The Children Of Dynmouth

  In the garden after breakfast they played with the setters, throwing a red ball and a blue ball on the damp grass of the lawns. There was no way of telling if you’d ever be good enough to bat for a county. You just had to wait and see, pretending a bit in the meanwhile.

  ‘Nice morning, Mr Plant,’ Timothy Gedge said on the promenade, where the publican was taking his ritual morning outing with his dog, Tike. Mr Plant was a large, red-fleshed man, the dog a smooth-haired fox-terrier, hampered by the absence of a back leg.

  ‘Hullo,’ Mr Plant said. His spirits, which had been high, sank. Because of his relationship with the boy’s mother, Timothy Gedge embarrassed him.

  ‘Nice after the storm, sir.’ He was carrying an empty carrier-bag with a Union Jack on it. He’d woken up at a quarter to eight with his mouth as dry as paper. He’d lain in bed, waiting for Rose-Ann and his mother to leave the flat, waiting for the two flushes of the lavatory and his mother’s hurrying feet and her voice telling Rose-Ann to hurry up also, and the smell of their after-breakfast cigarettes that always penetrated to his bedroom, and the abrupt turning-off of the kitchen radio, and the bang of the door. He’d got up and taken four aspirins from his mother’s supply and drunk nearly two pints of water. He’d gone back to bed and lain there, going over the events of the night before, trying to remember. When eventually he’d got up he’d had to iron his jeans and his zipped jacket because they’d become creased when they were damp. He was feeling a bit better now, but if he received an invitation to step down to the Artilleryman’s Friend so that he might restore himself further with a glass of beer he would accept it eagerly. No such invitation was forthcoming.

  ‘Only I thought the storm might last a few days, Mr Plant.’

  Mr Plant nodded, not interested in what this boy might have thought about the weather. He whistled at his dog, who was sniffing at the boots of two old men on a seat. The dog limped hurriedly back to him, its head slung low in anticipation of punishment.

  ‘Lovely dog, that,’ Timothy said. He had dropped into step with Mr Plant, to Mr Plant’s discomfiture. ‘Like a gum, sir?’ He offered the tube he’d bought yesterday. Mr Plant shook his head. ‘Tike like one, would he, sir?’

  ‘Leave the dog be, son.’

  Timothy nodded agreeably. He placed a blackcurrant-flavoured gum in his mouth and returned the tube to his pocket. He wanted to laugh because he’d suddenly remembered, rather faintly, that in his confusion last night he’d kept insisting that Miss Lavant was Mrs Abigail’s sister. He lifted a hand to his lips and kept it there for a moment, holding the laughter back. Mr Plant surveyed the sea, his eyes vacant and a little bloodshot, as they always were. Timothy said:

  ‘You’re out with a blonde, Mr Plant, you see the wife coming?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What would you do, sir?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The four-minute mile, Mr Plant!’

  Timothy laughed, but Mr Plant didn’t. A silence developed between them. Then Timothy said:

  ‘Only I was anxious to have a word with you, sir.’

  Mr Plant grunted, still surveying the sea. ‘I need your assistance, Mr Plant.’

  It surprised the publican to hear this. He considered it a strange statement for a boy to make, and he wondered for a moment – without knowing quite why he wondered it – if the boy was going to ask him about the facts of life. Uncomfortably, he recalled the occasion when he’d been discovered in the Cornerways flat with only a shirt on.

  ‘I’m going in for the Spot the Talent, Mr Plant. At the Easter Fête.’

  Mr Plant frowned at the horizon and then slowly turned his head and looked down at the sharply-featured face of Timothy Gedge. Beneath the short, nearly-white hair the eyes were earnest, the mouth smiled slightly beneath the suspicion of a pale moustache. As Mr Plant watched, the lips parted in a greater smile.

  ‘I’d like to tell you about it, Mr Plant,’ Timothy said, and did so as they walked. He went into detail, as he had for the Abigails, although in a different manner because he hadn’t had sherry and beer. He spoke of the brides of George Joseph Smith, and George Joseph Smith himself, who had bought fish for the dead Miss Munday, and eggs for Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty. He explained about how each of the brides would be struggling against the invisible hands of George Joseph Smith and how the stage would go black and when the light went up George Joseph Smith would be standing there, with jokes, in a dog’s-tooth suit.

