Читать книгу: «Mr Golightly’s Holiday»
Mr Golightly’s Holiday
Salley Vickers
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2003
Copyright © Salley Vickers 2003
The right of Salley Vickers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007156474
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007379651
Version: 2017-07-26
For my own father, who, valiant in the face
of adversity, taught me the charm of the comic
perspective – with all love.
Take hold tightly, let go lightly; this is one of the great secrets of felicity in love…
ROBERT ORAGE
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
March
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
April
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
May
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
June
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Keep Reading
The Research Notes of Johnny Spence
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Salley Vickers
About the Publisher
MARCH
1
ONE AFTERNOON IN MID MARCH, WHEN THE green-white snowdrops had blown ragged under the tangled hawthorn hedges, the pale constellations of primroses had ceased to be a novelty, and the more robust, sun-reflecting daffodils were in their heyday, an old half-timbered Traveller van drove into the village of Great Calne. There was, in fact, no other Calne, great or small, in the county of Devon; or if there ever had been, it had long since vanished into the indifferent encroachments of the moor. Great Calne stands at the edge of Dartmoor, one of the ancient tracts of land which still, in the twenty-first century, lends out its grazing free to the common people of England – though it must be said that the ‘common people’ are something of a scarcity these days.
Sam Noble, out walking his bitch, Daphne, named for his mother’s still-born twin sister, and having nothing better to do, watched with naked curiosity as the driver of the car negotiated the corner by the Stag and Badger – where, thanks to the pub’s garden wall, the passage was tight and drivers often came a cropper. He was mildly disappointed when nothing untoward occurred. Sam’s was not an especially malicious nature, but Great Calne did not provide the thrills he had once been used to. Before his retirement, Sam had been a film director, and had had hopes of winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes with a film about women jockeys which had subsequently made waves. However, for the past five years he had lived in Great Calne, where the principal excitement was provided by Morning Claxon’s plans to transform the tearooms into an alternative health centre.
There was another witness to the arrival of the car, a less obvious one. Johnny Spence had, as usual, skipped school and it wasn’t safe for him to show his face till after four o’clock. During the stranger’s arrival, Johnny was hiding, as was his habit, in the upper branches of a yew tree which spread its antique shade over the churchyard wall and on to the garden of the Reverend Meredith Fisher, the latest occupant of the rectory. Johnny, whose researches were thorough, knew that the lady vicar was off doing her counselling training down in Plymouth, and would not be back before six. So he was free to watch the old Morris – which from his calculations must be worth a bit – being brought skilfully round the corner and into the front garden of Spring Cottage, which since the death of Emily Pope had been let out by her daughter, Nicky, to holidaymakers.
Emily Pope had been dead long enough for Nicky to discover that Spring Cottage did not let easily. So far, it had been rented by a couple of families who complained about the out-of-date facilities, and the damp. One woman, from Clapham, claimed to have found toadstools. It had been something of a relief to receive a request via Nicky’s new website – www.moorvacs.co.uk – from the gentleman who had described himself as ‘a writer in need of a peaceful situation within easy walking distance of shops and pub’. Spring Cottage filled the bill nicely. Writers were notoriously careless people – very likely this one would smoke in the bedroom, but then again he was a man, and mightn’t notice that the back plates on the kitchen hob were dodgy, or that the avocado suite in the bathroom (once the pride of Emily Pope) was now badly out of fashion. Nicky, in the first flush of holiday letting, had splashed out on a Norwegian wood-burning stove, sold to her by a travelling salesman who had hinted at further attractions. These had never materialised, and the stove, prominent in the website details, filled the downstairs rooms with smoke when the wind was in the wrong direction. The Clapham woman had complained about this too; but Nadia Fawns, who ran an antiques store over in Backen, had sold Nicky a couple of convector heaters which she hoped would put paid to the heating problems.
Sam Noble, with several backward glances, had made his way with Daphne through the main street of Great Calne and up towards the moor by the time the driver came to unload the Traveller van. Only Johnny Spence was there to observe him more closely. Johnny’s powers of reconnaissance were keen; had he been asked he would have described the stranger as ‘a fattish old guy who looked as if he hadn’t had a proper shave’. But Johnny’s position on the yew bough would not have afforded a view of the newcomer’s most striking feature – a pair of eyes whose true colour was hard to discern, since they had a quality of shifting from the brooding shades of a storm-crushed sea to the limpid freshness of a dawn sky.
It appeared that the visitor was at any rate physically strong since he emptied the Traveller in double-quick time. The contents were comparatively few: a knocked-about suitcase, a baggy holdall, a laptop computer, a rather loud-looking portable stereo and some cardboard boxes, one of which bore the name of a well-known wine store. A drinking man, at least, Colin Drover, who managed the local inn, might have remarked. The visitor had brought his own alcohol – which might have been a disappointment to a publican. But with drink, as with so much else, inclination in one quarter usually leads to exploration of others.
And the publican’s optimism would have been confirmed. When the stranger had unpacked the van, and distributed some of his belongings in the cramped interior of Spring Cottage, he strolled up the main street to the inn, paused a moment to inspect the menu displayed outside, which promised Tasty Snacks & Bar Lunches, and then pushed open the solid double doors to enter the fire-lit warmth within.
