The Children Of Dynmouth

  Days went by like this, Sunday and Monday and Tuesday. On Saturday their parents would be back.

  On all these days Timothy Gedge appeared at the gate in the garden wall. On the Monday and the Tuesday he came to the front of the house and rang the hall door bell. ‘There’s that Gedge boy wants you,’ Mrs Blakey said in a puzzled way on each occasion, and on each occasion they replied that they didn’t wish to see him. When he came again Mrs Blakey said he must not return. The children hadn’t found his penknife, she said.

  For Kate, the passing of time made the silence chillier, until it felt like an icy shroud around her. For Stephen, time was a tormentor. Thoughts formed in his mind, images occurred. In the newspapers there’d been an army officer’s wife who’d disappeared while the army officer was engaged in a liaison with a woman in the army catering services. This woman had become the army officer’s second wife. His first wife had gone to Australia, he had claimed in the dock, but there was doubt about that. There’d been photographs of these people’s faces in the newspapers, but Stephen had forgotten what the faces looked like. Now faces appeared in his mind, with features that were grotesque in their exaggeration of innocence and evil.

  There was another face then, which didn’t have to be invented: a moustached face that had recently and endlessly appeared on the television news, the face of a man who was accused of battering to death the nanny of his children, of attempting to do the same to his wife. ‘A kind and generous person,’ a woman on the news said. ‘He loved people for what they were.’ He was missing and wanted for murder. His car was found with bloodstains on the steering-wheel. ‘He couldn’t possibly do a thing like that,’ his best friend said. In France and South Africa, all over the world, the police were looking for him. Had he, too, mended the broken wings of birds?

  His father had the same seriously intent eyes and the delicate look that Stephen had. But he was brown-haired and his smile was different. His smile came slowly, beginning at the corners of his mouth and creeping all over his face, wrinkling the flesh of his cheeks, lighting up his eyes. Stephen’s smile was jerky and nervous, coming quickly, in flashes, and quickly evaporating. His father had a way of losing himself in some private absorption, of not hearing when people spoke to him, and then of apologizing concernedly. He would watch the movements of birds for hours through his binoculars without ever assuming that this activity could be interesting to other people, without ever promoting it as a topic of conversation. His privacy in this matter, and in others, had thrown Stephen and his mother together. That had seemed natural to Stephen, the way things should be: his father working and then emerging from his work, all three of them walking on the beach, or walking to Badstoneleigh to go to the Pavilion, or having tea on Stephen’s birthday in the Spinning Wheel, or going to see Somerset play.

  It was impossible not to remember, after what Timothy Gedge had said. With his father and his mother, he’d often walked along the cliffs, by the golf-course. Dozens of times they’d gone in single file when they came to the narrow place, made narrow by a growth of gorse. ‘Careful, Stephen,’ they both seemed endlessly to have said. Often on the beach, when he’d run on ahead looking for flat pebbles to skim over the sea, he’d glanced back to find them walking with their arms around one another. ‘No one’s nicer than Daddy,’ his mother had once said.

  On those walks, when Stephen was much younger, his father used to tell him stories about a family of moles he’d invented, elaborate adventures that went on for miles. On his mother’s birthday they didn’t go to the Spinning Wheel but to the Queen Victoria for lunch, because his father insisted. She’d sit there in the place of honour, black-haired and rather thin, beautiful on her birthday, as his father used to say. She’d laugh at things. She’d reach out towards them both and put her hands on theirs, smiling with her very white teeth. He always liked it when she wore a certain shade of lipstick, coral, not cherry. He liked it when she wore her green dress, with the belt that had a brass buckle.

  His father insisted on the whole day being given up to her birthday, taking trouble, making her laugh. ‘Funny, being a bird-watcher,’ a boy called Cosgrave had once said and Stephen had made him take that back, twisting his arm until he agreed to. Once when he was alone with her he’d said it would be nice to have a brother, but she’d explained that it wasn’t possible. She’d hugged him, saying she was sorry. ‘Dear Mummy!’ his father said all of a sudden in the Queen Victoria, while the waiter was standing there spooning out peas.

