Mr Golightly's Holiday (6 page)

They were all chatting, eagerly now, about the escaped prisoner. Colin Drover remarked that in his view it all came
about through lack of corporal punishment for the young; Paula’s mum said it was a shame you had to discipline children but look what happened when you didn’t; Cherie Wolford said in her son Brian’s view all rapists should be castrated; and Paula, who had popped out for a word with her mum, said there would be no need for that if he came anywhere near her!

Only Mary Simms, who had said, to no one in particular, that she didn’t like to think of anyone coming to harm, listened when Mr Golightly remarked, ‘Hatred is like alcohol or cigarettes. We don’t know how dependent we are on it till we try to give it up.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said eagerly, leaning across the bar. ‘It’s true. But, please, why is that?’

Mr Golightly turned to look at the barmaid. Mary Simms had green eyes, and the midday sun, which was storming the window panes she had polished that morning, made bold bright gleams on her copper hair. Look on this, it said, and rejoice!

‘Perhaps we underestimate the powers that can destroy us,’ he suggested.

One sad thought generally leads to another. Mr Golightly’s mind, dwelling on the human taste for disaster, had also brought up the image, never far beneath its surface, of his own boy who, like the pretty barmaid, had also been such a one for saying ‘Yes’. That had been half the trouble, the boy’s disregarding unequivocal affirmation, which had led to the catastrophe.

It was three o’clock when Luke and Mr Golightly finally left the Stag and Badger. He had lingered beyond the time he had allowed for his lunch break; but the exchange with Mary Simms, and the lurking thoughts following in its wake, made the prospect of a return to solitude a bleak one.

‘Coffee?’ he suggested.

Luke was on for a cup. He had a few more ideas about the Myth of Creation to run past his new friend.

Together they walked down the hill towards Spring Cottage. Clouds, passing over the face of the sun, raced long combs of rippling shadow over the green fields. Mr Golightly, observing nature’s gentle chiaroscuro, felt the beginnings of a restoration of the peace which the conversation in the pub had disturbed. The natural play of light and shade over the landscape was restful after the brooding thoughts.

Though they weren’t unwelcome; they were as welcome as the rainbow, for was not any memory of his son the purest sunlight and water?

T
HE BRAKE OF THORN BUSHES GAVE NO
substantial cover but it provided a screen of shadow along which the man ran. As he ran he bent low, in a kind of creeping lope, more like a driven creature – a beaten dog, a mangy tiger escaped from a rackety travelling circus, or a wolf from a down-at-heel zoo – than a human being. The light was still low and the mist made weird shapes in the depressions and hollows of the moorland terrain.

The man was making for the beacon which had begun as a dark speck in the misty distance and now looked to be just a short run ahead. Yet each short darting burst he made seemed to bring him no nearer to reaching it. His breath scraped in his throat, like gravel in danger of being sucked too deeply into his struggling lungs.

At the far edge of the long thorn brake he stopped and cramped down his big body into the smallest bundle he could make of it. His ears, like those of any hunted beast, were super-alert, and he had caught, more a feeling than a sound, the faintest tremble of movement on the air.

As he crouched, his ears pinned, his heart contracted to a painful pulse, he felt, as he had felt before, the desire to walk out of the cover and give himself up to whoever or whatever was approaching his hiding place. But he did not
surrender to the impulse. He had lived night and day with the serpent voice which offered him the solace of betrayal.

Sunday was a day when Mr Golightly, from long habit, was used to taking a break from administering his business. Though when he woke on this particular Sunday morning, in the small cold bedroom of his holiday home, he hardly felt that a rest was what he deserved.

Another twenty-four hours seemed to have slipped by without him writing a word. He had enjoyed doing what Luke referred to as ‘chewing the fat’ yesterday afternoon, over several cups of coffee and, on Luke’s part, most of a packet of Silk Cut, till it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to stroll back with the young man up to the Stag and Badger for an early evening pint which had somehow extended to another one.

Looking out of the window at the back, he saw Samson dancing around an audience of rooks. Luke had referred to a gym down at Newton Abbot. He could do with a spot of exercise himself.

It was chilly outside. The houses of Great Calne lay comfortably asleep beneath a soft blanket of white mist. All the residents appeared to be abed too except for Ellen Thomas’s dog, Wilfred, who was already out patrolling the hedgerow for voles but eagerly abandoned this activity with the offer of better adventures.

Along the lane, Wilfred continued to make bounding
sorties after scuttling shapes of fur and bone. Beside the cattle grid, which marked the boundary to the moor, stood Lavinia Galsworthy’s house where Luke Weatherall rented his studio flat, but Mr Golightly did not consider calling in. It was too early for a social call and for the time being he’d had enough of human nature.

