Children Of Dynmouth

5

They clambered down the cliff-path from Sea House and set off in a western direction along the beach to Badstoneleigh. They wore fawn corduroy jeans, sandals and jerseys, Kate’s red, Stephen’s navy-blue. Mrs Blakey had spoken of anoraks, and the children had obediently collected these from their rooms. But not wishing to have the bother of carrying them, they’d left them on a chair in the kitchen.

The sea was out. It pattered quietly in the distance, each small wave softly succeeding the next. Near its edge the dark, wet sand was a sheen on which footsteps kept their shape for only a minute or two. Closer to the shingle, the children walked on sand that was firmer.

Kate related her dream about little Miss Malabedeely being bullied again by Miss Shaw and Miss Rist and then Miss Malabedeely’s marriage to the African bishop, who’d promised to worship her with his body. He couldn’t remember if he’d dreamed, Stephen said.

They might have exchanged, again, the people of their two schools, but to Kate these people seemed for the moment irrelevant. So were the Blakeys and her mother and Stephen’s father honeymooning in Cassis. Only she and Stephen were relevant. She wanted to ask him if he liked being alone with her, as he was now, on the quiet seashore on a nice day, but naturally she did not.

‘I’d say we’d gone two miles,’ Stephen said.

There were worms of sand where they walked, and here and there embedded shells. Fluffy white clouds floated politely around the sun, as though unwilling to obscure it. Far out to sea a trawler was motionless.

For a moment she had a day-dream. They were in a sailing boat, as far out as the trawler, both of them older, eighteen or nineteen. Stephen wasn’t different except for being taller; she was prettier, not round-faced. He said she was interesting. She made him laugh, he said, and in any case prettiness didn’t matter. She was witty, she had an interesting mind.

‘Further,’ she said. ‘More than two miles, I’d say.’ She asked him to test her on fielding positions, and he marked out on the sand the two sets of stumps and the ten fielding positions around them. ‘Silly mid-on,’ she said. ‘Silly mid-off, square leg, slips, long-stop. Wicket-keeper, of course.’

He told her the others and she tried to memorize them, the positions and the titles. He explained how the positions would change according to the kind of bowler, fast, slow, medium, or according to whether leg-breaks were being bowled or off-spin employed. They would also change according to the calibre of the batsman, and whether or not a batsman was left-handed, and the state of the wicket. Some batsmen, included in a team because of their bowling, might find themselves crowded by close slips. Others, in powerful form, would force the fielders to the boundary. Kate found it all difficult to understand, but she wanted to understand it. She only wished she was any good at the game herself, which unfortunately she wasn’t. She’d always preferred French cricket, although she’d naturally never told Stephen that.

They walked on, and after what they reckoned to be another mile they paused again and looked back at Dynmouth. It was now a cluster of houses with the pier protruding modestly into the sea and, unimpressive on the cliffs, the house they lived in themselves. On the beach a speck moved in the same direction as they did.

There was a second figure, which they didn’t see: high above them, Timothy Gedge gazed down from the cliff-top path. For a moment he ceased his observation of them and instead gazed out to sea, at the trawler on the horizon. The Commander was fond of saying it was the sea on which the Spanish Armada had been defeated, the sea that Adolf Hitler had not dared to cross. Timothy nodded to himself, thinking about the sailing ships of the Spanish Armada and the severe face of the German Führer, of which he’d seen pictures. On the golf-course behind him a foursome of players shouted to one another as they approached the fourteenth green.

He watched the children from Sea House again, becoming smaller on the sand. He guessed they were on their way to Bad-stoneleigh because of the double bill at the Pavilion. He’d seen it himself but he’d see it again just to keep latched on to them. They’d be at a loose end when it was over, which would be the time to approach them. He’d mention something about when Bond was in the sewer or whatever it was meant to be, load of rubbish really. With one hand he grasped the string handle of the carrier-bag with the Union Jack on it. In the other he clutched a fifty-p piece, a coin he’d discovered the evening before in Mrs Abigail’s purse, which carelessly she’d left on top of the refrigerator.

