Mr Golightly's Holiday (18 page)

T
HAT MORNING
,
THE SPOTTED FLYCATCHERS
had come, and had already begun to fashion a nest above the garden door. As Ellen was painting, she heard the gentle whirr of wings as they hovered in the air, plying their beakfuls of building matter, building their nests with impeccable design.

She had been up working for some time, when Wolford called. He walked straight round to the back of the house to where she was standing at her easel. She left off painting at once.

‘You’re out early, Mr Wolford.’

‘The early bird catches the worm.’

‘Do you think so? Worms are such unfathomable creatures. When I was a child, boys at my school used to cut them up to watch the separate sections wiggle away. I always thought it so instructive – they seemed to react to injury by taking on quite independent lives. Did you ever do that, Mr Wolford?’

Wolford gave an uncomfortable assent. ‘Reckon I did most things when I was a lad. Proper tearaway, I was.’

‘Of course, you lived in the village, didn’t you? Have you called about anything special? I’m just about to eat breakfast. Would you like some? I’m afraid I have no marmalade.’

Wolford refused breakfast. Side by side, they sat on a
garden bench which looked across the fields to the hills as Ellen, very upright, drank coffee from a gold-rimmed china cup. She did not, as she had to Mr Golightly, describe the hermit’s congregation of otters in the brook below, but she pointed out a flock of crossbills sitting on the barbed wire at the end of her garden.

‘Oh, do look, Mr Wolford, they’re rather rare. Do you see the strange bill? It is credited with having been twisted into that shape while attempting to wrest nails from the crucifixion.’

‘There’s a horse kept in that field, isn’t there?’ The woman’s way of talking made him feel uneasy.

Ellen stared at him. To do this she had to turn her head round. ‘What colour horse?’

‘A white one, isn’t it?’ For Christ’s sake, what was wrong with that? Wolford had been briefly engaged to a girl who had had a similar effect on him. She had said, once, after they had had sex, ‘You weren’t thinking of me, were you? You were thinking of we won’t say who…’ and had laughed knowingly.

‘How interesting,’ said Ellen. ‘The white horse. But you’ve come for something, Mr Wolford…?’

Wolford went to the point more quickly than he had intended. ‘We’ve a prisoner out, been missing for some while. You’ve not seen anyone who might be him?’

Ellen’s grey eyes looked dead at his. ‘My husband died a while ago and since then I have become rather reclusive. I am sure people will have told you that about me.’

This was true. ‘Never pokes her nose out, hardly,’ his mother had said.

‘So, you haven’t seen a man, at all?’ said Wolford, uncomfortable, but pushing on none the less.

‘Are you asking about my personal life or pursuing an official inquiry?’

‘I am asking a serious question, Mrs Thompson –’

‘Thomas.’

‘Excuse me, Thomas. I must tell you that it has been alleged that you have had a man staying here and if his identity is unknown then it’s my duty to report the matter to the authorities.’

‘Heavens,’ said Ellen comfortably, ‘ “the authorities”. Let’s see. I’m fifty-four, not entirely beyond repair but no oil painting either, and, unhappily for me, unattached. Someone, in the village – I assume it is – has been kind enough to suggest that a man might still find me passably attractive. Is that what you’ve come to discuss? My sex life?’

Wolford gave an official note to the clearing of his throat. ‘I don’t think you’ve grasped the seriousness of the situation, Mrs Thompson, I beg your pardon, Thomas. This man is dangerous. We have to pursue all avenues of inquiry. He has not been apprehended, unfortunately, and you, and all women, if I may say so, attractive or not, are in danger from him.’

‘You know what,’ went on Ellen, as if she hadn’t heard him, ‘it puts me in mind of a wicked story my husband used to tell. About an elderly spinster – are you sure you
won’t have any coffee? – who rang the police to say there was a man in her bedroom. The police said they were unable to ascertain the nature of her complaint.’

‘The man is a serious sex offender,’ said Wolford, by now in a cold rage.

‘Goodness,’ said Ellen, turning suddenly round to him again. ‘So you have kindly come to warn or protect me. Is that it?’

