The Children Of Dynmouth Read online

  ‘It’ll be all right.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Already his father had sold Primrose Cottage; already their furniture had been moved to Sea House. Going to live there was apparently the best arrangement, or so his father had explained when telling him about the forthcoming marriage. Kate’s mother had actually been born there and so had Kate. The house was much bigger than Primrose Cottage and more suitable for the four of them in other ways as well. But Primrose Cottage, a mile from Dynmouth, on the Badstoneleigh road, was what Stephen still thought of as his home, with its banks of primroses, and buddleia full of butterflies in the small back garden, and the memory of his mother.

  ‘You’ll like it, Stephen. The Blakeys are nice.’

  ‘I know the Blakeys are nice.’ He smiled again, his eyes remaining sombre even though he didn’t want them to. ‘I’m sure it’ll be all right.’

  The train rushed through the dismal afternoon, the silence between them had an edge to it. Stephen was often silent, but she knew he was thinking now of their parents’ marriage, and wondering about it. Two facts had made it possible: the divorce of her own parents and the death of his mother. The divorce had happened before she or Stephen could remember. Now and again her father came back to Dynmouth, or to see her at St Cecilia’s, but the visits made her unhappy because his presence caused her to sense the trouble and the pain there’d been. She couldn’t help not liking him, sensing as well that it was he who had been cruel, that he had deserted her mother for the wife he was now married to.

  The waiter brought sandwiches and more hot water and then a tray full of cellophane-wrapped pieces of fruitcake and slices of Swiss roll. Kate took a slice of Swiss roll and the waiter told her to have another because the slices were small. Stephen took a piece of fruitcake. He undid the cellophane, carefully remembering the past, wanting to because it was relevant on this particular day: the details were preserved, behind some screen in his mind, always available. A time would never come when he’d forget it had been autumn, or forget the slight foreboding he’d felt at being summoned. The undermatron, Miss Tomm, had come into the dormitory and asked him to come with her to the study. The half-past-eight bell had just gone. Lights-out was in a quarter of an hour. ‘Eee, what’s Fleming done?’ Cartwright shouted out, standing by his bed in a checked dressing-gown, with a towel in his hand. He flicked the towel at Stephen, and Miss Tomm sharply told him to leave off.

  His father was in the study, sitting in the chair in front of the Craw’s desk, the chair the Craw asked you to sit in when he was going to give you a row. His father hadn’t taken off his overcoat or his scarf.

  ‘Ah,’ the Craw said when Stephen entered.

  The Craw found another chair and drew it up to the desk. He told Stephen to sit on it, in a voice that wasn’t as scratchy as usually it was. His eyes kept darting about. Fingers like sticks were restless on the desk in front of him.

  ‘Shall I?’ he suggested, raising grey eyebrows at Stephen’s father. ‘Or would …?’

  ‘I’ll do it, please.’

  His father was different also. His cheeks were pale, quite noticeably so in the hard glare of the room’s electric light. Stephen thought he was ill. In the confusion of being so abruptly called out of the dormitory and then finding his father in the study, he could think of no better reason for his father’s presence than that he should have come to Ravenswood Court to tell him that he was ill.

  ‘Mummy,’ his father said in a peculiar, stuttering kind of voice, quite unlike his usual one. ‘Mummy, Stephen. Mummy …’

  He did not go on. He wasn’t looking at Stephen. He was looking down at his open overcoat, at its buttons and the brown and green of its tweed.

  ‘Is Mummy ill?’

  His father controlled himself. When he spoke it was no longer with a stutter. He said: ‘Not ill, Stephen.’

  Blood spread into Stephen’s neck and face. He could feel its warmth, and then he felt it draining away.

  ‘Mummy has died, Stephen.’

  The clock on the mantelpiece ticked busily. The Craw moved a paper on his desk. There was a knock on the door, but the Craw didn’t answer it.

  ‘Died?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Stephen.’

  ‘You must be brave, old chap,’ the Craw said, his voice beginning to make its scratchy sound again.

  The knock on the door was repeated. ‘Not now,’ the Craw shouted.

