Mr Golightly’s Holiday
Salley Vickers

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2003

Copyright © Salley Vickers 2003

The right of Salley Vickers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007156474

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007379651

Version: 2017-07-26

For my own father, who, valiant in the face

of adversity, taught me the charm of the comic

perspective – with all love.

Take hold tightly, let go lightly; this is one of the great secrets of felicity in love…

ROBERT ORAGE

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

March

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

April

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

May

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

June

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Keep Reading

The Research Notes of Johnny Spence

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Salley Vickers

About the Publisher

MARCH

1

ONE AFTERNOON IN MID MARCH, WHEN THE green-white snowdrops had blown ragged under the tangled hawthorn hedges, the pale constellations of primroses had ceased to be a novelty, and the more robust, sun-reflecting daffodils were in their heyday, an old half-timbered Traveller van drove into the village of Great Calne. There was, in fact, no other Calne, great or small, in the county of Devon; or if there ever had been, it had long since vanished into the indifferent encroachments of the moor. Great Calne stands at the edge of Dartmoor, one of the ancient tracts of land which still, in the twenty-first century, lends out its grazing free to the common people of England – though it must be said that the ‘common people’ are something of a scarcity these days.

Sam Noble, out walking his bitch, Daphne, named for his mother’s still-born twin sister, and having nothing better to do, watched with naked curiosity as the driver of the car negotiated the corner by the Stag and Badger – where, thanks to the pub’s garden wall, the passage was tight and drivers often came a cropper. He was mildly disappointed when nothing untoward occurred. Sam’s was not an especially malicious nature, but Great Calne did not provide the thrills he had once been used to. Before his retirement, Sam had been a film director, and had had hopes of winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes with a film about women jockeys which had subsequently made waves. However, for the past five years he had lived in Great Calne, where the principal excitement was provided by Morning Claxon’s plans to transform the tearooms into an alternative health centre.

There was another witness to the arrival of the car, a less obvious one. Johnny Spence had, as usual, skipped school and it wasn’t safe for him to show his face till after four o’clock. During the stranger’s arrival, Johnny was hiding, as was his habit, in the upper branches of a yew tree which spread its antique shade over the churchyard wall and on to the garden of the Reverend Meredith Fisher, the latest occupant of the rectory. Johnny, whose researches were thorough, knew that the lady vicar was off doing her counselling training down in Plymouth, and would not be back before six. So he was free to watch the old Morris – which from his calculations must be worth a bit – being brought skilfully round the corner and into the front garden of Spring Cottage, which since the death of Emily Pope had been let out by her daughter, Nicky, to holidaymakers.

Emily Pope had been dead long enough for Nicky to discover that Spring Cottage did not let easily. So far, it had been rented by a couple of families who complained about the out-of-date facilities, and the damp. One woman, from Clapham, claimed to have found toadstools. It had been something of a relief to receive a request via Nicky’s new website – www.moorvacs.co.uk – from the gentleman who had described himself as ‘a writer in need of a peaceful situation within easy walking distance of shops and pub’. Spring Cottage filled the bill nicely. Writers were notoriously careless people – very likely this one would smoke in the bedroom, but then again he was a man, and mightn’t notice that the back plates on the kitchen hob were dodgy, or that the avocado suite in the bathroom (once the pride of Emily Pope) was now badly out of fashion. Nicky, in the first flush of holiday letting, had splashed out on a Norwegian wood-burning stove, sold to her by a travelling salesman who had hinted at further attractions. These had never materialised, and the stove, prominent in the website details, filled the downstairs rooms with smoke when the wind was in the wrong direction. The Clapham woman had complained about this too; but Nadia Fawns, who ran an antiques store over in Backen, had sold Nicky a couple of convector heaters which she hoped would put paid to the heating problems.

Sam Noble, with several backward glances, had made his way with Daphne through the main street of Great Calne and up towards the moor by the time the driver came to unload the Traveller van. Only Johnny Spence was there to observe him more closely. Johnny’s powers of reconnaissance were keen; had he been asked he would have described the stranger as ‘a fattish old guy who looked as if he hadn’t had a proper shave’. But Johnny’s position on the yew bough would not have afforded a view of the newcomer’s most striking feature – a pair of eyes whose true colour was hard to discern, since they had a quality of shifting from the brooding shades of a storm-crushed sea to the limpid freshness of a dawn sky.

It appeared that the visitor was at any rate physically strong since he emptied the Traveller in double-quick time. The contents were comparatively few: a knocked-about suitcase, a baggy holdall, a laptop computer, a rather loud-looking portable stereo and some cardboard boxes, one of which bore the name of a well-known wine store. A drinking man, at least, Colin Drover, who managed the local inn, might have remarked. The visitor had brought his own alcohol – which might have been a disappointment to a publican. But with drink, as with so much else, inclination in one quarter usually leads to exploration of others.

And the publican’s optimism would have been confirmed. When the stranger had unpacked the van, and distributed some of his belongings in the cramped interior of Spring Cottage, he strolled up the main street to the inn, paused a moment to inspect the menu displayed outside, which promised Tasty Snacks & Bar Lunches, and then pushed open the solid double doors to enter the fire-lit warmth within.

2

THE NAME OF GREAT CALNE’S INN WAS THE Stag and Badger – known to locals as the Stag and Badge – and its manager, Colin Drover, was out the back hurrying up Paula over the prawns when Mr Golightly made his way to the bar. Customers liked their prawns better ‘shell-off’ but it was God’s own task to get Paula in the kitchen to shell them. There was always some excuse – if not her periods it was her boyfriend’s back, though what the devil that had to do with anything Colin Drover couldn’t imagine, as if ‘boy’ was what you could call Jackson anyway! Jackson had been at school with Colin Drover and both had seen the best side of fifty. As usual with any encounter with Paula, her employer had got the worst of it and this made him of a mind to try that bit harder with the person he now saw seated at one of the bars.

‘Good evening, what can I get you?’ The publican infused his greeting with a special concern, unconsciously hoping that this might act as antidote to any inhospitable shelliness in the Stag and Badger’s prawns.

The new customer smiled back. He had an agreeable expression and, thickset and sensibly dressed in an old tweed jacket and woollen shirt, had the appearance of a country person himself. But when he spoke Colin couldn’t place the accent. Welsh, maybe, he thought, or a trace of Derbyshire? Colin had family, on his mother’s side, in the Peak District.

‘Thank you. A pint of your special bitter, if you’d be so kind.’

Colin Drover had never lost his pleasure in drawing a pint of really good ale. He was proud of his beer, which he still reckoned king among the alcoholic beverages. People nowadays went overboard for wine, but in Colin Drover’s view you couldn’t beat a decent pint of real ale. A solid no-nonsense beer drinker was always welcome in the Stag and Badger.

He drew the beer to a foaming head and set it down delicately on the bar where the foam rocked and then slopped gently over the glass’s side. The man on the other side of the bar treated the drink with equal care, lifting the glass to his lips to sip the dark gold liquor beneath the creamy rim and Colin Drover watched, anxious to see how his beer went down.

The stranger sipped and sighed, and the landlord of the Stag and Badger sighed too with vicarious enjoyment. ‘Nothing like a good pint, I always say,’ he remarked with the subdued enjoyment that a satisfactory sale always brought.

‘Nothing like it, except perhaps another one!’ the stranger promisingly agreed. He seemed a self-sufficient sort, not chatty, but not one of your gloomy types either. He sat quietly absorbing the atmosphere, his eyes half lidded over as if to keep a veil over his thoughts. Not the kind to give much away but could make a valuable customer, was Colin Drover’s conclusion as he forced himself back to the kitchen to take up the cudgels again with Paula.

The newcomer looked about him, apparently taking in his surroundings. The inn was prosperous-looking: mahogany fittings, brass lights, and wallpaper with a leafy National Trust motif in the restaurant area, where tables were set out for dinner guests. It was in this part of the pub, where the stranger was sitting, that a few stools were available for the more elevated drinkers. But it seemed that the stranger did not include himself in this category for after another sip of beer he slid down and made his way round to the public bar, just as a thin young man with an earring and a closefitting woolly cap came through the door.

The young man took up a place as if this was a regular perch. Luke Weatherall was a poet, who comforted or rewarded himself, depending on the day’s output, most evenings about this time. This particular evening was one for comfort – his long, narrative poem, based on a Creation myth of the North American Indians, had stuck fast. Luke had pinned the sheet of paper he had covered in useless stanzas to the stud wall of his room – in Lavinia Galsworthy’s barn conversion just outside the village, where Luke rented a studio flat – and thrown darts at it before making his way down the hill to the Stag and Badger. It was at times like this that Luke wondered if he mightn’t have done better to choose the other Indians for his poem – the Eastern ones – about whom there was more known and less room for artistic confusion.

‘Evening, there,’ he said to the man who now came and sat beside him. Luke had a friendly nature, but he also hoped to have his mind taken off the worries of creation.

The other man acknowledged the greeting with a slight nod of his head and for half a second there flashed across Luke’s mind an image of a mountain lake in which there was perfectly reflected a pellucid gentian sky. Perhaps the stanzas hadn’t been so bad, after all.

‘Golightly’s the name. What can I get you?’

‘Hey, thanks, man. A bitter’d be great.’

The stranger waved a hand at the barmaid, a slight girl with long red hair demurely caught back in a velvet band.

Mr Golightly, who liked all prettiness, gave an affable glance in her direction and ordered. ‘How’s the weather been round here?’ he enquired, showing he was a thoroughbred Englishman and knew what bar talk entailed.

The girl set down the glasses so that not a drop slopped over the rim on to the polished surface of the bar.

‘Middling only, there’s been terrible rain but there’s been some God days, too.’

‘She means the odd sunny one,’ explained Luke, alive to the dangers of social exclusion.

