accumulation of three Christmases and four birthday celebrations.

  Now, however, all of it was missing. Ben knew what this meant. He understood that the absence of Santo’s equipment constituted Santo’s final message to his father, and he felt the impact of that message, just as he felt the weight and experienced the sudden illumination that the message provided as well: His own remarks—made unthinkingly and born of pigheaded self-righteousness—had effected this. Despite his every effort, despite the fact that he and Santo could not possibly have been more unlike each other in everything from personality to appearance, history had repeated itself, in form if not in substance. His own history spoke of wrongheaded judgement, banishment, and years of estrangement. Santo’s now spoke of denunciation and death. Not in so many words but, rather, with an open acknowledgement of a heaviness of heart that in and of itself had uttered a single damning question as loudly as if Ben had shouted it: What sort of miserable excuse for a man are you, to have done such a thing?

  Santo could not have failed to interpret this unspoken query as anything other than what it was, and any son of any father would have likely done the same and reacted out of the same sense of outrage that had taken Santo out to the cliffs. Ben himself had reacted to his own father in much the same manner at much the same age: You talk about man, I’ll give you man.

  But the underlying reason for Ben’s interaction with Santo remained unexamined although the superficial why of it didn’t need to be addressed at all, because Santo knew exactly what it was. The historical reason for their interaction, on the other hand, was far too frightening to contemplate. Instead of doing so, Ben had eternally told himself only that Santo was—always and merely—who Santo was.

  “It just happened,” Santo had confessed to Ben. “Look, I don’t want—”

  “You?” Ben said, incredulous. “You stop right there, because what you want doesn’t interest me. What you’ve done, on the other hand, does. What you’ve accomplished. The sum total of your bloody self-interest—”

  “Why the hell do you care so much? What is it to you? If there was something to be handled, I would have handled it, but there was nothing. There is nothing. Nothing, okay?”

  “Human beings,” Ben said, “are not to be handled. They’re not pieces of meat. They’re not merchandise.”

  “You’re twisting my words.”

  “You’re twisting people’s lives.”

  “That’s unfair. That’s so fucking unfair.”

  As Santo would find most of life, Ben had thought. Except he hadn’t lived long enough to do so.

  And whose fault was that, Benesek? he asked himself. Was the moment worth the price you’re paying?

  That moment had been a single remark, said partly in anger but in larger part bleak fear: “Unfair is having a worthless piece of manure as a so
n.” Once said, the words hung there, like black paint tossed at a clean white wall. His punishment for having said them was going to be the memory of that wretched statement and what it had produced, which was Santo’s face gone white and the fact that a father had turned his back on his son. You want man, I’ll show you man. In spades if I must. But show you I will.

  Ben didn’t want to think of what he’d said. If he had his preference, it would be that he might never think of anything again. His mind would go blank and thus it would remain, allowing him to go through the motions of living until his body gave out and eternal rest claimed him.

  Ben closed the cupboard and looped the padlock back into place. He breathed slowly through his mouth till he’d mastered himself and his guts were easy again. Then he went to the lift and rang for it. It descended at a dignified, antique speed that matched its appearance of open iron fretwork. It creaked to a stop and he rode it to the top of the hotel where the family flat was and where Dellen waited.

  He didn’t go to his wife at once. Instead, he went first to the kitchen. There, Kerra sat at the table with her partner. Alan Cheston was watching her, and Kerra herself was listening, her head tilted in the direction of the bedrooms. She was, Ben knew, waiting for a sign of how things would be.

  Her gaze took in her father as he came through the doorway. Ben’s eyes questioned. She responded. “Still,” was her answer.

  “All right,” he said.

  He went to the cooktop. Kerra had boiled a kettle there, and the fire was still on beneath it, low so the steam escaped soundlessly and the water stayed just beneath a boil. She’d set up four mugs. Each held a teabag. He poured water in two of them and stood there, watching the tea brew. His daughter and her lover sat in silence. He could feel their eyes upon him, though, and he could sense the questions they wanted to ask. Not only of him but of each other. There were matters to discuss in every corner.

  He couldn’t bear the thought of talking, so when the tea was sufficiently dark, he poured milk and added sugar to one and nothing to the other. He carried both from the kitchen and set one on the floor momentarily, in front of Santo’s door, which was closed but not locked. He opened it and went inside, into the dark with two cups of tea that he knew neither of them would be able or willing to drink.

  She’d switched on no lights, and as Santo’s room was at the back of the hotel, there were no streetlamps from the town to illuminate the darkness within. Across the curved expanse of St. Mevan Beach, the lights at the end of the breakwater and atop the canal lock glittered through the wind and the rain, but they did nothing to expel the gloom in here. A milky shaft of light from the corridor, however, fell across the rag rug on the bedroom floor. On this, Ben saw that his wife was foetally curled. She’d ripped sheets and blankets from Santo’s bed and she’d covered herself with them. Most of her face was in shadow but where it was not, Ben could see it was stony. He wondered if the thought was in her mind: If only I had been here…if only I hadn’t gone off for the day…He doubted it. Regret had never been Dellen’s style.

  With his foot, Ben closed the door behind him. Dellen stirred. He thought she might speak, but instead she drew the linens up to her face. She pressed them to her nose, taking in Santo’s scent. She was like a mother animal in this, and like an animal she operated on instinct. It had been her appeal from the day he’d met her: both of them adolescents, one of them randy and the other one willing.

  All she knew so far was that Santo was dead, that the police had been, that a fall had taken him, and that the fall was during a sea-cliff climb. Ben had got no further than that with the information because she’d said, “A climb?” after which she’d read her husband’s face as she’d long been capable of doing and she’d said, “You did this to him.”

  That was it. They’d been standing in the reception area of the old hotel because he’d not managed to get her any farther inside. Upon her return, she’d seen at once that something was wrong and she’d demanded to know, not as a way of deflecting the obvious question of where she herself had been for so many hours—she wouldn’t think anyone actually had a right to know that—but because something was wrong on a much larger scale than curiosity over her whereabouts. He’d tried to get her upstairs to the lounge, but she’d been immovable. So he told her there.

  She went for the stairs. She stopped momentarily at the bottom step, and she clutched the railing as if to keep herself upright. Then she climbed.

  Now, Ben set the milk-and-sugar tea on the floor near her head. He sat on the edge of Santo’s bed.

  She said, “You’re blaming me. You reek of blaming me, Ben.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d think that.”

  “I think it because we’re here. Casvelyn. That was all about me.”

  “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 h
eld 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.