A Perfectly Good Man (16 page)

She had thought they would be only the five hundred from off the train but there were far more marchers than that.

‘It’s all the Exiles,’ Jazz said knowledgeably.

‘What’s an exile?’ Carrie asked, thinking of Israelites.

‘She means students,’ Shell explained. ‘It’s a posh name for students.’

Just then the band struck up ‘Trelawny’ and everyone sang along, self-consciously at first, because people were watching from the pavements and taking photographs. A double-decker crawled by in the other direction and when people waved from the upper storey, the girls waved back. Then they burst out laughing again because they simultaneously forgot the words to the song and had to dum-ti-dum it. A couple of very serious men in suits in front turned back to glare at them. Soon after Jazz’s father came to claim her.

‘Come along, Jasmine,’ he said. ‘I hear you’re being undignified. Trafalgar Square’s up ahead.’

And so their little group fractured again as each girl rejoined her father and Carrie relieved Dad in pushing the buggy. As they entered Trafalgar Square Dad started to point things out to her again. He was distracted for a minute by a creepy-looking man with a big, bald head who stepped off the pavement to greet him. Dad gestured towards her and Jim, pointing them out to the man, but something made her prefer to stay where she was than go over politely to say hello.

‘Who was that?’ she asked, when Dad hurried back to her.

‘A former parishioner, from Portsmouth, I think,’ he said. ‘But actually I’ve no idea. You know how hopeless I am with names and faces.’ Then they followed the band down Whitehall towards the Houses of Parliament.

‘Look!’ Shell yelled back at her. ‘TV cameras!’ and her father smacked the back of her head. Carrie knew they shouldn’t wave as they passed the camera. It was a solemn occasion, a bit like church, but she didn’t know what to do instead so pretended Jim’s waterproof covering was coming adrift so as to look busy.

And then, all too soon it seemed to her, the march was over. A handful of carefully chosen representatives, Jazz’s father among them, was actually going inside Parliament to lobby MPs who, after all, wouldn’t have seen the march. The rest of them had a free afternoon in London before the Trelawny Train for home left at seven-thirty. And the police and stewards were keen for the marchers to disperse quickly now to free up the traffic jam that had built up behind them. Shell’s father was taking Shell and Jazz to Madame Tussauds, which sounded fun and Shell said it had blood and murderers and Michael Jackson. With his tight, talking-to-a-vicar manner, he asked if Dad and she wanted to come too but Dad surprised her by saying they had other plans, when so far as she knew they had no plans at all.

‘Isn’t it any good?’ she asked him once the others had gone on their way.

He pulled a bit of a face and said, ‘Not very,’ so she knew it was either a bit like Enid Blyton or too expensive or possibly a bit of both. ‘And we didn’t come all this way to see waxworks,’ he added.

So they agreed to choose one thing each and one for Jim. For Dad they went around Westminster Abbey. It was expensive and there were lots of tourists. Her favourite thing was all the wood carving in the choir stalls and the special carved seats called misericords, which Dad explained meant mercy because they had a little shelf that discreetly supported monks having to stand for long services in the middle of the night. Before they left, Dad suggested they go into one of the less crowded side chapels to pray that the march and the meeting with the MPs was a success.

She was worried people would stare at them or that he’d expect her to pray out loud, or that he would. But all he did was sit them in a quiet row near a pretty altar.

‘Let’s just think for a bit,’ he said, ‘about why we came today, and all the people we know whose lives will be turned upside down if Geevor closes and they have to find work somewhere else. Not just the miners, but their wives and girlfriends and children like Jasmine and Michelle.’

(She smiled at that because no one called Shell that any more than they called Carrie Caroline, but she hid her smile by kissing Jim’s head.)

‘But let’s think too about the mine managers and Mr Gilbert and Mrs Thatcher and her ministers who have to make the difficult decisions for the greater good. Let us pray.’ And then he knelt down and shut his eyes, so she put Jim back in his buggy and knelt down too beside Dad.

