Mr Golightly's Holiday

by Salley Vickers

  As a measure against this, Jackson had taken to working later and later. He had put away his tools and was replacing the ladder in the long grass, when Wolford, hands in pockets, sauntered by.

  Wolford had never spoken two words to Jackson on the occasions they had coincided up at the Stag, but he stopped and greeted him now before strolling through into the garden and introducing himself to Mrs Thomas who was sitting in the garden with her sketchbook.

  Wolford stood chatting and looking over her shoulder. Jackson, feeling protective, went across himself and, for want of any other means of expressing devotion, offered her the remaining tea from his flask. She refused the tea – nicely of course, she was always polite – and he had seen a sketch of the boy on her sketch pad.

  The arrival of Paula had dramatically altered Jackson’s nightly routine. Where in the past he would come back from the Stag and Badge and fall down senseless, often missing the bed by a mile, sometimes not even making it to the bedroom at all, these days he was expected to bathe and shave before he came to bed. But even smooth-faced, Jackson proved a problem. His silent passion for Ellen Thomas bred insomnia. With all the twisting and turning, Paula had decreed that he’d better sleep on the floor; he was ‘driving her mental’, she said.

  That evening, locked in the bathroom, examining his bulging belly in the mirror Paula had installed, and thinking about the boy’s face he had seen in Mrs Thomas’s sketchbook, Jackson felt quite ‘mental’ himself. Worn to distraction by unbearable longing, on the bedroom floor, with a cushion for a pillow, he tried, unsuccessfully, not to imagine Ellen Thomas’s bony hips pressed into his own, and her long legs twined around his waist and her white hands delicately cupping his scrotum. At least on the floor he was spared the bevy of animals which formed a furry citadel around Paula. With the crowd of creatures in the bed there was barely room for a grown man.

  Close by, in her elevated position in what had once been the bed of which Jackson was sole custodian, Paula made little grunts, her retinue of freshly washed Wombles guarding her Sleeping Beauty form. Jackson, wondering how the fuck this could have happened to him, got up and went downstairs and looked dismally at the drawing Paula had prepared for the True Life Romance bookshelf. It was designed, he noticed, to fit the space where once he had kept his beer crates. Under Paula’s regime, Jackson had shifted his stock to a high cupboard, but he had no secure hopes of it remaining there long.

  Jackson climbed on a stool and extracted four bottles of Newcastle Brown. In an effort to get his beer gut down he had been trying to drink less – but what was the fucking point? Ellen’s sketch of Johnny Spence had set off a train of misery which only strong drink could arrest.

  Love is the great binder and looser, and drink the great defrayer of embarrassment. A while later, without quite knowing how he got there, Jackson found himself outside Ellen Thomas’s house.

  The stars were still out and the slopes of the moor glowed with an eerie light. A barn owl veered out of the darkness, shrieking; and a badger lumbered by, maybe sensing a new-found safety from this torturer turned victim. In his state of agitation the night sounds were terrifying to Jackson. He stood, heart palpitating, staring at a white horse across the way in the field.

  Inside was his beloved, Ellen of the White Hands – the only woman who had ever treated him with kindness. Weeks of tongue-tied passion had eroded Jackson’s inherently shaky self-control. A tidal wave of emotion swelled up within him, and without any formed plan he began to climb the ladder to his ark. Up there, at least Ellen Thomas was beneath him, and not unassailably above him, like the white stars…

  ‘If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t have bothered – not so near the end of my time.’

  Between bites of sandwich, Bainbridge spoke in his strange rustling whisper, so that Ellen had to stretch her ears to hear him.

  ‘I was so glad to be back on the Moor again, when I was put on resettlement and working outside in the peat and heather and water, I never thought about escape. I never felt the need, you see.’

  She nodded, understanding the resignation which was not indifference.

