As well as this money, there was a gas-burner in the suitcase – a small smoke-blackened apparatus and a blue cylinder marked ‘Gaz’ – both of which he’d picked up on the beach when the people who owned them were in the sea. There was a glass horse, in blue and green, which Rose-Ann had been given by Len on her twenty-first birthday, and a wooden money-box in the shape of a mug which, strictly speaking, was the property of his mother. Cuss-box, it said in pokerwork, with a rhyme that began: Cussin’ ain’t the nicest thing, friends for you it shore don’t bring … There was a vest and a knife and fork in the suitcase, the property of Mrs Abigail, and a tin box that had once contained lozenges for the relief of throat catarrh and now contained a cameo brooch of Mrs Abigail’s, as well as an imitation pearl necklace of hers and an imitation pearl ring. There was a plastic hand, part of a shop-window model, which he’d found in a rubbish-bin attached to one of the promenade lamp-posts, and the upper section of a set of dentures, which he’d removed from a teacup on the beach while a man was in the sea. There was a narrow, paper-backed volume entitled 1000 Jokes for Kids of All Ages, legitimately obtained from W. H. Smith’s in Fore Street. There was his wig, removed from one of the school dressing-up baskets, and his make-up, from the same source: rouge, powder, cold-cream, lipstick and eye-shadow. The ersatz hair of the wig was orange-coloured and tightly curled: it was the one he had worn when he’d dressed up for Miss Wilkinson’s charade, to lend verisimilitude to his portrayal of Elizabeth I.
When he’d settled this wig on his head and transformed his face with make-up, he walked about the silent flat, unfortunately having to wear his own shoes since his feet were too large for his sister’s. He walked from his bedroom to the kitchen and then into Rose-Ann’s room again, into his mother’s and the bathroom, and into the room where the television set was, which Rose-Ann and his mother called the lounge. He walked with the short, quick step he’d seen Benny Hill employ when dressed up as a woman for his television show.
Sitting down at the kitchen table, which still had breakfast dishes on it, he opened 1000 Jokes for Kids of All Ages. He read through the jokes he’d underlined in ballpoint pen, closing his eyes after an initial prompting to see if he could remember them. He laughed as he repeated them in his falsetto voice, jokes about survivors on desert islands, mothers-in-law, drunks, lunatics, short-sighted men, women in doctors’ surgeries. ‘Well, have a plum,’ he said in his falsetto. ‘If you swallow it whole you’ll put on a stone.’ His mother wouldn’t be back from Cha-Cha Fashions until six. Rose-Ann worked late on the pumps on a Wednesday. Fourteen years ago his father had driven from Dynmouth with a lorryload of tiles and hadn’t ever returned.
He had become used to the empty flat and to looking after himself. Even when he first went to the primary school, when he was five, he would come back and let himself into the flat and wait until Rose-Ann returned from the Comprehensive and his mother from work. Before that he’d spent a lot of time with an aunt, a sister of his mother’s who was a dressmaker, who’d since moved to Badstoneleigh. He hadn’t cared for this woman. One of his earliest memories was not caring for having to sit in a corner of her work-room while she stitched or cut. All day long she had the radio going and when her husband came in from the sandpaper factory for his midday meal he’d say, always the same: ‘Good Lord, is that boy here again?’ It was particularly tedious having to sit in the room for another hour when his mother came to collect him, listening to the two of them talking. At all other times his mother was in a hurry, hurrying from the flat in the mornings, hurrying out again in the evenings for a break in the Artilleryman’s Friend or to Bingo. Once when he’d been waiting for her and his aunt to stop talking he’d broken a plate. He’d sat on it, pretending he didn’t notice it on the sofa, a plate that his aunt’s cat Blackie had had its dinner off. He’d been three and a half at the time, and he could still remember the agreeable sensation of the plate giving way beneath his weight. They’d both been furious with him.
