Children Of Dynmouth

3

‘Cheers, Mrs Abigail,’ Timothy Gedge said, stepping into the Abigails’ bungalow in High Park Avenue. ‘Rain’s started up again.’

She made a fuss, saying that the rain had soaked through his jacket. She made him take it off and hang it on a chair in front of the electric fire in the sitting-room, two bars glowing above an arrangement of artificial coal. She made him stand in front of the fire himself, to dry his jeans.

Mrs Abigail was a slight woman, with soft grey hair. Her hands and the features of her face were tiny; her eyes suggested tenderness. It was she who had knitted Timothy Gedge a pair of ribbed socks one Christmas, feeling sorry for him because he had turned out awkwardly in adolescence. Feeling sorry for people was common with Mrs Abigail. Her compassion caused her to grieve over newspaper reports and fictional situations in the cinema or on the television screen, or over strangers in the streets, in whom she recognized despondency. When she’d first known Timothy Gedge he’d been a child with particularly winning ways, and it seemed sad to her that these ways were no longer there. He’d called round at the bungalow a week after she and her husband had moved in, nearly three years ago now, and had asked if there were any jobs. ‘Boy scout are you?’ the Commander had enquired. ‘Bob-a-job?’ And Timothy had replied nicely that he wasn’t actually a boy scout, that he was just trying to make a little pocket money. He’d seemed an engagingly eccentric child, solitary in spite of his chattering and smiling, different from other children. He’d spent that first morning helping to lay the dining-room carpet, as cheerful as a robin.

In every way Mrs Abigail had found him a delightful little boy, and in the transformation that had since taken place it sometimes seemed to her that a person had been lost. The solitariness which had lent him character made her wonder, now, why it was that he had no friends; his chatterbox eccentricity struck a different note. But on Wednesday evenings he still came to do jobs, and in fact to share the Abigails’ supper. Under the Commander’s supervision he worked in the small front garden and in the back garden also. He’d assisted the winter before last in the painting of the larder. Mrs Abigail believed it was not impossible that the loss which had occurred might somehow be regained.

‘Commander still out on his swim, is he, Mrs Abigail?’

‘Yes, he’s still out.’ She wanted to say that it was foolish of her husband to stay out in all weathers, that it was foolish to go bathing at this time of year in the first place, but of course she couldn’t, not to a child, not to anyone. She smiled at Timothy Gedge. ‘He won’t be long.’

He laughed. He said: ‘Good weather for ducks, Mrs Abigail.’

Steam rose from his yellow jeans. Soon he would be shaving. Soon he’d have that coarse look that some youths so easily acquired.

‘Care for a fruit gum?’ He held out the Rowntree’s tube, but she declined to accept one of the sweets. He took one himself and put it in his mouth. ‘I see Ring’s setting up in the park,’ he said.

‘Yes, I noticed this morning.’

‘I don’t expect you and the Commander would ever fancy the Amusements, Mrs Abigail. Slot machines, dodgems, type of thing?’

‘Well, no –’

‘Rough kind of stuff, really.’

‘It’s more for young people, I think.’

‘Slot machines is for the birds.’

He laughed again, imagining for a moment Mrs Abigail and the Commander playing on a slot machine, or in a dodgem car, being pitched all over the place by the Dynmouth Hards, who were notorious in the dodgem rink. He mentioned it to her and she gave a little laugh herself. He began to talk about the Easter Fête, saying it was a pity that Ring’s Amusements opened for the first time on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, the very same time as the fête. It would take the crowds, he said. ‘I was saying that to the Reverend Feather and to Dass. They didn’t take a pick of notice.’

She nodded, thinking of something else. When Gordon returned from his swim he would offer the boy sherry. He’d done it before, the last three Wednesdays. She’d said she didn’t think it was a good idea. She’d said that tippling away at glasses of sherry wasn’t going to help the boy through a difficult adolescence, but Gordon had told her to learn sense.

Timothy went on talking about the Easter Fête because he didn’t want her to suggest it was time for him to begin on his jobs. One Wednesday he’d managed to go on talking for so long that the jobs hadn’t got done at all and she’d forgotten they hadn’t when the time for payment came. He said he was really looking forward to the Spot the Talent competition, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He was disappointed when a moment later she said that this week she wanted him to clean the oven of the electric cooker and to scour a saucepan that had the remains of tapioca in it. He far preferred to perform tasks in her bedroom because he could go through various drawers.

‘When the Commander offers it just say no, Timothy.’ She spoke in the kitchen, while he sprayed the oven with a cleansing agent called Force. ‘Just say your mother’d rather you didn’t.’

‘What’s that then, Mrs Abigail?’

‘When the Commander offers you the sherry. You’re under age, Timothy.’

He nodded, with his head partly in the oven. He said he was aware he was under age, but the law, he reminded her, applied only to persons under age being supplied with alcohol in a public house or an off-licence. He didn’t himself see any harm in a glass of sherry.

‘One thing I’d never touch, Mrs Abigail, and that’s a drug.’

‘Oh, no. Never, never take drugs. Promise me, never, Timothy.’

‘I’d never touch a drug, Mrs Abigail, because I wouldn’t know how to get hold of it.’ He laughed.

She looked down at him kneeling on a Daily Telegraph in front of the stove. His jacket was still drying in front of the sitting-room fire. There was a smudge on one of his wrists, where it had brushed against the half-congealed gravy in the oven. Laughing had caused the skin of his hollow cheeks to tighten. The laughter drifted away. His mouth still smiled a little.

‘Do it for me, dear,’ she whispered, bending down herself and smiling back at him. ‘Don’t take the sherry, Timmy.’

He sniffed her scent. It was a lovely smell, like a rose garden might be. At her neck a chiffon scarf in powder blue blended with the deeper blue of her dress.

‘Please, dear,’ she said, and for a moment he thought she was maybe going to kiss him. Then the Commander’s latch-key sounded in the lock of the front door.

