A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  With every good wish (and apologies for this ancient typewriter ribbon),

  Cordelia Penberthy

  Barnaby opened out the brown paper again, mystified, then thought to undo the ribbon tied around the little book. The second letter was folded tightly and tucked between the pages. It was written on the school paper, as usual, and her tone was so happily alive, no other word for it, that he had to break off reading after a couple of sentences and walk around the little study to compose himself.

  Dear Barny, she had written.

  Oh but it’s so beautiful here! Such a magical night. I’m writing this by torchlight and there are moths all around me like little fairies. I have been crazily daring and escaped for a whole weekend away on my own, like an intrepid lady adventurer of the 1860s. First I wrapped up like a local and visited the city and now I’m way out in the countryside, camping out in the school Jeep, with a night sky full of stars for company. There’s even a tiny creek where I can swim. Skinny dipping. Scandalous!

  Thanks for the lovely letter. Very glad you don’t have some stuck-up girlfriend from the local girls’ school. Stick to your studies, my boy, and to flowers. Listen to your nice housemaster and join Bot Soc. Flowers never disappoint. I have dreams of James’s garden sometimes and I swear I can smell those dark red roses. I wonder how his Paul is. Do you ever hear from him? Now there was a love!

  I’m never coming home. You’ll simply have to come out here to see me in your months off before university. Sod going to Florence and Rome like everyone else to look at paintings and bum around with spoilt Americans. Come out here and discover new ways of enjoying goat …

  Khartoum was wonderful. Exhilarating to be completely unknown after months of village life and everyone knowing my every move. I wore an impenetrable veil and strolled around the souk pretending to be a respectable young widow. I found a funny old bookshop. Lots of things in Arabic and the usual sad heap of left-behind Agatha Christies and Desmond Bagleys but then I found this and it sort of spoke to me. Yes, it seems to be a set of instructions to a monk on how to survive and thrive in the religious life, but it’s also full of good sense and I thought it would do pretty well for a clever yoof at bording skool. Lots of stuff about the importance of keeping your counsel and not investing too much in the good opinion of others or prizing mere stuff over the life of the spirit. He’s also very keen on warning against becoming seduced by the beauty and charm of your mortal companions. I think it must have belonged to a missionary, don’t you? I wonder what became of him. Roasted or boiled or sold as a sultan’s plaything?

  Anyway, better early than not at all. It can be this year’s Christmas present. Imagine Prof’s face if he caught you reading a book with this title! Sorry. Bit pissed. My first beer in about a year. Supper awaits me under the trees. I’ve got a little fire going and I expect I’ll sleep out there rather than locked in the Jeep as it’s so warm and there’s nobody around for miles. I’m cooking something I bought in the souk today. They said it was chicken. Well, ‘bird’ anyway. Like nothing you’d ever find in Sainsbury’s but I have to say it smells delicious and after such adventuring I could eat rook.

  Oh Barny, don’t you ever wonder what it’s all for? All this beauty and mess! These glorious moths! Sometimes when I’m lying awake here, especially just after dawn, I get such a powerful sense of

  And there she broke off. There was no bloodstain, no jagged tailing off of script. She had simply stopped because she was drunk and hungry and the letter could wait to be finished in sunlight. Had she eaten before they found her? Had she fallen asleep? Did she put up a fight?

  In an effort to still his mind, he set her letter aside and opened the little book. She had inked him a little dedication in the front. Even I found much good sense in here and think you may too! A. Khartoum, November ’67.

  He turned a page and began to read.

  MODEST CARLSSON AT 75

  Modest hated to admit it but Johnson’s suggestion that he take over the parish magazine was a stroke of genius. Ostensibly he was deemed to be suited to the work, being a retired bookseller, just the stupidly pointless connection people liked to make; actually it suited him because it placed him securely and squarely at the village’s heart. Certainly he was handling announcements of the next bring and buy sale or Charles Causley evening, not earth-shaking gossip, but it was surprising how much he learned when gathering in his copy. He passed none of this on; they’d stop confiding in him if he became known as a gossip. It was the possession of the knowledge that excited him. His predecessor in the post had always delivered her newsletter by car, longsuffering husband at the wheel. He had not driven since his pre-Portsmouth days, letting his driving licence and all the related expense go the way of the former identity now known only to the Probation Service.

