A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  But then he came right out with it, in that curiously direct way he had, and asked if he could be shown around the farm that afternoon as he had some spare time. ‘I’d walk around on my own,’ he said, ‘only I wouldn’t want to stray onto a neighbour’s land or go anywhere I shouldn’t.’

  ‘No one’ll take you for a cattle rustler,’ her mother said; the nearest she had come to levity since her widowing. ‘Dorothy can show you round.’

  ‘Of course I can,’ Dorothy said. ‘If you can spare me.’

  ‘Ooh, I can spare you an hour or two. Go on, girl. Do you good to get some colour back in your cheeks.’

  So she met him after lunch, awkward in his clerical black, with shinily new black wellies to match. ‘You see,’ he said. ‘I’m ready for anything,’ and he laughed at the boots on her behalf.

  She showed him the obvious things at first, the little milking parlour with its antique stools still hanging from wooden pegs, the hen house, the vegetable patch and the two pigs next door to it. She explained how the following spring the vegetables would grow where the pigs had been and new pigs would take the vegetables’ place and he chuckled at the simple practicality of it. So she told him how each year’s pigs always had the same names – Mary and Martha – regardless of gender, to stop anyone getting too attached – and he laughed out loud.

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said, scratching that year’s Martha with the old plastic back brush she kept on a hook for the purpose, so that the animal leaned heavily against the fence for pleasure. ‘I don’t get any less fond and I have to go to Truro for the day when they go for slaughter. Keeping the names just means I sort of transfer my love, so it’s as though all the Marys are standing in for the first one. It would make more sense to give them numbers, I suppose, like the cattle.’

  She showed him the barn where the straw bales were stacked to the rafters – the last of her father’s straw, she thought of it as – and where the milk-fed but ownerless cats hunted mice and held yowling duels for supremacy. He made to stroke an especially handsome grey tabby and she caught his arm to stop him being scratched or bitten. She let go straight afterwards but the warmth of his arm had been a shock. She showed him the shed where some of the beef cattle – Henry’s cattle now, not theirs – had gathered to feast on silage. They stood in silence to listen to the softly comforting sound of their munching and to feel the warmth of their huge sighs and yeasty snorts.

  ‘Most summers we get barn owls in here,’ she said, and realized she was whispering, as if at a service. She had always loved the cattle shed. It wasn’t old – not like the other buildings, which were low and ancient – but had gone up in her childhood during a rare moment of confidence and relative expansiveness of her father’s after a peculiarly good harvest of early potatoes. It was an utterly plain, tanalized wooden structure, with a heavy metal door and aluminium grilles through which cattle reached their mounded food. She loved its height, which felt churchlike after the intimate darkness of the granite sheds and barns but principally she loved what it did to the view. The shed was enclosed on three sides to about six feet, to give the animals shelter from rain and wind. For almost the same distance again there was a void before the wooden cladding began. Of course this was purely there to ventilate the shed for the health of the animals, in case especially harsh winter weather meant they had to be shut up there for days at a time. But by a happy accident it composed the view, of fields, hedges, mine sheds and distant Pendeen Watch, into something like a painting. Viewed from outside, the same view seemed disordered and fragmentary; the shed worked a magic on it.

  Lent courage by his interest, she led him across their fields towards the lighthouse, pointing out the bits to avoid in winter, where streams made the ground boggy – and where the easiest places were for crossing the hedges so as to avoid having to risk scrapes and cuts by fiddling with the rusting barbed-wire loops with which most of the gates were held shut.

  The beef cattle Henry was running on the fields were far more boisterous than her father’s had been, perhaps because they had less human contact or had more reasons to be wary of it. She could tell Mr Johnson had a town man’s fear of them and she showed him how to intimidate them in turn by raising both his clenched fists in a sort of Fascist salute and shouting Gaaah! He laughed when this worked and they backed off in respect, but she could tell he would be embarrassed to try it on his own and would be one of those walkers who turned back or took long detours rather than pass through a field of cattle.

