The tyres of the Wolseley crunched on gravel, a sound which carried faintly to Mrs Blakey and caused her face to crinkle with pleasure. She left the kitchen and moved along a corridor with springy green linoleum and green walls. She passed through a door that had baize of the same green shade on the side that faced the corridor. In the hall she could hear Kate’s voice telling the dogs not to jump up. She opened the hall-door and descended three slender steps to greet the children.
3
‘Cheers, Mrs Abigail,’ Timothy Gedge said, stepping into the Abigails’ bungalow in High Park Avenue. ‘Rain’s started up again.’
She made a fuss, saying that the rain had soaked through his jacket. She made him take it off and hang it on a chair in front of the electric fire in the sitting-room, two bars glowing above an arrangement of artificial coal. She made him stand in front of the fire himself, to dry his jeans.
Mrs Abigail was a slight woman, with soft grey hair. Her hands and the features of her face were tiny; her eyes suggested tenderness. It was she who had knitted Timothy Gedge a pair of ribbed socks one Christmas, feeling sorry for him because he had turned out awkwardly in adolescence. Feeling sorry for people was common with Mrs Abigail. Her compassion caused her to grieve over newspaper reports and fictional situations in the cinema or on the television screen, or over strangers in the streets, in whom she recognized despondency. When she’d first known Timothy Gedge he’d been a child with particularly winning ways, and it seemed sad to her that these ways were no longer there. He’d called round at the bungalow a week after she and her husband had moved in, nearly three years ago now, and had asked if there were any jobs. ‘Boy scout are you?’ the Commander had enquired. ‘Bob-a-job?’ And Timothy had replied nicely that he wasn’t actually a boy scout, that he was just trying to make a little pocket money. He’d seemed an engagingly eccentric child, solitary in spite of his chattering and smiling, different from other children. He’d spent that first morning helping to lay the dining-room carpet, as cheerful as a robin.
In every way Mrs Abigail had found him a delightful little boy, and in the transformation that had since taken place it sometimes seemed to her that a person had been lost. The solitariness which had lent him character made her wonder, now, why it was that he had no friends; his chatterbox eccentricity struck a different note. But on Wednesday evenings he still came to do jobs, and in fact to share the Abigails’ supper. Under the Commander’s supervision he worked in the small front garden and in the back garden also. He’d assisted the winter before last in the painting of the larder. Mrs Abigail believed it was not impossible that the loss which had occurred might somehow be regained.
‘Commander still out on his swim, is he, Mrs Abigail?’
‘Yes, he’s still out.’ She wanted to say that it was foolish of her husband to stay out in all weathers, that it was foolish to go bathing at this time of year in the first place, but of course she couldn’t, not to a child, not to anyone. She smiled at Timothy Gedge. ‘He won’t be long.’
He laughed. He said: ‘Good weather for ducks, Mrs Abigail.’
Steam rose from his yellow jeans. Soon he would be shaving. Soon he’d have that coarse look that some youths so easily acquired.
‘Care for a fruit gum?’ He held out the Rowntree’s tube, but she declined to accept one of the sweets. He took one himself and put it in his mouth. ‘I see Ring’s setting up in the park,’ he said.
‘Yes, I noticed this morning.’
‘I don’t expect you and the Commander would ever fancy the Amusements, Mrs Abigail. Slot machines, dodgems, type of thing?’
‘Well, no –’
‘Rough kind of stuff, really.’
‘It’s more for young people, I think.’
‘Slot machines is for the birds.’
He laughed again, imagining for a moment Mrs Abigail and the Commander playing on a slot machine, or in a dodgem car, being pitched all over the place by the Dynmouth Hards, who were notorious in the dodgem rink. He mentioned it to her and she gave a little laugh herself. He began to talk about the Easter Fête, saying it was a pity that Ring’s Amusements opened for the first time on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, the very same time as the fête. It would take the crowds, he said. ‘I was saying that to the Reverend Feather and to Dass. They didn’t take a pick of notice.’
