Perfectly Pure And Good Part 14

Anything to make him blink.'

The day had been long. The people were fractious, holiday-makers fussy, demanding the spice of the Mediterranean to go with the weather, rebelling against chips. There was a near riot down by the caravan site when the shop ran out of ice-cream and the van did not appear. Inside the hairdresser's, the heat was stifling, the gossip stifling too, old repet.i.tions of everlasting tales without topical edge, no-one wanting, yet everyone needing a storm, not a mild belt of rain like the day before, but a storm with noise.

When the news filtered through, about Stonewall Jones somehow running into a tree, going off to hospital in Rick's ice-cream van because Dr Pardoe reckoned it was quicker than waiting for an ambulance, it was no more serious than the accident that morning on the Norwich road, or someone failing to return a rent-a-bike from Mr Walsingham, getting drunk and throwing it into the quay. Someone went to see Stonewall's mother, but she was out, gone to pick up the pieces, the way a woman did. Inside the hairdresser's, where sweat trickled out behind cotton wool under the three dryers (40 per cent discount for senior citizens), they could have done with Mrs Pardoe, simply for the colour and the smell, turquoise or gold or silver, and the wafting scent of Yardley's lavender.

They waited for her at noon, again at one; then they looked at the sky and waited for rain.

Charles, coming off the beach, noticed before the others the signs of preternatural darkness, waited his turn for obscurity. He watched the other fools from the stable door of his beach hut, all of them, English holiday-makers who should have known that rain and cold were never more than a breath away on a coast which did not have a climate, only weather; watched them balancing the act until beyond the last minute, gazing, commenting on the lowering sky as it sank so low it merged with the land, continued watching, saying, Will it rain? Scrambling for cover only when the big spitting fell and it was far too late to avoid a soaking.

Like other Anglo-Saxons further afield in fetes and garden parties, the result the same as with these bewildered troops trailing away from the beach, along with Charles, wondering if he could beg another ice-cream on the way as long as his white hair was plastered to his head, his s.h.i.+rt sleeves rolled, trousers turned, his jacket over his arm, his eyes pink and full of sand.

No van, no food, simply the burning which spread from gut to brain and back again, an infection which began to consume, while he began to march, like a prisoner, along with the others who shuffled away into caravans, the bedraggled few who could still laugh, aiming for the town down the causeway.

He was beyond food; the paper in his back pocket, dry as his bones, crackled when he touched; hatred replacing hunger. Other visions, fables of revenge and failure. Lying, rolling, groaning in the dark while a man went on kicking. Sticking gla.s.s in the neck of a red-haired b.i.t.c.h. The dog on the beach, his hands round a neck, what was her name? Sarah. What had he done to Sarah?

There were benches along the causeway. Towards the end Charles sat. The sky was black, each feature of every building clearly defined. The short and vigorous shower stopped, temporarily out of mischief, leaving the light of thunder, the fantastic, promising light before a storm.

Sarah, that was her name. One of the other redheads, the wh.o.r.e. She who had so captured his fancy when he had seen her flying through the foyer of Ernest Mathewson's office, the soul of innocent perfection, grinning like a little girl who found life nothing more than a glorious joke.

Wearing a red coat clashed with her hair in a deliberate anarchy amounting to a kind of brilliance when combined with that untouched sophistication which seemed to be her hallmark. So Ernest had said, through several layers of suspicion, when asked.

Ernest always answered questions from valuable clients like Charles Tysall, not always truthfully. Our dear Sarah, he had said; such a celibate young woman, devoted to her career.

Charles had pursued. Asked her out to dinner and made her wait; discovered in her an unnerving indifference, followed her, had her followed. Felt himself hounded by her, the facsimile of the old wife, the ideal model for the new, touched, as yet, by nothing but loyalty. Perfectly pure and good, fine, fair . .. Other women jumped through hoops like circus dogs, responding to the click of his fingers. Not this one. Not this wh.o.r.e who slept with old men and young, judges, silks and boys, sullied herself with life's lonelier inadequates, ignored his superior gifts for a careless, dirty life like that, and so disgraced him. Imperfectly pure, imperfectly good.

The thought gnawed at him, like a rat on leather. Nothing could meet his hunger then, or the different kinds of hunger now Charles examined his hands, noticed the veins, the knuckles made more prominent by receding flesh, then saw with a shock that his intertwined fingers were resting on the pummel of Miss Gloomer's distinctively stolen stick, clutching it like an old man.

Foolish, stupid, beyond bravado, sitting on the edge of town nursing a prop dishonestly obtained by local standards, if certainly not by his own. He had taken it because he wanted it, therefore, logically, it became his. Like a wife, or a lover, or money. Until one of them refused and made a man descend into this darkness. A man had beaten him. He had lost all his power until he had floated out of the sea.