Wilfred, devout in his discipleship of tooth-and-claw, raced ahead in the hope of rabbits. Mr Golightly walked sedately, following the muddy track between the gorse bushes. He observed, in passing, the line of ghostly lichenplated thorn trees, bent, like a unanimous jury, in the direction of the prevailing wind.

The man, sweating in the cold morning air, stayed hunkered down as the dog lumbered lightly forwards; a black dog, like the one his aunt had said she could see on his shoulder when he was a boy. Gingerly, he put out his hand and the dog came towards it and stood, his pink tongue lolling across the cruel teeth, staring with brown, unworldly eyes. The crouching man and the Labrador dog faced each other. Then the dog, making some oracular choice, licked the man’s hand and moved away from the thorn.

‘Good dog,’ Mr Golightly said absently as Wilfred bounded back. If answers to unanswerable questions were to be found they might be found on the moor, where nature worked away without need of human encouragements.

And as if to demonstrate this inhuman industry, suddenly, from nowhere, the sun appeared and, borrowing from the swept sky, dashed down into a puddle a reckless sheet
of sheer blue; a peacock butterfly, confused in its dates, fluttered crazily past, its brilliant raggedy reflection erratically flickering in the mirror of the peaty water; and somewhere a yellowhammer offered a future mate ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’.

The other birds, scornful of the yellowhammer’s humble courtship offering, began to sound their own invitations to prospective partners, setting up a tuneful chain of eager pre-nuptial clamour.

The man behind the thorns heard the birds’ song and paused, allowing himself a fractional remission from the consuming fear. The birds themselves, afire with the ruthless drive of procreation, forced this respite on him, their thin, sweet voices pinking at his ear, drilling holes which let in, momentarily, the vast invisible space which encompasses the limits of this world and where music is forever playing.

Mr Golightly heard the same music and paused on the boggy track. People sometimes asked what the point of a thing was – for him it was the very pointlessness of the birds which filled him with satisfaction. Wilfred had come to a halt beside him, the gleaming rabbit pellets on the track suggesting that the objects of his own worship would not be far away. The dog waited patiently, recognising that here was another creature caught for a moment in its peculiar form of praise.

The Reverend Meredith Fisher had finished her sermon and the congregation had given voice, somewhat thinly, to the final hymn: ‘We plough the fields and scatter / The good seed on the land…’ She had taken the prospect of the hymn as an opportunity to speak in her sermon about the dangers of unprotected sex. For a while now she had been waging a campaign to have a vending machine selling condoms installed in the Stag and Badger, but Colin Drover’s wife, Kath, had been brought up Roman Catholic. She was lapsed herself but it had given her principles.

The Reverend Fisher – also from principle – was averse to all aversion, especially of a sexual kind. Her programme of enlightenment discouraged the notion that any physical act between consenting adults could be distasteful. However, there were realities to consider – Aids and venereal diseases were contingencies no modern Christian could afford to overlook.

She had put this thought to the drowsing congregation which this morning had consisted of Paula’s mum and her Auntie Edna, who’d come for a weekend’s country air to get over the death of Uncle Ron, a couple of the old bell-ringers, who turned up because Rector Malcolm had told them, before he became incoherent, they were to ‘mind’ the new incumbent and they owed him that at least, and Tessa, Nicky Pope’s daughter. Tessa was going through a religious phase and had had a vision of the Virgin during a lesson on Bosnia and, as a consequence, had been sent to the sick room to lie down.

And there was also Barty Clarke, the auctioneer and editor of the
Backenbridge Review.

It was as well, the Reverend Fisher thought, that Mr Clarke was there. His distinguished form stood upright among the more recumbent members of the congregation. He ploughed the fields and scattered in a vigorous bass, and he paid flattering attention to the sermon, apparently taking notes.

In following her vocation, Meredith Fisher had bravely set her face against disheartenment. The path of a modern Christian, particularly a female one, was bound to be uphill. Had our Lord been a woman Himself He could scarcely have been set a more challenging one to tread. Nevertheless, it made a welcome change to have a member of the congregation take such an interest as Mr Clarke.

Barty took the vicar aside at the end of the service after she had shaken hands with all her parishioners – which to one of a less optimistic turn of mind than hers might have seemed to take dispiritingly little time – and questioned her about her pronouncements on gay sex. He seemed impressed when she explained how they were all born of her own experience. It was encouraging to the vicar to encounter a fellow pilgrim – a man as well – on the hard road to enlightenment.

Up on the moor, Mr Golightly was sitting on the high granite bench of the tor, with Wilfred beside him. The moss
made plump emerald pillows on the rocky outcrop, and the delicate leaves and petals of the saxifrages formed fine-cut cameos at his feet. Mr Golightly smelled the moist earth and let the clean light bathe his eyes. He surveyed the scene before him: the green and brown and gold chequered moorland floor, the reservoir ahead, where light shone like polished silver on the water, the steep fall below, where humps of trees and glowing brambles tumbled to extinguish themselves in the rampaging River Dart.

