A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  Possibly the parish in Portsmouth had been too diffuse or too urban for him to feel so needed, but a real shock of taking up the job in Pendeen had been discovering that only about four tenths of his work involved the things he had learnt at Cuddesdon, procedures which only an anointed priest could carry out. The burdensome rest was social work, a complex of pastoral tasks that might as easily have landed on the desk of MP, policeman or social worker. These were tasks Dorothy grimly called mopping up, everything from visiting the sick, to helping with neighbourhood or family disputes, to advising on benefit claims and tenancy issues. He had not been trained in any of these and did his best – armed from the stash of appropriate leaflets – to nudge parishioners towards the relevant public or voluntary body. But there was, he came to see, something about the priest and his vested authority that retained a special weight in areas of the community where church attendance had become minimal. Just as non-attenders, non-believers even, regularly elected to hold funerals and weddings in church and to bring their babies for baptism, so the evidence of a vestigial faith showed itself in other ways, such as calls for him to bless a new home or barn, to perform exorcisms or, indeed, to hear unsought confessions from elderly agnostics suddenly afraid of death and judgements, not ostensibly believed in. Exorcisms he flatly refused but invariably found the call came from a household where there were other troubles, often unacknowledged, for which unquiet souls were an approximate metaphor – an unhappy or frustrated adolescent or an elderly parent showing signs of neglect.

  And in the background to all this, or foregrounded by it, was the surprise of family life and the adjustments it required of him: the mixed blessing of a live-in motherin-law, the exhausting delight of a baby and the see-saw blessing/challenge of taking in marriage a girl he soon realized understood as little of him as he did of her. They loved each other, desired each other – that much was plain and easy – but they would stumble onto sudden voids of comprehension or inequalities of experience which seemed to cast everything in doubt. (Within weeks, his advice sessions to prospective couples coming to him for marriage went from cheerfully formulaic to gravely questioning.)

  In fact the James Johnson Trust had three trustees: Mr Ewart, a solicitor and the old friend of James whom Barnaby’s father had scathingly referred to as ‘First Secretary’, but it was only ever Mr Ewart with whom Barnaby dealt directly. Beyond his school fees the trust paid for what might broadly be called educational holidays. This travel money had to be applied for by letter, which in turn had proved a neat way of keeping Barnaby and Mr Ewart in touch.

  Over consecutive summers, in between increasingly necessary holiday jobs in restaurants, offices and the back rooms of banks, Barnaby had seen Paris, Rome, Florence, Istanbul and the cultural highlights of Greece. The longed-for cheque was always accompanied by a note or letter from Mr Ewart, usually just a note and, through the telegraphese of these and his equally elegant Christmas cards, Barnaby was able to piece together a sketch of his life after James.

  The couple had soon tired of Ibiza and settled in a cheap quarter of Paris, which was where James finally died of cirrhosis of the liver. His having been hopeless with money was, in some ways, a myth to mask a sort of high standards alcoholism. James never drank Muscadet if Meursault were on offer, or Chianti when he could have vintage Barolo. Luckily for Paul, he had found it hard to resist auction houses and antique markets and had equally expensive and unerring instinct in objets d’art as in wine. So although the house had to be sold, the proceeds of that and the sale of all but the most portable contents kept them, as James put it, splendidly cushioned.

  Despite a legal challenge from Barnaby’s father, Mr Ewart inherited everything that wasn’t in the trust, precisely because James had converted so much money into things over the years, unitemised and hard to quantify. He left the sad memories of Paris behind and travelled for several years with various men, including the ‘First Secretary’, under whose tutelage he made excellent investments in property, just before the property market went into a period of massive growth. He was neither spendthrift nor an alcoholic. He would survive.

