Mr Golightly's Holiday (15 page)

M
R
G
OLIGHTLY FOUND ANOTHER COMMUNI
cation when he opened up his laptop:

who hath given understanding to the heart?

If anyone did, Mr Golightly knew that the universe was constructed on no plan or theory and that its riddles couldn’t be answered by neat phrases or easy solutions. But the e-mailer’s questions followed a trend which he had a dim and perturbing sense he ought to recognise.

The questions provoked further questions. Take his characters, for example. If anyone had given them ‘understanding’ it had to have been himself, their author. But that was just to push the question back a stage – where, if he had any, had his own understanding come from?

The truth was, though it was one he had not fully faced till now, any real understanding had sprung from the shock of losing his son. Until that event he had been remote, reserved, intolerant of human folly. The pain of loss had altered all that. But it was not till he had come here, to Great Calne, and tried to live a life of anonymity, that he had become more conscious of the trials which beset an ordinary person.

Had he ever before had any real comprehension of what
was asked of human beings? Even the patient husbanding of ordinary steady affection, he thought to himself, is as rare as the red-throated pipit, as hard to find as the eyrie of the golden eagle. The fact was – he was in a better position to see it now – people were lonely. In his elevated position, and with constant claims to distract him, he had kept that knowledge from himself. Only here, in Great Calne, had he felt – or allowed himself to feel – the ache of chronic loneliness. And yet, wasn’t it that same loneliness which had fostered understanding in his heart…?

He was climbing, as he pondered, the steep incline to Buckland Beacon where, he had been told by Colin Drover, at the Stag, some religious-minded philanthropist had had the Ten Commandments inscribed in stone.

‘An eccentric idea, but no doubt well intended,’ Mr Golightly had commented; and Kath Drover had observed that there was still much to be said for the Commandments; to which her husband had added that it was well known that it was dangerous to fancy your neighbour’s wife’s ass, which earned him an old-fashioned look from Kath.

Mr Golightly stopped to catch his breath and watch a family of buzzards, the babies like small old-fashioned planes buzzing soundlessly above. Starting up again towards the beacon, he saw a young woman approaching from the lee side. He hoped she might walk on; but she stopped and kneeled down.

Mr Golightly’s vision tended to long sight and focusing on the woman’s face and expression he found it was familiar.
After further observation, he was as sure as he could be that this was the mother of Johnny Spence, the woman who had been so elusive.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, walking up behind her with his usual quiet tread. ‘It’s Mrs Spence, isn’t it?’

The woman, still kneeling, swivelled round sharply. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘you gave me a fright!’

‘I’m sorry.’ He hadn’t meant to alarm her. ‘You were looking for something?’

Rosie Spence laughed uncertainly. ‘Oh, nothing. Just seeing what was there.’ She crumpled a piece of paper in her hand.

Mr Golightly felt awkward. He realised that he had caught her unawares. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have explained – I’m a friend of Johnny’s. You look so like him…’

Rosie Spence’s skin had the transparency of her son’s. She flushed. ‘You know Johnny?’

‘Very well. A bright boy. He works for me.’

‘Really?’ She sounded relieved. ‘That’s kind of you.’

‘No,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘Not “kind”. He has been what I can only describe as a godsend.’

‘I’m so pleased.’

‘The pleasure is mine.’

‘He’s not much of a one for school.’

‘I shouldn’t worry. In my view it’s overrated. My own son never attended school – nor did the Queen, I believe,’ he added hastily. He didn’t want to sound sexist. ‘But you are anxious over Johnny?’

Rosie looked at her questioner. She didn’t see a man of late-middle age, of medium height and unremarkable features. She saw a pair of eyes which seemed to penetrate to the bone.

‘Look,’ she said, and Mr Golightly, whose joints were not as supple as he would have liked, bent down, rather stiffly, and peered where she was pointing into a hollow in the rocks. It appeared empty of anything but heather. ‘It’s an old postbox. The moor people used them to send messages to each other – this was my grandad’s – he and my grandma used to leave each other messages when they were courting. I left this here for Johnny…’ She held out the crumpled piece of paper.

‘He didn’t get it, then?’

‘No. I didn’t know how to get in touch with him any other way. It was stupid of me, but I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘You’re worried.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

‘I’m worried sick.’

‘I can give him a message.’

Rosie hesitated.

‘I believe I can be trusted to keep my mouth shut.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rosie. ‘Would you say I’m fine and I’ll be here today week? Next Sunday, about this time.’

‘Consider it done.’

‘And give him my love?’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh God,’ Rosie said, sitting down suddenly on a rock. ‘It’s all such a bloody mess. I don’t know what to do.’