The children were dots on the sand, well ahead of him now, getting smaller all the time. In the other direction, becoming larger, the figure of Commander Abigail slowly advanced.

Mrs Abigail took round Meals on Wheels with Miss Poraway as her assistant, or runner, as the title officially was. Miss Poraway wore a mauve coat and a mauve hat that clashed with it. Mrs Abigail was neat, in blue.

They collected the food – each meal on two covered tin plates and the whole lot contained in large metal hot-boxes – from the old people’s home, Wisteria Lodge. Mrs Abigail drove the blue W R V S van, Miss Poraway sat beside her with a list of the names and addresses they were to visit that morning, the diabetics marked with a ‘D’, as were the corresponding dinners in the metal hot-boxes. Those who didn’t like gravy were indicated also, for there was often trouble where gravy was concerned.

‘Roast beef and rice pudding,’ Miss Poraway remarked as Mrs Abigail steered the van through the morning traffic. She went on talking about roast beef. They always liked it, she declared, and rice pudding too, come to that, though heaven alone knew why, the way they cooked it in Wisteria Lodge. She examined the list of names and addresses. Mr Padget, 29 Prout Street, who was usually the first to receive his meal, had been struck off. ‘Oh dear,’ Miss Poraway remarked.

Mrs Abigail nodded vaguely. The last thing she’d have chosen to listen to this morning was Miss Poraway’s conversation. When she’d lain awake in the night realizing how upset and worried she was by Timothy Gedge’s visit, she’d thought the one thing she wouldn’t be able to do was Meals on Wheels with Miss Poraway. She’d planned to telephone Mrs Trotter, who organized everything, and explain that she wasn’t feeling well. But when the morning came it had seemed disgraceful to pretend illness and let everybody down. She had reminded herself that once or twice recently Miss Poraway hadn’t been able to come because of her nasal complaint, and Mrs Blackham, who was at least efficient, had taken her place.

‘Well, I do like that,’ Miss Poraway was saying, pointing at a cartoon cut from the W R V S News that someone had stuck with Sellotape to the dashboard of the van. It showed an elderly couple being given their meal by a uniformed W R V S woman who was asking them if the food had been all right the last time. ‘Meat were luvely,’ the elderly wife was enthusing. ‘But gravy were tough,’ her ancient partner toothlessly protested.

Since Mrs Abigail, intent on driving, was unable to benefit from this, Miss Poraway read it out. She also read the message in italics printed beneath the cartoon, to the effect that the cartoonist responsible had for many years been officially connected with a provincial newspaper and was now, in the sunset of his life, himself the recipient of twice-weekly Meals on Wheels.

‘Well, I do call that amusing,’ Miss Poraway said, ‘the whole thing.’

The van drew up in Pretty Street and Miss Poraway and Mrs Abigail got out, Miss Poraway still talking about the cartoon, saying it would tickle her brother when she told him about it. Mrs Abigail carried the two covered plates, one on top of the other, using a tea-towel because they were hot. She opened the gate of Number 10, the terraced house of Miss Vine, whose budgerigar was unwell. Miss Poraway clattered noisily behind her, with her list and a tobacco tin for collecting the money in.

‘Morning, Miss Vine!’ Mrs Abigail called out, forcing cheerfulness as she opened the front door.

‘Morning, dear!’ Miss Poraway called out behind her.

They made their way to the kitchen, where Miss Vine was sitting on a chair beside the budgerigar cage. Usually she had a saucepan of water simmering on the electric stove, with two plates warming on top of it, waiting to receive the meal. But this morning all that had been forgotten because the budgerigar had taken a turn for the worse.

‘He’ll not last,’ Miss Vine said gloomily. ‘He’s down in the mouth worse’n ever today.’

‘Oh, he’ll perk up, Miss Vine,’ Mrs Abigail said, mustering further cheerfulness as she emptied roast beef, potatoes, brussels sprouts and gravy on to a cold plate. ‘They often pine for a day or two.’

