Mr Golightly's Holiday (14 page)

T
HE VERY EARLY MORNING LIES AT THE RAGGED
edge of consciousness, and while the curtain of the waking world is still half pulled, it is possible to steal among revenants of other worlds and not disturb their influence.

Ellen Thomas had woken to the soft insistent sound of cawing birds and the knowledge she was going to paint. It was as if the secret between her and Bainbridge piped into her veins fresh reserves of energy. The few hours she had slept were not, as before, fitful and wary, but peaceful and profound.

Ellen, in her nightdress, took her easel, her sketch pad and her box of pastels to the garden and began to make swift arcs across the page. She knew that she had to capture the long bands of mist, which racked the hilltops, and the scattering black birds which flew in between.

Crimson and powerful, the sun slid upwards, gashing the embers of the sky and leisurely raking it out to a tawny trenchant rose. Away across the hillside, the wind in the growing grain was making teasing, fluid whirls – like swirling, dancing petticoats, or the fluent signs and characters of magic writings. And the birds…how perfectly full of soaring life they were as they swooped and bowed and tumbled in the cold dawn…

During the days of misery and fearfulness Ellen had taken down her watercolour paintings from the sitting-room walls. They had come to seem mere tinsel, hiding an incompleteness they could never cure. One day, she had found in a cupboard a framed print of Robert’s, stowed away and forgotten, Van Gogh’s last painting, the cornfield, where the black crows presage the artist’s suicide.

Ellen, in her own darkness, had understood the artist’s torment. She had put the print up on the wall and studied it. The flying crows seemed to point to an escape from her own precariousness. She longed to take flight with them, away from a world which menaced and negated her. And it was birds, black and flocking, she had heard when she had woken to the sense of penetrating freshness infusing her being and propelling her outside.

The birds in Van Gogh’s cornfield were crows. The birds which summoned her now were rooks, the crows’ gregarious cousins, who resembled their carrion relatives as sleep resembles death – a likeness which hides the essential difference. It was as if through the fine-meshed net of despair, which had covered all events and people, and had hidden from her the meaning of things, had flown these exuberant birds. Their harsh clarion signalled something dim but potent, of which she herself could only sense the stirrings, but which the arrival of her secret guest seemed also to portend. The birds had broken through the veil of dismay, pecking holes in it in their quest for the protected content which it was their nature to devour. It was as if they were
picking out her soul’s vital secrets, tiny, yet filled with mysterious promise – seeds plucked from the fruit of her consumed heart.

Mr Golightly had also woken early that morning and he took himself off to his place of contemplation on High Tor. The last time he had visited he had spotted ravens. And there was one now, beak laden, its powerful wing-beats making nothing of the wind.

Mr Golightly sat on the flat, table-shaped rock and tried to remember why a raven was like a writing desk. He watched the anxious parent ravens and their brood, three puffed-up, sooty young thugs, almost ready to fly.

One of the adult ravens arrived and tried to stuff a morsel of live stuff into the bill of one of the young. But the young raven turned its head, the wriggling meal was not to its liking. Was it full? Anorexic? Or plain rebellious? Apparently, not even ravens were immune to concerns about their offspring. This notion that a creator had influence over the objects of its creation – where on earth did that idea come from? A parent, even a raven parent could tell you it was nonsense…

The conversation with Paula had made him pensive. Was she right that ‘love’ was, for most human beings, nothing but a cover for their own desire? The events of Great Calne, as he had witnessed them, certainly bore out Paula’s cynical view. Yet, for all her unblinkeredness, Paula’s wasn’t the whole truth – if such a thing was anyway discernible.

Over the years, Mr Golightly had come to place more confidence in truths than ‘truth’, a concept he looked on with suspicion ever since a man who might have saved his son had asked a specious, damn fool question about it. But, especially since embarking on his new recreation, he found his mind kept returning to an idea his son had been fond of.

