Children Of Dynmouth

1

Dynmouth nestled on the Dorset coast, gathered about what was once the single source of its prosperity, a small fishing harbour. In the early eighteenth century it had been renowned for its lace-making and its turbot, and had later developed prettily as a watering place. Being still small, it was now considered unspoilt, a seaside resort of limited diversions, its curving promenade and modest pier stylish with ornamental lamp-posts, painted green. At the foot of grey-brown cliffs a belt of shingle gave way to the sand on which generations of Dynmouth’s children had run and played, and built castles with moats and flag-poles.

In an unspectacular way the town had expanded inland along the valley of the Dyn. Where sheep had grazed on sloping downs a sandpaper factory stood now and opposite it, on the other side of the river, a tile-works. At the eastern end of the promenade, near the car-park and the public lavatories, there was a fish-packing station. Plastic lampshades were scheduled to be manufactured soon on a site that had once been known as Long Dog’s Field, and there were rumours – denied by the town council – that the Singer Sewing Machine organization had recently looked the town over with a view to developing a plant there. There were three banks in Dynmouth, Lloyd’s, Barclay’s and the National Westminster. There were municipal tennis-courts beside the Youth Centre, and a Baptist chapel and a Methodist chapel, the Church of England’s St Simon and St Jude, the Catholic Queen of Heaven. There were nine hotels and nineteen boarding-houses, eleven public houses and one fish and chip shop, Phyl’s Phries, next to the steam laundry on the Dynmouth Junction road. There was the East Street Bingo and Whist-Drive Hall and the ancient Essoldo Cinema in flaking pink, dim and cavernous within. Sir Walter Raleigh Park, enclosed by ornamental railings that matched the promenade’s lamp-posts, was rented from the council by Ring’s Amusements every summer season. Spreading inland from the cliffs, a golf-course had been laid out in 1936.

Winter and summer alike, every Sunday afternoon, the Badstoneleigh and Dynmouth Salvation Army Band marched through the town. Twice a week or so the Dynmouth Hards, a gang of motor-cyclists in fringed black leather, rampaged by night, with their black-fringed girl-friends crouched on pillions behind them. In 1969 there’d been a strike at the sandpaper factory. In 1970 an assistant chef at the Queen Victoria Hotel, dissatisfied with the terms of his employment, attempted to burn the building down by soaking curtains and bedclothes in paraffin, an incident that was reported on an inside page of the Daily Telegraph. The man, a Sicilian, was stated by Dr Greenslade to be insane.

A pattern, familiar elsewhere too, prevailed in Dynmouth. The houses of the well-to-do, solitary and set in generous gardens, were followed in order of such esteem by semi-detached villas that stood like twins in Dynmouth’s tree-lined avenues and crescents. After which came dwellings that had a look of economy about them, reflecting the burden of rent or mortgage. Far from the sea-front and the centre of the town was the sprawl of council estates and sand-yellow blocks of council flats. In streets near the river there were terraced houses of cramped proportions, temporarily occupied by those who waited for their names to rise to the top of a housing list. So close to the river that they were regularly flooded by it were the cottages of Boughs Lane, which people said were a disgrace. The handsomest dwelling in Dynmouth was Sea House, high on the cliffs beside the golf-course, famous for the azaleas of its garden.

Of the town’s 4,139 inhabitants half were children. There were three nursery schools: the Ring-o-Roses, Lavinia Featherston’s at the rectory, and the W R V S Playgroup. There was Dynmouth Primary School, Dynmouth Comprehensive and the Loretto Convent. There was Down Manor Orphanage, redbrick and barrack-like, beyond the electricity plant, and Dynmouth Nurseries, a mile outside the town. The Youth Centre was run by John and Ted.

The children of Dynmouth were as children anywhere. They led double lives; more regularly than their elders they travelled without moving from a room. They saw a different world: the sun looked different to them, and so did Dynmouth’s trees and grass and sand. Dogs loomed at a different level, eye to eye. Cats arched their tiger’s backs, and the birds behind bars in Moult’s Hardware and Pet Supplies gazed beadily down, appearing to speak messages. Pairs of Loretto nuns, airing themselves on the promenade, gazed down also, blackly nodding, a crucified body dangling among their black beads. Ring’s Amusements were Dynmouth’s Paradise.

No longer children, some found office work; others made for the supermarkets, the garages, the hotels, Dynmouth Lace Ltd, the printing-works of the Badstoneleigh and Dynmouth News, the laundry. Since the time of Queen Victoria – who visited the town – tea-shops had been a feature: there were twelve now, offering indifferent wages to girls who were nimble on their feet. A few boys became trawler-men, but life was easier and richer at the fish-packing station, and in the sandpaper factory and the tile-works. Some made their careers outside the town when the time came, even though Dynmouth remained home for them and was thought of with affection. Some couldn’t stand the town and dreamed, while still children, of being other people in other places.

Lavinia Featherston, who had been herself a child of Dynmouth, remembered when the green ornamental lamp-posts were all of a sudden huge no longer and when the grey-brown cliffs appeared to have been re-cut to size and the Spinning-Wheel Tea-Rooms seemed almost tatty. The rectory she lived in now, an ivy-clad building set among ragged lawns, had been a mysterious and forbidding house to her as a child, halfway up the hill called Once Hill, partly hidden from the road by a stone wall and a row of macrocarpa trees. It hadn’t changed, yet it was not the same. When she surveyed her nursery school in the rectory it sometimes saddened Lavinia that everything would become more ordinary for these children as they grew up, that all too soon the birds in Moult’s Hardware and Pet Supplies would cease to speak messages. She ran her school because she liked the company of children, though sometimes finding it a strain.

She found it so on the afternoon of a Wednesday in early April, the day, in fact, of St Pancras of Sicily, as her husband had remarked at breakfast-time. Outside, it was blustery and cold. Sheets of soft rain dribbled on the rectory’s window-panes. The fire in the sitting-room refused to light.

