A Perfectly Good Man (3 page)

Dorothy was an only child, however. There were no male relatives to whom her father would have cared to leave the farm and Henry was her mother’s godson. Nothing had been said in so many words, at least not in Dorothy’s hearing, but she suspected it was an understanding as reassuring to the older generation as a full barn or a dry August.

Henry was six years her senior – a man, in fact – and now that his father had died, he was her father’s equal, so called her mother Dulcie these days rather than Mrs Sampson. He and Dorothy barely spoke beyond cheerful greetings and goodbyes and more-cake-Henrys. But occasionally, once she had finally started to fill out, she would catch his eyes on her the second before he looked away and would feel her cheeks redden so that she had to slip away on an errand, fetching more milk for the table or wool for her knitting.

She would not be handed over like a parcel, though. She set no great store by romance – she had seen the messes and bad marriages into which romance led people – but she had sufficient dignity to want him to know her, to choose her at least partly for herself, not simply for what she represented or what acreage she brought with her. She was dreading him asking her out as she could not imagine going for a Sunday walk with him or even sitting beside him in the suggestive darkness of a cinema; she could not imagine what they would talk about or by what difficult process he would steer the conversation from the generally polite to the personally specific. Yet she knew this was a necessary stage and a part of her was impatient for it to begin so that it might become ordinary and familiar rather than a thing of dread.

But then everything was changed in a swift reversal worthy of a Bible story. Her father died. Barely sixty, and with no warning, he was taken from them, felled by a heart attack while hammering in fence posts. He died on a beautiful day – the sort of day that would routinely tempt him to skip his tea and stay out working beyond sundown, so it was only when he failed to appear at supper that they realized something was wrong. Mother and daughter hunted him through the fields with torches and the dog. It was the dog that found him, and barked with a high, frightened rapidity until they came.

He was buried in Pendeen churchyard and all at once her mother transferred her allegiance from her childhood church to his. She and Dorothy sat near the back, shy among people who were not strangers – these were neighbours, after all – but who possibly thought them stuck-up for never having been before. Which was how they came to hear the announcement that the new curate from upcountry would need somewhere reasonably cheap to stay, ideally with board as well as bed provided.

The women had always done the milking and looked after the hens, but it was Dorothy’s father who ploughed, topped the pasture, made silage or tended or harvested the barley. Henry came to the rescue, naturally, renting the pasture off them for some of his Devon Rubies. And as their own beef cattle were sold off in twos and threes, he took over the running of the farm. He paid an honourable rent but inevitably this would mean far less income than if the farm were still in family hands. In time, he would help raise them precious capital by organising a dispersal sale of the cows and dairy equipment and farm deadstock. They were advised to leave this until the following tax year, however, which was a relief as Dorothy sensed her mother needed to keep busy. Dorothy’s father had no life insurance. Mother and daughter lived simply, were good at making do, but they needed any extra cash they could secure. The curate would pay rent and use the guest bedroom where they never seemed to entertain guests. He would be no trouble.

It was strange having Henry Angwin coming by almost every day, not calling in, just going about his business. Watching him out of her bedroom window or spotting him as she crossed the yard from letting the chickens out, gave Dorothy a chance to get used to having him about the place, to imagine how it would be to be married to him. There were no such discussions, of course, and wouldn’t be for a month or two, but she was fairly sure the same idea was flitting through her mother’s mind. Without her father there to talk to, man to man, Henry seemed more reticent than ever – what with that and the speechlessness that afflicted most people faced with the recently bereaved. Whereas before it had been she who looked away, red in the face, Dorothy now found it was Henry who dropped his gaze after a mumbled greeting while she felt able to look him full in the face, almost boldly.

And then the curate arrived. She had pictured someone like the vicar only less interesting. Father Philip was old and frail-looking, with papery skin and a high, bloodless voice to match. Childless and long widowed, he lived like a hermit in one end of the rambling rectory and was generally regarded both as a sort of saint and as a figure of gentle fun. He had reached the great age that made it impossible to imagine him ever having been young or been subject to the usual human impulses and appetites.