She nodded, thinking of something else. When Gordon returned from his swim he would offer the boy sherry. He’d done it before, the last three Wednesdays. She’d said she didn’t think it was a good idea. She’d said that tippling away at glasses of sherry wasn’t going to help the boy through a difficult adolescence, but Gordon had told her to learn sense.
Timothy went on talking about the Easter Fête because he didn’t want her to suggest it was time for him to begin on his jobs. One Wednesday he’d managed to go on talking for so long that the jobs hadn’t got done at all and she’d forgotten they hadn’t when the time for payment came. He said he was really looking forward to the Spot the Talent competition, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He was disappointed when a moment later she said that this week she wanted him to clean the oven of the electric cooker and to scour a saucepan that had the remains of tapioca in it. He far preferred to perform tasks in her bedroom because he could go through various drawers.
‘When the Commander offers it just say no, Timothy.’ She spoke in the kitchen, while he sprayed the oven with a cleansing agent called Force. ‘Just say your mother’d rather you didn’t.’
‘What’s that then, Mrs Abigail?’
‘When the Commander offers you the sherry. You’re under age, Timothy.’
He nodded, with his head partly in the oven. He said he was aware he was under age, but the law, he reminded her, applied only to persons under age being supplied with alcohol in a public house or an off-licence. He didn’t himself see any harm in a glass of sherry.
‘One thing I’d never touch, Mrs Abigail, and that’s a drug.’
‘Oh, no. Never, never take drugs. Promise me, never, Timothy.’
‘I’d never touch a drug, Mrs Abigail, because I wouldn’t know how to get hold of it.’ He laughed.
She looked down at him kneeling on a Daily Telegraph in front of the stove. His jacket was still drying in front of the sitting-room fire. There was a smudge on one of his wrists, where it had brushed against the half-congealed gravy in the oven. Laughing had caused the skin of his hollow cheeks to tighten. The laughter drifted away. His mouth still smiled a little.
‘Do it for me, dear,’ she whispered, bending down herself and smiling back at him. ‘Don’t take the sherry, Timmy.’
He sniffed her scent. It was a lovely smell, like a rose garden might be. At her neck a chiffon scarf in powder blue blended with the deeper blue of her dress.
‘Please, dear,’ she said, and for a moment he thought she was maybe going to kiss him. Then the Commander’s latch-key sounded in the lock of the front door.
‘Remember now,’ she whispered, straightening up and moving away from him. ‘Timothy’s here, Gordon,’ she called out to her husband.
‘Oh, well played,’ the Commander said in the hall.
Commander Abigail, who had served at that naval rank for five months during the Second World War, was a scrawny, small man, bald except for a ginger fluff at the back of his head and around his ears. A narrow ginger moustache grew above a narrow mouth; his eyes had a staring quality. He was sixty-five and hampered in damp weather by trouble in the joints of the left side of his body. When he’d retired from a position in a London shipping firm he’d decided to come and live in Dynmouth because of his devotion to the sea. As well, he’d hoped the air would be bracing and with a tang, cold rather than wet. His wife had pointed out that the area had one of the highest rainfall records in England, but he had argued with her on the point, categorically stating that she had got her facts wrong. When an estate agent sent him a notice of the bungalow in High Park Avenue he’d announced that it was just what they wanted, even th
ough he’d in the meantime discovered that she was right in her claim that the Dynmouth area was one of the wettest in England. You must never admit defeat was one of Commander Abigail’s foremost maxims: you must stick to your guns even though the joints on the left side of your body were giving you gyp. It was sticking to your guns that had made England, once, what England once had been. Nowadays it was like living in a rubbish dump.
‘Cheers, Commander,’ Timothy said when the Commander came into the kitchen with his swimming-trunks and towel, and his sodden brown overcoat on a coat-hanger.
‘Good afternoon, Timothy.’
The Commander unhooked the ropes of a pulley and released a wooden clothes-airer from the ceiling. He placed the coat-hanger on it and hung out the swimming-trunks and towel. He returned it to its mid-way position. The overcoat began to drip.
Mrs Abigail left the kitchen. A pool of water would spread all over the tiles of the floor. Gordon would walk in it and Timothy would walk in it, and when the dripping had ceased, probably in about an hour and a half, she’d have to mop everything up and put down newspapers,
‘And how’s Master Timothy?’
