Mr Golightly's Holiday (2 page)

S
PRING
C
OTTAGE WAS NAMED FOR THE NATURAL
water supply which seeped up through the Devon soil and occasionally made its way through the porous walls of the old dwelling. The cottage stood in a run-to-seed garden, which looked across to hills and ran towards fields which sloped down to the River Dart. This, thanks to recent rains, was roaring like a hungry lion when Mr Golightly stepped outside his back door the following morning.

It was early, not yet six; the stars had yet to disappear and the near-full moon hung still, like a yellow paper lantern, in the west. Over the hills, black clouds made portentous shapes suggesting Eastern tales: dragons, strange-beaked birds, perilous cliffs. Behind the clouds, a veined-marble sky was streaked dim green and pearl. An experienced watcher of weather could have predicted that the day would be a bright one, for beyond, in the east, a thin patina of gold hinted at imminent light.

Mr Golightly snuffed the air like a hunter. It smelled to him of animal life and sappy growth, of burgeoning country things which gave a lift to his heart. All hearts need a lift from time to time and Mr Golightly’s was no exception. He had come to Great Calne to take a holiday. It had been many years since his duties had allowed such an indulgence,
but for some time he had been thinking that a project he had started long ago was due for reappraisal. Quite why Great Calne had been chosen as the place to set about this project was a question that Mr Golightly himself may not have been able to answer. But he understood, perhaps better than most, that all important questions are unanswerable.

The intricacies of the World Wide Web were still a mystery to Mr Golightly who, despite his business experience, with many other pressures and concerns to attend to, was not yet practised at using it. One of his valuable aides had entered his requirements – ‘Holiday let in peaceful rural setting’ – into the search engine, Alphaomega, coming up with Spring Cottage via Nicky Pope’s website.

So far the result appeared satisfactory. In any event, Mr Golightly did not give the impression of being a choosy sort. On the contrary, he emanated some sense that all places were alike to him. He gave every sign of being content with the simple accommodation – a bedroom (referred to in the website details as the master), which was almost filled by the iron, black-painted double bedstead, a boxroom (bedroom two) stuffed with old curtains, magazines, rugs, a fender, an exercise bike and supermarket bags full of the late Emily Pope’s correspondence with the taxman, which Nicky Pope, who as a single mother had her hands full already, meant to get around to when she could only find a moment.

Downstairs, there was a parlour (lounge-diner) which boasted an oak gateleg table, a couple of floral-covered comfy
chairs, a spine-challenging orange sofa bed, bought by Emily Pope during a short mid-life crisis in the sixties, a black-and-white TV, and the state-of-the-art wood-burning stove from Norway; also a narrow scullery (fitted kitchen with mod cons) which housed a microwave oven, an erratic hob, some Formica cupboards containing a medley of crockery, and a whining fridge which, as Nicky Pope had had to run off before she had quite seen that all was in order, still contained a tub of low-cost margarine, a dried-up half of a lemon and five of a ‘six-pack’ of Cokes, a legacy of the Clapham woman’s stay.

In the days before planning permission, the scullery had been tacked rakishly on to the side of the cottage and roofed, in a slapdash manner, with corrugated asbestos, which nowadays would have drawn down imprecations from a dutiful Health and Safety inspector. Lucky, then, for Nicky Pope, that Mr Golightly had none of the Clapham woman’s self-preserving assertiveness; or it may have been that health and safety were not issues for him.

When the rain fell it made a timpani on the scullery roof, a sound which Mr Golightly had yet to discover whether he found enchanting or distracting. A rickety fence, with a wicket gate let into it, which led through to the garden, ran beside the scullery. But this morning Mr Golightly was troubled by none of those things: he stood listening to the sound of the rushing brook, which ran through the lower meadows, and noting how the hills formed a gentle cleavage through which the River Dart found its way to the sea.

Grazing in the field, to which the untidy garden sloped, was a stocky brown horse with a white flash down its nose. Beyond, bounded by a beech hedge, where the leaves independently maintained their autumnal rust, lay further fields, where young spring wheat was forming a green glaze over the soil.

A batch of rooks was already out scouring the earth for food, while a band of their less diligent kin sat in the barefanned branches of an ash tree, making clean silhouettes against the gathering light. As Mr Golightly watched, a pair of magpies swooped gleaming down, balancing with their long tails and settling among the rooks to add a touch of Old Master cachet to the scene.

‘One for sorrow, two for joy.’

Mr Golightly spoke the words aloud. It was an ancient saying, old as any of the works of man, and he could not now recall when he had first heard it. But, like many country-bred people, he did not let reason oust superstition: the sight of the swaggering piebald birds gave an added fillip to his spirits.

And now, as if to add fuel to this fire, a sliver of sun appeared above one of the breast-like hills, a mere slice of orange which rapidly grew to an incandescent globe. Rifts of glowing red infiltrated the green-grey sky which began to take on further intimations of light.