2
THE NAME OF GREAT CALNE’S INN WAS THE Stag and Badger – known to locals as the Stag and Badge – and its manager, Colin Drover, was out the back hurrying up Paula over the prawns when Mr Golightly made his way to the bar. Customers liked their prawns better ‘shell-off’ but it was God’s own task to get Paula in the kitchen to shell them. There was always some excuse – if not her periods it was her boyfriend’s back, though what the devil that had to do with anything Colin Drover couldn’t imagine, as if ‘boy’ was what you could call Jackson anyway! Jackson had been at school with Colin Drover and both had seen the best side of fifty. As usual with any encounter with Paula, her employer had got the worst of it and this made him of a mind to try that bit harder with the person he now saw seated at one of the bars.
‘Good evening, what can I get you?’ The publican infused his greeting with a special concern, unconsciously hoping that this might act as antidote to any inhospitable shelliness in the Stag and Badger’s prawns.
The new customer smiled back. He had an agreeable expression and, thickset and sensibly dressed in an old tweed jacket and woollen shirt, had the appearance of a country person himself. But when he spoke Colin couldn’t place the accent. Welsh, maybe, he thought, or a trace of Derbyshire? Colin had family, on his mother’s side, in the Peak District.
‘Thank you. A pint of your special bitter, if you’d be so kind.’
Colin Drover had never lost his pleasure in drawing a pint of really good ale. He was proud of his beer, which he still reckoned king among the alcoholic beverages. People nowadays went overboard for wine, but in Colin Drover’s view you couldn’t beat a decent pint of real ale. A solid no-nonsense beer drinker was always welcome in the Stag and Badger.
He drew the beer to a foaming head and set it down delicately on the bar where the foam rocked and then slopped gently over the glass’s side. The man on the other side of the bar treated the drink with equal care, lifting the glass to his lips to sip the dark gold liquor beneath the creamy rim and Colin Drover watched, anxious to see how his beer went down.
The stranger sipped and sighed, and the landlord of the Stag and Badger sighed too with vicarious enjoyment. ‘Nothing like a good pint, I always say,’ he remarked with the subdued enjoyment that a satisfactory sale always brought.
‘Nothing like it, except perhaps another one!’ the stranger promisingly agreed. He seemed a self-sufficient sort, not chatty, but not one of your gloomy types either. He sat quietly absorbing the atmosphere, his eyes half lidded over as if to keep a veil over his thoughts. Not the kind to give much away but could make a valuable customer, was Colin Drover’s conclusion as he forced himself back to the kitchen to take up the cudgels again with Paula.
The newcomer looked about him, apparently taking in his surroundings. The inn was prosperous-looking: mahogany fittings, brass lights, and wallpaper with a leafy National Trust motif in the restaurant area, where tables were set out for dinner guests. It was in this part of the pub, where the stranger was sitting, that a few stools were available for the more elevated drinkers. But it seemed that the stranger did not include himself in this category for after another sip of beer he slid down and made his way round to the public bar, just as a thin young man with an earring and a closefitting woolly cap came through the door.
The young man took up a place as if this was a regular perch. Luke Weatherall was a poet, who comforted or rewarded himself, depending on the day’s output, most evenings about this time. This particular evening was one for comfort – his long, narrative poem, based on a Creation myth of the North American Indians, had stuck fast. Luke had pinned the sheet of paper he had covered in useless stanzas to the stud wall of his room – in Lavinia Galsworthy’s barn conversion just outside the village, where Luke rented a studio flat – and thrown darts at it before making his way down the hill to the Stag and Badger. It was at times like this that Luke wondered if he mightn’t have done better to choose the other Indians for his poem – the Eastern ones – about whom there was more known and less room for artistic confusion.
‘Evening, there,’ he said to the man who now came and sat beside him. Luke had a friendly nature, but he also hoped to have his mind taken off the worries of creation.
The other man acknowledged the greeting with a slight nod of his head and for half a second there flashed across Luke’s mind an image of a mountain lake in which there was perfectly reflected a pellucid gentian sky. Perhaps the stanzas hadn’t been so bad, after all.
‘Golightly’s the name. What can I get you?’
‘Hey, thanks, man. A bitter’d be great.’
The stranger waved a hand at the barmaid, a slight girl with long red hair demurely caught back in a velvet band.
Mr Golightly, who liked all prettiness, gave an affable glance in her direction and ordered. ‘How’s the weather been round here?’ he enquired, showing he was a thoroughbred Englishman and knew what bar talk entailed.
The girl set down the glasses so that not a drop slopped over the rim on to the polished surface of the bar.
‘Middling only, there’s been terrible rain but there’s been some God days, too.’
‘She means the odd sunny one,’ explained Luke, alive to the dangers of social exclusion.
But his concern for his new acquaintance was unnecessary, as once again Mr Golightly gave his accommodating smile. ‘Ah, yes,’ he agreed, ‘I know those!’
He seemed disinclined to chat further, so Luke turned to the back of the newspaper, which was kept for the customers, and started in on the crossword. The North American myth of Creation had cruelly reduced his circumstances; the only chance of a paper was when he walked down in the evening to the Stag.
