A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  Phuc pictured Dot, her broad, kind face, her strong arms streaked with grass stains and oil as she serviced the rectory lawn mower on an old dining table in one of the barns. He remembered the efficient brutality with which she drowned a trap full of rats in a water butt and her delicacy of touch in lifting a doily off a sponge cake to leave a pattern of icing sugar behind. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. He got up to turn off a tap Fern had left dripping. ‘She wasn’t so old, was she?’

  ‘Only sixty.’ Carrie shook out a checked handkerchief and blew her nose. Tears had sprung to her eyes but she rubbed them briskly away. ‘It wouldn’t have felt right just ringing you.’

  ‘No. Of course it wouldn’t. Thanks for that.’

  ‘Aren’t you even slightly upset?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told her honestly. ‘I think when you said you were coming, part of me thought Carrie’s coming to tell me she has cancer. I wasn’t thinking about Dot at all. I expect it’ll hit me later. Can you stay for a bite of early lunch? Fern seems to have bought goodies.’

  ‘Yes please. It’s a long drive home again and …’

  ‘Did I miss the funeral?’

  ‘No. Bad luck. It’s on Thursday at three.’

  ‘Which church?’

  ‘Pendeen. So she can be buried with Granny.’

  ‘Oh. That’s nice.’

  ‘Phuc, where’s the loo?’

  He showed her, remembering too late the blow-up of the silly picture of him in there, and wondered if it would annoy her.

  ‘I love that picture,’ she called through the closed door, so he guessed it probably had. She had almost certainly gone in there for a quick, medicinal cry. Even as a teenager, his earliest detailed memories of her, she had hated showing emotion in public. People thought she was cool. Some children at school had even assumed she was autistic. But she was just as emotionally engaged as anyone, she simply preferred to keep her feelings private and as reassuringly compartmentalized as the meticulously size-sorted screws in the trays of her tool box.

  When she returned to his side just as the others came back from their kindly slow stroll around the garden, he felt a great swell of love for her that caught in his throat and made him want to hug her as she had hugged him earlier, but it was Fern who took him in her arms, evidently told the news by Morwenna. He was glad of the comfort. The thought of Dot slumped in a corner of the church had brought upon him the kind of desolation and insecurity that would not so long ago have had him scrabbling for a syringe.

  But then the four of them were suddenly sitting down to an impromptu picnic. The women didn’t drink much because at least two of them were having to drive again that afternoon, but a kind of desperate hilarity came over Phuc and the three of them as they chatted and ate that felt almost like drunkenness. It was deeply strange, he thought. He knew Carrie was feeling as fragile as he was – their mother, the nearest person he had to a mother, was dead – and yet they seemed unable to resist this happiness that had stolen in amongst them and would not be denied. None of it had anything to do with Dot’s death, which they had all set aside as a grim thing to be dealt with later. It was born partly from the uncomplicated pleasure of a reunion and from the giddy sense of his two lives being allowed to flow into each other, partly from the faint hysteria induced by their realization that all too soon they had to re-enter the usual Saturday routine of fetching and ferrying the boys. But mainly, he felt, it was coming from the understanding begun with Fern’s blundering assumption earlier, that Carrie and Morwenna were falling in love.

  And then suddenly Fern was setting coffee cups among them and glancing over their heads at the big kitchen clock.

  ‘I hate to break up something beautiful,’ she said, ‘when I feel we’re only just beginning, but it’s a Saturday so our lives and cars are not our own.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Carrie said, glancing at her watch. ‘We’re going to visit the cathedral before we head home.’

  ‘But stay,’ Fern said as it occurred to her. ‘There’s no reason, just because we’ve got to go, you shouldn’t …’ And her suggestion died off incomplete, possibly because she realized she sounded as though she were offering them a bed and not for sleeping. ‘Oh Christ. I’m doing it again, aren’t I?’

  ‘No you’re not,’ Morwenna said, colouring. ‘But we shouldn’t really linger.’

  ‘I should get back to Dad,’ Carrie added.

  ‘Oh. Of course,’ Fern said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And Morwenna doesn’t like to leave her dad for too long.’

  ‘Are you a churchgoer too, then?’ Phuc asked Morwenna.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m a Quaker. And not a very regular one. But I’m not averse to a spot of soul-tourism.’

  ‘You must be close to your father, though, taking such care of him.’

  She shrugged and for the first time looked him full in the face. Her eyes were not green, as he had first supposed, but tawny. Hers was a face one instinctively trusted, wanted to confide in. And kiss. ‘My brothers both moved far away while he was still independent and I just happened to move back to Penzance in time for his decline. I suppose we are close but, well … I had a problematic youth. There are a lot of things about me he doesn’t know. You mustn’t worry if you’ve drifted apart from yours, you know. It’s perfectly possible to drift right back again and these things can’t be forced.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘trust me,’ and gave him a quick little kiss on the cheek as she stood. ‘Carrie, we should be off, I reckon.’

  They all left at once, Fern in an especial rush.

  ‘I told Dad that I’d tell you when the funeral was,’ Carrie told him, ‘but not to assume you’d be there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think …?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he told her.

