A Perfectly Good Man (33 page)

‘No, no,’ he sighed. ‘If I talk to them they might go away. I’m so sorry about all this.’

And he sat a moment, composing his thoughts or quite possibly praying before opening the door. Then, far more himself than he had seemed at the start of their drive home, he faced his questioners.

He stood with his back to Carrie’s van, unintentionally ensuring widespread publicity for her business as her name and phone number and website URL were clearly visible beside his shoulder.

She headed directly for the front door, thinking to have it unlocked and ready for his retreat. Mum was already on the look-out, for the door opened a little as she approached. But then she felt compelled to listen to what he said. He didn’t speak at first.

‘Mr Johnson?’ they called out. ‘Is it true you helped Lenny Barnes kill himself?’

‘Was that right as a priest, Reverend Johnson?’

‘How long have you known him?’

‘Vicar?’

‘Mr Johnson!’

But then the television woman, wilier or simply having done a little more local research than the others while waiting in her car, called out, ‘Father Barnaby?’

At that appeal, so like a parishioner’s, he at last spoke to them all. ‘Lenny Barnes was a son of this parish. I’d known him all his life. The accident which paralysed him and now his taking his own life are terrible things for his mother to bear. As her parish priest, I ask that you respect her privacy and grief.’

‘But did he kill himself? Did you help him?’ Her tone was harsh, without respect.

‘I was present at his request. I’m not at liberty to tell you more than that but the details will surely become clear at his inquest.’

‘Were you arrested?’

‘Did you kill him?’

He cracked at that point and swept into the house. Carrie locked the door behind him and quickly stooped to disconnect the doorbell battery. They still knocked, of course, and called through the letter box, now they’d all learnt his name.

‘Father Barnaby?’

‘Father Barnaby, please!’

There was a heavy velvet curtain that hung across the door for the colder part of the year to block draughts. It had hung there so long – all Carrie’s life certainly – that it was no longer any particular colour. It had been packed away for the summer but she knew where her mother stored it in the bottom drawer of the hall chest of drawers and she hung it as fast as she could, to block any views through the letter box or fanlight, where camera flashes were intruding with frightening rapidity.

Turning from the task she became aware that some kind of scene was going on between her parents. She heard her mother plead desperately, ‘Tell me. Just tell me and I can help you!’ They were in the winter sitting room, small and rather sunless; being on the house’s north side, it was the easiest to heat, having a small wood burner and only one small window. It was also the room furthest from the scrabbling and tapping and voices at the front, protected from intruders by the garden walls.

Perhaps feeling he could relax at long last, her father was slumped in the armchair that was too small for him, weeping with the abandon of a child, an already sodden handkerchief clumped in one fist as he attempted to hide his face in the other. She had never seen him cry before. It was as upsetting as if he had lost his temper, another thing he never did. ‘I can’t,’ he said in a odd, dry voice not his. ‘I can’t. I can’t.’

‘There,’ Mum said, as though calming a startled animal. ‘There there,’ and she ran a big hand across his hair and had never seemed stronger. But he wouldn’t be soothed and continued to weep, sobs shaking his shoulders. Seeing Carrie standing in the doorway, Mum mouthed
doctor
to her and Carrie slipped off to call Dr Murray and put the kettle on.

The doctor said it was shock and suggested tea and something to eat and said he’d drop off some sleeping pills. Carrie made up a tray. (There was always cake unless it was Lent or an Ember Day. Her mother made sponges and cherry cakes with no more effort than if she had been brushing her teeth or making toast.) Then, prompted by Mum, she made up a second one to take out to the journalists. She worried they’d try to take her photograph, scowling at them, tea tray in hand like a bad-tempered waitress, but they seemed disarmed by the gesture and readily downed cameras to accept mugs of tea and said how good the lemon drizzle cake was.

‘Hasn’t laced it with something, has he?’ one of the men asked, at which they all laughed then looked slightly ashamed.

They stood around drinking and eating cake and talking about everyday matters, traffic on the A30, Wimbledon, the local MPs.

‘So who are you?’ the television woman asked, returning her empty mug.

