‘You’ve had too much to drink, Timmy,’ she whispered.
He nodded at her, saying that once upon a time he’d searched high and low for her wedding-dress. When he couldn’t find it he’d remembered where there was another one. A wedding-dress wasn’t an easy garment to come by.
‘Get into your clothes immediately, boy. Cut along now.’ The Commander’s voice was sharp, like a splinter of something.
Timothy laughed because the voice sounded funny. Bloody ridiculous it was, going into the sea every day in bathing togs.
‘Could you make a pair of curtains, Mrs Abigail?’
She shook her head, not knowing what he was talking about.
‘I was saying it to Mr Feather and he said to ask you.’
‘We’ll talk about it another time, Timothy.’
‘Have you got a sewing-machine? Only you couldn’t make curtains without a machine.’
‘No, of course not –’
‘D’you think your sister has a sewing-machine?’ She nodded, trying to smile at him.
‘No problem then.’
‘I’ve made a request of you,’ the Commander said in the same splintery voice. ‘Take off my suit immediately.’
‘It would please us if you put on your own clothes again, dear.’
Children did dress up, she thought, trying to think calmly. It was a children’s thing, they enjoyed it. And yet it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t a child dressing up just for the fun of it. It was a child made drunk, his mouth pulled down at the corners, his eyes glassily staring, sweat all over his neck and face. In the dog’s-tooth suit he was grotesque. What was happening was like something you’d read about in a cheap Sunday newspaper.
He mentioned Opportunity Knocks, and Hughie Green, who might be staying in the Queen Victoria Hotel, in Dynmouth for the golf. Nobody had ever done a show like that on Opportunity Knocks. There were acts with pigeons on Opportunity Knocks, and family acts, and trick cyclists and singers and kids of three who could dance, and dogs smoking pipes, but he’d never yet seen a show that was comic and also about death. You’d have each of the brides acting like she was struggling against George Joseph Smith and all the time George Joseph Smith would be winning, only you wouldn’t actually see him, you’d have to imagine him. And when she went under the water the lights would go black and George Joseph Smith would appear a few seconds later in the dog’s-tooth suit. He’d tell jokes, standing beside the bath with the bride in it. You’d know she was in it because a bit of her wedding-dress would be draped over the side, only of course she wouldn’t be there at all because it was a one-man act. ‘Ah well, best be getting back to work,’ George Joseph Smith would say when he had them bringing the house down. The lights would go black and the next thing you’d see would be another bride struggling against the murdering hands of the man. After he’d drowned each bride George Joseph Smith had gone out to buy the dead woman her supper, fish for Miss Munday, eggs for Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty. It was a peculiarity with him, like his passion for death by the sea. George Joseph Smith had once stayed in Dynmouth, in the Castlerea boarding-house.
While she listened to all this, Mrs Abigail repeatedly believed she was dreaming. It was just like a dream, a nightmare that held you and held you, not letting you wake up. A child had perpetrated a comic act about three real and brutal murders. In a marquee on the lawn of a rectory he expected people to laugh. He appeared to believe that some television personality might by chance be there to see him.
‘D’you ever see Benny Hill, Mrs Abigail? Really funny, Benny Hill. And Bruce Forsyth. D’you like Bruce Forsyth when he gets going?’
‘Please.’ She still spoke softly, with a reasonableness that suggested the plea was being made for the first time.
‘Benny Hill was an ordinary milkman with pint bottles on a dray, cream and yoghurt and carrots, anything you wanted at the door. Opportunity knocked for Benny Hill. It could happen to you, Mrs Abigail. It could happen to anyone.’
‘Quickly now,’ the Commander limply ordered. ‘Get a move on, Gedge.’
But Timothy didn’t get a move on. He wagged his head, not attempting to rise from the chair he was sitting on. He mentioned the teacher called Brehon O’Hennessy and the drear landscape and how there were people like last year’s rhubarb walking about the streets. You had to smile, he said, but you could see the man’s point of view. Mad as a hatter he’d been, a real nutter, yet you couldn’t help getting the picture. He laughed. He spent a lot of time himself, he said, following people around, looking in windows.
