A Perfectly Good Man (13 page)
Jolted awake as they started out of Bristol, or Reading, or whichever station’s siding they had been waiting in, she touched the pushchair for reassurance and thought about names. They had agreed that the right name would come to them the moment he was with them. She had seen the sense in this; she knew it was best not to form too many preconceptions but simply to ready her heart for him like a sort of nest. But now she found herself restlessly trying names on for size. Thinking it might be a good idea to retain his initials, she tried thinking of name combinations starting in PL. Philip. Patrick. Paul. Peter. Piers. Petroc. The Ps came easily enough but she found the finding of L names a worry as she could muster only Leo and Lionel and Leslie, none of which she liked. Relief came as she remembered Lawrence, but she rejected that almost at once for the nasty thought of Lawrence’s martyrdom, roasted on a grill. It was almost as bad as Blaise, ingeniously torn apart with metal combs. By the time the steward knocked on their door and passed in their breakfast trays, Dorothy was up and dressed and grateful for the brief diversion of a teapot and some biscuits and the need to rouse Carrie before they arrived into Paddington.
There were hours to kill before they had to be at Heathrow as the flight wasn’t due in until one thirty, and it seemed important to give Carrie attention too that day, so they took her for a walk around Kensington Gardens to see the Peter Pan statue and the Serpentine and the Albert Memorial, Albert Hall and Kensington Palace (from the outside, which cost nothing) as it was her first visit to London. Then they gave her a ride in the top of a double-decker bus back to South Kensington where there was the added thrill of a trip on the Underground out to Heathrow.
Dorothy was too embarrassed to admit that it was her first visit to London too and was careful not to betray her ignorance in the face of Barnaby’s blithe assumptions. She loved the park, marvelling at the towering size of the plane trees compared to the stunted blackthorn and hawthorn that passed for trees at home and the way they seemed able to grow equally huge when growing out of small holes in the pavements. But she found the noise and crowds on the streets oppressive and was glad when they were back in the relative quiet of a train but out of the frightening tunnels.
His escort was a tiny Chinese nurse, reassuringly nannyish in her white uniform and black cardigan and sensible shoes but not remotely stern. As instructed by Bernard, they had written out a large card with their surname on it, which Carrie was holding up as they waited at the barrier. The nurse shook hands all round, with a slight bow each time, introduced herself as Mary Thien and said, ‘And this is your little boy. Fast asleep because the journey has worn him out. And of course he’s eight hours ahead of you …’
He was tucked into a carrycot, furled in a blanket donated by Qantas. He looked immensely solemn in sleep – used as Dorothy was to his laughing photograph – and he was beautiful – why had she not expected that? – with a shock of jet black hair and tawny skin and a dimple in his chin. It was doubly astonishing that nobody wanted him and in the hour that followed the three of them were unusually quiet, awed by the shock of his physical perfection. Mary Thien noticed, it seemed, and joked, as they were completing the last pieces of paperwork in the immigration office, ‘Don’t worry. He won’t seem quite such a little Buddha in an hour or two. He’ll start crying soon enough.’
She would be flying back to Hong Kong in a few hours, she told them, but several of her cousins had come out from London to have an airport meal with her and help her pass the time. They weren’t to worry about her. ‘Off you go,’ she said, ‘with your little bundle of joy,’ and she had them pose with the carrycot propped up between them while she took a few photographs for Sister Bernard on the smallest camera Dorothy had ever seen. Then they all shook hands again, Carrie included, and she waved them on their way, a family of four suddenly.
The trip to the airport and back had taken longer than expected so they had to run across Paddington to catch their train home, Carrie shouting with laughter as Barnaby gave her a ride on her brother’s pushchair, and they clambered into their carriage only just in time. The journey back to Penzance took hours, of course, so inevitably he needed changing and feeding. Waking up, he clearly wondered where he was and who these strangers were and began to cry. Dorothy carried him to the lavatory where she changed his nappy. He calmed down after that, especially when she fed him, and he began to take them in, staring at each in turn. She held him for a while, then Barnaby walked him up and down the carriage. But it was when she settled him on Carrie’s lap that he finally began to smile and gurgle. Perhaps he had spent so much time with other children recently that it was with them he felt most secure.