  His crime, punishment and release all predated the Sex Offender Register, of which he had read with mixed smugness and relief. The register caught up with him, however, after his move to Cornwall and in the most irritating and demeaning way. He posted a miscellaneous bundle of smutty photographs and magazines to a regular customer who had never given him trouble. A week later the police arrived with a warrant to search the house and carry off his sales records and he was taken in for questioning.

  The customer, a Plymothian, had been arrested for exposing himself to schoolchildren on buses and his flat been discovered to house an array of paedophile pornography. Just one photograph in the drab stash Modest had sold him gave cause for concern. Luckily there were no other such pictures in Modest’s stock so he escaped with a fine while the customer was jailed. His court appearance in distant Plymouth, under his real name, went miraculously unreported in The Cornishman’s terse column of court reports. However, in what seemed a piece of pure malice, the addition to his record for crimes of a sexual nature led to his name, his real name, being added to the register. Once a year he was required to call in and sign against his name at Penzance police station and, which was worse, to keep him on his best behaviour, the police reserved the right to call in on him unexpectedly. They had done so just once, nearly five years ago. It was a horrible, demeaning experience, reminding him that his new life and new identity were made of fragile stuff, and he lived in dread of its repetition.

  Modest Carlsson was a harmless old man to whom people chatted in bus shelters. He delivered the magazines by hand and recipients, seeing him coming up to their doors, breathless in summer or fumbling with his gloves in winter, often asked him in and seemed to enjoy plying a fat man with cake.

  This was how he had come to know Nuala Barnes. He was well aware of the Australian potter’s reputation as a godless rebel but had always wanted a closer look at her fascinating house. When it suited him, he decided he was not simply delivering the parish newsletter but representing the Church’s hand reaching out in fellowship.

  A former shooting lodge – some said it had always been a love nest – of a once powerful local landowner, Redworks Cottage lay high above the sea, on the edge of moorland. It was nearer Bossullow than Morvah and must surely have been at the outer limit of Johnson’s parish if not actually in Zennor. There was an American-style post box on a pole at the beginning of its lane, alongside the wheelie bin and recycling box, but he had chosen not to see it. The long route to her front door wound between fenced-in pastures and was utterly exposed to view so she would have ample opportunity to see his approach and choose not to answer her doorbell.

  He rang twice and there was no answer but then she emerged from the outbuilding where she presumably had her studio and asked him abruptly what he wanted. As he’d expected, she said she did not take the parish magazine but he had done his homework and added, ‘It’s not for you, it’s for Lenny. I gather he was confirmed last year.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said with a scowl. ‘Christ knows what that was about. Teen rebellion, I guess. Well …’ She grinned mischievously. ‘Can’t have him losing touch with the flock.’ And, claiming she was breaking off for tea in any case, sh
e asked Modest in.

  He continued delivering the magazine and she continued asking him in long after Lenny had dropped all claims to a faith in favour of rugby and his girlfriend, who continued coming to church without him. Nuala confessed she read the magazine herself. She had even been known to bring old clothes and books to jumble sales and to donate pots to fundraising auctions. She had no idea where in Pendeen Modest lived, and she never invited him further into her house than her kitchen. (He had once faked a weak bladder and been disappointed to find her downstairs lavatory lay unrevealingly nearby.) But she seemed to regard him with a kind of affection as a fellow outsider and he in turn enjoyed her battered glamour and caustic wit. She took it into her head that he was good, however, profoundly good, even wise. Nothing he said, no amount of scandalmongering or back-biting, would convince her.

  ‘You don’t fool me, Modest,’ she would say. ‘I know you’re above all that really.’ And after a while he came to feel a better, wiser person when he was in her presence, raised by an unbeliever’s faith.

