The Children Of Dynmouth

  ‘Shall we play Monopoly?’ Kate suggested, as though to please him.

  ‘Oh, now, wouldn’t you go outside?’ Mrs Blakey cried. ‘Go on one of your tramps, why don’t you? Make yourself sandwiches, dears.’

  ‘Shall we?’ Kate asked, looking at him.

  He wanted to say that she should make sandwiches for herself and go on her own for what Mrs Blakey called a tramp. There was nothing stopping her. If she was stupid enough not to realize that Timothy Gedge would be waiting for her it wasn’t anyone’s business except hers. He returned her look, not saying all that. He wished he could be alone, he tried to say with his own look.

  ‘There’s bananas there for sandwiches, see.’ Mrs Blakey was already bustling about, taking butter from the fridge and putting it on the edge of the Aga to soften, taking a sliced loaf from the bread-bin. ‘Chicken-and-ham paste, Stephen? Liver-and-bacon? Sardine? Tomato? Apricot jam?’

  He wanted to pick up something from the breakfast table and throw it on to the floor, the plate from which Mr Blakey had eaten his fry, the apricot jam, the tea-pot, the bundle of knives and forks that Kate had collected and put on top of the pile of green cereal bowls. Why did she collect the knives and forks and clear the table? She didn’t want to, nobody in their senses would want to: she did it because it was something her mother usually did. The feeling of anger increased, a choking in his throat. She’d stopped looking at him. She carried the cereal bowls and the knives and forks to the sink. She was about to wash them.

  ‘No, leave them, dear,’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘You make your sandwiches. And take apples. Granny Smiths in the cold room, Stephen.’

  ‘I don’t think Stephen wants to go out.’

  ‘Oh, Stephie, why ever not?’ Mrs Blakey cried.

  He left the kitchen without replying. He passed through the green-linoleumed passage and into the hall. There was a smell of polish. There were daffodils in bowls. The fire hadn’t been lit yet, but soon it would be. The flames would flicker on the glass of the brass-framed pictures, enlivening the theatrical characters, making everything cosy.

  He went to his bedroom and closed the door. He looked to see if there was a key in the lock, knowing there wasn’t because he’d looked before.

  ‘Essoldo Cinema, good morning, madam,’ a woman’s voice said.

  ‘Good morning,’ Mrs Blakey said into the telephone. ‘Who’s that, please?’

  ‘Essoldo box-office here. We’d like to speak to the kids, madam.’

  ‘Is that Timothy Gedge?’

  ‘Essoldo Cinema, madam. The kids was anxious about forthcoming attractions. Only we have a message to ring –’

  ‘You’ve a message to ring nowhere. D’you think I’m stupid or something? What do you want with them?’

  ‘Forthcoming attractions, as requested yesterday a.m. Could you get hold of the kids, please? Only there’s a queue forming.’

  Mrs Blakey replaced the receiver. In the hall of Sea House she stood by the telephone, looking at it. She felt quite shaky. It had happened before, last night and yesterday morning. She hadn’t guessed then that the woman’s voice was Timothy Gedge’s. She’d gone and found the children and they’d refused to come to the telephone, which had surprised her. The calls had come from a call-box because there’d been the call-box signal before the money was put in. Yet yesterday it hadn’t occurred to her that there was anything wrong with such a sound coming from the Essoldo Cinema box-office.

  As she stood in the hall, the recollection of the high-pitched voice seemed almost eerie to Mrs Blakey; so did the fact that she hadn’t bothered to think about the call-box signal. It was all absurd. It was absurd that she hadn’t guessed straightaway, and absurd that he should be standing in a telephone booth somewhere, talking about a queue forming. But the absurdity had something else woven through it, some sort of reality, sense of a kind. Because it was Timothy Gedge, with his loitering and his telephoning, who had caused the silence in the house. She’d sensed something when he’d first stood in the garden with the children; she’d sensed it when she’d opened the hall door to him.

  ‘That boy’d give you the creeps,’ she said, still shaky in the glass-house where her husband was working.