Miss Poraway disagreed. She was peering through the bars of the cage, making sucking noises. She advanced the opinion that the bird wouldn’t last much longer, and recommended Miss Vine to think about the purchase of a new one.

‘Pop your rice pudding in the oven, shall I?’ Mrs Abigail suggested, opening the oven door and lighting the gas.

Miss Vine did not reply. She had begun to weep. Nothing would induce her, she whispered, to have another bird in the house after poor Beano had gone. You got to love a bird like a human. You got so that the first thing you did every day was to go into the kitchen and say good morning to it.

Mrs Abigail took a soup-plate from a cupboard and emptied the rice pudding on to it. Miss Poraway should by now have collected twelve pence from Miss Vine. She should have ticked off Miss Vine’s name on her list and been ready to carry the empty plates and covers back to the van. Two minutes in any one house was as long as you dared allow if the last half-dozen dinners weren’t to be stone-cold. She placed the plate of rice pudding in the oven and drew Miss Vine’s attention to it. ‘Cub scouts,’ the voice of Timothy Gedge whispered again, like some kind of echo. All night long he’d been saying it.

‘That chap that has the hardware,’ Miss Poraway said. ‘Moult, isn’t it? Brings paraffin round in a van. He’s got birds. He’d easily fix you up, dear.’

‘Have you got your twelve p, Miss Vine?’ Mrs Abigail asked. ‘Don’t forget that rice pudding’s in the oven now.’

‘Shame really,’ Miss Poraway said, ‘when little creatures die.’

Unable to help herself, Mrs Abigail made a vexed noise. It was quite pointless having a runner who saw the whole thing as a social outing and had once even sat down in a kitchen and said she’d just rest for a minute. Half past three it had been when they’d arrived at Mr Grady’s, the last name on the list, his fish and chips congealed and inedible. As she collected up the plates and covers herself and went without Miss Vine’s twelve p, the face of Timothy Gedge appeared in her mind, causing her to feel sick in the stomach. God knows, it was bad enough having to poke your way along in the van, peering at the numbers of houses because your runner was incapable of it. It was bad enough having to do every single bit of the work, rushing like a mad thing because the person who was meant to help you couldn’t stop talking. It was bad enough in normal circumstances, but when you hadn’t slept a wink, when you’d lain there suffering from shock and disgust, it was more than any normal person could bear. Of course she’d been wrong not to telephone Mrs Trotter. She should have told Mrs Trotter that she was in no condition to deliver forty dinners, obstructed at every turn by Miss Poraway. She should have told her that after thirty-six years of marriage she’d discovered her husband was a homosexual, the explanation of everything.

She drove to the Heathfield estate, to Mr and Mrs Budd’s bungalow, and to Seaway Road, to Mrs Hutchings’, and then to the elderly poor of Boughs Lane. All the time Miss Poraway talked. She talked about her niece, Gwen, who had just married an auctioneer, and about the child of another niece, who had something the matter with his ears. When they arrived at Beaconville, where three elderly people lived together, Mrs Abigail gave her one dinner to carry but she dropped it while trying to open the hall-door. In every house they called at she forgot to collect the money. ‘It’s dangerous, a cold when you’re your age, dear,’ she said to Miss Trimm. ‘Don’t like the look of her,’ she remarked loudly in the hall, forgetting that despite her other failings Miss Trimm’s hearing had sharpened with age. They’d buried old Mr Rine that morning, she added, and old Mrs Crowley on Saturday.

As Mrs Abigail struggled through the morning, she was repeatedly reminded, as though this truth sought to mock her, that she had never wished to come to Dynmouth. In London there were the cinemas she enjoyed going to, and the theatre matinées. There were Harvey Nichols and Harrods to browse through, not that she ever bought anything. In Dynmouth the antiquated and inadequately heated Essoldo showed the same film for seven days at a time and the shops were totally uninteresting. With Miss Poraway chattering beside her, she reflected upon all this and recalled, as she had in the night, the course of her virginal marriage.

