“P’rhaps Kerra-”
“She’s out. My husband’s disappeared. Alan is closeted with his telephone. Come with me, Cadan.” Her eyes clouded when he didn’t move. “You need to eat and I need to talk. We can be of service to each other.” When he still didn’t move because he couldn’t come up with a way to get himself out of the situation, she added, “I’m the boss’s wife. I think you’ve no choice but to humour me.”
He gave a two-chuckle laugh, feeling no amusement. There seemed nothing for it but to follow her up the stairs.
They went up to what seemed to be the family’s flat. It was a good-size space that was modestly furnished in what had once been called Danish modern but now was Danish retro. She led him through a sitting room and into a kitchen, where she pointed to the table and told him to sit. She turned on a radio that sat on the spotless white work top, and she fiddled with the knob till she had a station that she seemed to prefer. It featured dance music of the ballroom type. She said, “That’s nice, isn’t it?” and kept the volume low. “Now.” She put her hands on her hips. “What do you fancy, Cadan?”
It was just the sort of question one saw in films: a Mrs. Robinson question while poor Benjamin was caught up still thinking about plastics. And Dellen Kerne was a Mrs. Robinson type, no doubt about that. She was, admittedly, a bit gone to seed, but it was a voluptuous gone to seed. She had the kind of curves one didn’t see in younger women obsessed with looking like catwalk models, and if her skin was grooved from years of sun and cigarettes, her masses of blonde hair made up for that. As did her mouth, which had what they called bee-stung lips.
Cadan reacted to her. It was automatic: too long a period of celibacy and now too much blood heading in the wrong direction. He stammered, “I was…that is…going to…tuna and sweet corn.”
Her full lips curved. “I think we can manage that.”
He was vaguely aware of Pooh moving restlessly on his shoulder, claws digging a little too deeply into his flesh. He needed to remove the bird, but he didn’t like to put the parrot onto the back of a chair since often Pooh took a removal from Cadan’s shoulder to a perch as a sign he was meant to drop his load. Cadan looked about for a newspaper that he could use beneath a chair, just in case. He spied one sitting on the counter, and he went to fetch it. Last week’s edition of the Watchman, he saw. He picked it up and said, “Mind?” to Dellen. “Pooh needs to perch and if I could put this on the floor…?”
She was opening a tin. She said, “For the bird? Of course,” and when he had the paper spread and Pooh on the back of the chair, she went on to say, “An unusual choice of pet, isn’t he.”
Cadan didn’t think he was meant to answer, but he did so anyway. “Parrots c’n live to be eighty.” The answer seemed to be sufficient unto itself: A pet who could live eighty years wasn’t likely to be going anywhere, and it didn’t take a degree in psychology to sort that one out.
“Yes,” Dellen said. “Eighty. I do understand.” She cast him a look and her smile was tremulous. “I hope he makes it. But they don’t always, do they.”
He dropped his gaze. “I’m sorry about Santo.”
“Thank you.” She paused. “I can’t talk about him yet. I keep thinking that if I just move forward a bit, even try to distract myself, I won’t have to face the fact that he’s dead. I know that’s not true, but I’m not…How can one ever be ready to look squarely at the death of one’s child?” She reached hastily for the knob of the radio and raised the volume. She began to move with the music. She said, “Let’s dance, Cadan.”
It was a vaguely South American rhythm. A tango, a rumba. Something like that. It called for bodies moving together sinuously, and no way did Cadan want to be one of them. But she moved across the kitchen towards him, each step a swaying of the hips, a rolling of one shoulder then the other, hands extended.
Cadan saw she was crying in the way that actresses cried in films: no redness of face, no screwing up of features, just tears marking a forking path downward from her remarkable eyes. She danced and she wept simultaneously. His heart went out to her. Mother of a son who’d been murdered…Who was to say how the woman was meant to act? If she wanted to talk, if she wanted to dance, what did it matter? She was coping as best she could.
She said, “Dance with me, Cadan. Please dance with me.”
He took her into his arms.
She pressed against him at once, each movement its own form of caress. He didn’t know the dance, but that didn’t appear to matter. She raised both arms to his neck and held him close, one hand on the back of his head. When she lifted her face to his, the rest was natural.
His mouth lowered to hers, his hands moved from his waist to her bum, and he drew her tightly against him.
She did not protest.
Chapter Fourteen
THE IDENTIFICATION OF SANTO’S BODY WAS MERELY PART OF police routine. While Ben Kerne knew this, he still experienced a moment of ludicrous hope that a terrible mistake had somehow occurred, that despite the car later found by the police and the identification within the car, the dead boy at the bottom of the cliff in Polcare Cove was someone other than Alexander Kerne. All fancy of this died, however, when he gazed at Santo’s face.
Ben had gone to Truro alone. He’d taken the decision that there was no point to exposing Dellen to Santo’s autopsied body, especially when he himself had no idea what condition the corpse would be in. That Santo was dead was terrible enough. That Dellen might have to see anything that had reduced him to death was unthinkable.
When he looked upon Santo, though, Ben also saw that his protection of Dellen had been largely unnecessary. Santo’s face had been seen to with makeup. The rest of him, which undoubtedly had been most thoroughly dissected and explored, remained beneath an institutional bedsheet. Ben could have asked to see more, to see it all, to know every inch of Santo as he had not known him since early childhood, but he had not. It seemed an invasion, somehow.
Ben had given a nod in answer to the formal question, “Is this Alexander Kerne?” and then he’d signed the documents placed before him and listened to what various individuals had to say about police, inquests, funeral homes, burials, and the like. He was numb to everything during these proceedings, especially to expressions of sympathy. For they were sympathetic, all the people he had to deal with at the Royal Cornwall Hospital’s mortuary. They’d gone this route a thousand times before-more than that, probably-but the fact had not robbed them of their ability to express fellow feeling for someone’s grief.
When he got outside, Ben began to feel in earnest. Perhaps it was the light rain falling that melted away his meagre protection, because as he walked to his Austin in the car park, he was struck by sorrow at the thought of the immensity of their loss and he was ravaged by guilt at his part in having brought it about. And then there was the knowledge that he would live with forever: that his last words to Santo had been spoken in a disgust born of his own inability to accept the boy for who he was. And that inability came from suspicion, one that he would never voice.
Why can’t you see how others feel about what you do? Ben would say to him, the constant refrain of a song of relationship they’d sung with each other for years. For Christ’s sake, Santo, people are real.
You act like I’m a user or something. You act like I force my will on everyone, and that’s not how it is. Besides, you never say a word when-
Do not bloody try that with me, all right?
Look, Dad, if I could-
Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? I, I, and me, me. Well, let’s get something straight. Life is not all about you. What we’re doing here, for example, is not about you. What you think and want does not concern me. What you do does. Here and elsewhere. Are we clear on that?