Mr Golightly's Holiday

by Salley Vickers

  He dug out his walking shoes and went out into the lane where Wilfred bounded to meet him as if he were an old friend. It was a while since they had walked up to the moor together, and he had returned to rescue the dog’s owner from the woman with the impressive bosom who had shown such concern for his bowels.

  Wilfred had taken an animal’s unilateral decision and run on ahead. The banks the dog was exploring had thickened with foliage since Mr Golightly had last walked there. Nettles were unfurling tender green leaves. Dock and sorrel were shooting up. Tiny violets, purple, mauve and white, grew scattered among the green growth, like wanton gems dropped by some ebullient and careless woman. Azureheaded chaffinches with apricot breasts pinked ecstatically along the dark, white-blossomed branches of blackthorn and flew ahead in dipping waves as he followed the Labrador up the lane. The April air was gentle and seductive. Nothing is so beautiful as spring, Mr Golightly said to himself.

  It was vexing, therefore, to meet Sam Noble at the cattle grid.

  Sam Noble had not forgotten his suggestion to Mr Golightly that the cultural arm of Great Calne would be strengthened by the formation of a writers’ group. Nor had he forgotten that it was he who had undertaken to get it going. What luck he had all that experience with the Mummers in Kensal Rise! He greeted Mr Golightly with enthusiasm, explaining that he had dropped by to canvass Luke – not about the car park, he wouldn’t want Golightly to think that his mind was not sometimes on ‘higher things’! – but about his idea for a writers’ group. ‘You’re the busy fellow – any day’ll suit us,’ Sam declared.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Golightly, who was unfamiliar with the unsolicited largesse which corrals. He wondered if he could refer to a business appointment in town; but with the date of the proposed meeting in his own control how could he arrange for it also to take place in his absence? This was just the kind of nuisance his staff had dealt with. For a second his mind turned regretfully to Martha: despite her temperamental behaviour, she would have come up with some saving strategy.

  ‘Luke’s keen,’ Sam announced.

  This was not quite true. Luke had been woken after a disturbed night, passed under the influence of Hiawatha’s insistent rhythms, by a phone call from Mary Simms, who wondered if he could possibly give her a hand with her Open University assignment. Aside from Longfellow, Luke knew very little about poetry. From being wakened suddenly, he had answered Mary awkwardly, Mary had rung off discouraged, and both parties had been left with the depressing sense of inadequacy brought on by a failed communication.

  The arrival of Sam Noble was at least a distraction and Luke was mildly flattered to be asked to join a writers’ group; but mostly he was hoping Sam would buzz off so he could have a smoke in peace. Luke was a pacific soul; it had been the path of least resistance to agree to Sam’s suggestions.

  A regular piece of luck, Sam said to himself, that he should meet Golightly just as he had got young Luke on board. And he had extracted a promise that a date would be set when they would all meet at Sam’s house. Satisfied that he now had the muse if not by the scruff of her neck at least by the hem of her robe, he walked, well pleased with himself, down the lane.

  Mr Golightly climbed slowly with Wilfred to his favourite spot on the tor. Making a shade with his hands round his eyes, he watched a pair of buzzards with their stiff stilted wings sail, in a regal mating dance, across the face of the sun. A little way off, stood a group of Dartmoor ponies, two the almost-black brown of their breed and one, larger, hardly a pony at all, a ghostly white. Their manes lifted in the breeze as, begging no favours and enjoining no compunction, they patiently cropped the perpetually renewing vegetable carpet of the Moor.

  Mr Golightly gazed for a long while on the scene before him. His was an imagination which, in its time, had fashioned many and diverse things. The imagination is a creator of worlds – and from his had issued gods and kingdoms, peoples and purposes, stables and citadels, deserts and mountain tops, the defeat of principalities, the frail victory of hope. Before him now, the sun was perfecting its own creation, sprinkling the vegetation with a shifting silver sheen. Out of the cool earth, through the sun’s unflagging warmth, sprang herbs and grasses and trees. And deep within the earth’s fiery centre its power formed the ores of precious metals, silver and gold – emblems of human nobility. But where was that nobility realised on the earth?