His son had insisted as a fundamental truth that love was always creative. But conversation with Paula had raised another problem. It seemed to Mr Golightly, watching the ravens feed their fledglings in the ubiquitous, levelling illumination of the sun, that love was very much like light – a thing that everybody imagined they knew but whose nature was very hard to define.

Yet from time to time – particularly since taking his holiday – he had felt he was on the brink of penetrating that enormous mystery. There was a law of the sun. Was there also a ‘law’ of love? Rapture, wonder, compassion, tenderness – the great emotions ranged to the pull of it – yet for all its supposed gentleness there seemed also to be something very reckless about love. His son had been called ‘meek’; yet he had been, above all, passionate, eager, impulsive, recalcitrant – given to risk of the highest order. It was that risk-taking ability which, he was coming to see, was so remarkable. For when the terrible had joined with the true, the sacrifice had been ruthless and the law of his son’s nature had become one with providence…

Ellen Thomas, in her nightdress, stood at her easel in the garden, painting birds in the flowing, dappling light. In her mind, they flew upward…ever onward and upward, into unimagined stratospheres, where time and space dissolved into the limitless aether beyond. She had thrown down the burden and now the birds lifted her, out of the little doom of irrelevance, the awful terror, the state of huddle which had cramped and hurt her. Never had she felt so clear, so free of polluting distractions.

As she painted, she found that whatever jarred she could at once paint out – and this too, this editing process, this disencumbering, peaceable eliding, which she did without thought but without regret either – it was remarkable how it seemed to be cutting the strings which had entangled and bound her, loosed her free to be whatever it was she was to be. With no sense of where she was going, or what was proper to this enterprise, she followed her inclination, which was, mostly, to remove and excise, to take out.

Yes, she was softly rubbing things out as she stood there, her needs, her desperations, her inclinations, all were disappearing – till she was left, footless and featureless, bodiless, almost, with only the strange divinations of the birds to speak for her. The ancient soothsayers looked to birds for auguries – the birds upon the wing were the flexion of her soul.

Mr Golightly, returning from his walk, and come to talk to Samson, spied Ellen across the barbed-wire fence. He quickly moved away but she must have felt his presence, as she turned round to greet him.

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I am painting.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘I see.’

‘Mostly, said Ellen, pausing from work as she spoke, ‘I am painting things out.’

‘It is vain to do with more what can be done with less?’

‘Exactly,’ said Ellen. ‘I’m glad you understand.’ She returned her gaze to a rook disappearing into the sky.

As the birds flew in and out of the deliquescence which had become her person, so too did the words of Jos Bainbridge, mingling with the flitting birds with the impalpable authority of a dream. They seemed to come from the same abode of otherness and darkness, the black birds and Bainbridge, flocking through the transparent envelope which surrounded her, alighting on the branches of her growing thoughts, gathering together in mysterious conjunctions, and then, as suddenly, arising and departing, leaving her in a solitude which had once incarcerated her and had now become the purest peace.

The gates of mercy had clanged shut against her, and here had come the harbingers, carrying in their bills the key to her release. They were her guardians, the birds and Bainbridge, her shady sentinels, her allies, the coordinates of her release.

T
HE
E
ASTER HOLIDAYS HAD PASSED MISERABLY
for Tessa Pope. Her story about the vicar had brought her attention: condolences and queries had been forthcoming, but she was learning that fame also brings privations. Tessa had never been popular in the village but now the local children laughed after her and called her rude names. And she was mortally afraid of meeting the vicar, which meant she spent the best part of her days watching TV inside.

Back at school – the private one in Newton Abbot which Nicky Pope thought less rowdy than the local primary – Tessa felt safer. But she was plagued by nightmares – one, in particular, about a fox which got under the bedclothes and terrifyingly snapped at her private parts.

In the past, if she was going up the village, Tessa took the short cut through the graveyard. But now, to avoid notice, if she went out at all, she had been using the route which went round along Rabbit Row. Paula, who had gone over to her mum’s to ferry more soft animals to Jackson’s, met Tessa face to face outside.

