Read Online Mr Golightly's Holiday by Salley Vickers - Free Book Online Page A

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 shouldguard 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