Mr Golightly's Holiday (7 page)

M
R
G
OLIGHTLY HAD MADE LITTLE PROGRESS
with his soap opera. In the early evening, he turned on the black-and-white TV set, for which he had to adjust the aerial many times, and watched
Neighbours
, hoping to pick up tips. There was no doubt about it, the writers of the series had a knack he lacked. When, after a simple supper, he took his regular evening stroll up to the Stag and Badger, to do the crossword with Luke and compare notes (somewhat pessimistic ones) about the day’s output, he heard all round him, in the talk of the people of Great Calne, just the kind of everyday dramas that he was vainly trying to work into his script.

This raised a question in his mind. Did the characters on television talk the way they did because that was how people naturally thought and talked? Or was it, he wondered, the other way round? Did flesh-and-blood people come to resemble fictional characters, imitating what they heard on the TV or cinema screen or read in fiction? In which case, how you wrote and what you wrote about was God’s own responsibility.

Perhaps it was the weight of this burden which held up Mr Golightly’s project. He woke each morning with firm intentions. After a walk round the garden, during which he would inspect the sky for signs of the coming weather (he
had little faith in forecasters), he would chat to Samson before returning inside where he put on music. (He had become keen on some of the minor Italians and was currently on Corelli which, rather enterprisingly, he couldn’t help feeling, he had ordered from Amazon.) Then he washed and shaved and made a cup of coffee and, very often, another. After all this, he was ready to sit at the gateleg table.

But try as he might, as the days passed, he could not get beyond the re-creation – or regeneration rather – of the original cast of characters. These he could see clearly in his mind’s eye.

The eye of Mr Golightly’s mind was no near-sighted one and it was easy enough to bring before it the familiar forms and faces of the characters he had created all that time ago. The action, after all, was, as Luke would say, already ‘blocked in’ from the original work. Put like that, the task he had set himself should be child’s play. But where to find a child? he ruefully asked himself one morning.

His own son, now…he had retained the childlike mentality he was after, had kept, to an extraordinary degree, that uncompromising quality which was so often a thorn in the parental side. Children, in fact, were very like characters in fiction: you couldn’t legislate for, never mind predict, how they might turn out. Once you’d created them they took on an independent, and often defiant, turn of life.

The drama he had written all that time ago, for example. How far had he been responsible for all the upsets and disasters? Could it have turned out differently? And the
love story – which he had hoped, might redeem the tragic elements in the plot and had ended so ambiguously – was that all down to him? The tale, and the participants, had gathered its own momentum, which had moved under laws he had certainly created but seemed to have passed beyond his control.

He sighed and pressed the start on the CD player. ‘Well, if your baby leaves you,/And you’ve gotta tale to tell –’

Here, now, was another thing. The pain which seemed such an inevitable accompaniment of all relationships. Mr Golightly’s foot swung to the beat of the music which obscured the sound of a rap at the door. The rapping was repeated more insistently.

‘Hell!’ exclaimed Mr Golightly, not altogether sincerely, for he had come to a point in his procrastinations where interruptions were something of a mercy.

When he had finally kicked open the front door, which had swollen again in the April rains, Mr Golightly saw before him a figure he vaguely recognised: an athletic-looking, ginger-haired young man wearing a large-checked sports jacket.

‘Brian Wolford. We met up at the Stag.’

The prison officer from Princetown, recalled Mr Golightly, wondering what he wanted.

Whatever it was, Brian Wolford didn’t wait to be invited but walked straight on in. Mr Golightly put ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on ‘Pause’ and offered coffee.

‘Thank you, sir, never touch it.’

‘Coke?’ There was a can left over from the six-pack.

‘Not offering me a line, are you, sir? ‘Scuse my little joke. No, I don’t touch sugar or artificial sweeteners either.’ Wolford revealed perfect teeth.

Mr Golightly’s teeth were almost antique, and he rarely showed them, but his grin now had the look of an aged dog trying to outwit an annoying master.

‘Milk?’

‘Fat-free diet, I’m afraid!’ Wolford, whose manner did not suggest fear, massaged his chest. The gesture gave an impression that what lay beneath the shirt was as indisputably hairy as the hand.

‘Water?’

‘I won’t if it hasn’t been filtered, sir, begging your pardon.’

