Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “Which was?”

  “I sacked the boy, and I encouraged her to get back to her surfing. Get back in shape. Get back on the circuit. I told her no one goes through life without getting their heart broken into bits, but people recover.”

  “Like you had?” Havers asked.

  “If it comes to it, yes.”

  “And what did you know of this other woman?” Bea asked him.

  “Nothing. Madlyn never said…I knew nothing.”

  “You, Mr. Reeth?”

  Jago picked up his block and examined it. He nodded slowly. “She told me. She wanted me to have a word with the boy. I s’pose it was to try to set him straight. But I told her it wouldn’t do much good. That age? A boy i’n’t thinking with his brain, and didn’t she see that? I tell her there’s lots of fish in the sea, like they say. I say, Let’s be rid of this sorry piece of business, girl, and get on with our lives. It’s the only way.”

  He didn’t seem to realise what he had just said. Bea eyed him carefully. She could tell that Havers was doing the same. Bea said, “Irregular is the term that’s been used for what Santo was up to on the side while he was seeing Madlyn, and Santo himself was the one to use it. He was advised to be honest about it, about the irregular bit. He may have been, but he apparently wasn’t with Madlyn. Was he honest with you, Mr. Reeth? You appear to have something of a touch with young people.”

  “I only knew what our Madlyn knew,” Jago Reeth said. “Irregular, you say? That was the word was used?”

  “Irregular, yes. Irregular enough for him to ask advice about it.”

  “Having it on with an older woman might’ve been irregular enough,” Lew noted.

  “But enough to seek advice about it?” Bea asked, more to herself than to them.

  “S’pose,” Jago said, “it depends on who the woman was, eh? It always comes down to that in the end.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  DESPITE JAGO’S WARNING, CADAN COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF. It was complete insanity and he damn well knew it, but he engaged in it anyway: the soft silken feel of her thighs tightening round him; the sound of her moaning and then the heightened growing rapturous yes of her response, and this set against a backdrop of waves crashing against the nearby shore; the mixed scents of the sea, of her female smells, and of wood rot from the tiny beach hut; the eternal female salt of her where he licked as she shrieked and yes yes as her fingers dug into his hair; the dim light from the cracks round the door casting a nearly ethereal glow on skin that was slick but lithe and firm and willing God so eager and ever so willing…

  It could have been like that, Cadan thought, and despite the growing lateness of the day he wasn’t all that far from establishing Pooh in the sitting room, hauling his bicycle out of the garage, and pedaling frantically to Adventures Unlimited to take Dellen Kerne up on her offer to meet at the beach huts. He’d seen just enough films in the cinema to know that the older woman–younger man bit was never perfect—let alone permanent—which was a plus as far as he was concerned. The very idea of having it on with Dellen Kerne was all so right in Cadan’s mind that it had moved quite beyond rightness into another realm altogether: into the sublime, the mystical, the metaphysical. The only metaphorical monkey in the barrel was, alas, Dellen herself.

  The woman was a nutter, no question about it. Despite his longing to press his lips to various parts of her body, Cadan knew barm when he saw barm, providing barm was actually a word, which he seriously doubted. But if it wasn’t a word, it needed to be one, and she was barm in spades. She was the walking, talking, breathing, eating, sleeping personification of barm, and the one thing Cadan Angarrack was besides randy enough to take on a herd of sheep was clever enough to give barm a wide berth.

  He hadn’t gone to work that day, but he hadn’t been able to face any questions from his father about why he was hanging about the house. So to keep Lew from venturing into that conversational territory, Cadan had risen as usual, had dressed as usual—going so far as to don his paint-spattered jeans, which he considered a very nice touch indeed—and had shown up as usual at the breakfast table where Madlyn was eating a virtuous half grapefruit, and Lew was sliding a decent fry-up from the pan onto his plate.

  Seeing Cadan, Lew had gestured towards the food in a surprisingly affable fashion. Cadan took this as a peace offering and as acknowledgement of his efforts at self-rehabilitation through gainful employment, so he accepted the food with a “Fantastic, Dad. Ta,” and tucked right in, asking his sister how she was coping.

