Shadows on the Mirror

by Frances Fyfield

  Dedication

  To

  Sylvia Norton,

  Jenny Jones, Martyn Woodnutt,

  Michael Kew and the other colleagues

  who make working life bearable

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Also by Frances Fyfield

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  In the face of his silence, there had followed an account of the first attempt by Charles to strangle his wife, recited while delicate food expanded in Ernest’s mouth, sticking in his throat. Then there had been more, the history of all the episodes since, the memory of all those cool anecdotes of horror. I cannot tell, Ernest told himself in a daily litany. I cannot ever tell. What is told to me in confidence, I cannot ever tell. So his father had said, God knows what he had heard: trust is a sacred privilege, as well as a curse. Beware of it. Ernest had armed himself, but he did not know what to do. Without a God to whom he should pray, he simply did nothing.

  But he worried about the women. Whoever they were, escaping with their lives, they never complained. Charles Tysall was too powerful for that. Ernest knew it all, understood not a jot. Hoped against hope Tysall would never find a passion so grand it could merit the ultimate finale, some final, insane revenge from an insane mind. Even Ernest knew he was dealing with a madman of enormous civility. It made him fear him more.

  Foreword

  He had loved her, she knew, in his vile, obsessive way, but she wished he had loved in a manner she understood. If he had ever loved her in some ordinary sense, he might have been here now, or she might not . . . But she could not cope with his kind of love or see herself as pet or instrument, could not live with being ugly.

  The child laughing at her was the end. Politely she had ignored it, walked on and seen her face in the window, the same face she had tried to ignore in most mirrors, disgusted at itself, but smiling to make it worse. Then she saw her own reflection in the waters of the quay, hovering and hideous by the boats, lower than life, and told herself she had brought her arse to anchor here. Even without an audience, she had apologised automatically to Charles for the inelegant expression: he had never liked her crudity except in bed.

  Then she went home for the pills.

  Wherever she looked, she caught herself smiling at passers-by, the way she always smiled in that other life. No good him saying they don’t notice the stitches, only the smile, like a lighthouse beacon: he would not believe it, nor did she. Charles had married her for her beauty, which he had made all ways ugly, and she could not, would not live with it.

  The final hope was revenge. Messages in cellophane in her purse and on her body bringing home to him, like ships in bottles, some sort of disgrace to damn him to hell. She could see from her face now how much she had loved him and how much she hated him now. Something the mirror and she could understand. She did not believe such a life could be redeemed as she paddled across the low tide and walked towards the blue distance, unsteady but determined. The man, distracted by the boy who had laughed in her face, thought she was drunk to walk like that, lurching and slightly slow. The tide was well turned, forcing her to wade through the water in the late evening sun. They assumed she would come back, lie down with her hideous face and sleep. She looked so tired.

  Next day, Sunday morning, summery, and away they were, down the creeks off the coast at Merton-on-Sea. He rowed out down the creeks with the screaming child in the boat. Born here and why not, can’t complain, mad if he did, and he wasn’t that. No cloud in the sky, except this beloved stepson who couldn’t stand the sea. Silly little sod, about eight years old and cried like a baby whenever he was taken out in the boat. The sky was full of his wild sobbing, but they had Grandma’s house on the quay, he and the boy’s mother. He could not afford a child who did not like water. They slept each night with the sea, and the boy would have to learn.

  But not this one, he wouldn’t do nothing to order, not ever. Put him in the boat, and he screamed fit to bust, so it had to be done again and again, kill or cure, poor little bastard, hates it, don’t know why. The new wife said it was the flood, when the tide put the boats right into the high street shops at midnight, and the boy lost his dad after a night howling on the roof, waiting for the storm to die. The new father had loved this woman too much and too long not to try. He’d have loved her with ten children, let alone this funny little brute. There was another on the way, light on the horizon, apart from the boy screaming and breathless, frightened of everything, making him feel like a monster. ‘C’mon, you little monkey,’ he muttered. ‘I love you better than all the world, and if you think I’ll like the new one better, you’re dafter than I thought. Stop crying now, good lad. This is where you get out in the warm and paddle, and stop screeching. There now. Not so bad is it?’

