Careless in Red

Chapter Ten

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.”

“Neither of you cooked, then?”

“Neither of us cooked. I could do eggs and toast, of course, and Helen was brilliant at opening tins of soup, beans, and smoked salmon although she could easily be expected to pop a tin in the microwave and possibly blow the entire electrical system in the house. We employed someone to cook for us. It was that, takeaway curry, or starvation. And one can eat only so much takeaway curry.”

“You poor things,” Daidre said. “Come along, then. I expect you can learn at least something.”

She returned to the kitchen and he followed her. From a cupboard, she took a wooden bowl-carved with primitive dancing figures round its rim-and she rustled up a cutting board and a number of, thankfully, recognisable foodstuffs meant to be combined into a salad. She set him to his task with a knife, saying, “Throw in anything. That’s the beauty of a salad. When you’ve got enough in the bowl, I’ll show you a simple dressing that won’t tax your sadly meagre talents. Any questions, then?”

“I’m sure I’ll have them as I go along.”

They worked in companionable silence, Lynley upon the salad and Daidre Trahair upon a dish with string beans and mint. Something was baking away in the oven-emitting the fragrance of pastry-while something else simmered in a pan. In time, they had a meal assembled, and Daidre instructed him in the art of laying a table, which he did, at least, know how to do but which he allowed her to demonstrate for him because allowing her that allowed him to watch and evaluate her.

He was acutely aware of DI Hannaford’s instructions to him, and while he didn’t like the idea of using Daidre Trahair’s hospitality as a device of investigation instead of a means of friendly entrée into her world, the part of him that was a policeman trumped the part of him that was a social creature in need of communing with other like creatures. So he watched and waited and he remained alert for what crumbs he could gather about her.

There were few enough. She was very careful. Which was, in itself, a valuable crumb.

They tucked into their meal in her tiny dining room, where a piece of cardboard fixed over a window reminded him of his duty to repair it for her. They ate something she called Portobello Wellington, along with a side dish of couscous with sun-dried tomatoes, green beans done up with garlic and mint, and his salad dressed with oil, vinegar, mustard, and Italian seasoning. They had no wine to drink, merely water with lemon. She apologized for this, much as she had over the sherry.

She said she hoped he didn’t mind a vegetarian meal. She wasn’t vegan, she explained, for she saw no sin in consuming animal products like eggs and such. But when it came to the flesh of her fellow creatures on the planet, it seemed too…well, too cannibalistic.

“Whatever happens to the beasts, happens to man,” she said. “All things are connected.” It sounded to him like a quote, and even as he thought as much, she unblushingly told him it was. She said, appealingly, “Those aren’t my words, actually. I can’t remember who said them or wrote them, but when I first came across them years ago, they had the ring of truth.”

“Isn’t there an application to zoos?”

“Imprisoning beasts leading to man’s imprisonment, you mean?”

“Something like that. I-forgive me-I don’t much care for zoos.”

“Nor do I. They hearken back to the Victorians, don’t they? That excited quest for knowledge about the natural world without an accompanying compassion for that world. I myself loathe zoos, to be quite honest.”

“But you choose to work in them.”

“I choose to be committed to improving conditions for the animals therein.”

“Subverting the system from within.”

“It makes more sense than carrying a protest sign, doesn’t it.”

“Rather like going on a foxhunt with a herring attached to your horse.”

“Do you like foxhunting?”

“I find it execrable. I’ve been only once, on Boxing Day one year. I must have been eleven years old. My conclusion was that Oscar had it right, although I couldn’t have said as much at the time. Just that I didn’t like it and the idea of a pack of dogs on the trail of a terrified animal…and then being allowed to tear it to pieces if they find it…It wasn’t for me.”

“You’ve a soft heart, then, for the animal world.”

“I’m not a hunter, if that’s what you mean. I would have made a very bad prehistoric man.”

“No killing sabre-tooth tigers for you.”

“Evolution, I’m afraid, would have ground to a precipitate halt had I been at the tribal helm.”

She laughed. “You’re very droll, Thomas.”

