Patrick Gale

A Perfectly Good Man

Dedication

For Aidan Hicks

Epigraph

All perfection in this life hath some
imperfection bound up with it; and no
knowledge of ours is without some darkness.

THOMAS À KEMPIS, De Imitatione Christi

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The reader is asked to remember that what follows is neither journalism nor history but a work of fiction. The novel’s principal settings and church parishes are real ones near my own home but their inhabitants, in particular the priest in their midst, are entirely imaginary. Where such true events as the March for Geevor are included, I have made use of the novelist’s prerogative to embroider on the facts for the low purpose of entertainment.

My text quotes from Dorothy Sayers’s radio play, The Man Born to be King, with the permission of the Sayers Estate, and from U.A. Fanthorpe’s poem ‘Atlas’, with kind permission from Dr Rosie Bailey.

PG

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Auhor’s Note

Lenny at 20

Dorothy at 24

Barnaby at 60

Modest Carlsson at 39

Barnaby at 52

Dorothy at 34

Barnaby at 40

Carrie at 11

Barnaby at 29

Modest Carlsson at 55

Nuala at 36

Jim at 12

Barnaby at 21

Lenny at 14¾

Carrie at 35

Barnaby at 16

Modest Carlsson at 75

Phuc at 27

Nuala at 56

Barnaby at 8

Author’s Acknowledgments

Other Books by Patrick Gale

Copyright

About the Publisher

LENNY AT 20

He had the heating on because immobility made him cold. The flat was recently built. Its windows and doors were all double-glazed but there was a keen easterly that had found a chink in one of the seals around the picture window and set up a wail. The whole flat was keening.

He was writing neat drafts of difficult letters to his mother and fiancée. Ex-fiancée. He kept getting the shakes, which spoiled his attempt at neat handwriting, and the unearthly noise was jangling his thoughts as effectively as a crying baby or a whining dog. He tossed down his pen and wheeled his chair to the window where he killed the noise by opening it a little. At once different sounds filled the room: traffic from the Ross Bridge, seagulls from the rooftops, the shouts of some hooded boys jumping their skateboards on and off a ledge in a corner of the harbour car park, one dog barking at another from the back of a pick-up.

It was sunny out but clean. Crisp. He liked that. With the boiler on and a window open he would be wasting fuel, heating outside, as his mother put it.

Sure enough, minutes after he wheeled himself back to the table and resumed writing, he heard the boiler fire up. There was a sudden blare of talking as Dilys next door, who was deaf, turned her television on. She watched the same programmes every day. As far as he could tell he was the only resident in the block who wasn’t over seventy. He had been there three months now. When a vacancy came up and the council offered it to him, he had seized the chance, spurred on, he was sure, by the grotesque local hero stories in The Cornishman.

Away from Pendeen and his mother’s stifling concern, given the opportunity to build an independent life for himself in town, where he needed nobody’s help to do anything, he was convinced that things would improve. The change of scene, the view, the independence had indeed all brought relief. The problem had moved house with him, of course. If anything it had been heightened. The flat was ingeniously perfect for his needs: a gentle ramp to the front door, all on the level within, and swings to help himself into bed and into the shower. Tables, work surfaces, fridge and cooker, clothes storage were all modified to be usable from a sitting position. There was even a full-length mirror in the hall so that he could check before he went out that, yes, he looked fine, like a perfectly unremarkable twenty-year-old who just happened to be in a wheelchair. The only things out of his reach were the pictures his mother had hung for him – a reproduction of a fiery Rachel Kelly painting he had always liked and a framed enlargement of a photograph he had taken of a sunset at Sennen Cove. This had hung on his bedroom wall ever since he won a prize for it at school and he had agreed without thinking when his mother assumed he would want to take it with him. But now it embarrassed him and was the last thing he needed when trying to muster the motivation to haul himself, literally, out of bed. What had once filled him with teenage pride now reminded him of the motivational posters first on the walls at school and then in the rooms of the rehabilitation centre he had religiously attended. He recalled with particular rancour an image of a soaring seagull with a quotation from Virgil: ‘They can because they think they can!’

It didn’t matter now. Nothing especially mattered. Unless, of course, he had been ripped off, like the time he had bought Ecstasy tablets that had turned out to be little more than overpriced remodelled Aspirin. He finished the second letter, sealed it and set it beside the first. He had never been comfortable stringing sentences together, still less using a pen, but somehow, as with thank-you letters, a pen had seemed called for. He had been obliged to buy paper and envelopes, which, like the open window on a heated room, seemed wasteful. Some would think it sad that he could think of only two people who mattered enough to him to merit a letter. There were others, of course, but these were the two people who needed to understand. His rugby friends had all pulled together at first, just as one would expect from team players. They had all tried so hard to do and say the right thing but none of them quite arrived at the point of managing to think it, so as to make their words and gestures more than that.

People were gathering on the car park. He saw some children in matching white tee-shirts running with paper fish fluttering on long lengths of bamboo above their heads, and he remembered it was Golowan; local schools and bands were assembling for the annual Mazey Day parade up Market Jew Street.

He checked the time. There was still an hour to go. He wheeled himself over to the kitchen drawer where he had stashed the two deliveries – two small, innocuous, brown, padded envelopes. One from Mexico contained a small polystyrene carton protecting what the label claimed to be veterinary Nembutal. (Knowing no corruptible doctors, vets or nurses, he had found it impossible to source the drug in the UK.) The other, posted within England, bought from an online specialist, was a simple barbiturate-testing kit. He had read the instructions already but read them again now because since the accident he had become that kind of person, a careful reader of warnings and waiter for lights, a measure-twice-cut-once sort of man.

The kit consisted of a tiny translucent plastic case which opened to reveal three small syringes and three tiny, clinical containers of liquid, a mixing vial and instructions. Following the instructions, he carefully used one of the syringes to draw just one millilitre of the putative Nembutal through its sterile seal. He began to shake again – something else that often happened since his accident – and he had to set the syringe down on the table for a second or two to let his hands relax. He breathed deeply twice and watched a lorry edge by, a local steel band mounted on its decorated trailer. Then he took up the syringe again and in a single confident movement added its contents to the vial. Then he did the same, adding to the Nembutal a quantity of one of the containers. Then he drew up the second liquid into a syringe.

‘Please,’ he thought. ‘Please, (just this once)’ and he squirted its contents into the mixing vial. At once the testing solution turned a bright, satisfying blue. He felt himself smiling honestly for the first time in weeks. ‘Bad news, mate,’ he said out loud. ‘You’re pregnant.’

Finally he took the third syringe, drew up the third liquid and added it to the rest. Nothing happened. No change. No diminishing of the intense, hope-laden blue. He screwed the cap back on the vial and gave it a shake to be sure. Still blue. ‘Still pregnant,’ he murmured.

