A Perfectly Good Man Read online

  ‘Er. No. Nuala, I should leave now.’

  She could so easily have let him go. He was by the door, after all, and the dog collar and all that black made him a good deal easier to resist, but for want of a more accurate phrase, the devil was in her so she reached up and took him by the lapels of his jacket, which he didn’t resist, and kissed him.

  They kissed, laughed and, kissing some more, sank onto the catty old sofa she had moved out there and made rapid, greedy love with their clothes on or almost on. He pulled off his dog collar as it seemed to be restricting his breathing and he undid the front of his shirt because she wanted to feel his chest. Most probably if they had been obliged to step apart to undress or even to compose themselves sufficiently to cross the yard to the relative privacy and comfort of her bedroom, reason and morality would have prevailed. But once she had the weight of him on her she was powerless to resist what (she knew) she had started; he was so delightfully not Christos, she was so fearless, so, relatively, in control. Her feelings for the next quarter-hour were so bound up in herself and the novelty of half-forgotten sensations, that the strength of his own responses came as a shock, not just his flattering need of her but the heartfelt sigh he let out afterwards. He hid his face from her on the pretext of kissing her hair.

  ‘Nuala,’ he sighed. ‘Oh Nuala.’

  ‘Was that the wickedest thing you’ve ever done?’ she asked, genuinely curious.

  He sighed again.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Was it the only wicked thing you’ve ever done?’

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. He propped himself up on one elbow to look down at her. He appeared utterly miserable.

  In a priestly way – all cheekbones and fine feeling – he was handsome, she considered, especially now she had put his hair in disarray and brought a boyish flush to his cheeks. ‘I don’t even know your wife’s name,’ she said. ‘Only that she irons better than I do.’

  ‘Dorothy,’ he said quietly and had to clear his throat. ‘Dot,’ he added.

  ‘And you love her.’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Then this must never happen again,’ she told him straightforwardly. ‘Fun though it was.’

  ‘Have you been married?’ he asked.

  ‘How …?’ she began then added, ‘Oh,’ as he touched her ring finger in explanation, running his fingertips over the callus that remained although she had not worn her wedding ring since impulsively taking it off and losing it while redecorating. ‘I was,’ she admitted. ‘He was a good Christian and a very bad husband. I left him.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I wasn’t. If I’d stayed he’d have ended up killing me. Don’t let’s talk about him. Sorry but my hips are going to sleep and this sofa isn’t very … Would you mind?’

  ‘No. Of course. Sorry.’

  And in a few minutes they were upright and respectable once more.

  As she showed him out he started to apologize again but she silenced him. ‘You weren’t here as my parish priest as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have a parish or need a priest. You were here as a friend returning borrowed clothes and what happened just happened … It was no dereliction of duty of care or whatever. It just happened. Look around you. No damage. Nobody saw. No thunderbolt. The sun’s even shining.’

  ‘You’re amazing.’

  ‘Drongo, get back to your flock.’

  Once he had bounced off down the track on his bicycle and she had taken a shower and, abruptly hungry, made herself a sturdy cheese sandwich, she let herself think about his visit afresh. She felt sad at her lack of self-control because, for all that he was a priest, she believed he might have become a friend with whom she could agree to differ, a friend off whom she could strike sparks, and she suspected they had now ruined the chances of that.

  He came back, however. After a day or two. He had found a replacement for the little, unreadable book that had brought them together – Thomas à Kempis – an exact likeness to the old one apparently, though, of course, without the dedication from his sister, and he had found Nuala a book in the same second-hand shop. It was a long, early-twentieth-century novel, an Australian one she had never read, although she had heard of its author, Mrs Henry Handel Richardson. ‘Something for the long winter evenings,’ he told her. ‘It has one of the most impossible husbands in all literature. And one of the best longsuffering wives.’

  ‘And you thought this would appeal to me because …?’ she teased.

  ‘Oh, no. I didn’t mean … It’s purely for the story and the writing. And she’s so good on the formation of an Australian middle class. And the hopeless husband. And it’s Australian.’