  ‘It would be better if you didn’t come home. It would be better if you could stay at school, Stephen. I thought at first you should come home.’

  ‘Best to stay at school, Stephen,’ the Craw said.

  ‘Died?’ Stephen said again. ‘Died?’

  His lips began to quiver. He felt the bones of his shoulders shaking uncontrollably. He could hear his own breathing, a noisy panting he couldn’t control either.

  ‘Died?’ he whispered.

  His father was standing beside him, holding him.

  ‘It’s all right, Stephen,’ he said, but it wasn’t all right and the other two in the room knew it wasn’t either. It was unbelievable, it was something that could not be true. He felt the tears on his face, a wetness that came warmly and then was chill. He struggled, as he often did in nightmares, trying to reach a surface, struggling to wake up from horror.

  ‘You must be brave, old chap,’ the Craw said again.

  She had a way of comforting, holding you differently from the way his father was holding him now. There was the softness of her hands, and her black hair, and a faint scent of perfume. ‘Eau de Cologne,’ she said. She smiled at him, her eyes lost behind sun-glasses.

  The Craw was no longer in the room. His father had a handkerchief in his hand. Stephen wept again, closing his eyes. He felt the handkerchief on his face, wiping away the tears. His father was murmuring but he couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  He couldn’t prevent himself from seeing her. She stood by the edge of the sea, a rust-coloured corduroy coat pulled tightly around her; he could see her breath on the icy air. He watched her making drop-scones in the kitchen of Primrose Cottage.

  Mrs Craw came in with a cup of chocolate, with the Craw behind her, carrying a tray of tea things. They didn’t say anything. The Craw put the tray on the desk, and Mrs Craw poured a cup of tea for his father. They both went away again.

  ‘Try and drink your chocolate,’ his father said.

  A skin had already formed on the surface. ‘Disgusting!’ he used to cry when she brought him chocolate in bed, and she’d laugh because it was a joke, because he was only pretending to be cross.

  He drank the chocolate. His father repeated that it would be better if he remained in the school rather than return to Primrose Cottage. ‘I’m sorry to be so little help,’ his father said.

  When he’d finished the chocolate the Craw and Mrs Craw returned. Mrs Craw said: ‘We’re going to put you in the san for the night. In Miss Tomm’s room.’

  There were awkward silences then, but they were only awkward afterwards, looking back on them; they were nothing at all at the time. His father put his arms round him again, and then Miss Tomm came into the study with his clothes and shoes for the morning, and his wash-bag. The wash-bag was dangling from one of her fingers, yellow and blue and red. ‘Here’s a nice one,’ he’d said in Boots in Dynmouth the time they’d bought it. ‘This one.’

  He walked with Miss Tomm across the quadrangle and then along the path by the playing-fields, to the sanatorium. Leaves squelched beneath their feet, it was windy and drizzling slightly. He couldn’t help shivering, even though it seemed wrong to be affected by the cold.

  It seemed wrong to fall asleep, but he did fall asleep. He was in a camp-bed beside Miss Tomm’s bed, and when he woke he didn’t know where he was. Then he remembered, and lay in the darkness sobbing, listening to Miss Tomm breathing. Once or twice she spoke in her sleep, once saying something about spoons, and once saying she loved someone. There was a smell of powder in the room, a smell that wasn’t like the
smell of eau de Cologne and yet reminded him of it. When the dawn began to come he could see the outline of Miss Tomm in bed and when the light was better he could see her open mouth and the hairpins in her hair and her clothes on a chair quite close to him.

  An alarm clock went off at half past seven and he watched Miss Tomm waking up and being surprised when she realized he was there. He watched her frowning, peering at him.

  ‘My mother died,’ he said.

  He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t going to shiver like that. If he cried, it would be in the middle of the night again, quietly and to himself. He felt an emptiness in his stomach when he thought about it, an actual pain that came and went. But he did not want to cry.

  He walked with Miss Tomm back to the school, carrying his pyjamas and dressing-gown and slippers. They would be late for breakfast, he said, because the bell had stopped ringing more than a minute ago. Mr Deccles had promised it wouldn’t matter, Miss Tomm said, and when they entered the dining-hall together he knew that the Craw had told the whole school what had happened. There was a silence when they entered the dining-hall, which continued while Miss Tomm went to the sideboard where the cornflakes were given out, while he himself pushed his way to his place.

