A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  The two families were lingering to take photographs of each other outside the church porch. Tabby stayed inside to take off her robes, possibly anxious lest this unorthodox occasion see her and her career martyred on YouTube. Modest Carlsson came up to her fairly shining with an odd sort of triumph in his face.

  ‘Lovely to see them so happy,’ he said. ‘But I can’t help wondering what the bishop would say if he—’

  Tabby cut him short, not exactly clicking her fingers but giving that impression, and something in her sudden air of authority reminded Nuala that her husband had long served on the local police force. ‘Could I have a quiet word?’ she said. She led him to the very back of the little church, where a curtain masked the brooms and dustpans and the ringing chamber. Nuala didn’t like to watch too closely, as it was faintly embarrassing, like watching a child being dressed down by its parent, but whatever Tabby said had a peculiar effect. He seemed to shrink in on himself, if that were possible, and age visibly. He pushed brusquely out through the laughing little crowd outside and hurried away along the road. Nuala heard Barnaby call out a merry, Bye, Modest – thanks for coming! There were curlews calling too. Another sign of winter looming.

  She caught Tabby’s eye as she followed her to the door. ‘He looked as if someone had walked on his grave,’ she told her. ‘Whatever did you say to him?’

  ‘Oh. Nothing much,’ Tabby said, gesturing for her to go out ahead of her. ‘Just words to the effect that God knows us for who we really are. And calls us by our true names.’

  BARNABY AT 8

  Barnaby watched from the shade of a wonderfully red tree he had recently learnt was a Japanese maple, as Mr Ewart, Uncle James’s secretary, emerged in his bright blue swimming trunks from the summerhouse, dived into the pool and swam an entire length underwater. The transformation was startling. Dressed, he seemed somehow always to be apologizing for himself, slouching in corners, not meeting one’s eye, mumbling when asked a question – all the things Prof and the Buttercluck said Barnaby must never do – yet undressed, he was revealed as utterly confident and a kind of god. He had muscles, which was unexpected because he did no heavy work – he did no work at all, the Buttercluck said – and his body was like the statues around Uncle James’s garden, only with all its limbs.

  Barnaby liked Mr Ewart, if only because he sensed he despised the Buttercluck, but was shy of him and never sure what to say beyond how do you do. Mr Ewart occupied a ambiguous position in Uncle James’s household similar to the role of the Buttercluck in their own; officially a sort of employee and yet somehow not, or more than: a servant who often overruled the master. This, a reverence for music, and their big, long noses, were about the only ways in which Barnaby’s father and uncle were alike.

  Mr Ewart swam a couple more lengths, doing proper crawl, putting his face in the water as Barnaby never could and snatching breaths under his left armpit. He seemed hardly to splash at all. He moved, Barnaby thought enviously, like a sort of beautiful pike.

  They were there for the day – Barnaby, his father, the Buttercluck and Barnaby’s big sister, Alice – because it was Uncle James’s birthday. But they were there for other reasons also and the air in the lovely old house was so tense with the things that might be thought but must never be spoken that he had jumped at the suggestion he run and play in the garden before lunch.

  ‘Swim too!’ Mr Ewart called.

  ‘I can’t, really,’ Barnaby called back. ‘Not yet. I’ll be learning when I start boarding school.’

  ‘So learn now. It’s not deep. You’ll be quite safe.’

  ‘I put out my swimming things but Mrs Clutterbuck said not to bring them as it’s September.’

  ‘But it’s boiling still! Silly cow …’

  Barnaby couldn’t help grinning at such forbidden language.

  Mr Ewart grinned back. ‘Swim in your pants. They’ll soon dry in the sun.’ And he carried on doing lengths.

  Barnaby watched a little longer. He was never bad. His role was to be as unobtrusive and as little bother to anyone as possible. This seemed to be getting harder, not easier, as he got older, which was one of the reasons he was secretly excited about starting boarding school next week. He hurried to the summerhouse before anyone might come and stop him, took off all his clothes but his pants, folded them neatly onto a chair the way Mr Ewart had done, then hurried to the pool.

