Mr Golightly's Holiday (20 page)

I
T WAS WARM WHEN
R
OSIE HAD SET OUT AND SHE’D
brought no coat or cardigan. Waiting in the mist on the top of the beacon, she shuddered beneath her thin dress. She was half desperate, half reluctant to see Johnny. If only, she thought, you could start over again, you might get it right next time…

She sat down on the boulder by the Ten Commandments and lit a cigarette. Someone had been cleaning the carving. Grandma would have been pleased. Incredible in this day and age that there were people whose job it was to clean the Commandments. The clearing operation seemed to have stopped at the commandment not to bear false witness. Well, she’d broken that one, for sure, along with all the rest…

‘Listen,’ said Ellen. She thought she’d seen a figure up the road by the lambing pen as she saw Johnny off, but it had disappeared now. ‘I think we should get out of here. The mist is so heavy no one’ll see us. I don’t want you here in case that vile man comes back. He might have reported this to someone.’

She’d gone to Bainbridge’s room where he was lying flat
in his usual position, except he seemed to take up even less space than usual.

‘Whatever you think…’

He left it, his tone said, to her – for himself he didn’t care. But she now, after all this time, was filled with a sense of vital urgency. ‘Where can I take you that will be safe? I’ll leave Mr G. a note.’

It was funny, they had hardly spent any time together, she and Mr Golightly, yet when they met it was as if he were her oldest friend. She would miss him, too, when he left Spring Cottage – she almost regretted they weren’t having, as that horrible man had insinuated, a love affair.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think – where’s safe till they’ve spoken to Rosie?’

‘I don’t know – the mire maybe…?’

At Southbrook, Wolford said, ‘The weather’s pretty rough. I’ll take you on where you’re going.’

Johnny had prepared what he was going to say next. He wasn’t having the screw track him to where his mum was waiting. Mr Golightly could tell her about the man. His job was to lose Wolford and make sure Wolford didn’t find her. ‘Yeah, OK. I’ll show you.’

Directing the screw, mostly by instinct, because the conditions made it hard to see, Johnny remembered the day he had taken Mr Golightly to the mire and told him about the sheep. He got Wolford to drop him by the track which led
to the old sheep cot. It was so quiet in the baffling mist they might have been on Mars.

‘Yeah, well, thanks,’ Johnny said, getting out of the car, and his heart hit the soles of his feet when Wolford got out too.

‘Lonely spot this. What you plan to do here, then, son?’

‘I need a piss,’ Johnny said, and walked off deliberately up the track to behind the sheep cot. He’d undone his flies when he felt a hand on his waist.

Johnny turned and kicked hard in the direction of Wolford’s groin. Then he ran towards the mire. He knew it well enough during the hours of daylight but with the mist down it was trickier to see the lie of the land.

Johnny’s kick knocked Wolford off balance but it missed its target. Thwarted desire, mingled with alarm at what he’d been about to do, flamed into bare panic and rage and he plunged after the boy. Unaware where he was following, he made some progress by sheer momentum, across the marsh, then staggered, swore, and began to founder. With his athletic strength he had almost managed to haul himself out, when Johnny, approaching along a solid spur of land, kicked him again, this time full in the face.

Wolford screamed, flailed around, and then grabbed at Johnny’s ankle, pulling the boy towards him.

Inside the sheep cot they heard the cries. ‘Wait there,’ Ellen said. ‘Don’t move till I come back. Just wait here. Promise me you won’t move…’

The last thing she saw of Jos Bainbridge was his assenting eyes, like great drops of dark rain.

I
T WAS FELT BY MANY AS REGRETTABLE THAT THE
latest edition of the
Backbiter
should appear with the headline
SHOCKING SCENES AT FILM DIRECTOR’S PARTY
so hard upon the terrible catastrophes which hit Great Calne. It was Barty Clarke, himself, people said, who started the whole thing, telling Nadia Fawns that it was Paula’s dad, Jenson, who had been up in court down in Plymouth, for living on immoral earnings. But then Nadia Fawns shouldn’t have said what she said to Paula – though, as Kath Drover said, by rights the little madam shouldn’t have been at the party at all.

‘Mr Samuel Noble, the eminent local film director,’ ran the story ‘spoke of his dismay when two of his guests attacked each other at his home in Great Calne on Sunday. “I was having a few friends over for drinks,” said Mr Noble, whose film about lady footballers was once tipped for a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, “when suddenly a fight broke out. Until then it was a most civilised occasion. I can only put it down to a misunderstanding between two of the ladies which unfortunately got out of hand.”’