  He settled in New York. When Barnaby announced his ordination, there was a pointed silence from him, but when he was given his interim parish in Portsmouth, a magnificent black suit from James’s old tailor, Gieves and Hawkes, and brogues from Church’s arrived. Generosity aside, the touching thing about this was that Mr Ewart had clearly noted his size when he last took him shopping in Paris as a grieving teenager. Since then there had been silence. He wrote nothing when Barnaby informed him about settling in Pendeen and marrying Dorothy, merely sending a bouquet so preposterously large it took every vase in Mrs Sampson’s armoury to accommodate it around the house and, on the day, a gardenia plant so large it was in effect a bush, whose sweet, suggestive scent coloured the entire house before it succumbed wretchedly to white fly and was adopted by his motherin-law, who prided herself on never giving up on a pot plant, however sick or ill-favoured.

  The New York Christmas cards since Barnaby’s marriage had contained nothing beyond a signature. Barnaby had come to assume he either felt he had done his duty by him or that he felt no sympathy with Barnaby’s having married (which would have been sad) or felt disgust at the Church of England’s persistently offensive attitude to homosexuality (which would have been quite understandable).

  Then he had rung up, out of the blue; something he had never done. The telephone was always left plugged in now, of course, though Dulcie Sampson had held out vigorously against having a second line put into her end of the house. (She claimed everyone she cared about lived within walking distance.)

  ‘Barnaby Johnson? This is Paul Ewart.’ It was so long since they had spoken, Barnaby would not have recognized his voice, which now had acquired a transatlantic timbre.

  Like an American cat, he thought nonsensically, picturing for the first time in years his late uncle’s dark blue swimming pool and his velvety roses.

  ‘There’s a painting coming up at auction near you next month, which I particularly want to bid for. I was going to be in London on business anyway and I see I can fly down there so I wondered if I might finally come on a visit?’ His voice had both a graininess and a confidence Barnaby could not remember. He was older, of course, and less self-doubting, his own man, not another’s secretary. Agreeing enthusiastically and making a note in the diary, Barnaby wondered if he had become immensely fat.

  He hadn’t, it turned out, but was just thicker in the neck and shoulders and sandy where he had been golden. Fifty or so to Barnaby’s twenty-nine, he had become overtly handsome, a man used to people saying yes; there was nothing left of his former, apologetic posture. Meeting him in the tiny airport at Newquay, to which he had brought Carrie along for the novelty, Barnaby held out his hand and found himself tugged into a hug that was somehow assessing.

  Introduced to Carrie, who could be shy with strangers, Paul immediately crouched down to her level, admired her dungarees and, saying he had heard a lot about her – which wasn’t strictly true, although he had been sent a recent family photograph so knew she was not yet one of nature’s frock-wearers – he presented her with a Yankees baseball cap and said that, once he had her size off her mother, he’d post her the jacket to match. She was clearly won over at once, all coy smiles and wriggling once she had said her obedient thank you, and both men laughed when she offered to carry Paul’s huge suitcase.

  Struck with shyness in his turn, Barnaby had been worrying about what they would find to talk about but Paul talked for two, easy chat, about his journey and the people he was staying with in London and then asking questions about whatever they were passing in the car. Barnaby had not been driving long. He had signed up for lessons on moving back to Pendeen but still tended to use his bicycle within the parish. If Paul was startled at the car’s age and decrepitude, he hid it well.

  He exclaimed with delight as St Michael’s Mount finally came into view and commented on how attractive Penz
ance looked but then fell silent as they headed sharply inland, away from the soft delights of the bay, and crossed up to the northeast and mining country. The seemingly haphazard scattering of terraces, bungalows and mine buildings always looked grimmer when the sun was in and that day an oppressive lid of grey cloud was bearing down over it all.

  As he turned down their lane, passing a stream of men coming away from the mine, Barnaby caught the appraising stare Paul gave them through the car’s grimy windows and diverted him by pointing out that Dorothy’s family had lived and farmed the spot for hundreds of years.

  ‘Ah,’ Paul said with something like relief. ‘Like the Johnsons.’

  ‘Sort of,’ Barnaby said and knew they were both thinking that, unlike the Johnsons, the Sampsons had not been obliged to sell up.

