‘D’you know Plant?’ he said. ‘Down at the Artilleryman’s?’
‘Plant?’ Stephen said.
‘He’s always hanging about toilets.’ He laughed. ‘After women.’
He explained to them what he meant by that, about how he’d run into Mr Plant in the small hours, wearing only a shirt. He described the scene he’d witnessed in his mother’s bedroom, during A Man Called Ironside.
They didn’t say anything, and after a few moments the silence hardened and became awkward. Kate looked out to sea, wishing he hadn’t joined them. She stared at the petrified trawler.
‘Your mum on a honeymoon?’ he said.
She nodded. In France, she said. Smiling, he turned to Stephen.
‘Your dad’ll enjoy that, Stephen. Your dad’ll be all jacked up.’
‘Jacked up?’
‘Steaming for it, Stephen.’
He laughed. Stephen didn’t reply.
His face was like an axe-edge, Kate thought, with another axe-edge cutting across it: the line of the cheek-bones above the empty cheeks. His fingers were rather long, slender like a girl’s.
‘Your mum has a touch of style, Kate. I heard that remarked in a vegetable shop. I’d call her an eyeful, Kate. Peachy.’
‘Yes.’ She muttered, her face becoming red because she felt embarrassed.
‘He knows his onions, Stephen? Your dad, eh?’
Again Stephen didn’t reply.
‘Did you mind me saying it, Stephen? He’s a fine man, your dad, they’re well matched. “It’s great it happened,” the woman in the shop said, buying leeks at the time. “It’s great for the children,” she said. D’you reckon it’s great, Kate? D’you like having Stephen?’
Her face felt like a sunset. She turned it away in confusion, pretending to examine the grey-brown clay of the cliff.
‘Dynmouth people can’t mind their own business,’ she heard Timothy Gedge saying. ‘They’re always like that, gassing their heads off in a public shop. The best place for Dynmouth people is in their coffins.’ Laughter rippled from him, quite gently, softly. ‘D’you ever go to funerals, Kate?’
‘Funerals?’
‘When a person dies, Kate.’
She shook her head. They progressed in silence for a moment. Then Timothy Gedge said:
‘Ever read books, Stephen? The Cannibal’s Daughter by Henrietta Mann?’
He laughed and they laughed also, a little uneasily. In a woman’s voice he said:
‘When’s it unlucky to have a cat behind you?’
They said they didn’t know.
‘When you’re a mouse. See it, Stephen? Cross an elephant and a kangaroo, Kate? What d’you get?’
She shook her head.
‘Dirty great holes all over Australia, Kate.’ He smiled at her. He said he was going in for the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’m looking for a wedding-dress. I have an act planned with a wedding-dress.’
‘You mean you dress up as a bride?’ Kate said.
He told them. He told them about the bath in Swines’ building yard. He repeated the information he’d passed on to the Abigails and to Mr Plant: that George Joseph Smith had bought fish for the late Miss Munday, and eggs for Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty. They didn’t comment on any of it.
‘I often saw your dad about the place, Stephen,’ he said. ‘With a pair of field-glasses.’
‘He’s an ornithologist.’
‘What d’you call that, Stephen?’
‘He writes books about birds.’
‘Is your mum’s wedding-dress in a trunk, Stephen?’
Stephen stopped, staring down at the sand. The toe of his right sandal slowly drew a circle. Kate looked from one face to the other, Stephen’s screwed up with bewilderment, Timothy Gedge’s smiling pleasantly.
‘I saw your dad with it, Stephen.’ He spoke softly, his smile still there. ‘I was looking in the window of that Primrose Cottage.’
They didn’t say anything. Both of them were frowning. They moved on again and Timothy Gedge went with them, swinging his carrier-bag.
‘You didn’t mind me looking in at the window, Stephen? Only I was passing at the time. Your dad was packing his gear up. He took the wedding-dress out of the trunk and put it back again. A faded kind of trunk, Stephen. Green it would be in its day.’