  The cool of it was delicious after the sticky heat of the drive from Bristol. He couldn’t do anything like the crawl yet and hated putting his face underwater but he did the doggy paddle Alice had taught him last time they went to the Buttercluck’s caravan at Combe Martin, and managed one, snorting length to about six of Mr Ewart’s.

  They paused side by side at the other end, Barnaby to recover his breath, Mr Ewart simply to be kind. He had rather pronounced, caramel-coloured nipples, which fascinated Barnaby as his own were barely there and baby pink, but he knew better than to stare so concentrated on the fun of letting his legs float to the surface in front of him while he kept his arms hooked on the silver rail. It wasn’t like other pools. It was dark blue, with a silver moon and stars on the bottom. Uncle James had promised that one day he should see it after dark when it was all lit up, but they never seemed to visit at night, only for these lunches.

  ‘Mr Ewart?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is it true Uncle James is going to die soon?’ It had seemed safe enough to ask this, since Mr Ewart was a secretary and so not people. But Barnaby saw a quick frown crumple his face for a moment.

  ‘What gave you that idea?’

  ‘Alice said. She said I wasn’t to tell people.’

  ‘Your sister’s very clever but she’s still a schoolgirl,’ Mr Ewart said rather sharply. ‘She doesn’t know everything.’

  ‘No. Of course. Sorry.’

  ‘But he’s not well, no. He may not have very long.’

  ‘Is it his liver?’ Barnaby asked, chancing his luck with something he had heard the Prof say to the Buttercluck.

  Mr Ewart looked away. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Among other things … If you leave your pants off when you dress again, I’ll get them dry for you,’ he added briskly and dived elegantly back into another length underwater.

  Barnaby felt himself dismissed. His teeth chattered as he hurried back to the summerhouse, enjoying the spongy grass and daisies under bare feet. There was a pile of towels, which were delightfully plump and soft, not like their hard old ones at home, which were good when you had an itchy back but never a comfort to wrap about you like these were. Dressing without pants on, which felt all the more wildly naughty for being undetectable, he wrung out his pants inside a towel, the way Alice had shown him, and laid them on the mosaic-topped table in the warm sunlight where Mr Ewart could not miss them.

  Looking at Mr Ewart’s neatly folded things – his disguise, as Barnaby thought of them now – he wished he hadn’t said anything about Uncle James not being well. It had somehow turned Mr Ewart into a servant when he had perhaps been about to become a friend. The desire to unsay things, he was learning, was as bad as the awful panic that could descend when something important was lost.

  Early that summer he had managed to drop the Buttercluck’s car keys somewhere on a busy street in Wells. Her anger and fuss, the waiting for the AA man, the very expensive process of getting more keys made at the garage, were as nothing compared to the agony of the few minutes before he had to tell her, when his only, hopeless wish had been that he could unpick time and find himself back at the moment when she so uncharacteristically entrusted them to him so he could wait in the car while she slipped into the chemist’s for whatever it was she didn’t want him to see her buy.

  He touched Mr Ewart’s sky-blue shirt. You could touch things, or people, very, very slightly and find a kind of tingling there in between, like electricity. This was something he hadn’t shared, not even with Alice, whom he loved and trusted, because the rest of his household had such deep scorn for anything that wasn’t
scientific. His father, Prof, was far too polite ever to call anyone a silly moo, even behind their backs, but you could tell when he wanted to, when he really despised someone, because he would call them irrational or sentimental, the two rudest words in his armoury.

  Leaving the summerhouse, glancing in vain for a parting peace gesture from Mr Ewart, who continued to swim, oblivious, he passed through the high copper beech hedges of the pool garden, with its clusters of ornamental trees just entering on their autumn splendour and crossed over the herbaceous walk to take the other, parallel route back to the house. This was bare by contrast, containing no flowers at all, only shades of green that were more refreshing on a hot day than the blazing variety of flowerbeds, and a severe, ornamental rill, slowly running from one end of the green corridor to the other, creating an optical illusion that the house lay at the top of a gentle slope when the approach was, in fact, perfectly level.

