Mr Golightly's Holiday (9 page)

T
HE GRAVEYARD AT
W
IDECOMBE EXTENDS
courteously towards the surrounding fields which, in turn, almost spill on to the encompassing moor. Rosie’s grandparents, who lived all their lives within ten miles of the village, had married, at eighteen, in Widecombe’s church.

As a girl, Rosie had kept in a box of treasures, along with a jay’s feather and the skull of a weasel, the crimson velvet rose her grandma had stitched into her chemise for her grandad to find on their wedding night when he first undressed her. In memory of this she had planted, on their joined graves, a deep red rose, whose scent in summer brought to her mind Grandma’s favourite hymn, ‘Summer suns are glowing’.

Rosie had brought with her some of the green garden twine she also associated with her grandad and a dibble, with which she planned to clear her grandparents’ graveyard plot of weeds. Beneath the rose she had planted daffodils, which she saw had outgrown their strength and required binding. The granite gravestone read: ‘William and Evelyn Coaker, 1899–1986’ and beneath this ‘In death they were not divided’.

As she worked Rosie sang to herself. ‘Summer suns are glowing / Over land and sea.’ They were almost twins, her grandparents – born just a month apart and sweethearts
since school, which they’d left together at fourteen, he to go to the stables at Oakburton, she to go into service at Buckfast. ‘Happy light is flowing / Bountiful and free.’ Nowadays people would say by having only each other they had missed out on experience, but when you thought what ‘experience’ could bring, you might say you went through life more happily without it.

When she had cleared the weeds to her satisfaction, Rosie crossed the road from the church to one of the cafés which promised ‘Full Cream Devon Teas’, where she ordered a coffee and a ham sandwich. The sun was unexpectedly strong and it was warm enough to sit outside. She lit a cigarette and watched a woman dragging a child across the green yelling, ‘Look what you’ve done to your trousers, for Christ’s sake!’ and wondered what Christ would have said on the subject. The things people did and said in his name. As if Jesus gave a stuff about mud on some poor kid’s trousers.

The weeping, raging boy reminded her of Johnny. He never cried now, but when they first moved in with Phil it was every night, till the threat of Phil’s hand dried up those fierce tears. Though it hurt her then to hear her boy’s sobbing cries, she almost wished he would cry again. Something had shut down in the candid hazel eyes. But she knew her son – she knew he knew she was unhappy; and he knew, very likely, that it was all her own fault.

As Rosie sat in Widecombe reviewing her past, Paula was engaged in furthering future plans. She inspected her naked body in the bathroom mirror. Satisfied with her new denuded look, she set out for Lavinia’s barn in her second-tightest pair of jeans. The encounter with Sam had merely confirmed her view that sex was the way to get a man to do what you wanted.

Luke, innocent of the treat in store for him, was surprised to find Paula when he answered the bell. His preoccupation with the myth of Creation had left him uncertain of his visitor’s identity. Confused, but polite, he invited her upstairs. Paula negotiated the stairs with some difficulty: Luke’s loft was some way up, and the tightness of the jeans, in concert with the effects of the Brazilian, produced unusual caution.

Gaining the upper floor first, Luke hurriedly pushed some clothes under the Indian bedspread and shoved a dirty plate of cigarette ends under the bed with his bare foot. ‘Coffee?’ he enquired, as Paula, rather breathy from the jeans and the unaccustomed exercise, emerged.

‘Yeah, thanks.’ Paula lowered the freshly dyed lashes, but Luke had his back to her and was filling the kettle with a good deal of noisy splashing so the effect was wasted.

Luke’s conversation was limited. Like many artists, writers in particular, he was not much interested in flesh-and-blood human beings. When he had established Paula worked at the pub and run the short course of the weather there was only his own narrative poem – over which he was still stuck, he explained to Paula – or
Hiawatha
to fall back on. But here
at least he was on familiar ground. And a trapped audience was an opportunity not to be passed up. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’ll see the problem if I read you a couple stanzas…’

There is a network of letter boxes across Dartmoor. By tradition, visitors to these hidden sites stamp postcards or sign, or write verses in, the books hidden inside the concealed metal boxes. But this strange system grew from a much older tradition, through which lovers and friends communicated across the moor’s inhospitable geography and the even greater inhospitality of economic circumstance.

