A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  This was utterly unfair, naturally, for he said none of these things, had not even hinted at them; Barnaby knew they were all in his own head. The fact remained, however, that these thoughts had only entered his head with the arrival of Paul and his urbanity, perhaps simply because Paul was like a human manifestation of the road not taken. Ashamed of himself, he made an extra effort with him, asking him to tell Dorothy about his father and uncle, and about the house. Hearing him talk so lovingly about James made Barnaby like him again.

  After lunch Barnaby was given presents. Carrie gave him a key rack she had made at school – basically a piece of wood stuck with a line of hooks – to hang by the front door. The charm lay in the little decorated labels she had drawn and glued on by each hook – a house, a car, and two wildly contrasting churches. He was always losing keys, under books or inside newspapers, so it would be genuinely useful if he remembered to use it. Dulcie had knitted him a fisherman’s jersey – a proper Cornish garnsey with the Sennen Cove stitch on it, ‘to identify your body when you get washed ashore in Padstow,’ she said with the unsmiling twinkle he had learnt to recognize as her version of mischief. It had taken her months of secret labour, apparently, and Carrie laughed because she had been in on the secret. She had not brought the jersey all the way down with her – the weather was too hot and the garment too heavy – but she had the pattern in her pocket so he could look at a picture of its intricate, hard-wearing design. She had even made it in unconventional black so that he might wear it over his dog collar and under his jacket on cold days in winter. This touched him deeply. He knew the profound adjustment she must have made to her wishes in accepting him as her son-in-law.

  Then Paul produced a little rectangular parcel. Barnaby protested – surely the fig tree and wine had been present enough – but no, those were for the house apparently while this was just for him. It was a painting, a tiny one evidently done on the size of sketchpad an artist could easily take on a walk. It unmistakably showed the hunched silhouette of Morvah church, with the dramatic sweep of coastline beyond it, yet it was almost an abstract, reducing the individual elements to blocks of strong colour. There was a lovely vigour to it, as if it had been done at speed, with enthusiasm or in a race against impending rain.

  ‘That is your other church, isn’t it?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Absolutely. I love it. You’re so kind. It can hang over my desk.’

  ‘It’s nothing very grand. A local painter, a woman still very much alive and working, I guess. I just saw the church and knew I must bid for it. Oh, erm, is she OK?’

  He gestured over Barnaby’s shoulder and Barnaby saw Dorothy had got to her feet and was heading back towards the house. ‘Darling?’ he called. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said weakly. ‘Don’t mind me,’ and kept walking.

  Barnaby jumped up. Carrie was back with her sandcastles and Dulcie had nodded off in the sunshine with her skirt uncharacteristically pulled up a little to warm her legs. ‘Paul,’ he said. ‘Would you think me awfully rude if I took her back? She hasn’t been brilliant lately.’

  ‘Go,’ Paul said. ‘Leave all this. Carrie and I can bring it up later. Go.’ And he waved him off.

  Still holding the little painting and Carrie’s key-rack, Barnaby ran to catch up with her.

  ‘You didn’t …’ she started.

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll walk you back.’ He realized she was choking back tears. ‘Dorothy?’

  ‘I’ve got a pain,’ she said, a hand on her stomach. ‘A kind of cramping. Barnaby, I think I’m losing it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose another baby …’

  ‘You won’t. It’ll be fine. We’ll get you back to the house and I’ll call the surgery. There’ll be someone on call we can get out to check on you.’ He tried to persuade her to take his arm and lean on him but she was hurrying onwards, focused on some deep imperative compared to which he was a small irrelevance. So he held her up mentally, hurrying at her side, praying they would meet nobody on the way for they’d feel obliged to maintain a front and chat. Luckily they passed only tourist walkers they could greet and pass by.

  Back at the house, she almost ran up the stairs and shut herself in the bathroom. He waited for her, sitting on the foot of their bed, marvelling at how brilliantly sunny the room was at this time of day when they were never normally in it. He prayed intently and in silence, as he tended to when he guiltily felt that his prayers were centred on self. But of course this prayer was for her as much as him. And Dulcie. And Carrie. He imagined her mother’s intense, quiet satisfaction at a grandson who might eventually take back the farm and revive its fortunes, even with an incomer’s surname. He even fantasized that, if they had a boy, they could make Sampson his middle name. He tried to clear his mind then, stilling his thoughts by staring down at the bright little painting of Morvah on his lap. Then he apologized in his head, making a mental gesture of contrition towards Paul, who had been so generous, and couldn’t help his urban spirit and practical, worldly values.