  ‘I was in a work party clearing a leat. That evening, I stopped to watch some rooks worrying a harrier – they do, you know, birds of prey don’t get much past rooks. When I looked back, the rest of them were hanging about having a smoke before getting into the van. The screws are quite easygoing with the resettlement bunch. I was known to be no trouble and I suppose so near the end of my stretch they didn’t think to mind out for me. I always knew where I was on the Moor, better than they did, but this time we were near where I used to go with her, and suddenly I had this feeling…

  ‘I wanted to tell her that whatever had happened had to happen, that I loved her, that she wasn’t to think I blamed her…I know it sounds crazy…’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not crazy – not crazy at all.’

  ‘I just started walking and after I’d gone a way I thought: they haven’t noticed – so I ducked down and wriggled along till I got to more cover. I wasn’t scared at first about them coming after me, but some protective thing must have kicked in because I made for the mire – that was part of her and me too – she used to dance across it as a child. I knew the dogs would lose my scent there, you see.’

  ‘Do they still use dogs?’

  ‘There’s no scientific substitute for a dog’s nose, thank God!’

  ‘And then…?’

  ‘I gave them the slip. I waded up river from the mire, the Swincombe, I knew it well, you see. It would have taken time to get the dogs and by then I’d drowned my tracks. There was something I suddenly thought of –’

  Her look said: say it only if you want to.

  ‘She gave me something she’d had since she was a girl. I hid it, when she’d gone off and left me, in a place she showed me – she said only I knew it – but who knows? – with a message, saying I loved her – I suppose I hoped she might find it there. I never asked her if she did because – well, I suppose because I never saw her again after they took me. I was walking upriver and it came to me: if it’s still there it’s a sign you’ll find her. You know how you do?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Mad, really, because it would have been ten years, near enough.’

  ‘And was it there? Did you find it?’

  He said nothing; and she felt in her eagerness she had intruded. Light was filtering through from the garden and it was time he returned to his daytime bed. She got up ready to say good night – and saw he was crying.

  ‘That was the amazing thing –’ in the faint dawn light she caught the tears. ‘After all this time – it was there. Stuffed in behind a stone where I’d put it. I’ve got it with me,’ he said.

  Jackson had brought with him the last of the Newcastle Browns and he opened the bottle with his teeth, spitting out the cap. It fell into the recess that had formed on the oddly constructed bungalow roof. With a drunk’s fastidiousness, he lurched perilously across the roof to retrieve it. The movement brought him face up against the internal window which looked across the hallway to the spare bedroom. Reaching down to find the bottle top, he made out the pale form of Ellen Thomas, with a man in her arms.

  5

  MR GOLIGHTLY FOUND ANOTHER COMMUNIcation when he opened up his laptop:

  who hath given understanding to the heart?

  If anyone did, Mr Golightly knew that the universe was constructed on no plan or theory and that its riddles couldn’t be answered by neat phrases or easy solutions. But the e-mailer’s questions followed a trend which he had a dim and perturbing sense he ought to recognise.

  The questions provoked further questions. Take his characters, for example. If anyone had given them ‘understanding’ it had to have been himself, their author. But that was just to push the question back a stage – where, if he had any, had his own understanding come from?

  The truth was, though it was one he had not fully faced till now, any real understanding had sprung from the s
hock of losing his son. Until that event he had been remote, reserved, intolerant of human folly. The pain of loss had altered all that. But it was not till he had come here, to Great Calne, and tried to live a life of anonymity, that he had become more conscious of the trials which beset an ordinary person.

  Had he ever before had any real comprehension of what was asked of human beings? Even the patient husbanding of ordinary steady affection, he thought to himself, is as rare as the red-throated pipit, as hard to find as the eyrie of the golden eagle. The fact was – he was in a better position to see it now – people were lonely. In his elevated position, and with constant claims to distract him, he had kept that knowledge from himself. Only here, in Great Calne, had he felt – or allowed himself to feel – the ache of chronic loneliness. And yet, wasn’t it that same loneliness which had fostered understanding in his heart…?