  Paul exclaimed over the loveliness of the house and the gnarled old quince tree sheltering itself by leaning into one side of it. He made Dorothy blush by kissing her on both cheeks and once again, à la française, said he loved his room, said of course he understood when Barnaby explained there was only one bathroom that was currently usable, and said Dorothy’s lemon curd sponge was better than anything New York had to offer. The sun came out and he cheerfully let Carrie lead him off on a walk around the farm in his unsuitable shoes while Barnaby slipped out to say evening prayers at Morvah.

  They saw little of him on the Saturday until late afternoon, as he rang for a taxi to the Penzance auction house – a place neither Barnaby nor Dorothy had ever had cause to visit.

  This was fortunate as there had been an accident at Geevor the afternoon before, which Barnaby only found out about on his way back from morning prayers at Pendeen. He had to drive to Truro to visit a miner in hospital and then call in on his wife and family in Truthwall. The man, who never came to church but whose motherin-law did, had somehow caught his hand under the wheel of one of the trucks used to bring rock to the surface. He himself couldn’t explain how it had happened, saying only that it was near the end of a shift and he had been working a lot of overtime – up to his legal maximum – so was tired and not concentrating. He wouldn’t lose all the hand, just the two smallest fingers, and it was his left and he was right-handed, but it seemed likely the nerve damage would leave him with little grip and mining was not a job for the single-handed. The hand, presumably greatly swollen, seemed fatter still for bandages and wadding, resembling a useless club. The miner seemed brave and astonishingly cheerful, but perhaps that was the painkillers numbing harsh truths as well as tissue damage and crushed bone. Barnaby asked him what work he could find, if he had to leave the mine, and he shrugged but continued to smile.

  ‘Farm labouring, maybe,’ he said. ‘Cutting broccoli. Pulling pints in the Radjel. I’ll get some compensation, though. The union and Mr Gilbert will look after me. I’ll be OK.’

  Barnaby cursed his naïveté in assuming the man’s relatives were in a position to make their own way to the hospital to visit. For sure enough, when he asked about this, he received a long explanation of how the man had lost his licence and they’d had to let the car go. He had not meant to bother the young wife with a long visit, meaning simply to call by to tell her how he had found her husband and to offer a lift to Treliske Hospital the following week. But, as was often the case, she insisted he come in and have a cup of tea and meet her two small children. Again, as was so often the case, she spontaneously explained how she used to attend church and had only stopped because her husband didn’t and it would have been a cause of awkwardness had she insisted. And he told her the half-joke he always told in such circumstances of how the Sunday School was an hour’s free childcare and how lots of parents came simply for the guaranteed peace and quiet.

  ‘Except for the hymns, of course,’ he added, and she laughed, as people always did and said well, maybe she’d have to come along and see, as people always said when they had no intention of doing so. He gave her one of the free children’s books from the literacy scheme, which he carried in the car boot, and checked she was certain about not wanting a lift to Truro. She cried a little when they talked about her husband’s job prospects and said she was going to start taking in ironing as that was something she could do from home with toddlers underfoot.

  The house was clean and tidy but shamingly small, with low ceilings and no outside beyond the tiny yard where she dried her washing, and would seem even more so once her boys grew. He wondered if the compensation would be large enough to help them move. He didn’t like to ask if the house were rented off the mine or the council, hoping, for her sake, it was the latter should her husband lose his job.

  The arbitrary cruelty of it still hung heavily on him when a taxi brought Paul back to the house. He returned laden. He had bought them a fig tree to complement their old quince, a half-case of claret far grander than anything they ever allowed themselves from the Co-op and a retracting tape measure and a spirit level for Carrie. ‘We had a little chat about tool kits last night,’ he explained. And he had secured the painting he wanted. Despite their protests, he insisted on removing its thick layers of bubble wrap and setting it on the sitting-room mantelpiece, ‘So we can all enjoy it for the weekend.’

