‘Then what is the truth?’ asked Mr Golightly, finally.
‘As one who had a hand in that affair of your son’s death once asked, and went on, in that bourgeois way I so despise, to wash his hands of the question. You speak as if “truth” were everything. Has it ever struck you that a lie might be as immortal, and therefore as much a cornerstone of creation as a truth?’
‘But who laid the cornerstone thereof?’ The ancient boast sounded pathetic now in his own ears.
‘Well, the raven must also be provided with food, to paraphrase some more of your words. After all, some would say,’ said his companion, ‘that the fiction we both create is merely a sophisticated version of lying.’
‘Only if it seeks to mislead,’ said Mr Golightly, a shade huffily.
‘Let’s call it “fabrication”, then,’ said his rival, taking from his pocket a flat tin – ‘Will you have one?’ and then as he extracted a small cigar and lit it – ‘Yes, yes, I’ll be careful. You have to concede, though, it’s a fine line: where does art end and falsehood begin?’
‘I would say when the intention is crooked,’ said Mr Golightly.
‘But who’s the judge? That is the question. A story is spun – you have done it, magnificently; I, in my lesser way, have merely sought, let us say, a diversion –’
‘I’m tempted to say a distortion,’ interrupted Mr Golightly.
‘To be sure,’ the other went on, in his more languid tone, ‘but that’s my very point, and, by the way, temptation itself, as you know, means to try the strength of. You had me test your servant to prove his mettle. Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? You yourself asked your servant Job. You might say it was I who did, and that all he suffered made a man of him – or, equally, a woman of your friend. You may call it distortion if you like, I would call it development; you say tomayto, I say tomarto…’
‘So “let’s call the whole thing off!”’ said Mr Golightly, impatiently. He was no metaphysician.
‘You suppose I am playing with you,’ said the other, ‘but as someone said: “The play’s the thing.” The point is, everything created, and recreated, I should add, in deference to your latest enterprise, is capable of different readings – alternatives, if you like: mine is the tragic, yours the comic turn. Humankind, your own great fiction, must determine between the ends we each offer them. All that time ago, when we fell out over that other woman, it was not that I misled her, certainly not that I seduced her in your precious garden, as you claimed –’ here Mr Golightly looked a little sheepish – ‘I merely gave her another interpretation – an alternative version of the story you had told her. Both have a place in the whole drama, neither was right or wrong, positive or negative –’ he always was long-winded, Mr Golightly reflected – ‘as I need hardly tell you, although you have been kind enough to flatter me by asking my views on this topic. I thought, by the way, that flattery was supposed to be my province?’
‘Yes, well, love is deeper than flattery,’ said Mr Golightly, shortly, ‘and for all your sophistry the plain fact is that in your ending men and women, and children too, die. It seems to me that nothing lends itself to lies like death.’
‘Oh, as to that, as one of them remarked, in the long run they are all of them dead. At your own request I spared Job’s life, but I wonder if he mightn’t have got the worst of it. Your friend could have told you there are blessings in mortality.’
‘It is true,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘that death has its points. But not to the survivors.’
His companion continued to smoke, tapping the ash into the palm of his hand. It was pale and slightly fleshy, unlike Mr Golightly’s more workmanlike hands.
‘But it is to the survivors you have given this peculiar choice. There are those who have elected to make the death of the carpenter’s son – I am giving him the pseudonym you also gave him – a comedy. It is a remarkable decision, one, if I may say so, that defeats my own modest dramatic purposes. But one that, against all reason, you yourself made available.’
‘He did give them a lead,’ said Mr Golightly, contemplatively.
‘One might say your son rather flung himself into the part,’ said the other. ‘But he, too, was a great dramatist. An original. Truly his father’s son.’ Mr Golightly made a gesture of deprecation. ‘No, no, I meant it – the darkness and the light were also alike to him.’
Mr Golightly, for whom a thousand years were as a day, saw in his mind’s eye the sun, in that distant land, standing still, withdrawing its light from the world. In the sky over High Tor that day, there was a bright blur. A different perspective, but the same sun. ‘So his death is, was, what people choose to make of it, comic or tragic, is that what you are saying?’