Phil Spence had been working the shooting gallery of a fairground in Plymouth when Rosie met him. She had levelled the rifle at the mechanical bear, which had reared up on its hind legs and growled, rather sexily, when her shot hit home. This had excited Rosie, and being the only woman customer to have achieved this superior marksmanship, the shot sent a corresponding bull’s-eye into Phil Spence’s heart.

Admiration for the spunky young woman had spawned first lust and then a certain weak affection, but the effort of sustaining any emotion was too much for a constitution brought up on alcohol and beatings, and soon Rosie and her son became the target of Phil Spence’s own hopelessness.

In a bid to inculcate affection for her son, Johnny’s mother had his name changed by deed poll to his stepfather’s, but the ploy never worked. The name stuck, but not the obligations that she had hoped would attend it.

‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Golightly, lowering himself carefully on to a massy boulder, ‘there isn’t anything you can.’ Beside him, carved on two flat stones, he observed, along with the injunctions not to kill, steal, covet, or commit adultery, the exhortation to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’. There should have been, he thought, a commandment to honour children, too.

‘Anything I can…?’

‘Do. There may be nothing to be done.’ The Commandments had a certain magisterial impressiveness but as a prescription
for human behaviour he couldn’t help finding them a little bald.

‘I know but…’

‘But of course that doesn’t help much, does it?’

The eyes had lost their penetration and now looked merely kind.

‘Not much.’

‘It’s like this,’ said Mr Golightly, and he spread his hands and contemplated them – they were broad hands, muscular and workmanlike, the hands of a sculptor, or a pianist. ‘You create something, a child, a book, a world, whatever, and if it is a true creation then it doesn’t stay yours – it takes on its own life and independence.’

‘But a child –’

‘Even a child,’ said Mr Golightly, interrupting, ‘has authority. Sometimes a superior authority.’ He was remembering how his own son had given his parents the slip when he was no more than a slip of a thing himself and had run off to talk to those who were considered his elders and betters. ‘We have to respect it,’ he said, ‘even if what the child does seems to us impossibly rash.’

It came to him, thinking of the young raven disdaining its parent’s well-intended food, that the unique power of each individual makes up the slow pulse of destiny. How could there be a blueprint, since no one could bargain for the maverick impact of any contributing part?

‘It’s not anything Johnny’s done – it’s me; I keep thinking how I’m to blame.’

‘Well, of course you do,’ said Mr Golightly, sounding almost cheerful. ‘And in a sense you are. It is rank folly, if not a kind of madness, to embark on a creation. Any author will tell you the same!’

‘You’re a writer?’ She remembered now, before she’d left Calne, she’d heard that a writer had moved into Spring Cottage.

‘Among other occupations – writing’s more of a hobby.’

‘It must take your mind off things.’

‘In a sense it puts them on it. As I said, I had a son, too, so I know how you feel…’

‘Responsible?’

‘Horribly!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rosie Spence, who had a sympathetic nature and knew when not to probe.

At the end of the Ten Commandments the philanthropist had tacked on another one:
A new commandment I give unto you: that ye love one another.

‘You see,’ said Mr Golightly, not quite noticing what had prompted him to continue, ‘when you love you give a hostage to fortune. A real love, and I’m coming to see that is a rare enough thing, exposes you, because what happens to the loved one is not yours to command. People imagine they can control their fate, or that somewhere there is someone, or something, a being which can control it for them. But fate is made up of so many varied parts that at best you can only bear it, your own or anyone else’s – and that is, or can be, dreadful.’

A single magpie flew past. One for sorrow.

‘Especially,’ he added, ‘if what happens feels as if it might have been prevented.’

‘Maybe,’ said Rosie, ‘ “preventing” things might be wrong, anyway. Even if you could. They might be the wrong things you prevented.’ She wasn’t quite sure herself what she meant by this.

Mr Golightly, however, looked cheered. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The old meaning of “prevent” meant to anticipate – it would be putting the cart before the horse, then, “preventing” things, instead of letting events unfold. Sorry, I’m a crossword fanatic,’ he explained.

‘My dad liked crosswords,’ said Rosie. She looked sad. ‘I’m no good at them – women usually aren’t.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘I doubt if it’s the case that there’s anything women are “no good” at, if they’ve a mind to it and it’s always valuable to have the feminine angle.’ Many years ago, there had been a woman he had hoped might help him, but he believed she had betrayed him with his business rival. He had made a fuss over this at the time – the recollection made him feel foolish now.

