‘Many distinguished people have followed that profession,’ said Mr Golightly, tactfully.
‘I wouldn’t say I was “distinguished”. I was into drugs and things, and there was this man…’
‘Naturally.’
One of the ponies, a skewbald, skittered suddenly sideways on tiny legs. There were so many things she could hardly bear if she thought about them. ‘I was a mad thing, took drugs, quarrelled with my father. I only stayed home because of someone who was kind to me…Anyway, I was one of those who got hooked on drugs and this man –’ after all these years she couldn’t bring herself to say his name – ‘used the habit to hook girls like me in further.’
‘One of my son’s best friends was in your line of work,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘I didn’t know her myself but I gather he thought highly of her. I imagine her sexual expertise was useful to him – helped him to see other matters more clearly.’
‘It’s funny, you know, people go on all the time about sex these days but they really haven’t a clue what’s going on.’
‘It’s not a subject I know much about,’ said Mr Golightly, apologetically.
‘I didn’t for sure. Now I know more than I want to. I didn’t know, for example, people have sex for all sorts of reasons which have nothing to do with sex.’
‘I should imagine so.’ That was the problem with evolution – adaptability was a sound principle in theory but it allowed for so much bewildering complication.
‘They have sex like they take exercise, for instance, because they think they should.’
‘Oh dear – that doesn’t sound much fun!’
‘Or because they are full of something they can’t get rid of – mostly hate in our case,’ said Rosie. She sounded tired.
‘Fear, as well, I guess?’
‘For sure. Fear of being alone, mostly. I married my husband to get away from the other man. And so’s not to be alone.’
‘It’s not an uncommon attempt at solving loneliness – marriage.’
‘It doesn’t work.’
‘No,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘It wouldn’t.’ There was no need to beat about the bush.
‘Johnny was someone else’s child. The person who was kind to me. I treated him very terribly. Oh God, what a mess!’
‘I often think so myself. I expect you did your best in what seemed an impossible situation.’
Rosie Spence looked down at the carefree River Dart where, as a girl, she had contemplated drowning herself. She wanted to do so still. ‘That’s nice of you but I don’t think so – I was just trying to save my own skin. It hasn’t helped me and it’s harmed Johnny. His stepfather loathes him, loathes me too, but that doesn’t matter.’
‘It might to John.’
‘Oh God, you’re right!’ Her skin, so like her son’s, surged red again.
‘I’m not always right.’
Rosie Spence lit a cigarette. ‘I used to come here sometimes with the man who was kind. He loved me – at least I think now he did. I didn’t see that then – but I didn’t see then how I could matter to anyone. D’you understand?’
‘I think I do.’ He hadn’t known how he had ‘mattered’ to his son – and on that account his son had apparently sacrificed himself.
‘Do you think anyone ever has enough love?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘To be frank, I’ve been wondering how much I do know these days.’
Once he had prided himself on knowing everything.
6
NADIA FAWNS WAS REREADING HER NOVEL, A Knight In Her Arms. It seemed to her that there was wisdom in it, a wisdom which she was failing to apply to her own life. Despite her friends’ reassuring claims, no troop of men had so far beaten a path to her door. Melissa Swan, the heroine of her novel, had not hung about waiting for action. She had courageously swallowed a potion of wolf’s claw and mistletoe and travelled through time to find her own true knight.
Sam Noble lacked some of the finer points of the chivalry of Sir Elidor, but, making the best of things, Nadia decided the moment was ripe to give him a nudge.
The kitchen facilities of the Backen cottage were limited. Sam had been round regularly for dinners which Nadia cooked painstakingly from her Delia Smith recipe books. Before the meal he drank gin and tonic – never fewer than two – and ate the pricier kind of nuts.
It had always been Nadia’s idea to improve matters with the installation of a fitted kitchen, one in which she and Delia could better parade their range. With Sam to be got on the boil, there was no time like the present.
