“It’s the how of it, man.”
Selevan couldn’t argue with this. He’d mucked up the how of it with his own children and now he was doing the same with Tammy. In contrast?he had to admit?Jago Reeth did have a way with the youngsters. Selevan had seen both of the Angarrack young people come and go from Jago’s hired caravan at Sea Dreams and when the dead boy?Santo Kerne?had dropped by to ask Selevan’s permission for beach access from his property, he’d ended up spending more time with the ancient surfer than in the water when that permission was given: waxing Santo’s board together, setting its fins, examining it for dings and imperfections, sitting in deck chairs on the patch of scrub grass next to the caravan and talking. About what? Selevan wondered. How did one talk to another generation?
Jago answered as if the questions had been asked aloud, saying, “’S more about listening than anything else, not speechifying when all you itch to do is make a speech. Or give a lecture. Bloody hell, how I want to give a lecture. But I wait till they finally say to me, ‘So what d’you think?’ and there’s the opening. Simple as that.” He winked. “But not easy, mind you. Quarter hour with them and the last thing you want is having your youth back. Trauma and tears.”
“That’d be the girl,” Selevan said wisely.
“Oh, aye. That’d be the girl. She fell and fell hard. Didn’t ask for my advice in the befores. Didn’t ask for my advice in the afters. But”?here he took a hefty swig of his stout and sloshed it round his mouth which was, Selevan thought, probably his only bow to oral hygiene?“I broke my own rule at the end of the day.”
“Speechifying?”
“Telling her what I’d do in her place.”
“Which was?”
“Kill the bastard.” Jago spoke casually, as if Santo Kerne were not as dead as a Christmas goose on the table. Selevan raised both eyebrows at this. Jago went on. “That not being possible, ’course, I told her to do it like a symbol. Kill off the past. Wave it good-bye. Make a bonfire of it. Toss in everything that bore on the two of them together. Diaries. Journals. Letters. Cards. Photos. Valentines. Paddington bears. Used-up condoms from their very first shag if she’d been feeling sentimental at that juncture. Everything. Just get rid of it all and move along.”
“Easy enough to say,” Selevan noted.
“Truth there. But when it’s a lass’s first and they’ve gone the full mile, it’s the only way when things go bad. Clean house of the bloke, you ask me. Which she was finally on her way to doing when…well…when it happened.”
“Bad, that.”
Jago nodded. “Makes it worse for the girl. How’s she supposed to see Santo Kerne in a real light now? No. She’s got her work cut out, getting over this. Wish it hadn’t happened, none of it. He wasn’t a bad lad, but he had his ways, and she didn’t see that till too bleeding late. By that time the locomotive was steaming out of the station, and all that was left to do was step out of the way.”
“Love’s a bitch of a thing,” Selevan said.
“It’s a killer, that,” Jago agreed.
Chapter Ten
LYNLEY LOOKED THROUGH THE GERTRUDE JEKYLL BOOK, AT the photos and drawings OF gardens that were vibrant with English springtime colours. Their palettes were soft and soothing, and gazing at them he could almost feel what it would be like to sit on one of the weathered benches and let the pastel blanket of petals wash over him. Gardens, he thought, were meant to be like these. Not the formal parterres of the Elizabethans, planted with careful displays of constipated shrubbery and clipped vegetation, but rather the exuberant mimicry of what might occur in a nature from which weeds were banished but other plant life was allowed to flourish: banks of colour tumbling unrestrained onto lawns and herbaceous borders bowing onto paths that themselves wandered, as a path would in nature. Yes, Gertrude Jekyll had known what she was about.