‘To an extent,’ said Wolford, stiffly. ‘But also there is the question of this man, it has been suggested –’

‘I do wonder who that could be?’ said Ellen. ‘Isn’t it exciting? Would you like some toast? The butter isn’t quite rancid. Perhaps it is my neighbour, Mr Golightly. He comes over from time to time. We talk about poetry.’

‘Where would that take place?’ asked Wolford, thinking of what Jackson had said about the bedroom. He supposed it was possible that the two were having some holiday romance.

‘Where do we discuss the poetry, do you mean? Oh dear, Mr Wolford, I think I must draw the line at that. It isn’t your business – is it? – to know the circumstances in which a discussion of Robert Frost took place between consenting adults.’

Over the barbed wire, in fact, the very first time she had met him.
Good fences make good neighbours
, he had said, and had asked her no questions.

The sun disappeared behind a cloud and her bare arms gave an excuse to say she must go inside. As she saw Wolford
off she wondered what Mr Golightly would make of the roles she had concocted for them – two washed-up, middle-aged people, consoling each other in their enforced solitude.

She waited till she was sure Wolford had gone and then went to the spare bedroom. Lifting the bedcover from his face, she thought: he expunges himself so successfully it’s as if he isn’t here.

‘Someone from the prison,’ she mouthed – and he nodded to show he understood. She wondered if it was a relief that something had happened at last.

All day she painted in a kind of fervent clarity. Never had she worked as she worked now, allowing the birds to fly from airy otherness into the hidden alembic of her creating source, then out down her arm again, through the brush in her hand. They were strange birds, ravens – almost human in their habits. Long ago, in Gilead, the prophet Isaiah had been fed by ravens – one of many such stories – bizarre when you thought about it – of the hospitality of creatures to humankind. Why ever did they bother? But in the story, it was their Creator who sent the rescuing birds…

As their little portion of the earth spun further from the light she went to fetch him. The days were so long now she left it till later. He was out of bed already, waiting, with no shadow of impatience; it crossed her mind that he was waiting to be led away.

‘Who was it, from the prison?’

‘Brian Wolford. He lives here – or rather his mother does.’

Bainbridge pulled a face. ‘That’s bad luck – he’s got a thing about nonces.’

‘Nonces?’

‘Sex offenders. You don’t get many in Dartmoor because it has no sex offenders treatment programme. Only those like me who insist they’re innocent get there – “refuseniks”, they call us.’

He had made such light of his time there she had hardly registered it. Ellen had a sudden flash of the reality of what he’d undergone. She pictured the ominous squared entrance with its heavy iron bell and before it the portal arch with its virgilian motto – ‘Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos’: to spare the vanquished and subdue the arrogant – and behind it the anonymous granite, passively forbidding.

Jos Bainbridge had been through hell enough – he must be spared – he must never go back.

‘Another “refusenik” I knew told me Wolford turned a blind eye when he was done over by some of the “better” class of inmates. Reckoned Wolford knew who did it but kept quiet about it. He’s unpopular with the other screws. They don’t like types like Wolford giving them a bad name.’

‘He struck me as a mother’s boy. Prowls about with a bully’s air and a self-satisfied look on his face. He just wandered into the garden one evening, when I was sketching, without so much as a by your leave. Poor Mr Jackson was horrified.’

Outside, the sky was drawn silk across the dying lamp of
the sun. About the shadowy garden bats had begun to flitter, mutely petitioning. Her sketchbook was near and for something to do she picked it up and began to pencil the outline of a tree in the fading light.

Bainbridge sat on the sofa, folded down in introspection. I’ll miss you, she thought, and mentally shook herself, getting up to fetch their supper tray from the kitchen. When she returned he had taken up the sketchbook and was looking at it.

‘Sorry – d’you mind?’

She was surprised that she didn’t. ‘Go ahead.’

‘No, it was rude of me. I should have asked.’

She gestured that it was OK and he flipped back looking at the previous sketches.

‘Who’s this?’

He had stood up and passed the book to her – the portrait she had done of Johnny.