‘Is Miss Lavant her sister, sir? Only Lavant’s fancied Dr Greenslade for twenty years and he won’t lift a finger in case he’d be struck off. Isn’t it awful, Miss Lavant wasting herself on a married man? Isn’t it a terrible story, Mrs Abigail? Your sister in a predicament like that?’
She nodded, not knowing what else to do.
‘There’s worse than that in this town. The time she gave me the sweet I thought maybe she was going to kidnap me. I thought she was after a ransom, two or three thousand –’
‘My wife has no sister. Will you kindly cease, boy.’
‘Miss Lavant’s the one I mean, sir. She gave me a sweet –’
‘Miss Lavant is not her sister.’
Mrs Abigail dragged her eyes away from the child, startled by the note of panic in her husband’s voice. He wasn’t enjoying being angry any more. His face was blotchy, his lips quivered as he shouted, his eyes were quivering also. Something was happening in the room, something that had more to do with Gordon than with the child dressed up in his clothes. She could feel it gathering all around her, cloying and thick and heavy. Gordon was hunched, appearing to be terrified, his eyes staring. Timothy Gedge was smiling pathetically. She wanted to weep over both of them, to ask Gordon what on earth the matter was, to ask Timothy the same question in another kind of way.
Still smiling, he spoke again. He’d witnessed all sorts, he said: the dead buried, kids from the primary school lifting rubbers out of W. H. Smith’s, Plant on the job with his mother, his legs as white as mutton-fat. He’d witnessed Rose-Ann and Len up to tricks on the hearth-rug, and others up to tricks in the wood behind the Youth Centre, kids of all ages, nine to thirteen, take your pick. He’d seen the Robson woman from the Post Office buying fish and chips in Phyl’s Phries with Slocombe from the Fine Fare off-licence, and Pym, the solicitor, being sick into the sea after a Rotary dinner in the Queen Victoria Hotel. He’d seen the Dynmouth Hards beating up the Pakistani from the steam laundry in a bus-shelter, and spraying Blacks Out on the back wall of the Essoldo. He’d seen them terrorizing Nurse Hackett, the midwife, swerving their motor-cycles in front of her blue Mini when she was trying to go about her duties at night-time. There was wife-swapping every Saturday night at parties on the new estate, Leaflands it was called, out on the London road. He’d looked in a window once and seen a man in Lace Street taking out his glass eye. He’d seen Slocombe and the Robson woman up on the golf-course. In Dynmouth and its neighbourhood he’d witnessed terrible things, he said.
He appeared to be rambling again, but it was hard to be certain. He had seemed to be rambling when he’d first mentioned a wedding-dress and when he’d referred to Miss Lavant as her sister and to a gooseberry in a lift.
‘You’ve no right to spy on people,’ the Commander began to say. ‘You’ve no right to go poking –’
‘I’ve witnessed you down on the beach, sir. Running about in your bathing togs. I’ve witnessed you up to your tricks, Commander, when she’s out on her Meals on Wheels.’
He smiled at her, but she didn’t want to look at him. ‘I wouldn’t ever tell a soul,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t, Commander.’
She waited, her eyes fixed on the flowered tea-pot, frowning at it. Whatever he was referring to, she didn’t want to hear about it. She wanted him to stop speaking. She felt herself infected by her husband’s panic, not knowing why she felt like that. They would keep the secret, the boy said. The secret would
be safe.
‘There’s no secret to keep,’ the Commander cried. ‘There’s nothing, nothing at all.’
She wished he hadn’t said that. If he hadn’t said it, they might have glossed over all the boy had said already. They might have pretended they were trying to help the boy, humouring him by agreeing there was some secret that affected them. They had been married thirty-six years, she said to herself, puzzled that that fact should have occurred to her now.
‘He’s talking nonsense.’ The Commander’s voice had dropped, his words were almost unintelligible.
She was a happy woman: she told herself that. She’d been perfectly happy making the supper, the chicken and the fig pudding. It didn’t matter if Gordon wanted to win arguments. It didn’t matter if his clothes dripped all over the kitchen. She’d devoted her life to Gordon. She didn’t want to hear. Whatever there was, she didn’t want to know.
‘Please don’t,’ she said, looking up from the tea-pot, looking across the table at Timothy Gedge. ‘Please don’t say anything more.’