  Once again he sat in his car watching the two of them walk along the road then he remembered the time and set off. They waved merrily as they saw him passing them. Whatever the nature of their friendship, however far it had advanced, they made a natural pair, even if, or possibly because, Morwenna made Carrie look more than ever like a bloke. He wondered if the little lunch party had been as transformative for them as he expected, one of those occasions where a new couple sees itself for the first time reflected in the welcome of others.

  All that evening he sensed Fern was keeping a wary eye on him, ready to take action when his grief finally broke through the surface of his composure. But it didn’t break. He was waiting for it too, as he remembered waiting when he had taken an unfamiliar drug and was watching, with a mixture of excitement and terror, for its effects and potency to make themselves known. In this odd state of suspense, he found himself freshly appreciative of the four boys, their profound differences of character already so deeply imprinted and their easy acceptance of the domestic stability their lives presented.

  For the first time he realized that, if Fern were to die, he had no claim whatsoever on his in-a-way sons and that he would miss them when they were taken from him, for all the formerly private hours they thoughtlessly annexed. Rather than grieving for his mother’s death, he found he was worrying about the death of theirs, worrying about her will and fretting because he didn’t know how to raise the subject and was afraid she would take it amiss if he did, as a reflection of the age difference between them, of which she was so conscious.

  The next day included his weekly NA meeting. Twice a month they had a guest speaker – a fellow recovering addict – and only a limited time for responses. In between they either had a step meeting, where members shared their progress through the twelve steps and helped one another forward, or a discussion meeting, like this one. He rarely felt the need to contribute much at these now.

  Members broadly fell into three categories – the nervous newcomers feeling their way, the members who had been clean for two or three years, now high on confidence and their smug sense of achievement and all too keen to b
ecome sponsors and pass on their knowledge, and relative old-timers, such as Phuc, content to let others monopolise the airtime. Though broadly a discussion around a given topic, the meeting gave useful space for safe, anonymous avowal.

  In practice, Phuc and several of the long-time sponsors now benefited more from their frank conversation over coffee and cigarettes on the fire escape afterwards and he found he resented it when one of the smug loudmouths tried to hang around too. At these informal, after-meeting meetings, any comfort offered tended to be of the glib, Big Book variety. In the spirit of tough love, the friends often said terrible, shattering things to those they knew best – usually at least partly true – yet still they parted on friendly terms and came back for more.

  The week’s topic was an old favourite, bottomless one: Family. As he took the steps down to the former crypt where the group held its meetings, he wondered if he would talk about the shock of Dot’s death and the tide of memories it was stirring up and how tempted he was to avoid her funeral because it was looming over the week like the worst-ever dental appointment. Instead he held back from speaking, glad for once of the loudmouths. But then, five minutes before the end, one of his tough-love mates drew him in saying, ‘Phuc? You’ve got a sister, haven’t you?’ and Phuc found himself talking.

  He said nothing about Dot but told them instead about seeing Carrie again. He spoke of how he loved her more than either adoptive parent and didn’t fully understand why he had been avoiding her and why he was still reluctant to see her again too soon. ‘She had nothing to do with my drug-taking,’ he said. ‘I never lied to her. I never stole from her and she’s never said a word in judgement about the things I did.’

  ‘Yes, but how does she make you feel?’ a sharp-eyed woman asked, who just ten minutes ago had been telling them how she used to drug her baby sister to keep her quiet while she shot up. ‘About yourself, I mean?’

  ‘Dirty,’ he replied, without a moment to consider. ‘Worthless.’

  The woman nodded and several of the others did likewise and he felt tricked into having given them such satisfaction.

  On Thursday he set out late from Exeter because of a sudden, stupid indecision about what to wear. He settled on a coloured, open-necked shirt and chinos, then changed his mind in favour of a dark suit, then realized he needed to buy one and then was left hurrying to ever less promising shops in search of a tie that was black but didn’t make him look as if he was in school uniform. The drive from Exeter to Launceston took less than an hour but he then had to cover the complete length of Cornwall and, at each of the sections of the A30 where the dual carriageway gave out, he found himself stuck in a queue behind a tractor with a heavily laden trailer. By the time he was edging towards the last little stretch of the dual carriageway between Varfell and Penzance, he knew he had missed the start of the service.

  It was a comfortless, unsummery day, intermittently showery and with a nasty north-easterly blowing. Pendeen weather, he thought harshly, weather for weeding out the proper Cornish from the incomers and tourists. He was half-minded to turn back, confident that no one would blame him, at least not to his face. It was not Carrie that made him press on in the end, up to the Mount Misery roundabout and then up the narrow road through Newbridge towards St Just, with the ordinarily glorious view of Mount’s Bay opening out behind him. As a van pulled over to let him pass on the dramatic lane that forked off towards Pendeen from above St Just, he wished he weren’t in the brand-new suit and mourning tie after all. It marked him out, he felt, as a man late for a funeral. Worse, in so under-populated an area it probably marked him out as Dot’s son late for his own mother’s funeral.

