A Perfectly Good Man Read online

  ‘But let’s think too about the mine managers and Mr Gilbert and Mrs Thatcher and her ministers who have to make the difficult decisions for the greater good. Let us pray.’ And then he knelt down and shut his eyes, so she put Jim back in his buggy and knelt down too beside Dad.

  At first she was thinking about how hard and mean the kneelers were compared to the nice, plump, tapestried ones in their churches at home. Then she was thinking about people peering into the chapel and seeing them praying like a waxworks tableau at Madame Tussauds. But then she found she was thinking about Shell and Jazz and their families and how Shell’s mother liked new clothes from Plymouth and how Jazz’s family didn’t even have a car because they couldn’t afford to run one and weren’t allowed a cat, like she and Jim had, because of the cost of food and vet’s bills. And finally she thought of how very hard it would be to have to make new friends if the girls had to move away so their parents could find other work. And then she dared to imagine if Mrs Thatcher decided that no, the mine could not be saved. And she imagined all of Geevor covered with grass again, the ugly concrete buildings and the head frame over Victory Shaft gone and trees and hedges and munching cattle in their place or just a park. An empty seaside park. There would be absolutely no risk of Jim having to risk his life down in that terrible, frightening pit when he grew up. She opened her eyes, startled, because she had not known until just then that this was even a possibility.

  Dad was already sitting back in his chair, just sitting and looking at the Jesus on the altar.

  ‘Better?’ he asked and she nodded and understood how a deep calm had come about her like the pillowy quilt in the bedroom that used to be Granny’s but was now for best. It was funny his asking if she felt better when she hadn’t complained of not feeling well or happy before but as he asked it, she realized she had been feeling strangely churned up inside about all sorts of things but especially her friendship with Shell and Jazz and the difference she felt more and more between herself and them. And now she felt better.

  ‘Time for lunch,’ he said. ‘And Jim’s treat.’

  Jim’s treat was to eat their packed lunch in St James’s Park, where he could feed the geese and ducks.

  ‘Now your treat,’ Dad said, when they had shaken out the last of their crumbs. But her mind was a shaming blank. He asked her what she had liked best in the Abbey and she said the misericords. He asked if she meant the carving or the woodwork. She said both, after some thought.

  So they caught a bus to the Victoria and Albert, which to her relief was completely free. The County Museum in Truro, which she had thought big, would have fitted into the entrance hall alone. The key thing with a museum this size, Dad said, was to have one thing you really wanted to see, or you got cultural indigestion.

  ‘And today ours is wood.’

  They looked at wooden carvings, religious ones of Jesus and Mary and lots of crucifixes, but also ones of people and faces, of flowers and trees. And they looked at wooden furniture, everything from huge four-poster beds to elegant little chairs. She had never seen so many beautiful or ingenious things in one place. She didn’t like to tell Dad, or hold him back now that Jim had woken up from his afternoon nap and was grizzling to be allowed to walk, but the things she liked best of all were the newest and probably the least valuable. There were some pieces of modern furniture in blonde wood she could actually imagine in her room. She could see the joins on these and picture them as a sequence of meticulously cut and sanded sections waiting to be assembled by Mr Ferris. There was a low Danish table that made her almost breathless in her desire to touch or, ideally, own it. She wanted to pull its little drawer out and slide it back into place, could imagine precisely the satisfactory little thunk it would make and the feeling of sliding one’s fingers into its elegant indentation that served as a handle.

  Dad gave her pocket money early so she could buy postcards, although there were none of the Danish table, and asked her to choose something to console Mum for not being there. This was hard as all the obviously feminine presents – beautiful scarves and china and glass – were far too expensive. But she found some pretty jam jar labels she knew would appeal to her practical economy. They changed Jim’s stinky nappy then Dad treated them to tea and cake in the basement cafeteria, which put Jim on such a sugar high they decided it was time to take him outside before he started climbing things and pulling things over.