  Mr Blakey raised his head from his seed-boxes. With soil-caked fingers he drew a handkerchief from a pocket and blew his nose. He did not say that a week ago the boy had been standing under the monkey-puzzle in the middle of the night, looking up at the windows of the house. It would have alarmed her if he had. She suffered slightly from blood pressure: there was no point in aggravating that. He said some kind of game was probably going on between the children and Timothy Gedge. ‘It’ll be nothing,’ he said. ‘Children have their ways.’

  ‘They’re not playing no game,’ Mrs Blakey said, her grammar lapsing as it did when she was distressed. She wanted to remain in the earthy warmth of the glass-house, watching him pricking out seedlings. She didn’t want to go back to the lies Kate told whenever she asked her what the matter was, to the telephone ringing and the queer, high-pitched voice insisting it was the box-office of the Essoldo Cinema.

  ‘Essoldo Cinema, good morning,’ it said again, as soon as she picked up the receiver in the hall.

  Stephen walked about his room, thinking about the house he was in, about the garden and the brick wall that surrounded it, and the white iron gate in the archway, and the setters and the summer-house. He hated all of it. He hated the room he’d been given as his own, with the picture of Tony Greig that someone had taken from his room in Primrose Cottage and pinned up on the wall, and the pictures of Greg Chappell, who’d once played for Somerset, and Brian Close. He hated the kitchen and the elegantly curving staircase and the Egyptian rugs on the stone floor of the hall. He hated the big drawing-room, with its French windows. He wanted the days to pass so that he could be back at Ravenswood School, safe in the dining-hall and his classroom. He wanted to be in bed in his dormitory, in the bed between Appleby’s and Jordan’s.

  ‘We can’t stay in for ever, Stephen. We can’t not ever go down to the beach again, or to the spinney.’

  Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra, he read, was completed in 1613 and is one of the most important monuments of its kind in India.

  ‘You go down. You do what you like.’ He spoke without taking his eyes from the print. The Mausoleum combines Hindu and Moslem art forms in a remarkable manner, he read, lying on his bed.

  The evening before, the carrier-bag had been at the foot of the monkey-puzzle, propped up against the trunk, facing the house. It had been placed there when Mr Blakey had finished in the garden. Stephen had seen it from the window of his room, its red, white and blue vivid in the twilight.

  ‘If we told the Blakeys,’ Kate began to say, ‘if we just said –’

  ‘Are you insane or something?’ He was shouting, suddenly glaring at her. His face was flushed. He looked as though he loathed her. ‘Why d’you keep saying it?’

  ‘Because we can’t just stay here. Because it’s silly to stay locked up in a house just because you’re afraid of someone.’ She was angry herself. She jerked her chin up. She glared back at him.

  ‘I’m not afraid of him,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you are. He’s a horrible person –’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop saying he’s a horrible person!’

  ‘I’ll say it if I like, Stephen.’

  ‘Well, don’t say it here. This is my room. It’s meant to be private.’

  ‘There’s no need to quarrel.’

  ‘What’s it like for me, d’you think? Locked up in a house –’

  ‘You’re not locked up. There’s no need to be locked up.’

  ‘Locked up in a house with people I don’t even like.’

  ‘You do like us, Stephen.’

  ‘I don’t like you and I don’t like your mother. Everything was perfectly all right until your mother came along.’

  ‘She didn’t come along. My mother was there all the time –’

  ‘She c
ame along and the trouble started. I don’t want to talk about it to you.’

  ‘We have to talk about it, Stephen. We can’t just leave it there, hanging there.’

  ‘Nothing’s hanging there. I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘You can’t just not talk to me.’

  ‘I can do what I bloody like. This is my room. I’m reading a book in it.’

  ‘You’re not reading a book. You’re lying there pretending.’

  ‘I am reading a book. Sikandra is five miles from Agra if you want to know. The entrance to Akbar’s tomb is of red sandstone with marble decorations.’

  ‘Oh, Stephen!’

  ‘I want to be left alone. I don’t like you. I don’t like the way you’re so bloody silly.’

  She began to say something else and then changed her mind. She said eventually:

  ‘Don’t let it upset you.’