‘I thought it was I who was supposed to be the “diabolic” one,’ said the figure with destroyed starlight for eyes. ‘I am saying that the awful choice you gave your own creation was surmounted by your son, who took upon himself both ways.’
‘It still killed him,’ pointed out his father.
There was another pause and then his companion spoke again. ‘It has been alleged that the “death” was not for ever…?’
‘Ah, as to that,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘that was not in the plot as I conceived it…’
‘But as we both know,’ said the other, ‘no author has the last word on his own work. Once in the world it is the world’s for the taking, or, if I may say – as one whose motives are so often misperceived – the mistaking. As you have been seeing for yourself, there is a great deal of hazard in human affairs.’
‘Is there no help for it, then?’ asked Mr Golightly, and his voice on the tor top sounded very small.
‘Only you, if I may say so,’ replied his companion, ‘as the author of all goodness, can answer that. This boy is saved – your son, and others, lost. If things go on as they are doing many parents will soon weep and know why. But look at it this way – your creation is capable of more than its creator. You and I have no life – so we cannot give it, in that reckless fashion, to save a world, or a friend. However it came about that this extraordinary faculty of human affection was implanted, I have to admit that in its foolhardy way it is rather wonderful.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Golightly, ‘I have been thinking that there are many ways in which my characters are superior to their author.’ And he sighed, thinking of Ellen Thomas and his beloved son.
‘You know,’ said his colleague, ‘you remind me of the great clown Grimaldi. Do you remember?’
‘As we have established, you have a better memory than me,’ said Mr Golightly, humbly. ‘As time goes on, I find I cannot always bring every last thing to mind. I’m afraid that I have uttered all kinds of things which nowadays I know not.’
‘Grimaldi,’ said the other, smoothly continuing, ‘in despair, anonymously consulted a doctor. He described, at length, his condition, which was one of considerable and sustained melancholy. Clinical depression, as it would be diagnosed today. The doctor listened carefully and then offered his prescription. “You are careworn,” he said, “and bowed down, and have forgotten that life has another face. What you need are the benefits of laughter. The remedy is easy; go to see the greatest comedian of all time – go and see Grimaldi.”
‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, gently, ‘when your holiday comes to a close, and you finish your soap opera, you will find a happy end…’
‘For a time, maybe,’ said Mr Golightly.
‘Well, but,’ said his partner and rival, ‘as we both know, everything here is only for a time…’
11
PAULA HAD BEEN GIVEN COMPASSIONATE LEAVE from work and it was to Paula’s mum’s, and not the Stag and Badger, that Mr Golightly went one late June evening in search of Luke.
Luke was delighted when his old crossword companion appeared asking if he could spare a few words.
‘Sure thing,’ said Luke, ever agreeable. ‘Come into the kitchen.’
Luke admitted he had been missing The Times. Paula’s mum took
the Mail, which, Luke observed, had a different mindset behind its crossword. He showed Mr Golightly one of the clues: ‘His bite could be worse than His bark if you confuse him (3)’, which reminded Mr Golightly that he had come to say that since his tenancy of Spring Cottage was almost at its end he wondered if Luke could look after Wilfred for a time. Johnny was going to have him eventually, but that would have to wait till Rosie Spence found a place to live and things got sorted over Johnny’s new dad. Apparently, Rosie was talking to solicitors and it looked as if it mightn’t be long before Jos Bainbridge would be free again.
Luke said he’d be glad to look after the Labrador, though he’d have to clear it with Paula’s mum – not that she ever put her foot down, especially now Paula was back. He offered his guest a Nescafé.
Mr Golightly reminded Luke he only drank real coffee. He had come, he said, mainly to say goodbye. Tomorrow he would be packing up and, having a dislike for farewells, he preferred to get them over with in advance.
‘Oh, right,’ said Luke. He was sorry his writing colleague was leaving. But he had an optimistic nature and expressed a hope they might meet up again.
