Mr Golightly's Holiday (11 page)

J
ACKSON’S NEW WILLINGNESS TO WORK HAD PUT
Paula in a good temper. He was up and off out of the house without her even having to try. The success with Jackson made Paula uncharacteristically charitable to Mary Simms and now she’d got Jackson in line, Paula’s energy needed a new target.

Paula had been back to Rabbit Row regularly and had seen Luke’s pathetically few possessions installed there. Mary was soft in the head and would make a perfect match with Luke, who was also a few pence short of the pound. If Mary Simms moved in with Luke her mum could charge double!

Up at the Stag and Badger’s kitchen she remarked, casually, ‘Know what, if you lay in a man’s bed and say his name forty times forty, he’s the one you’ll marry.’ This old wives’ tale had been freshly minted by Paula’s inventive brain, but it is a rare soul unhappily in love who can resist superstition, particularly a palliative one.

‘Is that true?’ asked Mary, whose nights had been tearful over Luke.

‘Yeah.’ Paula busied herself chopping off the heads of the plaice they were deep-frying. She liked looking into their dull dead eyes. ‘D’you want the key to me mum’s house, then?’ Time someone sorted out Mary Simms.

Mary didn’t grasp the point of this suggestion at first. She was no gossip herself and knew nothing of Paula’s changed circumstances.

‘That Luke’s staying in me old room now I’m up at Jackson’s.’

Light dawned on Mary Simms. ‘Oh, d’you think I should though?’

‘Yeah, give it a go, why not. It worked with me and Jackson.’ Paula, unused to employing her fictional powers, was enjoying herself.

‘What if he comes back? What would I say?’ But faced with this heaven-sent opportunity, she was ready to throw caution to the winds.

‘S’all right,’ said Paula. ‘I’ll keep him chatting here.’

Her plan was to pack Luke off smartly to her mum’s before Mary Simms had time to leave. Paula’s own previous failure to master Luke was no discouragement – having spent time with him, she was more confident of getting him to leave her company than getting him into bed; and if Luke found Mary actually in his bed surely even he wouldn’t be so daft as to pass up the opportunity.

‘D’you want the key or not?’ she asked, expertly slicing down the backbone of a plaice. ‘Me mum’s at me Auntie Edna’s over Easter so there’ll be no one in the house but you. Here’s what we do – you go off early and I’ll tell old Colic you’ve come on with your period and had to go home to lie down. Then I’ll think up something to say to that
Luke. Won’t be hard – trust, me!’ – to send him off to Rabbit Row, she added mentally.

Mr Golightly had his own reasons for retiring from the pub when the great storm broke on Friday night. Whatever the cause, his disquiet had been increased by the arrival of another disturbing e-mail.

have the gates of death been opened unto thee?

was the question which had faced him when he returned to the cottage that evening.

Death was a subject Mr Golightly had had occasion to contemplate. It was apparent that men and women feared it – the latter perhaps less so; and yet, he couldn’t help thinking, without death life was hardly possible. How to spend one’s time if ‘time’ became eternal was a question he was used to pondering.

Among the tried and trusted books he had brought with him was a rival to his own best-seller, which he planned to make a part of his holiday reading. He had slipped out, before his departure, and bought it from W.H. Smith, where he couldn’t help sneaking a look for his own work, placed in a rather out-of-the-way corner of the store and inconveniently low on the shelves. In contrast,
A Brief History of Time
by Stephen Hawking was prominently displayed.

Mr Golightly hoped that it was not a result of professional jealousy that so far he had not managed to get beyond the
introduction. There were issues he found he wanted to take up with the eminent scientist – he felt sure they could learn from discussion with each other.

But no scientist, however up to the minute, had successfully tackled the vexed question of death. The philosopher Wittgenstein had suggested that death was, by nature, unknowable, since, in the absence of life, it could not be experienced. There had been those who had challenged that proposition; Mr Golightly wasn’t one of them – there were things about the human condition he himself could never fully understand.

It was this sense of isolation which prompted a call, late on Friday night, to the office, ostensibly over the question of the Traveller, which was still failing to start. Early on Saturday morning Bill drove up on his motorbike. It was his usual day off, so it was a pleasant surprise when he roared into the front garden of Spring Cottage.