  It was by a local artist called Tuke. Barnaby knew almost nothing about the Newlyn School and their contemporaries but he dimly remembered the name so supposed he had seen other work by him in Penlee House or the Royal Cornwall Museum. His work left him so busy he and Dorothy had precious little opportunity for cultural excursions. They were one of the things he planned to make time for now Carrie was nearly old enough to start appreciating them. He had begun to think it a little unlikely that Paul would have come all this way simply to buy some Cornish painting; worrying that he had actually come in order to talk, to lay ghosts and finish business, Barnaby had become guiltily aware that, aside from their brief trip up the lane for evening prayers, he had allowed Paul not one minute alone with him. But as soon as the painting was unwrapped, he dismissed this as self-absorption.

  The painting showed a naked youth – a fisherman or farm labourer, to judge from his pale skin and heavily tanned face and hands – sprawled across a rock on a mattress of emerald green weed that made the redhead’s skin look all the more startlingly pale. It was a beautiful object, its vibrant colours crammed into a square of board little bigger than an Orthodox icon’s, and it was so much finer than anything else in the room, the murkily sentimental prints of cattle and horses left behind by Dulcie because the wallpaper had faded so around them, the shabby sofa and armchairs, the ugly but practical coffee table and the thickly varnished Victorian desk at which he would write the next day’s sermon before anyone else was up, that its beauty seemed to be drawing colour and energy from the things around it, becoming ever more intense at their expense. Even the people. Dorothy looked wan as she peered closely at it and he loved her for the sturdy way she admired Tuke’s technique in catching the seaweed and making it look wet.

  When Barnaby excused himself to go and say evening prayers, Paul asked if he might come too, and he came to church with the others in the morning, where he stood out as the best-dressed man or woman in the congregation, but throughout the weekend he gave no sign of having understood Barnaby’s job or why Barnaby did it. He was surprised at the calls on Barnaby’s time away from the church, the frequency with which the phone rang or the door knocker sounded even late into the evenings. He didn’t comment, as such, but he didn’t need to; Barnaby saw his eyes widen or heard his conversation break off.

  ‘Do you have to do that every day?’ he asked, as they were strolling back from the church on the Saturday evening.

  ‘Twice a day,’ Barnaby said.

  ‘But nobody’s there.’

  ‘I’m there,’ he said. ‘Which is all that matters. And God, of course.’

  And he could tell Paul’s idea of priesthood was out of Trollope: weddings and funerals, Sundays, Christmas and Easter but nothing intense or too overtly theological.

  Sunday happened to be Barn
aby’s birthday. The congregation surprised him by singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in place of ‘O Praise Ye The Lord’ for the final hymn and quite a few handed over presents as they shook his hand afterwards: pots of jam, wine, flowers, CDs and books. He could see Paul watching and being charmed but bemused by it all.

  It was traditional for them to have a picnic lunch and a swim down in Boat Cove. Dorothy had made little sausage-meat and tomato tarts and filled old ice-cream boxes with potato salad and carrot salad, and Dulcie and Carrie had spent the half-hour before church hulling strawberries. The other tradition was to drink the first bottles of the mildly alcoholic elderflower champagne Dorothy brewed every year in old cider bottles whose rubberized lids clamped shut against the gas fighting to escape.

  Freed from his suit back into holiday clothes, Paul was full of slightly nervous, funny chat about people they would never meet with more money than they could possibly imagine. He took photographs, including one of Carrie in which he persuaded her to pose in just the right position for the huge, black foghorns of Pendeen Watch to appear to be emerging from her head like Minnie Mouse’s ears. Then he took pictures of them all, sitting on rugs against the rocks. Of the sea and cliffs, of some weekend fishermen who came to push their fishing boat out. He drew out Dulcie Sampson the surest way, by encouraging her to reminisce about the Pendeen of her childhood, its church-filled Sundays, tea treats and homemade amusements. He built sandcastles with Carrie and showed her how to make dams. He was the perfect guest.

  Yet Barnaby found his very presence felt like a criticism, that the way of life his ward had chosen was impossibly provincial and dull, a waste of ability and education, and would have disappointed Uncle James, even that Dorothy represented a kind of misalliance, a falling-off.