Mr Golightly's Holiday (5 page)

‘It’s a dramatic epic,’ he averred, ‘which seeks to unfold the moral and spiritual history of human civilisation.’ That should do the trick. No one in their right mind could share an interest in such an undertaking.

‘Really?’ said Sam Noble. ‘The young chap up at Lavinia’s barn is writing a narrative poem. Tell you what, we should form a writers’ group. Read each other’s work, swap ideas. What d’you say?’

There were no e-mails waiting for him when Mr Golightly was released by his visitor’s departure back to the laptop. Since Sam Noble had drained the tin of evaporated milk
dry, if there was to be coffee, it meant another trip to the shop.

Immanuel Kant, Mr Golightly had heard, formed such a dependency upon coffee that, on an occasion when it was slow to arrive, he was heard to mutter, ‘Well, we can die after all; it is but dying, and in the next world, thank God, there is no coffee and consequently no waiting for it.’ Mr Golightly had begun to experience a fellow feeling with the querulous philosopher. It seemed impossible that he should embark on the revision of the work he had ironically represented to Sam Noble without the stimulus of caffeine. But after his caller he really couldn’t stomach another encounter with the bearded one up at the Post Office Stores. Maybe he would drive into Oakburton, fill the Traveller with petrol and get in some more supplies before getting down to work?

Being Friday, it was the Reverend Meredith Fisher’s day for Plymouth and Johnny Spence was lodged again in the yew tree. Its foliage was thick, little of the drizzling rain penetrated to the tree’s occupant, who lay in the fork of the trunk looking down like a watchful jaguar.

The jaguar gaze registered Mr Golightly manoeuvring the Traveller into the street. It crossed Johnny’s mind to ask for another lift; but, like any other wild animal, the coil of Johnny’s instinct was caution. His encounter with Spring Cottage’s occupant had turned out surprisingly well. But Johnny’s life to date had shown that if you trusted anyone on this earth you needed your head examined.

In any case, with the old bloke out of the way, he could get inside the house and have another snoop round.

Johnny slithered down the yew tree and nipped warily across the road and round the back of Spring Cottage, where he had noted from his first visit that the window was left unfastened. No probs – he could get in easy.

Samson sauntered over to the wire fence and stood watching as the boy creature swung his leg up and on to the sill, reached an arm inside an open window and disappeared inside.

On the other side of the window Johnny found the laptop on the gateleg table. It took five minutes to work out the means to find the password. Rapidly, he scanned the contents. Nothing interesting. No porn. A few e-mails, no sex or love stuff. There was someone called herself Muriel but she didn’t seem to amount to much.

Upstairs offered no new discoveries either. A book by the bed;
Jeeves in the Offing.
Nothing else different.

Downstairs there was a box of stuff. More books:
Ethics
by Spinoza,
The Sermons of John Donne
,
The Odyssey
, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, Philip Pullman, a load of poetry books,
The Wind in the Willows
– which was a kids’ book – and another book for kids Johnny’s mum had given him when he was seven,
Alice.
Maybe the old guy was a perve after all?

Johnny cast around looking for another unexplored quarter to assuage his curiosity. Next to the music centre there was a box of tapes and CDs – classical stuff and some rock
– Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Elvis, David Bowie, the kind of stuff old ravers went for – no rap or thrash, not that you’d expect that.

Mr Golightly had driven out of the village before he remembered his credit card. As a rule, he carried no cash or card as his staff attended to all money matters for him. But part of the point of the holiday was supposed to be an opportunity to sample the pleasures of self-sufficiency. Bill, his PA, had organised a special ‘Gold’ card. There had been talk of ‘Platinum’ but Mr Golightly had rejected this – platinum, with no poetic tradition behind it, he regarded as inferior to the nobler virtues of gold. However, in assembling the usual furniture of the inner pocket of his jacket – notebook, fountain pen, propelling pencil – he had forgotten to include the neat case in which, expensively sheathed, the card had arrived from the credit-card agency. As Martha would say, he would forget his own name next!