They had been two small, quiet people; he’d been, at twenty-nine, a gentle kind of man. She hadn’t known much about life, nor had he. They’d both lived with their parents near Sutton, he already in the shipping business from which he’d retired when they came to Dynmouth, she working in her father’s estate agency, doing part-time secretarial duties and arranging the flowers in the outer office. Both sets of parents had been against the marriage, but she and Gordon had persisted, drawn closer by the opposition. They’d been married in a church she’d always gone to as a child and afterwards there was a reception in the Mansfield Hotel, near by and convenient, and then she and Gordon had gone to Cumberland. She’d been trim and neat and pretty. She’d powdered her face in the lavatory on the train, examining her reflection in the mirror, thinking she wasn’t bad-looking. Twice before she’d had proposals of marriage and had rejected them because she couldn’t feel for the men they came from.

She hadn’t known what to expect of marriage, not precisely. They’d shared a bed in Cumberland and she had comforted Gordon because nothing was quite right. Everything took getting used to, she said, saying the same thing night after night, softly in the darkness. You had to learn things, she whispered, supposing that the activity which Gordon found difficult required practice, like tennis. It didn’t matter, she said. They went for long, pleasant walks in Cumberland. They enjoyed having breakfast together in the hotel dining-room.

She remembered clothes she had then, on her honeymoon and afterwards: suits and dresses, many of them in shades of blue, her favourite colour, coats and scarves and shoes. They had friends, other couples, the Watsons, the Turners, the Godsons. There were dinner-parties, bridge was played, there were excursions to the theatre, and dances. Once a man she’d never met before, a man called Peter who didn’t seem to have a wife, kept dancing with her in the Godsons’ house, holding her very close, in a way that quite upset her and yet was pleasurable. A year later, when the war had started and Gordon was already in the Navy, she’d met this Peter in Bond Street and he’d invited her to have a drink, reaching for her elbow. She’d felt quite frightened and hadn’t accepted the invitation.

After the war she and Gordon moved to another part of London. They didn’t see their pre-war friends again and didn’t replace them, it was hard to know why. Gordon seemed a little different, hardened by the war. She was different herself, looking back on it: she’d lost a certain naturalness, she didn’t feel vivacious. It was a disappointment not having children, but there were millions of couples who didn’t have children, and of course there were far worse things than that, as the war had just displayed.

At no time had she ever felt that Gordon was perverted. At no time, not even vaguely, had such a notion occurred to her, nor did she even think that he was not as other men. Since other marriages were without children she presumed that other couples, in their millions, shared their own difficulty. And it was theirs, she considered, not simply Gordon’s. They were both at fault if fault it could be called, which she doubted: more likely, it was the way they were made. She didn’t think about it, it was not mentioned.

But now it was everywhere, clamouring at her, shouting down the years of her virginal marriage. The bungalow they’d come to end their lives in was rich already with this new and simple truth, with a logic any child could understand. That Timothy Gedge, so awful in his drunkenness and apparently in himself, should have released it was even fitting. In his drunkenness he had seemed like something out of a cheap Sunday newspaper: her marriage was like that also, as her husband was, underhand and vicious in a small town. Only the truth had passed from Timothy Gedge, the unarguable strength of it, the power and the glory of it. She didn’t want to think about Timothy Gedge, to dwell on him or to consider him in any way whatsoever. Nothing could change the truth he had uttered, and that for the moment was enough.

‘Well, I do think it’s a lot, you know,’ Miss Poraway was remarking. ‘Forty dinners for just two pairs of hands.’

Mrs Abigail, taking another couple of plates from the back of the van, was aware only that her companion was speaking; the content of her statement did not register. All during the night, over and over again, she had found it absurd that she’d ever considered herself a happy woman. And in the same repetitious way she had recalled the scene she’d interrupted the evening before by announcing that supper was ready: Gordon and the boy seated in the sitting-room before the cosy glow of the electric fire, drinking sherry.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miss Poraway!’ she cried as another rice pudding slipped from Miss Poraway’s fingers. ‘What kind of fool are you?’