‘I’m his daughter,’ Carrie told her. ‘You’re not going to be here much longer are you?’

‘Is he going to talk to us again?’ She looked older than she appeared on television, less perky.

‘Doesn’t seem very likely,’ Carrie told her and gathered back the other mugs. Everyone thanked her politely.

He did talk to them again but not in a way they’d have expected. He had calmed down when Carrie returned to the winter sitting room to collect their tea things. He and Mum were both reading on either side of the unlit wood burner. Carrie had just sat down at a nearby table to flick through yesterday’s newspaper when Dad suddenly closed his book with a thump and said, ‘Right. Evening prayers. You both coming?’

Evening prayers, like morning prayers, wasn’t normally a service as such, although it was listed in small print on the church boards and in the parish magazine. Dad often called it
putting the church to bed
. This evening was clearly different and he was asking for their support.

‘Are you sure?’ Mum hesitated in the hall. ‘Tabby would do it for you in a flash if you asked her.’

‘I can’t hide,’ he said.

So they braved the journalists and photographers again, and soon were leading a small cavalcade up to Pendeen Church. While Dad went to ring the bell, Carrie led her mum to their usual pew, with the seabird kneelers made by Granny, near the front but discreetly to one side, while the journalists sat near the back, clumping together as if for courage. There seemed to be more of them than had been down at the house. Perhaps some had been scouting for stories in the two pubs and been alerted by text.

The only other parishioner present was Modest Carlsson, who sat horribly near Carrie and her mother, fairly vibrating with excitement at the drama unfolding around him. He was the ogre of her childhood, the monster it was somehow forbidden to name as such, blighter of otherwise happy occasions by his mere presence. At least two Christmases had been spoilt by Dad’s charitable insistence on inviting him for lunch because he had no one in the world. He was one of those people, Molly Bosavern was another, who seemed energized by other people’s suffering, who seemed to swell with the diminishing of others and to grow more lively with a death. Yet there was nothing one could point to directly and he forestalled any criticism by good behaviour; he was never so kind or considerate as when someone was taken seriously ill or had a major disaster or disgrace in the offing: a son in prison, an all too shamingly public visit from the bailiffs. The things he said or gestures he made towards others in such circumstances could not be faulted, but, for Carrie, were always undermined by his tangible excitement, like a dog’s at the shedding of blood or a cat’s at the fluttering of an injured bird.

He caught her eye as she glanced round to see what Dad was doing and his smile was hungry for developments. She steeled herself for speaking to him afterwards.

Mum suddenly let out a heavy sigh, possibly unconsciously. Carrie reached across and laid a hand on hers. Mum took back her hand shortly afterwards, using it to cover her mouth while she cleared her throat, abashed at having betrayed her weaker feelings perhaps. ‘Did you tell Phuc?’ she whispered.

‘Only a text,’ Carrie told her. ‘I’ll tell him more tonight.’

As ever, thinking of Phuc made Carrie feel suddenly vulnerable, churned up inside. It wasn’t normal to feel like this about a brother – she was fairly sure Morwenna Middleton wouldn’t feel like this about her two. Women usually complained about their brothers, implying they were immature, insensitive or bad sons, leaving their sisters to bear the parental burden. She imagined Morwenna’s brothers as reliable extensions of her peculiarly placid father, dependable, even a bit conventional compared to her.

Phuc was at once hopeless and spikily defensive, which tended to leave her feeling uselessly protective towards him, weirdly maternal, in fact. Weirdly because Carrie had never for one minute hankered after children of her own, always preferring to enjoy other people’s from an undemanding distance. The mere thought that she must get hold of him to tell him properly what had happened, giving him yet another reason to feel he might be about to fall short as a son and brother, upset her and she was glad of the sudden distraction of her father’s voice, as reassuringly familiar as her own front door, reciting an opening prayer.

Dad had not robed up. She guessed it was this lack of ritual distance combined with the absence of any musical equivalent that made people give these services such a wide berth. She had even overheard one congregant tell a new arrival who was quizzing her about other services in the week, ‘Oh, those. They’re listed on there but really they’re
private
.’ The lack of ritual, of masking, made the service feel at once direct and intimate in a way she imagined some people would find a little threatening.

