The Perfect Sinner

‘On the Dorset coast? Maybe, oh I don’t know, sixty miles east of here. The Isle of Purbeck? It’s not really an island. They just call it that. It’s this side of Weymouth.’

‘I haven’t been there, no.’ He talked as if he could persuade her she had.

‘Well, it was always famous for Purbeck marble. There’s not much left to be had now. Come in and have a quick look, I’ll show you.’

On a bench inside was a carved and fluted column in a stone so dark green it was almost black. It glistened.

‘It’s not really marble,’ he said, running one hand over it. ‘That’s just what they call it. It’s a sandstone, you see, but it’s packed full of tiny, hard shells and when you cut it clean you can get a real shine on it. Beautiful, isn’t it? They always used it for the fine work in churches and places like that.’ His voice had an unexpected reverence in it.

Despite herself, the stone drew her attention and she traced the path of his fingers with her own. ‘So you get it from Purbeck and you carve it here?’

‘Oh no, no. This came from here. That’s the whole point. This is a geological oddity, you see, our very own little outcrop of the marble on the south-west, north-east line. The only place you find it west of Purbeck itself.’

‘So people still want it?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What’s this bit for?’

‘Restoration work for a church in Winchester.’

‘And they come all the way here for it?’

‘Beth, this is where they came originally when they were building that same church. The marble looks just a little bit different in every seam, you see, the colour, the shade. You want to match it, you got to come back to the same place.’ He had always had enthusiasm and she could remember how much that had annoyed her when enthusiasm in any form was the last thing she admired. He bent down and pulled out a section of a column from the floor below the bench. It was dull and half of it had crumbled away. ‘This is the bit they want to replace. I’ve been down into a few of the old holes and I reckon I’ve found the very same face it came from in the first place. I’m carving the exact same stone.’

‘Why’s it in such a state?’ Beth asked, looking at the crumbling piece on the floor between them.

Lewis frowned. ‘It was just poor stuff. There was a pocket of mud in it and they carved it badly anyway. They should never have let it leave the quarry.’ He sounded irritated, almost angry, as if the family had let someone down.

‘When was that?’ Beth asked, thinking perhaps it was back in the fifties or sixties when his grandfather was still working.

‘Thirteen twenty-two,’ said Lewis. ‘They’ve still got all the old records. Very bad. You shouldn’t let anyone down like that. This stone should be good for thousands of years.’

She looked hard at him and saw he meant what he said. He was annoyed with stone cutters who had been dead more than seven centuries for letting the business down.

‘Any chance you can come back tomorrow?’ he said, looking at his watch again, ‘I’d like to show you the rest. See what you think.’

‘Maybe,’ said Beth. ‘I’m not sure how long I’m staying.’

‘Do you mind giving this to Eliza?’ he asked, picking up a shopping bag. ‘Her change is in it.’

‘If she’s there. I was going to take potluck. She doesn’t even know I’m here yet.’

‘Oh yes she does,’ said Lewis. ‘That’s how I knew you were here. She told me.’

Eliza already knew she was here. How could that be? All at once Beth found she needed to be out in the fresh air again, away from people who knew things. There was no escaping her grandmother though. Not if she knew.

‘Do you see much of her?’

‘She drops in most days for a chat and a cup of tea.’

She was heading for the door when she first noticed the fragments of the old stone slab. They were laid out on a flat table, eroded and camouflaged with lichen. She paused for a moment to look and Lewis stopped too. It had once been a stone rectangle, but at some point, long ago, it had broken apart into a dozen constituent pieces and the jagged edges had been softened and blurred with all the time that had passed since. Someone, Lewis presumably, had laid it out carefully on the wooden table, fitting it together like a jigsaw, but there was a large gap where one piece was missing. Faint lettering was incised into it, but that too had eroded almost away.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘I’m doing some restoration,’ Lewis said. ‘It came from the Chantry tower. They want me to put it back together if I can.’

‘Who’s they? English Heritage?’

‘No. The tower’s privately owned. The house and the tower. Don’t you remember? I think it’s changed hands since your time.’

She did remember, vaguely. The great tower had never been an important part of her life in Slapton, having no function.

‘What is this? A memorial of some sort?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Do you know what it says?’

‘Only part of it. You’ve heard of Guy de Bryan?’

‘No.’

He looked surprised for a moment then glanced at his watch yet again. ‘I really should get going. Come back when you’ve got a bit of time. I’ll tell you all about it.’

So then he was gone and she was alone again, outside the quarry, watching him drive away and pushing down the memories which seemed too childish to be allowed. She turned back to the path to Eliza’s, knowing there was no alternative but to walk on down it and knowing that at the far end was the wonderful, dreadful woman who was her grandmother and who loved her and disapproved of her in equal measure.

She sighed and started walking. It had never before struck her as odd that when the path bent around to the left and delivered her, still unprepared, to the house, it was the rear of the house that she saw and not the front. The house sat in a clearing in the trees facing the wrong way, as if it had one day heaved itself up in a sulk and turned its back on its visitors. The garden was here, on this side. The front faced nothing but the dense and ragged trees which Eliza had left untended for years so that they pressed against the front windows, scraping the glass when the wind blew and shading the sitting room. Eliza never bothered to open the curtains. She lived in the kitchen most of the time, except when she was out in her sheds doing obscure jobs with the wrong tools.

Eliza was standing there outside the back door as if she had been expecting her.

‘Have you come by yourself?’ was the first thing she said, taking the shopping bag and peering past Beth at the trees as though she might have to repel an invading horde.

‘Yes,’ said Beth ‘Hello Gran.’

‘You’d better come in before anyone sees you.’

That made Beth look around too, but all was quiet in the clearing in the trees and there was no one there but the two of them.

Eliza’s kitchen was the same as ever. In the middle stood an old oak table and around it were a sofa and three armchairs which, even before they had sagged with half a century of use, had been much too low for the table. Since Beth had first known this room, which was as far back as she could remember, she had always had to lean forward from the swaying nest of springs and horsehair to reach up to the table for her plate or cup. Meals at Quarry Cottage were eaten on your lap, and if Eliza was sitting opposite, you wound up talking to the top of her head because that was all you could see.

‘I’ve got elderflower or mead,’ said Eliza. ‘The mead’s sweeter but the elderflower’s older.’

‘Could I just have a glass of water?’ Beth nearly said mineral water before she remembered where she was.

‘From the tap?’ Eliza sounded shocked. ‘I’d have to boil it.’

‘Oh.’