  The grandfather clock downstairs struck three with its customary hesitancy between the second and third chime, and she came in to join him.

  ‘Darling?’

  ‘Hi,’ she said softly. She sat on the bed beside him and kicked off her shoes and lay back.

  ‘Dorothy?’

  He lay beside her. She lay as she always did when about to fall asleep, with her back to him and his hand held in hers between her breasts. She smelled of sandalwood soap. She never wore make-up or scent. Soap was her one indulgence. He bought her a box of it every Christmas – a French make from Peasgood’s in Penzance, that came in pretty wrapping at which Carrie marvelled.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she murmured. ‘We’re fine.’ And she chuckled. ‘Reckon I’d just eaten too many strawberries.’

  ‘Oh, Dot,’ he said into the back of her hair. ‘I was so worried.’

  ‘Well, it’s fine,’ she sighed. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. Can’t you tell?’

  MODEST CARLSSON AT 55

  Modest liked the fact that he lived in one of the ugliest bungalows in Pendeen. Its style was all wrong: pebbledash where its neighbours were granite, brown plastic windows where all the tasteful incomers opted for white painted hardwood, and with a nasty expanse of slippery crazy concrete where there could have been at least an attempt at a garden. What he relished especially was its name. Gosport was a harking back to his Portsmouth past that had made it feel as if the bungalow were choosing him the moment an agent sent him its drab particulars.

  People – people and bad films – assumed that one hid in a village behind a mask of prettiness, roses round the door, gingham at the windows, bees in the lavender, but he hid in plain sight in a bungalow so undistinguished people’s eyes skated over it as they passed. Deliverymen often claimed they had trouble finding it, although it fronted almost directly onto what passed in such a place for the main road, and he knew it was because it was a building one’s eye instinctively edited from the scene.

  He was not as poor as the shabbily eremitical image he maintained. He had cultivated old Patience so assiduously that she left him her house and all her pretty things and her considerable savings. He donated a new brass collection plate to the church in her memory but that had not stopped a rising tide of unpleasantness towards him there. A move was not strictly necessary – he could simply have stopped attending that church and transferred his allegiance to the newly completed cathedral, but house prices even in the streets of Paulsgrove were rising and he decided that, if he moved somewhere cheaper in his mid-fifties, he would not be too late to start a new life yet not so young for living carefully off his invested inheritance to prove impossible.

  Running into Barnaby Johnson and his little girl and Vietnamese toddler on a day trip to a London dealer awakened an old hunger, and the discovery that his Cornish parish was even lower on the economic ladder than Paulsgrove meant it felt like fate. He was fairly ce
rtain Johnson knew exactly who he was when they met in London, even though eleven or so years had passed and there was a limit to how far Patience’s money and her late father’s suits could improve his appearance or hide the obesity he liked thinking of as morbid. Johnson certainly remembered once Modest arrived in Pendeen and began busily attending services there. Like all truly good people, Johnson was no dissembler. When Modest joined the queue at the end of his first Pendeen service in order to grasp his hand in both of his and hold on just too long for comfort, Johnson failed to hide the effort with which he mastered his dread and disgust.

  The Pendeen church was less patchily attended than the Portsmouth one had been so it took a little time for a regular to make himself useful. Modest was not living entirely on Patience’s money – although he now dealt in books and magazines entirely online rather than endure the drudgery of running a shop – but he had plenty of spare time to offer the church, even allowing for the long afternoons in bed with a bag of cheap chocolates that were one of semi-retirement’s chief pleasures.

