Mr Golightly's Holiday

by Salley Vickers

  Pain, for example. He had heard it said that time heals all wounds. As to that, he doubted it. Time like an ever rolling stream might bear many things away but not the anguish of losing a child. That lay too deep for cure. If anything, like a ravening creature, made savage through incarceration, the recollection had grown more vicious with the passage of time. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all? Mr Golightly felt that if he had once known the answer to this question, his grasp of it – if he had ever truly held it – had slipped.

  The wicket gate opened as Johnny Spence came through into the garden and immediately Mr Golightly felt his spirits rise. He looked forward to seeing Johnny whose competence he was coming to rely on. And there was also the pleasure in observing that, rather as the garden, freed from winter’s repression, was throwing off caution and showing a different side to its nature, young Johnny Spence was also somewhat changed.

  For one thing, while he had not abandoned his perpetual hooded apparel it was now pushed back, showing more of his face. Which today was smiling.

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘Hi there!’ said Mr Golightly in return.

  ‘I done it. Here.’

  Johnny thrust some papers at Mr Golightly, who glanced through them. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Come inside. I was about to make breakfast.’

  Breakfast was egg, bacon, tomatoes, and thick slices of toast with butter and Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade.

  ‘I like this,’ said Johnny, helping himself to butter. ‘Me mum has some stuff for me dad’s heart. Don’t like that.’ He didn’t add that he’d be glad if his stepfather’s heart packed up altogether.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mr Golightly, who needed no addendum. Like the king in the rhyme, he too favoured a little bit of butter to his bread. ‘Coffee? Or would you prefer Coke?’

  They both drank coffee with creamy unpasteurised milk. The morning sun lit up the boy’s head making a halo of the mousy hair. Examples of such benedictions on any spring morning were so prodigal that his recent glum musings seemed absurd. But there was danger here, too. Johnny brought to mind another boy child, and even in the seeming paradise of the English countryside there were unmistakable signs of the ineradicable impulse to despoil.

  Mr Golightly’s bland assertion to Wolford that Johnny was his researcher had been translated into reality without further discussion on either part. Johnny had wondered about this. The papers he had handed over was the script of a TV soap. Why his benefactor wanted such a thing was a mystery, but while he was getting ten quid a day for downloading stuff off the Internet – which, provided his stepdad was out of the way, was a piece of piss – it was a mystery he was willing to leave unsolved.

  Mr Golightly was also inclined to forgo inquisition; he had taken pains that no shade of enquiry, other than that directed to his own work, should make itself felt in his dealings with Johnny Spence. Questions were the enemies of easygoing intercourse. He needed the boy at least as much as the boy needed him. One of the things his son had taught him was that the expression of need was a sign not of weakness but of strength.

  As it turned out, Johnny was full of handy hints and helpful information. He put Mr Golightly right on the structure of soap operas. ‘Scenes only take two minutes, hardly,’ he explained, when Mr Golightly commented on their extreme pace and brevity. ‘Gotta keep them watching. People haven’t got it up there for anything longer.’

  Conversation with Johnny suggested to Mr Golightly how he might bring his great work up to date – by mixing up the characters, events and time schemes. Trying to get the thing to run on linear, causal lines – he had been slow to latch on to this – was part of the trouble. It was an outmoded technique, not the modern style at all. Johnny had shown him that nowadays you had fast cutting between scenes and characters, who no longer needed lengthy explanations or histories behind them.

  The script he had asked Johnny to bring today was for the meeting of the writers’ group – he was not looking forward to it – which was booked for that afternoon. Sam had been doggedly persistent and there seemed no way, without blatant rudeness – something Mr Golightly preferred to avoid – to get out of it. His plan was to bring along, as a decoy for discussion, one of the scripts Johnny had downloaded.

  Sam had, in fact, been suffering over the writers’ group the anxieties of all those who initiate on the basis of whim rather than anything really substantial. Three people, when he thought about it, seemed inadequate. He decided to drop over to Backen and sound out – what was the woman’s name? – Nadia Something, with the hennaed hair, who ran the antiques shop. Nicky Pope had mentioned that the woman had had a novel published by a small press in Dartington.

