Then she beamed at him again, leant forward as the kettle, still warm, began to simmer, pulled the lobe of his left ear playfully and whispered into the right.
‘Got a friend upstairs, if you see what I mean,’ she said with a lascivious wink. The act was going well, Sarah could see from her vantage point, good to the point of ludicrous. Mouse Pardoe deserved an Oscar, but the man did not like a flirt.
‘Do you come here often?’ she trilled. ‘Oh yes, of course you do. I’ve seen you before. You’re a friend of my son Edward and I think you’re wearing my husband’s coat. Oh dear, oh dear, you’ve eaten those sandwiches. Silly boy!’
She was on the other side of the table from him now, leaning across, scooping the scones towards her with frantic movements, her back to the Raeburn.
That was too much for the intruder. He had winced when she pinched his ear; the touch was overdone, broke the trance in which her performance had held him, as if Mrs Pardoe had suddenly stepped out of the spotlight, become human, threatening. Her scooping up available food before his hunger was sated confirmed his irritation. He moved swiftly and clumsily, the stick beneath the coat knocking against the chairs as he lurched round the table towards her. He picked her up roughly by the straps of her dress, hoisted her upright so that she stood with her body pressed close against his. Then he whisked her round and in one swift movement, grabbed hold of both her hands, clamped the palms firmly to the sides of the kettle and held them there. There was a delayed reaction, both of them breathing deeply.
From her viewpoint, Sarah did not immediately comprehend. Actions of sheer malice were difficult to fathom, created paralysis rather than instant response. A high-pitched shriek of fear and pain burst forth from Mouse Pardoe’s lips; she began to struggle, but Charles braced her sagging frame upright, his knees pressed into the back of her thighs, held her hands in the vice of his own, pressed them firmly as the kettle began to boil, and then Sarah understood.
There was no thought in her reaction. As the shriek descended to a whimper, she crashed through the pantry door holding the newspaper, flung the contents at the same moment as the scream descended into a pleading moan. Something brown, damp and inert suddenly moved on the neck of the white head; squirming animal life landed on the Raeburn with a hiss. Lugworms met the heat of the kettle and the stove, more landed on the man’s arms and round his feet. He sprang back, slipped on the flesh, steadied himself, staring at the floor, seeing a serpent.
He raised his eyes slowly until he met those of Sarah, standing three feet away with the newspaper still in her hand. Their gaze locked in confused recognition. She should have known, she thought later, should have known from the first glimpse who he was, the style of his embrace, the clutching to himself of the thing he was about to torture. She should have known, from what she remembered.
Mouse Pardoe’s whimpering rose again to a crescendo, descending into a sobbing. Then there was the sound of heavy footsteps overhead. The man backed away from the two women and the worms writhing on the stove and floor, without taking his eyes away from Sarah’s face, his hands reaching for the scones and the milk on the table, grasping them blindly but accurately, as if he had rehearsed and memorized their position, shoving them in his pockets. The stick, banging again on the legs of a chair, made a loud sound. Against her own judgement, Sarah found herself advancing towards him, possessed by an anger which knew no fear, acknowledged no risk, desired nothing but violent retribution, a growl in her throat. Her hands had formed into claws; her voice emerged like a spitting cat.
‘Charles . . . you shit.’
The door from the hall crashed inwards, the verger cannoning through and into Sarah with her hands poised to strike and her face white with fury. He grabbed her, holding her wrists shouting, ‘Here! what’s this?’, blustering with breathless energy while she twisted. Charles melted away through the door, into the rain. Sarah felt the rotund, miniature shape holding her own, shrieked in turn, ‘Let go, you stupid shit, fucking let go!’
‘No,’ Mouse Pardoe shouted, shaking but suddenly firm. ‘No, don’t, not yet. That’s the last thing you should do.’
Sarah came back to earth and knew the Mouse was right. No-one should pursue a ghost.
