A Perfectly Good Man (17 page)
At last she said, ‘I think we’re getting in people’s way, Dad. It’s very crowded here.’
Dad folded up the armrest and they made Jim a sort of nest between them. As the train pulled out and Dad produced the third Tupperware of the day, and they discovered Mum had included homemade sausage rolls and her special chocolate buns in this one, as if knowing they’d be in need of a lift at a long day’s end, Carrie was happy to feel a child again, safe on the train, responsibility lifted off her weary shoulders. She found she was happy not to have to spend the long journey home with Shell and Jazz again.
‘What?’ Dad asked, seeing her smile out of the window.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m glad we didn’t go to Madame Tussauds.’
‘So am I. Here. A little something for you.’
He had bought her a wooden puzzle when she was looking through postcards at the museum. It was a perfect cube, made of wood the exact colour of the Danish table. There were twenty irregular pieces, the instructions said, which somehow fitted together to form the pleasingly regular finished shape.
‘It’s OK,’ Dad said. ‘You can take it apart if you like.’
But she couldn’t bear the thought of small pieces getting down the side of the seats and rather wished she hadn’t taken the cellophane off it already as she could feel the pieces starting to shift between her fingers, chaos trying to break out. ‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘I love it.’
When Mr Ewart finally took up their oft-repeated invitation to visit, Barnaby had been married and living in Pendeen for six years and Dorothy was pregnant a third time and insisting they keep it a secret.
At least, he hoped it was only the third time but the moment she swore him to secrecy, he found himself tormented by the thought that she might have had other miscarriages and not told even him. Dorothy’s combination of physical strength and emotional delicacy was daunting. He had always assumed marriage would be a process of getting to know a person better and better yet was finding her harder and harder to read as time went on. When she chose to withhold anything – whether a judgement or a piece of gossip she thought best left unrepeated – her self-control was complete and made him feel childishly self-evident by contrast.
Unearthing the very few photographs he possessed, he sketched out Paul Ewart’s odd relation to the family for her benefit. His father’s oldest brother James inherited the family estate and enjoyed it for some years in the company of first one then another young man, presented to the world as his secretary but plainly, at least in Paul’s case, the focus for a deep and enduring love. Dorothy seemed a bit shocked.
‘Did you know all this as a boy?’ she asked.
‘Only in part. I sort of pieced it together. In a funny way Alice and I worked it out because our father had a parallel situation, having taken up with Mrs Clutterbuck, who was officially a sort of housekeeper but obviously rather more than that to him.’
He had been set to inherit one day, he explained, James being childless, but James was profligate and idle and ran up such debts that almost everything had to be sold. In recompense, and possibly to balance out what he saw as the pernicious influence of his father and Mrs Clutterbuck, James set up a trust on his death to fund Barnaby’s education and escape from narrowness of outlook.
‘Paul was principle trustee so, in effect, a sort of guardian, even when my father was still alive.’
‘Your dad must have been furious.’
Barnaby thought back. ‘No. He wasn’t happy about it.’ And he looked more closely at the most recent of the pictures, which showed him as a mop-haired, grief-numbed teenager with Paul Ewart, both of them in very smart suits, eating in a Paris brasserie. He remembered little of the occasion beyond asking a waiter to take the picture for them, which in turn had rather irritated Paul.
‘And what about your sister? Wasn’t she a bit miffed?’
‘Oh, Alice never expected to inherit so she understood perfectly. They were close, though.’
He knew the explanation reduced to tidy plot summary a complex cluster of events and emotions whose challenge he had simply put out of mind rather than confront. He had loved his uncle instinctively, as he had loved no other relative but his sister, but he had been so young and tongue-tied that the feeling had never been expressed. So on James’s death the pent-up feelings had been transferred, with no encouragement, to Mr Ewart who had, perhaps, not known quite what to do with them. Arguably the two non-relatives, now only tenuously linked by the witnessing of an undiscussed love and the papery residue of a legal arrangement, had been in retreat from each other ever since. They exchanged annual Christmas cards, with telegraphed updates, but these only emphasized the distance time, as much as geography, was placing between them. Although the older man had been signing himself Paul for years, Barnaby continued to think of him as Mr Ewart, holding him, he realized, at a comfortable distance.