  Not, to be sure, among the population of Great Calne. It seemed that such virtues had faded from the world, leaving behind only a rusty stain. Perhaps the failure lay in him? Maybe his creative powers, on which so much of his identity had been based, had all been a sham, and the world which had once seemed so various, so beautiful, so new was nothing more than a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight…

  If Martha were here she would probably advise a short course of Seroxat. The visit from Wolford had depressed him. He had come away for a rest, a holiday, yet he found he was tired: tired of trying to dodge people who wanted something incalculable from him, tired of trying to master the tricks of a world which seemed to have shot ahead of him, tired of his efforts to weave the lives of those he had created into his idea for a soap opera. Tired, in short, of the memorials of his own inadequate vocation. It was a footling, foolhardy, crack-brained scheme – he’d do best to abandon it, return to his former privacy and allow the slow seepage of his fame to continue unarrested. Who would miss him, after all?

  He turned to make his way back down towards Great Calne and found that he was no longer alone. The boy, Johnny Spence, had followed him to the tor.

  2

  WHEN ELLEN THOMAS, LYING ON THE SOFA in her sitting room in the expectation of death, had found that nothing happened, she had felt at first let-down, then affronted. She had steeled herself for the promised end – and then nothing…

  After a while she got up and went towards the kitchen. The door was ajar and the light from the open fridge lent a sepulchral glow to the face which turned to hers. It looked startled; not the awe-inspiring aspect one hopes for in the Angel of Death. Across her mind flitted the notion that perhaps she should offer him something – a cup of tea, a dry sherry…

  The face had melted into fearfulness. It’s not the Angel of Death, she thought, regretfully. It’s a body in need.

  A man stood there, a shabby shape, blinking as she switched on the light. ‘Shut the fridge door,’ said Ellen. It was all she could think of to say. Then she added, remembering what she had considered offering the putative angel, ‘Would you like a drink – a cup of tea?’

  Later, when she thought about Jos Bainbridge, Ellen realised that he had trembled when she found him, that it was he and not she who had been afraid. Not registering this at the time, she had gone to the kettle and filled it with water, busying herself setting it to boil so that he could compose himself. He had simply stood there, his face pale, sweating gawkily.

  ‘So,’ she had said, her back turned to him, no longer bothered whether he had come to stab it, ‘what can I do for you?’

  The words laid down an invisible marker.

  ‘I need help.’

  In losing her husband, Ellen had lost those everyday occasions to give help which remain unregistered until they are gone. Helping others, she had gathered, was no longer considered a respectable – or even acceptable – element in loving them; but the impulse had not died with Robert.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Come into the other room, won’t you, and let’s have some tea and we’ll talk about it…’

  The sight of Johnny Spence’s fearful face appearing over the rocks of the tor also pressed a spring in Mr Golightly’s breast.

  ‘John?’ he asked, and waited.

  Johnny hadn’t planned what he was going to say. Muddled in a nightmarish mix in his mind was the image of his stepdad, Wolford and the prospect of Dartmoor prison.

  ‘Please, sir,’ he said, fear summoning words he knew from some dim past to be impressive, ‘I’m sore afraid.’

  Like El
len Thomas, Mr Golightly was not immune to the pleasures of helping others. The boy had already formed associations in his mind, painful yet affectionate, and the combination was a potent one.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Mr Golightly. He found his heart was skipping slightly.

  ‘Please, sir,’ said Johnny, reverting to a more familiar idiom, ‘I’m fucked!’

  Watching the boy skulk off up the high street, Wolford had felt a sense of loss. He stood contemplating the boy’s back and thin shoulders before deciding to follow him. The brief start the boy had meant that the athletic Wolford reached the tor only a fraction behind Johnny just as Wilfred began to bark.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he called, appearing, ginger and burly, over the rocks.

  Johnny had had no time to explain his fix to the man he had instinctively followed. He stood, head drooped in resignation, waiting for the beans to be spilled. God alone knew why he had made up that fuckwit story about the hymn book.

