A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  ‘She was furious when she did that,’ he said. ‘And even more so when she found I’d kept it.’

  ‘Sorry. Who was?’

  ‘My wife. She was a painter. Rachel Kelly.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That doesn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t really know anything about art.’

  He smiled with real warmth at that. ‘You really haven’t heard of her?’

  ‘Nope. Sorry.’

  ‘But how very refreshing!’

  ‘Is she famous, then?’

  ‘In her way. In that way that writers and artists can be which is still actually hardly famous at all compared to newsreaders or pop singers. She got much better known after she died but then that’s so often the case.’

  ‘Could I have a closer look?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She stood and went to peer closely at it. There was a protective layer of glass across it but still Carrie could see the furious brushstrokes and the places where the brush had actually torn the paper in the effort to intensify the colour beyond what mere paint could do.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ms Carpenter, but I’m not entirely sure why you’re here.’

  ‘Johnson,’ she told him again. ‘Carrie Johnson. I’m here to measure up for bookcases.’

  ‘Ah.’ Again that lovely smile.

  ‘The lady who rang me, obviously that wasn’t your wife.’

  ‘My daughter rang you. She’s home from Canada and quietly licking me into shape.’

  ‘Right. Do you know where she wants these shelves?’

  ‘Oh yes. Through here. It’s quite a project and I said I felt bad spending a lot of money on it.’

  ‘Well it might cost less than you think.’

  ‘I told her I could always offload more books. I got rid of a couple of hundred when we moved. I used to teach English, you see, and texts do pile up rather. Once you start to throw out it gets easier and easier. You soon realize you’re hanging onto things just because you’ve always hung onto them, not because they retain any meaning or value to you. Do you read much, Ms …’

  ‘Johnson,’ she told him again. ‘Carrie. No, not a lot, I’m afraid. I never seem to find the time.’

  He had led the way back to the hall and opened the door into the room at the front. Or tried to open it. There were books in tottering piles and books still in boxes on every side.

  Though not a great reader herself, Carrie had grown up in a house where there were always more books than bookshelf space and where a slow, mysterious tide seemed always to be carrying books from table to table and stair to stair, so she found books a comforting presence and thought the sight before her perfectly understandable. ‘That’s quite a yardage,’ she said, totting up the number of boxes and allowing a metre a box to leave room for growth.

  The front door opened behind her and a young woman breezed in singing to herself. On closer inspection she wasn’t so much young – she was the same sort of age as Carrie – as youthful. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’d completely forgotten about Golowan when I asked you to come today and then, like a lazy fool, I drove to my doctor’s appointment instead of walking and of course I couldn’t park again once I got back. I had to walk from Newlyn practically. Oh Lord! Books. Lots and lots of books. Look at them all! You must be Carrie. I like your van, by the way.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She looked more Irish than Cornish, with fine, pale skin and a tumble of springy hair the colour of wood shavings, which she was forever pushing out of the way.

  ‘I’ll have your parking space when you leave.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m Morwenna.’

  ‘Tea?’ said the father.

  ‘That’s a nice idea. Tea, Carrie?’

  They did a little shuffle as to who should put the kettle on, which the father won.

  Carrie had a long-established habit of mentally categorizing clients according to the dog breed they most resembled. It helped fix them and their names in her memory. The father, with his rangy frame and frank, loose-mouthed expression and eloquent economy of gesture was an English pointer. But the daughter fitted no breed stereotype. If anything she was a cat and not a domesticated one. Her eyes were unusual, hard to define – tawny? Khaki? This, combined with the hair, made Carrie think of lions.

  ‘What we thought was that we could turn this room into a sort of library,’ she said. ‘Shelves on every bit of wall, right up to the ceiling and even over the door and windows, just leaving the bit of wall over the fireplace bare for a picture or mirror so it doesn’t get too much. Would that be do-able?’