Johnny had memories of Elvis because before his mum met his stepdad she had used to dance to a tape,
Elvis: the Greatest Hits
, with Johnny in her arms. Mr Golightly, returning to retrieve the card, was greeted by a familiar bass-baritone declaiming that you could do anything you chose except step on his blue suede shoes. ‘Ah,’ he said, entering the parlour where he was met by a terrified young face, ‘a fellow fan…!’

There were some Cokes still left over from the six-pack in the fridge. Johnny drank one of these while Mr Golightly made himself a cup of black coffee and they both listened
to the King. However, when it came to one track, Mr Golightly made a pretext to leave the room.

The lyrics never failed to remind him of someone who was always on his mind.

M
R
G
OLIGHTLY’S
CD S
ESSION WITH
J
OHNNY HAD
concluded, to Johnny’s surprise, with no questions asked about his presence in Spring Cottage. It was as if his weird host believed the purpose of the call was to establish a musical bond. He had played Johnny some other CDs which, once Johnny had got over the shock of being offered a Coke, rather than a smack round the head, he found quite entertaining. Mr Golightly sounded pleased when his guest asked the name of one of the pieces.

‘Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” – an innovative work. Who is your own favourite?’

Johnny said he liked Badly Drawn Boy.

‘Any special number I should look out for?’ enquired Mr Golightly.

Johnny suggested his latest album,
Have You Fed The Fish
, was cool.

‘I’ll make a note of it. Next time you visit I must play you some Schubert songs, the
Winterreise
are particularly fine. But now I have things pressing and no doubt you have your own engagements to attend to…?’

It was nearly lunchtime and Johnny resumed his jaguar position in the yew tree while his host returned to the gateleg table prepared to start afresh. Coffee first. But hell and damnation, he still had no milk!

Mr Golightly consulted his watch. There was no help for it, a trip up to the shop and the aggressive young man with the beard. But a notice in green biro, also somewhat aggressive, met him, stating baldly that the shop was closed between the hours of one and two. To go in to Oakburton now would take up yet more of a day in which he had promised himself faithfully he would commence work. But to work without coffee…more and more Mr Golightly found himself in sympathy with the cantankerous philosopher.

Ellen Thomas lying on her sofa heard the wind chimes in the pear tree. A man was standing outside the glass door which made a fragile barrier between her and the terrible incandescence beyond. With the sun behind his head making a bright coronet, she thought at first he was the Angel of Death come to grant her release. Then she saw it was just her new neighbour with the funny name.

Ellen tried to throw off the overwhelming sense of listlessness which, like a heavy rug, covered every bit of her. She raised her body carefully from the sofa. Everything she did now she did slowly because she knew if she moved too fast she would shatter into a million fragments.

‘I’ve disturbed you,’ said Mr Golightly. He rocked slightly on the balls of his feet in embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry.’ He held in his hand a small pale pink jug, slightly cracked about the lip.

‘No,’ said Ellen truthfully. Nothing could disturb her more than she had already been disturbed.

‘Only,’ said her neighbour, ‘I have stupidly run out of milk.’

‘Oh, milk…’ said Ellen Thomas. She made it sound as if it was a concept foreign to her.

‘It sounds daft,’ Mr Golightly went on, ‘but I find I can’t get down to work without coffee. And the shop is closed for lunch so I just wondered…’ He held out the jug awkwardly, like a small boy making a peace-offering.

‘I can give you a cup of coffee, if that’s what you want.’ Whatever possessed her to say that?

Mr Golightly paused. It was not what he wanted. What he wanted more than anything was to get started on his project. But Ellen Thomas was being neighbourly – it seemed churlish to refuse. ‘Thank you,’ he said, politely.

He stepped past his hostess through the door into a room which put him in mind of a ship’s cabin: clean and orderly, with little furniture other than two sofas arranged at right angles. There were no pictures on the walls, other than one he recognised of some crows flying through a field of violent yellow corn. The woman herself seemed out of place.

‘Till last year I lived in a much grander house.’ She was the sort who read your thoughts, then.

‘I was grand once,’ said Mr Golightly, a touch regretfully.

‘You know,’ said Ellen, her mind flickering vaguely to the fridge – was there any milk in it? She hadn’t the least idea – ‘I’ve heard it said that as we get older we should
guard against a sense of lowered consequence, but I find I prefer obscurity.’