He was so attractive, so pet-like, that of course people kept stopping to admire him and inevitably some asked what he was called. ‘Phuc Lan,’ Barnaby told them. But after the third time he turned to Dorothy and said, ‘We have to give him another name.’
Dorothy told him about her experiments with PL combinations and he liked the idea of Peter Lawrence but then Carrie suddenly said he should be James, at which the baby laughed.
‘That was the name of your great-uncle,’ Barnaby said. ‘I’d like that.’
‘What about my family?’ Dot said, smiling.
‘How about James Sampson?’ he suggested. ‘For my lovely uncle and your lovely parents?’
And so it was agreed and the next passer-by who stopped to admire him and asked his name was told James Sampson and didn’t look surprised or say oh, which seemed a kind of blessing on it. So James Sampson he was, and Barnaby christened him the following Sunday in a church still full of daffodils.
Father and son bonded swiftly. James was still so tiny, small for his age, far too small for the knitting she had done for him, that Barnaby could comfortably carry him in a sling and took him on walks and even short bicycle rides around the parish, stopping to introduce him at every opportunity. Dorothy worried his evident pride, which somehow seemed more proprietorial, more overtly fatherly, than any she remembered him showing in Carrie at the same age, would hurt Carrie’s feelings but Carrie’s only gripe was at being deprived of constant access to the pushchair and its contents. Having had no interest in dolls, a flesh-and-blood brother had her transfixed. She wanted to help change, wash and feed him, do it herself if possible, and was soon parading him, in an echo of her father, before troops of girlfriends from school and their curious hangers-on. She had never wanted a pet – satisfied all her petting urges with the farm animals and semi-domestic cats – and was practical and unsentimental on the subject of the ducks’ likely mortality rates and probable deliciousness when cooked. But she cooed over James, whom she rapidly took to calling Jim or Jim-me-lad, as over a kitten, and lit up at his gratifyingly warm responses to her.
Even her grandmother, a woman incapable of dissembling, took to him, demanding he regularly visited her end of the house to sit on her lap and be read to from the battered
Patrick
annuals whose pictures had always left Dorothy faintly nauseous but which seemed to combine with the older woman’s lilting accent and the cosy fug of her wood burner to bring a heavy-limbed comfort to her son.
Her son. It was a fact. He was hers now and always would be. Happy photographs had been sent to Hong Kong and published in the parish newsletter to prove it. One had even found its way into
The Cornishman
, showing Dorothy dandling James on her knee on the stone hedge in Morvah churchyard, with the odd caption
My Vietnamese Joy
. But her heart had yet to take him in. She had been under no illusion, she knew that love grew slowly and fitfully between an adoptive mother and her child, that there might always be a shortfall in affection where a mother had not benefited from the long preparation of pregnancy. In the weeks before his arrival she had even thought she might be able to breastfeed him for a week or two. She held him to her breasts to still him when he cried. If milk arrived suddenly, as it had in the past when she had held friends’ babies, it would have felt quite natural to unbutton her blouse and offer him a nipple. But none did and, in any case, he stared up at her with that face which, however sweet, offered her back no reflection either of herself or of one she loved, so that what should have felt tender seemed briefly unnatural. And to look at him was only to remember the son who had died. Harold. The true son.
Her guilt at this was savage. Her failure to love him, simply to love him without compunction, revealed a stony side to her nature she had not guessed at. A secretive one too; she kept all this to herself. She prayed more hungrily and selfishly than she had ever done before, that love would yet surprise her, stealing into her heart the way James’s little hand often now stole into hers.
Meanwhile she understood that she must be fair and balance out the deficit in her love for him with a compensation of kindness and support. She would never raise her voice to him, as she often felt she must with Carrie, whom she loved unquestioningly and for whom she would die without a moment’s hesitation. She would never criticize him. If he at least appeared to be a little god to her, perhaps, just perhaps, the sharp instincts of childhood would not sniff out her treachery.