On his walk, in his brown overcoat, not carrying his towel and swimming-trunks, Commander Abigail was upset also. At breakfast nothing had been said, which perhaps wasn’t unusual, but afterwards she’d left the house without saying anything either. On a Thursday there was invariably some instruction about the lunch she’d left him, since Thursday was her day for doing her charity with the elderly. Yet not only had she not said anything but as far as he’d been able to ascertain she hadn’t left him any lunch.

Like his wife, the Commander hadn’t slept. Lying awake in the room next to hers, the episode with the boy had kept recurring to him, the sweat running on the boy’s face and his hands protruding from the sleeves of the dog’s-tooth suit and his voice making its extraordinary statements. When they had eventually managed to get him out of the house he’d helped her to carry the remaining dishes from the dining-room, a thing he never did. He’d repeated several more times that everything the boy had said was drunken nonsense. He’d said he was sorry the incident had occurred and had asked her if she’d like him to make her some Ovaltine. As far as he could remember, she hadn’t replied to anything except to shake her head when he mentioned Ovaltine.

As he walked on the sand, the Commander attempted to reassure himself. He had often watched the cub scouts playing rounders on the beach. The Gedge boy, who apparently spied on the entire population of Dynmouth, had no doubt seen him. But there was nothing furtive or dubious about watching a crowd of lads playing a game on the sands, any more than there was about carting food to the elderly. The boy’s unfortunately unsober condition and his inadequate ability to express himself had clearly made for confusion. Without a shred of evidence he had employed an innuendo when what he should have said was that any normal English person could not but approve of the sight of young English lads in their uniforms, and would naturally pause to observe how they played a game.

But with all this argument, contrived for his own reassurance and for retailing to his wife, the Commander failed in the end to convince himself. The truth kept poking itself up, like a weed in a garden. You pushed it away to the back recesses of your mind, but it crept and crawled about and then annoyingly broke through the surface again. The truth was that the unfortunate boy had somehow pried his way into an area that was private, an area that naturally didn’t concern anyone else. Commander Abigail didn’t even like the area: it caused him shame and guilt to consider it, he tried not to think about it. That occasionally it ran away with him was a simple misfortune, and was always distasteful in retrospect.

Progressing slowly, seeming older by years than he had seemed on this beach the day before, more bent and huddled, the Commander shook his head in time to the steps he took. It puzzled him beyond measure that the boy should have stumbled upon this private area. He racked his brains, he cast his mind back. Pictures he did not wish to see passed before him in dazzling procession. Voices spoke. He saw a figure that was himself, the villain of his peepshow. His own face smiled at him and then the pictures ceased. Again, more in control of matters, he cast his mind back.

When the boy had first come to the house he’d been more of a child and had naturally been treated as a child. Once or twice, when gesturing him into the dining-room for supper, he’d laid a hand on his shoulder. Once or twice, while the boy was squatting on the floor polishing the linoleum surround, he had playfully touched his head, as in passing one might pat the head of a dog. There was a game they’d played a few times when Edith was out of the house, a rough-and-tumble sort of thing, perfectly harmless. There was Blind Man’s Buff, and a thing called Find the Penny, in which he himself stood like a statue in the centre of the sitting-room while the boy searched him all over, rifling through his pockets for a hidden coin. A perfectly harmless little game it was, and had afforded both of them amusement. Naturally enough, they hadn’t played it since the boy had entered adolescence.

That had been, and was, their innocent relationship. Yet the boy had insinuated so knowingly that the Commander had begun to wonder if perhaps he suffered from lapses of memory. Had their rough-and-tumbles not been as he recalled, had their Blind Man’s Buff ended differently? Or could it be that the boy had taken his spying into the Essoldo Cinema? He pushed that from his mind, and his mind filled instead with the face of a lad on a bicycle who’d once been friendly, and the face of another who didn’t mind playing Find the Penny in the hut on the golf-course. There was the red-haired cub scout who liked talking about his badges.