  It was a walk, nothing more. She answered all his questions where she could and it seemed to her their conversation had been friendly but impersonal. She had asked him none of the questions in her mind, like what made a perfectly nice, normal man become a priest and did he have brothers and sisters. As they were re-entering the yard, though, they met Henry, who had driven up to drop off some mineral blocks for his cattle, and she felt her cheeks burn as she introduced them, as though the walk had been more than a walk and the conversation more than general.

  The physical contrast between the two men as they shook hands could hardly have been greater. Henry’s hand seemed twice the size of the curate’s, his shoulders twice the width, his skin ruddily healthy by comparison. She knew most girls in the area would have laughed at the way Henry’s comfortable Penwith burr made Barnaby Johnson’s upcountry accent sound comically fussy and his build made him seem boyishly puny, and she would have predicted her own reaction to be the same. She was surprised, however, to find a sharp impulse of protectiveness rise within her and she saw Henry as she imagined this cultivated visitor saw him: rough-skinned, blockish, of the flesh fleshly, and felt an answering confusion at her disloyalty.

  ‘Barnaby wanted to see the farm,’ she said defensively, ‘so I showed him around.’

  ‘Wasn’t too muddy for you, then?’ Henry asked, glancing down at where the muck had worked its way up the new boots and onto the black trousers.

  Then she realized she had wielded his Christian name as a kind of weapon and, confused, she left them to chat, hurrying away on the pretext of getting the hens in.

  Walking together on his day off became a regular event. She showed him every inch of the parish, from the farther reaches of Morvah to the edge of Botallack. She showed him the mine at Geevor – or as much as they could safely view – and took him to the ancient stones of Chun, the Lanyon Quoit and the Men-an-Tol.

  He began to reveal a bit about himself. She learnt that he had a rather strange childhood, with a widowed scientist father, now dead. His only sibling, a much older sister, had gone to Africa to teach and had died out there when he was still a boy. He had read history at Oxford, then trained for his ordination at somewhere called Cuddesdon, where he was still completing a part-time further degree in theology. He worried this had not equipped him to cope as a working priest since the experience had been so remote and scholastic, which was why he had eagerly accepted the invitation to come to Pendeen.

  ‘So he doesn’t like it,’ her mother said; for although their conversation was so stilted and correct at mealtimes, she was eager enough to hear reports after each week’s walk. ‘He’s only here because he thinks it’ll do him good.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite it. Maybe that’s how it was to start with. And Pendeen’s not obviously pretty, is it? Not picture-postcard pretty, like St Ives or Mousehole. So it’s always a shock when people first come out here. But I think he’s starting to see there’s more to it.’

  ‘You’re revealing its hidden charms?’ her mother said with something like a smile.

  ‘I think he’s finding them for himself.’

  She learnt other things, things she didn’t like to tell her mother: that he always carried a tiny, red, Victorian book and seemed to read it when alone or waiting, slipping it into his jacket pocket when he sensed her approach; that his shirts, which she had impulsively sniffed twice now when doing the laundry, had a sweet, burnt smell about them, like caramel
; and that, having been so solitary in his childhood, he dreamed of having lots of children, at least six, like an Old Testament patriarch.

  She too was having her eyes opened. Encouraged by his interest, she began to see that their house was beautiful – old, beautiful and even strange – when to her it had always been no more than home, the house where she grew up, the farm where she woke and slept and worked. He opened her eyes to its details: that not one of its windows was the same as another; that the ancient chimney at its centre was shaped like a barley-sugar cane; that half the house was seventeenth-century, half nineteenth, which implied the family had suddenly come into money or doubled in size. It was the same when they walked; his close attention showed her small wonders afresh: the way starry young thistles formed constellations across the March grass, the way jackdaw cries of ‘Pyow! Pyow!’ sounded like boys playing at cowboys.

