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