Relief stole over him. He had searched and searched online and found only impossible, unconvincing websites offering the drug without prescription, alongside a lurid buffet of antidepressants and sex-enhancers. Blatant scammers were everywhere as were hysterical-sounding victims desperate to expose them.

His salvation had arrived unexpectedly in the course of a purgatorial night out with old friends from the rugby club. It was somebody’s stag night. Things had started silly and were sure to get sillier and a rowdy pub was no fun when your head was at the height of everyone else’s arse and jokers kept pushing your wheelchair about. Pretending to be staying outside for a smoke as they arrived at the Swordfish, the third pub of the evening, he scored some skunk off a raspy-voiced old hippy to help him cope. The hippy asked outright how he came to be in the chair and Lenny soon found himself matching bluntness with bluntness and confessing the trouble he’d been having finding a trustworthy source of suicide drugs online.

‘Nembutal,’ the hippy had sighed with welcome candour. ‘The paralytic’s pal. No problem. I’ve got a woman friend in Puerto Vallarta. She can get you the kind for dogs. You’ll need 100 mil. Yeah. 100 mil and a pause for thought. You go back inside, my friend, and I’ll send her a text and let you know.’

He murmured a price in Lenny’s ear twenty minutes later as he unexpectedly passed him a drink in the crowd. It seemed worryingly cheap, like the sex he had been offered in Amsterdam, and he had every expectation that the drug would have been diluted to inefficacy or lost its power with age, both of which the chatter on the suicide forums told him could happen.

But no. It was real and full of kindly force.

He needed to get out. Even with the window ajar, the little bottle’s potency seemed to be drawing all the oxygen from the flat.

He threw the testing kit into the bin, tucked the Nembutal back in the fridge then hoisted himself onto the loo because excitement was getting to him and he needed to piss.

After the accident he had returned to work at the same Penzance chemist’s that had taken him on as a dispensing assistant after school. The grand scheme – derailed by the accident, of course – was to work there, gaining useful experience while he retook his maths and chemistry A-levels with a view to studying pharmacy at university. During the previous day’s shift, he had stolen from his employers for the first time, pocketing the dose of prescription-only anti-emetic he now swallowed with a gulp of juice straight from the carton. He wanted to be sure he didn’t throw up the precious Nembutal when the time came.

He took the anti-emetic’s packaging with him to throw into a bin on the prom; he didn’t want anyone at work to get into trouble on his account and had even slipped the money for it into the till in the hope the theft wouldn’t be detected. As he pulled the door locked behind him he remembered afresh that he was the only resident, on his floor at least, who had not bothered to prettify the entrance to his flat. All the others, all his elderly neighbours, had planted window boxes or hung wind chimes or even set out garden gnomes or resin meerkats. Everyone but him had done something to mark out their small share of walkway as their own.

Two of the residents whom he saw every day but whose names he had yet to learn had met by the entrance ramp and paused to chat. They watched him with approval.

‘Morning, Lenny. Off to watch the parade?’

‘That’s right,’ he told them, although he wasn’t. ‘Thought I might as well.’

‘Good lad,’ said the other.

And as he wheeled away from them he knew they would be looking after him and saying pity or waste just as they would over a nice young man who turned out to be gay or a nice young couple whose baby turned out to be autistic. ‘Shame,’ they’d say, then sigh, then move the conversation on because there was nothing to be done. ‘You having that lamb thing you bought, or the chicken?’

He followed the pavement around to the seafront but then, instead of turning left to where the marchers and bands, the fish, mermaids and starfish were preparing to parade up the hill, he turned right and headed away from them, over the Ross Bridge, past the Scillonian dock, around the corner, where the funfair had been set up and the traffic diverted, and onto the promenade.

Provided one could cross the road and find an access point onto the pavement unblocked by thoughtlessly parked cars, it was a good place to exercise, he had discovered. The pavement was broad so that he could pause if he wanted to without feeling he was getting in people’s way and there was always plenty of life along there: rollerbladers and skateboarders, dog-walkers, people jogging or pushing babies, or simply sitting on benches or leaning on the railings to watch the sea and one another.

He knew this should change his mind. In the Hollywood version of his story he would see a happy old couple or a beautiful girl, or be asked directions by an elegant woman or catch a ball for an endearingly plain child and be charmed into lingering, seduced by life. As it was, he wheeled himself along the front with no such significant encounter. Sunshine was dazzling on the sea, the brightly coloured banners cracked and flapped in the breeze. Nobody asked him directions or tossed him a hope-restoring ball. The only eyes that met his gaze were those of dogs, and of children in pushchairs, fascinated to find an adult on their level and unashamed of staring.

He crossed the road when he neared the Lugger and wheeled up to Captain’s to buy chips, which he took back to the front. They were perfect chips, crisp, hot and salty, and he ate them with slow relish so that his pleasure in the taste of them and his pleasure in the scene around him – water, people, dogs, life – became indistinguishable. He ate carefully. He had learnt the hard way that seagulls registered the wheelchair rather than the adult in it and read him as an overgrown and helpless child, easy to plunder. He had lost the best part of a pasty and suffered a nasty peck to the back of one hand before he learnt to eat with his food tucked beneath a jacket or coat.

As he wheeled himself homewards, the Mazey Day parade started off with a cacophony of steel drums, pipes, school bands and even what sounded like bagpipes and the synchronized chants and whooping of cheerleaders. As he came back over the Ross Bridge he saw the last of a squadron of drum majorettes, in white calf boots and rumpled pink satin, heading round the corner near the station.

It was one of several local festivals that had grown up in his lifetime, cheerful traditions confected to promote tourism and perhaps imbue a pride in all things Cornish. It meant no more to him than the dual-language English-Cornish signs that had begun to appear about the place, but perhaps future Cornish children would feel differently.

He saw Father Barnaby getting out of his impossibly old Rover up ahead and joining the crowd on the prom. He was all in black – a human crow amid the holiday crowd. Lenny had teased him once, about always wearing black, and Father Barnaby had joked that always wearing the same meant one less thing to decide in the mornings. In fact he did wear civilian clothes occasionally – he had a weakness for black, no-label jeans – but he looked strange in them and vulnerable, like an habitual glasses-wearer when he took his glasses off to clean them.

Lenny tailed him for a few minutes, noting how people made way for him, either because of his height or clerical dress, and how many of them stared or even flinched then let out nervous smiles. But then Lenny was held up by a double pushchair with a dog at its side and lost sight of him. It was probably better that way. If Father Barnaby had spotted him he would have offered to push the wheelchair and Lenny would have felt doubly exposed.

Predictably he was in conversation with one of the neighbours as Lenny approached the ramp. On a sunny day like this there was always one or another of them out on the walkway and priests were always good for a chat. Kitty had found him. Kitty who had the foul-mouthed, second-hand mynah bird that so embarrassed her. And now here she was, a schoolboy joke made flesh, all puffed up and aglow from the pleasure of passing the time of day with a handsome vicar. Tense, though, in case he wanted to step inside and heard her bird.

