A Perfectly Good Man (36 page)

‘You don’t fool me, Modest,’ she would say. ‘I know you’re above all that really.’ And after a while he came to feel a better, wiser person when he was in her presence, raised by an unbeliever’s faith.

He knew nothing about art but he could see that her bowls and plates and oddly elongated bottles were beautiful. Sitting with her at her slab-like oak table which was never without something of beauty on it – a pile of apples, a piece of driftwood, a ring of snow-white pebbles – he felt he was dipping into a headily different life that could never have been his because he had always lacked the courage. He had tried copying her in small ways but when he brought things home from his walks on cliffs or moor and cleared a space for them on a table they simply looked like junk. He kept hoping that one day she would give him one of her pots, not least for the pleasure it would cause him to be able to say, should he ever have a visitor, ‘Oh, that? It’s by my potter friend, Nuala Barnes. Effective, isn’t it?’ Only she never did and he was far too mean to buy one. Simply buying one, like anyone else, would have felt like cheating and not been the same at all.

When Lenny had his accident, Modest had known himself tested. A true friend would have hurried to her side to offer comfort or assistance but he had found himself checked for some reason, by doubt or inhibition and an uncharacteristic fastidiousness. When he did finally use the parish magazine as his usual excuse to visit, a bossy friend of hers, a true friend presumably, had taken it off him at the door and said Nuala and Lenny were busy with the occupational health visitor.

When he called by the following month, she was preoccupied with adapting the ground floor to Lenny’s wheelchair and had been woundingly dismissive of him. So he had cut her off his delivery rounds for three months in the hope of punishing her. And then curiosity overcame him and he felt compelled to visit to see how she was coping with the shock of Lenny’s insisting on moving out to live on his own in Penzance. He found her brittle and brave and once again content to sit with him at her kitchen table.

He did not make the same mistake twice. As soon as news reached him in the pub about Lenny’s suicide, he sent her flowers. He had never sent flowers to anyone in his life, not even his wife, and was scandalized at the expense but he understood that the pain – the sense of sacrifice – was part of the pleasure people took in giving.
I’m so very sorry
, he wrote on the little card the florist gave him to include in the package.
Let’s talk when you’re ready.

And now the latest edition of the parish newsletter gave him reason to climb her windswept drive again, whether she was ready to talk or not. He had not seen her around the village since the news broke but then one rarely did, as she did most of her shopping elsewhere. The funeral had been a godless cremation from which she had excluded everyone but her sister from Australia. He had all the salient details.

He was disappointed to see her emerge from her studio. She would take the magazine, he thought, and dismiss him.

‘You’re working,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’ He was slightly shocked that she
was
working. He had pictured her slightly crazed with grief, needing his wise words.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It’s all coming out badly,’ and she surprised him by kissing his cheek. ‘Thanks for the flowers, Modest. I should have written. It was very sweet of you. Everyone’s been so kind it got almost unbearable. Sympathy is hard to bear. Come in.’

Although death, inquest and funeral were all long past, there were flowers on every surface. Flowers, pot plants, even a small lemon tree. The scent of them all tickled his nose. She saw him look.

‘They’re starting to go over,’ she said. ‘I should start throwing them out but that would mean, well, you know.’

‘Starting over?’

‘Yeah,’ she laughed shortly. ‘Right. Something like that. We should have tea. Do you want tea?’

‘Please don’t go to any trouble, Nuala.’

‘It’s no trouble. I need tea,’ she said but having filled the kettle she sat down again without setting it on the hotplate and he did not like to say anything.

‘I expect it’s the last thing you need,’ he said. ‘But I brought you the latest …’ and he took a copy of the newsletter from his shoulder bag and set it on the table. She reached out a clay-whitened hand and touched it with something like tenderness.

‘You’re amazing the way you keep churning this horrible thing out,’ she said.

‘Oh, really,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing but typing. Other people do far more. They do real work.’

‘Yeah. Well. Other people. So what’s going to happen, Modest? Will they chuck him out, do you reckon?’