  He wanted the boy to love the creeks as he loved them. When the tide went out, water crept away through all these channels, leaving a trickle of rivers, with good shallow pools for swimming, safe as houses until the tide came roaring back and filled the gullies. When the tide was low, there was a playground of soft and sinking sand; when high, a riot of swift, deep water.

  The boy recovered instantly as soon as he was out of the boat. He would run around a corner of the bank towards the nearest pool, forgetting the torture of the journey completely, singing and playing while the borrowed father dug for bait. Peaceful for the moment, basking in sun without wind in the snug seclusion of the channels. The man sighed with relief, pulled the boat further on to the bank, and sighed again with pleasure. Until he saw her.

  If she hadn’t been dead, lying with her gob full of sand, he could have killed her, simply for lying there waiting to give the child a heart attack. He’d always been worried they’d find a dead dog or something out there, something to frighten the wits out of the boy just as he was beginning to make some kind of progress. She looked like a bundle of rags, hands twisted in the heather, silly bitch. Sea must have come in over her and gone down again, leaving her covered with mud and sand. Once he knew it was a body, he’d chucked water at its face. Red hair she had, terrible scars, and Christ, he recognised her. She was the one the boy had laughed at only yesterday while his ma cuffed him. He’d go mad if he saw her now, sharp-eyed little bugger. Mad and frightened, he’d be, then there’d be the asthma, panic and rows. He looked up quickly for the child, heard him down by the pool, singing softly to himself, hardly out of sight. Noise was muffled in the channels.

  Get rid of her. Nothing else for it. He could not let the child see. The banks were soft and easy, there was a shovel for bait in the boat and the muddy sand turned softly on the blade as he dug in the panic of haste, sweating himself like a pig to cover her in before the boy came back, soaking his clothes and gritting his teeth as he dragged the damp salty mass of her into a deep grave. He weighted her down before he slung the slodgy mud back on to her, closing his eyes and ears to the impact of its landing. What else to do? She had wanted to be found, that much was obvious, but not at his expense. It would take a tide or ten to shift her from there: next spring maybe. Maybe never. Sorry, lady. Silly bitch, you stay where you damn well are, stay down. I got my own to care for, he said, and this boy’s done enough crying.

  The woman called Elisabeth was buried without trace or cer
emony. In the bedroom of his London home, a husband twitched and dozed full of the last nightmares. I loved you, my Porphyria, he told himself, but I shall find another.

  Houses stirred into early evening. A fat lawyer and a young widow went out to dinner. Life went on as the hungry tide came back and covered the mound of earth, flattening it into innocence.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the days before he had ever heard of Charles Tysall, and on the date when a certain scarred lady disappeared, Malcolm Cook was a very fat man indeed, but when he reared up in court with an energetic grace quite at odds with the huge size of him, the audience forgot to laugh. While they were expecting the idiot to overbalance his bulk, tickle himself, and tell jokes, his mellifluous voice was not only a surprise but the first premonition of trouble for those who knew him slightly enough to believe that the prosecution had fielded a buffoon. He was genial and twinkling, an old young man, so harmless when his fat laugh echoed round the foyer, a man with whom a defendant could feel safe, until, armed with his voice and his uncanny intelligence, he asked for his answers. They were kind, compelling eyes, betraying knowledge of exactly what it was like to be cast aside like the man in the dock, whatever he had done. The accused betrayed themselves to him by confident lies, tripping over details, looking at the fat man and forgetting where they were, keeping nothing but the dignity he would never steal from them. In the courtroom, Malcolm Cook, Senior Crown Prosecutor, was a man of charisma, compassion and great forensic skill, a gentle giant with powerful weapons. Everywhere else, he was regarded as a perfect clown.

