‘Mr Samuel Noble, the eminent local film director,’ ran the story ‘spoke of his dismay when two of his guests attacked each other at his home in Great Calne on Sunday. “I was having a few friends over for drinks,” said Mr Noble, whose film about lady footballers was once tipped for a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, “when suddenly a fight broke out. Until then it was a most civilised occasion. I can only put it down to a misunderstanding between two of the ladies which unfortunately got out of hand.”’
Sam rang Barty. ‘Nice Girl was a film about jockeys, not footballers,’ he said, very irritated. Barty was apologetic but explained he could do nothing till the next edition. He advised Sam to write to the editor, correcting the error.
Nadia Fawns read the article while at Georgina’s having a pedicure. The recent tragedies took up the greater part of the conversation, but Di also had happier news to impart. Her boyfriend, Steve, a tattooist, who’d gone off unexpectedly to Western Australia, had e-mailed, equally unexpected, to say he couldn’t live without her and if she would join him out there he would make an honest woman of her – or at any rate they could try setting up a Body Beautiful Boutique together and see how they shook down. On balance, Di said, she thought he was sincere – so far as anyone who practised an artistic profession could be. She was selling up and moving on and guess who was buying the business?
According to Di, the vicar had written to the bishop, explaining that she had lost her faith, or, more accurately, that she had found she had never had one. She had spoken to the college down at Plymouth and had arranged to switch next term from her counselling course to ‘Beauty and Hairdressing’. It was Paula who had suggested that the vicar should take over the running of Georgina’s; the vicar was still in two minds about whether she should also take over the name.
The bishop had received the vicar’s news with his usual calm; it was Keith, the husband – wasn’t it always the way, Di suggested, giving Nadia’s big toenail a going over with an emery board – who was making the fuss. But the vicar, now freed of hampering Christian sentiments, had apparently told her husband she had been looking through the bank statements and if he didn’t push off – though in fact, Di confided, she understood much stronger language than that had been used! – the vicar would take legal steps to recover her missing share of their joint funds.
Nadia, with toenails freshly scarlet, drove straight from Oakburton to Sam’s to recover her kitchenware. ‘My kitchen’s nearly finished so I’ll get this out of your way.’ Not that Sam Noble would be seeing much of her cooking in future. Dear Barty, who had told her that that common little slut’s father was a pimp, had also given her to understand that Sam had spoken most disrespectfully about her novel. The moment she’d got her new kitchen organised Barty would be the one coming over for dinner. Blood will out, as she had remarked to that trollop! It certainly wasn’t Nadia’s fault that things had turned so nasty. She had had to defend herself, Barty had assured her; everyone knew that that was why she had pulled Paula’s hair. She was sorry Mr Golightly had got caught up in the crossfire but, then, like her he was a writer and everything was grist to a writer’s mill…
Di had also divulged that Patsy and Joanne had called in on Hugh, during their recent visit to their old stamping ground. It seemed that Morning had been studying crithomancy and proposed reopening the tearooms so that she could run classes on the ancient art of divination by dough. It looked as if Patsy and Joanne would be coming back to manage the tearooms in conjunction with some of Morning’s workshops, so that put paid to any ridiculous ideas Sam Noble might have had about that particular little tart!
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Is Jenson me proper name, then?’ Paula had not gone straight round to her mum’s from Sam Noble’s party. After slapping Nadia Fawns’s stupid face for her she had needed time to calm down.
‘How was I to know he was the same Jenson as your father?’ sobbed Paula’s mum, weakly. ‘It was all such a long time ago.’
‘Oh, thanks, mum,’ said Paula. ‘I’m only twenty-four, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Who could know he’d gone to the bad, like that? I was in love with him, you wouldn’t understand,’ said her mum, blowing her nose into some kitchen roll.
‘No,’ said Paula, ‘thank Christ I wouldn’t!’ If she had needed it, this would have convinced her that people did the most unbelievable things in the name of love.
