Perfectly Pure and Good

by Frances Fyfield

  Julian swore under his breath, trying to remember any jewels of animal husbandry his father had learned in that last of his many enthusiasms. What was it Father had wanted to do at the time, or was it Mother’s idea, collecting rare breeds of sheep? Put something back into the land, Mother had said.

  ‘I can’t see properly,’ he muttered, feeling the animal tremble beneath his hand. ‘Do you mind if we take her inside?’

  It was bizarre, standing in the cruel light of the kitchenette where a kettle bubbled on the cooker, with the sheep trying to back away from where he held her between braced legs.

  ‘The heat does seem to soften it. Here, hold on to her muzzle.’ Sarah obeyed with both hands. The terror in the wall eyes of the animal seemed to fill the room. Slowly, with considerable strength, Julian lifted the horn with a wringing motion of both his arms, twisting it up and back, well clear of the eye. Quickly Sarah wiped the moisture which had gathered round the wound below. Hettie bucked and reared. Enough was enough. They let her bolt for the door in shambling haste, dishrag unwinding as she went.

  ‘She looks like a woman coming out of the hairdresser’s, half done, I never knew sheep needed similar attention.’ She had turned to wash her hands in the sink, up to the elbow. Julian did the same.

  ‘I wouldn’t have seen you in the nurse’s role,’ he said lightly.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,’ Sarah said with equal lightness. ‘Would you like a drink? Plentiful supplies.’

  Any animosity between them was gone. He felt himself shiver, remembering the crumpled horn, boring into an animal’s head like the memories penetrating his own skull. The cottage was cool indoors, designed to repel heat in summer, preserve it in winter. Sarah was dressed in a cotton sweater, short sleeved with a deep V, buttercup yellow, her hair springy clean, the smell of soap, shampoo and perfume easily overpowering the farmyard traces of sheep and the lingering medicine smell of Miss Gloomer’s bedside. They sat in the small living room. A large shawl of many colours was flung over the sofa; an ugly table lamp had been removed to the floor to diffuse the light, transforming the place so much that even the single bar of the electric fire seemed cheerful. On the first sip, he noticed that her whisky was excellent and she sipped her own with the evident pleasure of a connoisseur.

  ‘Did you detour this way to tell me I was fired?’ she asked without rancour, as if the answer did not much matter.

  ‘No. You’re retained for having a certain expertise with a sheep. How did you learn that?’

  She shrugged. The sweater fell away a little at the neck; he noticed two small, raised scars, as if a mole had recently been removed.

  ‘I really don’t know. I don’t have any skills, animals are easier than people. Would you like some more?’

  The whisky had gone in the twinkling of an eye. He nodded. She rose gracefully, her arm catching the light, and he noticed three more of the little scars above one elbow, white against the golden brown of her skin. There was nothing disfiguring in any of the scars, but the sight of them filled him with a peculiar anguish.

  ‘We spoke on Friday,’ he said abruptly. ‘About the late Elisabeth Tysall. What do you know about her?’ Sarah followed the direction of his gaze to the marks on her neck, pulled the neck of the sweater closer to her ears with both hands.

  ‘Nothing while she was alive, but I came to know of her. I know that her husband considered I was her double. I know that he abused her badly and she killed herself off the coast down here. Let herself drown. Yesterday, I almost found out how. Do you know, if it had been warm, like yesterday, if she was drunk enough, drugged enough to lie down and sleep, it would have been a peaceful death, a simple letting go. No pain.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Provided she had no terror. Provided she had consumed enough to want to drift away.’

  Julian looked at her closely for signs of flippancy. Now he could see they were not the same, Elisabeth Tysall and this woman at his feet. They had little resemblance apart from the hair and the membership of the same league of female beauty.

  ‘I should like to know about Elisabeth Tysall,’ said Sarah wistfully, ‘because no-one ever asked.’

  Julian took a large swallow of the whisky and put it down. The prospect of shifting the burden of guilt by speaking of it made him react like the sheep at the end of the unexplained pain, silly and slightly skittish.

