Careless In Red (46 page)

When she set off again, she gained the roundabout that took her onto the A30. From there, the distance wasn’t great, and the route was familiar. She skirted Redruth, recovered quickly from one wrong turn, and at last ended up at the junction of B3297 and a numberless lane that was signposted for the village of Carnkie.

This part of Cornwall was completely unlike the vicinity of Casvelyn. Here, Daidre parked her Vauxhall in the triangle of pebble-strewn weeds that served as a meeting point of the two roads, and she sat with her chin on her hands and her hands on the top of the steering wheel. She looked out at a landscape green with spring, rippling into the distance towards the sea, penetrated periodically by derelict towers similar to those one found in the Irish countryside, the domiciles of poets, hermits, and mystics. Here, however, the old towers represented what remained of Cornwall’s great mining industry: each of them an enormous engine house that sat atop a network of tunnels, pits, and caverns beneath the earth. These were the mines that once had produced tin and silver, copper and lead, arsenic and wolfram. Their engine houses had contained the machinery that kept the mine operational: pumping engines that rid the mines of water, and whims that hauled both the ore and the waste rock in bucketlike kibbles up to the surface.

Like gipsy caravans, the engine houses were the stuff of picture postcards now. But once they’d been the mainstay of people’s lives, as well as the symbol of so many people’s destruction. They stood all over the western part of Cornwall, and they existed in inordinate numbers particularly along much of the coast. Generally, they came in pairs: the tower of the mighty stone engine house rising three or four floors and roofless now, with narrow arched windows as small as possible to avoid weakening the overall structure, and next to it—often soaring above it—the smokestack, which had once belched grim clouds into the sky. Now both the engine house and the smokestack provided a nesting place for birds above and a hiding place for dormice below and, in the crannies and crevices of the structures, a growing place for herb Robert’s pert magenta flowers that tangled with yellow bursts of ragwort as red valerian rose above them.

Daidre saw all this at the same time as she did not see it. She found herself thinking of another place entirely, on the coast opposite the one towards which she now gazed.

It was near Lamorna Cove, he’d said. The house and the estate upon which the house sat were together called Howenstow. He’d said—with some evident embarrassment—that he had no idea where the name of the place had come from, and from this admission she’d concluded—incorrectly or not—his ease with the life into which he’d been born. For over two hundred and fifty years his family had occupied both the house and the land, and apparently there had never been a need for them to know anything more than the fact of its being theirs: a sprawling Jacobean structure into which some long-ago ancestor had married, the youngest son of a baron making a match with the only child—the daughter—of an earl.

“My mother could probably tell you everything about the old pile,” he’d said. “My sister as well. My brother and I…I’m afraid we’ve both rather let down the side when it comes to family history. Without Judith—that’s my sister—I’d likely not know the names of my own great-grandparents. And you?”

“I suppose I did have great-grandparents somewhere along the line,” she’d replied. “Unless, of course, I came like Venus via the half shell. But that’s not very likely, is it? I think I’d have remembered such a spectacular entry.”

So what was it like? she wondered. What was it like? She pictured his mother in a great gilded bed, servants on either side of her gently dabbing her face with handkerchiefs soaked in rose water as she laboured to bring forth a beloved son. Fireworks upon the announcement of an heir and tenant farmers tugging their forelocks and hoisting jugs of homebrew as the news went round. She knew the image was completely absurd, like Thomas Hardy meeting Monty Python, but stupidly, foolishly she could not let it go. So she finally cursed herself, and she scooped up the postcard she’d brought from her cottage. She got out of the car into the chilly breeze.

She found a suitable stone just on the verge of the B3297. The rock was light enough and not half buried, which made its removal easy. She carried it back to the triangular juncture of the road and the lane, and at the apex of this triangle she set the stone down. Then she tilted it and placed the postcard of the gipsy wagon beneath it. That done, she was ready to resume her journey.

THE FINAL REMARK TAMMY HAD HURLED AT HIM BEFORE GETTING out of the car in Casvelyn was, “You don’t understand anything, Grandie. No wonder everyone left you like they did.” She hadn’t sounded angry as much as sad, which had made it difficult for Selevan Penrule to counter with anything abusive. He’d have liked to fire a verbal missile in her direction and, with the satisfaction that comes from long experience in the field of vocal warfare, to watch it hit its mark, but there was something in her eyes that prevented him, despite the pain that her parting shot caused him. Perhaps, he thought, he was losing his touch. Either that or the girl was getting under his skin. He hated to think that might be the case.

