A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  His memory was usually pretty keen but he tried in vain to think of a single occasion when he had seen Johnson and Nuala together. He tried to picture the preposterous, pornographic scene, the tugging off of dog collar, bursting of buttons, her clayey handprints on his hot, demanding flesh, but was troubled to find that the only image that would linger was of the two of them sitting companionably on the sofa in the sitting room she had never shown him. For all the glaring differences in their spiritual lives, they were, he realized, extremely well suited. As a couple they would have been compellingly attractive, even impressive. A couple to bring forth striking, successful children, a couple to inspire coupling in others.

  Poor Dorothy, Modest thought. Dowdy, unbohemian Dorothy. Dorothy had never managed to conceal her distaste for and suspicion of him. She might have retained her husband in the flesh but she would surely have lost him in spirit, lost his true affection and respect. Poor Dorothy. Like the surprisingly unpolished country wife of an urbane politician. A maker of cakes not conversation. The fat cake-baker. He smiled to himself at Nuala’s bitter little label for her. Dorothy had eluded him until now, secure in her quiet sense of position, her deep roots in the place and the evident affection in which she was held by the parish.

  As if his thoughts had conjured her from the gathering evening, he saw her ahead of him as he entered the village. She was walking the same way as him, laden with bags that were probably stuffed with flower-arranging materials, raspy blocks of oasis, ugly, long-hoarded plastic vases retained from funeral offerings. He was an old man compared to her, seventy-five where he assumed she was at most in her early sixties, yet to watch her he felt vigorous by comparison. She had always walked as though weighted down. She had become quite fat, to the point where she seemed to belong to a different race from her husband and skinny, boyish daughter, but it ran deeper than that. She walked as though her flesh were denser that other people’s and, it struck him now, as though her troubles were more burdensome.

  Until he spotted her, his assumption had been that he was heading home to tea and toast and a quiet drink or two floated on a tide of bad television uncritically absorbed. But when he saw her a terrible idea took shape and acquired direction when she ducked up the lane that led to the church and the building everyone still called the vicarage although Johnson and his family had always lived elsewhere.

  He had the perfect excuse, in a load of surplus parish magazines, to turn that way too. If she went into the vicarage, well, then he had business there because he produced the newsletter in the parish offices on the ground floor. If she continued to the church, he could be on his way there to leave the magazines on the table at the church’s rear.

  She continued to the church and he slackened his pace, enjoying the sense of anticipation. He actively disliked this church these days, compared to its older sister in Morvah. He found its crenellated outer walls forbidding as he did the stretch of rocky land immediately above the steeply sloping graveyard. He had never known such a steep graveyard and couldn’t see it in rain without imagining corpse juices trickling downhill towards the church’s foundations. And the church itself was too high for its narrow width, to his mind, so that its dark stained beams seemed steep and unsafe. Then there was its air of cheerful community clutter, which to his way of thinking typified the bit of this, bit of that compromise that was at the heart of all that was misguided in twenty-first-century Anglicanism, the lack of rigour that would surely prove its undoing. There were times recently when he had seriously considered converting to Rome.

  There was no sign of her as he came in and he thought for a moment she might have slipped out again by the smaller door on the vicarage side. But then he heard a clatter from the vestry and realized that she was indeed unloading materials for the flower-arrangers. He busied himself at the bookstall table, removing the pile of the previous month’s magazine and setting up a neat stack of the new one. Then he tidied the other piles as he waited for her to emerge.

  He did not need to see her expression. He could tell from the cheerful effort she put into greeting him how little she wished to find him there.

  ‘Dorothy,’ he said and boldly reached out to take both her plump hands in his. ‘I’m so very sorry for all you’re going through.’

  ‘There’s no need. Honestly,’ she said, taking back her hands after giving his a quick squeeze, and adding in an echo of Nuala, ‘People have been so kind.’

  ‘Have they? Good. I’m glad, because, well, not everyone around here is … well … You know how people are and how they talk.’

  ‘My mother brought me up not to listen,’ she said stiffly. ‘Oh. Is that your new issue? I’d better take one for us. You’re so amazing, the way you still deliver it.’

  ‘At my age!’

  ‘Well … I didn’t mean …’

  ‘I think it’s the only thing that keeps me fit.’ He let his glance play over her pillowy silhouette. ‘I sometimes think I feel younger now than when I first moved here over twenty years ago.’

  ‘Really? That’s good. Ah well, Modest, I must hurry on. I try to walk everywhere instead of taking the car, but it does eat up the day.’

  She had turned away and, for a moment, he hated her.

  ‘I took a copy up to Nuala Barnes,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ A definite strain in her voice at that.

  ‘Well … Lenny always took one and she carried on out of force of habit.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I had no idea, Dorothy. I don’t think anyone did.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Lenny.’

  ‘Poor Len. Such a terrible thing. People didn’t realize but Barnaby was devastated.’ She was fiddling with the bookstall, untidying his neat piles in small ways.

  ‘Well he would be.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ She faced him again and for a moment her expression was openly hostile. He disgusted her but disgust was easier to bear than pity.

