Perfectly Pure and Good (23 page)

`Talk to him,' Julian said to Rick. 'Tell him things. Make him blink.'

The eyes of the child were wide and rolling. Rick told him things.

`What do you think, eh, Stoney? I reckon that Omen III game is a load of shit. I thought we'd get that one with tigers in, street fighters V111? Bit easy do you reckon? Such a smart arse, you are, just ‘cos you can do ‘em all . tell you what ,you can order one all on your own. I'll get you a special cushion for the seat. Like the Queen. No? I'll get you a pin-up then, Madonna. Who done it, Stoney?'

`Ghost,' the boy said loud and clear. 'That one. Drowning.'

`You were right about Omen, I'm telling you,' Rick was saying in a conversational murmur.

`Crappy game, that was. Could do with a game about drowning. Ghost, you said? Didn't know about that one.'

`Ghost,' the boy said. He raised a hand in protest and closed his eyes. Rick turned his head away, fierce with fury.

Ìs this any good?' he muttered. 'That bastard. Is anything any good?'

`Perfect,' said Julian. 'Perfect. Keep talking. Everything's fine. Keep talking. Ask him things.'

Àbout ghosts?'

Ànything to make him blink.'

The day had been long. The people were fractious, holiday-makers fussy, demanding the spice of the Mediterranean to go with the weather, rebelling against chips. There was a near riot down by the caravan site when the shop ran out of ice-cream and the van did not appear. Inside the hairdresser's, the heat was stifling, the gossip stifling too, old repetitions of everlasting tales without topical edge, no-one wanting, yet everyone needing a storm, not a mild belt of rain like the day before, but a storm with noise.

When the news filtered through, about Stonewall Jones somehow running into a tree, going off to hospital in Rick's ice-cream van because Dr Pardoe reckoned it was quicker than waiting for an ambulance, it was no more serious than the accident that morning on the Norwich road, or someone failing to return a rent-a-bike from Mr Walsingham, getting drunk and throwing it into the quay. Someone went to see Stonewall's mother, but she was out, gone to pick up the pieces, the way a woman did. Inside the hairdresser's, where sweat trickled out behind cotton wool under the three dryers (40 per cent discount for senior citizens), they could have done with Mrs Pardoe, simply for the colour and the smell, turquoise or gold or silver, and the wafting scent of Yardley's lavender.

They waited for her at noon, again at one; then they looked at the sky and waited for rain.

Charles, coming off the beach, noticed before the others the signs of preternatural darkness, waited his turn for obscurity. He watched the other fools from the stable door of his beach hut, all of them, English holiday-makers who should have known that rain and cold were never more than a breath away on a coast which did not have a climate, only weather; watched them balancing the act until beyond the last minute, gazing, commenting on the lowering sky as it sank so low it merged with the land, continued watching, saying, Will it rain? Scrambling for cover only when the big spitting fell and it was far too late to avoid a soaking.

Like other Anglo-Saxons further afield in fetes and garden parties, the result the same as with these bewildered troops trailing away from the beach, along with Charles, wondering if he could beg another ice-cream on the way as long as his white hair was plastered to his head, his shirt sleeves rolled, trousers turned, his jacket over his arm, his eyes pink and full of sand.

No van, no food, simply the burning which spread from gut to brain and back again, an infection which began to consume, while he began to march, like a prisoner, along with the others who shuffled away into caravans, the bedraggled few who could still laugh, aiming for the town down the causeway.

He was beyond food; the paper in his back pocket, dry as his bones, crackled when he touched; hatred replacing hunger. Other visions, fables of revenge and failure. Lying, rolling, groaning in the dark while a man went on kicking. Sticking glass in the neck of a red-haired bitch. The dog on the beach, his hands round a neck, what was her name? Sarah. What had he done to Sarah?

There were benches along the causeway. Towards the end Charles sat. The sky was black, each feature of every building clearly defined. The short and vigorous shower stopped, temporarily out of mischief, leaving the light of thunder, the fantastic, promising light before a storm.

Sarah, that was her name. One of the other redheads, the whore. She who had so captured his fancy when he had seen her flying through the foyer of Ernest Mathewson’s office, the soul of innocent perfection, grinning like a little girl who found life nothing more than a glorious joke.

Wearing a red coat clashed with her hair in a deliberate anarchy amounting to a kind of brilliance when combined with that untouched sophistication which seemed to be her hallmark. So Ernest had said, through several layers of suspicion, when asked.