But Barnaby Johnson was in his mid-twenties, only a year older than her, if that. He was handsome, healthy-looking, funny and – there seemed no other word for it – normal. Her mother had a deep disapproval of what she called
the goings-on in London
, fired by reports she read in her Saturday newspaper or by what she saw on television. She particularly disliked men with flares or long hair or shoes that drew attention to themselves. Barnaby Johnson arrived with a short back and sides so strict it seemed almost cheeky in the circumstances.

He had two suitcases, one very heavy, which was his books, one very light, containing clothes. ‘Careful …’ he warned as she took the heavy one from him. ‘Oh!’ and he laughed at the ease with which she carried it up the stairs ahead of him.

‘Farming muscles,’ she explained, then thought how silly that sounded but didn’t know what to say instead. She showed him his room, with little apologetic gestures. She had prepared it herself, had made his bed, selected his towel, put a new bar of soap in his sink, Roger & Gallet sandalwood, hoarded from Christmas, and cut fresh lining for his drawers out of an old roll of wallpaper. She had thought it looked quite nice when she had finished but now that he was so young and smart she saw it for what it was, a pretty room for a maiden aunt, hopelessly old-fashioned. At least she had resisted the impulse to put lavender bags in the drawers but she had hung a homemade pomander in his wardrobe because it smelled a little musty with disuse.

‘Your bathroom’s across the landing,’ she told him, adding thoughtlessly, ‘I put soap in there too.’

‘Any rules about hot water?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said, confused. ‘There’s always plenty because of the Aga. The only rule I can think of is the phone. It’s in the hall and mother hates the noise of it ringing because it startles her and she always thinks it’ll be bad news. If you want to make a call you have to plug it in but you need to unplug it again afterwards.’

‘Fine,’ he said and she saw he was trying not to smile at what she had never thought eccentric until now. ‘It’s a wonderful old house,’ he added as she was leaving him to settle in.

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I suppose it is.’

‘It’s, what, seventeenth century? Older even.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Have you always lived here?’

She nodded. ‘Though I was born in Penzance.’ She heard her mother clear her throat downstairs. ‘I should, er … Mum says supper’s ready when you are. I’ll let you unpack then.’

‘Thank you, er?’

‘Dorothy.’

‘God’s gift.’

‘Who is?’

‘It’s what your name means. Mine’s Son of Consolation, which I always think’s a bit like being called Better Luck Next Time.’

She wasn’t sure what to say to that so smiled and fled after pointing out the laundry basket on the landing and handing him a backdoor key.

She saw fairly little of him at first; just breakfast and the occasional supper, and Sunday lunch – which took the place of supper on Sundays. But he was busy about the parish and she was busy about the farm. Mealtime conversations were necessarily stilted since her mother was present.

Her mother had never been a chatterbox or a gossip and had always tended to concentrate on the food set before her, and now grief and injustice had left her stony and reluctant to please. Besides, Dorothy did not know how to talk to him or what they should talk about. She was no simple farm girl; she had been well educated at some expense at St Clare’s, but his directness of manner was unlike anything she had encountered and when he looked she felt he really saw and understood things, perhaps more things than she felt comfortable acknowledging.

But then he came right out with it, in that curiously direct way he had, and asked if he could be shown around the farm that afternoon as he had some spare time. ‘I’d walk around on my own,’ he said, ‘only I wouldn’t want to stray onto a neighbour’s land or go anywhere I shouldn’t.’

‘No one’ll take you for a cattle rustler,’ her mother said; the nearest she had come to levity since her widowing. ‘Dorothy can show you round.’

‘Of course I can,’ Dorothy said. ‘If you can spare me.’

‘Ooh, I can spare you an hour or two. Go on, girl. Do you good to get some colour back in your cheeks.’

So she met him after lunch, awkward in his clerical black, with shinily new black wellies to match. ‘You see,’ he said. ‘I’m ready for anything,’ and he laughed at the boots on her behalf.