Barnaby was no idler. Lenny was counting on that. His focus on the matter in hand was always total. Sure enough, the moment he spotted Lenny, he broke off chatting.

‘Here’s the man I came to see. Goodbye – sorry. I don’t know your name.’

‘Kitty,’ she said, preening like a ten-year-old. ‘Kitty Arnold.’

‘Goodbye Kitty.’

He didn’t offer to help, as Lenny had been dreading, but simply strode forward and shook him by the hand. ‘Good to see you,’ he said.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Lenny began, leading the way to his door.

‘You’re bang on time. I was early. I’d forgotten about Golowan when we spoke and I thought I’d never be able to park but I got lucky.’

‘I know. I saw you.’

‘You saw me?’

‘You don’t exactly blend in, dressed like that.’ Lenny had his mother’s candour. He saw Father Barnaby flinch. ‘It’s not just the dog collar,’ he added. ‘You’re tall. Sit down. Can I get you anything?’

‘A glass of water would be good.’

Perfect. Lenny wheeled into the kitchen, poured him a glass of water and tipped his own drink into a second glass.

‘Thank you.’ Barnaby took his water and raised it. ‘Cheers.’ He drank, looked around him. ‘It’s nice,’ he said. ‘You’ve settled in?’

Lenny nodded. This was proving harder than he had imagined.

‘It must be a relief to be on your own. Your mum worries and that can be …’

‘Yeah.’

Barnaby stopped talking and let silence fall between them. He looked Lenny directly in the face. Lenny met his gaze for a few seconds then glanced away and fiddled with his glass. He remembered Barnaby as handsomer – Hollywood cowboy handsome – perhaps because of all he represented. In the flesh his jaw was weaker, his nose smaller than in Lenny’s memory. But his pale grey eyes had a startling intensity that was unnerving at close range.

‘How can I help you, Lenny?’ he asked at last.

‘I’ve not been a very … Does it matter that I never go to church these days?’

‘It does if it makes you unhappy. Does it?’

‘Not really. But … Do you pray for us? The people that don’t show up?’

‘Yes, but that’s a pretty impersonal prayer. I pray for you specifically.’

‘Do you?’

‘Do you mind?’

‘No,’ Lenny said, ‘but why?’

‘Lenny! Obviously I’ve been praying for you ever since your accident and during the operations and so on but … Do you need me to pray for you now for a specific reason?’

Lenny forced himself to meet Barnaby’s stare. ‘I’m going to die,’ he told him.

‘We’re all going to die. Does dying frighten you?’

‘I mean I’m going to kill myself.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Fucking can. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right. Why?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? Don’t worry. I’m not depressed or mad or anything. I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s a decision, that’s all. My life, my death.’

‘Lenny, your hands are shaking.’

Instinctively Lenny clasped his hands onto his useless knees to hold them still. ‘That’s because I haven’t told anyone this. Not my mum. Not …’

‘Not Amy?’

‘Certainly not Amy. Jesus! Sorry.’

‘That’s quite all right.’

‘I just can’t do this, OK? Everyone has been brilliant – the boys at the club, the people at work, the council, the physios, the old bats in this place. But I can’t do it. I mean look around you. No books. Not even a few. I don’t have – what did you call them that time? – inner resources. I know you think I just have to wait and they’ll well up in me like a bath but they won’t. I’ve always been a doer, a player. I did OK at school and college but I hate indoors. Working in a dispensary, it’s just a job. I lived for the nights out with Amy and practice and matches and … If I stay here like this I’m going to turn into some bitter old fuck-up downloading porn and taking pictures of girls who pass the window there …’

Barnaby winced: not as cool as he liked to make out.

‘Lenny, I’m so sorry. You should have said you needed help.’

‘Yes, well, everyone was being so nice.’

‘It’ll pass. You’ll find new things. New things will enter your life and change it.’

‘They already did. They’re called incontinence pads.’

‘Christ!’

‘You swore!’

‘Lenny, please. Give life a chance. I’ve seen lesser men than you work through things like this. When the mines were still open here the accidents could be—’

‘I’m never going to run or walk or surf again. I’m never going to score another try again. Or fuck.’

‘They kept you a place at the chemist’s, didn’t they?’

‘Oh yeah. They’ve even installed a ramp so I can get up high enough to see over the counter. But I won’t be able to reach the higher shelves so there’ll always have to be another dispensing assistant on duty with me. It’s charity. It’s making allowances. I know they mean well but I don’t want that.’

‘Please, Len. Think of your mum.’

‘I am thinking of her …’

‘And Amy. You’ve upset her dreadfully already. This’ll devastate her.’

‘Well she’ll get over it. I had to push her away. I couldn’t let her martyr herself.’

‘But if you’d been married already?’

‘I’d have divorced her.’

Barnaby broke off and looked at him with those eyes.

That’s shocked him into silence, Lenny thought.

Barnaby glanced at Lenny’s untouched glass in a way that made Lenny think he knew. He sighed. ‘All I’m saying,’ he started.

‘Don’t,’ Lenny said. ‘Don’t say anything, OK? I didn’t ask you here for that. I could have rung Samaritans if I wanted that.’

‘So what do you want me to do?’

‘Just … stay here for a bit.’

‘I’m here, Len. I’m not leaving until you want me to.’

‘It’s really fast. It takes two minutes till I pass out and another till my heart stops.’

‘Think of the risks. If it goes wrong you could end up—’

‘I know the risks. I researched them. Like a fucking chemistry project. I’ve tested it. It won’t go wrong. People do this all the time.’

‘And plenty choose not to.’

‘Don’t. I don’t need that.’ Lenny pointed to the table where he’d been writing earlier. ‘Those are letters to Mum and Amy. And you’ll need to call a doctor.’

‘Len, I’m a priest. I know what to do when someone dies.’

‘Sorry.’

There was a fresh blast of music from outside. Perhaps the front of the parade was already coming around again. Was that possible? Barnaby glanced away towards the sound and Lenny seized the moment to drain his glass. Barnaby didn’t see him do it. Lenny knew he had no idea.

It was unbelievably bitter, like drinking a whole glass of Stop’n Grow. Like drinking death itself. He gasped but managed not to retch. He felt utterly calm. A seagull hovered briefly outside the window then rolled off to the side. They can because they think they can.

‘Not long now,’ Lenny said and saw that Barnaby had realized then what was happening.

‘No!’ he shouted. He took Lenny’s hands in his. He kissed one of them. ‘Len?’

‘You’ll send the letters?’

‘I’ll send them.’

‘You can pray now. If you like.’

His mouth was going funny already and he wasn’t sure Barnaby had even understood him. Barnaby was gazing at him with those I-will-find-you eyes and he whipped out a little silver bottle and tipped some oil onto his finger, hands shaking, and touched Len’s head with it.

