Mr Golightly's Holiday (13 page)

T
HE EVENING FELL SOFT AND UNOBTRUSIVE AS
a nightjar. In the feathery, receding light, Ellen Thomas waited for the stars, shreds of holiness, to appear. It was now many nights she had waited like this, staring into the gathering dusk.

Her mind, limber and detached, flew effortlessly, a silent owl, to where she could see the lights of a car, creeping along the crest of the hill opposite. She pictured some prowling Martian, or other alien invader, inspecting the strangeness of the twilit human world.

She, too, had felt a stranger here. But she was no longer bound upon an axle of torment. Looking across at the blank shapes of the hills and the rims of trees, black against the sky, and beyond, and higher still, the evanescing stars, the grubbiness, the meanness and the pain seemed to dissolve into a larger vision: obdurate and fatal, but also splendid and possible and glorious. The little flickering world was there still, but behind it there lay a greater power.

A sense of peace and assurance filled her. The fear and the worry, the snagging tenseness, had shifted and settled to an equanimity and repose. The sting had been taken out of things, leaving her free to be comfortable.

She checked her watch. Looking towards the field, she
saw the horse had come, the horse which never showed till the stars, white as he was, gave the sign.

Quiet as a moth, she moved across the room and into the hallway, opening the door of the bedroom where the man stood waiting for her, as he waited every night. He had in his hand the bucket which he used to urinate in.

She took the bucket from him and emptied it herself into the lavatory. He had protested when she first did this but now he acquiesced, tacitly acknowledging that there was something in the action which satisfied her need to have thrown off any barrier to his being there.

He moved behind her, silent, in his socks, to the sitting room where the glass door was open to the night. He stood back while she looked out and then beckoned to him to come.

‘All clear. You could risk going out, if you wanted.’

But he shook his head. He had been out a couple of times but more to please her. For himself, for the moment, he was happier inside.

She returned from the kitchen with the bottle of wine and the plate of sandwiches which had become their daily shared meal. For some reason the sandwiches fitted her sense of the need for stealth – but also something careless and free, a picnic at the races, perhaps. Anyway, there was an air of insouciance about the sandwiches; she spent time thinking up new piquant fillings.

What she didn’t know was that the man had become used to routine and was alarmed by variety. Much as he had craved change, it was the regularity of his life here that he
clung to. Each day he slept, in the spare room, concealed by bedclothes in case of some chance intrusion. Only at night did he emerge from his cover, stretch his legs and share a meal with her.

Ellen had heard about the prisoner on the run from the young man with the unfortunate beard at the Post Office Stores. And Jackson had mumbled to her, as he left one evening, ‘You look out for yourself, now, mind,’ and she understood that he was urging she be watchful.

‘My builder, Mr Jackson, thinks I might be murdered in my bed by you.’

Jos Bainbridge blinked. After the days in semi-darkness, his eyes were sensitive. ‘I don’t have to stay…’

‘Don’t be silly, I was joking…’ Her smile was braver than his.

‘They’re bound to find me sometime.’

‘But why?’ Ellen said. ‘Why should they look here? I never go out anyway. And there’s nothing to link you with me.’

And it was true – there was nothing: not history, background, age, sex, experience, social habits, inclinations – nothing. The absolute purity of their association filled her with an exuberant joy. It flew in the face of nature and yet…and yet it was utterly natural.

‘They’ll never look here,’ she repeated. ‘Why would they? I’ve never seen you before, never heard of you – you’re a complete stranger! Why in God’s name would I harbour you?’ She relished the thought of their little cabal, the two of them, her and Bainbridge.

His story unfolded – through many silences and bites of sandwich – with him saying more when he saw he was not disbelieved. She didn’t know why she believed him except that there was no reason not to – she didn’t care what he’d done, she didn’t care if he raped her in her bed, she had hoped he had come to kill her. But she knew he wouldn’t. She knew she was right because she didn’t care.

He told her that his parents had died in a plane crash when he was two years old; he had been brought up, in Plymouth, by his mother’s sister, who late in life had married a member of her Methodist church. When he was ten years old, he had had a fit – and had been diagnosed epileptic. Perhaps because of this he had never been any use at school – his ‘uncle’ called him soft in the head.

At that she was concerned. ‘Should you be on medication?’ Dr Rhys was charming; she could always brave the surgery at Oakburton and ask him.

He shrugged. ‘They put me on phenytoin inside. But I’ve not had a fit since the day I was taken. I doubt I will again. There’s something there in place, you see.’

He’d left his aunt’s house, he said, as soon as he could leave school. He’d been forbidden a pet at home but always had a love of animals and offered himself for hire with a local farmer, who took him on as a shepherd. As a result he grew to know the Moor, like a friend, he said, and he hadn’t so many of those.