‘Remember now,’ she whispered, straightening up and moving away from him. ‘Timothy’s here, Gordon,’ she called out to her husband.

‘Oh, well played,’ the Commander said in the hall.

Commander Abigail, who had served at that naval rank for five months during the Second World War, was a scrawny, small man, bald except for a ginger fluff at the back of his head and around his ears. A narrow ginger moustache grew above a narrow mouth; his eyes had a staring quality. He was sixty-five and hampered in damp weather by trouble in the joints of the left side of his body. When he’d retired from a position in a London shipping firm he’d decided to come and live in Dynmouth because of his devotion to the sea. As well, he’d hoped the air would be bracing and with a tang, cold rather than wet. His wife had pointed out that the area had one of the highest rainfall records in England, but he had argued with her on the point, categorically stating that she had got her facts wrong. When an estate agent sent him a notice of the bungalow in High Park Avenue he’d announced that it was just what they wanted, even though he’d in the meantime discovered that she was right in her claim that the Dynmouth area was one of the wettest in England. You must never admit defeat was one of Commander Abigail’s foremost maxims: you must stick to your guns even though the joints on the left side of your body were giving you gyp. It was sticking to your guns that had made England, once, what England once had been. Nowadays it was like living in a rubbish dump.

‘Cheers, Commander,’ Timothy said when the Commander came into the kitchen with his swimming-trunks and towel, and his sodden brown overcoat on a coat-hanger.

‘Good afternoon, Timothy.’

The Commander unhooked the ropes of a pulley and released a wooden clothes-airer from the ceiling. He placed the coat-hanger on it and hung out the swimming-trunks and towel. He returned it to its mid-way position. The overcoat began to drip.

Mrs Abigail left the kitchen. A pool of water would spread all over the tiles of the floor. Gordon would walk in it and Timothy would walk in it, and when the dripping had ceased, probably in about an hour and a half, she’d have to mop everything up and put down newspapers,

‘And how’s Master Timothy?’

‘All right, Commander. Fine, thanks.’

‘Well played, boy.’

Timothy rinsed the sponge-cloth he was using, squeezing it out in his bowl of dirty water. He wiped the inside of the oven, noticed that it was still fairly dirty, and closed the door. He rose and carried the bowl and the sponge-cloth to the sink. He was thinking about the acquisition of the wedding-dress and the bath and the Commander’s dog’s-tooth suit. No problem at all, he kept saying to himself, and then he tried not to laugh out loud, seeing himself rising up out of the bath as Miss Munday when she should be dead as old meat.

‘Sherry when you’re ready,’ the Commander said, placing glasses and a decanter on a small blue tray. ‘In the sitting-room, old chap.’

Timothy scratched with his fingernails at the burnt tapioca in the saucepan that had been left for him. ‘Only fifteen years of age!’ cried the voice of Hughie Green excitedly.

He reached for a scouring cloth on a line that stretched above the sink. He rubbed at the tapioca with it, but nothing happened. He scratched at it again with his fingernails and rubbed at it with a Brillo pad. He then filled the saucepan with water and placed it, out of the way, on the draining-board. He’d explain to Mrs Abigail that in his opinion it needed to soak for a day or two.

‘Big hand!’ cried Hughie Green. ‘Big hand for Timothy Gedge, friends!’

To Stephen none of it was strange. For as long as he could remember he’d been coming to this house to play with Kate. The brown, bald head of Mr Blakey was familiar, and his slowness of movement and economy with speech. So were the dogs and the garden, and the house itself, and Mrs Blakey smiling at him.

He watched while Mr Blakey undid the ropes that secured their two trunks in the open boot of the car. It wasn’t raining any more, but the clouds were dark and low, suggesting that the cessation was only a lull. The air felt damp, a pleasant feeling that made you want to shiver slightly and be indoors, beside a fire. It was something his mother used to say about cold days in spring and summer, that it was a different kind of coldness from winter’s, pleasant because it wasn’t severe.

A fire was blazing in the hall. It was the only house he knew that had a fire-place in the hall. Kate said the hall was her favourite part of the house, the white marble of the mantelpiece, the brass fender high enough to form a seat of upholstered red leather, Egyptian rugs in shades of brown and blue spread over stone flags. On the crimson hessian of the walls a series of watercolours was set in brass frames: eighteenth-century representations of characters from plays. Neither of them knew what plays they came from, but the pictures were quite nice. So was the wide mahogany staircase that rose gently from the hall at the far end, curving out of sight at a window that reached almost to the wainscoting. He wondered if, in time, the hall would become his favourite part of the house too.

Mrs Blakey paused before passing through the door to the green-linoleumed passage, calling to them that supper would be ready in fifteen minutes. Stephen watched the door closing behind her and for a moment it seemed wrong that he should be here, standing in this house when his mother was dead. But the moment passed.

In the rectory the twins sat at the kitchen table with their parents, all of them eating poached eggs.

‘Horrible,’ Susannah said.

‘I said horrible,’ Deborah said. ‘I said horrible when Mummy.’

‘I said horrible when Mummy.’

‘I looked round and saw Mummy. Soon’s Mummy’s in the room I said horrible. You weren’t even looking, Deborah.’

‘When Mummy bringed the eggs I said horrible, Susannah.’

‘Mummy, Deborah’ll get dragons after her.’

‘Dragons and dragons and dragons and dragons and –’

‘You eat up your egg, Susannah.’

‘Too tired, Mummy.’

‘Now, now,’ Quentin said, finishing his own egg.

‘Too tired, Daddy. Mouth too tired, Daddy. Terribly, terribly tired. Terribly, terribly, terribly.’ Susannah closed her eyes, clenching the eyelids tightly. Deborah closed hers also. They began to giggle.

Lavinia felt weary. She snapped at her daughters, telling them not to be tiresome.