‘Bill,’ said Mr Golightly, going out to greet him, ‘You angel! I’m uncommonly glad to see you…’

Bill had brought his tool kit and was soon stripped down to his jeans and singlet, flat on his back and tinkering about under the van. Mary Simms, on her way to work, passed Spring Cottage as he was taking a rest from his labours with a cheese-and-pickle sandwich made by Mr Golightly – eaten leaning over the gate, getting the sun on his shoulders. Mary stopped in answer to a question and gave him the name of the local pub – she was just off to work there herself, she explained to the stranger with the impressive biceps.

Work on the Traveller took up the best part of the day. Bill said he might take in a quick pint before he set off back. Mr Golightly directed him to the Stag and Badger. ‘There’s a young fellow, name of Luke, you might come across there. Give him my regards.’

Luke had been sorry to miss his fellow writer the previous evening. He had stayed in, up at Paula’s mum’s, waiting for the storm to pass before making his way to the pub where he found Mr Golightly conspicuous by his absence. And tonight there was no sign of his friend either. They were all discussing the storm which had done some serious damage to the Calne roofs and had brought down several lofty trees. Barty Clarke said he knew for a fact it was the most severe in these parts since the great hurricane of 1638.

Missing his crossword companion, Luke filled in as much as he could – which still left a few blank – and sat on his bar stool at something of a loss.

‘Go on then,’ Paula said to Mary, smacking her on the back and nearly knocking her down. ‘I’ll tell old Colic you’ve come on sudden and you’ve gone home.’

But even the plans of womankind will sometimes go awry. When the tall good-looking young man, with the long fair hair and the motorbike leathers, approached Luke with good wishes from his boss, Luke became hospitable and it wasn’t long before the two were deep in conversation.

Bill, while no crossword expert, was able to fill in seven
across – ‘In all fairness, he could be confused with an Englishman (5)’ – and, encouraged by this, Luke went on to explain, to his new and sympathetic acquaintance, his problems with the fatally contagious rhythms of
Hiawatha.

Bill was a good listener. After commiserating with Luke he put it to him that while no writer himself, he had an idea, one he had long felt might have some commercial appeal which – he tentatively suggested – might supplant the American Indians and put paid to Longfellow’s dangerous pull. Luke became excited. His poetic account of the Creation had made scant progress – well, he had to say, none at all, really – and Bill had an air about him, enhanced no doubt by the quantities of lager Luke had drunk, which was inspiring.

Paula – who had popped out from the back earlier to tell Luke that her mum had telephoned in a panic about having left the gas on; would he please run back to Rabbit Row and check it out at once? – was furious to hear from Colin Drover, when she came out again to be sure Luke was on his way, that Luke had left five minutes earlier, talking animatedly to ‘a bloke in biking gear’.

The two young men had walked up the road to the cattle grid before Luke – his mind quite empty of Paula’s mum’s, luckily fictional, fears – remembered that this was no longer where he lived. He said if Bill didn’t mind he might walk a while on the moor to clear his head, which, thanks to Bill, was buzzing with ideas.

Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, or the lager,
though, as to that, he had drunk less than a pint, but Bill accepted an invitation to spend the night at Luke’s place, where the landlady was fortunately absent. Luke said when inspiration took him he often went without sleep, so he gave Bill the door key to Paula’s mum’s. ‘You have my bed,’ he suggested, directing his guest to Rabbit Row. ‘Times like this I often watch the sun come up – I could be out for hours.’

Mary Simms lying in her petticoat, counted to forty. And then another forty. Forty times forty times forty, she would stay there, to be on the safe side…

It was early, the sun had barely risen, and Mary Simms was walking by the river. She had woken bemused, not in her own bed. After a while she remembered that she had gone to Paula’s house to think of Luke Weatherall. But all thoughts of Luke had vanished, as the dew which washed her ankles would vanish before the midday sun.

She must have fallen asleep in the strange bed, and in a dream – or state of half-wakefulness – a pencil of light, sweet and precise, had seemed to search clean through her, to her hidden self, grateful and receptive. A vast unstintingness, which she felt first with the stunning force of a violent blow, and which had abated and dissolved into an enveloping and mighty tenderness, had surrounded and enfolded her, lifting her, bearing her, suffusing her utterly, till she woke to a sense, graceful and profound, of an unremitting
excellence drenching her whole being, and leaving her for ever changed.

If it was a dream, then it was a dream so absolute and vital that it seemed to Mary more real than the ground she was walking on.

