A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Of course. The next confirmation service in the area is in two months. That’s a bit soon. But we could put you down for one in the summer.’

  ‘Oh. Good. Thanks. And, er, can more than one person come?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Because a girl from my maths class wants to. Amy Hawker. Her parents were missionaries in Ghana. Sort of. And now they’re just teachers. I said I thought you liked women priests, having Tobes’ m—, I mean Mrs Morris, as a curate. What should I tell them?’

  ‘I’d tell them to ring me. But I … Do I get the impression you’d like to come at the same time as Amy?’

  ‘Er. Well. Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell them I can just fit her into my existing class, which happens to include you and no one else, but they needn’t know that, and we’ll take it from there. Would Thursday evenings at six work for you?’

  ‘Sure. I should think so. I’m not sure about Amy, though.’

  ‘Well how about I talk to her parents then let you know?’

  ‘I’ll give you my mobile number,’ Lenny said, scribbling it down on a scrap of paper from his wallet.

  ‘Lenny?’ Father Barnaby asked, taking it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does your mum not know you’re coming for confirmation classes?’

  ‘Not yet. No. I thought I’d check with you first.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But I’ll tell her now, or this evening.’

  ‘Good. Because it’s a big step to take without her blessing and precisely because she’s not a Christian it might be a big deal for her.’

  ‘But she had me christened, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’ Father Barnaby smiled in a way that felt private rather than just him being nice. ‘Yes, she did.’

  Lenny’s mum was startled at his insistence on both Hoovering out and washing her car when he got home but not as startled as he’d thought she’d be when he let slip as they were settling down to watch a film together, that he’d signed up for confirmation classes with Father Barnaby. In fact she laughed and said, ‘Cherchez la fille, huh?’

  ‘What?’ he said, not understanding.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, swallowing her smile.

  ‘So you don’t mind.’

  ‘Why should I mind, Lenny? I’d mind if you got a motorbike on eBay or started smoking skunk but you’re going to be spending one evening a week with a priest – a good priest, not one of the paedo woman-haters – learning how to be a better person. No. It’ll do you good. Just don’t expect me to stop fucking swearing or anything like that. And veganism is time consuming. If you go vegan on me, you’re learning to cook.’

  The classes started that week, not in the Johnsons’ house but in the old vicarage next door to Pendeen Church. Although it wasn’t used as a family house at the moment – there were homeless women upstairs or something and downstairs was used for all sorts of classes and meetings – the vicar used a room that must once have been a sitting room and was still fitted out as one, with comfy, bashed-up armchairs and sofas that didn’t go together and shelves full of books and windows opening onto a jungly garden between the vicarage and the parish hall next door.

  It didn’t feel like a class, because there were just the three of them. It felt more like a conversation. Barnaby – he encouraged them to call him that – began and ended with a short prayer that named them both so made it feel as though God were being put directly in touch with them for a while, and then he took another bit of the Lord’s Prayer each week for them to discuss. He said they’d work their way through that, and then the Creed, and by the end of that they’d either be ready to be confirmed or ready to give it all up. That was typical of him, apparently, always entertaining the possibility of failure, the reality that most people chose not to believe. It had the effect of making Lenny want the process not to fail.

  Barnaby discreetly asked them questions about themselves and what they wanted from life and somehow made it all right to say out loud things Lenny had only thought to himself before. He also enabled him and Amy to learn all sorts of things about each other they might have taken ages to find out, if ever. So he learnt that although Amy’s parents were so Christian, so certain, that they had allowed it to shape their whole lives, Amy had doubts she had never dared share with them. He learnt that, just like him, she had often wished she wasn’t an only child, so that there’d be shared responsibility for pleasing her parents.

  In the classes she seemed utterly sincere, talking about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and even sin and temptation with no trace of irony. But then, when the class finished and they walked back to the road together, it was as though she had left the business of the class entirely behind her, like the physics in a physics lesson or the verbs in a Spanish one, whereas he took a good hour to adjust and found he needed to take his time cycling home so as to process everything they’d been saying. Perhaps it was simply that she had known religion all her life whereas it was still new to him.