The door opened again, letting in the cleansing draught of a March wind and an apricot spaniel dog who trotted ahead of her owner. Sam Noble, the former film-maker, was also a regular at the pub. There was no need for him to speak his order and a gin and tonic was wordlessly laid before him by the red-headed barmaid.
Sam hesitated a moment as if unsure whether in betraying curiosity he mightn’t betray rather more, and then ostentatiously sat himself on the other side of Mr Golightly. ‘Evening,’ he said. ‘Visiting these parts?’
The question was unnecessary since he had witnessed Mr Golightly’s arrival at Spring Cottage earlier that afternoon. Perhaps Mr Golightly guessed this. In any case, he merely agreed that he was staying in the area.
‘In the village, is it?’ Sam asked. It was part of his social ritual to pretend to know at once more and less than he really did about his neighbours. ‘Holiday?’ he asked again.
But Sam’s project of enquiry was doomed, as all the other did was renew his opaque smile. He appeared more taken by the spaniel, who had sidled up and was rubbing her parts seductively against his boot.
‘Nice dog you’ve got there. Bitch, is she?’
‘Daphne, yes,’ agreed Sam, slightly affronted that his pet was making more impact than himself. But then the newcomer didn’t know about the Palme d’Or. Time enough to bring that up later. ‘Named for my aunt,’ he added. ‘My mother was a twin and lost her sister when she was born. Nowadays it would count as trauma.’ He was quietly proud of the tragedy which hung over the family psyche.
But even the account of this disaster did not disturb the newcomer’s humour. ‘Ah,’ he agreed, ‘it would, I suppose.’ He spoke as if he might have added that in his day they saw such matters differently – life and death, his demeanour seemed to suggest, were not so important that they should interrupt a quiet pint.
Sam Noble, sensing that conversation was drained dry, turned to the man who had approached the bar to ask for ‘twenty Lambert and Butlers’.
Jackson, the so-called ‘boyfriend’ of Paula out-the-back, was Great Calne’s handyman, though ‘handy’ was hardly the word to describe his skills. Residents of the village would frequently ask, on the matter of Jackson, why on earth they bothered – something of an existential question, as Jackson, like most who work in the building trade, dealt in promises of doubtful validity. No one in their right mind seriously believes a builder when he tells you he will be with you next Wednesday; certainly not when accompanied by the rider, ‘on the dot of nine’. As all the world knows, to a builder ‘next Wednesday’ means in a couple of months if you’re lucky, and no man or woman born and bred in Britain would seriously count on it being otherwise.
Jackson, however, took this licence to extremes, interpreting ‘next Wednesday’ to mean as much as a couple of years off. Nor, when he finally arrived to do a job, could the results be said to be satisfactory. He had set up old Emily Pope’s electric shower, down in Spring Cottage – in the days before it was let to holidaymakers – so that the first time she used it a jolt of electric current went through her naked body which people said had very likely contributed to her being carried off altogether the following year.
Jackson’s chief interest in life was baiting badgers, and girls. In the latter case, if not one of nature’s gentlemen he was at least one of her democrats. He had no fine feelings about what a girl looked like provided she was willing to drop her knickers with no fuss. Of course, it was a bonus if they were lookers too, but not essential to his general aim.
What happened to a girl once she had come across was another story. Paula had made history by keeping Jackson’s attention long after she had become unpredictable in the knickers department. Jackson himself did not wholly understand the reasons for his unusual constancy. Like many apparently aggressive men, he was frightened of violence and wasn’t at all sure what a dumped Paula mightn’t do. More than once, she had darkly referred to the collection of kitchen knives which were kept at the Stag and Badger for slicing cold meats. Jackson had an uneasy feeling that Paula’s mind, if sufficiently stirred, might turn to ideas of slicing other kinds of flesh. It was well to keep in with her; the badgers were a different matter.
In the days before Paula, Jackson had a vague scheme to get his leg over Mary Simms, the red-headed barmaid. But Mary herself had higher ideals. She had recently enrolled in an Open University course on Romantic poetry and had no plans to waste her time with a layabout like Jackson. ‘How are you getting on?’ she asked Luke who was frowning at the crossword. Luke was a poet and the course on Romantic poetry was not entirely coincidental.
‘“This Old Testament prophet gets cut off short in drought” – five letters?’ he queried aloud, oblivious to who was speaking. He was on unfamiliar territory with the Bible – American Indians were his thing.
Sam Noble decided to have a go at Jackson. ‘Any chance of you getting round to fixing the pond?’ he asked. This was a routine question; the pond had been waiting to be ‘fixed’ since the day Sam had moved into the village, leaving behind his showbiz career.
Jackson, who reserved a special contempt for townies, contracted his little red eyes as if in fierce thought. ‘Be with you Thursday –’ he announced oracularly – ‘Friday latest. Right?’
‘Very good,’ said Sam primly. ‘I shall expect you not later than Friday noon.’ After five years he was still prone to the error of imagining that his former position and class made any headway with Jackson.
A family party, parents and two small children, now arrived and flustered Colin Drover by ordering the prawns ‘shell-off’. The publican made a sortie out the back – to Paula’s domain – and returned red-faced to suggest that ‘shell-on’ could be had for a ‘pound off’. ‘Mu-um,’ the small boy whined, catching on that here was a chance for a scene, ‘I don’t like them with shells.’
