The Catalyst

by Angela Jardine

  ‘Well, Doctor will be doing his rounds at about five o’clock this afternoon and you’ll be able to ask him then.’

  Something in her manner as she replied to him, a certain subtle evasiveness, alerted him to a possible block to his being allowed home and, despite his unwillingness to hear any more bad news just at the moment, he knew he had to ask.

  ‘What happened to my eye?’

  ‘The doctor will tell you everything when he sees you.’ The nurse’s answer was the usual brisk brush-off given by medical staff and Jimmy instinctively knew that whatever the doctor was going to say it was definitely bad news.

  It mattered little to him at the moment, he was more concerned with Sunny’s obvious hurry to leave him behind without a word. He felt abandoned and, in his weakness and disappointment, he had no option but to lie there and curse Jenny. It was easier than admitting to himself that all that had happened could have been his own fault.

  Although Sunny had been released from hospital into Edward’s care, she saw it as only being for a day or two, just until she was strong enough to be able to look after herself at home. It was just the lifeline she had been looking for and she had agreed to it almost before Edward had finished offering. He had just been relieved she had not rejected his idea out of hand.

  Now, after wrapping her up in a voluminous, fluffy blanket and propping her up with pillows on his sofa, he had rushed off to the village shop for extra bread and milk.

  If Sunny was a little embarrassed by her need for Edward she managed to hide it well, simply grateful now she had some distance between herself and Jimmy, distance that would give her breathing space and time to think. Perhaps too much time, she thought as her mind repeatedly returned to him and the guilt set in.

  Despite being injured himself she knew he had saved her life, she would have bled to death with a severed artery if it hadn’t been for his quick thinking. She wondered now how badly he was hurt and felt uncomfortable with her decision to leave hospital without talking to him. She had checked on his progress with the nurse before leaving but she knew it was not enough.

  Then she remembered he had brought all this horror down on both of them. Even so it felt wrong to use Jimmy as a scapegoat, he was not the only one at fault here. She too was guilty, guilty of being too gullible, too easily persuaded. She thought back to how badly she had wanted to be persuaded by Jimmy.

  The vision of the woman who had attacked them rose in her mind and she could still feel the vengeful desperation that had emanated from her. She must have been distraught, deranged even, to wield a knife, to want to kill ... and she had wanted to kill, Sunny had known that as she stood in front of her. The memory of it had the power to turn her insides to water.

  Closing her eyes, she put her head back on the pillow and wondered what Jimmy was doing now? Was he awake, aware she had left him behind? Suddenly the shame welled up in her again and she wondered at herself, leaving him without any explanation, running away as usual when things went wrong.

  It had been cowardly of her to leave him alone in hospital and the shame deepened as she remembered the total abandon with which she had made love to him, a man who seemed almost like a stranger to her now in the new light of remorse. The memory of their lovemaking no longer had the power to raise the slightest echo of their passion, in this moment there was only dishonour. It had taken a mad woman’s knife to cut away her feelings for Jimmy but it had been a most effective weapon.

  Another new and unpleasant thought occurred to her. How soon would the locals find out she had been the injured woman? Those of them who watched the local news programme would certainly have recognised the farm, she was certain of that, and they would be sure the injured man was Jimmy. Indeed they had probably been expecting something of this nature to happen to him for years but who in the village might know she was the woman in the story, the other woman in fact?

  Even if the television programme had not named her the local newspaper reporter would find a way of ferreting it out soon enough, though that would be nothing to what the villagers would do. They would speculate on all the unknown details and the lurid guesses put in place of facts would soon be passed off as gospel truth, although she wondered now if it was possible for the guesses to be more lurid than the truth.

  Her mind’s eye showed her their faces, righteous and shocked, as they mulled it over in pub and chapel. Would Tom Batten still tug the peak of his cap at her as he passed in the street? Would Matty Tregoning still smile at her? She was sure they would be relieved she was alive, after all no one likes to believe there is some sort of knife wielding maniac in their midst, but she did wonder if such a crime of passion was almost excusable to them.

  Now there appeared to be no danger to anyone else there would be a dissecting of the scandal she had caused. Scandal was what they expected from Jimmy Fisher and she was almost sure they would feel Jimmy had got what he deserved. The men especially would probably have seen it as some sort of poetic justice for having had more women than they had, although they would probably have thought castration would have been a more appropriate retribution.

  She, however, would come off less well with them. What would the villagers think about her, the ones who simply observed her, the ones who had always thought of her as an outsider? They would regard her as the scarlet woman in this affair and she did not doubt they would make her life a misery of prurient, maybe even hostile, stares? Their sympathy could well be with the woman who had wielded the knife, the would-be murderer; the woman wronged who was nevertheless, one of their own.

  The bleakness of her old life, from which Jimmy Fisher had so capably lifted her for that bright, brief period, descended again and she was at the polar opposite of the emotions she had felt a few days ago. She rubbed away the tears that welled up and crushed the self-pity she knew she had no right to feel. She had wronged an innocent woman and she had been a coward to leave Jimmy in his damaged state. She had been both weak and deceitful by default and she could never undo her mistakes.