But his concern for his new acquaintance was unnecessary, as once again Mr Golightly gave his accommodating smile. ‘Ah, yes,’ he agreed, ‘I know those!’

He seemed disinclined to chat further, so Luke turned to the back of the newspaper, which was kept for the customers, and started in on the crossword. The North American myth of Creation had cruelly reduced his circumstances; the only chance of a paper was when he walked down in the evening to the Stag.

The door opened again, letting in the cleansing draught of a March wind and an apricot spaniel dog who trotted ahead of her owner. Sam Noble, the former film-maker, was also a regular at the pub. There was no need for him to speak his order and a gin and tonic was wordlessly laid before him by the red-headed barmaid.

Sam hesitated a moment as if unsure whether in betraying curiosity he mightn’t betray rather more, and then ostentatiously sat himself on the other side of Mr Golightly. ‘Evening,’ he said. ‘Visiting these parts?’

The question was unnecessary since he had witnessed Mr Golightly’s arrival at Spring Cottage earlier that afternoon. Perhaps Mr Golightly guessed this. In any case, he merely agreed that he was staying in the area.

‘In the village, is it?’ Sam asked. It was part of his social ritual to pretend to know at once more and less than he really did about his neighbours. ‘Holiday?’ he asked again.

But Sam’s project of enquiry was doomed, as all the other did was renew his opaque smile. He appeared more taken by the spaniel, who had sidled up and was rubbing her parts seductively against his boot.

‘Nice dog you’ve got there. Bitch, is she?’

‘Daphne, yes,’ agreed Sam, slightly affronted that his pet was making more impact than himself. But then the newcomer didn’t know about the Palme d’Or. Time enough to bring that up later. ‘Named for my aunt,’ he added. ‘My mother was a twin and lost her sister when she was born. Nowadays it would count as trauma.’ He was quietly proud of the tragedy which hung over the family psyche.

But even the account of this disaster did not disturb the newcomer’s humour. ‘Ah,’ he agreed, ‘it would, I suppose.’ He spoke as if he might have added that in his day they saw such matters differently – life and death, his demeanour seemed to suggest, were not so important that they should interrupt a quiet pint.

Sam Noble, sensing that conversation was drained dry, turned to the man who had approached the bar to ask for ‘twenty Lambert and Butlers’.

Jackson, the so-called ‘boyfriend’ of Paula out-the-back, was Great Calne’s handyman, though ‘handy’ was hardly the word to describe his skills. Residents of the village would frequently ask, on the matter of Jackson, why on earth they bothered – something of an existential question, as Jackson, like most who work in the building trade, dealt in promises of doubtful validity. No one in their right mind seriously believes a builder when he tells you he will be with you next Wednesday; certainly not when accompanied by the rider, ‘on the dot of nine’. As all the world knows, to a builder ‘next Wednesday’ means in a couple of months if you’re lucky, and no man or woman born and bred in Britain would seriously count on it being otherwise.

Jackson, however, took this licence to extremes, interpreting ‘next Wednesday’ to mean as much as a couple of years off. Nor, when he finally arrived to do a job, could the results be said to be satisfactory. He had set up old Emily Pope’s electric shower, down in Spring Cottage – in the days before it was let to holidaymakers – so that the first time she used it a jolt of electric current went through her naked body which people said had very likely contributed to her being carried off altogether the following year.

Jackson’s chief interest in life was baiting badgers, and girls. In the latter case, if not one of nature’s gentlemen he was at least one of her democrats. He had no fine feelings about what a girl looked like provided she was willing to drop her knickers with no fuss. Of course, it was a bonus if they were lookers too, but not essential to his general aim.

What happened to a girl once she had come across was another story. Paula had made history by keeping Jackson’s attention long after she had become unpredictable in the knickers department. Jackson himself did not wholly understand the reasons for his unusual constancy. Like many apparently aggressive men, he was frightened of violence and wasn’t at all sure what a dumped Paula mightn’t do. More than once, she had darkly referred to the collection of kitchen knives which were kept at the Stag and Badger for slicing cold meats. Jackson had an uneasy feeling that Paula’s mind, if sufficiently stirred, might turn to ideas of slicing other kinds of flesh. It was well to keep in with her; the badgers were a different matter.

In the days before Paula, Jackson had a vague scheme to get his leg over Mary Simms, the red-headed barmaid. But Mary herself had higher ideals. She had recently enrolled in an Open University course on Romantic poetry and had no plans to waste her time with a layabout like Jackson. ‘How are you getting on?’ she asked Luke who was frowning at the crossword. Luke was a poet and the course on Romantic poetry was not entirely coincidental.

‘“This Old Testament prophet gets cut off short in drought” – five letters?’ he queried aloud, oblivious to who was speaking. He was on unfamiliar territory with the Bible – American Indians were his thing.

Sam Noble decided to have a go at Jackson. ‘Any chance of you getting round to fixing the pond?’ he asked. This was a routine question; the pond had been waiting to be ‘fixed’ since the day Sam had moved into the village, leaving behind his showbiz career.

Jackson, who reserved a special contempt for townies, contracted his little red eyes as if in fierce thought. ‘Be with you Thursday –’ he announced oracularly – ‘Friday latest. Right?’

‘Very good,’ said Sam primly. ‘I shall expect you not later than Friday noon.’ After five years he was still prone to the error of imagining that his former position and class made any headway with Jackson.

A family party, parents and two small children, now arrived and flustered Colin Drover by ordering the prawns ‘shell-off’. The publican made a sortie out the back – to Paula’s domain – and returned red-faced to suggest that ‘shell-on’ could be had for a ‘pound off’. ‘Mu-um,’ the small boy whined, catching on that here was a chance for a scene, ‘I don’t like them with shells.’

‘Of course not, darling,’ said his mother. ‘I’m sure the nice man will get us some without.’

‘Nonsense,’ said his father. ‘Shells are fun! Daisy thinks they’re fun, don’t you, Daisy?’ He beamed at his daughter, calculating that if they all had the prawns with shells on the meal would be four quid less. He wanted to get back home for the match on TV; the evening out had not been his idea.

‘Don’t like shells,’ his son stubbornly maintained. Daisy was only four – what did she know? She didn’t eat grown-up food anyway.

Mr Golightly, who had been looking at nothing in particular, now turned his glance in the direction of the restaurant, and the boy piped down and shuffled his shoes against the table leg. They were new shoes, bought during the half-term which was almost over. He didn’t want to go back to school where he was bullied in the playground and had had his head pushed down one of the girls’ toilets.

‘Shells are fun!’ his father repeated. Like most repetition this was not convincing. But at that minute a grinning Colin Drover emerged from out the back with four plates of naked, steaming, rosy prawns. Inexplicably, Paula had buckled to and shelled them.

‘There now,’ the father spoke with wooden cheer, the promise of four quid saved disappearing with the arrival of the prawns. But by Monday the kids would be back at school and the half-term horror would be over. ‘Wasn’t that kind of the man, Daisy?’ he prompted, more enthusiastically.

Mr Golightly had turned his eyes from the table but the boy continued to watch him. He looked a bit like that picture of the man feeding birds, in olden times, his teacher had up in the classroom.

Mr Golightly finished his pint, lowered himself from the tall stool and stood looking round as if to take his leave of the company at the Stag and Badger.

‘Old Testament prophet six down,’ he said, passing behind Luke Weatherall to the door. ‘Hosea. Not a bad sort,’ he added.

3

SPRING COTTAGE WAS NAMED FOR THE NATURAL water supply which seeped up through the Devon soil and occasionally made its way through the porous walls of the old dwelling. The cottage stood in a run-to-seed garden, which looked across to hills and ran towards fields which sloped down to the River Dart. This, thanks to recent rains, was roaring like a hungry lion when Mr Golightly stepped outside his back door the following morning.

It was early, not yet six; the stars had yet to disappear and the near-full moon hung still, like a yellow paper lantern, in the west. Over the hills, black clouds made portentous shapes suggesting Eastern tales: dragons, strange-beaked birds, perilous cliffs. Behind the clouds, a veined-marble sky was streaked dim green and pearl. An experienced watcher of weather could have predicted that the day would be a bright one, for beyond, in the east, a thin patina of gold hinted at imminent light.

Mr Golightly snuffed the air like a hunter. It smelled to him of animal life and sappy growth, of burgeoning country things which gave a lift to his heart. All hearts need a lift from time to time and Mr Golightly’s was no exception. He had come to Great Calne to take a holiday. It had been many years since his duties had allowed such an indulgence, but for some time he had been thinking that a project he had started long ago was due for reappraisal. Quite why Great Calne had been chosen as the place to set about this project was a question that Mr Golightly himself may not have been able to answer. But he understood, perhaps better than most, that all important questions are unanswerable.

The intricacies of the World Wide Web were still a mystery to Mr Golightly who, despite his business experience, with many other pressures and concerns to attend to, was not yet practised at using it. One of his valuable aides had entered his requirements – ‘Holiday let in peaceful rural setting’ – into the search engine, Alphaomega, coming up with Spring Cottage via Nicky Pope’s website.

So far the result appeared satisfactory. In any event, Mr Golightly did not give the impression of being a choosy sort. On the contrary, he emanated some sense that all places were alike to him. He gave every sign of being content with the simple accommodation – a bedroom (referred to in the website details as the master), which was almost filled by the iron, black-painted double bedstead, a boxroom (bedroom two) stuffed with old curtains, magazines, rugs, a fender, an exercise bike and supermarket bags full of the late Emily Pope’s correspondence with the taxman, which Nicky Pope, who as a single mother had her hands full already, meant to get around to when she could only find a moment.

