The Children Of Dynmouth Read online

  ‘Kate wants to speak to you,’ Lavinia said.

  She must have once been a child of the nursery school. He looked more closely at her, remembering her: she was the child from Sea House, her parents were divorced. She didn’t come to church, or to Sunday school. Faintly, he remembered Lavinia once saying that the little girl from Sea House was going to come to the nursery school next term. Before the twins were born it would have been, seven or eight years ago, the nursery school’s earliest days.

  ‘Well, Kate?’ he said in his study, a small room with a cross over the mantelpiece. He was alone with the child because Lavinia didn’t ever remain when a visitor came to see him. ‘It’s that boy, Timothy Gedge,’ Lavinia had said, and then had called out to the twins, who were clamouring for her upstairs somewhere. ‘I’m here in the hall,’ she’d shouted as Quentin closed the study door.

  It was a rigmarole, a muddled torrent of words, not easy to follow and yet startling. Timothy Gedge had looked through the window of Miss Lavant’s bedsitting-room and had seen her pretending to give Dr Greenslade a meal. Timothy Gedge had met Mr Plant half undressed in the middle of the night. Timothy Gedge had become drunk in the Abigails’ bungalow. He’d been annoying the Dasses. He’d said to Mrs Abigail that her husband went homoing about the place. The act he’d devised for the Easter Fête was a black mass. Timothy Gedge was possessed.

  ‘Possessed?’ He was sitting behind his desk. Beside him there was a calendar with a square red frame around yesterday’s date. He moved the red frame and felt its magnetic base gripping the surface again. ‘Possessed?’ he repeated, as calmly as he could.

  She didn’t answer. She was facing him across his desk, sitting on the dining-room chair that was specially placed for visitors with troubles. She said that the act Timothy Gedge had devised had to do with the Brides in the Bath. He planned to dress up as each bride in turn and also as their murderer. It was all only an excuse. It was because he liked the idea of death, because he wanted to talk about it. The place for the people of Dynmouth, he’d said, was in their coffins.

  The child had begun to cry. He went to her and bent over her, giving her a handkerchief. He put an arm around her shoulders and kept it there for a moment. Then he returned to his desk and sat behind it. He thought of the funerals Timothy Gedge hung around. ‘Really good,’ he’d said again, in the vestry, after Miss Trimm’s. The child said he claimed to have witnessed a murder, and had been affected by it. Stephen’s mother hadn’t fallen from the cliff-path in a gust of wind: she had been pushed by Stephen’s father.

  ‘I love Stephen,’ she said, and then she repeated it, her tears returning. ‘I can’t bear it, seeing Stephen so frightened.’

  He knew who Stephen was. He remembered him at the funeral of his mother. He remembered speaking to him, saying he’d been brave. The parents of these children were now married. The man was an ornithologist.

  ‘There’s no need for anyone to be frightened, Kate.’

  She said she had prayed because it was impossible for people to live in a house like that, with lies everywhere, as there would have to be. In desperation she had prayed. She said:

  ‘You have to exorcize devils. Could you exorcize the devils in Timothy Gedge?’

  He was taken aback, and more confused than he’d been a moment ago. He slightly shook his head, making it clear he didn’t intend to exorcize devils.

  ‘When I prayed,’ she said, ‘I promised. I said, if it wasn’t true, then the devils would be exorcized. I promised God.’

  ‘God wouldn’t want a promise like that. He doesn’t make bargains. I can’t just exorcize a person because he tells a lie.’

  ‘Lie?’

  ‘Stephen’s father wasn’t in Dynmouth the day the accident happened. He came back from London and someone had to tell him at the station. He was actually on a train when it happened.’

  She looked at him, her eyes opening wider and then wider. Tears still glistened on one of her cheeks. Her lips parted and closed again. Eventually she said:

  ‘I prayed and He changed things.’

  ‘No, Kate. Nothing has changed. Before you prayed it was true that Stephen’s father was not here that day.’

  ‘You must exorcize Timothy Gedge, Mr Featherston.’