‘Where is the dancing and the noise of dancers’ feet, the banquets and the festivals?’ asked Mr Golightly. The question was purely rhetorical: it was reassuring to find his neighbour so sanguine about her altered circumstances.

Ellen Thomas opened her mouth and was startled to find further unsolicited words issuing from it. ‘You can stay for lunch, if there’s any food.’ And, more from the nervous rush that the speech produced than any wish to charm, she smiled.

Ellen Thomas had never been a beautiful woman; if her appearance was commented on at all she was described as ‘pleasant-looking’. But when she smiled her face was transformed in a way which her husband had found irresistible. Mr Golightly, who had determined to resist anything which would detain him further, also found himself unequal to the smile.

And I would have had to eat lunch anyway, he excused himself, stepping back over the wire to Spring Cottage for a bottle of light Moselle from the wine carton.

Ellen rediscovered table mats and linen napkins in the drawer of the oak sideboard, a legacy of Robert’s godmother, and, under his hostess’s instructions, Mr Golightly laid the table. He found there was something soothing about obeying orders.

In the kitchen, Ellen cracked duck eggs. I have been an emptied-out eggshell, she thought. She chopped sorrel, gathered from the garden, and beat the eggs to a froth in a
white bowl. Yellow and white, the colours of the narcissi she had planted beneath the pear tree.

‘Are you sitting up?’ she called through to the other room, where her guest was seated, a linen napkin tucked into the top of his shirt. ‘You have to eat an omelette like lightning or it ruins…’

Conversation over lunch was cordial but formal. Mr Golightly was greatly relieved to find his neighbour seemed not to want his help over any writing project or to press him into action over some scheme for Great Calne’s improvement. Instead, she described the local features: the stream, which ran through the meadow beneath them, for instance, called Holy Brook because once a hermit had preached there to a congregation of otters.

Mr Golightly was impressed. Otters, he said, were famously unbiddable – the hermit must have been a man of rare influence or had an uncommon way with words.

They moved on to the unpredictable spring weather, the asinine EEC regulations threatening a local variety of apple and the current world crisis, although Mr Golightly apologised for not wishing to pursue this topic.

Ellen was pleased at an opportunity to exercise forbearance. There was enough she preferred not to be exposed to herself. Deftly, she turned the conversation. She explained that she had been an artist, making a living from painting local landscapes, but gave her guest to understand that, as with much else, she had abandoned this activity after her husband’s death.

‘I am sorry,’ Mr Golightly said sincerely. He was familiar with the sapping effects of grief.

By the end of lunch he felt unusually sleepy. Between them he and his hostess had polished off the bottle of Moselle. He dallied a little over coffee, then made his regrets and under Samson’s unblinking gaze stepped cautiously over the barbed wire and back into the garden of Spring Cottage.

Returning to his seat at the gateleg table he found he had some problem with the focus of his eyes. A short liedown would do no harm – it would refresh him, pep him up for starting work on the soap opera.

Next door, Ellen Thomas washed up the glasses, the cutlery and crockery. She laid away the table mats and linen napkins carefully in the sideboard drawer. What a mercy at the last minute she had kept it back from the furniture sale. Lunch had been more than she had been used to eating – and she supposed it must be the wine which had gone to her head.

All at once, she wanted nothing more than to be outside. For too long she had managed no more than to creep out, with Wilfred, at dusk, like a felon on the run – it had hardly deserved the name of a ‘walk’. Now she felt a brisk stroll was just what she needed.

Summoning the black Labrador, they went out together and up the lane which rose towards the moor. As she watched the dog sniff along the hedgerow, her trained eye spotted tiny flowers like snowflakes, and she crouched to
put her nose to their sequestered sweetness. There are few blessings, thought Ellen Thomas – her head a little dizzy from the wine and from bending – as welcome as white violets.

T
HE
R
EVEREND
M
EREDITH
F
ISHER NEVER
economised with her conscience. She nursed it as a proud mother nurses a precocious child. And, like many such mothers, she was not parsimonious with the cherished one’s talents.