  It all looked completely unaltered, the inexcusably hideous bungalows facing the attractive granite terrace, the entrance, ever hopeful, to the museum where there had still been a working mine when he was a baby. The two pubs and then, all too soon, the easily missed turning up to the Sunday School and church.

  The service was extremely well attended. It shouldn’t have surprised him. Dot was of old Pendeen stock and popular in her unassuming way. He parked near the mouth of the church lane behind the other late arrivals. As he walked up he was uncomfortably aware of two undertakers watching him from near the hearse. One of them nodded respectfully and handed him an order of service.

  ‘It’s nearly over, I’m afraid, sir,’ he said.

  Phuc went no further than the porch. There was a crowd of people standing just inside, most of them in bandsmen’s uniforms. One of them glanced over his shoulder, saw Phuc, and made to open the door and make way for him but then his neighbour nudged him and he raised his cornet and joined in playing the introduction to the final hymn, which was ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’.

  Phuc panicked, and backed away. Ignoring the undertakers this time, letting them think what they like, he hurried back to his car and waited in there. Humidity from his drizzled-on suit and the numerous showers he had driven through now rapidly steamed it up, which suited him fine. He sat low in his seat and watched through a spyhole he wiped on the glass as the band grew louder, still playing the hymn, and the cortège led by Tabby Morris, who carried a small black umbrella to shelter her prayer book, wound up into the corner of the churchyard where the woman he couldn’t help but think of as Granny had been buried.

  The burial service was over surprisingly quickly, perhaps an abbreviated version had been opted for in view of the weather. As it began to drizzle again in earnest, mourners filed away down the lane beside him. Some on foot, most in cars. He slumped low in his seat until the last had passed, followed by the empty hearse. There would be a gathering back at the house. Carrie would have found relief in putting on kettles and slicing donated cakes. Old friends would be rallying round, kindly trying to elbow her out of the one occupation that would help her maintain her equilibrium. And Morwenna? Being new, Morwenna probably felt an intruder on the scene and would be keeping well back, chatting animatedly to some misfit or another spare spouse to make them feel less awkward, or carrying around trays as Phuc had learnt to do as a boy, to avoid having to make more than desultory conversation.

  And Barnaby? Phuc could not or would not imagine him. It was too hard. He had a feeling that Barnaby, who could normally be relied upon to stay buoyant, if only to make life easier for others, would be poleaxed by grief, frighteningly incapable even of greeting people.

  Phuc let himself out of the car and walked back up towards the churchyard entrance. The sexton had only just finished his work and was walking away from the grave with his shovel over one shoulder like a musket. He was whistling ‘The Day Thou Gavest’ but stopped when he saw Phuc.

  ‘Hello,’ Phuc said but the sexton had evidently forgotten his name or didn’t recognize him at all and simply muttered a greeting under his breath.

  The drizzle stopped again. Phuc laid his flowers alongside the others on the stony earth, whose smell, close to, was almost overpowering. Granny’s headstone said nothing about Dot yet. That would come, presumably. There was plenty of room, room enough for Barnaby too. He reached out to rest a hand on the stone. He had nothing to say, no prayer, no form of words, but he remembered the two women together in the kitchen, the room broiling because the oven was going full pelt, and there was laundry on the overhead drier. They were chuckling at something and encouraging Phuc and Carrie to have a go at stirring the Christmas cake mixture in the enormous mixing bowl that only came out for major tasks. Jim, rather; Phuc had no place in that scene.

  He turned away and was heading into the church, thinking he might simply sit there for a while to think, when someone shouted his name. It was Barnaby. He was clutching his bicycle and breathless.

  ‘Dad,’ he said automatically.

  ‘Sorry,’ Barnaby panted. ‘Bit breathless. I thought you hadn’t come.’

  ‘Well … I didn’t really. Dad, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘But Carrie’s new friend, Morwenna, said she’d seen your car parked on the lane so I dropped everything and
…’

  ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Can … could we go back up and have another look? I was a bit misted up earlier, what with the band.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Barnaby leaned his bike against the church wall and they walked back up to the graveside. ‘Are you quite … still quite well?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think I am. I’ve been clean for five years next week.’

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ Barnaby said and Phuc suspected he had no idea what clean meant. ‘Carrie said they’d been to see you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she said how nice your … Fern is.’

  Phuc smiled. ‘Good. Fern liked her back. And Morwenna.’

  They reached the grave and their pitiful conversation petered out. Barnaby crouched. Phuc had almost forgotten how tall and thin he was. He’d always thought he looked like a giraffe next to Dot; tall and benign and never entirely focused on matters at ground level. Phuc thought he was crouching to read the notes on the flowers people had left but then he thrust one of his hands deep into the soil and pressed down hard with a shoe on the spot where his hand had been.

  ‘Her wedding ring,’ he mumbled, staring down at the mess as though it were not of his own making. ‘Some ninny at the undertaker’s had taken it off. She’d have wanted to be buried in it.’

  ‘Have you put it in deep enough? Someone might find it and steal it.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Barnaby said and blew his nose, getting earth on his handkerchief. ‘Symbolic.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I’m afraid there’s no card with my flowers as I bought them on the way and they’re just sort of plonked down.’