The Children Of Dynmouth Read online

  Mr Blakey came out of a distant glass-house, beyond lawns and flower-beds. He called at the dogs, but they paid him no attention. Timothy stood still, not wishing to be bitten by the animals.

  ‘I was wanting to see the kids,’ he said when Mr Blakey came closer. The man was known to him by sight and by name; he had nothing against him. ‘Nice day, Mr Blakey,’ he said.

  Mr Blakey seized the dogs by their collars. He pointed at the house and ordered them to go towards it, which they obediently did.

  ‘I was talking to the kids yesterday,’ Timothy explained, giving Mr Blakey a smile. The man was staring at him, he noticed.

  ‘You came into this garden in the night,’ Mr Blakey said eventually.

  Timothy, still smiling, shook his head. He said he was always in bed at night. He laughed companionably. ‘I think you had a dream, sir.’

  At this point the children came through the drawing-room French windows. After a moment of hesitation they walked towards Timothy Gedge. Mr Blakey returned to his glass-house.

  ‘What d’you want?’ Stephen said.

  ‘I was thinking about the wedding-dress.’ He held out the bag with the Union Jack on it. ‘I have a carrier here for it.’

  ‘We haven’t got a wedding-dress,’ Stephen said quickly. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Is there a price on the wedding-dress, Stephen?’

  Stephen didn’t reply. He began to walk back towards the house. Kate followed him, and Timothy followed, also.

  ‘Your dad’d have no use for it, Stephen. It’s still in the trunk, no good to anyone.’ He said he wished he could be friends with them. He reminded them that yesterday he’d bought them two tins of Coca-Cola.

  ‘We don’t want to be friends with you,’ Stephen said angrily.

  ‘Leave us alone.’

  ‘You’re older than us,’ Kate explained.

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘We’re only twelve.’

  They had halted in their walk. Within the house, passing by the landing window, Mrs Blakey paused, surprised to see this older boy in the garden. It was odd that he should be there. Vaguely she wondered if Kate and Stephen had been up to mischief.

  ‘Your mum has no use for it either, Stephen.’

  ‘Stephen’s mother –’

  ‘Stephen’s mother’s dead, Kate.’

  Stephen began to walk away again. Kate said:

  ‘It upsets Stephen, talking about his mother.’

  She moved on, but Timothy Gedge moved with her. He remained silent until they had reached a flight of three stone steps between one lawn and a higher one, where Stephen was waiting. Then he said:

  ‘It’s no joke when your mother’s dead. It’s no joke for a kid, it could happen to any of us.’ He nodded at Stephen and Stephen stood still, waiting for him to turn and go, staring at him and frowning.

  ‘Plant’s going to convey the bath for me in his van, Stephen. Plant says the act’ll bring the house down.’

  ‘It’s all lies what you’re saying.’ Stephen’s face was flushed. He glared at Timothy and Timothy nodded at him, as if he’d misheard what had been said. He smiled at Stephen. He said:

  ‘Only I definitely need the wedding-dress.’

  ‘Well, you can’t have it. You’re stupid and pathetic. We don’t want to have anything to do with you.’

  Mrs Blakey, recognizing that something was wrong, rapped sharply on the landing window and beckoned at the children. Timothy waved at her, endeavouring to indicate that nothing was the matter.

  ‘I saw you at the funeral, Stephen. I saw your dad. I saw your mum, Kate.’ He spoke keenly and with even greater friendliness than before. ‘Your mother’s finished with the dress, Stephen.’

  They looked at him smiling his smile, one hand hanging limply by his side, the other grasping the carrier-bag. Then Stephen walked on towards the open French windows, and Kate walked beside him. When he’d said he’d seen Stephen at the funeral she’d felt afraid of him for a moment. Something in his voice had made her feel afraid, she didn’t know what.

  He walked beside her and she knew he was still smiling. She could hear him sucking at a fruit gum.

  ‘D’you know the Abigails, Kate?’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘And the Dasses?’ He laughed. ‘They have a house called Sweet-lea.’