Years back, Rosie’s grandad had shown her the private place he had fashioned so that he and her grandma could keep in touch when he was a stable lad and she in service, and they could not hope for many of their days off to coincide. Later, as a girl, Rosie had shown the secret to one other person, and in time, as a young mother, she had also shown his great-grandad’s postbox to Johnny. They had played, when he was small, at leaving notes to the Dartmoor spirits, who must be appeased lest they lead you astray and into the mire. Once she had said, ‘If you ever run away from home you must promise to leave me a message here,’ and wise-eyed Johnny had said, ‘You too, Mum…’

Rosie walked back from Widecombe towards Buckland Beacon. Around her lay the tranquil Moor, discreet and unjudging. All at once the name for a collection of larks flew back to her – an ‘exaltation’! Her grandad would be
pleased she’d remembered. She pictured him, getting up out of his bed of earth at Widecombe, bored with inactivity, and wandering up here in his nightshirt. For all its wildness, there was a safety in the Moor you could never be sure of with people. If she left a note in Grandad’s postbox Johnny might find it. He was quick, Johnny. He rarely forgot anything. To ring and maybe get Phil, or leave a message that he could get his hands on, was too risky. It was best for her and Johnny if she was out of the way for the time being.

Paula had nodded off.

‘…Till from Hiawatha’s wigwam

Kahgahgee, the King of Ravens,

Screamed and quivered in his anger,

And from all the neighbouring tree-tops

Cawed and croaked the black marauders.

“Ugh!” the old men all responded,

From their seats beneath the pine-trees!’

‘See what I mean,’ Luke said, pausing at last. ‘You can’t get away from Longfellow’s rhythm.’

Paula, coming to with a start, was inclined to fall in with the old men’s responses. ‘Yeah, well, I’d better be going, then.’ A kind of respect, forced by a single-mindedness superior to her own, made her unusually polite. Before Luke’s absolute absorption in his poetry, sexual allure had no chance.

‘Did you call about anything special?’ asked Luke, showing her down the stairs again.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Paula, driven by the unfamiliar experience to explicitness. ‘I was wondering if you fancied taking over me room at me mum’s. You could have it on the money you get from the social.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Luke, ever polite. ‘Yeah, ta. This is OK for now but thanks for the offer.’

‘Jesus, she’s welcome to him!’ Paula said aloud, as she picked her heels warily over the bars of the cattle grid. She could almost feel sorry for that stupid Mary Simms.

T
HE GARDENER PROMISED BY
N
ICKY
P
OPE HAD
never shown up, so Mr Golightly had fallen into the habit of keeping Spring Cottage’s garden tidy himself. This, in part, was to ensure that the Reverend Fisher, or Keith, would not visit with offers of Christian aid. But it also gave a chance to return to an old pastime. The apple tree by the parlour window, for example, looked as if it hadn’t been tended to in years.

Long ago, Mr Golightly had been something of an arborealist and had made quite a name for himself through a rare breed of tree, heralded for its ability to resist disease. But there had been problems with marketing it and in the end he had abandoned his interest in that part of the business, which was nowadays overseen by the industrious Bill and Mike.

It was many years since he had had anything to do with horticulture. To stroll in an English cottage garden, as he was this morning, was a rare joy. A garden is a gladsome thing, he said to himself, surveying the new translucent lime-green growth on the beech hedge.

Not for the first time it struck him that the life of a country labourer was one which might have suited him: where habits are so ingrained they become like instincts, hard labour from day to day in sun and wind and rain, with the weekly break and rest – a life not unlike his own had
once seemed to promise. But a labourer would have a wife and family to provide the staple comfort of kinship. The solitary state was one he had lived in so long it seemed a condition of his very existence. Yet once, he, too, had had a family, of sorts, he was close to.

