Mr Golightly's Holiday (10 page)

J
ACKSON WAS WRONG-FOOTED BY THE ARRIVAL OF
Paula in her mum’s Micra, loaded to the gunnels and complete with electric keyboard. The latter showed she meant business. He screwed up his little truculent eyes, ‘Wass this, then?’

‘Moving in, en’t I?’

‘Who says…?’

But the defeat of man before the enterprise of woman sounded in his voice. Paula, single-handed, could have controlled an empire or started a worldwide movement. She marched inside and commandeered the sitting room, rapidly whisking away empty beer glasses, full of fag ends, to the dirty kitchen and shuffling into order strewn sheets of the
News of the World
– except for those pages which carried pictures of girls in states of nudity which she screwed furiously into balls and dumped in a bin liner.

Jackson nipped upstairs and kicked a packet of condoms and some mags under the bed. The writing was on the wall – he’d have to find a safer place to hide his stash in future.

‘Right,’ said Paula, who had brought with her a roll of heavy-duty rubbish sacks and had already filled two with crumpled nudes, beer packs, crisp bags and empty packets of Lambert and Butler. ‘That’s got that started. I’m off to
the Stag, but when I get back we’ll give the place a proper tidy.’ She smiled, very terribly, at Jackson.

Jackson, who was not lily-livered through and through, said he had to go and see someone about a job and might not be in when she returned.

‘Who’s that, then?’

One reason men choose to live without the company of women is to avoid just such questions which no reasonable man ever asks. ‘That Mrs Thomas,’ said Jackson, grabbing at an answer. Ellen had telephoned the day before and left a message on his phone that she wanted some urgent work done.

‘Oh, her,’ said Paula, scornful. ‘She’s barking, en’t she?’ It was a rhetorical question; she was quite happy for Jackson to see Ellen Thomas, who had no tits to speak of and had long seen the back of fifty. And she, Paula, was going to see to it, anyway, that the lazy bastard got down to some work!

It was thanks to Paula, then, that Ellen Thomas received a visit later that same afternoon. She invited an unusually subdued Jackson into the sitting room.

‘Thank you for coming so promptly, Mr Jackson,’ said Ellen, whose retiring habits had left her ignorant of Jackson’s reputation. If she was surprised to receive a visit from a British workman on a Sunday afternoon she didn’t say so. ‘Will you have a cup of tea?’

Her caller said he didn’t mind if he did. They sat on opposite sofas, Jackson very awkward, drinking tea and looking out to the River Dart.

‘It’s this, you see, Mr Jackson,’ said Ellen, getting up to top up his cup from a white china teapot. ‘I find I need more space and I was wondering what it would take for you to make the area over the flat roof into another room for me?’ And she smiled the smile which had charmed Mr Golightly.

Jackson, who generally drank his tea from a beer mug, was unaccustomed to being received with such civility and was taken aback. As a rule people addressed him simply as ‘Jackson’ – his rudeness and lazy ways producing in them a tone equally abrasive. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t a builder anyway. His two occupations, getting the knickers off girls and baiting badgers, took up the best part of his creative energy. He could hack a spot of plumbing and minor electrics, but large-scale stuff was beyond him. Like many disagreeable people, Jackson was a realist: part of the reason he didn’t turn up for jobs was that he knew he wasn’t up to them.

Perhaps it was the shock of the arrival of Paula, or perhaps it was Ellen Thomas’s disarming smile but, against all previous experience, Jackson found himself wanting to oblige.

‘Take a butcher’s, will I?’ he suggested. No harm in having a look at the job.

Jackson went outside and stared at the roof. He returned and asked if he could have a ladder. There was a bit of bother getting this from the tool shed, where he was told to mind the nesting robin, but once he’d set it against the
wall he mounted it and got up on to the flat roof over the kitchen.

The bungalow had been built for himself by a builder who, late in life, gave up building works to become one of the Plymouth Brethren. Perhaps for this reason it was laid out on unusual lines. Planning permission had been applied for, and granted, before the builder’s own spiritual conversion had distracted him from the material conversion of his home; but the ‘bungalow’ had been built, and sold, to include an upper extension.

Jackson spent some time on the roof peering through a window into the hallway, before clambering down and pronouncing that so far as he could see there was ‘no problem’.

‘Good,’ said Ellen Thomas. ‘So when do you think you could let me have an estimate?’

Jackson, who had never before supplied such a thing in his life, said he would ring with an estimate without fail tomorrow.

‘Very good,’ said Ellen Thomas. ‘And provided I accept your estimate, when do you think you could start?’

The news, a few days later, that Jackson was working on Ellen Thomas’s house created some unrest in Great Calne. Despite Jackson’s reputation for poor workmanship, it was felt by some as a slight that Ellen Thomas should be favoured ahead of a long and patient queue. Sam Noble in particular was offended.

