A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  ‘He adored her, you know.’

  ‘Our mother?’

  ‘No! Alice. He hardly ever spoke of your mother. I used to think he was unfair with you.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well he wasn’t exactly even-handed. Alice could do no wrong but you could do no right and then when she was killed, well, she became a sort of saint.’

  ‘I was so upset because he didn’t have a funeral for her.’

  ‘It was selfishness,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He didn’t want to share her, or his grief. He’d pretty much shut me out from then on.’

  ‘But he married you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she conceded. ‘He was decent and practical that way. Thanks for fibbing back there. You meant well.’

  ‘It … It wasn’t a peaceful death. Not at all.’

  ‘Good. Shall I open another bottle of this? It’s rather good, isn’t it? He must have been saving it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  They drank on, he drinking less than she did because he knew he had a light head, and she let a great flood of reminiscence come out about how she had met his father, how she had stood by while he had affairs, how he controlled who she saw, who she befriended. How he belittled her and how much, despite it all, she continued to love him. She had a little cry then, but cheered up when he made them buttered toast because they had run out of crackers. It was dawn. The familiar thunder of traffic was starting up again. One of the new neighbours drove a little sports car into her parking space and let herself into the basement flat.

  ‘Prostitute,’ Marcia said. ‘Officially she works as a croupier in some club but she gets her money from sex.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She paid her down payment in cash. Unbelievable. Nice girl, though. Very clean. It’s spotless down there.’

  ‘Marcia, will you be OK?’

  ‘Listen to you. All of twenty-one in your Oxfam clothes.’

  ‘But will you?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll be dandy. Don’t worry about me. I’ll sell up here after the funeral and find somewhere near Weston. One of my sisters is there. The will’s very straightforward. We drew them up together after the wedding. Everything comes to me. But don’t worry. I’ll be changing mine now so that you get your share when my turn comes.’

  He had been thinking about emotions not money when he asked her if she’d be all right but now that she had talked about it, he was shocked to find he resented his father’s having effectively disinherited him. He was as poor as any student. Uncle James had paid for fees and travel, nothing more, but throughout his schooling Barnaby had become used to being markedly poorer than his friends and grown adept and bold at ferretting out obscure travel awards and scholarship funds he could apply for. He took a certain satisfaction in living off baked potatoes.

  He rang his tutors to explain and was given compassionate leave to remain away from his studies. It wasn’t an exam term. He stayed on with Marcia, as he found he now thought of her, until after the funeral. For a little over a week.

  He had never been aware of her having much of a family beyond a sister in Bridlington, perhaps because of his father’s strict control of their social life, but it transpired she had a huge one. As well as the sister in Weston-Super-Mare, there were three other siblings and Marcia was the only one of them not to have produced several children. For a week various configurations of Clutterbucks overran the little flat, all of them cheerful and bossily helpful. Clothes were cleared out, books boxed up, files of animal research papers and correspondence burnt in an old dustbin behind the laurels, sending acrid smoke into the November fog that had conveniently descended. Alternately overlooked or patronized, Barnaby felt uncomfortably redundant and in the way.

  After her night of drunken honesty, Marcia swiftly rebuilt her old self, hair, nails and all and distanced herself at once from him and from anything else she might rashly have told him. Yet he had promised to stay until the funeral so believed he must. He also felt peculiarly his father’s representative as the lone surviving Johnson-by-birth. He discovered that his student library ticket was accepted at Bristol University’s library, so spent several mornings hidden away in the history section, taking notes. None of Marcia’s nephews and nieces was a student. The entire family seemed to be in business or banking and it came as a shock to realize that they regarded her, whose conventionality had cast a pall over such a swathe of his childhood, as the family Bohemian and rebel, merely for having lived in sin with a scientist who didn’t play golf.

  An even greater shock was her arranging for his father to have a church funeral. His own preference was for this but he wouldn’t have dared suggest it to his father and assumed Marcia’s anticlerical stance had not changed.

  ‘Wouldn’t he have hated that? He thought it was all mumbo jumbo.’

  ‘Well it is,’ she said. ‘But it’s nicer somehow than just cremating him and walking away. Anyway, funerals are for the living, not the dead.’

  He didn’t feel he could argue but, come the day, for which one of the more reliable housemates sent down his suit and black shoes in a bag left at one end of a pre-agreed Bristol train carriage for him, he felt profoundly uncomfortable with being associated with such a flagrant hypocrisy. He was relieved when she insisted he go in and take a seat in the front pew so that she alone should walk up the aisle behind his father’s coffin.

  The priest did his best, given that he had no prior knowledge of Prof’s personality. Barnaby read one of the lessons, the account of Simeon’s preparation for death. When he came to the words, For mine eyes hath seen thy salvation, he found he was wringing every ounce of meaning out of them to compensate for an occasion he felt was using the church as a wedding party might some themed hotel dining suite. The other lesson, the inevitable gobbet of 1 Corinthians 13, worn by familiarity to bland meaninglessness, was read by one of what Marcia called the kittenmincers, who had offered himself for the task.