‘I’m really cross,’ Lavinia said, addressing her twin daughters, aged four. She regarded them sternly from the fireplace, out of breath because she’d been blowing at the charred edges of a newspaper. All day long, she reminded them, they’d been nothing but trouble, painting their hands at nursery school, tearing about Lipton’s when she’d told them to stand by the dog-food, and now, apparently, throwing jam at the kitchen window.

‘I didn’t,’ Susannah said.

‘Fell.’ Repeatedly Deborah nodded, lending weight to that explanation. ‘Fell and fell.’

Lavinia Featherston, a pretty, fair-haired woman of thirty-five, told her daughters to stop talking nonsense. Jam didn’t fall, she pointed out. Jam wasn’t like rain. Jam had to be taken from a pot and thrown. People were starving in the world: it wasn’t right to throw jam about a kitchen just because you were bored.

‘It fell out of the pot,’ Deborah said. ‘Goodness knows how it got to the window, Mummy.’

‘Goodness knows, Mummy.’

Lavinia continued to look sternly at them. They, too, were fair-haired; they had freckles on the bridges of their noses. Would a boy have looked the same? She’d often wondered that, and wondered it more relevantly just now.

That, at the moment, was the trouble with Lavinia. She was recovering from a miscarriage, feeling nervy and on edge. Everything had been going perfectly until a fortnight ago and then, after the loss of her child, Dr Greenslade had reminded her that he’d warned her against attempting to have it. The warning became an order: in no circumstances was she to attempt to have another baby.

This turn of events had upset Lavinia more than she’d have believed possible. She and Quentin had very much wanted a son; Dr Greenslade stood firm. The disappointment, still recent, was hard to shake off.

‘You know what happens to children who tell lies,’ she crossly reminded her daughters. ‘It’s high time you turned over a new leaf.’

The bell at the back door rang. A stick in the fire began half-heartedly to blaze. Slowly Lavinia gathered herself to her feet. It could be anyone, for the rectory was an open house. It was open to Mrs Slewy, the worst mother in Dynmouth, a shapeless woman who smelt of poverty and cigarettes, who lived in a condemned cottage in Boughs Lane with her five inadequate children. And to the elderly Miss Trimm, who’d been a schoolteacher in the town and nowadays was disturbed in her mind. Children returned for confirmation classes years after they’d left the nursery school, adults came for fellowship discussions. Mrs Keble, the organist, came to talk about hymns, and Father Madden to talk about ecumenicalism. Mrs Stead-Carter came importantly, Miss Poraway for a chat.

Today, though, it was none of these people: it was a figure known in Dynmouth only as Old Ape, who had come a day early for his weekly scraps. The scraps were meant to be for hens he kept, but everyone in Dynmouth knew that he didn’t possess hens and that he ate the scraps himself. When he came to the rectory he was also given a plate of meat and vegetables, provided he arrived at six o’clock on the specified day, which was Thursday. ‘I’ll get the scraps,’ Lavinia said at the back door. ‘You come back tomorrow for your dinner.’ Communication with Old Ape was difficult. It was said that he could speak but chose not to. It wasn’t known if he was deaf.

In the sitting-room the twins played with the pieces of a jigsaw, squatting on the hearth-rug in front of the damply flickering fire. When you interlocked the pieces of the puzzle there was a picture of a donkey, but they’d seen the donkey so many times it didn’t seem worth while going to all that trouble yet again. On the lid of the jigsaw box they built the pieces into a pyre.

‘Dragons come,’ Susannah said.

‘What dragons, Susannah?’

‘They come if you tell lies. They’re burny things. They’ve flames in them.’

But Deborah was thinking of something else. She was thinking of being in the garden, of looking all over the grass and then in the flower-beds and on the gravel by the garage and along by the edges of the paths, until she found a new leaf. She closed her eyes and saw herself leaning down by the edge of a path and turning the new leaf over to see what was on the other side.

In the kitchen their mother made a cup of tea, and in the streets of Dynmouth their father, the vicar of St Simon and St Jude’s, pedalled through the wind and the rain on a 1937 Rudge, left to him in a parishioner’s will. He was an impressive figure on this bicycle, rather lanky, his hair prematurely grey, his face seeming ascetic until cheered by a smile that occurred whenever he greeted anyone. He hoped as he went about his familiar Wednesday duty of visiting the sick among his parishioners that Lavinia wasn’t having a time with the twins, cooped inside on a damp afternoon. He thought about his wife as he chatted to old, disturbed Miss Trimm, who had a cold, and to little Sharon Lines, who was on a kidney machine. They’d waited almost nine years for the twins to be born: they had a lot to be thankful for but it was hard to comfort a woman who’d lost a child and couldn’t have another. Lavinia’s moments of despondency were irrational, she said so herself, yet they continued to afflict her. They made her not at all like what she was.

He rode down Fore Street, where holiday-makers who had taken advantage of the pre-Easter rates looked as though they regretted it as they loitered in the rain. Some took refuge in the doorways of shops, eating sweets or nuts. Others read the list of forthcoming attractions outside the Essoldo Cinema where The Battle of Britain was at present showing. In Sir Walter Raleigh Park, beside the promenade, Ring’s Amusements were preparing for their seasonal opening in ten days’ time, on Easter Saturday. Machines were being oiled and repaired, staff taken on, statutory safety precautions pondered over with a view to their evasion. The Hall of a Million Mirrors and the Tunnel of Love and Alfonso’s and Annabella’s Wall of Death were in the process of erection. The men who performed this work were of a muscular, weathered appearance, with faded scarves tied round their throats, some with brass rings on their fingers. Like their garish caravans and pin-tables and the swarthy women who assisted them, they seemed to belong to the past. They shouted to one another through the rain, using words that had an old-fashioned ring.

