The Children Of Dynmouth (19 page)

‘Ever read books, Stephen?
Clifftop Tragedy
by Eileen Dover?’

In a sudden jerk of anger Stephen turned and kicked at his shins, but the blows didn’t hurt because of Stephen’s Wellington boots. What was more painful were Kate’s fists smacking into his stomach, blow after blow. She hit him so savagely that a woman with a pram told her to calm down.

Kate took no notice of the woman. ‘You leave us alone,’ she shouted at Timothy Gedge. ‘Just get away with your lies.’

Her voice was quivering beneath the pressure of tears. She blinked her eyes in an effort to hold them back.

‘Don’t you dare speak to us again,’ she cried. ‘Don’t you dare ever speak to us.’

They left him standing there and this time he didn’t follow them. The woman with the pram asked him what all that had been about. He smiled at her even though his stomach was paining him. He said they were just kids. He said it was just fun.

They walked on, towards and then past Miss Lavant, and past the other strollers on the promenade. Miss Lavant’s scarlet coat was of fine tweed, her skin had the poreless look of porcelain. She smiled as they passed her by, and they saw revealed what Timothy Gedge had claimed: her beauty was marred by discoloured teeth.

Stephen agreed that they must tell Mrs Blakey. If they didn’t tell Mrs Blakey he would continue to follow them with his carrier-bag, talking. You could kick him and hurt him, you could hit him on the face and on the eyes so that he couldn’t see, but he’d still manage to torment you. His conversation would never cease. He’d smile and say it was great being friends with you. He’d go on telling lies.

‘He’s a horrible person,’ Kate cried with renewed vehemence, and looked behind her as if contemplating a continuation of her assault. He was standing where they had left him, a long way back now, gazing after them. It was too far to make out his smile, but she knew the smile was there.

‘Come on, Kate.’

As she turned to walk on she shivered, affected by a chilliness that seemed to be an expression of her revulsion.

‘We’ll only say,’ Stephen said, ‘he keeps following us about. We’ll say he wants clothes to dress-up in. No need to tell her everything.’

Kate agreed with that. There was no need to tell Mrs Blakey everything because so much of it just didn’t make sense.

The men of Ring’s Amusements whistled and shouted, still preparing the machinery in Sir Walter Raleigh Park. Fifty yards ahead a bus, in shades of silver, slowly drew up. A man who appeared to be passing with a camera took a photograph of it.

The sea slurped over green rocks, at the bottom of the promenade wall. It was beginning to go out again, calmly withdrawing, as though trained. ‘Look,’ his mother had said, making him watch with her while a tide spent itself. She had loved watching the sea. She’d loved walking by it. She’d loved the stones it smoothed, and its wildness when it flung itself over the promenade wall, scattering gravel and driftwood. Like anger, she’d said.

Elderly people climbed slowly out of the silver bus, women in brown or cream or grey, old men in overcoats and hats. They stood uncertainly on the promenade, as if alarmed. They murmured to one another, and then they laughed because the bus-driver leaned out of his cab and made a joke. The man who’d taken a photograph of the bus asked if he might photograph the old people also, and the bus-driver told him to wait a minute. He put aside a newspaper he’d been going to read and jumped out of his cab. ‘Everyone for the gentleman’s photograph,’ he shouted, lining the elderly people against the side of the bus. ‘Cheese please, Louise.’ All the elderly people laughed.

‘It’s called harassing,’ Kate said. ‘You harass people by not leaving them alone. I’d say it was against the law.’

Stephen nodded, not knowing if it was against the law or not, and not much caring. The clothes of people who died were naturally left behind; he hadn’t ever thought of that. He hadn’t wondered where her clothes were when he’d returned to Primrose Cottage at the end of that autumn term. Other things had still been there, lots of her things. But even without looking he’d known that her clothes – all her dresses and her coats and her cardigans and her shoes – were no longer in her wardrobe or in the chests of drawers she shared with his father in their bedroom.

‘What happens to dead people’s clothes, d’you think?’

She said she didn’t know. His father wouldn’t burn them. It would be cruel to burn them since people needed clothes, refugees in India and Africa. His father was too nice and too charitable. She thought that but did not say it. His father would have given them to Oxfam, or to a jumble sale.