  Sam rang Nicky, who said she had a copy of the book which she’d been meaning to put among those in Spring Cottage. It didn’t strike her as Mr Golightly’s cup of tea, so she was happy to drop it by to Sam’s.

  The novel, a story about a middle-aged woman who travels through time and finds love at the court of King Arthur, had not found its commercial feet; but it had been sympathetically reviewed, in the local paper, by a friend of Nadia’s who had described the book as ‘sensitive’. It was the same friend who had insisted – after Nadia’s husband had gone off with a woman to whom he had sold a grandmother clock – that it was this sensitivity of Nadia’s which would ensure that men would ‘flock’ to her.

  Sam, getting his spot of exercise, biked over to Backen just before lunch and stopped off at the Stannary Arms. The journey entailed some stiff uphill pedalling and, once he had reached his goal, he felt in need of something to help him recover his puff. Barty Clarke was in the bar when Sam called in. The latest Backbiter had just been put to bed, but Barty was an opportunist and – who could tell? – Sam might provide the very touch needed for the next edition.

  Sam knew in his bones that Barty was not to be trusted, but what we know in our bones doesn’t always translate well to our heads. The editor of the Backbiter listened politely while Sam explained about the writers’ group and why he had come to Backen. Barty knew Nadia, on whom, in his capacity as auctioneer, he offloaded the junk you couldn’t pay people to take away. He offered Sam a second gin and tonic. The novel the woman had written, Sam confided, looked to him like utter garbage, but beggars couldn’t be choosers!

  One swallow doesn’t make a summer nor a single sheep a flock, but Nadia had been agreeably surprised to find Sam at her door. He accepted a Cinzano Bianco, the remnants of a bottle brought by the manager of a branch of the Victoria wine stores down in Sidmouth, who had been invited to the launch of A Knight In Her Arms but had not followed through with any further offerings. Nadia became quite sprightly when asked to join the writers’ group and showed Sam her press clippings (luckily not very extensive).

  Luke had forgotten all about the meeting. He had slept late, and was about to hurry out to meet Mary Simms, who had rung with another query, this time about Keats. When the phone rang again, and it was Sam on the other end of the line, reminding him that he was expected shortly at the meeting, Luke had called Mary back to explain he had unfortunately double-booked. But she had sounded so offhand about his going round in the first place he couldn’t imagine she would mind.

  Such misunderstandings are the common currency of human intercourse, especially between men and women. Mary Simms had had many false stabs, picking up the phone and putting it down again, before she held her nerve sufficiently to keep on ringing till Luke answered. Even then she had only kept the wobble out of her voice by forcing herself to sound offhand. ‘Yes, I think I could be in on Saturday afternoon,’ she had fibbed when Luke had offered, if it was any use, to come by to help her arrange her thoughts about ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. As if she wasn’t willing to rearrange her entire life for him!

  And so it was that Mr Golightly, taking a detour by the upper meadows to avoid being early at Sam’s, met Mary Simms. On previous occasions he had seen her in her barmaid role, her hair swept back in its velvet ba
nd, her dress neat, her make-up immaculate. Now she presented a very different picture – eyes streaked with mascara, her hair wild, and wearing long earrings and a longer dress, chosen to evoke St Agnes and improbably elaborate for a country walk.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Mr Golightly. He had not forgotten how the sun had shone on Mary Simms’s hair.

  Mary stopped. Though her heart was breaking she could not be impolite.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, bravely. But her voice faltered.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Mr Golightly. The words had slipped out – but he was glad they had, as on hearing them Mary Simms began to cry.

  In her long, somewhat old-fashioned frock, her hair tousled into random ringlets, her pearl earrings echoing the tears which ran down her cheeks and her small fingers pleated together and pulling apart in anguish, Mary Simms was a sight for an angel.

  ‘Hey,’ said Mr Golightly, mentally resigning Sam and the writers’ group to perdition, ‘come on, let’s go for a walk.’