Of course he knew exactly who she meant but he was
Good Modest
when he was with her,
kind, unworldly Modest
.

‘Do you mean Father Barnaby?’ he asked softly.

‘Who else?’

‘I really couldn’t say. He’s very popular despite … What he said at the inquest, about prayer and … I think some people are taking him up as a kind of cause. People from outside the parish.’

‘People don’t know the half of it.’ She sighed with surprising violence and muttered, ‘And they probably never should.’

Modest had been about to stand to set the kettle to heat for her, as he was really very thirsty from all his walking and had said no to two previous offers in expectation of tea at Nuala’s, but he froze as her words sank in. Speaking very carefully, speaking just as he imagined a priest might in such a situation, and keeping his voice as gentle as he could, he asked, ‘Nuala, is there something … something
held back
which the inquest should have heard about?’

She didn’t answer him straight away. Instead she looked at him in a way that made him realize how rarely she actually looked at him. Her eyes were a deep blue that seemed hardly faded by age. For a moment she seemed to be examining him and he felt weighed in the balance and uncomfortable. Just when he thought she might be about to curse him and throw him out, she said simply, ‘Barnaby was Len’s father. It was a mistake. A stupid, silly fling. And I was a bitch. I realized I wanted a kid but I didn’t want Barnaby and all the hassle and fuss. So I never told Len who his father was.’

‘But Barnaby knew?’

‘Oh yeah. He knew. I owed him that much. But I told him if he ever told Lenny, I’d take the kid away, right away, where he and his fucking Jesus and that fat cake-baker couldn’t get their claws into him.’ She was crying now, shedding tears at least, but seemed not to notice. She had torn a dark blue flower from the pot on the table and was pulling its petals off one by one and laying them in a neat little daisy-shaped pattern.

Modest felt the room had suddenly become as quiet and airless as a tomb and that she was no longer aware of him, not as himself, that he might have been anybody and she would still have talked, simply because the moment had come for talking.

‘Oh, Nuala, I’m so sorry,’ he began, ever so slightly prompting her to continue. ‘It must have been so …’

‘And he didn’t say a word,’ she said. ‘He never said a word. I thought it was so obvious. I thought everyone would see how alike they were. But of course he was a priest so it’s the last thing anyone would … Even at the inquest. He was so fucking
good
, wasn’t he? He didn’t even perjure himself in order to keep his promise. He just didn’t quite say it all.’

‘But if Lenny didn’t know, why did he … Why involve him like that?’

‘It was just Jesus. Fucking Jesus. Len wanted Jesus with him at the end!’ She did not say
instead of me
but she did not need to. Her anger felt corrosive, unanswerable.

Good Modest
, he reminded himself.
Kind and wise and slightly shocked, perhaps, at her bad language
and he held his tongue in case she offered anything further.

But she pulled herself together suddenly, swept the petals into her hand and so to the compost bucket. ‘Christ. Sorry. I offered you tea, Modest, and I never even put the kettle on,’ she said and something in her tone, a small barb, made him wonder if she had ever really intended to.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘I should leave you and your troubles in peace.’

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she continued, ignoring him. ‘I don’t know what I was … Nobody knows except you. If word gets out, I’ll know it was you.’

‘I won’t breathe a word,’ he said, backing away from her sudden frankness. ‘I can keep a secret.’

‘Of course you can. You’re full of secrets, aren’t you?’ She opened the door for him. She handed him back the magazine. ‘Nothing personal,’ she said, ‘but please don’t bring me this thing anymore. I hate it and everything it stands for.’

‘Sure, Nuala,’ he said. ‘Understood.’

‘Good,’ she said and she closed the door.

