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A Perfectly Good Man

Page 24

by Patrick Gale


  ‘Do you do that often?’

  ‘Not really. It’s gone out of fashion. But most people die in hospital rather than at home now and if they don’t send for me, they’ll be visited by the hospital chaplain instead.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  Barnaby smiled, glanced at his watch and drained his can. ‘That’s your last question then we must both go home for our suppers. Does it work? I hope so. It’s a comfort. It’s a beautiful prayer. And people are often very frightened at the moment of death. They often feel guilty suddenly about things they’ve done in the past. On one level it’s like magic – it’s a ritual. We’ve no way of knowing if it saves a soul until it’s our turn to find out the truth for ourselves, but yes, from the point of view of those left behind, it often does work in that it brings peace. Now. Class well and truly dismissed.’ He stood up, so Lenny did too. ‘But between now and next week I’d like you to think about the next line of the Creed.’

  ‘He descended into hell.’

  ‘That’s the one. Maybe you can text Amy to remind her?’

  ‘She still doesn’t have a mobile. Not till her birthday.’

  He shook his head. ‘People like Derek Hawker make me feel very … inadequate. Not fit enough. Not good enough. Not strict enough. Is he bad at anything, do you think?’

  ‘He can’t sing. I sit by him in church and he really can’t sing.’

  Barnaby briefly rested a hand on Lenny’s shoulder. ‘That’s a great comfort,’ he said, mock solemn.

  He saw Lenny out to his bike and surprised him by insisting he put on his helmet and Sam Browne belt before setting off. He held out his hand for Lenny to shake before they parted on the corner. It felt a bit weird and formal – they had never done this before – but it also felt gratifyingly adult.

  Lenny wasn’t much given to fancy, outside of horror films, but the ride home that evening felt magical. There was a moon, fat and bright enough to be casting shadows, and he didn’t pass a single car or pedestrian from Pendeen to Morvah. At the bend in the track up the hill to home, he stopped to admire the way the moon was drawing glitter from the sea and throwing a distant container ship into sharp relief. Most of the time he took where he lived for granted, resenting what felt like extreme isolation and the myriad small marks of what he was coming to recognize as poverty. And yet there were times like this, or when he came down the track on his bike just as one of the German tour buses was creeping by on the way to Zennor and St Ives, when he saw his life as outsiders might see it and realized he was lucky.

  He probably wouldn’t stay. He couldn’t imagine what he could do as an adult that would give him a reason to – short of playing for the Pirates – and he wanted to travel, he wanted to see the world, he wanted to visit his cousins in Australia and experience life lived in a city like London, or New York, the sort of places you saw in crime dramas on television. And yet he was glad he’d be able to tell people he had grown up in Cornwall.

  His mum was out. He had forgotten she had an opening to go to in Truro that night. He was glad to have the house to himself for a change, to be spared the grilling which often passed with her for conversation. It amused him when friends asked if it wasn’t scary, living somewhere so remote; it never occurred to him to be scared, because this silence and darkness were what he had associated with home and security all his life. From what he could gather from The Cornishman, you were more likely to end up dead or hospitalized, the victim of scary people, if you had neighbours.

  Amy and he had to make do with e-mails until her parents let her have a mobile, and he secretly liked the relative formality and calm of it and that she wrote him whole sentences with whole words instead of the textspeak standard among his mates. Tonight’s e-mail was quite short because her mother was ill and she was having to make supper with her dad but still it gave him a little snapshot of her evening so that he knew how she was feeling, what she was going to eat and that she had nearly finished the book she was reading.

  They were both careful what they wrote. Her parents probably weren’t nearly as strict as it suited them to pretend, her father was probably far too tired after a long day’s teaching to spend time hacking into his daughter’s e-mail account. Amy and Lenny had yet to use the word Love with each other. Sometimes it felt like something just around the corner and possibly to be dreaded, sometimes it felt as though it didn’t need saying and that they had such a natural sympathy they could take it as read.

  But that evening, excited by starlight and having the house to himself, he didn’t want to leave it unsaid any more. Amy, he typed. I think I love you. Really. He kept it cool by not signing off, thinking she would know who it was from, which was all that mattered. Then he had a moment or two of panic after pressing send, in case she assumed he had merely pressed send too early and had more to say when in fact he had no idea what he should say next.

  He calmed himself by fetching his usual home-alone supper: a huge ham sandwich made crunchy with a chopped-up dill pickle and a slab of cheddar whose thickness would have had his mother talking about bills and do you think I’m made of money. A huge cheese and ham sandwich and a big glass of chocolate milk. Baby food really, but it was what he liked. And some ice cream to follow with a chopped banana.

  There was nothing he wanted to watch on TV and anyway he preferred to be in his room. He loved his room, especially at night-time. It was off on its own at the far end of the house. His bed was the same he had used since boyhood – a kind of bunk with the clothes storage built in underneath. He was getting too tall for it – his feet stuck out at the end if he didn’t lie with his head really near the top – but he enjoyed climbing a ladder to go to bed and he liked that he had a little porthole window near his pillow so he could look out at the stars and the distant view. When he was small he would turn out the lights and pretend his bed was a lunar module. Now he just liked turning out the lights and lying in bed.

