Perfectly Pure and Good

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Sarah said coldly. ‘I’ve been visited here by all members of your family. You give me the impression you’re more comfortable out of your own home than in it. Sit down.’ The charm and the warmth were back, the teasing note uppermost, some of the edginess gone.

  ‘Have you been home yet?’ she asked in that steady, reassuring, conversational way. Edward, in common with his colleagues after lunch, smelled slightly of the pub where he had gone and sat for an hour or more after an abortive and hesitant search of the caravan site and the dunes had revealed nothing of the white-haired man. Emptiness and sunset had ended the search: Edward was secretly afraid of the dark. He shook his head.

  ‘I went to look for someone,’ he muttered. ‘Why?’

  ‘Ah, you might not know then. The village ghost took human form this afternoon. He came up here and attacked your mother. She’s all right,’ she added, watching him closely, standing away from him, arms crossed. Edward sat heavily, rubbed his eyes with a pathetic gesture which made him look like an overgrown baby.

  ‘Not the first time he’s been here, though, is it?’

  Edward did not answer, his silence an affirmation.

  ‘I was present, you see,’ she went on, ‘when this nonghost arrived. Your mother said to him, and I quote, “You’re a friend of my son Edward, I’ve seen you before.” She sees a lot, your mother. I suppose I imagined from that that it was you who acts as his liaison officer. Difficult to see how any man, even one as resourceful as Charles Tysall, could stay alive in secret when he’s supposed to be dead. Not without assistance. Not much, perhaps: he likes to move alone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Edward was suddenly angry. ‘Charles Tysall? He was drowned, last year. My . . . acquaintance said he was sent by the family, the wife’s family, that is. Maybe the wife’s brother. He was having a long holiday, he said, experimenting with living rough. He said he wanted to know—’

  ‘Who had buried Elisabeth Tysall in the sand,’ Sarah finished for him.

  ‘Yes,’ Edward said, dumbfounded. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Edward,’ Sarah said, ‘I’m beginning to think you’re an idiot. Not the genuine article maybe, but a very good pretence.’ She unfolded her arms. He looked up at her like an animal waiting to be whipped. She smiled slightly. It scarcely lessened her intimidation.

  ‘I offered your brother a drink, so I suppose I’d better do the same for you.’ It was grudging. Watching her move about, Edward was paralysed with the sense of his own weakness and an awful physical desire which he knew, even then, was going to loosen his thick tongue.

  ‘I knew Charles Tysall,’ she was saying. ‘I also know he was obsessed with the fate of his wife. There’s no doubt about identity, so where do you come in?’

  ‘He hit Stonewall Jones this morning,’ Edward burst out, ignoring the question. ‘I can’t believe he did that. I can’t think why. He’s not a ghost, he’s a monster. The boy’s badly injured. Oh God, I never meant this. Honestly, I never meant this.’

  Sarah’s hand flew to her head with a brief cry. She felt along the side of her face where the pain had been, tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘Oh, poor boy, poor child. Oh, I wish I knew how to pray.’

  Edward sipped his drink, wondering if he should respond to that since he felt nothing for Stonewall Jones, could only see in his mind’s eye the relative sizes of tall man against small, helpless boy. Julian would have liked sitting here, sipping excellent Glenfiddich, he thought by way of distraction. The thought came upon him without a trace of bitterness. Jealousy merely lingered.

  ‘I shouldn’t play games, should I?’ Edward asked. ‘I found him squatting in the cottage next door to this.’ He jerked his head to the right, winced. ‘It seemed amusing not to report him. I didn’t want tenants in the place this summer, hate them, kids, buckets and spades, cars, spoiling the view. So Charles, if we must call him that, started a small fire for me. Nothing too drastic. Nothing which would spread.’

  She inclined her head, as if understanding completely.

  ‘There were also a few of my paintings in there. Joanna in the nude. Didn’t want her to see them if she spring-cleaned, didn’t know how else to get rid. They were a bit . . . suggestive. Watercolours, easy to burn. Painted from imagination, of course. Wishful thinking.’

  ‘Are you in love with her?’ A gentle question, without criticism or condemnation. He was grateful for that.

