Free A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale

ducked than a mere verbal pleasantry. To smile at someone, especially a stranger, was somehow to assume moral superiority until the smile was returned. When he smiled at someone and said a bright good morning to them and they did neither in return, he felt rewarded by a brief flush of angry satisfaction that he was the better person.
    He had no illusions about expecting love. He had experienced love and had thrown it away and that kind of true, trusting affection surely only came to each man once. It was not love for which he was lonely, or even friendship, although a friend, an equal, would have been pleasant. He had no such expectations because he knew he was repellent and he knew that the process was cumulative – the more he disgusted people, the more disgusting he would become. What he hungered for was nothing warmer-blooded than significance, he realized: to play a role in people’s lives again and know that his decisions and actions affected others. The significance he had known as a teacher, as a head of department no less, this he missed more than his personal significance to his wife and daughter.
    He considered suicide frequently. To jump into the sea, cut his wrists or step in front of a train or lorry was a regular temptation and he was ashamed at his fear of doing so and mildly intrigued that he should persist in clinging to life when life had so little to offer him.
    He turned instead to alcohol and Jesus. Alcohol found him easily. His appetite had greatly increased in prison and with it his size, to the point where he now had to buy his clothes in a dismal shop catering exclusively to the obese, which in turn so repelled him that he ate more to lift his spirits. He had always liked wine and, now that he lived and worked alone, found that he could easily drink a bottle a day, starting at lunchtime, two if the weather were especially cold or hot.
    Once or twice he became extravagantly, falling-down drunk. Waking on the floor of the shop in his own vomit and urine, entirely unaware of how the previous hours had been passed, except for the drinking. But before long he found he could drink steadily with, as he saw it, a measure of responsible control and show no ill effects beyond a generalized warmth of feeling that usually curdled by nightfall into self-pity that his warmth had gone unrecognized and unreturned.
    Jesus’s approach was characteristically sly and subtle. Modest had never been a Christian, not even, to his knowledge, been christened and certainly not confirmed. Studying then teaching English literature, he had learned enough to understand the broadest religious reference but he had never actually read or possessed a Bible. He had done his best to avoid poets such as Donne or Hopkins, most of whose work was incomprehensible to a reader with neither religious schooling nor spiritual leanings. But then he was called by one of his seedy new work contacts to clear the extensive bookshelves of an elderly cat lover. The books on the lower shelves were unsalvageable, from having been sprayed by generations of tom cats, and naturally he told his contact that all the books were ruined and worthless but that he would deal with them as a favour. Many of the books, needless to say, were in excellent condition – the ailurophile had been a keen book buyer and a blessedly tidy reader, the sort who never folded down a page or read while she was bathing or eating. She had a complete set of mint-condition William Golding hardbacks and a first edition of The Waste Land , which he sold for a tidy sum. And while picking through her collection in the shop, sorting trash from trophies, he found a New Testament. It attracted him precisely because it was so unlike a Bible to look at. Printed on good, quarto paper, with a large attractive font and laid out like a novel, with the paragraphs allowed to cross a whole page instead of being crammed into indigestible columns, and with the chapters numbered but not the verses.