He fell in love with the farmer’s daughter – younger than him she was, a wild one…she had loved to dance,
and they had gone dancing together, to clubs down Plymouth way, coming home all hours – he had had to watch himself to be up in time for the sheep…she was a dazzler, a star above him, he had known he would lose her…Ah, yes, he said, when Ellen made a demurring protest, he was a loser, he had always known he would.

She was a tease as well as beautiful: she’d mocked him, implying he was impotent – not man enough, anyway, to possess her. His upbringing had made him fearful over sex and he hung back. There were times she left him altogether, and went off and didn’t come home for weeks, when he would wander on the Moor and want and want her. She didn’t get on too well with her father, they quarrelled frequently so it was partly that – but partly, too, he knew, that he, Jos Bainbridge, wasn’t enough for her.

One day, she’d come home, after months away, and had been angry in a way he didn’t understand, had picked a fight, saying he was to blame, what did he expect, did he think she was going to wait for him for ever? In desperation at his own timidity, he’d drunk the best part of a bottle of whisky. They’d gone to a place on the Moor he thought of as theirs, and she had lain on the grass, laughing, her skirts pulled up showing her lovely legs – and, suddenly, something in him snapped, and he’d taken her and entered her roughly.

She had moaned and cried out as he came inside her and he had been visited by the most appalling feeling – that he was evil, that he would be damned for ever, that he was
noxious, vile, hideous, that he had tainted his darling, that he was the worst of men, that he would suffer for all eternity, that he was riddled, as his aunt had told him often, with mortal sin.

He had wandered off in horror, aghast at his own filth and ugliness, drunk the rest of the whisky and, still beside himself, returned to where he had left her to find another man there.

He stopped there and she had said, more to help than a wish to probe, ‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know. I’d never seen him before. He was beating her up. I tried to stop him – I was stronger then, and drunk with it, but he flattened me. Knocked me out. When I came to there was a mist down and I was still hung over. In fact, I didn’t know what had happened. People say “it was like a dream” but –’

‘Sometimes reality
is
like a dream?’ she interrupted.

‘Yes.’

Of course she knew that. ‘Don’t say more than you want to.’

‘Maybe another time…’

Ellen Thomas, when first she heard Jos Bainbridge tell his story, had been conscious of the strangest feeling. She followed the account, in the glimmering dimness in which he told it – which added to a sense of its being part of some taboo, or mythic story, told in the crepuscular conditions
of a tribal ritual – as raptly as if it were being etched before her by some fiery comet on the night sky. The words, faltering, passionate, yet altogether credible, sprang something deep within her, trapped till now, clogged in the wheels of her own desperation, which, shaken free, infused her suddenly with intense and staggering life. The starkness of the story, its violence and tenderness, the love he felt for his childish sweetheart, the horror of the outcome, declaimed by a man who spoke without artifice, revealed him – the depth and breadth and heart of him – more vividly than anyone she had ever known. The brevity of their acquaintance, and the circumstance of their meeting, illumined an intimacy so incontrovertible it was as if they had known each other since beyond the back of time.

Whatever there might still be to learn of his history, it would only be peripheral, a sop to curiosity; there was nothing of himself, the man’s own sheer and vital self, withheld. No crannies of concealment. Not even Robert had bared his soul so frankly before her. It filled her with awe, and then with wonder, that another living being should trust her enough to come so close. Seeing him eating her sandwiches, she remembered a winter when the weather had been harsh so that robins had fed from her outstretched palm and thought: he, too, takes bread from my hand!

She looked, from where he sat – palely eating on her sofa – then across to the sheep, also pale in the gloaming.

‘Funny you being a shepherd. I used to lie here looking
at the sheep. I had a fancy they were runes which spelled out some mystery.’

‘Maybe they did. They’ve sense in them, sheep.’

‘I’ve always seen them as rather silly animals.’

‘“Silly” comes from “sely” –’ her look was an enquiry – ‘“holy” it means, in the old speech. Sheep are clever, though. You know about the leer, do you?’

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s where they graze on the Moor. But there’s no boundaries marked, you see. No walls or fences keeps them in. They learn it – where to go safe.’

‘How?’

‘The dams teach it to the lambs. That’s why foot-and-mouth’s so feared – if a whole flock’s slaughtered you lose not just the flock but the knowledge of the leer. There’s none left to teach it, you see.’

Later, she was touched with pity, and then with sadness, but when she heard this, Ellen Thomas felt exultant. The moorland space which bore no visible definition, unbounded save by the sheep’s implicit knowledge, answered something in her. She was like a sheep which had lost its leer, and now she had found it again – a terrain where she was free to wander when she had lost all sense of where she might safely go.