  ‘You’re bloody mad,’ Mr Plant said, staring at the boy.

  ‘There’s an old bath down in Swines’ yard. I asked the foreman about it. Only we’d need your van to convey it, sir.’

  ‘Van? Who’d need the van? What’re you on about?’

  ‘Your little brown van, Mr Plant. If we could erect the bath up in the marquee on the Saturday morning. We could cover it with a sheet so’s nobody’d guess. We can get hold of a wedding-dress, no problem at all.’

  ‘You’re a bloody nutcase, son.’

  Timothy shook his head. He sucked on his fruit gum and said he wasn’t a nutcase. All he wanted to do, he explained, was to go in for the Spot the Talent competition.

  Mr Plant did not reply. He turned and began to walk back towards the town. His dog had gone to sniff a lamp-post. He called him to heel.

  ‘Shall I do you a woman’s voice?’ Timothy Gedge suggested.

  Mr Plant wondered if she’d dropped the boy when he was a baby. You heard of that kind of thing, a kid’s head striking the edge of something when the kid was a couple of months old and the kid never being normal. Then, as Mrs Abigail had, he recalled that dressing up and putting on shows was an activity that was popular with children. He’d often sat with his wife watching his own two boys and two girls enacting a playlet they’d made up by themselves, some fantasy set in a country house or a railway station. The Gedge boy seemed to be intent on something like that only with a gruesome flavour, murders taking place in a bath. Sick they called it nowadays, and sick it most certainly was. In his entire life, he estimated, he’d never heard anything like it.

  ‘It’s in the yard on the left, Mr Plant, behind the timber sheds. I told the foreman you’d be coming for it. Today or whenever you had a minute.’

  ‘You did what, son?’ His voice was quiet, with a threat in it. He was staring at Timothy Gedge again. ‘No one’s going getting baths out of Swines’ yard. Today or any other time.’

  ‘I’m anxious for your assistance, Mr Plant.’

  ‘Hop it, son. Go on now.’

  ‘I said some time, Mr Plant. I didn’t say today specially. The Saturday morning, Easter Saturday –’

  ‘You’re up the chute, son.’

  For the first time Timothy noticed that there was red hair growing out of the publican’s ears and nose. The hair was coarse and wiry, like the hair on his head. Women the age of his mother couldn’t pick and choose, he supposed. Nor could the women who let Plant get on the job in the Ladies in the Artilleryman’s car-park. He’d followed him in once and had listened to the sound of clothes being removed, and whispering. On another occasion, when he was watching A Man Called Ironside, he’d heard whispering and knew that his mother had taken Plant into her bedroom. He’d left the television on and gone to listen at the bedroom door. He’d looked through the key-hole and seen his mother without a stitch left on her, taking off the man’s socks. He reminded him now of this occasion, and of the occasion in the middle of the night.

  ‘You bloody young pup!’ Mr Plant exclaimed hotly.

  ‘All I mean is, we’ll keep the secret, Mr Plant. We have the secret between us, sir. I wouldn’t open my mouth to Mrs Plant.’

  ‘You bet your bloody life you wouldn’t. If you opened your bloody mouth you’d get a hiding that would cripple you.’

  ‘I’m saying I wouldn’t, Mr Plant. I’d never do a thing like that, sir. So if we could fix it for the Saturday a.m. and if you could get the bath in your little van, and don’t tell a soul so’s it’s a surprise. I’ve got the who
le thing planned, Mr Plant –’

  ‘Well, get it unplanned if you don’t want to end up in a borstal.’

  They had ceased to walk. Timothy listened, still sucking his fruit gum, while Mr Plant told him that he’d never heard anything as stupid or as pathetic in his life. No one was going to watch the kind of stuff that had been described to him, in a marquee or anywhere else. He spoke of a borstal again, he denied that he was an immoral man. He denied emphatically that the scene during A Man Called Ironside had ever taken place; or if it had, it had been some other man in the bedroom. On the night Timothy had seen him in a shirt he had come round to the Cornerways flat because Timothy’s mother had wanted his advice about a notice she’d had from the council regarding rent. He’d caught his trousers on a nail and had had to remove them in order that she could repair them. There was nothing wrong in that beyond what a dirty mind would make of it. ‘You want to be careful of that, son. Keep a clean nose on your face.’

