Perfectly Pure and Good (3 page)

These were the reasons she counted on her fingers as she reversed her car into the wall and heard the back wing crunch against concrete. Each reason had an element of truth. Malcolm would demolish them like a row of ninepins, argue with the full force of his finer feelings and his enlightened compassion. Finally, he might threaten her with ownership of the dog.

Sarah was feeling sufficiently liberated by the satisfying sound of mashed metal to recover her sense of humour. Perhaps that was all she wanted in the first place, not a lover who lived in the same building, whose father was her employer, but a dog.

The car was easily the flashiest of Sarah's possessions, a misguided bonus from the firm to keep her happy. The engine leapt into willing life at the merest touch, rather like Malcolm. From the outside it looked as if things had fallen into her lap. Which they had in the last year, with such crushing weight she reminded herself of a shopping trolley and it made the same sense as giving the world tour to a small, red squirrel.

Ernest Matthewson, close to retirement, inhabited a huge office decorated by his wife, which was why he could not get rid of all the humming birds climbing up the blinds and fluttering amongst the fabric of the chairs which were intended to make him feel thoroughly comfortable, a reminder of how he lived at home. Cushioned, catered for, resplendent, like a pasha on a throne, with a loving woman who bashed the heart and the ulcer by alternate feeding and starving of same.

He considered the dreams of slender youth, currently advanced to closeted luxury, weight control, client accounts, computers, goodwill, diplomacy and language. Sarah Fortune had been his choice: he had interviewed her years since, when she was freshly widowed, but he couldn't pretend she was partnership material, not in today's grey world. She was also the girl his wife favoured as daughter-in-law.

Ì disagree,' he said aloud, banging the desk, wincing. 'All right, ALL RIGHT! I still disagree!'

So: Sarah may well have turned his fat and isolated stepson into some semblance of a human being and brought him back into the fold, but one look at the child was enough to show the liaison would be a disaster. Women envied, youths simpered, clients salivated at the sight of Sarah, and although Ernest, out of respect to his age and his fragile health, did not follow suit, he considered his protégée as a jewel beyond price who belonged, for safety's sake, locked inside a watch.

He also loved her dearly in a manner which made him feel only slightly treacherous for hoping she would go away, even though a morning when her feet went by his office without pausing was a bleak day indeed. Having made his announcements to an empty room, Ernest listened.

She usually fell at the bottom step opposite his door, where the bad carpet curled against the good leading away from where important clients trod in quality shoes. The worn patch caught the headlong rush of her steps whenever she was blinded by the armful of flowers for her room and the minuscule briefcase containing some pretence of overnight work. As she tripped, she swore loudly. The sound of absent-minded obscenities made Ernest curl with laughter. He did not like to think what they did for his errant son.

Òh shit a fucking brick. Not again.' She spoke it in her low, musical voice, like a person reciting poetry. Ernest flung open his door, pretending to be angry, terrified in case she should be gone.

`What's wrong with you, woman? You do that every time and you always swear. I don't know.

What's the matter with your vocabulary?'

`What's wrong with your carpet, more to the point? Does this too, every time. I've just put a dent in the company car, nobody else's motor involved, you understand. Just some fucking concrete pillar.' She was standing there, grinning like a recently fed cat with half-clean paws, every inch of her unsuitable for the office of a solicitor of the supreme court, more like a bouncer at the Hippodrome if only she wasn't so tiny and so highly coloured.

The colour came from the freckled skin and the brilliant red hair. No-one could say she dressed like a siren, in a perfect camel brown dress, but there was something about that great, wide belt of soft, tan leather which made her look as edible as the bacon sandwich she proffered in his direction, shrouded in greasy paper, the whole gift presented with a grin.

`Yours,' she said. 'Oh, yes, and the racing pages. How's things?'

Ernest relaxed. His large stomach growled and sagged like a parachute landing. Sarah always made a man mindful of his girth, first to suck it in, then to let it out in glorious relaxation.

`Terrible,' he said. 'Awful, really. Come in. I've got a case for you. Should take you out of London for the summer. Come in.'