At Caddy’s Rock, where history related how many years back a girl had tried to drown her baby and been hanged for the crime, she found Mr Golightly. He was sitting, with his back to her, towards the quick-flowing river, watching a grey wagtail, in a dimple of sunlight, elegantly balancing its long yellow tail. But he must have sensed her presence for he turned as she approached.

‘Mary?’ he said, and in his eyes there was a glimmer of what might have been apprehension.

‘Hello,’ said Mary Simms. In her state of bedazement she recognised him. ‘Happy Easter.’

‘You’re out early.’

‘I could say the same to you!’ said Mary Simms, and she laughed, quite disrespectfully, given his age and obvious seniority.

Mr Golightly, however, showed no signs of standing on his dignity. Instead, he looked relieved. ‘I’m glad to see you happy,’ he said. ‘Shall we walk?’ And for a second time he offered his arm.

They walked together up through the fields of damp grass, where Mr Golightly rejoiced at finding mushrooms for his breakfast, and along the footpath where the wild garlic gave off a peppery scent, provocative and heady. They
parted by the church gate. Mr Golightly did not invite Mary to join him in the breakfast mushrooms; she had, she said, to get home anyway, there were things she needed to organise.

The bells from the tower were ringing, a trifle unevenly, to welcome Christ back into this world; but neither Mr Golightly nor Mary were to be found among the Easter Sunday congregation a little later that morning. However, the spirits of the Reverend Meredith were given a boost by the presence of a fair young man in leathers, one of the holiday bikers, who, doubtless through diffidence, remained at the back of the church and did not join the line to take communion.

Maybe the young man belonged to some other denomination, or perhaps he had not been confirmed. He slipped away afterwards, before the Reverend Fisher had the chance to inquire. Still, it was heartening to see the face of modern youth among them in Great Calne.

L
ADY VICAR SPEAKS FRANKLY OF GAY SEX EXPERIENCE
was the headline which met the thrilled gaze of the
Backbiter
readers on Easter Monday.

Sam Noble read the piece to Nadia Fawns over the phone that morning. The paschal lamb is part of an ancient tradition of ceremonial sacrifice and Nadia had cooked Sam an Easter lunch at which she had worn a silk blouse, rather low-cut, her best black trousers and quantities of gold chain.

Sam drank several gin and tonics (the Cinzano had been ditched and a large bottle of Gordon’s Gin had been substituted), helped himself liberally to cashew nuts, and enjoyed the lamb roast with rosemary and garlic. He found Nadia sympathetic over the fate of
Nice Girl.
She looked properly concerned when he described how the film had been jostled from its place of victory at the eleventh hour. And she spoke, not too much, about her own publishing misfortunes.

The two had not met since the fiasco over the writers’ group and the talk turned naturally to Golightly’s treacherous behaviour. Over this, Nadia was equally reassuring. ‘Don’t worry, I checked him out on Amazon. He’s a nobody!’

Sam was torn between his desire for disgruntlement and a wish to rub shoulders with celebrity. ‘Perhaps he uses a pen name?’

‘In that case he would have told you. Writers never hide their lights under bushels – except the really modest ones…’ Nadia smiled demurely. ‘Believe me, he’s nothing, my friends all tell me my intuitive side is very strong.’

The lunch had been lingering, Nadia had done all the washing up and Sam had returned to Great Calne with a replenished sense of his own importance, a tonic even during the palmiest days.

So it was only manners to ring to thank his hostess the following day.

Nadia quickly fetched her copy of the
Backbiter
and read it in company with Sam over the phone. The Reverend Fisher, the paper alleged, had frankly owned that the sexual practices she preached about sprang straight, so to speak, from the nag’s mouth. She had to put her money where her mouth was (‘Not a pretty thought in the circumstances,’ Sam wittily remarked) and come out openly in favour of gay priests, of both genders.

‘So she condones buggery,’ said Sam.

‘Oh, don’t,’ said Nadia, ‘such an ugly word!’ Her writing career had made her especially sensitive to language.

Paula’s mum, back from her visit to her sister in Somerset, also read the paper, over a bowl of Bran Flakes and cup of Nescafé with Luke.

Luke had found a new lease of life for his writing. Paula’s bedroom was too small for a desk, and there were still a number of furry animals which took up space, so he had set up his office at the kitchen table where the steady drip-feed of
chatter and local gossip from Paula’s mum was soothing rather than distracting. It was as if some weak-voiced bird, depleted of its natural drive after years of captivity, was constantly trilling, mindlessly and softly, in his ear.

