Mr Golightly's Holiday (16 page)

I
T WAS
S
UNDAY
,
AND
J
ACKSON HAD TOLD HIM
there was no need for him to come to work that day, but his stepdad was home and with nothing better to do Johnny called by Spring Cottage.

‘John,’ said Mr Golightly, ushering his young friend into the parlour where Paula, giving her feet a rest, was reading on the orange sofa. ‘You know Paula?’

Paula was aware of the miasma which surrounded the Spences. Her own fatherless state had encouraged a sensitivity to appearances – her mum was a weakling, but one Paula protected with a natural
noblesse oblige.
In marrying Spence, Rosie Coaker had gone down in the world. Paula, alive to the dangers of social decline, preferred not to risk infection by association with its sufferers.

‘’Lo,’ she said, unenthusiastically, not looking up from the book.

Johnny was used to being snubbed. On the other hand, he wanted it to be seen that he was esteemed in Mr Golightly’s eyes. ‘Come to see if you’ve got any work for me,’ he said, in the hope of impressing Mr Golightly’s visitor.

‘I might have. When Paula has finished with that book there are some references I’d like you to trace.’ Mr Golightly went over to the gateleg table and switched on the laptop. ‘I’ll be with you in a trice…’

There was not the man or boy alive who could hope to impress Paula. Nevertheless, she stopped reading and stared expressionlessly at Johnny Spence. She couldn’t stand kids; in fact, she planned to get herself sterilised as soon as she could afford to pay for it. But this was the kid who’d been working down at Mrs Thomas’s. She’d been getting a feeling that there was something funny going on there with Jackson. The other night he’d come home crying – pissed out of his head and covered with mud and blood and his front tooth bust. It’d taken an age to get the stains out of his vest.

Jackson had also been off sex – almost seeming to prefer the floor she had relegated him to. Paula had been willing to overlook this on the grounds that having got her foot well in his door her main objective had been achieved. But a girl has her pride.

The Spence kid was pretty. Maybe Jackson was gay? She wouldn’t put it past him, and, as her Auntie Edna said, there were more of them about these days than you thought.

Mr Golightly got up from the table where he had been copying something from his laptop and handed Johnny a sheet of paper. ‘See if you can find these in that for me, will you?’ nodding in the direction of the book.

‘Here y’are,’ said Paula, suddenly chucking it at Johnny’s face.

Johnny caught the blue-bound volume dextrously, but didn’t bother to look to see what he had in his hand.

‘Yeah, sure.’ He shot a look of sly triumph at Paula, but Paula worsted him.

‘Walk you back home, shall I?’

Johnny, instinctively, turned to Mr Golightly for help, but for once his patron let him down. He made no saving intercession and Johnny found himself swept up and out of Spring Cottage.

Halfway up the hill, Paula, darting ahead on her heels like a determined stilt, Johnny dragging behind, they met Sam, with Nadia’s arm firmly through his. Sam offered a curt ‘Hello’ and tried to pass off any acquaintance by hurrying by.

But Paula wasn’t having this. She shot Sam a smile that Tessa Pope might have recognised. ‘How you, then? How’s the plans for the tearooms getting on?’

Sam looked sheepish but made no comment, and the couple disappeared into his house.

Johnny, embarrassed by the unaccustomed exposure, was only anxious to get back to his usual obscurity. He was alarmed when, up at the top of the village, which ran up to the stretch of council houses where the Spences lived, they ran into Wolford.

Paula had lived for many years next door to Wolford and his mother – perhaps it was her recent train of thought, but with no extra external evidence a light suddenly went on. Johnny had stepped fractionally backwards away from the prison officer and Paula stepped back too, to stand shoulder to shoulder beside the boy.

‘Calling on anyone?’ she enquired.

Wolford’s motives for visiting the part of the village where the Spences lived were not wholly clear to himself. He
vaguely wanted to get a look at Johnny’s environment; but he had no serious plan to visit Phil Spence, or anyone in Johnny’s family. He was thrown off balance by Paula’s armour-plated smile.

‘Been to see my mother.’

‘Oh, nice,’ said Paula, raising her eyebrows. Rabbit Row was the other side of the village. ‘My mum there, was she?’ In fact, her mother always went across to her sister Edna’s on Sundays.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t see,’ said Wolford. He didn’t look at all at Johnny, who was staring at his feet. The three of them stood for a while with Paula grinning till Wolford said he’d best be getting back or his mother would be wondering where he’d got to.

‘Yeah, mustn’t fluster the poor dear,’ said Paula, with, to Wolford’s ear, abhorrent mateyness.

Paula’s prejudice about the Spences was reinforced by the state of the gate to number four, which stood off its hinges leaning on a run-to-wood privet hedge crammed with Coke cans and crisp bags. The front door was in such poor shape that Paula found herself wishing she’d brought along her sandpaper to give it a good rub down. There was no bell, and the knocker had no back plate, so she rapped sharply with her knuckles on the window.