Sam rang Barty. ‘
Nice Girl
was a film about jockeys, not footballers,’ he said, very irritated. Barty was apologetic but explained he could do nothing till the next edition. He advised Sam to write to the editor, correcting the error.

Nadia Fawns read the article while at Georgina’s having a pedicure. The recent tragedies took up the greater part of the conversation, but Di also had happier news to impart. Her boyfriend, Steve, a tattooist, who’d gone off unexpectedly to Western Australia, had e-mailed, equally unexpected, to say he couldn’t live without her and if she would join him out there he would make an honest woman of her – or at any rate they could try setting up a Body Beautiful Boutique together and see how they shook down. On balance, Di said, she thought he was sincere – so far as anyone who practised an artistic profession could be. She was selling up and moving on and guess who was buying the business?

According to Di, the vicar had written to the bishop, explaining that she had lost her faith, or, more accurately, that she had found she had never had one. She had spoken to the college down at Plymouth and had arranged to switch next term from her counselling course to ‘Beauty and Hairdressing’. It was Paula who had suggested that the vicar should take over the running of Georgina’s; the vicar was still in two minds about whether she should also take over the name.

The bishop had received the vicar’s news with his usual calm; it was Keith, the husband – wasn’t it always the way, Di suggested, giving Nadia’s big toenail a going over with an emery board – who was making the fuss. But the vicar, now freed of hampering Christian sentiments, had apparently told her husband she had been looking through the bank statements and if he didn’t push off – though in fact, Di confided, she understood much stronger language than
that
had been used! – the vicar would take legal steps to recover her missing share of their joint funds.

Nadia, with toenails freshly scarlet, drove straight from Oakburton to Sam’s to recover her kitchenware. ‘My kitchen’s nearly finished so I’ll get this out of your way.’ Not that Sam Noble would be seeing much of her cooking in future. Dear Barty, who had told her that that common little slut’s father was a pimp, had also given her to understand that Sam had spoken most disrespectfully about her novel. The moment she’d got her new kitchen organised Barty would be the one coming over for dinner. Blood will out, as she had remarked to that trollop! It certainly wasn’t Nadia’s fault that things had turned so nasty. She had had to defend herself, Barty had assured her; everyone knew that that was why she had pulled Paula’s hair. She was sorry Mr Golightly had got caught up in the crossfire but, then, like her he was a writer and everything was grist to a writer’s mill…

Di had also divulged that Patsy and Joanne had called in on Hugh, during their recent visit to their old stamping ground. It seemed that Morning had been studying crithomancy and proposed reopening the tearooms so that she could run classes on the ancient art of divination by dough. It looked as if Patsy and Joanne would be coming back to manage the tearooms in conjunction with some of Morning’s workshops, so that put paid to any ridiculous ideas Sam Noble might have had about that particular little tart!

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Is Jenson me proper name, then?’ Paula had not gone straight round to her mum’s from Sam Noble’s party. After slapping Nadia Fawns’s stupid face for her she had needed time to calm down.

‘How was I to know he was the same Jenson as your father?’ sobbed Paula’s mum, weakly. ‘It was all such a long time ago.’

‘Oh, thanks, mum,’ said Paula. ‘I’m only twenty-four, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Who could know he’d gone to the bad, like that? I was in love with him, you wouldn’t understand,’ said her mum, blowing her nose into some kitchen roll.

‘No,’ said Paula, ‘thank Christ I wouldn’t!’ If she had needed it, this would have convinced her that people did the most unbelievable things in the name of love.

M
R
G
OLIGHTLY DID NOT ATTEND
E
LLEN
Thomas’s funeral. He had another appointment that day but he met Rosie and Johnny Spence as they came out of the churchyard together, hand in hand. Most of the villagers, many of whom had never spoken to Ellen Thomas, were present. With the departure of the vicar, the bishop had conducted the ceremony himself, feeling that the tragic events which Calne had suffered merited recognition from the highest quarters.

Mr Golightly had not seen Johnny or his mother since the day of the catastrophe. Both looked pale and Rosie was plainly under pressure, but she told him she was managing and that till things got sorted she and Johnny were staying where she’d been before, in Plymouth, with her old friend, Jean. Mr Golightly invited Johnny for a drive. He promised to run him back to Plymouth afterwards.

The old man and the young boy walked wordlessly down the high street to Spring Cottage where the Traveller was parked in its familiar place in the front garden. Mr Golightly waited till Johnny was settled in the passenger seat. ‘Where shall we go?’ he asked.

Johnny felt unaccountably shy. ‘Don’t mind,’ he said, looking at the floor of the van.

‘What would you say to going to the mire?’

