The Children Of Dynmouth Read online

  She found it so on the afternoon of a Wednesday in early April, the day, in fact, of St Pancras of Sicily, as her husband had remarked at breakfast-time. Outside, it was blustery and cold. Sheets of soft rain dribbled on the rectory’s window-panes. The fire in the sitting-room refused to light.

  ‘I’m really cross,’ Lavinia said, addressing her twin daughters, aged four. She regarded them sternly from the fireplace, out of breath because she’d been blowing at the charred edges of a newspaper. All day long, she reminded them, they’d been nothing but trouble, painting their hands at nursery school, tearing about Lipton’s when she’d told them to stand by the dog-food, and now, apparently, throwing jam at the kitchen window.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Susannah said.

  ‘Fell.’ Repeatedly Deborah nodded, lending weight to that explanation. ‘Fell and fell.’

  Lavinia Featherston, a pretty, fair-haired woman of thirty-five, told her daughters to stop talking nonsense. Jam didn’t fall, she pointed out. Jam wasn’t like rain. Jam had to be taken from a pot and thrown. People were starving in the world: it wasn’t right to throw jam about a kitchen just because you were bored.

  ‘It fell out of the pot,’ Deborah said. ‘Goodness knows how it got to the window, Mummy.’

  ‘Goodness knows, Mummy.’

  Lavinia continued to look sternly at them. They, too, were fair-haired; they had freckles on the bridges of their noses. Would a boy have looked the same? She’d often wondered that, and wondered it more relevantly just now.

  That, at the moment, was the trouble with Lavinia. She was recovering from a miscarriage, feeling nervy and on edge. Everything had been going perfectly until a fortnight ago and then, after the loss of her child, Dr Greenslade had reminded her that he’d warned her against attempting to have it. The warning became an order: in no circumstances was she to attempt to have another baby.

  This turn of events had upset Lavinia more than she’d have believed possible. She and Quentin had very much wanted a son; Dr Greenslade stood firm. The disappointment, still recent, was hard to shake off.

  ‘You know what happens to children who tell lies,’ she crossly reminded her daughters. ‘It’s high time you turned over a new leaf.’

  The bell at the back door rang. A stick in the fire began half-heartedly to blaze. Slowly Lavinia gathered herself to her feet. It could be anyone, for the rectory was an open house. It was open to Mrs Slewy, the worst mother in Dynmouth, a shapeless woman who smelt of poverty and cigarettes, who lived in a condemned cottage in Boughs Lane with her five inadequate children. And to the elderly Miss Trimm, who’d been a schoolteacher in the town and nowadays was disturbed in her mind. Children returned for confirmation classes years after they’d left the nursery school, adults came for fellowship discussions. Mrs Keble, the organist, came to talk about hymns, and Father Madden to talk about ecumenicalism. Mrs Stead-Carter came importantly, Miss Poraway for a chat.

  Today, though, it was none of these people: it was a figure known in Dynmouth only as Old Ape, who had come a day early for his weekly scraps. The scraps were meant to be for hens he kept, but everyone in Dynmouth knew that he didn’t possess hens and that he ate the scraps himself. When he came to the rectory he was also given a plate of meat and vegetables, provided he arrived at six o’clock on the specified day, which was Thursday. ‘I’ll get the scraps,’ Lavinia said at the back door. ‘You come back tomorrow for your dinner.’ Communication with Old Ape was difficult. It was said that he could speak but chose not to. It wasn’t known if he was deaf.

  In the sitting-room the twins played with the pieces of a jigsaw, squatting on the hearth-rug in front of the damply flickering fire. When you interlocked the pieces of the puzzle there was a picture of a donkey, but they’d seen the donkey so many times it didn’t seem worth while going to all that trouble yet again. On the lid of the jigsaw box they built the pieces into a pyre.

  ‘Dragons come,’ Susannah said.

  ‘What dragons, Susannah?’

  ‘They come if you tell lies. They’re burny things. They’ve flames in them.’

  But Deborah was thinking of something else. She was thinking of being in the garden, of looking all over the grass and then in the flower-beds and on the gravel by the garage and along by the edges of the paths, until she found a new leaf. She closed her eyes and saw herself leaning down by the edge of a path and turning the new leaf over to see what was on the other side.

