Children Of Dynmouth

12

On the morning of Easter Saturday the marquee, borrowed for the Easter Fête through Mrs Stead-Carter, arrived in the rectory garden and was erected by the men who brought it, as it always was. The twins watched. They could remember the Easter Fête last year. It was a glorious occasion.

At half past ten Mr Peniket arrived, with the stage for the Spot the Talent competition on a trailer behind his car, the timber boards and the concrete blocks and the landscape of Swiss Alps on hardboard. Then Mr Dass arrived with his lights and the blackout curtains that had been cleaned by the Courtesy Cleaners.

Chairs and benches and trestle-tables were delivered, borrowed from another firm through the offices of Mrs Stead-Carter. Mrs Keble arrived to set up her tombola and Mrs Stead-Carter with cakes for her cake-stall. Miss Poraway told the men who were unloading the trestle-tables that she would require a good one, because she ran the book-stall and always had. They’d made thirty-five pence last year, she said, which was considered good. Mrs Trotter set up her jewellery-stall, and Quentin and Mr Goff arranged the hoopla, the coconut shy, the bran tub, and the Kill-the-Rat. In the rectory kitchen Lavinia and Mrs Blackham and Mrs Goff buttered buns and cut up sponge cake and ginger cake and fruitcake, and arranged oatmeal fingers on plates. Dynmouth Dairies delivered forty pints of milk.

People arrived with jewellery for Mrs Trotter and cakes for Mrs Stead-Carter and prizes for the tombola. People came with books for Miss Poraway, tattered green-backed Penguins, Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham, Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh, half of Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, the greater part of Death and the Dancing Footman. Someone brought an old Cook’s Continental Timetable and V A T News No. 4 and V A T News No. 5. Someone else brought fifty-two copies of the Sunday Times colour supplement.

‘Susannah help with books,’ Susannah said. ‘Susannah can.’

‘Deborah can,’ Deborah said.

‘Oh now, how kind you are!’ Miss Poraway cried, and one by one the twins took volumes from a carton that Mrs Stead-Carter had carried from her car. ‘We sell them for a penny each,’ Miss Poraway explained. ‘Some real bargains there are. Cow-Keeping in India,’ she read from the spine of a volume that had suffered from damp. Never judge a book by its cover, she warned the twins. ‘Practical Taxidermy,’ she read from the spine of another.

In the kitchen Mrs Blackham said Lavinia looked a little tired and Lavinia said she was, a little. Being upset about Timothy Gedge had made her tired, but she was glad she’d been upset, for at least it made sense, not like moping over a baby that couldn’t be born.

That afternoon, on the loudspeaker system of Ring’s Amusements, Petula Clark sang ‘Downtown’. All over Dynmouth she could be heard because the volume had been specially turned up, the first indication that Ring’s were once again open for business.

Even though it was daylight the strings of coloured bulbs were lit up in Sir Walter Raleigh Park. The voices of the stall-holders jangled against one another, urging and inviting, different from the voices of the stall-holders at the Easter Fête. The Ghost Train rattled, amplified screams came from a record in the Haunted House, and amplified laughter from the Hall of a Million Mirrors. Yellow plastic ducks went round and round, inviting hoops to be thrown over them. Wooden horses and kangaroos and chickens went round and round also, a few of them with children on their backs. Wooden motor-cars and trains went round and round, more slowly. Empty chairs with harnesses swung violently through the air, high above people’s heads. Motor-cycle engines roared in the pit of the Wall of Death. ‘Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city,’ sang Petula Clark. ‘Linger on the sidewalks where the neon-signs are pretty.’

Mrs Blakey heard the voice of Petula Clark, a faint whisper in the kitchen of Sea House. The atmosphere had gone from the house. At lunchtime the children had been normal, Stephen quiet but no longer looking drawn, Kate chattering about their parents’ return. She would not say anything, Mrs Blakey decided as she collected around her the ingredients of a steak and kidney stew for everyone’s supper. She wouldn’t mention the boy who’d made trouble unless for some reason she happened to be asked about him, and she felt she would not be. She hummed quite happily again, her two red cheeks exuding her interrupted cheerfulness.

Kate and Stephen went on the dodgems and then bought candy floss. They watched the Dynmouth Hards performing at the rifle range, their black-frilled girls loitering beside them, seeming bored. They watched Alfonso and Annabella on the Wall of Death. They walked through the Haunted House. They looked at themselves in the Hall of a Million Mirrors. They travelled on the Ghost Train.

