Mr Golightly's Holiday (21 page)

J
ACKSON WAS IN THE
S
TAG AND
B
ADGER THE
evening of Ellen Thomas’s funeral. People said afterwards that he showed no sign of emotion but drank steadily till closing time. Paula stayed over at her mum’s that night, so Jackson returned to an empty house, where he set about making a bookshelf for her. But it wasn’t Paula who was on Jackson’s mind.

It is no real loss when a feverish fantasy is replaced by a cool truth, but Jackson was not alone in feeling it to be an irreparable one. Although he had never entertained any serious belief that Ellen could be his, that there might be others to whom she was closer was too great a blow to his sense of imagined singularity and to a future which had given the illusion of being his to control. He had already lost himself in the service of Ellen Thomas, and it was the sense of recovering some of his old power that had prompted him to give away her secret to Wolford.

That Jackson was aware of what he had done became apparent when, the morning after Ellen Thomas’s funeral, he was found hanging from the pear tree in her garden. On the long grass beneath his dangling boots, where next spring the daffodils and narcissi she had planted would rise again, lay scattered the torn pieces of a ten- and twenty-pound note. Like confetti, Paula said, when she came to see him.

She insisted on going there, though her mum was all against it and said that if she stayed away no one could blame her. Jackson’s puffy, swollen-throated body was laid out, where the living form of the woman he had loved had once lain, on the sofa, by her painting of the ravens – which gave Paula’s mum a nasty turn, reminding her, as it did, of the big black bird which had settled on a tree outside her sister Edna’s when Ron died.

It was the tragedy that must have unhinged him, people said. It was wonderful how attached the work-shy Jackson had grown to poor Mrs Thomas, who now had no need of his rickety construction, which, in his last hours, its architect and builder had torn down.

J
OS
B
AINBRIDGE WAS ALONE IN HIS CELL WHEN
he heard the bird at midnight – close as his own breath, simple as a sheepbell, pure as starlight on a frosty night it lanced his heart till in grief and gratitude he cried aloud – and way across the quiet moor a black Labrador dog howled in concert with the convicted man, to the graceful incomprehending moon.

O
N THE NIGHT BEFORE
E
LLEN
T
HOMAS’S
funeral, Mr Golightly did not retire to bed in the black-painted iron bedstead in the bedroom of Spring Cottage. Instead, he stayed up, drinking whisky and rereading the pages Johnny Spence had provided him with. Early the following morning, he sent off an e-mail and, without waiting for a reply, he set out to walk to his old haunt on High Tor.

‘You got it then,’ he said, as he breasted the top, breathing slightly hard from the effort. ‘Thank you for coming. It’s been a time.’

His rival, who had come from business which took him to and fro and up and down the earth, looked every bit as ordinary as Mr Golightly. He stood turned away, as if inspecting the river which was purling beneath them.

‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘like you I’m always about.’

‘Certainly you have managed to track me here.’

The other, still with his back to him, visibly shrugged. ‘Do you imagine the likes of us can really take a break – in my case I can scarcely call it a “holiday”?’

‘Mine seems to have become more of a wake,’ said Mr Golightly. The line his old enemy had e-mailed him returned, mockingly:
Have the gates of death been opened unto thee?
‘I should have realised sooner. A clever trick to pose the questions back at the questioner.’

‘A trick? It is a method you yourself taught me. It is my role, isn’t it? The role you summoned me to perform on poor Job.’

‘You pity our servant, then?’ asked Mr Golightly.

‘Yes, I pity him,’ said the other. ‘I know from my own experience the anguish he suffered.’ A sluggish breeze round the tor top slightly ruffled his hair.

‘Is that, then, why you have chosen to torment me?’ Mr Golightly’s voice was measured. ‘Because I don’t, or didn’t, “know” anguish…?’

‘Oh, you…’ said the one beside him, ‘no one torments you but yourself. The questions I sent you were only the ones you yourself asked the righteous Job. I merely reflected them back to you. What’s sauce for the goose, you know? You might say I was being playful – part of your holiday recreation. It is what today I believe is called “consciousness raising”. One of the older of my functions.’

