Mr Golightly’s Holiday

Mr Golightly paused. It was not what he wanted. What he wanted more than anything was to get started on his project. But Ellen Thomas was being neighbourly – it seemed churlish to refuse. ‘Thank you,’ he said, politely.

He stepped past his hostess through the door into a room which put him in mind of a ship’s cabin: clean and orderly, with little furniture other than two sofas arranged at right angles. There were no pictures on the walls, other than one he recognised of some crows flying through a field of violent yellow corn. The woman herself seemed out of place.

‘Till last year I lived in a much grander house.’ She was the sort who read your thoughts, then.

‘I was grand once,’ said Mr Golightly, a touch regretfully.

‘You know,’ said Ellen, her mind flickering vaguely to the fridge – was there any milk in it? She hadn’t the least idea – ‘I’ve heard it said that as we get older we should guard against a sense of lowered consequence, but I find I prefer obscurity.’

‘Where is the dancing and the noise of dancers’ feet, the banquets and the festivals?’ asked Mr Golightly. The question was purely rhetorical: it was reassuring to find his neighbour so sanguine about her altered circumstances.

Ellen Thomas opened her mouth and was startled to find further unsolicited words issuing from it. ‘You can stay for lunch, if there’s any food.’ And, more from the nervous rush that the speech produced than any wish to charm, she smiled.

Ellen Thomas had never been a beautiful woman; if her appearance was commented on at all she was described as ‘pleasant-looking’. But when she smiled her face was transformed in a way which her husband had found irresistible. Mr Golightly, who had determined to resist anything which would detain him further, also found himself unequal to the smile.

And I would have had to eat lunch anyway, he excused himself, stepping back over the wire to Spring Cottage for a bottle of light Moselle from the wine carton.

Ellen rediscovered table mats and linen napkins in the drawer of the oak sideboard, a legacy of Robert’s godmother, and, under his hostess’s instructions, Mr Golightly laid the table. He found there was something soothing about obeying orders.

In the kitchen, Ellen cracked duck eggs. I have been an emptied-out eggshell, she thought. She chopped sorrel, gathered from the garden, and beat the eggs to a froth in a white bowl. Yellow and white, the colours of the narcissi she had planted beneath the pear tree.

‘Are you sitting up?’ she called through to the other room, where her guest was seated, a linen napkin tucked into the top of his shirt. ‘You have to eat an omelette like lightning or it ruins…’

Conversation over lunch was cordial but formal. Mr Golightly was greatly relieved to find his neighbour seemed not to want his help over any writing project or to press him into action over some scheme for Great Calne’s improvement. Instead, she described the local features: the stream, which ran through the meadow beneath them, for instance, called Holy Brook because once a hermit had preached there to a congregation of otters.

Mr Golightly was impressed. Otters, he said, were famously unbiddable – the hermit must have been a man of rare influence or had an uncommon way with words.

They moved on to the unpredictable spring weather, the asinine EEC regulations threatening a local variety of apple and the current world crisis, although Mr Golightly apologised for not wishing to pursue this topic.

Ellen was pleased at an opportunity to exercise forbearance. There was enough she preferred not to be exposed to herself. Deftly, she turned the conversation. She explained that she had been an artist, making a living from painting local landscapes, but gave her guest to understand that, as with much else, she had abandoned this activity after her husband’s death.

‘I am sorry,’ Mr Golightly said sincerely. He was familiar with the sapping effects of grief.

By the end of lunch he felt unusually sleepy. Between them he and his hostess had polished off the bottle of Moselle. He dallied a little over coffee, then made his regrets and under Samson’s unblinking gaze stepped cautiously over the barbed wire and back into the garden of Spring Cottage.

Returning to his seat at the gateleg table he found he had some problem with the focus of his eyes. A short liedown would do no harm – it would refresh him, pep him up for starting work on the soap opera.

Next door, Ellen Thomas washed up the glasses, the cutlery and crockery. She laid away the table mats and linen napkins carefully in the sideboard drawer. What a mercy at the last minute she had kept it back from the furniture sale. Lunch had been more than she had been used to eating – and she supposed it must be the wine which had gone to her head.

All at once, she wanted nothing more than to be outside. For too long she had managed no more than to creep out, with Wilfred, at dusk, like a felon on the run – it had hardly deserved the name of a ‘walk’. Now she felt a brisk stroll was just what she needed.

Summoning the black Labrador, they went out together and up the lane which rose towards the moor. As she watched the dog sniff along the hedgerow, her trained eye spotted tiny flowers like snowflakes, and she crouched to put her nose to their sequestered sweetness. There are few blessings, thought Ellen Thomas – her head a little dizzy from the wine and from bending – as welcome as white violets.

10

THE REVEREND MEREDITH FISHER NEVER economised with her conscience. She nursed it as a proud mother nurses a precocious child. And, like many such mothers, she was not parsimonious with the cherished one’s talents.

No event in Great Calne passed unnoted by its vigilant parish priest and so significant a matter as the arrival of a new tenant at Spring Cottage could hardly have been overlooked. If she had not yet made a welcoming visit this was not because she was idle.

Meredith Fisher took her pastoral work strenuously. On Wednesdays and Fridays, she attended the South Devon counselling training at Plymouth College, which had the virtue that it freed the yew tree by the rectory wall to harbour Johnny Spence.

