Children Of Dynmouth

7

He clambered over the shingle at the bottom of the cliff and then up the cliff itself, arriving at the eleventh green. He was carrying the carrier-bag with the Union Jack on it.

He passed through the archway in the garden wall of Sea House, opening the white iron gate and leaving it open. He walked between shrubs and empty flower-beds, past the monkey-puzzle beneath which, in his confusion, he had stood the night before last, thinking about the wedding-dress. He’d had an addled idea that he wanted to stand there all night, so that first thing in the morning he could approach the kids and explain to them what it was he was after. As he paused by the monkey-puzzle now the dogs came running at him, barking and jumping, sniffing at his feet.

Mr Blakey came out of a distant glass-house, beyond lawns and flower-beds. He called at the dogs, but they paid him no attention. Timothy stood still, not wishing to be bitten by the animals.

‘I was wanting to see the kids,’ he said when Mr Blakey came closer. The man was known to him by sight and by name; he had nothing against him. ‘Nice day, Mr Blakey,’ he said.

Mr Blakey seized the dogs by their collars. He pointed at the house and ordered them to go towards it, which they obediently did.

‘I was talking to the kids yesterday,’ Timothy explained, giving Mr Blakey a smile. The man was staring at him, he noticed.

‘You came into this garden in the night,’ Mr Blakey said eventually.

Timothy, still smiling, shook his head. He said he was always in bed at night. He laughed companionably. ‘I think you had a dream, sir.’

At this point the children came through the drawing-room French windows. After a moment of hesitation they walked towards Timothy Gedge. Mr Blakey returned to his glass-house.

‘What d’you want?’ Stephen said.

‘I was thinking about the wedding-dress.’ He held out the bag with the Union Jack on it. ‘I have a carrier here for it.’

‘We haven’t got a wedding-dress,’ Stephen said quickly. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’

‘Is there a price on the wedding-dress, Stephen?’

Stephen didn’t reply. He began to walk back towards the house. Kate followed him, and Timothy followed, also.

‘Your dad’d have no use for it, Stephen. It’s still in the trunk, no good to anyone.’ He said he wished he could be friends with them. He reminded them that yesterday he’d bought them two tins of Coca-Cola.

‘We don’t want to be friends with you,’ Stephen said angrily.

‘Leave us alone.’

‘You’re older than us,’ Kate explained.

‘Fifteen.’

‘We’re only twelve.’

They had halted in their walk. Within the house, passing by the landing window, Mrs Blakey paused, surprised to see this older boy in the garden. It was odd that he should be there. Vaguely she wondered if Kate and Stephen had been up to mischief.

‘Your mum has no use for it either, Stephen.’

‘Stephen’s mother –’

‘Stephen’s mother’s dead, Kate.’

Stephen began to walk away again. Kate said:

‘It upsets Stephen, talking about his mother.’

She moved on, but Timothy Gedge moved with her. He remained silent until they had reached a flight of three stone steps between one lawn and a higher one, where Stephen was waiting. Then he said:

‘It’s no joke when your mother’s dead. It’s no joke for a kid, it could happen to any of us.’ He nodded at Stephen and Stephen stood still, waiting for him to turn and go, staring at him and frowning.

‘Plant’s going to convey the bath for me in his van, Stephen. Plant says the act’ll bring the house down.’

‘It’s all lies what you’re saying.’ Stephen’s face was flushed. He glared at Timothy and Timothy nodded at him, as if he’d misheard what had been said. He smiled at Stephen. He said:

‘Only I definitely need the wedding-dress.’

‘Well, you can’t have it. You’re stupid and pathetic. We don’t want to have anything to do with you.’

Mrs Blakey, recognizing that something was wrong, rapped sharply on the landing window and beckoned at the children. Timothy waved at her, endeavouring to indicate that nothing was the matter.

‘I saw you at the funeral, Stephen. I saw your dad. I saw your mum, Kate.’ He spoke keenly and with even greater friendliness than before. ‘Your mother’s finished with the dress, Stephen.’

They looked at him smiling his smile, one hand hanging limply by his side, the other grasping the carrier-bag. Then Stephen walked on towards the open French windows, and Kate walked beside him. When he’d said he’d seen Stephen at the funeral she’d felt afraid of him for a moment. Something in his voice had made her feel afraid, she didn’t know what.

He walked beside her and she knew he was still smiling. She could hear him sucking at a fruit gum.