  ‘Please go away now.’ She put her head on one side, trying to make him understand from the look in her eyes that Stephen had been upset by the references to his mother’s death. He nodded at her. He said to Stephen:

  ‘A person can’t help himself, Stephen.’

  At the landing window Mrs Blakey frowned. The boy looked strange, loose-limbed and broad-shouldered, with his very fair hair. The children seemed quite tiny beside him, Stephen even frail. He kept grinning at them as though they were all three the very best of friends, but clearly that wasn’t quite so. He was so very familiar on the streets of the town, with that zipped yellow jacket and his jeans, yet he looked like something from another world in the garden. He didn’t belong in gardens, any more than he belonged in the company of two small children. His presence puzzled her beyond measure.

  ‘A person has temptations. You could argue like that, Stephen.’

  It seemed to them that he said anything that came into his head. His head was like a dustbin, with all sorts of rubbish mingling in it, and all of it eventually spewing out of his mouth.

  ‘Only the Commander was upset with nerves on account of a remark I made the other night. D’you understand what I’m referring to, Kate?’

  ‘How could she?’ Stephen cried. ‘How could she possibly make head or tail –’

  ‘The Commander’s gay as a grasshopper, homo-ing all over the joint. Out after cub scouts, lads in the Essoldo, anything you like. Up on the golf-course, down on the beach, in and out the windows. The wife never guessed.’

  He smiled at Kate because she was frowning, seeming bewildered and even put out. ‘The wife didn’t guess till it slipped out when I was on the sauce the other night. She married a gaylord, Kate.’

  Stephen shook his head, not believing that. There’d been a master at Ravenswood, a man called Funny Stiles who’d been given the sack because he’d made boys presents of whistles and fountain-pens. But Commander Abigail wasn’t like Funny Stiles. It couldn’t possibly make sense for a man who was married to go homo-ing about.

  They had reached the French windows. It wouldn’t take two minutes to slip up to the attic, Timothy Gedge said.

  ‘I often saw your dad,’ he said, ‘out with the field-glasses. The day I saw him at her funeral I said to myself he was a fine man. I saw him standing there getting wet all over him and I said to myself he was a fine person. I said it afterwards to the clergyman. The way he stood, I remarked to the Reverend Feather, the way he bowed his head down over the loss of your mother, Stephen. There’s some stand any old how, you’d be really ashamed of them. You’d want to go up to them and tell them to do better.’

  ‘You’re half mad,’ Stephen said quietly, with anger just beneath the surface of his voice.

  Timothy shook his head. ‘I thought the same thing the night I saw him with her wedding-dress. Not like Plant or Abigail, I remarked to myself. Not like Dass or the clergyman. I’d say your father looks a different kettle of fish, Stephen, and isn’t that the way to keep it? Any trouble your father might have we can hide under wraps. D’you get the picture, Stephen?’

  Stephen stepped through the French windows and when Kate was in the drawing-room with him he stood in the opening, one hand on the frame of the window, to prevent the older boy from entering. ‘Don’t ever dare to come into the garden again,’ he ordered, with the same violence in his voice. ‘Clear off and don’t come back.’

  He closed the window and latched it.

  ‘Whatever’s going on?’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘Whatever’s Timothy Gedge want?’

  He’d lost a penknife on the beach, Kate said. He was wondering if they’d found it.


  There was a spinney they’d made their own, by the river. They went there in the middle of that morning, passing through the gate in the garden wall and along the cliff-path for a few hundred yards and then on to the golf-course. Rapidly they crossed fairways, by greens and bunkers and tees. They passed behind the club-house, leaving the golf-course behind them. They went through a field where sheep grazed, and then through bracken that sloped down steeply to the River Dyn. They wore Wellington boots, their corduroy jeans and the same jerseys as yesterday, Kate’s red, Stephen’s navy-blue.

  Stephen walked ahead of her on the river bank. He led the way around the edge of a marsh and then through drier land, with limestone boulders on it. Ferns grew among the boulders, and further on the spring undergrowth was already dense. At a twist in the river lay the spinney, a clump of birch saplings sprouting through a thicket of bramble. It wasn’t large and never attracted other people. A stream ran through it to the river.

