A Perfectly Good Man (30 page)

‘After you’re confirmed and you’re a bit older, you’ll probably stop coming, regardless of how things develop between you and Amy. You might stop for a bit, you might stop for several years. But what matters is what you’ve learned and that you’ll know the church will remain there for you whenever you need it. Perhaps you’ll be in desperate need. Does that make sense?’ Barnaby asked him.

‘Yes.’

‘You said that very quickly, Len. I’m not a teacher you have to please. Tell me honestly. Has that made you feel less anxious?’

Lenny smiled. ‘A bit. Yes. Thanks.’

‘If I’ve done my job, you’ll have a bit of church inside your head and that’ll be enough to get you through. And you will need it, Len. Everyone does at some point. We all suffer fears and losses. It’s what makes us human. It’s what’ll make you a man.’

Lenny pictured the church in his head and saw it was people rather than a building. ‘You’ve called me Len twice now,’ he said.

‘Have I? Sorry.’

‘It’s OK. It’s what Mum calls me sometimes. I reckon he was an old boyfriend …’

Then Barnaby did something he’d never done before and never did again. He went off to the kitchen and came back with a can of beer for each of them. ‘Emergency supplies,’ he said. ‘Class over. Cheers.’

And they simply sat and drank and chatted for a while. He asked about school and what Lenny wanted to do later on and Lenny said he was torn between engineering and something involving chemistry but admitted that all he really wanted was to play rugby for the Pirates.

‘I know absolutely nothing about sport,’ Barnaby confessed. ‘Tell me. How feasible is that? Playing for them. How would you go about it?’

So Lenny told him about how he already played with the junior league and would go on and trial for St Just probably. About trials and scouts and sports scholarships to help with university fees. And Barnaby seemed truly interested in a way Mum never was. All she ever said was, ‘Just don’t let them bugger up your ears or break your pretty nose.’

And then, when conversation faltered a little, and because unaccustomed beer had made him bold, Lenny asked what had made Barnaby become a priest.

‘Ooh. That’s a hard one. Sometimes I think it just sort of happened.’

‘Nothing just happens.’

‘OK, OK.’ He swigged his beer and thought a little. ‘There was a sort of voice in my head that wouldn’t shut up. I’d had a very scientific childhood, with no religion in it all, but a part of me kept going back to … I was drawn in by, well, mystery, I suppose. And by people who showed kindness when they didn’t have to. I felt the pain of death when I was still very young and then I saw the terror of it in other people. My father’s death was … Sorry, Lenny. That’s not much of an answer. How about I think about it and tell you next time?’

‘No. It’s just …’ Lenny had never seen Barnaby so lost for words. His struggle to express something words couldn’t seem to cover was more convincing than any smooth theology. ‘What are you doing all day on a weekday?’

Barnaby smiled into his beer, let off the hook, perhaps. ‘Apart from parish admin? I visit the sick. A lot of people ask for that, even people who hardly ever set foot in a church. Sometimes they want communion at their bedside. They always want to talk. Most people are frightened of dying, and illness, even if it’s not especially serious, reminds them of that and they need comfort. And then, when people do die, I visit their families, to see how they’re coping. Funerals and weddings both take quite a bit of planning. And if a couple asks me to marry them, I expect them to set aside time to come in here to talk about marriage and what it means.’

‘They can’t just book the church and pay you?’

‘They can try but it’s a serious business, it should be, and marriage in church is a sacrament which I expect them to take seriously.’

‘What’s a sacrament?’

‘It’s any activity that involves a direct interaction of God’s grace – the Holy Spirit, if you like – in our lives. Most obviously Eucharist, when you’ll come to the altar for communion. And when the bishop confirms you. And when a different bishop ordained me a priest. And marriage and extreme unction – that’s when I pray for a person who is actually dying …’

‘Do you do that often?’

‘Not really. It’s gone out of fashion. But most people die in hospital rather than at home now and if they don’t send for me, they’ll be visited by the hospital chaplain instead.’

‘Does it work?’

