‘Sarah? Is that Charles? What’s the matter with him? Christ, he’s aged ten years. Is he hurt? The bastard. What are you doing? Let go, for God’s sake.’
She looked at him absently, his appearance a secondary consideration, spoke quietly.
‘If you hit him, I’ll kill you.’
Her own voice came from a great distance, followed by the cough which was Malcolm’s effort to control his voice before it became a murmur, strangled by his own, bitter emotion. He had slept with this woman. She had touched him. Now look at what she held, with the same intimacy.
‘So, Sarah my sweet. How could you? Is there anything you can’t touch? Anyone you don’t despise? How could you?’
She could not summon scorn. Could not say, Look, this is no more than a hunted man who is dying in pain and that is all I can acknowledge. Could not in her contempt of Malcolm’s futile clenched fists, even attempt to phrase a denial.
The pain drifted away and she still held him, protectively, knowing only that it was once handsome and proud Charles Tysall who held her hand as a talisman. Knowing too that there was nothing else she could do but hold on and lend warmth. No-one should die alone.
After the room became safely crowded and the rattle in his throat had ceased, she relinquished him calmly, watching the face turn from flushed to waxy pale, the lines of age and pain easing away in the immediacy of death. She walked out of the arcade past a silent phalanx of the men of the town and the hunting party, each staring more accusingly than the last. She walked the gauntlet with her head high, the mist teasing curls into her wild hair, blood on her hands and dirt on her clean clothes. Walked beyond the murmuring crowd, past the rising tide in the channels and the graceful swimming swans, until, beyond their sight, she broke into a run. The mist was wet on her face, the sea birds were silent, the earth was still, her stride punctuated only by the fierceness of her sobbing.
Hettie the sheep was still at the door, sporting her unequal horns and endless good nature. Oh to be sheeplike, docile and untroubled, satisfied, until the pointed horn of your life grew into your eye. Sarah picked the roses round the door, they owed her that, and put them in the back of her car. She rummaged in her case on the back seat for clean clothes, stripping and changing where she stood, obscured by the mist, wiping her hands on the garments she dropped, buttoning a clean blouse with shaking but efficient hands. She kicked what she had worn to one side, ever careless with her apparel, whatever it had cost. Clothes did not matter, they never had and they never would. Hettie began to eat her second outfit that week.
Late breakfast in the Pardoe household in a kitchen free of fishing utensils. Edward was giving up fishing, he was going away. Somewhere, he said. Joanna had long since told herself that in doing whatever he had done, he thought he was doing the best, although his notion of the best was no longer hers. It was more difficult to relinquish adoration than it was to relinquish love, everything would be all right in the end.
Julian and Edward were arguing, nothing altered except the tone, the tenor, the result, Edward still with that endless, hard-done-by element in his voice which he would have for ever, and if he ever found out why, he would only be worse.
I shall have to say goodbye, Sarah told herself at the door, look Edward in the eye to make my promise of blackmail stick. Julian was arguing in measured tones. Joanna cooked at the Raeburn, flushed and serene, with that hint of high anxiety which would always be hers. Mouse sat at one end of the mess-free table, eating nuts for breakfast, wearing a swimming-costume under her dressing-gown. She had things to do later; she would never make concessions to clothes, or ever buy new ones. She might, reluctantly, abandon the hats.
The appearance of Sarah, fresh and pale, sunny and clean, riveted attention and brought to the surface of every face a slight blush of shame. Joanna blushed least, for being nothing but inattentive to the guest in the face of greater dramas, but then it took little to activate her guilt towards what was only the hired help and ever so briefly, confidential friend and exemplar. All the same, her skin grew the colour of ripe strawberry.
Julian’s blush was more moderate, reaching up towards his sandy hair with the same sting of hospitable conscience as Jo, but also for his confessions and his cure, for what he had said and done so joyfully in the middle of the night. The mild coloration of Edward’s sallow skin was merely the result of a temporary worry about whether the guest had come to tell on him, a momentary sense of panic soon dismissed. Sarah’s smile, the conscious cheerfulness reminiscent of the ideal girl next door rather than the airs and graces of a high-powered lawyer paid by the day, made all of them feel better. She sat as if she could never take offence in a million years, looking like someone on the way out to play netball with the team. Joanna pushed a mug of coffee towards her which she took with exaggerated thanks. They all began to relax. Except Mother, who kept her nose buried in a newspaper.
‘All’s well with the world,’ Sarah said lightly, looking towards no-one in particular, ignoring the little lump in her throat. ‘They’ve found the ghost. Poor man, dead at the back of the amusement arcade. Something he ate.’