7
MR GOLIGHTLY DID NOT ATTEND ELLEN Thomas’s funeral. He had another appointment that day but he met Rosie and Johnny Spence as they came out of the churchyard together, hand in hand. Most of the villagers, many of whom had never spoken to Ellen Thomas, were present. With the departure of the vicar, the bishop had conducted the ceremony himself, feeling that the tragic events which Calne had suffered merited recognition from the highest quarters.
Mr Golightly had not seen Johnny or his mother since the day of the catastrophe. Both looked pale and Rosie was plainly under pressure, but she told him she was managing and that till things got sorted she and Johnny were staying where she’d been before, in Plymouth, with her old friend, Jean. Mr Golightly invited Johnny for a drive. He promised to run him back to Plymouth afterwards.
The old man and the young boy walked wordlessly down the high street to Spring Cottage where the Traveller was parked in its familiar place in the front garden. Mr Golightly waited till Johnny was settled in the passenger seat. ‘Where shall we go?’ he asked.
Johnny felt unaccountably shy. ‘Don’t mind,’ he said, looking at the floor of the van.
‘What would you say to going to the mire?’
‘Yeah, all right,’ said Johnny, obscurely relieved.
They drove, and this time Mr Golightly needed no directions. Johnny stared through the window. Small birds threaded through branches of gorse; bands of shaggy ponies stood stoutly among bracken, cropping the velvety grass; the sky was robin’s-egg blue. ‘A God day,’ one of the old bell-ringers had said in church, ‘Mrs Thomas has a God day for her send-off!’
It couldn’t have been less like the scene of the previous Sunday as they drove up the lumpy track and parked by the path which led to the sheep cot.
Mr Golightly and Johnny walked together down to the edge of the mire and for a long while nothing was said.
It was Johnny who broke the silence. ‘Mrs Thomas stopped that bastard from killing me.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘I guessed that was the case.’
‘I was trying to get away from him,’ said Johnny. He looked ill. ‘He was, you know, after me…’
All about them was deep quiet. Mr Golightly returned his gaze to the mire where a curlew had alighted and was delicately foraging with its long curved beak.
‘I tried to kick him under,’ Johnny said at last.
The curlew stopped its foraging and stood, head poised, as if to catch their conversation.
‘Well,’ said Mr Golightly, choosing his words, ‘to hold fast to life is life’s most powerful instinct and, as I suggested once, death improves some people.’
‘But Mrs Thomas died too. If I’d waited for you it wouldn’t have happened, would it?’
For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, for the want of the shoe the horse was lost…Mr Golightly’s heart contracted. ‘That’s brave,’ he said. ‘Not many people are able to do that.’
‘What?’ asked Johnny. If Mr Golightly hadn’t known better he might have imagined the boy was angry.
‘Not many people can own their part in a chain of error.’ For the want of the horse the battle was lost…‘If I’d not got distracted I would have been there for you in time, and if –’
‘And if my mum had stayed with my dad we wouldn’t have fetched up with my stepdad.’ Johnny still had in his pocket the remnants of the rose, that the man he’d learned was his dad had given Mrs Thomas to give him to give his mum.
‘Possibly that too. But all these “and ifs” – they are what life is: a series of decisions we can’t know the cons
equences of in advance, and who’s to say finally which are “good” and which “bad”?’
‘But Mrs Thomas is dead.’
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail…?
‘I know. That’s a hard one.’
‘I thought I was dead, too.’
In his mind’s eye, Mr Golightly saw a small boy in a carpenter’s shop, his head bent, engrossed in shaping a piece of wood to fashion a catapult, with no thought for the world to come.
‘I didn’t want to die,’ Johnny said. For the rest of his life he would see Mrs Thomas hauling him away from Wolford’s grip and herself being pulled into the mire. ‘Run,’ she had cried out, ‘run, Johnny,’ and when he had started instinctively towards the sheep cot, ‘no, not there…’
It was where, later, they found his dad.
