Perfectly Pure and Good (2 page)

A body was only a body, the man on the quay thought again. Since that woman had died, and then punished him by coming back, he had acquired twins and his wife was pregnant again. It was only because he so loved his own woman that he felt guilt for that other husband. The guilt was wasted, had he known. As the sea had swept over the slumbering form of Elisabeth Tysall, her husband Charles lay on a couch in their extravagant London home, reading his favourite poet, Browning, remembering his wife in the days when she was perfectly pure, obedient and good.

. . .
Happy and proud; at last I knew

Porphyria worshipped me: surprise

Made my heart swell, and still it grew .. .

I love you, my Porphyria, he had told himself Did you not know? Come back, before I find another.

One death alters nothing and everything. As Elisabeth Tysall's hair floated out beneath the water, the erstwhile landlord of her holiday cottage felt the first intimations of mortality. In a large house half a mile beyond the end of the quay in the opposite direction from the public beach, Mr Henry Pardoe, entrepreneur, self-made man of frugal habits and large pretensions, played Scrabble with his timid little wife and found, to his amazement, he enjoyed it. She let him win, of course, something he half realized but blocked the full knowledge.

He rubbed his chest where the faint, but nagging pain was a constant reminder to him to make a will sooner rather than later, although he did not seriously believe in death as a concept and was damned if he'd pay that old rogue Ernest Matthewson his London rates the way he had always done in the past. Daylight robbery. Mouse would help him draft a will. He looked at her faded prettiness with affection.

Life went on as the hungry tide came back through the channels and covered the earth. The coastline shifted with the seasons, flooded at high tide, drained by the low. Which meant that everything was the same, no matter who lived and died.

The men on the quay broke ranks. They made laconic farewells, drifted indoors for the innocent pleasure of the Sunday meal.

Malcolm Cook, advocate for the Crown, legal if cynical vigilante against injustice, was dark, lean, thirty-five. The only weight he carried was a surfeit of knowledge. He knew more about man's inhumanity to man, and rather less about domestic harmony, than he liked. While his work was merely the reflection of human perfidy, his own reflection was something he tried to avoid.

An aversion to mirrors often sent him out of doors wearing odd socks.

This morning he could not ignore his own image as he shaved, and as usual, felt himself flinching. A mirror was a cruel object. The contrast between himself as he had been before, a grossly fat clown of a man, and the thing he was now, streamlined by his own efforts into the shape of a marathon runner, was a sight which occasionally amused him. He would shake his head, smiling, expecting the old self to return, knowing the new one was merely a figment which did not fit the description of handsome, however often it was applied. These days, the contrast he saw in his own expression was more immediate. He looked old and worried, like his adoptive father in the throes of illness. The comparison between this and the person who sang through his morning ablutions was one which wounded him. He was losing something, and with it, all his fragile self-esteem. It felt like losing his teeth.

`Get down, you silly girl,' he muttered without taking his eyes away from the mirror. At least the dog, with her constant need to be close, never wavered in her affections, followed him from bedroom to bathroom like a silky, red shadow, so grateful for the sight of him she could not stay away. It did not do to make comparisons between this affectionate creature and Sarah, or to hope the gratitude of the one would inspire the same devotion in the other, but he made the comparison all the same with rueful humour and a slap to his own wrist. After all, he had saved them both. A pair of red-haired beauties, both in need of a champion.

Who looks after me? Malcolm thought with a sudden wave of self-pity, which he suppressed only when he saw to his horror how his eyes filled with tears in the privacy of the bathroom.

Quite right to avoid mirrors: he had always been too emotional for a man, even a fat man.

His father, Ernest Matthewson, had said so. Ernest had exercised the right to speak his mind since the day he had married Malcolm's mother and become the benign but tyrannical influence he was. Strange how roles altered themselves when no-one was looking. Who looked after whom these days was a moot point. Ernest Matthewson, senior partner, a man of old-fashioned principles and terrifying, irrational loyalty to clients of the firm, no matter how frightful they were, was also the indulgent employer of Malcolm's Sarah, but his powers had waned into frail irascibility in the last twelve months.