‘O Almighty God,’ he said, ‘With whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons, I humbly commend the soul of this thy servant, our dear brother Lenny, into thy hands as into the hands of a faithful Creator, and most merciful Saviour; most humbly beseeching thee, that it may be precious in thy sight.’

Barnaby’s voice grew quieter. His face was wet with tears but his words didn’t falter. It wasn’t like a prayer in church. It was like an important conversation with someone in the room. Someone else. Len’s sight clouded and he felt his head grow insupportably heavy. For a short while he was aware of nothing but the continuing voice.

‘Wash it, we pray thee, in the blood of that immaculate lamb, that was slain to take away the sins of the world; that whatsoever defilements it may have contracted in the midst of this miserable and naughty world, through the lusts of the flesh, or the wiles of Satan, being purged and done away, it may be presented pure and without spot before thee.’

Without spot, Len thought. That’s nice. Like sheets. And he pictured bed sheets on his mother’s washing line high above Morvah on a day when the sea down below was deep blue with white horses on it, and the temptation was strong to hold your face in them as they flicked and cracked in the wind and the bleaching sun. Pure. White. Without spot.

BARNABY AT 52

They hardly saw Jim in his first year at university. They all dropped him off initially, including Carrie, with a great heap of books and belongings he claimed he couldn’t do without, his clothes all crammed into the much-decorated rucksack he had taken on his travels. And he emailed them once or twice in his first weeks. Barnaby attended a church conference and took him out for lunch near the end of term at a grown-up wine bar Jim recommended. He seemed fine, almost chatty. But then he dropped the bombshell that he was unlikely to come home for Christmas. He needed money and he could make easy overtime by agreeing to work on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. And if he did come home, it would be with his restored Vietnamese name, Phuc, not as Jim.

Choosing not to rise to this, Barnaby joked that even priests got Boxing Day off, then wished he hadn’t because it caused Jim to pull what Dot called his battening-down-the-hatches-face and the subject was closed. Barnaby couldn’t help but remember the way he had pulled back from his own father when even younger, and how part of him had felt relief at his father’s seeming acceptance of it and part of him had been deeply wounded at it. So, although he accepted that Jim, sorry, Phuc wanted distance, he didn’t let him believe that he wasn’t missed or wanted. He wrote to him thereafter, every week, not e-mails, which he had learnt could so easily be blocked or deleted, but proper ink and paper letters, which could be reread and saved, and stack up to form a physical proof of love. Thinking of his own father’s constipated, codified offerings, he always wrote two sides, never hiding behind clippings or cuttings, though occasionally including photographs. He wrote early every Sunday morning, immediately after he wrote the day’s sermon when he hadn’t found someone else to preach in his stead. And he made an effort to be entirely himself on paper, entirely honest. He wrote about his religious doubts, if not quite admitting to loss of faith, and his impatience with church politics. He told stories of parishioners and neighbours, like Dot’s scary librarian friend or pathetic, fat Modest Carlsson who nobody could quite like or trust. He told stories too of his own boyhood and difficult, eventually broken, relationship with his father. He hesitated before writing, ‘I don’t want that to happen with you and me, Phuc. In fact I won’t let it happen.’

Jim responded only very occasionally, and only ever by e-mail or telephone, and when he rang it was always on Sunday morning when he could be sure of only speaking to the answering machine.

He came home for Christmas after all, for the bare twenty-four hours of the feast. He refused to attend church, saying it was all lies, he got drunk and he was consistently horrible to Dot in a sneering, needling way he’d rarely been as a sixth-former, which made her nervous so she kept calling him Jim instead of Phuc. He talked incessantly. He talked to himself. He never finished what was on his plate, although he was worryingly thin. He dressed as though he was going clubbing, immune, apparently, to the cold. If either Barnaby or Dot referred to any of these oddities, he lashed out.

Only Carrie was spared, and she seemed frozen, afraid to intervene and lose whatever attachment of his she retained. It was as though, having already wounded them by threatening to stay away, he had decided to come home only because he realized he could behave more hatefully that way.

Speaking to his parishioners about the Christ child’s message of love and how a baby was the perfect symbol of that obligatory, undeniable love within families, Barnaby tasted the sourness of deceit on his tongue more than ever before.

It was a measure of how tense and watchful the visit left the three of them that not one of them succumbed to the temptation to joke about the similarity between Jim’s new name and the expletive his behaviour surely made them all want to say.

Barnaby resumed writing to him immediately – it seemed more important than ever – and sent what was probably regarded as a pitiful cheque to help with the spring term’s rent. He grew angry afresh as he wrote, remembering how Phuc had spoken to his mother, so found himself apologizing for whatever they had done wrong in raising him. Silence followed, total silence into which Barnaby continued to send his letters as pebbles into a cold, dark shaft, until the end of term, when Carrie told them both he’d be spending the Easter break working in the wine bar.

No one expressed surprise. It was expensive being a student now, they reminded each other, and he didn’t have well-off parents to subsidize him. Then the hall of residence returned one of Barnaby’s letters with a note to say that Phuc was still a student of the university but had been obliged to move out. This was far more worrying, especially since Barnaby feared he would have moved out in an effort to save money. He emailed the contents of his letter instead, asking for Phuc’s new postal address. There was no response. He emailed again, and this time the e-mail bounced back with a message that Phuc’s e-mail account had been closed. At least, the only one that Barnaby and Dot knew about.

As spring unfolded into a glorious summer, they had no news and, Barnaby noticed, took to avoiding speaking of Phuc because the cycle of recrimination and equally useless worry the mere mention of him stirred up was too upsetting. He began to suspect how it might feel to have a loved one in a coma or on a life support machine for week after week, to the point where one would avoid speaking of them because every possible conversation about them would have been had and a kind of mourning delicacy would become preferable to further discussion.

Then he came back from an afternoon of parish visits to find a note from Dot in the usual place, leaning on the kettle.

3 p.m. Jim’s in hospital, she had written. Gone to fetch him home.

He had supper ready and had alerted Carrie by the time Dot brought Phuc home after dark. Phuc was in no state to eat anything. He had slept for the two-hour car journey but still looked like a walking corpse. Freezing all enquiries with a glance, Dot left father and daughter in the hall and put him straight to bed.

It was by the sheerest fluke she had even found out he was ill. The daughter of a woman in her book group was a junior nurse on the psychiatric ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter and recognized Phuc, despite his name, as she had been in the year below him at Cape Cornwall. She took the initiative, when he came round from sedation and finally started making sense. He had claimed to have no next of kin, but she went behind the ward sister’s back and rang her mother, who rang Dot.

Dot was late back because she had to wait to talk to a doctor. They had explained that he showed signs of addiction to amphetamines, which had left needle tracks, and sclerotic veins, on both his arms. He had been brought in temporarily psychotic from the effects of crystal meth. It had taken three policemen to control him sufficiently to get him into the back of a van and bring him in and it had taken a large dose of Largactil to sedate him to the point of safety and stop him repeatedly shouting, ‘You can’t do this to me. I’m the Son of God!’

