Children Of Dynmouth

9

The Holy Week that had passed so harshly for the children in Sea House had passed less fearfully in Dynmouth itself. The saints’ days had been noted by Quentin Featherston, St Walter’s, St Hugh’s, St Bademus’s. St Leo the Great, that year, claimed Maundy Thursday.

The town has changed since Easter last year, Miss Lavant wrote in her diary, but only in small little ways, not worth recording. Out walking this morning I noticed Dr Greenslade on his rounds. Mrs Slewy has been in trouble for taking the cancer-box from the counter in Mock’s.

The orphans from the Down Manor Orphanage progressed each day of that week in a crocodile from Down Manor to the beach. In pairs, the nuns from the convent walked on the promnade. Old Ape received his Thursday hand-out at the rectory. The Dynmouth Hards rampaged by night, wives were swapped on the Leaflands Estate, old Miss Trimm was buried. A niece of Miss Vine’s bought her a new budgerigar.

In the house which their son had accused them of boringly christening Sweetlea the Dasses continued the lives which he’d said were boring also. Mrs Dass read two further novels by Dennis Wheatley, and was unaware of the statements made to her husband by Timothy Gedge. Her husband lived uneasily with the statements. It upset him, as much as it would have upset his wife, to know that the boy had eavesdropped on this most intimate family moment. The fact gnawed at him, haunting him while he cleaned out the sitting-room fire or made tea or used the Electrolux. It was accompanied by an image: Nevil standing in the dining-room and saying what he had said, the boy peeping and listening. Time, by passing, had soothed some of the harshness of the occasion. Yet for no apparent purpose the painfully healing wound had been maliciously opened.

But there was a purpose and he was reminded of it, a purpose which seemed to Mr Dass to be so petty that he hadn’t at first been able to take it seriously. Then, while shopping in Fore Street one morning, he was approached by Timothy Gedge, who smiled at him as though nothing untoward had occurred between them and asked if he had come to a decision about donating the curtains. The boy walked beside him from the Post Office to Lipton’s, talking about the secret that was safe between them, pursuing him into the shop itself. ‘My God !’ Mr Dass cried, screwing his eyes up as though seeking to peer into the boy’s brain. He had a wire basket in his left hand, in which he had placed two tins of pineapple cubes. The bowl of his pipe hung from the top pocket of his tweed jacket. ‘All right then, Mr Dass?’ the boy said, going away at last.

Mr Dass couldn’t understand how a set of curtains for the stage at the Easter Fête could have driven a boy to such ends. Yet while his wife slept one afternoon he found himself looking in cardboard boxes in the attic for blackout curtains which he remembered from the War. ‘Yes, I’ve found some,’ he said the next morning, approached again by the boy, as he’d known he would be. He’d been down to the coke-cellar beneath the church, where the stage was stored, and with the assistance of Mr Peniket he’d tried the curtains for size. He’d left them in the Courtesy Cleaners: they’d be ready in time for Easter Saturday.

‘You didn’t mind me mentioning them, Mr Dass?’ the boy said, smiling at him. Mr Dass did not reply, for there was nothing he felt he might have said. In the eyes of this boy he and his wife were probably ridiculous, she lying on a sun-chair, he old and out of touch with the world. They probably seemed as ridiculous to the boy as they’d seemed boring to Nevil, who had been right to say they had harmed him with their indulgence and from whom they would willingly now have asked forgiveness. But they had done no harm to Timothy Gedge, and if they seemed ridiculous they couldn’t really help it. Unable to help it either, Mr Dass ended by hating the boy.

*

In High Park Avenue life fell together. During the first days of that Holy Week Mrs Abigail continued to believe that she could not endure a marriage that was a travesty, and that she could no longer endure life in Dynmouth. But as the days went on the truth became less difficult to live with than it had threatened to be, and she knew that she would never leave her husband because she, too, was to blame. The truth acquired a logic and an ordinariness, until in the end her blindness to it in the past became puzzling to comprehend. Increasingly, she wondered if in some unconscious way she had not simulated naivety since the first weeks of her marriage, if she had not – through her uncontrollable selflessness – permitted a skin to grow instead of probing beneath it. Married or unmarried, he would not have had the courage of his proclivities: he needed the pretence there had been because pretence was everything to him.

