The Children Of Dynmouth Read online

  ‘No, Timothy.’

  ‘I fancied the idea of devils.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The sexton doesn’t care for you, does he, Mr Feather? That Mr Peniket?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Does he think you’re laughable, Mr Feather?’

  Quentin did not reply. Timothy said:

  ‘If you want the wedding-dress you can have it, sir.’

  ‘I’d like it.’

  The boy left the room and on the way he turned the light on. He returned with an old, torn suitcase and a flat cardboard box. He opened the suitcase and took from it the carrier-bag with the Union Jack on it. He handed this to Quentin. The wedding-dress was still in it, he said, he hadn’t even taken it out. ‘There’s this,’ he said, holding out the cardboard box, ‘Abigail’s dog’s-tooth.’ He suggested that Quentin might like to return the suit to the bungalow in High Park Avenue, since he was returning the wedding-dress. There were other things in the suitcase, he explained, but they had nothing to do with his act. He’d known he wouldn’t be putting on the act as soon as the boy had handed him the carrier. He’d said to himself as he walked away with it that all along the act had been a load of rubbish.

  ‘You must leave those children alone now.’

  ‘They’re no use to me, Mr Feather.’ He laughed. ‘Opportunity won’t knock, sir. I’ll get work in the sandpaper factory. I’ll maybe go on the security. My dad scarpered. Like Dass’s son.’ He laughed, and Quentin realized that the Dasses’ son was one of the people whom Timothy had had conversations with on the streets of Dynmouth. He recalled the rather unhealthy appearance of Nevil Dass, the hot-house appearance of a youth too heavily cosseted.

  ‘I gave him the idea,’ Timothy said, ‘when I told him about my dad. “You just walk out,” I told him. “Don’t ever come back.” He was down in the Queen Victoria Hotel for two hours, plucking up courage on Double Diamond.’

  ‘Timothy –’

  ‘There was just the thing about the entrance fee, sir. Fifty p I give Dass.’

  Quentin gave him the coin, apologizing because he’d forgotten about it. Timothy said it didn’t matter. He began to talk again about Stephen handing him the wedding-dress, how he’d walked away with it and had then sat down on a seat on the promenade, not wanting to go on with his act any more. Miss Lavant had passed by and had smiled at him.

  ‘She gave me a sweet one time when I was a kid, a bag of Quality Street she had. She’s always had a smile for me, Mr Feather.’

  Quentin nodded, preventing himself from saying that Miss Lavant’s sweets and smiles were beside the point.

  ‘It never occurred to me till yesterday, sir. She gave birth to his baby.’

  ‘I’d like to help you,’ Quentin said again, and Timothy laughed again.

  ‘Did you ever hear it said, sir, that Miss Lavant and Dr Greenslade –’

  ‘Timothy, please.’

  ‘Only she gave birth to his baby, sir.’

  ‘That isn’t true, Timothy.’

  ‘I’d say it was, sir. She gave birth to it, only she couldn’t keep the kid by her because of what Dynmouth people would say about it. She removed herself from the town for the birth. The doctor goes with her, saying he was in Yorkshire on medical business. The next thing is they get the kid fixed up with a Dynmouth woman so’s they can see it growing. D’you get it, Mr Feather?’

  ‘That’s the purest fantasy, Timothy.’

  ‘D’you get the picture, though? Forty or fifty a week the Dynmouth woman’s paid.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly now. You know as well as I do a child was never born to Miss Lavant. Dr Greenslade is a happily married man –’

  ‘It never occurred to me till yesterday, Mr Feather, when I was sitting on the seat and she smiled at me. She was scared out of her skin the time I was walking along the wall of the prom. “Come down, please,” she says in that voice of hers, holding out the bag of Quality Street. It’s like something on a television thing, Crossroads maybe, or General Hospital, or the one about the women in prison.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense, Timothy.’

  ‘The man walks into this room, Mr Feather, and the baby’s there on the table. He takes one look at it and the next thing is he’s shouting. It’s not his baby is what he’s saying, no more than it’s hers. He’s not going in for any pretending over a baby unless he comes in for a share of the cash, bloody ridiculous it is. She goes up to him and tells him to stuff himself and in a flat half-minute he’s belting the old lorry up the London road. Isn’t that the way it happened, Mr Feather? Isn’t it true?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t true.’

