From Higher Places

by Roger Curtis

But it didn’t stabilise. She went back to St Thomas’, first with a staphylococcal problem which was quickly dealt with and then a herpes virus infection that was not. Still Brian refused her as a patient, in spite of Mark’s telephone entreaties. Patience, he would say, it will come right in the end.

  Her visits to the local shops became less frequent. Eventually they stopped. Her only regular contacts were her two gardeners – she could have sworn they pulled their hats down to shade their feelings – and Marguerite, who was gradually assuming the role of nurse. Day by day the house was coming to resemble a sanatorium in its patterns of activity. She might have been a tubercular patient of a generation back. She had not seen Brian or Alice since the dinner at Hightower after Jack Adams’ acquittal.

  Her enthusiasm for painting became an embarrassment with the – to her surprising – realisation that she had no talent. The crudity of the few daubed canvasses she did produce only reminded her of her condition. The ones that were not punched through or slashed quickly found their way to a cupboard in the tack room, away from critical eyes. The others, the majority, were cut up, bagged and taken to the council tip. Fits of frustration habitually resulted in her lying supine on the sofa with the curtains half-drawn, willing Marguerite to attend to her then scolding her when she did. She still read avidly, but with less and less concentration, for her thoughts were always on her face.

  Once, with her face veiled, she visited the medical library at the hospital and for the whole day read through surgical texts on facial repair. Afterwards she sat in the cafeteria and confided to her teacup that the conclusion was inescapable: she could hope for an improvement but a return to her former state lay only in the realm of fantasy.

  From beneath her veil she studied the faces around her. Most seemed to be patients. She tried to guess the conditions from which they were suffering. From somewhere within came the same pangs of pity she had once felt for her own patients. Then the pointer swung back: such sentiments were irrelevant. What she had lost was more important to her even than a healthy body, so long as it was in an intact frame. If she could barter days of her life for the restoration of her face where would the bottom line lie? She would be satisfied, she knew, with a residuum of almost anything: two years, a year, anything.

  At the next table a young mother sat with her two infant children, the younger on her lap, reaching up to explore her face. She wore a white pleated dress and had her long fair hair tied back in a pony-tail which switched shoulders as she spoke with another mother at the table behind. She was a treat for some young paediatrician; and it would be a treat for her to display her youth and prettiness in this awesome and exciting place.

  Sarah-Jane watched as the older child reached across the table towards his sibling’s glass of dark red juice. But instead of grasping the glass he pulled at the straw, tipping it over. A fan of the bright liquid advanced across the table and over the his mother’s spotless white dress.

  With the woman’s scream Sarah-Jane felt a surge of resentment towards the child. It came like a rogue wave, from nowhere, inexplicably. Why don’t you punish him? she demanded of the mother in her head, for blemishing something that had been perfect. But in that brief second she found the mission that until now she had entrusted only to others – and they had let her down. Culpability should not go unpunished. It was now up to her, and no-one else, to seek out and deal with her own assailant. The pursuit of Jack Adams had been a ridiculous escapade, against her better judgement, despite the pointing finger of possibility. And clinching it was the information Tom Sharp had given her. He was an exploiter and a persecutor, but hardly a liar, and she believed him.

  It happened coming back from town, somewhere south of Westminster Bridge. A church bell rang out, from no place she could see, but incisive and clear through the din of the traffic. She looked in the mirror, and for an instant the face there was her father’s. Into her head came his words, It tolls for thee. At the Elephant and Castle roundabout it was hardly a conscious decision, just an impulse to turn back. Re-crossing the bridge she found herself passing the palace, then Mayfair and on to the Edgware Road. Even when she joined the M40 she had no plan. But to confront Tom was now an overwhelming urge, against which nothing else mattered.