  When, in his hopelessly safe address, the priest said, ‘I know Mark wasn’t one of nature’s churchgoers,’ somebody further back laughed out loud and Marcia joined in.

  Whatever common humanity she had recently revealed was forgotten as all Barnaby’s old, reassuring dislike of her came bubbling back. It completely distorted the rest of the service for him. Where he wanted to be thinking of, even praying for, his father, he found he was thinking only of her and, with an inappropriate elation, of how, far from binding his stepmother to him, this occasion liberated him from her forever and forestalled any influence she might otherwise have acquired over him. He was free.

  LENNY AT 14¾

  Lenny liked to think his life was simple, his needs few. He thought in pictures, in things, not words, and the things that summed up all that mattered to him were simple and primary-coloured. Grass first, clean, green grass, not the muddy turf of a pitch by mid-March but the well-mown, unscarred promise of a season’s start. But grass didn’t just stand for rugby but for the land above Redworks Cottage and the hours he had spent walking the carns and moorland since early boyhood. Then blue sea, naturally, the picture postcard blue you got in a sandy bay with bright sun and a clear sky overhead. Then his mum. But his feelings about her were harder to give a colour to, especially recently, when he only had to enter the same room for her to start arguing with him and finding fault.

  So. To start again. Perhaps it was easier to have inanimate objects stand in for what matters. Much easier. In fact, with some ingenuity, he could probably have carried all three of them at once.

  First his rugby ball, which he spent so many hours throwing and catching as he lay on his bed that any rugby ball now felt like an extension of his hand. Then his surf-board, the salty smell of whose nylon bag summed up the pleasures of summer as neatly as the ball did those of the year’s end. Then his racing bike, much modified and added to until, to his immense satisfaction, it was no longer any identifiable brand but looked as though he’d
built it from a kit from scratch rather than starting with a well-meant but actually hopelessly cheap and uncool present from Halfords. This represented escape and freedom, of course, but also his primal love of speed and risk, of the wind in his hair (babyish helmet safely in his bag as soon as he was out of sight of home) as he pedalled as hard as he could on the way down No-Go-By Hill so that half the thrill was imagining how he would almost certainly die if he met a car coming out of a side turning. Like all boys his age, he fantasized about having a car one day, and which make it would have to be and what colour and how he would customize it, but still he found cars less exciting than being on his bike. Unless he could have all the windows down so it was good and windy inside, but Mum never allowed that as it ate petrol apparently.

  And then his mum. She could safely be represented by the one thing on his list that stayed put. It was a small pot which he used to keep his desk tidy. She had made it for him. Unlike almost all her work, it was square, because that was what he (aged seven) had demanded. It was a prototype, an idea she had taken little further because the shape was so prone to expensive failure. She had often offered to replace it with something better but he liked its intensity and lack of finesse. She joked it was a failure because it was square and that there was something inherently male about it after all her circles. Like all her work it managed to be several colours at once, flickering from a deep red to orange and yellow. Now that he understood the intense concentration that went into her art, and the value of the end product, he suspected he should stop keeping pens and paperclips in the pot and promote it to the rank of pure art object. He liked putting art to such mundane use, however, just as he liked the fact that the woman people at private views thought so special because art made her somehow better than everyone else was for him just a mum, someone who fed him and washed his underwear and shared his bathroom.

  At fourteen and three-quarters, however, at the start of a new school year, his life became far more complicated and broke out of these tidy lists and categories. The reason’s name was Amy Hawker. Her family must have just moved to the area as he would have remembered if he had seen her before. She looked more Swedish than Cornish, with perfectly straight blonde hair, blue eyes and skin so pale it made everyone around her look as though they didn’t wash properly. And her hands. He had never noticed girls’ hands before. Hands were just hands. But hers were so long and perfect, whether she was surreptitiously texting inside her schoolbag or discreetly using a pencil to relieve an itch on her scalp. They had the effect of making him see for the first time how varied girls’ hands were. He had often noticed how encrusted his mother’s hands could be when she came in from her studio but never how old they seemed. Really old, compared to Amy’s.

  Anyway, the new term started, with all the usual familiar faces, people he had been in Pendeen School with before coming to Cape. And there she was in his maths class, like a princess sent to a rural comprehensive to learn humility. Only she wasn’t a princess. She wasn’t stuck up or anything. Just nervous because everyone knew everyone else and she was new and when you started a new school at fourteen nobody said, this is Amy she’s new so be nice to her. They just let you get on with it.

  Maths was one of the subjects he enjoyed and was confidently good at. He liked subjects where there were right and wrong answers: maths, chemistry, physics, biology. The ones he hated were those where you were expected to come up with your own opinion, to read some old poem or story or a history book then say, I think this because this and this. Subjects like that were like boggy ground to him after tarmac, everything possible, nothing definite, everyone’s opinion valid and so no position entirely secure and satisfactory. They also seemed to be the subjects where teachers were especially merciless at singling out anyone who didn’t speak much, where the dreaded words, so tell us what you think, Lenny, were never far away.

