Perfectly Pure and Good

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Exactly. Edward would murder me. I can’t afford it anyway, I promised him a new fishing rod for his birthday, they cost a bomb—’

  ‘Stand up.’

  Joanna stood, much taller than Sarah.

  ‘I’ve got some lovely shirts, fit anyone. Leggings for the bottom? Come with me.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t, Miss Fortune, honestly. I’m really sorry, blubbing all over you, scarcely know . . . Oh, it’s so awful . . .’

  ‘Sisters under the skin,’ said Sarah lightly. Clothes could be the stuff of dreams or the staff of confidence. ‘I wouldn’t listen to Edward,’ she added kindly. ‘Men are no good on these things. A nice, bold colour, no patterns, is what you need.’

  ‘Black,’ said Jo fervently. ‘Then I could cope.’

  There was darkness and privacy in the pine woods which covered the dunes and led to the beach, but when the man with snow-white hair came to the brow of the last ridge, the wind took away his breath into a vast, galloping sky, leaving him shocked. Memory played such tricks, even since yesterday. He had forced himself to walk this far with his military steps; the sea should have been closer, instead of that distant, mocking promise. The tide was a fickle woman who never obeyed orders. The man saw only the horizon, noticed no details, felt no pain and counted nothing but the minutes.

  The sand was soft, his ill-fitting shoes suddenly struggling for a sinking foothold as he thrashed the air with his arms, overbalanced, fell with his jacket flapping, rolling over and over, sand in his hair and his mouth, landing on his back on the beach. There was an initial sense of fury, then exhilaration in letting go like a child, falling into a blissful, uninhibited waving of limbs without any sense of danger. He wanted to do it again. The sky was blinding blue when he opened his eyes and laughed. A face came into focus above his own.

  ‘That wasn’t very graceful,’ said Edward Pardoe.

  The man grunted, sat up, stroking his luxuriant white hair which curled into the back of his neck. His clothes were the ill-assorted garments of a tramp, too heavy for summer, but he folded his long, thin body about itself and clasped his hands to his knees with a kind of elegance. Strange, how wearing the clothes of a person of no importance could turn one into exactly that. He was beginning to perceive how disguise became habit. The transition had frightened him once, not now.

  Edward considered that the face beneath the stubble of beard had been handsome once, possibly exceptional. They sat and said nothing for a while.

  ‘I’d like to reorganize this shoreline,’ Edward remarked, frowning. ‘It’s so . . . imperfect.’

  ‘But it’s here,’ said the man.

  ‘Yes, I know, but the sea should be lapping at my feet. The trees should be more exotic than these drab pines. A few extraordinary shrubs. Flowers in winter. I could do it. I shall do it.’

  ‘After art, nature,’ the man murmured. ‘These kinds of dreams are expensive.’

  They were silent again. The sea stayed the same distance, the man staring at it as if mesmerized.

  ‘Have you been seen?’ Edward asked as if it did not matter.

  ‘What do you think? From sea or land? I suppose so. A beastly little boy and his dog. The dog ran after me. I loathe dogs. I move about, beach hut, boat, occasional empty cottage where people obligingly leave me their soap. The village is crowded with holiday-makers, ignorant pigs. They don’t notice anyone who looks so venerable.’ He touched his white locks. ‘People don’t notice me now.’

  ‘They may have done once, when you were younger,’ said Edward nastily.

  ‘I am a person of no fixed abode,’ said the man quietly. ‘That is my choice, not my destiny. It does not mean I am a person of no consequence.’ Even as he said it he wondered very briefly if it were true, looked down at his hands. Of course he could still remember how to pare his nails.

  ‘What did you do about the dog?’

  It was disturbing the way the man exerted superiority so easily with his patrician voice and his air of sheer indifference. He looked like an outcast and behaved as if he were a prince.

  ‘The dog? Buried it. It was only a dog.’

  Edward swallowed.

  ‘You aren’t invisible,’ he said sharply. ‘I’ve been hearing local rumours about a ghost with white hair committing minor burglaries. You’re obviously perfecting this talent of yours.’

  ‘Mrs Tysall was good at picking locks,’ the man volunteered irrelevantly. ‘She was never fond of keys, but she could always get in, or out.’