‘Undoubtedly,’ Mr Golightly assured him. ‘I never forget a friend.’
Luke apologised if he had seemed unsociable lately. He’d been hard at it, he explained, finishing his new work.
‘My own idea I’ve decided to set aside,’ Mr Golightly explained. It seemed to have found its own way of reproducing itself.
He was about to ask after Paula when the kitchen door opened and she appeared lugging a rubbish sack.
Paula had not been too thrilled by the discovery that her absconding father was in the same line of business as the man who had apparently beaten up Johnny Spence’s mother all that time ago. For a while there was an excited rumour that Paula’s father might also be Johnny’s; but this turned out to be local wishful thinking.
‘Shit, that’s a relief!’ Johnny said when he called by to borrow Paula’s Dread-Fox Bitch CD and heard the latest gossip. ‘You’d be on at me something horrible if you was me sister.’
‘You bet your sweet arse I would if you use language like that!’ Paula had said, whacking him on the backside. She told him he could come and play her keyboard any time. ‘You’re not like other kids. You’re like I was, you are.’
Her father had been missing most of her life and Paula had given him up long ago. Jackson’s death hit her harder. It revealed a side to him she hadn’t detected and the discovery made her thoughtful.
However, a little after his death, a note was found to have been left by Jackson. In ill-formed capitals, apparently printed just before his suicide, it read:
I LEAVE EVERYTHING TO PAULA JENSON.
The note was dated, and signed, also in capitals, J. JACKSON.
Since Jackson had no relatives, or, other than Paula, close friends, the full extent of his illiteracy was not widely known. It was shrewd, and considerate, of the desperate man to use the surname which Paula herself had only lately discovered.
The day that Jackson’s body was found in the pear tree Paula had returned to Rabbit Row to find Luke in a ferment over his writing. Luke had scarcely taken in the details of the true-life drama he was living among. Never much in touch with flesh-and-blood human beings, he was wholly preoccupied by the tragic tale he now believed – all memory of Bill having vanished – he had single-handedly constructed. Hungry for an opinion, and oblivious to her personal tragedy, he pressed it on Paula, who read it through in one sitting over her mum’s kitchen table.
‘’S a good story,’ said Paula, finally responding to Luke’s repeated requests to know how she found it. She stacked the exercise books smartly into order on the table. ‘You’ll need to get it looking tidy and properly word-processed before you show it to anyone. It starts off well. ‘S good the way the baby’s a bastard, and all that bit about the dump he’s born in, and not knowing who his real dad is and that he comes from a mysterious background, and that. That’s all good romance – the readers’ll like that. And the main character, the one who don’t mind what he says and tells them what’s what and gets himself killed for it – he’s got balls, I like him. But the ending won’t do.’
‘Why not?’ asked Luke, stung into protest. ‘I mean, it’s a fantastic ending – being put to death by the people you’re trying to save and left to die in humiliating agony.’
He was deflated by this unexpected criticism of his tale of tragic suffering.
‘Won’t do,’ said Paula, firmly. She knew from the best-seller lists at Tesco’s that sad endings were not at all popular. ‘It’ll never sell, not the way you tell it, anyway.’
Luke was downcast. ‘What’ll I do, then? I can’t change the ending. He has to die – that’s the whole point.’
‘You could add a bit on,’ said Paula, pragmatically. ‘He could die, right? Everyone could think he was dead – but he isn’t. He comes back and only a few people see him. Then people start to talk – he becomes a cult hero, like Elvis, and that way you can keep the death, for the sob stuff, but still have a happy end.’
She had been in her room, tidying things away, when Mr Golightly called. It was her doll’s house and the remaining toy animals, she told him, she had in the rubbish sack. ‘Luke’s going to put them up in the loft,’ she explained. ‘So there’s room for us both when I move me other bits back. They was OK when I was a kid, but, you know, you can’t stay a kid, you gotta move on…’
‘I understand,’ said Mr Golightly, wondering whether congratulations to the couple were in order. ‘There’s a time and place for all things.’ It was a sentiment he had written of once himself, long ago, in one of the more poetic passages of his own work.