  Madlyn cast him a baleful glance that recommended a change in conversational direction, so Cadan gave his father a moment’s study and realised Lew had about him the ease of movement that had in the past signified recent sexual release. He decided that his father was unlikely to be wanking in the midst of his morning shower, and he said to him, “Get back with Ione, Dad?” in a man-to-man tone whose implication could not be misconstrued.

  And Lew definitely did not misconstrue. Cadan could tell that much. For his father’s swarthy skin darkened ever so slightly before he went back to the cooker to prepare a second fry-up. This he did in silence.

  So much for the warm, familial colloquy. But, no worries. Since there was to be no additional sound among them beyond that which was made by mastication and swallowing, the entire issue of Cadan’s employment did not come up. On the other hand, Cadan was burning to ask what the big deal actually was if they exchanged a few bawdy words about Lew successfully talking Ione out of her pique long enough to pin her manfully to the mattress. All right, Madlyn was there and perhaps one ought to show deference to her femininity—not to mention everything that had gone wrong for her recently—by not bringing up the coarser aspects of male-female relationships. On the other hand, a wink between men wouldn’t have gone amiss, and in finer days Lew had not been averse to allowing his son a wee bit of knowledge in the area of triumphant conquests.

  Which made Cadan wonder what was going on.

  Had Lew moved on to another woman? It was definitely in his nature. A succession of women had come into the lives of the small Angarrack clan, women who had generally ended up weeping, ranting, or trying to be reasonable with conversation at the kitchen table or the front door or in the garden or wherever because Lew Angarrack would not commit to them. But when another woman was being worked into the picture, Lew generally brought her home to meet the kids prior to sex because bringing her home to meet the kids always gave the impression that something was actually possible between them…like a future. So what did it mean that here Lew was in the kitchen loose of limb and looking like a man who’s properly oiled a woman’s hinges, when no one had been brought by at all? The kids were older, true enough, but some things were written in concrete round here and one of them had long been Lew’s behaviour.

  Which brought to mind Dellen Kerne. Not that she was far from Cadan’s mind at any one moment, but it seemed to him that Lew’s secrecy meant there was reason for secrecy, and reason for secrecy implied the illicit, and illicit definitely led one down the mental garden path to adultery. A married woman. Christ, he concluded. His father had got to Dellen first. He didn’t know how, but he reckoned it had happened. He felt a stab of real jealousy.

  So he had plenty of time during the day to dwell on the what-could-still-be’s of a run-in with Dellen. He had the feeling she wouldn’t take it amiss to be doing a father-and-son shag, but the truth was that he didn’t want to make things with his father worse than they’d already been, so he ended up trying to occupy himself with other thoughts.

  The trouble here was that he was a doer, not a thinker. Heavy thinking bound him up in anxiety, the cure for which lay in two directions. One of them was action and the other was drink. Cadan knew which of the two he ought to choose, with respect to his history, but he damn well wanted to choose the other, and as the hours wore on, the wanting increased. When the wanting pressed him to the point at which rational thought was no longer possible, he gave Pooh a fruit plate to keep
him occupied—among other edibles, the parrot was particularly partial to Spanish oranges—and he fetched his bicycle. Binner Down House was his destination.

  Cadan’s purpose was to acquire a companion in the booze. Drinking alone more than once in a week suggested that a man might have something of a problem with mood-altering substances of the liquid variety, and Cadan didn’t wish to be labeled as anything other than a bon vivant. So he settled on Will Mendick as a likely partner in drink.

  Nothing having progressed for Will in the Madlyn arena, it stood to reason he might well want to get soused. Once getting soused was accomplished, they could both sleep it off at Binner Down House with no one ever the wiser. It seemed like a grand idea.