  Since Portsmouth, Johnson had acquired a family, of course, which served to shield him from the demands of his flock. The wife could be implacable where required and had undoubtedly learnt to protect him as much from his impulse to give of himself as from his parishioners’ desire to have of him. At Sunday services there was always a crowd of people round him, what with churchwardens, servers and visiting preachers, so that Modest’s encounters with him felt insufficiently meaningful to gratify his needs. However he soon discovered that, as at Portsmouth, there were brief, entirely spoken services of morning and evening prayer at one or other of the parish’s two churches. The wife had a tendency sometimes to attend the ones at Pendeen, presumably because she could walk to them with one or both children. For some reason she rarely came to the services at Morvah, so Modest made a point of attending these. He decided to make Morvah ‘his’ church. Although a much longer walk from Gosport, it was easier to love, being older, smaller and with a quaint association with St Birgit of Sweden that explained the attraction to anyone who knew of his Russo-Swedish parentage.

  Often he was the only worshipper besides Barnaby and relished the quiet intimacy of these occasions, the way their two voices remained distinct when joined in prayer or to recite a psalm. Barnaby clearly expected nobody to be there and Modest enjoyed the suspicion that his attendance obliged the priest to take a little longer over the services than he would if allowed to mutter through them on his own. Johnson always said good morning or good evening to him before starting and sometimes even handed him a Bible and asked him to give a reading.

  Modest loved being asked to read. Especially if there were only the two of them present. He liked to fantasize that their roles had suddenly switched and that, holding the Bible, standing to read, he had become the one with access to God and Johnson, sitting, lost in thought, sometimes with his head resting on and masked by one hand as though in prayer, were the supplicant thirsty for blessing and relief.

  Outside these moments of communion, and the ones at Eucharist where it was Johnson’s hands that held the chalice to his lips or pressed a wafer to his treacherously sweating palm, he remained teasingly elusive. The vicar was busy, forever cycling off to visit some parishioner or attend some meeting. His departures were always brisk, perfectly friendly but brisk, as though socializing were a kind of tar or birdlime that might hold him fast if he lingered over it.

  And yet, when he was amongst them, taking a service, leading prayers, he retained that slightly worrying quality that had so startled Modest when first they met, of laying himself utterly open, of hiding no part of himself. Modest itched to find a fault in him, even a small one – some laziness or a passing discourtesy – but could find none. His first Christmas in the village, several months after his arrival, Johnson surprised him with an invitation to join the family for lunch. He was tempted to refuse, correctly supposing that only the sad and relationless of the parish would be so singled out, but he accepted because surely in the bosom of his family a man was most likely to reveal his faults. Johnson had occasion enough – two of the other guests were especially troublesome old people, one of whom stank of urine and unwashed hair, and the children, the sturdy little girl and much younger, seraphic Vietnamese boy, clearly resented the intrusion of unloved strangers on such a family feast. But Johnson’s grace never wavered. Even when Modest talked so earnestly and so long to Dot that she contrived to burn the pudding so that every mouthful bore a bitter overtaste of charcoal, Johnson smothered her protests and apologies by asking for a generous second helping, lavished with cream ‘to take away the richness’.

  And he still had that little, battered leather-bound book, the red one, perhaps four inches by five, no more, which he carried with him everywhere. It was always in his hand or tucked into his sagging jacket pocket or waiting on the bookshelf of his stall in church. Two or three times when he came across him when walking, Johnson was reading it, perched on a rock or leaning on a gate, but swiftly tucked it away at Modest’s approach. It was too small for a Bible and wasn’t a prayer book. The more often he saw the little book in his hands or being tucked out of sight, the more convinced he became of its profound significance to him. It was surely the key to his maddening strength or, better still, the text that would reveal his hidden faults. Whatever, it was plainly a book he needed by him always, like a beloved friend, and that was reason enough to want to take it from him.

  The chance to steal it did not present itself for two or three years. He remembered the occasion well because it was his birthday and nobody knew. His long-ago wife and daughter perhaps, in whatever crisp new life they had made for themselves, would pause in their day unable to prevent the date from summoning his unwelcome face or voice, possibly without even acknowledging the sullen memory to one another, but that did not count. No one in the village knew it was his birthday and he had drunk a half-bottle of gin the night before then spent half the day in bed in a brief, pointless access of self-pity and despondency. He was fifty-five, which somehow felt more like the farewell to vigour than fifty had, and nobody was marking the occasion.