Timothy smiled at her. It was a secret between himself and the Commander, he said. He rose unsteadily from his chair and moved around the table to where Gordon was sitting. Her instinct was to put her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it because it seemed so silly. One Sunday afternoon, watching suburban cricket in Sutton, he had asked her to be his wife, telling her he loved her.
Timothy whispered, but the whisper was clumsy because of the sherry and the beer: she heard distinctly, as though he were shouting. They would keep the secret, he said, he would never tell a soul that her husband went after Dynmouth’s cub scouts, intent on committing indecencies.
A storm blew through the town that night. The narrow streets were washed with rain, the canvas of Ring’s Amusements flapped in Sir Walter Raleigh Park, breakers crashed against the wall of the promenade. The town was deserted. The pink Essoldo was dead as a doornail, Phyl’s Phries had shut up shop at half past ten, the night-porter of the Queen Victoria Hotel slept undisturbed in his cubby-hole. The police-car that sometimes slipped through Dynmouth’s night streets was parked with its lights off in the yard of the police station. The Dynmouth Hards weren’t abroad, nor was Nurse Hackett in her blue Mini. Only the shop windows showed signs of life. Television sets recorded the soundless mouthing of a late-night news-reader. In harsh white light figures without eyes displayed twin-sets and dresses or sat on G-plan furniture. A cardboard couple smiled joyfully, drawing attention to a building society’s rates.
The rain rattled on the slated roof of the Artilleryman’s Friend, beneath which its proprietor lay, drowsily fulfilled. Half an hour ago Mr Plant had engaged in sexual congress with his stoutly built Welsh wife, and in the ladies’ lavatory of the public house car-park he had earlier indulged himself with the trimmer form of Timothy Gedge’s mother. As always, he had enjoyed the contrast, both in anticipation during his conjunction with Mrs Gedge and in retrospect while involved with his wife. For their parts, the women had appeared to be satisfied.
In the ivy-clad rectory Lavinia Featherston lay awake, sorry she’d been so cross all day. It was wrong to be upset by circumstances, by a fact of your life that could not be altered. She’d been cross again after she’d put the twins to bed. She’d protested quite sharply to her husband about the people who came so endlessly to the rectory, the town’s unfortunates, the dirty, the ugly, the boring, the mad. She was tired of listening to Mrs Slewy complaining about the social security man. Mrs Slewy with a cigarette perpetually on the go, leaning against the back door, asking for the loan of a pound. She was tired of Old Ape arriving on the wrong day for his meal. She must have made a thousand cups of Nescafé for Mrs Stead-Carter, being bossed all over the place while she did so. It was a relief that crazy old Miss Trimm had a cold, a respite at least from her belief that she’d mothered a second Jesus Christ. Miss Poraway made you want to scream. Quentin had listened to her quietly, saying it was all understandable, and in greater irritation she’d replied that it was typical of him to say that, and then she’d cried. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured at his sleeping form, knowing that tomorrow she’d probably be edgy too.
She lay there, thinking of her nursery school. Little Mikey Hatch getting his arms wet. Jennifer Droppy looking sad. Joseph Wright pushing. Mandy Goff singing her song. Johnny Pyke laughing, Thomas Braine interrupting, Andrew Cartboy being good, Susannah and Deborah throwing dough. She forced herself to think of them, and then to think about prices and to work out figures in her mind because one of these days a new Wendy house was going to be necessary. Her mind attempted to reject these calculations and to return to its brooding, but she refused to permit that. Mandy Goff’s father might offer to make a new Wendy house if she paid for the materials and offered to pay for his time. With hardly any prompting he’d made the rack for hanging coats on, and the slide. She dropped into drowsiness, thinking of the grey wooden slide and the children sliding down it.
In the room next door the twins looked happy in their sleep, their limbs similarly arranged. Two miles away, in the Down Manor Orphanage, the orphans without exception dreamed, frightening themselves and delighting themselves. So did the children of Lavinia’s nursery school, scattered all over Dynmouth, and the children of the Ring-o-Roses nursery school and the W R V S Playgroup, and the children of Dynmouth Primary and of Dynmouth Comprehensive and of the Loretto Convent, and the travelling children of Ring’s Amusements, and Sharon Lines who owed her life to a machine.