No event in Great Calne passed unnoted by its vigilant parish priest and so significant a matter as the arrival of a new tenant at Spring Cottage could hardly have been overlooked. If she had not yet made a welcoming visit this was not because she was idle.

Meredith Fisher took her pastoral work strenuously. On Wednesdays and Fridays, she attended the South Devon counselling training at Plymouth College, which had the virtue that it freed the yew tree by the rectory wall to harbour Johnny Spence.

It might be hoped that the vicar’s training provided other benefits too. But it is a sad fact that a zest for human psychology is not always shared by the objects of its concern. Meredith Fisher’s attempts to counsel the parish of Great Calne had fallen on stony ground. Statistics indicated that it was improbable that Great Calne had escaped its share of sexual abuse – but if so, its victims and perpetrators were joined in some unholy pact to keep quiet about it. And adultery, though certainly rife, was, if not actually
applauded, apparently tolerated. It appeared there was no Christian means of helping the afflicted.

The arrival, therefore, of a brand new opportunity to adjust a psyche to normality (it was well known that writers were neurotic and this one was single, which, in a man, generally meant some kind of sexual dysfunction) was a bonus for the vicar. Hers was essentially a doctrine of light; there was no darkly noisome corner of the human psyche the Reverend Meredith Fisher felt unequal to illuminating.

The chance to cast light upon her neighbour’s darker corners presented itself on Saturday over her breakfast of Weetabix, toast and jam.

‘Been to see the writer chap over the road?’ her husband, Keith, asked casually behind the
Express.
He was keen to run down to Newton Abbot and lay a bet on ‘Banoffee Pie’ which was running seven to one in the 2.15. To accomplish this successfully his wife’s attention had to be diverted. There had been a worrying trend recently to make Saturday the day they ‘did things together’ which Keith was hoping to nip in the bud.

The common weal, and other large causes, can generally be relied on to outweigh lesser domestic concerns and Keith was relieved to see his wife already at the door of Spring Cottage as he reversed the Renault down and out of the front drive. He could wing it into Newton Abbot, place the bet on Banoffee Pie and then pick up some brownie points with She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed by hopping down to Tesco’s to do the weekend shop.

Mr Golightly had already switched on the kettle for a second cup of coffee and was about to put on Clifford Curzon playing the Schubert impromptus when there was a rap at the door. The lunch with Ellen Thomas had been nourishing, and entertaining, but it had not forwarded his writing plan. He had shut his eyes for a mere five minutes and already it was evening…But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof was his motto and that morning he had woken bright and early and ready to work.

The effort at opening the front door to Sam Noble had eased the tendency to stick; a fact which Mr Golightly regretted when he saw he had yet another visitor, one who was engaged, it appeared, in robbing the garden of its crop of harmless wildflowers. Unless it was the gardener Nicky Pope had warned him to expect.

The Reverend Fisher held out a frankly earthy hand – in the other she held a bunch of wilting dandelions.

‘Hi there. Meredith Fisher.’

‘Golightly,’ said Mr Golightly, somewhat emphasising the syllables of his name.

‘I’m the rector – don’t fall down dead with shock!’

‘No,’ said Mr Golightly. If anyone was about to fall down dead it certainly wouldn’t be he.

‘I’ll leave the weeds here, shall I?’ asked Meredith, rubbing earth enthusiastically into the other hand. ‘Better late than never! I’ve come to welcome you to the parish of Great Calne.’

‘What I like to stress to my clients,’ the Reverend Meredith was saying, ‘is that love is a
verb.
’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Golightly, trying his best not to show his attention was drifting.

Once he, too, had believed that he knew much about love. That a woman with a dog collar (though this morning the Reverend Fisher wore only a roll-neck sweater to indicate her calling) should beard him on the subject struck him as faintly absurd.

‘You see, it’s the active ingredient which counts.’

Mr Golightly had thought much about love’s multiple complexities. Like the vicar, there was a time when he had been strenuous in his loving. For years he had given his support to people in return for their absolute loyalty – but when, as was inevitable, given the instability of all things, this loyalty had flagged or wavered, he had reacted with a vehemence he now deplored.

