A Perfectly Good Man (5 page)
Around this time she became unusually tense and quick-tempered again, lashing out in particular at footstools, buckets, the fiddly plastic compartments in the new fridge – and turning her impotent fury on Dorothy if Dorothy dared to reason with her. ‘Don’t use that reasonable tone with me,’ she snapped on more than one occasion. Dorothy began to worry she was ill – not in her mind but her body – and that fear or pain was finding voice in anger. But they did not have the kind of relationship in which she could set her mind at rest by asking.
And then Barnaby Johnson appeared in the yard without warning. It was late afternoon. It had been unseasonably warm – oppressive, milk-turning weather that had brought clouds of thunder flies into the sheds. Dorothy was in the act of bringing in laundry from the line in the mowhay and saw him from behind a sheet without his seeing her. He walked up to the front door, shadowed by the dog, and then hesitated, visibly nervous, and went to check the milking parlour instead before heading back to the front door. She watched from her hiding place. He wore extraordinarily shiny black shoes and seemed taller and more grown up, somehow. He seemed to have invested in a new, darker suit, a very well-cut one. It looked expensive.
She slipped off to one side and in through the scullery. Her mother was in the kitchen, furiously rolling out pastry, and she reached her just before the door knocker sounded through the house. Dorothy had never been so decisive.
‘It’s him,’ she told her. ‘He’s come back. I’m not here.’
Flustered, her mother was taking off her apron and brushing flour from her hands. ‘But what should I—?’ she began.
‘I don’t know. I’m not here, that’s all. I’m in Truro for the day.’
She had expected a protest on moral grounds – her mother was rigorously truthful – so was surprised that she hurried out directly as he knocked again, and half-closed the kitchen door behind her. Dorothy positioned herself to one side of it so she could hear but could also escape silently through the scullery if need arose. She heard every word of the conversation that followed. Amplified by the hall, perhaps, which was all hard surfaces, she heard it as clearly as a radio play and, just as when she listened to the radio, she found she could picture the facial expressions from tones of voice.
‘Mrs Sampson?’
‘Hello. Dorothy’s not here.’ Her mother’s voice was harsh with anxiety. Dorothy knew what the lie cost her, but perhaps she convinced herself
not here
could simply mean not in the hall right now.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good because it’s not her I came to see. Not really.’
‘Oh? Will you come in. Can I fetch you a drink? Tea or something cold? It’s warm out there.’
‘Er. No. Thank you. I can’t stay.’
‘Well, let me just …’ And her mother must have stepped out to join him in the sunny yard because her words became maddeningly indistinct, then Dorothy heard the front door shut, and the sounds from outside – birdsong, cattle lowing – were abruptly muffled.
She hurried out into the scullery and watched through the window, amid the sharp scents of cheese rind, quinces and cold lamb from the day before yesterday, as her mother walked with him to the top of the yard and back onto the lane. The two of them were talking with some animation.
Then something she said made him stop, shake her mother’s hand and, unhesitatingly, plant a kiss on her mother’s cheek before he walked away. Her mother stood there a moment, gazing after him, and one hand rose to touch her face. Then she turned and looked, with unerring instinct, towards the scullery window and her expression was as stricken as Dorothy could remember seeing it, worse than when Dad died, and there were tears on her wrinkled cheeks. She had not cried when Dad died, or not in the open, and not like this.
Dorothy ran out and took her in her arms. They were not people who touched; she had not realized her mother had become so very thin and she worried, once again, she might be ill with stomach ulcers, or worse, and not telling her. Her mother did not embrace her back but said only, ‘I’m sorry,’ pulling back and controlling herself with a kind of shudder. ‘I meant it for the best. I was thinking of you. I didn’t want you hurt.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Dorothy told her. Some people were approaching on the footpath. She set a hand in the small of her mother’s back and gently steered her towards the open front door and privacy.
‘As a priest’s wife, you’d always be poor.’
Dorothy smiled. ‘I never thought to marry money, Mum. Anyway, who says he’s interested?’
‘And it’s a hard life,’ her mother went on quietly, ignoring her.
‘Harder than marrying a farmer?’
