A Perfectly Good Man
Page 35
‘You should have told me,’ Prof said. ‘I could have …’
‘You couldn’t have afforded the price I needed, and anyway, I couldn’t have stood being bailed out by my baby brother.’
‘Well I think it’s terribly sad,’ the Buttercluck said. ‘I’d always imagined Alice getting married from here. Four hundred years.’
‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Clutterbuck. I’m well aware how long the family has lived here and how I’m letting the side down yet again.’
‘I didn’t mean,’ she started to protest and then everyone seemed to be speaking at once.
All the horrible atmosphere that had been there when they first arrived came rushing back tenfold and all the air seemed sucked from the room. Barnaby jumped up, upsetting a coffee cup across a copy of The Burlington Magazine. His hands shook trying to right it and the little spotted thing whirled to the carpet where it broke neatly in two. Everyone stopped shouting.
‘That was an antique, Barny,’ Alice said softly.
‘Clumsy oaf,’ said Prof.
Mr Ewart swiftly stooped to scoop up the pieces and mop any coffee spill with his spotless handkerchief. It was like the ones with B for Barnaby Alice had given him for Christmas which he kept feeling he must save as they were for best, which meant never blowing your nose on them or mopping up coffee.
Barnaby knew he should apologize. Like everything in the house, the coffee cup had been chosen for its beauty. But all he could think to say, looking at Uncle James’s kind, ravaged face was, ‘I don’t want you to die. It’s not fair,’ which he knew was a stupid, childish thing to say, an irrational, sentimental thing. As he ran from the room, dodging footstools and startling Uncle James’s elderly whippet, he heard the Buttercluck say, ‘Too much sunshine and rich food. We should probably be going …’
Barnaby knew only that he needed to get outside, to breathe freely again and hide his shame. He went out the way he had come in and sat on the stone bench near the fig tree and the wasps. He hated making scenes or losing his temper. It was like running up a flight of stairs to find only a blank wall in the way; the only option was an ignominious return. Luckily Prof and the Buttercluck’s way of punishing such behaviour was to ignore one completely for an hour or so, which ironically was all Barnaby wanted just now. He was thinking he might creep out to the car and wait obediently on its back seat in the punishing heat when Uncle James came out to join him.
‘Come,’ he said, and held out a huge hand. He led Barnaby out of the courtyard and around the side of the house.
‘I’m so very sorry about the coffee cup,’ Barnaby managed at last. ‘Was it a special one?’
‘It was rather. It was a Caughley one that came with the house. But you know what? It couldn’t matter less. It’s only stuff. And I’ll give you a tip in life. Never collect china or glass in sets, just collect individual pieces you like. That way there are no obvious gaps to make you sad or cross when things break. Come. I want to show you something.’ He dropped Barnaby’s hand but steered him with an arm across his shoulders instead. His arm felt dense and immensely comforting.
They stopped beneath an oriel window. ‘There,’ he said. ‘My favourite rose in the entire garden.’ He gestured to a rose whose colour was somewhere between purple, red and black, if that were possible. The curling petals looked like something very expensive and soft – velvet, perhaps. ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain. Isn’t it lovely? Go on. Sniff it.’
The scent was as good as the colour. Barnaby felt he was seeing a rose properly for the first time. Its glossy leaves with their purply new growth, the elegantly lime-green bark with barely a thorn on it, the luxurious flowers that grew in ready-made bunches as if offering themselves to one’s hand. What possible purpose could such spendthrift beauty serve? ‘Why is it your favourite?’ he asked.
‘Oh. Apart from the colour, which is even better than Nuits de Young, it’s that it performs this well even on a north wall where it gets only indirect sun. In fact it actually seems to prefer it. It should have stopped flowering weeks ago but just look at it! Marvellous. I liked it so much I was greedy and planted two more out in the sunshine and they didn’t do nearly so well and looked all scorched and sad. Here.’ He took a small pair of secateurs from his jacket pocket and cut a perfect, half-open bud which he handed to Barnaby. ‘You can either put it in a glass on your bedside table and enjoy it as it opens and dies or you can squeeze it in a big book between two sheets of blotting paper, the way mad Victorian spinsters did. Choice is yours. Barnaby, dear, I’m sorry about the house.’
‘I don’t care about the house.’
‘Oh. Good.’
‘It’s only stuff. I care about you.’
‘Yes, well, I’m sorry about me too. I might go on for ages.’
‘But you might not.’