‘Right!’ he said, when Paula’s mum said that she felt, personally, that what people did in the privacy of their own homes was their own affair and that the lady vicar had been ever so kind to Edna after Ron had passed over, when she and her sister bumped into her at Tesco’s. And ‘Right!’ again, when Paula’s mum found, on the other hand, she couldn’t help wondering how the Reverend Malcolm, who, as he knew, had had Parkinson’s, would have taken the news…

Just how the Reverend Malcolm would have taken the allegation that his successor had a homosexual history remained a matter for a psychic medium, since he had joined Paula’s mum’s sister’s Ron on the Other Side. But there were other, more accessible, opinions voiced on the topic that day in Great Calne.

For one thing, the allegations revived the Tessa Pope and Patsy scandal, which, by association, reintroduced the tearooms as a hot subject of local concern.

The great thing about scandal is that while it can die it is always susceptible of resurrection.

‘I think it’s horrible,’ Nadia Fawns said. She had invited Sam over for a drink and he had stayed on, since it seemed she had just thrown together a lasagne.

‘Can’t say I care for diesel dykes myself,’ said Sam, ‘particularly not wearing dog collars!’

‘I hate anything unfeminine, don’t you?’ Nadia jingled her gold bracelets, but Sam was unaware that the exchange was one of the first steps on the foothills of a relationship. Nadia’s words were simply a signal to him to renew his efforts towards the tearooms.

Mr Golightly was no devil’s advocate but neither was he one for taking sides.

‘Some might say tolerance was a religious requirement,’ he suggested, when Sam, meeting the writer in the street, hotly aired his views.

‘I doubt Our Lord had that kind of cheek in mind when he told us to turn the other one!’

Mr Golightly looked suitably rebuked. Who was he to say? Although it had once been something of a thorn in his side, these days he had no special views on sexual behaviour. If he considered sex at all it seemed to him a topic which had taken on a significance too cumbersome for so quixotic a human activity. Nevertheless, he could hardly help becoming aware, not least from his soap opera researches, that sex today was a subject which resembled a series of educational, and social, hurdles: something onerous and definitely to be grappled with.

While ‘grappling’ was a skill Mr Golightly felt he had lost the knack of, Sam had not. ‘Few people stop to consider the destabilising effects of too much liberal thinking.’

‘Quite,’ said Mr Golightly, whose sympathies were all with the thoughtless majority.

The truth was that Sam had spent rather a lot of time
thinking about the shortness of Paula’s skirts, which had greatly fuelled his outrage. He wandered now, seemingly idly, up the street towards Jackson’s in the hope of catching sight of his tearoom goddess.

Paula was outside with a J-cloth, wiping the leaves of some primulas she’d rammed in on either side of the concrete path. The violence of the storm had washed earth everywhere and the leaves were unsightly with dirt. To see to the borders Paula was wearing her high-cut faded denim shorts, a mauve strappy vest-top which revealed a couple of tattoos – a rose on the left shoulder and a leopard on the right – her platforms and a ‘ruby’ nose stud. Sam stared in admiration.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Paula, unenthusiastically.

‘You look great,’ said Sam, who was sweating slightly.

‘Yeah?’ said Paula. Even if she had fancied Sam, she was not the type to be won by compliments.

‘I was wondering –’ Sam faltered over the gate which only that morning had been given a fresh lick of paint by the zealous goddess – ‘if we could have a word about the tearooms?’

‘Sure,’ said Paula. ‘You’d better come in anyway – you’ve got paint all over you.’

White spirit was fetched from the garage and Sam sat, like a small child, home from playschool, having the paint vigorously removed from his hands.

‘What did you want, then?’ asked Paula. Under her instructions, Sam rinsed his hands in the kitchen sink and
wiped them on the two sheets of kitchen roll provided, while Paula ran over the sink area with an antibacterial spray.

‘I’m going to have a word with the bank – it’s all quite feasible – I can buy them myself and it would keep the tearooms open in the village. You mentioned, very sweetly, once –’ Sam blinked and looked across to Jackson’s chipped but gleaming cooker – what a regular little homemaker Paula was! – ’you said once you might think of managing the tearooms…’

‘Yeah, all right, then,’ said Paula. It didn’t sound a bad plan. Give her something to do – a break from Jackson and a chance to stick it to old Colic and his stupid wife at the Stag.