She showed him the obvious things at first, the little milking parlour with its antique stools still hanging from wooden pegs, the hen house, the vegetable patch and the two pigs next door to it. She explained how the following spring the vegetables would grow where the pigs had been and new pigs would take the vegetables’ place and he chuckled at the simple practicality of it. So she told him how each year’s pigs always had the same names – Mary and Martha – regardless of gender, to stop anyone getting too attached – and he laughed out loud.

‘Does it work?’

‘Not really,’ she said, scratching that year’s Martha with the old plastic back brush she kept on a hook for the purpose, so that the animal leaned heavily against the fence for pleasure. ‘I don’t get any less fond and I have to go to Truro for the day when they go for slaughter. Keeping the names just means I sort of transfer my love, so it’s as though all the Marys are standing in for the first one. It would make more sense to give them numbers, I suppose, like the cattle.’

She showed him the barn where the straw bales were stacked to the rafters – the last of her father’s straw, she thought of it as – and where the milk-fed but ownerless cats hunted mice and held yowling duels for supremacy. He made to stroke an especially handsome grey tabby and she caught his arm to stop him being scratched or bitten. She let go straight afterwards but the warmth of his arm had been a shock. She showed him the shed where some of the beef cattle – Henry’s cattle now, not theirs – had gathered to feast on silage. They stood in silence to listen to the softly comforting sound of their munching and to feel the warmth of their huge sighs and yeasty snorts.

‘Most summers we get barn owls in here,’ she said, and realized she was whispering, as if at a service. She had always loved the cattle shed. It wasn’t old – not like the other buildings, which were low and ancient – but had gone up in her childhood during a rare moment of confidence and relative expansiveness of her father’s after a peculiarly good harvest of early potatoes. It was an utterly plain, tanalized wooden structure, with a heavy metal door and aluminium grilles through which cattle reached their mounded food. She loved its height, which felt churchlike after the intimate darkness of the granite sheds and barns but principally she loved what it did to the view. The shed was enclosed on three sides to about six feet, to give the animals shelter from rain and wind. For almost the same distance again there was a void before the wooden cladding began. Of course this was purely there to ventilate the shed for the health of the animals, in case especially harsh winter weather meant they had to be shut up there for days at a time. But by a happy accident it composed the view, of fields, hedges, mine sheds and distant Pendeen Watch, into something like a painting. Viewed from outside, the same view seemed disordered and fragmentary; the shed worked a magic on it.

Lent courage by his interest, she led him across their fields towards the lighthouse, pointing out the bits to avoid in winter, where streams made the ground boggy – and where the easiest places were for crossing the hedges so as to avoid having to risk scrapes and cuts by fiddling with the rusting barbed-wire loops with which most of the gates were held shut.

The beef cattle Henry was running on the fields were far more boisterous than her father’s had been, perhaps because they had less human contact or had more reasons to be wary of it. She could tell Mr Johnson had a town man’s fear of them and she showed him how to intimidate them in turn by raising both his clenched fists in a sort of Fascist salute and shouting
Gaaah!
He laughed when this worked and they backed off in respect, but she could tell he would be embarrassed to try it on his own and would be one of those walkers who turned back or took long detours rather than pass through a field of cattle.

It was a walk, nothing more. She answered all his questions where she could and it seemed to her their conversation had been friendly but impersonal. She had asked him none of the questions in her mind, like what made a perfectly nice, normal man become a priest and did he have brothers and sisters. As they were re-entering the yard, though, they met Henry, who had driven up to drop off some mineral blocks for his cattle, and she felt her cheeks burn as she introduced them, as though the walk had been more than a walk and the conversation more than general.

The physical contrast between the two men as they shook hands could hardly have been greater. Henry’s hand seemed twice the size of the curate’s, his shoulders twice the width, his skin ruddily healthy by comparison. She knew most girls in the area would have laughed at the way Henry’s comfortable Penwith burr made Barnaby Johnson’s upcountry accent sound comically fussy and his build made him seem boyishly puny, and she would have predicted her own reaction to be the same. She was surprised, however, to find a sharp impulse of protectiveness rise within her and she saw Henry as she imagined this cultivated visitor saw him: rough-skinned, blockish, of the flesh fleshly, and felt an answering confusion at her disloyalty.