‘Of course not, darling,’ said his mother. ‘I’m sure the nice man will get us some without.’
‘Nonsense,’ said his father. ‘Shells are fun! Daisy thinks they’re fun, don’t you, Daisy?’ He beamed at his daughter, calculating that if they all had the prawns with shells on the meal would be four quid less. He wanted to get back home for the match on TV; the evening out had not been his idea.
‘Don’t like shells,’ his son stubbornly maintained. Daisy was only four – what did she know? She didn’t eat grown-up food anyway.
Mr Golightly, who had been looking at nothing in particular, now turned his glance in the direction of the restaurant, and the boy piped down and shuffled his shoes against the table leg. They were new shoes, bought during the half-term which was almost over. He didn’t want to go back to school where he was bullied in the playground and had had his head pushed down one of the girls’ toilets.
‘Shells are fun!’ his father repeated. Like most repetition this was not convincing. But at that minute a grinning Colin Drover emerged from out the back with four plates of naked, steaming, rosy prawns. Inexplicably, Paula had buckled to and shelled them.
‘There now,’ the father spoke with wooden cheer, the promise of four quid saved disappearing with the arrival of the prawns. But by Monday the kids would be back at school and the half-term horror would be over. ‘Wasn’t that kind of the man, Daisy?’ he prompted, more enthusiastically.
Mr Golightly had turned his eyes from the table but the boy continued to watch him. He looked a bit like that picture of the man feeding birds, in olden times, his teacher had up in the classroom.
Mr Golightly finished his pint, lowered himself from the tall stool and stood looking round as if to take his leave of the company at the Stag and Badger.
‘Old Testament prophet six down,’ he said, passing behind Luke Weatherall to the door. ‘Hosea. Not a bad sort,’ he added.
3
SPRING COTTAGE WAS NAMED FOR THE NATURAL water supply which seeped up through the Devon soil and occasionally made its way through the porous walls of the old dwelling. The cottage stood in a run-to-seed garden, which looked across to hills and ran towards fields which sloped down to the River Dart. This, thanks to recent rains, was roaring like a hungry lion when Mr Golightly stepped outside his back door the following morning.
It was early, not yet six; the stars had yet to disappear and the near-full moon hung still, like a yellow paper lantern, in the west. Over the hills, black clouds made portentous shapes suggesting Eastern tales: dragons, strange-beaked birds, perilous cliffs. Behind the clouds, a veined-marble sky was streaked dim green and pearl. An experienced watcher of weather could have predicted that the day would be a bright one, for beyond, in the east, a thin patina of gold hinted at imminent light.
Mr Golightly snuffed the air like a hunter. It smelled to him of animal life and sappy growth, of burgeoning country things which gave a lift to his heart. All hearts need a lift from time to time and Mr Golightly’s was no exception. He had come to Great Calne to take a holiday. It had been many years since his duties had allowed such an indulgence, but for some time he had been thinking that a project he had started long ago was due for reappraisal. Quite why Great Calne had been chosen as the place to set about this project was a question that Mr Golightly himself may not have been able to answer. But he understood, perhaps better than most, that all important questions are unanswerable.
The intricacies of the World Wide Web were still a mystery to Mr Golightly who, despite his business experience, with many other pressures and concerns to attend to, was not yet practised at using it. One of his valuable aides had entered his requirements – ‘Holiday let in peaceful rural setting’ – into the search engine, Alphaomega, coming up with Spring Cottage via Nicky Pope’s website.
So far the result appeared satisfactory. In any event, Mr Golightly did not give the impression of being a choosy sort. On the contrary, he emanated some sense that all places were alike to him. He gave every sign of being content with the simple accommodation – a bedroom (referred to in the website details as the master), which was almost filled by the iron, black-painted double bedstead, a boxroom (bedroom two) stuffed with old curtains, magazines, rugs, a fender, an exercise bike and supermarket bags full of the late Emily Pope’s correspondence with the taxman, which Nicky Pope, who as a single mother had her hands full already, meant to get around to when she could only find a moment.
Downstairs, there was a parlour (lounge-diner) which boasted an oak gateleg table, a couple of floral-covered comfy chairs, a spine-challenging orange sofa bed, bought by Emily Pope during a short mid-life crisis in the sixties, a black-and-white TV, and the state-of-the-art wood-burning stove from Norway; also a narrow scullery (fitted kitchen with mod cons) which housed a microwave oven, an erratic hob, some Formica cupboards containing a medley of crockery, and a whining fridge which, as Nicky Pope had had to run off before she had quite seen that all was in order, still contained a tub of low-cost margarine, a dried-up half of a lemon and five of a ‘six-pack’ of Cokes, a legacy of the Clapham woman’s stay.
In the days before planning permission, the scullery had been tacked rakishly on to the side of the cottage and roofed, in a slapdash manner, with corrugated asbestos, which nowadays would have drawn down imprecations from a dutiful Health and Safety inspector. Lucky, then, for Nicky Pope, that Mr Golightly had none of the Clapham woman’s self-preserving assertiveness; or it may have been that health and safety were not issues for him.