‘Hi there,’ said Paula, and grinned.

Tessa’s recent history had made her more than usually apprehensive; detecting something sinister in Paula’s address she tried to walk on round her. She knew who Paula was,
and admired the several studs in her nose and the extreme shortness of her skirts. But until today Paula had never shown the slightest reciprocal interest in Tessa Pope.

Paula, who had been loading toys into the Micra, still had her Orinoco Womble in one hand. She gripped Tessa’s wrist with her other. ‘Come inside,’ she suggested, still grinning.

Tessa was about to protest when Paula clapped Orinoco across her mouth and pushed her down the garden path. Once inside the house, she shoved Tessa along the passage, past the kitchen – using her knee in the small of her captive’s back when she became resistant – and into Paula’s own old room where, to make a firmer gag, she wrapped her scarf round Orinoco and tied Tessa to the bed’s leg with Luke’s dressing-gown cord.

‘Don’t try anything,’ she warned, ‘or…’ and she delivered a snappy excerpt from the vicar’s talk on female circumcision.

Paula returned to the kitchen where Luke was busy writing. He looked up politely and offered her a Nescafé.

‘No, ta,’ said Paula, furious that this was her mum’s coffee he was offering. ‘Have you got the time?’

‘Sure,’ said Luke, consulting his watch. ‘Ten forty-five.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Paula, ‘I’d better be off. I just come by to get some more of me things but I’ve got an appointment to have me legs waxed at eleven.’ She whipped back to the bedroom.

‘Now,’ she hissed into Tessa’s ear, ‘hear this. You’re going
to write how you made a mistake when you said what you said about the vicar.’ And then, recalling her walk with Mr Golightly and his account of the Witches of Salem, ‘You can say the Devil done it, if you like. Yeah, that’s it, say Satan appeared to you and told you to say what you said…’

Tessa, released from Orinoco, and too distraught to cry, obediently wrote her ‘confession’ with the blue biro and plain sheet of paper which Paula, covering all eventualities, had taken the precaution to supply. Grabbing the paper, Paula used the knee to shove Tessa back ahead of her and out down the path into Rabbit Row. ‘Now, listen, kiddo,’ she said. ‘If you ever open your gob about this…’ and she concluded the lecture on female circumcision.

Morning Claxon, on her way back from a workshop on crystals, dropped by Nicky Pope’s to find out the date when Spring Cottage was coming free. She had met a tarot reader who was looking for a six-month rental, ‘somewhere not too pricey, but with good vibes’.

Tessa had scuttled home from Rabbit Row and was in the throes of explaining how she had come to have been misled about the vicar. A strange man, darkly garbed, who spoke in sepulchral tones had accosted her early one evening in the graveyard and forced words down her throat and into her stomach, which she had been commanded to expel with the story she now knew to be false. She’d been scared to look too close but now she came to think about it she was almost sure there had been something long and scaly, possibly a tail…

Nicky Pope said, when Morning called back with a remedy against the powers of Satan – made of the ground teeth of neutered dogs and with a provenance which went back to Druid times – that it wasn’t like Tessa. The child had been so upset that she hadn’t shed a single tear. All she wanted – it broke your heart to hear it – was to put things right for the vicar, who had been so sympathetic over the Virgin.

Paula was a natural General and knew instinctively the calibre of men and women. After her leg wax, she rang the vicar on her mobile. Running her hands down her calves, she invited the vicar to join her for a hot chocolate with whipped cream at Green Gables. She had a suggestion to put to her, now that Tessa Pope was dealt with and the amended story was in the bag.

‘M
ISTER
S
PENCE
,
HOW NICE
.’ R
UDDY
-cheeked and booming, Wolford straddled Johnny’s path blocking out the sun.

‘What you want?’ asked Johnny, unconsciously rubbing his shoulder where the memory of Wolford’s handling lingered.

‘Touchy, are we? So what has Mister Spence been up to?’

‘Helping down there.’

‘What’s that, then?’