  ‘If you close your eyes you can see it in this room, the two of them standing there, rough kind of people. She’s an awful bloody woman, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘That’ll do, Timothy. And if you go bothering Miss Lavant –’

  ‘We have the secret between us, sir. I wouldn’t mention it to another soul. I’d quicker burn than mention it to Miss Lavant. I wouldn’t embarrass her with it.’

  ‘You watch too much television, Timothy.’

  ‘There’s good stuff on the telly. D’you watch it yourself ever? Does Mrs Feather tune in at all? Only there’s women’s programmes in the afternoon, cooking hints, what to do with a fox-fur, anything you’d name. There’s educational programmes, not that Mrs Feather needs education. Only there’s good stuff for the ignorant. You know what I mean, sir?’

  ‘Forget the story you’ve made up about Miss Lavant, Timothy. It’s childish, you know.’

  ‘When she smiled at me yesterday I could see a resemblance. Did you ever notice the doctor’s cheek-bones? He has sharp cheek-bones, like a person I could mention not a million miles away.’

  ‘Please, Timothy.’

  ‘If you tell me to forget it I will, Mr Feather. I’ll put it out of my mind. I’ll promise you that, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Easy as skinning a cat, sir. All right then, Mr Feather?’ He moved towards the television set. He waited with his hand on a knob, politely.

  ‘I’m always there,’ Quentin said, and Timothy laughed. He turned the light out as the clergyman left the room.

  He secured the flat cardboard box on the carrier of his bicycle with a piece of string that was tied to the carrier for such a purpose. He hung the bag with the Union Jack on it from the handle-bars.

  He cycled to High Park Avenue and rang the bell of Number Eleven. When Mrs Abigail answered the door he handed her the box, saying he believed it was her property. He was sorry, he said, unable to think of anything better to say. He was sorry Timothy Gedge had been a nuisance. With some reluctance Mrs Abigail took the box from him. It didn’t matter about Timothy Gedge, she said, as long as he never came to the bungalow again.

  He cycled to Sweetlea and there, too, said he was sorry that Timothy Gedge had been a nuisance. It was very kind to have supplied curtains for the stage. ‘Curtains?’ Mrs Dass exclaimed softly, from her sun-chair in the bow window, and her husband confessed that he’d found an old set of blackout curtains that were just about right for size.

  It wouldn’t be necessary, Quentin told Mr Plant, to convey the bath from Swines’ yard to the rectory garden: Timothy Gedge’s act would not be included in the Spot the Talent competition because it wasn’t suitable. Mr Plant seemed doubtful when he heard that. He’d promised the boy, he said, he never liked to break a promise. ‘I’ve talked to the boy,’ Quentin said. ‘I’m sorry he was a nuisance, Mr Plant.’ But Mr Plant denied that Timothy Gedge had been a nuisance in any way whatsoever. He liked to do his bit, he said, for the Easter Fête or for any other good cause. If a bath needed moving he was only too willing; if it was to stay where it was, no problem either.

  ‘I think this is yours,’ Quentin said in Sea House, handing Stephen the bag with the wedding-dress in it.

  He felt foolish, doing all that. He saw himself: an ineffectual clergyman on a bicycle, lanky and grey-haired
, a familiar sight, tidying up. He remembered the child’s face when he’d tried to explain to her about devils. Timothy Gedge had used him to practise a fantasy on.

  ‘Almighty God, we beseech Thee graciously to behold this Thy family,’ he said in his church, murmuring the words in the presence of a small congregation. There was a smell of prayer-books and candle-grease, which he liked. ‘For which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross.’

  It was true, it had the feel of truth: the woman hadn’t just fallen over a cliff. Yet what good came from knowing that a woman had killed herself?

  The children who had suffered a trauma would survive the experience, scarred by it and a little flawed by it. They would never forget that for a week they had imagined the act of murder had been committed. They would never see their parents in quite the same way again, and ironically it was apt that they should not, because Timothy Gedge had not told lies entirely. The grey shadows drifted, one into another. The truth was insidious, never blatant, never just facts.

  ‘God be merciful to us,’ he said, ‘and bless us: and show us the light of His countenance.’

  The boy would stand in court-rooms with his smile. He would sit in the drab offices of social workers. He would be incarcerated in the cells of different gaols. By looking at him now you could sense that future, and his eyes reminded you that he had not asked to be born. What crime would it be? What greater vengeance would he take? The child was right when she said it was people like that who did terrible things.

