Mr Golightly's Holiday

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Golightly.

  Ellen Thomas turned to go inside.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Thomas,’ Morning said, remembering why she had made Ellen’s the final point of her run.

  Morning had overheard Nicky Pope, up at the Post Office Stores, mention that Ellen Thomas was ‘poorly’. From the sight of her it looked as if the woman might have ME, some sort of food intolerances certainly. Taking in the name of the house they stood outside – ‘Foxgloves’ – Morning remembered she had been meaning to have a word with the post office about getting the name of Hugh’s house, ‘Nutkins’, changed to ‘Morning Glory’.

  ‘Might I just pop in for a mo?’ she asked, unleashing her most empathic smile.

  Mr Golightly discerned a look of panic in Ellen Thomas’s eyes. He had returned from his outing in a mood to roll up his sleeves and start in at once on his soap opera. But Ellen Thomas had been neighbourly and a woman in distress spoke to his sense of protectiveness.

  ‘Ah, I was wondering if I, too, might have a word…?’

  ‘Of course…’ There was relief in Ellen Thomas’s glance at Mr Golightly as she vaguely gestured both guests inside.

  ‘And then,’ Morning Claxon’s voice had something of the swimming-bath attendant about it, ‘there’s colonic irrigation…’

  Mr Golightly, whose bowels needed no regulating, looked across at Ellen Thomas who was staring blankly out of the window.

  ‘I’m so sorry to interrupt,’ he said to Morning, ‘but I need a word with Mrs Thomas, ah, about the matter we talked of last time I was here…’

  ‘What matter?’ asked Ellen Thomas, almost rudely. Morning’s animated smiles had brought on fantasies of self-mutilation.

  ‘The, ah…’ he shot a look in the direction of the intruder. ‘I’m afraid it is private,’ he said, feebly.

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Morning, ‘don’t you two mind me. I must be off or Hughie will be frantic. He gets in a state when he doesn’t know where I’ve got to.’ With her back held in the correct postural alignment she rose from the sofa. ‘No, don’t get up – I can see my own way out.’ Obviously, there was a tendresse between the dear old pair – she was the last person to get in the way of Cupid’s work!

  When the front door had been heard to close Ellen Thomas put her hands over her face.

  Mr Golightly sat saying nothing, looking first at the picture of the crows flying over the cornfield and then across at the sheep, on the unpainted hills, which looked no more real than the painting of the landscape – like toy creatures set out on a child’s play farm.

  After a while Ellen said, ‘You see, since my husband died…’ and gave up. It wasn’t really Robert. For some reason, to Mr Golightly, even by omission, she didn’t want to lie.

  ‘You see,’ she said, again, ‘I have been asked, told…’ How could she explain…? And yet, somehow she wanted to explain to him. ‘I have been told to tell people…about love,’ she concluded, lamely.

  Mr Golightly, who knew minutely the truth and terror of this emotion, and its capacity to inspire and to ruin, looked at her but still said nothing.

  ‘I don’t know how to do it,’ said Ellen Thomas. She felt suddenly savage, thinking of the impossible task she had had forced upon her.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘without great wisdom and strength humankind should pray to be spared the experience of love.’ And he sighed, feeling he was in a unique position to know how impenetrable that condition is, perhaps most of all to those whom it masters.

  ‘I mean,’ said Ellen Thomas, taking courage from her fiat of anger, ‘why me? What, for God’s sake, do I know?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘since you ask,’ and his gaze, with its peculiar shifting quality, which had bent on her with unusual directness, now settled again in the direction of the dark crows, ‘I would say that perhaps what you know – it is a hard thing to explain – is that love is larger than life.’

  The drawn bow of the moon had soared austerely into the sky by the time the man left the beacon. He had accomplished what he had come for and now he must find food

  – his belly was clanking like an iron-clappered bell. The day and night spent in flight had raided his strength which the years of captivity had depleted. His limbs trembled with hunger and exhaustion as he made his way down the valley’s steep side, catching his ankle in the arm of a twisted bramble which ripped at his skin.