‘Oh on a farm there’s always work, the work never ends and there’s often uncertainty, but you stand together and … He may be exhausted half the time and out of the house the rest but you have him to yourself, girl. The husband who’s a priest will never be yours entirely. You have to share him. Your house, your family too. He’ll always have a higher duty than to you.’
She could tell this was a speech her mother had rehearsed in her head, maybe even muttered aloud as she milked the cows. ‘I know all this,’ she told her. ‘Do you think I haven’t worked this out for myself weeks ago? But it’s all by the by now. What did he want, anyway? You still haven’t said. Mother?’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a vicar’s wife who was happy, not outside of a novel …’ Her mother broke off and looked into Dorothy’s face with something like wonder, as though seeing it somehow transformed. ‘I meant it for the best,’ she said again. ‘I was only thinking of your happiness.’
‘For pity’s sake stop talking in code!’ Dorothy told her. ‘What have you gone and done?’
Her mother shrank in on herself again, accepting defeat. ‘They’re all here,’ she said and led the way back along the hall to the tall mahogany bookcase which stood at one end, beside the looking glass where she would always give a quick, corrective glare at herself before leaving the house, and the table where the only telephone was, chairless and far from the nearest heat source so that calls were kept short. She reached for the top shelf and took down a volume of the rarely consulted old encyclopaedia that was ranged there. ‘They weren’t so hard to find,’ she said wryly. ‘I put them under P for Priest.’ She took out a small bundle of envelopes and handed them over then returned to the kitchen and her pie-making.
There were eight letters in all. Only the first had been opened. Presumably discretion had overruled curiosity once her mother had learnt to recognize his handwriting and the Portsmouth postmark. Dorothy sat on the stairs to read them. Blood sang in her ears and burned in her cheeks. She could hear the familiar rhythmic thump of her mother’s rolling pin.
The first letter answered hers, of course, and the second, her second, but he had slowly sensed something was wrong as she failed to respond to his specific enquiries or to acknowledge that he had written at all. By the fourth letter he knew that his letters weren’t reaching her because her fourth letter must have said something like,
I understand your not writing back because your new post must keep you so busy
. But, like her, he had kept on writing and, unlike her, he had not lost faith. Whereas her letters had been quietly matter of fact, accounts of her days and snippets of news from the parish, his were lacking in specifics but simply about his feelings and thoughts and his hopes and plans for the future.
It was only in the short last letter that a note of self-doubt entered.
I have applied for the job at Pendeen and Morvah, was all it said. And my written application has seen me called for an interview. If you have been somehow turned aside, if, for instance, you have done the sensible thing and married Henry Angwin or somebody like him, someone who can support you and keep you in the way that would no doubt satisfy your mother, I too will turn aside and won’t accept the post if they offer me it. I can’t imagine living in that great, draughty vicarage without you or seeing you on Sundays coming up to the altar rail with someone else. But I can think of nothing nearer perfection than to build a life there with you at my side. Phoning you is pointless of course, so all I can do is write and hope. I wonder if this will ever reach you. Perhaps all my letters are tumbling into a hole in the lining of that thick curtain on the back of your front door? Perhaps that formidable postmistress with the Jack Russell is collecting them for reasons of her own?
Dorothy read all the letters a second time, so as to be quite sure she had missed nothing, then she pulled on a cardigan, because a cold wind was getting up as the sun sank low over the sea, and slipped out without a word to her mother. The letter said he would have taken a room at the nearest pub, the North Inn. It was thought to be more respectable than the Radjel for some reason. She had never been in there before, although of course she knew who the landlords were. The bar was already noisy with men, miners mostly, she guessed; she could smell the tang of Lifebuoy soap beneath the cigarette smoke. Presumably these were the unmarried ones. The ones with wives went home first to eat as the day’s shift finished. It was said wives listened out for the muffled dynamite blast that marked the end of each day’s work and lit their ovens at the sound of it, knowing exactly how long it would take their menfolk to reach the surface and head to the dry to wash off the day’s grime before walking home.