Ernest always answered questions from valuable clients like Charles Tysall, not always truthfully. Our dear Sarah, he had said; such a celibate young woman, devoted to her career.

Charles had pursued. Asked her out to dinner and made her wait; discovered in her an unnerving indifference, followed her, had her followed. Felt himself hounded by her, the facsimile of the old wife, the ideal model for the new, touched, as yet, by nothing but loyalty. Perfectly pure and good, fine, fair . .. Other women jumped through hoops like circus dogs, responding to the click of his fingers. Not this one. Not this whore who slept with old men and young, judges, silks and boys, sullied herself with life's lonelier inadequates, ignored his superior gifts for a careless, dirty life like that, and so disgraced him. Imperfectly pure, imperfectly good.

The thought gnawed at him, like a rat on leather. Nothing could meet his hunger then, or the different kinds of hunger now Charles examined his hands, noticed the veins, the knuckles made more prominent by receding flesh, then saw with a shock that his intertwined fingers were resting on the pummel of Miss Gloomer's distinctively stolen stick, clutching it like an old man.

Foolish, stupid, beyond bravado, sitting on the edge of town nursing a prop dishonestly obtained by local standards, if certainly not by his own. He had taken it because he wanted it, therefore, logically, it became his. Like a wife, or a lover, or money. Until one of them refused and made a man descend into this darkness. A man had beaten him. He had lost all his power until he had floated out of the sea.

Scornfully, Charles donned his damp jacket, buttoned it over his thin chest with the stick concealed, the pummel forming a lump inside the shoulder and the end of the stick protruding like a shortened third leg. He began to walk, across the quay, by now deserted save for those sitting inside cars in a state of martyred enjoyment, obscured from view by the rain outside and the condensation within. The amusement arcade heaved with people, music, electronic sound, the smell of candyfloss and onions making Charles faint. He swallowed, turned up the collar of his coat, went on walking down east quay and beyond, as innocent as anyone hurrying home. His home was the beach hut, the barn, the church porch. He knew no other.

Remembering his purpose, to make the hunger work, he turned towards East Wind House.

`More tea, sweetheart? I'll go.'

Mouse Pardoe lay on her bed alongside the verger, each with a cup of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, the coverlet over their knees. Everyone applauded the verger's good works in visiting the sick and the elderly (of which breed he was one of the more able-bodied), while only himself and his friend Mouse knew that these weekday visits were not exactly philanthropic.

They simply knew one another, in the biblical sense. They had known one another for a very long time, a knowledge of herself which Mrs Pardoe had shared with several men of the village who had the right qualifications. Namely, that they must treat her with an entirely non-possessive affection during Mr Pardoe's long business trips, and that their discretion should be bigger than their body weight. She liked them small and neat, in direct contrast to the bulky physique of Mr P. Such teeny-weeny infidelities of hers began as a game of tit for tat, then they became quite a delightful habit. One had to get on with life.

These days, she and the verger were usually content with a cuddle and the delicious comfort of secret trust. In both their eyes, a proper christian attitude only meant refraining from judgement, hurting no-one, and taking God's gifts wherever they could grab them.

The verger was about to agree to a little more tea and perhaps a soupcon of alcohol to go with the splutter of the rain on the windows, when Mouse, as much by instinct as by fine tuning, heard the watchdog bleating of the sheep at the front of the house below her window. She did not spoil Hettie for nothing. She put a finger to her lips; the verger replaced cup in saucer with elaborate care, grinned without alarm since this was not the first time they had been interrupted. All he had to do was to move to the chair by the bed, adopt the less comfortable position of a Church of England comforter while Mouse adjusted her dress and put her hat back on straight. Then she would start talking loudly and that was all there was to it. This time she shook her head. `Wait,'

she said. 'No car. I'll go and see.'

The pain in Sarah's head somehow lifted when the heavens opened to release the rain and the sky began to rumble like a giant's indigestion. She had spent the morning working on the estate, tabulating lists of properties, how long the lease, how easy to sell, value per area, inspired guesswork dogged by the stabbing behind the eyes. Frequent trips to the kitchen window showed the absence of cars outside the big house, all except her own.

