A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  Choosing not to rise to this, Barnaby joked that even priests got Boxing Day off, then wished he hadn’t because it caused Jim to pull what Dot called his battening-down-the-hatches-face and the subject was closed. Barnaby couldn’t help but remember the way he had pulled back from his own father when even younger, and how part of him had felt relief at his father’s seeming acceptance of it and part of him had been deeply wounded at it. So, although he accepted that Jim, sorry, Phuc wanted distance, he didn’t let him believe that he wasn’t missed or wanted. He wrote to him thereafter, every week, not e-mails, which he had learnt could so easily be blocked or deleted, but proper ink and paper letters, which could be reread and saved, and stack up to form a physical proof of love. Thinking of his own father’s constipated, codified offerings, he always wrote two sides, never hiding behind clippings or cuttings, though occasionally including photographs. He wrote early every Sunday morning, immediately after he wrote the day’s sermon when he hadn’t found someone else to preach in his stead. And he made an effort to be entirely himself on paper, entirely honest. He wrote about his religious doubts, if not quite admitting to loss of faith, and his impatience with church politics. He told stories of parishioners and neighbours, like Dot’s scary librarian friend or pathetic, fat Modest Carlsson who nobody could quite like or trust. He told stories too of his own boyhood and difficult, eventually broken, relationship with his father. He hesitated before writing, ‘I don’t want that to happen with you and me, Phuc. In fact I won’t let it happen.’

  Jim responded only very occasionally, and only ever by e-mail or telephone, and when he rang it was always on Sunday morning when he could be sure of only speaking to the answering machine.

  He came home for Christmas after all, for the bare twenty-four hours of the feast. He refused to attend church, saying it was all lies, he got drunk and he was consistently horrible to Dot in a sneering, needling way he’d rarely been as a sixth-former, which made her nervous so she kept calling him Jim instead of Phuc. He talked incessantly. He talked to himself. He never finished what was on his plate, although he was worryingly thin. He dressed as though he was going clubbing, immune, apparently, to the cold. If either Barnaby or Dot referred to any of these oddities, he lashed out.

  Only Carrie was spared, and she seemed frozen, afraid to intervene and lose whatever attachment of his she retained. It was as though, having already wounded them by threatening to stay away, he had decided to come home only because he realized he could behave more hatefully that way.

  Speaking to his parishioners about the Christ child’s message of love and how a baby was the perfect symbol of that obligatory, undeniable love within families, Barnaby tasted the sourness of deceit on his tongue more than ever before.

  It was a measure of how tense and watchful the visit left the three of them that not one of them succumbed to the temptation to joke about the similarity between Jim’s new name and the expletive his behaviour surely made them all want to say.

  Barnaby resumed writing to him immediately – it seemed more important than ever – and sent what was probably regarded as a pitiful cheque to help with the spring term’s rent. He grew angry afresh as he wrote, remembering how Phuc had spoken to his mother, so found himself apologizing for whatever they had done wrong in raising him. Silence followed, total silence into which Barnaby continued to send his letters as pebbles into a cold, dark shaft, until the end of term, when Carrie told them both he’d be spending the Easter break working in the wine bar.

  No one expressed surprise. It was expensive being a student now, they reminded each other, and he didn’t have well-off parents to subsidize him. Then the hall of residence returned one of Barnaby’s letters with a note to say that Phuc was still a student of the university but had been obliged to move out. This was far more worrying, especially since Barnaby feared he would have moved out in an effort to save money. He emailed the contents of his letter instead, asking for Phuc’s new postal address. There was no response. He emailed again, and this time the e-mail bounced back with a message that Phuc’s e-mail account had been closed. At least, the only one that Barnaby and Dot knew about.

  As spring unfolded into a glorious summer, they had no news and, Barnaby noticed, took to avoiding speaking of Phuc because the cycle of recrimination and equally useless worry the mere mention of him stirred up was too upsetting. He began to suspect how it might feel to have a loved one in a coma or on a life support machine for week after week, to the point where one would avoid speaking of them because every possible conversation about them would have been had and a kind of mourning delicacy would become preferable to further discussion.