“Only in fits and starts,” he told her. “Tell me how you subvert the system.”

“The zoo? Not as well as I would like to.” She helped herself to more green beans and she passed the bowl to him, saying, “Have some more. This is my mother’s recipe. The secret is what you do with the mint, popping it into the hot olive oil just long enough to wilt it, which releases its flavour.” Her nose wrinkled. “Or something like that. Anyway, the beans you boil only five minutes. Any longer and they’ll be mushy, which is the last thing you want.”

“Nothing being worse than a mushy bean,” he noted. He took another helping. “All praise to your mother. These are very good. You’ve done her proud. Where is she, your mother? Mine’s just south of Penzance. Near Lamorna Cove. And I fear she cooks about as well as I do.”

“You’re a Cornwall man, then?”

“More or less, yes. And you?”

“I grew up in Falmouth.”

“Born there?”

“I…Well, yes, I suppose. I mean, I was born at home and at the time my parents lived just outside Falmouth.”

“Were you really? How extraordinary,” Lynley said. “I was born at home as well. We all were.”

“In more rarefied surroundings than my own birthing chamber, I daresay,” Daidre pointed out. “How many of you are there?”

“Just three. I’m the middle child. I’ve an older sister-that would be Judith-and a younger brother, Peter. You?”

“One brother. Lok.”

“Unusual name.”

“He’s Chinese. We adopted him when I was seventeen.” She cut a wedge of her Portobello Wellington neatly and held it on her fork as she went on. “He was six at the time. He’s reading maths at Oxford at the moment. Quite brainy, the dickens.”

“How did you come to adopt him?”

“We saw him on the telly, actually, a programme on BBC1 about Chinese orphanages. He was handed over because he has spinal bifida. I think his parents thought he’d not be able to care for them in their old age-although I don’t know that for sure, mind you-and they didn’t have the wherewithal to care for him either, so they gave him up.”

Lynley observed her. She seemed completely without artifice. Everything she said could be easily verified. But still…“I like the we,” he told her.

She was spearing up some salad. She held the fork midway to her mouth, and she coloured lightly. “The we?” she said, and it came to Lynley that she thought he was referring to the two of them, at that moment, seated at her little dining table. He grew hot as well.

“You said ‘We adopted him.’ I liked that.”

“Ah. Well, it was a family decision. We always reached big decisions as a family. We had Sunday-afternoon family meetings, right after the joint of beef and the Yorkshire pud.”

“Your parents weren’t vegetarians, then?”

“Goodness no. It was meat and veg. Lamb, pork, or beef every Sunday. The occasional chicken. Sprouts-Lord, I do hate sprouts…always did and always will-boiled into submission, as well as carrots and cauliflower.”

“But no beans?”

“Beans?” She looked at him blankly.

“You said your mother taught you to cook green beans.”

She looked at the bowl of them, where ten or twelve remained uneaten. She said, “Oh yes. The beans. That would have been after her cookery course. My father went for Mediterranean food in a very big way and Mum decided there had to be life beyond spaghetti Bolognese, so she set about finding it.”

“In Falmouth?”

“Yes. I did say I grew up in Falmouth.”

“School there as well?”

She observed him openly. Her face was kind, and she was smiling, but her eyes were wary. “Are you interrogating me, Thomas?”

He held up both hands, a gesture meant to be read as openness and submission. “Sorry. Occupational hazard. Tell me about Gertrude Jekyll.” For a moment, he wondered if she would do so. He added helpfully, “I saw you’ve a number of books about her.”

“The very antithesis of Capability Brown,” was her answer, given after a moment of thought. “She understood that not everyone had sweeping landscapes to work with. I like that about her. I’d have a Jekyll garden if I could but I’m probably doomed to succulents here. Anything else in the wind and the weather…well, one has to be practical about some things.”

“If not about others?”

“Definitely.” They’d finished their meal during their conversation and she stood, preparatory to gathering up the dishes. If she’d taken offence at his questioning of her, she hid it well, for she smiled at him and told him to come along, as he was meant to help with the washing up. “After that,” she said, “I shall thoroughly scour your soul and reduce you to rubble, metaphorically speaking of course.”