‘Be praised!’ said Mr Golightly.

He did not speak aloud, but as if to a beloved intimate whose understanding had no need of outward hearing.

Samson, the horse, perhaps catching the drift of the unspoken words, made its way up to the wire which formed a boundary to Spring Cottage’s garden. ‘Hello, old boy.’ Mr Golightly ran a finger down the long plush nose and wished he had thought to bring sugar lumps. The cardboard box he had brought was packed with some of the items he might have difficulty finding in the average English village shop: tins of anchovies, jars of pickled walnuts, Marmite, a pot of moist Stilton, chillies, pine kernels, a French sausage, Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, sugared almonds – but despite these latter items Mr Golightly did not, in general, have a sweet tooth. He had not been raised on sugar and consequently it did not form part of his regular diet.

‘Sorry, old chap.’ He spoke regretfully: he liked to indulge animals who rarely bore resentment if one failed to do as they wished.

As if in response to his apology, a ribald cackling made itself heard and Mr Golightly turned away from Samson and towards the direction of the noise. The next-door garden was fenced by heavy barbed wire. Through the wire Mr Golightly could see a female figure among white geese with glistening orange bills and some farmyard ducks.

Mr Golightly was naturally courteous; but he was concerned, too, to establish peace with his neighbours so that there should be no threat to his tranquillity. His work had too often been a battle; he had no wish for his holiday to be marred by warfare. War between neighbours, he knew from long experience, is often of the most disruptive kind.

‘Hello,’ he said, and offered his hand across the barbed-wire fence.

The other said nothing but only stared. It was the kind of stare which might have perturbed anyone with an uneasy conscience; but if Mr Golightly’s conscience was uneasy he didn’t betray the fact. He held the gaze steadily till the woman relaxed and held out a hand.

‘Watch the spikes on the fence.’

‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

Mr Golightly could not have explained why he had made this remark. He was not in the modern habit of constantly enquiring into the workings of his own mind but tended to say whatever came into his head.

‘Ellen Thomas,’ said his neighbour, apparently ignoring his comment, and turned away.

‘Golightly,’ said Mr Golightly, looking after her; the grey eyes of Ellen Thomas were those of a creature in pain.

Back in the cottage, he unpacked the box of provisions and arranged these tidily in the Formica cupboards. He looked about for a kettle which he eventually found in the cupboard under the sink. No plug. Better make a shopping list, he decided.

Up in the bedroom he completed his unpacking. His possessions were simple: a couple of nightshirts, a pair of slippers, some woollies, a number of warm shirts, wool socks, underwear. His zip-up sponge bag, rather the worse for wear, was already in the avocado bathroom. No tie – this was a holiday. Among the other items there was a small travelling
photograph holder which framed the picture of a young man with a piteous face.

Mr Golightly looked at the face as he placed the picture beside the bed. Love is the price of love, he thought, as, observing the warning on a note tacked up by Nicky Pope, he minded his head down the steep stairs to the parlour where he prepared to do combat with a book of instructions lying beside the Norwegian woodstove.

Books of instructions were things with which Mr Golightly had little patience. He opened the booklet entitled ‘Norpine Stoves: the extra modern way to be old-fashioned’ and read:
The flue towards the left-handed side of the upper orifice is to be unclosed while the material fires is being laid down.

What the hell did all that mean?

E
LLEN
T
HOMAS LAY ON HER SOFA LOOKING
across to where the sheep stood making enigmatic runes on the hillside. She was reflecting that if she could read these runes she might become wise.

No living soul knew this but, shortly after her husband, Robert, died, Ellen had had a strange encounter with a gorse bush. She had been walking her dog, Wilfred, across the moor and, as usual when she walked in the days after Robert’s death, she had been crying. Although she had no inhibition about crying over Robert, the tears only seemed to come when she was mobile. While she was stationary they stayed dammed up inside her, causing unbearable pressure around the heart.

There was something about striding across the tough moorland grasses, through the plashy bogs and past the pale lichen-coated brakes of thorn, which made a breach in her constraining inner structures; so that when she had climbed to the stony outcrop of the tor she was able to stand against the wind on the spine of the skyline and howl like a banshee.

She was returning from just such a venting early one afternoon, a time when most people were eating lunch, when Wilfred began to sniff and whine round a patch of gorse. Supposing voles or rabbits, Ellen had put Wilfred on his lead and tried to drag the dog past the bush. But he
pulled so hard the lead slipped from her grasp, and Wilfred, barking frantically, bolted for home.

Ellen, about to hurry after him, was arrested by a strong sense that the gorse concealed more than a vole or a rabbit. A violent burning sensation leapt like a ravaging tiger at her heart and a voice, sweet and terrible, spoke from the golden bush.

‘I am love,’ it said.

Ellen was not of a religious disposition. If asked, she would have said she was an atheist, an agnostic at best, so these words startled her and at first she believed there must have been some mistake.

