A Perfectly Good Man (7 page)
She thanked the witnesses and composed her thoughts for a moment before standing to address the room. Her verdict was death by suicide and that Lenny’s body should be immediately released to his family.
Two days later was a Sunday, the third since Lenny’s death. Barnaby rose early as usual. He took Dot her tea then drafted a short sermon on the three resurrections that prefigured Christ’s own – those of Lazarus, Jairus’s daughter and the only son of the widow from Nain – and went on to write rather challengingly about mourning and how, along with married love, coping with loss was one of life’s fundamentals for which Christ left no helpful pattern. He may have wept with his friends at Lazarus’s tomb, but he negated that grief with a miraculous resurrection, as though death were no more than a misunderstanding and their grief a failure of faith. And Barnaby quoted Dorothy Sayers’s account of Lazarus describing life after death as being the moment of glimpsing the ‘beautiful and terrible’ front of the tapestry while the living must content themselves with seeing only the tangle of knotted threads at its rear.
Carrie had elected to experience her first Quaker meeting that morning with her new friends so he and Dot drove up alone. The church car park was full and the lane up to it crammed with cars as well, so Dot ended up dropping him off at the church door and driving back to park on the main road.
The robing servers were in a state of high excitement about the crowd and it was the youngest, most computer-savvy of them who explained. Barnaby’s testimony at the inquest had been recorded on somebody’s smart phone and uploaded to the Internet where it had already been viewed and copied thousands of times. Someone else who had been there, the lay leader of an evangelical church that met in an old warehouse in Penzance, a man Barnaby would have assumed would despise him as comparatively establishment and traditional, had started a Facebook Group called We Love Father Barnaby’s Power of Prayer.
‘I checked before I came up here,’ the server said, ‘And you’ve already got over four thousand likes. Four thousand!’ Barnaby had no idea what she meant.
The congregation was the biggest of his career. When he finished his sermon, to which the size of crowd had inspired him to add an improvised sentence or two, there was applause which completely drowned out his request for God’s blessing on it. The sign of peace lasted a good ten minutes. The collection plate was so full that notes drifted off it onto the altar as he held it aloft. They almost ran out of communion wafers, and had to break them into halves and then quarters to eke them out.
In any other circumstances it would have been an answer to prayers: a country-parish equivalent to the feeding of the five thousand. By the time he had shaken the last worshipper’s hand, however, his face ached.
He was resolved to call the archdeacon’s office the next morning and apply to leave his post and retire as soon as was conveniently possible.
Modest Carlsson had his life, if not his soul, saved in Portsmouth. He had come there on a bleak sort of whim and stayed there through despair. Modest Carlsson was not his real name, naturally. He was raised as Maurice Carver, but the name change had become necessary. And he used to be an English teacher, not a second-hand-book dealer. His life had been balanced, law abiding and uneventful: youth, university, teacher-training college, marriage, daughter.
But then into his sixth-form class had sauntered a girl, whose name he could no longer even bring his mind to shape. Blue-eyed, tawny-haired, extravagantly flirtatious, she had led him on. Even the judge, a woman, suggested as much in her summing-up. The girl had slowly unbuttoned her shirt as he talked to the class, stroked her cleavage with a pencil as he approached her desk, the same pencil she slowly chewed, staring at him, when lost for what to write during a test. She stood so close to him that he could smell the spearmint on her breath, catch the sugary, fruit bowl wafts of shampoo from her hair. It was often said in the common room that if this girl spent even half the attention on her studies that she lavished on that tumble of hair of hers, she would have made Oxbridge material. She was clever but fatally lazy. Something in her background had sapped her self-confidence too, which was perhaps why she set about ensnaring a teacher when she could have taken her pick from the boy-men of the school who followed her every slouching move and hung on her every mumbled word.
Up to this point her behaviour towards him was nothing out of the ordinary. Adolescence was about discovering and flexing one’s power over others, or learning to compensate for the lack of it and, as the only adults in range, teachers were natural targets against which that strength could be pitted. Plenty of boys and girls in every class in her year were clumsily flirting with teachers or, usually with more finesse, seeking out their weaknesses and mocking them. Unbeknownst to the pupils, the teachers held regular meetings at which such attacks were aired, even laughed over, and their dangerous potential disarmed by exposure. But then she went further than her peers by starting to write him notes, which she slipped in with her homework. Notes and occasionally photographs. And instead of showing his unsuspecting wife or battle-weary colleagues so as to maintain the moral high ground, he foolishly kept them to himself then, more foolishly still, responded in kind.
Before long they had an assignation. She slipped into his car outside a supermarket several blocks from the school and he drove her out to a notorious beauty spot car park where, among the lovers’ litter, she suddenly changed her mind and her successful seduction of him became his violent rape of her.
Had he murdered her, strangled her with her tights and pushed her into the flooded quarry nearby perhaps or even driven her side of the car into oncoming traffic, he might have escaped with only his soul in peril but he was no more a murderer than, calmly eating toast with his family that morning, he had been a rapist. So he handed her tissues for her tears and wet wipes for the rest of her, drove her back to the end of her street, apologizing the while, and dropped her off.
He had handed over her photographs to the police, thinking their sluttishness would weigh against her but, of course, everyone assumed he had stolen them from her locker, which meant they had the reverse effect from the one he had expected. The evidence, which included his DNA on her skirt, was plentiful and damning and it soon emerged that her lazy cleverness had ushered her into a class a year older than her, so the charge was not just rape but rape of a minor. And in the eyes of the local rag and his colleagues and family he was suddenly not just an unfaithful idiot who had abused a position of trust, but a paedophile. Although he was actually no more a paedophile than he was a murderer or, habitually, a rapist.