‘Supper,’ Mrs Abigail announced in Number Eleven High Park Avenue, entering the sitting-room and discovering that Timothy had taken no notice whatsoever of her request about the sherry. He’d put his zipped jacket on again and was sitting on the sofa on one side of the electric fire. Gordon was in his usual armchair, on the other. The curtains were drawn, the fire threw out a powerful heat. Only a table-lamp burned, its weak bulb not up to the task of fully illuminating the room. The effect of this half-gloom was cosy.

‘Oh, time for another.’ Commander Abigail gave a brief little laugh, expertly aiming the sherry decanter at Timothy’s glass and speaking to his wife as he did so. ‘Sherry, dear girl? Take a pew, why don’t you?’

She stood by the door, one foot in the hall, the other on the patterned sitting-room carpet. ‘Don’t mind if I do, sir,’ she heard Timothy saying after Gordon had refilled his glass, as though he had totally forgotten what she’d said to him. He even smiled at her through the gloom. ‘Yes, take a pew, Mrs Abigail,’ he even said, the words sounding foolish on his lips. The very sight of him was foolish, a child with a glass of Cyprus sherry in his hand, awkwardly holding it by the stem.

‘It’s just that it’ll all be overcooked,’ she said quietly, and her husband replied – as she knew he would – that they wouldn’t be more than another five minutes. She also knew that he’d enjoyed inviting her to take a pew in that casual way when everything was ready to eat. He gave the child sherry in order to irritate her. It was a pity he was like that, but it couldn’t be helped.

She closed the door and returned to the kitchen. She turned on the wireless and washed up some dishes. Voices were chatting their way through a word game. An audience laughed noisily at what was being said, but Mrs Abigail didn’t find any of it funny. Quite a few times in their marriage it had been suggested that she didn’t possess a sense of humour.

Mrs Abigail had married her husband because of his need of her and because, in her sympathy and compassion, she had felt affection for him. There was an emptiness in her marriage but she did not ever dwell on it. For thirty-six years he had been at the centre of her life. She had accepted him for better or for worse: in no way did she permit herself to believe that she was an unhappy woman.

She ladled pieces of chicken and vegetables on to three plates and placed them in the oven. On the wireless the word game came to an end and a play began. By the time she’d strained the peas and scooped the mashed potatoes from the saucepan into a dish she heard her husband’s voice in the hall, talking about pride.

‘A certain pride,’ he repeated as he sat down at the dining-room table. He smoothed the ginger of his small moustache with the forefinger and thumb of his right hand. ‘You were proud to be an Englishman, Timothy, once upon a time.’

‘Cherryade?’ she offered, poising the bottle over Timothy’s glass.

‘How about a glass of ale?’ the Commander suggested. ‘Watney’s Pale all right for you, old chap?’

She thought at first she had misheard him, but knew of course that she hadn’t. Never before had he brought beer into the house. He claimed not to like beer. At Christmas he purchased a bottle of Hungarian wine in Tesco’s. Bull’s blood he called it.

‘Nothing like a drop of ale.’ He opened the sideboard, took from it two large bottles marked Watney’s Red, Pale Ale and removed the caps. ‘Fancy a little yourself, dear?’

She shook her head. She could tell from the size of the bottles that they each contained a pint. With that amount of beer on top of two glasses of sherry the child could hardly be expected to remain sober. She voiced this fear, knowing it was unwise to do so.

‘Oh, no, no, dear girl.’ He laughed in a way he had. Filling his glass, Timothy laughed also.

‘A sense of peace,’ the Commander said, sitting down again. ‘In towns like Dynmouth you felt a sense of peace in those distant days. On Sundays people went to church.’

Timothy listened, aware that familiar developments were taking place around the table. Extraordinary couple they were. Extraordinary of the Reverend Feather to say they weren’t a funny type of people. Bonkers, the pair of them.

‘You’d find a shilling in your pocket, Timothy. Enough to take you to the pictures. Fire Over England!, Goodbye, Mr Chips. First-class fare. You’d pay for a seat and you’d have enough left over for a bag of fish and chips. God’s own food, the way they cooked it before the War.’

‘So I heard, sir.’ He spoke politely because he wished to please. The man liked to be addressed like that, and she liked you to smile at her. She was grumpy at present, but she’d soon cheer up.

‘Delicious potatoes, Mrs Abigail,’ he said, smiling widely at her. ‘Really nice they are.’

She began to say something, but the Commander interrupted her.

‘You’d go out hiking at the weekend. You’d take an early-morning train from London, you’d be in the middle of Bucks in half an hour. Packet of Woodbines in your back pocket, wet your whistle in a nice old pub. You couldn’t meet a soul, except some ancient labourer maybe, who’d raise his cap to you. Damned interesting, some of those old chaps were.’

‘So I heard, sir.’ He was feeling really good. Faintly, he was aware of applause, as though it were actually in the room. He closed his eyes, savouring the sensation of hearing something which he knew wasn’t really there. He concentrated on the sound. It flowed, softly and warmly, like a tepid sea. In the darkness behind his eyelids lights pleasantly flashed. He felt a hint of pressure on his left shoulder, as though someone had placed a hand there, in all probability Hughie Green. He was surprised when he heard the voice of Mrs Abigail, talking about steamed pudding. He opened his eyes. More time than he imagined appeared to have passed.

‘Fig, Timmy?’ she was saying. ‘Steamed fig pudding? You liked it last time.’

She held a knife above a brown lump of stuff on a plate, asking him how much he’d like.

‘D’you know what a york is?’ the Commander was enquiring.

‘Timmy?’

‘Delicious, Mrs Abigail. Really good, fig pudding is. A town is it, sir?’

‘It’s a strap that used to be worn by a farm labourer, around his trouser-leg.’

‘Custard, dear?’

‘Great, Mrs Abigail.’

She poured custard on to his pudding for him, fearing he would spill it if she handed him the jug. He wasn’t sober. Even before he’d taken more than a few sips of the beer she’d noticed that his movements weren’t co-ordinating properly. Sweat had begun to form on his forehead.

