“I’m hungry, too,” Jennie said. “Could we not eat, Mummy?”
Ione cast one last agonised look at the street. “I suppose,” she said.
She headed in the direction of the kitchen. Jennie popped off the sofa and followed, scratching her bum as she went. Leigh practised a catwalk prance in her sister’s wake, casting a baleful look at Cadan as she passed him.
“Stupid bird?” she said. “He doesn’t even talk? What sort of parrot doesn’t even talk?”
“One who saves his vocabulary for useful conversations,” Cadan said.
Leigh stuck out her tongue and left the room.
After a dreary meal of pizza left too long on the work top and salad left to the ministrations of a preoccupied chef wielding too much vinegar, Cadan offered to do the washing up and hoped in this offer that Ione would take her offspring and depart. No such luck. She hung about another ninety minutes, exposing Cadan to Leigh’s withering comments about the quality of his dishwashing and drying. She phoned Lew’s mobile four more times before taking herself and the girls to their home.
This left Cadan in his least favourite position: alone with his thoughts. He was thus relieved to field a phone call at long last revealing Madlyn’s whereabouts, but he was less relieved when the caller wasn’t his father. And he became downright concerned when a casual question on his part revealed that his father had not even been round seeking to discover Madlyn for himself. This concern led Cadan directly to being unnerved-a condition he didn’t care to speculate upon-so when his father finally turned up just shortly after midnight, Cadan was fairly cheesed off at the bloke for causing within him sensations he preferred not to feel. He was watching telly when the kitchen door opened and shut. Thereafter Lew appeared in the doorway to the lounge, standing in the shadows of the corridor.
Cadan said briefly, “She’s with Jago.”
Lew blinked and said, “What?”
“Madlyn,” Cadan said. “She’s with Jago? He rang. He said she’s asleep.”
No reaction from his father. Cadan felt an unaccountable chill at this. It ran up and down his arms like a dead baby’s fingers. He reached for the telly remote and clicked the off button.
“You were looking for her, right?” Cadan didn’t wait for an answer. “Ione was here. Her and the girls. Crikey, that Leigh’s a cow, you ask me.” Silence. So he said, “You were, right?”
Lew turned and went back to the kitchen. Cadan heard the fridge opening and something being poured into a pan. His father would be heating milk for his nightly Ovaltine. Cadan decided he wanted one himself-although the truth was, he wanted to read his father at the same time as he didn’t want to read his father-so he shuffled to the kitchen to join him.
He said, “I asked Jago what she was doing there. You know what I mean. Just, ‘What the heck’s she doing there, mate?’ because first of all why would she want to spend the night with Jago…What is he, seventy years old? That creeps me out if you know what I mean although he’s all right I expect but it’s not like he’s a relative or anything…and second of all…” But he couldn’t remember what the second of all was. He was babbling because his father’s obdurate silence was unnerving him more than he was already unnerved. “And Jago said he was up at the Salthouse with Mr. Penrule when this bloke came in with that woman who’s got the cottage in Polcare Cove. She said there was a body out there and Jago heard her say that she reckoned it was Santo. So Jago went to fetch Madlyn from the bakery to break the news to her. He didn’t phone here at first because…I don’t know. I s’pose she went dead mental on him when he told her and he had to cope with her.”
“Did he say that?”
Cadan was so relieved that his father was finally speaking that he said, “Who? Say what?”
“Did Jago say Madlyn went mental?”
Cadan thought about this, not so much whether Jago Reeth had actually said that about his sister but rather why his father was asking that of all possible questions. It seemed such an unlikely choice of queries that Cadan said, “You were looking for her, right? I mean that’s what I told Ione. Like I said, she was here with the girls. Pizza.”
“Ione,” Lew said. “I’d forgotten the pizza. I expect she left in a state.”
“She tried to ring you. Your mobile…?”
“I didn’t have it on.”
The milk steamed on the cooker. Lew got his Newquay mug and spooned Ovaltine into it. He used a generous amount, then he handed the jar over to Cadan who’d got his own mug down from the shelf above the sink.
“I’ll ring her now,” Lew said.
“It’s after midnight,” Cadan told him unnecessarily.
“Believe me, better late than tomorrow.”
Lew left the kitchen and went to his room. Cadan felt an urgent need to know what was going on. This was part curiosity and part a search for a reasonable means of calming himself without questioning why he needed calming. So he climbed the stairs in his father’s wake.
His intention was to listen at Lew’s door, but he found that wasn’t going to be necessary. He’d barely reached the top step when he heard Lew’s voice raise and could tell the conversation was going badly. Lew’s end consisted mostly of, “Ione…Please listen to me…So much on my mind…Overloaded with work…Completely forgot…Because I’m in the middle of shaping a board, Ione, with nearly two dozen more…Yes, yes. I am sorry, but you didn’t actually tell me…Ione…”
That was it. Then silence. Cadan went to the doorway of his father’s room. Lew was sitting on the edge of the bed. He had one hand on the phone’s receiver, which he’d just replaced in its cradle. He glanced at Cadan, but he didn’t speak. Instead, he got up and went for his jacket, which he’d thrown over the seat of a ladder-back chair in the corner of the room. He began to put it on. Apparently, he was going out again.
Cadan said, “What’s happening?”
Lew didn’t look at him as he replied with, “She’s had enough. She’s finished.”
He sounded…Cadan thought about this. Regretful? Tired? Heavyhearted? Accepting of the fact that as long as one remained unchanged, the past would accurately predict the future? Cadan said philosophically, “Well, you cocked things up. Forgetting her and everything.”
Lew patted his pockets as if looking for something. “Yes. Right. Well. She didn’t want to listen.”
“To what?”
“It was a pizza dinner, Cade. That’s all. Pizza. I could hardly be expected to remember a pizza dinner.”
“That’s cold, isn’t it,” Cadan said.
“It’s also none of your business,” Lew told him.
Cadan felt his belly grow tight and hot. He said, “Right. Well, I guess it isn’t. But when you want me to entertain your girlfriend while you’re out…out doing whatever…then it is my business.”
Lew dropped his hand from the search of his pockets. He said, “Christ. I’m…I’m sorry, Cade. I’m on edge. So much is going on. I don’t know how to explain myself to you.”
But that was just it, Cadan thought. What was going on? True, they’d heard from Will Mendick that Santo Kerne was dead-and yeah that was unfortunate, wasn’t it?-but why would the news throw their lives into chaos if chaos was indeed where they were?
THE EQUIPMENT ROOM OF Adventures Unlimited had been constructed in a former dining hall and the former dining hall had itself once been a tea-dancing pavilion in the heyday of the Promontory King George Hotel, a heyday that had occurred between the two world wars. Often when he found himself in the equipment room, Ben Kerne tried to imagine what it had been like when the parquet floor wore a gloss, the ceiling glittered with chandeliers, and women in frothy summer frocks floated in the arms of men wearing linen suits. They’d danced with a blissful lack of awareness then, believing that the war to end all wars had actually ended all wars. They’d learned otherwise, and far too soon, but the thought of them had always been soothing, as was the music Ben imagined he heard: the orchestra playing as white-gloved waiters passed finger sandwiches on silver trays. He considered the dancers-nearly saw their ghosts-and felt a poignancy about times that had passed. But at the same moment he always felt comfort. People came and went from the Promontory King George, and life continued.