  ‘Am I? I don’t know any more.’

  ‘Jealous of other men, though?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jealous of Julian?’

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ he shouted. ‘He’s so dependable, so bloody adult, so sodding disciplined and my father loved him. He doesn’t even need to learn to fish!’

  He subsided as suddenly as his voice had risen, flung himself back against the plaid-covered sofa, petulantly. His own native defences of self-justification surfaced. He looked at her unforgiving eyes, looked away.

  ‘Anyway,’ he mumbled, ‘owning a ghost was good sport for a while. I’m so bored, most of the time. Then he began to ask about Julian, how well he’d known Elisabeth Tysall. Well, I knew all about that. Julian just about lost his mind over that bitch, I watched him. The ghost wanted proof that Julian had something to do with her death. I pretended it existed but I knew it didn’t. Julian’s too soft to hurt anyone.’

  ‘Elisabeth Tysall was a victim,’ Sarah said sharply. ‘Don’t dare call her a bitch. You don’t know what she was.’

  ‘No,’ Edward conceded. Guilt was corrosive, it caught in the throat like a fishbone.

  ‘So,’ Sarah said, ‘you played make-believe with Charles as your creature. Thought you had the upper hand. Where is he, Ed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Edward whispered. ‘I just don’t know. I gave him the key to an empty caravan. He isn’t there. Maybe a beach hut, somewhere on the beach, he likes the beach.’

  She was so powerful, she seemed to draw the words from him, like a fish on the line with no power to escape. Still standing in front of him Sarah pulled her shirt over her head. A pretty colour, russet silk, Edward noticed, thinking at the same time, Christ, she’s mad; she’s going to strangle me with it. She pulled the shirt as far as her shoulders, left it bunched round her neck and turned her back on him. The gesture was shocking and bizarre; made him recoil with a small, half scream.

  ‘Please look at my back,’ she commanded. ‘Go on, look. With your artistic eye. Look closely, report what you see.’

  He wanted to avert his eyes, escape from this threatening action, but he stood awkwardly and looked. A graceful spine, curving into a tiny waist, the silky flesh criss-crossed with scars, three or four larger gashes, the majority small pit marks, white against the brown of her skin, ugly. She pulled the shirt back over her naked torso abruptly, leaving him relieved, shivery, revolted but aroused.

  ‘I just wanted to make a point,’ she said wryly. ‘Cuts like that are what you get for playing games with Charles Tysall. He makes you roll in broken glass. He holds you down among the fragments of a broken mirror. And when you’ve finished bleeding, although you never really do, he’ll leave you thinking it was all your own fault.’

  Edward had stared. With his eye for colour, he could imagine the vibrant blood welling from those wounds, flesh and skin mashed in ritualistic flogging. He could see the cool smile of the man this morning, the precision of his movements, the air of efficiency.

  ‘He did that?’

  ‘Oh yes. Slowly.’

  Edward stumbled into the kitchen and retched into the sink. Bile was all he could produce, the residue of a day without food, no sisterly sandwiches to fill the gap, nothing but two pints, three sips of whisky and a diet of anxiety. He drank some water, looked out into the dark, recovered himself, came back with a mumbled apology.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Sarah, equably, but dry. ‘I confess I don’t usually receive quite such a flattering reaction when I take off my clothes.
’

  Edward blushed, relaxed more than slightly. Even like this, so serious and frightening, she was able to make a man think there was nothing incurable about his own condition.

  ‘What shall I do, Sarah? What on earth shall I do?’ he asked humbly.

  She noted that he asked nothing about her own history, nothing about the scars, nothing which expressed concern about anyone other than himself. Men in extremis were always thus; she was used to it in the adult version, and this was a mere, play-acting boy. She sized him up, considered her own code for dealing with misery by the simple if temporary means of bodily comfort. The men in question needed to command affection and respect, this one commanded neither. All he deserved was a chance of redemption.

  ‘I don’t know. Stop dreaming of wealth and changing the landscape into something you might like. You hate this place, leave it. You’re the younger son, the under-achiever, your sister says. You’ll always be powerless here. Make a break for somewhere else, before your last friend rumbles you.’

