‘Only there’s not long till the Easter Fête, sir.’
To Mr Dass’s horror, the boy sat down. He unzipped his damp yellow jacket, settling himself on the sofa.
‘I was saying to Mr Feather, Ring’s is getting ready again. They’ll be opening up Easter Saturday.’
‘Yes, they will.’
‘Same day as the Easter Fête, Mr Dass.’
‘Yes.’
‘Only I was saying to Mr Feather they’ll take the crowds.’ Mr Dass shook his head. The crowds went from one attraction to the other, he explained. The opening of Ring’s Amusements on Easter Saturday brought people from outside Dynmouth: the Easter Fête actually benefited from the coincidence.
‘I wouldn’t agree, sir,’ Timothy said.
Mr Dass didn’t reply.
‘It’s bad weather, sir.’
Mr Dass said it was, and then asked if he could be of help in any way.
‘What’s he want?’ Mrs Dass suddenly demanded, opening her eyes.
‘Afternoon, Mrs Dass,’ Timothy said. Funny the way they wouldn’t give you a cup of tea. Funny the man standing there in his shirtsleeves. He smiled at Mrs Dass. ‘We were on about the Spot the Talent comp,’ he said.
She smiled back at the boy. He began to talk about a sewing-machine.
‘Sewing-machine?’ she said.
‘For making curtains, Mrs Dass. Only the Youth Centre curtains got burnt in December. New curtains are required is what I’m saying.’
‘What’s he mean?’ she asked her husband.
‘The Youth Centre curtains are apparently unavailable for the Easter Fête, dear. I don’t know why he’s come to us about it.’
Mr Dass lit his pipe. He had let the boy in because the boy had said he had an urgent message. So far no message had been delivered.
‘I’m afraid my wife is not in a position to make curtains,’ he said.
‘We’ll have to buy some then, Mr Dass. You can’t have a stage without curtains on it.’
‘Oh, I imagine we’ll manage somehow.’
‘I definitely need curtains for my act, sir.’
‘Mrs Dass will not be making curtains.’ A note of asperity had entered Mr Dass’s voice. As the manager of the Dynmouth branch of Lloyd’s Bank he had regularly had occasion to call on this resolute tone when rejecting pleas for credit facilities. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he added, taking his pipe from his mouth and pressing the smouldering tobacco with a thumb, ‘we are extremely busy this afternoon.’
‘I’m worried about the curtains, sir.’
‘That’s really Mrs Featherston’s pigeon, you know.’
‘Mr Feather said you’d supply new curtains, sir.’
‘Mr Featherston? Oh, I’m sure you’re quite wrong, you know.’
‘He said you’d definitely donate them, sir.’
‘Donate curtains? Now, look here –’
‘I think it’s a kind of joke,’ Mrs Dass said. She smiled weakly at Timothy Gedge. ‘We’re not good on jokes, I’m afraid.’
Mr Dass moved from the position he’d taken up by the fire. He leant over Timothy on the sofa. He spoke in a whisper, explaining that his wife liked to rest in the afternoons. It embarrassed him having to say all this to a schoolboy, but he felt he had no option. ‘I’ll see you out,’ he said.
‘All right is she?’ Timothy asked again, not that he cared: it was his opinion that Mrs Dass was a load of rubbish the way she affected herself, lying there like a dead white slug when there was nothing the matter with her.
Mr Dass opened the hall door of Sweetlea and waited while Timothy zipped up his jacket again.
‘You didn’t mind me asking about her, sir? Only she looked a bit white in the face.’
‘My wife’s not strong.’
‘She misses what’s-his-name?’
‘If you mean our son, yes, she does.’
‘He hasn’t been back in a long time, Mr Dass.’
‘No. Good-bye now.’