‘D’you know the Abigails, Kate?’

She didn’t reply.

‘And the Dasses?’ He laughed. ‘They have a house called Sweet-lea.’

‘Please go away now.’ She put her head on one side, trying to make him understand from the look in her eyes that Stephen had been upset by the references to his mother’s death. He nodded at her. He said to Stephen:

‘A person can’t help himself, Stephen.’

At the landing window Mrs Blakey frowned. The boy looked strange, loose-limbed and broad-shouldered, with his very fair hair. The children seemed quite tiny beside him, Stephen even frail. He kept grinning at them as though they were all three the very best of friends, but clearly that wasn’t quite so. He was so very familiar on the streets of the town, with that zipped yellow jacket and his jeans, yet he looked like something from another world in the garden. He didn’t belong in gardens, any more than he belonged in the company of two small children. His presence puzzled her beyond measure.

‘A person has temptations. You could argue like that, Stephen.’

It seemed to them that he said anything that came into his head. His head was like a dustbin, with all sorts of rubbish mingling in it, and all of it eventually spewing out of his mouth.

‘Only the Commander was upset with nerves on account of a remark I made the other night. D’you understand what I’m referring to, Kate?’

‘How could she?’ Stephen cried. ‘How could she possibly make head or tail –’

‘The Commander’s gay as a grasshopper, homo-ing all over the joint. Out after cub scouts, lads in the Essoldo, anything you like. Up on the golf-course, down on the beach, in and out the windows. The wife never guessed.’

He smiled at Kate because she was frowning, seeming bewildered and even put out. ‘The wife didn’t guess till it slipped out when I was on the sauce the other night. She married a gaylord, Kate.’

Stephen shook his head, not believing that. There’d been a master at Ravenswood, a man called Funny Stiles who’d been given the sack because he’d made boys presents of whistles and fountain-pens. But Commander Abigail wasn’t like Funny Stiles. It couldn’t possibly make sense for a man who was married to go homo-ing about.

They had reached the French windows. It wouldn’t take two minutes to slip up to the attic, Timothy Gedge said.

‘I often saw your dad,’ he said, ‘out with the field-glasses. The day I saw him at her funeral I said to myself he was a fine man. I saw him standing there getting wet all over him and I said to myself he was a fine person. I said it afterwards to the clergyman. The way he stood, I remarked to the Reverend Feather, the way he bowed his head down over the loss of your mother, Stephen. There’s some stand any old how, you’d be really ashamed of them. You’d want to go up to them and tell them to do better.’

‘You’re half mad,’ Stephen said quietly, with anger just beneath the surface of his voice.

Timothy shook his head. ‘I thought the same thing the night I saw him with her wedding-dress. Not like Plant or Abigail, I remarked to myself. Not like Dass or the clergyman. I’d say your father looks a different kettle of fish, Stephen, and isn’t that the way to keep it? Any trouble your father might have we can hide under wraps. D’you get the picture, Stephen?’

Stephen stepped through the French windows and when Kate was in the drawing-room with him he stood in the opening, one hand on the frame of the window, to prevent the older boy from entering. ‘Don’t ever dare to come into the garden again,’ he ordered, with the same violence in his voice. ‘Clear off and don’t come back.’

He closed the window and latched it.

‘Whatever’s going on?’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘Whatever’s Timothy Gedge want?’

He’d lost a penknife on the beach, Kate said. He was wondering if they’d found it.

There was a spinney they’d made their own, by the river. They went there in the middle of that morning, passing through the gate in the garden wall and along the cliff-path for a few hundred yards and then on to the golf-course. Rapidly they crossed fairways, by greens and bunkers and tees. They passed behind the club-house, leaving the golf-course behind them. They went through a field where sheep grazed, and then through bracken that sloped down steeply to the River Dyn. They wore Wellington boots, their corduroy jeans and the same jerseys as yesterday, Kate’s red, Stephen’s navy-blue.

Stephen walked ahead of her on the river bank. He led the way around the edge of a marsh and then through drier land, with limestone boulders on it. Ferns grew among the boulders, and further on the spring undergrowth was already dense. At a twist in the river lay the spinney, a clump of birch saplings sprouting through a thicket of bramble. It wasn’t large and never attracted other people. A stream ran through it to the river.