When the rain fell it made a timpani on the scullery roof, a sound which Mr Golightly had yet to discover whether he found enchanting or distracting. A rickety fence, with a wicket gate let into it, which led through to the garden, ran beside the scullery. But this morning Mr Golightly was troubled by none of those things: he stood listening to the sound of the rushing brook, which ran through the lower meadows, and noting how the hills formed a gentle cleavage through which the River Dart found its way to the sea.
Grazing in the field, to which the untidy garden sloped, was a stocky brown horse with a white flash down its nose. Beyond, bounded by a beech hedge, where the leaves independently maintained their autumnal rust, lay further fields, where young spring wheat was forming a green glaze over the soil.
A batch of rooks was already out scouring the earth for food, while a band of their less diligent kin sat in the bare-fanned branches of an ash tree, making clean silhouettes against the gathering light. As Mr Golightly watched, a pair of magpies swooped gleaming down, balancing with their long tails and settling among the rooks to add a touch of Old Master cachet to the scene.
‘One for sorrow, two for joy.’
Mr Golightly spoke the words aloud. It was an ancient saying, old as any of the works of man, and he could not now recall when he had first heard it. But, like many country-bred people, he did not let reason oust superstition: the sight of the swaggering piebald birds gave an added fillip to his spirits.
And now, as if to add fuel to this fire, a sliver of sun appeared above one of the breast-like hills, a mere slice of orange which rapidly grew to an incandescent globe. Rifts of glowing red infiltrated the green-grey sky which began to take on further intimations of light.
‘Be praised!’ said Mr Golightly.
He did not speak aloud, but as if to a beloved intimate whose understanding had no need of outward hearing.
Samson, the horse, perhaps catching the drift of the unspoken words, made its way up to the wire which formed a boundary to Spring Cottage’s garden. ‘Hello, old boy.’ Mr Golightly ran a finger down the long plush nose and wished he had thought to bring sugar lumps. The cardboard box he had brought was packed with some of the items he might have difficulty finding in the average English village shop: tins of anchovies, jars of pickled walnuts, Marmite, a pot of moist Stilton, chillies, pine kernels, a French sausage, Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, sugared almonds – but despite these latter items Mr Golightly did not, in general, have a sweet tooth. He had not been raised on sugar and consequently it did not form part of his regular diet.
‘Sorry, old chap.’ He spoke regretfully: he liked to indulge animals who rarely bore resentment if one failed to do as they wished.
As if in response to his apology, a ribald cackling made itself heard and Mr Golightly turned away from Samson and towards the direction of the noise. The next-door garden was fenced by heavy barbed wire. Through the wire Mr Golightly could see a female figure among white geese with glistening orange bills and some farmyard ducks.
Mr Golightly was naturally courteous; but he was concerned, too, to establish peace with his neighbours so that there should be no threat to his tranquillity. His work had too often been a battle; he had no wish for his holiday to be marred by warfare. War between neighbours, he knew from long experience, is often of the most disruptive kind.
‘Hello,’ he said, and offered his hand across the barbed-wire fence.
The other said nothing but only stared. It was the kind of stare which might have perturbed anyone with an uneasy conscience; but if Mr Golightly’s conscience was uneasy he didn’t betray the fact. He held the gaze steadily till the woman relaxed and held out a hand.
‘Watch the spikes on the fence.’
‘Good fences make good neighbours.’
Mr Golightly could not have explained why he had made this remark. He was not in the modern habit of constantly enquiring into the workings of his own mind but tended to say whatever came into his head.
‘Ellen Thomas,’ said his neighbour, apparently ignoring his comment, and turned away.
‘Golightly,’ said Mr Golightly, looking after her; the grey eyes of Ellen Thomas were those of a creature in pain.
Back in the cottage, he unpacked the box of provisions and arranged these tidily in the Formica cupboards. He looked about for a kettle which he eventually found in the cupboard under the sink. No plug. Better make a shopping list, he decided.
Up in the bedroom he completed his unpacking. His possessions were simple: a couple of nightshirts, a pair of slippers, some woollies, a number of warm shirts, wool socks, underwear. His zip-up sponge bag, rather the worse for wear, was already in the avocado bathroom. No tie – this was a holiday. Among the other items there was a small travelling photograph holder which framed the picture of a young man with a piteous face.
Mr Golightly looked at the face as he placed the picture beside the bed. Love is the price of love, he thought, as, observing the warning on a note tacked up by Nicky Pope, he minded his head down the steep stairs to the parlour where he prepared to do combat with a book of instructions lying beside the Norwegian woodstove.
Books of instructions were things with which Mr Golightly had little patience. He opened the booklet entitled ‘Norpine Stoves: the extra modern way to be old-fashioned’ and read: The flue towards the left-handed side of the upper orifice is to be unclosed while the material fires is being laid down.
What the hell did all that mean?
4
ELLEN THOMAS LAY ON HER SOFA LOOKING across to where the sheep stood making enigmatic runes on the hillside. She was reflecting that if she could read these runes she might become wise.
No living soul knew this but, shortly after her husband, Robert, died, Ellen had had a strange encounter with a gorse bush. She had been walking her dog, Wilfred, across the moor and, as usual when she walked in the days after Robert’s death, she had been crying. Although she had no inhibition about crying over Robert, the tears only seemed to come when she was mobile. While she was stationary they stayed dammed up inside her, causing unbearable pressure around the heart.