  And they ended up in a bed. Possibly because they undressed one another this time, and went to her bedroom, it felt worryingly like making love, less recreational than the first occasion. And they kept breaking off to laugh or to chat about things occurring to them.

  He seemed almost to lose his temper with her when she asked if it was marriage or God making him so guilty and he said the two were extensions of the same.

  ‘Go away, then,’ she said, angry in her turn. ‘Fuck off and take that bloody novel with you.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘No. Leave the book, but fuck off.’

  And she stayed in bed all afternoon, because she could these days, in this new life of hers, and she read the giant book. It was dry at first then compelling and wonderful, only she inevitably saw him as Richard Mahony, the doomed, feckless settler antihero, hopeless when poor and even less reliable when rich. She became morose and did no good work for days. She read on into volume two, scavenging meals from her fridge to take back to bed, and on into volume three.

  He came back a third time, somewhere in the chapters where Mahony was losing his sanity, and twice more after that. And they came very close to establishing the sort of pattern on which such unofficial relationships thrive, one of feigned indifference and underhand tenderness. But then something utterly predictable and stupid happened, which gave her the strength to call a halt to whatever was building up between them: she became pregnant.

  This need not have changed anything, but she realized the moment she next glimpsed him in the village – she unobserved in her car, he on the pavement with the nice-looking, big-boned woman she had guessed was his wife – that she wanted to keep the baby. So she split with him the cowardly way, but the only way in which she could trust herself not to weaken and yield once again, by simply hiding when he visited.

  It didn’t take much. He only visited twice more that she knew about. Despite the convenience of this, she was miffed at his apparent lack of persistence. He did nothing awkward like sending a letter or ringing her up. He dropped out of her life as abruptly as he had fallen into it, and as she entered her second trimester and morning sickness gave way to the kind glow of progesterone and endorphins, and her bump began to show, any twinge of regret was swept aside as she began to fall in love with her unborn child, made lists of names and held imaginary conversations with it.

  Pregnancy began to mesh her into the local community in a way that the solitary pursuit of art had not. As she waited at the surgery in St Just or queued in shops, there or in Pendeen, other women gave her kind smiles or started conversations. She picked up where she had so cruelly had to leave off the first time around, amassing clothes, many of them given by new friends, attending ante-natal classes (including a wonderfully woowoo one involving much mutual massage, goddess contemplation and flapjack eating), teaching herself to knit and preparing and furnishing a little bedroom.

  She told Niamh, who told their mother of course, and the two women agreed to be there for the birth, which would be in the spring, a perfect time for visiting Cornwall and escaping the winter back home. Perhaps because a part of her was aware how exhausted and short of time she would soon be, her creativity thrived and she established valuable connections with galleries further afield, in Falmouth and even Totnes.

  It was inevitable t
hat they would meet sooner or later. Knowing this, she had it all worked out, how she would simply deny it was his, tell some fib about a new man she’d been seeing on and off. But she met him completely outside his expected context, on a visit to the Tate. He was with a Eurasian-looking little boy, six or seven, whom he introduced as his son. The child was clearly impatient to visit the gallery shop, so he let him slip ahead and turned back to Nuala while her defences were down.

  ‘You look so well,’ he said.

  ‘I feel like a galleon,’ she said. ‘I can hardly fit in the driving seat.’

  ‘Is it kicking yet?’

  ‘And how.’ And without thinking she grasped his hand and placed it on her belly. The baby wasn’t kicking just then but the sudden warmth of the connection gave him permission to ask.

  ‘Is it a boy or a girl or haven’t you asked?’

  ‘It’s a boy,’ she said. ‘I just found out. Hung like a horse, they told me.’

  And he laughed. ‘Is it mine?’ he asked quietly, taking back his hand as people passed them on the stairs.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, all lies forgotten.

  ‘I’ll tell Dot,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask her for a divorce.’

  ‘But you love her,’ she reminded him. ‘You love her deeply.’