In the middle of the undergrowth, unseen either from the river or the bank on the other side, they had built a hut with lengths of fallen wood and some corrugated iron they’d found. It was a private lair, and though they’d often wished to have a fire they’d never done so – not because they feared for the dry wood of the spinney but because they knew that rising smoke would sooner or later be investigated.

They crawled into their hut. Outside, the sun glanced through a lacing of branches and bramble and scattered light in patches. Inside it was almost dark. They didn’t speak. Kate’s arms were clasped around her knees in an attitude she often took up. Stephen lay flat, gazing out at the patterns of sunlight, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. They hadn’t spoken to one another about Timothy Gedge, either last night or since Stephen had closed the French windows in his face, several hours ago. They hadn’t said to one another that they couldn’t understand his talk about the Abigails and the Dasses and Mr Plant of the Artilleryman’s Friend. They had attempted to visualize his world, as they had so often visualized each other’s boarding-schools. But they knew too little about him and what they knew was bewildering. They tried to imagine him acting in a comic manner the part of a man who had murdered three wives in a bath. They tried to imagine people watching this gruesome comedy.

‘He’s making it up. The wedding-dress isn’t even there.’ Kate spoke softly, shaking her head in denial.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s there.’ He remembered waking up in the middle of the night, and then he remembered Miss Tomm walking into the dormitory and saying that the headmaster wanted to see him and Cartwright saying: ‘Eee, what’s Fleming done?’ He remembered his father in his tweed overcoat in the Craw’s study, his father saying later how it had happened, and then the funeral in the rain. Timothy Gedge had said he’d seen him there. He’d said the best place for the people of Dynmouth was in their coffins.

Stephen suddenly wanted to hit him. He wanted to hit him all over the face with his fists, to smash away his stupid smile, to stop him talking.

‘I think we should tell Mrs Blakey,’ Kate said.

‘No.’ He shook his head, still gazing at the patterns of sunshine on the grass outside the hut. ‘No,’ he said again, closing the subject.

They made a dam on the stream, which was something they often did when they came to the spinney. They could feel the chill of the water through the rubber of their Wellington boots. Their hands, piling up stones, became red with cold.

Kate watched him, glancing sideways without turning her head. In the garden that morning she’d thought he was going to cry because of the memory of his mother’s death. She’d thought he was going to turn his back on Timothy Gedge and on herself and run into the house so that they wouldn’t see his tears. She’d felt his unhappiness and she felt it now. She wanted to say that he’d feel all right when a little time had passed, just like you did at school when you were homesick at the beginning of term. But she didn’t because she didn’t know that that would happen. She didn’t know what would happen, she didn’t know what was happening now.

They ate the sandwiches they’d made before they’d left the house, and then lay in their shelter and read two paper-backed books they’d brought with them. In the middle of the afternoon they decided to walk back to Dynmouth. There was an army display on for one day only, Mrs Blakey had said at breakfast: the car-park behind the fish-packing station had been taken over for it.

*

‘Hullo there,’ a sergeant said. ‘Come to see for yourselves, then?’

Boys were playing with machine-guns, swivelling them this way and that, peering through the sights. Bored soldiers were showing how various mechanisms operated and explaining the rate at which bullets could be discharged. Other boys climbed in and out of tanks or queued outside a caravan which advertised a film about combat in the jungle. A second caravan contained an exhibition of recruitment leaflets and in a third one there was an exhibition of army rations for Antarctic expeditions. Amplified pop music was playing.

‘This looks the best,’ Kate said, determinedly leading the way to the rations caravan. ‘Look, tinned rice pudding. And Spangles. Imagine taking Spangles to the Antarctic!’

There was meal to make porridge with in the Antarctic, and sugar and powdered milk, and biscuits and powdered soup, and tinned stew.

‘Whatever next?’ Kate tried to giggle, reading out the directions on the stew, but nothing seemed funny. ‘I think they’re pampered,’ she said lamely.

They went to the recruitment caravan, and to the film about combat in the jungle, which they left before it was over.

‘Cheers!’ Timothy Gedge said, coming up behind them.

His presence wasn’t a surprise. They didn’t reply to his greeting. He was carrying the same carrier-bag and for some reason they found it impossible not to stare at it. It swung lightly in the air, the Union Jack gay against his pallid clothes, seeming imbued with his own anticipation.

