Perfectly Pure and Good (20 page)

She said she'd had several affairs in the past, all as revenge against Charles for not loving her any more, but the suicide was pure revenge for her disfigurement. She couldn't tell tales about him while he was alive, but she planned for her body to be found, her injuries examined and him exposed. She didn't know much about the workings of the law; it wouldn't have stood up in court. Also, she didn't have the remotest will to live, something she had lost a long time before.

She didn't need your tranquillizers either since she already had an arsenal of pills. There was supposed to be another sealed letter on her when she was found, but that was lost.'

Sarah twisted to sit on the other hip, gracefully. Julian could feel a wild heat course through his veins. Anger, relief, remembered, unexercised desire, until now, dormant along with the dead.

Fury, guilt.

`That doesn't mean,' Sarah went on softly, 'that your reaction to her face was not horribly cruel, something to be ashamed of. But it does mean that it didn't influence events. You didn't kill her.

Charles killed her. As for kicking his corpse, a corpse has no feelings, leaves those with the living. Your father had just died. Grief makes us all knock on the doors of insanity. When my husband died, I wanted to kill, maim, torture. You hardly did that.'

Julian was leaning forward, hungry for hope, staring into her flecked eyes, finding them fathomless, generous, lonely without sadness. He did not move when she took his face between her hands and kissed him. The kiss went on: he recoiled slightly, then responded with a groan, drawn into the embrace with a long, shuddering sigh.

`Sarah, Sarah . . .'

`Don't think,' she murmured. 'Just don't think. Except of killing demons.'

He thought he also heard her say that Charles Tysall could not be allowed to claim so many lives, but he was not sure of anything she said. He heard only the rustle of clothing, himself climbing the stairs in her wake, entering the dark bedroom where the moonlight shone, pulling his shirt over his head, falling with her into a warm tangle of silky limbs, joined again by the kiss which seemed never to have stopped. Remembering her slenderness, feeling her strength, trying not to claw or to grasp. Shivering until she calmed him, guided him into one cataclysmic moment when he knew he shouted. When he swam back into the planet, he wanted to cry. Instead, he slept like a child.

The wheels of Edward's car spun on the gravel; not the swishing sound of a well-raked, richly coated drive, only the spinning of worn rubber on worn pebbles sunk into mud after warm rain.

Fishing: why ever would a man want to fish? Especially the way he fished, a sort of clandestine activity, often at night, for the romance of moonlight on the waves, but mostly for shame, because fishing was something he did to acquire a skill other men might envy, because a man of his vision should have been able to pull fish out of the sea as easily as far lesser men and he had to make his attempts at night because so far, they were conspicuous failures.

The fish would not bite, even after the hours he had spent over two years, they stayed beneath the water and laughed at him. The rods were state of the art, the bait was right according to the books, and that boy Stonewall swore it was, managing just a touch of scorn in his silent servility.

Edward admitted he needed a teacher, if he were humble enough to learn. He could cast, but he could not catch. It was like everything else — his failure was in proportion to the effort. If only Dad had taught him.

The house felt empty. 'Joanna!' he shouted up the stairs, careless of whom he might wake; how dare they sleep when he needed company and food in that order? Silence. Her car was gone, out with one of her bitchy friends, as long as that was all. He slammed down his fishing tackle on the kitchen table, emptied his jacket pockets of boxes of hooks, floats, casting weights, the detritus of failure, along with sandwiches in grease-proof paper, silly cow. The lightweight plastic of the box of hooks cracked, spilling them on the table, small things these ones, no bigger than a thumbnail. Edward scooped some of them into the kitchen drawer. There were signs of his impatience, signs of his desire, all over the house. New rods, new reels, hooks in every drawer.

Mother, Julian, even Father before had let him spread this litter. They all thought fishing might make a man of him. If he had heard that once, he had heard it ten dozen times.

`Joanna!'

Nothing. Edward went up to his room, hungry and bored, and looked out of the window. The rain had eased to a soft drizzle; the sky was clear for another day's fresher heat tomorrow. He was suddenly forlorn, still angry. The doll's house stood covered. He brought his fist down into the plywood roof, heard it crack and crumble, the contents inside skitter as the edifice tottered, groaned and stood still. Unable to bear examination of the carnage, he turned to the window; unable to look towards the sea, he looked towards the cottages.