“How shall you manage all that?”

“In a single evening, you mean?” She cocked her head in the direction of the sitting room. “With a game of darts,” she told him. “I’ve a tournament to practice for and while I expect you’ll not be much of a challenger, you’ll do in a pinch.”

“My only reply to that must be that I’ll trounce you and humiliate you,” Lynley told her.

“With a gauntlet like that thrown down, we must play at once, then,” she told him. “Loser does the washing up.”

“You’re on.”

BEN KERNE KNEW HE would have to phone his father. Considering the old man’s age, he also knew that he ought to drive the distance to Pengelly Cove and break the news about Santo in person, but he hadn’t been to Pengelly Cove in years, and he couldn’t face going there just now. It wouldn’t have changed at all-partly due to its remote location and even more due to the commitment of its citizens to never altering a thing, including their attitudes-and the lack of change would catapult him back into the past, which was the penultimate place in which he wished to dwell. The last place was in the present. He longed for a limbo of the mind, a mental Lethe in which he could swim until memory itself no longer concerned him.

Ben would have let the entire matter go had Santo not been beloved of his grandparents. Ben knew it was unlikely they would ever contact him. They hadn’t done so since his marriage, and the only time he’d spoken to them at all was when he’d phoned occasionally, either holding a stilted conversation with them at holiday time or speaking more freely to his mother when he phoned her office, or desperate for a place to send Santo and Kerra when Dellen was in one of her bad periods. Things might have been different had he written to them. He may have worn them down over time. But he was no writer, and even if he had been, there was Dellen to consider and his loyalty to Dellen and everything that loyalty to Dellen had demanded of him since his adolescence. So he’d let go of all attempts at reconciliation, and they had done the same. And when his mother had suffered a stroke suddenly in her late fifties, he’d learned of her condition only because the event had occurred during a period when Santo and Kerra had been staying with their grandparents, and they’d brought the news with them upon their return. Even Ben’s own brothers and sisters had been forbidden from passing the information along.

Another man might have extended the same treatment to his parents now, allowing them to learn of Santo’s death in whatever way fate allowed them to learn it. But Ben had tried-and failed in so many ways-to be a man unlike his father, and that meant creating a breach in the wall that surrounded his heart at this moment, allowing some form of compassion to enter it despite his need to hide himself away in a place where it would be safe for him to grieve all the things he needed to grieve.

At any rate, the police were going to contact Eddie and Ann Kerne, because that was what the police did. They delved into the lives and histories of everyone associated with the deceased-God, he was calling Santo the deceased and what did that mean about the state of his heart?-and they looked for anything that could be used to assign blame. Doubtless his father’s grief upon hearing about Santo would propel him into expletive first and accusation second, with no wife there willing or able to act as a moderating influence upon his words, but rather with Ann Kerne standing nearby looking what she felt, which would be tormented after years with a man whom she loved but could do little to temper. And although there was nothing for Ben to be accused of in Santo’s death, the job of the police was to make deductions, connecting dots no matter how unrelated they were one to another. So he didn’t need them talking to his father with his father unaware of what had happened to his favourite grandchild.

Ben decided to make the call from his office and not from the family’s flat. He went down by means of the stairs because doing so prolonged the inevitable. When he was in his office, he didn’t at once pick up the phone. Instead, he looked at the china board upon which the weeks prior to and after Adventures Unlimited’s opening day were marked in the fashion of a calendar and filled with both activities and bookings. He could see their need of Alan Cheston displayed on this board. For months before Alan’s advent, Dellen had been in charge of marketing Adventures Unlimited, but she’d not made much of a job of it. She had ideas but virtually no follow-through. Organisational skills were not her strength.

And what is her strength, if you don’t mind my asking? his father would have enquired. But never mind that, no answer required. The whole effing village knows what she’s good at and make no mistake about that, my boy.

Untrue, of course. It was just his father’s way of taking the piss because he believed that children were meant not to get puffed up, which was translated in Eddie Kerne’s mind to children not being meant to have confidence in their own decisions. He wasn’t a bad man, just set in his ways and his ways were not Ben’s ways, so they’d come into conflict.