  He was climbing, as he pondered, the steep incline to Buckland Beacon where, he had been told by Colin Drover, at the Stag, some religious-minded philanthropist had had the Ten Commandments inscribed in stone.

  ‘An eccentric idea, but no doubt well intended,’ Mr Golightly had commented; and Kath Drover had observed that there was still much to be said for the Commandments; to which her husband had added that it was well known that it was dangerous to fancy your neighbour’s wife’s ass, which earned him an old-fashioned look from Kath.

  Mr Golightly stopped to catch his breath and watch a family of buzzards, the babies like small old-fashioned planes buzzing soundlessly above. Starting up again towards the beacon, he saw a young woman approaching from the lee side. He hoped she might walk on; but she stopped and kneeled down.

  Mr Golightly’s vision tended to long sight and focusing on the woman’s face and expression he found it was familiar. After further observation, he was as sure as he could be that this was the mother of Johnny Spence, the woman who had been so elusive.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, walking up behind her with his usual quiet tread. ‘It’s Mrs Spence, isn’t it?’

  The woman, still kneeling, swivelled round sharply. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘you gave me a fright!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He hadn’t meant to alarm her. ‘You were looking for something?’

  Rosie Spence laughed uncertainly. ‘Oh, nothing. Just seeing what was there.’ She crumpled a piece of paper in her hand.

  Mr Golightly felt awkward. He realised that he had caught her unawares. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have explained – I’m a friend of Johnny’s. You look so like him…’

  Rosie Spence’s skin had the transparency of her son’s. She flushed. ‘You know Johnny?’

  ‘Very well. A bright boy. He works for me.’

  ‘Really?’ She sounded relieved. ‘That’s kind of you.’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘Not “kind”. He has been what I can only describe as a godsend.’

  ‘I’m so pleased.’

  ‘The pleasure is mine.’

  ‘He’s not much of a one for school.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry. In my view it’s overrated. My own son never attended school – nor did the Queen, I believe,’ he added hastily. He didn’t want to sound sexist. ‘But you are anxious over Johnny?’

  Rosie looked at her questioner. She didn’t see a man of late-middle age, of medium height and unremarkable features. She saw a pair of eyes which seemed to penetrate to the bone.

  ‘Look,’ she said, and Mr Golightly, whose joints were not as supple as he would have liked, bent down, rather stiffly, and peered where she was pointing into a hollow in the rocks. It appeared empty of anything but heather. ‘It’s an old postbox. The moor people used them to send messages to each other – this was my grandad’s – he and my grandma used to leave each other messages when they were courting. I left this here for Johnny…’ She held out the crumpled piece of paper.

  ‘He didn’t get it, then?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know how to get in touch with him any other way. It was stupid of me, but I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘You’re worried.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘I’m worried sick.’

  ‘I can give him a message.’

  Rosie hesitated.

  ‘I believe I can be trusted to keep my mouth shut.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rosie. ‘Would you say I’m fine and I’ll be here today week? Next Sunday, about this time.’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  ‘And give him my love?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Rosie said, sitting down suddenly on a rock. ‘It’s all such a bloody mess. I don’t know what to do.’

  Phil Spence had been working the shooting gallery of a fairground in Plymouth when Rosie met him. She had levelled the rifle at the mechanical bear, which had reared up on its hind legs and growled, rather sexily, when her shot hit home. This had excited Rosie, and being the only woman customer to have achieved this superior marksmanship, the shot sent a corresponding bull’s-eye into Phil Spence’s heart.

  Admiration for the spunky young woman had spawned first lust and then a certain weak affection, but the effort of sustaining any emotion was too much for a constitution brought up on alcohol and beatings, and soon Rosie and her son became the target of Phil Spence’s own hopelessness.

  In a bid to inculcate affection for her son, Johnny’s mother had his name changed by deed poll to his stepfather’s, but the ploy never worked. The name stuck, but not the obligations that she had hoped would attend it.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Golightly, lowering himself carefully on to a massy boulder, ‘there isn’t anything you can.’ Beside him, carved on two flat stones, he observed, along with the injunctions not to kill, steal, covet, or commit adultery, the exhortation to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’. There should have been, he thought, a commandment to honour children, too.