‘Time was,’ the Commander said, ‘when you could go into a grocer’s shop and there’d be a round-bottomed chair up by the counter for a customer to sit on. What d’you get now? Some child in a filthy white coat picking the dirt out of her nose while she’s working a till in a supermarket. No, I’ll not have any of that, dear girl.’

‘All right, Timmy?’ she whispered.

‘Cheers, Mrs Abigail.’

‘Some of those girls press half a million buttons a day,’ the Commander said.

Timothy drank more beer, washing down a mouthful of fig pudding and custard with it. He remembered a time when he was eight or so, walking along the wall of the promenade and Miss Lavant coming up to him and saying he shouldn’t because it was dangerous. She was a beautiful woman, always fashionably turned out: you wouldn’t mind being married to Miss Lavant. When he’d climbed down from the wall in order to please her she’d given him a sweet, holding out a paper-bag so that he could choose, Mackintosh’s Quality Street. The one he’d taken had green silver paper on it, a chocolate-covered toffee. All you had to do was to smile at women like that and it pleased them, like it pleased this woman now. He tried not to laugh, thinking of Miss Lavant in her expensive clothes, going up and down the promenade, giving people sweets. But he was unable to keep the laughter back and had to say he was sorry.

After that he lost track of time again. He noticed that she was on her feet, clearing their pudding plates away, putting them on the tray she always used, a brown tray made of imitation wood. She put the remains of the steamed pudding on it, and the custard. She was still looking grumpy, not smiling, not even trying to smile. Miss Lavant did that sometimes because for all her beauty she had bad teeth. He wondered if Miss Lavant was her sister. They were both small women, neither of them possessed children.

Timothy sat back in his chair and finished his beer. She’d be back in a few minutes with flowered cups and saucers and a flowered tea-pot, and cake. She’d sit down, trying not to listen to the Commander going on with his rubbish. She’d offer him a piece of McVitie’s fruitcake, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t ask her if Miss Lavant was her sister. It would please her, a question like that. It would please her if he told her a couple of funnies from 1000 Jokes for Kids of All Ages. He laughed and saw the Commander looking across the table at him, laughing himself, a tinny sound as though the man had something wrong with him. ‘Cheers, Commander,’ he said, waving his glass at him. ‘Any more Watney’s Pale, sir?’

‘My dear fellow, of course there is. Well played, old chap.’ The Commander rose at speed and crossed to the sideboard, from which he withdrew two further pint bottles. He was feeling sunny, Timothy guessed, because it would annoy her when she came in and found more beer on the table. ‘Forgive my inhospitality,’ the Commander said.

‘Ever read books, Commander? Embarrassing Moments by Lucy Lastick?’ He laughed vigorously, wagging his head at the Commander. He could have sat there for ever, he said to himself, telling funnies where they were appreciated. ‘Lucy Lastick,’ he said again. ‘D’you get, sir? Embarrassing Moments by Lucy Lastick? Bloke in a cafe, Commander: “Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?” “Looks like the breast-stroke, sir.” D’you get it, Commander? This bloke in a cafe –’

‘Yes, yes, Timothy. Very amusing.’

‘This woman goes into the kitchen and says to her kid she should have changed the gold-fish water. “They haven’t drunk the last lot yet!” the kid says. D’you get it, Commander? The kid thinks –’

‘I understand, Timothy.’

‘D’you know Plant down in the Artilleryman’s Friend, Commander?’

‘I don’t know Mr Plant. Well, I mean I know him to see. I’ve seen him out with his dog –’

‘I was in the car-park of the Artilleryman’s one night and Plant comes out of the Ladies. Two minutes later this woman comes out. I saw him up to it a few times. D’you get it, Commander?’

‘Well, yes –’

‘Another time I got up at two a.m. to go to the toilet and there’s Plant in our lounge in his shirt. Paying a visit to my mum, taken short in the middle of it.’ Again he was unable to prevent himself from laughing, thinking of Plant’s wife blowing her top if she ever heard about any of it. A big Welshwoman she was, with a temper like a cat’s. Disgusting Plant had looked, with his legs and his equipment showing.

She came into the sitting-room and placed a tray of tea things and the McVitie’s fruitcake on the table. He smiled, wagging his head at her.

‘It’s green and hairy and goes up and down, Mrs Abigail?’

She didn’t understand the question. She frowned and shook her head. She was beginning to add that she wondered if Timothy could manage a slice of cake when she noticed the newly opened bottles of beer.

‘Gordon ! Are you out of your mind?’

She couldn’t help herself. She knew it was wrong, she knew it was ridiculous to speak like that when he had opened the two fresh bottles purely in order to upset her. He smiled narrowly beneath his narrow moustache.

‘Mind?’ he said.

‘He’s had a pint of beer already. And sherry. Gordon, he’s fifteen. No child’s used to it.’

‘The boy asked for a little more ale, Edith.’

Timothy was red-faced, his lips wetly glistening, the upper one speckled with foam. His eyes were stupid-looking.

‘A gooseberry in a lift,’ he said.

‘I told you not to take the sherry,’ she cried, suddenly shrill.

He laughed, wagging his head. ‘D’you get it, though? Up and down in a lift. A gooseberry in a lift.’

She asked him to try and be sensible. He looked absurd, sitting there with his head wagging.

‘Bloke in a cafe: “Do you serve crabs?” “Sit down, mister, we serve anyone.” This bloke goes into this cafe, see, and says do they serve crabs –’

‘Yes, yes, of course, Timothy.’

‘Ever read books, Mrs Abigail?’

She didn’t reply. He couldn’t see if she was smiling or not. He couldn’t see her teeth but she could easily be smiling and not showing her teeth. Her sister hadn’t shown her teeth for an instant, the time she’d given him the choice of her Quality Street. Funny thing, really, a woman handing out sweets on a promenade just because she met someone else. ‘I met the boy,’ Plant had whispered that night when he’d returned to the bedroom, and then a giggling had started even before Plant closed the bedroom door. Plant was the type who was always coming out of toilets, the Ladies in the car-park, anywhere you liked. Another time Rose-Ann and Len had been on the job, on the hearth-rug in the lounge, when he’d walked in after the pictures. They hadn’t turned a hair.