Timothy nodded, not leaving the house. He’d known their son well, he said. He enquired about the work he was doing now and Mr Dass was vague in his reply, having no wish to discuss his son with a stranger, especially since his son had been at the centre of a domestic tragedy. The Dasses had two daughters, both of them now married and living in London. Their son, Nevil, born when Mrs Dass was forty-two, had taken them by surprise and as a result had been indulged in childhood, a state of affairs that the Dasses now bitterly regretted. Three years ago, when Nevil was nineteen, he had quite out of the blue turned most harshly on both of them and had not been back to Dynmouth since. He’d been particularly the apple of his mother’s eye: his rejection of her had gradually brought about her invalid state. The Dynmouth doctors had pronounced her condition to be a nervous one, but it was no less real for being that, as her husband in his affection for her realized. The whole unfortunate matter was never mentioned now, not even within the family, not even when the two daughters came at Christmas with their children and husbands. Every year a place was laid for Nevil on this festive occasion, a gesture more than anything else.
‘He was very fond of the Queen Victoria Hotel, sir. I’ll always remember him going in and coming out, sir.’
‘Yes, well –’
‘He’d always have the time of day for you.’
‘Look, I’d rather not discuss my son. If there’s anything else –’
‘I need special stuff with lights for the act I’ve got, Mr Dass. I need the stage in darkness and then the lights coming on. I need that four times, Mr Dass, the darkness and the light: I’ll give you the tip by winking. I need the curtains drawn over twice. That’s why I’m worried about them.’
‘Yes, well, I’m sure we can manage something.’
‘You’re out with a blonde, Mr Dass, you see the wife coming?’
Mr Dass frowned, imagining he had heard incorrectly. It was cold, standing in the hall with the door open. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.
‘What d’you do when you see the wife coming, sir?’
‘Now, look here –’
‘The four-minute mile, sir!’
Mr Dass said he had things to do. He said he’d be grateful if Timothy Gedge left his house.
‘I do jobs for the Abigails, Mr Dass, I’ll be round there tonight. If there’s anything you had here –’
‘It’s quite all right, thank you.’
‘I do the surrounds for Mrs Abigail, and stuff in the garden for the Commander. I’d clean your boots for you, sir. Mrs Dass’s as well.’
‘We don’t need help in the house. I really must ask you to go now.’
‘You didn’t mind me asking you? I’ll pop in again when I’m passing, sir. I’ll have a word with Mr Feather about the curtains.’
‘There’s no need to call here again,’ Mr Dass said quickly. ‘About curtains or anything else.’
‘I’m really looking forward to the Spot the Talent, sir.’
The door banged behind him. He walked down the short tiled path, leaving the garden gate open. It was too soon to go to the Abigails’. He wasn’t due at the Abigails’ bungalow in High Park Avenue until six o’clock, not that it mattered being on the early side, but it was only five past four now. He thought of going down to the Youth Centre, but all there’d be at the Youth Centre would be people playing ping-pong and smoking and talking about sex.
Slowly he walked through Dynmouth again, examining the goods in the shop windows, watching golf being played on various television sets. He bought a tube of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums. He thought about the act he’d devised for the Spot the Talent competition. He began to walk towards Cornerways, planning to dress himself up in his sister’s clothes.
At Dynmouth Comprehensive Timothy Gedge found no subject interesting. Questioned some years ago by the headmaster, a Mr Stringer, he had confessed to this and Mr Stringer had stirred his coffee and said it was a bad thing. He’d asked Timothy what he found interesting outside the Comprehensive and Timothy had said tel
evision shows. Prompted further by Mr Stringer, he’d confessed that as soon as he walked into the empty flat on his return from school he turned on the television and was always pleased to watch whatever there was. Sitting in a room with the curtains drawn, he delighted in hospital dramas and life at the Crossroads Motel and horse-racing and cookery demonstrations. In the holidays there were the morning programmes as well: Bagpuss, Camp Runamuck, Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan, Funky Phantom, Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), Junior Police Five, Car Body Maintenance, Solids, Liquids and Gases, Play a Tune with Ulf Goran, Sheep Production. Mr Stringer said it was a bad thing to watch so much television. ‘I suppose you’ll go into the sandpaper factory?’ he’d suggested and Timothy had replied that it seemed the best bet. On the school notice-board a sign permanently requested recruits for a variety of departments in the sandpaper factory. He’d been eleven or twelve when he’d first assumed that that was where his future lay.