Rosie Spence looked down to where a gang of Dartmoor ponies were close-cropping the grass – as they had been when she lay on the moor as a girl, before she had given away for ever her chance of love. Nowadays the ponies were bought and slaughtered wholesale and hacked into chunks of bleeding flesh and parcelled up and sold for dog food. ‘I was a prostitute for a while.’

‘Many distinguished people have followed that profession,’ said Mr Golightly, tactfully.

‘I wouldn’t say I was “distinguished”. I was into drugs and things, and there was this man…’

‘Naturally.’

One of the ponies, a skewbald, skittered suddenly sideways on tiny legs. There were so many things she could hardly bear if she thought about them. ‘I was a mad thing, took drugs, quarrelled with my father. I only stayed home because of someone who was kind to me…Anyway, I was one of those who got hooked on drugs and this man –’ after all these years she couldn’t bring herself to say his name – ‘used the habit to hook girls like me in further.’

‘One of my son’s best friends was in your line of work,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘I didn’t know her myself but I gather he thought highly of her. I imagine her sexual expertise was useful to him – helped him to see other matters more clearly.’

‘It’s funny, you know, people go on all the time about sex these days but they really haven’t a clue what’s going on.’

‘It’s not a subject I know much about,’ said Mr Golightly, apologetically.

‘I didn’t for sure. Now I know more than I want to. I didn’t know, for example, people have sex for all sorts of reasons which have nothing to do with sex.’

‘I should imagine so.’ That was the problem with evolution – adaptability was a sound principle in theory but it allowed for so much bewildering complication.

‘They have sex like they take exercise, for instance, because they think they should.’

‘Oh dear – that doesn’t sound much fun!’

‘Or because they are full of something they can’t get rid of – mostly hate in our case,’ said Rosie. She sounded tired.

‘Fear, as well, I guess?’

‘For sure. Fear of being alone, mostly. I married my husband to get away from the other man. And so’s not to be alone.’

‘It’s not an uncommon attempt at solving loneliness – marriage.’

‘It doesn’t work.’

‘No,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘It wouldn’t.’ There was no need to beat about the bush.

‘Johnny was someone else’s child. The person who was kind to me. I treated him very terribly. Oh God, what a mess!’

‘I often think so myself. I expect you did your best in what seemed an impossible situation.’

Rosie Spence looked down at the carefree River Dart where, as a girl, she had contemplated drowning herself. She wanted to do so still. ‘That’s nice of you but I don’t think so – I was just trying to save my own skin. It hasn’t helped me and it’s harmed Johnny. His stepfather loathes him, loathes me too, but that doesn’t matter.’

‘It might to John.’

‘Oh God, you’re right!’ Her skin, so like her son’s, surged red again.

‘I’m not always right.’

Rosie Spence lit a cigarette. ‘I used to come here sometimes with the man who was kind. He loved me – at least I think now he did. I didn’t see that then – but I didn’t see then how I could matter to anyone. D’you understand?’

‘I think I do.’ He hadn’t known how he had ‘mattered’ to his son – and on that account his son had apparently sacrificed himself.

‘Do you think anyone ever has enough love?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘To be frank, I’ve been wondering how much I do know these days.’

Once he had prided himself on knowing everything.

N
ADIA
F
AWNS WAS REREADING HER NOVEL
,
A Knight In Her Arms.
It seemed to her that there was wisdom in it, a wisdom which she was failing to apply to her own life. Despite her friends’ reassuring claims, no troop of men had so far beaten a path to her door. Melissa Swan, the heroine of her novel, had not hung about waiting for action. She had courageously swallowed a potion of wolf’s claw and mistletoe and travelled through time to find her own true knight.

Sam Noble lacked some of the finer points of the chivalry of Sir Elidor, but, making the best of things, Nadia decided the moment was ripe to give him a nudge.

The kitchen facilities of the Backen cottage were limited. Sam had been round regularly for dinners which Nadia cooked painstakingly from her Delia Smith recipe books. Before the meal he drank gin and tonic – never fewer than two – and ate the pricier kind of nuts.

It had always been Nadia’s idea to improve matters with the installation of a fitted kitchen, one in which she and Delia could better parade their range. With Sam to be got on the boil, there was no time like the present.

And nothing like a fait accompli either. Katy’s Kitchens in Exeter had a ‘Special Offer’ – one which included a double fan oven and an automatic spit. With this in mind, Nadia
booked a carpenter – recommended by Barty Clarke – to start work on the renovations.

‘This will be our last supper – for a while,’ she said to Sam, spooning juice over duck breasts.