  Enjoying the novel sensation of no pants under his trousers, he did what he always did on visits here, jumping back and forth across the rill a few times, then walking with one foot on either side of it, then staring at the water closely as he walked in an effort to convince his brain it flowed by gravity and that he was indeed walking uphill.

  Uncle James’s house was special. It was nearly four hundred years old and dated from when an enterprising ancestor, Olive Palmer, acquired land and barns off Malmesbury Abbey when it was dissolved by Henry VIII. Palmers and then Johnsons had always lived there and always would and, although Alice had brought home to him that this was something never to be spoken of, as his childless uncle’s only nephew, he would live there himself one day. Prof would probably live there first. He wasn’t younger by anything like the nine years that divided Barnaby from Alice, but there was nothing wrong with his liver and the Buttercluck maintained him with a care like that he lavished on his Alvis.

  Their own house, in Bristol, was attractive enough but it was Victorian and, even in the gloomy heart of its shrubbery, you could always hear the grumble of traffic. The Buttercluck had a sort of flat on the top floor, where she practised her French horn, but took all her meals with them, which only made sense as she cooked them too. She had been with them all his life. Alice said she had moved in to help when their mother was dying.

  She had met Prof in the amateur orchestra in which they both played on Wednesday nights. She played the French horn and Prof the cello, so they would have had ample scope for eye contact before they actually got around to speaking. She worked as a dental technician on Whiteladies Road as well as keeping house. Prof was a research chemist in a big laboratory near Swindon where he experimented on lots of animals. He had taken Barnaby there once and explained that the tanks of mice and puppies and kittens were not pets and wouldn’t live long but were giving their lives to help mankind.

  God was sentimental nonsense, a primitive myth we had long outgrown, but man was glorious. Prof and Buttercluck were agreed on this and spoke of Mankind in a voice similar to the one the lone religious teacher in his primary school used when talking of Our Lord. On Sundays, when other boys and girls were made to go to church, Prof or the Buttercluck or both expected Barnaby, and Alice if she were home, to join them on visits to monuments of Mankind’s achievements. Art galleries, museums (especially of science, engineering or industry – Barnaby’s least favourite subjects), canals, viaducts, huge Victorian stations, castles and even, once, a mine had all been visited and wondered at. Even today, when lunch had broken the usual routine, Prof had pulled over en route to make them admire some old ditch patterns in some lowlying country. Churches and cathedrals, however imposing, were somehow mentally edited out of the picture since, for all the brilliance of their construction, they were built in the name of irrationality and thus represented a Blind Alley in mankind’s glorious ascent. There were several big churches near their road in Bristol. Were it not for the energy the Buttercluck put into complaining about the noise their bell ringers made, Barnaby might have believed she was unaware of their existence.

  Alice didn’t believe in God either but she was characteristically calm about it, so more persuasive. She simply said there was a scientific explanation for absolutely everything that happened in our lives and that explanations were reassuring and made sense in ways that religion wasn’t and didn’t. She cited Darwin so frequently that Barnaby suspected she had a crush on him. Science, she said, had never been used to persecute people. Unless you counted the Nazis, which was pseudoscience. And while science had its heretics, it didn’t burn them but simply trounced them with fact and meticulous research. At the moment she wanted to be an economist when she grew up. There was nothing wrong in the world, she said, that might not be righted by redistribution of wealth and resources, and the steady erosion of religion and the strife it caused. As she was the nearest thing he had to a mother, he worshipped her and sought to emulate her in this and all things.

  Barnaby bravely echoed her reasoning in the playground at school and even in the classroom occasionally – his primary school having been chosen for its freethinking philosophy and lack of church affiliation – but he knew he could never convince as she could and suspected it was down to his weakness at maths. When he was stuck on his nine times table for weeks even after Prof pointed out the way every number in it added up to nine and how one numeral went up a stage while the other went down one, he saw how the difference in him was confirmed for them. Prof said he was a changeling because he had no aptitude for science and was given to dreams and pondering. When he protested to Alice, ‘But I’m only eight! I might change!’ she pointed out that she could do mental arithmetic for fun before she could read and was doing basic algebra by his age.