In the house called Sweetlea Mrs Dass lay sleepless in the dark, remembering the son who’d been the apple of her eye, a child she’d painfully borne, who had painfully rejected her. In her bedsitting-room in Pretty Street the beautiful Miss Lavant, who wished in all the hours of her wakefulness that she might have borne the child of the man she hopelessly loved, pored over the day’s blank space in her diary. Wet, she wrote and could think of nothing else to record: the day had passed without a sight of Dr Greenslade.
In Sea House Kate dreamed of the bedroom she slept in, its orange-painted dressing-table and orange-painted chairs, its blinds and wallpaper of a matching pattern, orange poppies in long grass. She dreamed that the stout waiter from the dining-car was standing in this room, offering her a toasted tea-cake, and that Miss Shaw and Miss Rist were bullying little Miss Malabedeely. A wedding took place in the room: an African bishop swore to honour Miss Malabedeely with his black body. He had the marks of a tiger’s claw on his cheeks. He said the toasted tea-cake was delicious.
Stephen slept also. He’d lain awake for a while, remembering his bedroom in Primrose Cottage, wondering who was sleeping there now. He’d been going through the Somerset batting averages for last season when he fell asleep.
Mr Blakey, awake above the garage, listened to the crash of breakers. Sudden gusts fiercely rattled the windows, driving the rain in sheets against the panes. Beside him, his wife was content in her unconsciousness.
Mr Blakey slipped out of bed. Without turning a light on he drew a brown woollen dressing-gown around him and left the room. Still in darkness, he passed through a small sitting-room and down a flight of stairs to a passage that led to the kitchen. He brewed tea and sat at the table to drink it.
In the outhouse where they slept the dogs barked, a distant sound that Mr Blakey paid no attention to, guessing it to be caused by the storm. He left the kitchen and passed along the green-linoleumed passage, into the hall. A window might be open, a door might be banging in the wind on a night like this. There was no harm in looking about.
He switched a light on in the hall, illuminating the theatrical figures on the red hessian walls. He listened for a moment. No sound came from the house, but the dogs still faintly barked and the sea was louder than it had been in his bedroom. Drawn by the sound of rain on the French windows, he moved into the drawing-room. Enough light to see by filtered in from the hall, though not enough to draw colour from the gloom. Wallpaper and curtains were greyly nondescript, pictures and furni
ture were shadows.
The sea was noisier in this room than anywhere else in the house, yet through the wide French windows there was nothing to be seen of the storm. He strained his eyes, peering into the dark for the familiar shapes of trees and shrubs, wondering what damage was being wrought. But when a shaft of moonlight unexpectedly flashed it wasn’t damage to his garden that startled his attention. A figure moved beneath the monkey-puzzle. A child’s face smiled at the house.
4
The storm died out in the night. At breakfast Mrs Blakey asked the children what they were going to do that day and Kate said that if Mrs Blakey would agree to have lunch early they’d like to walk the eight miles to Badstoneleigh. The attraction was Dr No and Diamonds Are Forever at the Pavilion. Mrs Blakey, while quite agreeable to providing an early lunch, pointed out that this double bill was due at the Essoldo the following week, but Kate said they’d rather not wait.
It was quite nice, Stephen thought, having breakfast without any fuss in the big lofty-ceilinged kitchen, with Mr Blakey not saying anything while he ate his sausages and bacon and an egg. He thought it might be quite nice to be like Mr Blakey, slow and silent and looking after a garden. It would be nice to have played cricket for a county first, so that you could think about it when you were growing dahlias and lettuces, fifty-seven not out against Hampshire, ninety against Lancashire, four for forty-one in a one-day Gillette Cup final versus Kent. Mr Blakey was happy, the way often people weren’t: you could tell by the way he sat there at the table. ‘You must try and be happy again,’ his father had said to him. ‘She’d want us both to be.’
It was a long time ago now; there wasn’t really a reason not to be happy. He knew there wasn’t. He knew it was easy to feel resentful just because his father had married again. But unhappy people were a bore and a nuisance, like Spencer Major who cried whenever there was fish, who was afraid of Sergeant Mcintosh, the boxing instructor.