  ‘Of course.’ Carrie wished that smiling came more easily to her. She would feel a smile but it often felt as though what emerged on her lips was closer to a sneer, especially if she were at all nervous, as she seemed to be now. ‘I always think it’s better to have more shelves than you need than too few, and built-in ones are more efficient than freestanding …’ I sound like a boiler salesman, she thought, and wondered why it should matter now when it never bothered her as a rule.

  ‘And then I thought a wooden curtain pole could simply run from one bookcase side to another rather than being fastened to the wall itself. We’re discovering the plaster-work here is really soft and crumbly, especially on the wall facing the front.’

  Carrie took out her tape measure and one of the notepads she made herself from the quantities of mail that her father’s parish business attracted, and began jotting down the room’s dimensions. ‘Paperbacks or hardbacks?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh. A mixture, definitely, so I doubt we should try squeezing in more than six rows. And it’s probably an idea to have an extra-big shelf space along the bottom for things like art books and dictionaries.’ She had a curious, breathy accent, lilting, again more Irish than Cornish, and hard to place.

  The father came back in with tea and tough-looking flapjacks on a tray that said NO TO WAR in multiple languages. ‘This seems such an indulgence,’ he told his daughter. ‘I’m sure I could give away more.’

  ‘We’ve been over this,’ she said patiently. ‘There’s no need. And why should you? You love your books!’

  Almost immediately he was distracted by a book he had stooped to tidy back into one of the overflowing boxes. He flipped it over to scan the blurb on the back – for all the world like a man browsing in a bookshop, then drifted out of the room with it, having started to read.

  Carrie caught Morwenna’s eye. ‘Was your dad a priest?’ she asked her.

  Morwenna smiled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just a very good person.’

  ‘Ah! You have my deepest sympathy. Mine’s a vicar. It’s not always easy.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, sipping her tea and sitting on one of the boxes. ‘Very, very high standards. He wasn’t strict, just … impossible to live up to. We were all doomed to disappoint him and he was far too nice ever to let the disappointment show, which somehow made it worse.’

  ‘How about your mum?’

  ‘His polar opposite,’ she said, looking aside and a crispness entered her tone so Carrie pried no further. ‘He’s fine physically. It’s just his short-term memory that’s going. Rachel was … capricious. So he’s always been in the habit of thoroughness. It’s no trouble getting him to keep a pad and diary by the phone. And he has forgiving friends so no one takes offence when he forgets a new name or doesn’t show up for something.’

  ‘It’s a lovely house,’ Carrie said, to keep the conversation going.

  ‘Do you think so?’ Again that touch of frost. ‘I’m not sure I like it. My brothers helped him choose it … The old house was so special and this feels a bit … I’d rather he’d made a complete break and moved away entirely but he was never going to do that. He couldn’t. Not now.’

  ‘Had you lived in the other place long?’

  ‘All my life until I went away to uni.’

  ‘Of course. Your dad said.’ Carrie thought of the yard at Pendeen, of the strange, vertigo-inducing view over their fields to the ligh
thouse and of how her mother and grandmother had lived there before her. ‘Yes,’ she added. ‘I can see how that would be a wrench. This must feel like …’

  ‘… a holiday house. It stopped being fun after a couple of weeks.’

  ‘So you grew up in Penzance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your accent’s …’

  ‘My accent’s weird, I know. Like my mother’s. I’m an accent sponge, my brothers say. Wherever I live, I start to pick it up. I lived in Belgium for a while and started talking English with a sort of all-purpose EEC accent like a drunk translator and now I’ve spent a couple of years with my aunt in Toronto I guess my voice has changed again. Someone said I sound like Jacqueline Du Pre now and I don’t think it was a compliment. My accent’s weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s weird. I know.’

  ‘No. It’s just unplaceable.’