The promenade was almost empty. Commander Abigail strutted along it towards the steps that led to the beach, with his bathing-trunks rolled up in a towel. The slight, carefully clad figure of Miss Lavant moved slowly in the opposite direction, beneath a red umbrella that caught occasionally in the wind. The wind bustled around her, gadding over the concrete of the promenade and up and down the short pier. It rattled the refuse-bins on the ornamental lamp-posts, and the broken glass in the bus-shelters. It played with cigarette packets and wrappings from chocolate and potato crisps. It drove paper-bags into corners and left them there, uselessly sodden.

The sea was so far out you could hardly see it. Seagulls stood like small rocks, rooted to the flattened sand. The sky was grey, shadowed with darker grey.

‘Cheers, sir,’ a voice called, and Quentin Featherston turned his head and saw Timothy Gedge standing on the edge of the pavement, apparently hoping for a word with him. Cautiously, he applied the Rudge’s brakes.

Timothy Gedge was a youth of fifteen, ungainly due to adolescence, a boy with a sharp-boned face and wide, thin shoulders, whose short hair was almost white. His eyes seemed hungry, giving him a predatory look; his cheeks had a hollowness about them. He was always dressed in the same clothes: pale yellow jeans and a yellow jacket with a zip, and a T-shirt that more often than not was yellow also. He lived with his mother and his sister, Rose-Ann, in a block of council-built flats called Cornerways; without distinction, he attended Dynmouth Comprehensive School. He was a boy who was given to making jokes, a habit that caused him sometimes to seem eccentric. He smiled and grinned a lot.

‘Hi, Mr Feather,’ he said.

‘Hullo, Timothy.’

‘Nice day, Mr Feather.’

‘Well, I don’t know about nice –’

‘I was meaning for ducks, sir.’ He laughed. His clothes were wet. His short pale hair was plastered around his head.

‘Did you want to speak to me, Timothy?’ He wished the boy would address him by his correct name. He had asked him to, but the boy had pretended not to understand: it was all meant to be a joke.

‘I was wondering about the Easter Fête, Mr Feather. Did you know Ring’s will be opening up the same afternoon?’

‘Ring’s always begin on Easter Saturday.’

‘That’s what I’m saying to you, Mr Feather. Won’t Ring’s take the crowds?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. They haven’t in the past.’

‘I’d say you were wrong, Mr Feather.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to see. Thank you for thinking of it, Timothy.’

‘I was wondering about the Spot the Talent comp, Mr Feather.’

‘We’re having the Spot the Talent competition at two-thirty. Mr and Mrs Dass will be in charge again.’

More than a month ago the boy had appeared at the rectory one evening, quite late it had been, after nine o’clock, and had asked if there was going to be a Spot the Talent competition at this year’s Easter Fête because he wanted to do a comedy act. Quentin had told him he imagined there would be, with Mr and Mrs Dass in charge as usual. He’d later heard from the Dasses that Timothy Gedge had been to see them and that they’d written his name down, the first entry.

He was a strange boy, always at a loose end. His mother was a good-looking woman with brassy hair who sold women’s clothes in a shop called Cha-Cha Fashions, his sister was six or seven years older than Timothy, good-looking also, employed as a petrol-pump attendant on the forecourt of the Smiling Service Filling Station: Quentin knew them both by sight. In adolescence, unfortunately, the boy was increasingly becoming a nuisance to people, endlessly friendly and smiling, keen for conversation. He was what Lavinia called a latch-key child, returning to the empty flat in Cornerways from the Comprehensive school, on his own in it all day during the school holidays. Being on his own seemed somehow to have become part of him.

‘She’s a funny woman, that Mrs Dass. He’s funny himself, with that pipe.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. I must be off, I’m afraid, Timothy.’

‘Will it be in the marquee again, sir?’

‘I should think so.’

‘D’you know the Abigails, Mr Feather? The Commander and Mrs? I do jobs for the Abigails, you know. Every Wednesday night; I’ll be round there tonight. Funny type of people.’

Quentin shook his head. He knew the Abigails, he said; they didn’t seem funny to him. His right foot was on the pedal, but he couldn’t push the bicycle forward because the boy was slightly in the way, his knee touching the spokes of the front wheel.

‘The Commander’s having his bathe now. I call that funny. In the sea in April, Mr Feather.’ He paused, smiling. ‘I see Miss Lavant’s out on her stroll.’

‘Yes, I know –’

‘Out to catch a glimpse of Dr Greenslade.’

The boy laughed and Quentin managed to get the front wheel of his bicycle past the protruding knee. Some other time they’d have a chat, he promised.

‘I think I’ll call in on Dass,’ Timothy Gedge said, ‘to see how he’s getting on.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother.’

‘I think I’d better sir.’

Quentin rode away, feeling he should have stayed longer with the boy, if only to explain why there was no need for him to go bothering the Dasses. There’d been a period when he’d come to the rectory every Saturday morning, sometimes as early as a quarter to nine. He’d had an idea, as he’d explained to Quentin, that when he grew up he’d like to be a clergyman. But when Quentin had eventually tried to persuade him to join his confirmation class, he’d said he wasn’t interested and had in fact given up the notion of a clerical career. He hung about the church now, and about the graveyard whenever there was a funeral service. It particularly worried Quentin that he was always around when there was a funeral.

Timothy watched the dark figure of the clergyman pedalling away, thinking to himself that strictly speaking the clergyman was a bit of a fool the way he let himself be taken advantage of. All sorts of tricks people got up to with the man, extraordinary it must be, being a clergyman. He shook his head over the folly of it all, and then he forgot about it and surveyed the promenade. Miss Lavant had gone, the promenade and the pier were deserted. In the far distance, a speck on the beach beneath the cliffs, Commander Abigail ran towards the sea. Timothy Gedge laughed, shaking his head over the folly of that also.

He walked along the promenade, taking his time because there was no particular hurry. He didn’t mind the rain, he quite liked it when he got wet. He walked past the small harbour and a row of boats upturned on the shingle. He wandered into the yard of the fish-packing station, to the shed where freshly caught fish was sold to anyone who wanted it. Dabs, it said on a slate on one side of the door. Lemon Sole, Mackerel, Plaice. If there’d been anyone buying fish there he’d have loitered in order to listen to the transaction, but nobody was. He went into the public lavatories in the car-park, but there was no one there either. He turned into East Street, moving towards the area where the Dasses lived.