There was another silence, and then they ran away from him, leaving him standing there, shocked to stillness by their abrupt movement. He couldn’t understand why they were suddenly running over the sand. He thought for a moment that it might be some kind of game, that their running would cease as suddenly as it had begun, that they’d stand like statues on the sand, waiting for him to catch up with them. But they didn’t. They ran on and on.
He took a fruit gum from what remained of the tube. He stood there sucking it, watching the seagulls.
6
‘I think I’m going to try and cut the grass,’ Quentin Featherston said as he and Lavinia washed up the dishes after the Mothers’ Union tea-party, which had been even more trying than usual. When Miss Poraway had mentioned a Tupperware party Mrs Stead-Carter had gone much further than she’d ever gone before. She’d pointed out that it was stupid to talk about Tupperware parties as a means of raising funds since funds raised at Tupperware parties naturally went to the manufacturers of Tupperware. Miss Poraway said there were other parties of a similar nature, at which suede jackets and coats were modelled, and sometimes underclothes. In greater exasperation Mrs Stead-Carter said she’d never heard anything as silly in her life: the Mothers’ Union in Dynmouth had neither Tupperware nor suede clothes nor underclothes at its disposal, Miss Poraway’s whole line of conversation was a waste of time. She failed to see, Mrs Stead-Carter finally declared, why it was that Miss Poraway, who had never been a mother, should concern herself with the Mothers’ Union in the first place. Miss Poraway had at once become tearful and Lavinia had had to take her to the kitchen. Mrs Abigail, she’d told Lavinia, had called her a fool that morning just because she dropped a tin plate when they were doing Meals on Wheels. Dynmouth was becoming a nasty kind of place.
‘Poor Miss Poraway,’ Quentin said as they washed the tea dishes, and Lavinia – not feeling agreeably disposed towards Miss Poraway – did not say anything. She wished she could say she was sorry now, not in the middle of the night when he was asleep. It wasn’t his fault; he did his best. It wasn’t easy for him, all those women bickering and only a handful of people out of Dynmouth’s thousands ever setting foot in his church, and Mr Peniket sighing over the decline of church life. She wished she could say she knew she was being difficult and edgy, taking it out on him because she’d been denied another child. But although she tried to speak, actually tried to form words and force them out of her mouth, no words came. They washed and dried in silence, and then the twins appeared with lemon cake all over them.
‘Tidying,’ Susannah said.
‘No, that’s not true,’ Lavinia protested. ‘You’ve been eating cake.’
‘Tidying on the floor,’ Deborah said.
‘Tidying crumbs,’ Susannah said.
‘I wish just once you’d tell the truth.’ Lavinia was angry. A day didn’t pass now during which it failed to occur to her that she had borne two congenital liars. Jam fell like rain, cake had to be tidied on the floor. ‘Mouses making buns,’ Deborah had said the afternoon before when flour and raisins had been discovered in a corner. ‘Mouses can have party,’ Susannah had added. ‘And games,’ Deborah said. ‘Mouses can have games if they want to.’
Lavinia, still scolding, wiped the crumbs from their cardigans.
‘Twins didn’t eat one crumb,’ Susannah assured her.
‘Mouses did,’ Deborah explained. ‘Two mouses came out of the chair.’
‘You come and watch me cutting the grass,’ Quentin suggested, but the twins shook their heads, not understanding because such a long time had passed since there’d last been grass-cutting.
They suspected, however, that whatever it was their father intended to do the activity would prove dull to watch. Watching wasn’t often interesting.
Already Quentin had begun to tidy up the garden for the Easter Fête. He’d pulled up the first spring weeds from the flower-beds, little shoots of dandelion and dock and Scotch grass. He’d poked at the soil with a hoe to give it a fresh look. He’d cleared away a lot of last autumn’s leaves.
In the garage he examined a machine called a Suffolk Punch, a lawnmower that was now exactly ten years old. It had been lying idle since a Saturday afternoon in October, with begonia tubers in its grass-box and a bundle of yellowing newspapers balanced on its engine. The bundle was tied together with string and had been left there and forgotten one morning when Lavinia was in a hurry. She collected old newspapers and milk-bottle tops and silver paper for the Girl Guides.