  ‘Yes, but …’ At which point his son came back to find him because he needed his money and Nuala escaped upstairs into the gallery. Her mind was now anywhere but on art. As she walked through the rooms, her eyes slid, uninvolved, over paintings and sculpture and a great curving wall of Bernard Leach pottery, as her thoughts churned over. She found she was becoming almost angry so gave up and stalked downstairs.

  He was waiting outside, his son playing on the beach with friends.

  ‘I don’t want a husband,’ she told him straight out. ‘Really not. Never again. And I don’t want him to have a father if it means hurting other children and your wife.’

  ‘But don’t I—’

  ‘Have a say? No.’ She was surprised at the strength of her own feelings. ‘Really not. I’m not letting you martyr yourself and them for this and if you do anything stupid, like tell your … tell Dorothy, I swear we’ll just vanish so you’ll have hurt her for nothing.’

  He was looking stricken.

  ‘Barnaby, I’m very happy, honestly. We’ll be happy. We’ll be fine. And of course you’ll be able to see him and know him. Only …’

  ‘Not as a father.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I …? Will you bring him to me to be christened, at least?’

  She smiled at that, at such an easy, meaningless thing to grant. ‘Of course I will,’ she said. ‘If you like I’ll do it while Niamh and my mum are still staying. They’ll like that. Now. Please, Barnaby. Step away from the foxy pregnant lady. We live in a goldfish bowl.’

  He obeyed her and walked slowly down the steps onto Porthmeor Beach, where he was absorbed by the Easter holiday crowds yet remained entirely visible and apart from them, in his incongruous black. He stopped to look back at her and she raised a hand and touched it to her lips, now he was far enough away for no one to link her gesture to his watching.

  JIM AT 12

  Jim lost all belief in God one June afternoon when he was twelve. There was no warning, no mental equivalent of distant thunder. The drama played out entirely inside his head. They had come away for a rare half-term holiday to spend a week in a static caravan on a farm near Bradford-on-Avon. They had enjoyed several excursions, to Bradford, to Bath, to Lacock Abbey, but that day’s outing began with him secure in the love of an all-knowing creator and ended, still in sunshine, with him knowing he was entirely alone.

  It was Granny and Carrie he first remembered. Carrie was always there, seemingly at once bossy and adoring, scooping him up, carrying him around, feeding him mashed banana, which was still a favourite taste of his. His other favourite taste, though rarely indulged in now he was growing up, was condensed milk eaten direct from the can in heart-speedingly sweet spoonfuls. This was the treat with which his Granny bound him to her. She kept a sticky can always in her little fridge in her rooms on the end of the house and gave him illicit helpings from it whenever he came to her with a sore hand or scratched knee or simply in search of love.

  ‘Granny’s secret, my bird,’ she said. ‘Does us both a bit of good.’ She often had a spoonful herself, closing her eyes in exaggerated pleasure at its deliciousness to make him laugh.

  His mother was less demonstrative and expressed her love as solicitude for his every bump and scrape and as immense care for his appearance. She knitted him a new jersey every year. Each had its particular character. He remembered most of them and was usually sorry to have outgrown them. And in each, until very recently, she embroidered three small kisses on the inside neck to show him which was the back. She liked kissing the back of his neck, or perhaps she preferred it to kissing his face. Whatever the truth behind it, that was the maternal touch that immediately sprang to mind. It became a small ritual between them, in the jersey-wearing months at least. She would pause in bidding him goodnight and say, ‘Oops. Something on the back of your neck. Look!’ Then she’d give him a quick little kiss on the back of the neck and one of them would say, ‘Jersey left one behind.’

  Secretly he thought of the three women like the beds in Goldilocks – too soft, too firm and just right – Carrie being the one who was just right. But each was beautiful to him for quite a while, at least until he started school at the top of their lane.

  As for Dad, he was love itself. When people talked about God, most listeners pictured an old man with a beard, for some reason, an old man at least. Perhaps to differentiate God the Father from God the Son. But when someone mentioned God to Jim, he saw only his own father. He was enthralled by visits to church, especially once he was old enough to understand what Carrie meant when she said what their father did. ‘He talks to God and does a kind of magic we can’t see. We can watch him do it but we can’t see it happening.’