  As she said this, Carrie realized she was just standing there holding her mug of cooling tea while they smiled and gabbled at each other. She never did this. She didn’t have friends like this. It made her think back with an ache to the fierce little friendships with Jazz and Shell in girlhood, of bikes and creepy, boring dolls and the queasily unstable currency of secrets. ‘So,’ she said, reminding herself why she was there. ‘Bookshelves.’ Her mobile started ringing but she ignored it. ‘I’ve done measuring. Let’s talk wood. Do you want them painted, in which case I can use nice, thick planks of MDF that won’t bend, or would you rather have oak, which’ll look lovely unpainted, but will cost your dad a bit more?’

  ‘Could you price for both, including the paint on the MDF?’

  ‘Sure. And maybe for Osmo on the oak. And then you need to decide if you want them fixed or with those little brass strips chamfered in so you can move the shelf supports?’ Her mobile was ringing again. She guessed it was her mother, who hated leaving messages and refused to learn to text because she said her fingers were too thick. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Better get this.’ She answered, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Carrie, it’s me.’ Mum was in a state. Not crying – Mum never seemed to cry – but worked up, high-pitched with tension.

  ‘Mum? What?’

  ‘It’s your father.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Her immediate thought of course was that he was dead and she pictured him sent flying from his rickety bike or face down somewhere around the house and her mother unable to move him. But the truth was far stranger.

  ‘He’s with the police. I … Carrie, I think he’s been arrested. He wasn’t making any sense and I can’t go because he took the car into town with him.’

  ‘The police station?’

  ‘Well yes. In town.’

  ‘Mum, try not to worry. I’m on my way there now to check.’ She realized that, far from leaving the room or at least pretending not to listen, as might have been normal, Morwenna Middleton was watching her, paying candid attention. ‘I’ll call you when there’s news,’ she added, ‘Bye,’ and hung up.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s nothing. But I have to go.’

  ‘All the blood just drained from your face, Carrie. What is it?’ Carrie told her and she insisted on coming too. ‘I know police stations from my misspent youth. You’ll need company. There’ll be a lot of waiting around.’

  Carrie protested but she insisted and suddenly the situation was so peculiar anyway that Carrie decided it might as well get more so and gave way. Morwenna said they should go in her car, so as to save the precious parking space in front. As they walked the length of the promenade to find it she talked nervously of her time with her aunt in Canada and her work as a children’s counsellor, throwing in that she was bipolar but scrupulous about taking her medication these days. ‘Sorry,’ she finished. ‘My car’s a tip.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  Morwenna threw a pile of books and files and an apple core off the passenger seat and into the tiny car’s rear and Carrie climbed in, rightly assuming there was nothing to be done about the passenger foot well, which appeared to function as a dustbin.

  ‘It’s also very old and sounds just like an electric sewing machine,’ Morwenna sighed as she pulled out of her parking space. She performed a rapid U-turn before speeding them back along the front and up Alexandra Road into the centre of town. She swerved left, up beside St John’s Hall to the police station, a utilitarian building almost as ugly and out of place as the town’s tax office though lower, at least, so not quite so brutal.

  ‘First time I’ve been in here in my entire life,’ Carrie said as Morwenna parked abruptly beside a patrol car.

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘You don’t have to come with me, you know. I can walk back to my van from here.’

  ‘I’m staying until we know everything’s all right. You have to get out first so I can lock from the inside. It’s that old.’

  ‘How can you drive this?’ The car was in shocking condition.

  Morwenna laughed at her. ‘You’re scandalized, aren’t you? It’s just a car. There’s a Quaker mechanic in Goldsithney who never gives up on a car unless it’s a write-off. Dad buys the cheapest thing going in The Cornishman small ads and together they keep them going a year or two.’

  ‘But how about long journeys?’

  ‘We take trains. It’s quite simple really. The trick is not to have shame, to remember it’s just transport and not your immortal soul.’

  She held open the police station door for her and, as Carrie went in, lightly touched her back. Because of Carrie’s peculiar emotional history, or rather lack of one, any physical contact she was not expecting had a stronger resonance for her than it might have done for other people. As she approached the desk officer, or whatever they were called, she continued to feel the palm against her shoulder blade, picturing it as a brightly painted handprint on her tee-shirt.

