A Perfectly Good Man Page 11

  He assured her it was no one she knew, no one in the congregation, so at least she would not be tempted to suspect each and every woman with whom she prayed or took communion. Even had he not been sworn to silence, he couldn’t have told her about the rest. He convinced himself it would only cause her unnecessary pain but he suspected his true motive was selfish. The omission lodged like a deep splinter in his spirit and festered there. But the longer he put off the telling of it, the less natural it would have seemed and the greater the hurt it would have caused.

  Dot forgave him and, in their gratitude at having apparently weathered a crisis, they even made love a few times before subsiding back into exhausted, passionless companionship. Which was when another room in his hell opened as he realized he was in love, and not with Dot.

  And then James, or Jim, as he had become, embarked on puberty and – while not actively rebelling the way friends’ sons had – withdrew into a kind of secretive, judgemental reserve that was almost worse. Another room in his hell.

  Yet another, with infinite little cupboards, annexes and corridors off it, was a loss of faith. It began as something even worse, a sense that yes, God was still there but had ceased to listen or even to care, not to others, just to him; an exclusive withholding of attention, interest, mercy, an idea he would once have thought as impossible as water flowing uphill, and almost sacrilegious.

  He let nothing show. He still went about his business, still conducting services, preaching, leading prayers, believing the magic would work for others at least. He even convinced himself he was being tested. But then, on one especially drab February Sunday, when everyone in the room from the smallest, fidgety child to the most devout widow, would surely rather have stayed in bed for all the transfiguration the dull occasion seemed to offer, his faith left him entirely, midway through his reading of the Gospel. It happened so abruptly it was almost a physical change, like the flicking off of a light, and he hesitated in his reading.

  God wasn’t listening because God wasn’t there. No one was but man, who had constructed it all, leaving only hell and desolation and the justification of Barnaby’s childhood killjoys. It was like a fairground ride Jim had persuaded them all onto once, a kind of revolving circular room where the floor slowly fell away from under one’s feet but centrifugal force held one stupefied in place against its whirling walls. Faith fell away and, surprise surprise, the world didn’t end. Everything simply lost its meaning and savour and people looked increasingly dull and stupid.

  He went to see the archdeacon about it. Patient and diplomatic, profoundly spiritual but sturdily practical too, as befitted a man much of whose job involved the settling of parish disputes, he would not hear of Barnaby resigning, ‘although no parish priest is worth their salt who isn’t constantly questioning the value of what we do.’ This happened all the time, he insisted, the difference in this case being that Barnaby was honest enough to admit it had happened. It had happened to himself once or twice. It was entirely to be expected, especially in a job so ruled by routine. ‘Think how monks and nuns manage,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know how they do,’ Barnaby replied. ‘I don’t know how they don’t go insane.’

  ‘Oh but they frequently do.’

  He prescribed three things: the closer study of Thomas à Kempis, of whom he had impressively remembered Barnaby was a devotee, the patient continuation of sacred routine into which faith and meaning would flood back in time, and a visit to his GP to discuss the distinct possibility that Barnaby was suffering from depression brought on by overwork.

  So Barnaby clung to routine. For week after week, month after month, he went through the holy motions, celebrating Eucharist, christening, marrying, burying and consigning to fire, visiting the unpalatable sick and hearing unasked-for, soiling confidences. And he began to take antidepressants, which he could tell frightened Dot, because she did not discuss the matter beyond his initial, half-baked explanation and accorded his pills the same discretion her mother would have done the family of ailments she regarded as private, women’s territory.

  The routine didn’t help but the medication did. And so did a new concentration on the not specifically religious aspects of his work – the social work aspects – especially the pastoral care of non-believers. But still he felt a fraud and a hypocrite, especially when he preached, which he began to do as little as he could, becoming an ingenious inviter-in of visiting priests. And especially when his path crossed that of his former lover, and he understood that, for all her friendliness, she saw a man in fancy dress; just a priest and nothing more.

