Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(35)

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Accepted. So tell me.”

She couldn’t. Too much hung in the balance to speak: too much seen and too much experienced for too many years. To explain it all to Alan was beyond her. He needed to take her word as the truth and he needed to act accordingly.

That he had not done so, that he was going to continue his refusals to do so rang the death knell over their relationship. Kerra told herself that, because of this, nothing that had happened that day actually mattered.

Even as she thought this, though, she knew that she was lying to herself. But that was something that also didn’t matter.

SELEVAN PENRULE THOUGHT IT was rubbish, but he joined hands with his granddaughter anyway. Across the narrow table in the caravan, they closed their eyes and Tammy began to pray. Selevan didn’t listen to the words although he caught the gist of them. Instead, he considered his grandchild’s hands. They were dry and cool but so thin that they felt like something he could crush simply by closing his own fingers roughly over them.

“She’s not been eating right, Father Penrule,” his daughter-in-law had told him. He hated what she called him?“Father Penrule” made him feel like a renegade priest?but he’d said nothing to correct Sally Joy, since speaking to him at all was something that she and her husband hadn’t bothered with for ages. So, he’d grunted and said he’d fatten the girl up. It’s being in Africa, woman, don’t you know that? You cart the girl off to Rhodesia?

“Zimbabwe, Father Penrule. And we’re actually in?”

Whatever the hell they want it to be called. You cart her off to Rhodesia and expose her to God only knows what and that would kill anyone’s appetite, let me tell you.

Selevan realised he was taking things too far at that point, because Sally Joy said nothing for a moment. He imagined her there in Rhodesia or wherever she was, sitting on the porch in a rattan chair with her legs stretched out and a drink on the table next to her…lemonade, it would be, lemonade, with a dash of…what is it, Sally Joy? What’s in the glass that would make Rhodesia go down a trick for you?

He harrumphed noisily and said, Well, never mind then. You send her along. I’ll get her sorted.

“You’ll watch her food intake?”

Like a peregrine.

Which he had done. She’d taken thirty-nine bites tonight. Thirty-nine spoonfuls of a gruel that would have made Oliver Twist lead an armed rebellion. No milk, no raisins, no cinnamon, no sugar. Just watery porridge and a glass of water. Not even tempted by her grandfather’s meal of chops and veg, she was.

“…for Your will is what we seek. Amen,” Tammy said, and he opened his eyes to find hers on him. Her expression was fond. He dropped her fingers in a rush.

He said roughly, “Bloody stupid. You know that, eh?”

She smiled. “So you’ve told me.” But she settled in so that he could tell her again, and she balanced her cheek on her palm.

“We pray before the bloody meal,” he groused. “Why d’we got to bloody pray at the bloody end as well?”

She answered by rote, but with no indication that she was tiring of a discussion they’d had at least twice a week since she’d come to Cornwall. “We say a prayer of thanks at the beginning. We thank God for the food we have. Then at the end we pray for those who don’t have enough food to sustain them.”

“If they’re bloody alive, they have enough bloody food to bloody sustain them, don’t they?” he countered.

“Grandie, you know what I mean. There’s a difference between just being alive and having enough to be sustained. Sustained means more than just living. It means having enough sustenance to engage. Take the Sudan, for example?”

“Now you hang on right there, missy-miss. And don’t move either.” He slid out from the banquette. He carried his plate the short distance to the caravan’s sink as a means of feigning other employment, but instead of beginning the washing up, he snatched her rucksack from the hook on the back of the door and said, “Let’s just have a look.”

She said, “Grandie,” in a patient voice. “You can’t stop me, you know.”

He said, “I know my duty to your parents is what I know, my girl.”

He brought the sack to the table and emptied its contents and there it was: on the cover a young black mother in tribal dress holding her child, one of them sorrowful and both of them hungry. Blurred in the background were countless others, waiting in a mixture of hope and confusion. The magazine was called Crossroads, and he scooped it up, rolled it up, and slapped it against his palm.

“Right,” he said. “Another bowl of that mush for you, then. Either that or a chop. You can take your choice.” He shoved the magazine into the back pocket of his drooping trousers. He would dispose of it later, when she’d gone to bed.

“I’ve had enough,” she said. “Truly. Grandie, I eat enough to stay alive and well, and that’s what God intended. We’re not meant to carry round excess flesh. Aside from being not good for us, it’s also not right.”

“Oh, a sin, is it?”

“Well…it can be, yes.”

“So your grandie’s a sinner? Going straight to hell on a plate of beans while you’re playing harps with the angels, eh?”