  Will lived at Binner Down House with nine surfers, male and female. He was the odd man out. He didn’t ride the waves because he didn’t like sharks and he wasn’t overly fond of weever fish either. Cadan found him on the south side of the property, which was an ancient place in the sort of condition a property gets into when it’s near the sea and no one takes proper care of it. So the land surrounding it was overgrown with gorse, bracken, and a tangle of sea grasses. A single gnarled cypress in what went for a front garden needed trimming, and weeds took the place of a lawn that had too long fought the good fight against them. The building itself was in sore need of repair, especially with regard to roof tiles and the wood surrounds of windows and doors. But the occupants had more important concerns than property maintenance, and a disreputable shed in which their surfboards lined up like colourful place markers in a book served as ample evidence of this. As did their wet suits, which generally hung to dry from the lower branches of the cypress.

  The south side of the house faced Binner Down, from whose environs floated the lowing of cows. Along the wall of the building, a triangular sort of greenhouse had been fashioned. Its glass roof tilted into the house, with one side of it also glass and the other comprising the existing granite of the old building, but painted white to reflect the sun. This was a vinery, Cadan had learned, its purpose being to grow grapes.

  Cadan found Will inside. He was bent to accommodate the tilted glass of the ceiling, digging round the base of an infant grapevine. When Cadan entered, Will straightened and said, “Fuck all, it’s about bloody time,” before he saw who it was coming through the door. “Sorry,” he then said. “I thought it was one of them.” He was, Cadan knew, referring to his surfing housemates.

  “Still not helping round here?”

  “Hell no. They might actually have to get off their bums.” Will had been using a pitchfork to work the soil—which didn’t look to Cadan the best way to go about it, considering the size of the plants, but he said nothing—and Will tossed the tool aside. He took up a cup of something sitting on a ledge, and he quaffed the rest of whatever was in it. It was warm in the greenhouse, as it was supposed to be despite the hour of the day, and he was sweating, which made his wispy hair cling to his skull. He was going to be bald by the time he was thirty, Cadan decided, and he gave silent thanks for his own thick locks.

  “I owe you,” Cadan told Will by way of prefatory remarks. “I came by to tell you that.”

  Will looked confused. He reached for his pitchfork and resumed his digging. “You owe me what, exactly?”

  “An apology. For what I said.”

  Will straightened again. He wiped his arm across his forehead. He was wearing a flannel shirt, partially unbuttoned. He had on his usual black T-shirt beneath it. “What did you say?”

  “That bit about Madlyn. The other day. You know. When you stopped by.” Cadan thought that the less said about Madlyn the better life would be for them both, but he did want to make sure Will knew what he was talking about. “Thing is, man, how the hell do I know who has a chance with my sister and who hasn’t?”

  “Oh, I expect you’d know well enough. As you’re her brother.”

  “Not as things turn out,” Cadan told him. “She was talking about you this morning at breakfast, as it happens. I heard that and I realised…Listen, man, I was dead wrong and I want you to know it.” He was lying, of course, but he reckoned he could be forgiven for that. A greater good was involved here: He didn’t actually know his sister’s mind on the subject of romantic entanglements, did he?—aside from how she felt about Santo Kerne at the moment and he wasn’t altogether sure of that, either—and, besides that, he needed Will Mendick just now. So if a small prevarication was going to get Will to open a bottle with him, that certainly could be forgiven. “What I’m saying’s that you shouldn’t write her off. She’s been in a bad way for a bit, and I reckon she needs you, even if she doesn’t know that yet.”

  Will went to the far end of the greenhouse where supplies were kept and fetched down a box of fertiliser from a shelf. Cadan followed him.

  “So I reckoned we could hoist a brew”—Cadan cringed internally at the bizarre expression; he sounded like someone on American telly—“and let bygones be bygones. What d’you say?”

  “Can’t,” Will said. “I can’t leave at the moment.”

  “That’s where you’re lucky. I wasn’t actually talking about leaving,” Cadan told him frankly. “I reckoned we could booze up here.”

  Will shook his head. He returned to his vines and his pitchfork. Cadan had the distinct impression that something was eating at his friend’s peace of mind.

