A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  She had fallen pregnant with Carrie soon after they were married and her adoration of, and concern for, the baby and the exhaustion attendant on new motherhood had mitigated most of her pain at having to share Barnaby with so many others. (And she did feel she was sharing him. He truly loved his parishioners, and gave so unstintingly of his time and counsel and affection that he often returned home with little surplus to offer.) She had assumed Carrie would be the first of three or even four, as did others. They were a young couple, clearly in love, clearly healthy. Love would take the lead and ingenious poverty would find a way to follow in its glowing footsteps.

  Sure enough she fell pregnant again just as she was weaning Carrie onto solids. She was delighted. As an only child of older parents she liked the idea of a small tribe of children transforming the place, supporting one another and, one day, taking over the farm again. She worried she was too serious to keep a child amused and assumed children were better at doing this for one another. She redecorated the small back bedroom Barnaby had once occupied as a paying guest, replacing its spinster chintzes with bright images from Beatrix Potter and Kate Greenaway. She planned how they could turn what was currently a box room, full of junk, into a play room children could keep toys in and make their own, unchecked by vicarage decorum.

  But she lost the baby, inexplicably, just as it was beginning to show. Her grief at this astonished her. It wasn’t as though the baby had yet become a person or acquired a personality; it was more that she felt a kind of fury at herself for failing at something requiring no effort, at something she had already proved she could do perfectly well.

  The third pregnancy lasted longer but she was so worried about another miscarriage she made Barnaby join her in telling no one, not even her mother. Which meant that when she miscarried this time it felt like a secret shame – worse than a public grief – and she couldn’t tell her mother now for fear of hurting her by having been so secretive.

  Inevitably all this, and the demands of a toddler, affected their love life. Barnaby started to treat her like something delicate, a patient almost, whereas she had previously gloried in what felt like an equal possession, a passion that, if not exactly careless, at least wasn’t constantly watchful.

  When she fell pregnant the fourth time, as a result of the giddy freedom of a camping holiday on Bryher, they left nothing to chance. Barnaby was solicitous. He insisted on taking her to a specialist – calling in favours, in a way he never usually did, so that she saw the archdeacon’s obstetrician sister, who had a private practice, free of charge. All went well, all her test results were fine, the baby grew until everyone could see. The scans revealed it was a boy. She became so big that people kept asking if she was expecting twins and she had to assure them that, no, it was simply the one, very well-cushioned baby.

  Her fingers swelled so, she was obliged to leave off first her wedding band and then the engagement ring Barnaby had given her – a lovely antique amethyst one which had come down through his family. It was so splendid, in its quiet way, she had taken to wearing it inside out most of the time, with its jewels facing inwards, for fear she might somehow lose or damage them. Perhaps because of the story attached to it, of all the Johnson women who had worn it before – none of them farmer’s daughters – she had always felt a little fraudulent wearing it, but putting it off entirely made her jumpy, as though the action were an unsaying of vows or unknitting of love.

  The archdeacon’s sister had said arrangements could be made to admit her a whole week early so as to have mother and baby under observation, but then agreed that there was no cause for worry since neither of her previous two pregnancies had proceeded this far. When the last week approached, though, Dorothy had her overnight case packed and waiting in the hall and Carrie was sent down the road to stay with the Angwins’ cousins, the Polglazes at Kelynack, whose boy Pearce was something of a hero to her.

  Her waters broke in the dead of night so the roads were still quite empty as Barnaby drove her to Treliske. But then it was clear something was wrong. She was examined and her bump repeatedly listened to by a midwife and a nurse, then her doctor was called. There was no pulse. No one could say exactly at which point the baby’s heart had stopped but it had been pumping away when her GP had called in on her the previous afternoon. Now she had to endure all the pain of labour knowing she was giving birth to a little corpse.

  From the moment they were told until after the birth, Barnaby stayed at her side, holding her hand when she let him, kissing it when the pain was at its peak. He had got up in his dog collar for some reason, security perhaps, or habit. It peeped out above the hospital gown they had tied about him and comforted her. She knew he was praying, even though he didn’t want to attract attention so was doing it in his head. She could always tell. His beautiful stare lost its focus and he pursed his lips slightly in his effort not to move them.

  The staff could not have been more sensitive or considerate. They cleaned and examined the baby as they would have done a living child and wrapped him in a towel and gave him to her to hold. She cried then, to see the perfection and shockingly blue stillness of him, cried far louder than she had done during labour, but could see she frightened Barnaby so controlled herself as soon as she could. He kissed her, kissed the baby and began to weep too, but silently, the first tears she had seen him shed, so that she knew the other losses had not reached him as this one had.

  ‘You can pray out loud now,’ she told him. ‘I think it might help,’ although this was a kind lie and she felt herself beyond all succour.

  They had agreed he would be called Harold, for her father, so he said a prayer for Harold as though he were dying between them and not already dead. It was a beautiful, complicated prayer she had never heard before – never having been present at a deathbed – and she marvelled at his ability not only to carry it in his memory but to be able to recall it without stumbling at such a moment. And he surprised her by producing his tiny silver flask of Chrism and making the sign of the cross on Harold’s rumpled forehead. Then she let him take the baby, feeling suddenly drained of all energy, and she joined in with the Lord’s Prayer. It left her hungry for more and she asked him to say the Grace for them all before he handed Harold to the nurses.

