A Perfectly Good Man Read online

  There was some confusion at the estate agent’s as to whether, actually, it was for sale or not. The owner was an old lady with a tribe of cats and no great fondness for her fellow men, especially if they had children, dogs or were merely looking for a holiday home.

  ‘Basically she’ll interview you before she’ll even let you see the place,’ the agent warned her. ‘That For Sale sign’s been up for two years but most people don’t get to see beyond the first room. Either that or they can’t take the cats.’

  Sure enough, the feline reek was almost overpowering and Miss Eddy, who had the look of a once-great actress devastated by years and misfortune, began by saying the agents had wasted Nuala’s time since the house was no longer for sale. But then she softened, when Nuala stooped to pet an antique, white tom who had come to circle her legs and – a further test – accepted coffee in cups that gave no sign of having been washed within recent memory. And then, after quizzing Nuala closely about her plans and prospects and pottery, she relented further and showed her around.

  Redworks House was newer than it appeared from a distance, being some rich man’s folly built just before the Great War. It was little more than a hunting lodge when Miss Eddy bought it and added a bathroom in the early sixties and she had lived there ever since, apparently doing nothing more to it. It retained its original, leaky, metal-framed windows and Bakelite light switches with, presumably, antique wiring to match. Beneath the cat-shredded rugs, yellowing newspapers and overflowing litter trays, Nuala could see a filthy parquet floor. There was no garden as such, just grass, gorse and incredible views. The two outbuildings were a garage and a stable complete with a rudimentary fireplace, where Nuala could position a kiln, assuming she could have three-phase wiring connected to such a remote address.

  ‘I love it,’ she wanted to enthuse but she was wise to the old bird so simply said, ‘I can’t think how you can bear to leave it.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Miss Eddy said. ‘Probably go in a box when I do.’

  She left things maddeningly vague, implying that, if she were to sell, if, then a non-churchgoing, non-dog-owning, childless artist like Nuala would be just the sort of person she’d want to sell to. If she wanted to sell.

  Nuala pressed her mobile number on her, promising to have nothing further to do with the estate agents, and Miss Eddy – Constance, as she now became – rang her repeatedly in the weeks that followed. As Nuala found other houses of less and less interest now that she had experienced the one that was perfect, she found herself dragooned into running ever more intimate errands for the old woman who had what she wanted. First she asked her to call in at the estate agents and pass on the message that the house was now definitely off the market. (‘Again,’ sighed the estate agent, picking the display out of her window.) Then she asked her to collect a prescription and to return some criminally overdue library books, which stank of cat. Then she asked her to take one of the cats to the vet in St Ives for a booster. This was a major test as the creature yowled all the way there and all the way back and, when it emerged that Constance’s account had long-unpaid invoices against it, Nuala had to pay for two years’ worth of injections.

  And then it became clear that a greater change was afoot, as the errands related to something very like housemoving. Sacks of empty food tins for taking to the recycling centre in St Just. Boxes of old books for the Oxfam shop. Boxes of clothes, ditto, though these were so stained Nuala shamefacedly stuffed them into the more anonymous Oxfam bin instead, so that she need meet nobody’s eye over them. Then all the cats bar the antique tom (the yowler and favourite) were mysteriously rehomed or rescued. And then, just when Nuala had decided to put in an offer on a perfectly nice and far more practical place on the lane down to Cape Cornwall, Constance rang, early and excited. She would like a lift to St Ives that morning, please.

  ‘Much better, now I’m getting on a bit,’ she said as Nuala negotiated the unbelievably narrow lane towards Zennor. ‘It’ll make a change being down in the sunshine and crowds, like being on holiday. I’ve paid all the bills and put everything in your name. The key’s under the dustbin at the back. You’ve been such a dear. So patient. I’ve had to leave you Eustace because he’s part of the furniture. He’d never have got on in a twilight home and he’ll be a reformed character now all the girls have gone. Otherwise the place is all yours.’

  ‘What about lawyers?’ Nuala stammered. ‘Bank details? Conveyancing?’

  Once she had settled Constance into the council-run home in St Ives, Nuala consulted her lawyer, who soon discovered that the old bird’s saying, ‘I couldn’t possibly sell you the place – it would be robbery,’ was perfectly true since she had never owned the house but had been a squatter. This explained both her longstanding reluctance to sell and her cheerful lack of interest in maintaining the property. No living owners could be traced. Perhaps because of the widely-held assumption that Constance owned it, the property had fallen through a loophole when the land to either side was adopted by the National Trust. Having squatted there herself for nearly a year, and spent what felt like a cottage’s cost on legal fees, Nuala became established as Redworks House’s rightful owner.

  Constance hated being in the home, predictably, became ever more peculiar and unruly then, mercifully, died. Nuala and the home’s matron were the only attendees at her faith-free cremation. Eustace held on a few months longer then took himself off somewhere in the impenetrable gorse thickets that had been his hunting grounds and never returned.