  The lights in Ellen Thomas’s sitting room were out because she had not troubled to put them on in the first place. After her neighbour left she had remained lying on the sofa. He had protected her, shown her solicitude and, now he was gone, she missed him. Tears slid down her face as she stared into the colourless dark.

  ‘Die? Die?’ suggested the young moon enticingly.

  Samson was safely stabled, but the ghost horse, who knew no stables, was making shadowy ellipses. It was some weeks since, towards evening, she had begun to see him cantering occasionally beside Samson – a white horse, the colour of old ivory.

  The audience of one became two as the man walked quietly towards the French windows and felt the back of his neck prick. As he turned to witness the circles made by the shaggy hooves and flowing mane, the slight movement caught Ellen Thomas’s eye.

  The man approached the windows and felt with his hand to see if he could ease them open. They slid smoothly and he stepped inside.

  Ellen Thomas shifted her limbs fractionally to be more comfortable for death. Well, it had come at last. She waited for the touch, sudden and appalling, praying that Robert might be on hand to see her safely through.

  The man, not seeing the still figure on the sofa, stole towards the farther door revealed in the cool moonshine. Feeling along the wall, he found his way to the kitchen. Nothing much in the fridge but a starving man is not fussy. He pushed aside a cut-glass bowl with three tinned prunes in it and plucked out a couple of hard-boiled eggs.

  He had crushed the shells of the eggs between his palms when a light was turned on and he was clean caught in the sudden illumination.

  APRIL

  1

  MR GOLIGHTLY HAD MADE LITTLE PROGRESS with his soap opera. In the early evening, he turned on the black-and-white TV set, for which he had to adjust the aerial many times, and watched Neighbours, hoping to pick up tips. There was no doubt about it, the writers of the series had a knack he lacked. When, after a simple supper, he took his regular evening stroll up to the Stag and Badger, to do the crossword with Luke and compare notes (somewhat pessimistic ones) about the day’s output, he heard all round him, in the talk of the people of Great Calne, just the kind of everyday dramas that he was vainly trying to work into his script.

  This raised a question in his mind. Did the characters on television talk the way they did because that was how people naturally thought and talked? Or was it, he wondered, the other way round? Did flesh-and-blood people come to resemble fictional characters, imitating what they heard on the TV or cinema screen or read in fiction? In which case, how you wrote and what you wrote about was God’s own responsibility.

  Perhaps it was the weight of this burden which held up Mr Golightly’s project. He woke each morning with firm intentions. After a walk round the garden, during which he would inspect the sky for signs of the coming weather (he had little faith in forecasters), he would chat to Samson before returning inside where he put on music. (He had become keen on some of the minor Italians and was currently on Corelli which, rather enterprisingly, he couldn’t help feeling, he had ordered from Amazon.) Then he washed and shaved and made a cup of coffee and, very often, another. After all this, he was ready to sit at the gateleg table.

  But try as he might, as the days passed, he could not get beyond the re-creation – or regeneration rather – of the original cast of characters. These he could see clearly in his mind’s eye.

  The eye of Mr Golightly’s mind was no near-sighted one and it was easy enough to bring before it the familiar forms and faces of the characters he had created
all that time ago. The action, after all, was, as Luke would say, already ‘blocked in’ from the original work. Put like that, the task he had set himself should be child’s play. But where to find a child? he ruefully asked himself one morning.

  His own son, now…he had retained the childlike mentality he was after, had kept, to an extraordinary degree, that uncompromising quality which was so often a thorn in the parental side. Children, in fact, were very like characters in fiction: you couldn’t legislate for, never mind predict, how they might turn out. Once you’d created them they took on an independent, and often defiant, turn of life.

  The drama he had written all that time ago, for example. How far had he been responsible for all the upsets and disasters? Could it have turned out differently? And the love story – which he had hoped, might redeem the tragic elements in the plot and had ended so ambiguously – was that all down to him? The tale, and the participants, had gathered its own momentum, which had moved under laws he had certainly created but seemed to have passed beyond his control.

