Perfectly Pure and Good (6 page)

`You've been through them all like a dose of salts today, Doctor. Reckon that's the lot and you can go home.'

Òh. Dr Freeman finished too, has he? Or would he like me to take one of his?'

She shifted uncomfortably. 'Well no, I don't think so. He's got a couple waiting, but they're his regulars, if you see what I mean.'

Dr Freeman was far more popular than Dr Pardoe. Nor did nice-natured women freeze him in his tracks. Once upon a time it had been the other way round.

Julian did not know if fury or relief was uppermost in his mind as he strode to his car. Relief to be out of the ugly modern medical centre with its compassionate efficiency, or fury with himself for skimping time with the patients and shying away from the opposite sex as if they could sting him. If only he could emulate the charm of Dr Freeman; give each one his undivided attention, instead of champing at the bit, brooding, hating himself, moving from one captivity to the next, taking no comfort.

The interior of his car was overpoweringly hot. It had been cleaned that morning in readiness for house calls to patients who would tell him about ghosts, as if he did not have enough of his own.

Freeman's car was carelessly filthy and parked beneath a tree. Julian wondered what had happened to his comfortable dreams and the endless sympathy he had once commanded, felt faintly savage, ashamed of himself for his own, dogged misery.

There was a smart red car with a dent, parked next to his own in the space marked 'doctors only'.

The sight of an inconsiderate outsider only increased his irritation.

Sarah Fortune felt a stranger, off territory and slightly confused. She was not due to reach the Pardoes until early evening and it was only early afternoon. She had several motives for reaching the village sooner than expected, but was unsure which to take first, so she dawdled in the high street, trying to orientate herself.

In briefing her for this task, Ernest Matthewson had been deliberately economical with the background information he had given her, which consisted of an Ordnance Survey map, directions and little else. She was left to glean what she could of the family who were paying her fees and giving her a place to stay while she earned them. Which was why, on a whim, in a state of indecision and not relishing the next task, she found herself in the hairdresser's. Hairdressers knew things and it was a place to sit.

Òn holiday, are you? You've been in here before, haven't you? I'm sure I know you from somewhere.'

`No,' said Sarah, smiling her disarming smile. `No to both. I'm working. For the Pardoes. Do you know them?'

The woman towelling her wet head of hair did not pause for a moment, but chuckled.

`Course. Everyone does. I got no worries. I pay my rent. How do you find Mrs Pardoe?

Comes in Monday mornings, all the clobber. Mad as a hatter, but still independent, you know. I suppose they'll have to get someone to look after her soon. Poor little Mouse.'

Ì haven't met her yet. I'm not due up there until this evening. Thought I'd have a look around first.'

Ànd get your hair done? Good idea.' They eyed each other in the mirror. 'Blow dry, or set?'

Sarah looked at the row of four ancient hairdryers, beneath which sat a selection of dozing women with hair tortured into rollers, their hands crossed on ample stomachs, a comfortable sight, along with the smells. In the ample bosom of Sylvie, conversation and coiffure would be more rewarding.

`What kind of work are you doing for the Pardoes?' The curiosity was mild, so innocuous it demanded an answer. Sarah never saw the virtue of being entirely honest when a vague evasion would serve the same purpose and, besides, she wasn't entirely sure. Ernest had been infuriatingly vague. You need an unsullied mind, he had said.

Òh, something to do with their house.' The woman nodded, understandingly.

Òh yes? I've heard they could do with a bit of decoration. Mr Pardoe was always adding bits on.

He was a dreamer. Never finishing anything of

Perhaps Sarah's clothes, smart in comparison to what she had seen outside, suggested interior decorator rather than woman of letters. She smiled again as her hair was brushed with rough efficiency.

`That bad, is it?'

`Well, old Mrs Pardoe isn't up to doing much, poor soul, is she? Daughter does her best and all that, the doctor's too busy, I expect, and that Edward's no more use than a sick headache, spiteful, lazy little sod. If only his sister would see it, but she won't, worships the ground he walks on.

Funny things, families. Mary!' she half turned to yell at her girl assistant. 'Turn Mrs Smith off, will you? Otherwise she'll melt.'