  At first one or other of her parents always drove her there and collected her punctually afterwards. But then there was a breakthrough, caused by her dad taking on a full-time teaching post in Hayle that meant he had less time, and she was allowed to ride a bike, both to school and to their classes. It was her mum’s and the world’s most embarrassing bike – a small-wheeled one designed for pootling along flat suburban roads to a shopping parade then home again, not for battling up long climbs. But she persevered, even though she admitted to giving up and pushing halfway up most of the hills, because her dad had promised her a bike of her own if she could prove it wouldn’t be a waste of his money. And of course, like Lenny, she was kitted out with a helmet and a Sam Browne belt, the crucial difference being that she obediently kept hers on even when out of sight of home.

  Granted this trust and freedom, they took to doing precisely what her father hoped they wouldn’t, loitering in the dark, secluded car park opposite the church to hold one another and kiss and have low, murmuring conversations then more kissing. The effect was doubly destabilizing for happening when his head was full of concepts like transubstantiation and redemption and deliver us from evil, but, because it only ever happened just after confirmation class and not behind the outbuildings after school or whatever, he found it hard to think of it as anything but good.

  It was odd. They never talked about love. That they loved each other was seemingly a given, although he’d have appreciated a little reassurance. The kissing and holding was a straightforward expression of what they both felt but couldn’t show in the rest of the week. He wanted to go a bit further than kissing. He knew exactly what to do and how to do it best, the internet being as useful on how to do sex as it was on how to strip and service a derailleur gear system, but she called a smiling halt to anything more adventurous than being allowed to cup just one breast at a time through several layers of winter clothing. She had a very clear idea of what was possible, of permitted risk, and he trusted her in that, for all his impatience and for all that he was having to smuggle home his own supply of paper tissues to cope with how stirred up their encounters left him. When Amy said, ‘Not yet,’ he trusted her.

  An unexpected development was that Barnaby expected them both to attend church on Sundays, even though they could as yet receive no more than a fatherly hand on the head from him at the altar rail. Her parents had already attended a service in Pendeen before approving Barnaby as a confirmation teacher, or whatever you called it, and were happy to come there rather than going all the way to the church in Penzance which they’d decided was too high for their tastes. So they drove Amy up every Sunday and he rode over on his bike and they encouraged him to sit with them as though they were a family of four. He usually ended up with Amy’s father beside him in the pew, sometimes her mum, but never Amy, but he could respect that. Given how strict they were, he could appreciate them letting him see much of her at all.

  At first, for all that he resented giving up his Sunday mornings
when he could have been lying in bed thinking of Amy or playing computer games with Tobes, he decided he liked how church made him feel. Lenny liked to be right, he liked that assurance. Going to church could never be wrong and, like doing well in sport or understanding trigonometry or being able to join in ‘Trelawny’ or simply knowing he was more or less Cornish, it gave him a warm sense of belonging. His mum had never been less than loving and supportive, even recently when things he did, and sometimes the mere fact of his being (nearly) a man, could make her so ratty, but she preferred to exist on the edge of the community rather than at its heart and that could have the effect of isolating him by association. School, first in Pendeen then at Cape in St Just, had gone some way towards stitching him in more closely, by giving him friends in the nearby villages, but in church he was made to feel part of an extended family.

  It was a curious family, with relations of all shapes and sizes, most of them fairly or outright old and some of them a bit peculiar, but he liked it that he was sometimes asked to do things, like carry a vase of water up to the sanctuary or that he was sometimes greeted in the street by name now by people from in church. Not just Tobes’ mother, who had often got his name wrong before, but others he hardly knew, like Miss Jago the organist, with the hair in a bun, whom he’d always thought scary until he met her in church and realized she was simply very shortsighted. Another who took to saying hello was the fat, bald man, Mr Carlsson, who delivered the parish magazine but looked like someone who stole girls’ knickers off washing lines.