  They hardly touched but he was always courteous, offering his support as she came over stiles, and she would thoughtlessly tap his arm now to catch his attention when she thought he had missed something. But then, one afternoon in April, when there was enough warmth in the sun to tempt one to stop walking and linger, they sat, then lay on the banks of cushiony sea grass and thrift flowers above Boat Cove, and quite suddenly he was kissing her and she was eagerly kissing him back.

  The kiss was not discussed afterwards but she found it dissolved any remaining diffidence she felt before him. It seemed to release something in him too. He started telling her how old his father’s family was, which was a bit strange. ‘I mean, every family’s old, of course, when you think about it, but this lot stayed put for centuries in the house they built, which somehow makes the continuity, the age, more apparent.’

  They headed back soon after this, walking with minimal conversation now because they had dawdled and lost track of time. They paused only to admire the first swallows, which had arrived that afternoon and were diving low across a silage field, eagerly hunting flies.

  In her bed that night she found herself puzzling over his words and the story of the old house that wasn’t his and never would be, the might-have-been, as he put it. She couldn’t work out why he had told her.

  He had no sooner raised the subject than he dismissed it. ‘Might-have-beens are insidious, aren’t they, in the way they don’t ever quite lie still or go away.’ It had seemed almost like a warning, like gently letting someone know you had madness in your family that was likely to be passed on.

  He left. He went with bewildering speed, before they could speak again, much less enjoy another walk. He made a sudden announcement to her mother over breakfast, before Dorothy had even come downstairs, and was driven to the station by Henry by half-past nine.

  Henry was chatty, by his standards, when he returned from the errand, trying to pass on gossip about how Father Philip had taken against having a curate and found it an imposition. She gave him no encouragement, however, saying only, ‘We liked him,’ as she paid him for the sack of chicken corn he had brought, which then caused an awkwardness between them which drove her indoors again soon after.

  She spent the rest of the day in a numb frenzy of usefulness but the trouble with practical tasks was that they had a way of occupying the hands alone, leaving the mind free to wander and wonder. As she stripped his bed and washed his bedding for the last time, as she swept and tidied his room and closed it back into the tomblike state in which it lay ready for visitors who never came, she thought over their last conversations, looking for ways in which she might have been to blame. Was she too bold? Was her family insufficiently old?

  She paid a visit to the forlorn little back bathroom he had been using. Having cleaned its worn, hip-pinching bath and rust-mottled sink, and retrieved his towel for the wash, she snatched up in a shamefaced impulse the nice soap which she had left in there for him instead of the Wright’s Coal Tar her mother was convinced kept disease from the house. Soap lasted a long time with them because their water was so soft but, still, there was something poignant in his not having even stayed long enough to progress to a second bar of it.

  It was only as she called in on her room to return the soap to her own sink that she found the envelope he had slipped under her door. The vigour with which he had flicked it through had sent it almost entirely beneath her bedside rug, where it might have lain hidden for weeks. She snatched it up. It was addressed to Dorothy, Pink Bedroom. Inside was a black and white postcard of the Mermaid Chair in Zennor church on the back of which he had simply written, Write to me! And his new, grim-sounding address in Portsmouth.

  All she knew of Portsmouth came from Mansfield Park. Austen’s evocation of the crowded, genteel poverty of Fanny Price’s home was fairly off-putting and she suspected time and two world wars had made the port less appealing still.

  She dropped his towel where she stood, hurried to the ugly Victorian sewing table that had always served as her desk, and wrote to him at once. She wrote four sides of Basildon Bond, what in effect was her first ever love letter, although its tone was almost as guarded as their earliest conversations had been because merely saying things and committing them to paper, where others might read them, were so different. Then she dumped the towel in the twin tub and hurried up to the village letter box. She liked the thought that the letter would soon be travelling upcountry on the same train line that was already carrying him. By the time her mother drove back from a trip into town with a friend, carrying a box of groceries from the Co-op, Dorothy was almost cheerful.

