A Perfectly Good Man (20 page)

He had not intended to walk so far, being weighed down by pie and beer, but then he spotted Johnson. The priest was evidently enjoying a half-day away from wife and children. He was sitting on a sunny rock to read. Modest did not recognize him from a distance because he was in mufti – black jeans and a black tee-shirt. But then Johnson looked up from his book – it was that book again, the small, red one – saw him coming and slid off the rock to continue walking and avoid company.

Piqued and darkly amused at the simple mischief of it, Modest pursued him. He did not call out or anything obvious. He merely quickened his pace and concentrated on narrowing the gap between them. He fancied Johnson glanced over his shoulders a couple of times. He imagined the polite torment he must be going through. A vicar could not openly avoid a parishioner without shame or embarrassment. He would be thinking up a lame excuse – ageing eyesight, a forgotten, urgent appointment at a distant farmstead. He would be wondering whether it might not be less painful simply to turn around and ‘meet’ Modest on the way back, with apologies but a characteristic briskness, so as to avoid actually walking home with him.

But Johnson didn’t turn. He walked faster, almost hurried, so that Modest began to indulge in a fantasy that he was hunting him down, that he had a savage hunting knife in his hand or something subtler, like a cutthroat razor in his pocket. It was a sunny day. The flowers, none of whose names he knew, were densely in bloom along the hedges, yet there was no one around. It was a weekday in term time.

Modest found himself entertaining a graphic fantasy of killing the priest with a swift slice to the jugular. He would watch him stumble, gurgling, into the gorse bushes at the path’s edge, pay close attention as the life left those blameless eyes, then walk on just as briskly, returning home by a long, circuitous route taking in a distant quoit and some of the coastal path. He pictured himself going to evening prayers in Morvah, so as to wait there, electrified in the fading light and deepening chill, for the priest who would not come. And so be able to turn tearfully to his neighbours and the police with the pathetic story. He imagined his unflattering photograph in
The Cornishman
as part of the crime report.
Regular church attender, antiquarian bookseller Modest Carlsson (55) waited in vain for the service of evening prayers at Morvah, which he had come to regard as part of his friendship with the savagely murdered vicar. ‘I waited nearly two hours,’ he said. ‘I waited until it was dark, and he never came. It was so unlike him. He was always so punctual.’ An added piquancy in the story comes from its having been widower Carlsson’s birthday. ‘If I had a cake to slice,’ he says, ‘I’d have wished for the killer to be brought swiftly to justice.’

But then he was pulled short by an agonizing stitch and had to give up both chase and lurid fantasy to slump against a farm gate, heedless in his pain and sweaty self-consciousness, of whether Johnson hurried on out of sight or turned back, shamed at last into solicitude, to assist him.

The stupid game had led him further than he ever walked as a rule or had planned to come. The view was spectacular but he felt exhausted and absurd and his birthday self-pity redoubled. Mopping his brow, deeply regretting his peacock folly in wearing one of Patience’s father’s thicker suits and stiff leather shoes quite unsuitable for country walks, he regained something like composure and turned back the way he had come.

The red book was so small he very nearly trod on and walked past it, nestled as it was in the long grass. It must have bounced out of the back pocket of Johnson’s jeans in his eagerness to be alone.

Just in case the priest were coming back by now and thus watching him, Modest pretended to retie a shoelace and so was able to slip the book into his fat palm and thence, undetected, to a jacket pocket. He walked all the way back to the safety of Gosport, excited afresh, without daring either to examine it or cast a glance over his shoulder. Behind closed doors he set the book on his desk, hung up the jacket, gulped down two mugs of water at the kitchen sink then came back to look at it properly.