The thunder rolled away, but the rain persisted, tumbling out of the sky in sheer impatience. Miss Gloomer liked it. After a particularly satisfactory tea, she had risen from her chair to look for her stick, an automatic reaction for which she chided herself, reaching instead for the substitute, a lesser favourite, then decided not to move at all and drew a rug round her knees instead. The nice doctor, who did not know he was a good man, would call at six. There was no need for him to do that and he might not stay long because he never intruded, he was brisk and respected her privacy. The burglary had shaken her, left her weaker, but not so weak she could not think. What one needs in life, she was telling an imaginary audience, as she would tell the doctor when he called, is an infinite capacity for forgiveness. People are only little, busy things, babies and animals, you see, they do what they can; they are thoughtless and selfish, they love nothing better than their own flesh and blood and that is the way they are. If you want to be on the inside track, Doctor, get yourself a family.
On that thought, of what she would say when he came in for a small glass of sherry, Miss Gloomer’s small and obdurate frame gave up the task of living. She died in her upright chair, wearing her winter and summer shoes, thinking of children and how little in life she really regretted including her inability to make a cake, why bother when you could buy better from the baker? This was one of life’s greater mysteries. Julian found her. He sat and held her cooling hand, called for the ambulance, which would take some time. Composed her eyes and her mouth, watched the instant, facelifting effect of death.
Rick took Joanna home, with the kind of absent kiss she understood without trying, then took the van back and parked it outside the arcade. Course he’d live, daft little sod, he had to live, made of metal, the doctor said, hit that head one more time and a stick would bounce. A weary sickness made him slow getting out, drawn to the row and the smell and the noise and the temporary end of thinking. He did not walk straight inside; he saw sense and went further down the quay where he bought fish and chips and ate them without tasting anything, standing in the wet without noticing that either. Getting food down and keeping it there was vital. He belched but did not spit and went in to work.
‘You’re late, boy, we’ve been taking serious money here, where the fuck you been?’ his father said. Rick seized him by the lapels of his jacket, shook him until he rattled and then sat him on the floor. There were no words with this brief exchange of views, only the breathy sounds of a precedent being established. It was enough.
‘Listen, Dad,’ said Rick, picking him up with absent-minded strength, ‘you got to do something useful tomorrow.’
‘Oh yes, what’s that, son?’ his father asked, almost respectfully.
Rick paused. ‘We’ve got to have this place for our own so we don’t owe anyone. But first we got to get our act together and find this ghost. He might have done for Stonewall. We got to find him.’
Malcolm Cook looked round Sarah Fortune’s London flat, standing disconsolately and a little defiantly, facing the elegant mirror which dominated the narrow hall, giving a view of anyone who entered and also the rooms either side. He never expected it to be quite the same as the last time he had seen it, since Sarah, who loved and acquired beautiful things, also gave them away with the same ease and moved them round, restlessly. Malcolm was the opposite, preferred the spartan and the durable objects he would preserve for ever.
Next to his flank and keeping close, the red-haired dog, ever immune to the reverberations of the place, could not resist the introspective mood.
Start again. Open this door and think about it. Look at it from her point of view. Would the new paint on the walls have changed anything in her mind? Would she miss the place at all in view of its history? If he was ever going
to understand her, he would have to make himself go over every step of her ordeal. At first, he could only see himself in here, using his enormous energy to clean up all the stains, so much blood he could only marvel, forced himself not to remember, but to feel, shivered.
So this was what he had done for her first, swept through the flat while she recovered, covering all traces with gloss and emulsion, three coats each. Maybe that had been wrong, just as encouraging her to forget the finer points, put the whole episode to one side like a useless gift, had also been mistaken. Perhaps she should have been forced to relive it again and again, exorcise the helpless pain of it, come to terms. Instead of which he had been saying, Look at me. Look at me, please, take me instead of looking back; I’m here for you, all yours.
