The Pariah Read Free Page B

went to the bathroom to shave.
    We had fitted out the bathroom with a large Victorian basin we had rescued from a derelict house in Swampscott, and we had adorned it with huge brass faucets. Over the basin was a genuine barbershop mirror, surrounded by an oval frame of inlaid kingwood. I inspected myself in the glass and decided I didn’t look too bad for a man who had been awake for most of the night - not only awake, but scared to go to sleep.
    Then I turned on the faucets and filled up the basin with hot water.
    It was only when I raised my head to start shaving that I saw the writing scrawled across the mirror. At least, it could have been writing; although it might almost as easily have been nothing more than curving drips of moisture. I stared at it closely, frightened and fascinated, and I was sure that I could make out the letters S, V, E, but with indistinguishable letters in between.
    S something V something-something E? What on earth could that mean? SAVE? SAVE
    ME?
    I was suddenly sure that I caught the reflection of a movement, something white flickering past the open bathroom doorway behind me. I turned around and said, over-loudly, ‘Who’s there?’ and then I stalked on fright-stiffened legs out on to the landing, and looked down the dark carved staircase towards the hallway. Nobody there. No footsteps, no whispers, no mysteriously closed doors, nothing. Only a small Edward Hicks painting of a matelot, staring back at me in that bovine, placid way that all Edward Hicks people stare at you.
    Nobody there. And yet, for the first time since she had died; for the first time in a whole month of loneliness and silent pain, I found myself whispering, ‘Jane?’

    TWO

    Walter Bedford sat behind his wide leather-topped desk, his face half-obscured by his green-shaded lamp, and said, ‘I’m taking her mother away next month. A few weeks in Bermuda, maybe, something to settle her mind, help her to come to terms with it. I should have taken her away earlier, I guess; but, you know, what with old Mr Bibber so sick …’
    ‘I’m sorry she’s taken it so badly,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything you want me to do …’
    Mr Bedford shook his head. To both himself and his wife Constance, Jane’s death had been the fiercest tragedy of their whole lives; even fiercer in some ways than losing their only other child, Jane’s brother Philip, at the age of five, of polio. Mr Bedford had told me that he felt when Jane died that he was cursed by God. His wife felt even more bitter, and considered that the agent of the curse was me.
    Although one of Mr Bedford’s younger partners in the Salem law firm of Bedford & Bibber had offered to execute Jane’s will, and to arrange for her funeral, he had insisted on handling all the details himself, with a kind of agonized relish. I understood why.
    Jane had been such a vivid light in all of our lives that it was difficult to let her go; and harder still to think that the day would one day pass when we didn’t think about her, even once.
    She had been buried at the Waterside Cemetery, in Granitehead, on a sharp February afternoon, aged 28, sharing her coffin with our unborn child, and her headstone read
    ‘Point me out the way to any one particular beauteous star.’

    Mrs Bedford had refused even to look at me throughout the ceremony. I think that in her eyes I was worse than a murderer. I hadn’t even had the civility to kill Jane in person, with my bare hands. Instead, I had al owed fate to do my dirty work for me. Fate had been my hired assassin.

    I had met Jane by accident; at a foxhunt, of all places, near Greenwood in South Carolina, less than two years before, although now it seemed like 20. My presence at the hunt had been compulsory: it was being run across the 1200-acre estate of one of my employer’s most influential clients; whereas Jane was there simply because a gushing girlfriend from Wellesley College had invited her to come for the excitement of