Scornfully, Charles donned his damp jacket, b.u.t.toned it over his thin chest with the stick concealed, the pummel forming a lump inside the shoulder and the end of the stick protruding like a shortened third leg. He began to walk, across the quay, by now deserted save for those sitting inside cars in a state of martyred enjoyment, obscured from view by the rain outside and the condensation within. The amus.e.m.e.nt arcade heaved with people, music, electronic sound, the smell of candyfloss and onions making Charles faint. He swallowed, turned up the collar of his coat, went on walking down east quay and beyond, as innocent as anyone hurrying home. His home was the beach hut, the barn, the church porch. He knew no other.

Remembering his purpose, to make the hunger work, he turned towards East Wind House.

'More tea, sweetheart? I'll go.'

Mouse Pardoe lay on her bed alongside the verger, each with a cup of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, the coverlet over their knees. Everyone applauded the verger's good works in visiting the sick and the elderly (of which breed he was one of the more able-bodied), while only himself and his friend Mouse knew that these weekday visits were not exactly philanthropic.

They simply knew one another, in the biblical sense. They had known one another for a very long time, a knowledge of herself which Mrs Pardoe had shared with several men of the village who had the right qualifications. Namely, that they must treat her with an entirely non-possessive affection during Mr Pardoe's long business trips, and that their discretion should be bigger than their body weight. She liked them small and neat, in direct contrast to the bulky physique of Mr P. Such teeny-weeny infidelities of hers began as a game of t.i.t for tat, then they became quite a delightful habit. One had to get on with life.

These days, she and the verger were usually content with a cuddle and the delicious comfort of secret trust. In both their eyes, a proper christian att.i.tude only meant refraining from judgement, hurting no-one, and taking G.o.d's gifts wherever they could grab them.

The verger was about to agree to a little more tea and perhaps a soupcon of alcohol to go with the splutter of the rain on the windows, when Mouse, as much by instinct as by fine tuning, heard the watchdog bleating of the sheep at the front of the house below her window. She did not spoil Hettie for nothing. She put a finger to her lips; the verger replaced cup in saucer with elaborate care, grinned without alarm since this was not the first time they had been interrupted. All he had to do was to move to the chair by the bed, adopt the less comfortable position of a Church of England comforter while Mouse adjusted her dress and put her hat back on straight. Then she would start talking loudly and that was all there was to it. This time she shook her head. 'Wait,'

she said. 'No car. I'll go and see.'

The pain in Sarah's head somehow lifted when the heavens opened to release the rain and the sky began to rumble like a giant's indigestion. She had spent the morning working on the estate, tabulating lists of properties, how long the lease, how easy to sell, value per area, inspired guesswork dogged by the stabbing behind the eyes. Frequent trips to the kitchen window showed the absence of cars outside the big house, all except her own.

Another was parked well short of the grounds, probably a walker. Perhaps Mrs Pardoe, all alone, did not like the rumblings of thunder; Sarah did not fool herself that she crossed the wet lawn for charity but as much for company, the continuance of yesterday's conversation, which had begged more questions than those it had answered, left her curious for more. There was something about Mouse which made her feel kindred: something she liked and a degree of unscrupulousness she could only admire.

The sheep cantered towards her and then wandered away, appreciating friend rather than stranger. Sarah went through the open back door into the kitchen, where all was quiet with mid-afternoon languor. A pile of crazy-looking sandwiches lay on the pine table, bread cut to the size of slabs, the fillings of yellow cheese and pate uninvitingly solid and nasty against the white dough, the whole edifice like some comic, plastic joke, a sandwich made by a child in its first stumbling lesson in home economics. Next to it, a row of sunken, sultana scones which made those in the tea shop a study in refinement.

There was another motive in her visiting, apart from the desire, part personal, part professional, to intrude upon Mrs Pardoe while she was alone. Sarah needed milk. It seemed impolite to call through the house as though summoning a dog, so she crept instead out into the hall which led to the front door, into the dining room and living rooms, sensing the warmth of recent presence, the smell of erratic polis.h.i.+ng, noticing the dead flowers left on a table from last Thursday's dinner, the half-drawn curtains and on the first rung of the stairs leading up, a feather from a hat.

Knowing she was an intruder, Sarah went on upstairs, stood on the landing at the top. From one of the front bedrooms, she heard the murmur of voices, backed away, then paused. Another door was ajar. Sarah went towards it, peered inside.

Edward's room, she could tell at a guess. There was an easel by the window which commanded the best view in the house. It was the view which drew her first, then the easel, depicting its strange, over-precise, hate-inspired version of the view. She turned away from it, disturbed. Then she looked inside a doll's house, the roof of which had collapsed, the rooms inside intact. Little figures, grotesque, clutching one another. Books on the floor, the room of a dreamer.

Embarra.s.sment flooded over her: her behaviour was that of a spy. She could not call out for Mouse now, not when she was already upstairs. Quietly, she crept out, back down to the kitchen.

She could just collect the milk then, for the fourteenth coffee of the day. A large and venerable refrigerator rumbled in the corner of the kitchen, circa 1955 with a rounded shape and a crusted handle. Inside, a medley of food and leftovers, but no milk, and she could not somehow take the milk from the table. Then Sarah remembered Joanna getting pints from the larder and went in that direction.