‘Helping Mrs Thomas with her new room, aren’t I?’ said Johnny, who would have preferred to tell Wolford nothing.

‘Oh yes? What she want with you there?’

‘Mr Golightly said to,’ Johnny averred. Here at least he was on strong ground.

‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ Wolford asked.

‘Shouldn’t you be screwing them poor bastards up at the jail?’

‘I’ve got my eye on you, Spence,’ Wolford yelled as Johnny ducked past him up the street. ‘I’ll be round to have a word with your dad any day, don’t you worry your sweet life!’

Jackson’s pride in his project and his new-found capability, had been eroded by his increasing awareness of Johnny’s
superior cleverness. Ellen had made sure to address all her business communications to Jackson, but, once Johnny had arrived on the scene, it was obviously he who solved the problems. Jackson was illiterate but he was not a fool. He was crushed when Johnny rattled off some complicated calculation to demonstrate how a basin in the new bathroom could fit; and humiliated when the boy worked out, on the back of his hand in biro, the flow to the new drainpipe.

Johnny also mended an ancient lawnmower which had defeated Jackson, who had advised the purchase of a Flymo. The lawnmower had been Robert’s and Ellen was reluctant to discard it. She cautioned Johnny, when he went to inspect the mower, about the nesting swallows, down in the lower shed. ‘It’s the swallows’ loft – they’re keeping it warm for me…’

If there is a specific against jealousy it is as hard to find as the disease is to endure. The boy had infiltrated Jackson’s empire, and had gained the trust of the object of his worship. Once it was he she had told to mind the nesting birds. Jackson had a growing suspicion that when he left in the evening Mrs Thomas got the boy to check over the work.

As a measure against this, Jackson had taken to working later and later. He had put away his tools and was replacing the ladder in the long grass, when Wolford, hands in pockets, sauntered by.

Wolford had never spoken two words to Jackson on the occasions they had coincided up at the Stag, but he stopped
and greeted him now before strolling through into the garden and introducing himself to Mrs Thomas who was sitting in the garden with her sketchbook.

Wolford stood chatting and looking over her shoulder. Jackson, feeling protective, went across himself and, for want of any other means of expressing devotion, offered her the remaining tea from his flask. She refused the tea – nicely of course, she was always polite – and he had seen a sketch of the boy on her sketch pad.

The arrival of Paula had dramatically altered Jackson’s nightly routine. Where in the past he would come back from the Stag and Badge and fall down senseless, often missing the bed by a mile, sometimes not even making it to the bedroom at all, these days he was expected to bathe and shave before he came to bed. But even smooth-faced, Jackson proved a problem. His silent passion for Ellen Thomas bred insomnia. With all the twisting and turning, Paula had decreed that he’d better sleep on the floor; he was ‘driving her mental’, she said.

That evening, locked in the bathroom, examining his bulging belly in the mirror Paula had installed, and thinking about the boy’s face he had seen in Mrs Thomas’s sketchbook, Jackson felt quite ‘mental’ himself. Worn to distraction by unbearable longing, on the bedroom floor, with a cushion for a pillow, he tried, unsuccessfully, not to imagine Ellen Thomas’s bony hips pressed into his own, and her long legs twined around his waist and her white hands delicately cupping his scrotum. At least on the floor he was spared
the bevy of animals which formed a furry citadel around Paula. With the crowd of creatures in the bed there was barely room for a grown man.

Close by, in her elevated position in what had once been the bed of which Jackson was sole custodian, Paula made little grunts, her retinue of freshly washed Wombles guarding her Sleeping Beauty form. Jackson, wondering how the fuck this could have happened to him, got up and went downstairs and looked dismally at the drawing Paula had prepared for the True Life Romance bookshelf. It was designed, he noticed, to fit the space where once he had kept his beer crates. Under Paula’s regime, Jackson had shifted his stock to a high cupboard, but he had no secure hopes of it remaining there long.