All this, he observed, was good. So what was wrong? Why were nature’s creations so gracious and vital compared to humankind? Humankind was part of nature too. But unlike the rest of nature it seemed so prone to litter the world with error and blunder, with noxious insinuations and captious demands which could never – surely reason would say so? – be fulfilled. Reason was supposed to be the prerogative of human beings but, of course, all really important things had little to do with reason.

He returned to Spring Cottage in low spirits to find a call registering on the answerphone.

‘Hi there, Boss! Got your call, I’ll give you a bell later. Cheers!’

Drat! He had forgotten all about the wretched e-mail. He wondered whether he could be bothered with it. These modern systems of communication seemed to be two-edged swords – they were tiresome to administer and exposed you to unwarranted intrusion. He went over to the gateleg table and opened the laptop. This time the e-mail started up with
no trouble and within seconds the ‘Inbox’ displayed the news that there were three messages waiting. The first was from Mike.

boss – keep trying with the server – it goes AWOL from time to time but don’t you fret – I’ll give you a buzz – mox

Yes, well, more of the same. Nevertheless, Mike was right, the wayward server had righted itself.

The next message was from Martha who said she wanted to ‘do diaries’ over some future engagements.

The third said:

as for darkness, where is the place thereof?

M
ORNING
C
LAXON
,
OVER TO SPEND THE
weekend with Hugh up at ‘Nutkins’, was out, that Sunday, for her morning run. Like Mr Golightly, she did not attend the service at the village church. Morning was a pagan and it was rumoured that she had danced naked, to see the sun up, on Widecombe Moor last midsummer. Gossip also claimed that the stone circle where she danced was the one put up by Jackson, when the people from Channel Four wanted a location for a film about Satanic rites.

Morning was broad-minded and sympathetic towards the Christian faith. It was her belief that Jesus was really a pagan, and she had been thrilled to hear in a lecture, given at Totnes, that one of the Gnostic sects – which it was widely believed, in Totnes, that Jesus belonged to – had been in the way of consuming a sacred drink, made up of menstrual blood and semen. Known to be a favourite among pagans, menstrual blood and semen had not yet hit the taste of Great Calne where communicants still favoured the more familiar wine and wafer; though, even for these, takers were somewhat slender, as the Sunday’s congregation showed.

Morning paced herself going down the hill where you could turn an ankle. Passing the church she was in time to see the Reverend Meredith talking to Barty Clarke. A pity
when women didn’t keep up appearances, Morning ruminated, raising her pace as she came down on to the flat. The vicar would look so much better with more fashionable glasses and eye make-up.

A barking Labrador bounded towards her.

‘Wilfred!’ reprimanded Ellen Thomas, who had come out into the street to look for her dog.

The black Labrador had made his way under the barbed-wire fence into the garden of Spring Cottage. Mr Golightly, finding the dog there after their walk on the moor, was returning him for a second time.

Morning pulled in her stomach muscles and lengthened her spine, conscious that good posture shows a woman’s breasts to advantage. A man of late middle age, altogether unremarkable in appearance, was not the stuff to bring out any special response in her. Still, a man was a man, and no opportunity to further her plans should be wasted. She had not given up the fight to transform the tearooms to an alternative health centre and was hopeful of instituting a Pilates class.

Mr Golightly’s was a nature adapted to finding pleasure wherever pleasure was honestly to be found. He enjoyed the sight of a shapely bosom and his eyes now rested on Morning Claxon’s, much as, a little earlier, he had paused to admire a crop of shining yellow celandines. ‘Good morning,’ he said. Had he had a hat he might have raised it, so statuesque was the young woman who stood before him.

Morning Claxon smiled on her elderly admirer. ‘My
friends will tell you otherwise but if you can’t be good be careful, I always say!’

Mr Golightly looked politely puzzled.

‘My name’s Morning,’ explained his new acquaintance. This was not strictly the case: her given forename was Maureen but this had not translated well to the alternative culture of the South-West.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Golightly.

Ellen Thomas turned to go inside.

‘Oh, Mrs Thomas,’ Morning said, remembering why she had made Ellen’s the final point of her run.

Morning had overheard Nicky Pope, up at the Post Office Stores, mention that Ellen Thomas was ‘poorly’. From the sight of her it looked as if the woman might have ME, some sort of food intolerances certainly. Taking in the name of the house they stood outside – ‘Foxgloves’ – Morning remembered she had been meaning to have a word with the post office about getting the name of Hugh’s house, ‘Nutkins’, changed to ‘Morning Glory’.

‘Might I just pop in for a mo?’ she asked, unleashing her most empathic smile.