  In the middle of the undergrowth, unseen either from the river or the bank on the other side, they had built a hut with lengths of fallen wood and some corrugated iron they’d found. It was a private lair, and though they’d often wished to have a fire they’d never done so – not because they feared for the dry wood of the spinney but because they knew that rising smoke would sooner or later be investigated.

  They crawled into their hut. Outside, the sun glanced through a lacing of branches and bramble and scattered light in patches. Inside it was almost dark. They didn’t speak. Kate’s arms were clasped around her knees in an attitude she often took up. Stephen lay flat, gazing out at the patterns of sunlight, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. They hadn’t spoken to one another about Timothy Gedge, either last night or since Stephen had closed the French windows in his face, several hours ago. They hadn’t said to one another that they couldn’t understand his talk about the Abigails and the Dasses and Mr Plant of the Artilleryman’s Friend. They had attempted to visualize his world, as they had so often visualized each other’s boarding-schools. But they knew too little about him and what they knew was bewildering. They tried to imagine him acting in a comic manner the part of a man who had murdered three wives in a bath. They tried to imagine people watching this gruesome comedy.

  ‘He’s making it up. The wedding-dress isn’t even there.’ Kate spoke softly, shaking her head in denial.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s there.’ He remembered waking up in the middle of the night, and then he remembered Miss Tomm walking into the dormitory and saying that the headmaster wanted to see him and Cartwright saying: ‘Eee, what’s Fleming done?’ He remembered his father in his tweed overcoat in the Craw’s study, his father saying later how it had happened, and then the funeral in the rain. Timothy Gedge had said he’d seen him there. He’d said the best place for the people of Dynmouth was in their coffins.

  Stephen suddenly wanted to hit him. He wanted to hit him all over the face with his fists, to smash away his stupid smile, to stop him talking.

  ‘I think we should tell Mrs Blakey,’ Kate said.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head, still gazing at the patterns of sunshine on the grass outside the hut. ‘No,’ he said again, closing the subject.

  They made a dam on the stream, which was something they often did when they came to the spinney. They could feel the chill of the water through the rubber of their Wellington boots. Their hands, piling up stones, became red with cold.

  Kate watched him, glancing sideways without turning her head. In the garden that morning she’d thought he was going to cry because of the memory of his mother’s death. She’d thought he was going to turn his back on Timothy Gedge and on herself and run into the house so that they wouldn’t see his tears. She’d felt his unhappiness and she felt it now. She wanted to say that he’d feel all right when a little time had passed, just like you did at school when you were homesick at the beginning of term. But she didn’t because she didn’t know that that would happen. She didn’t know what would happen, she didn’t know what was happening now.

  They ate the sandwiches they’d made before they’d left the house, and then lay in their shelter and read two paper-backed books they’d brought with them. In the middle of the afternoon they decided to walk back to Dynmouth. There was an army display on for one day only, Mrs Blakey had said at breakfast: the car-park behind the fish-packing station had been taken over for it.

  *

  ‘Hullo there,’ a sergeant said. ‘Come to see for yourselves, then?’

  Boys were playing with machine-guns, swivelling them this way and that, peering through the sights. Bored soldiers were showing how various mechanisms operated and explaining the rate at which bullets could be discharged. Other boys climbed in and out of tanks or queued outside a caravan which advertised a film about combat in the jungle. A second caravan contained an exhibition of recruitment leaflets and in a third one there was an exhibition of army rations for Antarctic expeditions. Amplified pop music was playing.

  ‘This looks the best,’ Kate said, determinedly leading the way to the rations caravan. ‘Look, tinned rice pudding. And Spangles. Imagine taking Spangles to the Antarctic!’

  There was meal to make porridge with in the Antarctic, and sugar and powdered milk, and biscuits and powdered soup, and tinned stew.

  ‘Whatever next?’ Kate tried to giggle, reading out the directions on the stew, but nothing seemed funny. ‘I think they’re pampered,’ she said lamely.

  They went to the recruitment caravan, and to the film about combat in the jungle, which they left before it was over.

