A Perfectly Good Man (8 page)

He considered suicide frequently. To jump into the sea, cut his wrists or step in front of a train or lorry was a regular temptation and he was ashamed at his fear of doing so and mildly intrigued that he should persist in clinging to life when life had so little to offer him.

He turned instead to alcohol and Jesus. Alcohol found him easily. His appetite had greatly increased in prison and with it his size, to the point where he now had to buy his clothes in a dismal shop catering exclusively to the obese, which in turn so repelled him that he ate more to lift his spirits. He had always liked wine and, now that he lived and worked alone, found that he could easily drink a bottle a day, starting at lunchtime, two if the weather were especially cold or hot.

Once or twice he became extravagantly, falling-down drunk. Waking on the floor of the shop in his own vomit and urine, entirely unaware of how the previous hours had been passed, except for the drinking. But before long he found he could drink steadily with, as he saw it, a measure of responsible control and show no ill effects beyond a generalized warmth of feeling that usually curdled by nightfall into self-pity that his warmth had gone unrecognized and unreturned.

Jesus’s approach was characteristically sly and subtle. Modest had never been a Christian, not even, to his knowledge, been christened and certainly not confirmed. Studying then teaching English literature, he had learned enough to understand the broadest religious reference but he had never actually read or possessed a Bible. He had done his best to avoid poets such as Donne or Hopkins, most of whose work was incomprehensible to a reader with neither religious schooling nor spiritual leanings. But then he was called by one of his seedy new work contacts to clear the extensive bookshelves of an elderly cat lover. The books on the lower shelves were unsalvageable, from having been sprayed by generations of tom cats, and naturally he told his contact that all the books were ruined and worthless but that he would deal with them as a favour. Many of the books, needless to say, were in excellent condition – the ailurophile had been a keen book buyer and a blessedly tidy reader, the sort who never folded down a page or read while she was bathing or eating. She had a complete set of mint-condition William Golding hardbacks and a first edition of
The Waste Land
, which he sold for a tidy sum. And while picking through her collection in the shop, sorting trash from trophies, he found a New Testament. It attracted him precisely because it was so unlike a Bible to look at. Printed on good, quarto paper, with a large attractive font and laid out like a novel, with the paragraphs allowed to cross a whole page instead of being crammed into indigestible columns, and with the chapters numbered but not the verses. There were attractive colour plate illustrations too, from the relevant sections of the Duc de Berry’s
Très Riches Heures
.

He meant to wrap it in cellophane like the other, better books but then, having poured himself a large glass of Riesling, he began to read and he read on through the rest of the night and the bottle. He carried on reading it all that week, whether there were customers in the shop or not, neglecting all other tasks, even to go to the public baths for his weekly wash. He read a Gospel a day and the Acts on Friday, was alternately bored and baffled by the Epistles on Saturday, when he should have been attending a bankruptcy sale in Gosport, and was so disturbed by the Book of Revelation on Sunday that he drank most of a bottle of gin as he read it and would ever after taste juniper on his tongue and feel breathless and a little dizzy when he heard a reading from it.

He had done nothing so intently and consistently since he was a student and the experience left him profoundly unsettled for days afterwards, despite attempting an exorcism by reading the least biblical texts the shelves could offer, from de Sade’s
Justine
to Angela Carter to ‘Readers’ Wives’ Confessions’. He kept having dreams in which Jesus, who had become conflated in his unconscious with the doe-eyed prison novelist, talked kindly to him in words he could not catch, Aramaic possibly, or, most disturbingly, came to sit at the end of his tiny bed, held his foot firmly through the bedding and said, all too clearly in English, ‘He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages.’

It was high summer, the sort of sticky August weather that brought out the crudest in everyone. Men paraded in nothing but Union Jack shorts. Every child seemed fractious and smeared with ice cream. Pubs spilled threateningly onto the pavements around them and the streets reeked of grilling, sweat and onions.

Out of wine, overcome by thirst, he had gone to the grimly genteel lounge bar of one of the least noisy of the neighbourhood pubs for a drink or two – nothing excessive – and was walking home in the sodium-lit non-night alternately seething at the rudeness of people and startled by the blare of music from passing cars.

