Children Of Dynmouth

11

It being Good Friday, the shops in Dynmouth were mostly closed. Fore Street and East Street were quiet, Pretty Street and Lace Street deserted. No one was about in the suburban roads and avenues.

In Sir Walter Raleigh Park, however, the activities of Ring’s Amusements were reaching a crescendo: tomorrow afternoon, at one forty-five, the booths and stalls and whirligigs would welcome the public. The shouting of the dark-faced men was louder, the bustle more urgent, the dismantled machinery for the most part back in place again. A dozen or so extra men had made their appearance in Sir Walter Raleigh Park, with wives and children who now assisted with the preparations. Lines of washing hung between the caravans, transistor radios played loudly. There was a smell of frying.

The Queen Victoria Hotel and the Marine, the Duke’s Head and the Swan were livelier with visitors than they had been. The Queen Victoria was full for the Easter weekend, the others nearly so. Some of these visitors strolled along the promenade; a few penetrated to the beach; none ventured on to the cliffs. Children eyed the closed Essoldo; a handful of golfers moved briskly on the golf-course. Quentin Featherston cut the grass of the rectory lawns again. It hadn’t grown much since he’d cut it a week ago, but he wanted the lawns to have a shaved appearance for the Easter Fête.

As he operated the Suffolk Punch, his thoughts wandered idly, in and out about his parish, through the poverty in Boughs Lane, among the inadequate children of Mrs Slewy. He’d woken up at a quarter past four that morning to find Lavinia awake beside him, as often she was now in the middle of the night. She said she was sorry she’d been so cross about Timothy Gedge. She worried about the twins, she said. The twins had wandered out of the rectory garden and had been missing for twenty minutes. They’d played with matches in their room, lighting a fire in the garden of their dolls’ house. All children, he’d begun to say, but she’d cut him short. Another thing, she didn’t feel she was good any more at running the nursery school. Indignantly, he’d told her what nonsense that was. Her nursery school had a waiting list a mile long. Everyone said it was better than the Ring-o-Roses, where there was no discipline of any kind whatsoever. And the playgroup that the W R V S ran was stodgy. In the end, to his own surprise, he had quite successfully smoothed away her early-morning blues, and she’d returned to sleep without having mentioned once the child she’d lost.

As he walked behind the lawnmower he didn’t care for, he remembered the first time he’d ever seen her. He’d met her on the beach walking with a dog, a wire-haired terrier called Dolly which had come sniffing up to him. He’d told her he’d come to Dynmouth to help old Canon Flewett. He’d loved her immediately, without any hesitation.

He loved her still, with just the same passion. ‘You’re to be good with Mummy,’ he’d commanded the twins after breakfast. ‘Do you understand now?’ He’d regarded them unsmilingly, as ferociously as he could. If there was trouble of any kind whatsoever that day, either the lighting of fires or leaving the rectory garden for a single instant, they would not be permitted to attend the Easter Fête. They would be put in two separate rooms, with the curtains drawn. Humbly they had promised to be good.

He emptied the grass-box, depositing the cuttings in a corner. He said to himself that there was nothing wrong with cutting grass on Good Friday. There’d been services in St Simon and St Jude’s every day this week. There’d been Holy Communion at eight this morning, and afternoon prayers. Later there’d be evensong. Yet a few of his older parishioners, passing by the rectory wall and hearing the engine of the Suffolk Punch, might consider it odd that grass should be cut by a clergyman on the day of the Crucifixion. Mr Peniket would certainly consider it odd and would again recall the days of old Canon Flewett. Nothing would ever be said, but the activity would be seen as part of a clerical decline. It would sadden Mr Peniket and the older parishioners, and it saddened Quentin to think it would, but he saw no point in sitting in a chair and meditating all day.

His name was called, and he turned his head and saw Lavinia waving at him from the porch. Beside her stood a child, not either of the twins. He turned the engine of the lawnmower off and waved back. He began to walk towards them.

The child was a girl, wearing corduroy jeans and a red jersey. Lavinia was wearing a tartan skirt and a green blouse and cardigan. He apologized when he was close enough, because he guessed he hadn’t been able to hear Lavinia calling to him above the noise of the Suffolk Punch. The child had brown hair, curving about a round face, and eyes that were round also.

‘Kate wants to speak to you,’ Lavinia said.

