The Children Of Dynmouth Read online

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  In High Park Avenue life fell together. During the first days of that Holy Week Mrs Abigail continued to believe that she could not endure a marriage that was a travesty, and that she could no longer endure life in Dynmouth. But as the days went on the truth became less difficult to live with than it had threatened to be, and she knew that she would never leave her husband because she, too, was to blame. The truth acquired a logic and an ordinariness, until in the end her blindness to it in the past became puzzling to comprehend. Increasingly, she wondered if in some unconscious way she had not simulated naivety since the first weeks of her marriage, if she had not – through her uncontrollable selflessness – permitted a skin to grow instead of probing beneath it. Married or unmarried, he would not have had the courage of his proclivities: he needed the pretence there had been because pretence was everything to him.

  Even within the handful of days of Holy Week, further pretence modestly began its growth. The Commander did not cease to deny the accusations of Timothy Gedge, while at the same time seeking his wife’s forgiveness in a general way. She recognized that he could not bear openly to confess, yet that he wished to in order to pronounce the mending of his ways. A message, unspoken, was there between them: he was to be a new man, there was to be a new relationship. But beneath the surface of resolution she knew he would regain his former self and enjoy again the shame of his surreptitious ways. He perked up during that Holy Week, little by little, hour by hour. He took up the daily routine of his swim again, and one afternoon when he was in the sea there was a visit to the bungalow by Timothy Gedge.

  ‘Fifteen p,’ the boy said, explaining that that was the amount outstanding since the night he’d cleaned the oven and left the tapioca saucepan to steep.

  She left him in the hall while she went to fetch her purse. When she returned with the money he brought up the matter of the dog’s-tooth suit. He asked if she’d had time to think about it. The Commander never wore it, he pointed out. He smiled at her, but the concern she’d once felt for him had wholly dissipated. ‘For the Easter Fête,’ he said. ‘I mentioned it.’

  She’d once been to the Easter Fête. She’d bought a pot of raspberry jam that had turned out to be bad. The talent contest had taken place in a marquee. Spot the Talent! a notice had said, but she hadn’t chosen to do so.

  ‘All right then?’ he said, smiling again, his head a little on one side, a gesture he’d had as a small boy. ‘O.K. to have the suit, is it?’

  ‘Of course not, Timothy.’ But while actually speaking she changed her mind. Quite suddenly it seemed fitting that the suit of her husband should garb a man who had slaughtered his brides: there was in that, somewhere, a gleam of relevance. It didn’t matter to her that Timothy Gedge intended to enact monstrous scenes in a rectory garden. It would have mattered once, she’d once have attempted to prevent him: for his own sake, she would have said. Instead, again, she told her visitor to wait.

  Her husband’s naval uniform hung neatly in his mock-mahogany wardrobe, retained with pride. Next to it was a suit in plain grey worsted and then a mustardy one, a brown pin-stripe, and the dog’s-tooth. She could remember the purchase of each, standing about herself in Dunne’s or Burton’s, going from one branch to another. She remembered his tetchiness with shop assistants, which presumably had been simulated. No doubt he’d enjoyed this association with young men, trousers and jackets endlessly tried on in curtained booths. ‘Oh, we can alter that, sir,’ a youth would pleasantly promise. ‘Nice young chap,’ he’d say casually afterwards, in Oxford Street or somewhere.

  She found a flat cardboard box in the bottom of the wardrobe and placed the dog’s-tooth suit in it. She didn’t try to disguise the gap it left behind by drawing the other suits together. He’d notice and wouldn’t mention it because mentioning would bring everything into the open again. He’d know what had happened to the suit, and it seemed right that he should: this small tribute to the truth that had been exposed seemed at least her due. She left the doors of the wardrobe open.

  ‘Do not ever come back here,’ she said in the hall.

  The boy had supplied her with facts. She should have been grateful. Yet as long as she lived she hoped she would never be obliged to exchange another word with him. She closed the hall door while he stood there, shutting him for ever away from her.

  In the rectory Lavinia Featherston’s edginess reached a new proportion.