Phuc had looked merely unkempt at Christmas but now his appearance had deteriorated shockingly. He was emaciated, sweaty, dirty and had the sort of acne he had managed to avoid throughout his teens. Dot’s only thought, her instinct, had been to bring him straight home without trying to collect his things. She dressed him in Barnaby’s pyjamas and Barnaby found her weeping over the state of his clothes as she put them to wash with agricultural quantities of liquid soap. Neither she nor Barnaby slept much that night because she kept tiptoeing across to his old room to check he was still there and still breathing.

He stayed in bed for two whole days, barely speaking, only waking to drink and to toy with the meals she took in to him. They made sure one of them or Carrie was always in the house so that he was never alone and had their GP look in on him too. On the third day he dressed in the basic clothes Barnaby had bought in one of the big supermarkets in Penzance and supplemented with a bag of more colourful things from charity shops. He sat in the garden, enjoying the sun and the cat, whose wordless love was doubtless welcome respite from the anxious expressions of the humans in the house. They conducted small, careful conversations about unthreatening matters in the present: the garden, the weather, the house, the cat. When Barnaby went to sit with him, Phuc would give a crumpled smile and say, ‘Hey, Dad,’ which made Barnaby feel things might be bad but were not quite broken.

He was more forthcoming with Carrie, admitting to having flunked his course, to being expelled from his hall of residence for stupid stuff, to living in a squat whose address he claimed not to be able to remember. To having no money left, and owing some to a man who scared him. He was nervous the hospital would know his parents’ address and pass it on so that the man might come after him.

‘It won’t all be true,’ Dot said, poring over the booklet the nurses had given her. ‘We can expect paranoia and mood swings, it says.’

‘It’s so good to see you,’ they told him, and ‘You must stay as long as you like.’

‘I don’t care about his degree,’ Barnaby told Dot in bed that night. ‘Or the police or anything. I just want him to stay here and get well, however long it takes.’ And he dared imagine a few sunny weeks, months even, of having both their adult children back in the nest, of Phuc rebuilding his health and his family relationships, with them in careful, loving, undemanding attendance; a prolonged and peaceful rehabilitation.

He knew this was naïve and that addiction was something about which he was shamefully ignorant for someone who had prided himself on taking a pastoral interest in the more wretched and less law-abiding households of the parish. At the end of the second day of sun and cat and careful conversation, he told Dot this was unlikely to last, that she must ready herself; they couldn’t keep Phuc prisoner, even for his own good. But it was still a shock when he vanished the next day and reappeared, high and barely able to speak, an hour or so after Dot had realized he had emptied her purse. Barnaby was still feeling wounded when Phuc disappeared the morning after that and didn’t come back.

He discovered the graffito when he went to say evening prayers in Morvah. Curiously these solitary services – when they were indeed solitary, for Modest Carlsson had an irritating way of showing up with something like glee, as though he had stumbled on some precious secret – were never as troubling to his evaporated faith as the better-attended ones. Speaking the words on his own, whether in the barnlike expanse of Pendeen church or the mossy tranquillity of Morvah, continued to feel like a ritual with significance, perhaps because, Modest apparitions aside, there was no one needing anything of him. Ideally it was just him and these buildings he now knew so intimately and for which he had come to feel such deep affection he no longer truly saw them, any more than one continued to see in detail friends one encountered every week of one’s life.

Even in high summer, Morvah church felt damp. Sometimes there were puddles on the floor, as though a stream were rising there, but the church wardens assured him it was simply the granite geeving. The whitewash was due for a fresh coat as it had marked green patches here and there but still the four words painted across it in blood-red gloss were plainly legible from yards away. They had been carefully placed to be the first thing he would see on letting himself in from the porch. Fuck Jesus, they said, Love Phuc.

Thank God Modest Carlsson was otherwise engaged that evening. Barnaby said the service as usual, adding in a prayer for Phuc, wherever he might be and whatever he might be doing. He examined the defacement closer to and touched it. The paint had not quite dried so stained his fingertips. He pictured his son leaving the church and throwing the paintbrush over the nearest hedge. And the paint? This could not have used an entire tin. He locked the church and walked around the graveyard, fearing some obscenity splashed across a headstone or on the rough granite of the building’s outer walls where it would be that much harder to clean away, but there was nothing. He found brush and empty paint tin under a bush and bagged them up to dispose of at home. The paint had been leftovers; he recognized the tin from earlier in the year when Dot had repainted a wooden, ride-on train from the women’s refuge.

He drove home. Dot came out to meet him as he pulled up in the yard.

‘He took my wallet,’ she said at once. ‘Stupid of me to leave it in my bag.’

‘Have you stopped the cards?’

‘Yes. And he took the Action Aid box from the hall table.’

‘Even if he caught the bus, he can’t have got far.’

‘He’ll have hitched,’ Carrie said, coming out from her workshop. ‘He could be miles away by now. Little bugger.’

Barnaby told them what Phuc had done besides and showed them the paint can. At once Dot was all practicality, as he knew she would be. She packed a wicker basket, as if for a bizarre picnic, with a bottle of solvent, a scrubbing brush, rubber gloves, paint brushes, a can of undercoat and a can of white emulsion. He was amazed afresh at the beautiful order of the big understairs cupboard where she kept her hardware. It gave one the same heartening sense of method and plenty as her larder, but instead of jewel-bright jams and chutneys, displayed identical jars of screws, nails, washers and Rawlplugs all sorted by size and neatly labelled. She kept paint in there too, despite the fire risk it posed, because tins kept in the sheds turned rusty in weeks and the fluctuating temperatures outside ruined the contents.

‘We had better change,’ she said, so they changed into clothes that didn’t matter, gardening clothes, and he drove her out to Morvah. ‘How bad is it?’ she asked, waiting beside him in the porch as he took the key from its hiding place in the rafters.

‘Pretty bad,’ he said. ‘But it’s only words, not pictures.’

He let her in and went to turn on the lights while she stared, taking in what Phuc had done. ‘It could be worse,’ she said as he came back to her. ‘He hasn’t touched the altar – most people would have done something to the altar – and he didn’t do anything to the flags.’

‘Or start a fire.’

‘Or start a fire.’ She actually smiled a little at that, then sighed. ‘Come on. If it’s not dry yet we can scrub a lot off with white spirit and at least blur the words a bit before we paint over them.’

They shut the door behind them and worked there all evening. They scrubbed off the worst of the paint with solvent then dried off the patch of reddened wall with an old towel from the car boot. Then they painted over it with undercoat to stop any traces of red coming through.

Carrie called by as they were cleaning the brushes. She had driven down to St Just to fetch fish and chips for them and had also brought a bottle of red wine, glasses, fruit cake and the radio. ‘Thought you might as well make an evening of it,’ she said, then left them alone as she was playing in a euchre drive for the lifeboats back in one of the pubs.

