She left him without replying. She said abruptly that she was going to the Watchman if anyone wanted her, daring him to make his point again about the futility of placing an advertisement in that paper, and she set out on her bicycle.
This time, however, she had no intention of riding until the sweat of her efforts bled the anxiety from her muscles. She also had no intention of going to the Watchman to place an advertisement for randy males willing to instruct equally randy females during daylight hours and fulfill their sexual fantasies at night. That was all they needed at Adventures Unlimited: an excess of testosterone oozing down the corridors.
Kerra pedaled off the promontory in the direction of Toes on the Nose, where she was forced to follow the one-way system through town. She climbed to the crest of the hill, where St. Mevan Down rolled inland from the sea, and made her way to Queen Street with its clutter of cars. Ultimately she coursed downward towards the Casvelyn Canal, where just beyond the wharf that edged it a bridge arched to a Y in the road. Go left and you ultimately headed to Widemouth Bay. Go right and you found yourself out on the Breakwater.
This formed the southwest side of the canal, just as the wharf served as its northeastern edge. Cottages lined it, sitting some fifteen feet above the tarmac, and at their far end was the largest of them, one that only a blind man could miss seeing. It was trimmed in fuchsia and painted the pink of flamingos. Unimaginatively, it was called Pink Cottage, and its owner was a maiden lady long referred to by townspeople as Busy Lizzie and only in part as a reference to the flowers she planted in her front garden in enormous banks with riotous abandon every late spring.
Kerra was known to Busy Lizzie as a regular visitor, so when she knocked on the door, the woman admitted her without question, saying, “Why, isn’t this the nicest surprise, Kerra! Alan’s not here at the moment, but I expect you know that. Come in, my dear.”
She was not even five feet tall, and she’d long reminded Kerra of a chess piece. Specifically, she looked very much like a pawn. She wore her white hair in an impressively constructed Edwardian pouf and she favoured high-necked ivory blouses and bell-shaped flannel skirts of navy or grey that fell to the floor. She always looked like someone on the verge of being discovered for a part in a Henry James novel brought to film, but as far as Kerra had ever been able to learn?which admittedly wasn’t very far?Busy Lizzie had no inclination for either screen or stage.
She let one of the bedrooms in her house, the rest being filled with her vast collection of Carlton Ware from the 1930s. She was liberal in her thinking, and, preferring young men to young women as her lodgers?“Somehow one always feels safer with a man in the house” was her way of putting it?she recognised that her lodgers had appetites whose fulfillment she oughtn’t deny. So each successive lodger had kitchen privileges, and if a sleepover occurred in which a young lady might put in an appearance at the breakfast table, Busy Lizzie did not complain. Indeed, she provided either tea or coffee and she asked, “Sleep well, dear?” quite as if the young lady belonged there.
While his house in Lansdown Road was undergoing work, Alan had his temporary lodging here in Pink Cottage. He could have moved in with his parents?it would have saved him money?but he’d explained to Kerra that, while he loved his mum and dad devotedly, he liked to have a degree of freedom that his parents’ blind adoration of him sometimes precluded. Besides, he’d delicately said to her, they had a certain image of him that he didn’t want to mess about with.
Kerra read this as he intended. She said, “God, they can’t think you’re a virgin, Alan.” And when he didn’t answer, “Do they, Alan?”