  ‘Leave? With nothing?’ he asked incredulously, glancing at the table, full of papers, brief notes in neat handwriting, valuations, lists.

  ‘Yes. Enough to sustain you for a while, perhaps. There won’t be much of an inheritance anyway. Not after your mother’s finished with it.’

  He looked at her, the pink spots on his cheeks an alien version of his sister’s. Sarah spoke patiently.

  ‘She wants to give it back, Edward dear. She wants to give back all this property to the local people who need it. That’s what she wants.’

  He started to laugh. A whinnying chuckle which went on and on until his eyes streamed.

  ‘You need food and an injection of sense, Edward Pardoe. You never felt this way before working up at the estate agent’s and discovering how much you might have, did you? You can get away with dreaming and painting and doll’s houses, Ed; you might even make a living at it, but you can’t get away with murder.’

  Food. The thought was no longer beguiling. Charles lurched in the narrow alleyway which skirted the back of Miss Gloomer’s cottage, leading by a route as twisted as her frame into the high street. The village was criss-crossed with similar environs, ancient rights of way, coal- and fish-delivery routes before the days when anyone would even dream of pulling a horse and cart in front of their own small doors, when families lay cheek by jowl in houses Rick found adequate for one.

  Food was not the problem for Charles: enough for the day was all he could contemplate after the sandwiches which had scarcely touched his rotting teeth. Something in the solidity of the scones, like hairs tickling his throat, made him cough, stand where he was and gag, left him thirsty even after the milk which had washed them down.

  There were fresh-water taps on the caravan site, easily found by dark when no-one looked. Too soon to go back to the beach, too far to go without water.

  ‘Give me water,’ he whispered, ‘and there is nowhere I cannot go, nothing I cannot do, even if I am beaten by women; rendered impotent by the weaker sex, when I could have snapped their necks like killing chickens, just like that.’

  He had no plans, there was no point in planning, but a dim feeling that he was running out of time for revenge. The image of Sarah Fortune, snarling at him, superimposed itself on the image of his Elisabeth’s face, but then these two images had always been blurred. Red hair, red bitches; a feeling of weakness. Was I always like this? Was I never strong? Who loved me?

  There was a tap in the graveyard. Perhaps if he went to the second grave of his wife, where he had left the thistles, she might let him in to sleep. Come back to him, chastened, beautiful, the way she was before. Porphyria. Perfectly pure and good. He would tell her he forgave her, raise her from the dead, the way he had raised himself from the sea.

  His footsteps were quiet in the dark; an old man padding through a village, unable to force himself to the brisk military walk, tardy, irritated by his own lack of strength, spitting on the ground in contempt of his own sloth, failing to see the blood in the phlegm on the road by the wicket-gate. By the side of her grave, he could almost believe she would rise and greet him; knelt, suddenly humble, felt for her shape in the dark.

  His hands felt the petals. Someone had prepared her. The ground was covered with fresh flowers, damp from the rain, smelling of heaven. Gifts for a lovely lady.

  Someone. Some man, some thief in the night had borne these tributes. Charles scattered the flowers in a fury of moving hands and kicking feet, ignoring the onset of pain as he bent and tore at roses and daisies, breaking the stems, flinging them as far as he could, kicking the containers, not caring about the sound, stamping on petals as if putting out a fire in a ritual dance of fury, finally lying down on the naked earth which covered her. An innocent piece of earth. Even beyond death, even now, just as he forgave her, someone else had laid their claims first, just as they had before. It had all been for nothing.

  No-one has claim to my image, Mouse Pardoe thought, not liking the indecision, not one little bit. She was being allowed only one ally at a time, most of them leaving her for diplomatic reasons, the verger first, Sarah later. They had talked a little about the ghost and who he was, and all this time, Mouse kept her hands in icy water. The verger, fisherman born, had dealt with the worms; there was now a ghastly smell of roasted flesh about the place, centred round the Raeburn, drifting through windows but determined to linger.