  Now she just felt deathly tired but she knew she needed to face facts, forcing herself to make plans. Once she had made certain Jimmy was going to be all right she would never see him again. She would move on, find another sanctuary and this time she would guard against any foolish neediness. Despite her attempts to bring her mind to bear on a future without Jimmy in it, she found herself returning over and over again to her feelings of shame, unable to rein them in.

  The knowledge of her foolishness ate into her heart like acid, burning holes in her soul and corroding her ever-fragile sense of self-worth. Her face burned at the remembrance of her susceptibility, her wantonness, her willingness to fall for such a man as Jimmy Fisher. How could that have been love? It had merely been the most basic sexual attraction, something cheap and shallow and she had allowed herself to be fooled by her own body.

  When Edward returned from the shop he found her weeping uncontrollably and totally beyond being able to articulate any reason for her distress. So, awkwardly, he held her, waiting for her to become calm and telling himself it was just reaction to the trauma she had endured.

  But when her subsequent calmness turned to a silent, listless staring out of the window, he found it far more unnerving and began to wonder what he had so lightly taken on. It was fortunate his sensitivity did not extend to mind reading as Sunny bleakly contemplated her future.

  A mermaid was an unusual catch for Matty Tregoning on an opportunistic morning fishing session between autumn storms. He had just rounded Carn Ruth rocks when he saw the woman entering the water. From such a distance he knew only that she seemed familiar as he watched her sink beneath the surface and automatically held his breath for her, expecting to see her start swimming.

  It took only a few seconds to realise she was not going to swim and that in fact, she was going to drown. Suddenly his lazy day of speculative fishing was forgotten as he gunned the Maid of Zennor along from where he had seen the woman sink to where he knew the current
would take her.

  He was just able to reach down and grab hold of her clothing before she sank too deeply for him to reach her from the boat. Hauling her up to the surface he manhandled her over the side of his boat and dumped her unceremoniously onto the deck. He was aware that even in her wet clothing she seemed to weigh hardly anything.

  ‘No, you don’t, my maid. You don’t go doing things like that on my watch. I’m lifeboat crew y’know, and we don’t allow such going’s on.’

  He turned her over and pushed the tangled hair away from her face to start CPR.

  ‘Bloody hell! Sunny! Sunny! What the hell did you think you were doing?’ Anxiety made him scold his catch severely and he hurriedly bent down to breath life into her just as she took a shuddering breath and choked up a cascade of water. Swiftly, he picked her up and held her close against himself to warm her.

  ‘Matty? Is that you?’ She peered up at him through waterlogged eyes, eyes the colour of the sea.

  ‘Yes, it’s Matty ... you’re safe now, m’dear … let’s just get you shoreside, eh?’ he said gruffly, hardly able to contain his relief as his heart raced at the thought of how close she had come to death.

  Quickly he hauled off his jumper and dropped it over her head before tucking it tightly around her and making for harbour as fast as the Maid of Zennor could go. For Sunny, who he still clutched tightly, the sound of his heartbeat and the rumble of his voice made her feel safe and she lay gratefully against him.

  ‘The current was too strong, Matty ... just too strong for me.’

  Her voice was merely a whisper and she knew she could never explain that epiphanal moment when the sea had taken hold of her and she had suddenly seen David’s sad face in front of her eyes. Only then had she known she did not have the right to throw away her life and the freedom he had given her at such a high price, no matter how overwhelmed by shame she felt.

  In that instant she had realised she had to honour his gift of life and had tried to fight against the deadly current that had her in its grip.

  Epilogue

  The woman balanced delicately on one leg, her hands raised above her head, palms together, the foot of the raised leg resting at right angles against the knee of the supporting leg. There was no sound in the room beyond her own soft rhythmic breathing as she stood steadily on the polished wooden floor.

  Beyond the French windows opening onto the balcony in front of her, the waters of the bay lay serene and innocent in the summer beauty of the late afternoon sun. The light reflected up from the placid surface of the sea outside to ripple on the ceiling above her and long curtains of white gauze bellied gently in the slight salt breeze that wafted into the room, but the woman saw none of this.

  Her gaze was turned in on herself, intent on feeling the stretch in her muscles and only vaguely aware of the tang of the sea as she breathed. She was however much more aware of a new lightness of spirit. It had been nine months since Matthew Tregoning had foiled her halfhearted suicide attempt and now she simply felt thankful for her life ... and the two remarkable men in it.

  Only now, as she finished her yoga session and picked up her towel, did she permit herself to dwell briefly on how far she had come since that time, seeing the past now as if through darkened glass, shadowy and not quite real.

  She made a ritual, and by now habitual, obeisance towards the sleeping power of the sea outside the open window before flipping the towel over her shoulder and running downstairs to uncork a bottle of wine to go with the evening meal.

  Jenny Lawrence had, with the help of her loyal friend Jasper Carne, but very much against his wishes, calmly turned herself in to the police. It was irrelevant to her that neither Sunny nor Jimmy had ever pressed any charges against her. She had simply pressed charges against herself having a deep conviction she needed to pay the price of her obsession.