Not unlike Ben himself and Santo, Ben realised now. The very hell of being a father was realising one’s own father cast a shadow one could not hope to escape.

He studied the calendar. Four weeks to opening and they had to open although he couldn’t see how they might be able to do so. His heart wasn’t in it, but they had so much money invested in the business that not to open or to postpone opening wasn’t an alternative he could choose. Besides, to Ben the bookings they had were covenants that could not be broken, and while there weren’t as many as he’d dreamed of having at this point in the business’s development, he had faith that bringing onboard Alan Cheston was going to take care of that. Alan had ideas and the wherewithal to make them into realities. He was clever, and a leader as well. Most important, he was not a bit like Santo.

Ben hated the disloyalty of the thought. In thinking it, he was doing what he vowed he would never do: repeat the past. You’re following your effing prong, boy! had been his father’s words, intoned with variation only in the emotion that underscored them: from sadness to fury to derision to contempt. Santo had done much the same, and Ben didn’t want to think what lay behind his son’s proclivity for sexual dalliance or where such a proclivity might have taken him.

Before he could avoid any longer, he picked up the phone on his desk. He punched in the numbers. He had little doubt his father would still be up and about the ramshackle house. Like Ben, Eddie Kerne was an insomniac. He’d be awake for hours yet, doing whatever it was one did at night when committed to a green lifestyle, as his father long had been. Eddie Kerne and his family had had electricity only if he could produce it from the wind or from water; they had water only if he could divert it from a stream or bring it up in a well. They had heat when solar panels produced it, they grew or raised what they needed for their food, and their house had been a derelict farm building, bought for a bargain and rescued from destruction by Eddie Kerne and his sons: granite stone by granite stone, whitewashed, roofed, and windowed so inexpertly that the winter wind hissed through the spaces between the frames and the walls.

His father answered in his usual way, with the barked greeting, “Speaking.” When Ben didn’t say anything at once, his father went on with, “If you’re there, start yapping. If not, get off the line.”

“It’s Ben,” Ben said.

“Ben who?”

“Benesek. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

After a brief pause, “And what if you did? You caring for anyone ’sides yourself these days?”

Like father, like son, Ben wanted to reply. I had a very good teacher. Instead he said, “Santo’s been killed. It happened yesterday. I thought you’d want to know, as he was fond of you and I thought perhaps the feeling was mutual.”

Another pause. This one was longer. And then, “Bastard,” his father said. His voice was so tight that Ben thought it might break. “Bastard. You don’t effing change, do you?”

“Do you want to know what happened to Santo?”

“What’d you let him get up to?”

“What did I do this time, you mean?”

“What happened, damn you. What God damn happened?”

Ben told him as briefly as possible. In the end he added the fact of murder. He didn’t call it murder. He used homicide instead. “Someone damaged his climbing kit,” he told his father.

“God damn.” Eddie Kerne’s voice had altered, from anger to shock. But he shifted back to anger quickly. “And what the hell were you doing while he was climbing some bloody cliff? Watching him? Egging him on? Or having it off with her?”

“He was climbing alone. I didn’t know he’d gone. I don’t know why he went.” The last was a lie, but he couldn’t bear to give his father any additional ammunition. “They thought at first it was an accident. But when they looked at his equipment, they saw it had been tampered with.”

“By who?”

“Well, they don’t know that, Dad. If they knew, they’d make an arrest and matters would be settled.”

“Settled? That’s how you talk about the death of your son? Of your flesh and blood? Of the means of carrying on your name? Settled? Matters get settled and you just go on? That it, Benesek? You and whatsername just stroll into the future and put the past behind you? But then, you’re good at doing that, aren’t you? So is she. She’s bleeding brilliant at doing that, ’f I recall right. How’s she taking all this? Getting in the way of her lifestyle, is it?”

