Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  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 vo
ice 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.”

  “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 wou
ld 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.”