They listened to a Prom while eating their supper and waiting for the undercoat to dry a little at least, then they painted on two coats of emulsion. They broke off in between to do something they had not done in years, taking a moonlit walk across the fields behind the church to the view out to sea from Chair Carn. It was an unusually still night, retaining some of the day’s warmth. The air bore the sweet scents of hot grass and honeysuckle and, nearer the sea, the foxy musk of bracken. They saw a barn owl hunting and, as they stood to watch it, she took his hand and kissed the back of it, which somehow felt as intimate a gesture as if she had unbuttoned his shirt and kissed the skin above his heart.

They painted the second coat to a series of motets by Tallis, who was Composer of the Week, barely speaking as they worked, then cleaned up in bitterly cold water from the graveyard tap. They drove home in silence but with the car windows open so that the smell of paint about them was rinsed by the warm night air.

For the first time in nearly fifteen years they made love. (He would not realize it had been that long until the morning, when he took in her tea and went to shave.) It was not earth-shatteringly passionate – they were both too surprised for that – but for him, at least, it felt like a deep restoration, at the roots of his being, a true forgiveness from the flesh rather than a light and easy one from the tongue.

MODEST CARLSSON AT 75

Modest hated to admit it but Johnson’s suggestion that he take over the parish magazine was a stroke of genius. Ostensibly he was deemed to be suited to the work, being a retired bookseller, just the stupidly pointless connection people liked to make; actually it suited him because it placed him securely and squarely at the village’s heart. Certainly he was handling announcements of the next bring and buy sale or Charles Causley evening, not earth-shaking gossip, but it was surprising how much he learned when gathering in his copy. He passed none of this on; they’d stop confiding in him if he became known as a gossip. It was the possession of the knowledge that excited him. His predecessor in the post had always delivered her newsletter by car, longsuffering husband at the wheel. He had not driven since his pre-Portsmouth days, letting his driving licence and all the related expense go the way of the former identity now known only to the Probation Service.

His crime, punishment and release all predated the Sex Offender Register, of which he had read with mixed smugness and relief. The register caught up with him, however, after his move to Cornwall and in the most irritating and demeaning way. He posted a miscellaneous bundle of smutty photographs and magazines to a regular customer who had never given him trouble. A week later the police arrived with a warrant to search the house and carry off his sales records and he was taken in for questioning.

The customer, a Plymothian, had been arrested for exposing himself to schoolchildren on buses and his flat been discovered to house an array of paedophile pornography. Just one photograph in the drab stash Modest had sold him gave cause for concern. Luckily there were no other such pictures in Modest’s stock so he escaped with a fine while the customer was jailed. His court appearance in distant Plymouth, under his real name, went miraculously unreported in The Cornishman’s terse column of court reports. However, in what seemed a piece of pure malice, the addition to his record for crimes of a sexual nature led to his name, his real name, being added to the register. Once a year he was required to call in and sign against his name at Penzance police station and, which was worse, to keep him on his best behaviour, the police reserved the right to call in on him unexpectedly. They had done so just once, nearly five years ago. It was a horrible, demeaning experience, reminding him that his new life and new identity were made of fragile stuff, and he lived in dread of its repetition.

Modest Carlsson was a harmless old man to whom people chatted in bus shelters. He delivered the magazines by hand and recipients, seeing him coming up to their doors, breathless in summer or fumbling with his gloves in winter, often asked him in and seemed to enjoy plying a fat man with cake.

This was how he had come to know Nuala Barnes. He was well aware of the Australian potter’s reputation as a godless rebel but had always wanted a closer look at her fascinating house. When it suited him, he decided he was not simply delivering the parish newsletter but representing the Church’s hand reaching out in fellowship.

A former shooting lodge – some said it had always been a love nest – of a once powerful local landowner, Redworks Cottage lay high above the sea, on the edge of moorland. It was nearer Bossullow than Morvah and must surely have been at the outer limit of Johnson’s parish if not actually in Zennor. There was an American-style post box on a pole at the beginning of its lane, alongside the wheelie bin and recycling box, but he had chosen not to see it. The long route to her front door wound between fenced-in pastures and was utterly exposed to view so she would have ample opportunity to see his approach and choose not to answer her doorbell.

He rang twice and there was no answer but then she emerged from the outbuilding where she presumably had her studio and asked him abruptly what he wanted. As he’d expected, she said she did not take the parish magazine but he had done his homework and added, ‘It’s not for you, it’s for Lenny. I gather he was confirmed last year.’

‘Yeah,’ she said with a scowl. ‘Christ knows what that was about. Teen rebellion, I guess. Well …’ She grinned mischievously. ‘Can’t have him losing touch with the flock.’ And, claiming she was breaking off for tea in any case, she asked Modest in.

He continued delivering the magazine and she continued asking him in long after Lenny had dropped all claims to a faith in favour of rugby and his girlfriend, who continued coming to church without him. Nuala confessed she read the magazine herself. She had even been known to bring old clothes and books to jumble sales and to donate pots to fundraising auctions. She had no idea where in Pendeen Modest lived, and she never invited him further into her house than her kitchen. (He had once faked a weak bladder and been disappointed to find her downstairs lavatory lay unrevealingly nearby.) But she seemed to regard him with a kind of affection as a fellow outsider and he in turn enjoyed her battered glamour and caustic wit. She took it into her head that he was good, however, profoundly good, even wise. Nothing he said, no amount of scandalmongering or back-biting, would convince her.

‘You don’t fool me, Modest,’ she would say. ‘I know you’re above all that really.’ And after a while he came to feel a better, wiser person when he was in her presence, raised by an unbeliever’s faith.

He knew nothing about art but he could see that her bowls and plates and oddly elongated bottles were beautiful. Sitting with her at her slab-like oak table which was never without something of beauty on it – a pile of apples, a piece of driftwood, a ring of snow-white pebbles – he felt he was dipping into a headily different life that could never have been his because he had always lacked the courage. He had tried copying her in small ways but when he brought things home from his walks on cliffs or moor and cleared a space for them on a table they simply looked like junk. He kept hoping that one day she would give him one of her pots, not least for the pleasure it would cause him to be able to say, should he ever have a visitor, ‘Oh, that? It’s by my potter friend, Nuala Barnes. Effective, isn’t it?’ Only she never did and he was far too mean to buy one. Simply buying one, like anyone else, would have felt like cheating and not been the same at all.

When Lenny had his accident, Modest had known himself tested. A true friend would have hurried to her side to offer comfort or assistance but he had found himself checked for some reason, by doubt or inhibition and an uncharacteristic fastidiousness. When he did finally use the parish magazine as his usual excuse to visit, a bossy friend of hers, a true friend presumably, had taken it off him at the door and said Nuala and Lenny were busy with the occupational health visitor.