Quentin hated the Suffolk Punch. He hated it especially now as he dragged it out of its corner in the garage, squeezed it between his Vauxhall Viva estate car and the twins’ tricycles, and rolled it on to the uneven surface in front of the garage doors. He pulled at the starting device, a coil of plastic-covered wire that snapped obediently back into position after each attempt to engage the engine. No sound came from the engine, no promising little cough, and naturally enough no roar of action. You could spend all day pulling the plastic-covered coil, the skin coming off your hands, sweat gathering all over you. You could take the plug out and examine it, not knowing what you were looking for. You could poke at it with a screwdriver or a piece of wire and wipe it with a piece of rag. You could take it to the kitchen and put it under the grill of the electric cooker in order to get it hot, without knowing why it should be hot.
He pulled the coil of plastic-covered wire forty times, pausing between every ten or a dozen efforts. A smell of petrol developed, as it usually did.
‘All right then, Mr Feather?’ the voice of Timothy Gedge enquired.
The boy was standing there, smiling at him for the second time that day. He attempted to smile back at him, but found it difficult. The same uneasy feeling he’d experienced that morning returned, and he realized now why it came: of all the people of Dynmouth this boy in his adolescence was the single exception. He could feel no Christian love for him.
‘Hullo, Timothy.’
‘Having trouble with the cutter then?’
‘I’m afraid I am.’ In the garage there was a kind of spanner, a hexagonal tube with a bar going through it, that was designed to remove plugs from engines. He went to look for it, remembering that he had used it a couple of times since October, trying to take the plugs out of the estate car. He disliked the estate car almost as much as the Suffolk Punch, which was why he preferred to make his way around the streets of Dynmouth on a bicycle. He disliked the English Electric washing-machine in the kitchen, especially the button which was meant to operate the door-release and quite often didn’t. He disliked the transistor radio he’d saved up for to get Lavinia for her birthday three years ago. No sound had emerged from it for six months: spare parts were hard to get, Dynmouth Hi-Fi Boutique informed him.
To his surprise, he found the hexagonal spanner on the ledge in the garage where it was meant to be. He returned to the lawn-mower with it. Timothy Gedge was still standing there. The way he kept hanging about him, Quentin wondered if he had perhaps decided to become a clergyman again.
‘You find what you want then, sir? Only I spoke to Dass about the curtains, Mr Feather.’
‘Curtains?’
‘I mentioned curtains to you this morning, sir.’
Quentin unscrewed the brass nipple on the end of the plug and disengaged the lead. He fitted the hexagonal spanner around the plug and turned it. The plug was wet with petrol and oil. There was a shell of carbon around the points. He never knew if there should be carbon there or not.
‘Dass is going to donate them, sir.’
‘Donate?’
‘A set of curtains, sir.’
‘Good heavens, there’s no need for that.’
He returned to the garage and tore a piece from one of the yellowing newspapers. He wiped the points of the plug with it. ‘I shall have to heat it up,’ he said.
Timothy watched him as he went hurriedly towards the house. He hadn’t even listened about the curtains. For all the man cared, the competition mightn’t take place, nor the Easter Fête either. He began to follow the clergyman into the house, and then changed his mind. No point in taking trouble with him; no point in explaining that he’d walked all the way up to the blooming rectory to set his mind at rest. Stupid it was, saying you had to heat up a thing out of a lawnmower.
Old Ape ambled past him on the way to the back door for his dinner and his scraps, carrying a red plastic bucket. Timothy addressed him, gesturing, but the old man ignored him.
‘Hullo,’ a voice said, and then another voice said it.
He looked and saw the clergyman’s two children, known to him from past association.
‘Cheers,’ he said.
‘We got cake,’ Susannah said.
‘We ate lemon cake,’ Deborah said.
He nodded at them understandingly. Any cake they could get hold of he advised them to eat. He said they could have a picnic if they brought some cake out into the garden, but they didn’t seem to understand him.
‘We’re good girls,’ Susannah said.
‘You’re good definitely.’
‘We’re good girls,’ Deborah said.