He’d confronted her when they were on the road to Clean Barrel Surf Shop, and he had been quite proud that he’d mastered in himself the compulsion to tackle her on the previous afternoon. He didn’t like secrets, and he hated lies. That Tammy possessed the first and acted on the second disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. For despite her oddities of dress, behaviour, nutrition, and intention, he liked the girl, and he wanted to think her different from the rest of the world’s furtive adolescents, who had clandestine secondary lives that appeared to be defined by sex, drugs, and bodily mutilation.

He’d believed this to be the case about her: her essential difference from others of her age. But then he’d found the envelope under her mattress when he’d changed the sheets, and he knew from reading its contents that she was, indeed, very like her contemporaries. Whatever progress he thought he’d made with her was nothing but a sham.

In some situations, that knowledge wouldn’t have bothered him. Nothing was going to happen immediately, so he could redouble his efforts and eventually bend her will to his…and to her parents’ as well. But the problem with that belief was that Tammy’s mum was a woman not known for her patience. She wanted results, and if she didn’t get them, Selevan knew that Tammy’s time in Cornwall would be terminated.

So he’d brought forth the envelope he’d found beneath her mattress and he’d placed it on the dashboard as they drove into town. She’d looked at it. She’d looked at him. And damn the girl, she’d taken the offensive. “You’re going through my personal things when I’m not home,” she’d said, sounding for all the world like a fatally wounded spirit. “That’s what you did to Auntie Nan, didn’t you?”

He wasn’t about to get into a discussion of his daughter and the worthless hooligan to whom she’d been married in alleged bliss for twenty-two years. He said, “Don’t make this about your aunt, girl. Tell me what you’re about with this nonsense.”

“You can’t tolerate anyone who disagrees with you, Grandie, and Dad’s just like you. If something’s not part of your experience, it’s not to be bothered with. Or it’s bad. Or evil, even. Well, this isn’t evil. It’s what I want and if you and Dad and Mum can’t see that it’s the sort of answer the whole bloody world needs just now in order to stop being the whole bloody world…” She’d grabbed up the envelope and shoved it into her rucksack. He thought to snatch it from her and toss it out of the window, but what would have been the point? Where that one came from, another could be got.

Her voice was different when she spoke again. She sounded shaken, the victim of betrayal. “I thought you understood. And, anyway, I didn’t think you were the sort of person who snoops in other people’s belongings.”

That was rather maddening to Selevan. He was the one betrayed by her, wasn’t he? She was hiding correspondence from him, not the other way round. When her mum phoned from Africa and Tammy was the object of discussion, he didn’t hide that from her and they didn’t speak in code. So her umbrage was completely out of order.

“Now you listen to me,” he’d begun.

“I won’t,” she said quietly. “Not till you start listening to me as well.”

That had been that until she’d opened the car door in Casvelyn. She’d made her final statements and trudged to the shop. At another time he would have followed her. No child of his had ever spoken to him in such a way without feeling the strap, the belt, the paddle, or the palm. Problem was, Tammy was not his child. An injured generation stood between them, and both of them knew who’d caused the wounds.

So he’d let her go, and he’d driven back to Sea Dreams with a very heavy heart. He did some cleaning and he cooked himself a second breakfast of beans on toast, hoping that putting something more in his stomach would cure its roiling. He took this to the table and he ate it, but the food didn’t stop him from feeling ill.

A car door slamming outside diverted Selevan from his misery. He glanced out of the window and saw Jago Reeth opening the door of his caravan as Madlyn Angarrack approached him. Jago came down the steps and held out his arms. Madlyn walked into them and Jago patted first her back and then her head. They went inside the caravan together, with Madlyn wiping her eyes on the sleeve of Jago’s flannel shirt.

The sight pierced Selevan. He couldn’t work out how Jago Reeth managed what was so bloody impossible for himself: being a man to whom young people actually wished to talk. Obviously, there was something to the way Jago listened and responded to youngsters that Selevan had failed to learn.