She must have once been a child of the nursery school. He looked more closely at her, remembering her: she was the child from Sea House, her parents were divorced. She didn’t come to church, or to Sunday school. Faintly, he remembered Lavinia once saying that the little girl from Sea House was going to come to the nursery school next term. Before the twins were born it would have been, seven or eight years ago, the nursery school’s earliest days.

‘Well, Kate?’ he said in his study, a small room with a cross over the mantelpiece. He was alone with the child because Lavinia didn’t ever remain when a visitor came to see him. ‘It’s that boy, Timothy Gedge,’ Lavinia had said, and then had called out to the twins, who were clamouring for her upstairs somewhere. ‘I’m here in the hall,’ she’d shouted as Quentin closed the study door.

It was a rigmarole, a muddled torrent of words, not easy to follow and yet startling. Timothy Gedge had looked through the window of Miss Lavant’s bedsitting-room and had seen her pretending to give Dr Greenslade a meal. Timothy Gedge had met Mr Plant half undressed in the middle of the night. Timothy Gedge had become drunk in the Abigails’ bungalow. He’d been annoying the Dasses. He’d said to Mrs Abigail that her husband went homoing about the place. The act he’d devised for the Easter Fête was a black mass. Timothy Gedge was possessed.

‘Possessed?’ He was sitting behind his desk. Beside him there was a calendar with a square red frame around yesterday’s date. He moved the red frame and felt its magnetic base gripping the surface again. ‘Possessed?’ he repeated, as calmly as he could.

She didn’t answer. She was facing him across his desk, sitting on the dining-room chair that was specially placed for visitors with troubles. She said that the act Timothy Gedge had devised had to do with the Brides in the Bath. He planned to dress up as each bride in turn and also as their murderer. It was all only an excuse. It was because he liked the idea of death, because he wanted to talk about it. The place for the people of Dynmouth, he’d said, was in their coffins.

The child had begun to cry. He went to her and bent over her, giving her a handkerchief. He put an arm around her shoulders and kept it there for a moment. Then he returned to his desk and sat behind it. He thought of the funerals Timothy Gedge hung around. ‘Really good,’ he’d said again, in the vestry, after Miss Trimm’s. The child said he claimed to have witnessed a murder, and had been affected by it. Stephen’s mother hadn’t fallen from the cliff-path in a gust of wind: she had been pushed by Stephen’s father.

‘I love Stephen,’ she said, and then she repeated it, her tears returning. ‘I can’t bear it, seeing Stephen so frightened.’

He knew who Stephen was. He remembered him at the funeral of his mother. He remembered speaking to him, saying he’d been brave. The parents of these children were now married. The man was an ornithologist.

‘There’s no need for anyone to be frightened, Kate.’

She said she had prayed because it was impossible for people to live in a house like that, with lies everywhere, as there would have to be. In desperation she had prayed. She said:

‘You have to exorcize devils. Could you exorcize the devils in Timothy Gedge?’

He was taken aback, and more confused than he’d been a moment ago. He slightly shook his head, making it clear he didn’t intend to exorcize devils.

‘When I prayed,’ she said, ‘I promised. I said, if it wasn’t true, then the devils would be exorcized. I promised God.’

‘God wouldn’t want a promise like that. He doesn’t make bargains. I can’t just exorcize a person because he tells a lie.’

‘Lie?’

‘Stephen’s father wasn’t in Dynmouth the day the accident happened. He came back from London and someone had to tell him at the station. He was actually on a train when it happened.’

She looked at him, her eyes opening wider and then wider. Tears still glistened on one of her cheeks. Her lips parted and closed again. Eventually she said:

‘I prayed and He changed things.’

‘No, Kate. Nothing has changed. Before you prayed it was true that Stephen’s father was not here that day.’

‘You must exorcize Timothy Gedge, Mr Featherston.’

He tried to explain. He didn’t believe in the idea of people possessed by devils, because it seemed to him that that was only a way of trying to tidy up the world by pigeon-holing everything. There were good people, and people who were not good: that had nothing to do with devils. He tried to explain that possession by devils was just a form of words.

‘I told him he had devils,’ she said.

‘You shouldn’t have, Kate.’

‘I promised God. God wants it, Mr Featherston.’

She cried out, her tears brimming over again, red in the face. The brown hair that curved in around her cheeks seemed suddenly untidy.

‘I promised God,’ she cried again.