‘But not the wedding-dress?’

‘You wouldn’t give a wedding-dress.’

‘You wouldn’t put it on a bonfire, either.’

‘It wouldn’t be right to do that.’

The wedding-dress was in the faded green trunk, just as he’d imagined it in the night. It was as real as the bath behind the timber sheds. She’d stowed it away there, his father had found it. The boy had seen because he was always looking to see what people were doing.

They had almost reached the end of the promenade. Behind them the elderly people poked their way about in twos and threes, careful on the concrete surface. Farther behind, the scarlet figure of Miss Lavant moved past the façade of the Queen Victoria Hotel, towards the harbour and the fish-packing station. Timothy Gedge was nowhere to be seen.

At the end of the promenade they could take a flight of steps down to rocks that were slippery with seaweed, and clamber over them until they reached the shingle. They could make their way over that and eventually up the cliff to the eleventh green of the golf-course, to the gate in the garden wall. Or they could fork to the right, up Once Hill, past the rectory and on to the steep, narrow road that wound over the downs to Badstoneleigh, off which the entrance gates of Sea House opened. They were considering this choice when they were abruptly aware of Commander Abigail.

He made his way down the narrow road, huddled like a crab within his familiar brown overcoat. But his step was not his familiar jaunty one, nor did he carry his rolled-up towel and swimming-trunks. He moved as the elderly people from the bus moved, but without their caution because a red Post Office van had to swerve to avoid him. He stood for a moment on the promenade in the same huddled way, and then he made his way slowly towards a green-painted seat and sat slowly down on it.

They walked by him, looking at him because they couldn’t help themselves. But their staring didn’t matter because he didn’t notice it. His face was parched. His eyes were dead, as if the Post Office van had mowed him down and killed him. His hands were clasped together as if to comfort one another. There was a chalkiness about his lips and his eyelids. His ginger moustache was vivid.

It was true, they thought, still looking at him: he was a married man who went homo-ing about, who had been exposed to his wife when Timothy Gedge was drunk. All that was easy to believe now, it was easy to imagine the drunkenness, and Timothy Gedge letting the facts slip out because he didn’t care, because he’d find it enjoyable, even better than going to a funeral.

They left the promenade and on the sleek tarred surface of the road Stephen walked in front, Kate behind him. He changed his mind about telling Mrs Blakey. He said they mustn’t, not adding that the sight of Commander Abigail on the green-painted seat made all the difference. And as he hadn’t at first referred to the wedding-dress, last night or until they’d reached the spinney that morning, so he didn’t refer now to the fantasies of Timothy Gedge that were turning out not to be fantasies at all.

They sat in the kitchen at teatime, an awkward occasion, with Mrs Blakey’s beaming face puzzled by their silence. If he were possessed by devils, Kate thought, it would be a simple explanation. In her first term at St Cecilia’s there’d been a girl who’d had the gift of levitation, a disturbed girl called Julie who had been able to float eight feet above the ground, whom Miss Scuse had eventually had to have removed. Girls often had gifts like that, Rosalind Swain had said at the time, especially in adolescence. A girl called Enid could hypnotize other girls with the aid of a silver-coloured fountain-pen top. Another girl could read a whole page of a newspaper and immediately repeat it. Rosalind Swain said she wouldn’t be able to when she’d finished growing up. Adolescence was mysterious, Rosalind Swain explained. Adolescents often harboured poltergeists.

Mrs Blakey kept on asking them what they’d done that day. As if he hadn’t heard her, Stephen didn’t answer. Kate said they’d gone to the army display and mentioned the rations that were taken on Antarctic expeditions. If he were possessed by devils, you couldn’t fight against him: devils could possess people in the same way as other people were made to harbour poltergeists or were haunted by ghosts. Were they like vapours that rustled through him, devils owning him while he was unaware, making him smile his smile? Did he know what he was doing?

‘Is Stephen all right, dear?’ Mrs Blakey asked her as they cleared the plates from the table, when Stephen had gone. Kate pointed out that Stephen was always a little on the silent side.

