A Perfectly Good Man (12 page)

All this reminded Dorothy of her own childhood in all the same places and made her glad that they were far too poor even to consider wrenching Carrie away from these local friendships to send her to a private school in town when the time came. Grateful though Dorothy was to her education in Penzance, the process of being sent to St Clare’s, where girls with accents were encouraged to lose them and where she was certainly the only pupil in her year who had grown up among miners’ daughters, had opened a rift between her and her Pendeen friends at the worst possible age, a process it had proved impossible to reverse.

There were women she often met in the lanes or at the shop or at the school gates with whom she used to play, swap secrets and make serious promises, who now greeted her cheerily enough but maintained a formal distance, turning back from greeting her to chat amongst themselves, with the friends who had never wavered. Quite possibly Carrie was befriending their children too by now and Dorothy was determined to allow those friendships to endure; any shortfall in Carrie’s education could always be made up for at home.

Dorothy’s other consolation, in a very quiet way, was God. Shortly before Carrie’s birth she had given up the Sunday School to an old schoolfriend of hers recently married to a policeman. Tabby Morris was eager and less encumbered. Dorothy had always guiltily thought that Sunday School and the excuse it gave to miss the sermon and the larger part of the Eucharist service suited her, that she could be busily useful in another room rather than quietly, even passively, contemplative in church, but something had shifted within her in becoming a mother and she found herself noticing and feeling the meaning of words she had long been reciting with her mind unengaged. Once or twice Barnaby persuaded her to read a lesson now but she hated that, hated standing up in front of everyone else and being the only one speaking. What she loved, she discovered, was prayer and an unaccustomed stillness that came over her as she knelt and covered her eyes and either murmured familiar words or focused her thoughts as a speaker directed.

She also loved Barnaby’s sermons. He always worked on them in his study very early on Sunday mornings after waking her with a cup of tea. He never discussed them with her or seemed to fret about them and she enjoyed the element of surprise on the occasions where she could recognize how some incident from the preceding week had prompted a particular subject. She had not great experience – the only other preachers she had heard were the old vicar she had grown up with, Father Philip, and their occasional guests – but she suspected that Barnaby’s sermons were relatively simple. They invariably took a text from one of the day’s readings or its psalm and, almost invariably, they had the effect of gently opening that text out so that she found herself understanding it better, or feeling a better identification with it. This was especially true when a reading threw up one of the Bible’s odder or less comforting moments – like one of Christ’s harsher pronouncements about separating child from parent, or one of the old Testament heroes’ less edifying exploits. His sermons were never long and sometimes they were very short indeed but involved significant pauses in which he directed everyone to think about or imagine something before he continued. He was, she came to realize, unlike most priests in his use of silence. The idea that sprang to mind when one thought
priest
was of someone talking, probably too much, of someone imposing his voice on one. Yet to conjure up Barnaby’s priesthood, his sermons or his services, was to remember the quality of their silences.

He was strongly against missionaries who sought to convert people away from an existing religion. This had been a cause of some conflict when he first took on his post, because one of the more forceful members of the PCC was of the saving the heathen mind-set and for some years money had been regularly sent to a mission specifically for the conversion of Muslims in Paris. Barnaby put a stop to that and he encouraged donations to missions whose emphasis lay on practicalities, improvement of sanitation, housing, education. He fostered connections with a mission in Sudan, where his sister Alice had died.

One of his projects supported a beleaguered nun who focused on the rescuing of street children in Hong Kong from labour or worse. Sister Bernard was an old-school letter writer and responded to each year’s cheque with four sides of closely spaced onion skin. She knew the Penzance area, having passed part of her long-ago girlhood at Porthcurno, where her father worked for Cable and Wireless, and she took an overseas subscription to
The Cornishman
so as to know a little about the lives of the people supporting her work and to follow the fortunes of the Cornish Pirates, of whom she was a surprisingly passionate fan.