It was pleasant to be spoken to as if she knew them all.

`Poor Mr Pardoe,' she said solicitously. 'How long is it since he died?'

`Fell off his roof with his heart attack, you mean? About a year, I suppose. Mind,' she lowered her voice and switched off the dryer, 'there's other things he could have died of, only I think he'd given that up.'

`Such as?' Sarah ventured. The blow-drying started again.

`Falling off a big woman!' Sylvie yelled, breaking into raucous laughter, then subsiding into the confidentiality of a stage whisper audible from a hundred yards. 'He did a lot of that in his time.

All right, Mrs Jones? You waiting for me? Please yourself.' She coughed impatiently.

`That Mrs Pardoe was wise, though,' she continued shouting. `Never complained. She just pretended she didn't notice, waited for him to stop his nonsense. They all come back in the end, don't they?'

Sarah nodded, slightly unsure of what kind of worldly wisdom it was she was endorsing. It never seemed to her worthwhile to wait for anyone to come back. Her head was hot, her hair floating away from the brush.

`Lovely colour,' Sylvie yelled. 'Natural, I can tell. Used to have a customer with hair exactly like this. What was her name, now? Oh, hallo. Look what the cat's brought in.'

The door of the shop had opened, the bell clattering. On the threshold stood a large young man, twenty-one or so, Sarah guessed. For all his astounding good looks, he had an air of shy uncertainty. Next to him, standing proudly in his shadow, was a boy the colour of sand. Sarah, her back to the door, screened by Sylvie, watched them through the mirror.

`What do you want, Rick?' said Sylvie, snapping as if scolding, but patently pleased to see them both.

`Boy needs a hair cut. He got chewing-gum in it.'

`Get your arse out of here, the two of you, and send him back in half an hour, all right? Can't you see I'm busy? You want spray?' Sylvie bellowed to Sarah all in one breath.

Sarah Fortune, with her cloud of clean hair and her small sum of knowledge, walked out beyond the town, away from the people and away from the sea.
En route
, she bought provisions for the cottage the Pardoes would provide and left them in the car, except for the flowers, which she took with her. This last action made her define the real purpose of being early, not merely to explore — something else far more important.

She had craved the sea for the last few days but once in view, found herself afflicted with a strange reluctance to look at the creeks, the channels and the quay which existed at the bottom of the street and ducked into the town instead. She was suddenly an alien, far from the metropolis which was home, and if not afraid, at least wary.

Tomorrow she would crave the sea again: the mere thought of it made her excited. So often she had dreamed her ignorant dream of living in an unpretentious place like this, inside a cottage with roses round the door. The dream had become a habit of familiar escape. Similar visions of privacy and non-accountability prevailed as her greatest ambition, the tawdry golden thread of her adult life. Somehow she had come to imagine Elisabeth Tysall may have felt the same.

On the edge of the village-cum-town, stood the church. According to the Ordnance Survey map, the only church, bearing bravely the signs of neglect as evidence of the dwindling faithful who needed no more than the burgeoning graveyard and the occasional blessing of a half-remembered God. Elisabeth Tysall, twice-buried, once beneath a sand bank and, later, here, had needed both.

It was her consecrated grave which was the purpose of Sarah's pilgrimage. The newer graves spilled into a field, less attractive than the mossy stones surrounding the church at crooked angles, like drunken friends on the way home, the names obscured, the grass growing between.

The interments of the last two years were less cheerful for being still remembered, harassed in equal terms by grief and dead flowers. Some had already begun to sink into the unkempt; others bore vestiges of fresh planting.

A temporary wooden marker bore the legend of Elisabeth's name. No-one had requisitioned a stone, but then Charles had died, had he not, so soon after she was identified. The grass grew round it freely. On either side, the close-packed graves bore bright, white stones, the soil packed with pansies to the left, a bunch of tired flowers in a plastic container to the right.

Elisabeth, who had chosen the wrong one to love. Sarah wanted to weep for her.

Ì'm sorry,' she was saying. 'I'm so sorry. I should have come sooner. Maybe you know how it is.

I should have come to your funeral, but I didn't know the full story. Still don't. Did anyone come to your funeral?'