‘The boy who’s been helping out here – on your room, actually.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Johnny Spence. A local boy. Clever – I like him. What is it?’

He was taking the sketch pad over to the door and then out into the garden. It was lighter than inside but he rarely ventured there.

‘It’s Rosie,’ he said, almost stepping on her foot as he pushed the page towards her. His face had gone as pale as the imminent moon.

‘Rosie?’ From the way her heart was being pressed to death she knew who he must mean.

‘The girl I loved. It’s her, no question – like as two peas. Where does he live?’

He had never named her. She had never asked. She didn’t even know where Johnny lived though it must be somewhere in the village. ‘I can find out,’ she said, ‘My neighbour, Mr Golightly, will know.’

I
N THE MONTHS AFTER HER HUSBAND’S DEATH
Ellen had felt she might wither away with loneliness. She had loved Robert physically, emotionally and mentally, and, to her surprise – for she was not a woman who expected much – he had seemed to reciprocate each of these different strands of love. There had only once been a question mark over their happiness – a period of dull agony when he had become sexually withdrawn and generally preoccupied and she had wondered about Dawn Phillips, the smart brunette who was the racing correspondent on the paper for which Robert worked. Eventually, her face flushed and her heart racing, she had raised this with her husband, steeling herself to hear the worst and he had met her timid enquiry with roaring, reassuring laughter. ‘Good God, girl,’ he had said, ‘she’s a piranha. D’you think I want my blasted head examining? It’s my blasted prostate not Phillips I’m worrying over.’

But it was his heart, not his prostate, which took him from her. Later, she wondered if she had mistaken her fear of the dark-haired girl for some anticipatory fear of that other dark despoiler of partnerships.

Ellen never got over missing Robert. But as the months went by, before her encounter with the gorse bush, she had begun to find, like some wise woman gathering simples in
a springtime wood, a few solaces in living alone. One of these was a sense that, left to her own devices, she knew just when to do things. Before, she had been Robert’s willing executive. ‘Let’s go to Vienna!’ he would say, and she would, gladly, organise the trip. Or, ‘Let’s have dinner at the Café Royal’ or ‘go to the pictures’ or ‘the races’. Once she had suggested they visit an exhibition, Matisse, in Paris, and she had been a little wounded at how hard it had been to get him to agree. He had loved it when he got there, though. They had stayed in a cheap hotel near St Sulpice, and he had teased her that she was someone he had picked up in the café-bar across the square and taken back to the hotel for a fling. ‘Come on,’ he had breathed into her ear, in the sexually enticing Paris dark, which smelled of pastries and ambiguous sanitation and the scent of strangers. ‘It’ll soon be back to the wife, so turn me another trick, will you?’ And she had been pleased to oblige.

She had shaped her will to Robert’s, and with him gone she’d had to learn to find a way of her own. It had not been easy, but with the loss of other footings she had acquired judgement. So, the evening after Wolford’s visit, and seeing the light was on in Spring Cottage, she said to Bainbridge, ‘Go back to your room, will you, I’m going out for a while.’ And then, as an afterthought, ‘I’ll leave the house dark.’

Mr Golightly had spent the day reading his own work. It was a long while since he had read it through and there
were parts he found he had misremembered, parts he wished he could rewrite, and some he’d forgotten and preferred not to be reminded of. He was still up when Ellen tapped lightly on the window. If he felt surprise at receiving a visit so late from his unsociable neighbour, he didn’t betray it but offered Ellen a glass of hock.

‘Thank you,’ she said, dropping on to the perilous orange sofa.

‘I’d value your opinion on this,’ said Mr Golightly, setting down the vicar’s book and pouring wine into the toothglass. ‘I think it’s rather good myself. The Germans are at their best with wine and music.’

‘But not jokes, or Jews?’ suggested Ellen.

Mr Golightly made no further comment but merely sipped his hock. The wine was the colour of liquid sovereigns. Ellen had been given a sovereign as a child by a great-uncle who had been in India and claimed to have a scar left by a tiger on his buttock. It had been an abiding childhood fear that he might one day offer to show her the wound.

‘Speaking of Jews,’ she went on, ‘I wondered if you could tell me where your boy is?’

