A Perfectly Good Man (18 page)

He hadn’t, it turned out, but was just thicker in the neck and shoulders and sandy where he had been golden. Fifty or so to Barnaby’s twenty-nine, he had become overtly handsome, a man used to people saying yes; there was nothing left of his former, apologetic posture. Meeting him in the tiny airport at Newquay, to which he had brought Carrie along for the novelty, Barnaby held out his hand and found himself tugged into a hug that was somehow assessing.

Introduced to Carrie, who could be shy with strangers, Paul immediately crouched down to her level, admired her dungarees and, saying he had heard a lot about her – which wasn’t strictly true, although he had been sent a recent family photograph so knew she was not yet one of nature’s frock-wearers – he presented her with a Yankees baseball cap and said that, once he had her size off her mother, he’d post her the jacket to match. She was clearly won over at once, all coy smiles and wriggling once she had said her obedient thank you, and both men laughed when she offered to carry Paul’s huge suitcase.

Struck with shyness in his turn, Barnaby had been worrying about what they would find to talk about but Paul talked for two, easy chat, about his journey and the people he was staying with in London and then asking questions about whatever they were passing in the car. Barnaby had not been driving long. He had signed up for lessons on moving back to Pendeen but still tended to use his bicycle within the parish. If Paul was startled at the car’s age and decrepitude, he hid it well.

He exclaimed with delight as St Michael’s Mount finally came into view and commented on how attractive Penzance looked but then fell silent as they headed sharply inland, away from the soft delights of the bay, and crossed up to the northeast and mining country. The seemingly haphazard scattering of terraces, bungalows and mine buildings always looked grimmer when the sun was in and that day an oppressive lid of grey cloud was bearing down over it all.

As he turned down their lane, passing a stream of men coming away from the mine, Barnaby caught the appraising stare Paul gave them through the car’s grimy windows and diverted him by pointing out that Dorothy’s family had lived and farmed the spot for hundreds of years.

‘Ah,’ Paul said with something like relief. ‘Like the Johnsons.’

‘Sort of,’ Barnaby said and knew they were both thinking that, unlike the Johnsons, the Sampsons had not been obliged to sell up.

Paul exclaimed over the loveliness of the house and the gnarled old quince tree sheltering itself by leaning into one side of it. He made Dorothy blush by kissing her on both cheeks and once again,
à la française
, said he loved his room, said of course he understood when Barnaby explained there was only one bathroom that was currently usable, and said Dorothy’s lemon curd sponge was better than anything New York had to offer. The sun came out and he cheerfully let Carrie lead him off on a walk around the farm in his unsuitable shoes while Barnaby slipped out to say evening prayers at Morvah.

They saw little of him on the Saturday until late afternoon, as he rang for a taxi to the Penzance auction house – a place neither Barnaby nor Dorothy had ever had cause to visit.

This was fortunate as there had been an accident at Geevor the afternoon before, which Barnaby only found out about on his way back from morning prayers at Pendeen. He had to drive to Truro to visit a miner in hospital and then call in on his wife and family in Truthwall. The man, who never came to church but whose motherin-law did, had somehow caught his hand under the wheel of one of the trucks used to bring rock to the surface. He himself couldn’t explain how it had happened, saying only that it was near the end of a shift and he had been working a lot of overtime – up to his legal maximum – so was tired and not concentrating. He wouldn’t lose all the hand, just the two smallest fingers, and it was his left and he was right-handed, but it seemed likely the nerve damage would leave him with little grip and mining was not a job for the single-handed. The hand, presumably greatly swollen, seemed fatter still for bandages and wadding, resembling a useless club. The miner seemed brave and astonishingly cheerful, but perhaps that was the painkillers numbing harsh truths as well as tissue damage and crushed bone. Barnaby asked him what work he could find, if he had to leave the mine, and he shrugged but continued to smile.

‘Farm labouring, maybe,’ he said. ‘Cutting broccoli. Pulling pints in the Radjel. I’ll get some compensation, though. The union and Mr Gilbert will look after me. I’ll be OK.’