The room moved slightly. On the other side of the table the Commander slipped about, to the left and then to the right, overlapping himself so that he had more than one pair of eyes and more than one moustache. ‘You’ve gone and got him drunk,’ her voice said, sounding distant, as though she were on the other end of a telephone.

Feeling that a further drink of beer would settle his vision, Timothy finished what was in his glass. He liked beer very much. Alone in the Youth Centre one afternoon, the first time he’d ever tasted beer, he’d found two bottles which someone had hidden at the back of a cupboard. No beer was permitted on the premises, only Coca-Cola or Pepsi, but often for a special occasion some was smuggled in. He’d taken the two bottles to the Youth Centre lavatory and had drunk the beer they contained, not expecting to like it but drinking it because it didn’t belong to him. He’d left the bottles sitting in the lavatory-pan in the hope that someone would use it before noticing they were there. He’d walked out into a sunny afternoon feeling tip-top. Ever since, he’d drunk what beer he could manage to get hold of.

He poured more now. He was aware that she was asking him not to. The liquid reached the top of his glass and overflowed on to the tablecloth because when he’d been smiling at her he’d forgotten to stop pouring it.

‘Whoa up there, old chap,’ the Commander protested with his tinny laugh.

‘Is Miss Lavant your sister, Mrs Abigail?’

He felt her fingers on his, taking the bottle from his hand. He said it didn’t matter, she could have it if she wanted it, he wouldn’t deprive her of a drink. Her sister was always fashionably dressed on account of the thing with Dr Greenslade. Her sister had no children either, he reminded her, and fashionable though she was she didn’t like to show her teeth.

The Commander was amused again. He was pointing at his wife with his thumb, only the thumb kept slipping about, like a bunch of thumbs. He was shaking his head and laughing.

‘I haven’t a sister,’ she said quietly.

‘My dad scarpered, Mrs Abigail.’

‘Yes I know, Timothy.’

‘He couldn’t stand it, a squawking baby around the place. If they’d taken precautions I wouldn’t be sitting here.’

He saw her nodding. He smiled across the table at her.

‘This woman goes into the kitchen, Mrs Abigail, and the kid’s there with the gold-fish bowl –’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Timothy!’

She was trying to take the glass away from him, but he didn’t want her to. He held on to it, smiling, with one eye closed in order to see properly. He heard her saying he’d better have some hot tea, but as soon as she released her hold on the glass he lifted it to his mouth and drank some more beer. The Commander was saying something about a young man growing up. She was trying to seize the glass again.

He began to laugh because it was really funny, the way she would keep pulling at the glass and the way the Commander’s face was sliding all over the place, and the way he himself was dying to go to the bog. His fingers slipped from the glass and some more of the beer got spilt, which caused him to laugh even more.

‘I need to go toilet,’ he pointed out, endeavouring to get to his feet and finding it difficult. ‘Toilet,’ he repeated, suddenly recalling the two beer bottles sitting in the lavatory-pan in the Youth Centre.

‘Come on then, old chap.’ The Commander was standing beside him, not sitting across the table any more. ‘Steady up, old chap,’ the Commander said.

Odd as square eggs they were. Standing up or sitting down, it didn’t matter a penny: really funny they were, funnier than the Dasses by two million miles. Ridiculous it was, the woman saying she hadn’t a sister. ‘Charrada,’ he said, up on his feet, with the Commander’s arm supporting him. ‘You’re out with a blonde, Mrs –’

‘Manage now, old chap?’ the Commander interrupted. ‘All right on your own, eh?’

The room was moving again, going down at one end and then coming slowly back again. She was on about giving alcohol to a child. The Commander was saying to have sense.

‘We did charades at the Comprehensive,’ he told them because as far as he could remember he hadn’t told them before. ‘Only the Wilkinson woman let the whole thing out of control. They had me done out as Elizabeth the First, jewellery, the lot. I must go to the bog, Commander.’

He felt better now that he’d got the hang of being on his feet. He crossed the room, opened the door without assistance and closed it behind him. He moved towards the lavatory, resolving that when he’d finished there he’d slip into the sitting-room and have another glass of sherry since she wasn’t keen on his taking any more Watney’s Pale. He whistled in the lavatory, saying to himself that he was as drunk as a cork. He felt really fantastic.

In the dining-room, meanwhile, there was silence. Mrs Abigail poured two cups of tea and handed one across the table to her husband.

‘Dear girl, it’s not my fault if the boy had a drop too much.’

‘Then who’s fault is it, Gordon?’ She knew it was as wrong to say that as it had been to ask him if he was out of his mind. Yet she still couldn’t help herself. No one could just sit there.

‘The boy asked for it, you know. I told you he asked for it.’

‘He asked for it because you’ve given him a taste for it. It’s silly, Gordon. Drinking sherry with a schoolboy, bringing in beer. You never bought beer in your life before, Gordon.’

‘No harm in a glass of ale, dear girl. Prince Charles takes a glass, the Duke of Edinburgh –’

‘Oh, nonsense, Gordon.’ She spoke in a way that was most unlike her, not caring what she said now because it had all become so silly. ‘And another thing. All that talk about going into a grocer’s shop. What on earth interest d’you think it is to a boy of fifteen?’

He delighted in her agitation. There was pleasure in a fleeting little smile that came and was quickly banished. He said snappishly:

‘It’s of historical interest, for a start. Are you saying it’s wrong for a lad to know the facts about his country?’

Mrs Abigail did not reply. Two small red spots had developed in her face, high up on either cheek.

‘I’ve asked you a question, Edith.’ His head was poked out across the table at her, his shoulders aggressively hunched. ‘I’ve asked you a question,’ he repeated.

She indicated that she was aware she’d been asked a question. Speaking quietly, she said that in her opinion the fact that there were once chairs in grocers’ shops was hardly of historical interest. In Mock’s in Pretty Street, she pointed out, a chair was still put out for customers but nobody ever sat on it.

