A Perfectly Good Man (22 page)

She discovered, too, the old-fashioned pleasure of writing letters – carefully edited accounts of herself to her mother in Adelaide and easier, entirely frank versions to Niamh. Niamh had recently seen her own life transformed when she fell in love with a farmer from WA and had thrown over banking and Melbourne for planting olives and making cheese from their own goats’ milk near Margaret River.

She thought about Christos, of course, but not often; it tended to be in dreams that he resurfaced. She was certainly no longer frightened or hiding and she found, when a friend of a friend wrote in a Christmas card about having spotted him with a new woman and a brace of children, that she had to manufacture curiosity and did not greatly care.

Driving home from dropping off some work in the St Ives gallery that had started selling it, hearing the appetizing rustling and clinking of her food shopping on the back seat, powering through rain so punishing her windscreen wipers could hardly cope with it, she listened to the radio telling her about terrible events far, far away and realized she was profoundly happy and very lucky indeed.

Then she had to slam on the brakes and skidded to a halt. A figure had taken her by surprise. It was a man, tall and thin, bunched up on the roadside to peer into the bracken on the verge. He jumped up, grimacing an apology into the glare of her headlights. He had no jacket on and his black tee-shirt and jeans would not have been wetter had he dipped himself in a pond. He stood aside and she began to pass but something in his face made her stop. He looked distraught, like someone who had lost a child. She wound down her passenger window.

‘Sorry,’ he stammered.

‘Christ, I’m the one who’s sorry,’ she said. ‘I could have killed you. Are you OK? Have you lost something down there?’

‘Nothing really. The stupidest thing. A little book. It must have fallen out of my pocket when I was walking.’

‘Well it’ll be ruined after a few minutes of this. Get in and I’ll …’

‘No. No, I’m sure it’s here somewhere.’

He turned aside and continued groping in the under-growth. Disturbed, she pulled over and parked, grabbed the heavy torch she always carried in the car to light her way from car to back door, and ran back to him through the downpour.

‘Here,’ she began. ‘This might help.’ But she broke off because he was weeping. He had been using a stick to prod around in the brambles and ferns which must have just broken as he was still clutching its useless stump in one hand as he hid his eyes with the other. ‘Hey,’ she said gently. ‘Come on. Get in the car and I’ll get you something dry to wear.’

‘I can’t,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I know it’s …’

‘Come on.’ She touched his shoulder and was surprised at the warmth of him even in the wet.

He let himself be led back to her car and did not even try to find his seatbelt as she drove the short distance along the lane then turned up the track to home. ‘So sorry,’ he mumbled.

‘Ssh,’ she told him.

His soaked clothes had brought the smell of rain and wet earth into the car with them. He fumbled a handkerchief out of his jeans that was as drenched as the rest of him and blew his nose on it. ‘Sorry,’ he said again and his teeth started to chatter.

‘Jesus!’ she said. ‘How long have you been out here?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ he said. ‘A couple of hours?’

‘Soon get you dry and warm.’

‘I’m wetting your car seat.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I never sit on that side.’

‘You’re Australian.’

‘And you’re not. Come on.’ She led the way into the house. One of the first improvements she had made was to install a big hot water tank, a good shower and an Aga that actually worked, unlike Constance’s antique Rayburn which appeared to do little but burn money.

She set the shower running and thrust a towel at him. He started to protest. ‘You’re shivering,’ she said simply. ‘You seem to be in shock. You might have exposure. Get in there and warm up. Clean towel. Go.’

‘But …’

‘I’ve got some overalls and socks you can borrow.’

She had several outsize pairs she had bought at Cornwall Farmers to wear while she cleaned out and began the slow process of restoring the house. She bought boot socks there too in several sizes too large to pad around the house in, in lieu of slippers. She found all these and opened the bathroom door a crack to push them in for him along with a carrier bag for his wet things. Then she lit a fire and smiled to think she had a handsome, naked stranger in the house. She had either taken leave of her senses or turned a corner in her recovery from marriage …

When he emerged, faintly comical in overalls and bright red socks, she put a whisky in his hands. ‘Medicine,’ she said. ‘Cheers.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and drank then smiled. ‘This was so incredibly kind of you.’