From time to time, when he was younger, his mother used to say that it was all his father’s fault. If his father hadn’t cleared off she wouldn’t have had to go out to work and everything would have been different. At other times she said she was glad he’d cleared off. ‘Shocking, the fights they had,’ Rose-Ann used to say. ‘Horrible he was.’ But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember a single thing about this man. When he was at primary school and Rose-Ann was still at the Comprehensive he’d often asked her because it was something to talk about in the afternoons, but Rose-Ann said curiosity killed the cat and would close herself into her bedroom. His mother and Rose-Ann were pally, sharing all sorts of conversational intimacies, rather like his mother and his aunt. ‘Three’s a crowd,’ Rose-Ann had had a way of saying when she was younger.
He’d become used to three being a crowd and at least he was glad that he no longer had to spend days in his aunt’s work-room. Every Sunday now his mother went over to Badstoneleigh to visit her sister and at one time Rose-Ann had always gone with her, but this arrangement had changed when Rose-Ann’s Len arrived on the scene. Timothy declined to go on these excursions himself, plainly to his mother’s relief.
There had, over the years, developed in Timothy a distrust of his mother, and of his sister also. He didn’t speak much in their company, having become familiar with their lack of response. He’d be the death of her, his mother used to reply when he asked her something, although he’d never been able to understand why he should be. ‘You’re a bloody little dopey-D,’ Rose-Ann had a way of saying when she wasn’t saying three was a crowd or curiosity killed the cat. It was all half joking, all quick and rushy, his mother laughing her shrill staccato laugh, Rose-Ann laughing also, neither of them listening to him. In the end he’d come to imagine that the atmosphere in the flat was laden with the suggestion that there’d be more room if he wasn’t there, more privacy and a sense of relief. Occasionally he felt that this suggestion peered at him out of their eyes, even when they were smiling and laughing, smoking their cigarettes. He listened to them talking to one another about things that had happened at the clothes shop and the Smiling Service Filling Station, and once he’d had a most peculiar dream: that sitting there listening to them he’d turned into his father, which was why, so he said to himself in the dream, they kept sticking forks into the backs of his hands. Whenever he could, he lay in bed in the mornings until they’d left the flat.
At Dynmouth Comprehensive the distrust continued. He had never thought much of the place, nor of its staff and pupils. He couldn’t see the point of having hair halfway down your back, which was the fashion among the boys, and it seemed to him that neither staff nor pupils had a sense of humour. Once during break he had sawn through the leg of a chair on which a heavily-built girl called Grace Rumblebow usually sat. Unfortunately, when the chair gave way, Grace Rumblebow struck the side of her forehead on another chair and had to have seven stitches in it. On another occasion he’d mixed up everyone’s books and pencils, muddling the contents of one desk with another. He’d set a piece of paper alight during a history lesson. He’d attached a needle to the end of his ruler with Sellotape and had prodded Grace Rumblebow with it. He’d put his mother’s alarm clock in Raymond Tyler’s desk and set it to go off during the worst lesson of the week, double physics. He’d wiped away the calculations that Clapp, the mathematics man, had taken twenty minutes to work out on the blackboard and was going to explain in detail after break. No one had thought any of it funny, not even when Grace Rumblebow screeched like a cat the time the needle went into her. No one laughed, even tittered, until Miss Wilkinson ordered that the dressing-up baskets should be carried into 3A, until he put the wig and the clothes on, and discovered he could do the voice. Fantastic, they kept saying then, suddenly aware of him. Everyone in the room stopped dressing up and turned round to look at him. Better than Morecambe and Wise, Dave Griggs said. Beverly Mack said he was a natural. Afterwards, unfortunately, they seemed to forget about it.
&n
bsp; But all that was in the past now. At the moment what was more to the point was that he needed, and had no intention of purchasing, a bath and a wedding-dress, and a suit for George Joseph Smith. There was a tin bath, badly damaged by rust, in the yard of Swines’ the builders. He had asked if it was wanted and the foreman had said it wasn’t. It was just a question of persuading someone to transport it for him. He knew where there was a wedding-dress: it was just a question of appropriating it. There was a dog’s-tooth suit, ideal for the purpose, hanging in Commander Abigail’s wardrobe.