‘All right, Commander. Fine, thanks.’
‘Well played, boy.’
Timothy rinsed the sponge-cloth he was using, squeezing it out in his bowl of dirty water. He wiped the inside of the oven, noticed that it was still fairly dirty, and closed the door. He rose and carried the bowl and the sponge-cloth to the sink. He was thinking about the acquisition of the wedding-dress and the bath and the Commander’s dog’s-tooth suit. No problem at all, he kept saying to himself, and then he tried not to laugh out loud, seeing himself rising up out of the bath as Miss Munday when she should be dead as old meat.
‘Sherry when you’re ready,’ the Commander said, placing glasses and a decanter on a small blue tray. ‘In the sitting-room, old chap.’
Timothy scratched with his fingernails at the burnt tapioca in the saucepan that had been left for him. ‘Only fifteen years of age!’ cried the voice of Hughie Green excitedly.
He reached for a scouring cloth on a line that stretched above the sink. He rubbed at the tapioca with it, but nothing happened. He scratched at it again with his fingernails and rubbed at it with a Brillo pad. He then filled the saucepan with water and placed it, out of the way, on the draining-board. He’d explain to Mrs Abigail that in his opinion it needed to soak for a day or two.
‘Big hand!’ cried Hughie Green. ‘Big hand for Timothy Gedge, friends!’
To Stephen none of it was strange. For as long as he could remember he’d been coming to this house to play with Kate. The brown, bald head of Mr Blakey was familiar, and his slowness of movement and economy with speech. So were the dogs and the garden, and the house itself, and Mrs Blakey smiling at him.
He watched while Mr Blakey undid the ropes that secured their two trunks in the open boot of the car. It wasn’t raining any more, but the clouds were dark and low, suggesting that the cessation was only a lull. The air felt damp, a pleasant feeling that made you want to shiver slightly and be indoors, beside a fire. It was something his mother used to say about cold days in spring and summer, that it was a different kind of coldness from winter’s, pleasant because it wasn’t severe.
A fire was blazing in the hall. It was the only house he knew that had a fire-place in the hall. Kate said the hall was her favourite part of the house, the white marble of the mantelpiece, the brass fender high enough to form a seat of upholstered red leather, Egyptian rugs in shades of brown and blue spread over stone flags. On the crimson hessian of the walls a series of watercolours was set in brass frames: eighteenth-century representations of characters from plays. Neither of them knew what plays they came from, but the pictures were quite nice. So was the wide mahogany staircase that rose gently from the hall at the far end, curving out of sight at a window that reached almost to the wainscoting. He wondered if, in time, the hall would become his favourite part of the house too.
Mrs Blakey paused before passing through the door to the green-linoleumed passage, calling to them that supper would be ready in fifteen minutes. Stephen watched the door closing behind her and for a moment it seemed wrong that he should be here, standing in this house when his mother was dead. But the moment passed.
In the rectory the twins sat at the kitchen table with their parents, all of them eating poached eggs.
‘Horrible,’ Susannah said.
‘I said horrible,’ Deborah said. ‘I said horrible when Mummy.’
‘I said horrible when Mummy.’
‘I looked round and saw Mummy. Soon’s Mummy’s in the room I said horrible. You weren’t even looking, Deborah.’
‘When Mummy bringed the eggs I said horrible, Susannah.’
‘Mummy, Deborah’ll get dragons after her.’
‘Dragons and dragons and dragons and dragons and –’
‘You eat up your egg, Susannah.’
‘Too tired, Mummy.’
‘Now, now,’ Quentin said, finishing his own egg.
‘Too tired, Daddy. Mouth too tired, Daddy. Terribly, terribly tired. Terribly, terribly, terribly.’ Susannah closed her eyes, clenching the eyelids tightly. Deborah closed hers also. They began to giggle.
Lavinia felt weary. She snapped at her daughters, telling them not to be tiresome.