‘No. But I don’t mind so I don’t think you should. Don’t tell Mrs Butterfuck but we’re not alone.’
‘God, you mean?’
‘Of course. Call it what you will. I look at a flower like that, or those birds swooping over the grass. And I know everything is going to be all right. All will be well. Walk with me. We’ve hardly talked. Are you surviving?’
‘I start boarding school next week.’
‘Hurrah. Is it hurrah?’
Barnaby nodded.
‘You’ll be a bit homesick at first, even for Mrs Clutterbuck, but that soon passes. I’d say write to me but I’m a hopeless correspondent.’
‘I’ll write to Alice.’
‘A much better idea. And Barnaby?’
‘Yes?’
‘Please don’t feel you always have to be good. Sometimes you’re so good it hurts to watch you. Now, come along. The others will be waiting and your father will worry I’m corrupting you with my dying breath.’
Sure enough, Alice and Mr Ewart met them as they returned to the side of the house. Uncle James kissed Alice seriously on the forehead, said, ‘Dear girl,’ and hugged her so warmly Barnaby knew they would have had a private conversation earlier.
Mr Ewart discreetly handed him his pants when no one was looking. ‘Still warm from the Aga rail,’ he said kindly as Barnaby thanked him and tucked them quickly into his pocket.
Sure enough, he was ignored on the drive home, even by Alice, but that suited him. He tucked the rose stem carefully into the map pocket on the back of Prof’s seat, then pretended to be asleep while his head swam with thoughts of what stayed and what slipped away, of death and renewal. And of the distinct possibility of God, who, having been nowhere and nothing when they set out that morning, suddenly seemed to be glowing out from every surface and every idea, from the quiet magic of the nine times table to the glitter of Mr Ewart’s secret muscles in the water.
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt thanks are due to the editorial skills of my first readers: Clare Reihill, Penelope Hoare, Patrick Ness, Mark Adley, Richard Betts and Caradoc King.
I am indebted to the Manussis siblings for tweaking my Greek endearment,
to the Venerable Roger Bush, the Reverend Prebendary Dr John May and the Reverend Stephen Coles for their patient assistance with matters ecclesiastical and theological,
to Sutton Taylor for guiding me through the process of making lustreware,
to Simon Ewart for the inspiring muddy walk and the old photograph of Pendeen Manor,
to Jo Martin for the hours of legal help regarding assisted suicide and standard procedure,
to Josephine Warburton and Cyril Honey of Geevor Tin Mine Museum’s archive for letting me plunder their fascinating hours of recordings and personal testimonies,
to Jane Finemore and Simon Clews for putting me right on the geographical niceties of Melbourne addresses,
to the wry wisdom of Sarah Meyrick’s Married to the Ministry and Noel Streatfeild’s A Vicarage Family,
and, most especially, to the Reverend Alan Rowell, the real, and surely spotless, vicar of Pendeen and Morvah: two lovely churches I hope the reader will now w
ish to visit.
Patrick Gale
Penzance, October 2011
Other Books by Patrick Gale
The Aerodynamics of Pork
Kansas in August
Ease
Facing the Tank
Little Bits of Baby
The Cat Sanctuary
Caesar’s Wife
The Facts of Life
Dangerous Pleasures
Tree Surgery for Beginners
Rough Music
A Sweet Obscurity
Friendly Fire
Notes fron an Exhibition
The Whole Day Through
Gentleman’s Relish
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
London W6 8JB
www.4thestate.co.uk
A PERFECTLY GOOD MAN. Copyright © Patrick Gale 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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The right of Patrick Gale to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HB ISBN 978-0-00-731347-1
TPB ISBN 978-0-00-744242-3
Quotation from Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King © 1943, reproduced by kind permission of David Higham Associates
Quotation from U. A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Atlas’, from From Me to You: Love Poems by U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey © 2007, reproduced by kind permission of Dr Rosie Bailey
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-746706-8
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Auhor’s Note
Lenny at 20
Dorothy at 24
Barnaby at 60
Modest Carlsson at 39
Barnaby at 52
Dorothy at 34
Barnaby at 40
Carrie at 11
Barnaby at 29
Modest Carlsson at 55
Nuala at 36
Jim at 12
Barnaby at 21
Lenny at 14¾
Carrie at 35
Barnaby at 16
Modest Carlsson at 75
Phuc at 27
Nuala at 56
Barnaby at 8
Author’s Acknowledgments
Other Books by Patrick Gale
Copyright
About the Publisher