She was still sitting down, leaning forward in her chair, burning at him with her round eyes. It was like being in the room with Miss Trimm yet again confiding that she’d mothered another Jesus Christ. Miss Trimm had talked about her son as an infant, how he had blessed the fishermen on Dynmouth Pier, how he had emerged from her womb without pain. In her days as a schoolteacher she’d been known for the quickness of her wit and her clarity of thought. But in her lonely senility her eccentric belief had been unshakable, the world had become impossible without the closeness of God. This child in her distress appeared to have discovered something similar.

Yet he was unable to help her, unable even properly to converse with her. God’s world was not a pleasant place, he might have said. God’s world was cruel, human nature took ugly forms. It wasn’t God who cultivated lily-of-the-valley or made Dynmouth pretty with lace and tea-shops or made the life of Jesus Christ a sentimental journey. But how on earth could he say that, any more than he could have said it to Miss Trimm? How could he say that there was only God’s insistence, even though He abided by no rules Himself, that His strictures should be discovered and obeyed? How could he say that God was all vague promises, and small print on guarantees that no one knew if He ever kept? It was appalling that Timothy Gedge had terrified these children, yet it had been permitted, like floods and famine.

‘He’ll do something terrible,’ she said, weeping copiously now. ‘It’s people like that who do terrible things.’

‘I’ll talk to him, Kate.’

Faintly, she shook her head. She was huddled on her chair, her small hands clenched, pressed against her stomach, as though some part of her were in pain, her face blotched. He felt intensely sorry for her, and useless.

‘He loves hurting,’ she said. People had done him no harm, the Dasses, the Abigails. He laughed when he mentioned the name of the Dasses’ house. ‘Mrs Abigail didn’t know about her husband. He went and told her. He got drunk on beer and sherry –’

‘So you said, Kate.’

‘He thinks it’s funny.’

‘Yes.’

‘He thinks it’s funny to do an act like that.’

‘His act won’t be permitted.’

‘He made us think a murder had been committed. We both believed it. Don’t you see?’ she cried. ‘We both believed it.’

‘I do see, Kate.’

‘They’d have driven a stake through him. They’d have burnt his bones until they were cinders.’

‘We’re more civilized now.’

‘We couldn’t be. He wouldn’t be alive if we were more civilized.’

‘Kate –’

‘He shouldn’t be alive. It’s that that shouldn’t be permitted.’ She screamed the words at him. He let a silence fall. Then he said:

‘You mustn’t say that, Kate.’

‘I’m telling you the truth.’

There was another silence, only broken by her sobbing. She wiped her face with his handkerchief and then held the handkerchief tightly, squeezing it in her fists. He said there was a pattern of greys, half-tones and shadows. People moved in the greyness and made of themselves heroes or villains, but the truth was that heroes and villains were unreal. The high drama of casting out devils would establish Timothy Gedge as a monster, which would be nice for everyone because monsters were a species on their own. But Timothy Gedge couldn’t be dismissed as easily as that. She had been right to say it was people like that who do terrible things, and if Timothy Gedge did do terrible things it would not be because he was different and exotic but because he was possessed of an urge to become so. Timothy Gedge was as ordinary as anyone else, but the ill fortune of circumstances or nature made ordinary people eccentric and lent them colour in the greyness. And the colour was protection because ill fortune weakened its victims and made them vulnerable.

While he spoke, he saw reactions in the child’s face. She didn’t like what he said about shades of grey, nor the suggestion that villains and heroes were artificial categories. It cut across her child’s world. It added complications she didn’t wish to know about. He watched her thinking that as he spoke, and then he saw everything he’d said being summarily dismissed. She shook her head.

She spoke of an idyll and said that God would not permit it now. She would go back to Sea House and tell Stephen that his father had been on a train at the time of his mother’s death. The nightmare was over, but in its place there was nothing. They would be friends again, but it wouldn’t be the same.

‘I can’t explain,’ she said, quite recovered now from her passion and her tears.

She meant he wouldn’t understand. She meant it wasn’t any good just talking, sitting there beneath a cross that hung on a wall. She meant he might at least have promised to have a go at shaking the devils out, even if he didn’t quite believe in them; he might at least have tried. No wonder clergymen weren’t highly thought of. All that was in her face, too.

