A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  ‘A glass of water would be good.’

  Perfect. Lenny wheeled into the kitchen, poured him a glass of water and tipped his own drink into a second glass.

  ‘Thank you.’ Barnaby took his water and raised it. ‘Cheers.’ He drank, looked around him. ‘It’s nice,’ he said. ‘You’ve settled in?’

  Lenny nodded. This was proving harder than he had imagined.

  ‘It must be a relief to be on your own. Your mum worries and that can be …’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Barnaby stopped talking and let silence fall between them. He looked Lenny directly in the face. Lenny met his gaze for a few seconds then glanced away and fiddled with his glass. He remembered Barnaby as handsomer – Hollywood cowboy handsome – perhaps because of all he represented. In the flesh his jaw was weaker, his nose smaller than in Lenny’s memory. But his pale grey eyes had a startling intensity that was unnerving at close range.

  ‘How can I help you, Lenny?’ he asked at last.

  ‘I’ve not been a very … Does it matter that I never go to church these days?’

  ‘It does if it makes you unhappy. Does it?’

  ‘Not really. But … Do you pray for us? The people that don’t show up?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s a pretty impersonal prayer. I pray for you specifically.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘No,’ Lenny said, ‘but why?’

  ‘Lenny! Obviously I’ve been praying for you ever since your accident and during the operations and so on but … Do you need me to pray for you now for a specific reason?’

  Lenny forced himself to meet Barnaby’s stare. ‘I’m going to die,’ he told him.

  ‘We’re all going to die. Does dying frighten you?’

  ‘I mean I’m going to kill myself.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Fucking can. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right. Why?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? Don’t worry. I’m not depressed or mad or anything. I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s a decision, that’s all. My life, my death.’

  ‘Lenny, your hands are shaking.’

  Instinctively Lenny clasped his hands onto his useless knees to hold them still. ‘That’s because I haven’t told anyone this. Not my mum. Not …’

  ‘Not Amy?’

  ‘Certainly not Amy. Jesus! Sorry.’

  ‘That’s quite all right.’

  ‘I just can’t do this, OK? Everyone has been brilliant – the boys at the club, the people at work, the council, the physios, the old bats in this place. But I can’t do it. I mean look around you. No books. Not even a few. I don’t have – what did you call them that time? – inner resources. I know you think I just have to wait and they’ll well up in me like a bath but they won’t. I’ve always been a doer, a player. I did OK at school and college but I hate indoors. Working in a dispensary, it’s just a job. I lived for the nights out with Amy and practice and matches and … If I stay here like this I’m going to turn into some bitter old fuck-up downloading porn and taking pictures of girls who pass the window there …’

  Barnaby winced: not as cool as he liked to make out.

  ‘Lenny, I’m so sorry. You should have said you needed help.’

  ‘Yes, well, everyone was being so nice.’

  ‘It’ll pass. You’ll find new things. New things will enter your life and change it.’

  ‘They already did. They’re called incontinence pads.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘You swore!’

  ‘Lenny, please. Give life a chance. I’ve seen lesser men than you work through things like this. When the mines were still open here the accidents could be—’

  ‘I’m never going to run or walk or surf again. I’m never going to score another try again. Or fuck.’

  ‘They kept you a place at the chemist’s, didn’t they?’

  ‘Oh yeah. They’ve even installed a ramp so I can get up high enough to see over the counter. But I won’t be able to reach the higher shelves so there’ll always have to be another dispensing assistant on duty with me. It’s charity. It’s making allowances. I know they mean well but I don’t want that.’

  ‘Please, Len. Think of your mum.’

  ‘I am thinking of her …’

  ‘And Amy. You’ve upset her dreadfully already. This’ll devastate her.’

  ‘Well she’ll get over it. I had to push her away. I couldn’t let her martyr herself.’

  ‘But if you’d been married already?’

  ‘I’d have divorced her.’

  Barnaby broke off and looked at him with those eyes.