He began to shudder uncontrollably as he walked away from her house. Alone between the wide expanses of field he felt vulnerable, as though walking with more riches than he could safely carry. On one level his long patience was rewarded. At last he had the plump, nutritious proof of Johnson’s fallibility and fundamental ordinariness. But on another he felt mocked by the hollowness of his triumph, for the proof was so tenuous – no more than hearsay, all too easily dismissed as mere spite – and in any case, after such a long interval, who would remember the justifying details? The broken-backed boy had been, what? Eighteen? Twenty? Modest calculated and realized the affair must have happened soon after his own arrival in the village and first involvement in the parish.

His memory was usually pretty keen but he tried in vain to think of a single occasion when he had seen Johnson and Nuala together. He tried to picture the preposterous, pornographic scene, the tugging off of dog collar, bursting of buttons, her clayey handprints on his hot, demanding flesh, but was troubled to find that the only image that would linger was of the two of them sitting companionably on the sofa in the sitting room she had never shown him. For all the glaring differences in their spiritual lives, they were, he realized, extremely well suited. As a couple they would have been compellingly attractive, even impressive. A couple to bring forth striking, successful children, a couple to inspire coupling in others.

Poor Dorothy
, Modest thought.
Dowdy, unbohemian Dorothy
. Dorothy had never managed to conceal her distaste for and suspicion of him. She might have retained her husband in the flesh but she would surely have lost him in spirit, lost his true affection and respect.
Poor Dorothy
. Like the surprisingly unpolished country wife of an urbane politician. A maker of cakes not conversation.
The fat cake-baker
. He smiled to himself at Nuala’s bitter little label for her. Dorothy had eluded him until now, secure in her quiet sense of position, her deep roots in the place and the evident affection in which she was held by the parish.

As if his thoughts had conjured her from the gathering evening, he saw her ahead of him as he entered the village. She was walking the same way as him, laden with bags that were probably stuffed with flower-arranging materials, raspy blocks of oasis, ugly, long-hoarded plastic vases retained from funeral offerings. He was an old man compared to her, seventy-five where he assumed she was at most in her early sixties, yet to watch her he felt vigorous by comparison. She had always walked as though weighted down. She had become quite fat, to the point where she seemed to belong to a different race from her husband and skinny, boyish daughter, but it ran deeper than that. She walked as though her flesh were denser that other people’s and, it struck him now, as though her troubles were more burdensome.

Until he spotted her, his assumption had been that he was heading home to tea and toast and a quiet drink or two floated on a tide of bad television uncritically absorbed. But when he saw her a terrible idea took shape and acquired direction when she ducked up the lane that led to the church and the building everyone still called the vicarage although Johnson and his family had always lived elsewhere.

He had the perfect excuse, in a load of surplus parish magazines, to turn that way too. If she went into the vicarage, well, then he had business there because he produced the newsletter in the parish offices on the ground floor. If she continued to the church, he could be on his way there to leave the magazines on the table at the church’s rear.

She continued to the church and he slackened his pace, enjoying the sense of anticipation. He actively disliked this church these days, compared to its older sister in Morvah. He found its crenellated outer walls forbidding as he did the stretch of rocky land immediately above the steeply sloping graveyard. He had never known such a steep graveyard and couldn’t see it in rain without imagining corpse juices trickling downhill towards the church’s foundations. And the church itself was too high for its narrow width, to his mind, so that its dark stained beams seemed steep and unsafe. Then there was its air of cheerful community clutter, which to his way of thinking typified the bit of this, bit of that compromise that was at the heart of all that was misguided in twenty-first-century Anglicanism, the lack of rigour that would surely prove its undoing. There were times recently when he had seriously considered converting to Rome.

There was no sign of her as he came in and he thought for a moment she might have slipped out again by the smaller door on the vicarage side. But then he heard a clatter from the vestry and realized that she was indeed unloading materials for the flower-arrangers. He busied himself at the bookstall table, removing the pile of the previous month’s magazine and setting up a neat stack of the new one. Then he tidied the other piles as he waited for her to emerge.

He did not need to see her expression. He could tell from the cheerful effort she put into greeting him how little she wished to find him there.

‘Dorothy,’ he said and boldly reached out to take both her plump hands in his. ‘I’m so very sorry for all you’re going through.’