When he called by the following month, she was preoccupied with adapting the ground floor to Lenny’s wheelchair and had been woundingly dismissive of him. So he had cut her off his delivery rounds for three months in the hope of punishing her. And then curiosity overcame him and he felt compelled to visit to see how she was coping with the shock of Lenny’s insisting on moving out to live on his own in Penzance. He found her brittle and brave and once again content to sit with him at her kitchen table.

He did not make the same mistake twice. As soon as news reached him in the pub about Lenny’s suicide, he sent her flowers. He had never sent flowers to anyone in his life, not even his wife, and was scandalized at the expense but he understood that the pain – the sense of sacrifice – was part of the pleasure people took in giving. I’m so very sorry, he wrote on the little card the florist gave him to include in the package. Let’s talk when you’re ready.

And now the latest edition of the parish newsletter gave him reason to climb her windswept drive again, whether she was ready to talk or not. He had not seen her around the village since the news broke but then one rarely did, as she did most of her shopping elsewhere. The funeral had been a godless cremation from which she had excluded everyone but her sister from Australia. He had all the salient details.

He was disappointed to see her emerge from her studio. She would take the magazine, he thought, and dismiss him.

‘You’re working,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’ He was slightly shocked that she was working. He had pictured her slightly crazed with grief, needing his wise words.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It’s all coming out badly,’ and she surprised him by kissing his cheek. ‘Thanks for the flowers, Modest. I should have written. It was very sweet of you. Everyone’s been so kind it got almost unbearable. Sympathy is hard to bear. Come in.’

Although death, inquest and funeral were all long past, there were flowers on every surface. Flowers, pot plants, even a small lemon tree. The scent of them all tickled his nose. She saw him look.

‘They’re starting to go over,’ she said. ‘I should start throwing them out but that would mean, well, you know.’

‘Starting over?’

‘Yeah,’ she laughed shortly. ‘Right. Something like that. We should have tea. Do you want tea?’

‘Please don’t go to any trouble, Nuala.’

‘It’s no trouble. I need tea,’ she said but having filled the kettle she sat down again without setting it on the hotplate and he did not like to say anything.

‘I expect it’s the last thing you need,’ he said. ‘But I brought you the latest …’ and he took a copy of the newsletter from his shoulder bag and set it on the table. She reached out a clay-whitened hand and touched it with something like tenderness.

‘You’re amazing the way you keep churning this horrible thing out,’ she said.

‘Oh, really,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing but typing. Other people do far more. They do real work.’

‘Yeah. Well. Other people. So what’s going to happen, Modest? Will they chuck him out, do you reckon?’

Of course he knew exactly who she meant but he was Good Modest when he was with her, kind, unworldly Modest.

‘Do you mean Father Barnaby?’ he asked softly.

‘Who else?’

‘I really couldn’t say. He’s very popular despite … What he said at the inquest, about prayer and … I think some people are taking him up as a kind of cause. People from outside the parish.’

‘People don’t know the half of it.’ She sighed with surprising violence and muttered, ‘And they probably never should.’

Modest had been about to stand to set the kettle to heat for her, as he was really very thirsty from all his walking and had said no to two previous offers in expectation of tea at Nuala’s, but he froze as her words sank in. Speaking very carefully, speaking just as he imagined a priest might in such a situation, and keeping his voice as gentle as he could, he asked, ‘Nuala, is there something … something held back which the inquest should have heard about?’

She didn’t answer him straight away. Instead she looked at him in a way that made him realize how rarely she actually looked at him. Her eyes were a deep blue that seemed hardly faded by age. For a moment she seemed to be examining him and he felt weighed in the balance and uncomfortable. Just when he thought she might be about to curse him and throw him out, she said simply, ‘Barnaby was Len’s father. It was a mistake. A stupid, silly fling. And I was a bitch. I realized I wanted a kid but I didn’t want Barnaby and all the hassle and fuss. So I never told Len who his father was.’

‘But Barnaby knew?’

‘Oh yeah. He knew. I owed him that much. But I told him if he ever told Lenny, I’d take the kid away, right away, where he and his fucking Jesus and that fat cake-baker couldn’t get their claws into him.’ She was crying now, shedding tears at least, but seemed not to notice. She had torn a dark blue flower from the pot on the table and was pulling its petals off one by one and laying them in a neat little daisy-shaped pattern.

Modest felt the room had suddenly become as quiet and airless as a tomb and that she was no longer aware of him, not as himself, that he might have been anybody and she would still have talked, simply because the moment had come for talking.

‘Oh, Nuala, I’m so sorry,’ he began, ever so slightly prompting her to continue. ‘It must have been so …’

‘And he didn’t say a word,’ she said. ‘He never said a word. I thought it was so obvious. I thought everyone would see how alike they were. But of course he was a priest so it’s the last thing anyone would … Even at the inquest. He was so fucking good, wasn’t he? He didn’t even perjure himself in order to keep his promise. He just didn’t quite say it all.’

‘But if Lenny didn’t know, why did he … Why involve him like that?’

‘It was just Jesus. Fucking Jesus. Len wanted Jesus with him at the end!’ She did not say instead of me but she did not need to. Her anger felt corrosive, unanswerable.

Good Modest, he reminded himself. Kind and wise and slightly shocked, perhaps, at her bad language and he held his tongue in case she offered anything further.

But she pulled herself together suddenly, swept the petals into her hand and so to the compost bucket. ‘Christ. Sorry. I offered you tea, Modest, and I never even put the kettle on,’ she said and something in her tone, a small barb, made him wonder if she had ever really intended to.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘I should leave you and your troubles in peace.’

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she continued, ignoring him. ‘I don’t know what I was … Nobody knows except you. If word gets out, I’ll know it was you.’

‘I won’t breathe a word,’ he said, backing away from her sudden frankness. ‘I can keep a secret.’

‘Of course you can. You’re full of secrets, aren’t you?’ She opened the door for him. She handed him back the magazine. ‘Nothing personal,’ she said, ‘but please don’t bring me this thing anymore. I hate it and everything it stands for.’

‘Sure, Nuala,’ he said. ‘Understood.’

‘Good,’ she said and she closed the door.

He began to shudder uncontrollably as he walked away from her house. Alone between the wide expanses of field he felt vulnerable, as though walking with more riches than he could safely carry. On one level his long patience was rewarded. At last he had the plump, nutritious proof of Johnson’s fallibility and fundamental ordinariness. But on another he felt mocked by the hollowness of his triumph, for the proof was so tenuous – no more than hearsay, all too easily dismissed as mere spite – and in any case, after such a long interval, who would remember the justifying details? The broken-backed boy had been, what? Eighteen? Twenty? Modest calculated and realized the affair must have happened soon after his own arrival in the village and first involvement in the parish.

His memory was usually pretty keen but he tried in vain to think of a single occasion when he had seen Johnson and Nuala together. He tried to picture the preposterous, pornographic scene, the tugging off of dog collar, bursting of buttons, her clayey handprints on his hot, demanding flesh, but was troubled to find that the only image that would linger was of the two of them sitting companionably on the sofa in the sitting room she had never shown him. For all the glaring differences in their spiritual lives, they were, he realized, extremely well suited. As a couple they would have been compellingly attractive, even impressive. A couple to bring forth striking, successful children, a couple to inspire coupling in others.