Barnaby cursed his naïveté in assuming the man’s relatives were in a position to make their own way to the hospital to visit. For sure enough, when he asked about this, he received a long explanation of how the man had lost his licence and they’d had to let the car go. He had not meant to bother the young wife with a long visit, meaning simply to call by to tell her how he had found her husband and to offer a lift to Treliske Hospital the following week. But, as was often the case, she insisted he come in and have a cup of tea and meet her two small children. Again, as was so often the case, she spontaneously explained how she used to attend church and had only stopped because her husband didn’t and it would have been a cause of awkwardness had she insisted. And he told her the half-joke he always told in such circumstances of how the Sunday School was an hour’s free childcare and how lots of parents came simply for the guaranteed peace and quiet.

‘Except for the hymns, of course,’ he added, and she laughed, as people always did and said well, maybe she’d have to come along and see, as people always said when they had no intention of doing so. He gave her one of the free children’s books from the literacy scheme, which he carried in the car boot, and checked she was certain about not wanting a lift to Truro. She cried a little when they talked about her husband’s job prospects and said she was going to start taking in ironing as that was something she could do from home with toddlers underfoot.

The house was clean and tidy but shamingly small, with low ceilings and no outside beyond the tiny yard where she dried her washing, and would seem even more so once her boys grew. He wondered if the compensation would be large enough to help them move. He didn’t like to ask if the house were rented off the mine or the council, hoping, for her sake, it was the latter should her husband lose his job.

The arbitrary cruelty of it still hung heavily on him when a taxi brought Paul back to the house. He returned laden. He had bought them a fig tree to complement their old quince, a half-case of claret far grander than anything they ever allowed themselves from the Co-op and a retracting tape measure and a spirit level for Carrie. ‘We had a little chat about tool kits last night,’ he explained. And he had secured the painting he wanted. Despite their protests, he insisted on removing its thick layers of bubble wrap and setting it on the sitting-room mantelpiece, ‘So we can all enjoy it for the weekend.’

It was by a local artist called Tuke. Barnaby knew almost nothing about the Newlyn School and their contemporaries but he dimly remembered the name so supposed he had seen other work by him in Penlee House or the Royal Cornwall Museum. His work left him so busy he and Dorothy had precious little opportunity for cultural excursions. They were one of the things he planned to make time for now Carrie was nearly old enough to start appreciating them. He had begun to think it a little unlikely that Paul would have come all this way simply to buy some Cornish painting; worrying that he had actually come in order to talk, to lay ghosts and finish business, Barnaby had become guiltily aware that, aside from their brief trip up the lane for evening prayers, he had allowed Paul not one minute alone with him. But as soon as the painting was unwrapped, he dismissed this as self-absorption.

The painting showed a naked youth – a fisherman or farm labourer, to judge from his pale skin and heavily tanned face and hands – sprawled across a rock on a mattress of emerald green weed that made the redhead’s skin look all the more startlingly pale. It was a beautiful object, its vibrant colours crammed into a square of board little bigger than an Orthodox icon’s, and it was so much finer than anything else in the room, the murkily sentimental prints of cattle and horses left behind by Dulcie because the wallpaper had faded so around them, the shabby sofa and armchairs, the ugly but practical coffee table and the thickly varnished Victorian desk at which he would write the next day’s sermon before anyone else was up, that its beauty seemed to be drawing colour and energy from the things around it, becoming ever more intense at their expense. Even the people. Dorothy looked wan as she peered closely at it and he loved her for the sturdy way she admired Tuke’s technique in catching the seaweed and making it look wet.

When Barnaby excused himself to go and say evening prayers, Paul asked if he might come too, and he came to church with the others in the morning, where he stood out as the best-dressed man or woman in the congregation, but throughout the weekend he gave no sign of having understood Barnaby’s job or why Barnaby did it. He was surprised at the calls on Barnaby’s time away from the church, the frequency with which the phone rang or the door knocker sounded even late into the evenings. He didn’t comment, as such, but he didn’t need to; Barnaby saw his eyes widen or heard his conversation break off.

‘Do you have to do that every day?’ he asked, as they were strolling back from the church on the Saturday evening.

‘Twice a day,’ Barnaby said.