  ‘Dorothy, you’ve been so amazing. Standing by all this time, not speaking out even when the likeness between father and son was so clear to everybody. I just want you to know that, if ever sides had to be taken, I can think of several of us who would be on yours …’

  She made abruptly for the door. Put-downs were not in her repertoire. Merely to leave without saying goodbye was rude enough in her lexicon. But then she sank with a little gasp into one of the rear pews and hunched over. He thought she was crying at first but as he drew closer he realized she was having some sort of attack. Her face was pale and sweaty and she was clutching her upper arm and panting.

  ‘Dorothy?’ he said softly. ‘Shall I …? Would you like me to fetch help?’

  There was a scene in that play, The Little Foxes, where the marvellous anti-heroine watched on, gloating, as her disapproving banker husband slumped in a heart attack on the stairs before her. It had been shocking even when played a couple of years ago by an amateur group in Newlyn with dodgy Southern accents and even wobblier sets. But thrilling too. He would love to have found such murderous presence of mind, to have watched, perhaps even taking a seat in a pew alongside Dorothy, talking half-audible horrors as she slipped away.

  He was a coward, however. He was also alive with the unexpected buzz of being swept up in such a drama.

  ‘Stay right there,’ he told her with a nervous dab at her shaking shoulder. ‘I’m going next door to call for help.’ And he actually ran to the vicarage so that he could scarcely speak when he got there. One of the Women’s Refuge people was in the office talking as Brid Williams did something to the parish website.

  ‘We must phone for an ambulance,’ he told them so abruptly they must have thought it was for him. ‘No no,’ he went on, flapping a handkerchief. ‘I’ll do it. You go to church to be with her. It’s Dorothy!’

  ‘I’ll call Barnaby’s mobile,’ Brid said, fumbling with her phone as she hurried out.

  Modest called the ambulance, calmly gave the directions and his name and,
when he said he thought it was a heart attack, noted down their instructions for how best they could help Dorothy while waiting.

  He poured himself a large glass of water then took the instructions back to the church. Dorothy was dead by the time he got there. Brid Williams stopped trying to be brave the moment he arrived and sank against him, hooting with grief. By the time the ambulance screeched up Church Lane, too late of course, he felt positively heroic. Wise Modest. Good Modest!

  PHUC AT 27

  Fern had four sons by two previous partners. Aged from fourteen to seven, each of them had sport, music, family and social engagements, all of which required their being driven somewhere and collected again. On top of these Saturday obligations, there was always a long list of food shopping and some DIY to be done. Fern was an adept at compartmentalizing her boys’ needs as she would those of her social work clients. Every Friday night, once the younger ones had been seen off to bed, she sat at the kitchen table with a large glass of Pinot Grigio and her mobile and a list of Saturday’s obligations and doggedly drew up a timetable. Saturday’s arrangements would not have been possible without a second driver, since so many of them were not even near a bus route. When he wondered how she would have managed before she met him, he soon remembered the ex-partners who, however unreliable, would have been pressed into service.

  Fern’s weekends involved no churchgoing, she was an atheist, but it often seemed that children and their needs had taken the place of religious observance. The moral imperatives invoked were just as unanswerable.

  Being nearly fifteen years younger than her and coming into her life freighted with what, in the vernacular of her profession, could be called issues, he strove never to act like an extra son on her timetable or an extra client on her caseload. But today he might have to be both.

  The text was from Carrie, announced by the chorus from ‘Trelawny’, the ringtone he had always assigned her.

  Hi, Phuc,

  she wrote. (She was perhaps the only person in the world he would have permitted to continue to call him Jim or James, but she was positively pious in remembering never to do so.)

  Something really bad. Will B with U 11. Be home. OK? Good friend driving me now. Hope that’s OK.

  Love as ever. C. x.

  The Saturday breakfast table scene was just as chaotic and noisy and rushed as its weekday equivalent, just fractionally later in the morning. Fern was brokering a treaty between Tom and Flynn over who had the last of the orange juice but saw Phuc read the text and sensed in that way she had that something was up.

  ‘Carrie’s coming over,’ he said, careful to add nothing that would prompt too many questions from the boys.

  ‘Who’s Carrie?’ asked the youngest.

  ‘Phuc’s sister,’ Fern told him. ‘Great,’ she added. ‘When?’

  ‘Elevenish.’

  She tapped open the timetable on her mobile. ‘That’s fine,’ she said almost at once. ‘If you can take Thomas to drama club, I can do the pool run, then we both have a window until about one.’

  ‘Fine,’ he told her. ‘Good.’ But he had to leave the table.

  ‘Phuc?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he told her. He took his tea, he only drank white tea these days – fresh, delicious and totally unexciting – and wandered out to the hall, sipping absently, then swiftly shut himself in the downstairs loo to think.

  He was confronted by the hugely enlarged framed print Fern had made of a photograph of him. It was taken on a demonstration when the Archbishop of Canterbury had visited Exeter. Phuc looked impossibly young in it, although it was only a few years old, and was grinning at something off camera. His tight black tee-shirt displayed a bold version of the anti-litter logo with a crucifix upside down in a rubbish bin and he held a placard that read: If Jesus comes again, kill him properly! For whatever reason, the picture had been adopted spectacularly on Facebook for a while and ended up in The Guardian where Barnaby and Dot had seen it and been predictably upset, although not upset enough to contact him and tell him so. He had heard the details from Carrie.