  Such memories crowded him. They came briefly, as moments rapidly hurrying, one bundled away by the next. But they were sharp as splinters, each stabbing on another’s wound. He clenched himself against them, tightening himself, determined not to be taken unawares. He wanted to be silent.

  ‘Now, don’t be silly, Kate,’ Mrs Blakey said firmly when Kate was helping her to make lemon meringue pie. ‘The boy don’t behave like a zombie for nothing. You’re both behaving queerly. D’you think I’m stupid or something?’

  ‘We don’t mean to, Mrs Blakey.’

  ‘If you’ve done something, tell me. If you’ve broken something –’

  ‘We haven’t broken anything.’

  ‘I can’t know if you don’t tell me, Kate.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  Mrs Blakey pressed her lips together. She said, coolly, that she could manage on her own in the kitchen now.

  ‘I don’t mind helping.’

  ‘You just run along now.’ She had been given a telephone number in France: Cassis 08.79.30, Les Roches Blanches, a hotel. It had been given to her in case an emergency arose, but it seemed to Mrs Blakey that the atmosphere which had developed in the house couldn’t be called an emergency. She wouldn’t know how to put it in any case, she wouldn’t be able to explain since it was all so hard to pin down. And it would cause a worry, ringing up France like that. For a start, it would cost a fortune.

  ‘Stephen,’ Kate called outside the closed door of his bedroom, but he didn’t answer.

  He stayed awake and after midnight he went to the room which Kate’s mother had set aside for his father to write about birds in. It was on the ground floor, at the back of the house. A single window reached almost to the floor, looking over the garden. Against a faded wallpaper, striped in red and pink, were cases of butterflies and moths. In the corner by the door there was a small grandfather clock; from the mantelpiece, beneath a dome of glass, an owl stared. His father’s four mahogany filing-cabinets from Primrose Cottage were there, in pairs against two walls, between glass-fronted bookcases that had always been in the room. There was a green-shaded lamp on his mahogany desk, and a small white Olympia typewriter. There was a blotting pad with blue blotting-paper, and a wooden bowl with pencils and paper-clips and a fountain pen in it.

  Stephen pulled down the blind and sat at his father’s desk, opening one drawer after another. He discovered notes on the Sand Martin and the Rufous-sided Towhee and the Isabel-line Wheatear and the Whiskered Tern. A professor in the University of Pennsylvania had written to ask about the distribution of the Upupidae Hoopoe in Britain. There was a bill from a firm of removals people, Messrs Hatchers Worldwide, and the final telephone account at Primrose Cottage, and the final electricity account, including the charge for disconnection. There were letters from solicitors and insurance people, and at the bottom of a drawer, tied together with string, there were letters of condolence.

  There were other letters, tied together also, old letters that his mother had written in 1954, and in a stained buff envelope there were some his father had written to her. They were full of love and promises, and references to the future. Stephen read bits of them and then replaced them.

  In another drawer, set aside from everything else, he found other letters that were full of love. They, too, referred to the future, to being at last together, and to happiness. There were fewer of them and they were shorter than his mother’s and none of them was dated beyond giving a day of the week. It’s hard to
wait, one protested. Nothing makes sense without you, said another. These, too, he left as he had found them.

  Light from the desk-lamp fell on his hands spread out on the blue blotting-paper, thin hands with thin fingers, only half the size they would become. His face in the gloom outside the glow of light was pale beneath his smooth black hair, his eyes intent yet empty of expression. He rose from the desk and turned on another light in the room. There was a book that had always been in Primrose Cottage, a thick book with a torn green dust-jacket. Fifty Famous Tragedies, it said on the jacket. He’d never seen his mother or his father reading it, but once he had opened it himself. He knew the kind of tragedies they were.

