Perfectly Pure and Good (29 page)

`Think I just saw someone going up the high street.' They both turned, uncertainly, uphill.

Sarah could smell him first, an animal in a lair, surrounded by the stench of faeces and fear. He was lying with his back propped against one of the dead machines, levered against it for support.

The pathetic outline of him emerged first from the half light in there, then the details. The track-suit bottoms had slid down from scraping along the ground, his thin hands were clasped over his stomach above his genitals which flopped in pathetic splendour. Hung like a donkey. His face wore the rictus of a smile, a dirty face, furrowed with tears.

She tried to make her voice harsh, summon up the hatred.

`Something you ate?' she said, standing over him, willing him to look at her with the unblinking eyes which looked towards the light instead. 'Shame on you, Charles Tysall, you made me offer to rut like a pig, and now, you look like a pig.'

How pathetic an insult, and then, suddenly she was weeping. He had been a handsome man once, lithe as a tiger, long limbed, broad shouldered, a prowler with infinite grace, a predator, but such a beautiful man, proud in his body and his obsessions, fastidious, wicked and still beautiful.

Never a man to crawl: it became him as ill as a wounded tiger, a rogue elephant with no notion of human distress. She thought of the hooks which might not have damaged a younger, stronger man, but tore at the weaker fabric of this gaunt and starving fugitive with the terrible glitter still in his piercing blue eyes. The rictus turned into a recognizable smile; he held out his hand, the long, elegant fingers flexing, then trembling, trying to summon into a small gesture some remnants of the old arrogance

Ìmperfectly pure and good,' he whispered. 'Look at me, Elisabeth. Are you satisfied?'

She remembered the hands, slender, manicured soft, caressing her body, spanning her neck, the buckle of his belt biting into her spine, the softness of his balls a cushion against her buttocks before the glass splintered and with it, all limitations on his calculating savagery. Felt the last, great spate of anger against him, remembering that torture, and then even with her own screams in her own ears, the anger died.

She tried to retrieve it, hold the need for revenge, felt it slip away as she watched, disgust mixed with compassion, with the treacherous, wasteful pity for him winning in the end. The body was merely a man, a thing, twisting and grimacing, trying now to pull up its trousers in some pathetic attempt at half-remembered modesty. She stooped, indifferent to the smells of sweet, sour and rancid, helped him. He was warm and clammy, screamed when she touched him and there was no satisfaction, even in that.

Water for the saliva crusted round the mouth: she did not want him to be seen this way, sharing for a brief moment the pride which made him want to cover himself, but when she rose from her haunches to find the sink, he uttered a groan of despair. The tap in the other room yielded water onto a rag; when she knelt again and applied it to his face, he moaned again with pleasure, sucked at the cloth with the greediness of a baby on a nipple.

They stayed thus, wordless, she holding him round the shoulders, feeling the bones, keeping the cloth to his face, murmuring nothings, wondering what next to do, with the tears still coursing down her face, dropping onto his skin.

`Do you forgive me, Porphyria?' the voice rattled, bubbling from the chest.

She could not say so, could not utter a clear word. She did not forgive him, either in her own right or on behalf of her friend Elisabeth, but she could not bear to see him suffering either.

The door to the back yard opened with a scraping sound; there were soft footsteps, a pair of training shoes, an increase in the light and then a tall shadow towering above them. Charles had hold of her hand, her arm wrapped across his chest; she tightened her hold, felt the papery skin of his palm, while she listened to a gasp of anger, felt the alien tension of bone and muscle, the intake of breath before effort, the scent of violent rage which would never emanate from Charles now. She held him closer, looked up like a fierce little animal. Malcolm stood above her, fists clenched, legs braced, a fighter ready to pounce.

He spoke through gritted teeth.

`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.

Ìf 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 Rayburn, 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, rivetted 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.

Àll'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.

Èrnest 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.

Òf course. Thank you for everything,' was all he said.

When the red car with the dented wing droves lowly 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.