Mr Golightly's Holiday (22 page)

P
AULA HAD BEEN GIVEN COMPASSIONATE LEAVE
from work and it was to Paula’s mum’s, and not the Stag and Badger, that Mr Golightly went one late June evening in search of Luke.

Luke was delighted when his old crossword companion appeared asking if he could spare a few words.

‘Sure thing,’ said Luke, ever agreeable. ‘Come into the kitchen.’

Luke admitted he had been missing
The Times.
Paula’s mum took the
Mail
, which, Luke observed, had a different mindset behind its crossword. He showed Mr Golightly one of the clues: ‘His bite could be worse than His bark if you confuse him (3)’, which reminded Mr Golightly that he had come to say that since his tenancy of Spring Cottage was almost at its end he wondered if Luke could look after Wilfred for a time. Johnny was going to have him eventually, but that would have to wait till Rosie Spence found a place to live and things got sorted over Johnny’s new dad. Apparently, Rosie was talking to solicitors and it looked as if it mightn’t be long before Jos Bainbridge would be free again.

Luke said he’d be glad to look after the Labrador, though he’d have to clear it with Paula’s mum – not that she ever put her foot down, especially now Paula was back. He offered his guest a Nescafé.

Mr Golightly reminded Luke he only drank real coffee. He had come, he said, mainly to say goodbye. Tomorrow he would be packing up and, having a dislike for farewells, he preferred to get them over with in advance.

‘Oh, right,’ said Luke. He was sorry his writing colleague was leaving. But he had an optimistic nature and expressed a hope they might meet up again.

‘Undoubtedly,’ Mr Golightly assured him. ‘I never forget a friend.’

Luke apologised if he had seemed unsociable lately. He’d been hard at it, he explained, finishing his new work.

‘My own idea I’ve decided to set aside,’ Mr Golightly explained. It seemed to have found its own way of reproducing itself.

He was about to ask after Paula when the kitchen door opened and she appeared lugging a rubbish sack.

Paula had not been too thrilled by the discovery that her absconding father was in the same line of business as the man who had apparently beaten up Johnny Spence’s mother all that time ago. For a while there was an excited rumour that Paula’s father might also be Johnny’s; but this turned out to be local wishful thinking.

‘Shit, that’s a relief!’ Johnny said when he called by to borrow Paula’s Dread-Fox Bitch CD and heard the latest gossip. ‘You’d be on at me something horrible if you was me sister.’

‘You bet your sweet arse I would if you use language like that!’ Paula had said, whacking him on the backside. She
told him he could come and play her keyboard any time. ‘You’re not like other kids. You’re like I was, you are.’

Her father had been missing most of her life and Paula had given him up long ago. Jackson’s death hit her harder. It revealed a side to him she hadn’t detected and the discovery made her thoughtful.

However, a little after his death, a note was found to have been left by Jackson. In ill-formed capitals, apparently printed just before his suicide, it read:

I LEAVE EVERYTHING TO PAULA JENSON.

The note was dated, and signed, also in capitals, J. JACKSON.

Since Jackson had no relatives, or, other than Paula, close friends, the full extent of his illiteracy was not widely known. It was shrewd, and considerate, of the desperate man to use the surname which Paula herself had only lately discovered.

The day that Jackson’s body was found in the pear tree Paula had returned to Rabbit Row to find Luke in a ferment over his writing. Luke had scarcely taken in the details of the true-life drama he was living among. Never much in touch with flesh-and-blood human beings, he was wholly preoccupied by the tragic tale he now believed – all memory of Bill having vanished – he had single-handedly constructed. Hungry for an opinion, and oblivious to her personal tragedy, he pressed it on Paula, who read it through in one sitting over her mum’s kitchen table.

‘’S a good story,’ said Paula, finally responding to Luke’s
repeated requests to know how she found it. She stacked the exercise books smartly into order on the table. ‘You’ll need to get it looking tidy and properly word-processed before you show it to anyone. It starts off well. ‘S good the way the baby’s a bastard, and all that bit about the dump he’s born in, and not knowing who his real dad is and that he comes from a mysterious background, and that. That’s all good romance – the readers’ll like that. And the main character, the one who don’t mind what he says and tells them what’s what and gets himself killed for it – he’s got balls, I like him. But the ending won’t do.’

‘Why not?’ asked Luke, stung into protest. ‘I mean, it’s a fantastic ending – being put to death by the people you’re trying to save and left to die in humiliating agony.’

He was deflated by this unexpected criticism of his tale of tragic suffering.

‘Won’t do,’ said Paula, firmly. She knew from the best-seller lists at Tesco’s that sad endings were not at all popular. ‘It’ll never sell, not the way you tell it, anyway.’

Luke was downcast. ‘What’ll I do, then? I can’t change the ending. He has to die – that’s the whole point.’

‘You could add a bit on,’ said Paula, pragmatically. ‘He could die, right? Everyone could think he was dead – but he isn’t. He comes back and only a few people see him. Then people start to talk – he becomes a cult hero, like Elvis, and that way you can keep the death, for the sob stuff, but still have a happy end.’

She had been in her room, tidying things away, when
Mr Golightly called. It was her doll’s house and the remaining toy animals, she told him, she had in the rubbish sack. ‘Luke’s going to put them up in the loft,’ she explained. ‘So there’s room for us both when I move me other bits back. They was OK when I was a kid, but, you know, you can’t stay a kid, you gotta move on…’

‘I understand,’ said Mr Golightly, wondering whether congratulations to the couple were in order. ‘There’s a time and place for all things.’ It was a sentiment he had written of once himself, long ago, in one of the more poetic passages of his own work.