Mr Golightly started at this. For a fraction of a second he misunderstood. Then he recognised she meant Johnny.

‘Yes, it is rather a ghetto existence he has led, but I hope we are beginning to change all that.’

‘I need to get in touch with him,’ said Ellen. ‘It’s quite urgent.’

Mr Golightly looked at his neighbour. She wasn’t an
alarmist or a troublemaker. ‘I can fetch him now if you wish,’ he said.

‘Oh, if it’s not too late I can go,’ said Ellen, not wanting to give trouble herself.

But Mr Golightly insisted. He suspected Johnny would still be up and it was no bother, he assured her. While he may be as old as the hills he had not forgotten his manners. They forbade him, he said, to allow an attractive woman out on her own on a dark night.

It was not, Ellen thought, impossible to imagine Mr Golightly, in a Paris hotel bedroom. She lay back on the uncomfortable sofa, drinking the cool gold wine. The music playing on the cassette recorder was Mozart; ‘
Don Giovanni
,’ she thought.

Up at Jackson’s, Paula and Johnny were arguing in the kitchen.

‘No, you gotta,’ Paula was saying.

‘I don’t do school,’ Johnny repeated. ‘You don’t learn nothing there.’ There might have been a point in staying with his stepdad.

‘Bollocks,’ said Paula. ‘You’re bright, you are. You got to get on in this world.’

‘School’s shit. Bet you never did it.’

Paula, who was taking some clothes out of the tumbledryer she’d recently bought on a scheme which gave you two years’ interest-free credit, flicked a shirt at Johnny’s head.
‘What’s that got to do with it, stupid? You stay here, you go to school, right?’

‘Mr Golightly never.’

‘That’s different,’ said Paula, smoothing out a towel. ‘Artists, writers an’ that, they’re not normal.’

‘Nor his son, didn’t, he told me. The Queen never neither.’

‘Well, you’re not the Queen less I’m very much mistaken. Anyway, what’s your mum say?’

Johnny flushed. ‘She don’t mind.’

‘What ‘bout your dad, then?’

‘He’s not my dad.’

‘What ‘bout your real dad? What’s he say?’ The flush deepened. ‘Or don’t you know where he is? Never mind,’ Paula relentlessly continued, folding the towels. ‘You’re the same as me, you are. Neither of us got dads. D’you know your real dad’s name?’

Johnny shook his head dumbly. His mum never talked about his real dad.

‘Me neither,’ said Paula, cheerfully. ‘Still, I’m better off than you. I got me mum’s name, I en’t got no stupid man’s.’

Don Giovanni, still defiant, was being dragged down to Hell when Mr Golightly returned with Johnny, whose sensation at hearing his employer’s voice at Paula’s door had been profound relief. His first thought on entering the parlour at Spring Cottage was to see if he could catch the tune of what
he was hearing. Yup – he thought he had it – definitely the last number, which was easy once you’d got it in your ear.

‘Johnny,’ said Ellen, who had risen from the sofa, ‘I’m sorry to trouble you but I wonder, could you tell me where we can find your mother?’

Gratitude at escaping Paula’s inquisition and the restorative effects of Mozart’s harmonies softened Johnny’s usual defences. He shot an enquiring look at Mr Golightly, who nodded reassuringly.

‘Might do. Why?’ Johnny said.

The house was dark when Wolford returned to Foxgloves, but his sixth sense told him it was not unoccupied. Jackson’s ladder was lying along the wall of the bungalow. If there was any trouble he could always invent an intruder on the roof.

Wolford, for all his bulk, was a light mover. He was careful as he mounted the ladder and walked quietly across the roof to the window which looked inside. But it was too dark to see anything.

Lights were on next door at Spring Cottage. The white horse the woman had been so funny about was cantering round the field behind the garden. Wolford liked horses. As a child, he had ridden on the moor and he’d had thoughts of joining the mounted police. He stowed away the ladder and stood in Ellen Thomas’s garden, beneath the pear tree
where the green fruit was beginning to form, watching the horse pass soundlessly before him in the oblique light of the risen moon.