In prison, where he was utterly isolated for his own protection and through others’ disgust, he shaved off his neat little beard and then his hair, so that his large head was quite egglike and, he fancied, monastic. His only comfort were books – with which the prison kept him well supplied because it was easier than talking to him – and food, of which he ate all he could until he appeared the demon of everyone’s imaginings.
On his release, married no longer and apparently no longer a father either, he used his release travel pass to buy a ticket to Portsmouth. After several years with all privilege of choice suspended, the sudden presentation of seemingly endless possibility was overwhelming. So he let the station destination displays do the deciding for him. Wherever he went would have to be a terminus, he decided. Portsmouth Harbour was the destination of the next train due in. It was either that or London, and London frightened him. He had reread the works of Jane Austen on the inside, soothed as much by her moral rectitude as by the elegant plainness of her cadences, and her references to Portsmouth aroused his curiosity to see a place he had never visited.
At once it seemed to him a terrible city, blighted first by the bombs of the Blitz then by the steady erosion of its
raison d’être
and naval pride and lastly by the steady flight of the middle class, but its grimness, its failure, suited his new sense of himself and the blasts of sea air, the scents of salt and car ferry, were a joy after the stale air of his cell.
To his probation officer to whom he was bound to continue to report regularly at first, he remained Maurice Carver, of course, but to the world at large he became Modest Carlsson, product of a Russian/Swedish union, his parents music lovers murdered for their principles, his wife and child dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in the only accommodation he could afford them.
He had not wasted his time in prison. Obviously he was far more highly educated than most, if not all his fellow inmates, so he did not sign up for GCSE courses, but he encouraged visits from a writer in residence attached to the prison, a novelist, who was a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fiction. The novelist was keen he should write about his childhood and family, which he duly did, albeit making most of it up, and that he seek to give his own pain and isolation a context by imagining and describing the pain and isolation of others. And it was from these exercises that Modest Carlsson and his lugubrious history emerged.
He had enjoyed few opportunities to rehearse this story in prison but he had reviewed and embroidered it in private. Once he got to Portsmouth, he released snippets of it in bus queues, on trains, in waiting rooms and in bars until he quite believed it himself and could grow genuinely moist eyed at the mention of his dead wife. Wife and child retained the names of their faithless real-life counterparts – Sylvia and Lily – because it gave him a cheap pleasure to murder them in conversation and because he fancied their unassuming, lower-middle class Englishness lent an added sheen to his sentimental history. Changing the name he went by could not have been simpler and, even though he was obliged to let the probation office know, he felt it made him less vulnerable to anyone from his past life who might seek him out.
He had always been careful with money and, even after the divorce settlement, retained enough savings to start a new life. Returning to teaching was out of the question. Instead, with the savings that had been harvesting a handsome interest in his absence, he took on a rundown second-hand bookshop whose owner had just died in harness. It had a lavatory, a sink, a kettle and there was just room to squeeze a single bed into the office so – probably illegally – he lived in the shop too.
Most of the stock was inferior, paperback stuff, the greasy fruit of house clearances, and it was hard to see how the previous proprietor had made an honest living. The most popular line, he soon discovered, were the tattered old porn magazines in the basement’s ‘adult’ section. Of these he duly sealed the less damaged in cellophane and began to market them at a premium as vintage erotica.
The other healthy market was signed for and unsigned first editions. He soon found there were collectors of these – usually men – who seemed to have less interest in the contents of a book than in its condition. Other dealers’ catalogues and prices taught him what to look out for. Every Monday he kept the shop closed to trawl house clearance sales and down-at-heel auctions where books were sold by weight or by the yard. And while he was minding the shop, he would pick through his latest haul, cleaning the better purchases and wrapping them neatly in cellophane. He became an extremely neat wrapper. When it was worth his time, he would visit book festivals and join the long (or sometimes surprisingly short) queues to have a famous writer sign an old copy of one of their books.
‘Just your signature,’ he would always tell them to prevent them writing
all good wishes
or some such devaluing nonsense.
By degrees his principal income began to come from online sales – a business for which the shop, which was hardly in a prime bibliophilic district, became little more than an office.
His time in prison and the reasons for it had killed off any impulse to form a relationship, even had the opportunity arisen. When his need became distracting he visited a prostitute, of which Portsmouth had such an abundance that he never needed to see the same one twice and so suffer the shame of her recognition or bad memories. Outside again, however, he was assailed by a bitter loneliness he had never felt as a prisoner. Free to move among people once more, he became sharply aware that he was noticed only for the brief registering of disgust. At least disgust involved notice. More wounding was the not being noticed at all, the skating over of eyes, the automatic, impersonal courtesies of transaction. He became obsessed with eye contact. When he paid for something, he would hold back his money a second or two until a salesgirl met his eye. When someone bought a book or magazine off him – especially when they bought a magazine – he would make them – make them! – return his gaze. And he would smile. In prison he was in all probability clinically depressed but now that he was free he taught himself to smile again, practising whenever he faced his spattered mirror. Smiles, he learned, were a challenge less easily ducked than a mere verbal pleasantry. To smile at someone, especially a stranger, was somehow to assume moral superiority until the smile was returned. When he smiled at someone and said a bright good morning to them and they did neither in return, he felt rewarded by a brief flush of angry satisfaction that he was the better person.
He had no illusions about expecting love. He had experienced love and had thrown it away and that kind of true, trusting affection surely only came to each man once. It was not love for which he was lonely, or even friendship, although a friend, an equal, would have been pleasant. He had no such expectations because he knew he was repellent and he knew that the process was cumulative – the more he disgusted people, the more disgusting he would become. What he hungered for was nothing warmer-blooded than significance, he realized: to play a role in people’s lives again and know that his decisions and actions affected others. The significance he had known as a teacher, as a head of department no less, this he missed more than his personal significance to his wife and daughter.