  In the kitchen their mother made a cup of tea, and in the streets of Dynmouth their father, the vicar of St Simon and St Jude’s, pedalled through the wind and the rain on a 1937 Rudge, left to him in a parishioner’s will. He was an impressive figure on this bicycle, rather lanky, his hair prematurely grey, his face seeming ascetic until cheered by a smile that occurred whenever he greeted anyone. He hoped as he went about his familiar Wednesday duty of visiting the sick among his parishioners that Lavinia wasn’t having a time with the twins, cooped inside on a damp afternoon. He thought about his wife as he chatted to old, disturbed Miss Trimm, who had a cold, and to little Sharon Lines, who was on a kidney machine. They’d waited almost nine years for the twins to be born: they had a lot to be thankful for but it was hard to comfort a woman who’d lost a child and couldn’t have another. Lavinia’s moments of despondency were irrational, she said so herself, yet they continued to afflict her. They made her not at all like what she was.

  He rode down Fore Street, where holiday-makers who had taken advantage of the pre-Easter rates looked as though they regretted it as they loitered in the rain. Some took refuge in the doorways of shops, eating sweets or nuts. Others read the list of forthcoming attractions outside the Essoldo Cinema where The Battle of Britain was at present showing. In Sir Walter Raleigh Park, beside the promenade, Ring’s Amusements were preparing for their seasonal opening in ten days’ time, on Easter Saturday. Machines were being oiled and repaired, staff taken on, statutory safety precautions pondered over with a view to their evasion. The Hall of a Million Mirrors and the Tunnel of Love and Alfonso’s and Annabella’s Wall of Death were in the process of erection. The men who performed this work were of a muscular, weathered appearance, with faded scarves tied round their throats, some with brass rings on their fingers. Like their garish caravans and pin-tables and the swarthy women who assisted them, they seemed to belong to the past. They shouted to one another through the rain, using words that had an old-fashioned ring.

  The promenade was almost empty. Commander Abigail strutted along it towards the steps that led to the beach, with his bathing-trunks rolled up in a towel. The slight, carefully clad figure of Miss Lavant moved slowly in the opposite direction, beneath a red umbrella that caught occasionally in the wind. The wind bustled around her, gadding over the concrete of the promenade and up and down the short pier. It rattled the refuse-bins on the ornamental lamp-posts, and the broken glass in the bus-shelters. It played with cigarette packets and wrappings from chocolate and potato crisps. It drove paper-bags into corners and left them there, uselessly sodden.

  The sea was so far out you could hardly see it. Seagulls stood like small rocks, rooted to the flattened sand. The sky was grey, shadowed with darker grey.

  ‘Cheers, sir,’ a voice called, and Quentin Featherston turned his head and saw Timothy Gedge standing on the edge of the pavement, apparently hoping for a word with him. Cautiously, he applied the Rudge’s brakes.

  Timothy Gedge was a youth of fifteen, ungainly due to adolescence, a boy with a sharp-boned face and wide, thin shoulders, whose short hair was almost white. His eyes seemed hungry, giving him a predatory look; his cheeks had a hollowness about them. He was always dressed in the same clothes: pale yellow jeans and a yellow jacket with a zip, and a T-shirt that more often than not was yellow also. He lived with his mother and his sister, Rose-Ann, in a block of council-built flats called Cornerways; without distinction, he attended Dynmouth Comprehensive School. He was a boy who was given to making jokes, a habit that caused him sometimes to seem ecce
ntric. He smiled and grinned a lot.

  ‘Hi, Mr Feather,’ he said.

  ‘Hullo, Timothy.’

  ‘Nice day, Mr Feather.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about nice –’

  ‘I was meaning for ducks, sir.’ He laughed. His clothes were wet. His short pale hair was plastered around his head.

  ‘Did you want to speak to me, Timothy?’ He wished the boy would address him by his correct name. He had asked him to, but the boy had pretended not to understand: it was all meant to be a joke.

  ‘I was wondering about the Easter Fête, Mr Feather. Did you know Ring’s will be opening up the same afternoon?’

  ‘Ring’s always begin on Easter Saturday.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying to you, Mr Feather. Won’t Ring’s take the crowds?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. They haven’t in the past.’