  ‘He gives me the creeps,’ she angrily cried, protesting about Timothy Gedge as Mrs Blakey had. She’d come across the twins propped up against the garage doors, applauding and screaming with delight at a patter delivered in a woman’s voice. She’d snatched them away as if they were in danger, and afterwards burst into Quentin’s study to have her scene. She glared accusingly at him, investing him with all the blame for Timothy Gedge’s presence in the garden. Furiously, she again spoke of Old Ape coming and going with his red plastic bucket, and Mrs Slewy denying she’d ever touched a cancer-box in her life, and Miss Poraway and Mrs Stead-Carter and old Miss Trimm, now mercifully dead. None of them at least had ever bothered the children. ‘He’s not to come back,’ she snapped, banging the study door.

  ‘We think you’re too old,’ Quentin said, ‘to play with the twins, Timothy.’

  10

  He was possessed by devils, Kate said, and then wept and could not contain herself. If you believed he was possessed, she whispered between her sobs, everything was explained.

  In the kitchen Mrs Blakey comforted her and Mr Blakey sat at the scrubbed table stirring sugar into a cup of tea. Possessed by devils put him in mind of a case in the north of England: a man had become worse than ever apparently after clergymen of two denominations had attempted an exorcism ceremony. He’d seen on television once an exorcism ceremony, a clergyman’s hands on the head of the afflicted person, the clergyman jerking about with spasms, perspiring and dishevelled. Afterwards the clergyman had said he could feel the devils leaving the body of the afflicted person, like an electrical current seemingly. And then the evil was meant to flow into his own body, where it could do no harm because of the presence of God. A lot of malarkey, Mr Blakey had considered; clergymen on television looking for publicity. The man in the north of England had clearly been a nutcase. Extremely harmful it had been, meddling with him like that.

  Kate’s sobbing subsided and ceased. She sipped some of the cocoa Mrs Blakey had made for her. She said she wanted Timothy Gedge to stop looking up at the windows of the house. She’d gone down to the seashore with the dogs and there he’d been, following her. He was an awful person.

  ‘Say things, does he?’ Mrs Blakey asked as casually as she could, pushing a packet of wafer biscuits towards Kate.

  ‘He says horrible things.’

  She ate a biscuit and drank more cocoa, Mrs Blakey asked what kind of things, and she said just horrible things, things about people having secrets. He looked in people’s windows, like Miss Lavant’s. He followed people about. He listened to people’s conversation. He harassed people with jokes that weren’t funny.

  She would not go into the detail that Mrs Blakey urged her towards. ‘Unless you explain to us, dear,’ Mrs Blakey began. ‘Unless you could say –’

  ‘He’s possessed, he’s not a normal person: you can tell that when you’re with him.’ She told them about the disturbed girl at St Cecilia’s, the girl called Julie who performed feats of levitation, and about the girl who could read a page of a newspaper and remember it, and Enid who could hypnotize with a fountain-pen top. She repeated what Rosalind Swain had said about odd things happening in adolescence, about adolescents harbouring poltergeists. Devils could get into children because children were weak and didn’t know what was happening to them. In the past there’d been cases of children who were witches.

  Mrs Blakey, only a little less sceptical than her husband of this line of talk, nevertheless recalled how Timothy Gedge had affected her when he’d come on to the telephone with a woman’s voice, and her bewilde
rment when the silence had first begun in the house. Yet it was hard to believe that the explanation for all this was that a schoolboy was in the hands of devils. Hypnosis and levitation and poltergeists were all very well, and so was remembering the page of a newspaper, but what on earth did devils mean? A hundred years ago they might have made sense, due to ignorance: like the child said, there’d been talk of witches. In Africa they were probably believed in even today, because of drum-beating and that. When she thought about them, she saw devils as small creatures with hooves and a tail, horned and two-legged and yet at the same time resembling tadpoles. It was extremely difficult to imagine an association between such creatures and a Dynmouth boy.

  Yet Mrs Blakey continued to sense the unease she’d been aware of on the telephone, which she’d first of all sensed when she’d looked out of the landing window and seen the boy with the children in the garden. The boy had waved at her. In retrospect his yellow clothes had seemed, just for a moment then, an outward sign of some disorder.