He turned and walked, more slowly still, back towards Dynmouth.

Like Dynmouth’s Essoldo, the Pavilion in Badstoneleigh was old. Swing-doors on either side of the box-office in the small foyer led to an inner foyer, carpeted and dimly lit. On brown walls there were large framed photographs of the stars of the thirties: Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, Annabella, Don Ameche, Robert Young, Joan Crawford. There were cigarette burns on the carpet, and here and there the brown of the walls had been rubbed away to reveal a pinkish surface beneath. There was a kiosk which sold confectionery.

The auditorium itself was rather similar, brown-walled and patchy. Lights were kept low, to cover a multitude of small defects. The upholstery of the seats had once been crimson: it had faded to a faint red glow, balding, springs occasionally exposed. Pale curtains with butterflies on them had once been a blaze of colour but now were nondescript. The smell was similar to the Essoldo’s smell: of Jeyes’ Fluid and old cigarette smoke.

In the stalls Timothy Gedge sat three rows behind the children from Sea House, with the carrier-bag by his feet. Having eaten two packets of bacon-flavoured potato crisps, he had purchased another tube of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums, which he was now enjoying while waiting for the lights to dim. Once Stephen looked round and Timothy smiled at him.

The dim lights were dimmed some more, and advertisements for local shops and eating places began. There was a film about the construction of a bridge in Scotland, two trailers, a list of future attractions, and then Dr No. The plot, familiar to Timothy, presented no new depths on a second investigation. Attempts were made to destroy James Bond by shooting him, placing a tarantula in his bed, poisoning his vodka, and drowning him. Each attempt failed due to the mental and physical inadequacies of its perpetrator. The story ended happily, with James Bond in a boat with a girl.

The lights went up and a picture of the confectionery kiosk appeared on the screen. An attached message announced that sweets, chocolate and nuts were available in the foyer.

Timothy rose when Stephen and Kate did, glad that they had decided on refreshment. ‘Cheers,’ he said, standing behind them in a queue.

They knew him by sight. He was a boy who was always on his own, often to be seen watching television programmes in the windows of electrical shops. He always wore the same light-coloured clothes, matching his light-coloured hair.

‘Hullo,’ Kate said.

‘I see you over Dynmouth way.’

‘We live in Dynmouth.’

‘You do.’ He smiled at them in turn. ‘Your mum just married his dad.’

‘Yes, she did.’

They bought packets of nuts, and Timothy bought another tube of fruit gums. When he returned to the stalls he sat beside Kate. ‘Care for a gum?’ he said, offering them both the tube. They took one each, and he noticed that they nudged one another with their elbows, amused because he had offered them fruit gums.

Diamonds Are Forever took the same course as its predecessor. James Bond ran a similar gamut of attempts to bring his life to a halt. He again ended with a girl, a different one this time and not in a boat.

‘We’d easily get the half-five bus,’ Timothy said, offering his gums again, blocking their passage and the passage of two elderly women who were endeavouring to pass into the foyer.

‘Come along then, please,’ an usherette, elderly also, cried. ‘Move there, sonny.’

In a bunch the women and the three children passed through the swing-doors into the brown foyer.

‘We’re going back by the beach,’ Kate said.

‘Great.’ He blinked against the sudden glare of sunshine on the street. He could see they were surprised that he’d latched on to them, but it didn’t matter. He walked beside them on the pavement, three abreast, so that pedestrians coming towards them had to step out into the street. He swung the carrier-bag with the Union Jack on it. It was hard to know what to say to them. He said:

‘D’you know that Miss Lavant? She fancies the doctor, Greenslade.’

