In the equipment room now, however, the tea dancers of 1933 didn’t enter Ben Kerne’s mind. He stood in front of a row of cabinets, one of which he’d unlocked. Inside this cabinet, climbing equipment hung from hooks, lay neatly in plastic containers, and coiled on shelves. Ropes, harnesses, slings, belay and camming devices, chock stones, carabiners…everything. His own equipment he stored elsewhere because he didn’t like the inconvenience of coming down here to sort out what he wanted to take with him if he had a free afternoon for a climb. But Santo’s kit had a prominent place, and above it Ben himself had proudly fixed a sign that said “Do Not Take From This.” Instructors and students alike were to know those pieces of gear were sacrosanct, the accumulation of three Christmases and four birthday celebrations.
Now, however, all of it was missing. Ben knew what this meant. He understood that the absence of Santo’s equipment constituted Santo’s final message to his father, and he felt the impact of that message, just as he felt the weight and experienced the sudden illumination that the message provided as welclass="underline" His own remarks-made unthinkingly and born of pigheaded self-righteousness-had effected this. Despite his every effort, despite the fact that he and Santo could not possibly have been more unlike each other in everything from personality to appearance, history had repeated itself, in form if not in substance. His own history spoke of wrongheaded judgement, banishment, and years of estrangement. Santo’s now spoke of denunciation and death. Not in so many words but, rather, with an open acknowledgement of a heaviness of heart that in and of itself had uttered a single damning question as loudly as if Ben had shouted it: What sort of miserable excuse for a man are you, to have done such a thing?
Santo could not have failed to interpret this unspoken query as anything other than what it was, and any son of any father would have likely done the same and reacted out of the same sense of outrage that had taken Santo out to the cliffs. Ben himself had reacted to his own father in much the same manner at much the same age: You talk about man, I’ll give you man.
But the underlying reason for Ben’s interaction with Santo remained unexamined although the superficial why of it didn’t need to be addressed at all, because Santo knew exactly what it was. The historical reason for their interaction, on the other hand, was far too frightening to contemplate. Instead of doing so, Ben had eternally told himself only that Santo was-always and merely-who Santo was.
“It just happened,” Santo had confessed to Ben. “Look, I don’t want-”
“You?” Ben said, incredulous. “You stop right there, because what you want doesn’t interest me. What you’ve done, on the other hand, does. What you’ve accomplished. The sum total of your bloody self-interest-”
“Why the hell do you care so much? What is it to you? If there was something to be handled, I would have handled it, but there was nothing. There is nothing. Nothing, okay?”
“Human beings,” Ben said, “are not to be handled. They’re not pieces of meat. They’re not merchandise.”
“You’re twisting my words.”
“You’re twisting people’s lives.”
“That’s unfair. That’s so fucking unfair.”
As Santo would find most of life, Ben had thought. Except he hadn’t lived long enough to do so.
And whose fault was that, Benesek? he asked himself. Was the moment worth the price you’re paying?
That moment had been a single remark, said partly in anger but in larger part bleak fear: “Unfair is having a worthless piece of manure as a son.” Once said, the words hung there, like black paint tossed at a clean white wall. His punishment for having said them was going to be the memory of that wretched statement and what it had produced, which was Santo’s face gone white and the fact that a father had turned his back on his son. You want man, I’ll show you man. In spades if I must. But show you I will.
Ben didn’t want to think of what he’d said. If he had his preference, it would be that he might never think of anything again. His mind would go blank and thus it would remain, allowing him to go through the motions of living until his body gave out and eternal rest claimed him.
Ben closed the cupboard and looped the padlock back into place. He breathed slowly through his mouth till he’d mastered himself and his guts were easy again. Then he went to the lift and rang for it. It descended at a dignified, antique speed that matched its appearance of open iron fretwork. It creaked to a stop and he rode it to the top of the hotel where the family flat was and where Dellen waited.
He didn’t go to his wife at once. Instead, he went first to the kitchen. There, Kerra sat at the table with her partner. Alan Cheston was watching her, and Kerra herself was listening, her head tilted in the direction of the bedrooms. She was, Ben knew, waiting for a sign of how things would be.
Her gaze took in her father as he came through the doorway. Ben’s eyes questioned. She responded. “Still,” was her answer.
“All right,” he said.
He went to the cooktop. Kerra had boiled a kettle there, and the fire was still on beneath it, low so the steam escaped soundlessly and the water stayed just beneath a boil. She’d set up four mugs. Each held a teabag. He poured water in two of them and stood there, watching the tea brew. His daughter and her lover sat in silence. He could feel their eyes upon him, though, and he could sense the questions they wanted to ask. Not only of him but of each other. There were matters to discuss in every corner.
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.