‘He promised to come to me next – I’ve been waiting for years!’ he exclaimed to Mr Golightly. ‘Of course, he’s very lower class.’

Mr Golightly, whose own origins were obscure, made no comment. Rather late in the day, he had called at Sam’s to apologise for his absence at the writers’ group. ‘I am sorry, something came up, but I’m sure you got along famously without me.’

‘We certainly missed you, I can’t pretend otherwise,’ said Sam, unwilling to relinquish the chance to be affronted.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mr Golightly repeated, mendaciously: he was perfectly ready to have let the world go hang for the walk by the river with Mary Simms.

‘I don’t know if there will be another. One of the party just hogged the time – went quite over the top!’ Sam was certainly not referring to himself; nor to that pleasant Nadia Fawns, who had thoughtfully invited him for lunch on Easter Sunday.

It might have surprised those who knew something of Mr Golightly’s enterprises to learn that he was quite forgetful of church festivals. As a rule, he was kept informed of such events by his efficient office, so that the news of the Easter bank holiday, pinned to the door of the Post Office Stores in Steve’s green biro –
SHOP CLOSED EASTER MONDAY
– caught him off guard.

Living so close by, Mr Golightly could hardly help casting an eye over the exterior of the church, but so far he had not set foot inside. Possibly the reminder of the coming
festival jogged his curiosity, for, on the way back from Sam’s, he turned through the moss-packed gate and up the path past the gravestones, which stood at angles, like the crooked, unruly teeth of some huge earth-dwelling hobgoblin.

Nowadays, with so much crime abroad, many church doors are kept locked, but the Reverend Fisher was much against this habit, believing it showed an unchristian mistrust. Mr Golightly negotiated the large latch and stepped across the stone threshold into the narrow interior, with its barrel ceiling, its painted roof bosses, its threadbare flags and jugs of bright flowers – narcissi, primroses, daffodils, grape hyacinths – echoing the instructive windows of coloured glass.

The air was old and musty, with the peculiar mix of dust and damp which scent the houses of the Lord. Distributed on a wooden table at the entrance were piles of hymn books and copies of the modern Prayer Book, one of which Mr Golightly picked up and leafed through and then put down again with an expression of mild disgust. He was not a one for favourites, but he’d a soft spot for Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer’s prose was to die for.

It was shocking that the austere and plangent language had been allowed to die instead, but was this not just the problem with his own work, its failure to keep abreast of changing times? Drifting up the side aisle, he stopped to inspect the plaque which bore the name of the men of Great Calne who had died in the Great War – and those in the even greater one which had followed it – and the rood
screen carving of Noah, drunk and exposing himself, while his sons cast furtive wooden glances – and garments – at their father’s immodesty. There was another carving, of the prodigal son, but this story of paternal loyalty affected Mr Golightly unhappily and he turned back, past the old banner of the Lion and the Unicorn, dating back to Queen Victoria’s jubilee, to the table with the guides and postcards, slightly the worse for damp, and the box in the wall which invited him to be honest and place in it any money he might choose to spend on purchases.

Mr Golightly dropped in a pound coin for a guide to the church and a damp-curled black-and-white postcard to send to Martha. She would enjoy smoothing it out.

Writing the postcard back at the cottage reminded him that there were office matters to attend to. But he had only bought one postcard and had already used up the limited space allowed for correspondence, describing two of the carved roof bosses: the pelican-in-its-piety, feeding its young from the blood of its own breast; and the leaping, altogether impious-looking hare, whose sole purpose seemed to be to celebrate its own abundant life.

Intending to e-mail Mike, he opened up his laptop:

canst thou bind the unicorn?

who hath begotten the drops of dew?

Two new messages had arrived.

Since his grievous loss Mr Golightly’s disposition to take offence had much abated. From time to time it crossed his
mind to question this longanimity, since those who discovered his willingness to let bygones be bygones seemed so ready to take advantage of his new latitude. In times past, when he had been quick to anger and quicker still to take vengeance, there was no doubt he commanded more respect. Nowadays, there was a tendency to treat him as a busted flush, a toothless tiger. The series of e-mails was a case in point: it looked as if he had become the ignominious butt of a taunter.

The annoying questions were goads, the latest seeming to point mockingly at the difficulty Mr Golightly felt himself labouring under. ‘Unicorns’ were the stuff of fiction – a medium in which he was stuck fast.

But the question provoked another: was a unicorn less ‘real’ for being fabulous? There were those – poets and artists – who had ‘bound’ the unicorn, rendering the imaginal creature as distinct and palpable as if they had seen and conversed with it. Some might say – his son had been one – that it was in the artefact of the ‘impossible’ that reality showed its true reach.

