A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  Had he murdered her, strangled her with her tights and pushed her into the flooded quarry nearby perhaps or even driven her side of the car into oncoming traffic, he might have escaped with only his soul in peril but he was no more a murderer than, calmly eating toast with his family that morning, he had been a rapist. So he handed her tissues for her tears and wet wipes for the rest of her, drove her back to the end of her street, apologizing the while, and dropped her off.

  He had handed over her photographs to the police, thinking their sluttishness would weigh against her but, of course, everyone assumed he had stolen them from her locker, which meant they had the reverse effect from the one he had expected. The evidence, which included his DNA on her skirt, was plentiful and damning and it soon emerged that her lazy cleverness had ushered her into a class a year older than her, so the charge was not just rape but rape of a minor. And in the eyes of the local rag and his colleagues and family he was suddenly not just an unfaithful idiot who had abused a position of trust, but a paedophile. Although he was actually no more a paedophile than he was a murderer or, habitually, a rapist.

  In prison, where he was utterly isolated for his own protection and through others’ disgust, he shaved off his neat little beard and then his hair, so that his large head was quite egglike and, he fancied, monastic. His only comfort were books – with which the prison kept him well supplied because it was easier than talking to him – and food, of which he ate all he could until he appeared the demon of everyone’s imaginings.

  On his release, married no longer and apparently no longer a father either, he used his release travel pass to buy a ticket to Portsmouth. After several years with all privilege of choice suspended, the sudden presentation of seemingly endless possibility was overwhelming. So he let the station destination displays do the deciding for him. Wherever he went would have to be a terminus, he decided. Portsmouth Harbour was the destination of the next train due in. It was either that or London, and London frightened him. He had reread the works of Jane Austen on the inside, soothed as much by her moral rectitude as by the elegant plainness of her cadences, and her references to Portsmouth aroused his curiosity to see a place he had never visited.

  At once it seemed to him a terrible city, blighted first by the bombs of the Blitz then by the steady erosion of its raison d’être and naval pride and lastly by the steady flight of the middle class, but its grimness, its failure, suited his new sense of himself and the blasts of sea air, the scents of salt and car ferry, were a joy after the stale air of his cell.

  To his probation officer to whom he was bound to continue to report regularly at first, he remained Maurice Carver, of course, but to the world at large he became Modest Carlsson, product of a Russian/Swedish union, his parents music lovers murdered for their principles, his wife and child dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in the only accommodation he could afford them.

  He had not wasted his time in prison. Obviously he was far more highly educated than most, if not all his fellow inmates, so he did not sign up for GCSE courses, but he encouraged visits from a writer in residence attached to the prison, a novelist, who was a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fiction. The novelist was keen he should write about his childhood and family, which he duly did, albeit making most of it up, and that he seek to give his own pain and isolation a context by imagining and describing the pain and isolation of others. And it was from these exercises that Modest Carlsson and his lugubrious history emerged.

  He had enjoyed few opportunities to rehearse this story in prison but he had reviewed and embroidered it in private. Once he got to Portsmouth, he released snippets of it in bus queues, on trains, in waiting rooms and in bars until he quite believed it himself and could grow genuinely moist eyed at the mention of his dead wife. Wife and child retained the names of their faithless real-life counterparts – Sylvia and Lily – because it gave him a cheap pleasure to murder them in conversation and because he fancied their unassuming, lower-middle class Englishness lent an added sheen to his sentimental history. Changing the name he went by could not have been simpler and, even though he was obliged to let the probation office know, he felt it made him less vulnerable to anyone from his past life who might seek him out.

  He had always been careful with money and, even after the divorce settlement, retained enough savings to start a new life. Returning to teaching was out of the question. Instead, with the savings that had been harvesting a handsome interest in his absence, he took on a rundown second-hand bookshop whose owner had just died in harness. It had a lavatory, a sink, a kettle and there was just room to squeeze a single bed into the office so – probably illegally – he lived in the shop too.

  Most of the stock was inferior, paperback stuff, the greasy fruit of house clearances, and it was hard to see how the previous proprietor had made an honest living. The most popular line, he soon discovered, were the tattered old porn magazines in the basement’s ‘adult’ section. Of these he duly sealed the less damaged in cellophane and began to market them at a premium as vintage erotica.

  The other healthy market was signed for and unsigned first editions. He soon found there were collectors of these – usually men – who seemed to have less interest in the contents of a book than in its condition. Other dealers’ catalogues and prices taught him what to look out for. Every Monday he kept the shop closed to trawl house clearance sales and down-at-heel auctions where books were sold by weight or by the yard. And while he was minding the shop, he would pick through his latest haul, cleaning the better purchases and wrapping them neatly in cellophane. He became an extremely neat wrapper. When it was worth his time, he would visit book festivals and join the long (or sometimes surprisingly short) queues to have a famous writer sign an old copy of one of their books.

  ‘Just your signature,’ he would always tell them to prevent them writing all good wishes or some such devaluing nonsense.

  By degrees his principal income began to come from online sales – a business for which the shop, which was hardly in a prime bibliophilic district, became little more than an office.