  ‘It had nothing to do with a penknife, had it, Kate?’

  ‘Penknife?’

  ‘You said he’d lost his penknife.’

  Kate shook her head. Mrs Blakey smiled encouragingly. It would help to know in what way precisely he maligned people, but the child remained as mum as a mute, one hand gripped tightly into a fist, the other holding the mug of cocoa. ‘Don’t tell Stephen,’ was all she’d say. ‘Don’t tell him I told you.’

  ‘Stephen went off with a carrier-bag, dear.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Has it to do with Timothy Gedge? The carrier, Kate?’

  Kate shook her head again, saying she didn’t know, and Mrs Blakey was aware she wasn’t telling the truth. You always knew when a child was lying, by the light in the child’s eyes, as she’d discovered twenty-seven years ago with her own Winnie.

  Kate finished her cocoa, listening to Mr Blakey breathing while he drank his tea beside her. She wasn’t sorry she’d told them what she had. ‘I missed seeing you,’ Timothy Gedge’s voice said again, as it had on the beach. It had echoed after she’d left him, as she’d turned into the archway in the wall and passed through the shrubbery of azaleas and magnolias and tree mallows, as she’d passed through the drawing-room and the hall. ‘I missed seeing you,’ it had kept saying, just like it was saying now.

  ‘Mr Blakey’ll speak to him,’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘Mr Blakey’ll read the riot act if ever he shows his face again.’

  Kate nodded, but didn’t feel reassured. What good were riot acts being read? What could you say to a person who was possessed since being possessed was a mystery? You couldn’t know anything about a person who was possessed. All there was was the voice, going on like a weapon, confusing and tormenting.

  There was a secret, Mrs Blakey said, they were keeping a secret. ‘Won’t you tell us, dear?’ she pleaded, but Kate said it wasn’t her secret to tell.

  That night in bed, not able to sleep, she remembered she’d once knocked on Miss Malabedeely’s door and when Miss Malabedeely hadn’t answered she’d just gone in. Miss Malabedeely had been kneeling by a chair, praying, and Kate had thought immediately that she’d been asking God to stop Miss Shaw and Miss Rist being so unpleasant to her. Miss Malabedeely had looked embarrassed, discovered on her knees like that, but it hadn’t mattered because of her niceness.

  Kate remembered all that, and then she said to herself that she had been meant to remember it. She began to pray to God herself, seeing God quite clearly, as she always did when she said prayers, a robed, long-haired, bearded figure, partly obscured by clouds. She hadn’t thought of praying before. For all the week that Timothy Gedge had been tormenting them it hadn’t once occurred to her, which surprised her as she prayed now. She began to go through the whole thing in her prayer and then realized that God of course would know anyway, so she simply asked if it could be that Timothy Gedge was possessed by devils. The bearded face went on staring at her, the eyes not blinking, the lips not moving. But Kate knew she was being told she was right, that Timothy Gedge was possessed by devils and that before anything else could happen the devils must be taken out of him. Everything would be different if the devils were taken out of Timothy Gedge because God could do anything. He could perform miracles. He could turn what had happened into a dream. She could wake up and find that it was still the night of their parents’ wedding, that only that afternoon she and Stephen had been on the train. She could lie there thinking about a most unpleasant nightmare, thanking God that it wasn’t true.

  She closed her eyes and communicated again with the figure. She promised that the devils would be cast out of Timothy Gedge, as it said in the Bible. When she concentrated, urging a reply, she was certain she was told that in return for her promise the facts of the last week would be altered, that yes, of course, a miracle was possible.

  *

  He smiled when Stephen came to him. He nodded and smiled, not reaching for the carrier-bag, waiting for Stephen to hold it out to him. He was sucking a gum. His sharp-boned face was lit with pleasure.

  ‘I’ll never forget it,’ he said, ‘the sound of your mum going over that cliff, Stephen.’

  11

  It being Good Friday, the shops in Dynmouth were mostly closed. Fore Street and East Street were quiet, Pretty Street and Lace Street deserted. No one was about in the suburban roads and avenues.