It might be hoped that the vicar’s training provided other benefits too. But it is a sad fact that a zest for human psychology is not always shared by the objects of its concern. Meredith Fisher’s attempts to counsel the parish of Great Calne had fallen on stony ground. Statistics indicated that it was improbable that Great Calne had escaped its share of sexual abuse – but if so, its victims and perpetrators were joined in some unholy pact to keep quiet about it. And adultery, though certainly rife, was, if not actually applauded, apparently tolerated. It appeared there was no Christian means of helping the afflicted.

The arrival, therefore, of a brand new opportunity to adjust a psyche to normality (it was well known that writers were neurotic and this one was single, which, in a man, generally meant some kind of sexual dysfunction) was a bonus for the vicar. Hers was essentially a doctrine of light; there was no darkly noisome corner of the human psyche the Reverend Meredith Fisher felt unequal to illuminating.

The chance to cast light upon her neighbour’s darker corners presented itself on Saturday over her breakfast of Weetabix, toast and jam.

‘Been to see the writer chap over the road?’ her husband, Keith, asked casually behind the Express. He was keen to run down to Newton Abbot and lay a bet on ‘Banoffee Pie’ which was running seven to one in the 2.15. To accomplish this successfully his wife’s attention had to be diverted. There had been a worrying trend recently to make Saturday the day they ‘did things together’ which Keith was hoping to nip in the bud.

The common weal, and other large causes, can generally be relied on to outweigh lesser domestic concerns and Keith was relieved to see his wife already at the door of Spring Cottage as he reversed the Renault down and out of the front drive. He could wing it into Newton Abbot, place the bet on Banoffee Pie and then pick up some brownie points with She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed by hopping down to Tesco’s to do the weekend shop.

Mr Golightly had already switched on the kettle for a second cup of coffee and was about to put on Clifford Curzon playing the Schubert impromptus when there was a rap at the door. The lunch with Ellen Thomas had been nourishing, and entertaining, but it had not forwarded his writing plan. He had shut his eyes for a mere five minutes and already it was evening…But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof was his motto and that morning he had woken bright and early and ready to work.

The effort at opening the front door to Sam Noble had eased the tendency to stick; a fact which Mr Golightly regretted when he saw he had yet another visitor, one who was engaged, it appeared, in robbing the garden of its crop of harmless wildflowers. Unless it was the gardener Nicky Pope had warned him to expect.

The Reverend Fisher held out a frankly earthy hand – in the other she held a bunch of wilting dandelions.

‘Hi there. Meredith Fisher.’

‘Golightly,’ said Mr Golightly, somewhat emphasising the syllables of his name.

‘I’m the rector – don’t fall down dead with shock!’

‘No,’ said Mr Golightly. If anyone was about to fall down dead it certainly wouldn’t be he.

‘I’ll leave the weeds here, shall I?’ asked Meredith, rubbing earth enthusiastically into the other hand. ‘Better late than never! I’ve come to welcome you to the parish of Great Calne.’

‘What I like to stress to my clients,’ the Reverend Meredith was saying, ‘is that love is a verb.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Golightly, trying his best not to show his attention was drifting.

Once he, too, had believed that he knew much about love. That a woman with a dog collar (though this morning the Reverend Fisher wore only a roll-neck sweater to indicate her calling) should beard him on the subject struck him as faintly absurd.

‘You see, it’s the active ingredient which counts.’

Mr Golightly had thought much about love’s multiple complexities. Like the vicar, there was a time when he had been strenuous in his loving. For years he had given his support to people in return for their absolute loyalty – but when, as was inevitable, given the instability of all things, this loyalty had flagged or wavered, he had reacted with a vehemence he now deplored.

‘Is it?’ he heard himself say. A mistake. He knew enough about human nature to be sure that he had let himself in for an argument.

‘Oh, I think so,’ said the Reverend Meredith, and her eyes gleamed with what Mr Golightly recognised, with an inward shudder, as zeal. Zeal, like vehemence, was nowadays a condition he fought shy of. ‘You see…’

Years ago, when Mr Golightly had gone about more in the world, he had encountered people like the Reverend Fisher. It seemed to him they spelled trouble. They had to put their fingers in every pie and could not leave well alone.

In the past, it had been his habit to try to steer such people into situations where their conviction had fuller scope. Some, he was sorry to say it now, he had employed to promote his business. But since the catastrophe he had become mistrustful of all endeavour which tried to improve the human lot. The world was no longer a theatre for his grand gestures. That idea now seemed unspeakably grandiose…

The worst thing about such people was that it was the Devil’s own job to escape the running fire of their counsels. The Reverend Fisher drew breath only on sufferance. She was delivering an enthusiastic account of the ‘meaning of the Gospels’, which, Mr Golightly dazedly gathered, were packed with emotional prophylactics and helpful panaceas, until the sound of a car outside distracted her. That, she explained, must be her husband, Keith, back from the shops.

Mr Golightly felt towards Keith something of the gratitude of a dog who sees a stranger about to remove a troublesome thorn from its paw. He conducted the vicar to the door, but she hung on still, promising a future visit accompanied by contemporary feminist exegeses of the parables. ‘I’ll get Keith to pop across and help you with all of this,’ she declared finally, gesturing at the crop of harmless dandelions.

‘No,’ said Mr Golightly firmly. ‘Golden lads and girls…’ He was fond of these reminders that all humanity must come at last to dust.

‘Sorry?’

‘Dandelions. When the blooms go they become like chimney sweepers’ brushes,’ he added, confusingly.

‘It will be good for Keith – for his health,’ said the Reverend Meredith, ignoring this incomprehensible irrelevance.

‘But not for mine.’

‘Well, if you’re sure…?’ asked his neighbour, fired up by the sense she had a fight on her hands.

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