She knew, as she listened, long before he reached the end of all he told her, that she would do almost anything to help this man. The tale she was audience to seemed to infiltrate her bloodstream, her lymph, her nervous system
and was circulating round her, informing her responses, knocking against her retired heart. The knocking beat up the blood in her. She had always thought her own thoughts, but they had come and gone lamely, without conviction.

As he spoke, through the pressure of the intimacy and the candour of the telling, she felt her thoughts root and expand. Out of the dark he had come to her – his darkness cancelling hers. It was as if under sentence of death she had been given to drink a fatal poison; and found it instead the elixir of life.

P
AULA WAS AT A LOOSE END
. S
HE HAD SCOURED
and scrubbed, bleached and polished, swept and vacuumed every available surface of Jackson’s shambolic house, bagged up years of rubbish, domestic and garden, and had even penetrated the garage where, amid impressive filth, she found Jackson’s pornographic magazines. Jackson had been toying with setting fire to them. To return home to a curt comment from Paula, that she’d ‘binned his comics’, was a double blow: it deprived him of the chance to express nobility towards his secret love and left him more than ever at the mercy of Paula’s jibes.

Paula had perceived that her plan with Mary Simms and Luke had not borne fruit. Luke was hardly ever at the pub these days. And God knew what had got into Mary! The silly cow seemed to have spent the whole night in Luke’s bed with nothing at all to show for it and was now mooning around with a daft expression on her face and rushing off to the toilet every five minutes. As for that Luke…Paula was mightily pissed off, when she had called round to Rabbit Row to pick up her
Lord of the Rings
collection of figures, to find her mum ironing his shirt.

Paula had done her own ironing since the age of eight; that – and the constant absence of Jackson, whose
reformation in the matter of work, like many reforms, seemed to have gone over the top – prompted her, on her evening off, to call in at the church where the vicar was giving one of her classes on ‘Woman as God’.

Numbers, never high, had fallen since the vicar’s own fall from grace. Tessa Pope had been one of the few regular attendees, but she was currently expending all her religious zeal trying to keep out of the vicar’s way. The vicar, however, whose walk by the river with Mr Golightly had restored some of her vim, was determined not to be cramped by recent events which she was preparing to discuss with the bishop, who had sent a handwritten note suggesting the two of them have ‘a quiet chat’. To jettison any professional commitment was to imply guilt; in defiance of Keith, she refused to cancel the class on ‘Judith and Holofernes’, which that evening consisted of herself, and Paula.

Paula was not familiar with the Bible but she became quite engaged when it was explained to her that Judith had, single-handedly, cut off Holofernes’s head – an action for which the biblical heroine was apparently applauded by the Almighty. It struck Paula that there was maybe more to Him – or Her – than met the eye. It also struck her that the vicar looked more than usually bedraggled. On an impulse, Paula invited her back for a drink. Jackson, she knew from experience, would not be back till well after closing time.

Despite her bold public stand, Meredith was feeling the effects of being a social pariah. All she had to go home to
was carping reproaches from Keith; Paula’s was the first offer of friendship she had received since the allegations began to circulate – indeed, since she came to the village at all.

Paula was the sort of girl the vicar had, in the past, been secretly afraid of – the kind at school who stole your lunch and stuffed it down the toilet and then shouted obscene things at you on your way home. It was an honour to be the invited guest of such a person. Meredith accepted gratefully, and she and Paula walked up the village together, passing a rather red-faced Sam Noble on the way.

Back in Jackson’s, now spanking clean, kitchen, Paula opened two of the bottles of scrumpy she’d found jammed away in a corner of the garage along with a leaky car battery, a broken hedge trimmer and the pornographic magazines. From her Stag and Badger stash, she produced peanuts and a catholic assortment of flavoured crisps.

‘Cheers!’ she said toasting the air with her bottle. ‘Here’s to women!’

Meredith was unused to drink and scrumpy is best left to those with strong heads. Intending to say nothing – often a prelude to sudden loquaciousness – it wasn’t long before the unaccustomed alcohol, and the novelty of an attentive audience, led to the whole Tessa Pope story pouring out.

In no time at all Paula had ingested the relevant information. The vicar’s predicament provided fuel for the mental furnace whose heat had been so wasted on Mary Simms. The discussion of Judith and Holofernes had not fallen on
stony ground: Paula had been gratified to learn, from such a source, of violence being put to educational ends.

‘Listen,’ she said, leaning across to offer a beef crisp to Meredith, ‘here’s how it goes.’

By this time the vicar had polished off her first bottle of scrumpy and was well on with the next. Shards of crisps flew wildly as she started on a heated account of the process of female circumcision. Privately, Paula’s withers were unwrung. Any girl mad enough to allow
that
to be done to her deserved all she got! However, this evening she was prepared to indulge the vicar and allowed her to rabbit on.