  That’s shocked him into silence, Lenny thought.

  Barnaby glanced at Lenny’s untouched glass in a way that made Lenny think he knew. He sighed. ‘All I’m saying,’ he started.

  ‘Don’t,’ Lenny said. ‘Don’t say anything, OK? I didn’t ask you here for that. I could have rung Samaritans if I wanted that.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Just … stay here for a bit.’

  ‘I’m here, Len. I’m not leaving until you want me to.’

  ‘It’s really fast. It takes two minutes till I pass out and another till my heart stops.’

  ‘Think of the risks. If it goes wrong you could end up—’

  ‘I know the risks. I researched them. Like a fucking chemistry project. I’ve tested it. It won’t go wrong. People do this all the time.’

  ‘And plenty choose not to.’

  ‘Don’t. I don’t need that.’ Lenny pointed to the table where he’d been writing earlier. ‘Those are letters to Mum and Amy. And you’ll need to call a doctor.’

  ‘Len, I’m a priest. I know what to do when someone dies.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  There was a fresh blast of music from outside. Perhaps the front of the parade was already coming around again. Was that possible? Barnaby glanced away towards the sound and Lenny seized the moment to drain his glass. Barnaby didn’t see him do it. Lenny knew he had no idea.

  It was unbelievably bitter, like drinking a whole glass of Stop’n Grow. Like drinking death itself. He gasped but managed not to retch. He felt utterly calm. A seagull hovered briefly outside the window then rolled off to the side. They can because they think they can.

  ‘Not long now,’ Lenny said and saw that Barnaby had realized then what was happening.

  ‘No!’ he shouted. He took Lenny’s hands in his. He kissed one of them. ‘Len?’

  ‘You’ll send the letters?’

  ‘I’ll send them.’

  ‘You can pray now. If you like.’

  His mouth was going funny already and he wasn’t sure Barnaby had even understood him. Barnaby was gazing at him with those I-will-find-you eyes and he whipped out a little silver bottle and tipped some oil onto his finger, hands shaking, and touched Len’s head with it.

  ‘O Almighty God,’ he said, ‘With whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons, I humbly commend the soul of this thy servant, our dear brother Lenny, into thy hands as into the hands of a faithful Creator, and most merciful Saviour; most humbly beseeching thee, that it may be precious in thy sight.’

  Barnaby’s voice grew quieter. His face was wet with tears but his words didn’t falter. It wasn’t like a prayer in church. It was like an important conversation with someone in the room. Someone else. Len’s sight clouded and he felt his head grow insupportably heavy. For a short while he was aware of nothing but the continuing voice.

  ‘Wash it, we pray thee, in the blood of that immaculate lamb, that was slain to take away the sins of the world; that whatsoever defilements it may have contracted in the midst of this miserable and naughty world, through the lusts of the flesh, or the wiles of Satan, being purged and done away, it may be presented pure and without spot before thee.’

  Without spot, Len thought. That’s nice. Like sheets. And he pictured bed sheets on his mothe
r’s washing line high above Morvah on a day when the sea down below was deep blue with white horses on it, and the temptation was strong to hold your face in them as they flicked and cracked in the wind and the bleaching sun. Pure. White. Without spot.

  DOROTHY AT 24

  Dorothy would soon marry Henry Angwin. She had assumed this was her destiny for some time now. She didn’t love him. She didn’t even know him especially well. But she knew his externals – his height, his voice, his shy-making brand of manliness – and she knew his reputation, which was quiet and trustworthy. Her mother was an old friend of his mother – they usually sat together, or at least nearby, in church. They had been visiting each other’s houses all her life. The Angwins farmed on the other side of St Just, between Kelynack’s sheltered valley and the coast, whereas her father’s farm was between Botallack and Pendeen, in harsher, mine-skirted territory. Neither family was exactly rich, but the Sampsons, like the Angwins, had owned their fields, barns and farmhouses for a generation or two so were secure and steady. Although they had a church nearby in Pendeen, her mother continued to worship in St Just, at the church of her childhood, where she had been married. She was too gentle for snobbery but, when challenged, she implied that there was something a little rough about the Pendeen congregation, that it was a miners’ not a farmers’ church. This was not strictly true, for most miners were Methodists and were well served by the huge chapel in St Just as well as the smaller ones in between. But her main reason was that St Just was where her girlhood friends worshipped – such as had not married chapel men or not been strong enough to change their habits if they had – and since most were kept busy on farms during the week, church was an opportunity to keep in touch.