‘Cheers,’ he said to a couple of old-age pensioners who were tottering along together, clinging to one another on a slippery pavement, but they didn’t reply. He paused beside three nuns who were examining a shop window full of garden tools while waiting for a bus. He smiled at them and pointed out a pair of secateurs, saying they looked good value. They were about to reply when the bus came. ‘It’s the friendly boy Sister Agnes mentioned,’ he heard one of them comment, and from the inside of the bus all three of them waved at him.

The Dasses lived in a semi-detached house called Sweetlea. Mr Dass had been the manager of the Dynmouth branch of Lloyd’s Bank and was now retired. He was a man with wire-rimmed spectacles, tall and very thin, given to wearing unpressed tweed suits. His wife was an invalid, with pale flesh that had a deflated look. She had once been active in Dynmouth’s now-defunct amateur dramatic society, the Dynmouth Strollers, and when Quentin Featherston had decided to hold his first Easter Fête to raise funds for the crumbling tower of St Simon and St Jude’s, Mrs Stead-Carter had put forward the idea of a talent competition and had suggested that Mrs Dass should be invited to judge it. The talent competition had become an annual event, Mrs Dass continuing to accept the onus of judgement and Mr Dass entering into the spirit of things by seeing to the erection and lighting of a stage in the tea marquee that was borrowed annually through the Stead-Carters, who had influence in the tenting world. The stage itself, modest in size, consisted of a number of timber boards set on concrete blocks. There was a wooden frame, knocked up by Mr Peniket, the sexton, which supported a landscape of Swiss Alps painted on hardboard, and the stage’s curtains. Each year the curtains were borrowed from the stage of the Youth Centre, and it was Mrs Dass, artistic in this direction also, who had been responsible for the all-purpose scenery. In his devotion to his wife and knowing more than anyone else about her invalid state, it pleased Mr Dass that the Spot the Talent competition was now an established event at the Easter Fête: it took her out of herself.

‘Only I was passing,’ Timothy Gedge said, having penetrated to the Dasses’ sitting-room. ‘I was wondering how things was going, sir.’

Mrs Dass was reclining on a sun-chair in the bow-window, reading a book by Dennis Wheatley, To the Devil, a Daughter. Her husband was standing by the door without his jacket, regretting that he’d admitted the boy. He’d been asleep on his bed when the bell had been rung, and the ringing hadn’t immediately wakened him. It had first of all occurred in a dream he was having about his early childhood, and had then been repeated quite a number of times before he could get downstairs. It had sounded important.

‘Things?’ he said.

‘The Spot the Talent comp, sir.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Only I was speaking to Mr Feather and he said I’d best look in at Sweetlea.’

In her sun-chair in the bow-window Mrs Dass put down To the Devil, a Daughter. For a moment she watched the sparrows in the small back garden and then she closed her eyes. She’d smiled a little when her husband had brought Timothy Gedge into the room, but she hadn’t spoken.

‘Everything’s A1,’ Mr Dass said. He hadn’t thought about the stage or the lighting yet. The stage would be where Mr Peniket and he had left it last year, in the cellar beneath the church where the coke was kept. The lights were in three cardboard boxes, under his bed.

‘We’ve had quite a few entries,’ he reported. Stout Mrs Muller, the Austrian woman who ran the Gardenia Café, went in for the competition every year, singing Austrian songs in her national costume accompanied by her husband on an accordion, in national costume also. A group called the Dynmouth Night-Lifers strummed electric guitars and sang. The manager of the tile-works played tunes on his mouth-organ. Mr Swayles, employed in a newsagent’s, did conjuring. Miss Wilkinson, who taught English in the Comprehensive school, had done Lady Macbeth and Miss Havisham and was down to do the Lady of Shalott this year. Last summer’s carnival queen, a girl employed in the fish-packing station, had never before entered the Spot the Talent competition. In her queen’s white dress, trimmed with Dynmouth lace, and wearing her crown, she was scheduled to sing ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree’.

‘Mrs Dass all right is she, sir?’ Timothy Gedge enquired, glancing across the room at her, thinking that the woman looked dead.

Mr Dass nodded. She often liked to lie with her eyes closed. He himself had moved across the room and was now standing with his back to a small coal fire. He took his pipe from a trouser pocket and pressed tobacco into it from a tin. He wished the boy would go away.

‘Only there’s not long till the Easter Fête, sir.’

To Mr Dass’s horror, the boy sat down. He unzipped his damp yellow jacket, settling himself on the sofa.

‘I was saying to Mr Feather, Ring’s is getting ready again. They’ll be opening up Easter Saturday.’

‘Yes, they will.’

‘Same day as the Easter Fête, Mr Dass.’

‘Yes.’

‘Only I was saying to Mr Feather they’ll take the crowds.’ Mr Dass shook his head. The crowds went from one attraction to the other, he explained. The opening of Ring’s Amusements on Easter Saturday brought people from outside Dynmouth: the Easter Fête actually benefited from the coincidence.

‘I wouldn’t agree, sir,’ Timothy said.

Mr Dass didn’t reply.

‘It’s bad weather, sir.’

Mr Dass said it was, and then asked if he could be of help in any way.

‘What’s he want?’ Mrs Dass suddenly demanded, opening her eyes.

‘Afternoon, Mrs Dass,’ Timothy said. Funny the way they wouldn’t give you a cup of tea. Funny the man standing there in his shirtsleeves. He smiled at Mrs Dass. ‘We were on about the Spot the Talent comp,’ he said.

She smiled back at the boy. He began to talk about a sewing-machine.

‘Sewing-machine?’ she said.

‘For making curtains, Mrs Dass. Only the Youth Centre curtains got burnt in December. New curtains are required is what I’m saying.’

‘What’s he mean?’ she asked her husband.