If only he had simply shut it away in a box, unexamined, it would at least have retained its dark price as something precious to the priest bravely stolen, but he turned on the reading light, donned his glasses and was intensely disappointed. The binding was not leather after all but cheap cloth tooled to resemble leather but already revealing its inferiority in a quantity of little scuffs and scars where the cardboard peered out behind the red. It was a pseudo-Victorian 1930s reprint edition of Thomas à Kempis’s
The Imitation of Christ
. It could hardly have felt cheaper. It was not even on India paper – whose rustling delicacy could be so pleasing. The font put him in mind of the ugly, mass-produced school prize certificates of the same period, often found pasted in the front of improving volumes with names like
Pride Before a Fall
or
Prudence’s Reward
.

He shook it upside down, hoping for notes or private letters, but nothing fell out. He flicked from page to page, looking for annotations but the pages were marked only by the stains of time and casual use. There was not even Johnson’s name or a telling dedication. Plainly he had come by it second-hand as the scribble in the front, in browning ink the colour of old bloodstains, said,
Even I found much good sense in here and think you may too! A. Khartoum, November ’67
.

Finally he tried reading it but found the thees and thous, the wouldests and couldests of the translation clotted and phonily antique. As far as he could make out it was a set of instructions to one embarking on life as a monk. It was quite unreadable and plainly had so little resale value it was the sort of book he would once have tossed into the grimy bargain bin on the pavement outside his shop, careless of who might steal it in passing. Plainly its only worth lay in its evident preciousness to Johnson so he tore it up and burnt it in his grate, working hard to conjure up a more gratifying sense of iniquity than the oddly flat gesture yielded.

Disgusted with himself after eating the whole of a shop-bought cream sponge, Modest lumbered slowly back along the road to Morvah for evening prayers. He had not forgotten his lurid fantasy of killing the priest and attending the service as a sort of alibi. He would meet his eye and smile, he decided, shaming Johnson for fleeing from him. He would smile and be kind and, as he knelt to pray, as he always did, resisting the growing vogue for simply slouching forward on one’s pew, he would catch the whiff of burnt book off his cuff and know and be glad.

But Johnson never showed up for the service. In a strange echo of his fantasy, Modest waited and waited until Brid Williams, the churchwarden, came by with her husband to lock up and, concerned to find him alone there, offered him a lift home.

Modest never said anything but the minor dereliction from duty was odd and he tucked it away as a small, sweet evidence of imperfection.

NUALA AT 36

Nuala had not lived in Morvah for long before she began to feel she was the most exotic person the community had known, simply by virtue of being Australian, an artist and a runaway wife. Not that she told many people about the last part, but in a rural parish one didn’t have to tell many people a thing for word of it to spread.

She didn’t care. People could know and think what they pleased. The only thing that mattered was that just two people in Australia knew where she was, her mother and her sister, Niamh, and both had hearts like strong boxes and would never blab. Nuala was safe. For the first time since she married, she was safe.

She had been surprised as anyone when she fell for Christos. A wild-child potter who had spent most of her time at VCA doing whatever drugs were on offer and, often as a result, sleeping with pretty much any man who asked, she thought of herself as a rebel. Unlike Niamh, who had always been the good girl and studied hard and ended up working for a bank, for Christ’s sake, Nuala had consciously fought against every respectable mould their widowed mother tried to put on them. But this guy had started buying her work and then he had asked her out, and because she was tired of immature men who couldn’t return phone calls, still less commit to a relationship, she said yes. He was sexy and rich and because he was a venture capitalist she convinced herself there was risk enough in his life to make up for the worrying detail that her mother approved of him even though he was, as she put it, a
Bubble-and-Squeak
.

Nuala was secretly pleased about this, too. That he was a Melburnian Greek rather than from old Irish stock played to what was left of her inverse snobbery.

Behind his back, while she was still in a position to talk to people behind his back, she joked that she had become a Bride of Christ. He was a churchgoer but claimed not to mind that she wasn’t. ‘I’ll pray for you,’ he said and, fool that she was, she thought he was joking. Niamh was a churchgoer and she loved Niamh. All would be well. She let him sweep her off her dusty Bohemian feet and they were married quietly, in Bali, within the year. She moved out of her grungy flat-share in Carlton and into his immaculate loft in an art deco building on Beaconsfield Parade.