‘Yeah, what?’ came a voice from somewhere inside.

Paula did not try to explain herself but wrenched the door open. She was met in the hallway by a man wearing a vest and a pair of stained trousers.

‘Your flies are undone,’ said Paula, smartly taking the offensive. Experience had taught her that few men recover well from this observation.

While Phil Spence fumbled obediently with his zip fastener Paula stalked past him into what she took for the kitchen. It was clear to her that it had had no proper feminine influence for some while.

‘Where’s your wife?’ asked Paula, taking advantage of her lucky strike over the flies. As well as True Life Romances, she was a devotee of True Life Crime and was hopeful that Johnny’s mother might be stashed in pieces in the deep-freeze cabinet, which had smears of what might be dried blood over its chipped surface.

Johnny had shot upstairs to get to the computer before getting a smack round the head. He knew better than to hang around and he wanted to get Mr Golightly’s stuff done quickly in case the screw turned up to shop him to his stepdad.

To Paula’s disappointment, Phil Spence’s response to her question was apparently innocent of guile. ‘Fucked if I know.’ He produced a tin of tobacco and began to roll a joint. ‘She done gone off. Bitch,’ he added, as if bothered that his reputation might be damaged by too great a show of uxorious concern.

‘When she gone, then?’ asked Paula. She was sorry that there was to be no murder but a vanishing was almost as good. There was that film she liked, where the girl disappeared in a petrol station and got herself, and her boyfriend, buried alive.

Phil Spence lowered himself on to a chair with most of its back missing. ‘Want one?’ he asked, offering her a spindly joint.

‘Ta, take one for later,’ said Paula. She didn’t smoke herself, it stained your teeth but, as Cherie Wolford would say, it didn’t pay to look a gift horse in the mouth. ‘So how long she been gone, then?’ she enquired again, sticking the spliff down her Wonderbra.

‘’Bout three four weeks, I reckon,’ said Phil, vaguely. His memory was the worse for the increased intake of beer and dope since his wife’s disappearance.

‘Who’s looking after the kid, then?’ asked Paula. She got up and filled a kettle after wiping the handle with a mouldy-looking cloth. The sink was filled with soggily disintegrating tea bags. ‘Make some tea, will I?’

‘Ta. Looks after hisself mostly.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Paula. ‘Where d’you keep your sugar?’ Phil Spence nodded in the direction of a cupboard which, when opened, proved to be full of scuddling silverfish. ‘How ‘bout I take him off your hands till his mum comes back, while you get yourself sorted?’ suggested Paula, picking out two tea bags from a split packet with the precision of a neurosurgeon.

E
LLEN WAS SITTING ON THE STEP OF THE DOOR
to the garden, her arms folded round her knees. Bainbridge was inside while she guarded the threshold. She had become a creature of thresholds, like the lares (or was it the penates?); the old gods Robert had told her the Romans worshipped. They were liminal beings both, she and Jos Bainbridge.

Wilfred emerged from the kitchen and padded silently towards where Bainbridge, his big form folded, sat on the sofa.

‘It’s lucky Wilfred likes you.’

‘My aunt used to say I had a black dog on my shoulder when I was in a temper as a little ‘un. I wasn’t s’posed to get angry, you see, because of the fits. But I thought it was wrong – the image, I mean. I loved dogs and they me, as a rule.’

‘People say terrible things to children, don’t they? Sometimes I’m glad I couldn’t have any. I might have done terrible things too.

‘I doubt that.’

‘I don’t know – I’ve been thinking we don’t know what we might do till we’re tested.’

‘We had this discussion group,’ he said, after a pause. ‘They’ve pretty good education programmes inside and one
of the governors got me interested in literature and philosophy. Anyway, we had this group which was supposed to be about “personal ethics” and one of the men, who was in for killing his wife’s lover, told us that before it happened, before he killed the guy he was inside for, he used to keep asking his friends this question: If I called you in the middle of the night and asked you to help me be rid of a dead body would you help?’

Ellen thought a moment. ‘I suppose for him the “right” answer could only be “Yes”.’

‘He used to ask us, in the group – you get close, you see – what we would say. I said I couldn’t tell him truly what I might do about anything till it happened. There aren’t any rules in advance. You don’t know who you are till you’re there, in it, you see.’

‘And then there’s no time to think.’

‘It’s why I like animals. They’ve no call to think in advance.’

‘And they don’t have rules of behaviour.’

‘They’re themselves – which is the hard thing for us. The hardest, I’d say.’

‘Especially on your own.’ A solitary bat flickered by – the first that year. It was a while since she had been able to hear their high squeak. When Robert was still alive. ‘When my husband was away, working in the Middle East, I used to send him my love through the bats,’ she told him.

