Perfectly Pure and Good

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Jo, don’t bother cooking today,’ Julian was suggesting pleasantly. ‘Mother doesn’t much care, seems a waste of the heat. Look, I meant to ask you ages ago, what happened to that boy you were seeing? Rick, from the arcade? Nice lad. I stitched his knee last year, he was extremely brave, I know we don’t talk about these things, but I mean, I never even told you I liked him—’

  ‘First I heard!’ Surprise and the restless energy made her hiss.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  Mother came back indoors. The full turquoise skirt was tucked into her knickers on one side. She did a waltzing turn, then beckoned to Hettie the sheep to follow from the doorway.

  ‘Can Hettie come in?’ she enquired with smooth politeness. The sheep seemed to snigger; they were only as silly as one another. ‘Only she’s so much better today, I’ve asked her for coffee.’

  ‘Not on weekdays, Mother, you know that,’ Julian admonished calmly. ‘Joanna, what do you mean? What happened to Rick? You two fall out or something? I hoped, well—’

  Joanna exploded in fury. How could he be so calm and concerned when all he wanted to do was put Mother in a home where they would never let her wear her own clothes? When it was he who wrecked her chances with Rick in the first place, drove him away with threats?

  ‘I mean,’ she hissed, ‘that no, we didn’t fall out. But it’s a bit difficult for a man to go on taking a girl out when her big brother tells him not to bother because if he doesn’t, he might lose his living. See what I mean? And don’t lie about it. Rick was shy enough already. You just made it worse.’

  She was shoving breakfast dishes into soapsuds with shaking hands. Julian’s calm only fuelled her fury.

  ‘Jo,’ he began.

  ‘Don’t call me Jo!’ she screamed. Mother erupted into laughter and then went back outside, humming in some strange sort of satisfaction. Julian let it all ride for a full minute until Joanna’s frenetic movements became slower, then joined her at the sink, drying as she washed, sorry all of a sudden for not doing more often as he did now. Unbidden, Sarah Fortune came to mind. Life is too short to bake cakes, she’d said, sometime early this morning; made him laugh, made him smile now. I love my sister, he thought, only I never say so. I love this place, if not this house, I’m not the worst doctor they ever had. I can live if I let myself live.

  ‘There’s the door,’ he said. ‘Go down to the quay, I should, and ask your Rick which brother it was gave him a warning. All I can say is it wasn’t this one. Oh, and do bear in mind the fact it could be simple nervousness makes a man give up on a gorgeous girl like you. You beautiful women never seem to know how terrifying you are. You scare us to death.’

  She was still defiant, horribly doubtful. So much easier to blame rather than act, so much simpler to wallow.

  ‘Gorgeous!’ she spat.

  ‘Oh, ever so, ever so gorgeous,’ said Mother, nodding like the sheep in the doorway.

  ‘Extremely good-looking, if you want to be pedantic,’ said Julian gravely. ‘If only you saw yourself as other people do.’

  ‘Such as?’ she flung back, still defiant, tossing her hair out of her eyes. He pretended to consider, think of an opinion she might value. Not the vicar, the genteel verger who kissed Mother after church, not any male in their small circle he could quote.

  ‘Sarah Fortune says so. She told me, I didn’t ask. Takes one good-looking woman to know another.’

  The front door slammed. Edward’s distinctive cough echoed in the distance. Joanna couldn’t face Edward. She stuck two fingers in the air, roughly towards Hettie, aimed towards all present, speechless, mollified, flattered, unable to say anything with grace, still trying to suppress all those warning chords in her head which had been humming with the strength of the church organ, about anything Edward had ever said.

  ‘Come in and have some more coffee, Mother,’Julian was saying. He was trying to distract her from her obvious efforts to introduce Hettie into the kitchen, as if she needed a watchdog, but also to turn attention away from Jo’s dilemma since the girl could never make a decision with the spotlight on her. Look at them both, Jo thought with fleeting concern, would he ever put Ma in a home, like Edward said? In the end, she didn’t want to think about either of them at all, she simply wanted to run.