  He tried to explain. He didn’t believe in the idea of people possessed by devils, because it seemed to him that that was only a way of trying to tidy up the world by pigeon-holing everything. There were good people, and people who were not good: that had nothing to do with devils. He tried to explain that possession by devils was just a form of words.

  ‘I told him he had devils,’ she said.

  ‘You shouldn’t have, Kate.’

  ‘I promised God. God wants it, Mr Featherston.’

  She cried out, her tears brimming over again, red in the face. The brown hair that curved in around her cheeks seemed suddenly untidy.

  ‘I promised God,’ she cried again.

  She was still sitting down, leaning forward in her chair, burning at him with her round eyes. It was like being in the room with Miss Trimm yet again confiding that she’d mothered another Jesus Christ. Miss Trimm had talked about her son as an infant, how he had blessed the fishermen on Dynmouth Pier, how he had emerged from her womb without pain. In her days as a schoolteacher she’d been known for the quickness of her wit and her clarity of thought. But in her lonely senility her eccentric belief had been unshakable, the world had become impossible without the closeness of God. This child in her distress appeared to have discovered something similar.

  Yet he was unable to help her, unable even properly to converse with her. God’s world was not a pleasant place, he might have said. God’s world was cruel, human nature took ugly forms. It wasn’t God who cultivated lily-of-the-valley or made Dynmouth pretty with lace and tea-shops or made the life of Jesus Christ a sentimental journey. But how on earth could he say that, any more than he could have said it to Miss Trimm? How could he say that there was only God’s insistence, even though He abided by no rules Himself, that His strictures should be discovered and obeyed? How could he say that God was all vague promises, and small print on guarantees that no one knew if He ever kept? It was appalling that Timothy Gedge had terrified these children, yet it had been permitted, like floods and famine.

  ‘He’ll do something terrible,’ she said, weeping copiously now. ‘It’s people like that who do terrible things.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him, Kate.’

  Faintly, she shook her head. She was huddled on her chair, her small hands clenched, pressed against her stomach, as though some part of her were in pain, her face blotched. He felt intensely sorry for her, and useless.

  ‘He loves hurting,’ she said. People had done him no harm, the Dasses, the Abigails. He laughed when he mentioned the name of the Dasses’ house. ‘Mrs Abigail didn’t know about her husband. He went and told her. He got drunk on beer and sherry –’

  ‘So you said, Kate.’

  ‘He thinks it’s funny.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He thinks it’s funny to do an act like that.’

  ‘His act won’t be permitted.’

  ‘He made us think a murder had been committed. We both believed it. Don’t you see?’ she cried. ‘We both believed it.’

  ‘I do see, Kate.’

  ‘They’d have driven a stake through him. They’d have burnt his bones until they were cinders.’

  ‘We’re more civilized now.’

  ‘We couldn’t be. He wouldn’t be alive if we were more civilized.’

  ‘Kate –’

  ‘He shouldn’t be alive. It’s that that shouldn’t be permitted.’ She screamed the words at him. He let a silence fall. Then he said:

  ‘You mustn’t say that, Kate.’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth.’

  There was another silence, only broken by her sobbing. She wiped her face with his handkerchief and then held the handkerchief tightly, squeezing it in her fists. He said there was a
pattern of greys, half-tones and shadows. People moved in the greyness and made of themselves heroes or villains, but the truth was that heroes and villains were unreal. The high drama of casting out devils would establish Timothy Gedge as a monster, which would be nice for everyone because monsters were a species on their own. But Timothy Gedge couldn’t be dismissed as easily as that. She had been right to say it was people like that who do terrible things, and if Timothy Gedge did do terrible things it would not be because he was different and exotic but because he was possessed of an urge to become so. Timothy Gedge was as ordinary as anyone else, but the ill fortune of circumstances or nature made ordinary people eccentric and lent them colour in the greyness. And the colour was protection because ill fortune weakened its victims and made them vulnerable.

  While he spoke, he saw reactions in the child’s face. She didn’t like what he said about shades of grey, nor the suggestion that villains and heroes were artificial categories. It cut across her child’s world. It added complications she didn’t wish to know about. He watched her thinking that as he spoke, and then he saw everything he’d said being summarily dismissed. She shook her head.