  Nobody teased him about churchgoing, probably because, apart from Tobes, most of them didn’t know he went and, in any case, were probably only getting out of bed and wondering what to do with their Sundays when he was queuing to shake Father Barnaby’s hand at the end of services. Even his mum bit her tongue beyond expressing appreciation that she no longer had to get dressed to fetch her Sunday paper. The questioning and doubting came entirely from within himself. His rational side, the side that had always until now dominated his thinking, began to nag him in the moments when his attention strayed. Yes but you don’t really believe it all? it asked. Not all the details? Not the Holy Ghost or the Virgin Birth? You don’t honestly think a prayer works better than medicine, or faith better than knowledge?

  The uneasiness this stirred up in turn fuelled his worry that Amy was simply pretending and the whole caboodle was for her a piece of compliant hypocrisy. After all, that’s what it had been for him to start with, hadn’t it? He took to looking at the other people in church when he was meant to be praying, looking for signs they were faking it. Whenever he saw someone stifle a yawn or glance at their watch, he registered a small, unpleasant flare of triumph.

  The problem was that religion was so irrational, so lacking in physical proofs, so easily denied. In a rugby game there were rules, there were physical properties, there were obvious consequences to every action – a misjudged drop kick, a mistimed pass – and where there was doubt it lay solely in who exactly was responsible when things went well or badly, a condition of functioning as a team being that the team fell or rose together.

  In the horror films he enjoyed watching with Chris and Tobes, the powers of good and evil were self-evident, at least eventually. Demons were revealed by glowing yellow eyes or an ability to make furniture block an escape route or knives fly across a room. While the force of good (or at least of anti-demonic power, because, for all the trappings of Christianity, the crucifixes and talk of angels and Jesus, there never seemed to be much actual prayer or churchgoing involved for the good guys) was equally impressive, a heroine muttered some words of challenge or held up a crucifix or a Bible like a weapon and evil retreated in hissed curses and pantomime smoke.

  Even a small superpower conferred by saying, ‘I believe,’ along with everyone else would have helped. But instead it all remained nebulous and doubtable. The only certainties were that it sometimes gave him a nice warm glow in which the sense of belonging was joined by a certain sense of backing the right side, and that it gave him regular, approved access to Amy and her breasts.

  His confession was not premeditated. He simply turned up for confirmation class one week to find that Amy had been obliged to stay home so it was just him and Father Barnaby. Barnaby was as friendly and easy to talk to as ever and Amy’s absence freed up something in Lenny and he found himself admitting the inadmissible: that he had only signed up for confirmation as a way of getting to see her with her parents’ approval.

  Barnaby wasn’t angry. He didn’t even seem especially surprised.

  ‘Would you rather stop coming to classes?’ he asked. ‘I can take your name off the confirmandi list easily enough.’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Because of Amy?’

  ‘Er. No. Only partly. It’s taken me a bit by surprise. I like coming to church. I like how it makes me feel and …’

  ‘There’s an old line about God moving in mysterious ways I could trot out here,’ Barnaby said. ‘It’s pretty apposite.’

  ‘You think he made me fall for Amy so as to bring me to confirmation?’

  Barnaby shrugged. ‘What do you think?’

  And then it all came out, all Lenny’s worry about not believing everything all the time, not always being sure about all the details.

  ‘Nobody believes all of it all the time, however hard they try,’ Barnaby assured him. ‘Doubt is good. Doubt shows that your powers of reasoning aren’t suspended. It gives your choice its value. Lenny, it doesn’t matter about Amy. You’re clearly good for each other. I’d say you were well matched. Her parents aren’t the most relaxed people but then she’s their only child so they’re bound to be protective. Your mum can be a tigress, too. I’m aware that you’re coming to church every Sunday because of Amy and because I told you to. But that’ll change. It always does. Always. Not long after I was confirmed, I stopped coming to church for two whole years.