  Dad had talked about walking back across Kensington Gardens, the park with the gigantic trees she remembered so vividly, but in the artificial light and warmth of the museum they had forgotten it was winter, and it was pitch-dark when they came out onto the pavement. Dad said the park would be locked at dusk but they could still save on a bus fare by walking to Paddington across the park but why not take in some street life first? He said they could walk to Knightsbridge to see Harrods all lit up like a Christmas tree.

  She was enough her parents’ daughter to see no point in window shopping – something she associated with a class trip to Plymouth earlier that month when she had not only had to endure window shopping but sit through an interminable pantomime, a nasty, lurid thing she had promised herself never to suffer again. She hoped Dad hadn’t suggested Harrods simply to humour her. He probably had, since he didn’t even buy his own socks and was even less interested in clothes than she was. She was trying to think of a way to let him know this without hurting his feelings when they came upon a small crowd of people standing on the pavement to watch news footage showing on a bank of televisions in a shop window. Dad was staring.

  ‘It’s the Challenger Shuttle,’ she explained. He hardly ever seemed to know about news from outside Cornwall, apart from famines, because his head was always so heavy with the problems of people nearby. He looked blank. ‘Like a plane but it goes into outer space,’ she said. She was well informed because they had been told all about it in science as there was a schoolmistress on board, a real schoolmistress who wasn’t a proper astronaut or anything like that.

  ‘Can we watch?’ Dad asked.

  She nodded and pulled the pushchair close in beside her so they wouldn’t obstruct pedestrians.

  ‘Where is it?’ he asked her quietly.

  ‘Cape Canaveral, I think,’ she said. ‘In Florida.’

  It was peculiar watching the images like something from Star Wars but with the throbbing noises of the street as soundtrack. There was a close-up of the jet bits of the launcher rocket then what looked like a shower around them – some kind of coolant, she supposed – and then they fired. For a weird second or two it didn’t seem to move and, because of the close-up camera angle not showing all the supports and things above, it was easy to believe the rocket was about to drop downwards onto the launchpad. But then it began to rise.

  ‘We have lift-off!’ a woman said to her friend just beside them, trying to sound American.

  It seemed to go slowly but of course that was because it was so big and so far away. The camera angle was further off by now so they could see the whole thing. The launcher rocket was like a huge, dull brown bullet. The pure white shuttle on its side looked scarily flimsy, like a boy’s toy. In fact, she decided, the whole thing, shuttle, launcher, rocket and the smaller white rockets on its side, looked like something a boy had made up. How could anybody think it was safe? But it had taken off safely several times. If it hadn’t, the schoolmistress would never have agreed to set foot in it.

  There was a different angle again, with a background of blue sky now, not grey, a deep blue, as though the darkness of outer space were near at hand, pressing in on the other side. And then the whole thing was swallowed up, not by flames and explosions, the way it would be in a film, but in a huge cloud. The cloud extended in more than one direction. For a second part of it looked just like a duck’s head. Then like a duck sitting on a mysteriously extending white branch. And then the camera moved and it was hard to make out where the shuttle had gone. There were simply long, thin streamers of cloud going down to the sea.
/>   It was beautiful although it was so frightening, like the film of an atomic bomb being tested in the desert that Miss Pendarves had made them watch.

  Dad pulled away suddenly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have seen that. Let’s go.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said.

  ‘It’s people dying.’

  ‘I’m not a baby.’

  ‘No,’ he conceded. ‘You’re not.’

  ‘I knew all about it. Jazz told us this morning while you were getting coffee. I thought you knew. I thought everybody did,’ although it was completely obvious he had known nothing.

  She tore herself away from the televisions to catch up with him. He seemed to be walking purposelessly now and she was worried he might forget where he was and step into the traffic. He could be so absentminded sometimes. Mum had recently told her always to keep an eye out around the house when he did things like put water on to boil or light the grill. He had set fire to some toast, really set fire to it, and not noticed that the kitchen was filling with smoke and he had twice let the bath overflow because he set it running then became too immersed in a book he was reading on the landing to remember to turn the tap off again.