Looking outside he saw a spider’s web, one of many whose delicate dentations decked the cottage windows. The spider spun its web simply to trap flies – but what was designed by nature for a natural function may take on more than nature’s ends. The fragile structure had caught, in its subtle mesh, the drops of rain from a morning shower and the diamond beads shone in the sun, fragments of some larger, profounder, more luminous light, reflecting the mysterious
power of creation to recreate, from its own forms, an infinite scintillation of possibilities; possibilities which gestured at realms far beyond the demands of immediate survival.

Why should that wholly practical, sticky emanation, devised by evolution to trap the food to fill the hungry spider’s belly, be able also to catch the human imagination and draw in the impressionable heart? The power of the universe to create and ascend beyond itself was also part of the reality of things – every bit as ‘real’ as the dead fly in the spider’s maw.

And had not his son, his own dearest creation, been just such a spinner of spells, a weaver of stories to catch human hearts?

F
ROM HER POSITION ON THE SOFA
, E
LLEN
Thomas was observing the brilliant orange bills of the white geese picking at the plantains, the plants said to have sprung up, from the prints of his feet, wherever Christ walked. It was Good Friday and the bells from the church tower were ringing for the respectable, and the God-fearing, to make their way to church. Ellen Thomas was neither. If we are quiet and still, she thought, the world turns through us, and what we know turns with it, which is truly to repent.

Mr Golightly also had no thoughts of church that morning. His mood was pensive when Johnny Spence came by to see if there was any work for him.

‘Do you know,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘I think what I’d like is to visit the mire.’

Johnny had told his employer about the mire, which was a place, Mr Golightly gathered, where it was still unsafe to walk at night, or under the frequent fickle Dartmoor mists. Johnny had been warned about its dangers by his mother when he had run away for the first time. Research on future escapes had revealed its whereabouts. He had been punished regularly by his stepdad for his absences, but this upbringing in the hard school of disappointment meant that he never took for granted a right to his own desires, and it was partly
this feature of his character which endeared him to Mr Golightly.

Under Johnny’s directions, Mr Golightly drove up past the cattle grid and then, taking a bridle path, into the heartland of the moor. The old half-timbered van traversed the rough ground like some shifting creaking house on wheels from Stratford-upon-Avon, but soon they were well out of sight of those who had chosen to celebrate the festival by worshipping with bare arms and knees and quantities of suntan oil.

After a while, Johnny brought them to a halt and they got out and stood at the edge of a patch of land where, to the innocent eye, there was nothing to be seen but grass.

‘Here y’are,’ said Johnny. He had once watched a sheep struggle to death in the mire and nursed a hope that he might one day witness the dispatch of a human being.

Mr Golightly examined the verdant treacherous vegetation, over which hovered hoards of tiny primeval insects. This example of unredeemed nature suited his mood. There was something about it which seemed to mirror his resiling sadness.

His choice of companion was well founded: Johnny had also wandered in the caves of despair. He told Mr Golightly about the sheep.

‘It weren’t half struggling, an’ making this wicked screeching and its eyes all rolled back and its teeth, and then it went down and you could see this bubbling. They didn’t find nothing of it, after.’

This grisly account was offered up through Johnny’s implicit sense of the other’s mood. Mr Golightly acknowledged the gift sombrely.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Death is not a pretty sight but people seem to like it, provided, of course, it is not their own or doesn’t touch them too nearly.’

‘Yeah,’ said Johnny, whose pitiless education had freed him of sentimentality. ‘Wouldn’t mind if me stepdad dropped dead.’

Mr Golightly, who was no sentimentalist either, was still looking at the deceiving surface of the mire. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Death improves some people.’

The tragedy was these were so rarely the ones who were chosen.

Ellen Thomas lay on her sofa watching the Holy Spirit bend back the grasses with its irrefragable force. The sound of Jackson hammering overhead didn’t bother her. Nor when he dismounted the ladder and came past the window did his soft swearing, for Jackson, miraculously, had continued to exempt Ellen Thomas from his general misogyny and was demonstrating this by keeping his language under his breath.

Jackson had astonished even himself by his fidelity to Ellen Thomas’s roof. He had turned up on the dot of nine, wearing workmen’s boots and the old baseball cap which showed he meant business. At twelve noon he appeared at the glass door and asked if he might be excused.

‘Oh, certainly, Mr Jackson, how rude of me not to say, of course you may use the lavatory any time.’

Jackson, who had been taking a leak from the roof – at best behind the mahonia bush – went puce. The word ‘lavatory’ from the mouth of Mrs Thomas sounded indecent.

‘I mean get me dinner,’ he explained.