‘Is it?’ he heard himself say. A mistake. He knew enough about human nature to be sure that he had let himself in for an argument.

‘Oh, I think so,’ said the Reverend Meredith, and her eyes gleamed with what Mr Golightly recognised, with an inward shudder, as zeal. Zeal, like vehemence, was nowadays a condition he fought shy of. ‘You see…’

Years ago, when Mr Golightly had gone about more in the world, he had encountered people like the Reverend Fisher. It seemed to him they spelled trouble. They had to put their fingers in every pie and could not leave well alone.

In the past, it had been his habit to try to steer such people into situations where their conviction had fuller scope. Some, he was sorry to say it now, he had employed to promote his business. But since the catastrophe he had become mistrustful of all endeavour which tried to improve the human lot. The world was no longer a theatre for his grand gestures. That idea now seemed unspeakably grandiose…

The worst thing about such people was that it was the Devil’s own job to escape the running fire of their counsels. The Reverend Fisher drew breath only on sufferance. She was delivering an enthusiastic account of the ‘meaning of the Gospels’, which, Mr Golightly dazedly gathered, were packed with emotional prophylactics and helpful panaceas, until the sound of a car outside distracted her. That, she explained, must be her husband, Keith, back from the shops.

Mr Golightly felt towards Keith something of the gratitude of a dog who sees a stranger about to remove a troublesome thorn from its paw. He conducted the vicar to the door, but she hung on still, promising a future visit accompanied by contemporary feminist exegeses of the parables. ‘I’ll get Keith to pop across and help you with all of this,’ she declared finally, gesturing at the crop of harmless dandelions.

‘No,’ said Mr Golightly firmly. ‘Golden lads and girls…’ He was fond of these reminders that all humanity must come at last to dust.

‘Sorry?’

‘Dandelions. When the blooms go they become like chimney sweepers’ brushes,’ he added, confusingly.

‘It will be good for Keith – for his health,’ said the Reverend Meredith, ignoring this incomprehensible irrelevance.

‘But not for mine.’

‘Well, if you’re sure…?’ asked his neighbour, fired up by the sense she had a fight on her hands.

‘Sure as eggs!’ said Mr Golightly and pulled the door to smartly.

It was a while since he had checked his e-mails. He had been about to when that pesky woman had called. He dialled up and waited for the sound as the messages arrived. But instead of a now familiar ‘plop’ an ugly noise heralded an announcement that the ‘domain’ wasn’t answering.

Mr Golightly experienced a bewildering sense of impotence. He was unused to being denied information. Information about any corner of his global enterprise, relayed by his band of assiduous aides, had been to hand whenever he required it. At a loss, he went to the telephone to ring the office. But hell and damnation, he had forgotten it was Saturday – the day the staff by long tradition took off! He left a curt request for someone to ring him back and dialled up again. This time the ugly noise prefaced an announcement that the ‘server’ did not ‘recognise his name’.

Mr Golightly was the first to acknowledge that all wayward things are best met with patience. Yet had the Reverend Fisher been present, and reminded her neighbour of the gospel saying ‘In your patience possess ye your souls’, she might have got a dusty response. If you are in the way of presiding over a large empire, or even a small one, it is
disturbing to find an area where your influence is nothing. Mr Golightly was unused to such discouragements and the effect was to make him suddenly famished.

The visit from Reverend Fisher had taken up the best part of the morning and it was close to lunchtime; he decided to kill two birds and walk up to the Stag and Badger for a pint and a cold sausage, to stay his hunger and work off his wrath.

Luke Weatherall had also suffered creative frustration that morning. His poem had not advanced; or rather it had advanced by three stanzas but these on rereading had been too patently influenced by the rhythms of
Hiawatha.
Luke had read Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
while researching his own narrative poem and had found his head taken over by its insistent rhythms. A trip to the Stag and Badge offered an antidote.

Mr Golightly and Luke met as they approached the inn; one thing led to another and the older man offered to buy the younger a drink. Luke had provided his first social exchange in Great Calne. Mr Golightly might not have fully recognised the sentiment but what he was feeling was that at a time of insecurity here was a friend.