‘ “The bat that flits at close of eve / Has left the brain that won’t believe.” A bat’s as good a messenger as any.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Blake. The governor I mentioned put me on to him – he was a poet, himself, the governor. “A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage,” he used to say.’

‘A poet, really?’

‘They’re not bad people, you know, in the prison service. Some of the screws were some of the most decent men I’ve known. There’s more than one man’s family, come from a distance and money tight, had their fares paid for by the prison officers having a whip-round.’

‘I suppose we tend to think of it as just a repository of evil.’ It looked so menacing, the great granite façade of the prison. Even in the days when she went out and around she tried to avoid driving past.

‘There’s good and bad there like everywhere else. I’ve seen murderers treat new inmates, shattered by where they’d fetched up, with the tenderest kindness – though there’s plenty of the other sort, of course.’

‘What did they think of you there, the others?’

‘Oh, they let me be. They knew the truth. You get to in prison, you see.’

M
R
G
OLIGHTLY WAS MAKING A SHEPHERD’S
pie when Nadia Fawns called at the back door. He was following a recipe he had torn – slightly furtively – from an out-of-date
Good Housekeeping
magazine he had found up at the Stag and Badger where, deprived of Luke’s company over the crossword, he had read about this season’s colour for paint and soft furnishings (lilac) and, should he be entertaining ambitions for cosmetic improvement, the pros and cons of Botox and liposuction.

Nadia was dismissive of
Good Housekeeping.
‘Shallots are much more flavoursome than onions – and Delia always adds a tablespoon or two of Worcester sauce. Delia’s my bible. Where do you get your meat?’

Mr Golightly, who didn’t know who ‘Delia’ was, but didn’t like to seem ignorant of any one’s bible, explained he got in the mince from the butcher who came round in a van.

‘Is he organic?’ asked Nadia. She was very keen on all that.

Mr Golightly had to acknowledge that here was another ignorance. So far as he was concerned, all animal products were organic – an attitude Nadia found hopelessly antediluvian.

‘No, no,’ said Nadia. ‘Most so-called “fresh” produce is
full of dangerous toxins. It’s essential to buy organic. If you saw what gets into ordinary food – the damage to the nervous system is shocking.’

Having installed her kitchenware at Sam’s, Nadia was faced with the more delicate task of installing her own person. She had begun this manoeuvre that day by preparing a Sunday lunch of venison, culled from a local deer farm. To accompany the rich meal of felled stag she had bought two bottles of middle-priced burgundy.

Sam, unused to alcohol in the daytime, had drunk a bottle and a half of a heavy Beaune and felt the need to lie down. ‘You go upstairs, why don’t you, and have a nap?’ suggested Nadia. ‘I’ll clear away down here.’

Sam had woken in a panic to find Nadia in bed beside him, stripped down to her cream satin ‘teddy’. Beneath this garment were further items he supposed must be suspenders. Not that he had anything against suspenders, it was just he had forgotten how the hell to tackle them. He fumbled around helplessly, till Nadia, taking matters into her own hands, gave some purposeful guidance.

The whole thing had gone off briskly, and to Nadia’s satisfaction. But the campaign was in its early stages – she knew that commitment was essential to any relationship – especially one started later in life. Like most women she had instincts, ones which told her that developing their liaison was not uppermost in Sam’s mind. They’d gone for a stroll and there’d been an encounter with that girl with the very short skirts who worked up at the pub and who’d made
some crack about the tearooms. Nadia had heard about Sam’s ambitions for the tearooms. Something was needed to establish her own presence in his life. A small party, with one or two other male guests, chosen to put Sam on his mettle – Barty Clarke and Golightly, for instance – would make their alliance more of a fixture. ‘I’ve called to invite you to a little drinks do we’re having next Sunday,’ she beamed. ‘If the weather’s kind we’ll be able to have it in the garden.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Golightly, non-committally. He was learning to take these social hurdles more in his stride.

His stride might have been thrown, however, by the discovery that he had been selected as a potential romantic rival, or at least someone to sharpen up Sam Noble’s intentions. Other than Martha and Muriel, Mr Golightly’s recent work had kept him largely out of touch with female company. Left to his own devices he would give Nadia Fawns a wide berth, but it was an unexpectedly pleasant aspect of his holiday, the friendships he had formed with his other women neighbours.

Up the road at Jackson’s, one of these was perusing the results of Johnny’s research. Never one for seeking permission, Paula had been through every last thing Johnny had brought over from Storey Lane with the intention of binning most of it. The pages he had printed out for Mr Golightly were stuffed into a Sainsbury’s bag and while Johnny was in the bath Paula skimmed them through.