Ben had forgotten the nasty emphases in his father’s speech, loaded words and pointed questions, all designed to carve away one’s fragile sense of self. No one was meant to be an individual in Eddie Kerne’s world. Family meant adherence to a single belief and a single way of life. Like father, like son, he thought abruptly. What a cock-up he’d made of the rough form of paternity he’d actually been granted.

Ben said, “There’s no funeral planned yet. The police haven’t released the body. I’ve not seen him, even.”

“Then how the hell d’you know it’s Santo?”

“As his car was at the site, as his identification was in the car, as he hasn’t returned home yet, I think it’s safe to assume the body is Santo.”

“You’re a piece of work, Benesek. Talking about your own son like that.”

“What do you want me to say when nothing I say is going to be right? I phoned to tell you because you’re going to learn about it anyway from the police, and I thought-”

“You don’t want that, do you? Me ’n’ cops in a converse. My jaw wagging and their ears perked up.”

“If that’s what you believe,” Ben said. “What I was going to say is that I reckoned you’d appreciate hearing the news from me and not from the police. They’ll be talking to you and Mum. They’ll be talking to everyone associated with Santo. I thought you’d want to know what they were doing on your property when they finally show up.”

“Oh, I’d reckon it’d have to do with you,” Eddie Kerne said.

“Yes. I suppose you would.”

Ben rang off then, no farewell given. He’d been standing, but now he sat at his desk. He felt a great pressure building within him, as if a tumour in his chest was growing to a size that would cut off his breath. The room seemed close. Soon the air would be used up.

What he needed was escape. Like always, his father would have said. His father: a man who rewrote history to suit whatever purpose the moment demanded. But there was no history to this moment. There was only getting through the now.

He rose. He went along the corridors to the equipment room, where he’d earlier gone himself and where he’d taken DI Hannaford. This time, though, he didn’t approach the row of long cupboards where the climbing equipment was stored. Rather, he went through the room to a smaller one, where a storage cupboard the size of a large wardrobe had a padlock hanging from a hasp. He possessed the only key to this lock, and he used it now. When he swung it open, the scent of old rubber was strong. It had been more than twenty years, he thought. Before Kerra’s birth, even. Likely the thing would fall apart.

But it didn’t. He was in the wet suit before he had a clear thought as to why he was in it, shoulders to ankles in neoprene, pulling the zip up his back by its cord, one hard tug and the rest was easy. No corrosion because he’d always taken care of his kit.

“Come on, come on, let’s bloody get home,” his mates would say to him. “Don’t be such a wanker, Kerne. We’re freezing our arses out here.”

But there was a hosepipe available, and he’d used it to rinse the saltwater off. Then he did the same when he got his kit home. Surfing kits were expensive and he had no intention of needing to purchase another because saltwater had corroded and rotted the one he owned. So he washed the wet suit thoroughly-its boots, gloves, and hood as well-and he washed the board. His mates hooted and called him a poofter, but he would not be moved from his intentions.

In that and in everything else, he thought now. He felt cursed by his own determination.

The board was in the cupboard as well. He eased it out and examined it. Not a ding anywhere, the deck still waxed. A real antique by the standards of today, but perfectly suitable for what he intended. Whatever that was, because he didn’t quite know. He just wanted to be out of the hotel. He scooped up boots, gloves, and hood. He tucked the surfboard under his arm.

The equipment room had a door that led to the terrace and from there to the still empty swimming pool. A concrete stairway at the far end of the pool area took one up to the promontory for which the old hotel had been named, and a path along the edge of this promontory followed the curve of St. Mevan Beach. A line of beach huts were tucked into the cliff here, not the standard huts which were generally freestanding, but rather a joined rank of them, looking like a long and low-slung stable with narrow blue doors.

Ben followed this route, breathing in the cold salt air and listening to the crash of the waves. He paused above the beach huts to don his neoprene hood, but the boots and gloves he would pull on when he got to the edge of the water.

He looked out at the sea. The tide was high, so the reefs were covered, and the reefs would keep the waves consistent. From this distance five feet seemed their size, with swells coming from the south. They were breaking right, with an offshore wind. Had it been daylight-even dawn or dusk-conditions would be considered good, even at this time of year when the water would be as cold as a witch’s heart.