  ‘Cheers!’ Timothy Gedge said, coming up behind them.

  His presence wasn’t a surprise. They didn’t reply to his greeting. He was carrying the same carrier-bag and for some reason they found it impossible not to stare at it. It swung lightly in the air, the Union Jack gay against his pallid clothes, seeming imbued with his own anticipation.

  He walked away from the army display with them, offering them fruit gums and chattering. In his woman’s voice he repeated two conversations between waiters and men ordering plates of soup. He drew their attention to the goods in shop windows, to the cooking-stoves and washing-machines in the windows of the electricity showrooms. These electrical gadgets were all good value, he said, nodding his head repeatedly: the South-Western Electricity Board was an honest organization. ‘If your mum’s after a washer,’ he advised Kate, ‘she’d best move in while the sale’s on.’ In everything he said there were wisps of mockery.

  ‘Why are you following us?’ Stephen asked, knowing the answer to the question.

  ‘I need the dress for my act, Stephen.’

  He smiled his smile at them. They stopped, waiting for him to walk on, but he didn’t.

  ‘We’ve told you we’re not going to get a wedding-dress for you,’ Kate said.

  He began to whistle beneath his breath, a soft sound without a tune, as if he were attempting to imitate the rushing of wind through trees. He ceased it in order to speak again.

  ‘It’s great being friends with you,’ he said. He pointed at meat in a shop window and said it was good value. ‘Did you ever notice,’ he said to Kate, ‘Miss Lavant has bad teeth?’

  They walked on, not speaking, not reacting to what he was saying. He asked them why elephants didn’t ride bicycles and explained that it was because they hadn’t any thumbs to ring the bell with. George Joseph Smith, he told them, had spent a night in Dynmouth one time, at the Castlerea boarding-house, still in business.

  ‘Were you ever in Tussaud’s, Kate? They have the bath set up on the floor there, you can reach a hand out and touch it. They have Christie in Tussaud’s, Kate. And this bloke called Haigh that sent his clothes in to the model-maker so’s they wouldn’t have the trouble of faking them. And another bloke that used to drink his own Number One.’ He laughed. He’d read up about George Joseph Smith, he said, after he’d got his idea for a show. ‘I read up about a lot of them, Kate. This Maybrick woman
who finished her hubby off with fly-papers. And the Thompson woman who was administering glass for eight months, only it didn’t take, so Freddie Bywaters had to stick a knife into the man near Ilford Station. And this Fulham woman who was administering arsenic, only all that was happening was her hubby was getting a tingling in his feet.’ He laughed again. A lot of it was comic, he explained, you definitely had to smile. You’d go mad if you couldn’t smile at things, you’d go mad without a sense of humour.

  ‘You should see a psychiatrist,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Freddie Bywaters definitely stuck the knife in, Stephen.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Freddie Bywaters. We think you’re insane.’

  ‘Did I mention the Dasses to you?’

  ‘We don’t want to hear about them.’ Stephen’s voice had risen, as it had that morning in the garden, and again Kate thought that he was trying not to cry. He was afraid of Timothy Gedge.

  ‘Let’s go in here, and I’ll show you that bath.’

  They were passing a builder’s yard. A. J. Swines, it said on high brown doors that were standing open so that lorries could pass in and out. Builders and Plumbers, it said.

  ‘It’s just there. Behind the timber sheds.’

  It would not be there, Kate thought. It would be like opening the trunk and the wedding-dress not being there. He would lead them into the yard and behind the sheds, and then he’d point at nothing and say there it was. It would at least be an explanation, a confirmation of his madness. Stephen hesitated and then followed the other two.

  They passed a cement-mixer that was being operated by two men with cement dust on their caps and dungarees. Timothy Gedge smiled at the men and said it was a nice day. He led the way behind some sheds in which planks of timber were stored. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘How’s about that then?’

  It was badly chipped and covered with rust marks. Timothy Gedge said it was made of tin. Quite light really, he explained, lifting up one end, not like a cast-iron one. ‘I thought you’d like to see it,’ he said as they left the yard. ‘Shall we walk up to the house now?’