‘Oh, why?’ Sam was spreading the gravy over the mash. He was specially fond of mashed potato which he had never got around to learning the trick of since the split with Irene.

Nadia explained about the kitchen. ‘I’ll have no facilities here for some time, I’m afraid.’

Sam, who had become unconsciously dependent on the regular free feeds, felt suddenly abandoned.

‘You can always come over to my place.’

The average human heart is a nervous organ and by visiting Nadia on her own territory Sam had left open a means of escape. If she turned nasty he could always go home. Women could turn nasty – there had been an embarrassing scene, in a hotel near Reading, when the Maltese air hostess had locked herself in the bathroom. Hearing himself voice these rash words to Nadia, Sam wanted to summon them back; but she was already thanking him fulsomely.

‘Oh, that is kind. Perhaps I could bring over some of my china. He’s starting on Monday and I have been bothered where to store it to keep it safe.’

Nadia arrived on Sunday in casual cords, and a good deal of lipstick, and unloaded a quantity of boxes from the boot of her Volvo. Sam felt dismay mount as the stack mounted in his kitchen.

‘Would you like to help? Be careful the dog doesn’t knock
over the soup plates, they belonged to my grandmother – the one who came from Normandy. People say I have a sort of a French look about me. It’s the cheekbones, I expect. The bay tree would go well here, what do you think?’

There was a lot of clutter accumulated at the back of Sam’s cupboards which Nadia suggested should be chucked out. Sam dug his heels in a couple of times – once over a pan for poaching eggs and then over a mincing machine – but the protest came more from principle than conviction. As Nadia pointed out, the egg pan was made of aluminium, which led to brain damage – he didn’t want that, she supposed. And not even Delia demanded hand-minced meat from her devotees – the mincer was practically an antique – perhaps he would like her to sell it for him in her shop?

Having substituted her own extensive collection of crockery and cooking implements, which thoroughly colonised the emptied kitchen cupboards, she drove off in the Volvo to ferry over another load.

Mr Golightly walked back from Buckland Beacon deep in thought. The encounter with Johnny’s mother, and her heartfelt admissions, had moved him. And it was sustaining to find a kindred spirit also challenged by the ruthless test of parenting. He was coming down the high street, contemplating the solaces of companionship, when he encountered Sam Noble, standing outside his house staring moodily at a small ‘bronze-effect’ statue of Cupid, naked, and astride a dolphin, which Nadia had felt it safest to fetch over from Backen, too.

Daphne rushed down the path and began to rub herself amorously against Mr Golightly’s leg as Sam, still nursing a grudge over the writers’ group but in more pressing need of moral support, hailed his neighbour.

‘Don’t think you’ve been in my house, have you?’ he asked, magnanimously overlooking the previous discourtesy. Mr Golightly agreed that this was the case and Sam invited him in and offered Earl Grey from one of the tins of assorted teas which were newly ranged along his kitchen counter.

‘Thank you, no,’ said Mr Golightly, who had a particular horror of bergamot. He turned down an offer of an espresso made from Nadia’s state-of-the-art Italian machine, which had been installed next to the teas, but accepted a cup of ordinary coffee and admired the bay tree.

Sam became embarrassed. ‘It belongs to a friend. I’m just looking after it,’ he explained.

‘The wicked flourish like them, I’ve heard tell,’ said Mr Golightly, affably.

The ‘quiet chat’ between the Reverend Fisher and the bishop had taken place and it had been agreed that recent events merited a break from the usual claims of duty on the vicar. She had suffered, and withstood, a crisis, and the bishop, a man of pacific tendencies, was keen that the flap die down before she resumed her pastoral round. So she was not at her familiar post in church that Sunday morning but was
walking, in her sunhat, when Morning Claxon, out on her run, almost crashed into her.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Morning apologised. She took another look at the vicar. Events had wrought changes in her. Behind a pair of smart new sunspecs, chosen from the Giorgio Armani collection at Oakburton’s optician, she was sporting eyeshadow – a vivid blue, perhaps unconsciously inspired by the bluebells she had passed on her riverside walk with Mr Golightly.

Morning had recently become a disciple of a guru living near Penzance – an ex-tax inspector, who taught that the spiritual path was most fully embraced by exploring all love’s byways. In this spirit of amity, Morning took the vicar’s arm. ‘Fancy a walk?’ she enquired.

The vicar and Morning walked up the lane to the sunspangled, earthy-smelling moor. They made their way along the bridle path, where Mr Golightly had walked with Wilfred, and Ellen Thomas had met the presence in the gorse bush. On the same clump of brimming, scented gold, a wheatear was lustily exercising its distinctive voice, a mellifluous warble mingled with a strange harsh creaking rattle – for, unlike humankind, nature doesn’t pretend to consistency.