No one surfed at night. There were too many dangers, from sharks to reefs to rips. But this wasn’t so much about surfing as it was about remembering, and while Ben didn’t want to remember, talking to his father was forcing him to do so. It was either that or remaining within the Promontory King George Hotel, and that he could not do.

He descended the steps to the beach. There were no lights here, but tall streetlamps that followed the path along the promontory above shed at least some illumination onto the rocks and sand. He picked his way through hunks of slate and sandstone boulders, clitter from the cliff top that now formed the base of the promontory, and he stepped at last onto the sand. This wasn’t the soft sand of a tropical isle, but rather the grit produced over eons as a frozen land of permafrost warmed till slow-moving landslides left coarse gravel in their wake, and water forever beating upon these stones reduced them to hard little grains that glittered in sunlight but shone dull otherwise, grey and dun coloured, unforgiving upon flesh and abrasive to the touch.

To his right was the Sea Pit, high tide filling it with new water now, nearly submersing it in order to do so. To his left was the tributary of the River Cas and beyond it what remained of the Casvelyn Canal. In front of him was the sea, restless and demanding. It drew him forward.

He set his board on the sand and donned his boots and gloves. He squatted for a moment-a huddled figure in black with his back to Casvelyn-and he watched the phosphorescence in the waves. He’d been to the beach at night as a youth, but those visits had not been for a surf. With their surfing done for the day, they’d make a fire ring. When embers were all that was left of the blaze, they’d pair off and if the tide was low, the great sea caves of Pengelly Cove beckoned. There they’d make love. On a blanket or not. Semiclothed or nude. Drunk, slightly tipsy, or sober.

She’d been younger then. She’d been his. She was what he wanted, all that he wanted. She had known it as well, and the trouble had come from that knowing.

He rose and approached the water with his board. He had no leash for it, but that didn’t matter. If it got away from him, it got away from him. Like so much else in his life, keeping the board close by should he fall from it was a concern beyond his control just now.

His feet and ankles felt the shock of the cold first and then his legs and thighs and upwards. It would take a few moments for his body temperature to warm the water within his wet suit, and in the meantime the bitter cold of it reminded him he was alive.

Thigh deep, he eased onto the board and began to paddle out through the white water towards the right-hand reef break. The spray hit his face and the waves washed over him. He thought-briefly-he might paddle forever, straight into morning, paddle until he was so far from shore that Cornwall itself would be only a memory. But instead, bleakly governed by love and by duty, he stopped beyond the reef at the swells, and there he straddled his board. He sat first with his back to the shore, looking out at the vast and undulating sea. Then he turned the board round and saw the lights of Casvelyn: the line of tall lamps shining whitely along the promontory and then the amber glow behind the curtained windows of the houses in town, like the gaslights of the nineteenth century, or the open fires of an earlier time.

The swells were seductive, offering him a hypnotic rhythm that was as comforting as it was false. It felt, he thought, like a return to the womb. One could stretch out on the board, bob in the sea, and sleep forever. But swells broke-the sheer volume of the water collapsing in on itself-as the landmass beneath it sloped up into the shore. There was danger here as well as seduction. One had to act or one submitted to the force of the waves.

He wondered if, after all these years, he would recognise the moment: that confluence of shape, force, and curl telling the surfer it was time to drop in. But some things ultimately were second nature, and he found that taking a wave was one of them. Understanding and experience coalesced into skill, and the passage of time had not robbed him of that.

The peak built, and he rose with it: paddling first, then up on one knee, and then erect. No deck grip at the tail of the board, holding the back foot in position, because on this board-on his board-such a device had never been placed. He skimmed for a second across the wave’s shoulder. He dropped into its face. He carved, getting high and fast, with his muscles acting on memory alone. Then he was in the barrel and it was clean. Green room, mate, they would have yelled. Sheeee-it! You’re in the green room, Kerne.

He rode until there was only white water, and there he stepped off, thigh deep in the shallows once again, catching the board before it got away from him. He paused with the inside waves breaking against him. His breath came hard, and he stood there till the pounding of his heart grew slower.

