Mr Golightly's Holiday (12 page)

J
ACKSON HAD MADE STRIDES WITH
E
LLEN
Thomas’s new room. It was hard to credit, but he was off in the morning with a flask of tea and a pack of sandwiches he even got for himself. True, he left the bread knife (nicked by Paula from the Stag and Badge) smeared with jam and peanut butter, but, as Cherie Wolford observed, when Paula, dropping by her mum’s, spoke a little roughly on this theme, Rome wasn’t built in a day! Cherie, who had come by to lend Paula’s mum a book on irritable bowel syndrome she’d been given by Morning Claxon, had also opined that it took a good woman to turn a man round.

There was no question that Jackson had been turned in some direction, but the key to his conversion was only indirectly Paula; his double-dyed shiftlessness had been given a jolt by the event which sets even the steadiest person awry: Jackson had fallen in love.

Jackson had loved only once before – Trixie, a Jack Russell who had bled to death in his owner’s twelve-year-old arms after losing a fight with a bull terrier. Since that time the badgers had borne the brunt of Jackson’s subliminal erotic drive.

Falling in love is a brutal business. Jackson had managed to slide by, for over thirty adult years, under the cover of lust – often a false security. Getting the knickers off girls
like Paula was a hobby – one he was seriously committed to; but it had not prepared him for the tormenting, strickening, taloned attacks of real live love.

Among love’s hidden terrors is its capacity to knock away old crutches and breathe on fiercely, and arouse, comfortably slumbering life. Ellen Thomas’s sympathetic manner had reached in and quickened faculties in Jackson he didn’t know he possessed. It was a painful revolution.

For one thing, he was forever running up and down the ladder to check out with Mrs Thomas that he was doing ‘the right thing’, where in the old days, had there been any fuss, he would have enquired if she was confusing him with someone who gave a fuck? There were times when he woke in the night, agonised that he might, inadvertently, have used
that
word with Mrs Thomas – the thought of using it now made him sweat with anxiety.

No badger could have been more painfully baited than Jackson. He found himself victim of a desire to please which ran altogether counter to his customary form. The loss of his old devil-may-care self left him helpless before a new, and minatory, inner character, one which, as with most despots, was constructed on unstable lines.

Mr Golightly observed Jackson one morning, sitting on an upturned barrel in Ellen Thomas’s garden, surrounded by geese and dolefully eating his breakfast of peanut butter sandwiches, and recognised a man in a crisis. Mr Golightly’s own experiences had made him indulgent towards the retarded. He knew how it was when the hard rind, which
has forbidden the incursion of emotion, drops away from the swelling heart leaving it exposed. At such moments a man needed company.

‘Hello there!’ he called across the barbed wire. Jackson, sunk in a gloom at his predicament, started, and the geese, startled, hissed maniacally. Jackson was in secret fear of the geese; but he was in more fear of Paula and his first reaction was to believe that she had arrived with some fresh and harrowing demand. He was relieved to see it was only the writer chap from next door. Gratitude made him expansive.

‘’Lo!’

‘Nice bit of work you’re doing,’ said Mr Golightly, who knew the value of encouragement.

Jackson perked up. ‘Like it?’ he enquired. Love had inspired a shaky-looking, boat-shaped construction on the bungalow’s flat Plymouth Brethren roof.

‘An old friend of mine once built something on those lines,’ said Mr Golightly, nodding in the direction of Jackson’s work.

On Mondays and Thursdays, Mr Golightly got in sausages and chops from the travelling butcher, who had once been a special needs teacher. On Fridays, there were kippers and smoked haddock from the travelling fishmonger, who had been lead guitar in a band called Rock Salmon. The name, the fishmonger said, had given him the clue for his change in employment.

Johnny Spence arrived just as Mr Golightly was cooking sausages, so it was nothing to throw a few more into the pan.

‘Do you happen to know why a raven is like a writing desk, John?’

‘Ravens them big black birds up the Moor, aren’t they?’ Unlike the fledgling raven, Johnny didn’t refuse breakfast.

‘It’s a riddle from a book but the author never gives the answer. It’s been plaguing me.’

‘It’ll be on the Internet,’ said Johnny, his eye on the sausages. ‘Do a search if you like.’

Johnny waited till his mouth was full to speak again. ‘Anything else you want doing?’ he asked. Wolford had not been round yet, but with his mum away life with his stepdad was dicey.