And nothing like a fait accompli either. Katy’s Kitchens in Exeter had a ‘Special Offer’ – one which included a double fan oven and an automatic spit. With this in mind, Nadia booked a carpenter – recommended by Barty Clarke – to start work on the renovations.
‘This will be our last supper – for a while,’ she said to Sam, spooning juice over duck breasts.
‘Oh, why?’ Sam was spreading the gravy over the mash. He was specially fond of mashed potato which he had never got around to learning the trick of since the split with Irene.
Nadia explained about the kitchen. ‘I’ll have no facilities here for some time, I’m afraid.’
Sam, who had become unconsciously dependent on the regular free feeds, felt suddenly abandoned.
‘You can always come over to my place.’
The average human heart is a nervous organ and by visiting Nadia on her own territory Sam had left open a means of escape. If she turned nasty he could always go home. Women could turn nasty – there had been an embarrassing scene, in a hotel near Reading, when the Maltese air hostess had locked herself in the bathroom. Hearing himself voice these rash words to Nadia, Sam wanted to summon them back; but she was already thanking him fulsomely.
‘Oh, that is kind. Perhaps I could bring over some of my china. He’s starting on Monday and I have been bothered where to store it to keep it safe.’
Nadia arrived on Sunday in casual cords, and a good deal of lipstick, and unloaded a quantity of boxes from the boot of her Volvo. Sam felt dismay mount as the stack mounted in his kitchen.
‘Would you like to help? Be careful the dog doesn’t knock over the soup plates, they belonged to my grandmother – the one who came from Normandy. People say I have a sort of a French look about me. It’s the cheekbones, I expect. The bay tree would go well here, what do you think?’
There was a lot of clutter accumulated at the back of Sam’s cupboards which Nadia suggested should be chucked out. Sam dug his heels in a couple of times – once over a pan for poaching eggs and then over a mincing machine – but the protest came more from principle than conviction. As Nadia pointed out, the egg pan was made of aluminium, which led to brain damage – he didn’t want that, she supposed. And not even Delia demanded hand-minced meat from her devotees – the mincer was practically an antique – perhaps he would like her to sell it for him in her shop?
Having substituted her own extensive collection of crockery and cooking implements, which thoroughly colonised the emptied kitchen cupboards, she drove off in the Volvo to ferry over another load.
Mr Golightly walked back from Buckland Beacon deep in thought. The encounter with Johnny’s mother, and her heartfelt admissions, had moved him. And it was sustaining to find a kindred spirit also challenged by the ruthless test of parenting. He was coming down the high street, contemplating the solaces of companionship, when he encountered Sam Noble, standing outside his house staring moodily at a small ‘bronze-effect’ statue of Cupid, naked, and astride a dolphin, which Nadia had felt it safest to fetch over from Backen, too.
Daphne rushed down the path and began to rub herself amorously against Mr Golightly’s leg as Sam, still nursing a grudge over the writers’ group but in more pressing need of moral support, hailed his neighbour.
‘Don’t think you’ve been in my house, have you?’ he asked, magnanimously overlooking the previous discourtesy. Mr Golightly agreed that this was the case and Sam inv
ited him in and offered Earl Grey from one of the tins of assorted teas which were newly ranged along his kitchen counter.
‘Thank you, no,’ said Mr Golightly, who had a particular horror of bergamot. He turned down an offer of an espresso made from Nadia’s state-of-the-art Italian machine, which had been installed next to the teas, but accepted a cup of ordinary coffee and admired the bay tree.
Sam became embarrassed. ‘It belongs to a friend. I’m just looking after it,’ he explained.
‘The wicked flourish like them, I’ve heard tell,’ said Mr Golightly, affably.
The ‘quiet chat’ between the Reverend Fisher and the bishop had taken place and it had been agreed that recent events merited a break from the usual claims of duty on the vicar. She had suffered, and withstood, a crisis, and the bishop, a man of pacific tendencies, was keen that the flap die down before she resumed her pastoral round. So she was not at her familiar post in church that Sunday morning but was walking, in her sunhat, when Morning Claxon, out on her run, almost crashed into her.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Morning apologised. She took another look at the vicar. Events had wrought changes in her. Behind a pair of smart new sunspecs, chosen from the Giorgio Armani collection at Oakburton’s optician, she was sporting eyeshadow – a vivid blue, perhaps unconsciously inspired by the bluebells she had passed on her riverside walk with Mr Golightly.