  ‘The Tysalls had a cottage here,’ he began. ‘At least, she made it very much theirs with improvements, but it was rented from us. They appeared to be enormously rich. I suspect the kind of rich who actually owned very little. Not our kind of rich. This isn’t a glamorous place, but Elisabeth Tysall liked it. Charles, her husband, let her come here alone, although he was extremely possessive. I supposed he reckoned there was no temptation in a little seaside town. We aren’t exactly endowed with adult attractions. No casinos, no places to be seen. You don’t get in the county calendar if you sit in the amusement arcade.’ He looked at her meaningfully, met an innocent stare.

  ‘She used to walk a lot. So did I, in those days when this landscape held magic for me.’

  He remembered to sip slowly, feeling slightly intoxicated already, speaking faster.

  ‘So I walked with her. I’d met Charles twice, when Father had had them up to the house for a drink. Charles saw me as a boring country bumpkin, the plain man I am. I met Elisabeth for longer in the surgery when she came in for a prescription. I don’t know how it happened. I couldn’t keep my eyes away. Life became a vacuum between meetings. A week when I didn’t see her, and there were plenty of those, was a week in hell. She wrote letters in between, teased me, made me stand back. She was a wise flirt, warned me about Charles’s savage jealousy. I told her, leave him: I’ll take on the whole world for you; but she said no, you don’t know me and no-one ever wins with Charles. Then all of a sudden one weekend, she succumbed. I can’t describe it,’ he said simply. ‘I’d sound like a boy if I tried to describe it.’ Julian sat back, exhausted by the memory.

  ‘I remember telling her, you are so beautiful, you’ll immobilize me completely with any other woman. What am I to do if you don’t stay with me for ever? Leave him, marry me. I shall never react like this to any other woman, you’re so perfect. Don’t say that, she kept saying. Please don’t say that.’ He began to tremble, reached for his glass, let the good whisky slop on the floor.

  ‘A fortnight later, she came back. You know how it is when you miss someone so much it hurts. I’d got myself into a pitch of anger because she hadn’t been in touch in any way, no letter, phone call, nothing, and of course I couldn’t get in touch with her because of Charles, but I was still mad to see her. My perfect Elisabeth, the fulfilment of all dreams. She wasn’t perfect, though, not even remotely beautiful any more. In fact, when she barged into my surgery, she was hardly recognizable apart from the hair. Her face had been cut to ribbons. It might have been glassed: it was difficult to tell with all the stitches and the swelling. I couldn’t look at her.’

  Julian put his head in his hands, briefly, toyed with his glass, his palms sticky with sweat.

  ‘I asked her how and why, of course. I think part of my reaction of revulsion, no more or less, was guilt, in case our affair had triggered what had been done to her. It was difficult for her to speak clearly; her mouth had been slit in one corner. She said it was nothing to do with me, Charles had done it on a whim. I didn’t believe her. I was stunned and revolted and frightened, so I behaved like an impatient irresponsible doctor. I prescribed for her massive doses of tranquillizers, sleeping aids, told her she’d do best by the healing process if she slept for twenty-four hours. I rang the pharmacy, didn’t even volunteer to stay with her. Instead, I went out and got drunk. Paralytic.’

  He emptied the tumbler.

  ‘May I have some more of this please, with the reassurance that I’m not going to repeat the exercise now? I’ve never been drunk since, though God knows I’ve tried.’

  He closed hi
s eyes and listened to the sound of the liquid gurgling into his glass. A generous measure, enough to make him shrug to attention. The hand touching his as he took the glass, was warm, encouraging.

  ‘I suppose it was the next day she disappeared, when I couldn’t raise my head off the pillow, cancelled Saturday surgery where, I gathered later, she called to see me. She might not have received a friendly reception, despite her state. They thought she was bad for me and they’d never exactly liked her manner, which was imperious, to say the least. I suppose a woman as beautiful has the right to be rude and defensive, so many people must want to touch.’

  He was nursing the whisky rather than drinking it. Sarah sensed a man of iron self-control, who drank not for pleasure, only for oblivion.

  ‘I assumed she had gone back to her husband. I got a letter from him, some time later, terminating the tenancy on the cottage. I felt, as I should have done, extremely guilty, also relieved. The guilt then was nothing to the guilt a year later, when she was found in the sand banks, half a mile from the quay. The buried body, come back into the land of the living.’

  ‘How did she come to be buried?’

