A Perfectly Good Man (31 page)

‘You can have all the visitors you like in there,’ her mother said, helping her move her things, which was the only comment she ever seemed to make, even indirectly, about Carrie’s persistently single state. The family cat, Sapphira – or was it Abishag by then? – elected to move in with her, apparently setting the seal on her spinster status, and that was that.

She did try. A boy on her carpentry course asked her out a couple of times and she went because he was sad and overweight and they got quite drunk and actually kissed, but she panicked when he got all steamed up and wanted to go further and he avoided speaking to her after that. She went to the North Inn or the Radjel occasionally after work, chatting to people she knew and largely avoiding people she didn’t. She dressed like a man, in a uniform of jeans and tee-shirts with some kind of jacket or hoodie to hide the large breasts inherited from her mother, because otherwise men stared at them in a way she suspected meant they were mentally detaching the breasts from the rest of her and weighing up in their minds if the breasts on their own were enough.

She wasn’t a virgin, at least. A migrant worker, Jaňek, had led her back to his caravan in Trewellard a couple of times after they got chatting and found they both had priests for parents and shared a guilty fondness for the songs of Elkie Brooks. He had been sweet and considerate and unforceful but the sex was unpleasant all the same, each time leaving her feeling she was being suffocated, and it had been a relief when he mournfully confessed he was having to return to Poland to marry his fiancée.

Once or twice women had made passes at her too, which was incredibly awkward as they had misread whatever signals her jeans and biker jacket were giving out whereas Carrie just thought they were being friendly. She apologized profusely, bought them drinks and heard their life stories while parrying any further advances. Sexual fulfilment might continue to elude her but she had somehow known for as long as she knew Simon le Bon and Adam Ant did nothing for her, that she wasn’t gay either.

Carrie spotted a space and pounced, swinging her little van over to the right-hand lane in the face of oncoming traffic she coolly ignored while parking and then thanked cheerfully once safely in. A space on the seafront was handy for the job in hand but also for catching the eyes of passers-by. With its neatly painted signage, done in exchange for building the signwriter a tissue box surround for a new, drop-in bath, the van was as good as a free billboard and brought in so much work she no longer went to the expense of advertising in
The Cornishman
.

It was mid-June and Golowan week so the front was looking festive with brightly coloured banners. She wasn’t fussed about going into town on a Saturday usually but had quite forgotten it was Mazey Day, with all the traffic and parking problems its parade and street fair would cause. At the far end of the front, near the lido, the usual funfair rides had been set up and the road was cordoned off.

She double-checked the address she had tapped into her phone. The house had a garden but, perhaps in keeping with the 1930s severity of the building, it was very simple and appeared to use only three plants. All along one side, edging the right of the path, was a thriving hedge of lavender. The left border of the path was defined by another fragrant hedge of something lavender-like but not lavender, with spikes of purple-blue flowers and blue-grey leaves. It flowed down onto the gravel on both sides, a sort of botanical wave. The third plant was some sort of tough rose bush, covered in loose-petalled white flowers.

Carrie knew nothing about gardening, for all that her mother had tried to teach her, contenting herself with cutting grass and keeping hedges neat, but she could see the admirable simplicity of the scheme. So many gardens struck her as busy hotchpotches, one of these one of those, a bunch of these because the colour was cheerful and of this because Doreen gave it for our wedding anniversary and of that because we’re not quite sure. Gardens seemed to be allowed to happen by accident in a way few people would consider decorating or furnishing a house, and it seemed to her it was this mishmash approach that made them a source of constant and fretful maintenance to their owners. This garden was pretty and stylish yet could be maintained with nothing more specialized than a once-a-year going-over from a hedge trimmer, and still achieved that other gardening goal of being different from all its neighbours. She felt an instinctive warmth towards whoever had created it.

She rang the bell and waited a few minutes, rang it again and was about to try calling the number she had stored when she heard footsteps approaching inside. An oldish man opened the door and smiled at her mildly. His thick white hair was standing in a tuft as though he had been lying on it.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d gone upstairs to fetch something and somehow fell sound asleep. Come in, come in.’