  ‘I never knew Mrs Tysall,’ said Edward, profoundly irritated. ‘It was my wonderful brother who knew her, as I told you in some detail.’ Both were staring seaward, their eyes never meeting.

  ‘I have to be sure,’ the man said.

  ‘How to get into the surgery,’ Edward continued, ‘is something you must work out for yourself. As I said yesterday, you’ll need the keys to his desk.’

  He dropped a ring of keys on the sand in between them. The man never took his eyes off the horizon as he felt for them with long, lazy fingers.

  ‘By the way, don’t stay in any of the cottages nearest the house again, will you? We have a visitor in the end one. My mother calls her a cow, but she seems quite observant.’

  ‘Aah, your lovely sister.’

  ‘Leave her alone, she’s mine,’ said Edward sharply.

  ‘Of course I shall. I didn’t doubt it for a moment. Ah, the love of a sister. How could you be ashamed?

  ‘“Say that we had one father, say one womb

  Are we not therefore each to the other bound

  So much the more by nature? by the links

  Of blood and reason? One soul, one flesh,

  One love, one heart, one all?”’

  Silence again.

  ‘Who wrote that?’ Edward asked softly. ‘I like it.’

  ‘ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.’

  Edward clenched his fists.

  ‘John Ford. A play. I’m not being personal.’

  Edward relaxed.

  ‘Here,’ he said roughly. ‘Be grateful for the love of a sister. She made these sandwiches for me. She does every day. Pity you can’t fish for food. I could give you a rod.’

  The man took the sandwiches without thanks, opened and ate them with the voracity of a dog before the daily bowl, swallowing rather than chewing. His teeth were brown. The silence was punctuated only by the sound of his jaws, the soft shushing of the trees behind them and the distant shouting of games. Edward could imagine the thin man eating carrion, crumbling bones and all, and shuddered slightly.

  ‘Food’, the man announced, ‘is a matter of complete indifference. I detest the vulgar business of eating. I suppose it would be useful if I had learned to fish. Can you fish?’

  ‘Not well. I go out at night to learn,’ said Edward, miserably. ‘When no-one’s watching. My father fished,’ he added inconsequentially. ‘He said it made a man of you.’ The silence stretched again, unbearably.

  ‘However did I come to meet someone like you?’ Edward asked facetiously, simply to interrupt it. ‘You’ve quite enlivened my summer.’

  ‘Dreams,’ the man said abruptly. ‘We are all entangled in dreams.’ From his mouth, the word sounded oddly obscene.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘You met me,’ the man said evenly, ‘when you found me trespassing in that cottage of yours. It seemed to amuse you. You said you wouldn’t turn me out immediately, would even show me another empty place to stay, provided I was good enough to set a little fire inside it, enough to stop it being used. It wasn’t much to ask of a man on holiday.’

  ‘We seem to have gone on from there,’ Edward murmured.

  ‘Into the dreams. You dream of changing the landscape. For which you need your brother destroyed and your mother dead.’

  Edward would never have put it so baldly. He felt the prickling of his scalp, a terrible tingling in his limbs of dreadful excitement.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘On my master’s behalf? I dre
am of the proof of wickedness and adultery. I dream of revenge and the satisfaction of honour. “Death, thou art a guest long looked for; I embrace thee and thy wounds.”’ Edward scrambled to his feet, lightheaded. Enough was enough.

  ‘Don’t tell me what my dreams are. I’ll see you here, same time, tomorrow or Sunday.’

  The man nodded, the breeze lifting his long white hair off the once spectacular face, his eyes still staring towards the sea.

  Sarah Fortune had packed a case for all eventualities except the extremes of country life, being ignorant of what it was; black could be provided. A sueded silk overshirt with the elbow-length sleeves she always wore, slightly padded shoulders, cool and elegant over leggings, completed by a deep cerise belt and a discreet but heavy silver necklace and ear-rings. The child looked ten years older, transformed into a sleek, black cat with a whole decade of confidence.

  ‘Shirt needs an iron. Where is it?’

  ‘Oh, in that cupboard. Oh, Sarah! This shirt is positively divine!’

