Perfectly Pure and Good (10 page)

She waited for signs of smugness, saw none as he handed her three typed pages, headed with the name of a local estate agent. A glance at the list showed a longish list of houses, business premises and shops. Sarah wondered fleetingly if there was anything freehold left in the village belonging to anyone else.

Àbout two thirds of it,' Julian said, guessing her thoughts. `Took him twenty years. My father,'

he continued, 'believed, passionately in bricks and mortar, exchanged the proceeds of his manufacturing concerns for nothing else. Hence it was apposite for him to be on a roof when having a heart attack, because, at the age of seventy, he chose to clean leaves from the gulley. He always was an over achiever and a lousy delegator. Since his death, my mother has been as you see her; it appears to be a permanent malady. She can no longer read or cook, has no sense of property or propriety, no sense of time, no sense of fear, absolutely no insight into her own condition and no perception of ours.

She's difficult, irritating, demanding, vulnerable and quite incapable of dealing with her own affairs since she doesn't even know what she owns. Neither do I, entirely. I believe Edward does.

He works at the estate agent's who manage things.'

He sighed as if bored by the whole subject. 'Father was copping out, you see.' Julian went on with the same suppressed irritation. `For such an astute and materialistic man, he was very indecisive. He left it all to Mother to sort it for him. Amazing. I thought he loved and trusted me.

Obviously not.' Sarah watched him flinch.

`For the last couple of years, he and Mother seemed to rediscover each other. They behaved like lovers, told each other jokes instead of him simply issuing orders. Father even gave up social climbing, she hated it anyway. He perfected his skill at fishing. Talked about raising rare breeds of sheep. There's one left, in the garden.'

Sarah wanted everything. She wanted to know where Mrs Pardoe had worn her gold dress for the first time and what Mr Pardoe had been like. She wanted family portraits, anecdotes, signs of grief, instead of this unnerving formality. All she could see from here was that husband and wife between them had created a good-looking tribe, disparate in appearance, Edward, dark and slight, Joanna fair and rounded, and the eldest, sitting opposite, stocky and attractive with a jutting chin, red-gold curls, the blazing eyes of a fever and no inclination to wander from the point. Sarah supposed she had better act as she had always done with clients and pretend that she had more to offer than educated common sense. The pretence often became real.

`Look,' she began, 'it's a perfectly valid will.'

`Yes, I know that,' he said rudely. And it leaves me, as the eldest, to administer an estate over which I have no power. Mother can't make a power of attorney in my favour, because she'd have to understand what it was. I've tried and failed. I manage to collect rents, pay cheques and run things only because the bank manager's a patient, but I've got responsibility without authority. I also know, before you deign to tell me, that if she dies, Edward, Joanna and I would inherit in equal shares. Meantime, we're all stuck.

We've got assets without a huge income. Enough, but not generous. Mother could last for thirty years.' He made the last statement fondly, a glimmer of admiration in his voice. Sarah caught him smiling, smiled back and watched his face harden, a man coarsened by bitterness and a loneliness beyond his own curing. Sarah was watching the fleeting betrayals of a condition which was second nature to herself saw a man who had passed harsh judgements on himself

`So,' she said briskly, 'this is what we do. Itemize the estate, then value it. Decide on how it should be managed, whether in or outside the family. Then go to the Court of Protection with our plans. They can write a will for your mother.'

`Simple,' said Julian ironically, the smile coming back.

`No. Not simple, but possible. It'll cost you the price of a house on a Monopoly board, but I don't suppose that matters, you seem to have plenty of houses. The object of this planning is to make sure your mother is safe, happy and well provided for. That's the primary aim. Then, to free up enough capital for you, Edward and Jo to spread your wings and fulfil your dreams sooner rather than later.'

Julian laughed, surprising himself There was irony in the laugh, but at least it was laughter.

`What dreams? What dreams could a simple country doctor have?'

Èveryone has dreams,' Sarah protested. 'Your father must have had dreams to acquire as he did.

Jo tells me that Edward has dreams of being an artist. She may dream of being a cook. Money's for refurbishing dreams. Why else work for it?'

`Some of us don't.'