He walked away from the army display with them, offering them fruit gums and chattering. In his woman’s voice he repeated two conversations between waiters and men ordering plates of soup. He drew their attention to the goods in shop windows, to the cooking-stoves and washing-machines in the windows of the electricity showrooms. These electrical gadgets were all good value, he said, nodding his head repeatedly: the South-Western Electricity Board was an honest organization. ‘If your mum’s after a washer,’ he advised Kate, ‘she’d best move in while the sale’s on.’ In everything he said there were wisps of mockery.

‘Why are you following us?’ Stephen asked, knowing the answer to the question.

‘I need the dress for my act, Stephen.’

He smiled his smile at them. They stopped, waiting for him to walk on, but he didn’t.

‘We’ve told you we’re not going to get a wedding-dress for you,’ Kate said.

He began to whistle beneath his breath, a soft sound without a tune, as if he were attempting to imitate the rushing of wind through trees. He ceased it in order to speak again.

‘It’s great being friends with you,’ he said. He pointed at meat in a shop window and said it was good value. ‘Did you ever notice,’ he said to Kate, ‘Miss Lavant has bad teeth?’

They walked on, not speaking, not reacting to what he was saying. He asked them why elephants didn’t ride bicycles and explained that it was because they hadn’t any thumbs to ring the bell with. George Joseph Smith, he told them, had spent a night in Dynmouth one time, at the Castlerea boarding-house, still in business.

‘Were you ever in Tussaud’s, Kate? They have the bath set up on the floor there, you can reach a hand out and touch it. They have Christie in Tussaud’s, Kate. And this bloke called Haigh that sent his clothes in to the model-maker so’s they wouldn’t have the trouble of faking them. And another bloke that used to drink his own Number One.’ He laughed. He’d read up about George Joseph Smith, he said, after he’d got his idea for a show. ‘I read up about a lot of them, Kate. This Maybrick woman who finished her hubby off with fly-papers. And the Thompson woman who was administering glass for eight months, only it didn’t take, so Freddie Bywaters had to stick a knife into the man near Ilford Station. And this Fulham woman who was administering arsenic, only all that was happening was her hubby was getting a tingling in his feet.’ He laughed again. A lot of it was comic, he explained, you definitely had to smile. You’d go mad if you couldn’t smile at things, you’d go mad without a sense of humour.

‘You should see a psychiatrist,’ Stephen said.

‘Freddie Bywaters definitely stuck the knife in, Stephen.’

‘I’m not talking about Freddie Bywaters. We think you’re insane.’

‘Did I mention the Dasses to you?’

‘We don’t want to hear about them.’ Stephen’s voice had risen, as it had that morning in the garden, and again Kate thought that he was trying not to cry. He was afraid of Timothy Gedge.

‘Let’s go in here, and I’ll show you that bath.’

They were passing a builder’s yard. A. J. Swines, it said on high brown doors that were standing open so that lorries could pass in and out. Builders and Plumbers, it said.

‘It’s just there. Behind the timber sheds.’

It would not be there, Kate thought. It would be like opening the trunk and the wedding-dress not being there. He would lead them into the yard and behind the sheds, and then he’d point at nothing and say there it was. It would at least be an explanation, a confirmation of his madness. Stephen hesitated and then followed the other two.

They passed a cement-mixer that was being operated by two men with cement dust on their caps and dungarees. Timothy Gedge smiled at the men and said it was a nice day. He led the way behind some sheds in which planks of timber were stored. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘How’s about that then?’

It was badly chipped and covered with rust marks. Timothy Gedge said it was made of tin. Quite light really, he explained, lifting up one end, not like a cast-iron one. ‘I thought you’d like to see it,’ he said as they left the yard. ‘Shall we walk up to the house now?’

They didn’t answer. He said again that it was great being friends with them.

‘We’re not your friends,’ Stephen replied hotly. ‘Can’t you get it into your head? We don’t like you.’

‘I often go up, Stephen. I go up to the place it happened: to remember the way it was, actually.’

They didn’t ask him what he meant. They were in Fore Street now, busy with afternoon shoppers. As in Badstoneleigh yesterday, he pushed his way through them.

‘I witnessed it,’ he said. ‘I was there in the gorse.’

They knew what he was referring to, and Kate resolved that whether Stephen liked it or not she was going to tell Mrs Blakey. She’d tell her every single thing, all he’d said about Commander Abigail and all about the bath and the wedding-dress and what he was saying now, about witnessing the accident. Mrs Blakey would immediately tell her husband and Mr Blakey would immediately go to wherever it was this boy lived and warn him that if he didn’t stop the police would be informed. And that would be the end of it.