He nodded at them again. He told them a story about a gooseberry in a lift and one about holes in Australia. ‘You’re out with a blonde,’ he said, ‘you see the wife coming?’
They knew it was all funny because of the funny voice he put on. He was doing it specially for them.
‘Ever read books?’ he said. ‘Tea for Two by Roland Butta?’
They laughed delightedly, clapping their hands together, and Timothy Gedge closed his eyes. The lights flickered in the darkness around him, and then the limelight blazed and he stood in its yellow flame. ‘Big hand, friends!’ cried Hughie Green, his famous eyebrow raised, his voice twanging pleasantly into his microphone. ‘Big hand for the boy with the funnies!’ All over Dynmouth the limelight blazed on Dynmouth’s television screens, and people watched, unable not to. ‘Big hand for the Timothy G Show !’ cried Hughie Green in Pretty Street and Once Hill and High Park Avenue. Like a bomb the show exploded, the funnies, the falsetto, Timothy himself. Clearly they heard him in the Cornerways flats and in Sea House and in the Dasses’ house and in the lounges of the Queen Victoria Hotel. From the blazing screen he smiled at the proprietor of the Artilleryman’s Friend and at his mother and Rose-Ann and his aunt the dressmaker and at his father, wherever he was. He smiled in the Youth Centre and in the house of Stringer the headmaster and in the house of Miss Wilkinson with her charrada. He smiled at Brehon O’Hennessy, wherever he was too, and in the houses of everyone in 3A. He thanked them all, leaning out of the blaze in order to be closer to them, saying they were great, saying they were lovely.
In the rectory garden the twins still laughed and clapped, more amused than ever because he was still standing there with his eyes closed, smiling at them. The most marvellous smile they’d ever seen, the biggest in the world.
Commander Abigail was not a heavy drinker, but after his gloomy morning walk he had felt the need of consolation and had found it in the Disraeli Lounge of the Queen Victoria Hotel. He had entered the lounge at twenty past two and had ordered a sandwich and a large measure of whisky, which he’d consumed quickly. He had attempted to obtain more whisky, but was informed that the bar was now closed until five-thirty. Unable to face his wife in the bungalow in High Park Avenue and fearful of meeting her in one of the shops if he hung about the town, he set off for another walk along the beach, striking out this time in the opposite direction from the one he’d taken that morning. With the passing of time, he began to think that he’d taken far too glum a view of the situation. His foremost maxim ?
?? of never admitting defeat, of sticking to your guns through thick and thin – came to his aid and offered the first shreds of comfort since the unpleasantness of the night before. At half past five he returned to the Disraeli Lounge and at ten to eight, his spirits further lightened by his intake of whisky, he entered the bungalow, whistling.
‘Where on earth have you been, Gordon?’ she demanded as soon as he appeared in the sitting-room. She was half-heartedly knitting, with the television on, the sound turned low.
‘Walking,’ he replied briskly. ‘I reckon I walked twenty miles today.’
‘Your dinner’ll be as dry as dust.’ She rose, sticking her knitting needles into a ball of blue wool. Laughter emerged softly from the television set as a man hit another man in the stomach. She could smell the whisky even though the length of the room was between them.
‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.
‘If you’re drunk, Gordon –’
‘I am not drunk.’
‘There’s been enough drunkenness in this house.’
‘Are you talking about young Gedge?’
‘I’ve been sitting here worried sick.’
‘About me, dear?’
‘I’ve been waiting for you for six hours. What on earth am I to think? I didn’t sleep a wink last night.’
‘Sit down, my dear.’
‘I want to leave Dynmouth, Gordon. I want to leave this bungalow and everything else. I thought I’d go mad with that woman this morning.’
‘What woman’s that, dear?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, what’s it matter what woman it is? You’ve never displayed the slightest interest in what I do. You’ve never asked me, not once, how anything has gone, or where I’ve been or whom I’ve seen.’
‘I’m sure I’ve asked about your Meals on Wheels, dear, I remember distinctly –’
‘You know perfectly well you haven’t. You’re incapable of taking an interest in me. You’re incapable of having a normal relationship with me. You marry me and you’re incapable of performing the sexual act.’