  “Can’t. Sorry.” Will picked up the pace of his work and clarified his situation by adding tersely, “Cops were at the grocery, Cade. They gave me a grilling.”

  “What about?”

  “What the hell d’you think it was about?”

  “Santo Kerne?”

  “Yeah, Santo Kerne. Is there another subject?”

  “Why you, for God’s sake?”

  “The hell I know. They’ve been talking to everyone. How’d you escape?” Will dug furiously once again.

  Cadan said nothing. He felt ill at ease all at once. Speculatively, he looked at Will. The fact that the cops had sought him out suggested things Cadan didn’t want to begin to consider.

  “Well,” he said in the expansive tone that always indicates an end to a conversation.

  “Yeah,” Will said grimly. “Well.”

  Cadan made his farewell soon after this and was thus at a loose end once again. Will and Will’s troubles aside, fate seemed to be telling him that action was called for. And action meant the single deed—aside from drinking—that Cadan had not been able to get out of his brain.

  Christ, but his mind seemed fixed on her. She might as well have been a deadly infection eating away at his brain. Cadan knew that his choices were simple: He had to get rid of her or he had to have her. Yet having her was not unlike committing ritual suicide, and he knew that if nothing else, so he rode from Binner Down House to the only place left in his limited list of escape hatches from the self: the Royal Air Station. He couldn’t come up with any other alternative. He’d lie to his father about having gone to work, if it came to that. He just needed to be somewhere that wasn’t at home alone or at Adventures Unlimited in the vicinity of that woman.

  As luck had it, his father’s car wasn’t there. But Jago’s was, which seemed a godsend. If anyone could act the part of confidant, it was Jago Reeth.

  Unfortunately, someone else had the same idea. Cadan walked in to find the two daughters of Ione Soutar in the reception area and the door to the inner workshops closed. Jennie was scrupulously attending to her school prep at the card table that served as his father’s desk while the redoubtable Leigh was pressing one finger to the side of her nostril, a tube of Super Glue on the counter in front of her along with a compact mirror into which she gazed.

  “Mum’s inside, Cadan?” Leigh told him with that perpetual, maddening interrogatory inflection of hers, which always suggested she was speaking to a fool. “She’s said it’s personal, so you’re not to go in?”

  “I expect she’s talking to Jago ’bout your dad,” Jennie added frankly. She was sucking on her lower lip as sh
e rubbed out pencil marks she’d made on her paper. “She said it’s over, but she keeps crying at night in the bath when she thinks we can’t hear, so I reckon it’s not as over as she wants it to be.”

  “She needs to give him the permanent heave-ho?” Leigh said. “I mean, no offense, Cadan, but your father’s a dickhead? Women need to stand up for themselves and they need to stand firm and they especially need to kick arse when they’re not being treated the way they deserve to be treated. I mean, like, what sort of example is she setting for the two of us?”

  “What the hell’re you doing to your face?” Cadan asked.

  “Mummy wouldn’t let her get her nose pierced, so she’s gluing a stone on,” Jennie informed Cadan in the friendly fashion that was her nature. “C’n you do long division, Cade?”

  “God, don’t ask him,” Leigh said to her sister. “He didn’t even pass one GSCE? You know that, Jennie.”

  Cadan ignored her. “You want a calculator?” he asked Jennie.

  “She’s supposed to show her work?” Leigh told him. She inspected her nose stud and said to the mirror, “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to rubbish up my face. Like I’d ackshully do that?” She rolled her eyes. “What d’you think, Jennie?”

  Jennie said without looking, “I think you’re going to have a real row with her now.”

  Cadan couldn’t disagree. Leigh looked like someone with a large spot of blood on the side of her nose. She should have chosen a different-coloured stone.

  “Mum’s going to make her take it off,” Jennie went on. “It’ll hurt when she does, as well, cos the Super Glue holds it real good. You’ll be sorry, Leigh.”

  “Shut up?” Leigh said.