As is often the case on a holiday, away from quotidian concerns, his mind free from the trammels of time, Mr Golightly found he was tending to brood. The original point of his break with the daily round pressed less urgently on him: with each passing day he found himself letting his thoughts, like an unleashed falcon, circle in wider and wider speculation.

He woke early in the narrow bedroom, but now, instead of starting out of bed, as he had at the beginning of his break, he found he was tending to lie, letting thoughts drift and collect, like the leaves from autumnal trees which make piles of mulch for the garden.

It was as if he was giving space to something he had feared. Was ‘feared’ the right word? Fear had an object – something tangible, definable, at least, with which one could do combat, strive and hope to overcome. This vague looming inchoate sense was more impalpable. Perhaps it was what he had heard philosophers call – without having much clue as to what they might mean – ’existential anxiety’. He seemed to remember that had something to do with the prospect of non-existence. Did he fear that he might not exist? It seemed a strange thing to get into a state about since if you didn’t exist how could you possibly mind?

Walking now, past clouds of irrepressible milky-blue forget-me-nots, upright scarlet tulips and extravagant garnet and topaz wallflowers, whose dark-scented velvet was already laden with droning bees, he decided that the philosophers were wrong, and that this insubstantial anxiety they went on about had more to do with a feeling that, however powerful you might be, there were crucial concerns outside your control.

Pain, for example. He had heard it said that time heals all wounds. As to that, he doubted it. Time like an ever rolling stream might bear many things away but not the anguish of losing a child. That lay too deep for cure. If anything, like a ravening creature, made savage through incarceration, the recollection had grown more vicious with the passage of time. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all? Mr Golightly felt that if he had once known the answer to this question, his grasp of it – if he had ever truly held it – had slipped.

The wicket gate opened as Johnny Spence came through into the garden and immediately Mr Golightly felt his spirits rise. He looked forward to seeing Johnny whose competence he was coming to rely on. And there was also the pleasure in observing that, rather as the garden, freed from winter’s repression, was throwing off caution and showing a different side to its nature, young Johnny Spence was also somewhat changed.

For one thing, while he had not abandoned his perpetual hooded apparel it was now pushed back, showing more of his face. Which today was smiling.

‘Hi!’

‘Hi there!’ said Mr Golightly in return.

‘I done it. Here.’

Johnny thrust some papers at Mr Golightly, who glanced through them. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Come inside. I was about to make breakfast.’

Breakfast was egg, bacon, tomatoes, and thick slices of toast with butter and Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade.

‘I like this,’ said Johnny, helping himself to butter. ‘Me mum has some stuff for me dad’s heart. Don’t like that.’ He didn’t add that he’d be glad if his stepfather’s heart packed up altogether.

‘Of course not,’ said Mr Golightly, who needed no addendum. Like the king in the rhyme, he too favoured a little bit of butter to his bread. ‘Coffee? Or would you prefer Coke?’

They both drank coffee with creamy unpasteurised milk. The morning sun lit up the boy’s head making a halo of the mousy hair. Examples of such benedictions on any spring morning were so prodigal that his recent glum musings seemed absurd. But there was danger here, too. Johnny brought to mind another boy child, and even in the seeming paradise of the English countryside there were unmistakable signs of the ineradicable impulse to despoil.

Mr Golightly’s bland assertion to Wolford that Johnny was his researcher had been translated into reality without further discussion on either part. Johnny had wondered about this. The papers he had handed over was the script
of a TV soap. Why his benefactor wanted such a thing was a mystery, but while he was getting ten quid a day for downloading stuff off the Internet – which, provided his stepdad was out of the way, was a piece of piss – it was a mystery he was willing to leave unsolved.