  He knew nothing about art but he could see that her bowls and plates and oddly elongated bottles were beautiful. Sitting with her at her slab-like oak table which was never without something of beauty on it – a pile of apples, a piece of driftwood, a ring of snow-white pebbles – he felt he was dipping into a headily different life that could never have been his because he had always lacked the courage. He had tried copying her in small ways but when he brought things home from his walks on cliffs or moor and cleared a space for them on a table they simply looked like junk. He kept hoping that one day she would give him one of her pots, not least for the pleasure it would cause him to be able to say, should he ever have a visitor, ‘Oh, that? It’s by my potter friend, Nuala Barnes. Effective, isn’t it?’ Only she never did and he was far too mean to buy one. Simply buying one, like anyone else, would have felt like cheating and not been the same at all.

  When Lenny had his accident, Modest had known himself tested. A true friend would have hurried to her side to offer comfort or assistance but he had found himself checked for some reason, by doubt or inhibition and an uncharacteristic fastidiousness. When he did finally use the parish magazine as his usual excuse to visit, a bossy friend of hers, a true friend presumably, had taken it off him at the door and said Nuala and Lenny were busy with the occupational health visitor.

  When he called by the following month, she was preoccupied with adapting the ground floor to Lenny’s wheelchair and had been woundingly dismissive of him. So he had cut her off his delivery rounds for three months in the hope of punishing her. And then curiosity overcame him and he felt compelled to visit to see how she was coping with the shock of Lenny’s insisting on moving out to live on his own in Penzance. He found her brittle and brave and once again content to sit with him at her kitchen table.

  He did not make the same mistake twice. As soon as news reached him in the pub about Lenny’s suicide, he sent her flowers. He had never sent flowers to anyone in his life, not even his wife, and was scandalized at the expense but he understood that the pain – the sense of sacrifice – was part of the pleasure people took in giving. I’m so very sorry, he wrote on the little card the florist gave him to include in the package. Let’s talk when you’re ready.

  And now the latest edition of the parish newsletter gave him reason to climb her windswept drive again, whether she was ready to talk or not. He had not seen her around the village since the news broke but then one rarely did, as she did most of her shopping elsewhere. The funeral had been a godless cremation from which she had excluded everyone but her sister from Australia. He had all the salient details.

  He was disappointed to see her emerge from her studio. She would take the magazine, he thought, and dismiss him.

  ‘You’re working,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’ He was slightly shocked that she was working. He had pictured her slightly crazed with grief, needing his wise words.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It’s all coming out badly,’ and she surprised him by kissing his cheek. ‘Thanks for the flowers, Modest. I should have written. It was very sweet of you. Everyone’s been so kind it got almost unbearable. Sympathy is hard to bear. Come in.’

  Although death, inquest and funeral were all long past, there were flowers on every surface. Flowers, pot plants, even a small lemon tree. The scent of them all tickled his nose. She saw him look.

  ‘They’re starting to go over,’ she said. ‘I should start throwing them out but that would mean, well, you know.’

  ‘Starting over?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she laughed shortly. ‘Right. Something like that. We should have tea. Do you want tea?’

  ‘Please don’t go to any trouble, Nuala.’

  ‘It’s no trouble. I need tea,’ she said but having filled the kettle she sat down again without setting it on the hotplate and he did not like to say anything.

  ‘I expect it’s the last thing you need,’ he said. ‘But I brought you the latest …’ and he took a copy of the newsletter from his shoulder bag and set it on the table. She reached out a clay-whitened hand and touched it with something like tenderness.

  ‘You’re amazing the way you keep churning this horrible thing out,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, really,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing but typing. Other people do far more. They do real work.’

  ‘Yeah. Well. Other people. So what’s going to happen, Modest? Will they chuck him out, do you reckon?’

  Of course he knew exactly who she meant but he was Good Modest when he was with her, kind, unworldly Modest.

  ‘Do you mean Father Barnaby?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say. He’s very popular despite … What he said at the inquest, about prayer and … I think some people are taking him up as a kind of cause. People from outside the parish.’