  The dramatic stripes of her light cotton skirt flowed round as she walked briskly down the road, the effect of it reassuring. Sarah Fortune’s influence had made her root through her wardrobe and the local shops for things which actually pleased her. If she were Sarah, how would she tackle Rick? Calmly, directly, without going pink or beating about the bush, saying, Can I talk to you, please? That’s what Sarah had said when they talked about it. She said, Find out the truth and then, if you have to, find someone else. A long talk it had been, with the clothes.

  The amusement arcade was an empty hall of sound, not yet fit for the crowd who would filter through later, clog the quayside with cars and sit like dummies munching chips. Joanna did not smooth her skirt or preen her hair, but went into the relative darkness, temporarily blinded. Rick was polishing. Thunderbirds V, she read; Street Fighters, Space Wars X, Kung Fu, a veritable graveyard of fun. He stopped and looked at her.

  His face broke into a slow smile. From the darkness behind, his father’s large, florid countenance appeared. A gnarled hand laid a warning grasp on his son’s arm, while the opposite hand tipped his cap to Joanna. Hypocrite, she thought, bully and hypocrite. Rick’s bruises were still faintly shocking. She looked from him to the old man and back again, challenging. He seemed to shrink in front of her eyes.

  ‘We’ll take the van,’ Rick said.

  Driving out to the woods by the beach, Rick rang the chimes, ignoring the early posses of children who waved. Joanna sat upright. Beyond the caravan site, where a pitted road marked ‘unsuitable for vehicles’ led into the woods, Rick turned left, stopped after two hundred yards. The human compulsion to congregate had always amazed him in its sheer perversity. Once off the beaten track, even so short a distance from two thousand other souls, there was rarely anyone at all. You’d think, he’d told Stonewall, that human beings really loved one another the way they went on.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you,’ said Rick to Joanna, resting over the wheel of the van. ‘But you called me out, so you go first.’ Her hands were in her lap; he could see she had been biting her nails and now she was taking an extra deep breath.

  ‘Rick, do you like me, even a little bit? Oh, that’s a silly question, you can’t really say no, can you?’

  ‘Yes I could, but it wouldn’t be true. Course I like you.’ He was furious about the tremor in his voice. ‘You and Stonewall, you’re all there is for me.’ Then he copied her deep breath, entirely without affectation. ‘Only your brother Edward said you were only playing games with me and I couldn’t take that, could I?’

  ‘Edward?’ she said slowly, in tones of despair.

  ‘Who else? He also said he could take away the arcade. I shouldn’t have listened Jo, should I? I shouldn’t, should I?’

  She had begun to cry, whether from a sense of relief or one of betrayal, she did not quite know.

  ‘No, you shouldn’t. We wouldn’t do any such thing. Dad wouldn’t, Julian wouldn’t, Edward . . . You know what we should do with all this stuff we own? We should just give it all back, all that stuff we have, get rid of it, let other people have it.’ The tears embarrassed her.

  Out in the woods, it was cool. They walked for a while in silence, moving by instinct towards the sea. You could live here ever so long and never fail to be drawn to the sea: all steps led in that direction, winter or summer. Rick wanted to make love to her there and then, on the pine needles, the way he had wanted to for months, too nervous to try because it mattered too much and he was so terrified it wouldn’t work, slid his arm round her waist instead. The crying ceased, slowly.

  ‘I’ve been so miserable, Rick,’ she said with a great tremulous sigh. ‘I’ve tried to stop being miserable
, but I can’t.’

  ‘You and me both.’ He tightened his hold. ‘You’re fading away. Don’t you go getting any thinner.’

  She wanted to laugh, still wanted to cry, turning to him as he turned to her, burying herself in his chest, her hair floating over his face, him stroking it into smoothness, looking down at the top of her head in wonder. Then moving on, arm in arm, looking for an even quieter place to sit down, somewhere where the sun would reach them but not intrude.

  ‘I could kill your brother Edward,’ Rick murmured. ‘He was out and about early today, though. I got Stonewall to follow him, for a game.’ Joanna did not like mention of Edward. She wanted to believe that the conjunction of Edward and mean little lies was a kind of mistake, all to be made clear, some other time.