Another was parked well short of the grounds, probably a walker. Perhaps Mrs Pardoe, all alone, did not like the rumblings of thunder; Sarah did not fool herself that she crossed the wet lawn for charity but as much for company, the continuance of yesterday's conversation, which had begged more questions than those it had answered, left her curious for more. There was something about Mouse which made her feel kindred: something she liked and a degree of unscrupulousness she could only admire.

The sheep cantered towards her and then wandered away, appreciating friend rather than stranger. Sarah went through the open back door into the kitchen, where all was quiet with mid-afternoon languor. A pile of crazy-looking sandwiches lay on the pine table, bread cut to the size of slabs, the fillings of yellow cheese and pâté uninvitingly solid and nasty against the white dough, the whole edifice like some comic, plastic joke, a sandwich made by a child in its first stumbling lesson in home economics. Next to it, a row of sunken, sultana scones which made those in the tea shop a study in refinement.

There was another motive in her visiting, apart from the desire, part personal, part professional, to intrude upon Mrs Pardoe while she was alone. Sarah needed milk. It seemed impolite to call through the house as though summoning a dog, so she crept instead out into the hall which led to the front door, into the dining room and living rooms, sensing the warmth of recent presence, the smell of erratic polishing, noticing the dead flowers left on a table from last Thursday's dinner, the half-drawn curtains and on the first rung of the stairs leading up, a feather from a hat.

Knowing she was an intruder, Sarah went on upstairs, stood on the landing at the top. From one of the front bedrooms, she heard the murmur of voices, backed away, then paused. Another door was ajar. Sarah went towards it, peered inside.

Edward's room, she could tell at a guess. There was an easel by the window which commanded the best view in the house. It was the view which drew her first, then the easel, depicting its strange, over-precise, hate-inspired version of the view. She turned away from it, disturbed. Then she looked inside a doll's house, the roof of which had collapsed, the rooms inside intact. Little figures, grotesque, clutching one another. Books on the floor, the room of a dreamer.

Embarrassment flooded over her: her behaviour was that of a spy. She could not call out for Mouse now, not when she was already upstairs. Quietly, she crept out, back down to the kitchen.

She could just collect the milk then, for the fourteenth coffee of the day. A large and venerable refrigerator rumbled in the corner of the kitchen, circa 1955 with a rounded shape and a crusted handle. Inside, a medley of food and leftovers, but no milk, and she could not somehow take the milk from the table. Then Sarah remembered Joanna getting pints from the larder and went in that direction.

She stood inside the door, amazed. The place was armed for a siege with durable products, jam jars by the dozen, full and empty, honey and lemon curd, sugar bags in rows, enough tea for a year, six pints of milk, two open and rancid, as well as four half-eaten pies, some weary lettuce, two cabbages from the garden with a faint smell of age, four loaves of bread, a side of ham, a dish of pate, a half-eaten trifle, a dozen tins each of peaches, pineapple, tuna, sardines, sweetcorn and beans. It looked like the style of provisioning suitable for a bunker. The crooked chocolate cake she had seen before, untouched and not improved by the keeping, although the air in here was as moist as a cellar. On the flagstone floor was newspaper, damp and messy, incongruous among the food.

The door swung to behind her, the pantry suddenly dark with some light from the storm-laden sky penetrating from a single, small window, covered in wire mesh to deter the flies which had penetrated in small numbers and circled round the light bulb lazily, ignoring all else, especially the cake. Sarah felt the perverse desire to lift that paper on the floor, a test of strength and curiosity, a way of manufacturing bravery, since she knew what dwelt in a state of inertia beneath. Their brothers had been on her kitchen floor.

Òh, Bugger . . .' someone swore beyond the door.

The someone was in the kitchen. A hacking cough. Sarah froze, suddenly conscious of her squatting, interfering pose, doubled up further at the prospect of embarrassment. She was a licensed visitor, sir, so the law would say, allowed across these portals by common consent, but not to grub around on the flagged tiles in a pantry while no-one else was looking. There was something else, an ear for sound, which told her the cough, the shuffling out there, was neither Edward, Julian, Joanna nor the Mouse. Each voice had a pitch, an intonation as unique as a favourite singing star who could not be copied, and this, while still a faintly familiar, patrician voice, was not one recently heard. Outside the wired pantry window, Hettie the sheep was bleating with a pathetic aggression, the sound first in the distance, hidden by rain, moving closer as if she had turned a corner and yelled in surprise.