“Kerra?”
“No. I said no. I don’t need your help. I don’t want your help. I want you to leave. Go.”
On a stand near the door a dozen or more copies of the Watchman had been piled. Alan reached for this. He put Casvelyn’s newspaper to good use. Kerra watched the oil soak into the newsprint. Alan did the same. They stood at opposite sides of the pool. She considered it a chasm but he, she knew, saw it as a momentary inconvenience.
He said, “You don’t need to feel guilty because you were angry at Santo. You had a right to anger. He may have thought it was irrational, even stupid of you to care about something that seemed silly to him. But you had a reason for what you felt and you had a right. You always have a right to whatever you feel, if it comes down to it. That’s how it is.”
“I asked you not to work here.” Her voice was expressionless; her emotion was spent.
He looked puzzled. It was a remark, she realised, coming from out of nowhere as far as he knew, but at the moment it summed up everything she was feeling but could not say.
“Kerra, jobs aren’t falling from the sky. I’m good at what I do. I’m getting this place noticed. The Mail on Sunday? There’re bookings coming in every day as a result of that piece. It’s tough out here, and if we mean to make a life in Cornwall?”
“We don’t,” she said. “We can’t. Not now.”
“Because of Santo?”
“Oh come on, Alan.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid. I’m never afraid.”
“Bollocks. You’re angry because you’re afraid. Anger is easier. It makes more sense.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Accepted. So tell me.”
She couldn’t. Too much hung in the balance to speak: too much seen and too much experienced for too many years. To explain it all to Alan was beyond her. He needed to take her word as the truth and he needed to act accordingly.
That he had not done so, that he was going to continue his refusals to do so rang the death knell over their relationship. Kerra told herself that, because of this, nothing that had happened that day actually mattered.
Even as she thought this, though, she knew that she was lying to herself. But that was something that also didn’t matter.
SELEVAN PENRULE THOUGHT IT was rubbish, but he joined hands with his granddaughter anyway. Across the narrow table in the caravan, they closed their eyes and Tammy began to pray. Selevan didn’t listen to the words although he caught the gist of them. Instead, he considered his grandchild’s hands. They were dry and cool but so thin that they felt like something he could crush simply by closing his own fingers roughly over them.
“She’s not been eating right, Father Penrule,” his daughter-in-law had told him. He hated what she called him?“Father Penrule” made him feel like a renegade priest?but he’d said nothing to correct Sally Joy, since speaking to him at all was something that she and her husband hadn’t bothered with for ages. So, he’d grunted and said he’d fatten the girl up. It’s being in Africa, woman, don’t you know that? You cart the girl off to Rhodesia?
“Zimbabwe, Father Penrule. And we’re actually in?”
Whatever the hell they want it to be called. You cart her off to Rhodesia and expose her to God only knows what and that would kill anyone’s appetite, let me tell you.
Selevan realised he was taking things too far at that point, because Sally Joy said nothing for a moment. He imagined her there in Rhodesia or wherever she was, sitting on the porch in a rattan chair with her legs stretched out and a drink on the table next to her…lemonade, it would be, lemonade, with a dash of…what is it, Sally Joy? What’s in the glass that would make Rhodesia go down a trick for you?
He harrumphed noisily and said, Well, never mind then. You send her along. I’ll get her sorted.
“You’ll watch her food intake?”