  ‘Stonewall didn’t do so well then. Edward came home as I left.’

  Rick stopped, faintly perturbed, not enough to distract him from the beating of his own heart. Much further and he would die; as long as he could sit with her, hold on to her, the rest could wait.

  His feet felt the smoothness of sand in a couch-shaped hollow to the left of the track, shielded by a crooked tree halfway up the last slope before the top ridge and the alien openness of the beach where two seekers of kinder light knew they did not want to go. They sat together, peaceful but awkward, he suddenly with all the patience in the world, wanting to do everything right with time as his ally.

  ‘You do want me, Jo? Are you sure?’

  From out of his mouth, the shortened name was fine, she loved it, gazed at him, and then, the expression on her face changed slowly. From one of dazed and mesmerized beauty, her huge pupils narrowed, defied the love in her eyes, became a mask of puzzlement, almost pain.

  ‘There’s a person, watching us,’ she murmured. ‘Over there.’

  Rick twisted away from her, shouted loudly, ‘Who’s that?’ focusing in the alternate light and dark made by the waving branches, listened, heard nothing but the sighing of the wind. Looked round in deep suspicion, fists clenched, ready to fight, saw a flash of purple.

  A sleeve and a hand extended from the other side of a tree, a thin stream of blood forming into a bright red drop at the end of the fingers, suddenly caught, looking as if it would never fall. Rick would not have recognized a mere hand, but he knew the colour of that piece of silken flotsam. Stonewall, the stupid spy, always playing games, the silly little runt.

  ‘Come out, you daft bugger!’ Rick bellowed.

  Slowly the hand slipped. Both watched, hypnotized, ready to be amused. Stonewall’s face, contused, streaked with dirty red, his eyes staring wide, emerged first. The hand moved in the semblance of a royal wave, making a big, slow, theatrical gesture until gently, violently, a slight trace of foam around his mouth, Stonewall slumped towards them.

  Shortly after Julian had left, before eight o’clock, she supposed, without checking her watch, Sarah felt that great stab of pain which made her sit on the side of the ancient bath, holding her head in her hands. The clanking of the plumbing which produced steamy hot water by chance rather than science, pipes reverberating inside walls like the tuning of an organ, stunned recollection, forbade thinking, encouraged screaming. The same with the pain itself, intense, dying slowly, inducing panic because she knew it was not hers and there was nothing she could do, could not divine the source or the cure, only feel and pray it would go.

  It was the same old affliction, an excess of vicarious knowledge. She was always able to sense loneliness across a road or a room, similar to an Exocet missile finding heat, but now all pain, physical and mental, seemed to find her, echoed from another body into her own and settled in her limbs, to be treated only by her own equivalent of prayer to no known god, the prayer as often a curse for the empathy she had somehow acquired.

  A sort of telepathy, Malcolm said dismissively. Grist to her mill, in the days before Charles Tysall and Malcolm when she had augmented her income by discriminate prostitution, less concerned about profit than fun and freedom, merely a woman in pursuit of a talent. She had never considered herself a therapist, simply a person without conventional morals of the kind which seemed both irrelevant and obstructive. Besides, she loved sleeping with men provided she liked them. Affection or respect was the key; either would do. Some of them preferred to chat: not many. Being a tart with a heart meant listening first or after, it did not matter what they wanted, provided she gave value and as often as not, received her own reward.

  Sarah washed with thoroughness, killing the smell of sexual contact with some regret. Losing the habits of genteel promiscuity because of being with Malcolm, did not mean losing either the empathy or the instincts. Malcolm’s kind lived by one set of rules, she lived by another, was all; she could not even see anything odd about hers, could not even see it as a strange way of going on.

  Or even a strange way of being, until she looked in the glass, as she did now, with the steam melting on the bathroom mirror and all the smell of sex gone, the pain receding into a dull ache, somewhere around the head, the ribs, the hand. She wanted not to stare at herself and could not close her eyes, they seemed to be stuck, staring wide. She turned on the basin tap to make more steam, scratching at those little grubs on the back of her arms where Charles Tysall had been, knowing he was alive, leaving his scars on her skin, like Elisabeth, now on someone else. The pain increased. She stared into the steam. There was a brief wish that someone, anyone, would stare back, that a hand could appear over her naked shoulder and brush away the worms, as no-one had ever done, not Malcolm with his best efforts, no-one, since no-one ever did.