‘Yeah, all right,’ said Johnny, obscurely relieved.

They drove, and this time Mr Golightly needed no directions. Johnny stared through the window. Small birds threaded through branches of gorse; bands of shaggy ponies stood stoutly among bracken, cropping the velvety grass; the sky was robin’s-egg blue. ‘A God day,’ one of the old bell-ringers had said in church, ‘Mrs Thomas has a God day for her send-off!’

It couldn’t have been less like the scene of the previous Sunday as they drove up the lumpy track and parked by the path which led to the sheep cot.

Mr Golightly and Johnny walked together down to the edge of the mire and for a long while nothing was said.

It was Johnny who broke the silence. ‘Mrs Thomas stopped that bastard from killing me.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘I guessed that was the case.’

‘I was trying to get away from him,’ said Johnny. He looked ill. ‘He was, you know, after me…’

All about them was deep quiet. Mr Golightly returned his gaze to the mire where a curlew had alighted and was delicately foraging with its long curved beak.

‘I tried to kick him under,’ Johnny said at last.

The curlew stopped its foraging and stood, head poised, as if to catch their conversation.

‘Well,’ said Mr Golightly, choosing his words, ‘to hold fast to life is life’s most powerful instinct and, as I suggested once, death improves some people.’

‘But Mrs Thomas died too. If I’d waited for you it wouldn’t have happened, would it?’

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, for the want of the shoe the horse was lost…Mr Golightly’s heart contracted. ‘That’s brave,’ he said. ‘Not many people are able to do that.’

‘What?’ asked Johnny. If Mr Golightly hadn’t known better he might have imagined the boy was angry.

‘Not many people can own their part in a chain of error.’ For the want of the horse the battle was lost…‘If I’d not got distracted I would have been there for you in time, and if –’

‘And if my mum had stayed with my dad we wouldn’t have fetched up with my stepdad.’ Johnny still had in his pocket the remnants of the rose, that the man he’d learned was his dad had given Mrs Thomas to give him to give his mum.

‘Possibly that too. But all these “and ifs” – they are what life is: a series of decisions we can’t know the consequences of in advance, and who’s to say finally which are “good” and which “bad”?’

‘But Mrs Thomas is dead.’

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail…?

‘I know. That’s a hard one.’

‘I thought I was dead, too.’

In his mind’s eye, Mr Golightly saw a small boy in a carpenter’s shop, his head bent, engrossed in shaping a piece of wood to fashion a catapult, with no thought for the world to come.

‘I didn’t want to die,’ Johnny said. For the rest of his life he would see Mrs Thomas hauling him away from Wolford’s grip and herself being pulled into the mire. ‘Run,’ she had cried out, ‘run, Johnny,’ and when he had started instinctively towards the sheep cot, ‘no, not there…’

It was where, later, they found his dad.

‘She told me not to go to where, you know, he was.’ Johnny, unwilling to give his new father a name, nodded towards the sheep cot. ‘We might’ve have saved her, him and me.’ He fingered in his pocket the rose, the last thing, almost, Mrs Thomas had touched – except for him, and Wolford.

Mr Golightly’s eyes, which were usually half-lidded over, looked full into Johnny’s – a steady, slow-piercing look. ‘I understand. As death is most violent in taking away, so love is most violent in saving us. It isn’t easy to be the recipient. But she didn’t want your father found either – she wanted him safe too.’

‘From that fucking bastard cunt! He fucking killed her. I saw…’

What had he seen? He hadn’t quite dared to picture it. He’d run till his lungs were busting and then he’d stopped and looked back. The screw was struggling and screeching out and Mrs Thomas had seemed to put her arms round his neck, almost as if she loved him and…

‘There was this horse,’ Johnny said. The curlew cocked its head to one side. ‘From over there.’ Johnny pointed across the moor towards High Tor. It had galloped towards him,
a large horse, not one of the ponies, its pale mane flowing, and passed so close he was afraid it might trample him with its big hooves; and he had smelled the breath from its nostrils and then…

And then when he’d looked she’d gone. Disappeared. And he hadn’t known what he should do – go back, or run on. He’d run with his heart like a lump of coal in his chest, till he’d reached the nearest farm.

Suddenly, he saw Mrs Thomas’s painting: You don’t happen to know why a raven is like a writing desk? She’d smiled at that daft answer he’d given her. She looked nice when she smiled.

By the mire, from which, days earlier, the water-logged bodies of Ellen Thomas and Brian Wolford had been dragged, Johnny Spence sobbed, while Mr Golightly held him in his arms and the curlew took off over their heads, keening for no other reason but that it was alive.