  This, then, was his season in hell, several seasons, during which he watched Carrie grow up into a worryingly unadventurous young woman and Jim sail through his exams with chilly detachment, apply to study philosophy in Exeter and plan a gap-year trip. It was a bad, bleak period made worse by the Church making itself especially hard to love and respect by its puerile attitudes to sex and women, its mishandling of assets, its dwindling, elderly congregations.

  As Jim grew away from them, becoming independent and studious, Dot blossomed as at a burden lifted. Her faith, which had always tended to the conventional and not been something she was happy discussing, began to sustain her in new ways. With no prompting from him, discovering opportunities for herself from the diocesan magazine, The Coracle, she signed up for courses and study weekends. His offence had given her leeway for some significant independence, perhaps. Encouraged by Tabby Morris who, as a non-stipendiary priest had rapidly become an invaluable extra pair of hands about the parish, she started a Julian Group and began to play a more active role in church services, as a reader and server. She joined a book group, run by Molly Rowe, the rather tough St Just librarian she befriended, and regularly withdrew now into long evenings with ‘the girls’, which he gathered were often as much about wine appreciation and group therapy as literature. When she hosted a meeting, he tried to arrange confirmation classes or PCC meetings for the same night so he could be busy up at the old vicarage, rather than find himself hiding in his study feeling oppressed by the bursts of womanly laughter or voices raised in bibulous argument, or tempted to eavesdrop when he heard just one voice, which might have been Dot’s, confiding something that had reduced the rest to silence he imagined to be indignant rather than merely attentive.

  Their love life had died, apparently, and he felt powerless to do anything to revive it. She had withdrawn from him after the intimate horror of the still birth; to be honest, they had withdrawn from each other, frightened at risking putting her through such an ordeal again. His withdrawal was only temporary, however, and he dared to assume hers was too. The way she gained weight – or simply failed to lose it – after that did not repel him, as she perhaps assumed, but it registered with him as a turning-aside, almost a burying of self. She gained in stature metaphorically as well as literally and he was intimidated. And then, with his infidelity and confession, he felt he had no right to expect or seek further comfort from her. Any overture had surely to come from her now, and it didn’t. He was forever advocating frank discussion between couples and yet found it impossible to practise what he preached.

  Far from suffering empty-nest syndrome when Jim took himself off for a year to America and Vietnam, Dot seemed to thrive in his absence. Barnaby found he was missing him keenly, for all that he had been an increasingly withdrawn and fault-finding presence, but didn’t like to say as much in case Dot took it as a criticism of some shortfall on her part.

  Carrie never left home, of course, not even to go travelling, which perhaps made the sudden lack of their son less painful. From a mixture of familial affection and intense practicality, she moved no further than the other end of the house. Though wary of the terrible old tradition of daughters being kept at home to be their ageing parents’ help-meets, he hoped she had chosen to stay where she was through no pressure on their part and suspected Dot was as delighted by the semi-detached arrangement as he was. He loved being able to drop in occasiona
lly, much as each child in turn had done on their grandmother, and made an effort not to do so too often.

  She had never outgrown her tomboy stage, never had a boyfriend so far as they knew. Once it was clear she wasn’t academic and wasn’t going to pursue some high-flying career, he couldn’t help dreaming she would start a family of her own instead, but that was becoming increasingly difficult to picture. She was loving, intensely so, and would have had a lot to offer children, boys especially, but she was also steadfast and nun-like, presenting the world with a personality that managed to be at once friendly and serenely uninviting, innocent in fact. Secretly, Barnaby was bewildered by her eccentricity in becoming a carpenter. He knew how cruel people could be in small communities. He worried people would laugh at her and shame made him all the more proud when she won respect for her craftsmanship, and relieved when that in turn made her friends.

  If she was lonely, she hid it well. Just occasionally some parishioner would let something slip when Carrie’s name came up though, saying pity or simply sighing, that would set him worrying that his and Dot’s non-policy of loving non-intervention might have done their daughter harm.