  She spoke of an idyll and said that God would not permit it now. She would go back to Sea House and tell Stephen that his father had been on a train at the time of his mother’s death. The nightmare was over, but in its place there was nothing. They would be friends again, but it wouldn’t be the same.

  ‘I can’t explain,’ she said, quite recovered now from her passion and her tears.

  She meant he wouldn’t understand. She meant it wasn’t any good just talking, sitting there beneath a cross that hung on a wall. She meant he might at least have promised to have a go at shaking the devils out, even if he didn’t quite believe in them; he might at least have tried. No wonder clergymen weren’t highly thought of. All that was in her face, too.

  She walked away from the rectory, up Once Hill and then on to the narrow road that wound, eventually, to Badstoneleigh. If they’d told the Blakeys a week ago the Blakeys would have said what the clergyman had said: that Stephen’s father could not have been responsible. She kept thinking of that, of their telling Mrs Blakey in the kitchen and Mrs Blakey throwing her head back and laughing. They’d all have laughed, even Mr Blakey, and then quite abruptly Mrs Blakey would have said that Timothy Gedge deserved to be birched.

  ‘You like a cuppa, Mr Feather?’

  Quentin declined the offer. The boy was alone in the flat in Cornerways. He’d explained that his sister was on the pumps at the Smiling Service Filling Station, even though it was Good Friday. His mother was over in Badstoneleigh for the day, seeing her sister, the dressmaker. He led the clergyman into a room that had the curtains drawn. Deanna Durbin was singing on the television screen.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Quentin said.

  ‘Is it about the competition, Mr Feather?’

  ‘In a way. The little girl from Sea House came to see me. Kate.’

  Timothy laughed. With annoying irrelevance it occurred to Quentin that the name of the film on the television screen was Three Smart Girls, which he’d seen about thirty-five years ago, when he was a child himself.

  ‘Do you mind if we have the television off, Timothy?’

  ‘Load of rubbish ’s matter of fact, sir. TV’s for the birds, Mr Feather.’ He turned it off. He sat down without drawing back the curtains. In the gloom he was only just visible, the gleam of his teeth when he smiled, his pale hair and clothes.

  ‘You’ve upset people, Timothy.’

  ‘Which people had you in mind, Mr Feather?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘There’s some upset easy, sir. There’s Grace Rumblebow down at the Comprehensive –’

  ‘I’m not talking about Grace Rumblebow.’

  ‘I give her a prick with a needle. You’d think I’d cut her foot off. D’you know Grace Rumblebow, Mr Feather?’

  ‘Yes I do, but it isn’t Grace Rumblebow –’

  ‘Unhealthy, she is, the size of her. She’s obsessed on doughnuts, did you know? Forty or fifty a day, three gallons of beer, drop dead one of these days –’

  ‘Why have you caused this trouble, Timothy?’

  ‘What trouble’s that, Mr Feather?’

  ‘Those two children.’

  ‘They’re tip-top kids, sir. Friends of mine.’

  ‘Timothy –’

  ‘The three of us went to the flicks, over Badstoneleigh way. James Bond stuff, load of rubbish really. I bought the kids Coca-Cola, Mr Feather, as much as they could drink. I explained to them about the act I’ve got.’

  ‘I’ve been told about your act. I’m afraid it isn’t suitable for the competition, Timothy.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the act, sir.’

  ‘I’ve heard about it.’

  ‘That kid’s talking through her umbrella, sir. It’s a straight routine, sir, it’ll bring the place down. D’you ever watch Benny Hill, Mr Feather?’

  ‘What happened to those three women wasn’t funny.’

  ‘It’s a long time ago, Mr Feather.’

  ‘I’d like you to give me the wedding-dress you got from the children.’

  ‘What wedding-dress is that, sir?’

  ‘You know what I mean. You terrorized those children, you bullied them into getting a wedding-dress for you.’

  ‘I got a dog’s-tooth off the Commander. Dass come up with the curtains, they’re down in the Courtesy Cleaners. I have Plant coming up with a bath.’

  ‘You’ve been telling lies.’