  Tonight he tried something weird and new. Praying. He prayed in church, of course, because you had to and everyone else did but he had lied when he said yes when Barnaby asked if he and Amy prayed at other times. Prayed out loud, at least. He couldn’t kneel at the foot of the bed or anything, which would have been unbearably strange in any case, but he whispered the words to the Lord’s Prayer out loud while shutting his eyes. He tried doing as Barnaby asked, actually thinking about the meaning of the words rather than simply chanting them. And then he opened his eyes and lay there looking out at the stars and listening to the wind which was starting to get up, whistling in the not quite blocked up chimney of his bedroom fireplace.

  The prayer was strange, a bit like how he imagined witchcraft was meant to be; you said words out loud and things changed around you. He waited, feeling for changes, thinking about Amy reading his e-mail, about Amy in her bed.

  When his mum came home he pretended to be asleep.

  CARRIE AT 35

  Carrie fell in love for the first time when she was thirty-five, and the sensation that stole over her was so utterly unfamiliar she could not recognize it for what it was.

  It took her a year or two past puberty to begin to suspect that she had no sex drive. As Jazz and Shell and her other friends at school erupted with hormones and developed crushes and either took cautious sips of sex or threw themselves into it with reckless thirst, she found herself more and more isolated from the instincts around her. At first she assumed she was simply a late developer or just developing in different stages to most people. But her body duly underwent all the dreaded, longed-for changes, and still there was no spark to make sense of it all.

  She went through the motions. She stared at airbrushed photographs of pop stars, listening to their music at the same time in case that helped. She did her best to see what it was about certain boys at school that made girls suddenly start flicking their hair about or striking unnatural poses, but they were simply boys and often neither the most pleasant nor the most intelligent ones. She listened carefully as girls confided erot
ic dreams they had, because she seemed to be having none and needed to know the salient detail in case she were ever called upon to pretend. She absorbed every detail of a page of masturbation tips in one of Shell’s mother’s magazines, in case this was the key that would unlock normality. But quite apart from making her feel completely weird, as though her head were swelling, the business unnerved her because the scenes and faces she should be conjuring up only made her want to stop immediately.

  She was fairly sure she wasn’t the only one, fairly sure that some of the others must be faking too, and was simply glad that she wasn’t somebody people noticed, least of all boys. Difference of any kind was usually brutally turned upon and she dreaded being suddenly accused of being a hypocrite or weird or, even worse, a dyke, which seemed to be the standard label for any girl who chose not to conform, even harmlessly straight punks or Goths. But she was far more cautious of letting her differences show than when she was little and, perhaps because she was perfectly normal-looking but no threat and such an attentive listener, her blossoming friends did not challenge her but seemed to relish the way her sexual blankness rendered them all the more ripe and available.

  And then, naturally, there was God. Her parents would never have shirked discussing sex or relationships with her and certainly would never have been especially strict, yet the tacit assumption among her friends seemed to be that, of course, she had to be careful and good and save herself because her dad was a vicar.

  Once they all left school, though, things changed. Friends moved away, either geographically or, abruptly, into the foreign, adjoining countries of motherhood and/or marriage. And never even thinking about sex, which in any case seemed to cause far more trouble than happiness, no longer seemed such a problem. She studied for her City and Guilds in carpentry, catching a bus and a train to Camborne every day, then quietly started her little business. Although she still effectively lived at home, her move into independent adulthood was marked by Dad’s suggestion she move into her grandmother’s old rooms at the oldest end of the house, so that she had her own kitchen, bathroom, living room and front door.

  ‘You can have all the visitors you like in there,’ her mother said, helping her move her things, which was the only comment she ever seemed to make, even indirectly, about Carrie’s persistently single state. The family cat, Sapphira – or was it Abishag by then? – elected to move in with her, apparently setting the seal on her spinster status, and that was that.

  She did try. A boy on her carpentry course asked her out a couple of times and she went because he was sad and overweight and they got quite drunk and actually kissed, but she panicked when he got all steamed up and wanted to go further and he avoided speaking to her after that. She went to the North Inn or the Radjel occasionally after work, chatting to people she knew and largely avoiding people she didn’t. She dressed like a man, in a uniform of jeans and tee-shirts with some kind of jacket or hoodie to hide the large breasts inherited from her mother, because otherwise men stared at them in a way she suspected meant they were mentally detaching the breasts from the rest of her and weighing up in their minds if the breasts on their own were enough.

  She wasn’t a virgin, at least. A migrant worker, Jaňek, had led her back to his caravan in Trewellard a couple of times after they got chatting and found they both had priests for parents and shared a guilty fondness for the songs of Elkie Brooks. He had been sweet and considerate and unforceful but the sex was unpleasant all the same, each time leaving her feeling she was being suffocated, and it had been a relief when he mournfully confessed he was having to return to Poland to marry his fiancée.

  Once or twice women had made passes at her too, which was incredibly awkward as they had misread whatever signals her jeans and biker jacket were giving out whereas Carrie just thought they were being friendly. She apologized profusely, bought them drinks and heard their life stories while parrying any further advances. Sexual fulfilment might continue to elude her but she had somehow known for as long as she knew Simon le Bon and Adam Ant did nothing for her, that she wasn’t gay either.