  He forced himself up and along the road to the Radjel, which was deserted, for a chicken pie and a pint of Doom. And then he took himself for a short walk. He was both profoundly unfit and intensely self-conscious, so did not like to walk fast or far enough to bring on a sweat. But a great advantage of the area was that one did not need to walk for more than quarter of an hour to be on the cliffs or crossing ancient field patterns or even mounting up into moorland. Drama and sensation lay close at hand.

  He was surprised at how this landscape stirred him. He had gone through life thinking himself lacking because of his failure to be interested in the natural world, as though he had been born without whichever gland it was that generated wonder. Dogs and cats, any pet, disgusted him and he saw love of animals as a sentimental weakness, but he suspected it was a flaw in him that he failed to be drawn to trees and flowers, fields and riverbanks. In his married days, his teaching days, he visited beauty spots imitatively, as a woman with no sense of smell still ducked her head to a bunch of flowers, but he continued to feel nothing but a vague unease at his lack of feeling and worry lest he let it show. This bleak West Cornwall fastness seemingly flung onto a narrow shelf between forbidding rocky high ground and no less savage coast, this scattered community with the ravaged landscape of abandoned mine works at its heart, roused him as no bluebell wood or picture postcard village ever had. He would always prefer buildings to grass but here he had at last found a landscape that confirmed something in his heart. It spoke of death and danger, of failed ventures and a reassuring lack of glory. He thrilled to the stories of local disasters men told him in the pubs: the collapse of the man engine, the perilous device of steam-driven, shifting ladders by which men and boys used to descend to the depth of the mine in the days before lifts, the underground drowning of a whole team of men because of one man’s shoddy surveying, ships wre
cked with all hands lost as those on shore looked down from the cliffs, powerless to do more than pray. Most of the tales had human error at their heart. He liked that.

  He had not intended to walk so far, being weighed down by pie and beer, but then he spotted Johnson. The priest was evidently enjoying a half-day away from wife and children. He was sitting on a sunny rock to read. Modest did not recognize him from a distance because he was in mufti – black jeans and a black tee-shirt. But then Johnson looked up from his book – it was that book again, the small, red one – saw him coming and slid off the rock to continue walking and avoid company.

  Piqued and darkly amused at the simple mischief of it, Modest pursued him. He did not call out or anything obvious. He merely quickened his pace and concentrated on narrowing the gap between them. He fancied Johnson glanced over his shoulders a couple of times. He imagined the polite torment he must be going through. A vicar could not openly avoid a parishioner without shame or embarrassment. He would be thinking up a lame excuse – ageing eyesight, a forgotten, urgent appointment at a distant farmstead. He would be wondering whether it might not be less painful simply to turn around and ‘meet’ Modest on the way back, with apologies but a characteristic briskness, so as to avoid actually walking home with him.

  But Johnson didn’t turn. He walked faster, almost hurried, so that Modest began to indulge in a fantasy that he was hunting him down, that he had a savage hunting knife in his hand or something subtler, like a cutthroat razor in his pocket. It was a sunny day. The flowers, none of whose names he knew, were densely in bloom along the hedges, yet there was no one around. It was a weekday in term time.

  Modest found himself entertaining a graphic fantasy of killing the priest with a swift slice to the jugular. He would watch him stumble, gurgling, into the gorse bushes at the path’s edge, pay close attention as the life left those blameless eyes, then walk on just as briskly, returning home by a long, circuitous route taking in a distant quoit and some of the coastal path. He pictured himself going to evening prayers in Morvah, so as to wait there, electrified in the fading light and deepening chill, for the priest who would not come. And so be able to turn tearfully to his neighbours and the police with the pathetic story. He imagined his unflattering photograph in The Cornishman as part of the crime report. Regular church attender, antiquarian bookseller Modest Carlsson (55) waited in vain for the service of evening prayers at Morvah, which he had come to regard as part of his friendship with the savagely murdered vicar. ‘I waited nearly two hours,’ he said. ‘I waited until it was dark, and he never came. It was so unlike him. He was always so punctual.’ An added piquancy in the story comes from its having been widower Carlsson’s birthday. ‘If I had a cake to slice,’ he says, ‘I’d have wished for the killer to be brought swiftly to justice.’