For some years after his affair, Barnaby descended into a self-made hell. This began straightforwardly and predictably enough with guilt at what he had done and shock that something blundered into with such giddy thoughtlessness should have such an irreversible effect. But then, far from crumbling with prayer and confession and the mercy of time, the first room of his hell turned out to open into a second and that into two more. It was a windowless, many-mirrored mansion.
He told Dot what had happened and she forgave him. Not immediately, of course. She was upset and angry. She tried blaming herself. But then she could see that it was over, could see that it probably made him a better priest, having discovered he was no less an animal than other men. She could see it had left him unhappy. She did not want to know who the woman was. ‘If I don’t put a face to her,’ she said, ‘it won’t feel so real.’
He assured her it was no one she knew, no one in the congregation, so at least she would not be tempted to suspect each and every woman with whom she prayed or took communion. Even had he not been sworn to silence, he couldn’t have told her about the rest. He convinced himself it would only cause her unnecessary pain but he suspected his true motive was selfish. The omission lodged like a deep splinter in his spirit and festered there. But the longer he put off the telling of it, the less natural it would have seemed and the greater the hurt it would have caused.
Dot forgave him and, in their gratitude at having apparently weathered a crisis, they even made love a few times before subsiding back into exhausted, passionless companionship. Which was when another room in his hell opened as he realized he was in love, and not with Dot.
And then James, or Jim, as he had become, embarked on puberty and – while not actively rebelling the way friends’ sons had – withdrew into a kind of secretive, judgemental reserve that was almost worse. Another room in his hell.
Yet another, with infinite little cupboards, annexes and corridors off it, was a loss of faith. It began as something even worse, a sense that yes, God was still there but had ceased to listen or even to care, not to others, just to him; an exclusive withholding of attention, interest, mercy, an idea he would once have thought as impossible as water flowing uphill, and almost sacrilegious.
He let nothing show. He still went about his business, still conducting services, preaching, leading prayers, believing the magic would work for others at least. He even convinced himself he was being tested. But then, on one especially drab February Sunday, when everyone in the room from the smallest, fidgety child to the most devout widow, would surely rather have stayed in bed for all the transfiguration the dull occasion seemed to offer, his faith left him entirely, midway through his reading of the Gospel. It happened so abruptly it was almost a physical change, like the flicking off of a light, and he hesitated in his reading.
God wasn’t listening because God wasn’t there. No one was but man, who had constructed it all, leaving only hell and desolation and the justification of Barnaby’s childhood killjoys. It was like a fairground ride Jim had persuaded them all onto once, a kind of revolving circular room where the floor slowly fell away from under one’s feet but centrifugal force held one stupefied in place against its whirling walls. Faith fell away and, surprise surprise, the world didn’t end. Everything simply lost its meaning and savour and people looked increasingly dull and stupid.
He went to see the archdeacon about it. Patient and diplomatic, profoundly spiritual but sturdily practical too, as befitted a man much of whose job involved the settling of parish disputes, he would not hear of Barnaby resigning, ‘although no parish priest is worth their salt who isn’t constantly questioning the value of what we do.’ This happened all the time, he insisted, the difference in this case being that Barnaby was honest enough to admit it had happened. It had happened to himself once or twice. It was entirely to be expected, especially in a job so ruled by routine. ‘Think how monks and nuns manage,’ he said.
‘I don’t know how they do,’ Barnaby replied. ‘I don’t know how they don’t go insane.’
‘Oh but they frequently do.’
He prescribed three things: the closer study of Thomas à Kempis, of whom he had impressively remembered Barnaby was a devotee, the patient continuation of sacred routine into which faith and meaning would flood back in time, and a visit to his GP to discuss the distinct possibility that Barnaby was suffering from depression brought on by overwork.
So Barnaby clung to routine. For week after week, month after month, he went through the holy motions, celebrating Eucharist, christening, marrying, burying and consigning to fire, visiting the unpalatable sick and hearing unasked-for, soiling confidences. And he began to take antidepressants, which he could tell frightened Dot, because she did not discuss the matter beyond his initial, half-baked explanation and accorded his pills the same discretion her mother would have done the family of ailments she regarded as private, women’s territory.