Mr Golightly's Holiday

by Salley Vickers

  It was Paula’s day off and she had an appointment at ‘Georgina’s’ in Oakburton for a bikini wax. There was a purpose to this. It was time, she reckoned, to move in on Jackson. He’d been sidestepping her with stories of ‘work’, which you’d have to be off your head if you believed, and having hung on so long she was buggered if she was letting him get away. But before she could move in with Jackson there was her mum to deal with.

  Her mum had been giving her a hard time lately, moaning on about how she’d bust the washing machine dying her bedspread purple, which was a joke when you considered how they’d had the machine since her mum’s boyfriend was around – at least fifteen years – and it had made a sound like it had a ball and chain round it then! She knew that, ‘cos she’d used to lay in her bed hearing the sound of the ball and chain, hoping that her mum’s boyfriend would end up with one round him too, if he whacked her mum one more time. Not that she didn’t often feel like whacking her mum herself these days…

  However, she didn’t want her mum out of pocket, so she needed to get that Luke Weatherall into her room for a lodger; which meant she was going to have to see to getting him there. She didn’t expect too many problems, even though that silly cow Mary Simms was getting nowhere with him fast.

  Mary had tried her best with Luke, but it is well known that love is blind – which, in practice, will often mean that young men, who turn out later to have been in love, will remain quite ignorant of this happy truth until it has been revealed to them. Mary had worn her sweetest smile and had tried her hardest with poetry. She had dropped, for Luke’s benefit, several lines from ‘The Lady of Shalott’ while serving up his bitter at the Stag. But Tennyson seemed to be lost on Luke – he only wanted to talk to Mr Golightly. It had crossed Mary’s mind to offer to ‘do’ for the tenant of Spring Cottage as a way of maybe bumping into Luke; but Mr Golightly seemed to be one of those self-sufficient men who liked to ‘do’ for himself, which was baffling to Mary, who clung to old-fashioned gender ideals.

  Paula, however, had brought up her mum single-handed and had methods of getting her way unknown to Mary Simms. Reaching Oakburton car park, she examined her face closely in the mirror of her mum’s Micra and decided, in preparation for the seduction of Luke, to have an eyelash dye and her eyebrows tidied.

  By the bottle bank, she met Sam Noble, who was calling by the surgery to collect a prescription from Dr Rhys.

  Sam had not been sleeping well. His plans for the tearooms to be owned by the village, collectively, had fallen on apathetic ears. Morning Claxon had been making energetic use of her verve with the women and her figure with the men to advance the cause of the alternative health centre, and there were those, of both sexes, who had been seduced by the prospect of massage with essential oils without thought to the likely consequences. In Sam’s eyes, these could only be a nasty crop of houses outside his bedroom window and the lowered value of his own. The thought played havoc with his sleep.

  Paula, who regarded Sam with the kind of contempt she reserved for her Auntie Edna’s incontinent poodle, lowered her glance. This was practice for her proposed encounter with Luke, but Sam was not to know this. Not since the Maltese air hostess had any woman lowered her eyes at him.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Paula, ‘where you off to then?’ She swayed her pelvis just a fraction.

  ‘Oh, just to the doctor’s,’ said Sam, and flushed.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Paula, assuming an indifference which concealed the real thing. ‘Not feeling too good?’

  ‘Nothing serious,’ said Sam, torn between a wish for feminine sympathy and a desire to be seen as manly. ‘A touch of insomnia.’ He frowned, trying to look as if he was a man weighed down by grave worldly concerns.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Paula. Her flat, compunctionless face staring unblinkingly at his.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee at Green Gables when you’ve finished your errands?’

  ‘Errands!’ thought Paula. Stupid git spoke like someone in an old film. ‘Yeah, all right, then.’

  Paula, in her short skirt, with Sam looking after her, stepped briskly in her platforms up the street to Georgina’s.

  ‘Georgina’ was in fact called Di, but she’d bought the franchise as a going concern from the previous beautician who had bestowed her name upon the business. When Paula said she had come for a bikini wax, Di suggested she might like to try a ‘Brazilian’.