Poor Dorothy, Modest thought. Dowdy, unbohemian Dorothy. Dorothy had never managed to conceal her distaste for and suspicion of him. She might have retained her husband in the flesh but she would surely have lost him in spirit, lost his true affection and respect. Poor Dorothy. Like the surprisingly unpolished country wife of an urbane politician. A maker of cakes not conversation. The fat cake-baker. He smiled to himself at Nuala’s bitter little label for her. Dorothy had eluded him until now, secure in her quiet sense of position, her deep roots in the place and the evident affection in which she was held by the parish.

As if his thoughts had conjured her from the gathering evening, he saw her ahead of him as he entered the village. She was walking the same way as him, laden with bags that were probably stuffed with flower-arranging materials, raspy blocks of oasis, ugly, long-hoarded plastic vases retained from funeral offerings. He was an old man compared to her, seventy-five where he assumed she was at most in her early sixties, yet to watch her he felt vigorous by comparison. She had always walked as though weighted down. She had become quite fat, to the point where she seemed to belong to a different race from her husband and skinny, boyish daughter, but it ran deeper than that. She walked as though her flesh were denser that other people’s and, it struck him now, as though her troubles were more burdensome.

Until he spotted her, his assumption had been that he was heading home to tea and toast and a quiet drink or two floated on a tide of bad television uncritically absorbed. But when he saw her a terrible idea took shape and acquired direction when she ducked up the lane that led to the church and the building everyone still called the vicarage although Johnson and his family had always lived elsewhere.

He had the perfect excuse, in a load of surplus parish magazines, to turn that way too. If she went into the vicarage, well, then he had business there because he produced the newsletter in the parish offices on the ground floor. If she continued to the church, he could be on his way there to leave the magazines on the table at the church’s rear.

She continued to the church and he slackened his pace, enjoying the sense of anticipation. He actively disliked this church these days, compared to its older sister in Morvah. He found its crenellated outer walls forbidding as he did the stretch of rocky land immediately above the steeply sloping graveyard. He had never known such a steep graveyard and couldn’t see it in rain without imagining corpse juices trickling downhill towards the church’s foundations. And the church itself was too high for its narrow width, to his mind, so that its dark stained beams seemed steep and unsafe. Then there was its air of cheerful community clutter, which to his way of thinking typified the bit of this, bit of that compromise that was at the heart of all that was misguided in twenty-first-century Anglicanism, the lack of rigour that would surely prove its undoing. There were times recently when he had seriously considered converting to Rome.

There was no sign of her as he came in and he thought for a moment she might have slipped out again by the smaller door on the vicarage side. But then he heard a clatter from the vestry and realized that she was indeed unloading materials for the flower-arrangers. He busied himself at the bookstall table, removing the pile of the previous month’s magazine and setting up a neat stack of the new one. Then he tidied the other piles as he waited for her to emerge.

He did not need to see her expression. He could tell from the cheerful effort she put into greeting him how little she wished to find him there.

‘Dorothy,’ he said and boldly reached out to take both her plump hands in his. ‘I’m so very sorry for all you’re going through.’

‘There’s no need. Honestly,’ she said, taking back her hands after giving his a quick squeeze, and adding in an echo of Nuala, ‘People have been so kind.’

‘Have they? Good. I’m glad, because, well, not everyone around here is … well … You know how people are and how they talk.’

‘My mother brought me up not to listen,’ she said stiffly. ‘Oh. Is that your new issue? I’d better take one for us. You’re so amazing, the way you still deliver it.’

‘At my age!’

‘Well … I didn’t mean …’

‘I think it’s the only thing that keeps me fit.’ He let his glance play over her pillowy silhouette. ‘I sometimes think I feel younger now than when I first moved here over twenty years ago.’

‘Really? That’s good. Ah well, Modest, I must hurry on. I try to walk everywhere instead of taking the car, but it does eat up the day.’

She had turned away and, for a moment, he hated her.

‘I took a copy up to Nuala Barnes,’ he said.

‘Oh yes?’ A definite strain in her voice at that.

‘Well … Lenny always took one and she carried on out of force of habit.’

‘I see.’

‘I had no idea, Dorothy. I don’t think anyone did.’

‘What about?’

‘Lenny.’

‘Poor Len. Such a terrible thing. People didn’t realize but Barnaby was devastated.’ She was fiddling with the bookstall, untidying his neat piles in small ways.

‘Well he would be.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ She faced him again and for a moment her expression was openly hostile. He disgusted her but disgust was easier to bear than pity.

‘Dorothy, you’ve been so amazing. Standing by all this time, not speaking out even when the likeness between father and son was so clear to everybody. I just want you to know that, if ever sides had to be taken, I can think of several of us who would be on yours …’

She made abruptly for the door. Put-downs were not in her repertoire. Merely to leave without saying goodbye was rude enough in her lexicon. But then she sank with a little gasp into one of the rear pews and hunched over. He thought she was crying at first but as he drew closer he realized she was having some sort of attack. Her face was pale and sweaty and she was clutching her upper arm and panting.

‘Dorothy?’ he said softly. ‘Shall I …? Would you like me to fetch help?’

There was a scene in that play, The Little Foxes, where the marvellous anti-heroine watched on, gloating, as her disapproving banker husband slumped in a heart attack on the stairs before her. It had been shocking even when played a couple of years ago by an amateur group in Newlyn with dodgy Southern accents and even wobblier sets. But thrilling too. He would love to have found such murderous presence of mind, to have watched, perhaps even taking a seat in a pew alongside Dorothy, talking half-audible horrors as she slipped away.

He was a coward, however. He was also alive with the unexpected buzz of being swept up in such a drama.

‘Stay right there,’ he told her with a nervous dab at her shaking shoulder. ‘I’m going next door to call for help.’ And he actually ran to the vicarage so that he could scarcely speak when he got there. One of the Women’s Refuge people was in the office talking as Brid Williams did something to the parish website.

‘We must phone for an ambulance,’ he told them so abruptly they must have thought it was for him. ‘No no,’ he went on, flapping a handkerchief. ‘I’ll do it. You go to church to be with her. It’s Dorothy!’

‘I’ll call Barnaby’s mobile,’ Brid said, fumbling with her phone as she hurried out.

Modest called the ambulance, calmly gave the directions and his name and, when he said he thought it was a heart attack, noted down their instructions for how best they could help Dorothy while waiting.

He poured himself a large glass of water then took the instructions back to the church. Dorothy was dead by the time he got there. Brid Williams stopped trying to be brave the moment he arrived and sank against him, hooting with grief. By the time the ambulance screeched up Church Lane, too late of course, he felt positively heroic. Wise Modest. Good Modest!