Paula said she would be selling Jackson’s place once all the legal stuff was tied up but that she couldn’t bring herself to spend another night there. For the time being she and Luke were going to squeeze in together at her mum’s.

Mr Golightly absorbed this new turn of events unsurprised. He was glad that two of his friends should strike up an association and his visit to Calne had taught him that human affairs had their own momentum.

Luke’s amiable indifference had conquered Paula far more effectively than any show of devotion could have done, but she was also impressed by the potential she saw in his writing. She took the opportunity to canvass their visitor’s view on Luke’s new project.

‘I told him, it won’t sell ‘less he does something about that ending. You got to look at the market. Change the ending and it could be a best-seller. I’m right, en’t I?’

Mr Golightly looked at Paula in her jeans and sequinned
T-shirt and her several gleaming nose studs. She had a far more discriminating worldly sense than ever he, or Luke, could hope to have.

‘I expect you are right, child,’ he said. And to Luke, ‘I’d follow her lead on this, old chap – she sees these things more clearly…’

B
Y THE TIME HE HAD FINISHED PACKING UP
Spring Cottage it was early evening, but Mr Golightly did not stroll up to the Stag and Badger. He’d had his fill of endings. Luke, or, better still, Paula, could look after those.

He went outside to give Samson the sugar lumps he had pilfered for the horse from his last visit to the pub. Samson stood sturdily oblivious to the ceremony of departure as Mr Golightly ran a finger down the plush nose. ‘Say “Ha, ha, among the trumpets” for me.’

He had promised Nicky Pope, who had her sister’s husband’s cousin staying and was up to her ears, to make sure that all was in apple-pie order to greet the new tenant, the tarot-card reader. The cottage hardly needed cleaning – Mr Golightly had discovered a fondness for housework. In any case, he gave the avocado bath and basin an extra going over, sprayed the kitchen hob with the last of the Mr Muscle that he and Johnny had bought together in Oakburton and got down on his knees to peer under the bed to see if there were any stray socks hiding. It was part of his rival’s cunning to whisk away trivia into dark corners; but on this occasion his socks had been spared. He had already packed away the laptop with its e-mail dialogue and the final message – for
the moment anyway – which had led to the meeting with his old associate:

shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him?

Perhaps this had brought on a fit of leniency? But it couldn’t last; they each had their own drama to play.

Walking back from Luke and Paula’s, beneath a lambent midsummer sky, he’d reflected how quick life was to heal the breaches, to close over the ragged wounds of loss. He would miss Ellen Thomas, as he missed his son; but they would not miss him. They were part of the teeming tribute of the earth, ephemeral, evanescent but, in its way, boundless and enduring. Nature doesn’t hold with tragedy, he thought, it has its own memorials: the green light of the dawn sky, the warmth of the spring soil, the spears of wheat, the blossom of a fruit tree, the clack of hooves, the clamour of starlings, the cool of rain, white stars and violets, the bark of an otter, the fall of dew, the abandoned dance of a girl, or the tears of a young boy as he wept for a world which had shown its best and its worst to him.

The tragedy was not his son’s or Ellen Thomas’s – it was poor demented Jackson’s, and Brian Wolford’s, and his mother’s. Cherie Wolford was beside herself for the son who had been the apple of her eye; it was thought she might never get over it, Nicky Pope had said.

Johnny Spence lived; and soon would have a father to quarrel with, and laugh about, and miss; and, no doubt, be ashamed of and bothered and anguished by. The beam of
the balance of the universe, though slow, found its own level. For the while, it had righted itself; but neither he, nor his old rival, was the agent. If nothing else, he had learned that on his holiday.

Looking out through the window on to the garden, Mr Golightly saw one of Ellen Thomas’s geese, its orange bill rootling in the grass through the barbed wire, and remembered that Mary Simms, who had promised to see to the livestock, was to call by. It would be a tonic to see Mary again before his departure.

There was tapping outside, so faint that, for a moment, Mr Golightly mistook it for the sound of the apple tree’s branches scraping on the window, but its persistence made him look out. Across the way he saw Keith, with a face like thunder, reversing the Renault, packed to the windows, down the vicarage drive.

By the open window stood a man, open-faced and shambling. ‘Evening, sir. I’ve come for the garden.’

‘What?’

‘The garden, sir. Mrs Pope said to come.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee it’s all yours!’ He gestured at the prodigal dandelions.

He had almost finished loading the Traveller when Mike and Bill arrived, Mike riding pillion on the bike.

‘Michael – Gabriel,’ he embraced them fondly, his faithful assistants.

Before they left, Mr Golightly said goodbye to the
gardener, who said his name was Joe, and that besides gardening he did a spot of woodwork. In fact, it was fixing up the fitted kitchen for Mrs Fawns, over Backen way, that had held him up so long from coming to do Spring Cottage.

Mike hopped in beside the driver’s seat and Bill revved up the bike and rode off ahead of the Traveller. So he missed seeing Mary Simms, who was in time to wave the others off.

Mary was looking well. She had brought with her a memento of Oakburton, a milk jug in the shape of a cow, a present from the vicar, who was busy setting up ‘Meredith’s’, her beauty salon, and couldn’t get away, but sent her love and asked to be remembered.

And the sight that Mr Golightly took away with him, when he turned to look back at Spring Cottage, where he had spent his holiday, was Mary Simms, leaning on the gate, with the light of the vanishing sun on her copper-coloured hair, chatting, in her good-natured way, to Joseph the gardener.

Later that evening, Tessa Pope claimed to have seen two angels – each with six wings – conducting a fiery car across the sky over High Tor. But no one believed her.

Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Ingelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Mind’s Bible.

KEATS