They left Sir Walter Raleigh Park and walked to the rectory garden. Stephen won a coconut. Kate bought two tickets in Mrs Keble’s tombola. They paid to enter the marquee to see the Spot the Talent competition. It was due to start at four o’clock, but didn’t begin until twenty past due to a hitch. Last year’s carnival queen sang ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree’. Stout Mrs Muller, in her national costume, sang. The Dynmouth Night-Lifers, with electric guitars, sang. The man called Pratt who’d come to the Dasses’ house on a motor-cycle did his imitations of dogs. Mr Swayles did his conjuring. The manager of the tile-works played the mouth-organ. Miss Wilkinson did her Lady of Shalott. Mrs Dass come on in a fluffy magenta dress and awarded the first prize to last year’s carnival queen and the second to Mr Swayles and the third to Mrs Muller.

The children left the marquee. They saw Miss Lavant in a suit with buttercups on it, strolling about among the stalls, her downcast eyes occasionally glancing up. But Dr Greenslade was not at the Easter Fête. They saw Commander Abigail, with his rolled-up towel and bathing-trunks under his arm, buying cake from Mrs Stead-Carter. Timothy Gedge’s sister, Rose-Ann, was there with her boyfriend, Len. His mother was there, her hair freshly styled, hurrying round the stalls with her sister the dressmaker, whose hair looked smart also. Mr Plant and his wife and children were there, but when he met Mrs Gedge face to face near the hoopla they passed as if they were strangers. Mrs Slewy slipped a bottle of sherry, third prize in the raffle, into a plastic hold-all.

The Easter Fête was for the birds, Timothy Gedge said. The Spot the Talent competition was a load of rubbish again. As he spoke, Kate could feel the devils. She could feel them coming towards her from his eyes and his smile, but they were different now, quieter, triumphant. He had won a victory. God had changed things but God had been defeated: she would believe that for ever, she would go on repeating it to herself to anyone else who ever wanted to know. A miracle had happened but the miracle had fallen flat because you couldn’t have miracles these days, because nobody cared, not even a clergyman. He’d see them around, Timothy Gedge said, but they knew from his tone of voice that they were of no further use to him. ‘Cheers,’ he said, not following them when they moved away.

They looked at Miss Poraway’s books. Practical Taxidermy had not yet been bought. ‘Such a lovely fête!’ Miss Poraway said. Susannah handed Stephen a book about bridge, grinning at him. Deborah handed Kate Cow-Keeping in India. ‘Only a penny!’ Miss Poraway cried, but Kate explained that Indian cow-keeping didn’t much interest her.

They left the fête and wondered for a moment about returning to Ring’s. While they paused on Once Hill, Mr Blakey approached in the Wolseley, on his way to Dynmouth Junction to fetch their parents from the station. He stopped when he saw them and asked if they wanted to come with him. They got into the back of the car.

He drove slowly, with old-fashioned care, easing the Wolseley through the Saturday shoppers in the centre of the town. Two nuns lifted cartons of groceries into the back of their new Fiat van. The Down Manor crocodile chattered in Lace Street, the orphans on their way to the Easter Fête and the Amusements. A waiter came out of the car-park of the Queen Victoria Hotel. People loitered outside the Essoldo Cinema, examining photographs that advertised The Wizard of Oz. Old Ape rooted in the dustbins outside Phyl’s Phries.

In the kitchen of the rectory Lavinia and Mrs Goff speedily washed cups and saucers which were immediately used again. Now that the Spot the Talent competition was over teas were being served in the marquee. Mrs Stead-Carter had sold her cakes and was hurrying between the kitchen and the tea-tables. So was Mrs Keble, who’d taken eight pounds odd on the tombola. Mrs Blackham was buttering more buns.

