Chapter Twenty

KERRA’S NIGHT HAD BEEN SLEEPLESS AND MUCH OF HER FOLLOWING day had been useless. She’d attempted to carry on as well as possible, keeping to a schedule of interviews that she’d set up in the preceding weeks: the search for potential instructors. She’d thought she could, at least, divert herself with the hopeful if unlikely pretence that Adventures Unlimited was actually going to open in the near future. The plan hadn’t worked.

This is it. That simple declaration, that coy little arrow from This is it to the great sea cave depicted on the postcard, the implication that conversations of a nature having nothing to do with business had passed between the writer of those words and the reader of those words, what lay behind, beneath, and beyond those conversations…These disquieting and turbulent thoughts had been the stuff of Kerra’s day and the sleepless night that had preceded it.

The postcard now had for some hours been burning a small rectangular patch against her skin from within the pocket where she’d stowed it. Each time she’d moved, she’d been aware of it, taunting her. She was going to have to do something about it, eventually. That dull burning told her as much.

Kerra hadn’t been able to avoid Alan, as she would have liked to do that day. The marketing office was not far from her own cubbyhole, and while she’d routinely taken prospective instructors to the first-floor lounge for their interviews rather than inside her cubbyhole, she’d greeted them in the vicinity of the marketing office. Alan had popped out more than once to observe her, and she wasn’t long in working out what his silent observation meant.

It was more than disapproval of her choice of candidates, all of them female. He’d made himself clear on that topic earlier, and Alan wasn’t the sort to keep pressing a point when someone was, in his opinion, being bloody-minded. Rather, his mute scrutiny of her told her that Busy Lizzie had mentioned Kerra’s visit to Pink Cottage. She’d likely told Alan about Kerra’s putative need to find a personal possession in Alan’s room, and he’d be wondering why Kerra herself hadn’t mentioned it. She had her answer ready had he cared to ask her, but he hadn’t asked.

She didn’t know where her father was. She’d seen him go out in the direction of St. Mevan Beach some hours ago, and as far as she knew he’d not returned. She’d reckoned at first he’d gone to watch the surfers, for the swells were good and the wind was offshore and she herself had seen a ragtag line of them working their way across the promontory. Had things been wildly different, her brother, Santo, might have been among them, lining up out there in the water to get into position. Her father might have been there as well. Her father and her brother together, as a matter of fact. But things were not different, and they never would be. That appeared to be the family’s curse.

And at the root of that curse: Dellen. It was as if all of them were wandering in a maze, trying to get to its mysterious centre, while all the time at its mysterious centre, Dellen waited, black-widow-like. The only way to elude her was to purge her, but it was far too late for that.

“Want something?”

Alan spoke. Kerra was in her office, where looking through a meagre stack of applicants was proving to be a dispiriting activity. She’d been working on sea kayaking, and she’d spoken to five possible instructors that day. Only two had the background she was looking for and, of them, only one had a physique suggestive of experience in the sea. The other looked like someone who kayaked on the River Avon, where the biggest challenge she faced would be taking care not to brain a cygnet with her paddle.

Kerra closed the last of the manila folders with their paltry bits of information. She wondered how best to answer Alan’s question. She was thinking it over-working on whether irony, sarcasm, or a display of wit was in her best interests-when he spoke again.

“Kerra? Want something? Cup of tea? Coffee? Something to eat? I’m going out for a bit, and I can stop-”

“No. Thanks.” She didn’t want to be beholden to him, even in so small a matter as this.

Instead, she examined him and he examined her. It was one of those moments when two individuals who have been lovers scrutinise each other like cultural anthropologists studying a tract of land for the remains of an ancient civilization long believed to have dwelt there. There should be marks, signs, indications of a passage…

“How does it go?” he asked.

She knew that he was well aware of how it went, but she played the game. “I’ve come up with several strong possibilities. I’m doing additional interviews tomorrow. But the real question is whether we’re actually going to open, isn’t it? We seem rather without direction, especially today. Have you seen my father?”

“Not for hours.”

“What about Cadan? Did he show up to work on the radiators?”

“Not sure. He may have done, but I haven’t seen him. It’s been rather quiet all the way round.”

He didn’t mention Dellen. On this day, she was as she had always been when things went bad: the great unmentionable. Just the thought of her-of Dellen the malodorous dead elephant in the room-reduced everyone to mute trepidation.

“What’ve you been…?” Kerra inclined her head towards his office. He seemed to take this as welcome, for he entered hers although this wasn’t what she’d intended. She wanted him at a distance. Things were, she’d decided, finished between them now.

He said, “I’ve been trying to get everyone in place for the video. Despite what’s happened, I do still think…” He pulled out a chair from its position between the office wall and the open door. When he sat, they were virtually knee to knee. Kerra didn’t like this. She didn’t want any kind of proximity to him. “This is important,” Alan said. “I want your dad to see that. I know the timing couldn’t be worse, but-”

“Not my mother?” Kerra inquired.

Alan blinked. He looked momentarily puzzled, perhaps by her tone. He said, “Your mum as well, but she’s already onboard, so your dad-”

“Oh. Is she?” Kerra said. “But then, I suppose she would be.” His embracing of her mother as a topic was surprising. Dellen’s opinion on anything had hardly ever counted, since she was incapable of consistency, so to hear someone counting it now came as something of a shock. Yet on the other hand, it did make sense. Alan worked with Dellen in marketing, on the rare occasions when Dellen actually worked at all, so they would have talked the video project through before he presented it to Kerra’s father. Alan would have wanted Dellen on his side: It meant one vote in the bag and a vote from someone who might have considerable influence with Ben Kerne.

Kerra wondered if Alan had talked to Santo as well. She wondered what Santo had made or would have made of Alan’s ideas for Adventures Unlimited.

“I’d like to talk to him again, but I haven’t actually seen…” Alan hesitated. Then he finally appeared to give in to his curiosity. He asked, “What’s going on? Do you know?”

“About what, exactly?” Kerra kept her voice polite.

“I heard them…Earlier in the day…I’d gone upstairs to look for…” His face was colouring.

Ah, she thought, were they there at last? “To look for?” Now she sounded arch. She liked that and wouldn’t have thought it was possible to manage arch when what she felt was anything but.

“I heard your mum and dad. Or rather your mum. She was…” He lowered his head. He appeared to be examining his shoes. These were two-tone saddle shoes, and Kerra regarded them as he did the same. What other man would wear saddle shoes? she wondered. And what on earth did it mean that he somehow managed to carry off wearing them without looking like Bertie Wooster? “I know things are bad,” he said. “I’m just not sure what I’m meant to be doing. At first I thought soldiering on was the ticket, but now it’s begun to seem inhuman. Your mum’s clearly in pieces, your dad’s-”