The apartment had the stuffy heat of a place enclosed in summer. He wanted to fling open the windows but desisted, imagining instead the place in darkness. Forced himself to think. What would have been the worst thing about that one night last July, the importance of which, as far as he was concerned, was to thrust Sarah, bloody and bowed and needing, into his arms?
He walked back to the front door, turned, as if coming inside for the first time, as she had done in the near dark, careless, lovely, amoral Sarah. Entering her own domain with a slight feeling of trepidation. Seeing, through the mirror in the hall, Charles Tysall lurking in the room to the right, waiting. Turning to flee, too late. Charles behind her then, embracing her, making her watch herself in a mirror like this mirror, making her strip in front of her own reflection, teasing, taunting, announcing his litany of hate and disappointment, calling her filth. Then flinging down the mirror which had rolled and broken into a thousand shapes, large shards, sharp-edged pieces and smaller slivers, twinkling. Charles, pressing Sarah’s naked body into that bed of bloody pain, holding her there, while she writhed against the glass and he waited to end it, to cut her face, her throat, whatever he would reach as she twisted away and he slashed, not caring if he cut his own, long fingers.
Malcolm shuddered again, his mouth hanging open, his eyes seeing again what he had discovered then. Led by the dog and her merciful passion for open doors, strange places, raw meat smells, they had come upstairs. Charles had penetrated the dog’s russet-coated neck with the biggest piece of glass, almost killed her. Canine blood, mixed with the human; the same smell.
So much blood, so much glass, he had not known how to move her. There was all the gore of an abattoir, none of the convenience. He had wrapped her in the white towels she had soaked, all contact with her skin giving rise to small, breathless screams, which she bit back so hard her mouth bled too. She could not stand, sit, faint or recline, a creature flayed by the glass, the place reverberating with her whimpering.
What would Sarah remember most, when she touched those little scars which marked where the myriad shards of glass had pierced so deep, leaving her arms, part of her abdomen, her back, her shoulders, littered with souvenirs? She touched them often: they itched, she said, excusing herself as someone would with the hiccoughs. He tried to analyse the pain, in a way he had never quite tried before, because he had been busy offering (instead of imagination) comfort, warmth, forgetfulness and the panacea of love.
Humiliation, that was what Sarah would remember. She would be most crippled by the inability to fight back, by her cowardice, by loss of control, by the obscene pleas she would have spoken to make the taunting stop. There would be the shame at crying in his presence, begging for life and a scintilla of dignity. It would be the poison of the shame, for doing nothing to prevent him, for letting it happen without seeing it was coming, for never fighting back until too late, misjudging, becoming helpless. That would kill the soul and leave the vacuum full of hatred.
Facing the mirror, he could feel it with her. Malcolm had been ashamed of his own furious ineptitude, but it was nothing like her shame. He should have made her talk. No-one earns a future by repressing the past, and pain like that, he saw clearly now, never goes away. He had merely done the equivalent, he supposed, of treating a wound with a bandage when only surgery would do.
The dullness of logic prevailed. Tomorrow was a full day’s work. Also the day after. He could rearrange his life to go and find her, a quest fit for a man who professed to love, rather than merely possess.
When he was calmer. When he could think of her not as what he wished she would be, but as what she actually was. Imperfectly pure: good by her own standards only, indelibly scarred.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Edward came home shivering. The almost tropical dampness made him long for foreign territory and a bath, but he could not bring himself to go indoors. All morning he had sat in the estate agent’s office where he worked, unable to get the white-haired man out of his head. If he looked out into the street, all he could see was white-haired men. Even his white-haired boss seemed threatening instead of contemptuous.
Edward hated working in the estate agent’s, hated working full stop. This latest of jobs, a sinecure, was one he liked least, reminding him all the time of what his family owned in property and making him incubate the worst of his dreams. The Pardoes did not own a single beautiful building, he explained; nor was there one he could see in the village. Otherwise he might have cared about his work. The place needed pulling down, how could a man of taste love it?
