Perfect Love

by Elizabeth Buchan

  ‘Do you want a divorce?’

  The locks on the case snapped shut and Prue breathed a sigh of relief. Max inhaled her scent and the freshness of recently ironed clothes, lifted the case off the table and opened the gun-safe.

  ‘It’s curious, isn’t it . . .?’ Prue held her breath and Max continued. ‘You imagine your life has a certain foundation . . .’ Prue winced. ‘In answer to your question, Prue. I’m not sure what I want, or what is going to happen.’ He stowed his father’s gun in its place and took out the Purdey.

  Prue thought of the easy things she could say.

  . She and Jamie were separate from her and Max’s marriage.

  The itch of her flesh made no difference.

  Max and Jane were too important to throw away.

  A smashed vase can be put back together with time and skill . . .

  None of them would do because Prue had loved Jamie and it had mattered, and had altered things at home.

  ‘Do you have to do that?’ She gestured towards the Purdey.

  He squinted over the bifocals at his wife. ‘Yes, I do. They need attention.’

  A sigh escaped her. ‘I am sorry I hurt you, Max. I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘You showed admirable judgement in finding precisely the point where I would hurt most.’ Max took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘Why weren’t you cleverer, Prue? You could have been, you know.’

  ‘Forgive me, Max. Forgive me.’

  Yes, Prue could have been a great deal more clever. More principled, tougher, she could have stayed at home. But she (as are others) was locked in an unconscious drama, propelled by ancient, primitive forces.

  Prue looked at Max and raised her shoulders. Oddly enough, Max understood the gesture. It embodied the spirit in which he had married Helen, against reason and sense. You did something because it was unavoidable. He decided to talk and laid the Purdey on the table.

  ‘As I said before, I knew about it for some time,’ he said, ‘but I did not know whom.’

  ‘I was so careful.’

  ‘You forget that I know you very well. I may not know what you think, but I know your mental geography. It changed, Prue, and I couldn’t find my way any more.’

  This was true.

  ‘Anyway, you bought a new set of underwear and there was dust on your St Joan notes. But, you see, I had prepared for all that.’

  ‘Was I that obvious?’ Prue looked at the carpet, so in need of the Hoover. ‘It’s a cliche, I know, but it was nothing to do with you.’

  ‘That’s one of your sillier statements.’ Max went over to the drinks tray.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit early?’ Prue watched him pour a whisky.

  ‘Shut up.’ Max measured out some water.

  She thought of Jamie bending over her in the bed at the hotel, tense with passion, kissing her naked shoulder and thought she would die from the pain.

  ‘I imagined you together,’ said Max. ‘I thought of what you did when we made love and I wondered if he took that bit of you which was mine as well. Or were you different with him?’

  She felt a tidal blush flood her face. ‘I never compared notes.’

  Max leant against the mantelpiece and toyed with the glass. ‘I know I’m getting older, Prue. We all know what happens to potency and I realized that by marrying someone so much younger I had to make allowances. In a way, I felt you were owed an affair. My mistake was to think I knew it all. You see, I thought Helen had taught me that the flesh was everything, but also nothing. I did not see what it would cost. I did not foresee it would involve my daughter. My daughters. And that cannot be.’

  She turned away her head, and fought her tears.

  ‘Anyway,’ Max continued, ‘it taught me a thing or two about sex. The degrees of complicity. Imagining, you see, which is what one does a lot of at this stage of life, instead of doing.’

  The tears slid down Prue’s cheeks. ‘So the gun and that stupid scene was for me as well as for Violet . . .’

  Max’s fingers tightened on the glass. ‘I found it unforgivable,’ he searched for the words, ‘unbearable, wicked, that you had taken my daughter’s husband, and I had to do something for her.’

  Prue knew then that she would never be free of Violet. Ever. Ever. That was her punishment. ‘The dustman or the mayor would have been fine, or any old Tom, Dick or Harry, but not Violet’s husband,’ she said.

  ‘You must see that, Prue.’

  She accepted it in silence. ‘The tiger principle,’ she said eventually and wiped her tears with the back of her wrist. ‘You’ve made the point. Will you have me back?’

  Max’s whisky made a glugging sound and displaced dust pricked at Prue’s nose. She waited.

  ‘For Jane’s sake, probably,’ said Max.

  ‘No. You’ve missed the point. Not for Jane’s sake, for mine. Because I’ve asked you. Because I decided to ask you to help rebuild our marriage.’

  ‘And Jane?’

  ‘It has to be between the two of us.’

  Max turned away from Prue, and jiggled the contents of his glass from side to side.

  Prue held our her hands, fingers stretched and quivering. ‘Max, please.’

  He did nothing. She gestured again. ‘Give me your hand, Max.’

  Still he waited.