  His time in prison and the reasons for it had killed off any impulse to form a relationship, even had the opportunity arisen. When his need became distracting he visited a prostitute, of which Portsmouth had such an abundance that he never needed to see the same one twice and so suffer the shame of her recognition or bad memories. Outside again, however, he was assailed by a bitter loneliness he had never felt as a prisoner. Free to move among people once more, he became sharply aware that he was noticed only for the brief registering of disgust. At least disgust involved notice. More wounding was the not being noticed at all, the skating over of eyes, the automatic, impersonal courtesies of transaction. He became obsessed with eye contact. When he paid for something, he would hold back his money a second or two until a salesgirl met his eye. When someone bought a book or magazine off him – especially when they bought a magazine – he would make them – make them! – return his gaze. And he would smile. In prison he was in all probability clinically depressed but now that he was free he taught himself to smile again, practising whenever he faced his spattered mirror. Smiles, he learned, were a challenge less easily ducked than a mere verbal pleasantry. To smile at someone, especially a stranger, was somehow to assume moral superiority until the smile was returned. When he smiled at someone and said a bright good morning to them and they did neither in return, he felt rewarded by a brief flush of angry satisfaction that he was the better person.

  He had no illusions about expecting love. He had experienced love and had thrown it away and that kind of true, trusting affection surely only came to each man once. It was not love for which he was lonely, or even friendship, although a friend, an equal, would have been pleasant. He had no such expectations because he knew he was repellent and he knew that the process was cumulative – the more he disgusted people, the more disgusting he would become. What he hungered for was nothing warmer-blooded than significance, he realiz
ed: to play a role in people’s lives again and know that his decisions and actions affected others. The significance he had known as a teacher, as a head of department no less, this he missed more than his personal significance to his wife and daughter.

  He considered suicide frequently. To jump into the sea, cut his wrists or step in front of a train or lorry was a regular temptation and he was ashamed at his fear of doing so and mildly intrigued that he should persist in clinging to life when life had so little to offer him.

  He turned instead to alcohol and Jesus. Alcohol found him easily. His appetite had greatly increased in prison and with it his size, to the point where he now had to buy his clothes in a dismal shop catering exclusively to the obese, which in turn so repelled him that he ate more to lift his spirits. He had always liked wine and, now that he lived and worked alone, found that he could easily drink a bottle a day, starting at lunchtime, two if the weather were especially cold or hot.

  Once or twice he became extravagantly, falling-down drunk. Waking on the floor of the shop in his own vomit and urine, entirely unaware of how the previous hours had been passed, except for the drinking. But before long he found he could drink steadily with, as he saw it, a measure of responsible control and show no ill effects beyond a generalized warmth of feeling that usually curdled by nightfall into self-pity that his warmth had gone unrecognized and unreturned.

  Jesus’s approach was characteristically sly and subtle. Modest had never been a Christian, not even, to his knowledge, been christened and certainly not confirmed. Studying then teaching English literature, he had learned enough to understand the broadest religious reference but he had never actually read or possessed a Bible. He had done his best to avoid poets such as Donne or Hopkins, most of whose work was incomprehensible to a reader with neither religious schooling nor spiritual leanings. But then he was called by one of his seedy new work contacts to clear the extensive bookshelves of an elderly cat lover. The books on the lower shelves were unsalvageable, from having been sprayed by generations of tom cats, and naturally he told his contact that all the books were ruined and worthless but that he would deal with them as a favour. Many of the books, needless to say, were in excellent condition – the ailurophile had been a keen book buyer and a blessedly tidy reader, the sort who never folded down a page or read while she was bathing or eating. She had a complete set of mint-condition William Golding hardbacks and a first edition of The Waste Land, which he sold for a tidy sum. And while picking through her collection in the shop, sorting trash from trophies, he found a New Testament. It attracted him precisely because it was so unlike a Bible to look at. Printed on good, quarto paper, with a large attractive font and laid out like a novel, with the paragraphs allowed to cross a whole page instead of being crammed into indigestible columns, and with the chapters numbered but not the verses. There were attractive colour plate illustrations too, from the relevant sections of the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures.

  He meant to wrap it in cellophane like the other, better books but then, having poured himself a large glass of Riesling, he began to read and he read on through the rest of the night and the bottle. He carried on reading it all that week, whether there were customers in the shop or not, neglecting all other tasks, even to go to the public baths for his weekly wash. He read a Gospel a day and the Acts on Friday, was alternately bored and baffled by the Epistles on Saturday, when he should have been attending a bankruptcy sale in Gosport, and was so disturbed by the Book of Revelation on Sunday that he drank most of a bottle of gin as he read it and would ever after taste juniper on his tongue and feel breathless and a little dizzy when he heard a reading from it.

  He had done nothing so intently and consistently since he was a student and the experience left him profoundly unsettled for days afterwards, despite attempting an exorcism by reading the least biblical texts the shelves could offer, from de Sade’s Justine to Angela Carter to ‘Readers’ Wives’ Confessions’. He kept having dreams in which Jesus, who had become conflated in his unconscious with the doe-eyed prison novelist, talked kindly to him in words he could not catch, Aramaic possibly, or, most disturbingly, came to sit at the end of his tiny bed, held his foot firmly through the bedding and said, all too clearly in English, ‘He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages.’

