Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(153)

“You aren’t s’posed to talk to me like?”

The inner door swung open. Ione stood there. She’d been crying. Massively, by the look of her. Damn, but she actually must love his father, Cadan thought.

He wanted to tell her to let his dad go and to get on with her life. Lew Angarrack wasn’t available, and he probably wouldn’t ever be. He’d been dumped by the Bounder?his one, true, eternal childhood love?and he’d not got past it. None of them had. That was their curse.

But how could one explain it to a woman who’d managed to carry on with her life when her marriage had ended? There was no way.

It looked, however, as if Jago had made a heroic effort in that direction. He stood behind Ione with a handkerchief in his hand. He was folding this and returning it to the pocket of his boiler suit.

Leigh took one look at her mother and rolled her eyes. She said, “I suppose this means we won’t be surfing any longer?”

Jennie added loyally, “I didn’t like it anyways,” as she gathered up her schoolbooks.

“Let’s go, girls,” Ione said. She cast a look round the workshop. “Nothing more to be said. Matters are quite finished here.”

Cadan she ignored altogether, as if he were a carrier of the family disease. He stepped out of the way as she herded her offspring out of the shop. She was setting off in the direction of her own shop in the air station as the door swung closed behind her.

“Poor lass,” was Jago’s comment on the matter.

“What’d you tell her?”

Jago went back into the glassing room. “The truth.”

“Which is?”

“No one changes a leopard’s spots.”

“What about the leopard?”

Jago was carefully peeling some blue tape from the rail of a pintail short board. Cadan noticed how bad his shakes were today. “Eh?” Jago said.

“Can’t a leopard change its own spots?”

“I’ll wager you c’n think that one through, Cade.”

“People do change.”

“Nope,” Jago said. “That they don’t.” He applied sandpaper to the resin seam. His glasses slipped down on his nose and he pushed them back into place. “Their reactions, p’rhaps. What they show to the world, if you see what I mean. That part changes if they want it to change. But the inside part? It stays the same. You don’t change who you are. Just how you act.” Jago looked up. A long hunk of his lank grey hair had come loose from his perennial ponytail, and it fell across his cheek. “What’re you doing here, Cade?”

“Me?”

“’Less you’ve changed your name, lad. Aren’t you meant to be at work?”

Cadan preferred not to answer that question directly, so he had a wander round the workshop as Jago continued to sand the rails of the board. He opened the shaping room?scene of his former attempt at employment at LiquidEarth?and he gazed inside.

The problem, he decided, was having been assigned to shaping boards. He had no patience for it. Shaping required a steady hand. It demanded the use of an endless catalogue of tools and templates. It asked one to consider so many variables that keeping them all in mind was an impossibility: the curve of the blank, single versus double concavity, the contours of the rails, the fin positions. Length of board, shape of tail, thickness of rail. One sixteenth of an inch made all the difference and bloody hell, Cadan, can’t you tell those channels are too deep? I can’t have you in here cocking things up.

All right. Fair enough. He was wretched at shaping. And glassing was so boring he wanted to weep. It frayed his nerves: all the delicacy required. The fiberglass unspooling from its roll with just enough excess not to be considered wasteful, the careful application of resin to fix the glass permanently to the polystyrene beneath it in such a way as to prevent air bubbles. The sanding, then the glassing again, then more sanding…

He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t made for it. You had to be born a glasser like Jago and that was that.

He’d wanted to work in the spray room from the first, applying the paint to his own board artwork. But that hadn’t been allowed. His father had told him he had to earn his way into that position by learning the rest of the business first, but when it had come down to it, Lew hadn’t demanded as much from Santo Kerne, had he?

“You’ll take over the business. Santo won’t. So you need to learn things top to bottom,” had been his father’s excuse. “I need an artist and I need one now. Santo knows how to design.”

He knows how to f*ck Madlyn, you mean, Cadan had wanted to say. But really, what was the point? Madlyn had wanted Santo employed there, and Madlyn was the favoured child.

And now? Who knew? They’d both disappointed their father in the end, but there was a chance that Madlyn had finally disappointed him more.

“I’m ready to come back here,” Cadan said to Jago. “What d’you think?”

Jago straightened from the board and set down his sanding block. He examined Cadan before he spoke. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Cadan riffled through his brain to try to come up with a good reason for his change of heart, but there was only the truth if he were to stand a chance of getting back into his father’s good graces, with Jago’s assistance. He said, “You were right. I can’t work there, Jago. But I need your help.”