‘The Youth Centre curtains are apparently unavailable for the Easter Fête, dear. I don’t know why he’s come to us about it.’

Mr Dass lit his pipe. He had let the boy in because the boy had said he had an urgent message. So far no message had been delivered.

‘I’m afraid my wife is not in a position to make curtains,’ he said.

‘We’ll have to buy some then, Mr Dass. You can’t have a stage without curtains on it.’

‘Oh, I imagine we’ll manage somehow.’

‘I definitely need curtains for my act, sir.’

‘Mrs Dass will not be making curtains.’ A note of asperity had entered Mr Dass’s voice. As the manager of the Dynmouth branch of Lloyd’s Bank he had regularly had occasion to call on this resolute tone when rejecting pleas for credit facilities. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he added, taking his pipe from his mouth and pressing the smouldering tobacco with a thumb, ‘we are extremely busy this afternoon.’

‘I’m worried about the curtains, sir.’

‘That’s really Mrs Featherston’s pigeon, you know.’

‘Mr Feather said you’d supply new curtains, sir.’

‘Mr Featherston? Oh, I’m sure you’re quite wrong, you know.’

‘He said you’d definitely donate them, sir.’

‘Donate curtains? Now, look here –’

‘I think it’s a kind of joke,’ Mrs Dass said. She smiled weakly at Timothy Gedge. ‘We’re not good on jokes, I’m afraid.’

Mr Dass moved from the position he’d taken up by the fire. He leant over Timothy on the sofa. He spoke in a whisper, explaining that his wife liked to rest in the afternoons. It embarrassed him having to say all this to a schoolboy, but he felt he had no option. ‘I’ll see you out,’ he said.

‘All right is she?’ Timothy asked again, not that he cared: it was his opinion that Mrs Dass was a load of rubbish the way she affected herself, lying there like a dead white slug when there was nothing the matter with her.

Mr Dass opened the hall door of Sweetlea and waited while Timothy zipped up his jacket again.

‘You didn’t mind me asking about her, sir? Only she looked a bit white in the face.’

‘My wife’s not strong.’

‘She misses what’s-his-name?’

‘If you mean our son, yes, she does.’

‘He hasn’t been back in a long time, Mr Dass.’

‘No. Good-bye now.’

Timothy nodded, not leaving the house. He’d known their son well, he said. He enquired about the work he was doing now and Mr Dass was vague in his reply, having no wish to discuss his son with a stranger, especially since his son had been at the centre of a domestic tragedy. The Dasses had two daughters, both of them now married and living in London. Their son, Nevil, born when Mrs Dass was forty-two, had taken them by surprise and as a result had been indulged in childhood, a state of affairs that the Dasses now bitterly regretted. Three years ago, when Nevil was nineteen, he had quite out of the blue turned most harshly on both of them and had not been back to Dynmouth since. He’d been particularly the apple of his mother’s eye: his rejection of her had gradually brought about her invalid state. The Dynmouth doctors had pronounced her condition to be a nervous one, but it was no less real for being that, as her husband in his affection for her realized. The whole unfortunate matter was never mentioned now, not even within the family, not even when the two daughters came at Christmas with their children and husbands. Every year a place was laid for Nevil on this festive occasion, a gesture more than anything else.

‘He was very fond of the Queen Victoria Hotel, sir. I’ll always remember him going in and coming out, sir.’

‘Yes, well –’

‘He’d always have the time of day for you.’

‘Look, I’d rather not discuss my son. If there’s anything else –’

‘I need special stuff with lights for the act I’ve got, Mr Dass. I need the stage in darkness and then the lights coming on. I need that four times, Mr Dass, the darkness and the light: I’ll give you the tip by winking. I need the curtains drawn over twice. That’s why I’m worried about them.’

‘Yes, well, I’m sure we can manage something.’

‘You’re out with a blonde, Mr Dass, you see the wife coming?’

Mr Dass frowned, imagining he had heard incorrectly. It was cold, standing in the hall with the door open. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

‘What d’you do when you see the wife coming, sir?’

‘Now, look here –’

‘The four-minute mile, sir!’

Mr Dass said he had things to do. He said he’d be grateful if Timothy Gedge left his house.

‘I do jobs for the Abigails, Mr Dass, I’ll be round there tonight. If there’s anything you had here –’

‘It’s quite all right, thank you.’

‘I do the surrounds for Mrs Abigail, and stuff in the garden for the Commander. I’d clean your boots for you, sir. Mrs Dass’s as well.’

‘We don’t need help in the house. I really must ask you to go now.’

‘You didn’t mind me asking you? I’ll pop in again when I’m passing, sir. I’ll have a word with Mr Feather about the curtains.’

‘There’s no need to call here again,’ Mr Dass said quickly. ‘About curtains or anything else.’

‘I’m really looking forward to the Spot the Talent, sir.’

The door banged behind him. He walked down the short tiled path, leaving the garden gate open. It was too soon to go to the Abigails’. He wasn’t due at the Abigails’ bungalow in High Park Avenue until six o’clock, not that it mattered being on the early side, but it was only five past four now. He thought of going down to the Youth Centre, but all there’d be at the Youth Centre would be people playing ping-pong and smoking and talking about sex.

Slowly he walked through Dynmouth again, examining the goods in the shop windows, watching golf being played on various television sets. He bought a tube of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums. He thought about the act he’d devised for the Spot the Talent competition. He began to walk towards Cornerways, planning to dress himself up in his sister’s clothes.