‘Oi! Excuse me.’

It was a bunch of sailors on leave. Even without the crew cuts and tattoos, he would have known this from the pub they were leaning against – one few civilian youths would dare frequent.

‘Oi! Fatty!’

Used to abuse, he did what he always did, ignored it, crossed the road and quickened his pace without actually breaking into a run.

‘I said Fatty. That’s you!’

Suddenly they were on the pavement before him. Behind him too. He remembered prison, combs improvised into blades, toothbrush handles patiently scraped to dagger sharpness, and turned so that his back was to the bricks.

‘Sorry,’ he said, putting on a stammer to make them find him ridiculous rather than offensive. ‘I’m a bit deaf.’

‘Excuse me,’ the leader said again. They were all drunk, unsteady on their feet but fired up. They reeked of beer and noxious cologne.

‘We only wanted to ask you a question.’

‘Don’t be frightened,’ another added.

‘I’m not frightened,’ he lied, wishing he could scale the wall behind him like a spider. ‘What’s the question?’

‘Well, Fatty. We were just wondering … Would you die for Queen and Country?’

‘I’m a bit old.’

‘Yes. And a bit fat. But would you? Would you die for Queen and Country?’

It was a trick, of course. If he said yes, they would kick him. If he said no, they would kick him. ‘Actually,’ he said. ‘Probably not, these days.’

The punch was so rapid he did not see which one delivered it. It came full in his face so that he flew back hard against the house wall and struck his head. There was another blow to his stomach that winded him and had him doubled over.

‘Yup. Really fat,’ one of them said. ‘Disgusting.’

They kicked him then. He had watched scenes like this in prison; he had known there would be kicking eventually.

In what space was left for thought between pain and pumping adrenaline, he assumed they were going to continue kicking him as he slumped to the pavement and that quite possibly he was about to die. But they broke off and ran away, laughing. He distinctly heard them begin their prank on someone else.

‘Hey. Excuse me? We’ve just got a question we’d like you to answer. Don’t be shy!’

He could feel blood bubbling from his nose and then tasted it too. He put a hand gingerly to the back of his head and felt wetness there that sickened him. He tried to stand but his legs would not obey him, robbed of power by shock, perhaps. Besides, he had no idea what he should do next. He supposed he must need a hospital yet knew neither where Portsmouth’s hospital was nor how he would reach it. He must leave the street, at least, he knew that much, in case the gang tired of their second victim and decided to return to their first.

‘No. Don’t try to get up.’

His eyes had closed up, he realized now, and made him temporarily blind. It was a young voice, low, educated, officer-class if it was a sailor’s. He felt a hand on his shoulder holding him in place quite firmly. ‘An ambulance is coming,’ the voice said. ‘You’re safe now. Did they rob you?’

‘No,’ Modest managed.

‘You’re bleeding quite a lot. I’m going to give you a handkerchief and you need to pinch it hard across the bridge of your nose if you can bear to.’

‘Not sure I can …’

‘Here. I’ll guide your hand.’

A folded handkerchief was pressed into his hand then his hand was guided to the middle of his face by large fingers which then clutched his into position. The pain grew no worse so perhaps there was no fracture. Modest felt a great desire to sleep come upon him.

‘No,’ said the priest. ‘You need to stay with me, I’m afraid, in case you’ve got concussion. What’s your name?’

‘Modest.’

‘How wonderful. Like Mussorgsky. And Tchaikovsky’s brother.’

‘Yes. Modest Carlsson.’

‘Are you Swedish?’

No one had ever asked this before. It made it so easy.

‘Half. And half Russian.’

‘Your English is very good.’

‘I’ve lived here all my life. I was born in Bayswater.’

‘And where do you live now?’

‘Allaway Avenue.’

‘So you were nearly home! That was bad luck.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did they hit you?’

‘I wouldn’t die for Queen and Country.’

‘Ha. That’s a new one. Me neither. I’m a terrible coward and I’ve got flat feet. And I’m a priest. We’re much more use alive in any case. Nature’s stretcher-bearers.’