‘But nobody’s there.’

‘I’m there,’ he said. ‘Which is all that matters. And God, of course.’

And he could tell Paul’s idea of priesthood was out of Trollope: weddings and funerals, Sundays, Christmas and Easter but nothing intense or too overtly theological.

Sunday happened to be Barnaby’s birthday. The congregation surprised him by singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in place of ‘O Praise Ye The Lord’ for the final hymn and quite a few handed over presents as they shook his hand afterwards: pots of jam, wine, flowers, CDs and books. He could see Paul watching and being charmed but bemused by it all.

It was traditional for them to have a picnic lunch and a swim down in Boat Cove. Dorothy had made little sausage-meat and tomato tarts and filled old ice-cream boxes with potato salad and carrot salad, and Dulcie and Carrie had spent the half-hour before church hulling strawberries. The other tradition was to drink the first bottles of the mildly alcoholic elderflower champagne Dorothy brewed every year in old cider bottles whose rubberized lids clamped shut against the gas fighting to escape.

Freed from his suit back into holiday clothes, Paul was full of slightly nervous, funny chat about people they would never meet with more money than they could possibly imagine. He took photographs, including one of Carrie in which he persuaded her to pose in just the right position for the huge, black foghorns of Pendeen Watch to appear to be emerging from her head like Minnie Mouse’s ears. Then he took pictures of them all, sitting on rugs against the rocks. Of the sea and cliffs, of some weekend fishermen who came to push their fishing boat out. He drew out Dulcie Sampson the surest way, by encouraging her to reminisce about the Pendeen of her childhood, its church-filled Sundays, tea treats and homemade amusements. He built sandcastles with Carrie and showed her how to make dams. He was the perfect guest.

Yet Barnaby found his very presence felt like a criticism, that the way of life his ward had chosen was impossibly provincial and dull, a waste of ability and education, and would have disappointed Uncle James, even that Dorothy represented a kind of misalliance, a falling-off.

This was utterly unfair, naturally, for he said none of these things, had not even hinted at them; Barnaby knew they were all in his own head. The fact remained, however, that these thoughts had only entered his head with the arrival of Paul and his urbanity, perhaps simply because Paul was like a human manifestation of the road not taken. Ashamed of himself, he made an extra effort with him, asking him to tell Dorothy about his father and uncle, and about the house. Hearing him talk so lovingly about James made Barnaby like him again.

After lunch Barnaby was given presents. Carrie gave him a key rack she had made at school – basically a piece of wood stuck with a line of hooks – to hang by the front door. The charm lay in the little decorated labels she had drawn and glued on by each hook – a house, a car, and two wildly contrasting churches. He was always losing keys, under books or inside newspapers, so it would be genuinely useful if he remembered to use it. Dulcie had knitted him a fisherman’s jersey – a proper Cornish garnsey with the Sennen Cove stitch on it, ‘to identify your body when you get washed ashore in Padstow,’ she said with the unsmiling twinkle he had learnt to recognize as her version of mischief. It had taken her months of secret labour, apparently, and Carrie laughed because she had been in on the secret. She had not brought the jersey all the way down with her – the weather was too hot and the garment too heavy – but she had the pattern in her pocket so he could look at a picture of its intricate, hard-wearing design. She had even made it in unconventional black so that he might wear it over his dog collar and under his jacket on cold days in winter. This touched him deeply. He knew the profound adjustment she must have made to her wishes in accepting him as her son-in-law.

Then Paul produced a little rectangular parcel. Barnaby protested – surely the fig tree and wine had been present enough – but no, those were for the house apparently while this was just for him. It was a painting, a tiny one evidently done on the size of sketchpad an artist could easily take on a walk. It unmistakably showed the hunched silhouette of Morvah church, with the dramatic sweep of coastline beyond it, yet it was almost an abstract, reducing the individual elements to blocks of strong colour. There was a lovely vigour to it, as if it had been done at speed, with enthusiasm or in a race against impending rain.

‘That is your other church, isn’t it?’ Paul asked.

‘Absolutely. I love it. You’re so kind. It can hang over my desk.’