  It was still early evening. She had no wish to frighten her mother with her appearance, which she had trivialised in their few telephone conversations since the attack. So she drove into Oxford and walked the streets for a couple of hours, returning to Peverell Hessett just after ten. The wind had got up and the branches of the uncut laurel hedge in the lane brushed against the car. She parked at the bottom of the drive and walked on the grass to the door. At the foot of the stairs she stood listening for the regularity of her mother’s breathing. Satisfied, she tiptoed to her father’s study, still as it was when she had tried to sleep there curled up in the chair. From the small wall safe which she had installed secretly while her mother was on a shopping trip she took a small pistol that had once belonged to her father, on what authority she neither knew nor cared. She toyed with the cartridges, then put them back in their box: a threat was one thing, a possible murder quite another. Then she left the house and walked in the darkness to the Sharps’ home near the church.

  Pauline opened the door. ‘Oh my God, Sarah. Tom told me he’d seen you but I didn’t know it was quite like that. You poor girl. Come on in.’

  ‘Is Tom about?’

  ‘Funny you should say that. He’s in your neck of the woods today. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’d tried to call on you. Said he had something to tell you.’

  ‘Pauline, you wouldn’t happen to know what it was?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. I’m sure you know how interested he’s been in your case. Got all the local papers religiously. I don’t know who it is but I think he suspects a former colleague of yours, but who and on what grounds I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘A doctor, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so. But you’ll have to ask him yourself. I’d hate to mislead you.’

  ‘Pauline, may I ask a favour?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Don’t tell my mother I called. I don’t want to alarm her with my face, you see. I’ll see her when it’s healed a little more.’

  The door closed and the street assumed the mantle of silence that Sarah-Jane had known in her distant childhood years, before cars had come to dominate the village (although later some would be siphoned off by the by-pass.) To the west the mass of Beacon Hill and, nearer, the lesser bulk of the church, obscured most of what remained of the night sky. Never before, it seemed to her, had the synthesis of silence and darkness been more perfect. The walk back to her car would be difficult, but there was pleasure to be had in the cold tingle at the base of her neck, bearable through anticipation of the warm security of her car.

  She had walked only a few yards when the twin headlights of a vehicle appeared in the far distance. Slowly the lights penetrated the oblivion from which her sense of disfigurement had been banished. Once again, in spite of the darkness, she became conscious of her face, and experienced the now familiar urge to creep into the shadows and hide herself away.

  She was, at that moment, level with a gate in the hedge at the extremity of the Sharps’ garden, visible only because of its white paint. She estimated that the car had just passed the turning into Tippett’s Lane and within seconds she would be glaringly and uncompromisingly visible. She groped for the latch and, finding it, opened the gate and crept through into the blackness beyond.

  It seemed at first that the driver must have seen her for the car slowed almost to a halt. But it passed the gate and drew up outside the Sharps’ door. It confirmed what had been spinning in her mind these past few seconds: it was Tom’s car.

  Whatever desire she had had to confront him had been dispelled by what Pauline had told her. In its place had come an intense curiosity, without obvious origi
n. There was more, significantly more, to be gained from the situation in which she now found herself but she could not fathom what it was. Except… except… that it had to do with the darkness and the place where she was standing.

  He would surely come looking for her. Five minutes after the front door had closed she heard it open again. Then the engine sprang to life. With a grating of gears the car executed a rapid three-point turn and headed in the direction from which it had come. Leaning over the white gate Sarah-Jane watched the tail lights disappear into Tippett’s Lane. She was confident he would not find her car, which she had parked round the bend beyond her mother’s house, and would assume she was well on the road back to London. But for the moment it would be unwise to re-enter the street.

  Her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. She was at the top of a short flight of stone steps leading down to a path between two hedges, so overgrown as to be almost touching. One of these, the lower, bordered the Sharps’ vegetable garden. Although she remembered the gate, she had no recollection of what was beyond. Yet, somehow, it was familiar. But then, she told herself, there must, even in this small village, be other paths between tall hedges; so a sense of déjà vu was at least explicable.