Jackson climbed on a stool and extracted four bottles of Newcastle Brown. In an effort to get his beer gut down he had been trying to drink less – but what was the fucking point? Ellen’s sketch of Johnny Spence had set off a train of misery which only strong drink could arrest.

Love is the great binder and looser, and drink the great defrayer of embarrassment. A while later, without quite knowing how he got there, Jackson found himself outside Ellen Thomas’s house.

The stars were still out and the slopes of the moor glowed with an eerie light. A barn owl veered out of the darkness, shrieking; and a badger lumbered by, maybe sensing a new-found safety from this torturer turned victim. In his state of agitation the night sounds were terrifying to Jackson. He
stood, heart palpitating, staring at a white horse across the way in the field.

Inside was his beloved, Ellen of the White Hands – the only woman who had ever treated him with kindness. Weeks of tongue-tied passion had eroded Jackson’s inherently shaky self-control. A tidal wave of emotion swelled up within him, and without any formed plan he began to climb the ladder to his ark. Up there, at least Ellen Thomas was beneath him, and not unassailably above him, like the white stars…

‘If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t have bothered – not so near the end of my time.’

Between bites of sandwich, Bainbridge spoke in his strange rustling whisper, so that Ellen had to stretch her ears to hear him.

‘I was so glad to be back on the Moor again, when I was put on resettlement and working outside in the peat and heather and water, I never thought about escape. I never felt the need, you see.’

She nodded, understanding the resignation which was not indifference.

‘I was in a work party clearing a leat. That evening, I stopped to watch some rooks worrying a harrier – they do, you know, birds of prey don’t get much past rooks. When I looked back, the rest of them were hanging about having a smoke before getting into the van. The screws are quite easygoing with the resettlement bunch. I was known to be
no trouble and I suppose so near the end of my stretch they didn’t think to mind out for me. I always knew where I was on the Moor, better than they did, but this time we were near where I used to go with her, and suddenly I had this feeling…

‘I wanted to tell her that whatever had happened had to happen, that I loved her, that she wasn’t to think I blamed her…I know it sounds crazy…’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not crazy – not crazy at all.’

‘I just started walking and after I’d gone a way I thought: they haven’t noticed – so I ducked down and wriggled along till I got to more cover. I wasn’t scared at first about them coming after me, but some protective thing must have kicked in because I made for the mire – that was part of her and me too – she used to dance across it as a child. I knew the dogs would lose my scent there, you see.’

‘Do they still use dogs?’

‘There’s no scientific substitute for a dog’s nose, thank God!’

‘And then…?’

‘I gave them the slip. I waded up river from the mire, the Swincombe, I knew it well, you see. It would have taken time to get the dogs and by then I’d drowned my tracks. There was something I suddenly thought of –’

Her look said: say it only if you want to.

‘She gave me something she’d had since she was a girl. I hid it, when she’d gone off and left me, in a place she showed me – she said only I knew it – but who knows? –
with a message, saying I loved her – I suppose I hoped she might find it there. I never asked her if she did because – well, I suppose because I never saw her again after they took me. I was walking upriver and it came to me: if it’s still there it’s a sign you’ll find her. You know how you do?’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Mad, really, because it would have been ten years, near enough.’

‘And was it there? Did you find it?’

He said nothing; and she felt in her eagerness she had intruded. Light was filtering through from the garden and it was time he returned to his daytime bed. She got up ready to say good night – and saw he was crying.

‘That was the amazing thing –’ in the faint dawn light she caught the tears. ‘After all this time – it was there. Stuffed in behind a stone where I’d put it. I’ve got it with me,’ he said.

Jackson had brought with him the last of the Newcastle Browns and he opened the bottle with his teeth, spitting out the cap. It fell into the recess that had formed on the oddly constructed bungalow roof. With a drunk’s fastidiousness, he lurched perilously across the roof to retrieve it. The movement brought him face up against the internal window which looked across the hallway to the spare bedroom. Reaching down to find the bottle top, he made out the pale form of Ellen Thomas, with a man in her arms.