  It will be a young man, sure as eggs, Mr Golightly thought. He had observed Mary Simms’s eyes stray towards Luke. Mr Golightly was not an advocate of idle words. He tucked Mary’s hand through the crook of his elbow so that as they descended through the fields to the river she leaned her slight weight upon him. It was an agreeable feeling, the pressure of the girl on his arm and beneath them the River Dart, a bright serpent, coiling through woods of oak and ash and hawthorn, as old as England.

  The oak leaves were already robustly pushing ahead but the slower ash was biding its time. A tear from Mary Simms’s chin dripped on to his wrist. If the oak is out before the ash then the summer will be a splash. Without turning to look her in the face, he sensed more where that had come from. If the ash is out before the oak then the summer will be a soak.

  They were down, now, upon the flat and the river was bibbling around flat grey stones, like the plates dropped by giants. Her face shining with tears, Mary Simms asked, ‘Oh, please, why doesn’t he want me?’

  Goodness knows, child, thought Mr Golightly. Any man in his right mind would want you. But not all men are in their right mind, indeed, few enough are, if it comes to that…

  Mary was standing by a hawthorn tree. Above her head its knotty thorned branches held out the promise of green-white mayflowers. Looking at her, Mr Golightly saw the likeness of someone he remembered…

  The meeting of the writers’ group was not a success. For a start, the absence of Mr Golightly set things off on the wrong foot. Sam Noble insisted they wait for a full house and that meant that the other two became disaffected. By the time it was clear that Mr Golightly wasn’t going to show up, Luke had begun to read Hiawatha aloud. Neither Nadia Fawns nor Sam had been able to endure this and it had led to the two of them drinking gin in a conspiratorial fashion. Luke had gone home to a sorrowful message from Mary Simms and had smoked a joint too many as a consequence, which had led, in turn, to his going off to bed leaving the bath running. The bath, which had been put in by Jackson, and therefore had no overflow fitted, had dripped through Lavinia Galsworthy’s ceiling on to the Afghan rug her father had brought back from the days he travelled in the East. Lavinia had been her father’s favourite. This was not the first of such incidents – but it was to be the last, and Luke, to the satisfaction of Paula, turned up the next morning in Rabbit Row, with a copy of Longfellow under his arm, sheepishly asking after a room to rent, proving, perhaps, that it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

  6

  JACKSON WAS WRONG-FOOTED BY THE ARRIVAL OF Paula in her mum’s Micra, loaded to the gunnels and complete with electric keyboard. The latter showed she meant business. He screwed up his little truculent eyes, ‘Wass this, then?’

  ‘Moving in, en’t I?’

  ‘Who says…?’

  But the defeat of man before the enterprise of woman sounded in his voice. Paula, single-handed, could have controlled an empire or started a worldwide movement. She marched inside and commandeered the sitting room, rapidly whisking away empty beer glasses, full of fag ends, to the dirty kitchen and shuffling into order strewn sheets of the News of the World – except for those pages which carried pictures of girls in states of nudity which she screwed furiously into balls and dumped in a bin liner.

  Jackson nipped upstairs and kicked a packet of condoms and some mags under the bed. The writing was on the wall – he’d have to find a safer place to hide his stash in future.

  ‘Right,’ said Paula, who had brought with her a roll of heavy-duty rubbish sacks and had already filled two with crumpled nudes, beer packs, crisp bags and empty packets of Lambert and Butler. ‘That’s got that started. I’m off to the Stag, but when I get back we’ll give the place a proper tidy.’ She smiled, very terribly, at Jackson.

  Jackson, who was not lily-livered through and through, said he had to go and see someone about a job and might not be in when she returned.

  ‘Who’s that, then?’

  One reason men choose to live without the company of women is to avoid just such questions which no reasonable man ever asks. ‘That Mrs Thomas,’ said Jackson, grabbing at an answer. Ellen had telephoned the day before and left a message on his phone that she wanted some urgent work done.

  ‘Oh, her,’ said Paula, scornful. ‘She’s barking, en’t she?’ It was a rhetorical question; she was quite happy for Jackson to see Ellen Thomas, who had no tits to speak of and had long seen the back of fifty. And she, Paula, was going to see to it, anyway, that the lazy bastard got down to some work!