  The path led her to a squat rectangular building, brick-built and probably old. It might once have been a stable or coach house, modified over time, but there appeared to be no route by which a vehicle, or even a horse, could have gained access. The structure was separated from the Sharps’ back garden by a bank of shrubs so thick that the lights of the house were barely pinpoint stars merging with the night sky. On the opposite side of the building there was dense undergrowth and beyond that a belt of trees. She tried to walk around it, but nettles stung her legs and brambles drove her back. Rounding a corner into hazy moonlight the sense of familiarity so palpable at the gate now, inexplicably, returned. Why do I know but do not recognise this place? she asked herself.

  The squeal of brakes and slamming of a door announced the return of Tom’s car. She heard him berating Pauline, angry at having missed her. At least he had not found her car, for that would have prompted a search. She wondered later why it didn’t occur to her to call again at the house; fear, maybe, outweighed any advantage. The earlier motivation, then so strong, had been replaced by a deeper, more subtle, urge that seemed not to require immediate action.

  With trembling fingers she lifted the latch and dabbed at the gate to avoid the squeal of its hinges. Keeping close to the hedgerow she walked with feline stealth along the pavement. Then, for the first time in years, she ran, and didn’t stop running until she saw the red glint of her car’s reflectors in Tippett’s Lane. She didn’t think to look at her mother’s house as she sped by.

  The following morning Sarah-Jane called on Mrs Fowler. When she left she was less sure that the man seen on the golf course had been Tom Sharp. But, try as she might, she couldn’t explain away the gut feeling that he had played some part in her demise.

  She drove to the clubhouse and sat for several minutes staring down the fairway. There were two possibilities, both medically qualified men who could, perhaps would, wish her harm. One was Edwin, but he was old and would have acted long before if he was to act at all; and besides, he had that wonderful capacity to resign himself to adversity. No, the more likely candidate by far was the disturbed Alan Murphy. Could a cut face alone expunge the pain of three deaths? She had to concede that, if anything, it offered too small a measure of revenge. Sarah-Jane was beginning to see her own disfigurement in a wider – and perhaps more threatening – context.

  She still had Alice’s letter concerning Alan in her pocket and drove straight to Jeff’s flat in Bermondsey.

  ‘I can give you five minutes of my time,’ he said. ‘Then I’ve a busy clinic.’

  ‘Then let me ask you one question, which you’ll answer because you will have no wish to involve your friend if he’s innocent.’ She stared into his face until his eyes reluctantly engaged. ‘Where was Alan Murphy when my face was cut?’

  ‘Alan Murphy returned to Australia the week before. In fact I had a card posted on the very day it happened.’ He walked to his desk and returned with a postcard showing the Sydney Opera House. ‘There’s no possibility, Sarah, believe me.’

  ‘Just one more question, then.’

  ‘Yes? Be quick.’

  ‘Why were you so sure about the date?’

  He laughed. ‘Because at the time we all thought he’d done it! I must go. Goodbye, Sarah’

  14

  It was becoming clear to all that Mark’s overt affection for his wife was waning. What was going on behind the stone-set mask was anyone’s guess.

  ‘He always did treat you like a piece of crystal,’ Brian said. ‘Preening himself in its reflected light but dropping it once the flaw was obvious.’

  ‘That’s not true. Why do you say that about your friend?’

  ‘You have to be realistic, Sarah’.

  She lay awake for nights in succession with the subject of her anger shifting between Mark for causing the hurt and Brian for revealing it. The truth was the stark emptiness of the bed beside her until midnight and why twice within recent days he had not even returned home until the early hours and once not at all. ‘When did he last make love to you?’ Alice asked. Sarah-Jane turned away, afraid she might see her fear. ‘Don’t worry, Sarah, you don’t have to answer. That’s what I live with all the time. One gets used to it.’