They turned into Lace Street, walking by the side of the Queen Victoria Hotel. They crossed a zebra-crossing when they came to the promenade and turned right, leaving the harbour and the fish-packing station behind them. Ahead of them was Sir Walter Raleigh Park and in the distance, the highest point on the cliffs, Sea House. Miss Lavant, with her wicker shopping basket, was out for her afternoon turn on the promenade, prominent among the other strollers, in scarlet. The beach, stretching endlessly away beneath the cliffs, was a narrow strip of shingle now, for the sea was fully in.

‘Tipped,’ Timothy Gedge said, the word appearing to have been chosen at random.

‘Listen, will you shut up?’ Stephen cried. ‘Will you shut up and go away? Will you clear off?’

‘I witnessed it, Stephen. I saw her tipped down that cliff.’

Stephen stared at him, ceasing to walk. He frowned, unable to think, unable to grasp immediately what was being implied.

‘Tipped?’ Kate repeated after a moment.

‘What d’you mean, tipped?’ Stephen demanded, not intending to ask the question. ‘What’re you talking about?’

He said the council had put up a wire fence at the place on the cliff-path. After the tragedy a couple of men had gone up with concrete posts: he’d watched them at it. The place was supposed to be dangerous because the path was too narrow between the gorse bushes and the edge: it stood to reason, she stumbled over in the wind. He put a fruit gum in his mouth. The truth was, all that was a load of rubbish. ‘Your dad tipped her down, in actual fact.’

Stephen tried to shake his head, but found it hard to do so. It was meant to be some kind of joke. It was meant to be funny.

‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ Kate said. Her voice was shaky, her eyes had become round and dull with astonishment. It didn’t seem to her that Timothy Gedge was trying to make a joke, yet it was amazing that he was saying all this just to pay them back for not being friendly or because he wanted a wedding-dress they wouldn’t give him, or for any reason at all.

‘She was shouting out your mum’s a prostitute, Kate. Then he tips her down and she’s screaming her head off. I was there in the gorse, Stephen. I followed them up.’

‘That’s not true,’ Kate cried. ‘None of it’s true.’

‘My mother’s death was accidental. She was alone. She went for a walk alone.’

‘It’s horrible what you’re saying,’ Kate cried.

‘We’ll keep the secret, Kate. He tipped her down because he was head over heels on your mum and she was calling your mum a prostitute. There’s always a reason why a person performs the murder act. They were on the job, see, your mum and Stephen’s dad. He was black as thunder when she said your mum was a pro. You’d be black yourself, Stephen, if someone said the same thing about Kate.’

Stephen began to walk on again. Kate said they’d tell the Blakeys and the Blakeys would go to the police.

‘Ever read books, Stephen? Clifftop Tragedy by Eileen Dover?’

In a sudden jerk of anger Stephen turned and kicked at his shins, but the blows didn’t hurt because of Stephen’s Wellington boots. What was more painful were Kate’s fists smacking into his stomach, blow after blow. She hit him so savagely that a woman with a pram told her to calm down.

Kate took no notice of the woman. ‘You leave us alone,’ she shouted at Timothy Gedge. ‘Just get away with your lies.’

Her voice was quivering beneath the pressure of tears. She blinked her eyes in an effort to hold them back.

‘Don’t you dare speak to us again,’ she cried. ‘Don’t you dare ever speak to us.’

They left him standing there and this time he didn’t follow them. The woman with the pram asked him what all that had been about. He smiled at her even though his stomach was paining him. He said they were just kids. He said it was just fun.

They walked on, towards and then past Miss Lavant, and past the other strollers on the promenade. Miss Lavant’s scarlet coat was of fine tweed, her skin had the poreless look of porcelain. She smiled as they passed her by, and they saw revealed what Timothy Gedge had claimed: her beauty was marred by discoloured teeth.

Stephen agreed that they must tell Mrs Blakey. If they didn’t tell Mrs Blakey he would continue to follow them with his carrier-bag, talking. You could kick him and hurt him, you could hit him on the face and on the eyes so that he couldn’t see, but he’d still manage to torment you. His conversation would never cease. He’d smile and say it was great being friends with you. He’d go on telling lies.

‘He’s a horrible person,’ Kate cried with renewed vehemence, and looked behind her as if contemplating a continuation of her assault. He was standing where they had left him, a long way back now, gazing after them. It was too far to make out his smile, but she knew the smile was there.