  Carrie spotted a space and pounced, swinging her little van over to the right-hand lane in the face of oncoming traffic she coolly ignored while parking and then thanked cheerfully once safely in. A space on the seafront was handy for the job in hand but also for catching the eyes of passers-by. With its neatly painted signage, done in exchange for building the signwriter a tissue box surround for a new, drop-in bath, the van was as good as a free billboard and brought in so much work she no longer went to the expense of advertising in The Cornishman.

  It was mid-June and Golowan week so the front was looking festive with brightly coloured banners. She wasn’t fussed about going into town on a Saturday usually but had quite forgotten it was Mazey Day, with all the traffic and parking problems its parade and street fair would cause. At the far end of the front, near the lido, the usual funfair rides had been set up and the road was cordoned off.

  She double-checked the address she had tapped into her phone. The house had a garden but, perhaps in keeping with the 1930s severity of the building, it was very simple and appeared to use only three plants. All along one side, edging the right of the path, was a thriving hedge of lavender. The left border of the path was defined by another fragrant hedge of something lavender-like but not lavender, with spikes of purple-blue flowers and blue-grey leaves. It flowed down onto the gravel on both sides, a sort of botanical wave. The third plant was some sort of tough rose bush, covered in loose-petalled white flowers.

  Carrie knew nothing about gardening, for all that her mother had tried to teach her, contenting herself with cutting grass and keeping hedges neat, but she could see the admirable simplicity of the scheme. So many gardens struck her as busy hotchpotches, one of these one of those, a bunch of these because the colour was cheerful and of this because Doreen gave it for our wedding anniversary and of that because we’re not quite sure. Gardens seemed to be allowed to happen by accident in a way few people would consider decorating or furnishing a house, and it seemed to her it was this mishmash approach that made them a source of constant and fretful maintenance to their owners. This garden was pretty and stylish yet could be maintained with nothing more specialized than a once-a-year going-over from a hedge trimmer, and still achieved that other gardening goal of being different from all its neighbours. She felt an instinctive warmth towards whoever had created it.

  She rang the bell and waited a few minutes, rang it again and was about to try calling the number she had stored when she heard footsteps approaching inside. An oldish man opened the door and smiled at her mildly. His thick white hair was standing in a tuft as though he had been lying on it.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d gone upstairs to fetch something and somehow fell sound asleep. Come in, come in.’

  ‘I’m Carrie Johnson,’ she felt she had to tell him first. ‘The carpenter? About the bookshelves?’

  ‘Yes. Do come in. You’re lucky I heard you. We’re discovering it’s a quirk of the design of this place that when you’re upstairs the sound of the sea becomes louder than noises from the road or the doorstep. Something to do with the concrete overhang at the top.’

  She closed the front door behind her and followed him across the black and white tiled floor into a kitchen that gave onto a sunny yard at the back that was lush with exotic plants in pots.

  ‘Far too many plants,’ he sighed. ‘I couldn’t bear to leave any behind. They become like friends. Some of them are probably older than you.’ He sat at the kitchen table so she sat too, setting her tool box carefully on the floor beside her. Then, as if remembering some long-ago training he said, ‘How terrible of me; I haven’t offered you anything. Coffee? Tea? Elderflower cordial?’

  ‘Cordial sounds nice,’ she said, thinking it also sounded like less trouble.

  ‘It’s homemade,’ he said. ‘I make it every year but the citric acid is getting harder and harder to find. The chemist looks at one most suspicio
usly and has to consult a colleague then fetch it from behind the counter.’

  ‘It’s a bomb ingredient,’ she explained. ‘My mother used to have the same trouble. But I made friends with a school lab technician I did some work for at Hayle and he slipped us a big jar of it – enough for years.’

  ‘Absurd,’ he said, as if he hadn’t been listening. ‘As if Quakers made bombs!’ And he set a glass of cordial before her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Delicious.’ It was. It smelled of summer. ‘So have you not lived here long?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I lose count. No thingy, you know, memory any more. One day’s much like the one before, which is restful or a kind of hell depending on how you look at it. Less than a year though. I didn’t move far. I spent all my life till now about two streets away. Nearer. But, well, my sons both live so far away now and since my wife died I didn’t need all that space. There’s a family living there again now, which is as it should be. Houses like that need children.’

  He broke off, apparently having run out of inspiration and Carrie didn’t do small talk, so they just sat there for a bit in companionable silence. She sipped her cordial and looked about her. It was a very tidy kitchen. It probably had to be because it was so small. It was much as she imagined the galley on a ship. The only unruly touch was an explosive little painting on the wall above the fridge. It was an abstract painting, all reds and oranges, like having a fire halfway up the wall. She didn’t normally like abstract art as she had no idea how she was supposed to look at it. This was different. It felt deeper, somehow, less scratchy. It was done with the same bold conviction as a small child’s painting, and had the same air of the painter understanding perfectly what he was about, as if he was seeing what he painted and not just drily thinking it.

 

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