‘I am Ellen Thomas,’ she had offered, diffidently, in return, and waited, expecting to be dismissed. But the dismissal came in the form of a further surprise.

‘Tell them.’

‘What?’ Ellen asked.

‘Tell them!’ said the voice again in its tender, commanding tone.

Ellen waited for more but no further utterances issued from the gorse. She walked home, dry-eyed, after Wilfred.

Ellen had no idea how to obey the injunction she had been given. She had no clue as to what the cryptic words might mean. Whatever they meant it was not – she was sure of this – that she should go about preaching to people. No being, not even one whose essence was love, would suborn her, Ellen Thomas, as a preacher in its cause. She wondered if what she was being asked was to write about
the experience, but that seemed hardly more likely. Robert had been a journalist and had occasionally run stuff past her for comments; but aside from that, and the jottings she sometimes wrote in her grandmother’s recipe book, since school, where she had not excelled, she had had no practice in writing.

To be asked to tell of love is a tall enough order; to be asked such a thing when one has not even the habit of belief is awful. The magnitude and impossibility of the task she had been assigned felled Ellen.

The loss of Robert had awoken her to the innate treachery of all certainties. Her husband’s enduring sympathy had made life seem unchangeable. With Robert gone this illusion, along with all human ties, vanished too. Yet even in his absence, the knowledge of Robert’s steady love had conferred upon her a sense of life’s consistency. But the enigmatic order from the gorse bush robbed Ellen of her old self and the sureties that had survived Robert’s death. She took to walking, day and night, seeking not so much a solution to the problem she had been unwillingly set as escape.

The walks left her overwhelmingly fatigued. The friendly countryside she had once enjoyed took on a menacing aspect. The foliage in the trees became baleful, dropping leaves and icy water on her as she passed. The hedges murmured threateningly in the wind, which rushed at her, haranguing her like some invisible prosecutor. Metal gates clanged horribly, bruising the calves of her legs, or making violent grating noises, shocking to her ears. The sun, red and glowering,
plunged down the sky in pursuit of her. Outside or in she felt alarmingly afraid.

Gradually, as rats are said to leave a sinking ship, her everyday capacities had begun to slink away, leaving her a remnant, a hapless passenger on the derelict wreck of her old personality, which now appeared to float on perilous and alien waters. She seemed to feel her feet sliding under her, sensed the deck shudder and tip her dangerously off balance, downwards to an icy darkness, where lurked shapeless, unformed things, and where death looked a blessed relief and disintegration easier than resistance.

With the last dregs of her failing resources, she dragged herself to sell Brook Farm, the farmhouse she had lived in with Robert for over twenty years, and move to the small, plain, characterless bungalow where obscurely she felt she might be safe. And here – after the anguish of disposing of the furniture over which she and Robert had laughed, planned, bickered, made love and acted all the multifacets of a long marriage, for there was no way the accumulation of a shared life would fit into her new home – she had hidden herself away, for what she found she chiefly could not bear was other people’s company.

From the long sofa, which, scraping the bottom of the barrel of her energy, she had made the object of a last-ditch shopping effort, she lay, unrecognisable to herself, gazing out in those moments of passionless lucidity which afflict the mortally wounded. It seemed to her, at such moments, that she might never rise again, but would simply freeze
there upon her long perch, like some stray migrant bird forced to winter over in a cold and alien land.

One morning, while she was engaged in looking out – if ‘engaged’ could be the right word for something which so much resembled the loosening of all former ties – she became aware that the nature of what she saw had undergone some alchemical change.

Ellen had been a watercolour artist, and made a successful living selling her paintings at local craft shops. She had an accurate eye and a patient hand, and the world, as she was used to seeing it, had beauty and charm. But now everything she had once seen as colourful, lyrical, dramatic, even, was subsumed into a vast, unquenchable litany of light.

The months that she had by now spent lying on the sofa had brought Ellen no further towards solving the problem she had been set by the presence in the gorse bush. But the vision of the changed world, rather than diminishing her sense of inadequacy, became a reproach. She looked outside to where the trees and hills and sheep apparently continued their former existence, but in the infinitude of space around and between them, she now knew there lay the inscrutable and uncompromising powers of love and mercy, and she, Ellen Thomas, had been enjoined to make them known.

The intense and brilliant light Ellen had seen at the centre of all things probed her being like a surgeon’s knife. There seemed no safety outside herself and no refuge within. She could tell no one what had occurred – lest she be taken for
a lunatic. She feared to show herself to anyone for she felt there must be a savour of madness about her.

During the day, apart from the sparest of attentions to economic necessities, she gazed out of the window, a shadow between two worlds, surveying the landscape, waiting for the awful injunction to return, for she knew that having been a prey to truth it would never leave her, but would make itself felt at any cost. At night she lay in a kind of dead-and-alive doze, apprehensive that the voice might call on her again.

The assault of love upon Ellen Thomas had been savage rather than sweet, and, like many caught in its toils, she longed to have been spared the experience.