She found she was raising her voice to the level of one commonsensical woman talking to a friend on equal terms, a person who was businesslike, ashamed of sentiment, but always prone to it. Sarah parted the grass to lay down the flowers, wishing she had bought something grander; there was no impulse of which she was ashamed, except meanness. Buried beneath was a suicidal woman of youth and beauty, unmourned, unnoticed, and that was an abomination. Sarah began to tidy, until her fingers struck razor points and she withdrew sharply.

Blood appeared on her knuckles; she sucked her fist, squatting back on her haunches to look again. Covered by grass, there were thistles lurking, dead, massed into a bunch beneath another bouquet of fat, desiccated roses, purple with indeterminate age, which crumbled at her touch.

Sarah parted more grass and laid her own daisies, level with the feet, not the heart. The silence of the place was extraordinary.

There was a posse of black crows congregating at the bottom of the field. Two years before, Elisabeth Tysall, wife of Charles Tysall, had walked out at low tide across the creeks. She had been presumed the victim of an accident. Sarah could hear the cultivated voice of Charles telling her of the need for punishment and knew the version was not true.

His Porphyria had laid down amongst the lavender and waited for the sea to take her. She may have covered her own elegant limbs with sand, the better to remain buried for a whole year before the tide broke the bank and released her.

`Why?' Sarah asked her. 'You let him win. I do wish I'd known you.' A redhead you were, like me. A beauty, since Charles would have wedded nothing less. You should have been mourned, whatever you were. Not only by Charles, who loved you in his own, perverted way, followed you into the sea to find your resting place, drowned in the same, aberrant flood.

Sarah looked again at the grave, the dead roses and the scornful thistles. Who loved you? Who cared for you then? Where did you go? You and I, we could have been friends. Instead, you were merely the catalyst in a story and another source of my endless guilt.

The silence struck again, like a blow to the ears, making her long for a voice in return. The intensity of it, the dearth of birdsong, made her look round, notice for the first time the mist of the now late afternoon, obscuring the sun, hiding the wicket gate to the church. She stood and looked down at the daisies.

A headstone for Elisabeth Tysall, something to mark her life, someone must. Something grand and beautiful for a woman who had wanted to live as much as the woman who stared at the flowers now.

Sarah walked back to the landward side of the village where she had left her car and took a wrong turn out of the town, looking for the coast road. The red car with the dented wing crawled through the lanes, following instructions, driving like the locals in second gear. To call this a town was a misnomer: it was a village. She imagined the populace from the hinterland trucking in on Saturday nights, like cowboys from the desert, in search of liquor 'n' entertainment.

A fish-and-chip frontage and a Victorian behind, was how Ernest had described it; a sort of harbour flanked with an amusement arcade and signs saying don't park the car on the front, or the tide may take it. Drive along the quay, Ernest had said, ignore a bend. Go straight on, he had said, off the main road, keep the sea on your left until the track runs out. The house is there, half a mile at most. You can't miss it.

She did miss it, because she detoured round the town out of curiosity and found herself stuck in a narrow lane against a wall lined with hollyhocks and someone waiting patiently behind. She went back to the quay, found it swathed in mist and wondered what Ernest meant about keeping the ocean on the left when she could not see a glimmer of water. The receding tide moved in a dirty little channel out beyond brown banks towards the invisible sea.

The garish lights of an amusement arcade hit her back and the din was raucous. People sat on a wall which separated quay from road, eating fish and chips; the air smelt of salt, vinegar, petrol.

It was all so messy and so normal, shabby holiday life, nothing sinister in the pedestrian litter.

The mist was puzzling rather than frightening; it spread round her like a warm blanket, bringing with it a premature darkness and making her realize at long last that she was very, very late for the Pardoes.

There was a cake on the kitchen table, a lopsided travesty of a confection which looked more like Plasticine. Two slabs of solid matter, wedged together with a gluey icing made with flour in mistake for sugar. One of Mother's better efforts at occupational therapy, Julian thought. The kitchen looked like a bomb site after her efforts. At the best of times it was a good enough kitchen, despite Edward's fishing mess; the oldest part of a patchwork house.