At Dynmouth Comprehensive Timothy Gedge found no subject interesting. Questioned some years ago by the headmaster, a Mr Stringer, he had confessed to this and Mr Stringer had stirred his coffee and said it was a bad thing. He’d asked Timothy what he found interesting outside the Comprehensive and Timothy had said television shows. Prompted further by Mr Stringer, he’d confessed that as soon as he walked into the empty flat on his return from school he turned on the television and was always pleased to watch whatever there was. Sitting in a room with the curtains drawn, he delighted in hospital dramas and life at the Crossroads Motel and horse-racing and cookery demonstrations. In the holidays there were the morning programmes as well: Bagpuss, Camp Runamuck, Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan, Funky Phantom, Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), Junior Police Five, Car Body Maintenance, Solids, Liquids and Gases, Play a Tune with Ulf Goran, Sheep Production. Mr Stringer said it was a bad thing to watch so much television. ‘I suppose you’ll go into the sandpaper factory?’ he’d suggested and Timothy had replied that it seemed the best bet. On the school notice-board a sign permanently requested recruits for a variety of departments in the sandpaper factory. He’d been eleven or twelve when he’d first assumed that that was where his future lay.

But then, not long after this conversation with Mr Stringer, an extraordinary thing happened. A student teacher called O’Hennessy arrived at the Comprehensive and talked to his pupils about a void when he was scheduled to be teaching them English. ‘The void can be filled,’ he said.

Nobody paid much attention to O’Hennessy, who liked to be known by his Christian name, which was Brehon. Nobody understood a word he was talking about. ‘The landscape is the void,’ he said. ‘Escape from the drear landscape. Fill the void with beauty.’ All during his English classes Brehon O’Hennessy talked about the void, and the drear landscape, and beauty. In every kid, he pronounced, looking from one face to another, there was an avenue to a fuller life. He had a short tangled beard and tangled black hair. He had a way of gesturing in the air with his right hand, towards the windows of the classroom. ‘There,’ he said when he did this. ‘Out there. The souls of the adult people have shrivelled away: they are as last year’s rhubarb walking the streets. Only the void is left. Get up in the morning, take food, go to work, take food, work, go home, take food, look at the television, go to bed, have sex, go to sleep, get up.’ Now and again during his lessons he smoked cigarettes containing the drug cannabis and didn’t mind if his pupils smoked also, cannabis or tobacco, who could care? ‘Your soul is your property,’ he said.

Timothy Gedge, like all the others, had considered O’Hennessy to be touched in the head, but then O’Hennessy said something that made him less certain about that. Everyone was good at something, he said, nobody was without talent: it was a question of discovering yourself. O’Hennessy was at the Comprehensive for only half a term, and was then replaced by Miss Wilkinson.

It seemed to Timothy that he was good at nothing, but he also was increasingly beginning to wonder if he wished to spend a lifetime making sandpaper. He thought about himself, as Brehon O’Hennessy had said he should. He closed his eyes and saw himself, again following Brehon O’Hennessy’s injunction. He saw himself as an adult, getting up in the morning and taking food, and then reporting to the cutting room of the sandpaper factory. Seeking to discover an absorbing interest, which might even become an avenue to a fuller life, he bought a model-aeroplane kit, but unfortunately he found the construction work difficult. The balsa wood kept splitting and the recommended glue didn’t seem to stick the pieces together properly. He lost some of them, and after a couple of days he gave the whole thing up. It was a great disappointment to him. He’d imagined flying the clever little plane on the beach, getting the engine going and showing people how it was done. He’d imagined making other aircraft, building up quite a collection of them, using dope like it said in the instructions, covering the wings with tissue paper. It would all have taken hours, sitting contentedly in the kitchen with the radio on while his mother and sister were out in the evenings, as they generally were. But it was not to be.

Then, on the afternoon of December 4th last, something else happened: Miss Wilkinson ordered that the two laundry baskets containing the school’s dressing-up clothes should be carried into the classroom and she made the whole of 3A dress up so that they could enact scenes from history. She called it a game. ‘The game of charades,’ she said. ‘Charrada. From the Spanish, the chatter of the clown.’ She divided 3A into five groups and gave each an historical incident to act. The others had to guess what it was. Nobody had listened when she’d said that a word came from the Spanish and meant the chatter of a clown; within five minutes the classroom was a bedlam. The eight children in Timothy Gedge’s group laughed uproariously when he dressed up as Queen Elizabeth I, in a red wig and a garment that had a lank white ruff at its neck. Timothy laughed himself, seeing in a mirror how peculiar he looked, with a pair of tights stuffed into the dress to give him a bosom. He enjoyed laughing at himself and being laughed at. He enjoyed the feel of the wig on his head and the different feeling the long voluminous dress gave him, turning him into another person.

It was the only occasion he had ever enjoyed at Dynmouth Comprehensive and it was crowned by his discovery that without any difficulty whatsoever he could adopt a falsetto voice. That night he’d lain awake in bed, imagining a future that was different in every way from a future in the sandpaper factory. ‘Charrada,’ Miss Wilkinson repeated in a dream. ‘The chatter of the clown.’

He’d felt aimless in his adolescence before that. After he’d failed with the model-aeroplane kit he’d taken to following people about just to see where they were going, and looking through the windows of people’s houses. He’d found himself regularly attending funerals because for some reason there was enjoyment of a kind to be derived from standing in the graveyard of the church of St Simon and St Jude or the graveyard of the Baptist, Methodist or Catholic churches, while solemn words were said and mourners paid respects. He continued to follow people about and to look through windows and to attend funerals, but he had also determined to enter the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête with a comic act and he now spent a considerable amount of his spare time trying to work out what it should be. He instinctively felt that somehow it should incorporate the notion of death, that whatever charrada he devised should be of a macabre nature.

In bed at night he thought about this, and continued to do so during geography lessons and tedious mathematics lessons, staring ahead of him in a manner that was complained of as vacant. He would smile when he was insulted in this way and for a moment would pay attention to a droning voice retailing information about the distribution of herring-beds around the shores of the British Isles or incomprehensibly speaking French. He would then revert to his more personal riddle of how to reconcile death and comedy in a theatrical act. He wondered about presenting himself as a female mourner, in a black dress down to his feet and a veiled black hat, with cheekily relevant chatter. But somehow that didn’t seem complete, or even right. Then, a month ago, Mr Stringer had taken forty pupils to London and had included in the itinerary a visit to Madame Tussaud’s. At half past eleven that morning Timothy Gedge had found the solution he was looking for: he decided to base his comic act on the deaths of Miss Munday, Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty, the Brides in the Bath, the victims of George Joseph Smith. All the way back to Dynmouth on the coach he’d imagined the act. To applause and laughter in the marquee at the Easter Fête, he rose from an old tin bath while the limelight settled on the wedding-dress he wore and his chatter began. He’d never in his life seen Benny Hill, or anyone else, attempting an act in a long white wedding-dress, impersonating three deceased women. It made him chortle so much in the coach that Mr Stringer asked him if he was going to be sick.