Morning remarked that when the gorse flower was out kissing was in season, a saying she had recently learned from Mary Simms, who had called round looking for a natural remedy for nausea. Mary didn’t like to trouble Dr Rhys, she said, who, poor man, looked worn out with all his work at the surgery. She had not gone on to explain to Morning – who
had been brought up on a high-rise estate – that the gorse flower blooms in all seasons, which is why, as all country people know, kissing never does go out of fashion. So perhaps it was with a misplaced sense of seizing the moment that Morning turned and suddenly embraced the vicar, kissing her full on the lips.

The vicar, who had not been kissed so passionately since the night when Keith was drunk and had mistaken her for the girl from Hove library – which had led, in time, to he and Meredith becoming engaged – was too taken aback to protest. Morning’s bosom was bountiful and yielding and after so many rejections Meredith found it soothing to be clasped there. She allowed herself to linger long enough for Morning to pat her on the shoulder blade and remark, ‘Love is Everywhere’ (one of the ex-tax inspector’s more popular wisdoms).

Buoyed up by her walk, and filled, indirectly, with the tax inspector’s enthusiasm, the vicar had returned home and embarked on a programme of clearing. Keith was out and Paula, in response to a call on her mobile, came over to lend a hand. The two had almost completed the task when Mr Golightly, on his way back from Sam’s, stopped to say ‘Hello’.

Meredith straightened up. ‘Clearing things out,’ she explained. ‘Stripping away.’ She beamed at her congregation of one. ‘Anything here you fancy?’

Mr Golightly, who had a weakness for second-hand books, poked about in one of the boxes which Paula, stripped
down to her vest, and showing her tattooed shoulders, had been shifting outside.

‘This one,’ he said, picking out a dark blue-bound volume, ‘if you really don’t –’

‘No, take it, take it!’ urged Meredith, excitedly. ‘I don’t want any of them. Love is not possession!’

She invited him in for tea and a slice of lemon sponge, brought by Patsy and Joanne – late of the tearooms – who had been passing through Calne to look up old acquaintances and had called by to congratulate the vicar over her stand on Gay Rights.

Mr Golightly, unwilling to explain his aversion to tea a second time, politely declined. Paula said if Meredith had finished with her she would be off too. Before he left, the vicar kissed Mr Golightly on both cheeks and informed him that ‘Love was Everywhere’, a sentiment which he felt it was hardly his place to challenge.

Going down the steep concrete ramp which led to the road, Paula, a little unsteady on her heels, grabbed Mr Golightly’s arm. Mr Golightly was touched. He had warmed to Paula and admired her taste in shoes. The shoes displayed courage. It took courage to befriend a social outcast in a time of trial. He remarked that he was pleased to find the vicar back on her old form and invited her ally over the road for a Scotch, which, coming from a man, Paula thought an unusually sensible invitation.

Inside Spring Cottage, Mr Golightly steered his guest towards one of the floral chairs and poured them each a
large measure of whisky. He threw the book he had extracted from Meredith’s box of discards down on to the orange sofa.

It is a tricky moment when any author finds a cherished, hard-wrought work in the position of poor relation in a second-hand bookshop. In principle, Mr Golightly was inured to this – it was not news to him that, just as for many years men had died for the right to read his great work, nowadays it had become a staple of cast-off bookstores. But finding his jewel among those books that the vicar – practically a personal friend – was casually jettisoning had been a jolt.

‘What’s this, then?’ Paula asked, picking up the book. Unable to sit still for long, she’d already been round the room on her knees collecting up threads which had moulted from the rag rug, made by Emily Pope in the days when she still had her sight.

‘Only an outdated classic in which nobody’s much interested,’ said Mr Golightly, rather pettishly.

Paula flicked it open. ‘S’the Bible, en’t it?’ Her encounter with the Old Testament heroine, who had cut off her enemy’s head, was entwined affectionately in her memory with her own victory over that stupid Tessa Pope.

Mr Golightly, slightly ashamed of his peevish outburst, handed his guest a half-full toothglass. ‘Would you care for water? It’s not bad from the tap.’

Paula preferred her Scotch neat. She knocked back the content of the toothglass while flicking rapidly through the flimsy pages.

‘I went to one of the vicar’s classes on the Bible. I liked it meself – it’s got style. Here, this bit’s good.’ She read out: ‘
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man
…’

‘Good God,’ said Mr Golightly, almost spilling his whisky, ‘I shall forget my own name next!’