‘Not at all,’ said Mr Golightly. He was intrigued to note how the refusal of hospitality was creating more attention than a demand for it.

‘Mind if I take a pew?’

‘I’m so sorry…’ His social skills had run their course but the man’s over-sureness invited rudeness.

‘Sorry to trouble you, sir, it’s this character we’ve got who’s done a runner,’ said Wolford, confidentially. As he spoke his tongue flicked lightly between his teeth.

There was no one about to hear them in the dust-dancing sunlit parlour but a tone of confidentiality, Mr Golightly observed to himself, has more to do with the speaker’s sense of self-importance than a wish for privacy. ‘Yes?’

‘Thing is, up there we don’t see how he could’ve got
away from the area. We got a cordon round the moor quick as scratch your bum –’ Mr Golightly shifted his buttocks uncomfortably – ‘so we’re asking around again, getting folk to search their memories, know what I mean?’

Earlier in his existence, as Mr Golightly was the first to acknowledge, his character had included a punitive streak, but time had softened his responses and nowadays he tried to let tenderness rule. His son had had a liking for miscreants and malefactors – had even sought out their company in preference to the well-to-do intelligentsia where he could easily have held his own among the best of them. The image of the escaped prisoner, hunted like a beast by men like Wolford, brought in its wake painful memories of other persecutions.

Perhaps detecting some unspoken dissent, the prison officer assumed a more official manner.

‘Just thought I’d call by, ask you to keep a look out. You’re new to the area. Familiarity breeds contempt.’ Wolford showed more of the superior teeth. ‘You might notice something which folk round here wouldn’t.’

‘When are we speaking of?’ enquired Mr Golightly. His memory may have been failing him lately but he recalled the date of the escape perfectly: it was the day at the Stag and Badger when the sun had glinted on Mary Simms’s hair. A prison officer would have no official role in the search. The visit, Mr Golightly guessed, had more to do with nosy curiosity, or, heaven help him, with yet another request to assist with some wretched form of creative writing.

‘Now I’ve got you in my clutches, if you’ll pardon the liberty, sir, there’s this idea I had for a book. Stop me if you’ve heard it,’ requested Wolford, sitting back confidently in the easy chair.

From his post in the yew tree, Johnny Spence had been spying on the various comings and goings of Great Calne. It was the Easter holidays, so for the time being he had no obvious need of concealment. But his stepdad was off work, and his mum had gone somewhere, so there was no safety at home. And Johnny hadn’t many friends – none now he’d knocked Dave Sparrow’s teeth down his head for him for saying he was queer. Partly out of boredom, and unwilling to waste an opportunity, Johnny elected to see if there was anything worth nicking from the church.

As Johnny slid jaguar-style from the tree, Brian Wolford was leaving Spring Cottage. The idea for the novel, about a sex offender doing life, had yielded no response from Golightly. He had made it pretty plain that he wasn’t much interested. Probably jealousy. Those writer johnnies were touchy as hell about their status.

Wolford’s own temper was uncertain; as a child he had knowingly starved his pet rabbits and his mother’s cat knew to keep out of his way when he was in a bad mood. Spotting Johnny Spence, Wolford quickened his stride and was in time to grab hold of the boy at the church door.

‘Whatcha do that for?’ Johnny asked, balefully rubbing
his arm. Wolford’s grip was strong enough to have bruised the flesh. Up at the prison, it was common knowledge that it was wise to stay on the right side of Wolford.

‘What you up to going into the church, then?’

‘Just going in there, aren’t I?’ Johnny knew what Wolford did. His stepdad was fond of telling him how he’d land inside himself one day.

‘Oh, a churchgoer, are we?’

‘Said I’d go there for the chappie yonder?’ said Johnny quickly, nodding his head towards Spring Cottage.

‘Oh yes,’ said Wolford. ‘What does Mr Golightly want you to do that for, then?’

Inspiration is democratic – it abandons great artists without a backward glance and alights on the shoulders of ragamuffins. ‘Wanted me to get him a hymn book, didn’t he?’ Elvis had been religious.

‘Oh, really?’ Wolford’s eyebrows signalled pleasure at this patent fiction. ‘Hymn books, is it? We’ll see what Mr Golightly says when I ask him, won’t we?’

‘Yeah,’ said Johnny, uneasily.