They made way for her with curious glances and she recognized some of them and nodded hello. She told the landlady she had come to see Barnaby Johnson, ordered herself a half of shandy then sat in the deserted saloon bar to wait for him and it was as though the first sip made her drunk. The strangeness of being in this building she had passed so often and never entered, of waiting there alone for a man she had convinced herself she loved as much as he loved her, although he still felt like a stranger to her, emphasized the sense that she had entered a sort of waiting room, a space of transition, between her old life and her new.
I am waiting
, she thought,
for the rest of my life. But I could still step back. I could leave this drink, this sticky table and tired chair and walk home to mutton and carrot pie and nothing need change.
But then he came in and she rose in such a hurry that she slopped her drink and she was smiling as broadly as he was so that it almost hurt and her future was suddenly blindingly simple. She drew him to her and they kissed for the second time. Her hand that had rested on his shoulder – and it
was
a new suit, she realized – strayed across to the alien material of his dog collar. It was so hard, not like fabric at all. She tapped it playfully with her fingernails.
‘Isn’t it uncomfortable?’ she asked.
‘You can pull it off, you know,’ he said. ‘It comes off as easily as a traffic warden’s tie.’
She tugged and gasped to find the symbol of his priesthood so swiftly in her hand like a sort of trophy. And he kissed her again far longer and more deeply this time so that she began to worry someone from the other bar would look in and see them. And as she kissed him back her fingers continued to fiddle with the collar behind his back.
Lenny’s inquest had been organized speedily out of mercy to his mother and perhaps because the evidence had been relatively easy to gather in. A few days ago a middle-aged woman in a dark blue suit had presented herself on the doorstep.
‘Are you the Reverend Barnaby Sadler Johnson?’ she asked and, because she couldn’t seem to stop smiling, he wondered if she were a premium bond emissary sent to tell him he had won a million pounds. When he smiled back and said yes, however, she abruptly stopped smiling and handed over a coroner’s summons.
The inquest was held in Penzance, in one of the larger committee rooms at St John’s Hall. The coroner, a fiercely intelligent and much-liked Cornishwoman, sat at a large mahogany table with a clerk beside her taking notes. Word had spread and the public chairs were nearly all taken. Barnaby and Dot sat at the front, in the chairs set aside for witnesses, as did Nick Morris the policeman and the ambulance driver who had come to Lenny’s flat and the detective who had conducted Barnaby’s interview following his arrest. Then there was a man Barnaby didn’t recognize, whom Dot murmured was a GP from St Just. The last witnesses to arrive – and they came, impressively, as a group – were Lenny’s ex, Amy, and her father and Nuala Barnes. There was another woman who looked startlingly like Nuala and who he realized must be the sister from Australia he had last seen at Lenny’s christening.
The coroner’s clerk came forward and walked along the row checking names off on a list, then conferred with the coroner before declaring the inquest open. The coroner looked, Barnaby decided, like one of the more approachable members of the royal family. She opened the proceedings by saying she had summoned the inquest to establish the truth of Lenny Barnes’s death on Mazey Day. ‘This is not a trial,’ she added firmly. ‘Although sometimes facts revealed at an inquest result in a criminal investigation. I am here to establish the whos, wheres, whens and hows. I feel I must begin by apologizing to Lenny’s mother, Mrs Barnes,’ and here the clerk indicated which of the women in the front row was Nuala, ‘that it is rarely possible to hold an inquest immediately after a death so as to allow the release of a loved one’s body for burial or cremation. Mrs Barnes’s understanding of the due processes of law and county bureaucracy is appreciated. Some of the things you may hear will be upsetting. However much any of you, or members of the press or public, wish to speak, I must ask you to keep silent unless asked to give evidence. Please respect the difficulty some of our witnesses may feel in speaking before an audience.’
She called the GP from St Just first. He took the oath for non-believers, gave his name and confirmed that he had been Lenny’s doctor for most of his life and, at one stage, his weekend rugby coach. Questioned, he described the nature of Lenny’s accident, how a collapsing scrum during a rugby match had given him a spinal injury resulting in a temporary total paralysis which two subsequent operations succeeded in reducing to a paralysis of the lower body. He stated that the specialist in charge of Lenny’s case had offered no hope of further recovery. He confirmed that Lenny had pursued an exhaustive course of rehabilitation and physiotherapy but had clearly been depressed at the prospect of life in a wheelchair.