Paula said she would be selling Jackson’s place once all the legal stuff was tied up but that she couldn’t bring herself to spend another night there. For the time being she and Luke were going to squeeze in together at her mum’s.
Mr Golightly absorbed this new turn of events unsurprised. He was glad that two of his friends should strike up an association and his visit to Calne had taught him that human affairs had their own momentum.
Luke’s amiable indifference had conquered Paula far more effectively than any show of devotion could have done, but she was also impressed by the potential she saw in his writing. She took the opportunity to canvass their visitor’s view on Luke’s new project.
‘I told him, it won’t sell ‘less he does something about that ending. You got to look at the market. Change the ending and it could be a best-seller. I’m right, en’t I?’
Mr Golightly looked at Paula in her jeans and sequinned T-shirt and her several gleaming nose studs. She had a far more discriminating worldly sense than ever he, or Luke, could hope to have.
‘I expect you are right, child,’ he said. And to Luke, ‘I’d follow her lead on this, old chap – she sees these things more clearly…’
12
BY THE TIME HE HAD FINISHED PACKING UP Spring Cottage it was early evening, but Mr Golightly did not stroll up to the Stag and Badger. He’d had his fill of endings. Luke, or, better still, Paula, could look after those.
He went outside to give Samson the sugar lumps he had pilfered for the horse from his last visit to the pub. Samson stood sturdily oblivious to the ceremony of departure as Mr Golightly ran a finger down the plush nose. ‘Say “Ha, ha, among the trumpets” for me.’
He had promised Nicky Pope, who had her sister’s husband’s cousin staying and was up to her ears, to make sure that all was in apple-pie order to greet the new tenant, the tarot-card reader. The cottage hardly needed cleaning – Mr Golightly had discovered a fondness for housework. In any case, he gave the avocado bath and basin an extra going over, sprayed the kitchen hob with the last of the Mr Muscle that he and Johnny had bought together in Oakburton and got down on his knees to peer under the bed to see if there were any stray socks hiding. It was part of his rival’s cunning to whisk away trivia into dark corners; but on this occasion his
socks had been spared. He had already packed away the laptop with its e-mail dialogue and the final message – for the moment anyway – which had led to the meeting with his old associate:
shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him?
Perhaps this had brought on a fit of leniency? But it couldn’t last; they each had their own drama to play.
Walking back from Luke and Paula’s, beneath a lambent midsummer sky, he’d reflected how quick life was to heal the breaches, to close over the ragged wounds of loss. He would miss Ellen Thomas, as he missed his son; but they would not miss him. They were part of the teeming tribute of the earth, ephemeral, evanescent but, in its way, boundless and enduring. Nature doesn’t hold with tragedy, he thought, it has its own memorials: the green light of the dawn sky, the warmth of the spring soil, the spears of wheat, the blossom of a fruit tree, the clack of hooves, the clamour of starlings, the cool of rain, white stars and violets, the bark of an otter, the fall of dew, the abandoned dance of a girl, or the tears of a young boy as he wept for a world which had shown its best and its worst to him.
The tragedy was not his son’s or Ellen Thomas’s – it was poor demented Jackson’s, and Brian Wolford’s, and his mother’s. Cherie Wolford was beside herself for the son who had been the apple of her eye; it was thought she might never get over it, Nicky Pope had said.
Johnny Spence lived; and soon would have a father to quarrel with, and laugh about, and miss; and, no doubt, be ashamed of and bothered and anguished by. The beam of the balance of the universe, though slow, found its own level. For the while, it had righted itself; but neither he, nor his old rival, was the agent. If nothing else, he had learned that on his holiday.
Looking out through the window on to the garden, Mr Golightly saw one of Ellen Thomas’s geese, its orange bill rootling in the grass through the barbed wire, and remembered that Mary Simms, who had promised to see to the livestock, was to call by. It would be a tonic to see Mary again before his departure.
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