‘She told me not to go to where, you know, he was.’ Johnny, unwilling to give his new father a name, nodded towards the sheep cot. ‘We might’ve have saved her, him and me.’ He fingered in his pocket the rose, the last thing, almost, Mrs Thomas had touched – except for him, and Wolford.
Mr Golightly’s eyes, which were usually half-lidded over, looked full into Johnny’s – a steady, slow-piercing look. ‘I understand. As death is most violent in taking away, so love is most violent in saving us. It isn’t easy to be the recipient. But she didn’t want your father found either – she wanted him safe too.’
‘From that fucking bastard cunt! He fucking killed her. I saw…’
What had he seen? He hadn’t quite dared to picture it. He’d run till his lungs were busting and then he’d stopped and looked back. The screw was struggling and screeching out and Mrs Thomas had seemed to put her arms round his neck, almost as if she loved him and…
‘There was this horse,’ Johnny said. The curlew cocked its head to one side. ‘From over there.’ Johnny pointed across the moor towards High Tor. It had galloped towards him, a large horse, not one of the ponies, its pale mane flowing, and passed so close he was afraid it might trample him with its big hooves; and he had smelled the breath from its nostrils and then…
And then when he’d looked she’d gone. Disappeared. And he hadn’t known what he should do – go back, or run on. He’d run with his heart like a lump of coal in his chest, till he’d reached the nearest farm.
Suddenly, he saw Mrs Thomas’s painting: You don’t happen to know why a raven is like a writing desk? She’d smiled at that daft answer he’d given her. She looked nice when she smiled.
By the mire, from which, days earlier, the water-logged bodies of Ellen Thomas and Brian Wolford had been dragged, Johnny Spence sobbed, while Mr Golightly held him in his arms and the curlew took off over their heads, keening for no other reason but that it was alive.
8
JACKSON WAS IN THE STAG AND BADGER THE evening of Ellen Thomas’s funeral. People said afterwards that he showed no sign of emotion but drank steadily till closing time. Paula stayed over at her mum’s that night, so Jackson returned to an empty house, where he set about making a bookshelf for her. But it wasn’t Paula who was on Jackson’s mind.
It is no real loss when a feverish fantasy is replaced by a cool truth, but Jackson was not alone in feeling it to be an irreparable one. Although he had never entertained any serious belief that Ellen could be his, that there might be others to whom she was closer was too great a blow to his sense of imagined singularity and to a future which had given the illusion of being his to control. He had already lost himself in the service of Ellen Thomas, and it was the sense of recovering some of his old power that had prompted him to give away her secret to Wolford.
That Jackson was aware of what he had done became apparent when, the morning after Ellen Thomas’s funeral, he was found hanging from the pear tree in her garden. On the long grass beneath his dangling boots, where next spring the daffodils and narcissi she had planted would rise again, lay scattered the torn pieces of a ten- and twenty-pound note. Like confetti, Paula said, when she came to see him.
She insisted on going there, though her mum was all against it and said that if she stayed away no one could blame her. Jackson’s puffy, swollen-throated body was laid out, where the living form of the woman he had loved had once lain, on the sofa, by her painting of the ravens – which gave Paula’s mum a nasty turn, reminding her, as it did, of the big black bird which had settled on a tree outside her sister Edna’s when Ron died.
It was the tragedy that must have unhinged him, people said. It was wonderful how attached the work-shy Jackson had grown to poor Mrs Thomas, who now had no need of his rickety construction, which, in his last hours, its architect and builder had torn down.
9
JOS BAINBRIDGE WAS ALONE IN HIS CELL WHEN he heard the bird at midnight – close as his own breath, simple as a sheepbell, pure as starlight on a frosty night it lanced his heart till in grief and gratitude he cried aloud – and way across the quiet moor a black Labrador dog howled in concert with the convicted man, to the graceful incomprehending moon.
10
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE ELLEN THOMAS’S funeral, Mr Golightly did not retire to bed in the black-painted iron bedstead in the bedroom of Spring Cottage. Instead, he stayed up, drinking whisky and rereading the pages Johnny Spence had provided him with. Early the following morning, he sent off an e-mail and, without waiting for a reply, he set out to walk to his old haunt on High Tor.