But then, not long after this conversation with Mr Stringer, an extraordinary thing happened. A student teacher called O’Hennessy arrived at the Comprehensive and talked to his pupils about a void when he was scheduled to be teaching them English. ‘The void can be filled,’ he said.
Nobody paid much attention to O’Hennessy, who liked to be known by his Christian name, which was Brehon. Nobody understood a word he was talking about. ‘The landscape is the void,’ he said. ‘Escape from the drear landscape. Fill the void with beauty.’ All during his English classes Brehon O’Hennessy talked about the void, and the drear landscape, and beauty. In every kid, he pronounced, looking from one face to another, there was an avenue to a fuller life. He had a short tangled beard and tangled black hair. He had a way of gesturing in the air with his right hand, towards the windows of the classroom. ‘There,’ he said when he did this. ‘Out there. The souls of the adult people have shrivelled away: they are as last year’s rhubarb walking the streets. Only the void is left. Get up in the morning, take food, go to work, take food, work, go home, take food, look at the television, go to bed, have sex, go to sleep, get up.’ Now and again during his lessons he smoked cigarettes containing the drug cannabis and didn’t mind if his pupils smoked also, cannabis or tobacco, who could care? ‘Your soul is your property,’ he said.
Timothy Gedge, like all the others, had considered O’Hennessy to be touched in the head, but then O’Hennessy said something that made him less certain about that. Everyone was good at something, he said, nobody was without talent: it was a question of discovering yourself. O’Hennessy was at the Comprehensive for only half a term, and was then replaced by Miss Wilkinson.
It seemed to Timothy that he was good at nothing, but he also was increasingly beginning to wonder if he wished to spend a lifetime making sandpaper. He thought about himself, as Brehon O’Hennessy had said he should. He closed his eyes and saw himself, again following Brehon O’Hennessy’s injunction. He saw himself as an adult, getting up in the morning and taking food, and then reporting to the cutting room of the sandpaper factory. Seeking to discover an absorbing interest, which might even become an avenue to a fuller life, he bought a model-aeroplane kit, but unfortunately he found the construction work difficult. The balsa wood kept splitting and the recommended glue didn’t seem to stick the pieces together properly. He lost some of them, and after a couple of days he gave the whole thing up. It was a great disappointment to him. He’d imagined flying the clever little plane on the beach, getting the engine going and showing people how it was done. He’d imagined making other aircraft, building up quite a collection of them, using dope like it said in the instructions, covering the wings with tissue paper. It would all have taken hours, sitting contentedly in the kitchen with the radio on while his mother and sister were out in the evenings, as they generally were. But it was not to be.
Then, on the afternoon of December 4th last, something else happened: Miss Wilkinson ordered that the two laundry baskets containing the school’s dressing-up clothes should be carried into the classroom and she made the whole of 3A dress up so that they could enact scenes from history. She called it a game. ‘The game of charades,’ she said. ‘Charrada. From the Spanish, the chatter of the clown.’ She divided 3A into five groups and gave each an historical incident to act. The others had to guess what it was. Nobody had listened when she’d said that a word came from the Spanish and meant the chatter of a clown; within five minutes the classroom was a bedlam. The eight children in Timothy Gedge’s group laughed uproariously when he dressed up as Queen Elizabeth I, in a red wig and a garment that had a lank white ruff at its neck. Timothy laughed himself, seeing in a mirror how peculiar he looked, with a pair of tights stuffed into the dress to give him a bosom. He enjoyed laughing at himself and being laughed at. He enjoyed the feel of the wig on his head and the different feeling the long voluminous dress gave him, turning him into another person.
It was the only occasion he had ever enjoyed at Dynmouth Comprehensive and it was crowned by his discovery that without any difficulty whatsoever he could adopt a falsetto voice. That night he’d lain awake in bed, imagining a future that was different in every way from a future in the sandpaper factory. ‘Charrada,’ Miss Wilkinson repeated in a dream. ‘The chatter of the clown.’
