The Children Of Dynmouth (13 page)

‘I’d say we’d gone two miles,’ Stephen said.

There were worms of sand where they walked, and here and there embedded shells. Fluffy white clouds floated politely around the sun, as though unwilling to obscure it. Far out to sea a trawler was motionless.

For a moment she had a day-dream. They were in a sailing boat, as far out as the trawler, both of them older, eighteen or nineteen. Stephen wasn’t different except for being taller; she was prettier, not round-faced. He said she was interesting. She made him laugh, he said, and in any case prettiness didn’t matter. She was witty, she had an interesting mind.

‘Further,’ she said. ‘More than two miles, I’d say.’ She asked him to test her on fielding positions, and he marked out on the sand the two sets of stumps and the ten fielding positions around them. ‘Silly mid-on,’ she said. ‘Silly mid-off, square leg, slips, long-stop. Wicket-keeper, of course.’

He told her the others and she tried to memorize them, the positions and the titles. He explained how the positions would change according to the kind of bowler, fast, slow, medium, or according to whether leg-breaks were being bowled or off-spin employed. They would also change according to the calibre of the batsman, and whether or not a batsman was left-handed, and the state of the wicket. Some batsmen, included in a team because of their bowling, might find themselves crowded by close slips. Others, in powerful form, would force the fielders to the boundary. Kate found it all difficult to understand, but she wanted to understand it. She only wished she was any good at the game herself, which unfortunately she wasn’t. She’d always preferred French cricket, although she’d naturally never told Stephen that.

They walked on, and after what they reckoned to be another mile they paused again and looked back at Dynmouth. It was now a cluster of houses with the pier protruding modestly into the sea and, unimpressive on the cliffs, the house they lived in themselves. On the beach a speck moved in the same direction as they did.

There was a second figure, which they didn’t see: high above them, Timothy Gedge gazed down from the cliff-top path. For a moment he ceased his observation of them and instead gazed out to sea, at the trawler on the horizon. The Commander was fond of saying it was the sea on which the Spanish Armada had been defeated, the sea that Adolf Hitler had not dared to cross. Timothy nodded to himself, thinking about the sailing ships of the Spanish Armada and the severe face of the German Führer, of which he’d seen pictures. On the golf-course behind him a foursome of players shouted to one another as they approached the fourteenth green.

He watched the children from Sea House again, becoming smaller on the sand. He guessed they were on their way to Bad-stoneleigh because of the double bill at the Pavilion. He’d seen it himself but he’d see it again just to keep latched on to them. They’d be at a loose end when it was over, which would be the time to approach them. He’d mention something about when Bond was in the sewer or whatever it was meant to be, load of rubbish really. With one hand he grasped the string handle of the carrier-bag with the Union Jack on it. In the other he clutched a fifty-p piece, a coin he’d discovered the evening before in Mrs Abigail’s purse, which carelessly she’d left on top of the refrigerator.

The children were dots on the sand, well ahead of him now, getting smaller all the time. In the other direction, becoming larger, the figure of Commander Abigail slowly advanced.

Mrs Abigail took round Meals on Wheels with Miss Poraway as her assistant, or runner, as the title officially was. Miss Poraway wore a mauve coat and a mauve hat that clashed with it. Mrs Abigail was neat, in blue.

They collected the food – each meal on two covered tin plates and the whole lot contained in large metal hot-boxes – from the old people’s home, Wisteria Lodge. Mrs Abigail drove the blue W R V S van, Miss Poraway sat beside her with a list of the names and addresses they were to visit that morning, the diabetics marked with a ‘D’, as were the corresponding dinners in the metal hot-boxes. Those who didn’t like gravy were indicated also, for there was often trouble where gravy was concerned.

‘Roast beef and rice pudding,’ Miss Poraway remarked as Mrs Abigail steered the van through the morning traffic. She went on talking about roast beef. They always liked it, she declared, and rice pudding too, come to that, though heaven alone knew why, the way they cooked it in Wisteria Lodge. She examined the list of names and addresses. Mr Padget, 29 Prout Street, who was usually the first to receive his meal, had been struck off. ‘Oh dear,’ Miss Poraway remarked.