  Then he came back from an afternoon of parish visits to find a note from Dot in the usual place, leaning on the kettle.

  3 p.m. Jim’s in hospital, she had written. Gone to fetch him home.

  He had supper ready and had alerted Carrie by the time Dot brought Phuc home after dark. Phuc was in no state to eat anything. He had slept for the two-hour car journey but still looked like a walking corpse. Freezing all enquiries with a glance, Dot left father and daughter in the hall and put him straight to bed.

  It was by the sheerest fluke she had even found out he was ill. The daughter of a woman in her book group was a junior nurse on the psychiatric ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter and recognized Phuc, despite his name, as she had been in the year below him at Cape Cornwall. She took the initiative, when he came round from sedation and finally started making sense. He had claimed to have no next of kin, but she went behind the ward sister’s back and rang her mother, who rang Dot.

  Dot was late back because she had to wait to talk to a doctor. They had explained that he showed signs of addiction to amphetamines, which had left needle tracks, and sclerotic veins, on both his arms. He had been brought in temporarily psychotic from the effects of crystal meth. It had taken three policemen to control him sufficiently to get him into the back of a van and bring him in and it had taken a large dose of Largactil to sedate him to the point of safety and stop him repeatedly shouting, ‘You can’t do this to me. I’m the Son of God!’

  Phuc had looked merely unkempt at Christmas but now his appearance had deteriorated shockingly. He was emaciated, sweaty, dirty and had the sort of acne he had managed to avoid throughout his teens. Dot’s only thought, her instinct, had been to bring him straight home without trying to collect his things. She dressed him in Barnaby’s pyjamas and Barnaby found her weeping over the state of his clothes as she put them to wash with agricultural quantities of liquid soap. Neither she nor Barnaby slept much that night because she kept tiptoeing across to his old room to check he was still there and still breathing.

  He stayed in bed for two whole days, barely speaking, only waking to drink and to toy with the meals she took in to him. They made sure one of them or Carrie was always in the house so that he was never alone and had their GP look in on him too. On the third day he dressed in the basic clothes Barnaby had bought in one of the big supermarkets in Penzance and supplemented with a bag of more colourful things from charity shops. He sat in the garden, enjoying the sun and the cat, whose wordless love was doubtless welcome respite from the anxious expressions of the humans in the house. They conducted small, careful conversations about unthreatening matters in the present: the garden, the weather, the house, the cat. When Barnaby went to sit with him, Phuc would give a crumpled smile and say, ‘Hey, Dad,’ which made Barnaby feel things might be bad but were not quite broken.

  He was more forthcoming with Carrie, admitting to having flunked his course, to being expelled from his hall of residence for stupid stuff, to living in a squat whose address he claimed not to be able to remember. To having no money left, and owing some to a man who scared him. He was nervous the hospital would know his parents’ address and pass it on so that the man might come after him.

  ‘It won’t all be true,’ Dot said, poring over the booklet the nurses had given her. ‘We can expect paranoia and mood swings, it says.’


  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ they told him, and ‘You must stay as long as you like.’

  ‘I don’t care about his degree,’ Barnaby told Dot in bed that night. ‘Or the police or anything. I just want him to stay here and get well, however long it takes.’ And he dared imagine a few sunny weeks, months even, of having both their adult children back in the nest, of Phuc rebuilding his health and his family relationships, with them in careful, loving, undemanding attendance; a prolonged and peaceful rehabilitation.

  He knew this was naïve and that addiction was something about which he was shamefully ignorant for someone who had prided himself on taking a pastoral interest in the more wretched and less law-abiding households of the parish. At the end of the second day of sun and cat and careful conversation, he told Dot this was unlikely to last, that she must ready herself; they couldn’t keep Phuc prisoner, even for his own good. But it was still a shock when he vanished the next day and reappeared, high and barely able to speak, an hour or so after Dot had realized he had emptied her purse. Barnaby was still feeling wounded when Phuc disappeared the morning after that and didn’t come back.