The words came out of his mouth before he could stop them and he turned away abruptly, winded by the devilish inspiration which had been incubating for many days and only now came into words. It was like delivering a baby with a knife. He was saddened too, at this instinctive combination of wanting her out of the way while knowing he would miss her. There was something about the effect she had had on their late client, Charles Tysall, to say nothing of his stepson, her ability to make strong men putty, along with something else which smacked of love and a profound suspicion.

Ònly if you want,' he added hurriedly, sitting to hide his confusion, lunging towards the bacon sandwich. Monday was always one of Mrs Matthewson's sensible days, Fridays were better.

Ì'm only suggesting you leave for a while to save me from this,' Ernest mumbled with his mouth full, feeling the decadent bacon grease creep down his chin. 'You're not good for my insides.'

`The bread's wholemeal,' said Sarah, tranquilly, as if that made all the difference. 'Full of fibre.'

She never had believed in diet, ate anything which was not moving. Looked at him with that complete acceptance she granted the human race. What she thought behind those great big eyes, he never questioned for fear of being told. Looking at his fidgeting, she thought how it was just as well that she and Malcolm and Malcolm's lovely mother had conspired to subvert Ernest's post bag and save him from the worst demands, as well as the hateful revelations, of his clients. Also, how she and Malcolm had managed to excuse her absence last year by saying she had suffered an accident.

She was a gifted liar. Making him ooh! and aghh! about the effects of a broken windscreen had been far better for his explosive ulcer and fragile heart than telling him the truth about a client.

Charles Tysall had done enough damage, most of it still unmended. Some people needed the truth. Others needed saving from their own beliefs that all clients were good chaps. Ernest was one of the latter. He might not have been once, but now his health made him so.

`Tell me about this case, then. I need amusement.'

`Very important client,' Ernest mumbled again.

Ìt can't be, or you wouldn't be sending me.'

Ernest sighed. 'Important by my standards, not by those of the partnership. Clients I've had for a long time.' He meant clients not eligible for the seduction of his junior partners, who rubbed grey-suited shoulders with bankers and accountants, captains of industry and Government officials, drinking mineral water at lunch-time, for God's sake, not a human being among them.

Ernest was well aware of being slightly redundant in the new generation, retained for the weight of his age and the number of nasty facts he knew about others, but Sarah had no chance. She was tolerated in the attics of the low-earning litigation department because someone had to do the odds and ends. The someone was preferably a woman without ambition. No partner would miss her for the summer. None of them guessed how valuable she was.

`Well, if these clients are important to you, I'll make them important to me. Why out of town?

When do I go? And what nasty thing do you want me to do?'

Ernest nearly fell out of his chair. For an idea with such a difficult, if spontaneous conception, this was all growing suspiciously fast. Not that she was usually unamenable to suggestion; the passivity hid the obstinacy of a mule, just like her smile hid depths of despair and a strange knowledge beyond her years, touching the parts other women did not reach. Too late, Ernest remembered Charles Tysall and where he had died.

A family estate,' he began, 'needs sorting out. By the sea. You're always saying you like the sea.'

Ì know nothing about probate. Or the sea.'

`What's that got to do with anything? Look, we're only talking about a family who need their heads knocking together. Just stick around, work out what they want, get a draft agreement on who should have what . . . the boffins and the Court of Protection can do the rest.'

Sarah dusted crumbs off her skirt. Ernest so admired the way she ate, like a delicate wolf.

Ì haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about. You'd better explain,' she said. He took a deep breath, prepared to mix fact with fiction in order to make the prospect more appealing.

`Large house in the country, right? No, not an ancestral mansion, but plenty of land, and . . . no, I'm not going to tell you why the estate is as big as it is. You can let that titillate the imagination and find out for yourself. It needs an entirely fresh mind, so the less you know the better. Family consists of two sons, one daughter, eighteen to thirty-four, I think, all of them at war.