He was glad Mr Ewart had not visited earlier. He was Barnaby’s standin parent, he had paid for Barnaby’s education. Barnaby wanted him to be proud of him and not merely bewildered or disappointed at the choices his protégé had made in life. Barnaby was not yet feeling settled in the parish. Far from smoothing the way, marrying so rootedly local a girl had actually caused some problems because she had been so anxious they continue to live in her family’s farmhouse and not have to move to Pendeen’s vicarage. After a long incumbency, during much of which his predecessor had been elderly and easily bossed around, the PCC was used to having its own way and unprepared for change. His early request that people call him Mr Johnson rather than the Catholic-sounding Father Barnaby was met with blank incomprehension. He accepted it was an entrenched tradition, common to many Cornish parishes, and decided not to make a fuss about something that seemed to bother him alone. Dorothy was successful, however, in negotiating for them to live on the farm, while he insisted the substantial vicarage be used for worthwhile causes rather than merely let out for profit. After consultation with Social Services to ascertain what needs were greatest and areas least well-funded, he saw the generous upstairs rooms turned into a women’s refuge and downstairs space used for couples counselling and adult literacy tutorials. The refuge was not popular, especially when there were occasional ugly scenes with vengeful husbands or partners on the doorstep and the police had to be called, but he had the support of his modernizing archdeacon and the change came to be accepted.
More enduring ructions arose from his insistence that the parish rooms, which lay between the village school and the vicarage and church, no longer be used solely for activities at least tenuously related to Christianity. The buildings needed rent to keep themselves in good repair and the church should be reaching out, not closing in. There had always been charity whist and euchre drives and coffee mornings and meetings of Cubs and Brownies in there, but now there were life classes (the windows were high enough for no shocks to passers-by), yoga, Humanist Society meetings (sparsely attended, he was pleased to see) and Mind Body Spirit Fayres (all too well attended, the church wardens claimed, by ‘pagans, witches and woowoos’). There was a near-constant rumble of discontent about the parish rooms, despite the useful money they brought in, which he came to suspect was as much to do with his relative youth and inexperience – he was the only member of the church team under forty-five – as with the violation of any strongly held principles.
Possibly the parish in Portsmouth had been too diffuse or too urban for him to feel so needed, but a real shock of taking up the job in Pendeen had been discovering that only about four tenths of his work involved the things he had learnt at Cuddesdon, procedures which only an anointed priest could carry out. The burdensome rest was social work, a complex of pastoral tasks that might as easily have landed on the desk of MP, policeman or social worker. These were tasks Dorothy grimly called
mopping up
, everything from visiting the sick, to helping with neighbourhood or family disputes, to advising on benefit claims and tenancy issues. He had not been trained in any of these and did his best – armed from the stash of appropriate leaflets – to nudge parishioners towards the relevant public or voluntary body. But there was, he came to see, something about the priest and his vested authority that retained a special weight in areas of the community where church attendance had become minimal. Just as non-attenders, non-believers even, regularly elected to hold funerals and weddings in church and to bring their babies for baptism, so the evidence of a vestigial faith showed itself in other ways, such as calls for him to bless a new home or barn, to perform exorcisms or, indeed, to hear unsought confessions from elderly agnostics suddenly afraid of death and judgements, not ostensibly believed in. Exorcisms he flatly refused but invariably found the call came from a household where there were other troubles, often unacknowledged, for which unquiet souls were an approximate metaphor – an unhappy or frustrated adolescent or an elderly parent showing signs of neglect.
And in the background to all this, or foregrounded by it, was the surprise of family life and the adjustments it required of him: the mixed blessing of a live-in motherin-law, the exhausting delight of a baby and the see-saw blessing/challenge of taking in marriage a girl he soon realized understood as little of him as he did of her. They loved each other, desired each other – that much was plain and easy – but they would stumble onto sudden voids of comprehension or inequalities of experience which seemed to cast everything in doubt. (Within weeks, his advice sessions to prospective couples coming to him for marriage went from cheerfully formulaic to gravely questioning.)