  There were rapid steps in the hall. ‘OK! We’re off!’ Fern called out.

  ‘OK!’ he called back.

  ‘Tom’s drama’s at ten and Flynn needs to be at the station car park for nine-thirty.’

  ‘OK! See you!’

  He was not in love with Fern, nothing so destabilizing, but he liked her immensely and trusted her and she knew he was reliable in all the ways his predecessors hadn’t been. And, quite unpredictably, they were a good fit in bed, which helped. She was so busy and capable, so overworked, so bruised by her emotional history that he could not quite believe she had taken him on and, three years since moving in with her, still felt he must be on probation.

  His predecessors, the boys’ fathers, she presented as hollow reeds when the boys weren’t in earshot, and flattered him by comparison but he couldn’t help suspecting that, in some way, he conformed to the same type and fulfilled a need in her to rescue and rehabilitate hopeless cases.

  He was no longer a total wreck when they met. He had been clean for over a year. He had stuck with Narcotics Anonymous and somehow got himself back into the university to attain a practical qualification, as a social worker this time rather than aiming for anything so dangerously nebulous as completing his philosophy degree. They met when he was assigned to her unit for his work experience. She had been going through a messy divorce from partner number two and Phuc became a shoulder to cry on. She returned the favour by writing him a glowing report and nudging him to harness his demons, and draw on his now considerable experience as an NA sponsor, by becoming one of the city’s drugs counsellors. He was assigned to a rehab clinic but also regularly visited schools to scare children witless, which was easy, and to persuade teenagers there was nothing remotely glamorous about drug addiction, which was well-nigh impossible.

  So this was his new life, the rest of his life, he hoped. No longer the screwed-up adopted son of a Cornish vicar but a cool Vietnamese-American with sons of his own – in-a-way sons, he and Fern called them – whose affection and approval were coming to matter almost more to him than their mother’s.

  Carrie was the only link he maintained with his old life, and maintained implied more effort than he expended. His love for her was as uncomplicated as breath but expressing it, actually meeting her, was made hard by the weirdness of her still living with Dot and Barnaby. When he tried sharing this with his NA group, responding to a speaker whose talk on making amends to families had touched on conflict with his unaddicted siblings, a bunch of them took him aside afterwards and told him his whole understanding of parenthood was damaged by the knowledge that his own mother had rejected him as a baby. ‘That’s why you had to make your adoptive mother reject you too,’ one particularly irritating newcomer had said. But of course neither Dot nor Barnaby had ever rejected him. That was what was so hard to bear. The more Barnaby forgave him, the worse Phuc felt – until he simply had to make contact impossible.

  He had not seen either of them for eight years. He had returned from his gap year trip to Vietnam with a Speed habit as well as a Vietnamese name and a directionless rage at the disconnect between where he came from and where he had grown up. But when he behaved like a little shit when he returned to Pendeen that Christmas, still they forgave him, Barnaby writing a considered letter about Phuc’s childhood and actually asking Phuc to forgive any mistakes they had made and enclosing a maintenance cheque he knew they could ill afford.

  He didn’t go home for Easter, having the excuse of two holiday jobs, in a supermarket and a nightclub, badly needed to fund what was by now an ounce-a-week amphetamine habit. His debts spiralled. He was expelled from his hall of residence for repeatedly starting a fire in a wastepaper basket because he enjoyed the excitement of triggering the alarms and getting everyone out of bed and angry. He attended fewer and fewer philosophy lectures and his mood swings, paranoia and relentless cadging alienated all but his drug friends, who of
course were anything but friendly when judged in normal terms. Then he failed his first-year exams and celebrated the news by shooting up crystal he had scored behind the nightclub dump bins in exchange for sexual favours he elected to forget.

  The rush it gave him was like a rocket take-off after the fairground ride of Speed. It felt as though immortality were spreading through his veins, transforming him. For a few exhilarating minutes he became the sexiest, cleverest, happiest person he knew. Nothing could touch him. He could have anyone he wanted. Nobody mattered. He could kill. He was God.

  Luckily for him, it was a Friday night so there were police everywere.

  Dot came to the rescue through some characteristically convoluted Cornish Whispers – the daughter of a second cousin’s husband’s schoolfriend Betty … She appeared at his hospital bedside with bananas, which she remembered were one of his more innocent weaknesses. She asked no questions, passed no audible judgement, simply hugged him, loaded him into the terrible old car and drove him the two-and-a-half-hour journey back to the only cure she knew: home and family.

  He stayed a week, barely speaking, regained his strength, stole from her purse to buy insanely strong skunk from an old classmate’s hippie mother in St Just, defaced the walls of Morvah church, which he knew was Barnaby’s favourite, then hitched back to his Exeter squat, having first broken into the hippie mother’s greenhouse to steal the rest of her skunk to dry in the microwave and trade for the white powder he was craving.