  ‘Yes?’ Mr Golightly spoke shortly. His sense of privacy was strong; to be tracked by the very man who had driven him out to the place where he most enjoyed his solitude was an abomination.

  ‘Sorry to trouble you again, sir,’ Wolford’s voice bore a patina of servility. ‘Only it’s this young lad here.’

  ‘Yes?’ Mr Golightly repeated. A perceptive listener might have detected a thread of menace in the voice.

  ‘He work for you, does he?’

  Mr Golightly was watching a crowd of starlings fall for cover like a shower of stones from the sky and disappear from sight beneath the feet of the sheep who grazed the common land. Like as not that meant there was a sparrowhawk about. Shepherds of old, who lived close to nature and spent long months alone on the moor with only their flock and their dog and the realm of the invisible for company, felt a special fondness for starlings on account of their association with sheep.

  Mr Golightly, who shared something of the shepherds’ faith in the unseen, shared also their affection for the gregarious birds. He shaded his eyes, looking for the neat hunting hawk whose habit was to bite off the starling’s head, fastidiously leaving the beak beside the body.

  ‘Yes.’

  Wolford’s smile, which had begun by being insolent, faded, and the cheeks beneath the pale ginger fuzz turned a darker red.

  ‘Pardon me, sir?’

  ‘I said “Yes”, he does work for me.’

  Wolford, a habitual juggler with the truth, had a nose for when it was being played with. ‘Mind telling me what he does exactly, sir?’

  ‘I don’t, though I might ask in return, Mr Wolford, what that has to do with you. I am a writer, as you know. John has been helping me with my research.’

  It would have been hard to say who was the more surprised at these words, Wolford or Johnny. The prison officer, trying to hold on to his temper, stared at a white horse with a flowing mane which was cropping the grass just beneath them.

  ‘I see.’

  Mr Golightly said nothing. He had finally spotted the elegant outline of the sparrowhawk and appeared to be watching it intently.

  ‘Good,’ said Wolford. It was plain his emotion ran on other lines.

  ‘Yes?’ said Mr Golightly again, turning back, and the two men, with the boy between them, stood in silence on the tor top till Wilfred began to yap.

  ‘Well,’ said Wolford, ‘I’ll be off, then.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mr Golightly, watching the thwarted hawk’s outline wheel away across the bright dome of the sky.

  3

  EVEN THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER VISITED Dartmoor may have heard of Widecombe because of the famous fair, and the song in which Tom Pearce loaned his grey mare so that Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawk, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all could ride there. Although the village itself is set in a basin within surrounding heights, the ways up to Widecombe-in-the-Moor are notoriously steep, which is why Tom Pearce’s overburdened mare gave up the ghost before the party reached their destination. In those days, the horse was the chief form of Dartmoor’s transport; today most travellers go by car or, if they are on holiday, and health or leisure minded, on foot.

  Johnny Spence’s mother, Rosie, was not on holiday but she owned no car and had grown up with a thorough knowledge of the paths across the moor. She set off for Widecombe by the ancient Abbot’s Way – irregularly marked by tipsily leaning stone crosses, whose wise, or foolish, legends are too worn by wind and weather to be easily deciphered. The Way, now also somewhat indecipherable, once formed one of the principal routes across the breadth of the moor, from the imposing Buckfast Abbey to the rival one at Tavistock.

  Rosie didn’t walk far along the medieval trail but soon branched up and crossed one of the surviving clapper bridges, built about the time that the monks’ sandalled feet regularly trod the heather corridor of their Way. Rosie stopped in the middle of the flat bridge, made of huge slabs of unquarried moorland stone; beneath it the brawling East Dart ran bois-terously to meet its parent. She was remembering her grandfather, who had been old enough to stable the packhorses for which the cyclopic bridges were built to cross the tracery of rivers seeping from the wide sponge of the Dartmoor peat.