Morning had recently become a disciple of a guru living near Penzance – an ex-tax inspector, who taught that the spiritual path was most fully embraced by exploring all love’s byways. In this spirit of amity, Morning took the vicar’s arm. ‘Fancy a walk?’ she enquired.
The vicar and Morning walked up the lane to the sunspangled, earthy-smelling moor. They made their way along the bridle path, where Mr Golightly had walked with Wilfred, and Ellen Thomas had met the presence in the gorse bush. On the same clump of brimming, scented gold, a wheatear was lustily exercising its distinctive voice, a mellifluous warble mingled with a strange harsh creaking rattle – for, unlike humankind, nature doesn’t pretend to consistency.
Morning remarked that when the gorse flower was out kissing was in season, a saying she had recently learned from Mary Simms, who had called round looking for a natural remedy for nausea. Mary didn’t like to trouble Dr Rhys, she said, who, poor man, looked worn out with all his work at the surgery. She had not gone on to explain to Morning – who had been brought up on a high-rise estate – that the gorse flower blooms in all seasons, which is why, as all country people know, kissing never does go out of fashion. So perhaps it was with a misplaced sense of seizing the moment that Morning turned and suddenly embraced the vicar, kissing her full on the lips.
The vicar, who had not been kissed so passionately since the night when Keith was drunk and had mistaken her for the girl from Hove library – which had led, in time, to he and Meredith becoming engaged – was too taken aback to protest. Morning’s bosom was bountiful and yielding and after so many rejections Meredith found it soothing to be clasped there. She allowed herself to linger long enough for Morning to pat her on the shoulder blade and remark, ‘Love is Everywhere’ (one of the ex-tax inspector’s more popular wisdoms).
Buoyed up by her walk, and filled, indirectly, with the tax inspector’s enthusiasm, the vicar had returned home and embarked on a programme of clearing. Keith was out and Paula, in response to a call on her mobile, came over to lend a hand. The two had almost completed the task when Mr Golightly, on his way back from Sam’s, stopped to say ‘Hello’.
Meredith straightened up. ‘Clearing things out,’ she explained. ‘Stripping away.’ She beamed at her congregation of one. ‘Anything here you fancy?’
Mr Golightly, who had a weakness for second-hand books, poked about in one of the boxes which Paula, stripped down to her vest, and showing her tattooed shoulders, had been shifting outside.
‘This one,’ he said, picking out a dark blue-bound volume, ‘if you really don’t –’
‘No, take it, take it!’ urged Meredith, excitedly. ‘I don’t want any of them. Love is not possession!’
She invited him in for tea and a slice of lemon sponge, brought by Patsy and Joanne – late of the tearooms – who had been passing through Calne to look up old acquaintances and had called by to congratulate the vicar over her stand on Gay Rights.
Mr Golightly, unwilling to explain his aversion to tea a second time, politely declined. Paula said if Meredith had finished with her she would be off too. Before he left, the vicar kissed Mr Golightly on both cheeks and informed him that ‘Love was Everywhere’, a sentiment which he felt it was hardly his place to challenge.
Going down the steep concrete ramp which led to the road, Paula, a little unsteady on her heels, grabbed Mr Golightly’s arm. Mr Golightly was touched. He had warmed to Paula and admired her taste in shoes. The shoes displayed courage. It took courage to befriend a social outcast in a time of trial. He remarked that he was pleased to find the vicar back on her old form and invited her ally over the road for a Scotch, which, coming from a man, Paula thought an unusually sensible invitation.
Inside Spring Cottage, Mr Golightly steered his guest towards one of the floral chairs and poured them each a large measure of whisky. He threw the book he had extracted from Meredith’s box of discards down on to the orange sofa.