She walked away from the rectory, up Once Hill and then on to the narrow road that wound, eventually, to Badstoneleigh. If they’d told the Blakeys a week ago the Blakeys would have said what the clergyman had said: that Stephen’s father could not have been responsible. She kept thinking of that, of their telling Mrs Blakey in the kitchen and Mrs Blakey throwing her head back and laughing. They’d all have laughed, even Mr Blakey, and then quite abruptly Mrs Blakey would have said that Timothy Gedge deserved to be birched.

‘You like a cuppa, Mr Feather?’

Quentin declined the offer. The boy was alone in the flat in Cornerways. He’d explained that his sister was on the pumps at the Smiling Service Filling Station, even though it was Good Friday. His mother was over in Badstoneleigh for the day, seeing her sister, the dressmaker. He led the clergyman into a room that had the curtains drawn. Deanna Durbin was singing on the television screen.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Quentin said.

‘Is it about the competition, Mr Feather?’

‘In a way. The little girl from Sea House came to see me. Kate.’

Timothy laughed. With annoying irrelevance it occurred to Quentin that the name of the film on the television screen was Three Smart Girls, which he’d seen about thirty-five years ago, when he was a child himself.

‘Do you mind if we have the television off, Timothy?’

‘Load of rubbish ’s matter of fact, sir. TV’s for the birds, Mr Feather.’ He turned it off. He sat down without drawing back the curtains. In the gloom he was only just visible, the gleam of his teeth when he smiled, his pale hair and clothes.

‘You’ve upset people, Timothy.’

‘Which people had you in mind, Mr Feather?’

‘I think you know.’

‘There’s some upset easy, sir. There’s Grace Rumblebow down at the Comprehensive –’

‘I’m not talking about Grace Rumblebow.’

‘I give her a prick with a needle. You’d think I’d cut her foot off. D’you know Grace Rumblebow, Mr Feather?’

‘Yes I do, but it isn’t Grace Rumblebow –’

‘Unhealthy, she is, the size of her. She’s obsessed on doughnuts, did you know? Forty or fifty a day, three gallons of beer, drop dead one of these days –’

‘Why have you caused this trouble, Timothy?’

‘What trouble’s that, Mr Feather?’

‘Those two children.’

‘They’re tip-top kids, sir. Friends of mine.’

‘Timothy –’

‘The three of us went to the flicks, over Badstoneleigh way. James Bond stuff, load of rubbish really. I bought the kids Coca-Cola, Mr Feather, as much as they could drink. I explained to them about the act I’ve got.’

‘I’ve been told about your act. I’m afraid it isn’t suitable for the competition, Timothy.’

‘You haven’t seen the act, sir.’

‘I’ve heard about it.’

‘That kid’s talking through her umbrella, sir. It’s a straight routine, sir, it’ll bring the place down. D’you ever watch Benny Hill, Mr Feather?’

‘What happened to those three women wasn’t funny.’

‘It’s a long time ago, Mr Feather.’

‘I’d like you to give me the wedding-dress you got from the children.’

‘What wedding-dress is that, sir?’

‘You know what I mean. You terrorized those children, you bullied them into getting a wedding-dress for you.’

‘I got a dog’s-tooth off the Commander. Dass come up with the curtains, they’re down in the Courtesy Cleaners. I have Plant coming up with a bath.’

‘You’ve been telling lies.’

‘I definitely told the truth, Mr Feather. The Commander’s gay as a grasshopper, old Dass’s son walks in and tells them they make him sick to the teeth. I only reminded Dass about that, sir. I only explained I was listening in at the time. I didn’t make anything up.’

‘That boy imagined his father was a murderer. You made him imagine that. For no earthly reason you caused him to believe a monstrous lie.’

‘I wouldn’t say it was a lie, Mr Feather. George Joseph Smith –’

‘It has nothing to do with George Joseph Smith. The child’s father was on a train. He was nowhere near that cliff when his wife was killed. Nor were you, Timothy.’

‘I was often in the gorse, Mr Feather. I like following people about.’

‘You weren’t in the gorse then. And a murder did not take place.’

‘I heard them having a barney, Mr Feather. A different time this is, if you get me. She’s calling the girl’s mum a prostitute. I heard her, sir: “Why don’t you throw me down?” she says. He told her not to be silly.’

‘Timothy –’

‘I’d call it murder, Mr Feather. If the man was on two thousand trains I’d call it murder.’

‘She fell over a cliff.’

‘She went down the cliff because he was on the job with the other woman. He was fixing to get rid of the first one in the divorce courts. I was up at Sea House one night, looking in through the window –’

‘I don’t want to know what you were doing.’ He shouted angrily. He jumped up from the chair he was sitting on and knocked something on to the floor, something that must have been on the arm.