  He discovered the graffito when he went to say evening prayers in Morvah. Curiously these solitary services – when they were indeed solitary, for Modest Carlsson had an irritating way of showing up with something like glee, as though he had stumbled on some precious secret – were never as troubling to his evaporated faith as the better-attended ones. Speaking the words on his own, whether in the barnlike expanse of Pendeen church or the mossy tranquillity of Morvah, continued to feel like a ritual with significance, perhaps because, Modest apparitions aside, there was no one needing anything of him. Ideally it was just him and these buildings he now knew so intimately and for which he had come to feel such deep affection he no longer truly saw them, any more than one continued to see in detail friends one encountered every week of one’s life.

  Even in high summer, Morvah church felt damp. Sometimes there were puddles on the floor, as though a stream were rising there, but the church wardens assured him it was simply the granite geeving. The whitewash was due for a fresh coat as it had marked green patches here and there but still the four words painted across it in blood-red gloss were plainly legible from yards away. They had been carefully placed to be the first thing he would see on letting himself in from the porch. Fuck Jesus, they said, Love Phuc.

  Thank God Modest Carlsson was otherwise engaged that evening. Barnaby said the service as usual, adding in a prayer for Phuc, wherever he might be and whatever he might be doing. He examined the defacement closer to and touched it. The paint had not quite dried so stained his fingertips. He pictured his son leaving the church and throwing the paintbrush over the nearest hedge. And the paint? This could not have used an entire tin. He locked the church and walked around the graveyard, fearing some obscenity splashed across a headstone or on the rough granite of the building’s outer walls where it would be that much harder to clean away, but there was nothing. He found brush and empty paint tin under a bush and bagged them up to dispose of at home. The paint had been leftovers; he recognized the tin from earlier in the year when Dot had repainted a wooden, ride-on train from the women’s refuge.

  He drove home. Dot came out to meet him as he pulled up in the yard.

  ‘He took my wallet,’ she said at once. ‘Stupid of me to leave it in my bag.’

  ‘Have you stopped the cards?’

  ‘Yes. And he took the Action Aid box from the hall table.’

  ‘Even if he caught the bus, he can’t have got far.’

  ‘He’ll have hitched,’ Carrie said, coming out from her workshop. ‘He could be miles away by now. Little bugger.’

  Barnaby told them what Phuc had done besides and showed them the paint can. At once Dot was all practicality, as he knew she would be. She packed a wicker basket, as if for a bizarre picnic, with a bottle of solvent, a scrubbing brush, rubber gloves, paint brushes, a can of undercoat and a can of white emulsion. He was amazed afresh at the beautiful order of the big understairs cupboard where she kept her hardware. It gave one the same heartening sense of method and plenty as her larder, but instead of jewel-bright jams and chutneys, displayed identical jars of screws, nails, washers and Rawlplugs all sorted by size and neatly labelled. She kept paint in there too, despite the fire risk it posed, because tins kept in the sheds turned rusty in weeks and the fluctuating temperatures outside ruined the contents.

  ‘We had better change,’ she said, so they changed into clothes that didn’t matter, gardening clothes, and he drove her out to Morvah. ‘How bad is it?’ she asked, waiting beside him in the porch as he took the key from its hiding place in the rafters.

  ‘Pretty bad,’ he said. ‘But it’s only words, not pictures.’

  He let her in and went to turn on the lights while she stared, taking in what Phuc had done. ‘It could be worse,’ she said as he came back to her. ‘He hasn’t touched the altar – most people would have done something to the altar – and he didn’t do anything to the flags.’

  ‘Or start a fire.’

  ‘Or start a fire.’ She actually smiled a little at that, then sighed. ‘Come on. If it’s not dry yet we can scrub a lot off with white spirit and at least blur the words a bit before we paint over them.’

  They shut the door behind them and worked there all evening. They scrubbed off the worst of the paint with solvent then dried off the patch of reddened wall with an old towel from the car boot. Then they painted over it with undercoat to stop any traces of red coming through.