Modest was going to ask him his name but suddenly the ambulance arrived and a policewoman and the priest explained briefly that he had seen nothing, just found him, which surely was not quite the truth, then he gave Modest’s shoulder a quick squeeze and murmured, ‘God watches you, Modest. All will be well,’ and seemed to melt away as other voices and other hands took over.

When he told them he was a childless widower, the nurses insisted on keeping him in overnight for observation. He needed stitches to the back of his head. A nurse laid a deliciously cold dressing across his nose and eyes to reduce the swelling but even so, when he could see again properly come morning, he found that his fat face now looked monstrously swollen.

A consultation of the section on stains in the
Reader’s Digest Household Manual
– a book which, like the New Testament, he had impulsively removed from stock for his own uses – told him the trick with bloodstained linen was to soak it in brine. He was not particularly interested in hygiene, beyond the preservation of books, but he was due to take a wash to the launderette and salt happened to be one of the few cooking ingredients he had in his possession.

There was something satisfactorily symbolic, too, in redeeming his shirt from the previous night’s outrage and in being able to watch the blood slowly lift away as though any lasting wound went with it down the plughole. The next day he bundled shirt and handkerchief, still wet, into the holdall with his rather smelly laundry. When he retrieved it that evening from the pursy-lipped launderette attendant, who resented him for not paying extra to have things ironed, the handkerchief was revealed as sporting a dark blue embroidered B on one corner. He had an M one just like it, a long-ago Christmas present from his daughter, Lily, which miraculously had been waiting for him in the pocket of his court-case suit when it was handed back to him on his release.

He was tempted to keep it, naturally, but the Jesus dreams began to trouble him again and he sensed the two things were connected. ‘I gave you my hanky,’ the honey-voiced Jew kept saying. ‘I died for Queen and Country and you gave me nothing in return. Thy paths drop fatness.’ On and on until Modest began to punch and kick him.

Eventually he began investigating churches around Paulsgrove and then further afield, in Cosham and Portchester, rarely far from the dreary thunder of the M27. He held a picture of the priest in his head, of course, but all he actually had to go on was his distinctive voice and the feel of his hands. And the letter B. He knew this was foolish behaviour, erratic even, but the challenge of it diverted him from his aching face and he was obsessive by design, one of nature’s librarians, he had come to realize, systematic and relentless in seeing a task through to its conclusion.

And then he felt inhibited about simply showing up and asking questions, so he attended services as a cover for his research, one church, one Sunday, at a time. In a few weeks he was forgetting even to take the handkerchief with him to hand over should he find the right priest. The Anglican cathedral was too pale and impersonal, the Catholic one, too full of trinkets, like a common Christmas tree. The Methodists felt too low, the happy-clappy brigade friendly in a worrying way, the Christian Scientists felt insufficiently like a church, the United Reformed too like a bank. The Jehovah’s Witness’ literature was so full of judgement and righteousness that he came no closer than the Kingdom Hall’s car park, then he lost nerve and went to the Society of Friends on Northwood Road instead. But the Quakers met in a place that didn’t even pretend to be a church and he grew so bored by the hour’s silence that he fell asleep, and then was so irritated by the kind smiles they gave him at the hour’s end that he left with gratifying rudeness, spurning with a wordless sneer their offer of coffee and biscuits.

Then he found the perfect fit. It wasn’t even a Sunday but he was passing and the doors were open. It was a piece of shabby, sidestreet Victoriana, all pitch pine and brass memorials; the sort of place that in a wealthier city might have become a cinema or carpet warehouse by now but in Portsmouth was simply limping on towards dereliction and redundancy.

An old woman was arranging brutish chrysanthemums on a hideous brass pillar. The spicy scent of their discarded foliage piled on a sheet beside her reached him as he passed and she offered her muted greeting. The building’s Blitz-broken glass had been crudely replaced with not quite matching panes that were mainly a nasty, watery green. With its unplastered brickwork and humble, stunted proportions, the place felt like the ecclesiastical equivalent of his shop in Paulsgrove – unloved, undervisited.

‘Can I help you?’ The woman had followed him and timidly apologized for making him jump. ‘The next service isn’t until Sunday,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid our congregation’s so small now that there’s only one evensong a week and that was yesterday. And it’s only spoken now.’