  ‘No-one knows, or if they do, they won’t be telling now, but the creeks change shape all the time. A section of bank could have fallen on her, buried her, then split apart again after months. There was a storm tide the day before she was found. It was the growth of hair, mainly, which indicated how long she’d been there. Then the police investigation, her husband saying she’d never gone back to London at all, he thought she’d gone home to America, which is where she came from originally. Elisabeth was under the sand from almost the day I spoke to her last. I wish there was some doubt: there isn’t. I shall always know it was I who put her there. She came to me for help. The one who was her lover gave her the means for suicide. The last straw. I may as well have ordered her to go and die.’

  The whisky was untouched and the room was silent. Julian coughed, painfully.

  ‘Charles came to look at the body of course. He phoned me and I told him he could stay in his old cottage if he wanted, but all he kept asking was how his wife came to be buried in the sand, as if I should know. I was angry with him, short, said I didn’t want to know, shouted at him, he should have loved her. It was the same week Father died, my behaviour before that might explain why he didn’t trust me. Charles simply wouldn’t accept any of the explanations of how Elisabeth had been interred there so long, he wanted me to take him to see the place. I couldn’t, wouldn’t. Then I was called to remove his body from where it was washed up. I knew it must be him. Do you know what I did? I kicked that sodden bundle in the ribs, put the last nail in the coffin of my self-esteem. Then I came home to bury my father. I knew then what I’ve known ever since.’ He began to count on his fingers. ‘Namely, I’m not fit to be a human being among all these decent people here, let alone a doctor. I killed her, you see. I may as well have killed myself.’

  Sarah got up and moved into the kitchen area where he could see her putting the kettle on the stove, lighting the gas. A moth came in through the window, fluttered in front of the mirror Joanna had used to dress, reflecting the light from the floor. Julian wanted to stop the sound of the flapping wings round the light.

  ‘Coffee?’ Sarah was asking.

  ‘Yes.’ He waited, leaned forward and caught the moth in both hands, got up and released it through the open window. Sarah came back, put the coffee on the floor beside the lamp, sat where she had been at his feet. There was nothing submissive in the pose, only a command for attention.

  ‘Now you listen,’ she said. ‘There’s something you should know. Don’t ask for the sources of information, just believe, Elisabeth Tysall did not kill herself on your account. She planned it before she came here that last time and nothing was going to stop her. She had written a letter to Ernest Matthewson, deposited with her bank, to be forwarded to him only in the event of her death being confirmed. The bank followed her instructions to the letter. Ernest was ill, his wife intercepted the letter and finally, gave it to me. I showed it to a friend – no-one else. Elisabeth stated on page one exactly what she was going to do, how and where. She said she’d had several affairs in the past, all as revenge against Charles for not loving her any more, but the suicide was pure revenge for her disfigurement. She couldn’t tell tales about him while he was alive, but she planned for her body to be found, her injuries examined and him exposed. She didn’t know much about the workings of the law, it wouldn’t have stood up in court. Also, she didn’t have the remotest will to live, something she had lost a long time before. She didn’t need your tranquillizers either since she already had an arsenal of pills. There was supposed to be another sealed letter on her when she was found, but that was lost.’

  Sarah twisted to sit on the other hip, gracefully. Julian could feel a wild heat course through his veins. Anger, relief, remembered, unexercised desire, until now, dormant along with the dead. Fury, guilt.

  ‘That doesn’t mean,’ Sarah went on softly, ‘that your reaction to her face was not horribly cruel, something to be ashamed of. But it does mean that it didn’t influence events. You didn’t kill her. Charles killed her. As for kicking his corpse, a corpse has no feelings, leaves those with the living. Your father had just died. Grief makes us all knock on the doors of insanity. When my husband died, I wanted to kill, maim, torture. You hardly did that.’

  Julian was leaning forward, hungry for hope, staring into her flecked eyes, finding them fathomless, generous, lonely without sadness. He did not move when she took his face between her hands and kissed him. The kiss went on: he recoiled slightly, then responded with a groan, drawn into the embrace with a long, shuddering sigh.

  ‘Sarah, Sarah . . .’

  ‘Don’t think,’ she murmured. ‘Just don’t think. Except of killing demons.’