  Carrie called by as they were cleaning the brushes. She had driven down to St Just to fetch fish and chips for them and had also brought a bottle of red wine, glasses, fruit cake and the radio. ‘Thought you might as well make an evening of it,’ she said, then left them alone as she was playing in a euchre drive for the lifeboats back in one of the pubs.

  They listened to a Prom while eating their supper and waiting for the undercoat to dry a little at least, then they painted on two coats of emulsion. They broke off in between to do something they had not done in years, taking a moonlit walk across the fields behind the church to the view out to sea from Chair Carn. It was an unusually still night, retaining some of the day’s warmth. The air bore the sweet scents of hot grass and honeysuckle and, nearer the sea, the foxy musk of bracken. They saw a barn owl hunting and, as they stood to watch it, she took his hand and kissed the back of it, which somehow felt as intimate a gesture as if she had unbuttoned his shirt and kissed the skin above his heart.

  They painted the second coat to a series of motets by Tallis, who was Composer of the Week, barely speaking as they worked, then cleaned up in bitterly cold water from the graveyard tap. They drove home in silence but with the car windows open so that the smell of paint about them was rinsed by the warm night air.

  For the first time in nearly fifteen years they made love. (He would not realize it had been that long until the morning, when he took in her tea and went to shave.) It was not earth-shatteringly passionate – they were both too surprised for that – but for him, at least, it felt like a deep restoration, at the roots of his being, a true forgiveness from the flesh rather than a light and easy one from the tongue.

  DOROTHY AT 34

  Nearing the end of her first decade of married life, Dorothy felt she must have aged more rapidly in the last ten years than in the twenty-four preceding them. This was odd in that, compared to those of most new wives, her life had outwardly changed so little. She lived in the farmhouse she had grown up in, she still lived with her mother, who had created a kind of flat for herself, with its own front door, at one end of the house, and she still knelt in the same pew in church and taught Sunday School there. Ten years on it was still a surprise to receive a letter or invitation dignifying her as Mrs Barnaby Johnson for she secretly still felt like Dorothy Sampson or simply Dulcie Sampson’s Girl.

  Her mother, she was coming to realize, was always right. Her stern predictio
ns of what lay in store for the wives of priests had all come true: the lack of privacy, the lack of money. But her mother had soon acquired a deep respect, almost an awe, for her son-in-law and never breathed a word of I-Told-You-So when she and Dorothy were alone. Becoming a grandmother and sloughing off all responsibility for farm or buildings, had made her biddable, almost sweet. On Dorothy’s worst days, when the door knocker and telephone were barely silent and her kitchen seemed constantly invaded by smiling strangers, days when Carrie contrived to be ill or an ancient radiator sprang a leak or a Mary or Martha escaped and rooted up all her seedlings, she would think back to her mother’s former shortness of temper and wonder that she had never actually shouted or been violent.

  Challenged by life, Dorothy discovered she was stronger than she knew. Poverty, or the constant threat of it, made her ingenious. She reminded herself how to knit and picked up a second-hand electric sewing machine so as to make her own and the child’s clothes. The Angwins helped too, discreetly, encouraging her to ‘invest’ in one of their beef calves every year or two, to keep the freezer stocked with mince and stews. She had always been able to change fuses and paint a room. Now that she was plainly never going to have a husband who could shift for himself in such matters, she pored over a Reader’s Digest manual, acquired a power drill and lost her ignorant fear of plumbing and wiring.

  As for the privacy question, she learned assertiveness. It was she who decided that the family would live in the farmhouse and that the former rectory would serve as the office. It was she who pointed out that there were two rooms in the latter not used by the women’s refuge or mother and baby group or any of the other worthy organizations to which Barnaby had offered house room there, which would serve as a far more convenient parish office and confirmation classroom than her kitchen and sitting room. People continued to show up on the doorstep of course – Barnaby insisted their home address and phone number continue to be displayed on the church signs – but at least these tended to be people in need: the poor, the fearful, the guilty rather than the officious and busy.