‘Well I reckoned you were a chump, not an axe murderer. Me Nuala. Nuala Barnes.’

‘Barnaby Johnson.’

‘Not Cornish, then?’

‘Not remotely.’

‘Sit for a bit.’ She gestured to the second of Constance’s dog-eared armchairs across the wood burner from her.

‘I’d love to, but I should be getting back to Pendeen. My wife will be worrying.’

‘Of course.’ She hoped she showed no disappointment. ‘I’ll drive you.’

‘I can walk. It’s not so far. And the rain seems to have stopped.’

‘You’ve only just warmed up, for Christ’s sake.’

He smiled. ‘Accepted.’ He met her eyes as she stood. He had the sort of direct gaze that seemed to miss nothing. It was at once kind and unsettling; his wife could have no secrets from him, poor bitch. She liked the way he had looked about him but asked no questions, but villages being what they were, he probably knew everything about her already.

They were both silent as her car bounced back down the track to the road so perhaps he was feeling the oddness of their situation. ‘You’re thinking about that book again, aren’t you?’ she teased.

‘I am, actually. Sorry. I should do what I’m always telling my children – just let it go.’

‘So what was it that was so precious?’

‘It has a very off-putting title.’

‘Try me.’

‘
The Imitation of Christ
.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Exactly so. It sounds better in the original Latin.
De Imitatione Christi
.’

‘Like an Italian wine.’

‘Yes,’ he sighed.

‘Let it go,’ she said.

‘Yes, yes,’ he laughed.

‘Was it valuable?’

‘Not remotely, in money terms. But my sister gave it to me before she died and, well, I suppose it had become like a talisman. I seemed to take it with me everywhere.’

‘A comfort.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So do you?’ she asked, turning left at Morvah. ‘Imitate Christ?’

‘I ought to, being your parish priest.’

‘Ah. Married and a priest. No dog collar.’

‘It was my afternoon off.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t come to church much. I don’t come at all.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘No,’ he said and his tone was smiling. ‘Of course I don’t. But so many more people don’t come to church than do that I find it’s my default response.’

They were driving through Pendeen now and despite the damp and chill and the welcoming fire and supper waiting for her at home, she realized she was wishing they had another half-hour in the car together. ‘Do I turn up to the church?’ she asked.

‘No, no. We’re a bit further on and down the lane to the right, but honestly here’s fine and I’ll make my own way down.’

She was about to protest but saw that perhaps it would involve him in one less explanation if he didn’t have a strange Australian woman in tow.

‘Thanks for rescuing me, Nuala,’ he said. ‘How on earth do I spell that?’

She told him, adding, ‘Rhymes with ruler.’

He hadn’t shaken her hand or touched her at all, she noticed. As she turned the car round and headed home she told herself jeeringly that he was a typical priest and scared of women, but sensed as she did so that neither of these was true. On the contrary, as an attractive man with constant access to women and their lives and secrets, and with none of the helpful paraphernalia of consulting room and receptionist and professional protocols to protect him, he must have had to work constantly to maintain a kind of glass barrier against overly warm responses to the attentiveness that was his stock-in-trade.

When he cycled up to her door two days later to return the borrowed clothes, she saw at once how the dog collar and black clothes could be as effective an anaphrodisiac as any crisp receptionist. ‘Ah,’ she said, opening the studio door. ‘Now you look the part.’

His wife had washed both overalls and socks. She had even ironed the overalls. ‘How does she do that?’ she asked. ‘They look as though they’ve just come out of the wrapper.’

‘The least we could do,’ he said and she felt a passing pang for his wife who possibly ironed all his shirts in the rueful knowledge that he did not begin to understand that clothes did not simply fall into these crisp folds when one unpegged them from the line.

Her being at work led naturally to his asking to see inside her studio and to examine her pottery. For once she did not resent having to explain what lustreware was, because he was so clearly interested and understanding. But then, as her exposition degenerated into self-criticism, she found his gaze on her in that penetrating way he had, a not-quite-smile about his lips. She broke off. ‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ he said, flustered suddenly. ‘I should get on and leave you.’