  ‘People don’t know the half of it.’ She sighed with surprising violence and muttered, ‘And they probably never should.’

  Modest had been about to stand to set the kettle to heat for her, as he was really very thirsty from all his walking and had said no to two previous offers in expectation of tea at Nuala’s, but he froze as her words sank in. Speaking very carefully, speaking just as he imagined a priest might in such a situation, and keeping his voice as gentle as he could, he asked, ‘Nuala, is there something … something held back which the inquest should have heard about?’

  She didn’t answer him straight away. Instead she looked at him in a way that made him realize how rarely she actually looked at him. Her eyes were a deep blue that seemed hardly faded by age. For a moment she seemed to be examining him and he felt weighed in the balance and uncomfortable. Just when he thought she might be about to curse him and throw him out, she said simply, ‘Barnaby was Len’s father. It was a mistake. A stupid, silly fling. And I was a bitch. I realized I wanted a kid but I didn’t want Barnaby and all the hassle and fuss. So I never told Len who his father was.’

  ‘But Barnaby knew?’

  ‘Oh yeah. He knew. I owed him that much. But I told him if he ever told Lenny, I’d take the kid away, right away, where he and his fucking Jesus and that fat cake-baker couldn’t get their claws into him.’ She was crying now, shedding tears at least, but seemed not to notice. She had torn a dark blue flower from the pot on the table and was pulling its petals off one by one and laying them in a neat little daisy-shaped pattern.

  Modest felt the room had suddenly become as quiet and airless as a tomb and that she was no longer aware of him, not as himself, that he might have been anybody and she would still have talked, simply because the moment had come for talking.

  ‘Oh, Nuala, I’m so sorry,’ he began, ever so slightly prompting her to continue. ‘It must have been so …’

  ‘And he didn’t say a word,’ she said. ‘He never said a word. I thought it was so obvious. I thought everyone would see how alike they were. But of course he was a priest so it’s the last thing anyone would …
Even at the inquest. He was so fucking good, wasn’t he? He didn’t even perjure himself in order to keep his promise. He just didn’t quite say it all.’

  ‘But if Lenny didn’t know, why did he … Why involve him like that?’

  ‘It was just Jesus. Fucking Jesus. Len wanted Jesus with him at the end!’ She did not say instead of me but she did not need to. Her anger felt corrosive, unanswerable.

  Good Modest, he reminded himself. Kind and wise and slightly shocked, perhaps, at her bad language and he held his tongue in case she offered anything further.

  But she pulled herself together suddenly, swept the petals into her hand and so to the compost bucket. ‘Christ. Sorry. I offered you tea, Modest, and I never even put the kettle on,’ she said and something in her tone, a small barb, made him wonder if she had ever really intended to.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘I should leave you and your troubles in peace.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she continued, ignoring him. ‘I don’t know what I was … Nobody knows except you. If word gets out, I’ll know it was you.’

  ‘I won’t breathe a word,’ he said, backing away from her sudden frankness. ‘I can keep a secret.’

  ‘Of course you can. You’re full of secrets, aren’t you?’ She opened the door for him. She handed him back the magazine. ‘Nothing personal,’ she said, ‘but please don’t bring me this thing anymore. I hate it and everything it stands for.’

  ‘Sure, Nuala,’ he said. ‘Understood.’

  ‘Good,’ she said and she closed the door.

  He began to shudder uncontrollably as he walked away from her house. Alone between the wide expanses of field he felt vulnerable, as though walking with more riches than he could safely carry. On one level his long patience was rewarded. At last he had the plump, nutritious proof of Johnson’s fallibility and fundamental ordinariness. But on another he felt mocked by the hollowness of his triumph, for the proof was so tenuous – no more than hearsay, all too easily dismissed as mere spite – and in any case, after such a long interval, who would remember the justifying details? The broken-backed boy had been, what? Eighteen? Twenty? Modest calculated and realized the affair must have happened soon after his own arrival in the village and first involvement in the parish.