Mr Golightly was seeing Nadia out when Paula turned
up at the back door. ‘Stupid cow thinks she’s somebody ‘cos she’s written a book.’ Paula didn’t give a monkey’s who that old idiot Sam Noble chose to go with, but she knew trash when she met it. Nadia Fawns’s book couldn’t amount to anything – no one had seen it in Tesco’s. ‘How’s your own writing coming on?’ she enquired.

‘You know what,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘I’m thinking of giving it up. I’m not sure I’m cut out for the modern style.’

‘Hey, never say die. I brought over the stuff the kid done for you. He says it’s research. S’interesting.’

‘You think so?’

‘Yeah. I read the rest of it in the vicar’s book. Here.’ She handed back the blue-bound volume.

‘What did you think?’

But Paula was wrinkling her nose. ‘You got something cooking? I can smell burning.’

‘Hell and damnation!’ said Mr Golightly, shooting out to the scullery and returning with a pan.

‘It’s that Nadia Whatsit,’ said Paula, taking the pan and examining the blackened contents. ‘She’d put anyone off. That’s what that sort does. They does your head in so you can’t think straight.’

‘You may have a point.’

‘Still, sorts the women out from the boys.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Put people under pressure and you see what they’re made of. Like old thingy, back in the day, you got the kid to print out the stuff about. He took a hammering and a
half you’d reckon would drive anyone round the twist, but he stuck it out and it all worked out OK for him in the end.’

‘You’d say so?’

‘Well, he got all them sheep and goats and she-asses, an’ that, didn’t he? Mind you, you can stick those friends of his. Friends? Nightmare, if you ask me. That Sam Noble’ll get more comfort out of that Nadia Whatsit’s fanny than you’d get out of that lot in a month of wet Christmases!’ She laughed. ‘Well, see you, then. I’d better get on back, make the kid his supper.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Mr Golightly who had been examining the pages and suddenly remembered he hadn’t delivered Rosie’s message. ‘Where is John?’

Paula jerked her head. ‘Staying with me up at Jackson’s. Seemed best with his mum away. The place was a pigsty and the kid’s running wild. Needs discipline, he does. You and me together, we’ll keep him in line.’

‘No, Paula,’ said Mr Golightly, affectionately. ‘
You
will keep him in line. Ask him to come over when he has a minute, will you. There’s something I forgot to tell him.’

‘You come up to ours, why don’t you? You know where we are? The row of old council houses up the top of the village. You’ll know the one – ‘s’ got one them toadstools they make up at the prison outside.’

The shepherd’s pie was past saving and Mr Golightly made do with bread and cheese for supper. Instead of going up to the Stag and Badger, he took the Spiderman mug outside to the garden bench and sat, cradling his coffee, mulling the results of Johnny’s research as the sun slipped down to the other side of the world.

It was simple to be the sun – it just came up and went down, or whatever it was people nowadays thought it did, the theories changed so often he had lost track. But no one, so far, had ever had the temerity to suggest that the sun didn’t exist!

Swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Sunne
Shall shine as He shines now, and heretofore…

His old friend Jack Donne might have sympathised with his current state of mind. The poet understood the comfortless abyss of perfect loss and the lonely pinnacle of absolute love. And bridging both, the desolate plain of abandonment. But Donne, on his deathbed – lying in the shadow of his own imminent annihilation – in his final, fretful, feverish longing, had begged to be reassured of the continuing recreation of love’s constant light, had turned, in his last need, to a Creator for whom ‘sun’ and ‘son’ were one.

Who, on earth, had he to turn to?

He went inside and put on Haydn’s
Mass in Time of War
, went to the scullery, made another cup of coffee, put some milk in the microwave, spilled it on his hand as he was
pouring it, tipped over the Spiderman mug, swore mightily, looked for a J-cloth, found he was out of them, placed a tissue over the pools of milk and coffee which were slowly combining, and walked back to the window, where he stood staring out at the green-and-amber-trailed sky.

A wedge of wild geese flew past – seven black silhouettes, like the seven stars, or the seven angels, who fly in and out before the Holy One.

Stepping across the room he turned up the volume of the music: it was his favourite moment, the point in the Agnus Dei where Haydn has the kettledrums boom out like a roll of cannon fire.

It was easy to be a star, or a goose – or even an angel. What was damnably difficult was being human. There was so little to hang on to – all those impossible questions seemed to offer such scope and largesse until you had to live with them.

The phantom e-mailer had been sending questions he himself had posed centuries ago and which he’d become too abstracted (or raddled in his wits? he’d almost forgotten to give Johnny that message from his mother) to remember. What had he been thinking of allowing patient loyal Job to undergo that torment? He’d even participated in it.

If anyone did, he should know that the universe was not a cheat, or a hoax, or a box of tricks governed by some sleight of hand. What is forgotten, or ignored, will seek retribution. It appeared that someone, or something, was giving him a taste of his own medicine…