From all sides of the table came a palpable sigh of relief. Julian caught her eye and smiled with full magnetic glare. Sarah wished she could afford dislike for mere weakness, but that, along with hatred and judgement, was a luxury.
And I’m going home now, she was going to say, before the Big Ben chimes of the ice-cream van impinged, first distant then strident, dah da, dah da! Louder and louder, scorching not to the front door of the ugly old pile, but the back, by the cabbage patch, the van itself assuming a new intimacy with this terrain. They would not be the landowning Pardoes for long. Everyone would be welcome.
‘Ernest will send in the bill,’ Sarah yelled at Julian above the din of scraped-back chairs and the headlong rush to the door, led by Mother, all of them wanting a distraction.
‘Of course. Thank you for everything,’ was all he said.
When the red car with the dented wing drove slowly past the front of the house, the ice-cream chimes still rang, like church bells at a wedding, the harbinger of good news, so demanding no-one noticed the sound of an engine going away. Rick’s news would be repeated a thousand times, like the tune of the chimes. Stonewall, back on the road of living and loving, demanding a video, and could he borrow the sheep for a visit and what kind of dog should they get? And Rick knowing exactly the right kind. And that other fucker, that ghost, well he’s really dead. This time.
In a half-hour wake of the van, another car, small, blue, undented, well looked after, pulled hesitantly to the front of the house. Malcolm Cook decanted his long limbs, walked in the direction of celebratory sound. No-one had turned off the ice-cream bell; it grated in his ears. Rick was high on coffee and wine, slow on the introductions. For the moment, the tall, dark man who could hunt so assiduously and run like a dream was just another stranger.
‘Come to collect Miss Fortune,’ he said with the half-apologetic, half-aggressive tones of a taxi driver.
‘She’s gone,’ someone said, he was not sure who. ‘You’re too late.’ Rick looked at him sideways, wondering, for the first time, exactly who he was.
‘Too late,’ he chanted, sounding just like Stonewall.
Well beyond the town, out on the coast road, travelling fast, until she found the turning and bumped down the track she had found before. She moved the car to the very edge where shingle met sand on this flat coast. The mist was peculiarly local: ten miles away from Merton’s quay it did not exist. She looked at the retreating sea, the stretch of warm sand, stayed inside the confines of her car, with the bordello in the back, the shawl to decorate a room, the virtue to decorate a life, the odd crate of booze, the remnants of fear packed along with the clothes, and felt no longer drawn to the water. Thought of Elisabeth Tysall’s headstone with remote satisfaction. Who loves you, beautiful? I do.
Thought of pleading with Charles Tysall a year ago, standing in front of the mirror in her
flat while he accused her. You have no virtue to protect, do you? he had said, despising the offer she had made of her body in return for her life. You are nothing: a woman is nothing without virtue. Looking at the sea, Sarah remembered what she had replied, and what she would say now. She had said then, Of course I have virtue. I do not torment or abuse. I leave when I am not welcome. I do not trespass or take anything from anyone, except my own payment which need not be money. I keep every secret which is entrusted in me. I do not really know the meaning of malice. I like to live without rules, that is all, and that is a kind of virtue no-one values.
Virtue all the same. She left the bleakness of the warm sand with all its temptations, turned away from the coast. Found a deserted lane, full of meadowsweet so prolific, so untouched by human hand, it hid the car from sight. She took a bottle of warm champagne from the supplies in the back and a beaker from the glove compartment in the front. After she had disposed her legs comfortably through the window, she lit a cigarette and wondered, Now where shall I go next? What shall I be next, now I am free?
There did not seem anything wrong with going on exactly as before.
About the Author
FRANCES FYFIELD has spent much of her professional life practicing as a criminal lawyer, work which has informed her highly acclaimed novels. She has been the recipient of both the Gold and Silver Crime Writers’ Association Daggers. She is also a regular broadcaster on Radio 4, most recently as the presenter of the series ‘Tales from the Stave.’ She lives in London and in Deal, overlooking the sea, which is her passion.
www.francesfyfield.co.uk
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Also by Frances Fyfield
A Question of Guilt
Shadows on the Mirror
Trial by Fire
Shadow Play
A Clear Conscience
Without Consent
Blind Date
Staring at the Light
Undercurrents
The Nature of the Beast
Seeking Sanctuary
Looking Down
The Playroom
Half Light
Safer Than Houses
Let’s Dance
The Art of Drowning
Blood from Stone
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book was originally published in 2012 by Little, Brown Book Group.
PERFECTLY PURE AND GOOD. Copyright © 1994 by Frances Fyfield. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition MARCH 2014 ISBN 9780062301345
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