  She had assumed Harold would be quietly cremated along with all the other sad hospital waste – the other dead, incomplete babies, the severed limbs, the cancerous organs. This did not bother her remotely; she had a farmer’s lack of sentimentality about the swift and hygienic disposal of the dead and she had said her goodbye simply by cradling that small parcel that so clearly was never him. Barnaby surprised her, however, by arranging that the baby was collected by undertakers and given a tiny, plain wooden coffin, like something one might store letters in, or family silver, under a bed.

  She drew the line at involving anyone else, or at telling Carrie, for fear of traumatizing her. A hole was dug in the Sampson plot, over where her father lay, and where her mother would one day join him, and they held a pared-down funeral and committal service very early the following Sunday morning when no one was about. They returned home, breakfasted with her mother and Carrie and then he went to finish the day’s sermon and she to start Sunday lunch and nothing further was said.

  Carrie seemed disappointed rather than distraught, having already learnt the farm’s lessons in mortality from pigs, calves and chickens, and was easily diverted with a kind gift from Jane Angwin of some ducklings to raise. Carrie kept them in a pen under a warm light in the old dairy and spent hours talking to them and seeking ways – impossibly – to tell them apart.

  Dorothy was not a glutton and she could not recall actively eating for comfort but she never lost the weight she had gained with Harold. It spread from her belly to settle on her hips, and her previously neat breasts remained heavy and pendulous and seemed doomed to stay that way. She avoided looking at herself in the full-length bedroom mirror, especially when naked, and took to making a point of hurrying into bed before Barnab
y came upstairs to join her so that he need not see her undressing or hear the treacherous complaint of bedsprings as she climbed in and arranged herself.

  It was around this time that he took to calling her Dot, which she had never liked or encouraged, and the name stuck and soon spread around the parish. It was born of the jokey way he liked to make Carrie giggle by greeting mother and daughter together as Dot and Carry One, but she could not help feeling the ease with which her diminutive was taken up was in part a jibe at her growing girth. It was like calling a tall man Titch or a short one Lofty.

  He began to pay her less and less attention physically, or rather, to concentrate his touches of affection to her face, ears, throat and hands – ironically those very areas magazines clucked that larger women should adorn in order to distract attention from their other parts. In truth she was content to receive no more strenuous attentions and not just because size had made her self-conscious but for fear of being made to lose another baby. Possibly he shared her dread. Certainly he shouldered a share of blame, for she had never forgotten how he repeatedly apologized as she laboured to give birth to Harold’s corpse. They could have taken the usual precautions, she could have gone on the pill easily enough or suggested he have a vasectomy, but there seemed no point when there was nothing to take precautions against.

  In the first years of their marriage they often fell asleep in each other’s arms. Now, just ten years on, he always turned his back on her to sleep. He kissed her first usually, and murmured good night, but then he settled with his back to her. She wasn’t unhappy – nothing so dramatic or definite – it was simply that she occasionally felt called upon to pretend she was happier than she was. People liked to make out all marriages foundered or were founded on sex but she knew there was more. She knew from the stories she heard in the women’s refuge and from the unhappy people who often sat at her kitchen table – people whom she would never have met if she had married Henry Angwin – that sex without love, or sex with love gone wrong, could be horrific and tantamount to violence. She knew she was lucky in love, that she loved him and he her. It was simply that they had arrived at the companionate, two-old-shoes stage of marriage earlier than she would have predicted.

  Carrie was her consolation. A needy, clingy baby, she became a self-reliant and independent-minded child, thoroughly her own person, still tomboyish in her idolizing of Henry Angwin and Pearce Polglaze and in her ideas of pleasure, but reassuringly girlish in her devotion to her father and her passionate friendships.

  That she despised dolls had been a mercy when Dorothy was going through the pain of repeated baby-loss, and that she seemed so good at forming friendships lessened her mother’s worry that she would be lonely as an only child. Aside from Pearce, who would soon be too old to pay her any attention, her best friends were a pair of miners’ daughters from the village school. Carrie didn’t seem to mind their hours of play with their Barbies because, rather touchingly, they understood that she had a special understanding of Barbie’s open-topped sports car, which she would solemnly ‘service’ while the dolls were being dressed and reclothed. The three of them were keen little cyclists, pedalling up and down the village, from the miners’ terraces in Boscaswell, along Church Road and down the lane to the farm. The girls’ parents were not churchgoers, which made it all the more amusing that Carrie persuaded her friends to start attending Sunday School with her, often in wildly inappropriate clothes which they had picked out for themselves as their parents lay sleeping.