Downstairs, there was a parlour (lounge-diner) which boasted an oak gateleg table, a couple of floral-covered comfy chairs, a spine-challenging orange sofa bed, bought by Emily Pope during a short mid-life crisis in the sixties, a black-and-white TV, and the state-of-the-art wood-burning stove from Norway; also a narrow scullery (fitted kitchen with mod cons) which housed a microwave oven, an erratic hob, some Formica cupboards containing a medley of crockery, and a whining fridge which, as Nicky Pope had had to run off before she had quite seen that all was in order, still contained a tub of low-cost margarine, a dried-up half of a lemon and five of a ‘six-pack’ of Cokes, a legacy of the Clapham woman’s stay.

In the days before planning permission, the scullery had been tacked rakishly on to the side of the cottage and roofed, in a slapdash manner, with corrugated asbestos, which nowadays would have drawn down imprecations from a dutiful Health and Safety inspector. Lucky, then, for Nicky Pope, that Mr Golightly had none of the Clapham woman’s self-preserving assertiveness; or it may have been that health and safety were not issues for him.

When the rain fell it made a timpani on the scullery roof, a sound which Mr Golightly had yet to discover whether he found enchanting or distracting. A rickety fence, with a wicket gate let into it, which led through to the garden, ran beside the scullery. But this morning Mr Golightly was troubled by none of those things: he stood listening to the sound of the rushing brook, which ran through the lower meadows, and noting how the hills formed a gentle cleavage through which the River Dart found its way to the sea.

Grazing in the field, to which the untidy garden sloped, was a stocky brown horse with a white flash down its nose. Beyond, bounded by a beech hedge, where the leaves independently maintained their autumnal rust, lay further fields, where young spring wheat was forming a green glaze over the soil.

A batch of rooks was already out scouring the earth for food, while a band of their less diligent kin sat in the bare-fanned branches of an ash tree, making clean silhouettes against the gathering light. As Mr Golightly watched, a pair of magpies swooped gleaming down, balancing with their long tails and settling among the rooks to add a touch of Old Master cachet to the scene.

‘One for sorrow, two for joy.’

Mr Golightly spoke the words aloud. It was an ancient saying, old as any of the works of man, and he could not now recall when he had first heard it. But, like many country-bred people, he did not let reason oust superstition: the sight of the swaggering piebald birds gave an added fillip to his spirits.

And now, as if to add fuel to this fire, a sliver of sun appeared above one of the breast-like hills, a mere slice of orange which rapidly grew to an incandescent globe. Rifts of glowing red infiltrated the green-grey sky which began to take on further intimations of light.

‘Be praised!’ said Mr Golightly.

He did not speak aloud, but as if to a beloved intimate whose understanding had no need of outward hearing.

Samson, the horse, perhaps catching the drift of the unspoken words, made its way up to the wire which formed a boundary to Spring Cottage’s garden. ‘Hello, old boy.’ Mr Golightly ran a finger down the long plush nose and wished he had thought to bring sugar lumps. The cardboard box he had brought was packed with some of the items he might have difficulty finding in the average English village shop: tins of anchovies, jars of pickled walnuts, Marmite, a pot of moist Stilton, chillies, pine kernels, a French sausage, Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, sugared almonds – but despite these latter items Mr Golightly did not, in general, have a sweet tooth. He had not been raised on sugar and consequently it did not form part of his regular diet.

‘Sorry, old chap.’ He spoke regretfully: he liked to indulge animals who rarely bore resentment if one failed to do as they wished.

As if in response to his apology, a ribald cackling made itself heard and Mr Golightly turned away from Samson and towards the direction of the noise. The next-door garden was fenced by heavy barbed wire. Through the wire Mr Golightly could see a female figure among white geese with glistening orange bills and some farmyard ducks.

Mr Golightly was naturally courteous; but he was concerned, too, to establish peace with his neighbours so that there should be no threat to his tranquillity. His work had too often been a battle; he had no wish for his holiday to be marred by warfare. War between neighbours, he knew from long experience, is often of the most disruptive kind.

‘Hello,’ he said, and offered his hand across the barbed-wire fence.

The other said nothing but only stared. It was the kind of stare which might have perturbed anyone with an uneasy conscience; but if Mr Golightly’s conscience was uneasy he didn’t betray the fact. He held the gaze steadily till the woman relaxed and held out a hand.

‘Watch the spikes on the fence.’

‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

Mr Golightly could not have explained why he had made this remark. He was not in the modern habit of constantly enquiring into the workings of his own mind but tended to say whatever came into his head.

‘Ellen Thomas,’ said his neighbour, apparently ignoring his comment, and turned away.

‘Golightly,’ said Mr Golightly, looking after her; the grey eyes of Ellen Thomas were those of a creature in pain.

Back in the cottage, he unpacked the box of provisions and arranged these tidily in the Formica cupboards. He looked about for a kettle which he eventually found in the cupboard under the sink. No plug. Better make a shopping list, he decided.

Up in the bedroom he completed his unpacking. His possessions were simple: a couple of nightshirts, a pair of slippers, some woollies, a number of warm shirts, wool socks, underwear. His zip-up sponge bag, rather the worse for wear, was already in the avocado bathroom. No tie – this was a holiday. Among the other items there was a small travelling photograph holder which framed the picture of a young man with a piteous face.

Mr Golightly looked at the face as he placed the picture beside the bed. Love is the price of love, he thought, as, observing the warning on a note tacked up by Nicky Pope, he minded his head down the steep stairs to the parlour where he prepared to do combat with a book of instructions lying beside the Norwegian woodstove.

Books of instructions were things with which Mr Golightly had little patience. He opened the booklet entitled ‘Norpine Stoves: the extra modern way to be old-fashioned’ and read: The flue towards the left-handed side of the upper orifice is to be unclosed while the material fires is being laid down.

What the hell did all that mean?

4

ELLEN THOMAS LAY ON HER SOFA LOOKING across to where the sheep stood making enigmatic runes on the hillside. She was reflecting that if she could read these runes she might become wise.

No living soul knew this but, shortly after her husband, Robert, died, Ellen had had a strange encounter with a gorse bush. She had been walking her dog, Wilfred, across the moor and, as usual when she walked in the days after Robert’s death, she had been crying. Although she had no inhibition about crying over Robert, the tears only seemed to come when she was mobile. While she was stationary they stayed dammed up inside her, causing unbearable pressure around the heart.

There was something about striding across the tough moorland grasses, through the plashy bogs and past the pale lichen-coated brakes of thorn, which made a breach in her constraining inner structures; so that when she had climbed to the stony outcrop of the tor she was able to stand against the wind on the spine of the skyline and howl like a banshee.

She was returning from just such a venting early one afternoon, a time when most people were eating lunch, when Wilfred began to sniff and whine round a patch of gorse. Supposing voles or rabbits, Ellen had put Wilfred on his lead and tried to drag the dog past the bush. But he pulled so hard the lead slipped from her grasp, and Wilfred, barking frantically, bolted for home.

Ellen, about to hurry after him, was arrested by a strong sense that the gorse concealed more than a vole or a rabbit. A violent burning sensation leapt like a ravaging tiger at her heart and a voice, sweet and terrible, spoke from the golden bush.

‘I am love,’ it said.

Ellen was not of a religious disposition. If asked, she would have said she was an atheist, an agnostic at best, so these words startled her and at first she believed there must have been some mistake.

‘I am Ellen Thomas,’ she had offered, diffidently, in return, and waited, expecting to be dismissed. But the dismissal came in the form of a further surprise.

‘Tell them.’

‘What?’ Ellen asked.

‘Tell them!’ said the voice again in its tender, commanding tone.

Ellen waited for more but no further utterances issued from the gorse. She walked home, dry-eyed, after Wilfred.

Ellen had no idea how to obey the injunction she had been given. She had no clue as to what the cryptic words might mean. Whatever they meant it was not – she was sure of this – that she should go about preaching to people. No being, not even one whose essence was love, would suborn her, Ellen Thomas, as a preacher in its cause. She wondered if what she was being asked was to write about the experience, but that seemed hardly more likely. Robert had been a journalist and had occasionally run stuff past her for comments; but aside from that, and the jottings she sometimes wrote in her grandmother’s recipe book, since school, where she had not excelled, she had had no practice in writing.

To be asked to tell of love is a tall enough order; to be asked such a thing when one has not even the habit of belief is awful. The magnitude and impossibility of the task she had been assigned felled Ellen.

The loss of Robert had awoken her to the innate treachery of all certainties. Her husband’s enduring sympathy had made life seem unchangeable. With Robert gone this illusion, along with all human ties, vanished too. Yet even in his absence, the knowledge of Robert’s steady love had conferred upon her a sense of life’s consistency. But the enigmatic order from the gorse bush robbed Ellen of her old self and the sureties that had survived Robert’s death. She took to walking, day and night, seeking not so much a solution to the problem she had been unwillingly set as escape.

The walks left her overwhelmingly fatigued. The friendly countryside she had once enjoyed took on a menacing aspect. The foliage in the trees became baleful, dropping leaves and icy water on her as she passed. The hedges murmured threateningly in the wind, which rushed at her, haranguing her like some invisible prosecutor. Metal gates clanged horribly, bruising the calves of her legs, or making violent grating noises, shocking to her ears. The sun, red and glowering, plunged down the sky in pursuit of her. Outside or in she felt alarmingly afraid.

Gradually, as rats are said to leave a sinking ship, her everyday capacities had begun to slink away, leaving her a remnant, a hapless passenger on the derelict wreck of her old personality, which now appeared to float on perilous and alien waters. She seemed to feel her feet sliding under her, sensed the deck shudder and tip her dangerously off balance, downwards to an icy darkness, where lurked shapeless, unformed things, and where death looked a blessed relief and disintegration easier than resistance.

With the last dregs of her failing resources, she dragged herself to sell Brook Farm, the farmhouse she had lived in with Robert for over twenty years, and move to the small, plain, characterless bungalow where obscurely she felt she might be safe. And here – after the anguish of disposing of the furniture over which she and Robert had laughed, planned, bickered, made love and acted all the multifacets of a long marriage, for there was no way the accumulation of a shared life would fit into her new home – she had hidden herself away, for what she found she chiefly could not bear was other people’s company.

