A Perfectly Good Man (42 page)

Another wayside shrine had sprung up outside the little village school in Pendeen he had left aged eleven. Driving home from the Truro crematorium, giddy from a continuing sense of unreality and an overdose of antidepressants and therapeutic alcohol, she made Niamh stop her hire car.

‘I hate that,’ she said. ‘I fucking hate it. Most of them didn’t even know him.’

‘So let’s trash it,’ Niamh said, with the same giggle with which she’d once pointed out that a crack in their Melbourne uncle’s bathing box on Brighton Beach let them watch the cute boys in the one next door getting out of their swimmies. ‘It’s sort of yours to trash, after all. It’s your grief, Noolie, not theirs.’

So Niamh swerved alongside it like a bank robber and they swiftly piled her car boot high with rotting bundles of flowers, children’s paintings, candles in jam jars and soggy Hallmark cards. A couple of children were standing nearby and just stared back when Niamh told them, in that blunt way she had, ‘You can lend a hand if you care to, girls.’

It was extremely satisfying and, fired up, Nuala slipped into the post office, ostensibly to buy milk and bread and the paper but actually to tell the people in there that she’d taken down the shrine and didn’t want a fresh one going up, please.

‘Len’s gone now,’ she told them. ‘The fuss is over and I need to take him home with me.’

The ashes were delivered by courier the next day. The sisters buried them illegally, high on Watch Croft, near a rock where he liked to sit to look out to sea. At least they buried as much as would fit in the funny red-gold desk tidy she had made him once. She packed it in and formed a rudimentary lid with a section cut from a cork tile. The rest they put into a firework – a huge rocket Niamh had bought especially in Chinatown on her way through London. Niamh expertly slit it open, extended and rebuilt it to include the ashes in a fragile chamber of lining paper near its tip. On the eve of Niamh’s departure, they took olives, cold pasties and beer out to the tip of Bosigran Castle so they had sea on three sides of them and, as the sun began to set, launched what remained of Len on a glorious, blue-flamed trajectory over the waves.

Nuala began to go a little mad. Not a half-day passed without another delivery of flowers, or cake, or casserole or art or just another flurry of kind letters and cards and she began to feel immured by it all and panicky.

The low point was a visit from Modest Carlsson, who meant well and could not help being so repellent, and whom she shocked by suddenly burdening with a secret he had surely not come to hear. She was rude to him and felt guilty but not for long; she was glad if what she said kept him and his unwanted pity and genteel curiosity away. And she was confident that a basic insecurity about him would stop his ever risking passing on what she had told him; he was an outsider like her but with the crucial difference, one could see, that he ached to belong.

The one person she wanted to hear from was the only one who kept silent, sent no flowers or letter and never rang. All she had was his stricken message on her answering machine, which Niamh, in her ignorance, had wiped off. Nuala had been humbled by his discretion at the inquest. She knew what it would have cost him to hide the truth, to lie even only by omission. To lie with his hand on a Bible. It was that as much as grief that had caused her to run so melodramatically from the council chamber.

When she came to the flat and saw Lenny dead, the kind paramedics left her alone with him for a few minutes, then were almost in tears at having to take him away from her. Beside herself, she was weeping, talking out loud, pacing around and it was just then that silly Kitty came knocking and oh so respectful in her hour of grief, with a cup of nastily milky tea and the letter. Which was when Nuala cracked and burnt the letter like a witch, burnt it in the kitchen sink, setting off the bloody smoke alarm, and told the frightened old biddy the things she shouldn’t have, which started the awful, stupid rumours.

She could see clearly now. She had been envious, grotesquely so, of Barnaby’s being with him at the end, and ashamed that she had not proved brave enough to listen to Lenny’s mounting despair. She didn’t for one moment believe Barnaby had helped kill him but she felt now that she, as the only parent the boy had known, should have offered to, or at least made it easier for him. Mothers were so glib about saying,
oh I’d give him my kidney
or
oh I’d die for him, no question
, but how many would be ready to reach for a smothering pillow or merciful syringe?