  Timothy mentioned the Ladies in the car-park, adding that he had repeatedly observed Mr Plant emerging a few minutes after a woman. He mentioned the time he’d heard clothes being removed, and the whispering. Mr Plant said he was mistaken. Then, suddenly, he laughed. He told Timothy not to poke about in things he didn’t understand. If he’d emerged from the toilet, he said, then maybe he’d been in there fixing a ball-cock, and there was no crime in removing an article of clothing in a toilet. Still laughing, he said it could happen to anyone, a pair of trousers catching on a nail.

  ‘You mind your own bloody business, son,’ he said, not amused any more, ‘unless you want a fat lip.’ He lifted a large hand in the air and held it up in front of Timothy Gedge’s face. He told him to look at it and to remember it. It would thump him to a pulp. It would thump the living daylights out of him if he ever again dared to open his mouth as he had just now, to anyone.

  ‘You don’t get the picture, Mr Plant –’

  ‘I bloody do, mate. You’ll be left for dead, son, and when they get you to your feet you’ll do five and a half years in a borstal. All right then?’

  Mr Plant walked away with his dog hobbling beside him. Timothy did not follow him. He stood on the promenade, watching the publican and his three-legged pet, bewildered by the man.

  ‘Ashes to ashes,’ intoned Quentin Featherston in the churchyard of St Simon and St Jude’s. A small piece of clay, dislodged from the side of the grave, clattered on the brash new wood of a coffin containing the remains of an aged fisherman called Joseph Rine. Attired in black, the elderly wife of the fisherman wept. A sister, bent with rheumatics, wept also. The old man’s son considered that his father had had a good innings.

  Quentin shook hands with them at the end of the service and walked to the church with the sexton. Quietly, Mr Peniket remarked that the Rines were a good family, even if they didn’t go to church much. He’d had to order more coke, he added, although he’d hoped not to have to do so until the autumn. He hoped that was all right.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, Mr Peniket.’

  ‘Better to be safe, sir.’

  Mr Peniket was a conscientious bachelor of late middle age, devoted to St Simon and St Jude’s. He polished the pews and the brass and personally washed the tiles. He was in no way hostile to Quentin, but he often spoke of the time when old Canon Flewett had been the rector, when many more people had come to church and church life had thrived. He was aware that times had changed, yet somehow when he spoke about Quentin’s predecessor Quentin always felt that he believed that if old Canon Flewett were still in charge the change would not have been so drastic.

  ‘I’ll just tidy around,’ the sexton said now, and Quentin nodded, stepping into the vestry.

  ‘Really good that was,’ Timothy Gedge said, entering the vestry a minute or so later with his carrier-bag. ‘Really nicely done, Mr Feather.’

  Quentin softly sighed. The boy had recently developed this habit of walking into the vestry without knocking, usually to announce that a funeral service had been nicely conducted.

  ‘I’m disrobing, Timothy. I like to be alone when I’m disrobing, you know.’

  ‘I’ve come in for a chat, sir. Any time you said. Isn’t it a pity about Mr Rine, sir?’

  ‘He was very old, you know.’

  ‘He wasn’t young, sir. Eighty-five years of age. I wouldn’t like to live as long as that, Mr Feather. I wouldn’t feel easy about it.’

  Quentin began to disrobe since it was clear that the boy wasn’t going to leave the vestry. He removed his surplice and hung it on a peg in a cupboard. He unbuttoned his cassock. Timothy Gedge said:

  ‘A very nice man, Mr Rine, I often had a chat with him. God’s gain, sir.’

  Quentin nodded.

  ‘The son’s in the fish-packing station. An under-manager. Did you know that, Mr Feather? There’s fish in the family.’

  ‘Timothy, I wish you wouldn’t call me by that name.’

  ‘Which name is that, Mr Feather?’

  ‘My name is Featherston.’ He smiled, not wishing to sound pernickety: after all, it wasn’t an important point. ‘There’s a “ston” at the end, actually.’

  ‘A ston, Mr Feather?’

  He hung the cassock in the cupboard. There was a Mothers’ Union tea that afternoon, an event he had to brace himself to sustain. Nineteen women would arrive at the rectory and eat sandwiches and biscuits and cake. They’d engage in Dynmouth chatter, and he would call on God and God would remind him that the women were His creatures. Miss Poraway would say it would be a good thing if something on the lines of a Tupperware party could be arranged to raise funds, and Mrs Stead-Carter would coldly reply that you couldn’t have anything on the lines of a Tupperware party unless you had a commodity to sell. Mrs Hayes would suggest that not all the funds raised at the Easter Fête should go towards the church tower, and he’d have to point out that if salvage work didn’t start on the church tower soon there wouldn’t be a church tower to salvage.