  ‘Really, they’re all doing it in London. A nice neat line down the front. Some people go all the way and have it all off – it’s called a “Hollywood”, I believe, but first time round I would recommend the “Brazilian”. I promise you, it’s getting really popular.’

  Paula owned a couple of thongs which she’d relegated to the back of her drawer after she’d landed Jackson. She’d thought, in fact, to dig them out as part of the next phase in her campaign to move in with him. The ‘Brazilian’ fitted in with her plans.

  ‘I suggest we do the wax first,’ Di proposed. ‘The old eyes tend to water a bit when we’re working downstairs…’

  Sam, temazepam in his pocket, was waiting in Green Gables when Paula arrived, walking slightly gingerly. She sat down, crossing and uncrossing her legs to get the feel of the depilations below. ‘A coffee, ta,’ she requested. ‘Black, I’m on a diet.’

  ‘Surely there’s no need for that?’

  Sam was looking at her in a way which provoked in Paula extreme disgust. Now she’d got him all worked up she was landed with the bother of getting rid of the old idiot.

  ‘Have to watch me figure, don’t I?’ Paula was mentally trying on each of the two thongs; one, a kind of lilacky mauve, with little rosettes, was the prettier, while the other, black and pink, matched her bra.

  ‘You have a very nice figure,’ said Sam, staring at Paula’s chest.

  ‘S’a Wonderbra,’ said Paula, deciding that the moment to wean Sam had arrived.

  But a swallowed bait is not so readily regurgitated and Paula had done no more than stir up the sludge of fantasy which lies at the bottom of the sanest human heart; Sam was already picturing a welcoming Paula spread out on the bed, in her underwear.

  ‘Well, you look wonderful in it.’

  Jesus, give us a break! Paula thought. With the Brazilian wax and her eyebrows plucked to a dangerous pitch, she could afford no more time on this old fart.

  ‘Yeah, well, I must be off, I’m ‘fraid…’

  ‘Oh, don’t go…’ The words were out before he could hold them back. Conscious that he might have betrayed too much, Sam tried to rescue the situation. ‘I was wondering about the tearooms…’

  ‘Yeah?’ Paula turned a face of vague interest. She had heard from her mum about the tearoom saga.

  ‘You’d be the perfect person to run them, with all your pub experience…’

  In Sam’s imagination there was Paula greeting him in a frilly white apron over a very short black dress.

  ‘Oh, right, yeah!’

  ‘So –’ said Sam, rushing on possessed by an impossible idea –’ if I were to buy the tearooms, how about it if you were to come and run them? Say you will…?’

  Brian Wolford’s mum, Cherie, was fond of the expression: There’s no fool like an old fool.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll think about it.’ No harm in agreeing and it got the old twit off her back. Paula was itching to get home and try out the results of Di’s handiwork under the mauve thong, which would go nicely, she’d decided, with her purple sequinned T-shirt.

  4

  THE GRAVEYARD AT WIDECOMBE EXTENDS courteously towards the surrounding fields which, in turn, almost spill on to the encompassing moor. Rosie’s grandparents, who lived all their lives within ten miles of the village, had married, at eighteen, in Widecombe’s church.

  As a girl, Rosie had kept in a box of treasures, along with a jay’s feather and the skull of a weasel, the crimson velvet rose her grandma had stitched into her chemise for her grandad to find on their wedding night when he first undressed her. In memory
of this she had planted, on their joined graves, a deep red rose, whose scent in summer brought to her mind Grandma’s favourite hymn, ‘Summer suns are glowing’.

  Rosie had brought with her some of the green garden twine she also associated with her grandad and a dibble, with which she planned to clear her grandparents’ graveyard plot of weeds. Beneath the rose she had planted daffodils, which she saw had outgrown their strength and required binding. The granite gravestone read: ‘William and Evelyn Coaker, 1899–1986’ and beneath this ‘In death they were not divided’.