From the long sofa, which, scraping the bottom of the barrel of her energy, she had made the object of a last-ditch shopping effort, she lay, unrecognisable to herself, gazing out in those moments of passionless lucidity which afflict the mortally wounded. It seemed to her, at such moments, that she might never rise again, but would simply freeze there upon her long perch, like some stray migrant bird forced to winter over in a cold and alien land.

One morning, while she was engaged in looking out – if ‘engaged’ could be the right word for something which so much resembled the loosening of all former ties – she became aware that the nature of what she saw had undergone some alchemical change.

Ellen had been a watercolour artist, and made a successful living selling her paintings at local craft shops. She had an accurate eye and a patient hand, and the world, as she was used to seeing it, had beauty and charm. But now everything she had once seen as colourful, lyrical, dramatic, even, was subsumed into a vast, unquenchable litany of light.

The months that she had by now spent lying on the sofa had brought Ellen no further towards solving the problem she had been set by the presence in the gorse bush. But the vision of the changed world, rather than diminishing her sense of inadequacy, became a reproach. She looked outside to where the trees and hills and sheep apparently continued their former existence, but in the infinitude of space around and between them, she now knew there lay the inscrutable and uncompromising powers of love and mercy, and she, Ellen Thomas, had been enjoined to make them known.

The intense and brilliant light Ellen had seen at the centre of all things probed her being like a surgeon’s knife. There seemed no safety outside herself and no refuge within. She could tell no one what had occurred – lest she be taken for a lunatic. She feared to show herself to anyone for she felt there must be a savour of madness about her.

During the day, apart from the sparest of attentions to economic necessities, she gazed out of the window, a shadow between two worlds, surveying the landscape, waiting for the awful injunction to return, for she knew that having been a prey to truth it would never leave her, but would make itself felt at any cost. At night she lay in a kind of dead-and-alive doze, apprehensive that the voice might call on her again.

The assault of love upon Ellen Thomas had been savage rather than sweet, and, like many caught in its toils, she longed to have been spared the experience.

5

AFTER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF FRUITLESS struggle Mr Golightly had reached the view that the instructions for the up-to-the-minute stove had probably been produced and marketed by his business rival. He had not admitted this to anyone at the office, but he had been troubled, lately, by recent signs that his rival’s business was beginning to supersede his own. It was a business formed upon the back of his own global enterprise, and this made its proliferation especially galling. To distract his mind from this unwelcome line of thought, he began to check out the rest of Spring Cottage’s equipment.

He found the two convector heaters, slightly chipped and rusting, in the cupboard under the stairs. Well, that was a blessing, anyway. He could afford to take a more cavalier position with the stove. In one of the Formica cupboards there was a toaster, thank goodness with a plug attached; a broken machine, apparently designed for grinding; in the cupboard beneath the stairs an iron which had seen better days, and an impossible ironing board. There had been times when he might have gone in for grinding, but not on his holiday. Nor, since his secretary was not there to pass comment, was there any call to iron. Toast, now, was a different kettle of fish: toast fingers, with a boiled egg, was something which Mr Golightly was partial to…

It was nearly nine and a walk to the shop would give the opportunity to assess what provisions were available in Great Calne. He hoped not to have to drive too far afield. The Traveller could play up and he didn’t want the bother of having to find a mechanic who could fix it. Of course, he could always send for someone to come down from the office, but it was to get away from all of that that he had come away for his holiday.

Putting on a green parka, Mr Golightly walked up the hill towards the Post Office Stores where a young man with a straggly beard was stacking oranges in the window.

‘Good morning’, said Mr Golightly. And he spoke truly for the fully risen sun was unreservedly lighting the village of Great Calne.

‘Depends who you are,’ rejoined the beard, stepping back from the window. ‘Shit!’ as the oranges rebelled and rolled down and all over the floor.

Oh dear. Mr Golightly spoke only to himself. He had selected milk, fresh and ‘untreated’ – he didn’t hold with ‘dead’ milk in cartons – half a dozen eggs, some local cheese, tomatoes and a couple of brown rolls.

‘You staying at Spring Cott?’ asked the young man, cramming too many tomatoes into a tiny paper bag.

‘Yes, indeed. A pretty location.’

‘All right for toads! Damp as hell. Wouldn’t catch me there, that’s for sure.’

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it…

As Mr Golightly walked back down the hill, some words, which had always struck him as particularly grim, rang in his mind. But better not to meet trouble halfway – there were boiled eggs and toast to look forward to, he was on holiday and here to revise his great work.

Many years earlier Mr Golightly had written a work of dramatic fiction which, after slow initial sales, had gradually grown to become a best-seller. In time, the by-products of this enterprise had expanded to form the basis of a worldwide business. The work had been based on his observations of human life – its loves, hopes, fears, lusts, idiocies, anxieties, false securities, vanities, dishonesties, fantasies, cruelties and general tendency to inveterate folly. Mr Golightly, in his droll way, liked to describe his work as a ‘comedy’; but in this, he had discovered, he resembled the playwright Chekhov.

Chekhov, attending the dress rehearsal of one his plays, was surprised to find that the director, none other than the great Russian Stanislavsky, was playing it as a tragedy. There were no laughs, Chekhov was tickled to find, except those provided by the single audience of the humorous playwright himself.

Mr Golightly’s magnum opus had something of The Cherry Orchard’s ambiguity. Perhaps it was this, or perhaps it was the gradually reducing sales – though to be sure it had had a good enough run: for years it had been an international sensation – which had determined him to rewrite the work. The idea had come to him when, one evening, he had turned on the TV and had become engrossed in one of the many soap operas which run there.

Mr Golightly’s business was so time-consuming that often he remained ignorant of the rapid developments of modern culture. His philosophy was that if a thing was going to catch on it would, in the fullness of time, catch up with him. That millions of people organised their lives so as not to miss their personal ‘soap’ was news to Mr Golightly.

But herein lay one of the gifts which made him unique in his sphere. Far from being shocked, or taking an ‘it wasn’t like that in my day’ attitude (a common trap among the older generation), he saw at once the advantages. His own work, he felt, after sampling the current TV output, had many of the features of a modern soap – it was merely the idiom and the episodes which needed bringing up to date. The characters in his original drama were only apparently unlike those of the present day. Human nature hadn’t changed, of course, but custom had, and the times.

And then there was that delightful notion of a holiday…

Mr Golightly had been taken by an item concerning ‘stress in the office’ which had followed Neighbours, the soap his secretary watched and for which he had found he himself developing a liking. Stress, it seemed, was a recently discovered malady and one, Mr Golightly couldn’t help feeling, that he could be a candidate for. It seemed there were all kind of palliatives available to combat it – t’ai chi, reiki, Pilates, yoga, reflexology, hypnosis, homeopathy, psychotherapy, acupuncture, massage – but something in Mr Golightly baulked at these remedies which, so far as he was able to grasp them, struck him as somewhat invasive.

But a ‘holiday’ was a different story: that harked back to a former era – a time when he had been able to rest on his laurels and had taken delight in all he had achieved. And what better plan than to combine a long overdue rest with a reworking of his great enterprise?

No one but an artist knows the peculiar delight of being summoned by a work which, as yet unborn, lies, with all its potential undisclosed, within the dormant darkness of the creating heart. Mr Golightly’s tread had a secret bounce as he made his way down the hill and towards his awaiting soap opera. He would boil the eggs, pour a mug of coffee, with the unpasteurised milk he had bought at the miserable young man’s stores, and set up the laptop, the use of which Mike had instructed him in before his departure.

Mike, it was agreed by all at the office, was a perfect angel. His patience was a byword and he had promised, if necessary, to come down to Great Calne himself should Mr Golightly encounter any technical problem with the newly installed e-mail system.

Mr Golightly had drunk his coffee, from the Spiderman mug he had found among the medley of crockery, before he opened up his laptop to check his e-mails. Mike had explained that the system called for an e-mail address and something called a ‘server’. He had set up golightly@golightly.com which allowed, he suggested, for expansion into a website. For some time Mike had been of the view that a website would make a valuable innovation for the Golightly Enterprises and was hoping to take advantage of this holiday to persuade the boss of its commercial advantages.

Connecting the laptop to the phone involved some fiddling about with the leads which Mike had had the foresight to include, so that by the time Mr Golightly was ready to dial up it was past ten o’clock. Plenty of time, though, to start work – the day was still young.

Several e-mails, accompanied by a sound effect, appeared on the screen. The first was a message from the server, cosmos. com, and offered Mr Golightly the benefit of bargain travel services, including a cheap offer to go diving in the Red Sea.

In his younger, more forceful, days Mr Golightly had often visited that part of the world. But the greener, less turbulent pastures of England, were, he felt, a more soothing environment for his recreational plans. The Red Sea would take him too far down memory lane, a route to be avoided when one was set upon change.

The second message was from Bill, his handsome PA, and concerned some charity, to do with Third World aid, to which Mr Golightly had agreed to lend the firm’s name.

The third was from no recognisable name or address.

by what way is the light parted?

was the disconcerting message.

Scientific questions had not troubled Mr Golightly greatly over the years. In the past, when questions had been asked at all, it was he who had tended to do the asking. His secretary, Martha, the one who had put him on to Neighbours, would probably say that this was ‘very like a man’. Comments along these lines from Martha had been more forthcoming lately. She had worked faithfully for the Golightly firm for many years but latterly she seemed to have picked up the modern woman’s tendency – an unfortunate one, Mr Golightly couldn’t help sometimes feeling – to criticise the male; or perhaps criticise him openly was more accurate, since Mr Golightly was too shrewd a judge of human nature to suppose that men had ever, in women’s private thoughts, got off scot-free.