Ever since he’d planned to go in for the Spot the Talent competition he’d been affected by a pleasant fantasy. Having been successful in the competition, he found himself going in for Opportunity Knocks on the television. Sometimes, if he let his thoughts drift, it seemed that Hughie Green was staying in the Queen Victoria Hotel, in Dynmouth for the golf, and having nothing better to do had wandered up to the Easter Fête in the rectory garden and had wandered into the Spot the Talent competition. ‘That’s really good!’ he proclaimed with great delight, excited when he saw the act, and the next thing was the act was being done in the Opportunity Knocks studio.
Timothy walked about the flat again, from one room to another, practising in front of the bathroom mirror, telling jokes in his falsetto, smiling at himself. ‘You’re easily tops, lad,’ Hughie Green was enthusing, putting an arm round his shoulder. The applause and the laughter gave off warmth, like a fire. The clapometer was bursting itself, registering 98, a record. ‘You’re bringing the house down,’ Hughie Green said.
2
That afternoon, while Timothy Gedge practised his act and the Featherston twins continued to be bored in the rectory, Stephen and Kate Fleming, aged twelve, returned to Dynmouth by train from London. At eleven o’clock that morning their parents – Stephen’s father and Kate’s mother – had been married in a register office, making the children, in a sense, brother and sister. Their parents were now on their way to London Airport, to honeymoon in Cassis. For the next ten days the children were to be on their own with Mr and Mrs Blakey in Sea House.
‘Let’s have tea,’ Kate said, putting down a book about three children who surreptitiously kept a turkey as a pet.
Stephen was reading last year’s Wisden. He had once scored seventeen runs in an over, against the bowling of a boy called Philpott, A. J. His ambition, unuttered, was to go in Number 3 for Somerset. He supported Somerset because it was next door to Dorset and because it had once looked as though Somerset might win the county championship. That hadn’t happened, but he’d remained loyal to the county and believed he always would be. He also believed, but did not often say, that Somerset’s captain, Close, was the most ingenious cricketer in England. Cricket interested him more than anything else.
In the empty dining-car they sat down at a table for two. They were still in their school uniforms – Stephen’s grey with touches of maroon, Kate’s brown and green – for the marriage had been arranged to coincide with the end of the Easter term. That morning Stephen had travelled down from Ravenswood Court in Shropshire and Kate from St Cecilia’s School for Girls in Sussex, two days before she should have.
Of the two, Kate was the less matter-of-fact. Her mind had a way of wandering, of filling sometimes with day-dreams. At St Cecilia’s she had been designated both idle and slap-dash. Romantic she had not been called, although that, more essentially, was what she was. Kate’s imagination can be fired, a sloping hand had once pronounced on an end-of-term report. At the moment she knew by heart ‘The Lord of Burleigh’, having recently been obliged to learn it as a punishment for firing imaginations herself: with the seven other inmates of the Madame Curie dormitory, she had been caught at midnight by Miss Rist performing rituals culled from a television documentary about the tribes of the Amazon. Her face was plump, with brown hair curving round it and eyes that were daubs in it, like blue sunflowers.
‘Home for the hols?’ a stout waiter waggishly enquired in the dining-car. ‘Tea for two, madam?’
‘Yes, please.’ Kate felt her face becoming warm, the result of being addressed so jauntily without warning.
‘I’ve seen him before,’ Stephen said when the man had gone. ‘He’s all right actually.’ He wasn’t a tall boy; he had a delicate look, although physically he wasn’t delicate in the least. His eyes were a dark shade of brown and remained serious when he smiled. His smooth black hair was an inheritance from his mother, who had died two years ago.
Kate nodded uneasily when he said the waiter was all right. She felt embarrassed because her face had gone red like that. Several times at the party that had taken place after the ceremony in the register office it had gone red, especially when people had jocularly enquired if she approved of the marriage. The party, in a lounge of a hotel, had been almost unbearably boring. She felt it had been unnecessary as well: after the ceremony there should immediately have been the journey back to Dynmouth, to the house and the dogs and Mr and Mrs Blakey. Ever since half-term, when she’d first heard about the marriage arrangements, she’d been greedily looking forward to being alone with Stephen in Sea House with only Mr and Mrs Blakey to look after them. In the Madame Curie dormitory it had seemed like a form of bliss, and it still did. No other friendship was as special for Kate as the friendship she felt for Stephen. She believed, privately, that she loved Stephen in the same way as people in films loved one another. When they walked along the seashore at Dynmouth she always wanted to take his hand, but she had never done so. She often imagined he was ill and that she was looking after him. She’d once dreamed that he had lost the use of his legs and was in a wheel-chair, but in her dream she loved him more than ever because of that. In her dreams they agreed that they would marry one another.