  He sighed and pressed the start on the CD player. ‘Well, if your baby leaves you,/And you’ve gotta tale to tell –’

  Here, now, was another thing. The pain which seemed such an inevitable accompaniment of all relationships. Mr Golightly’s foot swung to the beat of the music which obscured the sound of a rap at the door. The rapping was repeated more insistently.

  ‘Hell!’ exclaimed Mr Golightly, not altogether sincerely, for he had come to a point in his procrastinations where interruptions were something of a mercy.

  When he had finally kicked open the front door, which had swollen again in the April rains, Mr Golightly saw before him a figure he vaguely recognised: an athletic-looking, ginger-haired young man wearing a large-checked sports jacket.

  ‘Brian Wolford. We met up at the Stag.’

  The prison officer from Princetown, recalled Mr Golightly, wondering what he wanted.

  Whatever it was, Brian Wolford didn’t wait to be invited but walked straight on in. Mr Golightly put ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on ‘Pause’ and offered coffee.

  ‘Thank you, sir, never touch it.’

  ‘Coke?’ There was a can left over from the six-pack.

  ‘Not offering me a line, are you, sir? ‘Scuse my little joke. No, I don’t touch sugar or artificial sweeteners either.’ Wolford revealed perfect teeth.

  Mr Golightly’s teeth were almost antique, and he rarely showed them, but his grin now had the look of an aged dog trying to outwit an annoying master.

  ‘Milk?’

  ‘Fat-free diet, I’m afraid!’ Wolford, whose manner did not suggest fear, massaged his chest. The gesture gave an impression that what lay beneath the shirt was as indisputably hairy as the hand.

  ‘Water?’

  ‘I won’t if it hasn’t been filtered, sir, begging your pardon.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Mr Golightly. He was intrigued to note how the refusal of hospitality was creating more attention than a demand for it.

  ‘Mind if I take a pew?’

  ‘I’m so sorry…’ His social skills had run their course but the man’s over-sureness invited rudeness.

  ‘Sorry to trouble you, sir, it’s this character we’ve got who’s done a runner,’ said Wolford, confidentially. As he spoke his tongue flicked lightly between his teeth.

  There was no one about to hear them in the dust-dancing sunlit parlour but a tone of confidentiality, Mr Golightly observed to himself, has more to do with the speaker’s sense of self-importance than a wish for privacy. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thing is, up there we don’t see how he could’ve got away from the area. We got a cordon round the moor quick as scratch your bum –’ Mr Golightly shifted his buttocks uncomfortably – ‘so we’re asking around again, getting folk to search their memories, know what I mean?’

  Earlier in his existence, as Mr Golightly was the first to acknowledge, his character had included a punitive streak, but time had softened his responses and nowadays he tried to let tenderness rule. His son had had a liking for miscreants and malefactors – had even sought out their company in preference to the well-to-do intelligentsia where he could easily have held his own among the best of them. The image of the escaped prisoner, hunted like a beast by men like Wolford, brought in its wake painful memories of other persecutions.

  Perhaps detecting some unspoken dissent, the prison officer assumed a more official manner.

  ‘Just thought I’d call by, ask you to keep a look out. You’re new to the area. Familiarity breeds contempt.’ Wolford showed more of the superior teeth. ‘You might notice something which folk round here wouldn’t.’

  ‘When are we speaking of?’ enquired Mr Golightly. His memory may have been failing him lately but he recalled the date of the escape perfectly: it was the day at the Stag and Badger when the sun had glinted on Mary Simms’s hair. A prison officer would have no official role in the search. The visit, Mr Golightly guessed, had more to do with nosy curiosity, or, heaven help him, with yet another request to assist with some wretched form of creative writing.

  ‘Now I’ve got you in my clutches, if you’ll pardon the liberty, sir, there’s this idea I had for a book. Stop me if you’ve heard it,’ requested Wolford, sitting back confidently in the easy chair.

  From his post in the yew tree, Johnny Spence had been spying on the various comings and goings of Great Calne. It was the Easter holidays, so for the time being he had no obvious need of concealment. But his stepdad was off work, and his mum had gone somewhere, so there was no safety at home. And Johnny hadn’t many friends – none now he’d knocked Dave Sparrow’s teeth down his head for him for saying he was queer. Partly out of boredom, and unwilling to waste an opportunity, Johnny elected to see if there was anything worth nicking from the church.