What would Martha make of the enigmatic question which now confronted him? It seemed to contain a sly play on his name. And who on earth could have sent it? His usual movements, for the purpose of the smooth running of the firm, were shrouded in a certain mystery; he was unused to being confronted with barefaced questions, especially ones which touched obliquely on his own person.

Mr Golightly had set up his computer on the gateleg table with a view on to the garden and down to the field below. Looking out, he saw the horse standing in the sun, taking the benefit of its warmth on his chestnut coat. There was something reassuring about the horse’s stance. Not quite meaning to, Mr Golightly got up from the table and wandered outside.

Samson, observing activity, walked over to investigate. Mr Golightly felt regretful again over the sugar lumps. But no doubt the horse’s owner would anyway disapprove. It was discouraging how few of the world’s prodigal comforts were nowadays available for enjoyment. Mr Golightly had been cautioned by Martha against exceeding the recommended number of ‘units’ of alcohol he drank in a week. There had been times when her boss had supped of the vine in a manner which would throw a modern health practitioner into a frenzy, and yet, Mr Golightly couldn’t help feeling, he was not obviously any the worse for his past excesses.

Next door, Ellen Thomas was lying on her sofa. She looked out to where the rooks were dredging the fields clean of the new-sown wheat. A saying of her late husband’s drifted into her mind. ‘Forbear not sowing because of the birds,’ he had used to say, when counselling against needless caution. Her new neighbour, with his big head, reminded her a little of Robert. She might give him some of the duck eggs, azure, like the sky’s watery reflection in the puddle which had collected on the upturned barrel she had put outside for some purpose she couldn’t now remember.

What did ‘remember’ mean? Robert had told her this once, too. Wasn’t it putting back together the body’s members which had been torn asunder…?

6

IT WAS THURSDAY, AND CONSEQUENTLY THE YEW tree was not a safe hiding place for Johnny Spence. The Reverend Meredith Fisher was at home and would be back and forth, sticking her nose into other people’s business or attending to her parish duties, depending on your point of view. Johnny’s attitude was laissez-faire: he didn’t mind what the lady vicar did so long as she didn’t interfere with his use of the churchyard.

The concept of sanctuary is an old one and in using the environs of the Lord for this purpose Johnny followed a long and venerable tradition. But he was not the first to be ousted from safe-hiding by one of the Lord’s appointed. Who can say how far the Lord Himself, were He to be consulted, would sanction the attitudes of those who undertake to speak on His behalf? As it was, Johnny had to look for an alternative place of concealment.

Great Calne’s church, with its square Norman tower, stood flanked on one side by the rectory and on the other by the Post Office Stores. A little way down the hill, on the opposite side of the road, lay Spring Cottage where only the previous day Johnny had watched the arrival of Mr Golightly.

Johnny had practised being invisible since his mum took up with his stepdad. Like all early training, this stood him in sound stead. At school his absences were so regular as to be generally overlooked and often his name was omitted entirely from any official register. A conviction that one is nothing acts as a powerful charm against being perceived, but Johnny was experienced enough in the ways of the world to know that you mustn’t take anything for granted. Despite the fact that, to the authorities, he didn’t exist, that didn’t mean he should be careless. Like a young tomcat, he whipped down the street and inside the gateway of Spring Cottage. He felt cautiously well disposed towards the bloke he had spied on and he wanted, anyway, to get a closer look at the Traveller.

The sky had turned indigo and the sun set up at once a contesting sheet of light. A cloud of rooks, with the mysterious concordance of flocking birds, rose, hovered in the petrol-coloured sky, gathered together again, then, as suddenly, parted into factions to flutter like confetti from some Satanic wedding on to the fields, or settle in the stands of reddening beech. Splashes of sunlight on the birds’ plumage made fitful, darting gleams. And now the sky, as if surrendering to an eloquent seducer, cleared rapidly again, stretches of blue wash appeared and scraps of cloud, as picturesquely puffed as any on a painted Italian ceiling, began to scud wantonly across the renewing sky.

Mr Golightly, sitting before his laptop, watched this drama. It was amazing what could be accomplished if you simply left a system to run itself. This was the policy he tried to operate in his business. In the early days, he had held the reins more tightly, managing everything more or less single-handed. But that was before the catastrophe which had changed everything. These days, as the office knew, delegation was his watchword. And it was precisely this which made it possible for him to take this holiday and rewrite his great work into the soap opera, which he had decided to call – he was a little proud of the title – That’s How Life Is.

But, how, in God’s name, to begin?

For a start he needed the cast of characters. Until recently, he would have written these down in a small, leather-bound notebook, which he still carried about with him in case he should wish to jot down a passing thought or useful saying. But now that he had the services of a computer he supposed he’d best adopt new practices…

He opened a file, as Mike had shown him, and ‘saved’ it as ‘THLI’. Then, typing slowly, he spelled out ‘Cast of Characters’ and paused, debating whether that didn’t belong better in a file marked ‘Prelims’ – a piece of technical advice about organising his material which he had picked up at the office, from Muriel in Accounts.

Muriel was less in the forefront of office affairs than Mike, or Bill. She was a retiring soul, who kept herself to herself, but she’d been part of the firm since its inception. Muriel had a capacious memory. If Mr Golightly wasn’t one hundred per cent sure how a word was spelled, he would check with Muriel. Thinking of her, he remembered he must rescue his Oxford English Dictionary, which he had jammed under the passenger seat of the Traveller. Bill had suggested that Mike could load on to the laptop a CD-ROM of the OED, which would apparently furnish every word in the English language anyone could wish to check. But in Mr Golightly’s view, a computer screen was no substitute for a solid book you could get your hands around. It was his habit to read the dictionary in bed, an activity which he suspected neither Mike nor Bill would fully understand. Slightly evasively – he didn’t like to have to defend his preferences – he had stuffed the two volumes of the Shorter OED into the Traveller at the last moment of departure.

The office could tell you that when the boss got his dander up he could spit fire and hailstones, but these days, for the most part, Mr Golightly was a pacific sort and his inner state was reflected in his physical movements. Johnny Spence, who from years of cohabiting with his stepdad could detect a human tread quicker than any cat, only saw Mr Golightly as he came round the side of the cottage. Johnny shot under the Traveller and lay pulling the hood of his baggy top well over his face.

Mr Golightly stood for some minutes by the open car door, straightening out a dog-ear from a page of Vol. II Marl–Z. As he did so he whistled. He was senior enough to have tuned in regularly to a radio programme, Whistle While You Work, on the old BBC Light, and the injunction had infiltrated his habits.

Johnny Spence, crammed under the van, heard the bars from Fidelio and was strangely reassured. He was not familiar with Beethoven’s single opera, but those who fight for freedom are joined by more than temporal bonds and Johnny perhaps recognised, in the long-departed composer’s music, a theme in tune with his own revolutionary aims.

Mr Golightly had finished smoothing out the crumpled page and, still whistling, paused a while longer to read the definition of a word he had forgotten. His memory, once capacious, had been playing up lately. He had disguised this from the office, but there were times when he found himself suffering worrying blanks and lapses when he couldn’t find a familiar word or place a name. But, he comforted himself, even the most efficient memory cannot retain everything and a less than perfect memory had benefits. It lessened the likelihood of grudge bearing. A tendency to bear grudges was a habit which, when he encountered it, embarrassed Mr Golightly; it reminded him too much of former times.

Johnny Spence lay dead still under the van. The old bloke hadn’t moved off – from where he was lying he could see his shoes, the kind with little holes in the toes, scuffed but posh leather. He needed a pee – what the fuck was the old bastard doing just standing there?

Mr Golightly’s attention had been caught by a word on the crumpled page of the dictionary: ‘uberty’, pronounced, as he now read, like ‘puberty’, it meant full of bounteous kindness, a state which he was disposed to approve of. Here was another forgotten joy of authorship: the chance to stow away a likely-looking word and make occasion to use it. A pity that the word was too obscure for his soap opera. Bill and Mike were too respectful to let it slip, but he had picked up from Martha, whose pronouncements tended less towards ‘uberty’, that the language of his original work was considered antiquated and abstruse.

For all the forgetfulness, Mr Golightly’s mind still ran easily on parallel lines, and as he mused on the perils of authorship he wondered what to do about the young boy in the hooded garment hidden under the Traveller.

His first instinct on seeing Johnny duck under the van’s carriage had been to ignore him. Latterly, live and let live was one of his mottoes, and if the boy wanted to make the Morris a hiding place it was nothing to him. But a flashing impression of the face, as it dived beneath the van, had affected him. It brought to mind another boy child, so grippingly that he couldn’t tear himself away to return to the laptop.

Although he liked to think of himself as essentially creative, it was in fact many years since Mr Golightly had tried to put his ideas into effect. Perhaps he felt a certain forbidding fear at re-embarking on this insecure enterprise. Or perhaps it was the memory evoked by Johnny Spence which made him say, ‘I wonder whether you’d care for some refreshment?’

Johnny Spence did not at first take these words as meant for him. Without an introduction, Mr Golightly had adopted an over-formal mode of address. Hearing himself, he adjusted his style.

‘Hey, you, boy under the car, fancy a Coke?’

This was spoken in a tone which made Johnny shoot out from under the Traveller before he was aware of what he was doing. He lay on the ground, half on his side, squinnying up at Mr Golightly. Sure as fuck the old guy would hand him over to his stepdad, or the social services.

The sun which had gone behind a cloud reappeared at this moment and casually dropped a ray upon the little earth, transfiguring the upturned face of young Johnny Spence. Mr Golightly swallowed hard and held out a hand.

‘There’s Coke in the fridge. If you want biscuits one of us’ll have to go up to the shop.’

‘Not me,’ said Johnny Spence. Ignoring the hand he got to his feet. Whatever was going on he wasn’t going to show himself out of school time to that Steve Meadows at the post office, thank you very much!