The rain had increased by the time he reached Cornerways. It dripped from his face and hair. He could feel areas of damp on his back and his stomach. His legs and arms were drenched. In the flat he removed some of the wet clothes in order to practise his act. He didn’t turn the television on because he liked the flat to be quiet when he was practising.

In his sister’s bedroom he eased himself into a pair of black tights. A torn toenail caught in the fine mesh of the material, creating an immediate hole. The same thing had happened once before and then he’d felt something else going as soon as he sat down. Rose-Ann had gone on about the damage for quite some time and had eventually taken the tights back to the shop, where she’d been received with hostility.

He regarded himself in the long Woolworth’s mirror that Rose-Ann’s boyfriend Len had fixed up for her on the inside of her cupboard door. He still wore his own yellow T-shirt; the tights were taut on his calves and thighs. The hole his toenail had caused was round the back somewhere, which was a relief because Rose-Ann mightn’t even notice it. He picked up a flowered brassiere and held it for a moment against his chest, examining the effect in the mirror. He had perfected his own method with his sister’s brassieres, employing two rubber bands to bridge the gap at the back.

He took off his shirt, selected a pair of Rose-Ann’s ankle socks, knotted the rubber bands and attached them securely to the brassiere’s hooks. He then slipped the garment over his head, wriggled his way into it, and stuffed an ankle sock into each cup. He put on a dress that was too big for Rose-Ann, which had been given to her by a friend. It wasn’t too big for him. It was wine-coloured, with small black buttons.

He left his sister’s bedroom and crossed the small landing to his room. He stood on a chair and lifted from the top of a cupboard a small cardboard suitcase in which he kept his private possessions. The suitcase itself, reclaimed from the beach, was badly damaged. The brown cardboard was torn here and there, string replaced its handle and only one of its hinges was intact. He opened it on his bed and glanced suspiciously over its contents, as though fearing theft. He kept his money in the suitcase, in an envelope: twenty-nine pounds and fourpence. On his visits to the Abigails’ bungalow he’d managed to appropriate some of this, and he’d also managed to filch coins of low denomination from his mother’s handbag. Once he’d picked up a purse which he’d noticed an elderly woman dropping in the street and which turned out to contain six pounds and fifty-nine pence. Rose-Ann had left her wage packet on the dresser one Friday evening and when she found it was missing had assumed she’d lost it on the way home from the filling station.

As well as this money, there was a gas-burner in the suitcase – a small smoke-blackened apparatus and a blue cylinder marked ‘Gaz’ – both of which he’d picked up on the beach when the people who owned them were in the sea. There was a glass horse, in blue and green, which Rose-Ann had been given by Len on her twenty-first birthday, and a wooden money-box in the shape of a mug which, strictly speaking, was the property of his mother. Cuss-box, it said in pokerwork, with a rhyme that began: Cussin’ ain’t the nicest thing, friends for you it shore don’t bring … There was a vest and a knife and fork in the suitcase, the property of Mrs Abigail, and a tin box that had once contained lozenges for the relief of throat catarrh and now contained a cameo brooch of Mrs Abigail’s, as well as an imitation pearl necklace of hers and an imitation pearl ring. There was a plastic hand, part of a shop-window model, which he’d found in a rubbish-bin attached to one of the promenade lamp-posts, and the upper section of a set of dentures, which he’d removed from a teacup on the beach while a man was in the sea. There was a narrow, paper-backed volume entitled 1000 Jokes for Kids of All Ages, legitimately obtained from W. H. Smith’s in Fore Street. There was his wig, removed from one of the school dressing-up baskets, and his make-up, from the same source: rouge, powder, cold-cream, lipstick and eye-shadow. The ersatz hair of the wig was orange-coloured and tightly curled: it was the one he had worn when he’d dressed up for Miss Wilkinson’s charade, to lend verisimilitude to his portrayal of Elizabeth I.

When he’d settled this wig on his head and transformed his face with make-up, he walked about the silent flat, unfortunately having to wear his own shoes since his feet were too large for his sister’s. He walked from his bedroom to the kitchen and then into Rose-Ann’s room again, into his mother’s and the bathroom, and into the room where the television set was, which Rose-Ann and his mother called the lounge. He walked with the short, quick step he’d seen Benny Hill employ when dressed up as a woman for his television show.

Sitting down at the kitchen table, which still had breakfast dishes on it, he opened 1000 Jokes for Kids of All Ages. He read through the jokes he’d underlined in ballpoint pen, closing his eyes after an initial prompting to see if he could remember them. He laughed as he repeated them in his falsetto voice, jokes about survivors on desert islands, mothers-in-law, drunks, lunatics, short-sighted men, women in doctors’ surgeries. ‘Well, have a plum,’ he said in his falsetto. ‘If you swallow it whole you’ll put on a stone.’ His mother wouldn’t be back from Cha-Cha Fashions until six. Rose-Ann worked late on the pumps on a Wednesday. Fourteen years ago his father had driven from Dynmouth with a lorryload of tiles and hadn’t ever returned.