There was something about striding across the tough moorland grasses, through the plashy bogs and past the pale lichen-coated brakes of thorn, which made a breach in her constraining inner structures; so that when she had climbed to the stony outcrop of the tor she was able to stand against the wind on the spine of the skyline and howl like a banshee.
She was returning from just such a venting early one afternoon, a time when most people were eating lunch, when Wilfred began to sniff and whine round a patch of gorse. Supposing voles or rabbits, Ellen had put Wilfred on his lead and tried to drag the dog past the bush. But he pulled so hard the lead slipped from her grasp, and Wilfred, barking frantically, bolted for home.
Ellen, about to hurry after him, was arrested by a strong sense that the gorse concealed more than a vole or a rabbit. A violent burning sensation leapt like a ravaging tiger at her heart and a voice, sweet and terrible, spoke from the golden bush.
‘I am love,’ it said.
Ellen was not of a religious disposition. If asked, she would have said she was an atheist, an agnostic at best, so these words startled her and at first she believed there must have been some mistake.
‘I am Ellen Thomas,’ she had offered, diffidently, in return, and waited, expecting to be dismissed. But the dismissal came in the form of a further surprise.
‘Tell them.’
‘What?’ Ellen asked.
‘Tell them!’ said the voice again in its tender, commanding tone.
Ellen waited for more but no further utterances issued from the gorse. She walked home, dry-eyed, after Wilfred.
Ellen had no idea how to obey the injunction she had been given. She had no clue as to what the cryptic words might mean. Whatever they meant it was not – she was sure of this – that she should go about preaching to people. No being, not even one whose essence was love, would suborn her, Ellen Thomas, as a preacher in its cause. She wondered if what she was being asked was to write about the experience, but that seemed hardly more likely. Robert had been a journalist and had occasionally run stuff past her for comments; but aside from that, and the jottings she sometimes wrote in her grandmother’s recipe book, since school, where she had not excelled, she had had no practice in writing.
To be asked to tell of love is a tall enough order; to be asked such a thing when one has not even the habit of belief is awful. The magnitude and impossibility of the task she had been assigned felled Ellen.
The loss of Robert had awoken her to the innate treachery of all certainties. Her husband’s enduring sympathy had made life seem unchangeable. With Robert gone this illusion, along with all human ties, vanished too. Yet even in his absence, the knowledge of Robert’s steady love had conferred upon her a sense of life’s consistency. But the enigmatic order from the gorse bush robbed Ellen of her old self and the sureties that had survived Robert’s death. She took to walking, day and night, seeking not so much a solution to the problem she had been unwillingly set as escape.
The walks left her overwhelmingly fatigued. The friendly countryside she had once enjoyed took on a menacing aspect. The foliage in the trees became baleful, dropping leaves and icy water on her as she passed. The hedges murmured threateningly in the wind, which rushed at her, haranguing her like some invisible prosecutor. Metal gates clanged horribly, bruising the calves of her legs, or making violent grating noises, shocking to her ears. The sun, red and glowering, plunged down the sky in pursuit of her. Outside or in she felt alarmingly afraid.
Gradually, as rats are said to leave a sinking ship, her everyday capacities had begun to slink away, leaving her a remnant, a hapless passenger on the derelict wreck of her old personality, which now appeared to float on perilous and alien waters. She seemed to feel her feet sliding under her, sensed the deck shudder and tip her dangerously off balance, downwards to an icy darkness, where lurked shapeless, unformed things, and where death looked a blessed relief and disintegration easier than resistance.
With the last dregs of her failing resources, she dragged herself to sell Brook Farm, the farmhouse she had lived in with Robert for over twenty years, and move to the small, plain, characterless bungalow where obscurely she felt she might be safe. And here – after the anguish of disposing of the furniture over which she and Robert had laughed, planned, bickered, made love and acted all the multifacets of a long marriage, for there was no way the accumulation of a shared life would fit into her new home – she had hidden herself away, for what she found she chiefly could not bear was other people’s company.
From the long sofa, which, scraping the bottom of the barrel of her energy, she had made the object of a last-ditch shopping effort, she lay, unrecognisable to herself, gazing out in those moments of passionless lucidity which afflict the mortally wounded. It seemed to her, at such moments, that she might never rise again, but would simply freeze there upon her long perch, like some stray migrant bird forced to winter over in a cold and alien land.
One morning, while she was engaged in looking out – if ‘engaged’ could be the right word for something which so much resembled the loosening of all former ties – she became aware that the nature of what she saw had undergone some alchemical change.
Ellen had been a watercolour artist, and made a successful living selling her paintings at local craft shops. She had an accurate eye and a patient hand, and the world, as she was used to seeing it, had beauty and charm. But now everything she had once seen as colourful, lyrical, dramatic, even, was subsumed into a vast, unquenchable litany of light.
The months that she had by now spent lying on the sofa had brought Ellen no further towards solving the problem she had been set by the presence in the gorse bush. But the vision of the changed world, rather than diminishing her sense of inadequacy, became a reproach. She looked outside to where the trees and hills and sheep apparently continued their former existence, but in the infinitude of space around and between them, she now knew there lay the inscrutable and uncompromising powers of love and mercy, and she, Ellen Thomas, had been enjoined to make them known.