  ‘What’s it mean, ston, sir?’

  ‘It’s just my name.’

  He lifted his black mackintosh from a coat-hanger and locked the cupboard door. The boy walked behind him when he left the vestry and by his side on the aisle of the church. Mr Peniket was tidying the prayer-books in the pews. It embarrassed Quentin when Timothy Gedge came to the church and Mr Peniket was there.

  ‘This bloke in a restaurant, Mr Feather. “Waiter, there’s a rhinoceros in my soup –” ’

  ‘Timothy, we’re in church.’

  ‘It’s a lovely church, sir.’

  ‘Jokes are a little out of place, Timothy. Especially since we’ve just had a funeral.’

  ‘It’s really good the way you do a funeral.’

  ‘I have been meaning to mention that to you, Timothy. It isn’t the best of ideas to hang round funerals, you know.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You seem always to be at the funerals I conduct.’ He spoke lightly, and smiled. ‘I’ve seen you in the Baptist graveyard also. It’s really not all that healthy, Timothy.’

  ‘Healthy, Mr Feather?’

  ‘Only friends of the dead person go to the funeral, Timothy. And relatives, of course.’

  ‘Mr Rine was a friend, Mr Feather. Really nice he was.’

  Mr Peniket was listening carefully, doing something to a hassock. He was bent over the hassock in a pew, apparently plumping it. Quentin could feel him thinking that in Canon Flewett’s time schoolboys wouldn’t have come wandering into the church to discuss the recently dead.

  ‘What I mean about going to funerals, Timothy –’

  ‘You go to the funeral of a friend, sir.’

  ‘Old Mrs Crowley was hardly a friend.’

  ‘Who’s Mrs Crowley then?’

  ‘The woman whose funeral you attended last Saturday morning.’ He tried to speak testily but did not succeed. It annoyed him when he recalled the attendance of Timothy Gedge at Mrs Crowley’s funeral, a woman who’d been a resident in the town’s old people’s home, Wiste
ria Lodge, since before Timothy Gedge’s birth. It annoyed him that Mr Peniket was bent over a hassock, listening. But the annoyance came softly from him now.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t come to funerals,’ he said.

  ‘No problem, Mr Feather. If that’s the way you want it, no problem. I wouldn’t go against your wishes, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Timothy.’

  At the church door Quentin turned and bowed in the direction of the altar and Timothy Gedge obligingly did the same. ‘Goodbye, Mr Peniket,’ Quentin said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Featherston,’ the sexton replied in a reverent voice.

  ‘Cheers,’ Timothy Gedge said, but Mr Peniket did not reply to that.

  In the porch, full of missionary notices and rotas for flower-arranging, Quentin bent to put on his bicycle-clips.

  ‘Funny fish, that sexton,’ Timothy Gedge said. ‘Ever notice the way he looks at you, sir? Like you were garbage gone off.’ He laughed. Quentin said he didn’t think there was anything funny about Mr Peniket. He wheeled his bicycle on the tarred path that led, between gravestones, to the lich-gate.

  ‘I went up to see Dass, sir. Like you said.’

  ‘I didn’t actually say you should, you know.’

  ‘About the Spot the Talent competition, Mr Feather. You said the Dasses was in charge.’

  ‘I know, Timothy, I know.’

  ‘Only the curtains in the Youth Centre got burnt, Mr Feather. Two boys burnt them in December.’

  ‘Burnt them?’

  ‘I think the boys had been drinking, sir.’

  ‘You mean, they just set light to them?’

  ‘They put paraffin on them first, sir. They were making an effort to burn the place down, sir.’

  He remembered. There had been an attempt to burn the Youth Centre down, but he hadn’t known that the curtains of the stage had been at the point of ignition. It was true, though: the curtains hadn’t been there for ages. He’d wondered why a couple of times.

  ‘Only I need curtains for my act, Mr Feather. I need darkness in the marquee and the curtains drawn twice. I explained to Dass. I have quick changes to do.’