  ‘Nothing’s upsetting me.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean and I don’t want to. We don’t have to do everything together. I’m sick of Mrs Blakey talking about Granny Smiths. I’m sick of everything.’

  ‘You don’t have to hate me.’

  ‘I’ll hate you if I want to.’

  ‘But you don’t and I don’t hate you –’

  ‘I don’t mind if you hate me.’

  She looked at him lying on his bed, pretending to read. She wanted to cry and she imagined the tears flowing down her cheeks and dripping on to her jersey and how he’d probably say that she should go somewhere else to cry. She felt silly standing there. She wished she was grown-up, brisk and able to cope.

  ‘You do mind if I hate you,’ she said.

  He went on pretending to read and then he suddenly looked up and stared at her, examining her. His face was cold, that same unsmiling face, pinched and thin, his dark eyes cruel, as if he dared not let them be anything else.

  ‘You’re always going red. You go red for the least little thing. You’ll be fat like Mrs Blakey.’

  ‘I can’t help going red –’

  ‘You’re ugly, even when you’re not red you’re ugly. You’re unattractive. It’s just silly to think you’re going to grow up and be pretty.’

  ‘I don’t think that.’

  ‘You said so. You said you wanted to be pretty. I don’t care if you want to be pretty. I don’t know why you tell me.’

  ‘I said I’d like to be. It’s not the same –’

  ‘Of course it’s the same. If you’d like to be it means you want to be. It’s stupid to say it doesn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘Why don’t you say what you mean then?’

  ‘I do say what I mean,’ she cried with sudden anger. ‘Why are you being so horrible to me? Why d’you keep away from me? Why can’t you even speak to me?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘You’re boring.’

  He returned to his encyclopedia. She had to pause before she could speak because there were tears behind her eyes, her voice would be clogged with them. Blinking, she fought them back, aware of their actual withdrawal. It was horrible to be called boring. She said:

  ‘I’m going down to the beach.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘Stephen –’

  ‘I don’t care where you’re going.’

  She went away, and after a minute or two he got up from his bed and went to the window. She was in the garden with the setters on their leads. He watched while she approached the gate in the wall, while she went through it and then passed out of sight. Ten minutes later she appeared on the distant seashore. As he watched her, he suddenly thought how childish it had been to imagine you could play number three for Somerset just because you’d once made seventeen in an over off the indifferent bowling of Philpott, A. J.

  He took the carrier-bag from a drawer. He opened the door and paused for a moment, listening for sounds of Mrs Blakey. He crossed the landing and mounted the narrow stairs to the attics. When he opened the faded green trunk the wedding-dress was there, at the bottom, beneath clothes that were familiar to him.

  On the seashore Kate threw two balls for the dogs, the red one and the blue one. She kept wanting to cry, as she had with Stephen, as she had for so much of the time since Timothy Gedge had come into their lives. The dogs bounded about her, obstreperously wagging their tails. Again she felt – and more vehemently now than she had felt it before – that Timothy Gedge was possessed.

  ‘I missed seeing you,’ he said, coming from nowhere.

  She told him then, unable to help herself: he was possessed by devils. He revelled in the idea of murder, he wanted to glorify the violence of murder in a marquee at the Easter Fête. He wanted people to applaud because harmless women had been killed. It would give him pleasure to make jokes that weren’t funny while he was dressed up in the wedding-dress of a woman he claimed had been murdered also. He went to funerals because he liked to think of people being dead in coffins. There was nothing about him that wasn’t unpleasant.

  ‘Devils?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know the unhappiness you cause.’

  He shook his head. He didn’t smile, as she’d expected he might. He said he only told the truth. He followed her when she moved towards the cliffs and began to climb up the path that curved and twisted on the cliff-face. She asked him not to follow her, but he took no notice. He said:

  ‘At half past eleven on a Thursday morning I had the idea in Tussaud’s.’

  He was talking nonsense. He was mocking and pretending, even though he wasn’t grinning any more. His act with the brides in the bath was an excuse. His wanting the wedding-dress was an excuse for saying all the things he’d said. Nothing was as it appeared to be with him.

  ‘Devils?’ he said again. ‘D’you think I have devils, Kate?’