Mrs Abigail nodded vaguely. The last thing she’d have chosen to listen to this morning was Miss Poraway’s conversation. When she’d lain awake in the night realizing how upset and worried she was by Timothy Gedge’s visit, she’d thought the one thing she wouldn’t be able to do was Meals on Wheels with Miss Poraway. She’d planned to telephone Mrs Trotter, who organized everything, and explain that she wasn’t feeling well. But when the morning came it had seemed disgraceful to pretend illness and let everybody down. She had reminded herself that once or twice recently Miss Poraway hadn’t been able to come because of her nasal complaint, and Mrs Blackham, who was at least efficient, had taken her place.

‘Well, I do like that,’ Miss Poraway was saying, pointing at a cartoon cut from the
W R V S News
that someone had stuck with Sellotape to the dashboard of the van. It showed an elderly couple being given their meal by a uniformed W R V S woman who was asking them if the food had been all right the last time. ‘Meat were luvely,’ the elderly wife was enthusing. ‘But gravy were tough,’ her ancient partner toothlessly protested.

Since Mrs Abigail, intent on driving, was unable to benefit from this, Miss Poraway read it out. She also read the message in italics printed beneath the cartoon, to the effect that the cartoonist responsible had for many years been officially connected with a provincial newspaper and was now, in the sunset of his life, himself the recipient of twice-weekly Meals on Wheels.

‘Well, I do call that amusing,’ Miss Poraway said, ‘the whole thing.’

The van drew up in Pretty Street and Miss Poraway and Mrs Abigail got out, Miss Poraway still talking about the cartoon, saying it would tickle her brother when she told him about it. Mrs Abigail carried the two covered plates, one on top of the other, using a tea-towel because they were hot. She opened the gate of Number 10, the terraced house of Miss Vine, whose budgerigar was unwell. Miss Poraway clattered noisily behind her, with her list and a tobacco tin for collecting the money in.

‘Morning, Miss Vine!’ Mrs Abigail called out, forcing cheerfulness as she opened the front door.

‘Morning, dear!’ Miss Poraway called out behind her.

They made their way to the kitchen, where Miss Vine was sitting on a chair beside the budgerigar cage. Usually she had a saucepan of water simmering on the electric stove, with two plates warming on top of it, waiting to receive the meal. But this morning all that had been forgotten because the budgerigar had taken a turn for the worse.

‘He’ll not last,’ Miss Vine said gloomily. ‘He’s down in the mouth worse’n ever today.’

‘Oh, he’ll perk up, Miss Vine,’ Mrs Abigail said, mustering further cheerfulness as she emptied roast beef, potatoes, brussels sprouts and gravy on to a cold plate. ‘They often pine for a day or two.’

Miss Poraway disagreed. She was peering through the bars of the cage, making sucking noises. She advanced the opinion that the bird wouldn’t last much longer, and recommended Miss Vine to think about the purchase of a new one.

‘Pop your rice pudding in the oven, shall I?’ Mrs Abigail suggested, opening the oven door and lighting the gas.

Miss Vine did not reply. She had begun to weep. Nothing would induce her, she whispered, to have another bird in the house after poor Beano had gone. You got to love a bird like a human. You got so that the first thing you did every day was to go into the kitchen and say good morning to it.

Mrs Abigail took a soup-plate from a cupboard and emptied the rice pudding on to it. Miss Poraway should by now have collected twelve pence from Miss Vine. She should have ticked off Miss Vine’s name on her list and been ready to carry the empty plates and covers back to the van. Two minutes in any one house was as long as you dared allow if the last half-dozen dinners weren’t to be stone-cold. She placed the plate of rice pudding in the oven and drew Miss Vine’s attention to it. ‘Cub scouts,’ the voice of Timothy Gedge whispered again, like some kind of echo. All night long he’d been saying it.

‘That chap that has the hardware,’ Miss Poraway said. ‘Moult, isn’t it? Brings paraffin round in a van. He’s got birds. He’d easily fix you up, dear.’

‘Have you got your twelve p, Miss Vine?’ Mrs Abigail asked. ‘Don’t forget that rice pudding’s in the oven now.’

‘Shame really,’ Miss Poraway said, ‘when little creatures die.’

