Mr Golightly’s Holiday. Salley Vickers

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.