The intense and brilliant light Ellen had seen at the centre of all things probed her being like a surgeon’s knife. There seemed no safety outside herself and no refuge within. She could tell no one what had occurred – lest she be taken for a lunatic. She feared to show herself to anyone for she felt there must be a savour of madness about her.
During the day, apart from the sparest of attentions to economic necessities, she gazed out of the window, a shadow between two worlds, surveying the landscape, waiting for the awful injunction to return, for she knew that having been a prey to truth it would never leave her, but would make itself felt at any cost. At night she lay in a kind of dead-and-alive doze, apprehensive that the voice might call on her again.
The assault of love upon Ellen Thomas had been savage rather than sweet, and, like many caught in its toils, she longed to have been spared the experience.
5
AFTER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF FRUITLESS struggle Mr Golightly had reached the view that the instructions for the up-to-the-minute stove had probably been produced and marketed by his business rival. He had not admitted this to anyone at the office, but he had been troubled, lately, by recent signs that his rival’s business was beginning to supersede his own. It was a business formed upon the back of his own global enterprise, and this made its proliferation especially galling. To distract his mind from this unwelcome line of thought, he began to check out the rest of Spring Cottage’s equipment.
He found the two convector heaters, slightly chipped and rusting, in the cupboard under the stairs. Well, that was a blessing, anyway. He could afford to take a more cavalier position with the stove. In one of the Formica cupboards there was a toaster, thank goodness with a plug attached; a broken machine, apparently designed for grinding; in the cupboard beneath the stairs an iron which had seen better days, and an impossible ironing board. There had been times when he might have gone in for grinding, but not on his holiday. Nor, since his secretary was not there to pass comment, was there any call to iron. Toast, now, was a different kettle of fish: toast fingers, with a boiled egg, was something which Mr Golightly was partial to…
It was nearly nine and a walk to the shop would give the opportunity to assess what provisions were available in Great Calne. He hoped not to have to drive too far afield. The Traveller could play up and he didn’t want the bother of having to find a mechanic who could fix it. Of course, he could always send for someone to come down from the office, but it was to get away from all of that that he had come away for his holiday.
Putting on a green parka, Mr Golightly walked up the hill towards the Post Office Stores where a young man with a straggly beard was stacking oranges in the window.
‘Good morning’, said Mr Golightly. And he spoke truly for the fully risen sun was unreservedly lighting the village of Great Calne.
‘Depends who you are,’ rejoined the beard, stepping back from the window. ‘Shit!’ as the oranges rebelled and rolled down and all over the floor.
Oh dear. Mr Golightly spoke only to himself. He had selected milk, fresh and ‘untreated’ – he didn’t hold with ‘dead’ milk in cartons – half a dozen eggs, some local cheese, tomatoes and a couple of brown rolls.
‘You staying at Spring Cott?’ asked the young man, cramming too many tomatoes into a tiny paper bag.
‘Yes, indeed. A pretty location.’
‘All right for toads! Damp as hell. Wouldn’t catch me there, that’s for sure.’
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it…
As Mr Golightly walked back down the hill, some words, which had always struck him as particularly grim, rang in his mind. But better not to meet trouble halfway – there were boiled eggs and toast to look forward to, he was on holiday and here to revise his great work.
Many years earlier Mr Golightly had written a work of dramatic fiction which, after slow initial sales, had gradually grown to become a best-seller. In time, the by-products of this enterprise had expanded to form the basis of a worldwide business. The work had been based on his observations of human life – its loves, hopes, fears, lusts, idiocies, anxieties, false securities, vanities, dishonesties, fantasies, cruelties and general tendency to inveterate folly. Mr Golightly, in his droll way, liked to describe his work as a ‘comedy’; but in this, he had discovered, he resembled the playwright Chekhov.
Chekhov, attending the dress rehearsal of one his plays, was surprised to find that the director, none other than the great Russian Stanislavsky, was playing it as a tragedy. There were no laughs, Chekhov was tickled to find, except those provided by the single audience of the humorous playwright himself.
Mr Golightly’s magnum opus had something of The Cherry Orchard’s ambiguity. Perhaps it was this, or perhaps it was the gradually reducing sales – though to be sure it had had a good enough run: for years it had been an international sensation – which had determined him to rewrite the work. The idea had come to him when, one evening, he had turned on the TV and had become engrossed in one of the many soap operas which run there.
Mr Golightly’s business was so time-consuming that often he remained ignorant of the rapid developments of modern culture. His philosophy was that if a thing was going to catch on it would, in the fullness of time, catch up with him. That millions of people organised their lives so as not to miss their personal ‘soap’ was news to Mr Golightly.
But herein lay one of the gifts which made him unique in his sphere. Far from being shocked, or taking an ‘it wasn’t like that in my day’ attitude (a common trap among the older generation), he saw at once the advantages. His own work, he felt, after sampling the current TV output, had many of the features of a modern soap – it was merely the idiom and the episodes which needed bringing up to date. The characters in his original drama were only apparently unlike those of the present day. Human nature hadn’t changed, of course, but custom had, and the times.