  ‘I’d say you were wrong, Mr Feather.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to see. Thank you for thinking of it, Timothy.’

  ‘I was wondering about the Spot the Talent comp, Mr Feather.’

  ‘We’re having the Spot the Talent competition at two-thirty. Mr and Mrs Dass will be in charge again.’

  More than a month ago the boy had appeared at the rectory one evening, quite late it had been, after nine o’clock, and had asked if there was going to be a Spot the Talent competition at this year’s Easter Fête because he wanted to do a comedy act. Quentin had told him he imagined there would be, with Mr and Mrs Dass in charge as usual. He’d later heard from the Dasses that Timothy Gedge had been to see them and that they’d written his name down, the first entry.

  He was a strange boy, always at a loose end. His mother was a good-looking woman with brassy hair who sold women’s clothes in a shop called Cha-Cha Fashions, his sister was six or seven years older than Timothy, good-looking also, employed as a petrol-pump attendant on the forecourt of the Smiling Service Filling Station: Quentin knew them both by sight. In adolescence, unfortunately, the boy was increasingly becoming a nuisance to people, endlessly friendly and smiling, keen for conversation. He was what Lavinia called a latch-key child, returning to the empty flat in Cornerways from the Comprehensive school, on his own in it all day during the school holidays. Being on his own seemed somehow to have become part of him.

  ‘She’s a funny woman, that Mrs Dass. He’s funny himself, with that pipe.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I must be off, I’m afraid, Timothy.’

  ‘Will it be in the marquee again, sir?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘D’you know the Abigails, Mr Feather? The Commander and Mrs? I do jobs for the Abigails, you know. Every Wednesday night; I’ll be round there tonight. Funny type of people.’

  Quentin shook his head. He knew the Abigails, he said; they didn’t seem funny to him. His right foot was on the pedal, but he couldn’t push the bicycle forward because the boy was slightly in the way, his knee touching the spokes of the front wheel.

  ‘The Commander’s having his bathe now. I call that funny. In the sea in April, Mr Feather.’ He paused, smiling. ‘I see Miss Lavant’s out on her stroll.’

  ‘Yes, I know –’

  ‘Out to catch a glimpse of Dr Greenslade.’

  The boy laughed and Quentin managed to get the front wheel of his bicycle past the protruding knee. Some other time they’d have a chat, he promised.

  ‘I think I’ll call in on Dass,’ Timothy Gedge said, ‘to see how he’s getting on.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother.’

  ‘I think I’d better sir.’

  Quentin rode away, feeling he should have stayed longer with the boy, if only to explain why there was no need for him to go bothering the Dasses. There’d been a period when he’d come to the rectory every Saturday morning, sometimes as early as a quarter to nine. He’d had an idea, as he’d explained to Quentin, that when he grew up he’d like to be a clergyman. But when Quentin had eventually tried to persuade him to join his confirmation class, he’d said he wasn’t interested and had in fact given up the notion of a clerical career. He hung about the church now, and about the graveyard whenever there was a funeral service. It particularly worried Quentin that he was always around when there was a funeral.

  Timothy watched the dark figure of the clergyman pedalling away, thinking to himself that strictly speaking the clergyman was a bit of a fool the way he let himself be taken advantage of. All sorts of tricks people got up to with the man, extraordinary it must be, being a clergyman. He shook his head over the folly of it all, and then he forgot about it and surveyed the promenade. Miss Lavant had gone, the promenade and the pier were deserted. In the far distance, a speck on the beach beneath the cliffs, Commander Abigail ran towards the sea. Timothy Gedge laughed, shaking his head over the folly of that also.

  He walked along the promenade, taking his time because there was no particular hurry. He didn’t mind the rain, he quite liked it when he got wet. He walked past the small harbour and a row of boats upturned on the shingle. He wandered into the yard of the fish-packing station, to the shed where freshly caught fish was sold to anyone who wanted it. Dabs, it said on a slate on one side of the door. Lemon Sole, Mackerel, Plaice. If there’d been anyone buying fish there he’d have loitered in order to listen to the transaction, but nobody was. He went into the public lavatories in the car-park, but there was no one there either. He turned into East Street, moving towards the area where the Dasses lived.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said to a couple of old-age pensioners who were tottering along together, clinging to one another on a slippery pavement, but they didn’t reply. He paused beside three nuns who were examining a shop window full of garden tools while waiting for a bus. He smiled at them and pointed out a pair of secateurs, saying they looked good value. They were about to reply when the bus came. ‘It’s the friendly boy Sister Agnes mentioned,’ he heard one of them comment, and from the inside of the bus all three of them waved at him.