One day she wrote out of the blue for once, and not in acknowledgement of a donation. She was desperately worried about the plight of children, many of them only babies, in the refugee camps set up in the colony for the Vietnamese fleeing the regime in their homeland. The first wave of Vietnamese refugees, fleeing war, had tended to be better off, often well-educated and with the skills, including languages, necessary to help an immigrant negotiate their legal and social way into a new culture. Now, however, the refugees were fleeing the oppression following the hostilities and were coming from the other end of the social scale, taking incredible risks and often spending whatever savings they had simply to escape in criminally overcrowded boats. Unlike the earlier waves of refugees, these arrived with almost nothing to pave their way into a new life. Many died in trying to make the journey, leaving orphans behind them. Other orphans were quite possibly not parentless at all but simply burdens their mothers could not bear or children of rape. Sister Bernard was having the greatest difficulty finding new homes for these children in Hong Kong, whether in families or already crowded orphanages. So she was writing to everyone she knew, literally everyone in her address book, in search of people prepared to take them in. Margaret Thatcher was limiting the numbers of refugee immigrants the UK would accept, but an adopted child would not have refugee status. Through relentless lobbying of airlines and Hong Kong and Kowloon companies, Sister Bernard had the funding to see any adoptees escorted safely to Heathrow, so now she needed willing families at the long flight’s end. Characteristically frank, she enclosed a mixed assortment of available children, little photographs accompanied by whatever scant biographical details she had procured.

‘We should,’ Barnaby said, ‘shouldn’t we?’ at once invoking their ethical responsibility and passing the onus of decision to Dorothy. ‘At least, I think we should be thinking about it.’

He left the letter and photographs where she could see them and of course Dorothy looked them over and was instantly drawn in to the terse, terrible dramas they suggested. They were not all adorable – a couple were particularly plain – and several were quite old, old enough at six or seven to be traumatized and to arrive with a catalogue of challenges for their new parents. But she found herself returning to a one-year-old boy with a winning grin and black hair standing in a tuft.
Parents Unknown
, his notes said.
Found in hold of boat
. So either his mother had died during the dreadful voyage and been thrown overboard or had fallen overboard alive and drowned or, saddest of all, had tucked her baby into what she hoped was a safe place so as to brave her new life unencumbered. Dorothy thought of Carrie at that age, her clinginess, the difficulty of setting her down anywhere for long without having to unpick the tight grasp of her little fingers unless she was asleep. She could not begin to imagine simply putting down a baby and walking away.

‘I think this one,’ she told Barnaby at lunch. ‘Him. PL. He’s smiling. I like his face, don’t you?’

‘A boy?’

‘Yes. Then we’d have one of each.’

‘You’re sure, though?’

‘Well … Would you rather have another girl?’

‘No. I meant are you sure about adopting?’

‘I don’t really know,’ she told him. ‘Yes. I think so. And as you said, we should. There are so many children in need of homes. We should probably all be adopting.’

‘Yes. And you think a Vietnamese will cope growing up here?’

‘He won’t be Vietnamese. By the time he’s old enough to know what’s what, he’ll be as Cornish as Carrie!’

He came round the table to hold her and kiss the top of her head, so that she felt a flush of answering warmth within her and thought,
Yes. The right decision. A good decision. We love each other and we will love him
.

After consulting the unfamiliar international section at the front of the phone book to ascertain the time difference with Hong Kong, which turned out to be eight hours, they worked out that Sister Bernard might not yet have gone to bed. They telephoned. Barnaby did the talking, Dorothy at his side. It was a pet hate of his to have someone chipping in or calling out things when he was on the telephone, so she had to clutch the back of his chair and simply hope Sister Bernard was giving him the information he wasn’t requesting. When he said, ‘Good. Oh good. That’s excellent news. So what do we do next?’ she realized her blood was humming in her ears.

PL stood for his Vietnamese name, which his mother had written on a card tucked into his bedding. Phuc Lan. Neither of them was given to swearing and when Barnaby said the first name he pointedly pronounced it to rhyme with book. ‘He’d probably need an English name anyway,’ he said, ‘to help him fit in here. Phuc really would be impossible. He’d be teased to death.’