  The sky remained the colour of gun metal. Mouse thought she would always remember the colours of the room; the verger’s black against the pinkness of his skin, Sarah’s pallor, her freckles, the hair, the russet colour of her shirt, then the colours of the best Pardoe hat with old feathers on the table, the surface of which seemed to glow a dirty yellow. She only noticed then the total absence of the yellower scones with their little bullets of burnt sultanas. She must have been mad. How could she? She talked to Sarah, a little irrationally and over-expansively, about her life, burbling, she said in apology, and all the time she looked at the space where her baking had been. There had been no-one looking when she had made those scones and still she had made them.

  Mouse was chill beneath her evening frock and woolly dressing-gown, a combination of garments she would otherwise enjoy. A little lonely, too, but not enough to shout down the earlier suggestions of getting a doctor. ‘I’ve got one of those,’ she said to Sarah, ‘and a daughter, although I hate the thought of relying on either.’ Mouse noticed, quietly, that dear Miss Fortune had been uneasy as well as practical about calling the police. They met each other’s eyes over the dialling in a mutual suspicion of authority. The police might question, Mouse thought, the quality of her baking. And the motives, which she could not now remember.

  Then Joanna came home. After thirty minutes of PC Curl’s questioning, a process as slow as Sarah’s delivery was quick, she took the Biro from his hand and wrote it all down for him. Then Sarah left too, just before Julian arrived and there they all were, the whole business protracted by news which put it in perspective. En famille, with all the complications of being so. Oh dear.

  The trouble was, Mouse Pardoe did not know whether she should go on being sweetly mad or loudly sane. It had been so pleasant, even with blistering hands, to talk to the only two people in the world who knew she could think. She missed it sorely, could not decide whether to keep up her act with her daughter and son, could not even quite remember when it had started or why, could not imagine, above all, how she would explain herself for all these months of calculated pretence. Julian was looking at her closely. The stuff he had put on her throbbing hands had been applied, she noticed, with peculiar gentleness. No. Good Lord, no; she could not keep up her twittering birdsong, not after hearing what the same ghost had done to Stonewall Jones, the boy who had waved and danced for her in the garden whenever he brought up bait for Edward. Her own hands, her own fortune, were not important enough by comparison, and besides, her children were listening to her, really listening, not even pretending.

  ‘
I think the shock seems to have cleared your mind a bit, Mother,’ Julian was saying, without talking as if she was deaf all the time. She glanced at him slyly. He did not seem to be playing games; like Joanna, he was honestly and simply concerned, listening with both ears. Jo flitted round the kitchen, bringing back bits and pieces of bland food, the panacea for all ills; Julian offered the wine. Each time Jo passed, she hugged her mother. Mouse had missed the hugging which was something a mad woman denied herself, if not with the verger, certainly with her children.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ she said demurely to Julian. ‘I do believe my mind is feeling better. Now, what is PC Curl going to do?’

  ‘Send out a patrol car regularly overnight to us, then organize a search party in the morning. That policeman can’t do anything too quickly. He isn’t the type.’

  His father was not slow, Mouse thought, with a secret, reminiscent smile. Now there had been a neat and nimble figure of a man with a twinkle in the eye to match, oh yes. Tuesday afternoons, for a long time, he was.

  ‘A ghost hunt,’ she murmured, forgetting to add a manic giggle. Should she say who she knew the ghost was, or say she had seen him with Edward? She could keep her powder dry until she found out what other people knew. Her conscience was variable in its hints, but he was always on it, whatever he did.

  ‘I don’t think the search party should include Rick,’ Jo said. ‘There’s no telling what he would do. Julian, what’s the hope for Stonewall? Rick loves him.’

  They sat at table, comfortably elbow to elbow.

  ‘Well, I can only say that will help.’

  She rested her head against his shoulder, briefly, the first time they had touched in as long as she could remember. He ruffled her blond hair fondly; she did not resist.

  Mouse looked at them. Children, love one another; and where is my little changeling, Edward? Love me, love one another, but listen to me sometimes. That was all I wanted. I think. She chuckled.

  ‘When that Stonewall comes home in the ice-cream van, I shall dance like Tallulah Bankhead.’