  With what was left of the settlement from her divorce, Nuala turned the old stable into a studio. Inspired by her new surroundings, the radically different weather, colours, rocks and plants, her work took a new direction. Escaping at last from the oppressive influence of her teachers at VCA who, ironically, had been shaped in turn by the St Ives potter, Bernard Leach, she no longer felt the need to produce work that was in any way useful or practical. Or, indeed, brown. Although she still made the occasional bowl that might be prettily filled, her bottles, vases and platters were now far too delicate for use. She began to lose herself in the risky, expensive realms of lustreware.

  Fascinated by the colours she could produce with ground-down gold and silver jewellery, picked up in antiques markets, she also experimented with the metal-laden clays that bad weather washed out of the adits of some of the abandoned mine workings, from Geevor to Nanquidno. One especially arsenical shaft often produced an intense sunshine yellow that was all the more pleasing for the knowledge that a poison had been transformed to produce something so cheerful. Inevitably she had disasters, false turnings, entire batches – weeks of work – ruined when the insane winds made her kiln burn too hot and took all the precious glazes up the chimney, but she steadily found a new style that worked for her. She specialized in pieces that looked ancient – their intense colours frayed and foxed so that they seemed like once-bright artefacts clouded by centuries under sand or earth.

  She was learning about herself too. Raised in cities, always in noisy crowds even when she escaped to the beach or the bush, she discovered that she preferred solitude and that her apparent gregariousness had been no more than an habitual mask. She enjoyed her own company. Entirely alone, she was discovering she was far more thoughtful than her upbringing had led her to believe. She had always read for pleasure, though never voraciously. Settling into the house, prompted by boxes of Constance’s old books that had travelled no further than the garage, she fell into a routine of reading in the evenings, reading for reading’s sake rather than merely to fill the time or make her sleepy.

  She discovered, too, the old-fashioned pleasure of writing letters – carefully edited accounts of herself to her mother in Adelaide and easier, entirely frank versions to Niamh. Niamh had recently seen her own life transformed when she fell in love with a farmer from WA and had thrown over banking and Melbourne for planting olives and making cheese from their own goats’ milk near Margaret River.

  She thought about Christos, of course, b
ut not often; it tended to be in dreams that he resurfaced. She was certainly no longer frightened or hiding and she found, when a friend of a friend wrote in a Christmas card about having spotted him with a new woman and a brace of children, that she had to manufacture curiosity and did not greatly care.

  Driving home from dropping off some work in the St Ives gallery that had started selling it, hearing the appetizing rustling and clinking of her food shopping on the back seat, powering through rain so punishing her windscreen wipers could hardly cope with it, she listened to the radio telling her about terrible events far, far away and realized she was profoundly happy and very lucky indeed.

  Then she had to slam on the brakes and skidded to a halt. A figure had taken her by surprise. It was a man, tall and thin, bunched up on the roadside to peer into the bracken on the verge. He jumped up, grimacing an apology into the glare of her headlights. He had no jacket on and his black tee-shirt and jeans would not have been wetter had he dipped himself in a pond. He stood aside and she began to pass but something in his face made her stop. He looked distraught, like someone who had lost a child. She wound down her passenger window.

  ‘Sorry,’ he stammered.

  ‘Christ, I’m the one who’s sorry,’ she said. ‘I could have killed you. Are you OK? Have you lost something down there?’

  ‘Nothing really. The stupidest thing. A little book. It must have fallen out of my pocket when I was walking.’

  ‘Well it’ll be ruined after a few minutes of this. Get in and I’ll …’

  ‘No. No, I’m sure it’s here somewhere.’

  He turned aside and continued groping in the under-growth. Disturbed, she pulled over and parked, grabbed the heavy torch she always carried in the car to light her way from car to back door, and ran back to him through the downpour.

  ‘Here,’ she began. ‘This might help.’ But she broke off because he was weeping. He had been using a stick to prod around in the brambles and ferns which must have just broken as he was still clutching its useless stump in one hand as he hid his eyes with the other. ‘Hey,’ she said gently. ‘Come on. Get in the car and I’ll get you something dry to wear.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I know it’s …’

  ‘Come on.’ She touched his shoulder and was surprised at the warmth of him even in the wet.

  He let himself be led back to her car and did not even try to find his seatbelt as she drove the short distance along the lane then turned up the track to home. ‘So sorry,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Ssh,’ she told him.

  His soaked clothes had brought the smell of rain and wet earth into the car with them. He fumbled a handkerchief out of his jeans that was as drenched as the rest of him and blew his nose on it. ‘Sorry,’ he said again and his teeth started to chatter.

  ‘Jesus!’ she said. ‘How long have you been out here?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ he said. ‘A couple of hours?’

  ‘Soon get you dry and warm.’

  ‘I’m wetting your car seat.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I never sit on that side.’

  ‘You’re Australian.’

  ‘And you’re not. Come on.’ She led the way into the house. One of the first improvements she had made was to install a big hot water tank, a good shower and an Aga that actually worked, unlike Constance’s antique Rayburn which appeared to do little but burn money.