  As she worked Rosie sang to herself. ‘Summer suns are glowing / Over land and sea.’ They were almost twins, her grandparents – born just a month apart and sweethearts since school, which they’d left together at fourteen, he to go to the stables at Oakburton, she to go into service at Buckfast. ‘Happy light is flowing / Bountiful and free.’ Nowadays people would say by having only each other they had missed out on experience, but when you thought what ‘experience’ could bring, you might say you went through life more happily without it.

  When she had cleared the weeds to her satisfaction, Rosie crossed the road from the church to one of the cafés which promised ‘Full Cream Devon Teas’, where she ordered a coffee and a ham sandwich. The sun was unexpectedly strong and it was warm enough to sit outside. She lit a cigarette and watched a woman dragging a child across the green yelling, ‘Look what you’ve done to your trousers, for Christ’s sake!’ and wondered what Christ would have said on the subject. The things people did and said in his name. As if Jesus gave a stuff about mud on some poor kid’s trousers.

  The weeping, raging boy reminded her of Johnny. He never cried now, but when they first moved in with Phil it was every night, till the threat of Phil’s hand dried up those fierce tears. Though it hurt her then to hear her boy’s sobbing cries, she almost wished he would cry again. Something had shut down in the candid hazel eyes. But she knew her son – she knew he knew she was unhappy; and he knew, very likely, that it was all her own fault.

  As Rosie sat in Widecombe reviewing her past, Paula was engaged in furthering future plans. She inspected her naked body in the bathroom mirror. Satisfied with her new denuded look, she set out for Lavinia’s barn in her second-tightest pair of jeans. The encounter with Sam had merely confirmed her view that sex was the way to get a man to do what you wanted.

  Luke, innocent of the treat in store for him, was surprised to find Paula when he answered the bell. His preoccupation with the myth of Creation had left him uncertain of his visitor’s identity. Confused, but polite, he invited her upstairs. Paula negotiated the stairs with some difficulty: Luke’s loft was some way up, and the tightness of the jeans, in concert with the effects of the Brazilian, produced unusual caution.

  Gaining the upper floor first, Luke hurriedly pushed some clothes under the Indian bedspread and shoved a dirty plate of cigarette ends under the bed with his bare foot. ‘Coffee?’ he enquired, as Paula, rather breathy from the jeans and the unaccustomed exercise, emerged.

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’ Paula lowered the freshly dyed lashes, but Luke had his back to her and was filling the kettle with a good deal of noisy splashing so the effect was wasted.

  Luke’s conversation was limited. Like many artists, writers in particular, he was not much interested in flesh-and-blood human beings. When he had established Paula worked at the pub and run the short course of the weather there was only his own narrative poem – over which he was still stuck, he explained to Paula – or Hiawatha to fall back on. But here at least he was on familiar ground. And a trapped audience was an opportunity not to be passed up. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’ll see the problem if I read you a couple stanzas…’

  There is a network of letter boxes across Dartmoor. By tradition, visitors to these hidden sites stamp postcards or sign, or write verses in, the books hidden inside the concealed metal boxes. But this strange system grew from a much older tradition, through which lovers and friends communicated across the moor’s inhospitable geography and the even greater inhospitality of economic circumstance.

  Years back, Rosie’s grandad had shown her the private place he had fashioned so that he and her grandma could keep in touch when he was a stable lad and she in service, and they could not hope for many of their days off to coincide. Later, as a girl, Rosie had shown the secret to one other person, and in time, as a young mother, she had also shown his great-grandad’s postbox to Johnny. They had played, when he was small, at leaving notes to the Dartmoor spirits, who must be appeased lest they lead you astray and into the mire. Once she had said, ‘If you ever run away from home you must promise to leave me a message here,’ and wise-eyed Johnny had said, ‘You too, Mum…’

  Rosie walked back from Widecombe towards Buckland Beacon. Around her lay the tranquil Moor, discreet and unjudging. All at once the name for a collection of larks flew back to her – an ‘exaltation’! Her grandad would be pleased she’d remembered. She pictured him, getting up out of his bed of earth at Widecombe, bored with inactivity, and wandering up here in his nightshirt. For all its wildness, there was a safety in the Moor you could never be sure of with people. If she left a note in Grandad’s postbox Johnny might find it. He was quick, Johnny. He rarely forgot anything. To ring and maybe get Phil, or leave a message that he could get his hands on, was too risky. It was best for her and Johnny if she was out of the way for the time being.