Except it was so easy when they weren’t your relations, wasn’t it? And wasn’t that something that Jago himself had already said?

It didn’t matter. All Selevan knew was that Jago Reeth might possess the key to a grandfather’s having one single reasonable conversation with his own granddaughter. He needed to find out what that key was before Tammy’s mother pulled the plug and sent the girl elsewhere to take the mental cure.

He waited till Madlyn Angarrack had left, exactly forty-three minutes after she’d arrived. Then he crossed over to Jago’s caravan and rapped upon the door. When Jago opened it, Selevan saw that his friend was about to head off somewhere, as he’d put on his jacket, the half-broken specs which he wore only at LiquidEarth, and a headband to keep his long hair away from his face. Selevan was about to offer an apology for the disruption to Jago’s plans, but the other man stopped him and told him to come inside.

“You got something eating at you,” he said. “I c’n see that without you telling me, mate. Just let me…” Jago went to a phone and punched in a few numbers. He reached an answer machine, it seemed, because he said, “Lew, me. Going to be late. Got a bit of ’mergency here at home. Madlyn stopped in, by the way. Bit upset again, but I think she’s sorted. There’s a board needs checking in the hot cupboard, eh?” He rang off, replacing the receiver.

Selevan watched his movements. The Parkinson’s looked bad this morning. Either that, or Jago’s medication hadn’t kicked in. Old age was a bugger, no doubt of that. But old age and disease together were the devil.

As a means of introducing the subject for discussion, he took from his pocket the necklace he’d removed from Tammy on the previous day. He laid it on the table and when Jago joined him at the banquette that served as a seat, he gestured to it.

“Found this on the girl,” Selevan told him. “She was wearing it round her neck. Said the M means Mary. Do you credit that? Came right out and said it, didn’t she, bland as could be, like it was the most natural thing in the world.”

Jago picked the necklace up and examined it. “Scapular,” he said.

“That’s it. That’s what she called it. Scapular. But the M’s for Mary. That’s the concern. The Mary bit.”

Jago nodded, but Selevan could see that a smile was playing round the corners of his mouth. This was a bit of an irritant to Selevan. Easy for Jago to have a bleeding laugh at the situation. Wasn’t his granddaughter wearing M for Mary round her neck. He said, “Something’s happened to the girl somewhere ’long the line. That’s all I can reckon from the mess she is now. I put it down to Africa. Being exposed to all those native women in the raw. Walking round the streets of wherever with their privates hanging out. ’S no wonder to me she’s got herself confused.”

“Mother of Jesus,” Jago said.

“That and then some,” Selevan intoned.

Jago laughed then, and he did so heartily. Selevan reared up. Jago said, “Don’t get yourself twisted, mate. You said yourself it’s M for Mary. On a scapular, that would mean M for Mary for the mother of Jesus. It’s a devotional thing, this is. Catholics wear them. You might see a picture of Jesus on one. A saint on another: St. Whoever of Whatever. It’s a mark of devotion.”

“Damn,” Selevan muttered. “No bloody end to this mess.” Tammy’s mum would have a seizure, no doubt about that. One more reason to pack Tammy up and send her on her way. In Sally Joy’s mind the only thing worse than being a Catholic was being a terrorist. “St. George and the dragon would’ve been better,” Selevan said. That image, at least, could have been seen as patriotic.

“Not likely to find St. George on one of these,” Jago said, allowing the scapular to dangle from his fingers, “dragons being the work of imagination which makes St. George himself something of a question mark, eh? But that’s the general idea of ’em. A believer in this or that holy person puts this thing round his neck—or her neck in the case of your Tammy—and I s’pose she ends up feeling holy herself.”

“I blame the effing politicians,” Selevan said darkly. “They made the world in the state it’s in today and that’s why the girl’s working to get herself holy. Trying to prepare for the end of days, she is. And, there’s no one been able to talk her out of it.”

“That what she says?”

“Eh?” Selevan took the scapular and shoved it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “She says she wants a prayerful life. That’s her very words. ‘I want a prayerful life, Grandie. I believe it’s what everyone should aspire to.’ As if sitting alone in a cave somewhere and eating grass for your meals and drinking your own piss once a week is going to do one bleeding thing to solve the world’s problems.”