  He thought he also heard her say that Charles Tysall could not be allowed to claim so many lives, but he was not sure of anything she said. He heard only the rustle of clothing, himself climbing the stairs in her wake, entering the dark bedroom where the moonlight shone, pulling his shirt over his head, falling with her into a warm tangle of silky limbs, joined again by the kiss which seemed never to have stopped. Remembering her slenderness, feeling her strength, trying not to claw or to grasp. Shivering until she calmed him, guided him into one cataclysmic moment when he knew he shouted. When he swam back into the planet, he wanted to cry. Instead, he slept like a child.

  The wheels of Edward’s car spun on the gravel; not the swishing sound of a well-raked, richly coated drive, only the spinning of worn rubber on worn pebbles sunk into mud after warm rain. Fishing: why ever would a man want to fish? Especially the way he fished, a sort of clandestine activity, often at night, for the romance of moonlight on the waves, but mostly for shame, because fishing was something he did to acquire a skill other men might envy, because a man of his vision should have been able to pull fish out of the sea as easily as far lesser men and he had to make his attempts at night because, so far, they were conspicuous failures. The fish would not bite, even after the hours he had spent over two years, they stayed beneath the water and laughed at him. The rods were state of the art, the bait was right according to the books, and that boy Stonewall swore it was, managing just a touch of scorn in his silent servility. Edward admitted he needed a teacher, if he were humble enough to learn. He could cast, but he could not catch. It was like everything else – his failure was in proportion to the effort. If only Dad had taught him.

  The house felt empty. ‘Joanna!’ he shouted up the stairs, careless of whom he might wake; how dare they sleep when he needed company and food in that order? Silence. Her car was gone, out with one of her bitchy friends, as long as that was all. He slammed down his fishing tackle on the kitchen table, emptied his jacket pockets of boxes of hooks, floats, casting weights, the detritus of failure, along with sandwiches in greaseproof paper, silly cow. The lightweight plastic of the box of hooks cracked, spilling them on the
table, small things these ones, no bigger than a thumbnail. Edward scooped some of them into the kitchen drawer. There were signs of his impatience, signs of his desire, all over the house. New rods, new reels, hooks in every drawer. Mother, Julian, even Father before had let him spread this litter. They all thought fishing might make a man of him. If he had heard that once, he had heard it ten dozen times.

  ‘Joanna!’

  Nothing. Edward went up to his room, hungry and bored, and looked out of the window. The rain had eased to a soft drizzle; the sky was clear for another day’s fresher heat tomorrow. He was suddenly forlorn, still angry. The doll’s house stood covered. He brought his fist down into the plywood roof, heard it crack and crumble, the contents inside skitter as the edifice tottered, groaned and stood still. Unable to bear examination of the carnage, he turned to the window; unable to look towards the sea, he looked towards the cottages.

  A light in a window over there. Hettie the sheep grazing in front of the one door out of the three which had roses. An upstairs light and a downstairs light. Julian’s car parked by the front door of their house, as usual. Edward suddenly knew where he was. The knowledge made him feel sick.

  He clattered downstairs in case he was wrong, passed via a wide detour to the back of the house where Julian’s room stood next to Jo’s, both doors ajar, both rooms empty. Back to his own room, looking out again. The light above the front door shone out to welcome everyone home, illuminating the grass. He could see Sarah Fortune in the nude, walking away from him like a contemptuous ghost, a model for a painting with her handbag balanced on her head and her arms outstretched for balance in perfect poise. Save me from desire, he told himself with all the fervour of the prayer he despised. Save me.

  Back down in the kitchen, he tripped over his rod, swore, tripped over the newspaper on the pantry floor, swore again. He seized a fistful of bread, felt a tickle on the back of his neck, turned. Mother was behind him, still in the feather hat she had worn that morning, a tweedy coat over the same dress. She was clearly startled. More satisfyingly, she was also frightened. Retreating before him like a slave, back into the kitchen, putting her hand on the hooks on the table, screaming short little shrieks like a parrot, raising her palms as if about to pray, before he hit her. A punch was all, to the side of that ridiculous hat, but hard, making her fold, clutch the back of a chair with a hook or two still in her palm. She gasped but would not fall, straightened up, clasped the table for support with the other hand and stood straight, swaying slightly. The hat was knocked even further sideways, the feathers curling and brushing the left ear lobe, from which a drop of blood began to form and slowly fall. She opened the palm in which two fish hooks were embedded and sighed theatrically.