  As Johnny slid jaguar-style from the tree, Brian Wolford was leaving Spring Cottage. The idea for the novel, about a sex offender doing life, had yielded no response from Golightly. He had made it pretty plain that he wasn’t much interested. Probably jealousy. Those writer johnnies were touchy as hell about their status.

  Wolford’s own temper was uncertain; as a child he had knowingly starved his pet rabbits and his mother’s cat knew to keep out of his way when he was in a bad mood. Spotting Johnny Spence, Wolford quickened his stride and was in time to grab hold of the boy at the church door.

  ‘Whatcha do that for?’ Johnny asked, balefully rubbing his arm. Wolford’s grip was strong enough to have bruised the flesh. Up at the prison, it was common knowledge that it was wise to stay on the right side of Wolford.

  ‘What you up to going into the church, then?’

  ‘Just going in there, aren’t I?’ Johnny knew what Wolford did. His stepdad was fond of telling him how he’d land inside himself one day.

  ‘Oh, a churchgoer, are we?’

  ‘Said I’d go there for the chappie yonder?’ said Johnny quickly, nodding his head towards Spring Cottage.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Wolford. ‘What does Mr Golightly want you to do that for, then?’

  Inspiration is democratic – it abandons great artists without a backward glance and alights on the shoulders of ragamuffins. ‘Wanted me to get him a hymn book, didn’t he?’ Elvis had been religious.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Wolford’s eyebrows signalled pleasure at this patent fiction. ‘Hymn books, is it? We’ll see what Mr Golightly says when I ask him, won’t we?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Johnny, uneasily.

  Wolford looked at his victim’s face more closely. ‘You live up Storey Lane, don’t you? Your dad know what you’re doing?’ He knew Phil Spence by reputation – a drunk and a layabout, probably a ‘domestic violent’ too.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Johnny, too quickly this time.

  ‘Well, now, you get back to your hymn books then, Mister Spence, and maybe I’ll pay your dad a visit. I’ll be asking questions about you, don’t you worry.’

  Johnny’s sense of danger was acute: he knew that it wasn’t safe to tangl
e with a sadist. As he and the screw were speaking, he’d seen, in his peripheral vision, the tenant of Spring Cottage go out of the house and off up the street. Mr Golightly had been OK. Maybe his best bet was to go after him and explain. If Wolford spoke to his stepdad he’d be for it – and so would his mum.

  The prison officer’s visit had left Mr Golightly feeling the need for a change of air. He had not cared for Wolford, nor his fiction proposal, which struck Mr Golightly as based on something unsavoury into which he did not wish to delve. And the mention of the escaped prisoner had touched off those insidious feelings which so haunted and perplexed him.

  The fact was that Mr Golightly had a secret – or rather, not a secret exactly, because it was not that he was hiding it from anyone – certainly not himself, which is often the way with a secret. But there was no one he could tell, or talk over with, the matter which was always on his mind.

  The idea which he could not shake off was that he had in some way been responsible for the catastrophe which had deprived him of his beloved son and had had such widespread consequences. Not for one second, since he had watched his boy die, had he been free from the carking sense that he had been crucial in that unbearable end. Not that the appalling affair had been – could ever have been – his plan for his boy; but the lad had somehow got it into his head that to embark on the course he had taken was what his father expected of him…

  There had been complicating factors: Mr Golightly had been about other business at the time; regrettably, he had trusted to others to see that the boy – who, from the first, had shown a reckless disregard for consequences – came to no harm. The boy’s mother, for instance. Somehow he had supposed that a woman’s sense would have…but what was the use in going down that regretful road? His mother had been devastated too; as had all the women the boy had collected around him. There was no doubt the lad had been attractive to women, as any man who is careless of his own safety will be. And of course, whenever he opened his mouth he attracted not just women – but people of all kinds. He had a way that drew every type to him, far more effectively than his father had managed. Indeed, Mr Golightly mused, it was his own foolish imperviousness to human psychology which in part caused the trouble in the first place…