‘That’s not true.’ His voice was controlled, matching her calmness. ‘I sit on that chair myself.’

‘Then what are you on about, Gordon? One minute you’re talking about chairs in grocers’ shops as though they were a thing of the past, the next you’re saying you sit on one yourself when you go into Mock’s. Besides,’ she added quietly, ‘it’s all irrelevant.’

‘It’s hardly irrelevant that the country for which men were prepared to give their lives has become a rubbish dump.’

‘It’s irrelevant at this moment, Gordon.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake have sense, woman!’

He was losing his temper, which he loved doing. His eyes flashed, his lips quivered, causing the ginger moustache to quiver also.

‘That boy’s all part of it,’ he snapped. ‘D’you think he’d be the same, for God’s sake, if he was at Charterhouse or Rugby? Have a titter of sense, Edith.’

She sighed, vaguely moving her head about, shaking it at first and then nodding it. It was no time for arguing. There was the problem of an inebriated boy, and she was being as silly as anyone, making matters worse by pursuing a pointless disagreement.

She watched him drinking his tea with victory in the gesture of lifting the cup. The flare of temper had died away; he had inflicted the defeat he had wished to inflict without having to throw a milk-jug at the wall, as he’d had to do once, early on in their marriage. He would be complimenting himself on his restraint: she could even see a reflection of that in his gesture of victory with the teacup. It had often occurred to her that marriage was all defeat and victory, and worked better when women were the defeated ones since men apparently could not bear to be and had no philosophy for that condition.

‘What shall we do with Timothy, Gordon?’

He drew back his lips, displaying a small array of teeth that were appropriately tinged with gingery brown.

‘Leave Master Timothy to me,’ he said, his tone of voice confirming what she already knew: that he had created the situation in order to display his prowess by sorting it out, just as he had goaded her into an argument in order to experience the thrill of winning it. She was reflecting upon all that, and at the same time worrying about the condition of the child who was being such a long time in the lavatory, when the door opened and Timothy entered. To her astonishment, he was wearing one of Gordon’s suits.

‘My God !’ the Commander murmured.

He smiled at them, holding on to the back of a chair, swaying a bit. He said he wanted to show them the thing about the charades. He had invented a comic act, he said, which he was going to do at the Easter Fête. He had to dress up as three different brides. He had to dress up as George Joseph Smith as well: he was trying the suit on for size. He’d chosen the dog’s-tooth one because he reckoned it was the kind the man would possess.

‘Stringer took us into Tussaud’s, down to the Horror Chamber. Did you ever see Miss Lofty, sir?’

‘You’ve had too much to drink, Timmy,’ she whispered.

He nodded at her, saying that once upon a time he’d searched high and low for her wedding-dress. When he couldn’t find it he’d remembered where there was another one. A wedding-dress wasn’t an easy garment to come by.

‘Get into your clothes immediately, boy. Cut along now.’ The Commander’s voice was sharp, like a splinter of something.

Timothy laughed because the voice sounded funny. Bloody ridiculous it was, going into the sea every day in bathing togs.

‘Could you make a pair of curtains, Mrs Abigail?’

She shook her head, not knowing what he was talking about.

‘I was saying it to Mr Feather and he said to ask you.’

‘We’ll talk about it another time, Timothy.’

‘Have you got a sewing-machine? Only you couldn’t make curtains without a machine.’

‘No, of course not –’

‘D’you think your sister has a sewing-machine?’ She nodded, trying to smile at him.

‘No problem then.’

‘I’ve made a request of you,’ the Commander said in the same splintery voice. ‘Take off my suit immediately.’

‘It would please us if you put on your own clothes again, dear.’

Children did dress up, she thought, trying to think calmly. It was a children’s thing, they enjoyed it. And yet it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t a child dressing up just for the fun of it. It was a child made drunk, his mouth pulled down at the corners, his eyes glassily staring, sweat all over his neck and face. In the dog’s-tooth suit he was grotesque. What was happening was like something you’d read about in a cheap Sunday newspaper.

He mentioned Opportunity Knocks, and Hughie Green, who might be staying in the Queen Victoria Hotel, in Dynmouth for the golf. Nobody had ever done a show like that on Opportunity Knocks. There were acts with pigeons on Opportunity Knocks, and family acts, and trick cyclists and singers and kids of three who could dance, and dogs smoking pipes, but he’d never yet seen a show that was comic and also about death. You’d have each of the brides acting like she was struggling against George Joseph Smith and all the time George Joseph Smith would be winning, only you wouldn’t actually see him, you’d have to imagine him. And when she went under the water the lights would go black and George Joseph Smith would appear a few seconds later in the dog’s-tooth suit. He’d tell jokes, standing beside the bath with the bride in it. You’d know she was in it because a bit of her wedding-dress would be draped over the side, only of course she wouldn’t be there at all because it was a one-man act. ‘Ah well, best be getting back to work,’ George Joseph Smith would say when he had them bringing the house down. The lights would go black and the next thing you’d see would be another bride struggling against the murdering hands of the man. After he’d drowned each bride George Joseph Smith had gone out to buy the dead woman her supper, fish for Miss Munday, eggs for Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty. It was a peculiarity with him, like his passion for death by the sea. George Joseph Smith had once stayed in Dynmouth, in the Castlerea boarding-house.

While she listened to all this, Mrs Abigail repeatedly believed she was dreaming. It was just like a dream, a nightmare that held you and held you, not letting you wake up. A child had perpetrated a comic act about three real and brutal murders. In a marquee on the lawn of a rectory he expected people to laugh. He appeared to believe that some television personality might by chance be there to see him.

‘D’you ever see Benny Hill, Mrs Abigail? Really funny, Benny Hill. And Bruce Forsyth. D’you like Bruce Forsyth when he gets going?’

‘Please.’ She still spoke softly, with a reasonableness that suggested the plea was being made for the first time.