At first she was thinking about how hard and mean the kneelers were compared to the nice, plump, tapestried ones in their churches at home. Then she was thinking about people peering into the chapel and seeing them praying like a waxworks tableau at Madame Tussauds. But then she found she was thinking about Shell and Jazz and their families and how Shell’s mother liked new clothes from Plymouth and how Jazz’s family didn’t even have a car because they couldn’t afford to run one and weren’t allowed a cat, like she and Jim had, because of the cost of food and vet’s bills. And finally she thought of how very hard it would be to have to make new friends if the girls had to move away so their parents could find other work. And then she dared to imagine if Mrs Thatcher decided that no, the mine could not be saved. And she imagined all of Geevor covered with grass again, the ugly concrete buildings and the head frame over Victory Shaft gone and trees and hedges and munching cattle in their place or just a park. An empty seaside park. There would be absolutely no risk of Jim having to risk his life down in that terrible, frightening pit when he grew up. She opened her eyes, startled, because she had not known until just then that this was even a possibility.

Dad was already sitting back in his chair, just sitting and looking at the Jesus on the altar.

‘Better?’ he asked and she nodded and understood how a deep calm had come about her like the pillowy quilt in the bedroom that used to be Granny’s but was now for best. It was funny his asking if she felt better when she hadn’t complained of not feeling well or happy before but as he asked it, she realized she had been feeling strangely churned up inside about all sorts of things but especially her friendship with Shell and Jazz and the difference she felt more and more between herself and them. And now she felt better.

‘Time for lunch,’ he said. ‘And Jim’s treat.’

Jim’s treat was to eat their packed lunch in St James’s Park, where he could feed the geese and ducks.

‘Now your treat,’ Dad said, when they had shaken out the last of their crumbs. But her mind was a shaming blank. He asked her what she had liked best in the Abbey and she said the misericords. He asked if she meant the carving or the woodwork. She said both, after some thought.

So they caught a bus to the Victoria and Albert, which to her relief was completely free. The County Museum in Truro, which she had thought big, would have fitted into the entrance hall alone. The key thing with a museum this size, Dad said, was to have one thing you really wanted to see, or you got cultural indigestion.

‘And today ours is wood.’

They looked at wooden carvings, religious ones of Jesus and Mary and lots of crucifixes, but also ones of people and faces, of flowers and trees. And they looked at wooden furniture, everything from huge four-poster beds to elegant little chairs. She had never seen so many beautiful or ingenious things in one place. She didn’t like to tell Dad, or hold him back now that Jim had woken up from his afternoon nap and was grizzling to be allowed to walk, but the things she liked best of all were the newest and probably the least valuable. There were some pieces of modern furniture in blonde wood she could actually imagine in her room. She could see the joins on these and picture them as a sequence of meticulously cut and sanded sections waiting to be assembled by Mr Ferris. There was a low Danish table that made her almost breathless in her desire to touch or, ideally, own it. She wanted to pull its little drawer out and slide it back into place, could imagine precisely the satisfactory little thunk it would make and the feeling of sliding one’s fingers into its elegant indentation that served as a handle.

Dad gave her pocket money early so she could buy postcards, although there were none of the Danish table, and asked her to choose something to console Mum for not being there. This was hard as all the obviously feminine presents – beautiful scarves and china and glass – were far too expensive. But she found some pretty jam jar labels she knew would appeal to her practical economy. They changed Jim’s stinky nappy then Dad treated them to tea and cake in the basement cafeteria, which put Jim on such a sugar high they decided it was time to take him outside before he started climbing things and pulling things over.

Dad had talked about walking back across Kensington Gardens, the park with the gigantic trees she remembered so vividly, but in the artificial light and warmth of the museum they had forgotten it was winter, and it was pitch-dark when they came out onto the pavement. Dad said the park would be locked at dusk but they could still save on a bus fare by walking to Paddington across the park but why not take in some street life first? He said they could walk to Knightsbridge to see Harrods all lit up like a Christmas tree.

She was enough her parents’ daughter to see no point in window shopping – something she associated with a class trip to Plymouth earlier that month when she had not only had to endure window shopping but sit through an interminable pantomime, a nasty, lurid thing she had promised herself never to suffer again. She hoped Dad hadn’t suggested Harrods simply to humour her. He probably had, since he didn’t even buy his own socks and was even less interested in clothes than she was. She was trying to think of a way to let him know this without hurting his feelings when they came upon a small crowd of people standing on the pavement to watch news footage showing on a bank of televisions in a shop window. Dad was staring.

