A Perfectly Good Man Read Online Free PDF

the farm where she woke and slept and worked. He opened her eyes to its details: that not one of its windows was the same as another; that the ancient chimney at its centre was shaped like a barley-sugar cane; that half the house was seventeenth-century, half nineteenth, which implied the family had suddenly come into money or doubled in size. It was the same when they walked; his close attention showed her small wonders afresh: the way starry young thistles formed constellations across the March grass, the way jackdaw cries of ‘Pyow! Pyow!’ sounded like boys playing at cowboys.
    They hardly touched but he was always courteous, offering his support as she came over stiles, and she would thoughtlessly tap his arm now to catch his attention when she thought he had missed something. But then, one afternoon in April, when there was enough warmth in the sun to tempt one to stop walking and linger, they sat, then lay on the banks of cushiony sea grass and thrift flowers above Boat Cove, and quite suddenly he was kissing her and she was eagerly kissing him back.
    The kiss was not discussed afterwards but she found it dissolved any remaining diffidence she felt before him. It seemed to release something in him too. He started telling her how old his father’s family was, which was a bit strange. ‘I mean, every family’s old, of course, when you think about it, but this lot stayed put for centuries in the house they built, which somehow makes the continuity, the age, more apparent.’
    They headed back soon after this, walking with minimal conversation now because they had dawdled and lost track of time. They paused only to admire the first swallows, which had arrived that afternoon and were diving low across a silage field, eagerly hunting flies.
    In her bed that night she found herself puzzling over his words and the story of the old house that wasn’t his and never would be, the might-have-been , as he put it. She couldn’t work out why he had told her.
    He had no sooner raised the subject than he dismissed it. ‘Might-have-beens are insidious, aren’t they, in the way they don’t ever quite lie still or go away.’ It had seemed almost like a warning, like gently letting someone know you had madness in your family that was likely to be passed on.
    He left. He went with bewildering speed, before they could speak again, much less enjoy another walk. He made a sudden announcement to her mother over breakfast, before Dorothy had even come downstairs, and was driven to the station by Henry by half-past nine.
    Henry was chatty, by his standards, when he returned from the errand, trying to pass on gossip about how Father Philip had taken against having a curate and found it an imposition. She gave him no encouragement, however, saying only, ‘We liked him,’ as she paid him for the sack of chicken corn he had brought, which then caused an awkwardness between them which drove her indoors again soon after.
    She spent the rest of the day in a numb frenzy of usefulness but the trouble with practical tasks was that they had a way of occupying the hands alone, leaving the mind free to wander and wonder. As she stripped his bed and washed his bedding for the last time, as she swept and tidied his room and closed it back into the tomblike state in which it lay ready for visitors who never came, she thought over their last conversations, looking for ways in which she might have been to blame. Was she too bold? Was her family insufficiently old?
    She paid a visit to the forlorn little back bathroom he had been using. Having cleaned its worn, hip-pinching bath and rust-mottled sink, and retrieved his towel for the wash, she snatched up in a shamefaced impulse the nice soap which she had left in there for him instead of the Wright’s Coal Tar her mother was convinced kept disease from the house. Soap lasted a long time with them because their water was so soft but, still, there was something poignant in his not having even stayed long