Bea recognised the name of the caravan park and she cocked her head. Perhaps she’d been wrong about this girl and Santo. She said, “Did you meet him there?”
“No. Like I said, I met him at Clean Barrel.”
“Sorry. I don’t mean met him as in met him,” Bea clarified. “I mean met him as in having assignations with him.”
Tammy flushed. There was so little substance between her skin and her blood vessels that she coloured nearly to purple and she did so quickly. “You mean…Santo and me…for sex? Oh no. I live there. At Sea Dreams. My granddad owns the caravan park. I knew Santo from Clean Barrel, like I said, but he came to Sea Dreams with Madlyn. And he came on his own as well because there’s a cliff he used to practise on sometimes and granddad said he could get to it across our land if he wanted to abseil. Anyway, I saw him there and we talked sometimes.”
“On his own?” Bea asked. This was something new.
“Like I said. He climbed. Down and up but sometimes just up, so he’d come from below…or I suppose he just went down and then up all the time because I can’t quite remember. He also visited Mr. Reeth. So did she. Madlyn. Mr. Reeth, he works for Madlyn’s dad at-”
“Yes. I know. We’ve spoken to him.” But what she didn’t know was that Santo had been there to Sea Dreams on his own. This was a new wrinkle.
“He was nice, Santo.”
“He was especially nice to girls, I gather.”
Tammy’s flush had receded, and she didn’t flush again. “Yes, I suppose he was. But it wasn’t like that for me because…Well, that’s not important. What is important is that we talked from time to time. When he was finished with his climbing or when he was leaving Mr. Reeth’s. Or sometimes when he was waiting for Madlyn to get there from work.”
“They didn’t come together?”
“Not always. Madlyn works in town now, but she didn’t earlier. She had to come a greater distance than Santo, from out by Brandis Corner. She worked on a farm, making jam.”
“I expect she preferred teaching surfing.”
“Oh yes, she did. She does. But that’s in the season, when she teaches surfing. She’s got to do something else the rest of the year. She works in the bakery now. In town. They make pasties. Mostly for wholesale, but they sell some of them out of the shop as well.”
“And where does Santo fit in with all this?”
“Santo. Of course.” She’d been using her hands to gesture with as she talked, but now she clasped them again in her lap. She said, “We talked now and again. I liked him, but I didn’t like him in the way most girls probably would, if you know what I mean, so I think that made me different and maybe safer or something. For advice or whatever because he couldn’t go to his dad or his mum-”
“Why not?”
“His dad, he said, would’ve got the wrong impression, and his mum…I don’t know his mum, but I get the idea she’s…well, she’s not very mummish, apparently.” She smoothed her skirt. It looked like something that would be scratchy against the skin and it was virtually shapeless, a fashion penance. “Anyway, Santo asked me for advice about something and that’s what I thought you ought to know.”
“Advice of what kind?”
She seemed to look for a gentle way to say what came next and, not finding a euphemism, went for a circuitous route to the truth. “He was…He’d got someone new, you see, and the situation was irregular-that’s the word he used when he talked to me, he said it was irregular-and he wanted to ask me what I thought he should do about that.”
“Irregular. That was his word? You’re sure?”
Tammy nodded. “He said he thought he loved her-this is Madlyn-but he wanted this other thing as well. He said he wanted it very badly and if he wanted this other thing the way he wanted this other thing, did it mean he didn’t actually love Madlyn?”
“He talked to you about love, then?”
“No, that part was more like Santo talking to Santo. He wanted to know what I thought he should do about the whole situation. Should he be honest with everyone about it? he wanted to know. Should he tell the truth start to finish? he asked.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I said he should be honest. I said he should always be honest because when people are honest about who they are, what they want, and what they do, it gives other people-this is the people they’re involved with, I mean-the chance to decide if they really want to be with them.” She looked at Bea and her expression was earnest. “So I suppose he was, you see,” she said. “Honest, I mean. And that’s why I’ve come. I think that maybe he’s dead because of it.”
“MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, it’s a question of balance,” was the declaration that Alan used to conclude. “You see that, don’t you, darling?”
Kerra’s hackles stood stiffly. Darling was too much. There was no darling. She was no darling. She thought she’d made that clear to Alan, but the bloody man refused to believe it.
They stood before the glass-fronted notice board in the entry area of the former hotel. Your Instructors was the purpose of their discussion. The imbalance between male and female instructors was Alan’s point. In charge of hiring all of the instructors, Kerra had allowed the balance to swing to females. This was not good for several reasons, according to Alan. For marketing purposes, they needed an equal number of men and women offering instruction in the various activities and, if possible and what was highly desirable, they needed more male than female. They needed the males to be nicely built and good looking because, first of all, such men could serve as a feature to bring unmarried females to Adventures Unlimited and, second of all, Alan intended to use them in a video. He’d lined up a crew from Plymouth to take video footage, by the way, so whatever instructors Kerra came up with also needed to be onboard within three weeks. Or, he supposed-thinking aloud-perhaps they could actually use actors…no, stuntmen…yes, stuntmen could be very good in making the video, actually. The initial outlay would be higher because stuntmen no doubt had some sort of scale upon which they were paid, but it wouldn’t take as long to film them because they’d be professionals, so the final cost would likely not be as high. So…
He was absolutely maddening. Kerra wanted to argue with him, and she had been arguing, but he’d matched her point for point.
He said, “The publicity from that Mail on Sunday article helped us enormously, but that was seven months back, and we’re going to need to do more if we’re to begin heading in the direction of the black. We won’t be in the black of course, not this year and probably not next, but the point is, we have to chip away at debt. So everyone has to consider how best to get us out of the red.”
Red did it for her. Red held her between wanting to run and wanting to argue. She said, “I’m not refusing to hire men, Alan, if that’s what you’re implying. I can hardly be blamed if they’re not applying in droves to work here.”
“It’s not a question of blame,” he reassured her. “But, to be honest, I do wonder how aggressive you’re being in trying to recruit them.”
Not aggressive at all. She couldn’t be. But what was the point in telling him that?
She said, with the greatest courtesy she could manage, “Very well. I’ll start with the Watchman. How much can we spend on an advertisement for instructors?”
“Oh, we’ll need a much wider net than that,” Alan said, affably. “I doubt an ad in the Watchman would do us much good at all. We need to go nationaclass="underline" advertisements placed in specialised magazines, at least one for each sport.” He studied the notice board where the pictures of the instructors were posted. Then he looked at Kerra. “You do see my point, don’t you, Kerra? We must consider them as an attraction. They’re more than merely instructors. They’re a reason to come to Adventures Unlimited. Like social directors on a cruise line.”