‘Come on, Kate.’

As she turned to walk on she shivered, affected by a chilliness that seemed to be an expression of her revulsion.

‘We’ll only say,’ Stephen said, ‘he keeps following us about. We’ll say he wants clothes to dress-up in. No need to tell her everything.’

Kate agreed with that. There was no need to tell Mrs Blakey everything because so much of it just didn’t make sense.

The men of Ring’s Amusements whistled and shouted, still preparing the machinery in Sir Walter Raleigh Park. Fifty yards ahead a bus, in shades of silver, slowly drew up. A man who appeared to be passing with a camera took a photograph of it.

The sea slurped over green rocks, at the bottom of the promenade wall. It was beginning to go out again, calmly withdrawing, as though trained. ‘Look,’ his mother had said, making him watch with her while a tide spent itself. She had loved watching the sea. She’d loved walking by it. She’d loved the stones it smoothed, and its wildness when it flung itself over the promenade wall, scattering gravel and driftwood. Like anger, she’d said.

Elderly people climbed slowly out of the silver bus, women in brown or cream or grey, old men in overcoats and hats. They stood uncertainly on the promenade, as if alarmed. They murmured to one another, and then they laughed because the bus-driver leaned out of his cab and made a joke. The man who’d taken a photograph of the bus asked if he might photograph the old people also, and the bus-driver told him to wait a minute. He put aside a newspaper he’d been going to read and jumped out of his cab. ‘Everyone for the gentleman’s photograph,’ he shouted, lining the elderly people against the side of the bus. ‘Cheese please, Louise.’ All the elderly people laughed.

‘It’s called harassing,’ Kate said. ‘You harass people by not leaving them alone. I’d say it was against the law.’

Stephen nodded, not knowing if it was against the law or not, and not much caring. The clothes of people who died were naturally left behind; he hadn’t ever thought of that. He hadn’t wondered where her clothes were when he’d returned to Primrose Cottage at the end of that autumn term. Other things had still been there, lots of her things. But even without looking he’d known that her clothes – all her dresses and her coats and her cardigans and her shoes – were no longer in her wardrobe or in the chests of drawers she shared with his father in their bedroom.

‘What happens to dead people’s clothes, d’you think?’

She said she didn’t know. His father wouldn’t burn them. It would be cruel to burn them since people needed clothes, refugees in India and Africa. His father was too nice and too charitable. She thought that but did not say it. His father would have given them to Oxfam, or to a jumble sale.

‘But not the wedding-dress?’

‘You wouldn’t give a wedding-dress.’

‘You wouldn’t put it on a bonfire, either.’

‘It wouldn’t be right to do that.’

The wedding-dress was in the faded green trunk, just as he’d imagined it in the night. It was as real as the bath behind the timber sheds. She’d stowed it away there, his father had found it. The boy had seen because he was always looking to see what people were doing.

They had almost reached the end of the promenade. Behind them the elderly people poked their way about in twos and threes, careful on the concrete surface. Farther behind, the scarlet figure of Miss Lavant moved past the façade of the Queen Victoria Hotel, towards the harbour and the fish-packing station. Timothy Gedge was nowhere to be seen.

At the end of the promenade they could take a flight of steps down to rocks that were slippery with seaweed, and clamber over them until they reached the shingle. They could make their way over that and eventually up the cliff to the eleventh green of the golf-course, to the gate in the garden wall. Or they could fork to the right, up Once Hill, past the rectory and on to the steep, narrow road that wound over the downs to Badstoneleigh, off which the entrance gates of Sea House opened. They were considering this choice when they were abruptly aware of Commander Abigail.

He made his way down the narrow road, huddled like a crab within his familiar brown overcoat. But his step was not his familiar jaunty one, nor did he carry his rolled-up towel and swimming-trunks. He moved as the elderly people from the bus moved, but without their caution because a red Post Office van had to swerve to avoid him. He stood for a moment on the promenade in the same huddled way, and then he made his way slowly towards a green-painted seat and sat slowly down on it.

They walked by him, looking at him because they couldn’t help themselves. But their staring didn’t matter because he didn’t notice it. His face was parched. His eyes were dead, as if the Post Office van had mowed him down and killed him. His hands were clasped together as if to comfort one another. There was a chalkiness about his lips and his eyelids. His ginger moustache was vivid.