Even within the handful of days of Holy Week, further pretence modestly began its growth. The Commander did not cease to deny the accusations of Timothy Gedge, while at the same time seeking his wife’s forgiveness in a general way. She recognized that he could not bear openly to confess, yet that he wished to in order to pronounce the mending of his ways. A message, unspoken, was there between them: he was to be a new man, there was to be a new relationship. But beneath the surface of resolution she knew he would regain his former self and enjoy again the shame of his surreptitious ways. He perked up during that Holy Week, little by little, hour by hour. He took up the daily routine of his swim again, and one afternoon when he was in the sea there was a visit to the bungalow by Timothy Gedge.

‘Fifteen p,’ the boy said, explaining that that was the amount outstanding since the night he’d cleaned the oven and left the tapioca saucepan to steep.

She left him in the hall while she went to fetch her purse. When she returned with the money he brought up the matter of the dog’s-tooth suit. He asked if she’d had time to think about it. The Commander never wore it, he pointed out. He smiled at her, but the concern she’d once felt for him had wholly dissipated. ‘For the Easter Fête,’ he said. ‘I mentioned it.’

She’d once been to the Easter Fête. She’d bought a pot of raspberry jam that had turned out to be bad. The talent contest had taken place in a marquee. Spot the Talent! a notice had said, but she hadn’t chosen to do so.

‘All right then?’ he said, smiling again, his head a little on one side, a gesture he’d had as a small boy. ‘O.K. to have the suit, is it?’

‘Of course not, Timothy.’ But while actually speaking she changed her mind. Quite suddenly it seemed fitting that the suit of her husband should garb a man who had slaughtered his brides: there was in that, somewhere, a gleam of relevance. It didn’t matter to her that Timothy Gedge intended to enact monstrous scenes in a rectory garden. It would have mattered once, she’d once have attempted to prevent him: for his own sake, she would have said. Instead, again, she told her visitor to wait.

Her husband’s naval uniform hung neatly in his mock-mahogany wardrobe, retained with pride. Next to it was a suit in plain grey worsted and then a mustardy one, a brown pin-stripe, and the dog’s-tooth. She could remember the purchase of each, standing about herself in Dunne’s or Burton’s, going from one branch to another. She remembered his tetchiness with shop assistants, which presumably had been simulated. No doubt he’d enjoyed this association with young men, trousers and jackets endlessly tried on in curtained booths. ‘Oh, we can alter that, sir,’ a youth would pleasantly promise. ‘Nice young chap,’ he’d say casually afterwards, in Oxford Street or somewhere.

She found a flat cardboard box in the bottom of the wardrobe and placed the dog’s-tooth suit in it. She didn’t try to disguise the gap it left behind by drawing the other suits together. He’d notice and wouldn’t mention it because mentioning would bring everything into the open again. He’d know what had happened to the suit, and it seemed right that he should: this small tribute to the truth that had been exposed seemed at least her due. She left the doors of the wardrobe open.

‘Do not ever come back here,’ she said in the hall.

The boy had supplied her with facts. She should have been grateful. Yet as long as she lived she hoped she would never be obliged to exchange another word with him. She closed the hall door while he stood there, shutting him for ever away from her.

In the rectory Lavinia Featherston’s edginess reached a new proportion.

‘He gives me the creeps,’ she angrily cried, protesting about Timothy Gedge as Mrs Blakey had. She’d come across the twins propped up against the garage doors, applauding and screaming with delight at a patter delivered in a woman’s voice. She’d snatched them away as if they were in danger, and afterwards burst into Quentin’s study to have her scene. She glared accusingly at him, investing him with all the blame for Timothy Gedge’s presence in the garden. Furiously, she again spoke of Old Ape coming and going with his red plastic bucket, and Mrs Slewy denying she’d ever touched a cancer-box in her life, and Miss Poraway and Mrs Stead-Carter and old Miss Trimm, now mercifully dead. None of them at least had ever bothered the children. ‘He’s not to come back,’ she snapped, banging the study door.

‘We think you’re too old,’ Quentin said, ‘to play with the twins, Timothy.’