For Stephen the friendship was special too, though in a different way. Since the death of his mother it was with Kate more than anyone that his natural reticence most easily evaporated. At school he had never found it easy to initiate friendships and often did not want to. He was in the fringes of things, or even in the shadows, not unpopular with other boys and not aloof, but affected by a shyness that hadn’t existed in his relationship with his mother and didn’t with Kate. He found it easy to drift in and out of conversations with Kate, as it had been with his mother. It wasn’t necessary to make an effort, or to be on guard.
Other people sat down in the dining-car, a sprinkling at the empty tables. The stout waiter carried round a tray of metal tea-pots. The children talked about the terms they’d spent at Ravenswood Court and St Cecilia’s, and about the people at these two similar boarding-schools. The headmaster of Ravenswood Court, C. R. Deccles, was known as the Craw, and his wife as Mrs Craw; Miss Scuse was the headmistress of St Cecilia’s. At Ravenswood Court there was a master called Quiet-Now Simpson, who couldn’t keep order, and a master called Dymoke – Geography and Divinity – who was known as Dirty Dymoke because he’d once confessed that he had never in his life washed his hair. Quiet-Now Simpson had kipper feet.
At St Cecilia’s little Miss Malabedeely taught History and was fifty-four, bullied by Miss Shaw and Miss Rist. Miss Shaw was moustached and had a hanging jaw, all teeth and gums; Miss Rist was forever knitting brown cardigans. They were jealous because Miss Malabedeely had once been engaged to an African bishop. They often spoke of Africa in a disparaging manner, and when they were speaking of something else they had a way of abruptly ceasing when Miss Malabedeely entered a room. ‘We’ll go on with that later,’ Miss Rist would say, sighing while she looked at Miss Malabedeely. There were other teachers at St Cecilia’s, and other masters at Ravenswood, but they weren’t so interesting to talk about.
In the dining-car Kate imagined, as she often had before, Quiet-Now Simpson’s kipper feet and Dirty Dymoke. And Stephen quite vividly saw the fortitude on the face of little damson-cheeked Miss Malabedeely let down by an African bishop, and Miss Shaw’s landscape of teeth and gum and Miss Rist forever knitting cardigans. He imagined the bullying of Miss Malabedeely, the
two women breaking off their conversation whenever she entered a room. That term, he said, a boy called Absom had discovered Quiet-Now Simpson and Mrs Craw alone in a summer-house, sitting close to one another.
‘You pour the tea,’ he said.
They went on talking about the schools and then they talked about the party that morning in the lounge of the hotel, at which there’d been champagne and chicken in aspic and cream cheese in bits of celery stalks and smoked salmon on brown bread.
‘Toasted tea-cake, madam?’ the stout waiter offered.
‘Yes, please.’
The conversation about schools and the wedding party was a way of filling in the time, or of avoiding what seemed to Kate to be a more important conversation: was Stephen as happy as she was about their parents’ marriage? It was more of an upheaval for Stephen, having to move with his father to Sea House, where she and her mother had always lived. As they ate their toasted tea-cakes it occurred to her that Stephen might never refer to the subject at all, that this single conversation might be difficult between them. His mother was dead: did he resent someone else in her place? Did he resent all of a sudden having a sister? Being friends was one thing; all this was rather different.
They added raspberry jam to brown bread and butter. They watched a station going by, in a heavy, dismal downpour. Leaning on a brush, a damp porter looked back at them from the platform. Machine Engraving, it said on a poster, Archer Signs Ltd.
‘D’you think you’ll like living in Sea House, Stephen?’
He was still looking out of the window. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, not turning his head.