“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.