He’d felt aimless in his adolescence before that. After he’d failed with the model-aeroplane kit he’d taken to following people about just to see where they were going, and looking through the windows of people’s houses. He’d found himself regularly attending funerals because for some reason there was enjoyment of a kind to be derived from standing in the graveyard of the church of St Simon and St Jude or the graveyard of the Baptist, Methodist or Catholic churches, while solemn words were said and mourners paid respects. He continued to follow people about and to look through windows and to attend funerals, but he had also determined to enter the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête with a comic act and he now spent a considerable amount of his spare time trying to work out what it should be. He instinctively felt that somehow it should incorporate the notion of death, that whatever charrada he devised should be of a macabre nature.
In bed at night he thought about this, and continued to do so during geography lessons and tedious mathematics lessons, staring ahead of him in a manner that was complained of as vacant. He would smile when he was insulted in this way and for a moment would pay attention to a droning voice retailing information about the distribution of herring-beds around the shores of the British Isles or incomprehensibly speaking French. He would then revert to his more personal riddle of how to reconcile death and comedy in a theatrical act. He wondered about presenting himself as a female mourner, in a black dress down to his feet and a veiled black hat, with cheekily relevant chatter. But somehow that didn’t seem complete, or even right. Then, a month ago, Mr Stringer had taken forty pupils to London and had included in the itinerary a visit to Madame Tussaud’s. At half past eleven that morning Timothy Gedge had found the solution he was looking for: he decided to base his comic act on the deaths of Miss Munday, Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty, the Brides in the Bath, the victims of George Joseph Smith. All the way back to Dynmouth on the coach he’d imagined the act. To applause and laughter in the marquee at the Easter Fête, he rose from an old tin bath while the limelight settled on the wedding-dress he wore and his chatter began. He’d never in his life seen Benny Hill, or anyone else, attempting an act in a long white wedding-dress, impersonating three deceased women. It made him chortle so much in the coach that Mr Stringer asked him if he was going to be sick.
The rain had increased by the time he reached Cornerways. It dripped from his face and hair. He could feel areas of damp on his back and his stomach. His legs and arms were drenched. In the flat he removed some of the wet clothes in order to practise his act. He didn’t turn the television on because he liked the flat to be quiet when he was practising.
In his sister’s bedroom he eased himself into a pair of black tights. A torn toenail caught in the fine mesh of the material, creat
ing an immediate hole. The same thing had happened once before and then he’d felt something else going as soon as he sat down. Rose-Ann had gone on about the damage for quite some time and had eventually taken the tights back to the shop, where she’d been received with hostility.
He regarded himself in the long Woolworth’s mirror that Rose-Ann’s boyfriend Len had fixed up for her on the inside of her cupboard door. He still wore his own yellow T-shirt; the tights were taut on his calves and thighs. The hole his toenail had caused was round the back somewhere, which was a relief because Rose-Ann mightn’t even notice it. He picked up a flowered brassiere and held it for a moment against his chest, examining the effect in the mirror. He had perfected his own method with his sister’s brassieres, employing two rubber bands to bridge the gap at the back.
He took off his shirt, selected a pair of Rose-Ann’s ankle socks, knotted the rubber bands and attached them securely to the brassiere’s hooks. He then slipped the garment over his head, wriggled his way into it, and stuffed an ankle sock into each cup. He put on a dress that was too big for Rose-Ann, which had been given to her by a friend. It wasn’t too big for him. It was wine-coloured, with small black buttons.
He left his sister’s bedroom and crossed the small landing to his room. He stood on a chair and lifted from the top of a cupboard a small cardboard suitcase in which he kept his private possessions. The suitcase itself, reclaimed from the beach, was badly damaged. The brown cardboard was torn here and there, string replaced its handle and only one of its hinges was intact. He opened it on his bed and glanced suspiciously over its contents, as though fearing theft. He kept his money in the suitcase, in an envelope: twenty-nine pounds and fourpence. On his visits to the Abigails’ bungalow he’d managed to appropriate some of this, and he’d also managed to filch coins of low denomination from his mother’s handbag. Once he’d picked up a purse which he’d noticed an elderly woman dropping in the street and which turned out to contain six pounds and fifty-nine pence. Rose-Ann had left her wage packet on the dresser one Friday evening and when she found it was missing had assumed she’d lost it on the way home from the filling station.