  It was beyond doubt that he was gross in size, but there was a finesse hidden in the bulk of it he was never encouraged to show, and certainly not in present company, as far as Sarah Fortune could tell. Bright brown glance, looking at women with eyes which knew they were not looking back, determined against embarrassment, blanked against longing. Malcolm’s stories were famous, told in a dozen accents, and as for his antics, they made a party all on their own. A curiosity, with merely borrowed membership of the human race, freakish good value, everyone forgave the way he looked. Belinda Smythe would never seat as many as eight at her gatherings of lawyers, accountants, architects and assorted spouses without him being one of them, since his mere presence ensured success. Pound for pound, Malcolm Cook was worth the feeding since he provided a shoulder for weeping ladies, chest for pummelling children, mouth for laughing and merely sociable kisses, big clever teddy for the whole world. And he could drink. The legendary capacity was first joke of the evening: ‘We’ve been down to the warehouse for you, Malcolm, here’s your crate.’ ‘Thanks very much, see you’re as mean as ever.’ A benign exchange of seasoned insults, tokens of pleasure to meet him, all smiles and relief: he would see to the evening’s entertainment. Sarah watched him closely, wondering if she was wrong to sense a kindred spirit, another outsider like herself, being used on a hostess ego-trip, someone who had arrived for dinner as an alternative to loneliness. Imagination had run riot in the six months of her altered status. She was sick of being invited out of duty and knew this was the last time she would accept. She tried and failed to dismiss her curiosity for the haunted man who laughed too much.

  ‘Malckie?’ shrieked Belinda, sensing from the kitchen the comparative lull which signified his absence from the room beyond when his presence was crucial. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘He’s gone to see the children,’ said Sarah, dutiful guest making salad-dressing.

  ‘What’s he want to do that for? Damn the man, we’re ready to eat. Go and fetch him, Sarah, won’t you?’ Sing for your supper, Malcolm; Belinda was leaving nothing to chance. Sarah went, grateful her role in the guest hierarchy was less onerous than his. It was far easier to look pretty, please the people and run errands, the last done most willingly for the excuse of brief escapes. She was sent to look for the warm-up man who had left his audience to wither without him; he must hurry back or they would miss him.

  She found him upstairs, squatting at the bedside of a snuffling three-year-old, his stomach and chest meeting bulging thighs while the child giggled softly at the jowled faces he pulled. ‘Noo, no, wait.’ Conspiratorial whispers. ‘Can you do this one?’ ‘Which one?’ ‘Like this.’ Eyes pulled down by one thumb and fourth finger, nose pushed up and sideways by the other thumb . . . ‘Ugghh!’ ‘Good, isn’t it?’ ‘Triffic, show me how . . .’ Sarah saw them both in the mirror, lit by the night-light left to comfort the child, a huge grown man lost in playing, the child transfixed with concentration. Each in his element, herself in the mirror, the silhouette of an interfering adult. She did not want to stop him; happiest in clowning to an audience who knew him with better instincts than those downstairs, but his dark eyes caught her brief movement, the barely perceptible warning gesture of hers which said, don’t stop, you’re doing fine, I did not mean to interrupt, and at once the face of him showed weary anger before a resigned smile. He turned to the child with a warmer smile, and tucked her arms below the sheet.

  ‘Must go, honey, supper’s ready.’

  ‘Will you come back later, Malcolm, promise?’

  ‘Promise, but you know how Mummy fusses about the food.’

  There was more giggling. ‘Give me a kiss, Malcolm, please.’

  ‘Ah.’ Aware of his audience, he paused theatrically. ‘I can’t resist that, you know I can’t.’

  The child threw her arms round his neck and hugged for dear life. Malcolm’s upper arm where the golden head was buried hid her completely in the breadth of it. Sarah thought of King Kong with his tiny princess, ridiculous, sad, but complete for the moment. The eyes meeting Sarah’s over the blonde hair in his arms issued a brief challenge before the grown-up mask returned. ‘See?’ he joked for the adult not the child. ‘Beautiful women find me irresistible.’ She turned away from them and left, embarrassed by her presence at the scene of genuine affection and equally disturbed by the change her presence provoked. Next time she looked he would be one of the bosom buddies, a proper guest, one of the pack.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ she told Belinda briefly. ‘And by the way, what a gorgeous daughter you have.’ The mother had her hands full, not thinking of children.