Then he walked towards the beach, the seawater pouring off him like a discarded cape. He trudged in the direction of the stairs.

As he did so, a figure-midnight silhouette-came forward to meet him.

KERRA HAD SEEN HIM leave the hotel. At first she hadn’t known it was her father. Indeed, for a mad moment her leaping heart had declared it to be Santo beneath her, striding across the terrace and up the steps towards the promontory and St. Mevan Beach to have a secret surf at night. She’d watched from above, and seeing only the black-garbed figure and knowing that figure had come out of the hotel…There was nothing else for her to think. It had all been a mistake, she’d thought nonsensically. A terrible, ghastly, horrible mistake. There was some other body discovered at the base of that cliff in Polcare Cove, but it was not her brother.

So she’d hurried to the stairs and she’d clattered down them, as the antique lift would have been too slow. She dashed through the dining hall, which, like the equipment room, opened onto the terrace, and she set across this and flew up the stairs. By the time she reached the promontory, the black-garbed figure was down on the beach, squatting next to the surfboard. So she waited there and there she watched. Only as he approached her after riding a single wave did she realise it was her father.

She was filled with questions and then with fury, with the eternal and unanswerable why’s of nearly everything that had defined her childhood. Why did you pretend…? Why did you argue with Santo about…? And beyond that, the who of it all. Who are you, Dad?

But she asked none of these half-formed questions as her father reached her position at the base of the steps. Instead she tried in the semidarkness to read his face.

He paused. His expression seemed to soften and he looked as if he intended to speak. But when he finally opened his mouth, it was only to say, “Kerra, love,” and then he passed her. He climbed the steps to the promontory path, and she followed him. Wordlessly, they approached the hotel, where they descended towards the empty swimming pool. At a hosepipe, her father paused and washed the seawater from his surfboard. Then he went on, into the hotel.

In the equipment room, he stripped off his wet suit. He was wearing his undershorts beneath it, and his skin was pimpled with the cold. But this didn’t seem to bother him because he didn’t shiver. Instead, he carried the wet suit to a large, heavy plastic rubbish bin in the corner of the room, and he dumped it inside without ceremony. The dripping surfboard he carried into another room-an inner room, Kerra saw, a room she had not yet investigated in the hotel-and there he put it into a cupboard. This he locked with a padlock, which he then tested, as if to make sure the cupboard’s contents were safe from prying eyes. From family eyes, she realised. From her eyes and from Santo’s eyes because her mother must have known this secret all along.

Santo, Kerra thought. The sheer hypocrisy of it all. She simply did not understand.

Her father used his T-shirt to dry himself off. He tossed it to one side and donned his pullover. He motioned for her to turn her back, which she did and heard the sound of him removing his undershorts, plopping them onto the floor, and then zipping his trousers. Then he said, “All right.” She turned back to him, and they faced each other. He waited, clearly, for her questions.

She determined to surprise him as he’d surprised her. So what she said was, “It’s because of her, isn’t it?”

“Who?”

“Mum. You couldn’t surf and watch her at the same time, so you stopped surfing. That’s why, isn’t it? I saw you, Dad. How long has it been? Twenty years? More?”

“Yes. Since before you were born.”

“So you put on your wet suit, you went out there, you took the first wave that came along, and that was it. No trouble. It was easy for you. It was child’s play for you. It was nothing. Like walking. Like breathing.”

“Yes. All right. It was.”

“Which means…How long had you surfed when you stopped?”

Her father picked up his T-shirt and folded it neatly, despite its condition, which was damp through. He said, “Most of my life. It’s what we did in those days. There was nothing else. You’ve seen how your grandparents live. We had the beach in the summer and school the rest of the time. There was work at home, trying to keep that bloody house from falling apart, and when there was free time, we surfed. There was no money for holidays. No cheap flights to Spain. It wasn’t like today.”

“But you stopped.”

“I stopped. Things change, Kerra.”

“Yes. She came along. That was the change. You got caught up in her, and by the time you saw what she’s really like, it was too late. You couldn’t get away. So you had to make a choice and you chose her.”