Barnaby smiled, glanced at his watch and drained his can. ‘That’s your last question then we must both go home for our suppers. Does it work? I hope so. It’s a comfort. It’s a beautiful prayer. And people are often very frightened at the moment of death. They often feel guilty suddenly about things they’ve done in the past. On one level it’s like magic – it’s a ritual. We’ve no way of knowing if it saves a soul until it’s our turn to find out the truth for ourselves, but yes, from the point of view of those left behind, it often does work in that it brings peace. Now. Class well and truly dismissed.’ He stood up, so Lenny did too. ‘But between now and next week I’d like you to think about the next line of the Creed.’

‘He descended into hell.’

‘That’s the one. Maybe you can text Amy to remind her?’

‘She still doesn’t have a mobile. Not till her birthday.’

He shook his head. ‘People like Derek Hawker make me feel very … inadequate. Not fit enough. Not good enough. Not strict enough. Is he bad at anything, do you think?’

‘He can’t sing. I sit by him in church and he really can’t sing.’

Barnaby briefly rested a hand on Lenny’s shoulder. ‘That’s a great comfort,’ he said, mock solemn.

He saw Lenny out to his bike and surprised him by insisting he put on his helmet and Sam Browne belt before setting off. He held out his hand for Lenny to shake before they parted on the corner. It felt a bit weird and formal – they had never done this before – but it also felt gratifyingly adult.

Lenny wasn’t much given to fancy, outside of horror films, but the ride home that evening felt magical. There was a moon, fat and bright enough to be casting shadows, and he didn’t pass a single car or pedestrian from Pendeen to Morvah. At the bend in the track up the hill to home, he stopped to admire the way the moon was drawing glitter from the sea and throwing a distant container ship into sharp relief. Most of the time he took where he lived for granted, resenting what felt like extreme isolation and the myriad small marks of what he was coming to recognize as poverty. And yet there were times like this, or when he came down the track on his bike just as one of the German tour buses was creeping by on the way to Zennor and St Ives, when he saw his life as outsiders might see it and realized he was lucky.

He probably wouldn’t stay. He couldn’t imagine what he could do as an adult that would give him a reason to – short of playing for the Pirates – and he wanted to travel, he wanted to see the world, he wanted to visit his cousins in Australia and experience life lived in a city like London, or New York, the sort of places you saw in crime dramas on television. And yet he was glad he’d be able to tell people he had grown up in Cornwall.

His mum was out. He had forgotten she had an opening to go to in Truro that night. He was glad to have the house to himself for a change, to be spared the grilling which often passed with her for conversation. It amused him when friends asked if it wasn’t scary, living somewhere so remote; it never occurred to him to be scared, because this silence and darkness were what he had associated with home and security all his life. From what he could gather from
The Cornishman
, you were more likely to end up dead or hospitalized, the victim of scary people, if you had neighbours.

Amy and he had to make do with e-mails until her parents let her have a mobile, and he secretly liked the relative formality and calm of it and that she wrote him whole sentences with whole words instead of the textspeak standard among his mates. Tonight’s e-mail was quite short because her mother was ill and she was having to make supper with her dad but still it gave him a little snapshot of her evening so that he knew how she was feeling, what she was going to eat and that she had nearly finished the book she was reading.

They were both careful what they wrote. Her parents probably weren’t nearly as strict as it suited them to pretend, her father was probably far too tired after a long day’s teaching to spend time hacking into his daughter’s e-mail account. Amy and Lenny had yet to use the word Love with each other. Sometimes it felt like something just around the corner and possibly to be dreaded, sometimes it felt as though it didn’t need saying and that they had such a natural sympathy they could take it as read.

But that evening, excited by starlight and having the house to himself, he didn’t want to leave it unsaid any more.
Amy
, he typed.
I think I love you. Really.
He kept it cool by not signing off, thinking she would know who it was from, which was all that mattered. Then he had a moment or two of panic after pressing send, in case she assumed he had merely pressed send too early and had more to say when in fact he had no idea what he should say next.

He calmed himself by fetching his usual home-alone supper: a huge ham sandwich made crunchy with a chopped-up dill pickle and a slab of cheddar whose thickness would have had his mother talking about bills and
do you think I’m made of money
. A huge cheese and ham sandwich and a big glass of chocolate milk. Baby food really, but it was what he liked. And some ice cream to follow with a chopped banana.