  The boys at his table looked at him, and although talk had begun again at other tables the boys at his remained silent. Quiet-Now Simpson, who was at the head of the table, didn’t know what to say.

  Afterwards, during the day, boys said they were sorry. And much later on he was told that when the Craw had informed the school he’d said it would be better if boys didn’t mention the matter. ‘Just be kind to Fleming,’ apparently he’d admonished.

  He went to see the Craw and said he wanted to go to his mother’s funeral. He didn’t want to remain at home after it, or go home immediately. He just wanted to return to Dynmouth for the funeral.

  The headmaster shook his head, and for a moment Stephen thought he was going to say that this request would be impossible to grant.

  ‘Your father,’ the Craw said instead. ‘I just wonder what your father …’

  ‘Could you telephone my father, sir? Please, sir.’

  ‘Well. Well, yes, I dare say.’

  There and then the telephone call was made. Impatiently, the headmaster’s stick-like fingers rapped the surface of the desk while he waited to be connected. It was clear he would have preferred not to telephone. It was clear that he considered it a nuisance, a boy having to go to a funeral, special arrangements made.

  ‘Ah, Mr Fleming. Deccles here.’ His voice softened by an injection of mournfulness, was less scratchy than it had been a moment ago. He repeated the request that had been made. He listened for a moment. He nodded and then he said, handing Stephen the receiver:

  ‘Your father’d like to speak to you.’

  Stephen took the receiver from him, unable to avoid contact with the fingers that generations of boys hadn’t cared to touch either.

  ‘Are you really sure, Stephen? Mummy wouldn’t have –’

  ‘I’d like to come.’

  Miss Tomm put him on a train, his father met him at Dynmouth Junction and drove him back to Primrose Cottage. Later they drove from the cottage to Dynmouth, to the church of St Simon and St Jude, where Mr Featherston conducted the service. The clergyman gave an address, referring to the death as a tragedy. ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy,’ he said softly, ‘to take unto Himself the soul of our dear sister, we therefore commit her body to the ground.’

  It was sunny in the graveyard. Yellow and brown leaves were scattered everywhere. It was unbelievable that she was lying in the gleaming coffin which four men were lowering on ropes. It was unbelievable that her body was going to rot, that never again would she be seen or heard, that never again would she kiss him. He wasn’t able to prevent himself from crying. The more he held it all back the worse it became. He wanted to cry loudly, to run to the coffin and embrace it, to speak to her even though she was dead.

  ‘Come now, Stephen,’ his father said, and the people standing about – relations and friends, strangers some of them – turned away from the grave.

  The clergyman put his hand on Stephen’s shoulder. ‘You’re a brave little boy,’ he said.

  His father drove him all the way back to Ravenswood Court, and the silence of the journey made him realize why his father hadn’t wanted him to come home for the funeral. ‘I’ve got a few sweets,’ Miss Tomm whispered in the hall of Ravenswood. ‘Lime and lemon sherbet. D’you like sherbet, Stephen?’

  Miles of landscape had gone by, the silence in the dining-car had been a lengthy one. The stout waiter broke it by asking if everything had been all right. He flicked a page of the pad he held and swiftly wrote them out a yellow bill. ‘Obliged to you, sir,’ he said, giving it to Stephen.

  They each placed money on the table, and the waiter collected it up and thanked them. Out of the ugliness of the divorce and the death it seemed only fair to Kate that there should come this happy ending. Her mother had been deserted. Stephen’s father had suffered a horrible tragedy. She loved her mother, and she liked Stephen’s father better than her own. She liked him because he was quiet and gentle. He had a smile she liked, he was clever: an ornithologist with a passion for the birds he wrote books about. With Stephen, she’d watched him cleaning oil from the feathers of seagulls. He’d shown them how to set a stonechat’s broken wing.

  In the house they were to share all four of them deserved their happy ending: an idyll, Kate had said to herself ever since she’d known about the marriage that had been planned, repeating the word because she loved the sound of it. All the pain there’d been would be soothed away, since that was what idylls were for.