Mr Golightly was also inclined to forgo inquisition; he had taken pains that no shade of enquiry, other than that directed to his own work, should make itself felt in his dealings with Johnny Spence. Questions were the enemies of easygoing intercourse. He needed the boy at least as much as the boy needed him. One of the things his son had taught him was that the expression of need was a sign not of weakness but of strength.

As it turned out, Johnny was full of handy hints and helpful information. He put Mr Golightly right on the structure of soap operas. ‘Scenes only take two minutes, hardly,’ he explained, when Mr Golightly commented on their extreme pace and brevity. ‘Gotta keep them watching. People haven’t got it up there for anything longer.’

Conversation with Johnny suggested to Mr Golightly how he might bring his great work up to date – by mixing up the characters, events and time schemes. Trying to get the thing to run on linear, causal lines – he had been slow to latch on to this – was part of the trouble. It was an outmoded technique, not the modern style at all. Johnny had shown him that nowadays you had fast cutting between scenes and characters, who no longer needed lengthy explanations or histories behind them.

The script he had asked Johnny to bring today was for the meeting of the writers’ group – he was not looking forward to it – which was booked for that afternoon. Sam had been doggedly persistent and there seemed no way, without blatant rudeness – something Mr Golightly preferred to avoid – to get out of it. His plan was to bring along, as a decoy for discussion, one of the scripts Johnny had downloaded.

Sam had, in fact, been suffering over the writers’ group the anxieties of all those who initiate on the basis of whim rather than anything really substantial. Three people, when he thought about it, seemed inadequate. He decided to drop over to Backen and sound out – what was the woman’s name? – Nadia Something, with the hennaed hair, who ran the antiques shop. Nicky Pope had mentioned that the woman had had a novel published by a small press in Dartington.

Sam rang Nicky, who said she had a copy of the book which she’d been meaning to put among those in Spring Cottage. It didn’t strike her as Mr Golightly’s cup of tea, so she was happy to drop it by to Sam’s.

The novel, a story about a middle-aged woman who travels through time and finds love at the court of King Arthur, had not found its commercial feet; but it had been sympathetically reviewed, in the local paper, by a friend of Nadia’s who had described the book as ‘sensitive’. It was the
same friend who had insisted – after Nadia’s husband had gone off with a woman to whom he had sold a grandmother clock – that it was this sensitivity of Nadia’s which would ensure that men would ‘flock’ to her.

Sam, getting his spot of exercise, biked over to Backen just before lunch and stopped off at the Stannary Arms. The journey entailed some stiff uphill pedalling and, once he had reached his goal, he felt in need of something to help him recover his puff. Barty Clarke was in the bar when Sam called in. The latest
Backbiter
had just been put to bed, but Barty was an opportunist and – who could tell? – Sam might provide the very touch needed for the next edition.

Sam knew in his bones that Barty was not to be trusted, but what we know in our bones doesn’t always translate well to our heads. The editor of the
Backbiter
listened politely while Sam explained about the writers’ group and why he had come to Backen. Barty knew Nadia, on whom, in his capacity as auctioneer, he offloaded the junk you couldn’t pay people to take away. He offered Sam a second gin and tonic. The novel the woman had written, Sam confided, looked to him like utter garbage, but beggars couldn’t be choosers!

One swallow doesn’t make a summer nor a single sheep a flock, but Nadia had been agreeably surprised to find Sam at her door. He accepted a Cinzano Bianco, the remnants of a bottle brought by the manager of a branch of the Victoria wine stores down in Sidmouth, who had been invited to the launch of
A Knight In Her Arms
but had not followed
through with any further offerings. Nadia became quite sprightly when asked to join the writers’ group and showed Sam her press clippings (luckily not very extensive).

Luke had forgotten all about the meeting. He had slept late, and was about to hurry out to meet Mary Simms, who had rung with another query, this time about Keats. When the phone rang again, and it was Sam on the other end of the line, reminding him that he was expected shortly at the meeting, Luke had called Mary back to explain he had unfortunately double-booked. But she had sounded so offhand about his going round in the first place he couldn’t imagine she would mind.