Today, both his aggression and his defensiveness seemed to have disappeared. He felt naked, vulnerable and mean. It made no difference, working in an office which the Pardoes virtually owned. Conscience could always undermine money.
Edward knew he should have been able to identify the white-haired ghost by at least a name, but it had never been important when all they were doing was playing games. He should have been in control of the trespasser he had found, but he was not. With his estate agency knowledge, Edward had housed, sometimes fed, the malevolent spirit for three months. All in the interests of fun and the somewhat malicious, somewhat romantic dreaming which fed his own daily existence and made it worthwhile. It had made him walk taller but now made him want to hide. He had meant mischief, but the reality, the look of hatred on the man’s face, somehow extended it further than his own cowardice allowed. Edward might have hit his own silly mother from time to time, he might have detested his brother, but wanting them to disappear was not quite the same any longer as wanting them dead.
The discomfort, which had begun when he heard about Miss Gloomer’s burglary, increased somehow because of the mere presence of Sarah Fortune and solidified into an indigestible lump after this morning’s conversation, like much of Jo’s cooking and all of Mother’s playful cakes. Increased threefold when his two colleagues came back from a makeshift lunch at the pub which the Pardoes also owned, talking about the ghost. Above the cheese-and-onion which Edward could smell as they spoke, the pungency overcoming the waft of a pint of lager between them, he learned all about how Stonewall Jones had met the ghost in the dunes and had his head caved in with a stick. The lady behind the bar worked in the surgery up until noon, then moved sideways into a less sterile atmosphere. Best gossip around, she was, with her dual sources.
Edward’s blood ran hot, the slow digestion of the news creating a sweat under his cotton shirt, once perfectly ironed by Joanna and now a mass of wrinkles. The news made him itch all over, as if bitten by insects and carrying poison. Edward had never been anywhere where he might catch malaria: he had never dared, no money, no courage and no stamina, preferring the sneering discontent of home. Sitting outside his own house, he longed to go as far away as any aeroplane would take him. To any other kind of jungle where no-one knew him.
There were cars lined up outside the front door as usual, Jo’s, Julian’s, the visitor’s, plus another, the house apparently the scene of a conference. The rain was easing. Edward felt allergic to them all, especially Joanna. On the wet grass of the lawn, another ghost, that of naked Sarah Fortune, still travelled, pale and tantalizing, in smooth circles across the green, the only thing of objective beauty he had seen in
weeks. Oh, come on, he told himself, as the rain drizzled mildly against the windscreen of his car, come on. Be manly or something. A man should be able to fish, like his father, a man was not ashamed to be whatever he was, even if that made him idle, artistic, self-seeking, incestuous. A man should be large, not small, indecisive and afraid. Edward looked at his own neat hands in a hot flush of realizations he wanted to avoid. The hands shook, more than they had shaken when he lost his temper and hit his mother last evening. A man should achieve control of his actions. He should also have someone to tell.
Wavering lights, out there, as he sat looking over the marshes towards the sea which he wished would come closer, even though its proximity made him afraid, as well as the house itself, lit like some ugly Christmas tree. One thing he knew now, above all others: he had loathed this place for as long as he remembered. Squinting through the glass, he could see two things. First, the strange car belonged to PC Curl, their only full-time member of Constabulary; second, from the near distance, the light outside Sarah’s cottage beckoned like a flickering star.
Nine-thirty, he read on his watch; the mere beginning of a summer night. Closer, the light shone more like a keep-out sign than a welcome, a warning, a weapon against this early dark created by the long, mocking storm. It was ironic, he thought, beneath the lingering anxiety, that he should follow his brother’s footsteps so meekly, treading the same route with similar humility. He knocked loudly on the door, making a tune out of it, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, instead of just banging once, something to prove he was a nonchalant son of a bitch who would go away whistling if there was no response, waiting all the same.
She answered after a long delay, less winsome than before, still beautiful. A woman with a fierce look on her face as she looked out of the window first, then said, ‘Come in,’ with a purely neutral friendliness.
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