A light in a window over there. Hettie the sheep grazing in front of the one door out of the three which had roses. An upstairs light and a downstairs light. Julian's car parked by the front door of their house, as usual. Edward suddenly knew where he was. The knowledge made him feel sick.

He clattered downstairs in case he was wrong, passed via a wide detour to the back of the house where Julian's room stood next to Jo's, both doors ajar, both rooms empty. Back to his own room, looking out again. The light above the front door shone out to welcome everyone home, illuminating the grass. He could see Sarah Fortune in the nude, walking away from him like a contemptuous ghost, a model for a painting with her handbag balanced on her head and her arms outstretched for balance in perfect poise. Save me from desire, he told himself with all the fervour of the prayer he despised. Save me.

Back down in the kitchen, he tripped over his rod, swore, tripped over the newspaper on the pantry floor, swore again. He seized a fistful of bread, felt a tickle on the back of his neck, turned. Mother was behind him, still in the feather hat she had worn that morning, a tweedy coat over the same dress. She was clearly startled. More satisfyingly, she was also frightened.

Retreating before him like a slave, back into the kitchen, putting her hand on the hooks on the table, screaming short little shrieks like a parrot, raising her palms as if about to pray, before he hit her. A punch was all, to the side of that ridiculous hat, but hard, making her fold, clutch the back of a chair with a hook or two still in her palm. She gasped but would not fall, straightened up, clasped the table for support with the other hand and stood straight, swaying slightly. The hat was knocked even further sideways, the feathers curling and brushing the left ear lobe, from which a drop of blood began to form and slowly fall. She opened the palm in which two fish hooks were embedded and sighed theatrically.

`What did I do, Ed dear? What did I do?'

There was a draught of cold air from the back door. Joanna stood, hair damp, frizzed by rain, looking at the tableau of mother and son. Mother sat with great precision and began to tease the two hooks out of her palm, wincing only slightly, tut-tutting under her breath. It was the barbs, pointing backwards, that got under the skin and went into the bone of a fish without causing pain; Joanna had listened to a thousand expositions and explanations from Edward. The hooks did not look painless inside a hand.

`There!' Mother said, triumphantly, easing out the first, holding it to the light and going to work on the second. 'You just have to do this and then you go this way, see? Easy peasy.' Joanna was comforted. Accidents will happen, fishing was silly sport. Then the drop of blood oozing from behind Mother's hat, a single drop, plopping on the table before Mother caught it in her injured palm, sucked greedily. All gone, that bright red speck, all gone. Then she saw Joanna for the first time. Her voice became defensive. She looked at Edward, fearfully.

Àll gone!' she said, gaily, retrieving the second hook. 'Time for bed! Time for bed long ago!

Should not have got up!'

Edward was filling the kettle at the sink. Joanna looked long and hard at the hunch of his back as she guided her mother out of the room.

`Want a sandwich, Ma?' she asked as they went slowly upstairs. Àre you hungry?'

`No, thank you, thank you no.' Then as an afterthought. `Mustn't wear ear-rings, darling, they hurt if you fall over.'

Joanna was glad Mother wanted nothing like a sandwich. She did not want to go back to the kitchen, with all its lingering body heat, the claustrophobic warmth, the accusations, the denting of faith in the brother she had trusted. Not yet.

The tide receded. Hooked against a rope in the quay, looking jaunty in the moonlight, hung a purple shirt like a church gown left out to dry at the end of the Sabbath. A pair of sandals danced and sank, moving on elsewhere with the fish.

Julian Pardoe stirred in Sarah's arms, bereft of guilt or pain. `Sarah?'

`Yes?' Moving closer.

`When grief makes you insane, what do you do? What did you do the first time?'

`This,' she murmured sleepily. 'Only this.' Then later, another murmur. 'I never was much good at the law, you see, never much good at anything, but I am good at this. The law is so slow. It's no fun at all. It should be more than arithmetic . . . There are so many better ways to cure an ill.' He did not understand: it did not matter, he pulled her closer, back into the kiss, felt those strange scars on her arms, too late for questions, let himself drown in the oldest medicine of all.