  ‘Those poor people,’ he was saying. ‘Awful. I’d heard people talking but hadn’t understood properly. How many of them were there?’

  ‘I don’t remember exactly. Seven or eight, I think. Far more than in the Apollo rocket that blew up.’

  They reached a corner and suddenly there was a huge shop up ahead of them ablaze with lights, not just in its windows but all over the surface of it so that it looked like a mad fairy palace.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘What? Oh, that.’ He was still lost in thought. ‘That’s Harrods, the shop I told you about.’

  It was the most amazing place, just as amazing in its way as the Abbey or the Victoria and Albert had been and she longed to go closer, even though they had no money and shopping of itself didn’t interest her. It looked so warm and comforting in the drizzly darkness. But she could tell Dad was feeling quite the reverse, that after the desperation of the miners and then the horrible beauty of what they had just watched on television, the shop and all it stood for disgusted him. So she just stood close to him and waited as he stared. She imagined herself as people must be seeing her, a small, careworn version of her mother, shielding priest and grizzling toddler from a buffeting by passers-by, sensible coat buttoned to her neck, chin set in defiance of mockery, a parody of any vicar’s wife. She felt extremely grown up suddenly and resented the feeling.

  At last she said, ‘I think we’re getting in people’s way, Dad. It’s very crowded here.’

  Dad folded up the armrest and they made Jim a sort of nest between them. As the train pulled out and Dad produced the third Tupperware of the day, and they discovered Mum had included homemade sausage rolls and her special chocolate buns in this one, as if knowing they’d be in need of a lift at a long day’s end, Carrie was happy to feel a child again, safe on the train, responsibility lifted off her weary shoulders. She found she was happy not to have to spend the long journey home with Shell and Jazz again.

  ‘What?’ Dad asked, seeing her smile out of the window.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m glad we didn’t go to Madame Tussauds.’

  ‘So am I. Here. A little something for you.’

  He had bought her a wooden puzzle when she was looking through postcards at the museum. It was a perfect cube, made of wood the exact colour of the Danish table. There were twenty irregular pieces, the instructions said, which somehow fitted together to form the pleasingly regular finished shape.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Dad said. ‘You can take it apart if you like.’

  But she couldn’t bear the thought of small pieces getting down the side of the seats and rather wished she hadn’t taken the cellophane off it already as she could feel the pieces starting to shift between her fingers, chaos trying to break out. ‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘I love it.’

  BARNABY AT 29

  When Mr Ewart finally took up their oft-repeated invitation to visit, Barnaby had been married and living in Pendeen for six years and Dorothy was pregnant a third time and insisting they keep it a secret.

  At least, he hoped it was only the third time but the moment she swore him to secrecy, he found himself tormented by the thought that she might have had other miscarriages and not told even him. Dorothy’s combination of physical strength and emotional delicacy was daunting. He had always assumed marriage would be a process of getting to know a person better and better yet was finding her harder and harder to read as time went on. When she chose to withhold anything – whether a judgement or a piece of gossip she thought best left unrepeated – her self-control was complete and made him feel childishly self-evident by contrast.

  Unearthing the very few photographs he possessed, he sketched out Paul Ewart’s odd relation to the family for her benefit. His father’s oldest brother James inherited the family estate and enjoyed it for some years in the company of first one then another young man, presented to the world as his secretary but plainly, at least in Paul’s case, the focus for a deep and enduring love. Dorothy seemed a bit shocked.

  ‘Did you know all this as a boy?’ she asked.

  ‘Only in part. I sort of pieced it together. In a funny way Alice and I worked it out because our father had a parallel situation, having taken up with Mrs Clutterbuck, who was officially a sort of housekeeper but obviously rather more than that to him.’

