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.
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.