They could go fishing for the ghost and earn themselves glory. Stonewall and Rick were down in the boat, a battered old rower with a put-put engine, half a horsepower, Rick said, but good enough for the creeks and if you let it go with the tide, it could win the Olympics. They were waiting for the water in the kind of milky sweet dawn which made Stonewall shiver. The boat lay snug against the harbour wall. He leant over the side with his line, looking for the crabs he could sell for bait or more likely throw back if he caught them, found instead a purple shirt drying on the mooring rope, wrapped it round his skinny middle and felt absurdly happy with his prize. Rick lay supine and looked at the sky.

He stood to stretch his legs and yawn, his head below the level of the quayside wall when he heard Edward Pardoe pass in his unseasonally heavy shoes. Rick balanced himself on the central bench of the boat, clutched the wall and sprang over. Intent on his own progress, looking briefly at the swans which dithered with the tide, Edward noticed nothing else.

Rick put a finger over his mouth as Stonewall sprang to attention beside him. Both silent by common consent, they leaned with their elbows propped on the bonnet of a car, looking through the windscreen and out the back to watch Edward walk towards the road which led out to the beach, the caravan park and the woods.

Rick snapped his fingers and jerked his head in Edward's direction in a parody of military command, instantly appreciated. Stonewall made a mocking salute, trotted away in his filthy training shoes after the disappearing figure. Rick shaded his eyes with his hand, still acting the role. The sun was brighter by the minute; Stonewall's mum would blame him if the lad was not home by breakfast, time enough for that. Now what was that bastard Edward doing? He wouldn't rise early in the morning for nothing, wouldn't rise at all if he could help it. Rick turned and spat on the ground, always did him good to spit, even if it was a habit recently learned and one which shamed him.

He'd acquired it first a few weeks since, when Edward came down the arcade and warned him off Joanna. What's it to you who she goes out with? Rick had said. I'm not going to do her any harm.

Just lay off, that's all, she doesn't even like you, just pretends, laughs at you behind your back, Edward had drawled, so leave her alone, or we'll see about your amusement arcade, your job and your dad's living, plus all those other souls who work in there from time to time. That's when Rick spat, more in response to the first half of the message than the second, powerless, the way he often felt, story of his life.

Pardoes and fathers have the last word. Not any more. He looked across the road at the kingdom of his arcade. Even with a dad like his, he was good enough for anyone. He'd been thinking about it all. Today was the day to find Jo.

Rick folded back the doors to the arcade, went inside, moving from switch to switch. The place was suddenly full of flashing light and wonderful, raucous sound which gave him strength.

Stonewall thought he had got the drift of Edward's purposeful direction, since on this road there was very little choice. Maybe the lazy sod was going to dig up his own bait for a change, but he carried nothing. The road could only lead to caravan site, beach or woods; Stonewall couldn't see a Pardoe having much to do with caravans. Edward walked on the bank parallel with the silent road, with Stonewall shadowing, shielded from view even with the piece of purple flotsam round his waist, as he trailed behind, slightly excited, more irritated than thrilled, for once, slightly insulted by being so inconspicuous.

He was hungry, he was following Ed who owed him money, committed to the pursuit, even if he was cross enough to risk a short cut. Stonewall launched across the caravan park, flitted like a shadow between the sleepy, slug-like vehicles where morning life was just beginning, into the woods where the wind moaned softly. Ed must have gone to the beach; he would head him off.

He followed a series of tracks which led through the scented pine woods, dipping through sandy valleys, up and down to the final ridge of trees on the edge of the sand. There was a path across the ridge, again dipping into gaps where entries and exits had been forged or grown. Stonewall scanned the beach, moved slowly left. He had first seen the ghost talking to Edward, right out there. They had met in the middle of the wilderness, like two people about to fight a duel.

That was weeks ago. This time he heard the voices first and almost stumbled across them, sitting halfway up part of the steep slope which led from woods to beach, out of the breeze. Two of them, Edward and the white-haired man sitting in his old clothes with the palms of both hands on the pummel of a stick which Stonewall also recognized. Miss Gloomer's stick. Stonewall fell flat to earth as if he had been shot, lay with his hands propping up his head. He could scarcely hear them, what with the wind in the trees behind him and the mewing of the gulls on the beach below, struggled to listen for the sake of having something to report. His stomach grumbled, he farted and almost apologized aloud. People did not do that on videos and the prospect of doing it again stopped him crawling closer.