Why? Dad died two years ago, left the whole caboodle to his wife for life, and then,' he rummaged on the desk, flicked the pages of a grease-stained photocopy, `. . . I quote, "to all my children in whatever shares my wife should decide". Perfectly poisonous will; he should have asked me to draft it, ungrateful sod. I did everything else. He must have been out of his mind.'

Ànd was he?'

`Probably, but not provably. The point is, his wife is. Off her rocker, barmy, barking, out of her tree.' He liked to mix metaphors. 'She's never going to be in a position to make a valid will. If she dies intestate, disaster. Terrible tax implications. The children aren't exactly carving each other up, I think they have straws between their teeth, or would it be sand? Needs an outside mind to construct an acceptable arrangement, working out who'll get what and when. Then they can run their lives peacefully until the old lady pops her clogs and even then, the transition will be easy.'

Sarah rose gracefully. 'You need an estate planner, not me,' she said.

Ì need a litigation expert who knows how to make people avoid litigation. I think you've got to be on the spot, hopeless otherwise. They'll put you up, always a spare cottage, they rent them out, saves expenses.' He was full of admiration for himself: everything dovetailed so neatly without him thinking at all. In fact, he rarely indulged deep thought.

She was standing over his desk, reached forward and pinched his cheek.

`Wake up, Ernest, will you? This is me, Sarah. You must detest these clients, or you wouldn't consider foisting me on them simply because you would like me to be a hundred miles away from Malcolm.'

`Sarah, nothing was further . .He was blushing like a schoolboy caught smoking in the lavatory, and she was smiling like an indulgent teacher who was going to forgive him.

`Nothing was closer to your mind, Ernest dear. Don't worry about it, please, but don't treat me like a fool. I may not deserve much, but I deserve better than that. Of course you're right to think I'm all wrong for Malcolm in the long run. I know that; he doesn't. Yet. It may take him some time. Now, do we understand one another?'

He could have wept. She sat down again.

`Don't fret, Uncle Ernest, please don't. Worry's infinitely worse for the ulcer than a bacon sandwich.' She looked at the grease-stained photocopy of a badly typed will. But is sending me to this particular part of East Anglia a clause in the master plan? Same village, I see, where Charles Tysall walked off and drowned, mimicking the actions of his wife the year before. You want to punish me or something?'

`No, no, I promise you . . . Sarah, I swear!'

`You've just told me not to do that. I believe you, but if you'll excuse the pun, I thought you might have wanted me to lay the odd ghost.'

Malcolm Cook did not have his stepfather's shrewd business acumen, nor did he think his life was ruined by the omission. He considered that less pay for more enlightenment was a good bargain. As for the rest of his limitless kindness, he had learned his compassion as well as his tolerance on the sharp learning curve of his own loneliness. The metamorphosis from laughable clown to thin athlete also made him an incurable optimist, most of the time, although not on this particular evening. 'You don't know anything about women,' Ernest had warned him, a truism liberally applied to the whole male sex, but one which was, in his case, less accurate than usual.

Malcolm's former fatness had only preserved a habit of celibacy, not innocence, making him a confidant rather than a practitioner, without rendering him naive. So had childhood illness. Even a once-fat man, helplessly in love and struggling to disguise it, knows when he is being abandoned.

There was no point in going back over old ground trying to work out where one or the other had failed, no point arguing; no purpose in analysing performance and saying 'if only'. He knew you cannot make a person stay if they want to go any more than you can make a tiger a truly tame beast, and with Sarah the analogy was sound since she had that sleekness, with none of the ability to maul or scratch. Nothing had been said, neither in her flat (where she hid her shopping from him), nor in his, where he had nursed her more than a little following the ministrations of obsessive Charles Tysall. They had survived a hot summer of healing wounds, a companionable winter of hot toddies, laughter and warm blankets and he had thought she was his for ever.

He should have known how no man is allowed to assume anything. In the spring, he could feel her straining the leash, like the dog guided away from the daffodils. He could feel the numbness of loss from the moment of realization when he began vainly arming himself. He must not carp, he must not complain, he must not.