‘Benny Hill was an ordinary milkman with pint bottles on a dray, cream and yoghurt and carrots, anything you wanted at the door. Opportunity knocked for Benny Hill. It could happen to you, Mrs Abigail. It could happen to anyone.’

‘Quickly now,’ the Commander limply ordered. ‘Get a move on, Gedge.’

But Timothy didn’t get a move on. He wagged his head, not attempting to rise from the chair he was sitting on. He mentioned the teacher called Brehon O’Hennessy and the drear landscape and how there were people like last year’s rhubarb walking about the streets. You had to smile, he said, but you could see the man’s point of view. Mad as a hatter he’d been, a real nutter, yet you couldn’t help getting the picture. He laughed. He spent a lot of time himself, he said, following people around, looking in windows.

‘Is Miss Lavant her sister, sir? Only Lavant’s fancied Dr Greenslade for twenty years and he won’t lift a finger in case he’d be struck off. Isn’t it awful, Miss Lavant wasting herself on a married man? Isn’t it a terrible story, Mrs Abigail? Your sister in a predicament like that?’

She nodded, not knowing what else to do.

‘There’s worse than that in this town. The time she gave me the sweet I thought maybe she was going to kidnap me. I thought she was after a ransom, two or three thousand –’

‘My wife has no sister. Will you kindly cease, boy.’

‘Miss Lavant’s the one I mean, sir. She gave me a sweet –’

‘Miss Lavant is not her sister.’

Mrs Abigail dragged her eyes away from the child, startled by the note of panic in her husband’s voice. He wasn’t enjoying being angry any more. His face was blotchy, his lips quivered as he shouted, his eyes were quivering also. Something was happening in the room, something that had more to do with Gordon than with the child dressed up in his clothes. She could feel it gathering all around her, cloying and thick and heavy. Gordon was hunched, appearing to be terrified, his eyes staring. Timothy Gedge was smiling pathetically. She wanted to weep over both of them, to ask Gordon what on earth the matter was, to ask Timothy the same question in another kind of way.

Still smiling, he spoke again. He’d witnessed all sorts, he said: the dead buried, kids from the primary school lifting rubbers out of W. H. Smith’s, Plant on the job with his mother, his legs as white as mutton-fat. He’d witnessed Rose-Ann and Len up to tricks on the hearth-rug, and others up to tricks in the wood behind the Youth Centre, kids of all ages, nine to thirteen, take your pick. He’d seen the Robson woman from the Post Office buying fish and chips in Phyl’s Phries with Slocombe from the Fine Fare off-licence, and Pym, the solicitor, being sick into the sea after a Rotary dinner in the Queen Victoria Hotel. He’d seen the Dynmouth Hards beating up the Pakistani from the steam laundry in a bus-shelter, and spraying Blacks Out on the back wall of the Essoldo. He’d seen them terrorizing Nurse Hackett, the midwife, swerving their motor-cycles in front of her blue Mini when she was trying to go about her duties at night-time. There was wife-swapping every Saturday night at parties on the new estate, Leaflands it was called, out on the London road. He’d looked in a window once and seen a man in Lace Street taking out his glass eye. He’d seen Slocombe and the Robson woman up on the golf-course. In Dynmouth and its neighbourhood he’d witnessed terrible things, he said.

He appeared to be rambling again, but it was hard to be certain. He had seemed to be rambling when he’d first mentioned a wedding-dress and when he’d referred to Miss Lavant as her sister and to a gooseberry in a lift.

‘You’ve no right to spy on people,’ the Commander began to say. ‘You’ve no right to go poking –’

‘I’ve witnessed you down on the beach, sir. Running about in your bathing togs. I’ve witnessed you up to your tricks, Commander, when she’s out on her Meals on Wheels.’

He smiled at her, but she didn’t want to look at him. ‘I wouldn’t ever tell a soul,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t, Commander.’

She waited, her eyes fixed on the flowered tea-pot, frowning at it. Whatever he was referring to, she didn’t want to hear about it. She wanted him to stop speaking. She felt herself infected by her husband’s panic, not knowing why she felt like that. They would keep the secret, the boy said. The secret would be safe.

‘There’s no secret to keep,’ the Commander cried. ‘There’s nothing, nothing at all.’

She wished he hadn’t said that. If he hadn’t said it, they might have glossed over all the boy had said already. They might have pretended they were trying to help the boy, humouring him by agreeing there was some secret that affected them. They had been married thirty-six years, she said to herself, puzzled that that fact should have occurred to her now.

‘He’s talking nonsense.’ The Commander’s voice had dropped, his words were almost unintelligible.

She was a happy woman: she told herself that. She’d been perfectly happy making the supper, the chicken and the fig pudding. It didn’t matter if Gordon wanted to win arguments. It didn’t matter if his clothes dripped all over the kitchen. She’d devoted her life to Gordon. She didn’t want to hear. Whatever there was, she didn’t want to know.

‘Please don’t,’ she said, looking up from the tea-pot, looking across the table at Timothy Gedge. ‘Please don’t say anything more.’

Timothy smiled at her. It was a secret between himself and the Commander, he said. He rose unsteadily from his chair and moved around the table to where Gordon was sitting. Her instinct was to put her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it because it seemed so silly. One Sunday afternoon, watching suburban cricket in Sutton, he had asked her to be his wife, telling her he loved her.

Timothy whispered, but the whisper was clumsy because of the sherry and the beer: she heard distinctly, as though he were shouting. They would keep the secret, he said, he would never tell a soul that her husband went after Dynmouth’s cub scouts, intent on committing indecencies.

A storm blew through the town that night. The narrow streets were washed with rain, the canvas of Ring’s Amusements flapped in Sir Walter Raleigh Park, breakers crashed against the wall of the promenade. The town was deserted. The pink Essoldo was dead as a doornail, Phyl’s Phries had shut up shop at half past ten, the night-porter of the Queen Victoria Hotel slept undisturbed in his cubby-hole. The police-car that sometimes slipped through Dynmouth’s night streets was parked with its lights off in the yard of the police station. The Dynmouth Hards weren’t abroad, nor was Nurse Hackett in her blue Mini. Only the shop windows showed signs of life. Television sets recorded the soundless mouthing of a late-night news-reader. In harsh white light figures without eyes displayed twin-sets and dresses or sat on G-plan furniture. A cardboard couple smiled joyfully, drawing attention to a building society’s rates.