  Dad was loving at home, solemn and funny, often funny in ways you couldn’t quite understand, and always readier than their mother, it seemed, to give that love simple physical expression in a passing touch or hug or simply in the ready way he came down to one’s own level, bending his long legs to hunker down with a game or book on the floor. But at home, and especially in what Jim instinctively thought of as his own clothes, as opposed to the black ones, he looked incomplete. He was most himself when he stood before them all in the pulpit or at the altar, transformed by vestments into a dazzling figure who, by virtue of skirts and glittery bits, seemed to be mother and father in a single being. Watching him at work before so many of the villagers filled Jim with a warm pride indistinguishable from a trusting belief in God. He could no more disbelieve in God than he could deny the reality of his own father.

  He was a scientific child, questioning and enquiring, reassured by an ever-growing compendium of facts. The earth was round (ish). The moon’s gravitational pull caused the waves and tides. There was still plenty of tin under their feet but its value was too low now to justify the cost of mining it out. God knew everything and looked after everybody. Just another fact to help one map out an understanding of the way things were. The women of the house tended not to speak of God or religion when not in church and he noticed that if circumstances obliged them to they used a special tone of voice. A reverent voice. This was a pet word of his mother’s. Reverent. When they arrived in their pew in church, she would often still any chattering conversation he and Carrie had brought in from outside by tapping his knee and saying, ‘A quick prayer, now, to settle your thoughts, then sit up and be reverent.’

  He found it hard to believe now but, looking back, scanning the scant evidence of his mother’s intermittently maintained photograph album, he could see that he had no sense of being in any way different from his family. He certainly didn’t think of himself as being in any way foreign or exotic. He simply accepted that, when they stood side by side to look in the bath
room mirror, Carrie’s eyes, high above his of course, were one shape and his were another; grapes and almonds. Their parents must have discussed the matter because the weekend before he started primary school they explained that he was adopted. ‘We chose you especially,’ his mother said. They said how he came from a long long way away, from an ancient, beautiful kingdom called Vietnam. But at five, he had no comprehension of great distance beyond the fact that very occasionally they expected him to sit in the car for what seemed like an entire day.

  Pendeen School represented an abrupt awakening from bliss. It was a cheerful enough place but it was rambunctious compared to home and he felt unprotected and miserable there and other boys teased him, pulling their eyes into slits, putting on silly voices he laughed at too because they sounded nothing like him, and saying Chinky Chinky Chink at him. Girls liked and protected him, however, and a pattern was established in which he gravitated to female company because he felt safer there. Girls had a tendency to treat him like a kind of doll or pet and awoke him to his cleverness by asking his opinion, which nobody had ever done before. Boys stole his things or broke them. Individually boys could be perfectly nice but as soon as two or three were gathered together, something in them polarized against him and they became like members of a gang from which he was excluded for reasons obvious to everyone but himself. There were boys who tried to befriend him but he soon realized they were the ones everyone despised, the ones who didn’t wash enough or whose clothes smelled of wee, so with them he tried to be like his father with his more difficult parishioners like Mr Carlsson: friendly but somehow preoccupied.

  He wasn’t the only adopted child in the school. One of the girls who took a proprietorial interest in him, Teagan Thomas, revealed that she too lived with parents who weren’t her real parents. Her situation was unimaginably complicated. Her mother was still alive but ill in some way in her head that meant that she wasn’t allowed to have Teagan with her. Loony, Teagan called it, because her mother was scared of things that weren’t there and thought everyone was spying on her. Yet her mother still had her rights, so Teagan spent time with her and a child-welfare officer. Her foster parents disliked this and wanted to adopt her outright. She was a startling girl, sultry even, with long lashes, dark eyes and a pout beyond her years. Yet, as she showed Jim, beneath her clothes her limbs were raw with bloody eczema and this always got worse when she was due to visit her mother. Torn between two mothers, she was happiest with the surrogate parenting of school.