Anyone serving a client like Charles Tysall deserved to be ill.

Malcolm snorted, waving his hand at the mirror. There was nothing to envy about his father's career. Ernest had the sumptuous office and the salary to match, but Malcolm felt he had a certain moral advantage. It was not one which could ever make him oblivious to Ernest's good opinion. Malcolm loved Ernest, Ernest loved Malcolm; they were stuck with it, even if they rowed like enemies to hide an attachment they simply could not avoid.

He might despise my relative poverty, Malcolm thought, but at least I am licensed to tell the truth. And at least I can sneak my dog into my office without anyone worrying about the furnishings.

Nor did he have to care today about the fact that it was too late and getting later, and he did not give a damn. The dog's lead evaded detection. Must be in Sarah's flat, that's where it was; she had been the last to walk the beast. Malcolm stroked the spaniel's silky head, felt the warmth behind the ears, the thump of her tail. At least there was some consistency in his life.

They walked downstairs from his spacious attic in the huge Victorian terrace on the side of the park, round to the front door, inside with the key and up one floor to another door where a small brass plate announced 'Sarah Fortune'. Somehow in the intervening year, they had lived between the two places, tending more towards his, especially in the early days. That was during the time when her flat was being cleared up, to put it mildly. The contrast between then and now hit him again as he opened the door. There was a new mirror, winking at the end of the hall, new carpet on the floor, a mushroom colour in a hall lined with pictures, all slightly dusty. He could never forget what had happened here, even on a fine morning like this when the sunlight sanitized the memory.

The trust of the dog was infinite. She never growled on crossing the threshold: it was Malcolm who did that. She should have murmured at least, he thought resentfully; she was badly hurt in here, but then she has nothing of which to be ashamed. She does not suppress memory; she simply forgets everything but the next meal. It was a knack Sarah should learn too.

There were a few new marks on the clean paint by the kitchen door. Spilt coffee, tribute to Sarah's domestic carelessness, at odds with her flair for making things beautiful, translating junk into elegance. Coffee stains, or wine, not blood. Malcolm was beginning to understand that he might be stuck with the memory of the blood, however much he encouraged it to fade. Each time he came here he felt as if he was retracing his own fleeting steps, following the dog up to this apartment where she had led him twelve months ago, inspired by her mischievous curiosity.

Disobedient dog, running amok at the end of a late-night run, cannoning into the insecure front door, up the stairs, leaving him no choice but to follow, cursing her.

No, don't remember it. Memories were for old men. Past accidents, old horrors, should be recognized, of course, put into the scheme of things so that life could continue as soon as possible. Too much analysis only increased the weight of the baggage and both he and Sarah carried plenty of that already. Malcolm sighed, resigned to a mental ritual. OK, run through the facts on record, including those which embarrassed him personally, as if explaining them briefly to a stranger, then put them back on the shelf where they belonged.

It was his way of dealing with it. So. Charles Tysall, Dad's super-rich handsome bastard of a client, got involved with Sarah, whom he met through Dad's firm. No, correction, not involved, obsessed. Had this fixation, see, with red hair. Sarah gives him the cold-shoulder, so he breaks in here one night, waits for her. There is a fight in which a large mirror is broken. Sarah falls on the glass, has lots of nasty little injuries all over, though not on her face, God knows how. Led by his daft dog, he, Malcolm, had intervened and pursued the attacker out into the park, and this was the bit he most loathed to recall. Bringing the man down like a Rottweiler after cattle, hitting him far too hard and too long for the purpose, and, oddly, enjoying it. Malcolm hated violence, had never known he was so capable of it.

It had been a cruel way to bring Sarah into his life, he would concede for the record, but since he loved her with every ounce of his sinewy frame, the means of this savage introduction were less important than the ends.

The dog's lead was in the kitchen. Malcolm found it and then took a quick tour of the rooms, guilty again, looking for the negative, for some signs that she was not packing up and leaving.

She could not do that now, not with all the exclusive knowledge which bound them together.

Knowledge of Charles Tysall, not only as that rich and privileged businessman-thief whom Malcolm had pursued with all the futility of the law long before it was made apparent to Sarah what else he was. Bugger the past. It was the future Malcolm wanted.