Although he was of a mind to avoid questions, Mr Golightly couldn’t help wondering about the whereabouts of Johnny’s mother. His own parenting had been so deficient he hardly felt he was in any position to judge. Johnny’s mother may be under pressures – or, like him, believe she was, because, it was clear to him now that, with his own son he had been negligent. He was aware that, with Johnny, he was making up for some of that neglect. But it was hard to know how to occupy the boy. There were only so many soap opera scripts he could ask him to download from the Internet.

‘What does your mother think about you being here all the time?’

Johnny flushed and Mr Golightly turned away and busied himself mixing mustard. He liked the English variety which he had bought in bright yellow powder in a tin from the Post Office Stores. He stirred methodically – it took patience in the mixing to keep out the lumps.

When he looked again at Johnny he was staring at his empty plate.

‘Another sausage?’ asked Mr Golightly, and then, because he occasionally believed in the virtues of nettle grasping, ‘John, where is your mother?’

Johnny and his mum had come with his stepdad to Great Calne when Johnny was five. Before that they’d lived in a caravan near Plymouth and had got the council house in Calne when his stepdad’s nan had died. At least since they’d come to Calne he’d had his own bedroom.

‘Don’t know,’ he admitted after a pause. ‘She’s gone somewhere.’

‘Oh dear. What about your stepfather? Does he know where she is?’

Johnny made a face. ‘Shouldn’t think so. What’s he going to know?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Golightly, candidly. He felt that things had not been intended to work out this way. The more he saw of the world, the more it seemed to him that everything had got into a tremendous muddle.

But seeing Jackson sitting on his barrel Mr Golightly had a brainwave. Johnny possessed many more skills than his Internet competencies. He was, he explained to his employer,
in the habit of ‘multitasking’. At present he was busy replacing the plugs on most of Spring Cottage’s ropy appliances. And he had already dealt with the stove so successfully that the smoke went quite docilely up the chimney. Nicky Pope, when she popped by to ask if the gardener had called yet, had suggested that the next time she let the cottage she’d have to raise the rent.

‘How about helping out with Mrs Thomas’s building works?’ Mr Golightly suggested. He observed across the way how Ellen Thomas’s geese, sensing Jackson’s fear, were hissing at him forbiddingly.

Johnny’s response to this was equivocal. He didn’t much like the thought of helping anyone but Mr Golightly; but, like Jackson, he had discovered the new, and pain-inducing, desire to please.

‘If you want.’

Mr Golightly’s sensibilities had quickened. ‘It’s only next door so you could take your meals with me,’ he reassured. ‘We could talk the project over together.’

It would keep Johnny busy, but he also had a neighbourly concern for Ellen Thomas – and for Jackson. Having, with his weather eye, appraised the construction on the bungalow roof, Mr Golightly sensed that the building works could do with a hand.

T
HE
R
EVEREND
F
ISHER WAS A BRAVE FIGHTER
, but, like many martyrs, she was fighting with her hands tied. Sex and religion, separately, are high-calorie foodstuffs for fancies hungry for sustenance and the Reverend Fisher combined the two, and made an exceptionally juicy bone. The Tessa Pope story, with all its opportunities for shock and sympathy, was too tasty for the village of Great Calne to bury too soon.

It was the Easter break and the Plymouth College was closed, so the vicar didn’t even have the empathic support of her counselling colleagues to fall back on. Like many people who end up in the countryside, Meredith was secretly afraid of nature and had barely explored beyond the immediate surroundings of the village. But faced with notoriety, and the triumphant sneers of Keith (who had seized the occasion to deflect attention from the depleted joint account), Meredith began to ramble abroad. She didn’t venture up on to the moor, which, in her imaginings, was filled with women-hating rapists, but she made her way down to the more approachable reaches of the river.

She was walking there early one morning when she encountered Mr Golightly, sitting on Caddy’s Rock, where he had met with Mary Simms. This time he was watching
a dipper immersing its white throat and bitter chocolate body in the spangling brown waters.

Mr Golightly was alive to the scandal which had scorched Meredith Fisher. He didn’t, as in past days he might have done, join in the vicar’s husband’s jibes that she was reaping the rewards of her own mistakes. Mr Golightly wasn’t at one with the Reverend’s outlook but he knew how sorrow is an architect as well as a demolition expert and maybe even now was laying down, in the vicar, the foundations of a wider view.

‘Hi!’ he said, instinctively – and without any counselling training – adopting the idiom of the person he hailed.

Meredith looked alarmed. Unlike Mary Simms she didn’t recognise him. Closer scrutiny revealed the writer from over the road.