  Paula had nodded off.

  ‘…Till from Hiawatha’s wigwam

  Kahgahgee, the King of Ravens,

  Screamed and quivered in his anger,

  And from all the neighbouring tree-tops

  Cawed and croaked the black marauders.

  “Ugh!” the old men all responded,

  From their seats beneath the pine-trees!’

  ‘See what I mean,’ Luke said, pausing at last. ‘You can’t get away from Longfellow’s rhythm.’

  Paula, coming to with a start, was inclined to fall in with the old men’s responses. ‘Yeah, well, I’d better be going, then.’ A kind of respect, forced by a single-mindedness superior to her own, made her unusually polite. Before Luke’s absolute absorption in his poetry, sexual allure had no chance.

  ‘Did you call about anything special?’ asked Luke, showing her down the stairs again.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Paula, driven by the unfamiliar experience to explicitness. ‘I was wondering if you fancied taking over me room at me mum’s. You could have it on the money you get from the social.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Luke, ever polite. ‘Yeah, ta. This is OK for now but thanks for the offer.’

  ‘Jesus, she’s welcome to him!’ Paula said aloud, as she picked her heels warily over the bars of the cattle grid. She could almost feel sorry for that stupid Mary Simms.

  5

  THE GARDENER PROMISED BY NICKY POPE HAD never shown up, so Mr Golightly had fallen into the habit of keeping Spring Cottage’s garden tidy himself. This, in part, was to ensure that the Reverend Fisher, or Keith, would not visit with offers of Christian aid. But it also gave a chance to return to an old pastime. The apple tree by the parlour window, for example, looked as if it hadn’t been tended to in years.

  Long ago, Mr Golightly had been something of an arborealist and had made quite a name for himself through a rare breed of tree, heralded for its ability to resist disease. But there had been problems with marketing it and in the end he had abandoned his interest in that part of the business, which was nowadays overseen by the industrious Bill and Mike.

  It was many years since he had had anything to do with horticulture. To stroll in an English cottage garden, as he was this morning, was a rare joy. A garden is a gladsome thing, he said to himself, surveying the new translucent lime-green growth on the beech hedge.

  Not for the first time it struck him that the life of a country labourer was one which might have suited him: where habits are so ingrained they become like instincts, hard labour from day to day in sun and wind and rain, with the weekly break and
rest – a life not unlike his own had once seemed to promise. But a labourer would have a wife and family to provide the staple comfort of kinship. The solitary state was one he had lived in so long it seemed a condition of his very existence. Yet once, he, too, had had a family, of sorts, he was close to.

  As is often the case on a holiday, away from quotidian concerns, his mind free from the trammels of time, Mr Golightly found he was tending to brood. The original point of his break with the daily round pressed less urgently on him: with each passing day he found himself letting his thoughts, like an unleashed falcon, circle in wider and wider speculation.

  He woke early in the narrow bedroom, but now, instead of starting out of bed, as he had at the beginning of his break, he found he was tending to lie, letting thoughts drift and collect, like the leaves from autumnal trees which make piles of mulch for the garden.

  It was as if he was giving space to something he had feared. Was ‘feared’ the right word? Fear had an object – something tangible, definable, at least, with which one could do combat, strive and hope to overcome. This vague looming inchoate sense was more impalpable. Perhaps it was what he had heard philosophers call – without having much clue as to what they might mean – ’existential anxiety’. He seemed to remember that had something to do with the prospect of non-existence. Did he fear that he might not exist? It seemed a strange thing to get into a state about since if you didn’t exist how could you possibly mind?

  Walking now, past clouds of irrepressible milky-blue forget-me-nots, upright scarlet tulips and extravagant garnet and topaz wallflowers, whose dark-scented velvet was already laden with droning bees, he decided that the philosophers were wrong, and that this insubstantial anxiety they went on about had more to do with a feeling that, however powerful you might be, there were crucial concerns outside your control.