  She set the shower running and thrust a towel at him. He started to protest. ‘You’re shivering,’ she said simply. ‘You seem to be in shock. You might have exposure. Get in there and warm up. Clean towel. Go.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I’ve got some overalls and socks you can borrow.’

  She had several outsize pairs she had bought at Cornwall Farmers to wear while she cleaned out and began the slow process of restoring the house. She bought boot socks there too in several sizes too large to pad around the house in, in lieu of slippers. She found all these and opened the bathroom door a crack to push them in for him along with a carrier bag for his wet things. Then she lit a fire and smiled to think she had a handsome, naked stranger in the house. She had either taken leave of her senses or turned a corner in her recovery from marriage …

  When he emerged, faintly comical in overalls and bright red socks, she put a whisky in his hands. ‘Medicine,’ she said. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and drank then smiled. ‘This was so incredibly kind of you.’

  ‘Well I reckoned you were a chump, not an axe murderer. Me Nuala. Nuala Barnes.’

  ‘Barnaby Johnson.’

  ‘Not Cornish, then?’

  ‘Not remotely.’

  ‘Sit for a bit.’ She gestured to the second of Constance’s dog-eared armchairs across the wood burner from her.

  ‘I’d love to, but I should be getting back to Pendeen. My wife will be worrying.’

  ‘Of course.’ She hoped she showed no disappointment. ‘I’ll drive you.’

  ‘I can walk. It’s not so far. And the rain seems to have stopped.’

  ‘You’ve only just warmed up, for Christ’s sake.’

  He smiled. ‘Accepted.’ He met her eyes as she stood. He had the sort of direct gaze that seemed to miss nothing. It was at once kind and unsettling; his wife could have no secrets from him, poor bitch. She liked the way he had looked about him but asked no questions, but villages being what they were, he probably knew everything about her already.

  They were both silent as her car bounced back down the track to the road so perhaps he was feeling the oddness of their situation. ‘You’re thinking about that book again, aren’t you?’ she teased.

  ‘I am, actually. Sorry. I should do what I’m always telling my children – just let it go.’

  ‘So what was it that was so precious?’

  ‘It has a very off-putting title.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘The Imitation of Christ.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Exactly so. It sounds better in the original Latin. De Imitatione Christi.’

  ‘Like an Italian wine.’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed.

  ‘Let it go,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he laughed.

  ‘Was it valuable?’

  ‘Not remotely, in money terms. But my sister gave it to me before she died and, well, I suppose it had become like a talisman. I seemed to take it with me everywhere.’

  ‘A comfort.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So do you?’ she asked, turning left at Morvah. ‘Imitate Christ?’

  ‘I ought to, being your parish priest.’

  ‘Ah. Married and a priest. No dog collar.’

  ‘It was my afternoon off.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t come to church much. I don’t come at all.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘No,’ he said and his tone was smiling. ‘Of course I don’t. But so many more people don’t come to church than do that I find it’s my default response.’

  They were driving through Pendeen now and despite the damp and chill and the welcoming fire and supper waiting for her at home, she realized she was wishing they had another half-hour in the car together. ‘Do I turn up to the church?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no. We’re a bit further on and down the lane to the right, but honestly here’s fine and I’ll make my own way down.’

  She was about to protest but saw that perhaps it would involve him in one less explanation if he didn’t have a strange Australian woman in tow.

  ‘Thanks for rescuing me, Nuala,’ he said. ‘How on earth do I spell that?’

  She told him, adding, ‘Rhymes with ruler.’

  He hadn’t shaken her hand or touched her at all, she noticed. As she turned the car round and headed home she told herself jeeringly that he was a typical priest and scared of women, but sensed as she did so that neither of these was true. On the contrary, as an attractive man with constant acces
s to women and their lives and secrets, and with none of the helpful paraphernalia of consulting room and receptionist and professional protocols to protect him, he must have had to work constantly to maintain a kind of glass barrier against overly warm responses to the attentiveness that was his stock-in-trade.

  When he cycled up to her door two days later to return the borrowed clothes, she saw at once how the dog collar and black clothes could be as effective an anaphrodisiac as any crisp receptionist. ‘Ah,’ she said, opening the studio door. ‘Now you look the part.’

  His wife had washed both overalls and socks. She had even ironed the overalls. ‘How does she do that?’ she asked. ‘They look as though they’ve just come out of the wrapper.’

  ‘The least we could do,’ he said and she felt a passing pang for his wife who possibly ironed all his shirts in the rueful knowledge that he did not begin to understand that clothes did not simply fall into these crisp folds when one unpegged them from the line.

  Her being at work led naturally to his asking to see inside her studio and to examine her pottery. For once she did not resent having to explain what lustreware was, because he was so clearly interested and understanding. But then, as her exposition degenerated into self-criticism, she found his gaze on her in that penetrating way he had, a not-quite-smile about his lips. She broke off. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, flustered suddenly. ‘I should get on and leave you.’

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘I’m done for the day anyway. What is it?’

  ‘It’s just so nice to hear someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and is really good at it talk about their work,’ he said, taking a step or two away from her kiln.

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ she said. ‘But that wasn’t it, was it?’