  CARRIE AT 11

  They had set off at five o’clock; so early it had felt like the middle of the night. Carrie had almost wept when Dad woke her with a gentle touch to her shoulder and the murmur of her name. Jim did cry, of course, furious at being woken next but Carrie had the knack of stilling him, jiggling him quickly on her hip while Dad found him clothes from the chest of drawers. Dad and Mum had argued, in that quiet, insistent way they had, about his wanting to bring Jim on the march.

  ‘It’s such a long day. If he doesn’t get his sleep, he’ll grizzle. You’ll not be popular.’

  ‘He’ll be good as gold. It’s an historical occasion.’ And so on.

  She knew her mother was actually worrying about practicalities – nappy changing, regular meals, drinks, and had found a moment at bedtime to reassure her. ‘I’ll look after him,’ she said. ‘I know what he needs.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t have to.’ Mum started fretting anew.

  ‘It’s fine. It’s easy. Don’t worry,’ Carrie said, willing away the furrows on her mother’s brow and kissing them quickly to speed the process.

  Most mothers granted a long, family-free day at home, would enjoy a lie-in, go shopping, treat themselves in some way, but she knew hers would use it to catch up on some task she had been wanting, actually wanting, to do, like taking all the jam from the larder and cleaning both shelves and jars, or dusting all the books with the brush attachment on the Hoover or putting in the wiring herself to make a light inside the walk-in cupboard in Carrie’s bedroom.

  Her mum was unusually practical. She wasn’t beautiful, although Carrie had thought her so when she was very little. She had big, heavy limbs. She was immensely strong – Pearce Polglaze claimed he had once seen her with a calf under her arm. Certainly she could always open tightly fastened jars and she continued swinging Carrie up onto her shoulders at an age when Dad had said she was now too heavy. Carrie was aware that, in her peculiar way, her mother, who was her own plumber and electrician, sewed and knitted, kept chickens and made the best sponges in Pendeen, was a kind of goddess. Shell’s mother was pretty but could do none of these things and was married to a man – actually she only lived with him, Shell had confided – who she said was good for only one thing, and that only occasionally.

  ‘I wish I was married to your mum,’ Shell’s mum said once. ‘At least during the day.’

  So Mum would enjoy herself today, but not in ways any normal woman would recognize as pleasurable.

  Carrie had assumed they’d be travelling by bus, as that was cheapest. But a train had been chartered especially, with room for five hundred, more if people were content to stand. Once news got out it was rapidly nicknamed Trelawny’s Train. This led to a quick patriotic lesson from Miss Pendarves about Bishop Trelawny and the last time Cornishmen had marched upon London in protest back in 1688. Miss Pendarves had even taught them a song about it. It had a catchy little tune which Carrie had been whistling ever since and had tried picking out on her penny whistle, only she didn’t know all the fingerings. ‘Trelawny’ was a very, very well-known tune, she had discovered. You only had to whistle it to yourself or even quietly hum it, and an adult in the room would instinctively start humming or whistling it too. It worked on Mum every time. In fact Mum actually burst into song, words and all. And shall Trelawny live? And shall Trelawny die? There’s twenty thousand Cornish men will know the reason why!

  ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ Dad said, ‘But the marchers actually only got as far as Bristol before Trelawny was released …’

  So. Not buses or sick-making coaches for once but a proper train in which you could walk up and down and even go to the loo as it went along. Although Mr Gilbert and his team were fully behind the march, pulling alongside the union men for once, there had been a fuss made that the mine management would spare so few men to come on the march. Only thirty employees out of three hundred and seventy-five were coming. But the bosses made the point that closing the mine for the day, or drastically reducing production, would have given out the wrong message when they were marching to let the world know tin mining at Geevor was still a viable industry. Carrie knew all this from Jazz, whose father, being a union rep, was one of the thirty. Carrie had heard her mother call Jazz a little firebrand and was fairly sure it wasn’t for her red hair.