  ‘But that’s all right,’ she said kindly. ‘You can be a theorist when you grow up. We can’t all be practical. The world will always need men of vision too.’

  The gong sounded, which meant he was already late. He sprinted along the length of the rill, across a courtyard at the house’s rear where the fig tree’s late fruit had fallen on the flagstones and gathered drunken wasps around it, and into the little lavatory at one end of the dining room corridor where he quickly pissed, washed his hands and tidied his hair with a wet nailbrush that was a bit soapy.

  ‘Welcome, wanderer,’ Uncle James called out. They were already seated at the round dining table, even Mr Ewart, who must have slipped in by the other route while Barnaby was daydreaming. ‘Sit by me and tell me everything.’

  This was by way of a joke, since Barnaby was always peculiarly tongue-tied with Uncle James. He liked him, though, his immaculate clothes and florid, ruined face and the way he asked questions whereas Prof made statements.

  He sat in the tapestried dining chair left vacant between James and the Buttercluck and did as the Buttercluck indicated, smothering his lap in a big, white napkin.

  ‘Have you been swimming?’ she asked, turning her horrified stare on him.

  ‘I wet my hair just now to tidy it,’ he said, which wasn’t a lie, and remembered to fill her water glass before he filled his own. Mr Ewart caught his eye and winked quickly. ‘Why are your roses still flowering, Uncle James?’ Barnaby asked. ‘When ours have all stopped?’

  ‘I deadhead every day from June till October,’ James told him. ‘And have no useful occupation.’

  Uncle James was a very good cook and grew all his own vegetables. Every time something was praised, from the little cheese mousses to the cold tarragon chicken to the pudding he called mulberry tumble, the Buttercluck said, ‘You must give me the recipe,’ in a way that sounded less and less pleasant and James answered her, ‘Of course I will,’ and somehow you knew he wouldn’t. The grown-ups drank, of course, even Alice, since she was seventeen, which made them noisier and funnier than usual and even Barnaby was given a tiny antique glass of champagne so they could all toast James’s birthday.

  By the time they had left the table and crossed the hall to the drawing room for coffee, whatever tensions Barnaby had sensed when they arrive
d had evaporated. Mr Ewart was telling Alice stories that were making her smile and blush and Mrs Clutterbuck actually sat very close to Prof on a sofa, which was something she never did, at least not when Barnaby and Alice were present, and was actually giggling.

  But then Uncle James tapped his spoon on his coffee cup for silence. ‘Sorry to break in on the jollity,’ he said, ‘but there’s news I have to share with you and this is as good a time as any.’

  ‘James, are you sure …?’ Prof began, with a pointed glance at Barnaby but James went on.

  ‘Oh absolutely. This is something the young things should hear too and directly from me.’ It was strange. He never normally seemed the older brother because he was jollier than Prof and what the Buttercluck called frivolous, but now he seemed much the oldest and most serious person in the room. ‘This is, I’m afraid, the last time I can gather you all here for lunch,’ he said. ‘As you probably all know, I’ve not been well. What you probably didn’t know is that I’ve had increasing problems with money and the debts have got out of control. In the end I had no option but to sell up.’

  The Buttercluck drew in her breath so sharply Barnaby could hear it from the other end of the Persian rug between them.

  ‘Contracts on the house sale have been exchanged and Christie’s have sent down a team to do a valuation and draw up a catalogue for a contents sale next month. Obviously I’ll hang on to a few things, and there are a few good family bits that should eventually come to Alice and Barnaby. The plan is to move somewhere warm and cheap – Ibiza appeals – less stuffy than Madeira. And Mr Ewart has kindly agreed to come with me to, er, take care of things.’ He raised his coffee cup to Mr Ewart in a kind of tribute gesture but Mr Ewart was folding and refolding a truffle wrapper and not looking.