  In Sir Walter Raleigh Park, however, the activities of Ring’s Amusements were reaching a crescendo: tomorrow afternoon, at one forty-five, the booths and stalls and whirligigs would welcome the public. The shouting of the dark-faced men was louder, the bustle more urgent, the dismantled machinery for the most part back in place again. A dozen or so extra men had made their appearance in Sir Walter Raleigh Park, with wives and children who now assisted with the preparations. Lines of washing hung between the caravans, transistor radios played loudly. There was a smell of frying.

  The Queen Victoria Hotel and the Marine, the Duke’s Head and the Swan were livelier with visitors than they had been. The Queen Victoria was full for the Easter weekend, the others nearly so. Some of these visitors strolled along the promenade; a few penetrated to the beach; none ventured on to the cliffs. Children eyed the closed Essoldo; a handful of golfers moved briskly on the golf-course. Quentin Featherston cut the grass of the rectory lawns again. It hadn’t grown much since he’d cut it a week ago, but he wanted the lawns to have a shaved appearance for the Easter Fête.

  As he operated the Suffolk Punch, his thoughts wandered idly, in and out about his parish, through the poverty in Boughs Lane, among the inadequate children of Mrs Slewy. He’d woken up at a quarter past four that morning to find Lavinia awake beside him, as often she was now in the middle of the night. She said she was sorry she’d been so cross about Timothy Gedge. She worried about the twins, she said. The twins had wandered out of the rectory garden and had been missing for twenty minutes. They’d played with matches in their room, lighting a fire in the garden of their dolls’ house. All children, he’d begun to say, but she’d cut him short. Another thing, she didn’t feel she was good any more at running the nursery school. Indignantly, he’d told her what nonsense that was. Her nursery school had a waiting list a mile long. Everyone said it was better than the Ring-o-Roses, where there was no discipline of any kind whatsoever. And the playgroup that the W R V S ran was stodgy. In the end, to his own surprise, he had quite successfully smoothed away her early-morning blues, and she’d returned to sleep without having mentioned once the child she’d lost.

  As he walked behind the lawnmower he didn’t care for, he remembered the first time he’d ever seen her. He’d met her on the beach walking with a dog, a wire-haired terrier called Dolly which had come sniffing up to him. He’d told her he’d come to Dynmouth to help old Canon Flewett. He’d loved her immediately, without any hesitation.

  He loved her still, with just the same passion. ‘You’re to be good with Mummy,’ he’d commanded the twins after breakfast. ‘Do you u
nderstand now?’ He’d regarded them unsmilingly, as ferociously as he could. If there was trouble of any kind whatsoever that day, either the lighting of fires or leaving the rectory garden for a single instant, they would not be permitted to attend the Easter Fête. They would be put in two separate rooms, with the curtains drawn. Humbly they had promised to be good.

  He emptied the grass-box, depositing the cuttings in a corner. He said to himself that there was nothing wrong with cutting grass on Good Friday. There’d been services in St Simon and St Jude’s every day this week. There’d been Holy Communion at eight this morning, and afternoon prayers. Later there’d be evensong. Yet a few of his older parishioners, passing by the rectory wall and hearing the engine of the Suffolk Punch, might consider it odd that grass should be cut by a clergyman on the day of the Crucifixion. Mr Peniket would certainly consider it odd and would again recall the days of old Canon Flewett. Nothing would ever be said, but the activity would be seen as part of a clerical decline. It would sadden Mr Peniket and the older parishioners, and it saddened Quentin to think it would, but he saw no point in sitting in a chair and meditating all day.

  His name was called, and he turned his head and saw Lavinia waving at him from the porch. Beside her stood a child, not either of the twins. He turned the engine of the lawnmower off and waved back. He began to walk towards them.

  The child was a girl, wearing corduroy jeans and a red jersey. Lavinia was wearing a tartan skirt and a green blouse and cardigan. He apologized when he was close enough, because he guessed he hadn’t been able to hear Lavinia calling to him above the noise of the Suffolk Punch. The child had brown hair, curving about a round face, and eyes that were round also.