‘It’s the Challenger Shuttle,’ she explained. He hardly ever seemed to know about news from outside Cornwall, apart from famines, because his head was always so heavy with the problems of people nearby. He looked blank. ‘Like a plane but it goes into outer space,’ she said. She was well informed because they had been told all about it in science as there was a schoolmistress on board, a real schoolmistress who wasn’t a proper astronaut or anything like that.

‘Can we watch?’ Dad asked.

She nodded and pulled the pushchair close in beside her so they wouldn’t obstruct pedestrians.

‘Where is it?’ he asked her quietly.

‘Cape Canaveral, I think,’ she said. ‘In Florida.’

It was peculiar watching the images like something from
Star Wars
but with the throbbing noises of the street as soundtrack. There was a close-up of the jet bits of the launcher rocket then what looked like a shower around them – some kind of coolant, she supposed – and then they fired. For a weird second or two it didn’t seem to move and, because of the close-up camera angle not showing all the supports and things above, it was easy to believe the rocket was about to drop downwards onto the launchpad. But then it began to rise.

‘We have lift-off!’ a woman said to her friend just beside them, trying to sound American.

It seemed to go slowly but of course that was because it was so big and so far away. The camera angle was further off by now so they could see the whole thing. The launcher rocket was like a huge, dull brown bullet. The pure white shuttle on its side looked scarily flimsy, like a boy’s toy. In fact, she decided, the whole thing, shuttle, launcher, rocket and the smaller white rockets on its side, looked like something a boy had made up. How could anybody think it was safe? But it had taken off safely several times. If it hadn’t, the schoolmistress would never have agreed to set foot in it.

There was a different angle again, with a background of blue sky now, not grey, a deep blue, as though the darkness of outer space were near at hand, pressing in on the other side. And then the whole thing was swallowed up, not by flames and explosions, the way it would be in a film, but in a huge cloud. The cloud extended in more than one direction. For a second part of it looked just like a duck’s head. Then like a duck sitting on a mysteriously extending white branch. And then the camera moved and it was hard to make out where the shuttle had gone. There were simply long, thin streamers of cloud going down to the sea.

It was beautiful although it was so frightening, like the film of an atomic bomb being tested in the desert that Miss Pendarves had made them watch.

Dad pulled away suddenly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have seen that. Let’s go.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said.

‘It’s people dying.’

‘I’m not a baby.’

‘No,’ he conceded. ‘You’re not.’

‘I knew all about it. Jazz told us this morning while you were getting coffee. I thought you knew. I thought everybody did,’ although it was completely obvious he had known nothing.

She tore herself away from the televisions to catch up with him. He seemed to be walking purposelessly now and she was worried he might forget where he was and step into the traffic. He could be so absentminded sometimes. Mum had recently told her always to keep an eye out around the house when he did things like put water on to boil or light the grill. He had set fire to some toast, really set fire to it, and not noticed that the kitchen was filling with smoke and he had twice let the bath overflow because he set it running then became too immersed in a book he was reading on the landing to remember to turn the tap off again.

‘Those poor people,’ he was saying. ‘Awful. I’d heard people talking but hadn’t understood properly. How many of them were there?’

‘I don’t remember exactly. Seven or eight, I think. Far more than in the Apollo rocket that blew up.’

They reached a corner and suddenly there was a huge shop up ahead of them ablaze with lights, not just in its windows but all over the surface of it so that it looked like a mad fairy palace.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘What? Oh, that.’ He was still lost in thought. ‘That’s Harrods, the shop I told you about.’

It was the most amazing place, just as amazing in its way as the Abbey or the Victoria and Albert had been and she longed to go closer, even though they had no money and shopping of itself didn’t interest her. It looked so warm and comforting in the drizzly darkness. But she could tell Dad was feeling quite the reverse, that after the desperation of the miners and then the horrible beauty of what they had just watched on television, the shop and all it stood for disgusted him. So she just stood close to him and waited as he stared. She imagined herself as people must be seeing her, a small, careworn version of her mother, shielding priest and grizzling toddler from a buffeting by passers-by, sensible coat buttoned to her neck, chin set in defiance of mockery, a parody of any vicar’s wife. She felt extremely grown up suddenly and resented the feeling.