  All the people Timothy Gedge had spoken of were there: Freddie Bywaters and Edith Thompson, Mrs Fulham, the beautiful Mrs Maybrick, Christie and Haigh and Heath, George Joseph Smith. There was Irene Munro, who had improved her complexion with Icilma cream before being battered to death for her handbag on a beach. There was a girl called Constance Kent, who had confessed to the murder of her small brother, fifty years ago, in a house not far from Dynmouth. On August 2nd, 1951, 48-year-old Mrs Mabel Tattershaw was spoken to by the man next to her in the Roxy Cinema, Nottingham. ‘I am,’ her murderer later remarked, ‘quite proud of my achievement.’ Owen Lloyd, a nine-year-old boy, drowned a four-year-old friend. ‘I won’t do it again,’ he promised at his trial. A man called Wilson murdered a Mrs Henrichson because she refused to rent him a room. Charlie Peace complained about the quality of the bacon at his execution breakfast. A chicken farmer called Edmund James Thorne fed the flesh of his wife to his fowls. In Brighton in 1934 the torso of a woman was found in a plywood trunk, wrapped in brown paper and tied with blind cord. Her murderer was never discovered. In Earl’s Colne on January 20th, 1961, Linda Smith went out to buy a newspaper and was later found strangled eighteen miles away, in a field, by a hawthorn hedge. Her murderer was never discovered, either.

  Murder was committed in order to silence people, and out of jealousy and revenge and anger, and simply for its own sake. There was murder within marriage because a husband or a wife wanted life to be different and for one reason or another could find no other way to bring that about. There was murder for gain, and for the most trivial and pointless reasons, often for hardly any reason at all. Two adolescent girls in New Zealand had killed with a brick the mother of one of them just because they wanted to. A child of eight had killed for sweets. In Hull a man had poisoned his wife because she’d refused to sew buttons on to his clothes.

  Stephen turned the main light off and returned to his father’s desk. He sat in front of the white typewriter, listening to the ticking of the clock in the corner by the window. The fountain-pen in the wooden bowl was blue, a small slim pen that had been hers. He remembered her using it, writing Christmas cards with it, and shopping lists.

  In the room she seemed real. She felt quite close to him, as though her spectre might appear, but he didn’t feel afraid of that. He touched the fountain-pen and then held it in his hand. It seemed warm to him, as the handle of a spoon or a fork had often been, passed from her hand to his, after she’d mashed up something on a plate for him when he was younger.

  He tried to remember if his parents had quarrelled the holidays before she died, but couldn’t remember that they had. It had been a fine summer. His father had been busy writing about shore larks. They’d gone to see Somerset playing Essex, Virgin 70 not out.

  The more he thought about that summer the pleasanter it seemed. He remembered one Thursday morning walking with his mother from Primrose Cottage to a place called Blackedge Top, an old quarry on a hill. They’d gone to see another hill, which had been a Roman fort, covered in ferns now. He remembered having supper in the garden of Primrose Cottage, his parents seeming fond of one another, not quarrelling or even disagreeing. They’d sat there for hours, until nine o’clock at least, until the small garden became shadowy in the dusk. There’d been a smell of roses, and of coffee. There’d been pink wine, Rosé Anjou 1969 on the label, celebrating the completion of the first half of his father’s book on the shore lark. He’d had Ribena with ice in it himself, and he could remember now, quite distinctly, thinking how horrible it must be for Kate, not to have a father, nor ever to have an occasion like this.

  Yet all the time it must have been different. His father had wanted things to be different, as Edith Thompson had, in love with Freddie Bywaters, as Mrs Maybrick had, and Mrs Fulham. They had sat there that night, after he’d gone to bed, and their faces had changed. They had stopped smiling because it wasn’t necessary to pretend any more. They had sat there hating one another, quarrelling in bitter voices, not wanting to look at one another. As he thought about it, creating the scene as it must have been, his father shouted at her that she was useless and silly. His father was quite unlike himself. Nothing she ever did was any good, he said. The strawberry jam she’d made hadn’t set, she couldn’t even take a telephone message. It sounded stupid the way she went on about loving the sea. It was no good pretending, his father said, it was no good having birthday celebrations in the Queen Victoria Hotel just so Stephen wouldn’t know.

  He left the room and in his bed he wept with a violence he had never known before, spasm following spasm. It was as though she had died again, only it was worse, and he felt guilty that he hadn’t wept properly when she’d really died. He felt that if he had all this would somehow not have happened. He pressed his face into the pillow to conceal the sound of a sobbing he could not control. He wished he could destroy himself, as she had been destroyed. He wished he might die. He fell asleep still wishing that.