  Dorothy was an only child, however. There were no male relatives to whom her father would have cared to leave the farm and Henry was her mother’s godson. Nothing had been said in so many words, at least not in Dorothy’s hearing, but she suspected it was an understanding as reassuring to the older generation as a full barn or a dry August.

  Henry was six years her senior – a man, in fact – and now that his father had died, he was her father’s equal, so called her mother Dulcie these days rather than Mrs Sampson. He and Dorothy barely spoke beyond cheerful greetings and goodbyes and more-cake-Henrys. But occasionally, once she had finally started to fill out, she would catch his eyes on her the second before he looked away and would feel her cheeks redden so that she had to slip away on an errand, fetching more milk for the table or wool for her knitting.

  She would not be handed over like a parcel, though. She set no great store by romance – she had seen the messes and bad marriages into which romance led people – but she had sufficient dignity to want him to know her, to choose her at least partly for herself, not simply for what she represented or what acreage she brought with her. She was dreading him asking her out as she could not imagine going for a Sunday walk with him or even sitting beside him in the suggestive darkness of a cinema; she could not imagine what they would talk about or by what difficult process he would steer the conversation from the generally polite to the personally specific. Yet she knew this was a necessary stage and a part of her was impatient for it to begin so that it might become ordinary and familiar rather than a thing of dread.

  But then everything was changed in a swift reversal worthy of a Bible story. Her father died. Barely sixty, and with no warning, he was taken from them, felled by a heart attack while hammering in fence posts. He died on a beautiful day – the sort of day that would routinely tempt him to skip his tea and stay out working beyond sundown, so it was only when he failed to appear at supper that they realized something was wrong. Mother and daughter hunted him through the fields with torches and the dog. It was the dog that found him, and barked with a high, frightened rapidity until they came.

  He was buried in Pendeen churchyard and all at once her mother transferred her allegiance from her childhood church to his. She and Dorothy sat near the back, shy among people who were not strangers – these were neighbours, after all – but who possibly thought them stuck-up for never having been before. Which was how they came to hear the announcement that the new curate from upcountry would need somewhere reasonably cheap to stay, ideally with board as well as bed provided.

  The women had always done the milking and looked after the hens, but it was Dorothy’s father who ploughed, topped the pasture, made silage or tended or harvested the barley. Henry came to the rescue, naturally, renting the pasture off them for some of his Devon Rubies. And as their own beef cattle were sold off in twos and threes, he took over the running of the farm. He paid an honourable rent but inevitably this would mean far less income than if the farm were still in family hands. In time, he would help raise them precious capital by organising a dispersal sale of the cows and dairy equipment and farm deadstock. They were advised to leave this until the following tax year, however, which was a relief as Dorothy sensed her mother needed to keep busy. Dorothy’s father had no life insurance. Mother and daughter lived simply, were good at making do, but they needed any extra cash they could secure. The curate would pay rent and use the guest bedroom where they never seemed to entertain guests. He would be no trouble.

  It was strange having Henry Angwin coming by almost every day, not calling in, just going about his business. Watching him out of her bedroom window or spotting him as she crossed the yard from letting the chickens out, gave Dorothy a chance to get used to having him about the place, to imagine how it would be to be married to him. There were no such discussions, of course, and wouldn’t be for a month or two, but she was fairly sure the same idea was flitting through her mother’s mind. Without her father there to talk to, man to man, Henry seemed more reticent than ever – what with that and the speechlessness that afflicted most people faced with the recently bereaved. Whereas before it had been she who looked away, red in the face, Dorothy now found it was Henry who dropped his gaze after a mumbled greeting while she felt able to look him full in the face, almost boldly.