  At eleven she was finally outgrowing her phase of resenting the continual constraints imposed on them by lack of money and beginning instead to understand, anticipate and worry about them instead. Her underwear, socks and shoes were new. Everything else was second-hand. This did not matter so much at school, where they all wore boring uniforms, but she was conscious of it on days like today when they wore weekend clothes. She had a horror of somebody pointing at her coat or jersey and calling out, ‘Hey! That used to be mine!’ (A woman had accosted them in Greenmarket Car Park once because she recognized their crummy old Ford as one she used to own when it didn’t have all the dents and rusty bits. She obliged them to stand around awkwardly waiting while she sighed over the state of it and, perhaps inspired by the dog collar, launched into a worryingly tearful speech about how time didn’t stand still for any of them.) For this reason Carrie always chose the least noticeable garments in charity shops, resisting Mum’s nudging to be more adventurous and feminine and avoiding anything with a pronounced feature, like a fake fur trim or fancy buttons. She had learnt that, of all colours, navy blue and dark brown provoked the least notice. Mum disliked her in brown, saying it was like wearing mud or worse, of which they had more than enough around the yard and fields, so she favoured navy blue. Dad seemed to like this. Whenever she wore her blue coat, as she did today, of course, because it was January, damp and perishing, he made some affectionate comment about my little nun or Sister Carrie.

  Shell and Jazz, her best friends for as long as she could remember, couldn’t understand her tastes and regarded her family’s shopping for clothes in charity shops as a kind of disability, to be spoken of only elliptically or in hushed voices. Their fathers, being mine workers now threatened with redundancy (in every sense) were no richer than hers, she guessed, but their mothers preferred new bargains, which they tracked down with a hunter’s pride, to any charity clothes, which they regarded as both pitiable and unhygienic. Occasionally she had tagged along with them on a shopping trip to Truro or even far-away Plymouth, and had to bite back the bitter knowledge learned from her parents that new clothes could only be sold so cheaply at human cost, usually to a worker, possibly even a working child. Everything had consequences. Everything a cost. But it did not do to point this out.

  As the daughter of a vicar, she was expected to be perfect and superior so had to be forever undercutting this cruel expectation with small evidences of normality and safe displays of ordinary error. Shell’s grandmother, whom she called Nan although her name was Clarice,
and who never seemed to leave her armchair in her stifling front room in Botallack, took this expectation to sinister lengths, regarding Carrie as somehow holy and powerful, simply by distant association with the Church.

  ‘Here’s my little mystic,’ she would say and would clasp the hand Carrie obediently held out to her and press it to her head or her elbow or whichever bit of her was currently giving her trouble. ‘That’s better,’ she’d say. ‘You’ve healing hands, my precious. No need to visit church if you can visit me, eh?’ And Shell would watch through slightly narrowed eyes and say nothing about it afterwards although it gave Carrie the creeps.

  They were late for the train. They were often late for things because Dad always had more things to do than he realized. Any departure from the house, even like today’s, under cover of darkness, involved eleventh-hour scribblings of notes, piling up of things for collection. They raced to buy a parking ticket and whizzed up with Jim’s buggy just as the Mayor and Mayoress were giving the train a formal send-off.

  Jazz’s father being a union rep, she had been there from about five-fifteen, when the train first rolled up, and had bagged seats for Carrie and Dad at the same table as her and Shell. The girls talked excitedly at first, as did the men and women around them, but the dark, early hour and the recollection that there were six or more hours of train travel ahead of them all soon had people falling quiet and nodding off. Even Jim and Dad fell asleep soon after they reached Redruth, where more miners and band players got on. Jim sprawled blissfully across Dad’s lap, as on a bony armchair, one of his clompy, Magic Roundabout shoes jigging against Carrie’s thigh. She turned away slightly, in case he left mud on her clean jeans – which had not been trendy even when new but were at least clean, undamaged and navy blue.