Mr Golightly said nothing but stood sunk in thought. It was true – hedged about, safe from turmoil, he had not been tested by life, and he had come to see that he had been the poorer thereby.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘forgive me, there is no one else with whom I can have this discussion and it crosses my mind that perhaps you may be able to help me.’ He was thinking of the e-mail he had dispatched that morning. ‘I have been wondering very much about suffering and love. You see –’

‘I understand,’ the companion at his side interrupted, ‘as the fountainhead yourself, you had no individual experience of it and yet –’

‘And yet there is my son,’ Mr Golightly broke in, not wanting the other to broach the name.

For the first time, his old rival turned to face him fully and his eyes looked like ruined stars. ‘I was going to say,’ he suggested mildly, ‘that, from my rare observations of the phenomenon, to love another means in some sense to put oneself in their person; and for that to be possible there must first be the extinction of the self. I offer the idea in pure humility –’ Mr Golightly gave a slight nod – ‘this, perhaps, is what your son –’

‘Was that why you had him killed?’ broke in Mr Golightly.

‘I was no more responsible for your son’s death than you were for saving the life of that boy you are so fond of!’ replied the other, sharply.

Somewhere a rock tumbled noisily down to the river.

The other resumed. ‘If nothing else, I know what is due to a kinsman. Don’t lay that barbarity – or this latest local disaster –’ he waved his hand in the direction of the mire – ‘at my door.’

‘Whose then?’ asked Mr Golightly, feeling a flash of anger that the death of his friend and neighbour should be so summarily dismissed.

‘Do you really not know?’ said the other. ‘Surely you see that it was neither you nor I but your own creation, your pride and joy, that brought about the death of your friend
and killed your own son: pinned his human flesh through with nails to hang in the hot sun till his unsupported neck fell on his own windpipe and slowly suffocated him. A particularly unsophisticated method of dispatch.’

‘It wasn’t you who put them up to it?’

‘No more than you. You allowed them a choice – remember? And they chose to save the life of a common murderer instead. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned. Do you mind if we sit down?’

‘So long as you don’t start a forest fire,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘We’d best sit on this –’ indicating the desk-shaped rock – ‘the place’ll go up like dry tinder if you don’t watch yourself.’

They sat, side by side, on the rocky tor.

‘Then what is the truth?’ asked Mr Golightly, finally.

‘As one who had a hand in that affair of your son’s death once asked, and went on, in that bourgeois way I so despise, to wash his hands of the question. You speak as if “truth” were everything. Has it ever struck you that a lie might be as immortal, and therefore as much a cornerstone of creation as a truth?’

‘But who laid the cornerstone thereof?’ The ancient boast sounded pathetic now in his own ears.

‘Well, the raven must also be provided with food, to paraphrase some more of your words. After all, some would say,’ said his companion, ‘that the fiction we both create is merely a sophisticated version of lying.’

‘Only if it seeks to mislead,’ said Mr Golightly, a shade huffily.

‘Let’s call it “fabrication”, then,’ said his rival, taking from his pocket a flat tin – ‘Will you have one?’ and then as he extracted a small cigar and lit it – ‘Yes, yes, I’ll be careful. You have to concede, though, it’s a fine line: where does art end and falsehood begin?’

‘I would say when the intention is crooked,’ said Mr Golightly.

‘But who’s the judge? That is the question. A story is spun – you have done it, magnificently; I, in my lesser way, have merely sought, let us say, a diversion –’

‘I’m tempted to say a distortion,’ interrupted Mr Golightly.

‘To be sure,’ the other went on, in his more languid tone, ‘but that’s my very point, and, by the way, temptation itself, as you know, means to try the strength of. You had me test your servant to prove his mettle. Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? You yourself asked your servant Job. You might say it was I who did, and that all he suffered made a man of him – or, equally, a woman of your friend. You may call it distortion if you like, I would call it development; you say tom
ay
to, I say tom
ar
to…’

‘So “let’s call the whole thing off!”’ said Mr Golightly, impatiently. He was no metaphysician.

‘You suppose I am playing with you,’ said the other, ‘but as someone said: “The play’s the thing.” The point is, everything created, and recreated, I should add, in deference to your latest enterprise, is capable of different readings – alternatives, if you like: mine is the tragic, yours the comic
turn. Humankind, your own great fiction, must determine between the ends we each offer them. All that time ago, when we fell out over that other woman, it was not that I misled her, certainly not that I seduced her in your precious garden, as you claimed –’ here Mr Golightly looked a little sheepish – ‘I merely gave her another interpretation – an alternative version of the story you had told her. Both have a place in the whole drama, neither was right or wrong, positive or negative –’ he always was long-winded, Mr Golightly reflected – ‘as I need hardly tell you, although you have been kind enough to flatter me by asking my views on this topic. I thought, by the way, that flattery was supposed to be my province?’