They’d seen Miss Lavant on the promenade and about the town, always walking slowly, sometimes with a neat wicker basket. Kate had often thought she was beautiful. She hadn’t known she was in love with Dr Greenslade, who had a wife already, and three children.

‘She fancied the man for twenty years,’ Timothy said.

It explained Miss Lavant. There was a nervous quality about her, which was now explained also: her nerves were on edge as she slowly perambulated. Her eyes, always a little cast down, were being well behaved, resisting the temptation to dart about in search of Dr Greenslade.

‘She’s in a bedsitting-room in Pretty Street,’ Timothy said. ‘To the left of the hall door.’ He laughed remembering again how he’d insisted that Miss Lavant was Mrs Abigail’s sister. ‘I looked in the window once and she was eating a boiled egg, with another boiled egg in an egg-cup across the table from her. She was chatting sixteen to the dozen, entertaining Greenslade even though he wasn’t there. Three o’clock in the afternoon, everyone out in their deck-chairs.’

He had a funny way of talking, Kate thought. Yet he made her feel sorry for Miss Lavant, a woman she’d hardly thought about before. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the bedsitting-room in Pretty Street, on the left of the hall door, and the two boiled eggs in two egg-cups.

Stephen felt sorry for Miss Lavant also, and resolved to examine her more closely. She never walked on the beach, and without ever thinking about it he had assumed she didn’t because she didn’t want to spoil her shoes. He thought he’d once heard someone saying that about her, but it now seemed that reason wasn’t the right one: the beach was hardly the place to catch a glimpse of Dr Greenslade, with his black bag and his stethoscope, which he sometimes wore round his neck on the street.

‘I wouldn’t mind a beer,’ Timothy said, adding that the only trouble was that the Badstoneleigh supermarkets wouldn’t serve a person who was under age. ‘There’s an off-licence in Lass Lane,’ he said, ‘where the bloke’s half blind.’

On the way to Lass Lane they told him their names and he said his was Timothy Gedge. He advised them not to come into the off-licence with him. He offered to buy them a tin of beer each, but they said they’d rather have Coca-Cola.

‘You eighteen, laddie?’ the proprietor enquired as he reached down a pint tin of Worthington E. He wore thick pebble spectacles, behind which his eyes were unnaturally magnified. Timothy said he’d be nineteen on the twenty-fourth of next month.

‘Gemini,’ the man said. Timothy smiled, not knowing what the man was talking about.

‘You often get loonies in joints like that,’ he remarked on the street. ‘They drink the sauce and it softens their brains for them.’ He laughed, and then added that he’d been drunk as a cork himself actually, the night before. He’d woken in a shocking state, his mouth like the Sahara desert.

They walked towards the seashore and sat on the rocks, beside a pool with anemones in it. They drank the Coca-Cola and Timothy consumed the Worthington E, saying it was just what he needed after being on the sauce the night before. When he’d finished he threw the beer-tin into the pool with the anemones in it.

They began to walk towards Dynmouth. The sea was coming in. There were more seagulls than there had been that morning, on the cliffs and on the sea itself. The same trawler was in the same position on the horizon.

‘Are you at school then?’ he asked, and they told him about their two boarding-schools. He knew they were at boarding-schools, but it was something to say to the kids. He said he was at Dynmouth Comprehensive himself, a terrible dump. There was a woman called Wilkinson who couldn’t keep order in a bird-cage. Stringer, the headmaster, was rubbish; the P.E. man went after the girls. Sex and cigarettes were the main things, and going up to the Youth Centre to smash the legs off the table-tennis tables. There was a girl called Grace Rumblebow who had to be seen to be believed.

‘D’you know Plant?’ he said. ‘Down at the Artilleryman’s?’

‘Plant?’ Stephen said.

‘He’s always hanging about toilets.’ He laughed. ‘After women.’

He explained to them what he meant by that, about how he’d run into Mr Plant in the small hours, wearing only a shirt. He described the scene he’d witnessed in his mother’s bedroom, during A Man Called Ironside.