There was nothing he wanted to watch on TV and anyway he preferred to be in his room. He loved his room, especially at night-time. It was off on its own at the far end of the house. His bed was the same he had used since boyhood – a kind of bunk with the clothes storage built in underneath. He was getting too tall for it – his feet stuck out at the end if he didn’t lie with his head really near the top – but he enjoyed climbing a ladder to go to bed and he liked that he had a little porthole window near his pillow so he could look out at the stars and the distant view. When he was small he would turn out the lights and pretend his bed was a lunar module. Now he just liked turning out the lights and lying in bed.

Tonight he tried something weird and new. Praying. He prayed in church, of course, because you had to and everyone else did but he had lied when he said yes when Barnaby asked if he and Amy prayed at other times. Prayed out loud, at least. He couldn’t kneel at the foot of the bed or anything, which would have been unbearably strange in any case, but he whispered the words to the Lord’s Prayer out loud while shutting his eyes. He tried doing as Barnaby asked, actually thinking about the meaning of the words rather than simply chanting them. And then he opened his eyes and lay there looking out at the stars and listening to the wind which was starting to get up, whistling in the not quite blocked up chimney of his bedroom fireplace.

The prayer was strange, a bit like how he imagined witchcraft was meant to be; you said words out loud and things changed around you. He waited, feeling for changes, thinking about Amy reading his e-mail, about Amy in her bed.

When his mum came home he pretended to be asleep.

CARRIE AT 35

Carrie fell in love for the first time when she was thirty-five, and the sensation that stole over her was so utterly unfamiliar she could not recognize it for what it was.

It took her a year or two past puberty to begin to suspect that she had no sex drive. As Jazz and Shell and her other friends at school erupted with hormones and developed crushes and either took cautious sips of sex or threw themselves into it with reckless thirst, she found herself more and more isolated from the instincts around her. At first she assumed she was simply a late developer or just developing in different stages to most people. But her body duly underwent all the dreaded, longed-for changes, and still there was no spark to make sense of it all.

She went through the motions. She stared at airbrushed photographs of pop stars, listening to their music at the same time in case that helped. She did her best to see what it was about certain boys at school that made girls suddenly start flicking their hair about or striking unnatural poses, but they were simply boys and often neither the most pleasant nor the most intelligent ones. She listened carefully as girls confided erotic dreams they had, because she seemed to be having none and needed to know the salient detail in case she were ever called upon to pretend. She absorbed every detail of a page of masturbation tips in one of Shell’s mother’s magazines, in case this was the key that would unlock normality. But quite apart from making her feel completely weird, as though her head were swelling, the business unnerved her because the scenes and faces she should be conjuring up only made her want to stop immediately.

She was fairly sure she wasn’t the only one, fairly sure that some of the others must be faking too, and was simply glad that she wasn’t somebody people noticed, least of all boys. Difference of any kind was usually brutally turned upon and she dreaded being suddenly accused of being a hypocrite or weird or, even worse, a dyke, which seemed to be the standard label for any girl who chose not to conform, even harmlessly straight punks or Goths. But she was far more cautious of letting her differences show than when she was little and, perhaps because she was perfectly normal-looking but no threat and such an attentive listener, her blossoming friends did not challenge her but seemed to relish the way her sexual blankness rendered them all the more ripe and available.

And then, naturally, there was God. Her parents would never have shirked discussing sex or relationships with her and certainly would never have been especially strict, yet the tacit assumption among her friends seemed to be that, of course, she had to be careful and good and save herself because her dad was a vicar.

Once they all left school, though, things changed. Friends moved away, either geographically or, abruptly, into the foreign, adjoining countries of motherhood and/or marriage. And never even thinking about sex, which in any case seemed to cause far more trouble than happiness, no longer seemed such a problem. She studied for her City and Guilds in carpentry, catching a bus and a train to Camborne every day, then quietly started her little business. Although she still effectively lived at home, her move into independent adulthood was marked by Dad’s suggestion she move into her grandmother’s old rooms at the oldest end of the house, so that she had her own kitchen, bathroom, living room and front door.