Ben didn’t want to think of what he’d said. If he had his preference, it would be that he might never think of anything again. His mind would go blank and thus it would remain, allowing him to go through the motions of living until his body gave out and eternal rest claimed him.
Ben closed the cupboard and looped the padlock back into place. He breathed slowly through his mouth till he’d mastered himself and his guts were easy again. Then he went to the lift and rang for it. It descended at a dignified, antique speed that matched its appearance of open iron fretwork. It creaked to a stop and he rode it to the top of the hotel where the family flat was and where Dellen waited.
He didn’t go to his wife at once. Instead, he went first to the kitchen. There, Kerra sat at the table with her partner. Alan Cheston was watching her, and Kerra herself was listening, her head tilted in the direction of the bedrooms. She was, Ben knew, waiting for a sign of how things would be.
Her gaze took in her father as he came through the doorway. Ben’s eyes questioned. She responded. “Still,” was her answer.
“All right,” he said.
He went to the cooktop. Kerra had boiled a kettle there, and the fire was still on beneath it, low so the steam escaped soundlessly and the water stayed just beneath a boil. She’d set up four mugs. Each held a teabag. He poured water in two of them and stood there, watching the tea brew. His daughter and her lover sat in silence. He could feel their eyes upon him, though, and he could sense the questions they wanted to ask. Not only of him but of each other. There were matters to discuss in every corner.
He couldn’t bear the thought of talking, so when the tea was sufficiently dark, he poured milk and added sugar to one and nothing to the other. He carried both from the kitchen and set one on the floor momentarily, in front of Santo’s door, which was closed but not locked. He opened it and went inside, into the dark with two cups of tea that he knew neither of them would be able or willing to drink.
She’d switched on no lights, and as Santo’s room was at the back of the hotel, there were no streetlamps from the town to illuminate the darkness within. Across the curved expanse of St. Mevan Beach, the lights at the end of the breakwater and atop the canal lock glittered through the wind and the rain, but they did nothing to expel the gloom in here. A milky shaft of light from the corridor, however, fell across the rag rug on the bedroom floor. On this, Ben saw that his wife was foetally curled. She’d ripped sheets and blankets from Santo’s bed and she’d covered herself with them. Most of her face was in shadow but where it was not, Ben could see it was stony. He wondered if the thought was in her mind: If only I had been here…if only I hadn’t gone off for the day…He doubted it. Regret had never been Dellen’s style.
With his foot, Ben closed the door behind him. Dellen stirred. He thought she might speak, but instead she drew the linens up to her face. She pressed them to her nose, taking in Santo’s scent. She was like a mother animal in this, and like an animal she operated on instinct. It had been her appeal from the day he’d met her: both of them adolescents, one of them randy and the other one willing.
All she knew so far was that Santo was dead, that the police had been, that a fall had taken him, and that the fall was during a sea-cliff climb. Ben had got no further than that with the information because she’d said, “A climb?” after which she’d read her husband’s face as she’d long been capable of doing and she’d said, “You did this to him.”
That was it. They’d been standing in the reception area of the old hotel because he’d not managed to get her any farther inside. Upon her return, she’d seen at once that something was wrong and she’d demanded to know, not as a way of deflecting the obvious question of where she herself had been for so many hours-she wouldn’t think anyone actually had a right to know that-but because something was wrong on a much larger scale than curiosity over her whereabouts. He’d tried to get her upstairs to the lounge, but she’d been immovable. So he told her there.
She went for the stairs. She stopped momentarily at the bottom step, and she clutched the railing as if to keep herself upright. Then she climbed.
Now, Ben set the milk-and-sugar tea on the floor near her head. He sat on the edge of Santo’s bed.
She said, “You’re blaming me. You reek of blaming me, Ben.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d think that.”
“I think it because we’re here. Casvelyn. That was all about me.”
“No. It was for all of us. I’d had enough of Truro as well. You know that.”
“You would have stayed in Truro forever.”
“That’s not the case, Dellen.”
“And if you’d had enough-which I don’t believe anyway-it hadn’t to do with you. Or Truro. Or any town. I can feel your loathing, Ben. It smells like sewage.”
He said nothing. Outside, a gust of wind hit the side of the building, rattling the windows. A fierce storm was brewing. Ben knew the signs. The wind was onshore. It would bring in heavier rain from the Atlantic. They were not yet out of the season of storms.
“It’s myself,” he said. “We had words. I said some things-”
“Oh, I expect you did. You saint. You bloody saint.”
“There’s nothing saintly about following through. There’s nothing saintly about accepting-”
“That’s not what things were about between you and Santo. Don’t think I don’t know. You’re a real bastard.”
“You know why.” Ben set his mug of tea on the bedside table. Deliberately, then, he switched on the lamp. If she looked at him, he wanted her able to see his face and to read his eyes. He wanted her to know that he spoke the truth. “I told him he needed to take more care. I told him people are real, not toys. I wanted him to see that there’s more to life than seeking pleasure for himself.”
Her voice was scorn. “As if that’s how he lives.”
“You know that it is. He’s good with people. All people. But he can’t let that…that skill of his lead him to do wrong by them or to them. But he doesn’t want to see-”
“Doesn’t? He’s dead, Ben. There is no doesn’t.”
Ben thought she might weep then, but she did not. He said, “There is no shame in teaching one’s children to do right, Dellen.”
“Which means your right, yes? Not his. Yours. He was supposed to be made in your likeness, wasn’t he? But he wasn’t you, Ben. And nothing could make him in your likeness.”
“I know that.” Ben felt the words’ intolerable weight. “Believe me, I know that.”
“You don’t. You didn’t. And you couldn’t cope with it, could you? You had to have him the way you wanted.”
“Dellen, I know I’m to blame. Do you think that I don’t? I’m as much to blame for this as-”
“No!” She rose to her knees. “Do not dare,” she cried. “Don’t bring that back to me just now because if you do, I swear if you do, if you even mention it, if you bring it up, if you try to, if you…” Words seemed to fail her. Suddenly, she reached for the mug he’d placed on the floor and she threw it at him. Hot tea stung his chest; the rim of the mug struck his breastbone. “I hate you,” she said and then louder with each successive word, “I hate you, I hate you. I hate you.”
He dropped off the bed and onto his knees. He grabbed her then. She was still shrieking her hate as he pulled her to him, and she beat on his chest, his face, and his neck before he was able to catch her arms.
“Why didn’t you let him just be who he was? He’s dead and all you ever needed to do was just to let him be. Was that too much? Was that asking too much?”