He had become used to the empty flat and to looking after himself. Even when he first went to the primary school, when he was five, he would come back and let himself into the flat and wait until Rose-Ann returned from the Comprehensive and his mother from work. Before that he’d spent a lot of time with an aunt, a sister of his mother’s who was a dressmaker, who’d since moved to Badstoneleigh. He hadn’t cared for this woman. One of his earliest memories was not caring for having to sit in a corner of her work-room while she stitched or cut. All day long she had the radio going and when her husband came in from the sandpaper factory for his midday meal he’d say, always the same: ‘Good Lord, is that boy here again?’ It was particularly tedious having to sit in the room for another hour when his mother came to collect him, listening to the two of them talking. At all other times his mother was in a hurry, hurrying from the flat in the mornings, hurrying out again in the evenings for a break in the Artilleryman’s Friend or to Bingo. Once when he’d been waiting for her and his aunt to stop talking he’d broken a plate. He’d sat on it, pretending he didn’t notice it on the sofa, a plate that his aunt’s cat Blackie had had its dinner off. He’d been three and a half at the time, and he could still remember the agreeable sensation of the plate giving way beneath his weight. They’d both been furious with him.

From time to time, when he was younger, his mother used to say that it was all his father’s fault. If his father hadn’t cleared off she wouldn’t have had to go out to work and everything would have been different. At other times she said she was glad he’d cleared off. ‘Shocking, the fights they had,’ Rose-Ann used to say. ‘Horrible he was.’ But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember a single thing about this man. When he was at primary school and Rose-Ann was still at the Comprehensive he’d often asked her because it was something to talk about in the afternoons, but Rose-Ann said curiosity killed the cat and would close herself into her bedroom. His mother and Rose-Ann were pally, sharing all sorts of conversational intimacies, rather like his mother and his aunt. ‘Three’s a crowd,’ Rose-Ann had had a way of saying when she was younger.

He’d become used to three being a crowd and at least he was glad that he no longer had to spend days in his aunt’s work-room. Every Sunday now his mother went over to Badstoneleigh to visit her sister and at one time Rose-Ann had always gone with her, but this arrangement had changed when Rose-Ann’s Len arrived on the scene. Timothy declined to go on these excursions himself, plainly to his mother’s relief.

There had, over the years, developed in Timothy a distrust of his mother, and of his sister also. He didn’t speak much in their company, having become familiar with their lack of response. He’d be the death of her, his mother used to reply when he asked her something, although he’d never been able to understand why he should be. ‘You’re a bloody little dopey-D,’ Rose-Ann had a way of saying when she wasn’t saying three was a crowd or curiosity killed the cat. It was all half joking, all quick and rushy, his mother laughing her shrill staccato laugh, Rose-Ann laughing also, neither of them listening to him. In the end he’d come to imagine that the atmosphere in the flat was laden with the suggestion that there’d be more room if he wasn’t there, more privacy and a sense of relief. Occasionally he felt that this suggestion peered at him out of their eyes, even when they were smiling and laughing, smoking their cigarettes. He listened to them talking to one another about things that had happened at the clothes shop and the Smiling Service Filling Station, and once he’d had a most peculiar dream: that sitting there listening to them he’d turned into his father, which was why, so he said to himself in the dream, they kept sticking forks into the backs of his hands. Whenever he could, he lay in bed in the mornings until they’d left the flat.

At Dynmouth Comprehensive the distrust continued. He had never thought much of the place, nor of its staff and pupils. He couldn’t see the point of having hair halfway down your back, which was the fashion among the boys, and it seemed to him that neither staff nor pupils had a sense of humour. Once during break he had sawn through the leg of a chair on which a heavily-built girl called Grace Rumblebow usually sat. Unfortunately, when the chair gave way, Grace Rumblebow struck the side of her forehead on another chair and had to have seven stitches in it. On another occasion he’d mixed up everyone’s books and pencils, muddling the contents of one desk with another. He’d set a piece of paper alight during a history lesson. He’d attached a needle to the end of his ruler with Sellotape and had prodded Grace Rumblebow with it. He’d put his mother’s alarm clock in Raymond Tyler’s desk and set it to go off during the worst lesson of the week, double physics. He’d wiped away the calculations that Clapp, the mathematics man, had taken twenty minutes to work out on the blackboard and was going to explain in detail after break. No one had thought any of it funny, not even when Grace Rumblebow screeched like a cat the time the needle went into her. No one laughed, even tittered, until Miss Wilkinson ordered that the dressing-up baskets should be carried into 3A, until he put the wig and the clothes on, and discovered he could do the voice. Fantastic, they kept saying then, suddenly aware of him. Everyone in the room stopped dressing up and turned round to look at him. Better than Morecambe and Wise, Dave Griggs said. Beverly Mack said he was a natural. Afterwards, unfortunately, they seemed to forget about it.

But all that was in the past now. At the moment what was more to the point was that he needed, and had no intention of purchasing, a bath and a wedding-dress, and a suit for George Joseph Smith. There was a tin bath, badly damaged by rust, in the yard of Swines’ the builders. He had asked if it was wanted and the foreman had said it wasn’t. It was just a question of persuading someone to transport it for him. He knew where there was a wedding-dress: it was just a question of appropriating it. There was a dog’s-tooth suit, ideal for the purpose, hanging in Commander Abigail’s wardrobe.

Ever since he’d planned to go in for the Spot the Talent competition he’d been affected by a pleasant fantasy. Having been successful in the competition, he found himself going in for Opportunity Knocks on the television. Sometimes, if he let his thoughts drift, it seemed that Hughie Green was staying in the Queen Victoria Hotel, in Dynmouth for the golf, and having nothing better to do had wandered up to the Easter Fête in the rectory garden and had wandered into the Spot the Talent competition. ‘That’s really good!’ he proclaimed with great delight, excited when he saw the act, and the next thing was the act was being done in the Opportunity Knocks studio.

Timothy walked about the flat again, from one room to another, practising in front of the bathroom mirror, telling jokes in his falsetto, smiling at himself. ‘You’re easily tops, lad,’ Hughie Green was enthusing, putting an arm round his shoulder. The applause and the laughter gave off warmth, like a fire. The clapometer was bursting itself, registering 98, a record. ‘You’re bringing the house down,’ Hughie Green said.