‘Oh, how silly of me, Mr Jackson, of course you must eat. Would you like to eat in here or are you happier outside?’

Jackson had planned to nip up to the Stag and Badge for a couple of quick ones. Paula had the day off and was back at Rabbit Row getting her things from the loft. These, Jackson had been informed, included her collection of True Life Romances, a prospect which struck a chord of foreboding in Jackson’s heart. He sensed the days of dodging his own true-life romance were drawing to a close, if the door had not already been slammed shut. The prospect was a bleak one.

‘Yeah, like to, yeah,’ he mumbled. There was something about Mrs Thomas which soothed his anxiety over Paula. This meant, though, he had to go to the shop for a sandwich. ‘Get you anythink?’ he asked.

Ellen gave him a five-pound note and said she’d be grateful for half a pound of tomatoes.

‘Getting your leg over the widow, are you?’ asked Steve, up at the shop. He was quite scared when Jackson, flushing furiously, told him to shut his fucking mouth or he’d find his teeth up his arse.

Ellen Thomas was mildly surprised when Jackson
returned with a bunch of stiff white daisies, along with the tomatoes, a sandwich and a can of Red Bull. He returned the five-pound note, refusing to take any money for the tomatoes, and offered the flowers awkwardly. ‘F’r Easter.’

‘How terribly kind, Mr Jackson,’ said Ellen, who liked most flowers. That she did not much like these made her arrange them the more carefully in the cut-glass vase Robert had bought her.

Jackson ate a tuna sandwich on the sofa, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand until Ellen supplied a napkin. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Jackson. Let me get you a glass for your pop. It looks exciting.’

Jackson was all but illiterate and not having drunk a soft drink for many years had chosen this because ‘Red’ was one of the few words he could read. He poured most of the content on the carpet trying to get it into a glass.

‘How silly of me,’ said Ellen. ‘I can see now it’s supposed to be drunk from the can.’

Jackson went the colour of the name of his drink and said he’d best be getting back to work. It was the first time in years he had worked for more than a single hour at a time and he found himself strangely agitated by the process.

There was a problem in starting the Traveller when Johnny and Mr Golightly came to leave the mire. Johnny poked about under the bonnet and wriggled under the carriage but was forced, rather unwillingly, to admit he didn’t know
what was wrong. In the end, with Johnny steering and Mr Golightly lending his weight, they got the van going. Johnny was keen to stay at the wheel but Mr Golightly considered it prudent to take over once they reached the cattle grid at the moor’s edge.

Perhaps it was the temperamental behaviour of the Traveller but Mr Golightly had even less conversation than usual as he drove back down the hill towards Great Calne. He turned on the radio, and when Johnny asked about the music he was told it was by someone called ‘Bark’.

‘The
Matthew Passion
, John. Extraordinary, wouldn’t you say? One could almost imagine the man was there to witness it!’

Johnny, uncertain what event was being referred to, said that he agreed it made ‘a fair sound’. He was pleased to be asked in to Spring Cottage and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to a pianist called Solomon whom Mr Golightly said he admired.

‘The Jews were always a musical people, John. Look at David. He was a great little scrapper, too. Fighting and music, it’s in their blood!’

Later that evening, the sombre mood still upon him, Mr Golightly walked up the hill to the Stag and Badger. Barty Clarke and Sam Noble were drinking together in the bar and discussing the escaped prisoner.

‘I promise you he’s from hereabouts,’ said Barty, whose researches into local history were, for different reasons, as thoroughgoing as Johnny’s.

‘But shouldn’t the police be giving us special protection, then?’ asked Sam, nodding coolly in Mr Golightly’s direction. He had not forgiven the lamentable dereliction over the writers’ group. ‘Surely we’re all under threat!’

‘That’s right,’ said Barty. ‘I expect we’ll all be murdered in our beds. Still, look on the bright side, it’ll make a good item in the
Backenbridge
!’ He laughed heartily.

‘Jesus wept!’ said Sam, for whom his own safety was no laughing matter.

At that point the sky broke apparently in two with a resounding crack of thunder, so deafening that George said it might have woken his poor wife, Anna, from her comfortable graveyard bed. As for the lightning which sizzled to the ground, barely missing the pub, everyone agreed it must have been visible all the way to Land’s End. Mr Golightly, who had ordered a pint of best, was evidently so perturbed by the violence of the storm that he left the inn altogether, with his beer undrunk on the bar counter. Colin Drover, who had seen that it was untouched by any human hand but his own, drank it himself because, as he remarked to his wife, to waste good bitter was a crime worse than rape – a comment which got a sharp retort from Kath, who informed him he was dissing women in saying so.

But this exchange was lost among the general excitement over the weather, which, everyone agreed, even in the unpredictable South-West, was extraordinary.