  The church was without flowers because of Lent. Old Ape was in the shadows at the back, Mrs Stead-Carter looked impatient at the front.

  ‘The peace of God,’ he said, ‘which passeth all understanding, be with you and remain with you, tonight and for evermore.’

  Their heads were bowed in prayer and then they slowly raised them. They shuffled off, Mrs Stead-Carter brisker than the others, Miss Poraway waiting to say good-bye. Mr Peniket collected the prayer-books and straightened the hassocks.

  As he disrobed in the vestry, Quentin paused more than once, glancing at the closed door, as though expecting the boy to appear with his smile. He thought he might because evening prayer on Good Friday was in a way a funeral service. But the boy didn’t come. Quentin took his black mackintosh from a hook and put it on.

  In the empty church more truth nagged, making itself felt. It didn’t belong in the category of murder, or of suburban drama with sex or filial rejection. Yet it seemed more terrible, a horror greater than the Abigails’ marriage or the treatment of the Dasses by their son, greater even than the death of Stephen’s mother because Stephen’s mother had sought peace and at least had found it. It filled his mind, and slipped through the evening streets of Dynmouth with him as he rode his bicycle back to his ivy-clad rectory. It kept him company on Once Hill and as he pushed the bicycle into the garage and leant it against the Suffolk Punch.

  In the sitting-room Lavinia listened.

  ‘Horror?’ she said, bewildered by her husband’s emotion. He stood with his back to the sitting-room door, leaning against the door-frame. His bicycle-clips were still around his ankles. ‘Horror?’ she said again.

  Two people had derived a moment of pleasure from the boy’s conception. The mother you could see about the place, hurrying on the streets of Dynmouth, a woman with brass-coloured hair who sold clothes in a shop. The father was anonymous. The father had probably been unhappy with his wife; he’d probably set up another family somewhere. The boy had become what he was while no one was looking. The boy’s existence was the horror he spoke of.

  Lavinia wanted to say she was sorry for Timothy Gedge, but did not because it didn’t seem true. An image of Timothy Gedge hovered, smiling in his irritating way. She knew what the child had meant, saying he had devils in him. She remembered how he had given her the creeps.

  ‘I should have been honest with that child this morning.’

  ‘Of course you were honest, Quentin.’

  He shook his head. He said he should have said that morning that if you looked at Dynmouth in one way you saw it prettily, with its tea-shops and lace; and that if you looked at it in another way there was Timothy Gedge. You could even drape prettiness over the less agreeable aspects of Dynmouth, over Sharon Lines on her kidney machine and the world of Old Ape and Mrs Slewy’s inadequate children and the love that had ruined Miss Lavant’s life. You could make it all seem better than it was by reminding yourself of the spirit of Sharon Lines and the apparent contentment of Old Ape and the cigarette cocked jollily in the corner of Mrs Slewy’s mouth and the way in which Miss Lavant had learnt to live with her passion. But you couldn’t drape prettiness over Timothy Gedge. He had grown around him a shell because a shell was necessary. His eyes would for ever make their simple statement. His eyes were the eyes of the battered except that no one had ever battered Timothy Gedge.

  ‘But surely,’ Lavinia said, beginning some small protest and then not continuing with it. ‘Come and sit down,’ she urged instead.

  Existence had battered him, he said, remaining where he was, seeming not to have heard her: there’d been a different child once. He paused and shook his head again. What use were services that recalled the Crucifixion when there was Timothy Gedge wandering about the place, a far better reminder of waste and destruction? What on earth was the point of collecting money to save the tower of a church that wasn’t even beautiful? He was a laughable figure, with his clerical collar, visiting the sick, tidying up.

  ‘You’re not laughable, Quentin.’

  ‘I can do nothing for that boy.’

  He took his black mackintosh off, and his bicycle-clips. He came and sat beside her, saying that the story of Timothy Gedge seemed to be there to mock him. The story wasn’t fair. You couldn’t understand it and mockingly it seemed that you weren’t meant to: it was all just there, a small-scale catastrophe, quite ordinary although it seemed not to be. Wasn’t it just as neat and unlikely to blame the parents as it was to talk about possession by devils? Were the parents so terrible in their sins? Didn’t it seem, really, to be just bad luck?

  She didn’t understand. ‘Bad luck?’ she said.

  ‘To be born to be battered. To be Sharon Lines or Timothy Gedge.’

  ‘But surely –’

  ‘God permits chance.’