  His answer came within the week. He had made a mistake, he wrote, left on impulse and now was in a kind of hell, missing her, the landscape, their walks. Her letter, he said, was precious and she must write more even if he was sometimes kept too busy to write back.

  So of course she replied. She had always suspected her letters were like herself: calm and possibly not very interesting. She wrote accounts of her tasks, of news from the village, of developments at the mine or at the Sunday School, where she had started to help out – inspired by him – and didn’t feel she could drop out of now that he had gone. She began to keep notes in an old exercise book in her room of things to remember to tell him, things she had seen or that people had said. But she was careful not to write too often. She wrote every other Friday – the day he had gone – and she continued to limit herself to two pieces of Basildon Bond.

  But he wrote back to her only that once. For a while she did not mind. She convinced herself he would write if he could and she enjoyed writing the letters anyway; it was the most creative and thoughtful she had allowed herself to be since leaving school. But after three long months of unanswered letters, she dared entertain the suspicion that his first reply had been no more than sensitive politeness, humouring her, and that proved a poison to her hopes and she let their non-correspondence cease.

  Then Henry Angwin startled everyone by getting engaged. His fiancée was from the county’s wealthy middle. Her father was a farmer too and when he had died and her brother inherited the farm, which was near Chacewater, she had taken a job as a cashier at Truro cattle market, which was how Henry had met her. He joked he had bought far more store cattle than he could afford over the last weeks in the effort to muster the courage to ask her out.

  Since Dorothy’s parents had long been as his own, it was only natural that he should bring the girl to visit. The two of them came for Sunday lunch, of course, and were given the best china and Dorothy made them a summer pudding.

  Jane was perfect for him; pretty, healthy, clearly a hard worker and a thoroughly nice girl it was easy to imagine befriending. She was nearer his age than Dorothy was, in her late twenties perhaps, and seemed so entirely fitting a partner for him Dorothy wondered how she could ever have imagined herself in such a position, taking his arm and exchanging banter. But thanks to what Barnaby had awoken in her, Henry suddenly seemed the manliest man she knew, of course, and the sisterly happiness she felt for him was borne up on little upswells of erotic regret. She sensed that Jane read
the situation correctly as she said her goodbyes, fancied she could smell the disappointment off her, a passing sourness, as of stale sweat trapped in a dress sleeve. Washing up and putting away the china after they were gone, she felt a kind of desolation steal over her.

  Her mother’s response was brief but heartfelt. ‘I should have pushed you together more,’ was all she said after they had done the evening chores and eaten a bowl of soup in silence. ‘A chance like that won’t come your way again. Not here.’

  As ever, her mother’s emotion was expressed in her attitude to inanimate objects. All that evening and all the day that followed, things made her cross and she spoke to wobbling tables, sticking doorkeys, even a chicken she was stuffing, as though they were deliberately setting out to make her teasy.

  Dorothy knew she ought to reach out to her, if only to say something not quite true, like, ‘Mum, honestly, it doesn’t matter.’ She knew her mother was suffering in her way quite as if it were she and not Dorothy who had been passed over. She loved her and hated to see her in pain, but there was a forbidding reserve to the older woman, especially when she was upset, expressed in a tension across her shoulders and a tightness to the set of her jaw that had always made it hard to express whatever warmth Dorothy felt for her. Funnily enough her father had the same trouble with her, never trying to reason or cajole her out of a black mood.

  ‘Your mother’s stiff-shouldered,’ he used to tell Dorothy with a certain pride. ‘All the Treeves were that way. We just have to wait for her to smile again of her own accord.’

  In this instance, her mother’s spell of growling at sticking drawers or dripping taps or cats in her path at least had the effect of drawing Dorothy’s attention away from any pain of her own. She knew, without it being discussed, that when they went to church together now, or into Penzance, her mother was looking around her, assessing any single men on her behalf and finding them all wanting.