  ‘Anything I can…?’

  ‘Do. There may be nothing to be done.’ The Commandments had a certain magisterial impressiveness but as a prescription for human behaviour he couldn’t help finding them a little bald.

  ‘I know but…’

  ‘But of course that doesn’t help much, does it?’

  The eyes had lost their penetration and now looked merely kind.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Mr Golightly, and he spread his hands and contemplated them – they were broad hands, muscular and workmanlike, the hands of a sculptor, or a pianist. ‘You create something, a child, a book, a world, whatever, and if it is a true creation then it doesn’t stay yours – it takes on its own life and independence.’

  ‘But a child –’

  ‘Even a child,’ said Mr Golightly, interrupting, ‘has authority. Sometimes a superior authority.’ He was remembering how his own son had given his parents the slip when he was no more than a slip of a thing himself and had run off to talk to those who were considered his elders and betters. ‘We have to respect it,’ he said, ‘even if what the child does seems to us impossibly rash.’

  It came to him, thinking of the young raven disdaining its parent’s well-intended food, that the unique power of each individual makes up the slow pulse of destiny. How could there be a blueprint, since no one could bargain for the maverick impact of any contributing part?

  ‘It’s not anything Johnny’s done – it’s me; I keep thinking how I’m to blame.’

  ‘Well, of course you do,’ said Mr Golightly, sounding almost cheerful. ‘And in a sense you are. It is rank folly, if not a kind of madness, to embark on a creation. Any author will tell you the same!’

  ‘You’re a writer?’ She remembered now, before she’d left Calne, she’d heard that a writer had moved into Spring Cottage.

  ‘Among other occupations – writing’s more of a hobby.’

  ‘It must take your mind off things.’

  ‘In a sense it puts them on it. As I said, I had a son, too, so I know how you feel…’

  ‘Respo
nsible?’

  ‘Horribly!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rosie Spence, who had a sympathetic nature and knew when not to probe.

  At the end of the Ten Commandments the philanthropist had tacked on another one: A new commandment I give unto you: that ye love one another.

  ‘You see,’ said Mr Golightly, not quite noticing what had prompted him to continue, ‘when you love you give a hostage to fortune. A real love, and I’m coming to see that is a rare enough thing, exposes you, because what happens to the loved one is not yours to command. People imagine they can control their fate, or that somewhere there is someone, or something, a being which can control it for them. But fate is made up of so many varied parts that at best you can only bear it, your own or anyone else’s – and that is, or can be, dreadful.’

  A single magpie flew past. One for sorrow.

  ‘Especially,’ he added, ‘if what happens feels as if it might have been prevented.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Rosie, ‘ “preventing” things might be wrong, anyway. Even if you could. They might be the wrong things you prevented.’ She wasn’t quite sure herself what she meant by this.

  Mr Golightly, however, looked cheered. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The old meaning of “prevent” meant to anticipate – it would be putting the cart before the horse, then, “preventing” things, instead of letting events unfold. Sorry, I’m a crossword fanatic,’ he explained.

  ‘My dad liked crosswords,’ said Rosie. She looked sad. ‘I’m no good at them – women usually aren’t.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘I doubt if it’s the case that there’s anything women are “no good” at, if they’ve a mind to it and it’s always valuable to have the feminine angle.’ Many years ago, there had been a woman he had hoped might help him, but he believed she had betrayed him with his business rival. He had made a fuss over this at the time – the recollection made him feel foolish now.

  Rosie Spence looked down to where a gang of Dartmoor ponies were close-cropping the grass – as they had been when she lay on the moor as a girl, before she had given away for ever her chance of love. Nowadays the ponies were bought and slaughtered wholesale and hacked into chunks of bleeding flesh and parcelled up and sold for dog food. ‘I was a prostitute for a while.’