‘Supper,’ Mrs Abigail announced in Number Eleven High Park Avenue, entering the sitting-room and discovering that Timothy had taken no notice whatsoever of her request about the sherry. He’d put his zipped jacket on again and was sitting on the sofa on one side of the electric fire. Gordon was in his usual armchair, on the other. The curtains were drawn, the fire threw out a powerful heat. Only a table-lamp burned, its weak bulb not up to the task of fully illuminating the room. The effect of this half-gloom was cosy.
‘Oh, time for another.’ Commander Abigail gave a brief little laugh, expertly aiming the sherry decanter at Timothy’s glass and speaking to his wife as he did so. ‘Sherry, dear girl? Take a pew, why don’t you?’
She stood by the door, one foot in the hall, the other on the patterned sitting-room carpet. ‘Don’t mind if I do, sir,’ she heard Timothy saying after Gordon had refilled his glass, as though he had totally forgotten what she’d said to him. He even smiled at her through the gloom. ‘Yes, take a pew, Mrs Abigail,’ he even said, the words sounding foolish on his lips. The very sight of him was foolish, a child with a glass of Cyprus sherry in his hand, awkwardly holding it by the stem.
‘It’s just that it’ll all be overcooked,’ she said quietly, and her husband replied – as she knew he would – that they wouldn’t be more than another five minutes. She also knew that he’d enjoyed inviting her to take a pew in that casual way when everything was ready to eat. He gave the child sherry in order to irritate her. It was a pity he was like that, but it couldn’t be helped.
She closed the door and returned to the kitchen. She turned on the wireless and washed up some dishes. Voices were chatting their way through a word game. An audience laughed noisily at what was being said, but Mrs Abigail didn’t find any of it funny. Quite a few times in their marriage it had been suggested that she didn’t possess a sense of humour.
Mrs Abigail had married her husband because of his need of her and because, in her sympathy and compassion, she had felt affection for him. There was an emptiness in her marriage but she did not ever dwell on it. For thirty-six years he had been at the centre of her life. She had accepted him for better or for worse: in no way did she permit herself to believe that she was an unhappy woman.
She ladled pieces of chicken and vegetables on to three plates and placed them in the oven. On the wireless the word game came to an end and a play began. By the time she’d strained the peas and scooped the mashed potatoes from the saucepan into a dish she heard her husband’s voice in the hall, talking about pride.
‘A certain pride,’ he repeated as he sat down at the dining-room table. He smoothed the ginger of his small moustache with
the forefinger and thumb of his right hand. ‘You were proud to be an Englishman, Timothy, once upon a time.’
‘Cherryade?’ she offered, poising the bottle over Timothy’s glass.
‘How about a glass of ale?’ the Commander suggested. ‘Watney’s Pale all right for you, old chap?’
She thought at first she had misheard him, but knew of course that she hadn’t. Never before had he brought beer into the house. He claimed not to like beer. At Christmas he purchased a bottle of Hungarian wine in Tesco’s. Bull’s blood he called it.
‘Nothing like a drop of ale.’ He opened the sideboard, took from it two large bottles marked Watney’s Red, Pale Ale and removed the caps. ‘Fancy a little yourself, dear?’
She shook her head. She could tell from the size of the bottles that they each contained a pint. With that amount of beer on top of two glasses of sherry the child could hardly be expected to remain sober. She voiced this fear, knowing it was unwise to do so.
‘Oh, no, no, dear girl.’ He laughed in a way he had. Filling his glass, Timothy laughed also.
‘A sense of peace,’ the Commander said, sitting down again. ‘In towns like Dynmouth you felt a sense of peace in those distant days. On Sundays people went to church.’
Timothy listened, aware that familiar developments were taking place around the table. Extraordinary couple they were. Extraordinary of the Reverend Feather to say they weren’t a funny type of people. Bonkers, the pair of them.
‘You’d find a shilling in your pocket, Timothy. Enough to take you to the pictures. Fire Over England!, Goodbye, Mr Chips. First-class fare. You’d pay for a seat and you’d have enough left over for a bag of fish and chips. God’s own food, the way they cooked it before the War.’
‘So I heard, sir.’ He spoke politely because he wished to please. The man liked to be addressed like that, and she liked you to smile at her. She was grumpy at present, but she’d soon cheer up.