  If she was in his English or History class, she’d have thought him an idiot, but girls were good at all the subjects he hated so there was small chance of that. He was sitting a few places to the side of her so he could see her when she leaned forward to write something, which she did quite a lot, and when that plonker Jez Smith wasn’t lolling all over the place blocking his view. But the only way he could really get her attention was to ask Mr Gower something, or answer a question.

  Suddenly there was an opening for him, an answer he could see for solving an equation. So when Gower asked if anyone had any ideas, he dared to be seriously gay and put his hand up first, actually saying please without thinking.

  ‘Lenny! Excellent. Glad to know you’re awake. Come up and show us, then.’

  And Lenny headed up to the front and took the offered pen to write his solution on the whiteboard. But then he found he was looking straight into her lovely face and she was smiling, really smiling at him, this great smile like the sun coming out after a wet morning, and straight away he forgot what the solution was that he’d seen. He started to write then he paused and, amid jeers and hoots from his mates at the back, had to just stop.

  ‘You buzzed too early, Mr Barnes,’ Gower told him. ‘That’s twenty points to the other team. Go back to sleep. Anyone else?’

  And as Lenny walked back, he saw she was still smiling at him, as though she knew her smile had made him forget everything. And she put up her hand instead.

  ‘Good,’ Gower said, ‘er …?’

  ‘Amy, sir,’ she said, neatly introducing herself to Lenny and the rest of them while she was at it. ‘Amy Hawker.’

  She walked up to the front, not smiling now but very serious and took the pen and balanced the equation. She didn’t wipe out what Lenny had written, because it turned out he was perfectly right but had just forgotten. She simply completed what he had started, pausing for thought now and then, and when she finished and Gower said, ‘Well done. Round of applause for Amy,’ she said what sounded like, ‘Team work,’ and cast a quick glance at Lenny as she returned to her seat.

  So it felt fairly easy to catch her eye as everyone was haring out at the end of the lesson and say, ‘I’m Lenny.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m Amy.’

  ‘Yeah. I heard,’ he said and they laughed so he guessed she was as nervy as he was. ‘So have you just moved here?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Just last week. The house is still full of boxes and my mum’s insane.’

  ‘Are you in St Just, then?’

  ‘Ke …’ She broke off. ‘Kellynack?’

  ‘It’s KeLYnack,’ he corrected her. ‘I’ll show you around if you like.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’d like …’ and then Chris and Tobes, who couldn’t even spell tact, blundered back in to see what was keeping him and a whole load of Year Six kids rushed in behind them for the next maths class and he had to leave and go one way and she had to go the other, borne on a human tide.

  He looked out for her all day without success. She was in the same year as him for sure but in a different form and possibly with no overlap other than maths. Incomers often seemed to be more advanced, as though used to greater pressure. Perhaps maths was her least good subject which, given the ease with which she had solved the equation, was a depressing prospect. He had rugby coaching that evening so couldn’t loiter under the funny, silver-leafed trees by the school gates in the hope of catching her. It was one of those rare situations where having a sister would have been an advantage: a spy in the other camp.

  The next day he had no maths and didn’t even glimpse her in the distance, or the day after that. Cape had never felt so large. He was beginning to think she might be avoiding him when he stumbled on her in a lunch break. Like most of his friends he walked into Market Square in the lunch hour in search of a pasty or bag of chips or both, usually washed down with a sports drink. He was on his way out, held back behind the rest because the deputy head had fallen into conversation with him about whether he thought his mum would come in to talk about her pottery one assembly, which he considered about the most
embarrassing thing imaginable, when he found her. She was on her own, eating a very neat packed lunch which seemed to be nothing but bits of fruit and vegetable, sitting on a low wall where she’d have known, if she’d been at Cape longer, that nobody normal ever sat.

  They didn’t talk very long because what he really wanted was to hold her lovely face in his hands and kiss her and see if her hair felt as soft as it looked and he couldn’t tell her things like that, obviously, but they established that his mother was a potter and that her parents were both teachers. That they had moved to Cornwall from Ghana, which was the only other place she had lived and that she had been home-educated until now.

  ‘So school feels a bit …’

  ‘I know,’ he said, although he had no idea what she meant. ‘How did you stay so pale living in Africa?’ he blurted out.

  ‘Basically,’ she said, ‘I lived like a vampire.’

  And she laughed, which gave him the courage to ask if she’d give him her mobile number, at which she blushed and said her parents didn’t let her have one. At least not yet.

  ‘Have you got a bike?’ he asked.

  ‘My mum has. I can borrow it probably.’

  And he explained that he rode to school and if she did maybe they could do stuff in the afternoons sometimes.

  He kicked himself for that do stuff, as it sounded sexy and he hadn’t meant it to. And then he hurried into town because he was incredibly hungry, enough for double chips, and people were starting to look at them for sitting where only freaks and gays sat.

  They had maths that afternoon and she somehow engineered to sit beside him, which was so exciting he could hardly absorb anything Gower was telling them, what with the little wafts he had of her shampoo whenever she moved her head and the chance he now had to take in every little detail of the hand holding her pen and her extremely precise handwriting and the purple ink she used.