‘You mean you will?’ Sam couldn’t believe his ship had come home so swiftly and laden with the hoped-for cargo.

‘Don’t see why not. The key’s round at me mum’s. Go and have a look at them if you like.’

The tearooms, since the departure of Joanne and Patsy, and the subsequent refusal by Paula’s mum to see to them, had not been touched by any living creature, save the rats. Rats cut no ice with Paula. To her, the tearooms looked most desirable – plenty for her to get her hands on and get a nice little business going. Her mind which moved at the pace of an express train began to itemise the necessary steps required to lick it into shape.

Sam, on the other hand, faced with the reality of his prospective investment, felt disheartened. The place of his fantasy was a paradise of soft-porn gentility, not a toppling,
rain-sodden, outbuilding, full of vermin droppings and doubtless grossly overpriced.

‘What do you think?’ With the innate fickleness of the human heart, he angled for a negative response.

‘I think it’s lovely,’ was Paula’s emphatic answer. Her head was already full of schemes for the curtains – baby pink, or blue, she thought, with tiny, lacy bows.

At Nicky Pope’s, as with almost all the households of Great Calne, the vicar’s sexual leanings were being thoroughly analysed, with Nicky giving it as her opinion to Cherie Wolford that the whole thing was ‘disgusting!’ The conversation was conducted in lowered tones and out of Tessa’s hearing. The poor child had had that nasty experience while helping out at the tearooms. But the sound of a lowered voice, especially a parental one, is a sure way of attracting attention. The vision of the Virgin having faded with repetition, Tessa Pope’s imagination was in need of refurbishment. It wasn’t long before she was in the lounge on her knees and crying, while her mother tactfully extracted the story of how the lady vicar had touched her ‘round the bra area’ when she was helping her with the flowers up at the church.

Tessa Pope’s revelation was a piece of luck for Barty Clarke, whose phone hadn’t stopped ringing since the latest edition of the
Backbiter
had appeared. Although he was practised at sailing near the wind, even Barty was alarmed by the boldness of the piece when he saw it in print and was
planning to consult his solicitor the following day when the Tessa Pope story broke. It reached him via Nadia Fawns, who had run low on tonic and had dropped by the Stannary Arms to buy a couple of bottles for an impending visit by Sam.

Barty, greatly relieved to hear how his insinuations had been rewarded by fate with this surprise witness, offered to buy Nadia a drink. Nadia accepted a Campari and soda and described, in some detail, the Arthurian novel which Barty had already heard about from Sam in the very same pub. But this Barty kept to himself. There was another edition of the
Backbiter
due out in a couple of months and he had a reputation to live up to now.

All this while the Reverend Fisher was ignorant of the downturn in her personal fortunes. She had taken the occasion of the Bank Holiday Monday to visit her sister, Mandy, in Weston. Mandy kept a sweetshop, specialising in seaside rock and sugar confections. Bank holidays were prime time for pink sugar legs and false teeth and she couldn’t herself get away. Meredith returned late in the evening to find Keith in a lather.

Keith had stayed away from the pink sugar legs with a fabricated headache in order to watch the 2.30 run at Epsom. On a sure-fire inside tip from the man who ran the chip shop down at Oakburton – whose cousin’s sister was dating one of the lads at a racing stables – he had extracted two
hundred quid from the joint savings account to put on ‘Mother’s Ruin’, and had been anxious over the consequences. ‘Mother’s Ruin’ had cantered home last but one, which coloured the mood with which he met Meredith when she arrived back from Weston with a bag of sugar pebbles. He shoved a copy of the
Backbiter
at her. ‘See! That’s where bloody feminism gets you! I won’t be able to show my face!’

The Reverend Fisher, however, was not one to flinch under fire. She wasn’t bothered about her husband’s sexual reputation; nor, very much, her own. To be pilloried and jeered at was, after all, the fate of her leader. True, he had not been a woman, but, as the man in the film had said, ‘No one is perfect!’ She grabbed the
Backbiter
and read the item thoroughly and then went straight for the telephone.

‘What are you doing?’ asked an astonished Keith.

‘Ringing Mr Clarke,’ said Meredith with cold calm. She asked Directory Enquiries for the number.