‘Well, if you can manage without…’ It had been Mr Golightly’s theory that the modern child only ate biscuits; but there was bread and Marmite and the Frank Cooper’s marmalade if the boy was hungry. With his still outstretched hand, he touched the boy lightly on his shoulder. ‘Come along inside, why don’t you?’ he suggested.

7

ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE STREET TO Spring Cottage, set back from the road and fronted by an ugly, untended garden, was a long low building which bore a painted sun-peeled sign, nutkin’s tearooms. This, despite a further legend which promised ‘Full Devon Cream Teas’, was well on the way to becoming derelict. In fact, the only takers for teas now, cream or any kind, were the brown rats whose scampering depredations had so scared Paula’s mum that she had had to give up her little cleaning job, while those who owned it made up their minds what they were going to do with the blamed place! In the past, the tearooms had provided a useful, if limited, source of income for those residents of Great Calne who were neither retired nor living on social security and consequently barred from able-bodied work. During the holiday season, coachloads of tourists had visited regularly and the people of Great Calne had themselves liked to take an occasional light snack there when the services offered extended to a soup and salad luncheon with choice of white or brown ‘fresh-baked’ bread rolls (delivered twice weekly from Bunn’s Bakery, in nearby Oakburton).

In those days the tearooms had been run by Patsy and Joanne, a lesbian couple of the old school. They had left Great Calne after there had been talk that Patsy had made a pass at Nicky Pope’s daughter Tessa. Tessa was known to be fanciful, and feeling among the village – after the departure of the two women, who in their quiet way were popular – ran high. It was felt by some that justice would have been better served if Tessa Pope, rather than being offered counselling by the lady vicar, had been smacked hard for her lying ways.

The tearooms were bought by a retired couple from London, Hugh and Heather Wright, who also took over the name of ‘Nutkins’ for their house at the top of the village. But after Heather ran off with a lecturer in medieval social history – he had come to do research on vanished villages of Dartmoor and vanished instead with Mrs ‘Nutkin’ – Hugh had found consolation with Morning Claxon, a practitioner in crystal healing. A committed campaigner for health foods, she had turned Hugh against cream – indeed against cholesterol of any kind.

Among the residents of Great Calne, ‘Morning’ was not a name which inspired confidence. The example of Patsy and Joanne had induced tolerance of homosexuality – indeed, sexual proclivities of most varieties were generally accepted – but the village was inclined to be mistrustful of anything ‘hippie’. A name like ‘Morning’ didn’t command sympathy. It had been the devil of a job to get those long-haired squatters out of the rectory, when it was empty all that time after Rector Malcolm died of Parkinson’s. The lager cans and quantities of roll-up butts had become local legend. Morning’s plans to turn the tearooms into an alternative health clinic had attracted suspicion rather than support. And there was the question of the car park, which butted on to Sam Noble’s garden.

The tearooms car park was placed, somewhat anomalously, up the hill and across the road from the tearooms. It stood behind the village hall bearing a sign TEAROOMS PARKING only and was mostly used by the children of Great Calne when learning to ride their bikes. Sam, a man who read both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph and was well versed in his rights, was adamant that an alternative health centre would bring unacceptable noise levels to the proximity of his bedroom.

A meeting of the parish council had been called at which Morning had spoken, passionately, of the benefits of Indian head massage. Not properly a resident – she only came down for weekends, when she had Hugh Wright out in the garden all day, getting a dig, people said, at the old wife by having him unearth all the shrubs she had planted – her right to speak was questioned and her words did not carry weight.

The car park was, in fact, a prime building site. It was Sam’s nightmare that a speculator would buy it and try to engineer a profitable development. While planning permission in the area was granted rarely, there was nothing, Sam knew, that money couldn’t buy. That Indian massage woman was flaky. Even if she had no plans for developing the car park herself, a speculator could easily get hold of her, cross a few palms with silver and then where would their peace and quiet be? No, by far the best plan would be for the village collectively to buy back the tearooms from Hugh Wright; then Sam could oversee the car park.

To this end, Sam had run a cost-benefit analysis which he had printed out on his computer. He proposed to call on all the village personally and drum up support.

The Morris Traveller was parked in the front when Sam called on Spring Cottage and banged on the door with the flat of his hand. There was no bell or knocker; when Emily Pope had lived there folk always went round the back; but the new tenant had not been installed long enough for proprieties to be dispensed with.

Johnny Spence was on his second can of Coke when Sam knocked and Johnny’s reaction was to look for a place to hide. There was a cupboard under the stairs but his eye had hardly found it before Mr Golightly laid a hand again on his shoulder. Placing a finger to his lips, he mouthed conspiratorially, ‘Wait there!’

Johnny found himself obeying his host who walked with his peculiar silent tread to the hallway.

Opening the front door took a bit of shoving: the door was used infrequently, and the wood had swollen in the winter damp so that in opening it Mr Golightly almost staggered into the man standing outside.

‘Morning there. Sam Noble – we met the other evening up at the Stag.’

A hand was being proffered, but Mr Golightly was annoyed at having his conversation with Johnny interrupted and his response was lukewarm.

‘Yes?’

He hoped this visit would not form a precedent. He must be careful not to convey an impression that Spring Cottage was a home for social chit-chat.

‘Pleased to meet you again. I’m calling about the tearooms.’

‘The tearooms?’ Mr Golightly’s face was a disobliging blank. Tea gave him a headache – he rarely touched the stuff.

‘All here,’ said Sam, ‘cost-benefit analysis.’ He slapped a furled bundle of papers on the palm of his hand. ‘Scheme for the village. I’d be glad of your views.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Golightly, ambiguously. It was to escape the affairs of the world that he had come to Great Calne. The last thing he wanted was to be involved in local politics – indeed, politics of any kind.

Johnny Spence, after an initial obedience to Mr Golightly’s directive, had nipped up to the bedroom to check it out. The room didn’t look like a perve’s. Not that Johnny specially cared. That jerk who slept in the caravan all last summer, up in the parking place on the edge of the moor by old Lavinia Galsworthy’s house where you weren’t supposed to park, had tried something on him and Johnny had kneed him in the balls. If this bloke had any ideas Johnny was prepared. But somehow he didn’t give off that kind of feeling.

Mr Golightly’s employees could have told Johnny that to pry undiscovered was a lost cause. The boss had supersubtle powers of observation. It was said that their business rival had once, long ago, worked for him and got himself sacked that way; on the other hand, there were rumours they had fallen out over some woman. Those who knew the boss felt that this last was unlikely – certainly the idea of some inexcusable interference fitted the picture better. When Martha had once, quite innocently, moved some of his archaeological specimens to give them a thorough clean, she had received a dressing down which had led to bad feeling for several weeks. Since then, the boss had tidied his own desk, which, as Martha said, behind his back, meant those nasty old stones, dating back from God knew when, merely gathered more and more dust, which was murder for her asthma.

Mr Golightly, having seen Sam off, looked in the direction of the stairs. If he sensed Johnny’s investigations – and it would be hard to see how he could – he must have decided not to mention it since he merely said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you, before you go?’

The idea of leaving made Johnny’s stomach lurch, like when his mum had gone in for her operation and he’d had to sleep on the sofa over at his Auntie Jean’s. Not that Jean was really his ‘auntie’: she was his mum’s friend from when he was a kid and he and his mum and Auntie Jean lived together over Plymouth way. That time, when his mum was in the hospital, Uncle Glenn, his Auntie Jean’s live-in boyfriend, had driven Johnny in his convertible to see her.

‘Can I have a go in your car?’

Mr Golightly inwardly sighed. What about his writing schedule? But the boy’s hazel eyes looked at him with frank beseechment.

A dart of pain touched Mr Golightly in the upper quarter of his left ribcage. Subduing irritation, he said, ‘Well, we can’t go far but…maybe you could direct me to the nearest place for decent shopping?’

That was easy. Oakburton was three miles down the road and full of all the supermarkets and wine stores anyone could desire. Under Johnny’s guidance, they reached Oakburton in remarkable time, given the age of the Traveller, and soon Johnny was guiding his new acquaintance round Somerfields.

Not that any of the foodstuffs seemed to have had much to do with fields, or with summer, Mr Golightly observed to himself. He bought a plastic bag of seedy-looking potatoes, some tins of tomatoes on special offer (four for the price of three), lavatory paper, kitchen roll, and a kitchen cleanser called Mr Muscle, a name which took his fancy. When they got to the till Johnny, who had been dragging round behind, surprised him.

‘Seven pound ninety-four.’

‘Seven ninety-four,’ the cashier, with bored inattention, repeated a second later.

Mr Golightly forked out a ten-pound note and they went next door to the Oak Deli. Johnny wandered off, leaving Mr Golightly to buy a brie, some slices of garlic sausage, olive oil, wine vinegar and some stuffed olives. These delicacies in hand, he looked for the small hardware store which, painted in a green gloss, had caught his eye as they drove into the town.

‘Paint’, ‘Timber’, Glass’, ‘Keys’ promised one window, while its twin announced, ‘Gas’, ‘Houseware’, ‘Plumbing’, ‘Fancies’.

Mr Golightly was taken by the idea of ‘Fancies’. He liked the look of this shop and entering felt at once at home among the curious collection of bric-a-brac. Here were dyes, bath plugs, colanders, tea cosies, flour sieves, screws and hooks and brass bolts of all sizes, slug pellets, hot-water bottles, jam covers, lemon squeezers, thermos flasks and hurricane lanterns. In particular there was a milk jug in the likeness of a cow. Mr Golightly lingered a little over the cow but in the end he bought a hot-water bottle with a knitted cover, some clothes pegs, shaped like little wooden people with stiff legs, some electric plugs and a packet of firelighters.

The door of the shop was fitted with an old-fashioned bell which raucously announced the arrival of Johnny. Mr Golightly pointed out the cow. ‘Me mum would like that,’ Johnny observed. ‘Eight pound forty-nine,’ he said, before the elderly man at the till had had time to ring up the items.