‘You got it then,’ he said, as he breasted the top, breathing slightly hard from the effort. ‘Thank you for coming. It’s been a time.’
His rival, who had come from business which took him to and fro and up and down the earth, looked every bit as ordinary as Mr Golightly. He stood turned away, as if inspecting the river which was purling beneath them.
‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘like you I’m always about.’
‘Certainly you have managed to track me here.’
The other, still with his back to him, visibly shrugged. ‘Do you imagine the likes of us can really take a break – in my case I can scarcely call it a “holiday”?’
‘Mine seems to have become more of a wake,’ said Mr Golightly. The line his old enemy had e-mailed him returned, mockingly: Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? ‘I should have realised sooner. A clever trick to pose the questions back at the questioner.’
‘A trick? It is a method you yourself taught me. It is my role, isn’t it? The role you summoned me to perform on poor Job.’
‘You pity our servant, then?’ asked Mr Golightly.
‘Yes, I pity him,’ said the other. ‘I know from my own experience the anguish he suffered.’ A sluggish breeze round the tor top slightly ruffled his hair.
‘Is that, then, why you have chosen to torment me?’ Mr Golightly’s voice was measured. ‘Because I don’t, or didn’t, “know” anguish…?’
‘Oh, you…’ said the one beside him, ‘no one torments you but yourself. The questions I sent you were only the ones you yourself asked the righteous Job. I merely reflected them back to you. What’s sauce for the goose, you know? You might say I was being playful – part of your holiday recreation. It is what today I believe is called “consciousness raising”. One of the older of my functions.’
Mr Golightly said nothing but stood sunk in thought. It was true – hedged about, safe from turmoil, he had not been tested by life, and he had come to see that he had been the poorer thereby.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘forgive me, there is no one else with whom I can have this discussion and it crosses my mind that perhaps you may be able to help me.’ He was thinking of the e-mail he had dispatched that morning. ‘I have been wondering very much about suffering and love. You see –’
‘I understand,’ the companion at his side interrupted, ‘as the fountainhead yourself, you had no individual experience of it and yet –’
‘And yet there is my son,’ Mr Golightly broke in, not wanting the other to broach the name.
For the first time, his old rival turned to face him fully and his
eyes looked like ruined stars. ‘I was going to say,’ he suggested mildly, ‘that, from my rare observations of the phenomenon, to love another means in some sense to put oneself in their person; and for that to be possible there must first be the extinction of the self. I offer the idea in pure humility –’ Mr Golightly gave a slight nod – ‘this, perhaps, is what your son –’
‘Was that why you had him killed?’ broke in Mr Golightly.
‘I was no more responsible for your son’s death than you were for saving the life of that boy you are so fond of!’ replied the other, sharply.
Somewhere a rock tumbled noisily down to the river.
The other resumed. ‘If nothing else, I know what is due to a kinsman. Don’t lay that barbarity – or this latest local disaster –’ he waved his hand in the direction of the mire – ‘at my door.’
‘Whose then?’ asked Mr Golightly, feeling a flash of anger that the death of his friend and neighbour should be so summarily dismissed.
‘Do you really not know?’ said the other. ‘Surely you see that it was neither you nor I but your own creation, your pride and joy, that brought about the death of your friend and killed your own son: pinned his human flesh through with nails to hang in the hot sun till his unsupported neck fell on his own windpipe and slowly suffocated him. A particularly unsophisticated method of dispatch.’
‘It wasn’t you who put them up to it?’
‘No more than you. You allowed them a choice – remember? And they chose to save the life of a common murderer instead. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned. Do you mind if we sit down?’
‘So long as you don’t start a forest fire,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘We’d best sit on this –’ indicating the desk-shaped rock – ‘the place’ll go up like dry tinder if you don’t watch yourself.’
They sat, side by side, on the rocky tor.
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