“It’s not that simple.” He moved past her, out of the smaller room and into the larger equipment room. He waited for her to follow him and when she was with him, he shut and locked the smaller room’s door.

“Did Santo know?”

“About?”

“This.” She gestured to the door he’d locked. “You were good, weren’t you? I saw enough to know that. So why…?” Suddenly, she was as close to weeping as she’d come in the last terrible thirty hours or so.

He was watching her. She saw that he looked ineffably sad, and in that sadness she understood that while they were a family-the four of them then, the three of them now-they were a family in name only. Beyond a common surname, they were and had always been merely a repository of secrets. She’d believed that all of these secrets had to do with her mother, with her mother’s troubles, her mother’s periods of bizarre alteration. And these were secrets to which she herself had long been a party because there was no way to avoid knowing them when the simple act of coming home from school might put her in the midst of what had always been referred to as “a bit of an embarrassing situation.” Don’t breathe a word to Dad, darling. But Dad knew anyway. All of them knew by the clothes she wore, the tilt of her head when she was speaking, the rhythm of her sentences, the tap of her fingers on the table during dinner, and the restlessness of her gaze. And the red. They knew from the red. For Kerra and Santo, what came on the heels of that colour was a prolonged visit to the elder Kernes and “What’s the cow up to now?” from her granddad. But “Say nothing to your grandparents about this, understand?” was the injunction that Kerra and Santo had lived by. Keep the faith, keep the secret, and eventually things would return to normal, whatever normal was.

But now Kerra understood there were even more secrets than those which she’d kept about her mother: arcane bits of knowledge that went beyond Dellen’s convoluted psyche and touched upon Kerra’s father as well. Embracing this stinging piece of truth, Kerra realised there was no solid place to put down her foot if she wished to walk forward and pass into the future.

“I was thirteen years old,” she said. “There was a bloke I liked, called Stuart. He was fourteen and he had terrible spots, and I liked him. The spots made him seem safe, you know? Only he wasn’t safe. It’s funny actually because all I’d done was go to the kitchen to fetch us some jam tarts and a drink-less than five minutes-and that’s all it took. Stuart didn’t understand what was going on. But I knew, didn’t I, because I’d grown up knowing. So had Santo. Only he was safe because-let’s face it-he was just like her.”

“Not in all ways,” her father said. “No. Not that.”

“That,” she said. “You know it. That. And in ways that affected me.”

“Ah. Madlyn.”

“We were best friends. Before Santo got his hands on her.”

“Kerra, Santo didn’t intend-”

“Yes, he did. He bloody well did. And the worst part of it was that he didn’t need to pursue her. He was already pursuing…what…three other girls? Or was it that he’d already been through three other girls?” She knew that she sounded what she was: bitter. But it seemed to her in that moment that nothing in her life had ever been secure from depredation.

Her father said, “Kerra, people go their own way. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Do you actually believe that? Is that how you defend her? Defend him?”

“I’m not-”

“You are. You always have done, at least when it comes to her. She’s made a fool of you for my entire life and I’ll put money down on the bet she’s made a fool of you since the day you met her.”

If Ben was offended by Kerra’s remark, he didn’t say so. Rather he said, “It’s not your mother I’m talking about, love, and it’s not Santo. It’s this Stuart lad, whoever he was. It’s Madlyn Angarrack.” He paused before finishing with, “It’s Alan, Kerra. It’s everyone. People will go their own way. You’re best off to let them.”

“Like you did, you mean?”

“I can’t explain things further.”

“Because it’s a secret?” she asked, and she did not care that the question sounded like a taunt. “Like everything else in your life? Like the surfing?”

“We don’t choose where to love. We don’t choose who to love.”

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” she said. “Tell me why you didn’t like Santo surfing.”

“Because I believed no good would come of it.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

He said nothing. For a moment, Kerra thought he would not reply. But at last he said what she knew he would say. “Yes. Not a single good came of it for me. So I lay down the board and got on with my life.”

“With her,” Kerra noted.

“Yes. With your mother.”