‘How did you work that out?’ Mr Golightly asked.

‘Did it in me head.’

‘Did you now,’ said Mr Golightly. He had heard about savage child geniuses and hoped to goodness he hadn’t got one on his hands.

8

SAM NOBLE HAD BEEN DISAPPOINTED THAT HIS brief conversation with the tenant at Spring Cottage had offered no purchase for the story of the Palme d’Or. The residents of Great Calne had all heard about it – many several times.

The opportunities to repeat the account of his brush with success had diminished over the five years since Sam had moved from London to the village after his divorce from Irene. Sam sometimes regretted parting from Irene. At the time the world had presented itself as his oyster. The separation had occurred after the near miss at Cannes and had been speeded on its way by a temporary association with an air hostess from Malta. But the oyster seemed to have clammed up since, and such pearls as may have been lying in wait remained ungarnered.

It was true that Irene had not been inspiring: she had wittered on, and long before the intervention of the air hostess Sam had ceased to pay her attention. But nowadays he sometimes missed her chattiness, her observations about the garden and whether they should use chemical pesticides on the patio moss, or go for something organic. There were times when he even missed her warm, comfortably ageing body in the bed beside him.

Sleeping alone in the double bed – which, since it had become available for legitimate double occupancy, had remained depressingly single – had eroded Sam’s confidence. He dreamed fitfully about naked women jockeys and woke in the mornings too early. Dr Rhys at the Oakburton surgery had even discussed Prozac with him but, in the end, Sam decided he preferred to go it alone without anything chemical. After all, he still had a brain – or liked to think he did!

Dr Rhys was young and handsome and believed in the Hippocratic oath. That, and his sympathetic manner, meant he got lumbered with all the psychological stuff. He had suggested that maybe Sam might like to ‘talk’ to somebody. But Sam feared the ‘somebody’ might mean the lady vicar, who was training as a counsellor. Everyone knew she had a bee in her bonnet about male sexual performance. She had alarmed George, who dug the graves and helped out down at Folly Farm with the lambing, during bereavement counselling by asking questions which were hardly decent when you thought that his wife of fifty years was barely cold in her grave. And the grave dug lovingly by her grieving husband’s own two hands too! But these days it was all live-in sex and what the lady vicar worryingly referred to as ‘seeing to yourself’, with precious little about the rites of holy matrimony.

Sam had no particular concerns about the Church of England’s attitude to sexual habits, or to anything else for that matter. He had lived most of his working life in Hampstead and was a confirmed social atheist. But he didn’t care to be asked about his morning erections, particularly not by a lady vicar. George, it was rumoured, had been encouraged to plot a graph.

In any case, it was not attentions of that kind he necessarily craved; it was intellectual stimulus. The empty early mornings had produced a new idea for a creative project – a film about sheep dog trials. According to Nicky Pope, this chap who’d moved into Spring Cottage was a writer. He would probably welcome a chance to hear about Sam’s contacts in the film trade.

Mr Golightly’s first day of writing had been a washout. The shopping excursion with Johnny had protracted into lunch. The cottage had been chilly on their return, and the boy, off his own bat, had read, and apparently comprehended, the instruction book for the wood-burning stove. A miracle, Mr Golightly couldn’t help thinking, and far more useful than some he had known. The impossible-looking diagrams had seemingly been clear as daylight to Johnny, who had flicked, switched and adjusted knobs and had even managed to open the firelighters, which were packed so impenetrably that they defeated Mr Golightly. After that it would have been churlish not to offer to share his modest lunch, though, from the way Johnny had wolfed down the rolls, they could have done with the species of miracle which multiplies.

Johnny had left just after four and by the time Mr Golightly had washed up and checked his e-mails again, dealt with a question from Muriel – it was shocking what the government took you for VAT these days – it was far too late to begin a day’s work. Instead, he strolled up to the Stag and Badger, where he adroitly avoided conversation with Sam Noble by helping out the young poet in the woolly hat again with his crossword.

Mr Golightly was a crossword addict, a passion he shared with Muriel at the office and over the years he had fallen into the habit of doing The Times crossword with her. One reason for reading the dictionary was to pick up unusual vocabulary which might crop up, since it is well known that crossword setters are of the tribe of fiends. It had once been put to him that in the beginning was the word, and although in his own view things were both simpler and more complicated than that, it was a theory he had sympathy for.

Long ago Mr Golightly had discovered the principle of synchronicity, the law of meaningful coincidence, and it was following its signs in his business practices which was perhaps responsible for their general success. So he was not too surprised when four down in The Times read, ‘a deprived adolescence provides succour (6)’.

‘Uberty!’ said Mr Golightly, blatantly disregarding Luke’s chance to have a shot at the clue.

Luckily, Luke was not competitive. ‘What’s that? Never heard of it.’

But at that moment a thickset young man with a loud jacket, exuding a smell of aftershave, equally loud, made his way towards the bar.

‘Evening. Wolford, Brian Wolford.’ The man held out a well-cushioned hand. Perhaps it was the overpowering smell of the aftershave but Mr Golightly withheld his own. Rather deliberately he picked up his pint mug.

‘Golightly,’ he said. ‘You know Mr Weatherall?’

‘You’re the writer chappie,’ said Wolford, ignoring Luke. He made it sound like an accusation.

‘My friend is a writer too,’ said Mr Golightly, distinctly.

But Luke was more interested in the crossword clue. ‘So what’s it mean, then?’

‘Funny thing’, said Wolford, ‘I work up at the prison yonder. You come across some pretty weird stuff there. I’ve often thought of writing a book about it. Might drop round your place and have a natter. We’ve all got a novel in us, right?’

‘Uberty?’ Mr Golightly said, pointedly addressing only Luke. ‘It’s the milk of human kindness,’ he explained, a trifle vaingloriously.

The next morning saw Mr Golightly more than ever determined to get the soap opera under way. Staring out of the window for inspiration he saw the horse, Samson, standing four-square in the greensward. Columns of fine rain were blowing in misty battalions across the fields. A kestrel, resting magisterially on pillows of air, circled above the low-falling rain. Kingdom of daylight’s dapple-drawn dawn falcon…Mr Golightly found he was suddenly overcome by a need for coffee.

But, maddeningly, he had forgotten that the boy had finished off all the milk yesterday.

Up at the shop the bearded Steve said, with evident satisfaction, ‘Out of milk, I’m afraid, even the long-life. Got soya, though, that do you? Weather’s all right for those as has webbed feet.’

Mr Golightly did not care for soya in his coffee. He bought a small tin of evaporated milk and returned glumly down the hill. Yesterday’s buoyancy had deserted him. The unwritten soap opera had become an unresponsive lover, one who resists the most ardent attentions.

Coffee with evaporated milk did not improve his mood but, nevertheless, by 10 a.m. Mr Golightly was once again seated at the gateleg table. Better check the e-mails in case there was something at the office…

Three messages, heralded by their zippy musical accompaniment, materialised in the ‘Inbox’. One from Muriel, to do with one of the many unpaid accounts they were increasingly having to hassle for, one from a firm selling timeshares in Spain – Mr Golightly paused to wonder how ‘time’, which was indivisible, could conceivably be ‘shared’ – and one from yesterday’s anonymous correspondent:

hath the rain a father?

it asked.

Mr Golightly did not know what to think. He was too unpractised in the art of e-mail to be able to decipher any clue to the questioner’s identity, and while he didn’t want to reveal that he was the victim of an anonymous correspondent perhaps an e-mail to Mike was called for. He thought a moment then tapped out:

‘Dear Mike,

If someone e-mails me how do I know who they are?

And how do I reply to them?’

He pondered a moment more and then concluded:

‘Yours ever, Golightly’.

Mr Golightly had never had occasion to write to Mike before, or any of the office staff. It made him realise how little he really knew about ordinary channels of communication. Alone in Spring Cottage, with no one by to protect or defend him, he experienced an unfamiliar sense of vulnerability.

The marching columns of rain had dissolved into a uniform drizzle and Mr Golightly thought he might stretch his legs before starting work. The River Dart was flowing into hills covered today by a modest décolleté of mist and seagulls had winged their way inland suggesting rough weather out at sea. The air was laden with moisture, but Mr Golightly had spent much of his existence under sun-parched skies and the cool wash of English country air was a welcome balm.

He stood with the mild wetness anointing his face. He had to admit it, he was rattled: not merely by the fact of the phantom e-mailer but by the nature of the message. The references to fatherhood and the coincidence of the rain gave the impression that his unknown correspondent was peering at him knowingly – a feeling that challenged his usual security.

Back inside, the ‘Inbox’ announced that he had received another e-mail. Opening it, he read:

boss,

scroll down and you’ll see name of sender and address – bring cursor to ‘reply’ box, click and space for message will appear – compose message then click on ‘send’ – simple!

cheers, mox

There was something unsettling in this communication too. Mike seemed to have dispensed with the normal rudiments of style, with capital letters for example. And then the tone, while not actually disrespectful, was uncharacteristically familiar – that circle and cross by the signature, presumably betokening kisses and so forth. Presumably such endearments were part of e-mail etiquette. In which case, was he expected to do likewise?

Following Mike’s instructions he scrolled down the anonymous message to find nemo@nemo.com. Whoever the someone was, they had an ancient language in common. Nemo; evidently, the someone who was ‘no one’ didn’t wish to be known.

Slightly trepidatious, Mr Golightly clicked on the ‘Reply’ box and at once a space appeared ready to record his answer. But what in the name of heaven to say to an anonymous correspondent? Mike had mentioned, in passing, the propensity of e-mailers sometimes to get into overintimate communications. Mr Golightly had given this information short shrift – it was hardly the kind of mess he had foreseen himself getting into. But might he not be about to fall into just such a trap?

And yet he had to admit he was curious about the anonymous mailer.