  He dreamed of the saintly Constance Kent cutting the throat of her baby brother in a quiet country house not far from Dynmouth. And of the beautiful Mrs Maybrick soaking the arsenic from fly-papers in order to poison her husband. And of Irene Munro improving her complexion with Icilma cream, and of the torso in the plywood trunk. His mother slept in a deck-chair, near a fuchsia hedge, her black hair like polished ebony in the sun. A bundle flapped in the wind, a rust-coloured headscarf, her rust-coloured coat. Screams came from the bundle as it fell, turning twice in the air against the grey-brown cliff-face. The sea washed over her, swirling the headscarf into foam that was crimson already. The flesh of her face was rigid: taut, icy flesh that no one would touch. The setters rushed towards the sea and then pulled up short, barking at the waves. ‘Come on, come on,’ he called, but they took no notice. The sun was setting, making the dogs pink, like the pink wine that had been there on the table.

  The setters ran away, sniffing the air excitedly. In the far distance they stopped, sniffing again, at a pink lump on the sand. It wasn’t her, it was Commander Abigail in his swimming-trunks. His lips were drawn back in a snarl of pain, his skinny white limbs were like a frozen chicken’s.

  ‘She’s over here,’ a voice shouted from the top of the cliff. He looked up. His father was pointing down at the rocks. The sea had gone out, his father shouted, but it hadn’t taken her with it because she hadn’t wanted to go. ‘She just wanted to die there,’ his father said, beginning to laugh. She had only herself to blame.

  And then Mr Blakey stood among his rose-beds with his shears dripping blood, and her head lay in the soil. Her body without it walked away towards the house, staggering from side to side, blood flowing from the stump that had been her neck.

  She had only herself to blame: she said that herself too, waking up in her deck-chair. She’d been silly, getting into an argument on the edge of a cliff and saying the wrong thing. But Stephen said it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter in the least if her strawberry jam didn’t set, no matter what his father said. In his dream he felt relief because she hadn’t died, because it had all been some other dream, because she was smiling in the sunshine.

  Kate sat by the summer-house with the setters, hugging them and whispering to them, seeming small beside them. She brushed them with a brush that was kept in the summer-house, making them stand still, with their heads up.
She wished people were like dogs, she said to them, and they looked at her knowledgeably with their big, drooping eyes. She sat between them on the steps of the summer-house, their chins on her knees, warmed by the heat of their bodies. It would be nice to breed dogs, she thought, and imagined setters running all over the garden, like the dalmatians in The One Hundred and One Dalmatians. She imagined living alone in Sea House, being quite old. She imagined puppies in the hall and a row of kennels at the side of the house, and people ringing the doorbell because they wanted to buy one of a litter. She would never have married because she couldn’t marry Stephen. She might even be like Miss Lavant. People would tell other people the story of the woman in Sea House who lived alone with dogs. They’d tell of a tragedy on the cliffs, a death that wasn’t what it had seemed to be. You couldn’t blame Stephen for hating Dynmouth, people would say, for going away from it and all its horrible reminders.

  But later, in a different mood, she knocked again on his door. The future she’d visualized was silly, puppies and a row of kennels and being alone. It was probably acceptable enough. But it wasn’t a happy ending.

  She could hear him in the room, yet he didn’t answer. Something dropped to the floor, there was a rattle of paper. He was causing these noises deliberately, so that she’d know he was there, so that she’d know he didn’t want to talk to her. His face had become cold and hard, like a face that could not smile and never had.

  She knocked again, but still he didn’t answer.

  Stephen wished she wasn’t always there. He wished she wasn’t forever tapping on the door of the room that was meant to be his, calling out to him when he didn’t answer. She was there every morning as soon as he left the room, on the stairs or in the hall. A sloppy look kept coming into her face. She was sorry for him.

  ‘Well, what are you two going to do today?’ Mrs Blakey had a way of saying, annoying Stephen because of the implication that everything they did had to be done together. She said it in the kitchen, on the Wednesday of that week, looking round from the Aga where she was frying bacon. She put the bacon on to two warmed plates and placed the plates in front of them. She asked again what they were going to do.