Unable to help herself, Mrs Abigail made a vexed noise. It was quite pointless having a runner who saw the whole thing as a social outing and had once even sat down in a kitchen and said she’d just rest for a minute. Half past three it had been when they’d arrived at Mr Grady’s, the last name on the list, his fish and chips congealed and inedible. As she collected up the plates and covers herself and went without Miss Vine’s twelve p, the face of Timothy Gedge appeared in her mind, causing her to feel sick in the stomach. God knows, it was bad enough having to poke your way along in the van, peering at the numbers of houses because your runner was incapable of it. It was bad enough having to do every single bit of the work, rushing like a mad thing because the person who was meant to help you couldn’t stop talking. It was bad enough in normal circumstances, but when you hadn’t slept a wink, when you’d lain there suffering from shock and disgust, it was more than any normal person could bear. Of course she’d been wrong not to telephone Mrs Trotter. She should have told Mrs Trotter that she was in no condition to deliver forty dinners, obstructed at every turn by Miss Poraway. She should have told her that after thirty-six years of marriage she’d discovered her husband was a homosexual, the explanation of everything.

She drove to the Heathfield estate, to Mr and Mrs Budd’s bungalow, and to Seaway Road, to Mrs Hutchings’, and then to the elderly poor of Boughs Lane. All the time Miss Poraway talked. She talked about her niece, Gwen, who had just married an auctioneer, and about the child of another niece, who had something the matter with his ears. When they arrived at Beaconville, where three elderly people lived together, Mrs Abigail gave her one dinner to carry but she dropped it while trying to open the hall-door. In every house they called at she forgot to collect the money. ‘It’s dangerous, a cold when you’re your age, dear,’ she said to Miss Trimm. ‘Don’t like the look of her,’ she remarked loudly in the hall, forgetting that despite her other failings Miss Trimm’s hearing had sharpened with age. They’d buried old Mr Rine that morning, she added, and old Mrs Crowley on Saturday.

As Mrs Abigail struggled through the morning, she was repeatedly reminded, as though this truth sought to mock her, that she had never wished to come to Dynmouth. In London there were the cinemas she enjoyed going to, and the theatre matinées. There were Harvey Nichols and Harrods to browse through, not that she ever bought anything. In Dynmouth the antiquated and inadequately heated Essoldo showed the same film for seven days at a time and the shops were totally uninteresting. With Miss Poraway chattering beside her, she reflected upon all this and recalled, as she had in the night, the course of her virginal marriage.

They had been two small, quiet people; he’d been, at twenty-nine, a gentle kind of man. She hadn’t known much about life, nor had he. They’d both lived with their parents near Sutton, he already in the shipping business from which he’d retired when they came to Dynmouth, she working in her father’s estate agency, doing part-time secretarial duties and arranging the flowers in the outer office. Both sets of parents had been against the marriage, but she and Gordon had persisted, drawn closer by the opposition. They’d been married in a church she’d always gone to as a child and afterwards there was a reception in the Mansfield Hotel, near by and convenient, and then she and Gordon had gone to Cumberland. She’d been trim and neat and pretty. She’d powdered her face in the lavatory on the train, examining her reflection in the mirror, thinking she wasn’t bad-looking. Twice before she’d had proposals of marriage and had rejected them because she couldn’t feel for the men they came from.

She hadn’t known what to expect of marriage, not precisely. They’d shared a bed in Cumberland and she had comforted Gordon because nothing was quite right. Everything took getting used to, she said, saying the same thing night after night, softly in the darkness. You had to learn things, she whispered, supposing that the activity which Gordon found difficult required practice, like tennis. It didn’t matter, she said. They went for long, pleasant walks in Cumberland. They enjoyed having breakfast together in the hotel dining-room.

She remembered clothes she had then, on her honeymoon and afterwards: suits and dresses, many of them in shades of blue, her favourite colour, coats and scarves and shoes. They had friends, other couples, the Watsons, the Turners, the Godsons. There were dinner-parties, bridge was played, there were excursions to the theatre, and dances. Once a man she’d never met before, a man called Peter who didn’t seem to have a wife, kept dancing with her in the Godsons’ house, holding her very close, in a way that quite upset her and yet was pleasurable. A year later, when the war had started and Gordon was already in the Navy, she’d met this Peter in Bond Street and he’d invited her to have a drink, reaching for her elbow. She’d felt quite frightened and hadn’t accepted the invitation.

After the war she and Gordon moved to another part of London. They didn’t see their pre-war friends again and didn’t replace them, it was hard to know why. Gordon seemed a little different, hardened by the war. She was different herself, looking back on it: she’d lost a certain naturalness, she didn’t feel vivacious. It was a disappointment not having children, but there were millions of couples who didn’t have children, and of course there were far worse things than that, as the war had just displayed.