It was true, they thought, still looking at him: he was a married man who went homo-ing about, who had been exposed to his wife when Timothy Gedge was drunk. All that was easy to believe now, it was easy to imagine the drunkenness, and Timothy Gedge letting the facts slip out because he didn’t care, because he’d find it enjoyable, even better than going to a funeral.

They left the promenade and on the sleek tarred surface of the road Stephen walked in front, Kate behind him. He changed his mind about telling Mrs Blakey. He said they mustn’t, not adding that the sight of Commander Abigail on the green-painted seat made all the difference. And as he hadn’t at first referred to the wedding-dress, last night or until they’d reached the spinney that morning, so he didn’t refer now to the fantasies of Timothy Gedge that were turning out not to be fantasies at all.

They sat in the kitchen at teatime, an awkward occasion, with Mrs Blakey’s beaming face puzzled by their silence. If he were possessed by devils, Kate thought, it would be a simple explanation. In her first term at St Cecilia’s there’d been a girl who’d had the gift of levitation, a disturbed girl called Julie who had been able to float eight feet above the ground, whom Miss Scuse had eventually had to have removed. Girls often had gifts like that, Rosalind Swain had said at the time, especially in adolescence. A girl called Enid could hypnotize other girls with the aid of a silver-coloured fountain-pen top. Another girl could read a whole page of a newspaper and immediately repeat it. Rosalind Swain said she wouldn’t be able to when she’d finished growing up. Adolescence was mysterious, Rosalind Swain explained. Adolescents often harboured poltergeists.

Mrs Blakey kept on asking them what they’d done that day. As if he hadn’t heard her, Stephen didn’t answer. Kate said they’d gone to the army display and mentioned the rations that were taken on Antarctic expeditions. If he were possessed by devils, you couldn’t fight against him: devils could possess people in the same way as other people were made to harbour poltergeists or were haunted by ghosts. Were they like vapours that rustled through him, devils owning him while he was unaware, making him smile his smile? Did he know what he was doing?

‘Is Stephen all right, dear?’ Mrs Blakey asked her as they cleared the plates from the table, when Stephen had gone. Kate pointed out that Stephen was always a little on the silent side.

‘You’ve gone silent yourself, Kate.’ Mrs Blakey spoke in a sudden, laughing kind of way, seeming relieved because she’d received an answer of a kind. Would she have collapsed into a heap if she’d learnt that Stephen was silent because he was wondering if his father had murdered his mother? His father who mended the broken wings of birds, his mother who had loved him for his gentleness? Was it really true? Had his mother shouted and screamed on the edge of a cliff, calling her own mother a prostitute? People quarrelled horribly. People were cruel, like her father had been before the divorce, like Miss Shaw and Miss Rist were to Miss Malabedeely. Yet of course it wasn’t true. Of course she hadn’t screamed like that.

In the drawing-room of the house that because of death and marriage had become his home Kate watched him while he, in turn, watched the coloured rectangle of the television screen. His intensity was contrived; already he had closed himself away from her. Like a physical presence, she could feel that between them.

Bullets ricocheted off the surface of a boulder, chipping pieces out of it but missing Kid Curry and Hannibal Hayes, alias Smith and Jones. Dismally she thought that nothing would be the same again. After all this ugliness, like a slime around them, he would resent her because she knew about it, because in sharing it she’d become part of it. She closed her eyes, wanting to cry but preventing herself.

‘You’re Hannibal Hayes,’ the voice of a sheriff roared from the television drama, and the voice of the cowboy quietly retorted, denying that he was. When she opened her eyes the cowboys were no longer crouched by the boulder. They were astride a single horse, tied back to back, being led along a skyline by the sheriff’s posse. Still hiding in pretended concentration, Stephen watched as though his life depended on it.

Ghosts were exorcized, there was a special service. There was the casting out of devils, which sounded similar. If the devils were cast out of Timothy Gedge, would everything miraculously be different? Would she and Stephen be sitting just as they were now and be suddenly unable to remember anything that had happened because nothing would have been real? Would the idyll she had dreamed of be there again, not smashed to pieces as it seemed to be?

It had been smashed to pieces because Timothy Gedge had followed them. Timothy Gedge, with his hollow cheeks and his gawkiness, had picked on them even though he didn’t know them, even though they’d done him no harm. Did he hate them because they lived in Sea House, because there was the garden and the setters, because they were friends and he had no friends himself? Or did he really just want a wedding-dress? Had she really screamed like that?