She very nearly didn’t hear about Dot’s death at all. Immediately after Modest’s visit she had impulsively booked a flight to Perth. Having emptied and turned off the fridge, and locked all the shutters, she called in at the post office to cancel her newspaper order and make arrangements for her mail to be held for her. She overheard the crucial words in a tillside conversation.

She had not once walked down his lane in twenty years, even to reach the footpath to the coast, but she did so then, did it easily. She gave herself no time to think, to fret or compose suitable words but simply walked down to the lovely old house, knocked and presented herself. It was Carrie who opened the door and Nuala found herself instinctively saying just to give him her love and that they were to ring her if she could help in any way. But Carrie was resolute, for all her croaky voice and red-rimmed eyes.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think you should see him. I know he’ll want to see you,’ and she had shown her to a little, dark, book-lined room at the house’s rear where Barnaby rose from his chair and took her in his arms.

Helping them in all the small, practical necessities that beset an unexpected death had given a purpose to the weeks that followed. Nothing needed to be explained. Everyone accepted that Barnaby had private dealings with virtually everyone within a five-mile radius. In the strangest, sweetest way, Carrie drew her in and relied on her like an old family friend. Morwenna, meanwhile, formed a swift alliance with her as a fellow alien in Barnaby’s close-knit congregation of largely female supporters.

From myriad small evidences and signs, from her daughter’s drily Cornish sense of humour to the astonishing order of her kitchen and understairs cupboards, Nuala came to see what a remarkable woman Dot had been. And to regret that she had never felt able to befriend her.

Barnaby was lost without her. ‘She was my north and south,’ he told her candidly. ‘In an odd way, I find she was my reason too.’

On the afternoon of Dot’s death, he had been at the Diocesan offices, formally confirming his decision to retire. In a curious way, he confided to her on another occasion, losing Len had restored his faith with one hand and entirely taken away, with the other, any ability to stand before a congregation ever again. ‘Your boy humbled me,’ he told her. ‘Utterly.’ At which, naturally, they both had a good cry.

Tabby Morris was to take up his role for the prescribed interregnum and several of them, himself included, were urging her to apply for his post when the opportunity arose. Meanwhile, as with any retiring priest, he would be obliged to quit the parish to make room in every sense for his successor.

He horrified Nuala by saying he was seriously considering entering a monastic order. ‘After over half a lifetime’s study of Thomas à Kempis, I reckon I’m ready.’ Unsure what to suggest instead, she merely changed the subject as soon as she could but she talked the matter over with Morwenna and Carrie when they called in on her during a walk.

The problem was money and property. His stepmother’s retirement home bills had used up whatever expectations he had from his father. He had little money of his own, and his pension would be enough to live off – in his habitually frugal style – but not enough to pay much rent. The farmhouse and land had belonged to Dot and naturally came to him as her husband but the long-term plan, set out in both their wills, was that Carrie, as the eldest, inherit both in turn and that Phuc have rent-free use of the end of the house currently lived in by Carrie. All very tidy if Barnaby were to die soon after Dot or indeed to take himself off to Whelm, Alton Abbey, Ewell or wherever but impossible if he needed to sell the farm in order to buy himself somewhere else.

A sly solution presented itself, which Nuala dared not voice just yet. For all Modest Carlsson’s assiduity in delivering the parish magazine there, she had recently discovered that her house lay in another parish entirely.

As Morwenna and Carrie’s love gradually blossomed and they announced they were going to be civilly partnered and move in together at Carrie’s end of the house, so Barnaby slowly emerged from his helpless state and seemed to look around him like the dazed survivor of an aerial attack. A little shy and old-fashioned in the face of the young women’s love, he called increasingly on Nuala for company. They took long walks, attended concerts, even, on her sufferance, church. She no longer itched for him as she had when they both were younger, but found his company comforting and congenial. They hugged on meeting and parting, which was enough to remind her they were a good fit, and occasionally held hands when no one was around to see – out on a footpath or sitting on the bench against Redworks House’s southerly flank to stare, lost in thought, at the maplike view of fields, and cottages and sea.

‘The thing is, Barny,’ she finally dared to say. ‘We didn’t, either of us, waste the time we were apart, of course we didn’t, but it would be a fucking awful waste if you did become a monk after all these years.’

‘Hmm,’ he said unhelpfully. ‘You do swear an awful lot.’