  There were two approaches to Sea House, one from the road that rose steeply from Dynmouth and led to Dynmouth Golf Course and then on to Badstoneleigh, the other from the seashore, by a path that rose more steeply still, sharply winding around the contours of the cliff-face. The latter surfaced at the eleventh green and continued by the turf’s edge until the turf gave way to a high wall of weathered brick, touched with Virginia creeper. This bounded a garden that was uniquely rich, a streak of acid soil in the surrounding lime, a fluke of nature that generations in Sea House had taken advantage of. Set in an archway in the wall, a white wrought-iron gate led to a path through the shrubbery of azaleas for which the garden was reputed but which, in April, was only a mass of green. Magnolias and tree mallows stood starkly, with dripping leaves; rhododendrons glistened, heavy with buds. Ahead, the garden inclined upward, stretching extensively over three levels, with steps and banks of heather separating one surface from the next. Only daffodils and crocuses were in bloom now, and spring heathers and some winter jasmine. In the distance, to the left of the house and behind it, glass-houses leant from the high brick wall, with vegetable-beds around them; nearer, a paved herb garden had box hedges and a sundial. There were rose-beds and a white summer-house. A monkey-puzzle stood solitary on a wide expanse of lawn.

  Sea House itself was a long, low Georgian manor, two storeys of old brick. A row of six French windows opened directly on to grass, beneath twice as many windows upstairs. The window-frames were white.

  Two dappled English setters nosed about the garden on this damp Wednesday afternoon, their huge frilled tails thrashing the air, their grey and white coats wet, their mouths exposing handsome fangs and long pink tongues. They ran and sniffed by turn, looking for frogs in the long grass beneath the tree mallows. They settled for a while by the summer-house, leonine, eyeing one another. They rose and stretched, and nosed their way around the house and down the gravel drive that curved between further lawns to iron entrance gates. They returned with their tails less vigorous, satisfied that all was in order on their territory. In front of the white hall-door they settled again, between two pillars and urns containing tulips.

  Within the house Mrs Blakey made raisin-and-stout cake in the kitchen. Her husband had gone to Dynmouth Junction to meet
the children off the six-forty train. They’d be on the way back by now, she reflected, glancing at the clock on the dresser, and for an instant she imagined the two contrasting faces of the children, and the children themselves sitting in the back of the old Wolseley, and her husband silently driving because silence was his way. She tipped the brown cake-mixture into a baking tin, scooping the last few spoonfuls out of the bowl with a wooden spoon. She placed it in the top oven of the Aga and set a timer on the dresser to buzz in an hour.

  Mrs Blakey, with busy eyes and cheeks that shone, possessed a nature which had been formed by a capacity for looking on the bright side. Clouds were there for the harvesting of their silver linings, despair was just a word. The kitchen of Sea House, where she spent the greater part of her day, seemed quite in keeping with all this: the Aga burning quietly, the lofty, panelled ceiling, flowered plates arranged on the dresser, the commodious wall-cupboards, the scrubbed wooden table. The kitchen was comfortable and comforting, as in many ways Mrs Blakey herself was.

  The Blakeys had come to live at Sea House in 1953, the year their daughter Winnie married, the year after their son had emigrated to British Columbia. Before that they’d come up from Dynmouth every day, to work in the garden and the house. The work was part of them by now, and they were part of the house and garden. They remembered the birth of Kate’s mother. There’d been the deaths, within six months, of Kate’s grandparents. Although he never said it, Mrs Blakey knew that her husband sometimes felt, through his affection for it, that the garden was his. He had dug more soil in it than anyone else alive now, and year by year had watched more asters grow. He had changed the shape of the herb garden; forty-one years ago he had created two new lawns. He knew the house as well, and felt a similar affection for it. It was he who cleaned the windows, inside and out, and cleared the gutters in the spring and repainted, every three years, the white woodwork and the drainpipes and the chutes. He replaced slates when storms blew them from the roof. He knew the details of the plumbing and the wiring. Five years ago he had re-boarded the drawing-room floor.