  ‘Er. Hello. I’m here to see my father,’ she said, ‘Barnaby Johnson?’ hating the way nervousness of authority made her statement emerge as a question.

  ‘Hang on a tick,’ the desk officer said and went away from his window to make enquiries.

  Carrie glanced at Morwenna, who smiled encouragingly. In this context, with her raggedy clothes and wild hair and homemade-looking shoes, she might have been one of the hippies that ran hopeless but tenacious little shops in Bread Street or St Just.

  As the desk officer returned, she saw him glance across and assumed he was trying to place them as friends or siblings. ‘It’ll be a while yet, I’m afraid. Your dad was brought in nearly an hour ago but the duty solicitor was held up in Golowan traffic so they’re only just doing the interview now.’

  ‘But why does he need a solicitor?’

  ‘It’s his right. He’s been arrested.’

  ‘But what’s the charge?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to tell you.’

  ‘Can we wait? My … my friend and I?’

  ‘Of course. There are some chairs over there and a coffee machine and so on.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said as they sat. ‘He’s a vicar. He never breaks the law. He’s not physically capable. What do they think he’s done?’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough. The solicitor will be told you’re here and will come out to talk to you once the interview’s over.’

  ‘How come you know so much about this? Just how misspent was your youth?’

  ‘Not very. Just a bit sad and misguided. One of my brothers – the youngest – died when I was a student. It was an accident but I was there, in the car though not driving, and Rachel, that was my mother, said … I was left feeling it was all my fault or that the wrong one had died or whatever. I was seriously mixed up and I had no therapy or counselling and no medication. And I ran away. Right away. Sort of lost myself around the slummier bits of London, then Germany and Holland and Belgium. Most of the people I ended up living with were self-medicating addicts of one kind or another or living in squats. Apart from the nu
ns. They were sweet. And a poor honey in Brussels. She was in love with me and wanted to wrap me in cotton wool and make everything all right. So I know waiting rooms, hospitals, prisons, police stations. It’s always the same tired, plastic chairs and greasy-looking magazines. And nasty coffee. Do you fancy one?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  Two small girls dressed as fairies, for the parade presumably, slipped in and presented themselves at the front desk then stood there for a while, whispering to one another. Their mother, a uniformed WPC, came out and took their photograph on her mobile phone before leading them back outside to her car.

  ‘So why did you become a carpenter?’ Morwenna asked. She had kicked off her funny shoes and drawn her bare feet up onto the chair beside her and was picking pensively at her dusty toes.

  ‘A man came to mend the staircase at home.’

  ‘And you fell for him?’

  ‘No. I don’t even remember his face or if he was young or old.’ Carrie thought back, remembering a set of beautifully maintained chisels in a neat pouch he let her roll and unroll while he worked. ‘I fell for his tools and the way wood shavings curled away from the wood as he used a spokeshave. I don’t think I’d really looked at wood before then, maybe because there were no trees to speak of around Pendeen. He had a sort of display kit for customers. It had identical cubes, no, fingers really, of different woods. He’d cut them himself and varnished them at one end and simply waxed or oiled them at the other, so you could see the different grains and colours and make your mind up. Mahogany. Tulip wood. Oak. Pine. Iroko. Lime. Ash. Beech. I begged my parents for a set like it for Christmas but of course it’s not a thing you could buy – you had to make it yourself. They gave me the Observer Book of Trees instead and signed me up for carpentry lessons. And that was it. I was lost.’

  The solicitor emerged and explained. Dad had been arrested at his own suggestion but whether he would be charged or simply called to give evidence at an inquest was a matter the Crown Prosecution Service would decide in the coming days. Carrie would not have to stand bail since he was plainly trustworthy and a well-known and responsible member of the community.