The dog froze at Malcolm's flank, leaning against him. Red hairs from her long coat already decorated the trousers of his suit. Footsteps, upstairs in the flat above, harmless, unhurried. They both relaxed. The dog shook herself; he felt inclined to copy. Dog lived in the present; so should they all. Charles Tysall was dead. He might have mutilated his own wife and driven her to suicide, then turned his attentions to Sarah, but now he was dead. Dead as an old potato chip.

That was all right then. Perhaps all himself and Sarah needed was a holiday.

Brisk sea air, that sort of thing.

I am only an ordinary man, Malcolm told himself. An ordinary man who tries to be decent and honourable. I should not have memories like this, complications like this. I only want to love and be loved.

Back outside in the sunshine of summer, crossing the park to the road, he made himself think of sea air, but his thoughts only shifted back. That was the problem with reliving memory, even in the tidy way he did; it infected everything, like rancid oil in cooking. He could not think of sun, sea and sand without thinking back to Charles. How the man who was the closest thing to evil he had ever encountered went on being so, even in death. Only Charles Tysall, moving unit of harm, could choose to despoil some innocent seaside resort by committing suicide in it, just as his wife had done. Had the man never heard of preservation?

Life, Malcolm thought to himself, is a bitch. If he could ever have thought of Sarah as a bitch, it would be easier.

Watching the dog lolloping away, he began to laugh. The laughter was the result of suddenly seeing himself introducing Sarah to others. This is my wife Sarah. We met in the hall, beneath the mirror, through an extraordinary set of coincidences you would find impossible to believe and so do I.

The word 'wife' stuck in his throat. He wanted to be a husband; take this wonderful creature and make an honest woman of her. Laughter ceased. Oh yes, he told himself, you can lead a dream to water, but you cannot make it drink.

Sarah Fortune had been taught by her mother never to complain. She had also been warned that there was an element of indecency in her nature; that her energy was a nuisance and that a woman's lot was not happy. Parental ambition had amounted to a kind of Calvinism, a constant push in the direction of career over frivolity which dictated that Sarah keep her nose to the grindstone and her red hair in ugly plaits until she was qualified to earn a living. With the double standard of a mother, Sarah's had still wanted her daughters wed, the sooner the better; wanted them free but still suppressed, clever but stupid, independent but biddable.

By damning with faint praise, she nurtured in Sarah a profound sense of worthlessness which secured obedience to all expectations. The girl passed examinations, became a lawyer, acquired another as a husband and everything seemed well, until the point when he died behind the wheel of his car, distracted by recent sex, not with Ms Fortune but her sister. He was a lazy opportunist who went for the nearest. In one fell swoop, red-haired Sarah lost trust, a spouse, a sibling and all her mother's values, as well as the foetus she carried at the time.

After a period of recovery in which she remained, as always, a reluctant but efficient professional, she set about shedding the work ethic as easily as she shed her clothes, an exercise she could complete with incredible speed and efficiency. Ms Fortune recognized no moral principles other than thou shalt be kind, few instincts which were not positive and no incontrovertible fact other than that men always leave in the end.

She retained that bitter sense of worthlessness, saw all the accidents of her life as a reflection of it. Sarah could no more believe that someone truly loved her than she could have flown over the moon. She saw sex as an enjoyable necessity, love as a variety of claustrophobia, a fine deceit, a trap. She was warm as fire, generous to a fault, occasionally as cold as ice. She took nothing for granted.

Miss Fortune, at thirty-three, was contemplating the dreaded moment of saying goodbye to Malcolm Cook for a number of reasons which made eminent sense in the middle of the night, rather less in the bright sunlight of a July morning. He had loved her from afar for two years, at closer quarters for one, saved her life and continued to offer the kind of single-minded devotion he himself received from his dog. He was fuller of natural goodness than a bowl of cornflakes and it drove Sarah beyond distraction. For one, she knew she wasn't worthy of that; for two, she did not want to receive what she knew she could not give; for three, he would be better off without her; fourthly, she was already too far involved with his family; fifth, she felt like a prisoner and was not the stuff of a good wife.