‘No,’ she told him. ‘I’m done for the day anyway. What is it?’

‘It’s just so nice to hear someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and is really good at it talk about their work,’ he said, taking a step or two away from her kiln.

‘Oh. Yes,’ she said. ‘But that wasn’t it, was it?’

‘Er. No. Nuala, I should leave now.’

She could so easily have let him go. He was by the door, after all, and the dog collar and all that black made him a good deal easier to resist, but for want of a more accurate phrase, the devil was in her so she reached up and took him by the lapels of his jacket, which he didn’t resist, and kissed him.

They kissed, laughed and, kissing some more, sank onto the catty old sofa she had moved out there and made rapid, greedy love with their clothes on or almost on. He pulled off his dog collar as it seemed to be restricting his breathing and he undid the front of his shirt because she wanted to feel his chest. Most probably if they had been obliged to step apart to undress or even to compose themselves sufficiently to cross the yard to the relative privacy and comfort of her bedroom, reason and morality would have prevailed. But once she had the weight of him on her she was powerless to resist what (she knew) she had started; he was so delightfully not Christos, she was so fearless, so, relatively, in control. Her feelings for the next quarter-hour were so bound up in herself and the novelty of half-forgotten sensations, that the strength of his own responses came as a shock, not just his flattering need of her but the heartfelt sigh he let out afterwards. He hid his face from her on the pretext of kissing her hair.

‘Nuala,’ he sighed. ‘Oh Nuala.’

‘Was that the wickedest thing you’ve ever done?’ she asked, genuinely curious.

He sighed again.

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Was it the only wicked thing you’ve ever done?’

‘Don’t,’ he said. He propped himself up on one elbow to look down at her. He appeared utterly miserable.

In a priestly way – all cheekbones and fine feeling – he was handsome, she considered, especially now she had put his hair in disarray and brought a boyish flush to his cheeks. ‘I don’t even know your wife’s name,’ she said. ‘Only that she irons better than I do.’

‘Dorothy,’ he said quietly and had to clear his throat. ‘Dot,’ he added.

‘And you love her.’

‘Very much.’

‘Then this must never happen again,’ she told him straightforwardly. ‘Fun though it was.’

‘Have you been married?’ he asked.

‘How …?’ she began then added, ‘Oh,’ as he touched her ring finger in explanation, running his fingertips over the callus that remained although she had not worn her wedding ring since impulsively taking it off and losing it while redecorating. ‘I was,’ she admitted. ‘He was a good Christian and a very bad husband. I left him.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I wasn’t. If I’d stayed he’d have ended up killing me. Don’t let’s talk about him. Sorry but my hips are going to sleep and this sofa isn’t very … Would you mind?’

‘No. Of course. Sorry.’

And in a few minutes they were upright and respectable once more.

As she showed him out he started to apologize again but she silenced him. ‘You weren’t here as my parish priest as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have a parish or need a priest. You were here as a friend returning borrowed clothes and what happened just happened … It was no dereliction of duty of care or whatever. It just happened. Look around you. No damage. Nobody saw. No thunderbolt. The sun’s even shining.’

‘You’re amazing.’

‘Drongo, get back to your flock.’

Once he had bounced off down the track on his bicycle and she had taken a shower and, abruptly hungry, made herself a sturdy cheese sandwich, she let herself think about his visit afresh. She felt sad at her lack of self-control because, for all that he was a priest, she believed he might have become a friend with whom she could agree to differ, a friend off whom she could strike sparks, and she suspected they had now ruined the chances of that.

He came back, however. After a day or two. He had found a replacement for the little, unreadable book that had brought them together – Thomas à Kempis – an exact likeness to the old one apparently, though, of course, without the dedication from his sister, and he had found Nuala a book in the same second-hand shop. It was a long, early-twentieth-century novel, an Australian one she had never read, although she had heard of its author, Mrs Henry Handel Richardson. ‘Something for the long winter evenings,’ he told her. ‘It has one of the most impossible husbands in all literature. And one of the best longsuffering wives.’