Wolford looked at his victim’s face more closely. ‘You live up Storey Lane, don’t you? Your dad know what you’re doing?’ He knew Phil Spence by reputation – a drunk and a layabout, probably a ‘domestic violent’ too.

‘Yeah,’ said Johnny, too quickly this time.

‘Well, now, you get back to your hymn books then, Mister Spence, and maybe I’ll pay your dad a visit. I’ll be asking questions about you, don’t you worry.’

Johnny’s sense of danger was acute: he knew that it wasn’t safe to tangle with a sadist. As he and the screw were speaking, he’d seen, in his peripheral vision, the tenant of Spring Cottage go out of the house and off up the street. Mr Golightly had been OK. Maybe his best bet was to go after him and explain. If Wolford spoke to his stepdad he’d be for it – and so would his mum.

The prison officer’s visit had left Mr Golightly feeling the need for a change of air. He had not cared for Wolford, nor his fiction proposal, which struck Mr Golightly as based on something unsavoury into which he did not wish to delve. And the mention of the escaped prisoner had touched off those insidious feelings which so haunted and perplexed him.

The fact was that Mr Golightly had a secret – or rather, not a secret exactly, because it was not that he was hiding it from anyone – certainly not himself, which is often the way with a secret. But there was no one he could tell, or talk over with, the matter which was always on his mind.

The idea which he could not shake off was that he had in some way been responsible for the catastrophe which had deprived him of his beloved son and had had such widespread consequences. Not for one second, since he had watched his boy die, had he been free from the carking sense that he had been crucial in that unbearable end. Not that the appalling affair had been – could ever have been – his plan for his boy; but the lad had somehow got it into his head that
to embark on the course he had taken was what his father expected of him…

There had been complicating factors: Mr Golightly had been about other business at the time; regrettably, he had trusted to others to see that the boy – who, from the first, had shown a reckless disregard for consequences – came to no harm. The boy’s mother, for instance. Somehow he had supposed that a woman’s sense would have…but what was the use in going down that regretful road? His mother had been devastated too; as had all the women the boy had collected around him. There was no doubt the lad had been attractive to women, as any man who is careless of his own safety will be. And of course, whenever he opened his mouth he attracted not just women – but people of all kinds. He had a way that drew every type to him, far more effectively than his father had managed. Indeed, Mr Golightly mused, it was his own foolish imperviousness to human psychology which in part caused the trouble in the first place…

He dug out his walking shoes and went out into the lane where Wilfred bounded to meet him as if he were an old friend. It was a while since they had walked up to the moor together, and he had returned to rescue the dog’s owner from the woman with the impressive bosom who had shown such concern for his bowels.

Wilfred had taken an animal’s unilateral decision and run on ahead. The banks the dog was exploring had thickened with foliage since Mr Golightly had last walked there. Nettles were unfurling tender green leaves. Dock and sorrel were
shooting up. Tiny violets, purple, mauve and white, grew scattered among the green growth, like wanton gems dropped by some ebullient and careless woman. Azureheaded chaffinches with apricot breasts pinked ecstatically along the dark, white-blossomed branches of blackthorn and flew ahead in dipping waves as he followed the Labrador up the lane. The April air was gentle and seductive. Nothing is so beautiful as spring, Mr Golightly said to himself.

It was vexing, therefore, to meet Sam Noble at the cattle grid.

Sam Noble had not forgotten his suggestion to Mr Golightly that the cultural arm of Great Calne would be strengthened by the formation of a writers’ group. Nor had he forgotten that it was he who had undertaken to get it going. What luck he had all that experience with the Mummers in Kensal Rise! He greeted Mr Golightly with enthusiasm, explaining that he had dropped by to canvass Luke – not about the car park, he wouldn’t want Golightly to think that his mind was not sometimes on ‘higher things’! – but about his idea for a writers’ group. ‘You’re the busy fellow – any day’ll suit us,’ Sam declared.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Golightly, who was unfamiliar with the unsolicited largesse which corrals. He wondered if he could refer to a business appointment in town; but with the date of the proposed meeting in his own control how could he arrange for it also to take place in his absence? This was just the kind of nuisance his staff had dealt with. For a second his mind turned regretfully to Martha: despite her temperamental
behaviour, she would have come up with some saving strategy.