  Sarah did nothing, stared towards the blurred reflection of her face, concentrated to keep her eyes open, in case other, more innocent eyes should close.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘All gone! Everybody gone!’

  Left to her own devices, Mrs Jennifer Pardoe tended to potter and talk to herself, a mild eccentricity, she thought, a measure to preserve sanity in the face of the constant charade. The trouble was, it was becoming difficult to tell which persona was which. She kept finding herself acting oddly, even in privacy. Daily domestic help was long since vetoed: acting mad in front of the family was exhausting enough, though less of a strain recently. Mouse Pardoe was more than happy to justify her own existence in the meantime. By a gentle, none too efficient polishing of the furniture, a little playful baking, the occasional stroll with the vacuum cleaner, since it was not as though she had ever intended Joanna to be a slave, although it had often crossed her fertile mind that excessive domestic burdens could provoke the child to rebel enough to get the men to do it. This ploy had not worked: Joanna as housekeeper had a dedication well beyond her years.

  Mouse sighed. A pretty girl of eighteen should find better things to do than think about the kitchen, or allow her brother to impose his presence everywhere by the clumsy means of all his fishing mess. Look at it, always taking up one end of the long table, reels, weights, ugly things, all there to exert male power. Mr Pardoe had done the same. In Mrs Pardoe’s languid tidying of the kitchen and pantry, there were vague, but varied purposes. It allowed her to hide the tracks of predatory forays into the larder in the early hours of the morning; made it easier to blame her own, quixotic, greedy tastes on the men of the house. She could succumb to the desire to make another truly ugly cake which no-one could eat and that gave her magnificent licence to irritate. No-one had eaten the one she made to greet Sarah Fortune.

  ‘They’re all in their own worlds, dear,’ she said to Hettie who stood sentry at the back door, a cunning watchdog who would warn if anyone approached by the simple means of a subdued bleating, which reminded Mrs Pardoe of someone coughing in church, a polite little rattle behind a handkerchief. Thinking of which, the verger who had greeted her so affectionately on Sunday was coming for tea this afternoon, which would be very nice indeed, the way it had been for years of Mondays. Mrs Pardoe laughed, a snuffling, giggling, finally trumpet-like sound which she smothered with a tea towel, her chin resti
ng on the table. I’ll be coming for tea, oh yes. There were certain phrases did this to her, such as the vicar saying, I’ll give you a tinkle, meaning he would phone; Joanna asking, Where is the crevice tool for the Hoover? Such rude descriptions, shouted aloud with such innocence. Mouse sat at the end of the table with her head on her knuckles and chuckled until the onset of the sobriety which usually followed private laughter except on special occasions demanding silence, when the giggles would go on and on until she wanted to be sick in a sort of secret drunkenness. Share this with another and they become a friend, a bit like a joke with sex, and that, she told herself firmly, was enough of that.

  There was something she had meant to tell Sarah Fortune. Something important. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Memory gone. Perhaps she was really going round the twist after all.

  Her tidying at table level had disturbed a collection of hooks in packets. Similar, but larger than the feathery, coarse-fishing kind she had collected in her palm the night before. She looked at them with caution and a dull hatred. Edward’s little toys; Edward, fishing to compete with his father, using fishing as an alibi, like his father. Then the same suppressed levity came welling up within her again, a desire to play with things. A mischievous impulse. She would hide all the reels, throw away the weights, tie knots in the lines, sweep up the hooks. Then say, I was playing, dear. I was only playing; like you were when you hit me.

  There was a dish of soft butter on the table, along with the milk, a bowl of soft liver pâté in the larder, cheese, soft sliced bread in the bread bin. She would make the men a sandwich. Then she would make, not a cake, but scones to greet them home. They would never eat them, and the waste of what they would not eat would really rile them.