  ‘I definitely told the truth, Mr Feather. The Commander’s gay as a grasshopper, old Dass’s son walks in and tells them they make him sick to the teeth. I only reminded Dass about that, sir. I only explained I was listening in at the time. I didn’t make anything up.’

  ‘That boy imagined his father was a murderer. You made him imagine that. For no earthly reason you caused him to believe a monstrous lie.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it was a lie, Mr Feather. George Joseph Smith –’

  ‘It has nothing to do with George Joseph Smith. The child’s father was on a train. He was nowhere near that cliff when his wife was killed. Nor were you, Timothy.’

  ‘I was often in the gorse, Mr Feather. I like following people about.’

  ‘You weren’t in the gorse then. And a murder did not take place.’

  ‘I heard them having a barney, Mr Feather. A different time this is, if you get me. She’s calling the girl’s mum a prostitute. I heard her, sir: “Why don’t you throw me down?” she says. He told her not to be silly.’

  ‘Timothy –’

  ‘I’d call it murder, Mr Feather. If the man was on two thousand trains I’d call it murder.’

  ‘She fell over a cliff.’

  ‘She went down the cliff because he was on the job with the other woman. He was fixing to get rid of the first one in the divorce courts. I was up at Sea House one night, looking in through the window –’

  ‘I don’t want to know what you were doing.’ He shouted angrily. He jumped up from the chair he was sitting on and knocked something on to the floor, something that must have been on the arm.

  ‘You knocked over an ash-tray, Mr Feather.’

  ‘Look, Timothy. You told those children terrible lies –’

  ‘Only I wouldn’t call them lies, sir. “I’m afraid of what she’ll do,” the man says when I was looking in through the window, and then the other woman goes up to him and starts loving him. She’s stroking his face with her fingers, a married man he was, and then the next thing is –’

  ‘That doesn’t concern us, Timothy.’

  ‘The next thing is, sir, I was there in the gorse again. She was crying and moaning in the wind, sir, up there on her owny-oh with nobody giving a blue damn about her. She went down the cliff when a gust of wind came.’

  ‘Timothy –’

  ‘They pushed her, Mr Feather. D’you get what I mean? She was fed up with the carry-on.’
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br />   ‘You don’t really know, Timothy. You’re guessing and speculating.’

  Timothy Gedge shook his head. It had upset him at the time, but you had to get over stuff like that or you’d go to the wall. He smiled. You had to keep cheerful, he said, in spite of everything.

  ‘That wedding-dress must be returned. I’ve come for that, Timothy.’

  ‘I was thinking maybe that Hughie Green would be in Dynmouth, Mr Feather. Only I heard of stranger things. I was thinking he’d maybe walk into the marquee –’

  ‘That’s nonsense and you know it. Your act has been an excuse to torment people. You had no right to behave to those children as you did.’

  ‘I can do a woman’s voice, Mr Feather, I had them in stitches up at the Comprehensive. I had your own two kiddies in stitches.’ He laughed. ‘The charrada of the clown, Mr Feather, if ever you’ve heard of it.’

  Quentin sat down again. He told Timothy he lived in fantasies. His act had been devised, he said again, so that people could be shocked and upset. To his surprise he saw Timothy nodding at him through the dimness, before he’d finished speaking.

  ‘As a matter of fact, it was for the birds, sir.’

  There was a silence. Then he added:

  ‘I often thought it was maybe for the birds. The only people who liked it was your kiddies.’

  ‘I’d like to help you, you know.’

  ‘I’m happy as a sandboy, Mr Feather.’

  ‘I don’t think you can be.’

  ‘I put a lot of thought into that act. I used to walk around the place, thinking about it. And all the time it was a load of rubbish. Kid’s stuff, Mr Feather.’ He nodded. He explained, as he had to everyone else, how his act had come about: Miss Wilkinson’s charades, the visit to Madame Tussaud’s. He explained about how the philosophy of Brehon O’Hennessy had remained with him, even though at the time Brehon O’Hennessy had seemed to everyone to be a nutter.

  ‘The kid remarked I had devils.’ He laughed. ‘Do you think I have devils, Mr Feather?’