She stood inside the door, amazed. The place was armed for a siege with durable products, jam jars by the dozen, full and empty, honey and lemon curd, sugar bags in rows, enough tea for a year, six pints of milk, two open and rancid, as well as four half-eaten pies, some weary lettuce, two cabbages from the garden with a faint smell of age, four loaves of bread, a side of ham, a dish of pate, a half-eaten trifle, a dozen tins each of peaches, pineapple, tuna, sardines, sweetcorn and beans. It looked like the style of provisioning suitable for a bunker. The crooked chocolate cake she had seen before, untouched and not improved by the keeping, although the air in here was as moist as a cellar. On the flagstone floor was newspaper, damp and messy, incongruous among the food.

The door swung to behind her, the pantry suddenly dark with some light from the storm-laden sky penetrating from a single, small window, covered in wire mesh to deter the flies which had penetrated in small numbers and circled round the light bulb lazily, ignoring all else, especially the cake. Sarah felt the perverse desire to lift that paper on the floor, a test of strength and curiosity, a way of manufacturing bravery, since she knew what dwelt in a state of inertia beneath. Their brothers had been on her kitchen floor.

Oh, b.u.g.g.e.r . . .' someone swore beyond the door.

The someone was in the kitchen. A hacking cough. Sarah froze, suddenly conscious of her squatting, interfering pose, doubled up further at the prospect of embarra.s.sment. She was a licensed visitor, sir, so the law would say, allowed across these portals by common consent, but not to grub around on the flagged tiles in a pantry while no-one else was looking. There was something else, an ear for sound, which told her the cough, the shuffling out there, was neither Edward, Julian, Joanna nor the Mouse. Each voice had a pitch, an intonation as unique as a favourite singing star who could not be copied, and this, while still a faintly familiar, patrician voice, was not one recently heard. Outside the wired pantry window, Hettie the sheep was bleating with a pathetic aggression, the sound first in the distance, hidden by rain, moving closer as if she had turned a corner and yelled in surprise.

Oh Lord.' It was not the tone of prayer, only a curse, but mixed with wonder as whoever it was b.u.mped against the kitchen table. There was a scrabbling sound: paper, a chair sc.r.a.ped back, a sudden silence, a gulping noise, a burp of satisfaction, all seconds apart. Sarah knelt and moved towards the pantry door. It was not a door which could ever quite shut, warped by decades and no-one ever noticing it should be able to shut, a door which banged but never quite closed.

Through the aperture, at the wrong angle to see more than she tried to look, in desperation moved the door a fraction to see the man at the table. A long tall hobo. Whitish hair sc.r.a.ped back into a small rat's tail, not the friendly rat of a cartoon character, seizing the last of the monumental sandwich, gulping at the open pint of milk, eyeing the scones, not for taste or shape, merely for size .. .

Mouse Pardoe clattered downstairs, cramming her hat to her head. She seemed to have lost a feather, picked it up on the bottom step, stuck it into her bosom, made her walk the one of dignified senility and entered the kitchen. There was a man sitting at the kitchen table with his finger making imprints on a single scone, digging at it once and then putting his fist in his mouth.

He was wearing a jacket, something she had seen before; something which may have been collected out of a wardrobe upstairs where all things worn by the late Mr Pardoe still remained, unlooked at and forgotten, she recalled, later. For the moment, she remembered only her lines.

Adjusted her hat to a daft angle, twirled the feather picked up (mile stairs between her fingers, flipped the skirt of her evening dress over her knee and stepped lightly into the room.

'Hallo . .. oo,' she cooed. 'Hallo, haloo . . . ooo!' It was a salutation fit for a pigeon, soft and dulcet, but commanding.

Are you making tea?' she demanded, moving in the direction of the sink. 'Oh, do be a darling. I want some too, but I don't know how. Nothing like a man to help.'

Dumbly he rose, lifted the kettle from the edge of the Rayburn, shook it. She took it from him with a manic beam, and banged it down again, her ample hips swinging to some unheard beat, humming throughout, the humming emerging into operatic singing, accompanied by operatic gestures.

'Say, gentle ladies,' she trilled, 'eef love you know .. . Is love this fever, troubling me so .. .

Ees love this fe . . . ever, troubling meahh, so?'

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 Rayburn.

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 Rayburn 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 s.h.i.+t.'

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?', bl.u.s.tering 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 s.h.i.+t, f.u.c.king 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 subst.i.tute, 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 gla.s.s 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 f.u.c.k 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, s.h.i.+vered.

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, b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y pain, holding her there, while she writhed against the gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion 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 gla.s.s, almost killed her. Canine blood, mixed with the human; the same smell.

So much blood, so much gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s, the place reverberating with her whimpering.

What would Sarah remember most, when she touched those little scars which marked where the myriad shards of gla.s.s 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 a.n.a.lyse 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 inept.i.tude, 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 s.h.i.+vering. 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 trespa.s.ser 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+rt, once perfectly ironed by Joanna and now a ma.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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.