In fact the James Johnson Trust had three trustees: Mr Ewart, a solicitor and the old friend of James whom Barnaby’s father had scathingly referred to as ‘First Secretary’, but it was only ever Mr Ewart with whom Barnaby dealt directly. Beyond his school fees the trust paid for what might broadly be called educational holidays. This travel money had to be applied for by letter, which in turn had proved a neat way of keeping Barnaby and Mr Ewart in touch.
Over consecutive summers, in between increasingly necessary holiday jobs in restaurants, offices and the back rooms of banks, Barnaby had seen Paris, Rome, Florence, Istanbul and the cultural highlights of Greece. The longed-for cheque was always accompanied by a note or letter from Mr Ewart, usually just a note and, through the telegraphese of these and his equally elegant Christmas cards, Barnaby was able to piece together a sketch of his life after James.
The couple had soon tired of Ibiza and settled in a cheap quarter of Paris, which was where James finally died of cirrhosis of the liver. His having been hopeless with money was, in some ways, a myth to mask a sort of high standards alcoholism. James never drank Muscadet if Meursault were on offer, or Chianti when he could have vintage Barolo. Luckily for Paul, he had found it hard to resist auction houses and antique markets and had equally expensive and unerring instinct in
objets d’art
as in wine. So although the house had to be sold, the proceeds of that and the sale of all but the most portable contents kept them, as James put it, splendidly cushioned.
Despite a legal challenge from Barnaby’s father, Mr Ewart inherited everything that wasn’t in the trust, precisely because James had converted so much money into things over the years, unitemised and hard to quantify. He left the sad memories of Paris behind and travelled for several years with various men, including the ‘First Secretary’, under whose tutelage he made excellent investments in property, just before the property market went into a period of massive growth. He was neither spendthrift nor an alcoholic. He would survive.
He settled in New York. When Barnaby announced his ordination, there was a pointed silence from him, but when he was given his interim parish in Portsmouth, a magnificent black suit from James’s old tailor, Gieves and Hawkes, and brogues from Church’s arrived. Generosity aside, the touching thing about this was that Mr Ewart had clearly noted his size when he last took him shopping in Paris as a grieving teenager. Since then there had been silence. He wrote nothing when Barnaby informed him about settling in Pendeen and marrying Dorothy, merely sending a bouquet so preposterously large it took every vase in Mrs Sampson’s armoury to accommodate it around the house and, on the day, a gardenia plant so large it was in effect a bush, whose sweet, suggestive scent coloured the entire house before it succumbed wretchedly to white fly and was adopted by his motherin-law, who prided herself on never giving up on a pot plant, however sick or ill-favoured.
The New York Christmas cards since Barnaby’s marriage had contained nothing beyond a signature. Barnaby had come to assume he either felt he had done his duty by him or that he felt no sympathy with Barnaby’s having married (which would have been sad) or felt disgust at the Church of England’s persistently offensive attitude to homosexuality (which would have been quite understandable).
Then he had rung up, out of the blue; something he had never done. The telephone was always left plugged in now, of course, though Dulcie Sampson had held out vigorously against having a second line put into her end of the house. (She claimed everyone she cared about lived within walking distance.)
‘Barnaby Johnson? This is Paul Ewart.’ It was so long since they had spoken, Barnaby would not have recognized his voice, which now had acquired a transatlantic timbre.
Like an American cat
, he thought nonsensically, picturing for the first time in years his late uncle’s dark blue swimming pool and his velvety roses.
‘There’s a painting coming up at auction near you next month, which I particularly want to bid for. I was going to be in London on business anyway and I see I can fly down there so I wondered if I might finally come on a visit?’ His voice had both a graininess and a confidence Barnaby could not remember. He was older, of course, and less self-doubting, his own man, not another’s secretary. Agreeing enthusiastically and making a note in the diary, Barnaby wondered if he had become immensely fat.