  Lavinia looked at her husband, looking into his eyes, which contained the weariness that his words implied. It wasn’t easy for him, having to accept that God permitted chance, any more than it was easy for him to be a clergyman in a time when clergymen seemed superfluous. He would pray for Timothy Gedge and feel that prayer wasn’t enough in a chancy world.

  ‘It depresses you,’ he said, and felt as he spoke that he’d be better employed packing fish in the fish-packing station than in charge of a church. His house of holy cards had collapsed through his own ineptitude. The opinion of the child that morning, and of Timothy Gedge, was an opinion shared by the greater part of Dynmouth: there were the shreds of a traditional respect for his calling, and then impatience, occasionally contempt.

  It was hard to comfort him. Awful things happened, she said, feeling the statement to be lame; yet people had to go on. It was impossible to know the truth about Timothy Gedge, why he was as he was; no one could know with certainty. The Easter Fête would take place. They’d hope for a fine day. He had a wedding at half past ten and another at twelve. He should go to bed, she said.

  ‘He’s pretending he’s Miss Lavant’s child.’

  ‘Miss Lavant’s? But Miss Lavant –’

  ‘Miss Lavant’s and Dr Greenslade’s. A child that was given to Mrs Gedge to bring up.’

  ‘But where on earth did he get that idea?’

  ‘It replaces his fantasy about going on a television show.’

  ‘But he can’t believe it.’

  ‘He does. And more and more he will.’

  There was a silence for a moment in the sit
ting-room, and then Lavinia said again that he should go to bed.

  He nodded, not moving, not looking at her.

  ‘You’re tired,’ she said, and added that there was no point in gloom because gloom made everything worse. There were the good things, too, she reminded him. There were children who were loved and who were lovable. There were their own two children, and thousands of others, in Dynmouth and everywhere. It was only the odd one who grew a shell like Timothy Gedge’s.

  He nodded again, turning to look at her.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so dreary lately,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re never dreary, Lavinia.’

  They went to bed and when Lavinia woke in the night it was Timothy Gedge she thought of, not her lost child. Was it really impossible to know the truth about him? She wondered how he would be now if he’d been brought up in the Down Manor Orphanage. She wondered how he’d be if his father had not driven off or if his mother had shown him more affection. How would he be if on one of those Saturday mornings when he’d hung around the rectory she’d recognized herself the bitterness beneath his grin?

  She couldn’t believe that the catastrophe of Timothy Gedge was not somehow due to other people, and the circumstances created by other people. Quentin was wrong, she said to herself. She was certain he was wrong, certain that it was not just bad luck in a chancy world; but she did not intend to argue with him. And doubting her husband on this point, she wondered if Timothy Gedge’s future was as bleak as he had forecast. She thought about it without finding any kind of answer, and then she thought about the futures of her nursery-school children and others among the children of Dynmouth. What men would her own two children marry, if they married at all? Would they be happy? Would the children of Sea House be happy? Would Stephen ever discover that Timothy Gedge had not entirely told lies? She did not visualize Kate as Kate had visualized herself, alone in Sea House, a woman like Miss Lavant. Quentin had said that for a moment Kate had reminded him of Miss Trimm, and for another moment Lavinia imagined that: Kate at eighty-two, passionately involved with God. That might be so, or not. Kate, and Stephen too, must be left suspended because children by their nature, with so vast a future, had to be. Little Mikey Hatch she thought of, suspended also, dipping his arms into water at the nursery school, and Jennifer Droppy looking sad, and Joseph Wright pushing, and Johnny Pyke laughing, and Tracy Waye being bossy, and Thomas Braine interrupting, and good Andrew Cartboy, and Mandy Goff singing her song. Their faces slipped through her mind, round faces and long faces, thin, fat, smiling, sombre. A whole array of faces came and went, of children who were at her school and children who had been there once. Would little Mikey Hatch become, like his father, a butcher? Would Mandy Goff break hearts all over Dynmouth, as people said her mother had? Would Joseph Wright in time become a Mr Peniket, or Johnny Pyke a Commander Abigail, or Jennifer Droppy a Miss Poraway? Would Thomas Braine, indulged by his parents already, one day turn on them, as the child of the Dasses had? Would Andrew Cartboy, so tiny and sallow, become a Dynmouth Hard? Would Tracy Waye’s bossiness turn into the middle-aged bossiness of a Mrs Stead-Carter?