Mary Simms remarked, when she popped out the back to have a peek at her hair and touch up her lipstick, that the writer from Spring Cottage was in. She made no mention of Luke; she had plans for him, and no woman worth her salt lets slip her plans about anyone of the opposite sex. But Paula’s negative intuition was fine-tuned.

‘That Luke Weatherall in, is he?’

Paula had her own reasons for asking this. If she could get someone to rent her room she could leave home and move in with Jackson. Looking around, she had lighted upon Luke as the best bet. After all, he would be nearer the village, and the Stag and Badge, and that Lavinia Galsworthy was a fussy cow. Luke ought to be glad to leave her poxy ways and her crappy studio flat!

Paula’s plan to move in with Jackson was born of determination rather than any warmer emotion. She didn’t like Jackson; rather the reverse. But she had detected Jackson’s desire to be rid of her, and also his fear of her, and the combination made a powerful draw. Years ago, her dad had left her mum, leaving her mum to lean on her. If Paula moved in with Jackson she could get her own back on the lot of them.

Mary flushed. ‘I didn’t notice.’

‘Like fuck, you didn’t!’ said Paula, expertly banging down a sharp steel knife on a cherry tomato. ‘Anyone with half a mind can see you can’t wait to have him up you!’ Mary Simms got on her nerves.

Luke Weatherall found the tenant of Spring Cottage sympathetic when Luke confided, over a pint of Brewer’s Best, the problem he was having over
Hiawatha.
Mr Golightly had been growing aware himself of the potential inhibiting influence of another work of art. Was he not finding just such a handicap himself? His dramatic epic, which had made such an impact, acted now as a dismaying block to his new idea
which, he had begun to worry, might never match the success of the original.

Luke finished his pint and asked if he could return the compliment. It seemed impolite to refuse. The conversation had brought up thoughts in Mr Golightly of whether he mightn’t have bitten off more than he could chew. There was comfort in comradeship, the young man’s company was agreeable and another pint would hardly detain him for long.

Mary Simms said, ‘It’s the mire I’d be worried about if I were him, poor soul.’

There had been an escape reported from Dartmoor prison and Sam Noble and Barty Clarke were discussing the news with whoever wanted to join in.

‘What’s he in for, then?’ This was Paula’s mum who had popped in for a word with Paula and was taking the weight off her feet with a half of sweet cider and some cheese-and-onion crisps.

‘Child molester,’ said Barty Clarke.

Barty, a tall man with a yellow-white moustache and mild blue eyes, was the local auctioneer, who also published his own newspaper. Called the
Backenbridge Review
, and known locally as the
Backbiter
, its chief purpose was the vicious promulgation of local gossip.

‘No, it was rape, my Brian told me.’ This was Cherie Wolford, the prison officer’s mother, who lived next to Paula and her mum in Rabbit Row. Although Wolford had his own house over at Princetown, near the prison, he was a
frequent visitor to Calne, where his mother still kept his old room for whenever he chose to stay. Brian, as Cherie was fond of telling everyone, had been to university, where he had been popular at student parties with his disc jockey skills. He had even toyed with becoming a disc jockey full-time, his mother said, but in the end the prison service offered a pension and more stability. Great Calne – Cherie Wolford anyway – was proud of his achievements

‘Same difference,’ insisted Barty, piqued that his role as the fount of bad news was being usurped.

Mary Simms tried to draw Luke into the conversation. ‘Listen to them,’ she said, putting her copper-coloured head on one side. A boy she’d been out with once had said she looked winning when she did that. ‘You’d think they’d never been in trouble theirselves…’ Mary’s was a soft heart. She didn’t like to think of those men all shut away in that nasty cold prison with no one to give them a cuddle.

But Luke was too preoccupied with the problems of art to care about a real-life drama. ‘The way I see it,’ he was saying, ‘is that once you get the plot blocked in you free yourself up for the dialogue, right?’

Mr Golightly had no notion of whether this was right or wrong. The truth was he felt a little out of his depth. The young man seemed full of enthusiasm but also full of unfamiliar terminology. And around him the conversation plucked worrying chords.