‘You’ve gone silent yourself, Kate.’ Mrs Blakey spoke in a sudden, laughing kind of way, seeming relieved because she’d received an answer of a kind. Would she have collapsed into a heap if she’d learnt that Stephen was silent because he was wondering if his father had murdered his mother? His father who mended the broken wings of birds, his mother who had loved him for his gentleness? Was it really true? Had his mother shouted and screamed on the edge of a cliff, calling her own mother a prostitute? People quarrelled horribly. People were cruel, like her father had been before the divorce, like Miss Shaw and Miss Rist were to Miss Malabedeely. Yet of course it wasn’t true. Of course she hadn’t screamed like that.

In the drawing-room of the house that because of death and marriage had become his home Kate watched him while he, in turn, watched the coloured rectangle of the television screen. His intensity was contrived; already he had closed himself away from her. Like a physical presence, she could feel that between them.

Bullets ricocheted off the surface of a boulder, chipping pieces out of it but missing Kid Curry and Hannibal Hayes, alias Smith and Jones. Dismally she thought that nothing would be the same again. After all this ugliness, like a slime around them, he would resent her because she knew about it, because in sharing it she’d become part of it. She closed her eyes, wanting to cry but preventing herself.

‘You’re Hannibal Hayes,’ the voice of a sheriff roared from the television drama, and the voice of the cowboy quietly retorted, denying that he was. When she opened her eyes the cowboys were no longer crouched by the boulder. They were astride a single horse, tied back to back, being led along a skyline by the sheriff’s posse. Still hiding in pretended concentration, Stephen watched as though his life depended on it.

Ghosts were exorcized, there was a special service. There was the casting out of devils, which sounded similar. If the devils were cast out of Timothy Gedge, would everything miraculously be different? Would she and Stephen be sitting just as they were now and be suddenly unable to remember anything that had happened because nothing would have been real? Would the idyll she had dreamed of be there again, not smashed to pieces as it seemed to be?

It had been smashed to pieces because Timothy Gedge had followed them. Timothy Gedge, with his hollow cheeks and his gawkiness, had picked on them even though he didn’t know them, even though they’d done him no harm. Did he hate them because they lived in Sea House, because there was the garden and the setters, because they were friends and he had no friends himself? Or did he really just want a wedding-dress? Had she really screamed like that?

8

The sun trickled around the blinds in Kate’s bedroom, falling in narrow shafts over the poppies on the wallpaper and on the orange-painted dressing-table. It was warm in the room when she awoke and for some seconds she was aware of pleasurable anticipation, before the revelations of the day before came flooding in on her. Higgledy-piggledy they came, without rhyme or reason. Unwillingly she marshalled them into order, beginning with the moment when she and Stephen had stepped out of the French windows, apprehensive because Timothy Gedge was in the garden. Stephen had been friends with her then. He had been friends while they talked in the spinney, and while they made the dam on the stream and read their paper-backed books after they’d eaten their sandwiches.

She got up, pulling back the bedclothes and releasing the blinds on both windows. The sea was calm. No breeze disturbed the budding magnolias or the tree mallows, or the azaleas for which the garden was noted. Mr Blakey stood among his cropped rose-beds, pondering something. In their favourite morning resting place, warm in the sunshine by the summer-house, the setters reclined with dignity, like sleepy lions. In Dynmouth the clock of St Simon and St Jude’s chimed eight. She took her nightdress off and quickly dressed.

That day, a Saturday, was a horrible day. They didn’t leave the house. In Kate’s room, hardly speaking, they played draughts and Monopoly and Rickety Ann and Switch and Racing Demon. She hated the silence and felt subdued by it, and in the end defeated. When she tried to be cheerful she ended up flustered and red-faced, clammy all over. At lunchtime in the kitchen she tried to cover the silence up by chattering about anything that came into her head, but her chattering made the silence more obvious. Stephen didn’t say a single word. Mrs Blakey became worried, and it showed.

They watched a Saturday-afternoon film on television,
All This and Heaven Too.
Afterwards they read. They played Monopoly again. From the window of Kate’s room they watched Mrs Blakey on the distant seashore throwing driftwood for the setters. They watched her returning, passing through the gate in the archway of the garden wall, the setters’ mouths drooping open from excitement and fatigue.

They were still at the window when Timothy Gedge appeared a few minutes later. He peeped through the white ornamental iron-work of the gate. He looked up at the windows of the house.