  All this reminded Dorothy of her own childhood in all the same places and made her glad that they were far too poor even to consider wrenching Carrie away from these local friendships to send her to a private school in town when the time came. Grateful though Dorothy was to her education in Penzance, the process of being sent to St Clare’s, where girls with accents were encouraged to lose them and where she was certainly the only pupil in her year who had grown up among miners’ daughters, had opened a rift between her and her Pendeen friends at the worst possible age, a process it had proved impossible to reverse.

  There were women she often met in the lanes or at the shop or at the school gates with whom she used to play, swap secrets and make serious promises, who now greeted her cheerily enough but maintained a formal distance, turning back from greeting her to chat amongst themselves, with the friends who had never wavered. Quite possibly Carrie was befriending their children too by now and Dorothy was determined to allow those friendships to endure; any shortfall in Carrie’s education could always be made up for at home.

  Dorothy’s other consolation, in a very quiet way, was God. Shortly before Carrie’s birth she had given up the Sunday School to an old schoolfriend of hers recently married to a policeman. Tabby Morris was eager and less encumbered. Dorothy had always guiltily thought that Sunday School and the excuse it gave to miss the sermon and the larger part of the Eucharist service suited her, that she could be busily useful in another room rather than quietly, even passively, contemplative in church, but something had shifted within her in becoming a mother and she found herself noticing and feeling the meaning of words she had long been reciting with her mind unengaged. Once or twice Barnaby persuaded her to read a lesson now but she hated that, hated standing up in front of everyone else and being the only one speaking. What she loved, she discovered, was prayer and an unaccustomed stillness that came over her as she knelt and covered her eyes and either murmured familiar words or focused her thoughts as a speaker directed.

  She also loved Barnaby’s sermons. He always worked on them in his study very early on Sunday mornings after waking her with a cup of tea. He never discussed them with her or seemed to fret about them and she enjoyed the element of surprise on the occasions where she could recognize how some incident from the preceding week had prompted a particular subject. She had not great experience – the only other preachers she had heard were the old vicar she had grown up with, Father Philip, and their occasional guests – but she suspected that Barnaby’s sermons were relatively simple. They invariably took a text from one of the day’s readings or its psalm and, almost invariably, they had the effect of gently opening that text out so that she found herself understanding it better, or feeling a better identification with it. This was especially true when a reading threw up one of the Bible’s odder or less comforting moments – like one of Christ’s harsher pronouncements about separating child from parent, or one of the old Testament heroes’ less edifying exploits. His sermons were never long and sometimes they were very short indeed but involved significant pauses in which he directed everyone to think about or imagine something before he continued. He was, she came to realize, unlike most priests in his use of silence. The idea that sprang to mind when one thought priest was of someone talking, probably too much, of someone imposing his voice on one. Yet to conjure up Barnaby’s priesthood, his sermons or his services, was to remember the quality of their silences.

  He was strongly against missionaries who sought to convert people away from an existing religion. This had been a cause of some conflict when he first took on his post, because one of the more forceful members of the PCC was of the saving the heathen mind-set and for some years money had been regularly sent to a mission specifically for the conversion of Muslims in Paris. Barnaby put a stop to that and he encouraged donations to missions whose emphasis lay on practicalities, improvement of sanitation, housing, education. He fostered connections with a mission in Sudan, where his sister Alice had died.

  One of his projects supported a beleaguered nun who focused on the rescuing of street children in Hong Kong from labour or worse. Sister Bernard was an old-school letter writer and responded to each year’s cheque with four sides of closely spaced onion skin. She knew the Penzance area, having passed part of her long-ago girlhood at Porthcurno, where her father worked for Cable and Wireless, and she took an overseas subscription to The Cornishman so as to know a little about the lives of the people supporting her work and to follow the fortunes of the
Cornish Pirates, of whom she was a surprisingly passionate fan.

  One day she wrote out of the blue for once, and not in acknowledgement of a donation. She was desperately worried about the plight of children, many of them only babies, in the refugee camps set up in the colony for the Vietnamese fleeing the regime in their homeland. The first wave of Vietnamese refugees, fleeing war, had tended to be better off, often well-educated and with the skills, including languages, necessary to help an immigrant negotiate their legal and social way into a new culture. Now, however, the refugees were fleeing the oppression following the hostilities and were coming from the other end of the social scale, taking incredible risks and often spending whatever savings they had simply to escape in criminally overcrowded boats. Unlike the earlier waves of refugees, these arrived with almost nothing to pave their way into a new life. Many died in trying to make the journey, leaving orphans behind them. Other orphans were quite possibly not parentless at all but simply burdens their mothers could not bear or children of rape. Sister Bernard was having the greatest difficulty finding new homes for these children in Hong Kong, whether in families or already crowded orphanages. So she was writing to everyone she knew, literally everyone in her address book, in search of people prepared to take them in. Margaret Thatcher was limiting the numbers of refugee immigrants the UK would accept, but an adopted child would not have refugee status. Through relentless lobbying of airlines and Hong Kong and Kowloon companies, Sister Bernard had the funding to see any adoptees escorted safely to Heathrow, so now she needed willing families at the long flight’s end. Characteristically frank, she enclosed a mixed assortment of available children, little photographs accompanied by whatever scant biographical details she had procured.