‘I’m Carrie Johnson,’ she felt she had to tell him first. ‘The carpenter? About the bookshelves?’

‘Yes. Do come in. You’re lucky I heard you. We’re discovering it’s a quirk of the design of this place that when you’re upstairs the sound of the sea becomes louder than noises from the road or the doorstep. Something to do with the concrete overhang at the top.’

She closed the front door behind her and followed him across the black and white tiled floor into a kitchen that gave onto a sunny yard at the back that was lush with exotic plants in pots.

‘Far too many plants,’ he sighed. ‘I couldn’t bear to leave any behind. They become like friends. Some of them are probably older than you.’ He sat at the kitchen table so she sat too, setting her tool box carefully on the floor beside her. Then, as if remembering some long-ago training he said, ‘How terrible of me; I haven’t offered you anything. Coffee? Tea? Elderflower cordial?’

‘Cordial sounds nice,’ she said, thinking it also sounded like less trouble.

‘It’s homemade,’ he said. ‘I make it every year but the citric acid is getting harder and harder to find. The chemist looks at one most suspiciously and has to consult a colleague then fetch it from behind the counter.’

‘It’s a bomb ingredient,’ she explained. ‘My mother used to have the same trouble. But I made friends with a school lab technician I did some work for at Hayle and he slipped us a big jar of it – enough for years.’

‘Absurd,’ he said, as if he hadn’t been listening. ‘As if Quakers made bombs!’ And he set a glass of cordial before her.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Delicious.’ It was. It smelled of summer. ‘So have you not lived here long?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But I lose count. No thingy, you know, memory any more. One day’s much like the one before, which is restful or a kind of hell depending on how you look at it. Less than a year though. I didn’t move far. I spent all my life till now about two streets away. Nearer. But, well, my sons both live so far away now and since my wife died I didn’t need all that space. There’s a family living there again now, which is as it should be. Houses like that need children.’

He broke off, apparently having run out of inspiration and Carrie didn’t do small talk, so they just sat there for a bit in companionable silence. She sipped her cordial and looked about her. It was a very tidy kitchen. It probably had to be because it was so small. It was much as she imagined the galley on a ship. The only unruly touch was an explosive little painting on the wall above the fridge. It was an abstract painting, all reds and oranges, like having a fire halfway up the wall. She didn’t normally like abstract art as she had no idea how she was supposed to look at it. This was different. It felt deeper, somehow, less scratchy. It was done with the same bold conviction as a small child’s painting, and had the same air of the painter understanding perfectly what he was about, as if he was seeing what he painted and not just drily
thinking
it.

‘She was furious when she did that,’ he said. ‘And even more so when she found I’d kept it.’

‘Sorry. Who was?’

‘My wife. She was a painter. Rachel Kelly.’

‘I’m sorry. That doesn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t really know anything about art.’

He smiled with real warmth at that. ‘You really haven’t heard of her?’

‘Nope. Sorry.’

‘But how very refreshing!’

‘Is she famous, then?’

‘In her way. In that way that writers and artists can be which is still actually hardly famous at all compared to newsreaders or pop singers. She got much better known after she died but then that’s so often the case.’

‘Could I have a closer look?’

‘Of course.’

She stood and went to peer closely at it. There was a protective layer of glass across it but still Carrie could see the furious brushstrokes and the places where the brush had actually torn the paper in the effort to intensify the colour beyond what mere paint could do.

‘I’m sorry, Ms Carpenter, but I’m not entirely sure why you’re here.’

‘Johnson,’ she told him again. ‘Carrie Johnson. I’m here to measure up for bookcases.’

‘Ah.’ Again that lovely smile.

‘The lady who rang me, obviously that wasn’t your wife.’

‘My daughter rang you. She’s home from Canada and quietly licking me into shape.’

‘Right. Do you know where she wants these shelves?’

‘Oh yes. Through here. It’s quite a project and I said I felt bad spending a lot of money on it.’

‘Well it might cost less than you think.’