‘You knocked over an ash-tray, Mr Feather.’

‘Look, Timothy. You told those children terrible lies –’

‘Only I wouldn’t call them lies, sir. “I’m afraid of what she’ll do,” the man says when I was looking in through the window, and then the other woman goes up to him and starts loving him. She’s stroking his face with her fingers, a married man he was, and then the next thing is –’

‘That doesn’t concern us, Timothy.’

‘The next thing is, sir, I was there in the gorse again. She was crying and moaning in the wind, sir, up there on her owny-oh with nobody giving a blue damn about her. She went down the cliff when a gust of wind came.’

‘Timothy –’

‘They pushed her, Mr Feather. D’you get what I mean? She was fed up with the carry-on.’

‘You don’t really know, Timothy. You’re guessing and speculating.’

Timothy Gedge shook his head. It had upset him at the time, but you had to get over stuff like that or you’d go to the wall. He smiled. You had to keep cheerful, he said, in spite of everything.

‘That wedding-dress must be returned. I’ve come for that, Timothy.’

‘I was thinking maybe that Hughie Green would be in Dynmouth, Mr Feather. Only I heard of stranger things. I was thinking he’d maybe walk into the marquee –’

‘That’s nonsense and you know it. Your act has been an excuse to torment people. You had no right to behave to those children as you did.’

‘I can do a woman’s voice, Mr Feather, I had them in stitches up at the Comprehensive. I had your own two kiddies in stitches.’ He laughed. ‘The charrada of the clown, Mr Feather, if ever you’ve heard of it.’

Quentin sat down again. He told Timothy he lived in fantasies. His act had been devised, he said again, so that people could be shocked and upset. To his surprise he saw Timothy nodding at him through the dimness, before he’d finished speaking.

‘As a matter of fact, it was for the birds, sir.’

There was a silence. Then he added:

‘I often thought it was maybe for the birds. The only people who liked it was your kiddies.’

‘I’d like to help you, you know.’

‘I’m happy as a sandboy, Mr Feather.’

‘I don’t think you can be.’

‘I put a lot of thought into that act. I used to walk around the place, thinking about it. And all the time it was a load of rubbish. Kid’s stuff, Mr Feather.’ He nodded. He explained, as he had to everyone else, how his act had come about: Miss Wilkinson’s charades, the visit to Madame Tussaud’s. He explained about how the philosophy of Brehon O’Hennessy had remained with him, even though at the time Brehon O’Hennessy had seemed to everyone to be a nutter.

‘The kid remarked I had devils.’ He laughed. ‘Do you think I have devils, Mr Feather?’

‘No, Timothy.’

‘I fancied the idea of devils.’

‘Yes.’

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

‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea.’

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

Quentin did not reply. Timothy said:

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

‘I’d like it.’

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

‘You must leave those children alone now.’

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

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

‘Timothy –’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Timothy, please.’

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

‘That isn’t true, Timothy.’

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

‘That’s the purest fantasy, Timothy.’

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

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

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

‘You’re talking nonsense, Timothy.’

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

‘Of course it isn’t true.’

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

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

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

‘You watch too much television, Timothy.’

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

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

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

‘Please, Timothy.’

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

‘Thank you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the sitting-room Lavinia listened.

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

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

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

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

‘Of course you were honest, Quentin.’

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

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

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

‘You’re not laughable, Quentin.’

‘I can do nothing for that boy.’

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

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

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

‘But surely –’

‘God permits chance.’

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

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

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

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

‘Miss Lavant’s? But Miss Lavant –’

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

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

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

‘But he can’t believe it.’

‘He does. And more and more he will.’

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

He nodded, not moving, not looking at her.

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

He nodded again, turning to look at her.

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

‘You’re never dreary, Lavinia.’

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

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

The future mattered because the future was the region where their stories would be told, happy and unfortunate, ordinary and strange. Yet it was sad in a way to see them venturing into it, so carelessly losing innocence. The future was like the blackness that surrounded her, in which there weren’t even shadows. She stared into the blackness, and the faces and limbs of children, her own and others, again slipped about in her mind. And Timothy Gedge smiled at her, claiming her, or so it seemed. His face remained when the others had gone, sharp-boned and predatory, his eyes hungry, his smile still giving her the creeps.