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.”