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

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 awhite 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 the wine which had gone to her head.
    All at once, she wanted nothing more than to be outside. For too long she had managed no more than to creep out, with Wilfred, at dusk, like a felon on the run – it had hardly deserved the name of a ‘walk’. Now she felt a brisk stroll was just what she needed.
    Summoning the black Labrador, they went out together and up the lane which rose towards the moor. As she watched the dog sniff along the hedgerow, her trained eye spotted tiny flowers like snowflakes, and she crouched toput her nose to their sequestered sweetness. There are few blessings, thought Ellen Thomas – her head a little dizzy from the wine and from bending –