  A lawyer dressing a client for a night on the town. If these were the worst eccentricities of country life, Sarah thought she could take to it. In the course of this long foraging through her suitcase, she had heard plenty of family history since Joanna talked non-stop. Such as, Father being a lovable tyrant, they’d all wept buckets; Julian a despicable one. Such as Mother never getting her own way about anything when Father was alive, poor thing. About Edward being marvellous, but constantly misjudged, and about how all Joanna Pardoe wanted to do with her life was to learn to cook properly, get married and have a lot of babies.

  Sarah had agreed that feminism was overrated, no, a career was not always a route to happiness, and that yes, family life was a perfectly honest ambition, if you had the temperament for it. Then she heard all about Rick and how wonderful he was and how he didn’t love Joanna any more. Julian had told him to fuck off.

  ‘I suppose,’ Joanna finished wistfully, putting on the freshly pressed shirt, which looked easily as expensive as its price, ‘that’s a better reason for being rejected than being too fat. Heavens, look at the time.’

  ‘Fat? Who’s fat?’ said Sarah. She had dragged a mirror from the bedroom. Joanna pirouetted in front of it, giggling, half convinced, but better than that, being sure she could convince others of profound sophistication.

  ‘What did you do to my hair?’ It was twisted above her head: it would fall throughout the evening, gracefully. Blond tendrils escaped round her ears. ‘Look, are you sure I can wear this?’

  ‘You can be sick on it if you like. I wouldn’t have ironed it otherwise, would I? Eat your heart out, Caroline what’sit. You look a million dollars. I’d kill for hair like yours,’ Sarah added fervently.

  ‘But yours is so lovely.’

  ‘No, not always,’ said Sarah.

  Mrs Pardoe had removed her station to the upstairs window where she often waited throughout the late afternoon, in case the ice-cream van came, not every day, but often enough to warrant her vigil.

  She watched her daughter, crossing from the cottages where she had seen her go earlier with the old cow. When she saw Joanna striding back like a modern princess, head held high, face enlivened by a rosy glow of hope, she sat back and sighed with profound pleasure.

  Ernest Matthewson was an old friend, one to be trusted. He had such good ideas.

  Ernest made her think of food: ice-cream, chocolate cake, steak and champagne. And all those years of being called Mouse.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Malcolm Cook sat with his stepfather and his mother over the evening meal they shared once a fortnight, sometimes under sufferance, although never when Sarah had been included. There were no apologies for absences; the food was elaborate since it never took long for plump Mrs Matthewson to recover from a period of dietetic austerity. Ernest was spared the low-fat yoghurt in the interests of feeding Malcolm, a son who was far too thin in his mother’s estimation. She did her best by hiding cream in the soup, serving hot garlic bread ostensibly made with low-calorie spread. Her husband ate heartily while Malcolm failed to be fooled, played the game back, complimenting everything, eating only what he needed.

  ‘Want some more, Malcolm dear? Another potato?’

  Everything calm so far, just like a normal Friday dinner, as long as she was careful not to leave them alone for too long. So they all sat with their coffee, their spines sunk into the feathers and the humming birds of the chairs and behaved as if nothing had happened, until the phone rang in the hall and Mrs Matthewson thought it was safe to leave them.

  ‘Father,’ said Malcolm, ‘why did you send Sarah away?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Ernest responded indignantly. ‘It was her choice, she volunteered. Couldn’t wait to go. She wanted the sea, didn’t mind where it was. She’s always talking about living in the country, by the sea. Good chance to experiment. Nothing to do with you.’

  Malcolm felt in the cigar box on his left, set on an ornate table decorated with more birds. He withdrew one of his father’s best, tucked it into the open pocket of his shirt, then lit one of his own cigarettes which Father despised. Ernest winced at the subtlety of these gestures of insolence.

  ‘You must think my stupidity is entirely comprehensive,’ Malcolm continued in the smooth, authoritative tones of the advocate he was. ‘But sometimes it lapses into an aberration called intelligence. You may have been right about Sarah and me, I doubt it, but did you have to be so cruel to her?’

  ‘Cruel?’ Ernest blustered. ‘Who said anything about cruel? All right, I thought it was time both of you did a bit of thinking and it seemed like a good opportunity. I must admit to not quite realizing where it was I was sending her. She said it didn’t matter. There was something she wanted to do in that part of the world. Someone to see.’

