A Perfectly Good Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

she could and it seemed to her their conversation had been friendly but impersonal. She had asked him none of the questions in her mind, like what made a perfectly nice, normal man become a priest and did he have brothers and sisters. As they were re-entering the yard, though, they met Henry, who had driven up to drop off some mineral blocks for his cattle, and she felt her cheeks burn as she introduced them, as though the walk had been more than a walk and the conversation more than general.
    The physical contrast between the two men as they shook hands could hardly have been greater. Henry’s hand seemed twice the size of the curate’s, his shoulders twice the width, his skin ruddily healthy by comparison. She knew most girls in the area would have laughed at the way Henry’s comfortable Penwith burr made Barnaby Johnson’s upcountry accent sound comically fussy and his build made him seem boyishly puny, and she would have predicted her own reaction to be the same. She was surprised, however, to find a sharp impulse of protectiveness rise within her and she saw Henry as she imagined this cultivated visitor saw him: rough-skinned, blockish, of the flesh fleshly, and felt an answering confusion at her disloyalty.
    ‘Barnaby wanted to see the farm,’ she said defensively, ‘so I showed him around.’
    ‘Wasn’t too muddy for you, then?’ Henry asked, glancing down at where the muck had worked its way up the new boots and onto the black trousers.
    Then she realized she had wielded his Christian name as a kind of weapon and, confused, she left them to chat, hurrying away on the pretext of getting the hens in.
     
     
    Walking together on his day off became a regular event. She showed him every inch of the parish, from the farther reaches of Morvah to the edge of Botallack. She showed him the mine at Geevor – or as much as they could safely view – and took him to the ancient stones of Chun, the Lanyon Quoit and the Men-an-Tol.
    He began to reveal a bit about himself. She learnt that he had a rather strange childhood, with a widowed scientist father, now dead. His only sibling, a much older sister, had gone to Africa to teach and had died out there when he was still a boy. He had read history at Oxford, then trained for his ordination at somewhere called Cuddesdon, where he was still completing a part-time further degree in theology. He worried this had not equipped him to cope as a working priest since the experience had been so remote and scholastic, which was why he had eagerly accepted the invitation to come to Pendeen.
    ‘So he doesn’t like it,’ her mother said; for although their conversation was so stilted and correct at mealtimes, she was eager enough to hear reports after each week’s walk. ‘He’s only here because he thinks it’ll do him good.’
    ‘I don’t think that’s quite it. Maybe that’s how it was to start with. And Pendeen’s not obviously pretty, is it? Not picture-postcard pretty, like St Ives or Mousehole. So it’s always a shock when people first come out here. But I think he’s starting to see there’s more to it.’
    ‘You’re revealing its hidden charms?’ her mother said with something like a smile.
    ‘I think he’s finding them for himself.’
    She learnt other things, things she didn’t like to tell her mother: that he always carried a tiny, red, Victorian book and seemed to read it when alone or waiting, slipping it into his jacket pocket when he sensed her approach; that his shirts, which she had impulsively sniffed twice now when doing the laundry, had a sweet, burnt smell about them, like caramel; and that, having been so solitary in his childhood, he dreamed of having lots of children, at least six, like an Old Testament patriarch.
    She too was having her eyes opened. Encouraged by his interest, she began to see that their house was beautiful – old, beautiful and even strange – when to her it had always been no more than home, the house where she grew up,