Such misunderstandings are the common currency of human intercourse, especially between men and women. Mary Simms had had many false stabs, picking up the phone and putting it down again, before she held her nerve sufficiently to keep on ringing till Luke answered. Even then she had only kept the wobble out of her voice by forcing herself to sound offhand. ‘Yes, I
think
I could be in on Saturday afternoon,’ she had fibbed when Luke had offered, if it was any use, to come by to help her arrange her thoughts about ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. As if she wasn’t willing to rearrange her entire life for him!

And so it was that Mr Golightly, taking a detour by the upper meadows to avoid being early at Sam’s, met Mary Simms. On previous occasions he had seen her in her
barmaid role, her hair swept back in its velvet band, her dress neat, her make-up immaculate. Now she presented a very different picture – eyes streaked with mascara, her hair wild, and wearing long earrings and a longer dress, chosen to evoke St Agnes and improbably elaborate for a country walk.

‘Hello there,’ said Mr Golightly. He had not forgotten how the sun had shone on Mary Simms’s hair.

Mary stopped. Though her heart was breaking she could not be impolite.

‘Hello,’ she said, bravely. But her voice faltered.

‘What’s up?’ asked Mr Golightly. The words had slipped out – but he was glad they had, as on hearing them Mary Simms began to cry.

In her long, somewhat old-fashioned frock, her hair tousled into random ringlets, her pearl earrings echoing the tears which ran down her cheeks and her small fingers pleated together and pulling apart in anguish, Mary Simms was a sight for an angel.

‘Hey,’ said Mr Golightly, mentally resigning Sam and the writers’ group to perdition, ‘come on, let’s go for a walk.’

It will be a young man, sure as eggs, Mr Golightly thought. He had observed Mary Simms’s eyes stray towards Luke. Mr Golightly was not an advocate of idle words. He tucked Mary’s hand through the crook of his elbow so that as they descended through the fields to the river she leaned her slight weight upon him. It was an agreeable feeling, the pressure of the girl on his arm and beneath them the River
Dart, a bright serpent, coiling through woods of oak and ash and hawthorn, as old as England.

The oak leaves were already robustly pushing ahead but the slower ash was biding its time. A tear from Mary Simms’s chin dripped on to his wrist.
If the oak is out before the ash then the summer will be a splash.
Without turning to look her in the face, he sensed more where that had come from.
If the ash is out before the oak then the summer will be a soak.

They were down, now, upon the flat and the river was bibbling around flat grey stones, like the plates dropped by giants. Her face shining with tears, Mary Simms asked, ‘Oh, please, why doesn’t he want me?’

Goodness knows, child, thought Mr Golightly. Any man in his right mind would want you. But not all men are in their right mind, indeed, few enough are, if it comes to that…

Mary was standing by a hawthorn tree. Above her head its knotty thorned branches held out the promise of green-white mayflowers. Looking at her, Mr Golightly saw the likeness of someone he remembered…

The meeting of the writers’ group was not a success. For a start, the absence of Mr Golightly set things off on the wrong foot. Sam Noble insisted they wait for a full house and that meant that the other two became disaffected. By the time it was clear that Mr Golightly wasn’t going to show up, Luke had begun to read
Hiawatha
aloud. Neither Nadia Fawns
nor Sam had been able to endure this and it had led to the two of them drinking gin in a conspiratorial fashion. Luke had gone home to a sorrowful message from Mary Simms and had smoked a joint too many as a consequence, which had led, in turn, to his going off to bed leaving the bath running. The bath, which had been put in by Jackson, and therefore had no overflow fitted, had dripped through Lavinia Galsworthy’s ceiling on to the Afghan rug her father had brought back from the days he travelled in the East. Lavinia had been her father’s favourite. This was not the first of such incidents – but it was to be the last, and Luke, to the satisfaction of Paula, turned up the next morning in Rabbit Row, with a copy of Longfellow under his arm, sheepishly asking after a room to rent, proving, perhaps, that it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.