Had he been violent from the start she would probably have seen sense and made good her escape sooner than she did. But he began simply by exerting control over her, control always underpinned with sex – at which he was so good precisely because a part of him was always rationally attuned to her every little reaction and reflex – and overlaid with love.

Christos really loved her. She had never felt so loved, so needed, so special, so absolutely at the centre of a man’s world. Little by little he isolated her from most of her old friends, subtly encouraging her to fall out with them when they criticized her new life or, worse, her husband, or convincing her they were envious of her superior skill as an artist.

Curiously her pottery was the one area of her life in which he made no attempt to interfere. It took a month or two of marriage, and the first little checks to new love, for her to notice that he actually knew nothing whatsoever about art and would probably have bought whatever work she had produced if it gained him her initial attention and respect. He bought a huge glass display cabinet – a sort of room divider – in which hidden lights showed off her bowls and vases as though they were in a museum. He bought no more pots, of course, and after a while she started keeping even the ones she wanted for herself at her workshop where she could handle them and let them gather dust or fill with flowers or fruit, rather than see another piece of hers immured in his glass tomb.

The first time he beat her it was over nothing she could have foreseen – some imagined slight she had made in a conversation with friends of his – and he was so apologetic, so devastated afterwards that she found herself apologizing for having upset him in the first place. The first time she assumed it would be an isolated incident. And the second time, when she let a pan of rice boil dry. And the third, when she forgot to drop off his dry cleaning.

With hindsight it astonished her that an intelligent, experienced woman could have been so blind, but she could see that what he did, whether by design or the simple instincts of a twisted personality, differed very little from the techniques used to bind people into cults. Only theirs was a cult of two. He destabilized her with love and intense attention, a commitment to her and their marriage that was almost a parody of the behaviour women the world over were despairing of ever finding in a man, and continued the process by isolating her from the usual voices of reason in her life until his were the only available arms to fall into when she lost her balance at his hands. It was because he was so loving, so considerate, so minutely attentive and supportive most of the time that she could so easily convince herself he was worth forgiving, over and over again, so easily persuade herself that he would change.

She became pregnant. Christos desperately wanted children, a boy above all, she supposed, even though parenthood would necessitate drastic changes to his immaculate way of life. He bought her a diamond bracelet, a beautiful, ludicrous thing that would surely spend most of its life in her dressing-table drawer, and took her to look at pretty houses with gardens in St Kilda. The child must have a garden. But then she sighed when he said he had invited his mother on a celebration visit. It was no more than that. A sigh because it had been a long day, made worse by morning sickness, not a sigh related to his mother, who was an adoring, permanently bewildered sweetheart, and he let fly.

He only hit her twice this time, far less than before. The first blow was a punch to the side of her neck, which must have briefly cut the blood supply to her brain or something because she momentarily blacked out, swiftly coming to on the floor at the intense pain of the kick he delivered to her belly.

He cried. He had never cried before and it scared her more than his passing angers because she could not pretend she was in any way to blame. He ran her a bath, helped her into it and washed her all over as tenderly as if she had been his child.

Something had changed, she realized, had cracked and fallen away. As he washed and massaged her, and wept, and kissed her hands and feet and murmured the Greek endearments that normally made her melt within –
se latrévo agápi mou, ómorfiángele mou
– she said nothing to take a share of blame. She said nothing, in fact, until she woke some hours after he had dried her all over and led her to bed and made love to her in a way that, for the first time, appalled her in its precision.

She was woken by a sharp, unfamiliar pain, and said, into the darkness, ‘Please drive me to the hospital.’

He was the soul of attentiveness, of course, frightened as much for the child as his reputation, but at least he had the dignity not to plead with her to keep schtum or even to ask what she was going to say.