He would come regularly to the rectory now, Lavinia thought. Not to play with the twins, not for solace or scraps or to complain about the social security man, but simply to be a nuisance since being a nuisance was his way: to say again that he was the child of Miss Lavant. He would take the place of the rectory visitor who had died, mad Miss Trimm, and the place of the child which had not been born. After her long wakefulness in the night there was no escaping that thought, there was no escaping the suggestion of a pattern: the son who had not been born to her was nevertheless there for her. Believing still that the catastrophe had been caused by other people and the actions of other people, believing it as firmly as Kate believed that it had been caused by devils and Quentin that it was part of God’s mystery, Lavinia saw a spark in the gloom. It was she, it seemed, not Quentin, who might somehow blow hope into hopelessness. It was she who one day, in the rectory or the garden, might penetrate the shell that out of necessity had grown. As she changed the water in her washing-up bowl, the feeling of a pattern more securely possessed her, the feeling of events happening and being linked, the feeling that her wakeful nights and her edginess over her lost child had not been without an outcome. Compassion came less easily to her than it did to her husband. She could in no way be glad that Timothy Gedge would come regularly to the rectory: that prospect was grim. Yet she felt, unable to help herself, a certain irrational joyfulness, as though an end and a beginning had been reached at the same time. You could not live without hope, some part of her woman’s intuition told her: while a future was left you must not.

Coming into the kitchen, Quentin saw these thoughts reflected in his wife’s face and said to himself that no matter what else had recently happened in Dynmouth, Lavinia had at least recovered from her discontent. His faith, to a degree, had dissipated his own, imbuing with a little fresh strength his run-down role. It was a greater task to be as he was in his given circumstances than among God-fearing people: in that fact itself there was an urge towards determination, and a hint of comfort. From across the kitchen Lavinia smiled at him as though to reassure him, as though stating again that he did not seem laughable. He slightly shook his head, hoping to imply that it wasn’t important how he seemed.

‘More butter, have we, Mrs Featherston?’ Mrs Blackham enquired, and Lavinia said there were half-pounds in the door of the fridge.

On the loudspeakers of Ring’s Amusements Petula Clark sang her song again. Everything was waiting for you, she pointed out, and everything was going to be all right.

‘Dynmouth’s livening up,’ Timothy Gedge remarked, falling into step with an old-age pensioner on the way down Once Hill, smiling and laughing. Things always livened up, he went on, when Ring’s opened; things got set for the season. The Whitsun visitors would follow the Easter ones; in no time at all the hotels would be jammed to the doors. He told the old-age pensioner two jokes. He revealed that he’d been intending to do an act at the Easter Fête but had abandoned it because he’d decided it was a load of rubbish. He asked the old man if he’d ever worked in the sandpaper factory and added that he’d probably be going to work there himself when he’d finished at the Comprehensive. He wasn’t sure, he said, you never could tell. He asked the old man if he knew Miss Lavant, if he’d seen her at the fête, in clothes with buttercups on them.

His companion, who’d attempted to interrupt before, successfully did so now: it was no use trying to have a conversation with him because his deaf-aid had fallen to pieces.

Timothy Gedge nodded sympathetically. It was a beautiful story, he said, the story of Miss Lavant and Dr Greenslade. It was beautiful, two people loving one another all these years and Dr Greenslade being too much of a gentleman to leave his wife and family, and Miss Lavant giving birth to a baby and the baby being handed to a Dynmouth woman. It was beautiful how they’d laid it down that the baby should be brought up in Dynmouth so that they could always see it about the place. Miss Lavant looked great in all the different clothes she had, her scarlet outfit and her green and her blue, the beautiful buttercup thing she was wearing today. Fifteen years ago they’d decided to be circumspect, they’d brought their love affair to an end because the baby had been born. He was an elegant man, Dr Greenslade, a handsome man in his grey suit and his smooth grey hair, not at all run to fat, like Cary Grant almost. If you closed your eyes you could imagine them together on the promenade, arm-in-arm like they should be, the doctor with a silver-knobbed stick, loving one another in a public place.

He raised his voice even though the old man continued to indicate that he could not hear him. It would always be a secret: even if the doctor’s wife died and the doctor married Miss Lavant it would still be a secret about the child that had been born, because they’d never want it to be known out of respect for the dead. It would be a secret carefully kept, never mentioned by the people it concerned. It would just be there, like a touch of fog. He had said to the clergyman that opportunity wouldn’t knock, but you never knew and you definitely had to keep your spirits up or you’d go to the wall. One minute you discovered you could do a falsetto, the next that there was a reason why a woman had given you a sweet. Everything was waiting for you; for a start you could get money left to you in a will. He smiled at the old-age pensioner and wagged his head. ‘Really good,’ he said, referring to the voice of Petula Clark.

The old-age pensioner could not hear it, but for everyone else it continued to throb with the promise of its message, drifting over Dynmouth on the breeze that blew gently from the sea.

‘How can you lose?’ sang Petula Clark. ‘Things will be great.’