  It was high summer, the sort of sticky August weather that brought out the crudest in everyone. Men paraded in nothing but Union Jack shorts. Every child seemed fractious and smeared with ice cream. Pubs spilled threateningly onto the pavements around them and the streets reeked of grilling, sweat and onions.

  Out of wine, overcome by thirst, he had gone to the grimly genteel lounge bar of one of the least noisy of the neighbourhood pubs for a drink or two – nothing excessive – and was walking home in the sodium-lit non-night alternately seething at the rudeness of people and startled by the blare of music from passing cars.

  ‘Oi! Excuse me.’

  It was a bunch of sailors on leave. Even without the crew cuts and tattoos, he would have known this from the pub they were leaning against – one few civilian youths would dare frequent.

  ‘Oi! Fatty!’

  Used to abuse, he did what he always did, ignored it, crossed the road and quickened his pace without actually breaking into a run.

  ‘I said Fatty. That’s you!’

  Suddenly they were on the pavement before him. Behind him too. He remembered prison, combs improvised into blades, toothbrush handles patiently scraped to dagger sharpness, and turned so that his back was to the bricks.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, putting on a stammer to make them find him ridiculous rather than offensive. ‘I’m a bit deaf.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ the leader said again. They were all drunk, unsteady on their feet but fired up. They reeked of beer and noxious cologne.

  ‘We only wanted to ask you a question.’

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ another added.

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ he lied, wishing he could scale the wall behind him like a spider. ‘What’s the question?’

  ‘Well, Fatty. We were just wondering … Would you die for Queen and Country?’

  ‘I’m a bit old.’

  ‘Yes. And a bit fat. But would you? Would you die for Queen and Country?’

  It was a trick, of course. If he said yes, they would kick him. If he said no, they would kick him. ‘Actually,’ he said. ‘Probably not, these days.’

  The punch was so rapid he did not see which one delivered it. It came full in his face so that he flew back hard against the house wall and struck his head. There was another blow to his stomach that winded him and had him doubled over.

  ‘Yup. Really fat,’ one of them said. ‘Disgusting.’

  They kicked him then. He had watched scenes like this in prison; he had known there would be kicking eventually.

  In what space was left for thought between pain and pumping adrenaline, he assumed they were going to continue kicking him as he slumped to the pavement and that quite possibly he was about to die. But they broke off and ran away, laughing. He distinctly heard them begin their prank on someone else.

  ‘Hey. Excuse me? We’ve just got a question we’d like you to answer. Don’t be shy!’

  He could feel blood bubbling from his nose and then tasted it too. He put a hand gingerly to the back of his head and felt wetness there that sickened him. He tried to stand but his legs would not obey him, robbed of power by shock, perhaps. Besides, he had no idea what he should do next. He supposed he must need a hospital yet knew neither where Portsmouth’s hospital was nor how he would reach it. He must leave the street, at least, he knew that much, in case the gang tired of their second victim and decided to return to their first.

  ‘No. Don’t try to get up.’

  His eyes had closed up, he realized now, and made him temporarily blind. It was a young voice, low, educated, officer-class if it was a sailor’s. He felt a hand on his shoulder holding him in place quite firmly. ‘An ambulance is coming,’ t
he voice said. ‘You’re safe now. Did they rob you?’

  ‘No,’ Modest managed.

  ‘You’re bleeding quite a lot. I’m going to give you a handkerchief and you need to pinch it hard across the bridge of your nose if you can bear to.’

  ‘Not sure I can …’

  ‘Here. I’ll guide your hand.’

  A folded handkerchief was pressed into his hand then his hand was guided to the middle of his face by large fingers which then clutched his into position. The pain grew no worse so perhaps there was no fracture. Modest felt a great desire to sleep come upon him.

  ‘No,’ said the priest. ‘You need to stay with me, I’m afraid, in case you’ve got concussion. What’s your name?’

  ‘Modest.’

  ‘How wonderful. Like Mussorgsky. And Tchaikovsky’s brother.’

  ‘Yes. Modest Carlsson.’

  ‘Are you Swedish?’

  No one had ever asked this before. It made it so easy.

  ‘Half. And half Russian.’

  ‘Your English is very good.’

  ‘I’ve lived here all my life. I was born in Bayswater.’

  ‘And where do you live now?’

  ‘Allaway Avenue.’

  ‘So you were nearly home! That was bad luck.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did they hit you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t die for Queen and Country.’

  ‘Ha. That’s a new one. Me neither. I’m a terrible coward and I’ve got flat feet. And I’m a priest. We’re much more use alive in any case. Nature’s stretcher-bearers.’

  Modest was going to ask him his name but suddenly the ambulance arrived and a policewoman and the priest explained briefly that he had seen nothing, just found him, which surely was not quite the truth, then he gave Modest’s shoulder a quick squeeze and murmured, ‘God watches you, Modest. All will be well,’ and seemed to melt away as other voices and other hands took over.