It is a tricky moment when any author finds a cherished, hard-wrought work in the position of poor relation in a second-hand bookshop. In principle, Mr Golightly was inured to this – it was not news to him that, just as for many years men had died for the right to read his great work, nowadays it had become a staple of cast-off bookstores. But finding his jewel among those books that the vicar – practically a personal friend – was casually jettisoning had been a jolt.
‘What’s this, then?’ Paula asked, picking up the book. Unable to sit still for long, she’d already been round the room on her knees collecting up threads which had moulted from the rag rug, made by Emily Pope in the days when she still had her sight.
‘Only an outdated classic in which nobody’s much interested,’ said Mr Golightly, rather pettishly.
Paula flicked it open. ‘S’the Bible, en’t it?’ Her encounter with the Old Testament heroine, who had cut off her enemy’s head, was entwined affectionately in her memory with her own victory over that stupid Tessa Pope.
Mr Golightly, slightly ashamed of his peevish outburst, handed his guest a half-full toothglass. ‘Would you care for water? It’s not bad from the tap.’
Paula preferred her Scotch neat. She knocked back the content of the toothglass while flicking rapidly through the flimsy pages.
‘I went to one of the vicar’s classes on the Bible. I liked it meself – it’s got style. Here, this bit’s good.’ She read out: ‘Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man…’
‘Good God,’ said Mr Golightly, almost spilling his whisky, ‘I shall forget my own name next!’
7
IT WAS SUNDAY, AND JACKSON HAD TOLD HIM there was no need for him to come to work that day, but his stepdad was home and with nothing better to do Johnny called by Spring Cottage.
‘John,’ said Mr Golightly, ushering his young friend into the parlour where Paula, giving her feet a rest, was reading on the orange sofa. ‘You know Paula?’
Paula was aware of the miasma which surrounded the Spences. Her own fatherless state had encouraged a sensitivity to appearances – her mum was a weakling, but one Paula protected with a natural noblesse oblige. In marrying Spence, Rosie Coaker had gone down in the world. Paula, alive to the dangers of social decline, preferred not to risk infection by association with its sufferers.
‘’Lo,’ she said, unenthusiastically, not looking up from the book.
Johnny was used to being snubbed. On the other hand, he wanted it to be seen that he was esteemed in Mr Golightly’s eyes. ‘Come to see if you’ve got any work for me,’ he said, i
n the hope of impressing Mr Golightly’s visitor.
‘I might have. When Paula has finished with that book there are some references I’d like you to trace.’ Mr Golightly went over to the gateleg table and switched on the laptop. ‘I’ll be with you in a trice…’
There was not the man or boy alive who could hope to impress Paula. Nevertheless, she stopped reading and stared expressionlessly at Johnny Spence. She couldn’t stand kids; in fact, she planned to get herself sterilised as soon as she could afford to pay for it. But this was the kid who’d been working down at Mrs Thomas’s. She’d been getting a feeling that there was something funny going on there with Jackson. The other night he’d come home crying – pissed out of his head and covered with mud and blood and his front tooth bust. It’d taken an age to get the stains out of his vest.
Jackson had also been off sex – almost seeming to prefer the floor she had relegated him to. Paula had been willing to overlook this on the grounds that having got her foot well in his door her main objective had been achieved. But a girl has her pride.
The Spence kid was pretty. Maybe Jackson was gay? She wouldn’t put it past him, and, as her Auntie Edna said, there were more of them about these days than you thought.
Mr Golightly got up from the table where he had been copying something from his laptop and handed Johnny a sheet of paper. ‘See if you can find these in that for me, will you?’ nodding in the direction of the book.
‘Here y’are,’ said Paula, suddenly chucking it at Johnny’s face.
Johnny caught the blue-bound volume dextrously, but didn’t bother to look to see what he had in his hand.
‘Yeah, sure.’ He shot a look of sly triumph at Paula, but Paula worsted him.
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