  Sarah-Jane told herself she had no intention of living with it. For a while Alice’s analysis of her predicament had led her to exploit new ways of concealing her disfigurement. In company she learnt to mingle with people so that they were kept as far as possible on her ‘good’ side; and sometimes strangers walked away from a conversation without suspecting anything was amiss. She sat on unfamiliar chairs because the lighting happened to be more favourable. She chose to shop where waiting at counters or in queues exposed only her intact face. She took to wearing hats, provided it suited the weather, and sometimes even wore a head scarf, until she heard Mark mutter ‘fish wife’ to Marguerite under his breath. But most of all she simply kept out of people’s way, becoming more and more a recluse.

  It was difficult to gauge the depth and nature of Mark’s antipathy towards her. She rightly suspected that re-adjustment was almost as difficult for him as for her. She knew now that her role in the partnership had largely been an extension of his ego. Previously content not to face the issue, she had accepted it because of the advantages it conferred. Thus there was a loss to both of them. But the rejection was not total and from time to time there would be little acts of kindness – a box of chocolates here, or a new novel there – but it was much as she might bring home a bone for the dog, or a bag of carrots for the horses.

  Marguerite’s position was equivocal. Was it better that her husband should satisfy his lust with someone incapable of snatching him away? Strangely, it did not hurt her that much to think that the girl was disloyal. One reason was that there was no deliberate attempt to deceive. If Sarah-Jane had asked how many times or what positions they used she would have been told, with a shrug of the shoulders that said, I’m sorry, Miss, I don’t have a choice. The other reason was, for the moment, less easy to define.

  The bright summer days had led Sarah-Jane to set up her easel in the guest room where, through Venetian blinds, the high windows still admitted abundant light. The room overlooked the twinkling blue water of the swimming pool. In parting the slats one morning it came as no surprise to see Marguerite sunning herself on the terrace. It amused Sarah-Jane that the gardeners had chosen that morning to skim a handful of leaves from the surface of the pool, no doubt having thrown them in the night before. The girl preserved her modesty by lying for most of the time with her back to the sun.

  Sarah-Jane knew that Marguerite was nothing if not a creature of habit, and on top of that the weather held. The
following morning she dealt with the gardeners by sending them to a farm near Godstone to collect hay for the horses. For the winter, she said with tongue in cheek when they protested that the hay loft was still a third full.

  By the time Marguerite appeared, Sarah-Jane was stretched out on a beach towel on the grass of one of the green bays on the far side of the pool. It was one of a number of enclaves on the lawn separated from each other by shrubs or low hedges to give privacy to guests at the house parties that she and Mark had long contemplated but never actually held. The vegetation had grown lush, and each now afforded almost total seclusion, being visible only from the upper floors of the house.

  Marguerite nearly tripped over her. ‘I’m sorry, Miss. I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘I’d be pleased if you’d join me.’

  ‘Well I…’

  ‘I had something to tell you.’ Sarah-Jane thought fast. ‘I’m sorry I forgot. Jed and Abel are going for hay. If you’re quick you could go with them.’

  ‘I’d rather stay with you, Miss.’

  Sarah-Jane patted the ground beside her. Marguerite laid out her towel. For a moment she remained standing, embarrassed, not knowing what to do next.

  ‘Come and talk to me,’ Sarah-Jane said, still lying on her stomach, the damaged part of her face tucked away towards the bushes and invisible.

  ‘If you don’t mind.’

  The girl’s jeans crumpled around her ankles. Sarah-Jane held them while she freed her feet. Instead of the bikini bottom of the day before the girl wore the skimpiest of panties that Sarah-Jane had already noted, from their occasional appearance in the laundry, tended to be reserved for special occasions. As she lowered herself onto the towel her ample breasts were barely restrained by the tied front of her shirt.

  ‘You won’t get much of a tan if you keep that on,’ Sarah-Jane observed.

  No longer supported, the breasts swung free. Sarah-Jane saw that the nipples were erect.