“Anyways, I’m glad you didn’t scarper cos they’d have my skin for that one, your mum and dad. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, but, Grandie, some things can’t be helped.”

“And this is one of them, is it?”

“That’s how it is.”

“Sure of it, are you? Because that’s what they all say when the cults get hold of them and send them out on the streets to beg money. Which they then take off them, by the way. So they’re trapped like rats on a sinking ship. You know that, don’t you? Some big guru with an eye for girls-just like you-who’re meant to have his babies like a sheik in a tent with two dozen wives. Or one of them, you know, polygammers.”

“Polygamists,” she said. “Oh, you really can’t think this is like that, Grandie. You’re joking about it. Only I don’t think it’s funny, see?”

They’d reached his car. She looked in the back as she got in, and she saw her old duffel bag. Her lip jutted out, but she drew it back in. Home to Africa, her expression said, which meant home to Mum and Dad until they thought of another plan to shake her resolve. They’d tick Send Her to Her Grandfather off their list and come up with the next idea. Something like Send Her to Siberia. Or Send Her to the Australian Bush.

She got into the car. She fastened her seat belt and crossed her arms. She looked stonily forward at the canal, and her expression didn’t soften even when she took in the ducklings and how their little webbed feet raised them above the water when they hastened to follow their mother, making them look like tiny runners on the surface of the canal, just the sort of harkening back to a miracle that Selevan reckoned she’d appreciate. She didn’t, however. She was concentrating on what she thought she knew: how long a drive it was to Heathrow or Gatwick and whether her plane left for Africa tonight or tomorrow. Likely tomorrow, which would mean a long night in a hotel somewhere. Perhaps even now she was making her plan to escape. Out of the hotel window or down the stairs and then to France by hook or by crook.

He wondered if he should let her think that was where he was taking her. But it seemed cruel to let the poor lass suffer. Truth of the matter was that she’d suffered enough. She’d held firm through everything that had been thrown at her and that had to mean something even if it meant what none of the rest of them could bear considering.

He said as he started up the car, “I made a phone call, I did. Day or two ago.”

She said dully, “Well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you.”

“Truth in that. They said come along. Wanted to talk to you as well, but I told ’em you were unavailable at present-”

“Ta for that, at least.” Tammy turned her head and examined the scenery. They were passing through Stratton, heading north on A39. There was no easy way to get out of Cornwall, but that had long been part of its draw. “I don’t much want to talk to them, Grandie. We’ve already said all there is to say.”

“Think that, do you?”

“We’ve talked and talked. We’ve rowed. I’ve tried to explain, but they don’t understand. They don’t want to understand. They’ve got their plans and I’ve got mine and that’s how it is.”

“Didn’t know you’d talked to them at all.” Selevan made his voice deliberately thoughtful, a man considering the ramifications of what his granddaughter was telling him.

“What d’you mean you didn’t know I’d talked to them?” Tammy demanded. “That’s all we did before I got here. I talked, Mum cried. I talked, Dad shouted. I talked, they argued with me. Only I didn’t want to argue because far as I can tell there’s nothing to argue about. You understand or you don’t, and they don’t. Well, how could they? I mean, Mum’s whole way of living should’ve told me she’d never be able to come onboard. A life of contemplation? Not very likely when your real interest is looking at fashion magazines and gossip magazines and wondering how you can make yourself into Posh Spice while you’re living in a place where, frankly, there’s not a whole lot of designer shops. And you weigh about fifteen stone more ’n she does anyway. Or whatever she’s called these days.”

“Who?”

“What d’you mean who? Posh Spice. Posh whoever. Mum has Hello! and OK! sent over by the lorry load, not to mention Vogue and Tatler and whatever else, and that’s her ambition. To look like all of them and to live like all of them and it’s not mine, Grandie, and it never will be, so you can send me home and nothing’ll be different. I don’t want what they want. I never have, and I never will.”

“I didn’t know you talked to them,” he repeated. “They said they’d not talked to you.”

“What do you mean?” She flung herself round in the seat so that she faced him.

“The Mother Whatever-she-is,” he said. “The abbot lady. What d’they call her?”

Tammy hesitated then. Her tongue came out and licked her lips and then her teeth caught the lower one and she sucked on it in a childlike reaction. Selevan felt his heart twist at the sight of this. So much of who she was was still a little girl. He could see how her parents couldn’t bear the thought of watching her disappear behind convent doors. Not this sort of convent at least, where no one emerged till they emerged in a coffin. It didn’t make sense to them. It was so…so un-girl-like, wasn’t it? She was supposed to care about pointy shoes with tall heels, about lipstick and hair thin-gummy dandershoots, about short skirts, long skirts, or in-between skirts, about jackets or not, waistcoats or not, about music and boys and film stars and when in her life she should lower her knickers for a bloke. But what she was not supposed to think about at the age of seventeen was the state of the world, war and peace, hunger and disease, poverty and ignorance. And what she definitely was never supposed to think about was sackcloth and ashes or whatever it was they wore, a small cell with a bed and a prayer stand and a cross, a set of rosary beads, and getting up at dawn and then praying and praying and praying and all the time locked away from the world.

Tammy said, “Grandie…” But she didn’t seem to trust herself to finish the sentence.

He said, “Tha’s who I am, girl. The granddad who loves you.”

“You phoned…?”

“Well, that’s what the letter said, didn’t it? Phone the Mother Whosis to arrange for a visit. Girls sometimes find they can’t cope, she said. They think there’s a romance to this kind of life, and I assure you there isn’t, Mr. Penrule. But we offer retreats to individuals and to groups and if she’d like to take part in one, we’d welcome her.”

Tammy’s eyes were Nan’s eyes once again, but Nan’s eyes as they should have been when she looked on her dad, not as they’d become as she’d listened to him rage. She said, “Grandie, you’re not taking me to the airport?”

“’Course not,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for him to fly in the face of her parents’ wishes and drive his granddaughter to the Scottish border to spend a week in a Carmelite convent. “They don’t know and they aren’t going to know.”

“But if I decide to stay…If I want to stay…If I find it’s what I think it is and what I need…You’ll have to tell them. And then what?”

“You let me worry about your parents,” he said.

“But they’ll never forgive you. If I decide…If I think it’s best, they’ll never agree. They’ll never think…”

“Girl,” Selevan said to his granddaughter, “they’ll think what they think.” He reached in the side compartment of his door and brought out an A to Z for the UK. He handed it over to her. He said, “Open that up. If we’re going to be driving all the way to Scotland, I’m going to need a bloody good navigator. Think you’re up for the job?”

Her smile was blinding. It crushed his heart. “I am,” she told him.