  ‘Of course you knew. You were once friends with the Pardoe family. You sent her to sort out an estate which could be sorted out better by someone else in a matter of hours, to the place where Charles Tysall’s wife committed suicide, and he followed suit.’ He kept his voice calm. Ernest was at his least reliable when alarmed. All he could do at the moment was grunt.

  ‘What happened to the Tysall business empire, Father?’

  Ernest snorted in disgust. ‘The estate will take years to resolve. What do you know or care about business? You like it down where you are, prosecuting grubby criminals—’

  ‘And what else was Charles? The soul of probity? Eton educated he may have been, good family, yes, but he founded his companies on stolen ideas, drove people to ruin, brutalized his wife—’

  ‘There’s no proof about that,’ Ernest muttered. ‘He may have told me things, but he may have fantasized. Don’t speak ill of the dead.’

  The Persian cat sprang from its cushion as Malcolm leaned over his father. There was a little hiss from Ernest of post-prandial sleep, only possibly feigned. Malcolm, ever aware of the shame of violence which was subsumed in himself by the habit of running twenty miles a week, was far too humane to strike someone already unconscious, although the temptation was certainly there. If only this old man were not so Machiavellian; if only they had talked more, instead of just enough; if only they had really exchanged information about what had happened to Sarah immediately before Malcolm found her. If only the son and the mother, in the interests of Ernest’s health, had not sought to protect him from information which could shock and alarm, and if only it were not too late now.

  ‘I’m thinking about Sarah, not your bloody clients,’ Malcolm muttered, more to himself. ‘Because she taught me about loving, Dad. That’s what she did. That’s what she does. I don’t mean just sex; I mean loving.’

  Ernest jolted out of a dream, rubbing his belly.

  ‘Tart. That’s the problem. A bit of a tart,’ he muttered.

  ‘What did you say?’ Malcolm asked. ‘I was talking about Sarah.’

  ‘So was I, but what I meant was that I shouldn’t have eaten that pie. Too tart,’ Ernest grumbled, still stroking his paun
ch. He looked at his stepson pleadingly.

  ‘Do you know your loyalty to your clients is ludicrous?’ said Malcolm. ‘You take the code to extremes. I thought you’d have been cured. Would you tell me, for instance, if Tysall was alive?’

  ‘No,’ said Ernest. ‘He isn’t, but I wouldn’t. Not for you to do what you were trying to do before. Prosecute him for fraud when all he ever did was steal other people’s ideas. Perfectly good capitalistic practice. I couldn’t let that happen to a client of mine. Not even a dead one.’

  Again, that terrible temptation twitched in Malcolm’s fingers, made him ball his hands into fists and keep them by his sides. The ample figure of Malcolm’s mother stood frozen in the doorway, the whole of her suddenly forlorn. After all the work she and Sarah had done, there they were, father and adopted son, back at loggerheads, with love, that dangerous and volatile commodity, as elusive as ever.

  ‘You see? I love it, see?’ Rick yelled above the din. ‘I mean I just do. Could be all I know and that’s for why, but I love it. Can’t help it.’

  ‘Can I try?’

  ‘Course you can. Pity Stonewall isn’t here. He’s the expert. Which one do you want? Try this one, this one’s really good.’

  Sarah wasn’t confused by choice, only the row. There was a background and foreground of thunder, of bleep, bleep, bleep, explosions, machine-gun fire, electronic voices issuing commands, the muffled explosions of a dozen bombs, the sound of falling cash. In the corner of the large room, separated from the rest by age, the older generation sat to play bingo in a serious, dedicated row of grey heads with handbags on laps, listening with all the earnestness of a congregation in church to a voice echoing sonorously through a microphone. ‘Number eleven, go to heaven, take a dive, number five . . . on its own, number one . . .’ Above them hung the tawdry prizes for which they concentrated as though their lives would be altered by lime green furry bears, brilliant pink dolls, plastic skeletons, jigsaw puzzles and on the top tier only, dusty under the unforgiving lights, glass and brass table lamps with heavily frilled nylon shades, brilliant vases, sets of cheap tumblers, bigger teddy bears with bows, grinning pottery cats with glittery eyes, none of it worth the price of three tickets for a game or the yearning it inspired.