  ‘Zoe? Yes, she’s sweet. Adores Malckie of course, so does our son. There’ll be ructions in the morning if he’s spoken to one and not the other. He’ll have to come round again. We all adore Malckie.’

  But you don’t, Sarah thought. You don’t even begin to see him. You’re giving houseroom to all that bulk simply because he entertains; you have no idea of what he is, what he does, or what he feels. He is here through loneliness and because he loves your children. If you were a true friend you’d put him on a diet rather than insist he eat even more than all the others, while you make him play to your gallery, damn your bloody silliness. And why do I come to your house when I don’t even like you? Because you’re my husband’s friends, and because, like Malcolm, I’m useful. No, that isn’t fair, I know it isn’t fair, it was my choice I’m here, no one made me. Not your fault, but I’ve just seen something of big fat Malcolm you might not have seen, and I’ll bet your daughter knows him a damn sight better than you. Sad man, but not pathetic. She could not move him from her mind.

  Belinda and Martin Smythe were living happily ever after in the house he had converted from a mid-Hampstead ruin. Each visit there involved another guided tour, since some aspect of the house was bound to have changed. It moved and altered like a living thing, first a conservatory appeared, then another bedroom, then an attic created out of roof space, signs of admirable energy, but she could never quite understand why she didn’t feel comfortable. The whole thing was violent and superficial self-advertisement and so were the owners. Sarah’s husband had loved it; now it was time for dividing the ways. But she was here now; she should be grateful for the irritating insensitivity of their generosity.

  And she wasn’t bored, simply disturbed: no one was bored with Malcolm around, court jester, delighting them all with self-mockery.


  ‘What do you do?’ Someone asked him the inevitable party question.

  ‘Obvious, isn’t it?’ he replied with the infectious grin, pirouetting on the carpet, mincing his steps with one hand on huge hip. ‘Male model for Aquascutum double-breasted. When I’m not doing swimwear.’ Shrieks of laughter. He was a gifted mimic with his extravagant gestures, tossing imaginary locks out of his eyes, assuming the distant gimlet glare of the romantic hero, tripping over his own feet. ‘But when I grow up . . .’ – they waited with bated breath – ‘I shall pose for Henry Moore. Why hide a perfect body like this?’ Belinda was priming him for more. ‘Where did you get that suit, Malc?’ she said, pointing to his well-worn garment. ‘That, my dear, was specially imported. It is the produce of wool from a thousand Falkland sheep who shrugged their fleece simultaneously as soon as they knew the size of the order . . .’ And so it went on until Malcolm’s antics had welded a group of relative strangers into an audience who could talk among themselves. ‘Another drink, Malckie?’ ‘Oh, please, just give me the bottle and a straw . . .’ Outrageous, he encouraged them all to their party pieces, stroking performers as he left them the stage, assuring all present that though they might feel foolish, he would be worse.

  Sarah was nurturing a resentment she knew was unjustified, watching Malcolm Cook with a liking which grew in proportion to the loneliness of him, which glared towards anyone observant enough to see it. She saw the fat, asthmatic little boy he had been, standing on the sidelines as he did now, making up stories and pulling faces for attention, fighting his own demons. She liked him with a furious and defensive liking, intensely angry with him for clinging to acceptance where it was offered at the price of acting the fool. This much she had gathered by the time the sweet course was placed in front of Malckie in magnificent creamy entirety with a teasing flourish of stunning unkindness by Martin. ‘All yours, old man. Thought you were wasting away . . .’ ‘So kind,’ said Malcolm, ‘but I always take cheese first . . .’ The table rocked with well-fed mirth, and Sarah squirmed for the victim reacting to his cue, taking his poison. The man needed intravenous confidence, something to make him love himself. ‘I know what you need,’ Sarah told herself, ‘. . . and I should like to provide it, by way of experiment.’ Not a whole cure, but a start perhaps.