And then there was that delightful notion of a holiday…
Mr Golightly had been taken by an item concerning ‘stress in the office’ which had followed Neighbours, the soap his secretary watched and for which he had found he himself developing a liking. Stress, it seemed, was a recently discovered malady and one, Mr Golightly couldn’t help feeling, that he could be a candidate for. It seemed there were all kind of palliatives available to combat it – t’ai chi, reiki, Pilates, yoga, reflexology, hypnosis, homeopathy, psychotherapy, acupuncture, massage – but something in Mr Golightly baulked at these remedies which, so far as he was able to grasp them, struck him as somewhat invasive.
But a ‘holiday’ was a different story: that harked back to a former era – a time when he had been able to rest on his laurels and had taken delight in all he had achieved. And what better plan than to combine a long overdue rest with a reworking of his great enterprise?
No one but an artist knows the peculiar delight of being summoned by a work which, as yet unborn, lies, with all its potential undisclosed, within the dormant darkness of the creating heart. Mr Golightly’s tread had a secret bounce as he made his way down the hill and towards his awaiting soap opera. He would boil the eggs, pour a mug of coffee, with the unpasteurised milk he had bought at the miserable young man’s stores, and set up the laptop, the use of which Mike had instructed him in before his departure.
Mike, it was agreed by all at the office, was a perfect angel. His patience was a byword and he had promised, if necessary, to come down to Great Calne himself should Mr Golightly encounter any technical problem with the newly installed e-mail system.
Mr Golightly had drunk his coffee, from the Spiderman mug he had found among the medley of crockery, before he opened up his laptop to check his e-mails. Mike had explained that the system called for an e-mail address and something called a ‘server’. He had set up golightly@golightly.com which allowed, he suggested, for expansion into a website. For some time Mike had been of the view that a website would make a valuable innovation for the Golightly Enterprises and was hoping to take advantage of this holiday to persuade the boss of its commercial advantages.
Connecting the laptop to the phone involved some fiddling about with the leads which Mike had had the foresight to include, so that by the time Mr Golightly was ready to dial up it was past ten o’clock. Plenty of time, though, to start work – the day was still young.
Several e-mails, accompanied by a sound effect, appeared on the screen. The first was a message from the server, cosmos. com, and offered Mr Golightly the benefit of bargain travel services, including a cheap offer to go diving in the Red Sea.
In his younger, more forceful, days Mr Golightly had often visited that part of the world. But the greener, less turbulent pastures of England, were, he felt, a more soothing environment for his recreational plans. The Red Sea would take him too far down memory lane, a route to be avoided when one was set upon change.
The second message was from Bill, his handsome PA, and concerned some charity, to do with Third World aid, to which Mr Golightly had agreed to lend the firm’s name.
The third was from no recognisable name or address.
by what way is the light parted?
was the disconcerting message.
Scientific questions had not troubled Mr Golightly greatly over the years. In the past, when questions had been asked at all, it was he who had tended to do the asking. His secretary, Martha, the one who had put him on to Neighbours, would probably say that this was ‘very like a man’. Comments along these lines from Martha had been more forthcoming lately. She had worked faithfully for the Golightly firm for many years but latterly she seemed to have picked up the modern woman’s tendency – an unfortunate one, Mr Golightly couldn’t help sometimes feeling – to criticise the male; or perhaps criticise him openly was more accurate, since Mr Golightly was too shrewd a judge of human nature to suppose that men had ever, in women’s private thoughts, got off scot-free.
What would Martha make of the enigmatic question which now confronted him? It seemed to contain a sly play on his name. And who on earth could have sent it? His usual movements, for the purpose of the smooth running of the firm, were shrouded in a certain mystery; he was unused to being confronted with barefaced questions, especially ones which touched obliquely on his own person.
Mr Golightly had set up his computer on the gateleg table with a view on to the garden and down to the field below. Looking out, he saw the horse standing in the sun, taking the benefit of its warmth on his chestnut coat. There was something reassuring about the horse’s stance. Not quite meaning to, Mr Golightly got up from the table and wandered outside.
Samson, observing activity, walked over to investigate. Mr Golightly felt regretful again over the sugar lumps. But no doubt the horse’s owner would anyway disapprove. It was discouraging how few of the world’s prodigal comforts were nowadays available for enjoyment. Mr Golightly had been cautioned by Martha against exceeding the recommended number of ‘units’ of alcohol he drank in a week. There had been times when her boss had supped of the vine in a manner which would throw a modern health practitioner into a frenzy, and yet, Mr Golightly couldn’t help feeling, he was not obviously any the worse for his past excesses.
Next door, Ellen Thomas was lying on her sofa. She looked out to where the rooks were dredging the fields clean of the new-sown wheat. A saying of her late husband’s drifted into her mind. ‘Forbear not sowing because of the birds,’ he had used to say, when counselling against needless caution. Her new neighbour, with his big head, reminded her a little of Robert. She might give him some of the duck eggs, azure, like the sky’s watery reflection in the puddle which had collected on the upturned barrel she had put outside for some purpose she couldn’t now remember.
What did ‘remember’ mean? Robert had told her this once, too. Wasn’t it putting back together the body’s members which had been torn asunder…?
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