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.
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