  She didn’t reply. The setters walked sedately on the cliff-path, beside the eleventh green. Ahead of them the weathered brick of the garden wall, touched with Virginia creeper, looked warm in the morning sun.

  ‘Devils,’ he murmured, as if the sound of the word pleased him. He’d thought he’d die himself, he said when they came to the white iron gate, he’d thought he’d die when he’d heard the woman’s scream, sharp as a blade above the whine of the wind and the rain. Kids should be protected from stuff like that, he said. You read it in the papers: it could ruin you for life, witnessing a murder.

  9

  The Holy Week that had passed so harshly for the children in Sea House had passed less fearfully in Dynmouth itself. The saints’ days had been noted by Quentin Featherston, St Walter’s, St Hugh’s, St Bademus’s. St Leo the Great, that year, claimed Maundy Thursday.

  The town has changed since Easter last year, Miss Lavant wrote in her diary, but only in small little ways, not worth recording. Out walking this morning I noticed Dr Greenslade on his rounds. Mrs Slewy has been in trouble for taking the cancer-box from the counter in Mock’s.

  The orphans from the Down Manor Orphanage progressed each day of that week in a crocodile from Down Manor to the beach. In pairs, the nuns from the convent walked on the promnade. Old Ape received his Thursday hand-out at the rectory. The Dynmouth Hards rampaged by night, wives were swapped on the Leaflands Estate, old Miss Trimm was buried. A niece of Miss Vine’s bought her a new budgerigar.

  In the house which their son had accused them of boringly christening Sweetlea the Dasses continued the lives which he’d said were boring also. Mrs Dass read two further novels by Dennis Wheatley, and was unaware of the statements made to her husband by Timothy Gedge. Her husband lived uneasily with the statements. It upset him, as much as it would have upset his wife, to know that the boy had eavesdropped on this most intimate family moment. The fact gnawed at him, haunting him while he cleaned out the sitting-room fire or made tea or used the Electrolux. It was accompanied by an image: Nevil
standing in the dining-room and saying what he had said, the boy peeping and listening. Time, by passing, had soothed some of the harshness of the occasion. Yet for no apparent purpose the painfully healing wound had been maliciously opened.

  But there was a purpose and he was reminded of it, a purpose which seemed to Mr Dass to be so petty that he hadn’t at first been able to take it seriously. Then, while shopping in Fore Street one morning, he was approached by Timothy Gedge, who smiled at him as though nothing untoward had occurred between them and asked if he had come to a decision about donating the curtains. The boy walked beside him from the Post Office to Lipton’s, talking about the secret that was safe between them, pursuing him into the shop itself. ‘My God !’ Mr Dass cried, screwing his eyes up as though seeking to peer into the boy’s brain. He had a wire basket in his left hand, in which he had placed two tins of pineapple cubes. The bowl of his pipe hung from the top pocket of his tweed jacket. ‘All right then, Mr Dass?’ the boy said, going away at last.

  Mr Dass couldn’t understand how a set of curtains for the stage at the Easter Fête could have driven a boy to such ends. Yet while his wife slept one afternoon he found himself looking in cardboard boxes in the attic for blackout curtains which he remembered from the War. ‘Yes, I’ve found some,’ he said the next morning, approached again by the boy, as he’d known he would be. He’d been down to the coke-cellar beneath the church, where the stage was stored, and with the assistance of Mr Peniket he’d tried the curtains for size. He’d left them in the Courtesy Cleaners: they’d be ready in time for Easter Saturday.

  ‘You didn’t mind me mentioning them, Mr Dass?’ the boy said, smiling at him. Mr Dass did not reply, for there was nothing he felt he might have said. In the eyes of this boy he and his wife were probably ridiculous, she lying on a sun-chair, he old and out of touch with the world. They probably seemed as ridiculous to the boy as they’d seemed boring to Nevil, who had been right to say they had harmed him with their indulgence and from whom they would willingly now have asked forgiveness. But they had done no harm to Timothy Gedge, and if they seemed ridiculous they couldn’t really help it. Unable to help it either, Mr Dass ended by hating the boy.