‘I told her I could always offload more books. I got rid of a couple of hundred when we moved. I used to teach English, you see, and texts do pile up rather. Once you start to throw out it gets easier and easier. You soon realize you’re hanging onto things just because you’ve always hung onto them, not because they retain any meaning or value to you. Do you read much, Ms …’

‘Johnson,’ she told him again. ‘Carrie. No, not a lot, I’m afraid. I never seem to find the time.’

He had led the way back to the hall and opened the door into the room at the front. Or tried to open it. There were books in tottering piles and books still in boxes on every side.

Though not a great reader herself, Carrie had grown up in a house where there were always more books than bookshelf space and where a slow, mysterious tide seemed always to be carrying books from table to table and stair to stair, so she found books a comforting presence and thought the sight before her perfectly understandable. ‘That’s quite a yardage,’ she said, totting up the number of boxes and allowing a metre a box to leave room for growth.

The front door opened behind her and a young woman breezed in singing to herself. On closer inspection she wasn’t so much young – she was the same sort of age as Carrie – as youthful. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’d completely forgotten about Golowan when I asked you to come today and then, like a lazy fool, I drove to my doctor’s appointment instead of walking and of course I couldn’t park again once I got back. I had to walk from Newlyn practically. Oh Lord! Books. Lots and lots of books. Look at them all! You must be Carrie. I like your van, by the way.’

‘Thanks.’

She looked more Irish than Cornish, with fine, pale skin and a tumble of springy hair the colour of wood shavings, which she was forever pushing out of the way.

‘I’ll have your parking space when you leave.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’m Morwenna.’

‘Tea?’ said the father.

‘That’s a nice idea. Tea, Carrie?’

They did a little shuffle as to who should put the kettle on, which the father won.

Carrie had a long-established habit of mentally categorizing clients according to the dog breed they most resembled. It helped fix them and their names in her memory. The father, with his rangy frame and frank, loose-mouthed expression and eloquent economy of gesture was an English pointer. But the daughter fitted no breed stereotype. If anything she was a cat and not a domesticated one. Her eyes were unusual, hard to define – tawny? Khaki? This, combined with the hair, made Carrie think of lions.

‘What we thought was that we could turn this room into a sort of library,’ she said. ‘Shelves on every bit of wall, right up to the ceiling and even over the door and windows, just leaving the bit of wall over the fireplace bare for a picture or mirror so it doesn’t get too much. Would that be do-able?’

‘Of course.’ Carrie wished that smiling came more easily to her. She would feel a smile but it often felt as though what emerged on her lips was closer to a sneer, especially if she were at all nervous, as she seemed to be now. ‘I always think it’s better to have more shelves than you need than too few, and built-in ones are more efficient than freestanding …’
I sound like a boiler salesman
, she thought, and wondered why it should matter now when it never bothered her as a rule.

‘And then I thought a wooden curtain pole could simply run from one bookcase side to another rather than being fastened to the wall itself. We’re discovering the plaster-work here is really soft and crumbly, especially on the wall facing the front.’

Carrie took out her tape measure and one of the notepads she made herself from the quantities of mail that her father’s parish business attracted, and began jotting down the room’s dimensions. ‘Paperbacks or hardbacks?’ she asked.

‘Oh. A mixture, definitely, so I doubt we should try squeezing in more than six rows. And it’s probably an idea to have an extra-big shelf space along the bottom for things like art books and dictionaries.’ She had a curious, breathy accent, lilting, again more Irish than Cornish, and hard to place.

The father came back in with tea and tough-looking flapjacks on a tray that said
NO TO WAR
in multiple languages. ‘This seems such an indulgence,’ he told his daughter. ‘I’m sure I could give away more.’

‘We’ve been over this,’ she said patiently. ‘There’s no need. And why should you? You love your books!’

Almost immediately he was distracted by a book he had stooped to tidy back into one of the overflowing boxes. He flipped it over to scan the blurb on the back – for all the world like a man browsing in a bookshop, then drifted out of the room with it, having started to read.