‘Oh, hi there.’ Unusually, for Meredith, she found herself hoping she would be able to get away.

It might be that Mr Golightly was getting a bit of his own back, because if he was aware of the vicar’s wish for privacy he ignored it. ‘You’re out early.’

It was the same remark as he had made to Mary Simms but Meredith heard it as a charge. ‘I’m always up before six!’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Golightly. If he felt put in his place he didn’t show it. Experience had taught him that, when in a hole, what is needed is a sense of comradeship. ‘Me too,’ he agreed. ‘No one about – that’s the best part.’

‘It’s when I pray,’ said Meredith.

This was not quite the full tale. Meredith used the
early-morning hours to write up her counselling case studies and practise her Swahili. Praying was an activity to which she paid lip-service, but in her mind it was mere sponge cake and flummery, which didn’t merit the energetic application of real-life demands.

Mr Golightly was not one for praying himself and didn’t probe too far into the vicar’s story. Instead, he proposed a walk. He didn’t offer, as he had with Mary Simms, his arm. No doubt he felt decorum, or the vicar’s principles, would lead her to refuse it.

They walked along the narrow path beside the river. Foils of light flashed between branches of the trees; at their feet, stems of penumbrous bluebells were unfolding into flower, the lustrous leaves making an undercarpet of brilliant green. Thread-of-gold catkins swung on hazel bushes, like the downy, muted clappers of small invisible bells, silently pealing alongside the clean voices of the woodland birds. By the river bank, Mr Golightly spotted the skulking form of a rat – but rats also have their place in the scheme of things, he mused; on such a day even a rat was owed toleration.

The Reverend Meredith, however, was blind to these manifestations of regenerate life. She was the victim of injustice – and from one of her own sex – and not all nature’s clemency was equal to dispelling that rankling rejection. She walked in the shade of human degeneracy, deaf to the birds which jubilantly warbled a spirit superior to the soiling contacts of the mortal world.

Mr Golightly, who knew something about the effects of
injustice, knew enough not to counsel the vicar in her dark hour. He whistled a few bars from
Fidelio
, but the revolutionary theme did not have the strengthening impact on the vicar that it had had on Johnny Spence. Meredith was not musical; indeed she was tone deaf, a fact which had been mutteringly noted by the old bell-ringers of Great Calne.

After a while they came to a place where the river made a wide bend and Meredith stopped and stood, apparently inspecting a grey heron. The heron, hunched and indifferent, was watching the waters for passing fish. ‘Why me?’ she asked. ‘Why me?’

She was speaking to no one in particular – unless it was the heron she addressed. Mr Golightly, in the absence of any visible other, spoke.

‘I sometimes ask myself the same question.’

‘Oh,’ said Meredith, turning upon him a face of taut rage. ‘You men! You turn every damn thing to your bloody self-centred selves!’

Mr Golightly liked to think of himself as pretty much equal to any display of emotion but even he, schooled under Martha’s tongue, was taken aback. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘steady on!’ He might have added ‘old girl’ – thinking of a mettlesome jade he had once used to ride – but stopped himself in time.

But his response had an effect. Meredith’s face began to soften and fold. She took off her specs and wiped her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said, and blew her nose on a tissue which had dwindled to a small, damp twist in her hand.

‘Here,’ said Mr Golightly, offering his handkerchief. A
red-spotted one – a point of disagreement with Martha. He was taken to task over his refusal to give up cotton handkerchiefs which, besides being unhygienic, were, she contended, adding to the laundry load, which was ecologically unsound.

The otiose handkerchief, however, was a success with the Reverend Fisher, who brightened. ‘Like Benjamin Bunny’s!’

‘Peter Rabbit’s in fact, I think you’ll find.’ Mr Golightly explained he was a Potter fan. ‘Beatrix rather than Harry – I’m afraid I’ve not got round to him yet. It’s her prose I like – a wonderful cadence, and you can’t help admiring a woman who farmed her own sheep.’

He described to the vicar how the celebrated children’s writer had once met a tramp who had taken the sack on her head, worn as protection against the rain, as a sign that she was a fellow-traveller. ‘Weather’s nowt so good for the likes of thee and me,’ he had companionably commented.

A lively exchange followed over the merits of
The Tale of Mr Todd
over
Two Bad Mice
, Mr Golightly favouring the former, the vicar the latter. He was too tactful to say so, but he couldn’t help thinking it boded well for the vicar, and perhaps less so for Tessa Pope, that in both books the principal characters were of a vicious turn of temper.