  ‘Give, Max.’

  Slowly he put out his hand and laid it in hers, his cool, manicured lawyer’s hand, so familiar against her hot, unsteady flesh. Their fingers held, moved and twined together.

  ‘Oh, Max,’ she said, her gaze fixed on the white slash of Helen’s wound.

  ‘There’s a brick coming loose in the wall by the gate,’ he remarked. Then he said, ‘What’s for lunch?’

  After a while, he picked up the Purdey and replaced it in the gun-safe, which he locked with a click of metal on metal.

  The Reverend Richard Williams looked a happy man. Although Easter was, of course, hugely important, Midnight Mass at Christmas was the colourful highspot of the year. Lit by candles, the church looked so beautiful, so swathed in mystery and light. Unlike the world.

  Regardless of his parishioners’ sleep quota, Richard had decided to give a sermon. He felt something was needed to mark a bad year, financially, politically and spiritually. Was there anyone left untouched by cynicism and who trusted a politician? He thought not, although the Church could be said to have benefited from the misery brought on by recession even if the unemployed arriviste churchgoer was only there because it marked out a day in the week.

  Keith, her husband, relegated to the seat behind the pillar, Molly sang ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear’ loudly enough for two, and Richard suspected she had had a couple of nips. The Valours were in the pew behind. Mrs Valour looked strained and he wondered if she was sickening for something. Mind you, the daughter was very pale and, now he looked properly, far too thin.

  His sermon was one over which he had brooded long and hard, in the belief that, in the end, you must stand and be counted. Vicars were there as sacrificial lambs or, worse, Aunt Sallies, but also examples to their flocks. He knew he was going to cause offence and viewed it with trepidation, but with a sense of martyrdom searched for and found, he mounted the pulpit.

  ‘The family,’ he announced, ‘is under assault and I want to talk to you about it.’

  Prue stole a glance at Max out of the corner of her eye, but he was staring ahead.

  ‘Easy options . . .’ Richard was warming nicely to this theme, ‘It’s easy to conclude that your spouse is dull, or doesn’t satisfy you, and to decide to seek out someone else. It is far harder to stand by the vow of marriage and to make a go of it. I accuse those who are listening of giving in to these temptations at one point or another.’

  Several stifled yawns issued from the Paulton family and Keith Greer had taken advantage of his cover to slip quietly into a doze. Quite a few in the pews adjusted their expressions into blankness and wished that the vicar would shut up. Jeremy North thought of several little episodes with
some pleasure, Fred Stokes with less. Old windbag, the latter thought, keeping his eyes fixed on the vicar and attempting to look stern.

  Prue thought of the tides beating inside her body that would take years to subdue and subside. Of extremes of feeling, of the scars still unhealed, of the moments when she soared above ordinary levels, of her daughter’s misery, and thought, savagely and stubbornly. Even so, I can’t regret it.

  ‘What do we want?’ Richard Williams’s question was rhetorical for he did not wish to run the risk of being given the wrong answer. ‘Security, real security, for our children to grow up in. We want families, real families, to make our communities and to set an example to future generations. We want standards.’

  Newly married, newly arrived in the parish, exuding a fresh-minted quality, Carole and Peter Danby shifted closer together and tried to disguise that they were holding hands. Max turned his head and indicated the Danbys with a nod.

  What’s in store for them? he asked Prue silently.

  She returned his gaze, and took on board its new speculative quality and concluded that, in a strange way, the events of the last year had revitalized Max. In some indefinable manner, repossessing had turned out to be an aphrodisiac.

  Against that, Prue had to remember that he would not forget what she had done, and that she must accept his anger. Recession had changed the face of the village, of the country, and shone a dim but, perhaps, honest light on them all, rather as an unwise love affair had exposed the wrinkles in her marriage. Prue could never again regard her husband in the same light, neither would Max her, but her vision was wider.

  She turned her attention back to the vicar.

  Yet that was not quite how Max viewed the situation. He was thinking: There is no fool like an old one. Nevertheless, when he looked at his wife his eyes suggested that he accepted the perversities of the spirit - the contradictions on which deep-seated, long-term relationships often thrived. Particularly his own.

  ‘We should consider divorce the last resort and . . .’ Richard paused to milk the drama ‘. . . deviant sexuality should be helped and pitied but should never be regarded as anything but outside the norm.’

  There was an audible rustle as Joe Tatchett got up and walked out, throwing his prayer book on to the table by the door with a thump.

  The candles burned lower and the yawns got louder.

  Jane moved restlessly beside Prue and Prue bent over her.

  ‘Not much longer,’ she whispered.

  ‘So boring,’ Jane whispered back, and leant briefly against her mother.

  ‘The promises we make to ourselves and to others,’ Richard wound up with a flourish, ‘should be made on the absolute assumption that we try to keep them. Not on the I’ll-give-it-a-go basis.’