‘Get used to it. Come on a trip with me.’

‘I’m as poor as the proverbial church mouse.’

‘I’m not,’ she said.

‘Well that’s nice.’

‘Isn’t it? Come to WA with me. Just for a month or two. We could stay on Niamh’s olive farm. There’s a cottage there we can use. And walk and talk and, you know, grieve and make friends with goats and recover.’

‘Nuala, I couldn’t take—’

‘It’s not charity, drongo. It would be as much my treat as yours. And there are two bedrooms, so no pressure there either.’

He didn’t say yes or no but simply lifted the hand he was holding and kissed its freckled back.

‘Your nose is burning,’ she said and put her straw gardening hat on him. She saw him smile in its shadow.

‘I don’t deserve you,’ he said quietly.

‘Oh … Regard me as a fitting punishment instead,’ she told him.

‘Carrie has no idea,’ he said. ‘About, you know … Lenny and me.’

‘Jesus, Barny. You did the decent thing for so long, the least I can do is return the favour. He stays our son, even as a secret.’

In the event he would be paying his own way. After announcing the trip, whose duration became ever less definite, he insisted on swapping house-ends with Carrie to give the girls more space. This involved a long September weekend of throwing out, boxing up and tidying away, in the course of which Morwenna let out a cowgirl whoop of surprise that brought Nuala from the adjoining room.

While giggling over a funny photograph she had found of little Carrie posed in front of Pendeen Watch so that the black fog horns turned her into Minnie Mouse, she had come across a dusty little painting tucked within a bookshelf: a rough, colourful representation in oils of Morvah church and the land around it.

‘I was given it by my uncle’s boyfriend years ago,’ he said, as he came to look too. ‘It’s sat there so long that I’ve sort of stopped seeing it.’

Having eagerly asked his permission, Morwenna deftly used a fingernail to slit open the brown paper masking its back. This revealed a little red-painted design of a childlike tug. She pointed it out to Carrie who instantly understood and gasped, ‘Dad!’

‘It’s an ark,’ Morwenna explained. ‘A visual/sonic pun for RK. My mother’s little pictogram she used on paintings before she got established and started signing the fronts instead. Do you … do you have any idea what this is worth, Barnaby?’

‘Well, as I said,’ he began, ‘It was a present. Ages ago …’

‘It’s one of a series she did on a crazy, week-long autumn walk she took with a tent from Penzance to St Ives along the coast once, not long after Antony met her when she was first pregnant. Some sharp-eyed collector bought all the others in one of the early St Just cancer charity shows and at least half of those are now in the Guggenheim. People always thought Patrick Heron’s family had the others or that she’d just burnt them in one of her clear-outs.’

‘Well,’ he said, blatantly humouring her enthusiasm and still not really convinced. ‘Isn’t that nice?’

Once Morwenna’s enquiries followed up by some emailed photographs had produced a convincingly staggering estimate from Christie’s, he proved honest to a fault, not surprisingly, and called up the picture’s donor. His late uncle’s boyfriend was now a wealthy old crocodile in Palm Springs, apparently, who retained no recollection of the gift, although he remembered little Carrie’s dungarees and hooted with pleasure at the news of her civil partnership plans. He declared himself delighted and said of course Barnaby must sell and enjoy the proceeds.

‘Oh God,’ Barnaby said, once he’d hung up. ‘Wasn’t that awful? I never told Paul about Dot. Somehow I just couldn’t bear to. They never quite understood each other and I didn’t want to hear him say something pat and automatic. Poor Dot. I must write to him at once.’

Nuala had always assumed women priests would be all sugary smiles in their effort not to seem to replicate their male counterparts but, while not stern or pompous, Tabby was unafraid to be solemn. With great tact and a certain wit, she had involved both the sisters-in-law in the joining families so that, after handing over the brides, the menfolk were purely decorative.

The pretty, older woman, Phuc’s fiancée with the plant name Nuala had temporarily forgotten, read U. A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Atlas’. ‘There is a kind of love called maintenance, Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it …’ As the woman read she fiddled nervously with an exquisite sapphire ring she could not have been wearing for long, and Phuc put an arm around the smallest of the boys to pull him closer.