  Grandad was the first to call her ‘Rosie’, after Rosamundi, one of the old roses he grew in his garden, where he also grew sweet peas and runner beans which embraced in a pretty tangle around bamboo wigwams. It seemed to Rosie that it had been a more appealing world then. Few people, these days, knew what ‘clapper’ bridges were, or why they had come into being; or had heard any of the stories her grandad used to tell her, in his greenhouse, while he gently pushed, with big, cracked thumbs, the seedlings into shallow wooden boxes of peaty earth. You never saw those boxes now.

  Or heard the tales – like the one about the man who salted his dad, because the weather was too foul for the undertaker to visit to his lonely place on the Moor; or the great storm, when the Devil rode into Widecombe and snatched a member of the congregation playing cards at the back of the church. On the way to Widecombe, the Devil had stopped to demand drink from an innkeeper’s wife, who reported afterwards that she heard the liquor sizzle in the diabolic throat.

  Johnny had loved that story when he was little – not that you could call him ‘big’ now. But he had a grown-up way with him for all he was so hard to handle. Even as a bab he had looked at her with those slow hazel eyes which scared her almost. An old soul, her grandma had said.

  Her grandma had died right after her grandad, a shrewd, bony woman. ‘I’ve not a moment’s peace thinking of the muddle that man’ll get into without me,’ she had declared, crossly, when a neighbour called to condole. She was dead herself a month after her husband.

  Their only son, Rosie’s father – Rosie had wondered how he had come to be conceived for she never saw the old couple touch, but then, sex was strange and there were no rules – had become a local tenant farmer. Rosie had gone with him to Widecombe Fair, where the ruddled sheep – whose red markings looked like a child’s poster paint – were sold in the days when people still bought English mutton and wool. What they did nowadays Rosie didn’t know and her dad wasn’t likely to tell her. They hadn’t spoken in years. Please God it wouldn’t be like that with her and Johnny!

  But it might be. History repeated. Grandma had often said so and Rosie’d lived long enough to tell the truth of it. Patterns got into your brain, someone else who’d also loved her once said, and then got into your life and played hell with it. You always hurt the ones you love, the song said. She didn’t want to hurt Johnny. But then what about her now, leaving him with Phil, who was capable of hitting Johnny so hard he could easily land up in hospital.

  As Rosie walked on she began to make out in the distance the shape of one of Dartmoor’s most noted attractions. Widecombe Church, dedicated to St Pancras (famed for the railway station), is called the ‘Cathedral of the Moor’ on account of its lofty tower. A hundred years or so after the church’s conception, those who worked the tin mines
were numerous enough to make a fair-sized congregation and it was these ‘tinners’ who provided the funds to put up, as a thanksgiving for their prosperity, the Perpendicular tower.

  The less prosperous holders of the ancient forest tenements, from the valleys of the East Dart, also resorted to the church, ‘forest’ on Dartmoor being those historic areas where animals once roamed wild and tenants could take ‘everything that may do them good save vert and venison’. ‘Vert’, Rosie’s grandad had explained to her, was the green wood of the growing tree. The red deer whose flesh provided the forbidden venison – the cause of many hangings – had been hunted out long before hanging for poaching, and then, finally, hanging itself, was abolished. There were legendary Dartmoor hunters her grandad told her of: Childe the Hunter, for instance, whose tomb lay near the mire, where, as a ‘child’ herself, in flight from her father, she had half hunted death. It was her nightmare now that Johnny might hunt it there too.

  It was no accident that Rosie’s mind was fixed on death because it was to visit the graves of her grandparents that she was walking to Widecombe. Her grandmother had died in the month of April, and, in recent years, Rosie had evolved a ritual in which she paid her respects on that date to the man and woman who had been her steadiest examples of affection. She missed them – the way you missed people you had taken for granted, the way you missed anything you took for granted when it disappeared.

  The heather caught at her long skirt and her swinging stride started up birds before her. Maybe she would see a lark. She took it for a lucky sign when she saw her grandad’s favourite bird on her way to visit him and Grandma. When she was Johnny’s age, she’d won a prize at school in a competition, when she’d been the only one to know the name for a collection of larks – her grandad taught her the word for that too, but she couldn’t remember it now.