  And then the curate arrived. She had pictured someone like the vicar only less interesting. Father Philip was old and frail-looking, with papery skin and a high, bloodless voice to match. Childless and long widowed, he lived like a hermit in one end of the rambling rectory and was generally regarded both as a sort of saint and as a figure of gentle fun. He had reached the great age that made it impossible to imagine him ever having been young or been subject to the usual human impulses and appetites.

  But Barnaby Johnson was in his mid-twenties, only a year older than her, if that. He was handsome, healthy-looking, funny and – there seemed no other word for it – normal. Her mother had a deep disapproval of what she called the goings-on in London, fired by reports she read in her Saturday newspaper or by what she saw on television. She particularly disliked men with flares or long hair or shoes that drew attention to themselves. Barnaby Johnson arrived with a short back and sides so strict it seemed almost cheeky in the circumstances.

  He had two suitcases, one very heavy, which was his books, one very light, containing clothes. ‘Careful …’ he warned as she took the heavy one from him. ‘Oh!’ and he laughed at the ease with which she carried it up the stairs ahead of him.

  ‘Farming muscles,’ she explained, then thought how silly that sounded but didn’t know what to say instead. She showed him his room, with little apologetic gestures. She had prepared it herself, had made his bed, selected his towel, put a new bar of soap in his sink, Roger & Gallet sandalwood, hoarded from Christmas, and cut fresh lining for his drawers out of an old roll of wallpaper. She had thought it looked quite nice when she had finished but now that he was so young and smart she saw it for what it was, a pretty room for a maiden aunt, hopelessly old-fashioned. At least she had resisted the impulse to put lavender bags in the drawers but she had hung a homemade pomander in his wardrobe because it smelled a little musty with disuse.

  ‘Your bathroom’s across the landing,’ she told him, adding thoughtlessly
, ‘I put soap in there too.’

  ‘Any rules about hot water?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, confused. ‘There’s always plenty because of the Aga. The only rule I can think of is the phone. It’s in the hall and mother hates the noise of it ringing because it startles her and she always thinks it’ll be bad news. If you want to make a call you have to plug it in but you need to unplug it again afterwards.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said and she saw he was trying not to smile at what she had never thought eccentric until now. ‘It’s a wonderful old house,’ he added as she was leaving him to settle in.

  ‘Is it?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I suppose it is.’

  ‘It’s, what, seventeenth century? Older even.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Have you always lived here?’

  She nodded. ‘Though I was born in Penzance.’ She heard her mother clear her throat downstairs. ‘I should, er … Mum says supper’s ready when you are. I’ll let you unpack then.’

  ‘Thank you, er?’

  ‘Dorothy.’

  ‘God’s gift.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘It’s what your name means. Mine’s Son of Consolation, which I always think’s a bit like being called Better Luck Next Time.’

  She wasn’t sure what to say to that so smiled and fled after pointing out the laundry basket on the landing and handing him a backdoor key.

  She saw fairly little of him at first; just breakfast and the occasional supper, and Sunday lunch – which took the place of supper on Sundays. But he was busy about the parish and she was busy about the farm. Mealtime conversations were necessarily stilted since her mother was present.

  Her mother had never been a chatterbox or a gossip and had always tended to concentrate on the food set before her, and now grief and injustice had left her stony and reluctant to please. Besides, Dorothy did not know how to talk to him or what they should talk about. She was no simple farm girl; she had been well educated at some expense at St Clare’s, but his directness of manner was unlike anything she had encountered and when he looked she felt he really saw and understood things, perhaps more things than she felt comfortable acknowledging.