  ‘After you’re confirmed and you’re a bit older, you’ll probably stop coming, regardless of how things develop between you and Amy. You might stop for a bit, you might stop for several years. But what matters is what you’ve learned and that you’ll know the church will remain there for you whenever you need it. Perhaps you’ll be in desperate need. Does that make sense?’ Barnaby asked him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You said that very quickly, Len. I’m not a teacher you have to please. Tell me honestly. Has that made you feel less anxious?’

  Lenny smiled. ‘A bit. Yes. Thanks.’

  ‘If I’ve done my job, you’ll have a bit of church inside your head and that’ll be enough to get you through. And you will need it, Len. Everyone does at some point. We all suffer fears and losses. It’s what makes us human. It’s what’ll make you a man.’

  Lenny pictured the church in his head and saw it was people rather than a building. ‘You’ve called me Len twice now,’ he said.

  ‘Have I? Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s what Mum calls me sometimes. I reckon he was an old boyfriend …’

  Then Barnaby did something he’d never done before and never did again. He went off to the kitchen and came back with a can of beer for each of them. ‘Emergency supplies,’ he said. ‘Class over. Cheers.’

  And they simply sat and drank and chatted for a while. He asked about school and what Lenny wanted to do later on and Lenny said he was torn between engineering and something involving chemistry but admitted that all he really wanted was to play rugby for the Pirates.

  ‘I know absolutely nothing about sport,’ Barnaby confessed. ‘Tell me. How feasible is that? Playing for them. How would you go about it?’

  So Lenny told him about how he already played with the junior league and would go on and trial for St Just probably. About trials and scouts and sports scholarships to help with university fees. And Barnaby seemed truly interested in a way Mum never was. All she ever said was, ‘Just don’t let them bugger up your ears or break your pretty nose.’

  And then, when conv
ersation faltered a little, and because unaccustomed beer had made him bold, Lenny asked what had made Barnaby become a priest.

  ‘Ooh. That’s a hard one. Sometimes I think it just sort of happened.’

  ‘Nothing just happens.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ He swigged his beer and thought a little. ‘There was a sort of voice in my head that wouldn’t shut up. I’d had a very scientific childhood, with no religion in it all, but a part of me kept going back to … I was drawn in by, well, mystery, I suppose. And by people who showed kindness when they didn’t have to. I felt the pain of death when I was still very young and then I saw the terror of it in other people. My father’s death was … Sorry, Lenny. That’s not much of an answer. How about I think about it and tell you next time?’

  ‘No. It’s just …’ Lenny had never seen Barnaby so lost for words. His struggle to express something words couldn’t seem to cover was more convincing than any smooth theology. ‘What are you doing all day on a weekday?’

  Barnaby smiled into his beer, let off the hook, perhaps. ‘Apart from parish admin? I visit the sick. A lot of people ask for that, even people who hardly ever set foot in a church. Sometimes they want communion at their bedside. They always want to talk. Most people are frightened of dying, and illness, even if it’s not especially serious, reminds them of that and they need comfort. And then, when people do die, I visit their families, to see how they’re coping. Funerals and weddings both take quite a bit of planning. And if a couple asks me to marry them, I expect them to set aside time to come in here to talk about marriage and what it means.’

  ‘They can’t just book the church and pay you?’

  ‘They can try but it’s a serious business, it should be, and marriage in church is a sacrament which I expect them to take seriously.’

  ‘What’s a sacrament?’

  ‘It’s any activity that involves a direct interaction of God’s grace – the Holy Spirit, if you like – in our lives. Most obviously Eucharist, when you’ll come to the altar for communion. And when the bishop confirms you. And when a different bishop ordained me a priest. And marriage and extreme unction – that’s when I pray for a person who is actually dying …’