Surely she could not believe Edward had honest dreams. So much for her wisdom. Edward dreaming of being an artist only meant the same Edward who blamed all his failures on being bored, growing from spiteful boy into lazy man, drifting through one job after another until his father had got him a sinecure in the local estate agent's office. His ability to concentrate was pathetic,' his lack of convention a sham. Julian looked at Sarah and decided her neutral expression was a clever sham too. She might repeat what she was told, but only believe what she chose.

He sat back. This time the smile did not retreat into the gauntness of his face.

`Miss Fortune, I believe you may be a witch. I was waiting for you to accuse me of cupidity and you talk about dreams. I suppose you also exorcise demons?'

Sarah shook her head, smiling. 'I find it easier to pay them off. Gremlins, demons, goblins, regrets. They're the symptoms of life after thirty.'

Julian allowed himself another bark of laughter, which stopped abruptly to coincide with a knock on his door and the entry of a buxom nurse who bustled towards the pile of notes in a wire basket on the edge of the desk, smiling her professional smile. Then she stopped, face to face with Sarah, ceased smiling, grabbed the notes and scuttled away without apology. The door clicked shut angrily behind her. Sarah pretended to study the list of Pardoe assets Julian had given her.

'Amusement arcade, East Quay,' was a description which sprang from the page. The room was suddenly hot.

Ìs that enough to keep you going?' Julian asked, back into the persona of a doctor asking if the medication would last the week. She wanted to slap him, but rose gracefully, tucking the papers under her arm.

Ì wonder if your nurse thought I was a malingerer? Asking for a sick note to sit in the sun, or something of the kind? She seems . . . a little possessive.' She felt unreasonably angry, looked down at the pristine slacks which had replaced the dirtier jeans, too smart for a village surgery, noticed that Julian's skin resembled the colour of chalk.

Ì'm sorry. You must have given her a shock. Actually, you gave me a shock when I first saw you. You happen to be the graven image of a patient of ours, oh, two years ago, but she was . . .

well, difficult to forget.'

`Mrs Tysall,' said Sarah flatly. 'Your mother calls me Mrs Tysall. Someone in the hairdresser's said I was like an old client. It's extremely disconcerting, a person could get sick of comparisons, but I suppose you all mean Elisabeth Tysall who resides in the graveyard, without even a headstone on her grave. Wife of Charles.'

He had risen from his seat, still pale, twisting a pencil in his large hands.

`Your sister says you dealt with both bodies, Elisabeth and her husband,' Sarah went on artlessly, driven by the same flat anger. `She was your patient, you say. I always wanted to meet someone who knew her. Was she very lovely?'

The pencil snapped.

`Get out of here. You're right. Comparisons are odious. You don't resemble Elisabeth at all. No-one does.'

Sarah stopped, watched his rage crumble into a thinly disguised distress, the veneer of control exerting itself slowly.

`Demons and gremlins,' she murmured. 'I didn't mean to touch a nerve. Was she a friend of yours? She certainly needed one.'

He shook his head, reverting abruptly to the original state of officious rudeness.

`Please go, Miss Fortune. I doubt if you're at all suitable to help us. Spend the weekend in the cottage, as our guest. Then we'll reconsider.'

Às you please.'

Stonewall Jones ran from the amusement arcade, left down the quay, left again and then cut through a crooked alley leading to the main street. On the way, he could nod in several directions to houses where various relatives lived, first his mother, out at work at the moment, her carefully made sandwiches mashed in his pocket, his baby brothers three doors up with Aunty Mary, Uncle Jack round the corner in the police station. The place was a mine of people who were good for a fifty-pence touch, and those who would, in various scolding ways, let him in had he asked, but not one compared with Cousin Rick.

Rick had his drawbacks, but as a hero he was faultless, while as a spy, Stonewall was the soul of discretion, with the added talent of being able to lie convincingly, although truth was his natural inclination. He also had a memory as long as his fleeting stride and a fine eye for detail. Which was why he was now so excited. The redhead.

The memory was visual rather than verbal. Stonewall talked all the time to Rick, sometimes to his mates at school, while anyone else got short shrift. The redhead girl came back before his eyes from a time when he had been smaller, but not such a baby he'd fail to remember a woman with her face full of stitches, coming out of the medical centre, crying. That was two years and a whole lifetime ago; but he never quite forgot because he had not had the chance. First he had found her credit cards and stuff with her photo on it hidden in the creeks. Then he and his stepdad found the body, exactly one year after.