‘So can we have him?’

‘Well nobody has moved to adopt him yet. And the period has passed during which his relations can claim him. Bernard will set things in motion at her end. We’ll be sent a heap of paperwork to sign and so on. She was most insistent that we’re committed to nothing until we sign the papers and send them back, and she wanted us to feel free to show them to a solicitor first.’

‘But we want him, don’t we?’

‘Don’t we?’

‘Well I think so!’ And they laughed and kissed and a giddy excitement came over them.

She told Carrie that evening as she was seeing her to bed. Carrie was confused at first then seemed a little doubtful. ‘Are you pleased?’ she asked Dorothy.

‘Well yes. I’ve always wanted a brother for you.’ Dorothy showed her his picture and she examined it closely, frowning. ‘He looks happy,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Why did you choose him?’

Dorothy wondered. ‘He was smiling. He chose us really. And he’s still only a baby so it should be easier for us all to adjust than if he was older.’

‘Does he speak English?’

‘He won’t speak anything much yet. But he’ll learn English the same way you did.’

‘What’ll we call him?’

‘You have a think and let us know. He’ll be your brother as well as our son.’

Dorothy had worried about how to tell other people. The village was no problem. Now that Carrie knew, Carrie told her friends who told their mothers and soon diffident, slightly confused congratulations were being offered. Her own mother was harder.

‘What do you want to do that for?’ was her immediate, so most honest response. Once she heard that Barnaby, who could do no wrong these days, thought it was right, she changed tack and decided the baby was an object of pity. ‘Poor little thing,’ she said whenever she looked at his picture. (Dorothy had made everyone copies to assist in the bonding process even before the baby arrived.) ‘Poor little monkey.’ Like any farmer’s wife, she couldn’t help her dynastic fantasies and, just as a daughter was not the same, neither was an adopted, Vietnamese son. Dorothy thought it best not to tell her he was called Phuc.

Paperwork came from Hong Kong and London and, a few weeks later, a phone call from Sister Bernard, borrowing a tame banker’s phone line, told them that all the formalities were complete and they had a date for the baby’s arrival. Happily this was the week after Easter, so both Carrie and Barnaby would be on holiday.

They left her mother at home but took Carrie and travelled up on the sleeper to Paddington, which in itself was an adventure and a new experience for all three of them. Dorothy did not sleep. She had Carrie softly snoring in the bunk above her and found that every time the train braked, she rolled towards the void on her right and was wide awake again. Barnaby had opted to save them money by spending the night in a seat in an ordinary carriage, but then he had the enviable gift of being able to sleep anywhere, seemingly at will.

So she contented herself with simply lying there in the semi-darkness left by the blue glow of the compartment’s nightlight, preparing herself. She imagined him flying across the world to find her, imagined the small, hungry warmth of him, the scent of his hair, the feel of his little hands. She had brought along changes of clothes for him, nappies (because she had no idea how advanced his potty training would be), warm layers because, coming from Hong Kong and the fug of an airplane, his own clothes would almost certainly not be warm enough. She had knitted him a little hat – on the large side because she had no idea how large he would be. All these and a bottle and a selection of baby food were packed into Carrie’s old pushchair, which Dorothy had retained as evidence of hope. She could reach out and touch it where she lay, for it filled half the scant floor space beside her bunk. She thought of the photograph and imagined him in the pram looking back at her, smiling, yawning, asking for her.

She slept eventually, at some point in the night when the train came to a halt somewhere, and she had convoluted dreams, all anxiety, in which she was not allowed to take the baby from his Chinese escort’s arms at the airport because she could not name him. In the dream he knew who she was and was holding out his hands to her and screaming but the officials and his stern escort wouldn’t allow her to step forward and take him because no name she came up with matched what they had written down. Part of the reason the dream was so unsettling was that her dreaming self knew they were in the right, that she was unfit and unprepared to claim him.