  He had been set to inherit one day, he explained, James being childless, but James was profligate and idle and ran up such debts that almost everything had to be sold. In recompense, and possibly to balance out what he saw as the pernicious influence of his father and Mrs Clutterbuck, James set up a trust on his death to fund Barnaby’s education and escape from narrowness of outlook.

  ‘Paul was principle trustee so, in effect, a sort of guardian, even when my father was still alive.’

  ‘Your dad must have been furious.’

  Barnaby thought back. ‘No. He wasn’t happy about it.’ And he looked more closely at the most recent of the pictures, which showed him as a mop-haired, grief-numbed teenager with Paul Ewart, both of them in very smart suits, eating in a Paris brasserie. He remembered little of the occasion beyond asking a waiter to take the picture for them, which in turn had rather irritated Paul.

  ‘And what about your sister? Wasn’t she a bit miffed?’

  ‘Oh, Alice never expected to inherit so she understood perfectly. They were close, though.’

  He knew the explanation reduced to tidy plot summary a complex cluster of events and emotions whose challenge he had simply put out of mind rather than confront. He had loved his uncle instinctively, as he had loved no other relative but his sister, but he had been so young and tongue-tied that the feeling had never been expressed. So on James’s death the pent-up feelings had been transferred, with no encouragement, to Mr Ewart who had, perhaps, not known quite what to do with them. Arguably the two non-relatives, now only tenuously linked by the witnessing of an undiscussed love and the papery residue of a legal arrangement, had been in retreat from each other ever since. They exchanged annual Christmas cards, with telegraphed updates, but these only emphasized the distance time, as much as geography, was placing between them. Although the older man had been signing himself Paul for years, Barnaby continued to think of him as Mr Ewart, holding him, he realized, at a comfortable distance.

  He was glad Mr Ewart had not visited earlier. He was Barnaby’s standin parent, he had paid for Barnaby’s education. Barnaby wanted him to be proud of him and not merely bewildered or disappointed at the choices his protégé had made in life. Barnaby was not yet feeling settled in the parish. Far from smoothing the way, marrying so rootedly local a girl had actually caused some problems because she had been so anxious they continue to live in her family’s farmhouse and not have to move to Pendeen’s vicarage. After a long incumbency, d
uring much of which his predecessor had been elderly and easily bossed around, the PCC was used to having its own way and unprepared for change. His early request that people call him Mr Johnson rather than the Catholic-sounding Father Barnaby was met with blank incomprehension. He accepted it was an entrenched tradition, common to many Cornish parishes, and decided not to make a fuss about something that seemed to bother him alone. Dorothy was successful, however, in negotiating for them to live on the farm, while he insisted the substantial vicarage be used for worthwhile causes rather than merely let out for profit. After consultation with Social Services to ascertain what needs were greatest and areas least well-funded, he saw the generous upstairs rooms turned into a women’s refuge and downstairs space used for couples counselling and adult literacy tutorials. The refuge was not popular, especially when there were occasional ugly scenes with vengeful husbands or partners on the doorstep and the police had to be called, but he had the support of his modernizing archdeacon and the change came to be accepted.

  More enduring ructions arose from his insistence that the parish rooms, which lay between the village school and the vicarage and church, no longer be used solely for activities at least tenuously related to Christianity. The buildings needed rent to keep themselves in good repair and the church should be reaching out, not closing in. There had always been charity whist and euchre drives and coffee mornings and meetings of Cubs and Brownies in there, but now there were life classes (the windows were high enough for no shocks to passers-by), yoga, Humanist Society meetings (sparsely attended, he was pleased to see) and Mind Body Spirit Fayres (all too well attended, the church wardens claimed, by ‘pagans, witches and woowoos’). There was a near-constant rumble of discontent about the parish rooms, despite the useful money they brought in, which he came to suspect was as much to do with his relative youth and inexperience – he was the only member of the church team under forty-five – as with the violation of any strongly held principles.