He sat motionless for a minute and then found he had typed:

who is this that darkeneth counsel?

Mr Golightly was not quite sure himself where these words had come from. But then many things which emanated from him emerged without consideration. ‘Consider’ – now there was a word the phantom e-mailer might also understand…con sidere – with the stars. Was that how the e-mails travelled, through the upper reaches of the ether? He pictured himself, wearing a pair of silver shoes, strolling soundlessly through the quiet chilly regions of the far-flung universes…

At this moment a loud banging at the back door and a raised voice penetrated his musing.

‘Hell-oah! Anybody at home?’

‘Someone, I know, who’s in the know, said there was some kind of handkerchief-pankerchief with the judges.’

Sam Noble had been at Spring Cottage for nearly an hour. Mr Golightly had, slightly maliciously, directed his visitor to the orange sofa, but a challenge to the spine is no deterrent to the determinedly garrulous. Sam had accepted, and drunk, two coffees from the Spiderman mug, and was well launched into the history of What’s a Nice Girl?, his film about female jockeys.

‘Everyone said it was in the bag.’ A piece of luck for this Golightly chap, Sam thought, that he was able to put him in the frame about the movie business.

Mr Golightly, who, by and large, believed in the virtues of politeness, was suffering in silence. Protected as he had been by his faithful staff, he was rarely exposed to unwanted company and lacked the social know-how to rid himself of an unwelcome guest.

‘Of course, it was a set-up,’ Sam reaffirmed. ‘Everyone knew the Palme should have gone to Nice Girl.’

‘Yes?’ asked Mr Golightly.

‘No question.’

There was a pause during which Mr Golightly said nothing. He had had no idea how mind-numbing self-absorption could be.

‘So, what are you up to then?’ asked Sam, mustering some faint recollection that social engagement was supposed to entail dialogue.

‘Up to?’ The question had an intrusive flavour; it reminded Mr Golightly of the anonymous e-mailer’s challenges.

‘Yes, what are you writing, then? Novel, is it?’ Sam gambled. It was usually a novel that chaps like this were engaged in when they came to out-of-the-way parts like Great Calne. They all thought they’d got one in them!

‘Not exactly,’ said Mr Golightly, stiffly.

‘If it was a script, then if there was any way I could –’

‘Not a script,’ said Mr Golightly. ‘Thank you,’ he added. He did not cross his fingers behind his back because he regarded such superstitions as childish. But he felt indignant that he had been driven to fib.

‘– because if it was a script then I’m your man.’

Mr Golightly had observed over the years that there are occasions when a truth cannot be told. On the whole, his policy had been tell the truth and shame the Devil, but there were also occasions when a truth can act as a lie.

‘It’s a dramatic epic,’ he averred, ‘which seeks to unfold the moral and spiritual history of human civilisation.’ That should do the trick. No one in their right mind could share an interest in such an undertaking.

‘Really?’ said Sam Noble. ‘The young chap up at Lavinia’s barn is writing a narrative poem. Tell you what, we should form a writers’ group. Read each other’s work, swap ideas. What d’you say?’

There were no e-mails waiting for him when Mr Golightly was released by his visitor’s departure back to the laptop. Since Sam Noble had drained the tin of evaporated milk dry, if there was to be coffee, it meant another trip to the shop.

Immanuel Kant, Mr Golightly had heard, formed such a dependency upon coffee that, on an occasion when it was slow to arrive, he was heard to mutter, ‘Well, we can die after all; it is but dying, and in the next world, thank God, there is no coffee and consequently no waiting for it.’ Mr Golightly had begun to experience a fellow feeling with the querulous philosopher. It seemed impossible that he should embark on the revision of the work he had ironically represented to Sam Noble without the stimulus of caffeine. But after his caller he really couldn’t stomach another encounter with the bearded one up at the Post Office Stores. Maybe he would drive into Oakburton, fill the Traveller with petrol and get in some more supplies before getting down to work?

Being Friday, it was the Reverend Meredith Fisher’s day for Plymouth and Johnny Spence was lodged again in the yew tree. Its foliage was thick, little of the drizzling rain penetrated to the tree’s occupant, who lay in the fork of the trunk looking down like a watchful jaguar.

The jaguar gaze registered Mr Golightly manoeuvring the Traveller into the street. It crossed Johnny’s mind to ask for another lift; but, like any other wild animal, the coil of Johnny’s instinct was caution. His encounter with Spring Cottage’s occupant had turned out surprisingly well. But Johnny’s life to date had shown that if you trusted anyone on this earth you needed your head examined.

In any case, with the old bloke out of the way, he could get inside the house and have another snoop round.

Johnny slithered down the yew tree and nipped warily across the road and round the back of Spring Cottage, where he had noted from his first visit that the window was left unfastened. No probs – he could get in easy.

Samson sauntered over to the wire fence and stood watching as the boy creature swung his leg up and on to the sill, reached an arm inside an open window and disappeared inside.

On the other side of the window Johnny found the laptop on the gateleg table. It took five minutes to work out the means to find the password. Rapidly, he scanned the contents. Nothing interesting. No porn. A few e-mails, no sex or love stuff. There was someone called herself Muriel but she didn’t seem to amount to much.

Upstairs offered no new discoveries either. A book by the bed; Jeeves in the Offing. Nothing else different.

Downstairs there was a box of stuff. More books: Ethics by Spinoza, The Sermons of John Donne, The Odyssey, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, Philip Pullman, a load of poetry books, The Wind in the Willows – which was a kids’ book – and another book for kids Johnny’s mum had given him when he was seven, Alice. Maybe the old guy was a perve after all?

Johnny cast around looking for another unexplored quarter to assuage his curiosity. Next to the music centre there was a box of tapes and CDs – classical stuff and some rock – Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Elvis, David Bowie, the kind of stuff old ravers went for – no rap or thrash, not that you’d expect that.

Mr Golightly had driven out of the village before he remembered his credit card. As a rule, he carried no cash or card as his staff attended to all money matters for him. But part of the point of the holiday was supposed to be an opportunity to sample the pleasures of self-sufficiency. Bill, his PA, had organised a special ‘Gold’ card. There had been talk of ‘Platinum’ but Mr Golightly had rejected this – platinum, with no poetic tradition behind it, he regarded as inferior to the nobler virtues of gold. However, in assembling the usual furniture of the inner pocket of his jacket – notebook, fountain pen, propelling pencil – he had forgotten to include the neat case in which, expensively sheathed, the card had arrived from the credit-card agency. As Martha would say, he would forget his own name next!

Johnny had memories of Elvis because before his mum met his stepdad she had used to dance to a tape, Elvis: the Greatest Hits, with Johnny in her arms. Mr Golightly, returning to retrieve the card, was greeted by a familiar bass-baritone declaiming that you could do anything you chose except step on his blue suede shoes. ‘Ah,’ he said, entering the parlour where he was met by a terrified young face, ‘a fellow fan…!’

There were some Cokes still left over from the six-pack in the fridge. Johnny drank one of these while Mr Golightly made himself a cup of black coffee and they both listened to the King. However, when it came to one track, Mr Golightly made a pretext to leave the room.

The lyrics never failed to remind him of someone who was always on his mind.

9

MR GOLIGHTLY’S CD SESSION WITH JOHNNY HAD concluded, to Johnny’s surprise, with no questions asked about his presence in Spring Cottage. It was as if his weird host believed the purpose of the call was to establish a musical bond. He had played Johnny some other CDs which, once Johnny had got over the shock of being offered a Coke, rather than a smack round the head, he found quite entertaining. Mr Golightly sounded pleased when his guest asked the name of one of the pieces.

‘Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” – an innovative work. Who is your own favourite?’

Johnny said he liked Badly Drawn Boy.

‘Any special number I should look out for?’ enquired Mr Golightly.

Johnny suggested his latest album, Have You Fed The Fish, was cool.

‘I’ll make a note of it. Next time you visit I must play you some Schubert songs, the Winterreise are particularly fine. But now I have things pressing and no doubt you have your own engagements to attend to…?’

It was nearly lunchtime and Johnny resumed his jaguar position in the yew tree while his host returned to the gateleg table prepared to start afresh. Coffee first. But hell and damnation, he still had no milk!

Mr Golightly consulted his watch. There was no help for it, a trip up to the shop and the aggressive young man with the beard. But a notice in green biro, also somewhat aggressive, met him, stating baldly that the shop was closed between the hours of one and two. To go in to Oakburton now would take up yet more of a day in which he had promised himself faithfully he would commence work. But to work without coffee…more and more Mr Golightly found himself in sympathy with the cantankerous philosopher.

Ellen Thomas lying on her sofa heard the wind chimes in the pear tree. A man was standing outside the glass door which made a fragile barrier between her and the terrible incandescence beyond. With the sun behind his head making a bright coronet, she thought at first he was the Angel of Death come to grant her release. Then she saw it was just her new neighbour with the funny name.

Ellen tried to throw off the overwhelming sense of listlessness which, like a heavy rug, covered every bit of her. She raised her body carefully from the sofa. Everything she did now she did slowly because she knew if she moved too fast she would shatter into a million fragments.

‘I’ve disturbed you,’ said Mr Golightly. He rocked slightly on the balls of his feet in embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry.’ He held in his hand a small pale pink jug, slightly cracked about the lip.

‘No,’ said Ellen truthfully. Nothing could disturb her more than she had already been disturbed.

‘Only,’ said her neighbour, ‘I have stupidly run out of milk.’

‘Oh, milk…’ said Ellen Thomas. She made it sound as if it was a concept foreign to her.

‘It sounds daft,’ Mr Golightly went on, ‘but I find I can’t get down to work without coffee. And the shop is closed for lunch so I just wondered…’ He held out the jug awkwardly, like a small boy making a peace-offering.

‘I can give you a cup of coffee, if that’s what you want.’ Whatever possessed her to say that?

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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