  The Dasses lived in a semi-detached house called Sweetlea. Mr Dass had been the manager of the Dynmouth branch of Lloyd’s Bank and was now retired. He was a man with wire-rimmed spectacles, tall and very thin, given to wearing unpressed tweed suits. His wife was an invalid, with pale flesh that had a deflated look. She had once been active in Dynmouth’s now-defunct amateur dramatic society, the Dynmouth Strollers, and when Quentin Featherston had decided to hold his first Easter Fête to raise funds for the crumbling tower of St Simon and St Jude’s, Mrs Stead-Carter had put forward the idea of a talent competition and had suggested that Mrs Dass should be invited to judge it. The talent competition had become an annual event, Mrs Dass continuing to accept the onus of judgement and Mr Dass entering into the spirit of things by seeing to the erection and lighting of a stage in the tea marquee that was borrowed annually through the Stead-Carters, who had influence in the tenting world. The stage itself, modest in size, consisted of a number of timber boards set on concrete blocks. There was a wooden frame, knocked up by Mr Peniket, the sexton, which supported a landscape of Swiss Alps painted on hardboard, and the stage’s curtains. Each year the curtains were borrowed from the stage of the Youth Centre, and it was Mrs Dass, artistic in this direction also, who had been responsible for the all-purpose scenery. In his devotion to his wife and knowing more than anyone else about her invalid state, it pleased Mr Dass that the Spot the Talent competition was now an established event at the Easter Fête: it took her out of herself.

  ‘Only I was passing,’ Timothy Gedge said, having penetrated to the Dasses’ sitting-room. ‘I was wondering how things was going, sir.’

  Mrs Dass was reclining on a sun-chair in the bow-window, reading a book by Dennis Wheatley, To the Devil, a Daughter. Her husband was standing by the door without his jacket, regretting that he’d admitted the boy. He’d been asleep on his bed when the bell had been rung, and the ringing hadn’t immediately wakened him. It had first of all occurred in a dream he was having about his early childhood, and ha
d then been repeated quite a number of times before he could get downstairs. It had sounded important.

  ‘Things?’ he said.

  ‘The Spot the Talent comp, sir.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Only I was speaking to Mr Feather and he said I’d best look in at Sweetlea.’

  In her sun-chair in the bow-window Mrs Dass put down To the Devil, a Daughter. For a moment she watched the sparrows in the small back garden and then she closed her eyes. She’d smiled a little when her husband had brought Timothy Gedge into the room, but she hadn’t spoken.

  ‘Everything’s A1,’ Mr Dass said. He hadn’t thought about the stage or the lighting yet. The stage would be where Mr Peniket and he had left it last year, in the cellar beneath the church where the coke was kept. The lights were in three cardboard boxes, under his bed.

  ‘We’ve had quite a few entries,’ he reported. Stout Mrs Muller, the Austrian woman who ran the Gardenia Café, went in for the competition every year, singing Austrian songs in her national costume accompanied by her husband on an accordion, in national costume also. A group called the Dynmouth Night-Lifers strummed electric guitars and sang. The manager of the tile-works played tunes on his mouth-organ. Mr Swayles, employed in a newsagent’s, did conjuring. Miss Wilkinson, who taught English in the Comprehensive school, had done Lady Macbeth and Miss Havisham and was down to do the Lady of Shalott this year. Last summer’s carnival queen, a girl employed in the fish-packing station, had never before entered the Spot the Talent competition. In her queen’s white dress, trimmed with Dynmouth lace, and wearing her crown, she was scheduled to sing ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree’.

  ‘Mrs Dass all right is she, sir?’ Timothy Gedge enquired, glancing across the room at her, thinking that the woman looked dead.

  Mr Dass nodded. She often liked to lie with her eyes closed. He himself had moved across the room and was now standing with his back to a small coal fire. He took his pipe from a trouser pocket and pressed tobacco into it from a tin. He wished the boy would go away.