From time to time, as the vicar expounded her theme, Paula leaned across the table and swept some of the crisp crumbs into a little pile and then into the palm of her hand. Her guest was showing signs of moving down to another topic on her long list of cruelties perpetrated on the female sex, when Paula decided it was time to draw a line. Her organised mind preferred to deal with the present atrocity which, as she pointed out ‘weren’t done by a man but by that nutty girl’.

She sent the vicar up to the bathroom to wash her face before packing her off back to her husband. Time enough to settle his hash when the Pope kid was sorted. Having steered the vicar, her hair rather wild, through the front door, Paula settled to indexing her collection of True Life Romances.

The True Life Romances didn’t take long to knock into
shape and Paula looked about for other employment. Finding nothing amiss in the already pristine surroundings, and seeing the evening was fine, she went out for a breath of air. She didn’t fancy going up the Stag, where it was too like work, but she fancied she might walk round to her mum’s for the Micra and maybe run over to Backen to see what was on at the Stannary Arms.

Mr Golightly was returning from an evening stroll by the Dart when he met Paula. Although they had never been introduced, by this time he knew by sight most of the residents of Great Calne and he grasped the occasion to extend his acquaintance. He greeted her, describing where he had been walking.

‘Don’t go down to the river much meself, it’s ruin for the shoes,’ Paula explained.

Mr Golightly glanced down at Paula’s feet which, perched on four inches of heel, were magnificently adorned in thin straps of baby blue with a floppy blue flower at the toe. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘I can see those wouldn’t suit the path of dalliance. My own I choose so they will take me on all terrains.’

They walked down the hill together towards Rabbit Row. Mr Golightly, who had been missing Luke’s company, asked for news of his friend.

‘Doing his stupid scribbling night and day, so far as I can see,’ said Paula shortly. She was privately livid that her mum seemed to have taken to the new lodger with so little apparent regret for the departed.

Mr Golightly also felt something like jealousy. It sounded as if Luke had got up fresh steam with his writing just as he himself had begun to despair of making any headway at all. A silence led to his asking Paula, ‘Do you watch a TV soap yourself?’

‘Yeah, course,’ said Paula. She watched them all, when she had the chance. ‘
EastEnders
I like best.’

At Johnny’s advice, Mr Golightly had sampled
EastEnders.
‘I prefer
Neighbours
, myself. It has an upbeat note.’
EastEnders
had more of the tragic impulse, a style he was keen to avoid.

‘They’re all the same.’

‘You’d say so?’

‘Yeah, course,’ said Paula. ‘That’s the point.’

‘Is it?’

‘Oh, yeah. They’re all about sex and money – that’s what people want…’

‘And not love?’

‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ said Paula, grudgingly. ‘But what people call “love”, en’t real.’

‘Would you say there was such a thing?’ asked Mr Golightly. Paula struck him as unusually clear-sighted.

‘Search me,’ said Paula. ‘If there is, I en’t met it. Mostly what people call “love” is wanting their own way.’

They had reached Rabbit Row but Paula stayed talking to Mr Golightly, leaning on her mum’s Micra in the benign impartial rays of the late evening sun. Her companion’s attention made her confiding – the writer seemed less of a
wanker than most men and she found herself discussing with him the vicar’s plight.

‘What’s done her head in most is it was this girl done it to her.’

Mr Golightly nodded. ‘Yes, I feel for the vicar. Betrayal is hard to come to terms with. Dante placed it in the central circle of hell. He had a point. But perhaps we are all traitors somewhere?’

Paula had not heard of the great Italian poet. She said she, personally, wanted to help the vicar who, if she knew anything about it, had no interest in sex. To Paula’s mind, the vicar’s obsession with female circumcision didn’t qualify – that was the kind of stuff you got on BBC4 – not proper sex at all.

Mr Golightly had a thought. ‘Maybe that’s the problem?’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be altogether innocent about things like sex. What’s ignored takes its revenge, you know?’

Paula said that in her view the person who had the ‘problem’ was that stupid kid, Tessa Pope, and if there was any revenge to be taken it should be taken on her.

Mr Golightly agreed. ‘It’s the child, clearly, who has the hang-up, not the poor vicar. It puts me in mind of the Witches of Salem. There’s an excellent play on the theme.’ He sketched the plot of Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible.

Paula listened attentively to the story of the sexually repressed adolescent girls who turn a Puritan community upside down with hysterical allegations of witchcraft and Satanism.

‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Sex, like I said.’

‘Or power?’ suggested Mr Golightly.

‘Same thing,’ said Paula, sagely. ‘Sex ‘n’ power – getting your own way – that’s how life is.’