They didn’t say anything, and after a few moments the silence hardened and became awkward. Kate looked out to sea, wishing he hadn’t joined them. She stared at the petrified trawler.

‘Your mum on a honeymoon?’ he said.

She nodded. In France, she said. Smiling, he turned to Stephen.

‘Your dad’ll enjoy that, Stephen. Your dad’ll be all jacked up.’

‘Jacked up?’

‘Steaming for it, Stephen.’

He laughed. Stephen didn’t reply.

His face was like an axe-edge, Kate thought, with another axe-edge cutting across it: the line of the cheek-bones above the empty cheeks. His fingers were rather long, slender like a girl’s.

‘Your mum has a touch of style, Kate. I heard that remarked in a vegetable shop. I’d call her an eyeful, Kate. Peachy.’

‘Yes.’ She muttered, her face becoming red because she felt embarrassed.

‘He knows his onions, Stephen? Your dad, eh?’

Again Stephen didn’t reply.

‘Did you mind me saying it, Stephen? He’s a fine man, your dad, they’re well matched. “It’s great it happened,” the woman in the shop said, buying leeks at the time. “It’s great for the children,” she said. D’you reckon it’s great, Kate? D’you like having Stephen?’

Her face felt like a sunset. She turned it away in confusion, pretending to examine the grey-brown clay of the cliff.

‘Dynmouth people can’t mind their own business,’ she heard Timothy Gedge saying. ‘They’re always like that, gassing their heads off in a public shop. The best place for Dynmouth people is in their coffins.’ Laughter rippled from him, quite gently, softly. ‘D’you ever go to funerals, Kate?’

‘Funerals?’

‘When a person dies, Kate.’

She shook her head. They progressed in silence for a moment. Then Timothy Gedge said:

‘Ever read books, Stephen? The Cannibal’s Daughter by Henrietta Mann?’

He laughed and they laughed also, a little uneasily. In a woman’s voice he said:

‘When’s it unlucky to have a cat behind you?’

They said they didn’t know.

‘When you’re a mouse. See it, Stephen? Cross an elephant and a kangaroo, Kate? What d’you get?’

She shook her head.

‘Dirty great holes all over Australia, Kate.’ He smiled at her. He said he was going in for the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’m looking for a wedding-dress. I have an act planned with a wedding-dress.’

‘You mean you dress up as a bride?’ Kate said.

He told them. He told them about the bath in Swines’ building yard. He repeated the information he’d passed on to the Abigails and to Mr Plant: that George Joseph Smith had bought fish for the late Miss Munday, and eggs for Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty. They didn’t comment on any of it.

‘I often saw your dad about the place, Stephen,’ he said. ‘With a pair of field-glasses.’

‘He’s an ornithologist.’

‘What d’you call that, Stephen?’

‘He writes books about birds.’

‘Is your mum’s wedding-dress in a trunk, Stephen?’

Stephen stopped, staring down at the sand. The toe of his right sandal slowly drew a circle. Kate looked from one face to the other, Stephen’s screwed up with bewilderment, Timothy Gedge’s smiling pleasantly.

‘I saw your dad with it, Stephen.’ He spoke softly, his smile still there. ‘I was looking in the window of that Primrose Cottage.’

They didn’t say anything. Both of them were frowning. They moved on again and Timothy Gedge went with them, swinging his carrier-bag.

‘You didn’t mind me looking in at the window, Stephen? Only I was passing at the time. Your dad was packing his gear up. He took the wedding-dress out of the trunk and put it back again. A faded kind of trunk, Stephen. Green it would be in its day.’

There was another silence, and then they ran away from him, leaving him standing there, shocked to stillness by their abrupt movement. He couldn’t understand why they were suddenly running over the sand. He thought for a moment that it might be some kind of game, that their running would cease as suddenly as it had begun, that they’d stand like statues on the sand, waiting for him to catch up with them. But they didn’t. They ran on and on.

He took a fruit gum from what remained of the tube. He stood there sucking it, watching the seagulls.