Mr Golightly discerned a look of panic in Ellen Thomas’s eyes. He had returned from his outing in a mood to roll up his sleeves and start in at once on his soap opera. But Ellen Thomas had been neighbourly and a woman in distress spoke to his sense of protectiveness.

‘Ah, I was wondering if I, too, might have a word…?’

‘Of course…’ There was relief in Ellen Thomas’s glance
at Mr Golightly as she vaguely gestured both guests inside.

‘And then,’ Morning Claxon’s voice had something of the swimming-bath attendant about it, ‘there’s colonic irrigation…’

Mr Golightly, whose bowels needed no regulating, looked across at Ellen Thomas who was staring blankly out of the window.

‘I’m so sorry to interrupt,’ he said to Morning, ‘but I need a word with Mrs Thomas, ah, about the matter we talked of last time I was here…’

‘What matter?’ asked Ellen Thomas, almost rudely. Morning’s animated smiles had brought on fantasies of self-mutilation.

‘The, ah…’ he shot a look in the direction of the intruder. ‘I’m afraid it is private,’ he said, feebly.

‘Oh, please,’ said Morning, ‘don’t you two mind me. I must be off or Hughie will be frantic. He gets in a state when he doesn’t know where I’ve got to.’ With her back held in the correct postural alignment she rose from the sofa. ‘No, don’t get up – I can see my own way out.’ Obviously, there was a
tendresse
between the dear old pair – she was the last person to get in the way of Cupid’s work!

When the front door had been heard to close Ellen Thomas put her hands over her face.

Mr Golightly sat saying nothing, looking first at the
picture of the crows flying over the cornfield and then across at the sheep, on the unpainted hills, which looked no more real than the painting of the landscape – like toy creatures set out on a child’s play farm.

After a while Ellen said, ‘You see, since my husband died…’ and gave up. It wasn’t really Robert. For some reason, to Mr Golightly, even by omission, she didn’t want to lie.

‘You see,’ she said, again, ‘I have been asked, told…’ How could she explain…? And yet, somehow she wanted to explain to him. ‘I have been told to tell people…about love,’ she concluded, lamely.

Mr Golightly, who knew minutely the truth and terror of this emotion, and its capacity to inspire and to ruin, looked at her but still said nothing.

‘I don’t know how to do it,’ said Ellen Thomas. She felt suddenly savage, thinking of the impossible task she had had forced upon her.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘without great wisdom and strength humankind should pray to be spared the experience of love.’ And he sighed, feeling he was in a unique position to know how impenetrable that condition is, perhaps most of all to those whom it masters.

‘I mean,’ said Ellen Thomas, taking courage from her fiat of anger, ‘why me? What, for God’s sake, do I know?’

‘Well,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘since you ask,’ and his gaze, with its peculiar shifting quality, which had bent on her with unusual directness, now settled again in the direction
of the dark crows, ‘I would say that perhaps what you know – it is a hard thing to explain – is that love is larger than life.’

The drawn bow of the moon had soared austerely into the sky by the time the man left the beacon. He had accomplished what he had come for and now he must find food

– his belly was clanking like an iron-clappered bell. The day and night spent in flight had raided his strength which the years of captivity had depleted. His limbs trembled with hunger and exhaustion as he made his way down the valley’s steep side, catching his ankle in the arm of a twisted bramble which ripped at his skin.

The lights in Ellen Thomas’s sitting room were out because she had not troubled to put them on in the first place. After her neighbour left she had remained lying on the sofa. He had protected her, shown her solicitude and, now he was gone, she missed him. Tears slid down her face as she stared into the colourless dark.

‘Die? Die?’ suggested the young moon enticingly.

Samson was safely stabled, but the ghost horse, who knew no stables, was making shadowy ellipses. It was some weeks since, towards evening, she had begun to see him cantering occasionally beside Samson – a white horse, the colour of old ivory.

The audience of one became two as the man walked quietly towards the French windows and felt the back of his
neck prick. As he turned to witness the circles made by the shaggy hooves and flowing mane, the slight movement caught Ellen Thomas’s eye.

The man approached the windows and felt with his hand to see if he could ease them open. They slid smoothly and he stepped inside.

Ellen Thomas shifted her limbs fractionally to be more comfortable for death. Well, it had come at last. She waited for the touch, sudden and appalling, praying that Robert might be on hand to see her safely through.

The man, not seeing the still figure on the sofa, stole towards the farther door revealed in the cool moonshine. Feeling along the wall, he found his way to the kitchen. Nothing much in the fridge but a starving man is not fussy. He pushed aside a cut-glass bowl with three tinned prunes in it and plucked out a couple of hard-boiled eggs.

He had crushed the shells of the eggs between his palms when a light was turned on and he was clean caught in the sudden illumination.