  I suppose, thought Prue, concentrating on her love for Max and Jane, the Church has to say that and it is useful. But it is not the whole story. Not at all.

  Twelve days later, the tree needed to be dismantled and the decorations replaced in their box. Max would put them back in their place in the attic beside the fishing rods - at which point he usually retrieved the latter to look them over.

  Prue and Jane were wrapping silver balls in tissue paper when, true to form, Max entered the room and dumped canvas-shrouded rods and a cobwebbed fishing bag on the sofa.

  Prue got in quick before he became sidetracked. ‘Can you help with the tree? I think we’ll have to cut it up before we take it out.’

  ‘Plain Janey,’ Max used the old nickname, ‘can you get the clippers from the shed and a black plastic rubbish bag?’

  Prue held up a ball to the light. It was made of delicate, transparent glass and the light slid over it like coloured oil. ‘Pretty,’ she said.

  Both Max and Jane were reflected in its curve, distorted, distant reflections. I’ve been away, Prue told herself, suppressing her grief. I went and looked at another land, and wandered beside a river flowing with honey. But I had to come back, and I had to find the way home.

  The image blurred under the warmth of her fingers and, after wrapping the ball carefully in the tissue, Prue put it in its place in the box.

  Turning back from strange lands to light the fire and tend the hearth was not a bad decision - quite the contrary - but not every woman’s. But to arrive at it, it was necessary to beat out its decisions in grief and bewilderment before arriving at a plan of action.

  Prue had an idea that the roar and buffets of the battles ahead would strengthen her power. Love, after all, was an act of will. Passion was not.

  Jane returned with the clippers and handed them to her father.

  ‘Hold the tree steady,’ he said. ‘And hold the bag open, Prue.’

  Cursing gently when the needles punctured his skin, Max pruned the tree of its branches and stuffed them into the bag. It rained needles on to the carpet, which disappeared under a green sea, and the tree shrank and became bald.

  After the last branch had been disposed of, Max straightened up. ‘That’s Christmas over,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this thing outside and I’ll chop it up.’

  Prue bent over and fastened the plastic bag because she did not want Max or Jane to see that she was crying.

  Jane watched her mother. Her expression suggested that she had learnt something about the precariousness of the adult world. It also contained a provocative element - how can I use this knowledge? — but mainly relief. ‘Hurry up, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’m hungry. What’s for supper?’

  Joan did not disappear with the casting of her mortal remains into the Seine and with the scattering of the pyre’s ashes to the wind. Neither did Prue’s love for Jamie. Nor his for her. But as Joan was reborn as a myth, a legend, a heroine and, finally, a saint ... but she danced, as another of her biographers phrased it, down the centuries, first one shape, then another.

  Prue learnt to accommodate her experience. She also questioned harder. What had Molly been doing when she made Max turn back? But Prue knew one thing: forgiveness is, perhaps, the greatest virtue, and she was fortunate to have experienced its healing.

  It might have been better for a young ignorant girl with androgynous leanings, a taste for battle (but not for killing) and a highly developed notion of her country in an age when the boundaries were confused, to stay at home. But France would have been denied the spectacle of Joan’s passion, sincerity, courage, extraordinary vision and burning - the term is not ironic - faith. We would have been, Prue concluded as she put away her research books, denied a heroine for all times.

  She laid a hand on the top volume in farewell.

  That was how it was.

  Also by Elizabeth Buchan

  Daughters of the Storm

  Light of the Moon

  Consider the Lily

  First published 1995 by Macmillan an imprint of Macmillan General Books Cavaye Place London SVV10 9PG and Basingstoke

  Associated companies throughout the world ISBN 0-333-59154-2

  Copyright © Elizabeth Buchan 1995

  The right of Elizabeth Buchan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  135798642

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Many thanks are due to many people including my agent, Caroline Sheldon, and my editor, Suzanne Baboneau, for their back-up and expertise, to Peta Nightingale whose input was vital, and to Hazel Orme, on whom I rely absolutely. Last but certainly not least, to my mother, sisters, children and husband.

  There is a huge body of work devoted to the life of
Joan of Arc and I would like to mention two in particular: Edward Lucie Smith’s Joan of Arc(Allen Lane, 1976) and Marina Warner’s brilliant Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981). I took factual information and drew on ideas from both of these works.

  In memory of my beloved father, Peter Oakleigh-Walker

  (1917-1993)

  © 2017 Elizabeth Buchan

  Elizabeth Buchan has asserted her rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  Published by Penguin Books

  First published and printed in 1995

  First published in eBook format in 2017

  ISBN: 9781912317059

  (Printed edition: 0333591542)

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.

  All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Prologue

  Spring

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine