‘I’m sure Mr Dass can rig something up.’
‘He says he can’t do curtains, Mr Feather. No way, he says.’
‘Well, we’ll find something somewhere.’ He smiled at the boy. He pushed his bicycle across the pavement and on to the road. He had a list of shopping to do for the Mothers’ Union tea.
‘Dass says he couldn’t supply curtains on his own, sir, on account of the expense. Only I think he’s maybe in financial trouble –’
‘Oh, we couldn’t have Mr Dass spending money on curtains. I’m sure we’ll find some somewhere. Don’t worry about it.’
‘You can’t help worrying, sir.’
Astride the saddle of his bicycle, the tips of his toes touching the ground in order to retain his balance, Quentin said again that curtains would be found for the Spot the Talent competition. He nodded reassuringly at Timothy Gedge. He felt uneasy in the presence of the boy. He felt inadequate and for some reason guilty.
‘You’re out with a blonde, sir, you see the wife coming –’
‘I’m sorry, Timothy, I really must be on my way now.’
‘It’s a joke when I call you Mr Feather, sir. Like a feather in a chicken, if you get it.’
Quentin shook his head. They’d have another chat soon, he promised.
‘I don’t think that sexton likes us, sir,’ Timothy Gedge called after him. ‘I don’t think he cares for either of us.’
At half past eleven that morning a man and a woman on a motor-cycle asked the way to the Dasses’ house, Sweetlea.
‘Name’s Pratt,’ the man said when Mr Dass answered the doorbell. Beneath a street-light that was still flickering from the night before the motor-cycle was propped up by the kerb. A woman in motor-cycling clothes and a helmet was standing beside it.
The man said he’d heard about the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête. He was new to the neighbourhood, he and his wife had come to live in Paltry Combe, eighteen miles away. They’d ridden over on the bike as soon as they’d heard, on the chance that they wouldn’t be too late to fill in an entry form. He did imitations of dogs, he said.
He was a stocky man with a crash-helmet on his head and leather gloves tucked under his arm. He gestured with his head in the direction of the woman by the motor-cycle, confirming that she was his wife. He went in a lot for competitions, he said, villages, resorts, it didn’t matter to him. He asked about the prize money when he’d finished filling in the entry form, and wrote down the amounts on the back of an envelope. ‘An old pro,’ Mr Dass remarked in the sitting-room after he’d gone. ‘Makes eleven in all. Two up on last year.’ Yesterday had officially been the last day for entries, but he’d seen no reason to turn away the man’s fifty p.
The doorbell of Sweetlea rang again, and Mr Dass said if it was someone else who wanted to enter he’d again stretch a point. Imitations of dogs weren’t exactly going to set Easter Saturday alight, and everything else looked like yesterday’s buns with a vengeance. Contrary to his speculations, however, their visitor wasn’t another late entrant.
‘Cheers,’ Timothy Gedge said, and then reported that he’d spoken to the clergyman about the curtains and that the clergyman had been at his wits’ end to know where to lay his hands on some.
Mr Dass looked at the boy, determined not to let him into his house. It was intolerable, having your privacy invaded at all hours, for no reason whatsoever.
‘Is that all you came about, curtains?’
‘I thought you’d like to know, sir.’
Mr Dass, about to ejaculate angrily, did not say anything. He peered at the boy through his spectacles, thinking that he seemed to be off his head.
‘Funny the way your son doesn’t ever come back to Dynmouth any more, sir. Funny he wouldn’t want to see his mum. I remember the night he cleared off, sir.’
‘Now look here, boy –’
‘Mr Feather said definitely come over to you, Mr Dass. There isn’t a curtain to be had in the place, sir. Nor high nor low, sir, the church, the rectory –’
‘I told you,’ Mr Dass said in a level voice. ‘I told you not to come calling at this house. You’re a damned pest, if you must know. Will you kindly get it into your head that I do not intend to supply curtains for that stage? If there are no curtains on that stage, then we must manage without. Now will you please go away?’
The boy smiled at him and nodded. He’d followed his son, he said, on that particular night. He’d followed him from the Queen Victoria Hotel, interested in him because he’d been staggering. He’d followed him all the way to his house. He’d listened at the window of the dining-room and had overheard the conversation that had taken place.
‘Who is it?’ Mrs Dass called gently from the sitting-room and, quite unlike himself, her husband did not reply. For nineteen years Nevil had seemed fond of them, fonder than most sons in a way, and then in a matter of moments he’d spurted out his awful truth. She’d had a sardine salad ready in the dining-room for supper, and instead of watching Nevil enjoying it she had heard herself despised. Nevil had always found it difficult to work and had spent long periods at home doing nothing. They’d known even then that he’d perhaps been a little indulged by both of them, but on that awful evening he’d turned their indulgence into a crime, bitterly referring to the long periods he’d spent at home, eating their food and accepting pocket money. They’d ruined him. They’d wanted to keep him for ever in the house they boringly called Sweetlea. They’d made him fit for nothing, they’d made allowances for his failures when they should have told him to get on with it. It had been tedious beyond words, he said, living with all that: all his life, for as long as he could remember, he’d been bored by them. He had no love for her, he said to his mother; no love had been bought. They’d treated two daughters in a sensible manner; why couldn’t they have been sensible with him? In a matter of moments he had broken his mother’s heart.
‘It would upset her to know a stranger heard,’ the boy said, smiling as though in sympathy before he turned to go away. Any mother would be upset, he added, to know that a stranger had overheard remarks like those. ‘But we could keep the secret, Mr Dass. We would keep it from her. Only I couldn’t perform the act on a stage without curtains.’
5
They clambered down the cliff-path from Sea House and set off in a western direction along the beach to Badstoneleigh. They wore fawn corduroy jeans, sandals and jerseys, Kate’s red, Stephen’s navy-blue. Mrs Blakey had spoken of anoraks, and the children had obediently collected these from their rooms. But not wishing to have the bother of carrying them, they’d left them on a chair in the kitchen.
The sea was out. It pattered quietly in the distance, each small wave softly succeeding the next. Near its edge the dark, wet sand was a sheen on which footsteps kept their shape for only a minute or two. Closer to the shingle, the children walked on sand that was firmer.
Kate related her dream about little Miss Malabedeely being bullied again by Miss Shaw and Miss Rist and then Miss Malabedeely’s marriage to the African bishop, who’d promised to worship her with his body. He couldn’t remember if he’d dreamed, Stephen said.
They might have exchanged, again, the people of their two schools, but to Kate these people seemed for the moment irrelevant. So were the Blakeys and her mother and Stephen’s father honeymooning in Cassis. Only she and Stephen were relevant. She wanted to ask him if he liked being alone with her, as he was now, on the quiet seashore on a nice day, but naturally she did not.
‘I’d say we’d gone two miles,’ Stephen said.
There were worms of sand where they walked, and here and there embedded shells. Fluffy white clouds floated politely around the sun, as though unwilling to obscure it. Far out to sea a trawler was motionless.
For a moment she had a day-dream. They were in a sailing boat, as far out as the trawler, both of them older, eighteen or nineteen. Stephen wasn’t different except for being taller; she was prettier, not round-faced. He said she was interesting. Sh
e made him laugh, he said, and in any case prettiness didn’t matter. She was witty, she had an interesting mind.
‘Further,’ she said. ‘More than two miles, I’d say.’ She asked him to test her on fielding positions, and he marked out on the sand the two sets of stumps and the ten fielding positions around them. ‘Silly mid-on,’ she said. ‘Silly mid-off, square leg, slips, long-stop. Wicket-keeper, of course.’
He told her the others and she tried to memorize them, the positions and the titles. He explained how the positions would change according to the kind of bowler, fast, slow, medium, or according to whether leg-breaks were being bowled or off-spin employed. They would also change according to the calibre of the batsman, and whether or not a batsman was left-handed, and the state of the wicket. Some batsmen, included in a team because of their bowling, might find themselves crowded by close slips. Others, in powerful form, would force the fielders to the boundary. Kate found it all difficult to understand, but she wanted to understand it. She only wished she was any good at the game herself, which unfortunately she wasn’t. She’d always preferred French cricket, although she’d naturally never told Stephen that.
They walked on, and after what they reckoned to be another mile they paused again and looked back at Dynmouth. It was now a cluster of houses with the pier protruding modestly into the sea and, unimpressive on the cliffs, the house they lived in themselves. On the beach a speck moved in the same direction as they did.
There was a second figure, which they didn’t see: high above them, Timothy Gedge gazed down from the cliff-top path. For a moment he ceased his observation of them and instead gazed out to sea, at the trawler on the horizon. The Commander was fond of saying it was the sea on which the Spanish Armada had been defeated, the sea that Adolf Hitler had not dared to cross. Timothy nodded to himself, thinking about the sailing ships of the Spanish Armada and the severe face of the German Führer, of which he’d seen pictures. On the golf-course behind him a foursome of players shouted to one another as they approached the fourteenth green.
He watched the children from Sea House again, becoming smaller on the sand. He guessed they were on their way to Bad-stoneleigh because of the double bill at the Pavilion. He’d seen it himself but he’d see it again just to keep latched on to them. They’d be at a loose end when it was over, which would be the time to approach them. He’d mention something about when Bond was in the sewer or whatever it was meant to be, load of rubbish really. With one hand he grasped the string handle of the carrier-bag with the Union Jack on it. In the other he clutched a fifty-p piece, a coin he’d discovered the evening before in Mrs Abigail’s purse, which carelessly she’d left on top of the refrigerator.
The children were dots on the sand, well ahead of him now, getting smaller all the time. In the other direction, becoming larger, the figure of Commander Abigail slowly advanced.
Mrs Abigail took round Meals on Wheels with Miss Poraway as her assistant, or runner, as the title officially was. Miss Poraway wore a mauve coat and a mauve hat that clashed with it. Mrs Abigail was neat, in blue.
They collected the food – each meal on two covered tin plates and the whole lot contained in large metal hot-boxes – from the old people’s home, Wisteria Lodge. Mrs Abigail drove the blue W R V S van, Miss Poraway sat beside her with a list of the names and addresses they were to visit that morning, the diabetics marked with a ‘D’, as were the corresponding dinners in the metal hot-boxes. Those who didn’t like gravy were indicated also, for there was often trouble where gravy was concerned.
‘Roast beef and rice pudding,’ Miss Poraway remarked as Mrs Abigail steered the van through the morning traffic. She went on talking about roast beef. They always liked it, she declared, and rice pudding too, come to that, though heaven alone knew why, the way they cooked it in Wisteria Lodge. She examined the list of names and addresses. Mr Padget, 29 Prout Street, who was usually the first to receive his meal, had been struck off. ‘Oh dear,’ Miss Poraway remarked.
Mrs Abigail nodded vaguely. The last thing she’d have chosen to listen to this morning was Miss Poraway’s conversation. When she’d lain awake in the night realizing how upset and worried she was by Timothy Gedge’s visit, she’d thought the one thing she wouldn’t be able to do was Meals on Wheels with Miss Poraway. She’d planned to telephone Mrs Trotter, who organized everything, and explain that she wasn’t feeling well. But when the morning came it had seemed disgraceful to pretend illness and let everybody down. She had reminded herself that once or twice recently Miss Poraway hadn’t been able to come because of her nasal complaint, and Mrs Blackham, who was at least efficient, had taken her place.
‘Well, I do like that,’ Miss Poraway was saying, pointing at a cartoon cut from the W R V S News that someone had stuck with Sellotape to the dashboard of the van. It showed an elderly couple being given their meal by a uniformed W R V S woman who was asking them if the food had been all right the last time. ‘Meat were luvely,’ the elderly wife was enthusing. ‘But gravy were tough,’ her ancient partner toothlessly protested.
Since Mrs Abigail, intent on driving, was unable to benefit from this, Miss Poraway read it out. She also read the message in italics printed beneath the cartoon, to the effect that the cartoonist responsible had for many years been officially connected with a provincial newspaper and was now, in the sunset of his life, himself the recipient of twice-weekly Meals on Wheels.
‘Well, I do call that amusing,’ Miss Poraway said, ‘the whole thing.’
The van drew up in Pretty Street and Miss Poraway and Mrs Abigail got out, Miss Poraway still talking about the cartoon, saying it would tickle her brother when she told him about it. Mrs Abigail carried the two covered plates, one on top of the other, using a tea-towel because they were hot. She opened the gate of Number 10, the terraced house of Miss Vine, whose budgerigar was unwell. Miss Poraway clattered noisily behind her, with her list and a tobacco tin for collecting the money in.
‘Morning, Miss Vine!’ Mrs Abigail called out, forcing cheerfulness as she opened the front door.
‘Morning, dear!’ Miss Poraway called out behind her.
They made their way to the kitchen, where Miss Vine was sitting on a chair beside the budgerigar cage. Usually she had a saucepan of water simmering on the electric stove, with two plates warming on top of it, waiting to receive the meal. But this morning all that had been forgotten because the budgerigar had taken a turn for the worse.
‘He’ll not last,’ Miss Vine said gloomily. ‘He’s down in the mouth worse’n ever today.’
‘Oh, he’ll perk up, Miss Vine,’ Mrs Abigail said, mustering further cheerfulness as she emptied roast beef, potatoes, brussels sprouts and gravy on to a cold plate. ‘They often pine for a day or two.’
Miss Poraway disagreed. She was peering through the bars of the cage, making sucking noises. She advanced the opinion that the bird wouldn’t last much longer, and recommended Miss Vine to think about the purchase of a new one.
‘Pop your rice pudding in the oven, shall I?’ Mrs Abigail suggested, opening the oven door and lighting the gas.
Miss Vine did not reply. She had begun to weep. Nothing would induce her, she whispered, to have another bird in the house after poor Beano had gone. You got to love a bird like a human. You got so that the first thing you did every day was to go into the kitchen and say good morning to it.
Mrs Abigail took a soup-plate from a cupboard and emptied the rice pudding on to it. Miss Poraway should by now have collected twelve pence from Miss Vine. She should have ticked off Miss Vine’s name on her list and been ready to carry the empty plates and covers back to the van. Two minutes in any one house was as long as you dared allow if the last half-dozen dinners weren’t to be stone-cold. She placed the plate of rice pudding in the oven and drew Miss Vine’s attention to it. ‘Cub scouts,’ the voice of Timothy Gedge whispered again, like some kind of echo. All night long he’d been saying it.
‘That chap that has the hardware,’ Miss Poraway
said. ‘Moult, isn’t it? Brings paraffin round in a van. He’s got birds. He’d easily fix you up, dear.’
‘Have you got your twelve p, Miss Vine?’ Mrs Abigail asked. ‘Don’t forget that rice pudding’s in the oven now.’
‘Shame really,’ Miss Poraway said, ‘when little creatures die.’
Unable to help herself, Mrs Abigail made a vexed noise. It was quite pointless having a runner who saw the whole thing as a social outing and had once even sat down in a kitchen and said she’d just rest for a minute. Half past three it had been when they’d arrived at Mr Grady’s, the last name on the list, his fish and chips congealed and inedible. As she collected up the plates and covers herself and went without Miss Vine’s twelve p, the face of Timothy Gedge appeared in her mind, causing her to feel sick in the stomach. God knows, it was bad enough having to poke your way along in the van, peering at the numbers of houses because your runner was incapable of it. It was bad enough having to do every single bit of the work, rushing like a mad thing because the person who was meant to help you couldn’t stop talking. It was bad enough in normal circumstances, but when you hadn’t slept a wink, when you’d lain there suffering from shock and disgust, it was more than any normal person could bear. Of course she’d been wrong not to telephone Mrs Trotter. She should have told Mrs Trotter that she was in no condition to deliver forty dinners, obstructed at every turn by Miss Poraway. She should have told her that after thirty-six years of marriage she’d discovered her husband was a homosexual, the explanation of everything.
She drove to the Heathfield estate, to Mr and Mrs Budd’s bungalow, and to Seaway Road, to Mrs Hutchings’, and then to the elderly poor of Boughs Lane. All the time Miss Poraway talked. She talked about her niece, Gwen, who had just married an auctioneer, and about the child of another niece, who had something the matter with his ears. When they arrived at Beaconville, where three elderly people lived together, Mrs Abigail gave her one dinner to carry but she dropped it while trying to open the hall-door. In every house they called at she forgot to collect the money. ‘It’s dangerous, a cold when you’re your age, dear,’ she said to Miss Trimm. ‘Don’t like the look of her,’ she remarked loudly in the hall, forgetting that despite her other failings Miss Trimm’s hearing had sharpened with age. They’d buried old Mr Rine that morning, she added, and old Mrs Crowley on Saturday.