Sure enough, Dad was suddenly walking among them with a couple of Bibles and a prayer book.

‘Hello,’ he said to one of the journalists. ‘We haven’t met properly but since you’re here I wonder if I could ask you to read the Old Testament lesson when we get to it and … er … you to read the New Testament one? Don’t worry. Both very short and I’ll say when. Thanks.’

He spoke so that his enquiry was actually a direction. The tactic, if that’s what it was, paid off. Having been obliged to read the Bible to one another and to hear each other mumbling the sixty-ninth psalm –
Save me, O God: for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me
– the journalists melted away. Just one lingered to take a photograph as Carrie and her parents emerged from locking up the church. Modest Carlsson had already vanished, in a rare display of shyness or sensitivity.

She saw her parents into their kitchen then left them in peace and retreated to her end of the house. Dad was plainly a husk of himself after the service and would be taking an early night. There was no guest preacher the next day so he would be rising early to write a sermon. Mum was rattled but would calm her nerves by listening to the radio after supper, hands busy with a jersey or some mending. To Carrie’s lasting shame, she persisted in mending Carrie’s work clothes the way she had once mended her father’s.

The latest half-tamed farm cat, a bulky brindle called Jehoshaphat – inevitably known as Phatty – had adopted her because Dad suffered cramp in the night and tended to kick him off the bed. She fed him, poured herself a badly needed beer and sat down to e-mail Phuc as promised, warning him there was likely to be something in the morning’s papers, if not on the night’s local news. ‘Now we just have to wait,’ she told him. ‘To see if the CPS are going to prosecute and, if not, to wait for the inquest. Whatever happens, he’ll be a key witness at that. And then the Church might take action against him, or the PCC. Do ring,’ she added, knowing he wouldn’t, ‘if you want to know more. Cxx.’

While she was dithering over pressing send, her mobile chirruped, which made her jump, which startled the cat off her lap. It was a voicemail alert. Living where they did, the signal came and went, going more often than not. Texts and alerts seemed to make it through with more consistency than calls. She walked out into the yard and stood on the mounting block there, which she had learnt of old secured the best available signal short of walking up the lane towards the village.

‘Hi,’ said a voice she immediately placed as Morwenna Middleton’s. ‘Just calling to see how you all got on. Carrie please
please
don’t worry about those shelves when you’ve got all this to deal with. They can be something to look forward to. But oak. Definitely oak and hang the expense! MDF scares me; what goes into
making
that stuff? Ah well. I just wanted to say hello, really, and that Dad and I are thinking of you … Oh, that’s it, and to remind you of something my mad mother used to say when she was being funny and mad rather than mad and scary.
Normal family life is seriously weird.
OK. I’ll stop wittering on since you’re obviously hiding. Hi and bye. Morwenna.’

How strange it was that she left her name at the end! Dad did the same thing in his messages, as though signing a letter. Carrie folded away her mobile, dodging the impulse to return the call since she was unsure what she would say. Instead she returned to her kitchen to make herself a quick Marmite and lettuce sandwich, then took a second beer across the yard to her workshop.

This lay in what had once been the dairy. Long since stripped of equipment that new regulations had probably rendered obsolete, it was a simple, whitewashed space with a rack along the longest wall for storing timber on as the damp air would have made wood banana if stored on its end. Her grandfather’s work bench, complete with his antique vice and several of his tools was placed so she could work on either side of it and enjoy a view across the yard to the seaward fields. There was a tiny second-hand Swedish wood burner, which she fuelled with offcuts tossed into an old wheelbarrow kept for the purpose. Utilitarian fluorescent lighting and a paint-spattered CD player were slung from the beams.

Phatty followed her, wanting company, and immediately settled in the old Parker Knoll by the wood burner from which he had a good vantage over any mice that ventured out from amongst the piles of wood shavings. The wood burner was old and a bit leaky so at this time of year, when it had stood cold for a month or two, it added a tang of charcoal and ash to the comforting smell of wood.