Mr Golightly's Holiday by Salley Vickers Page A

gathered its own momentum, which had moved under laws he had certainly created but seemed to have passed beyond his control.
    He sighed and pressed the start on the CD player. ‘Well, if your baby leaves you,/And you’ve gotta tale to tell –’
    Here, now, was another thing. The pain which seemed such an inevitable accompaniment of all relationships. Mr Golightly’s foot swung to the beat of the music which obscured the sound of a rap at the door. The rapping was repeated more insistently.
    ‘Hell!’ exclaimed Mr Golightly, not altogether sincerely, for he had come to a point in his procrastinations where interruptions were something of a mercy.
    When he had finally kicked open the front door, which had swollen again in the April rains, Mr Golightly saw before him a figure he vaguely recognised: an athletic-looking, ginger-haired young man wearing a large-checked sports jacket.
    ‘Brian Wolford. We met up at the Stag.’
    The prison officer from Princetown, recalled Mr Golightly, wondering what he wanted.
    Whatever it was, Brian Wolford didn’t wait to be invited but walked straight on in. Mr Golightly put ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on ‘Pause’ and offered coffee.
    ‘Thank you, sir, never touch it.’
    ‘Coke?’ There was a can left over from the six-pack.
    ‘Not offering me a line, are you, sir? ‘Scuse my little joke. No, I don’t touch sugar or artificial sweeteners either.’ Wolford revealed perfect teeth.
    Mr Golightly’s teeth were almost antique, and he rarely showed them, but his grin now had the look of an aged dog trying to outwit an annoying master.
    ‘Milk?’
    ‘Fat-free diet, I’m afraid!’ Wolford, whose manner did not suggest fear, massaged his chest. The gesture gave an impression that what lay beneath the shirt was as indisputably hairy as the hand.
    ‘Water?’
    ‘I won’t if it hasn’t been filtered, sir, begging your pardon.’
    ‘Not at all,’ said Mr Golightly. He was intrigued to note how the refusal of hospitality was creating more attention than a demand for it.
    ‘Mind if I take a pew?’
    ‘I’m so sorry…’ His social skills had run their course but the man’s over-sureness invited rudeness.
    ‘Sorry to trouble you, sir, it’s this character we’ve got who’s done a runner,’ said Wolford, confidentially. As he spoke his tongue flicked lightly between his teeth.
    There was no one about to hear them in the dust-dancing sunlit parlour but a tone of confidentiality, Mr Golightly observed to himself, has more to do with the speaker’s sense of self-importance than a wish for privacy. ‘Yes?’
    ‘Thing is, up there we don’t see how he could’ve gotaway from the area. We got a cordon round the moor quick as scratch your bum –’ Mr Golightly shifted his buttocks uncomfortably – ‘so we’re asking around again, getting folk to search their memories, know what I mean?’
    Earlier in his existence, as Mr Golightly was the first to acknowledge, his character had included a punitive streak, but time had softened his responses and nowadays he tried to let tenderness rule. His son had had a liking for miscreants and malefactors – had even sought out their company in preference to the well-to-do intelligentsia where he could easily have held his own among the best of them. The image of the escaped prisoner, hunted like a beast by men like Wolford, brought in its wake painful memories of other persecutions.
    Perhaps detecting some unspoken dissent, the prison officer assumed a more official manner.
    ‘Just thought I’d call by, ask you to keep a look out. You’re new to the area. Familiarity breeds contempt.’ Wolford showed more of the superior teeth. ‘You might notice something which folk round here wouldn’t.’
    ‘When are we speaking of?’ enquired Mr Golightly. His memory may have been failing him lately but he recalled the date of the escape perfectly: it was the day at the Stag and Badger when the sun had glinted on Mary Simms’s hair. A prison