  It was thanks to Paula, then, that Ellen Thomas received a visit later that same afternoon. She invited an unusually subdued Jackson into the sitting room.

  ‘Thank you for coming so promptly, Mr Jackson,’ said Ellen, whose retiring habits had left her ignorant of Jackson’s reputation. If she was surprised to receive a visit from a British workman on a Sunday afternoon she didn’t say so. ‘Will you have a cup of tea?’

  Her caller said he didn’t mind if he did. They sat on opposite sofas, Jackson very awkward, drinking tea and looking out to the River Dart.

  ‘It’s this, you see, Mr Jackson,’ said Ellen, getting up to top up his cup from a white china teapot. ‘I find I need more space and I was wondering what it would take for you to make the area over the flat roof into another room for me?’ And she smiled the smile which had charmed Mr Golightly.

  Jackson, who generally drank his tea from a beer mug, was unaccustomed to being received with such civility and was taken aback. As a rule people addressed him simply as ‘Jackson’ – his rudeness and lazy ways producing in them a tone equally abrasive. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t a builder anyway. His two occupations, getting the knickers off girls and baiting badgers, took up the best part of his creative energy. He could hack a spot of plumbing and minor electrics, but large-scale stuff was beyond him. Like many disagreeable people, Jackson was a realist: part of the reason he didn’t turn up for jobs was that he knew he wasn’t up to them.

  Perhaps it was the shock of the arrival of Paula, or perhaps it was Ellen Thomas’s disarming smile but, against all previous experience, Jackson found himself wanting to oblige.

  ‘Take a butcher’s, will I?’ he suggested. No harm in having a look at the job.

  Jackson went outside and stared at the roof. He returned and asked if he could have a ladder. There was a bit of bother getting this from the tool shed, where he was told to mind the nesting robin, but once he’d set it against the wall he mounted it and got up on to the flat roof over the kitchen.

  The bungalow had been built for himself by a builder who, late in life, gave up building works to become one of the Plymouth Brethren. Perhaps for this reason it was laid out on unusual lines. Planning permission had been applied for, and granted, before the builder’s own spiritual conversion had distracted him from the material conversion of his home; but the ‘bungalow’ had been built, and sold, to include an upper extension.

  Jackson spent some time on the roof peering through a window int
o the hallway, before clambering down and pronouncing that so far as he could see there was ‘no problem’.

  ‘Good,’ said Ellen Thomas. ‘So when do you think you could let me have an estimate?’

  Jackson, who had never before supplied such a thing in his life, said he would ring with an estimate without fail tomorrow.

  ‘Very good,’ said Ellen Thomas. ‘And provided I accept your estimate, when do you think you could start?’

  The news, a few days later, that Jackson was working on Ellen Thomas’s house created some unrest in Great Calne. Despite Jackson’s reputation for poor workmanship, it was felt by some as a slight that Ellen Thomas should be favoured ahead of a long and patient queue. Sam Noble in particular was offended.

  ‘He promised to come to me next – I’ve been waiting for years!’ he exclaimed to Mr Golightly. ‘Of course, he’s very lower class.’

  Mr Golightly, whose own origins were obscure, made no comment. Rather late in the day, he had called at Sam’s to apologise for his absence at the writers’ group. ‘I am sorry, something came up, but I’m sure you got along famously without me.’

  ‘We certainly missed you, I can’t pretend otherwise,’ said Sam, unwilling to relinquish the chance to be affronted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mr Golightly repeated, mendaciously: he was perfectly ready to have let the world go hang for the walk by the river with Mary Simms.

  ‘I don’t know if there will be another. One of the party just hogged the time – went quite over the top!’ Sam was certainly not referring to himself; nor to that pleasant Nadia Fawns, who had thoughtfully invited him for lunch on Easter Sunday.

  It might have surprised those who knew something of Mr Golightly’s enterprises to learn that he was quite forgetful of church festivals. As a rule, he was kept informed of such events by his efficient office, so that the news of the Easter bank holiday, pinned to the door of the Post Office Stores in Steve’s green biro – SHOP CLOSED EASTER MONDAY – caught him off guard.