  Jasper had wanted to spirit her abroad and hide with her in a country where no one could find her, offering to give up everything to keep her safe and out of prison. It was true she had been tempted for a moment but she knew it was too much of a price for him to pay, even for a friendship as strange and deep as theirs.

  Her decision had not surprised Jasper even though he could not understand it. The strange thing was that surrendering her freedom had not seemed like any sort of burden to her and it was with the same sense of natural justice having been served that she seemed to have calmly accepted her loss of sight.

  There seemed to be no reason for her persistent blindness. All the tests proved there was nothing physically wrong with her eyes and their connection to the brain. The doctors believed it to be a psychosomatic disorder, some sort of self-imposed penance, the mechanism of which they still did not fully understand. The specialist’s diagnosis of ‘hysterical blindness’ however had still not been enough to keep her from jail.

  The villagers of Porthcarn, of course, had their own views and were divided between scepticism and pity, with many of them uncharitably convinced she was ‘putting it on’ to shorten her jail sentence. Only Sunny, who knew what Jenny had seen and could guess at what she had endured, knew she had paid the price for her actions long before she had been sentenced to jail.

  So Jasper continued to build his salvage empire in between the times he spent visiting Jenny, constantly seeking new treatments for her self-imposed blindness and appealing for a reduced sentence. And if he sometimes looked sadly into her blank eyes and wished her better he also lived with the hope that when she was released she would feel she had paid the appropriate price and allow herself to see again.

  Jimmy too had realised that keeping out of Jenny’s life from now on would be in her best interests as well as his own and so she remained strangely at peace with herself.

  Sunny had plucked up enough courage to say goodbye to Jimmy face to face. She knew it was the only way to sever the ties properly so she had visited him on his release from hospital. It had been a brief but emotionally draining meeting and she had fled from his farm in tears with Jimmy’s curses following her out of the door.

  He had been unable to understand why she was leaving him now, after all they had been through and his anger at being unable to persuade her to change her mind had made her frightened for his sanity. He could still see nothing wrong with his treatment of Jenny and that fact alone had convinced Sunny she was doing the right thing in leaving him.

  Even so, she had faced him with the unwelcome knowledge that seeing him again had brought back everything she felt for him. Now she knew more clearly than ever that she still loved him, it had not just been lust, it had not just been infatuation. The only difference now was that their relationship was tainted with blood and what seemed like a sort of madness.

  It had been defiled beyond redemption by his deceit and her naivety and, for her, there was no going back. She had decided she would just have to learn to live alone with her shame but if she thought that was a simple decision she had been wrong. As the days passed after leaving Jimmy her mental agonies had increased until they became insupportable.

  The sea had appeared to offer her a way out but Sunny's private attempt at penance by drowning seemed to have been rejected by Fate. What was more, it had redeemed her. At the moment of drowning, realising not just that she wanted to survive but that she desired life with a desperate intensity, she had tried to fight for it.

  In that instant of recognition of her truest, purest feelings all the memories of her previous misery had crystallised and shattered and only the timely intervention of Matty Tregoning had saved her from an eternity of regret.

  The baptism of the sea had given her a gift, a new way of being. It had given her another chance to deal with her guilt with courage and prove herself. Now, finally, she felt strong enough to stop running away from life and its complexities and take a stand.

  Edward Hervey slammed the door shut with his foot, dropping books all over the Victorian tiles in the hallway.

  ‘Oh bugger! That’ll do the covers in,’ he said with a r
ueful chuckle, looking up at Sunny as she walked towards him, still in her yoga gear. She handed him a glass of red wine with a smile.

  ‘Hello, you ... dinner's in the oven and I’ll be changed in two ticks. Oh and Matty will be here shortly too, I invited him over for to eat with us. Can you listen out for him at the door?’

  She picked up the books he had dropped and piled them on the old wooden settle in the hall as he sank down and sat beside them. He watched her slight figure run upstairs to change, his heart as usual, well and truly fixed on his sleeve.

  So what if it wasn’t a marriage, or even a romance, he thought as he sipped his wine, it was still good to be sharing a home with her. The nightmare of the morning he had found Matty Tregoning standing on the steps of his cottage with a dripping Sunny in his arms had now well and truly begun to recede into the past.

  Of course he would have liked more from her. Alone in his bed at night he knew what he hoped for but for now it really was enough that she was living here with him in a beautiful house overlooking the sea. He was content for their relationship to be what it was, he knew his emotions were safe in her keeping. He had at last learned to trust a woman again and besides which one never knew what the future might bring.

  It had been a struggle for Jimmy to accept Sunny's decision to leave him, and an even bigger struggle not to give in to the temptation to seek her out and 'accidentally' bump into her in the town. Eventually he felt he could no longer bear the thought he might meet her in the street and she would pass him by as though he was merely a stranger. He had never quite been able to forget his dream of her looking coldly at him and had no wish to see it become a reality.

  So he had left the farm on the cliff top, left the place he had loved above all others for so long and gone to live abroad. His home was now a low, white-walled villa on a Mediterranean island where, having lost one of the passions of his life, he continued to lose himself in the other. He could admit quite openly to himself that he used his obsession with his work as the only effective antidote to his anguish.