Dad had been terribly sick, which Stonewall had not considered a good example. Tutored by illicit, adult videos, seen in the house of a mate, he wasn't that shocked himself. The redhead looked like a real dead dog, not a person, the impression accentuated by the long hair like red spaniel ears covered in muddy sand, floppy, silken, gritty and wet. She was a thing, not to be confused with anything live.

The man they had found a month later, well he was different. This time it had been him and Rick, the rovers of the creeks in their idle hours last summer, looking for flotsam, only Stonewall secretly hoping they'd find another corpse, because of all the fuss people made of him last time.

Being famous gave him a wonderful, fleeting insight into being noticed.

They'd been so brave, they could still make themselves shudder at the memory. The second body, a man, had only been in and out of the sea for two days and was so nearly alive they couldn't look at him. A man with his face in the rictus of a smile, another gob full of sand as he lay on a bank, sluiced with mud, his good trousers dragged off his ankles and his bottom a little white mountain.

Turned him over and his goolies fell out. Hung like a donkey, Rick said. They had sniggered while trembling, called Uncle Jack who panicked and talked about sending for the lifeboat. More sniggering, hugging themselves, as if anything more than a rowboat could get near at low water, he'd have to go by land. Seen one, seen 'em all, said Rick. They had stood in the tideless channel and rocked with mirth until the doctor came and seemed to know who it was. Then it was harder to laugh. In the end, it was he who carried the corpse away with their help, brought his car as far as he could, using a piece of Rick's dripping sail to lug the thing over two creeks and into the boot; it was all anyone could do with the tide rising all the time.

Mostly, though, it was left to the doc. Everyone else turned away; so had Rick and he, but not before they had both seen what they had seen: the doctor, kicking the corpse as if it had been a football. Just a couple of kicks, but hard. Stonewall could still hear the sound of a shoe going into a‘ waterlogged chest, could not quite recall the sight of it, since even he had turned his head, but he could always recall the sound. Schluck, schluck, schluck, the thudding of mad hatred.

Funny at the time. Everything with Rick was funny, but they never, ever discussed that bit again.

Stonewall had felt sorry for the drowned man, later. He reckoned that if he drowned, he would be taken away and buried somewhere like the man was. His mum and dad wouldn't come to the funeral either. They'd be too busy.

Stonewall pounded on the door of Swamp Cottage, then opened it. There was a lock which was never used, nothing to steal; burglary was not a problem in the village, except recently, when it could be called the work of tourists or the ghost. The door led straight into a tiny scullery where only two dishes lurked in the sink and a fly buzzed at the window, down a step into a living room where a TV blared. Rick sat in an old sofa, his finger easing stuffing out a split in the arm as he gazed at the screen. The sight of the haversack on the floor and the bruises round the eyes threw Stonewall into a panic.

`You're not going, Rick? You're not going away, are you? Your dad'll kill you.' His voice was high with anxiety.

`He already tried,' Rick grunted. He got up, towering in the gloomy room, his head inches away from the ceiling as he ruffled the boy's hair. 'Don't fret, boy, it wasn't so bad. Only I might go on the boat tonight. Then again, I might not.'

`Can I come too?'

`Nope. Only in the mornings. Your mum'd miss you. God knows why.' Stonewall relaxed. If Rick was teasing, he must be all right. The boy took up occupation of the sofa and began to play with the stuffing, rolling flax between his fingers. He was utterly relieved to find Rick so normal, had news to impart which made him as full to bursting as three rounds of chips followed by chocolate.

`Tell you what, Rick, I just seen a ghost just now. I did, honest. A woman.'

Òh yeah?'

Ì saw this woman, see? Same one as I used to see, long time ago, when my dad started taking me out in the boat—'

Ànd you were scared to death of the water. Oh I remember that. You'd cry like some mating cat in heat, you would.' Rick taunted without malice. 'Wait a minute,' he added, still teasing, `you mean you saw one whole woman ugly enough to be a ghost? Just the one? There's dozens out there!' His laugh hit the rafters.