‘Yes, well, love is deeper than flattery,’ said Mr Golightly, shortly, ‘and for all your sophistry the plain fact is that in your ending men and women, and children too, die. It seems to me that nothing lends itself to lies like death.’

‘Oh, as to that, as one of them remarked, in the long run they are all of them dead. At your own request I spared Job’s life, but I wonder if he mightn’t have got the worst of it. Your friend could have told you there are blessings in mortality.’

‘It is true,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘that death has its points. But not to the survivors.’

His companion continued to smoke, tapping the ash into the palm of his hand. It was pale and slightly fleshy, unlike Mr Golightly’s more workmanlike hands.

‘But it is to the survivors you have given this peculiar
choice. There are those who have elected to make the death of the carpenter’s son – I am giving him the pseudonym you also gave him – a comedy. It is a remarkable decision, one, if I may say so, that defeats my own modest dramatic purposes. But one that, against all reason, you yourself made available.’

‘He did give them a lead,’ said Mr Golightly, contemplatively.

‘One might say your son rather flung himself into the part,’ said the other. ‘But he, too, was a great dramatist. An original. Truly his father’s son.’ Mr Golightly made a gesture of deprecation. ‘No, no, I meant it – the darkness and the light were also alike to him.’

Mr Golightly, for whom a thousand years were as a day, saw in his mind’s eye the sun, in that distant land, standing still, withdrawing its light from the world. In the sky over High Tor that day, there was a bright blur. A different perspective, but the same sun. ‘So his death is, was, what people choose to make of it, comic or tragic, is that what you are saying?’

‘I thought it was I who was supposed to be the “diabolic” one,’ said the figure with destroyed starlight for eyes. ‘I am saying that the awful choice you gave your own creation was surmounted by your son, who took upon himself both ways.’

‘It still killed him,’ pointed out his father.

There was another pause and then his companion spoke again. ‘It has been alleged that the “death” was not for ever…?’

‘Ah, as to that,’ said Mr Golightly, ‘that was not in the plot as I conceived it…’

‘But as we both know,’ said the other, ‘no author has the last word on his own work. Once in the world it is the world’s for the taking, or, if I may say – as one whose motives are so often misperceived – the mistaking. As you have been seeing for yourself, there is a great deal of hazard in human affairs.’

‘Is there no help for it, then?’ asked Mr Golightly, and his voice on the tor top sounded very small.

‘Only you, if I may say so,’ replied his companion, ‘as the author of all goodness, can answer that. This boy is saved – your son, and others, lost. If things go on as they are doing many parents will soon weep and know why. But look at it this way – your creation is capable of more than its creator. You and I have no life – so we cannot give it, in that reckless fashion, to save a world, or a friend. However it came about that this extraordinary faculty of human affection was implanted, I have to admit that in its foolhardy way it is rather wonderful.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Golightly, ‘I have been thinking that there are many ways in which my characters are superior to their author.’ And he sighed, thinking of Ellen Thomas and his beloved son.

‘You know,’ said his colleague, ‘you remind me of the great clown Grimaldi. Do you remember?’

‘As we have established, you have a better memory than me,’ said Mr Golightly, humbly. ‘As time goes on, I find I
cannot always bring every last thing to mind. I’m afraid that I have uttered all kinds of things which nowadays I know not.’

‘Grimaldi,’ said the other, smoothly continuing, ‘in despair, anonymously consulted a doctor. He described, at length, his condition, which was one of considerable and sustained melancholy. Clinical depression, as it would be diagnosed today. The doctor listened carefully and then offered his prescription. “You are careworn,” he said, “and bowed down, and have forgotten that life has another face. What you need are the benefits of laughter. The remedy is easy; go to see the greatest comedian of all time – go and see Grimaldi.”

‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, gently, ‘when your holiday comes to a close, and you finish your soap opera, you will find a happy end…’

‘For a time, maybe,’ said Mr Golightly.

‘Well, but,’ said his partner and rival, ‘as we both know, everything here is only for a time…’