The rain rattled on the slated roof of the Artilleryman’s Friend, beneath which its proprietor lay, drowsily fulfilled. Half an hour ago Mr Plant had engaged in sexual congress with his stoutly built Welsh wife, and in the ladies’ lavatory of the public house car-park he had earlier indulged himself with the trimmer form of Timothy Gedge’s mother. As always, he had enjoyed the contrast, both in anticipation during his conjunction with Mrs Gedge and in retrospect while involved with his wife. For their parts, the women had appeared to be satisfied.

In the ivy-clad rectory Lavinia Featherston lay awake, sorry she’d been so cross all day. It was wrong to be upset by circumstances, by a fact of your life that could not be altered. She’d been cross again after she’d put the twins to bed. She’d protested quite sharply to her husband about the people who came so endlessly to the rectory, the town’s unfortunates, the dirty, the ugly, the boring, the mad. She was tired of listening to Mrs Slewy complaining about the social security man. Mrs Slewy with a cigarette perpetually on the go, leaning against the back door, asking for the loan of a pound. She was tired of Old Ape arriving on the wrong day for his meal. She must have made a thousand cups of Nescafé for Mrs Stead-Carter, being bossed all over the place while she did so. It was a relief that crazy old Miss Trimm had a cold, a respite at least from her belief that she’d mothered a second Jesus Christ. Miss Poraway made you want to scream. Quentin had listened to her quietly, saying it was all understandable, and in greater irritation she’d replied that it was typical of him to say that, and then she’d cried. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured at his sleeping form, knowing that tomorrow she’d probably be edgy too.

She lay there, thinking of her nursery school. Little Mikey Hatch getting his arms wet. Jennifer Droppy looking sad. Joseph Wright pushing. Mandy Goff singing her song. Johnny Pyke laughing, Thomas Braine interrupting, Andrew Cartboy being good, Susannah and Deborah throwing dough. She forced herself to think of them, and then to think about prices and to work out figures in her mind because one of these days a new Wendy house was going to be necessary. Her mind attempted to reject these calculations and to return to its brooding, but she refused to permit that. Mandy Goff’s father might offer to make a new Wendy house if she paid for the materials and offered to pay for his time. With hardly any prompting he’d made the rack for hanging coats on, and the slide. She dropped into drowsiness, thinking of the grey wooden slide and the children sliding down it.

In the room next door the twins looked happy in their sleep, their limbs similarly arranged. Two miles away, in the Down Manor Orphanage, the orphans without exception dreamed, frightening themselves and delighting themselves. So did the children of Lavinia’s nursery school, scattered all over Dynmouth, and the children of the Ring-o-Roses nursery school and the W R V S Playgroup, and the children of Dynmouth Primary and of Dynmouth Comprehensive and of the Loretto Convent, and the travelling children of Ring’s Amusements, and Sharon Lines who owed her life to a machine.

In the house called Sweetlea Mrs Dass lay sleepless in the dark, remembering the son who’d been the apple of her eye, a child she’d painfully borne, who had painfully rejected her. In her bedsitting-room in Pretty Street the beautiful Miss Lavant, who wished in all the hours of her wakefulness that she might have borne the child of the man she hopelessly loved, pored over the day’s blank space in her diary. Wet, she wrote and could think of nothing else to record: the day had passed without a sight of Dr Greenslade.

In Sea House Kate dreamed of the bedroom she slept in, its orange-painted dressing-table and orange-painted chairs, its blinds and wallpaper of a matching pattern, orange poppies in long grass. She dreamed that the stout waiter from the dining-car was standing in this room, offering her a toasted tea-cake, and that Miss Shaw and Miss Rist were bullying little Miss Malabedeely. A wedding took place in the room: an African bishop swore to honour Miss Malabedeely with his black body. He had the marks of a tiger’s claw on his cheeks. He said the toasted tea-cake was delicious.

Stephen slept also. He’d lain awake for a while, remembering his bedroom in Primrose Cottage, wondering who was sleeping there now. He’d been going through the Somerset batting averages for last season when he fell asleep.

Mr Blakey, awake above the garage, listened to the crash of breakers. Sudden gusts fiercely rattled the windows, driving the rain in sheets against the panes. Beside him, his wife was content in her unconsciousness.

Mr Blakey slipped out of bed. Without turning a light on he drew a brown woollen dressing-gown around him and left the room. Still in darkness, he passed through a small sitting-room and down a flight of stairs to a passage that led to the kitchen. He brewed tea and sat at the table to drink it.

In the outhouse where they slept the dogs barked, a distant sound that Mr Blakey paid no attention to, guessing it to be caused by the storm. He left the kitchen and passed along the green-linoleumed passage, into the hall. A window might be open, a door might be banging in the wind on a night like this. There was no harm in looking about.

He switched a light on in the hall, illuminating the theatrical figures on the red hessian walls. He listened for a moment. No sound came from the house, but the dogs still faintly barked and the sea was louder than it had been in his bedroom. Drawn by the sound of rain on the French windows, he moved into the drawing-room. Enough light to see by filtered in from the hall, though not enough to draw colour from the gloom. Wallpaper and curtains were greyly nondescript, pictures and furniture were shadows.

The sea was noisier in this room than anywhere else in the house, yet through the wide French windows there was nothing to be seen of the storm. He strained his eyes, peering into the dark for the familiar shapes of trees and shrubs, wondering what damage was being wrought. But when a shaft of moonlight unexpectedly flashed it wasn’t damage to his garden that startled his attention. A figure moved beneath the monkey-puzzle. A child’s face smiled at the house.