The Children Of Dynmouth (18 page)

‘Whatever’s going on?’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘Whatever’s Timothy Gedge want?’

He’d lost a penknife on the beach, Kate said. He was wondering if they’d found it.

There was a spinney they’d made their own, by the river. They went there in the middle of that morning, passing through the gate in the garden wall and along the cliff-path for a few hundred yards and then on to the golf-course. Rapidly they crossed fairways, by greens and bunkers and tees. They passed behind the club-house, leaving the golf-course behind them. They went through a field where sheep grazed, and then through bracken that sloped down steeply to the River Dyn. They wore Wellington boots, their corduroy jeans and the same jerseys as yesterday, Kate’s red, Stephen’s navy-blue.

Stephen walked ahead of her on the river bank. He led the way around the edge of a marsh and then through drier land, with limestone boulders on it. Ferns grew among the boulders, and further on the spring undergrowth was already dense. At a twist in the river lay the spinney, a clump of birch saplings sprouting through a thicket of bramble. It wasn’t large and never attracted other people. A stream ran through it to the river.

In the middle of the undergrowth, unseen either from the river or the bank on the other side, they had built a hut with lengths of fallen wood and some corrugated iron they’d found. It was a private lair, and though they’d often wished to have a fire they’d never done so – not because they feared for the dry wood of the spinney but because they knew that rising smoke would sooner or later be investigated.

They crawled into their hut. Outside, the sun glanced through a lacing of branches and bramble and scattered light in patches. Inside it was almost dark. They didn’t speak. Kate’s arms were clasped around her knees in an attitude she often took up. Stephen lay flat, gazing out at the patterns of sunlight, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. They hadn’t spoken to one another about Timothy Gedge, either last night or since Stephen had closed the French windows in his face, several hours ago. They hadn’t said to one another that they couldn’t understand his talk about the Abigails and the Dasses and Mr Plant of the Artilleryman’s Friend. They had attempted to visualize his world, as they had so often visualized each other’s boarding-schools. But they knew too little about him and what they knew was bewildering. They tried to imagine him acting in a comic manner the part of a man who had murdered three wives in a bath. They tried to imagine people watching this gruesome comedy.

‘He’s making it up. The wedding-dress isn’t even there.’ Kate spoke softly, shaking her head in denial.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s there.’ He remembered waking up in the middle of the night, and then he remembered Miss Tomm walking into the dormitory and saying that the headmaster wanted to see him and Cartwright saying: ‘Eee, what’s Fleming done?’ He remembered his father in his tweed overcoat in the Craw’s study, his father saying later how it had happened, and then the funeral in the rain. Timothy Gedge had said he’d seen him there. He’d said the best place for the people of Dynmouth was in their coffins.

Stephen suddenly wanted to hit him. He wanted to hit him all over the face with his fists, to smash away his stupid smile, to stop him talking.

‘I think we should tell Mrs Blakey,’ Kate said.

‘No.’ He shook his head, still gazing at the patterns of sunshine on the grass outside the hut. ‘No,’ he said again, closing the subject.

They made a dam on the stream, which was something they often did when they came to the spinney. They could feel the chill of the water through the rubber of their Wellington boots. Their hands, piling up stones, became red with cold.

Kate watched him, glancing sideways without turning her head. In the garden that morning she’d thought he was going to cry because of the memory of his mother’s death. She’d thought he was going to turn his back on Timothy Gedge and on herself and run into the house so that they wouldn’t see his tears. She’d felt his unhappiness and she felt it now. She wanted to say that he’d feel all right when a little time had passed, just like you did at school when you were homesick at the beginning of term. But she didn’t because she didn’t know that that would happen. She didn’t know what would happen, she didn’t know what was happening now.

They ate the sandwiches they’d made before they’d left the house, and then lay in their shelter and read two paper-backed books they’d brought with them. In the middle of the afternoon they decided to walk back to Dynmouth. There was an army display on for one day only, Mrs Blakey had said at breakfast: the car-park behind the fish-packing station had been taken over for it.

*

‘Hullo there,’ a sergeant said. ‘Come to see for yourselves, then?’

Boys were playing with machine-guns, swivelling them this way and that, peering through the sights. Bored soldiers were showing how various mechanisms operated and explaining the rate at which bullets could be discharged. Other boys climbed in and out of tanks or queued outside a caravan which advertised a film about combat in the jungle. A second caravan contained an exhibition of recruitment leaflets and in a third one there was an exhibition of army rations for Antarctic expeditions. Amplified pop music was playing.

‘This looks the best,’ Kate said, determinedly leading the way to the rations caravan. ‘Look, tinned rice pudding. And Spangles. Imagine taking Spangles to the Antarctic!’

There was meal to make porridge with in the Antarctic, and sugar and powdered milk, and biscuits and powdered soup, and tinned stew.

‘Whatever next?’ Kate tried to giggle, reading out the directions on the stew, but nothing seemed funny. ‘I think they’re pampered,’ she said lamely.

They went to the recruitment caravan, and to the film about combat in the jungle, which they left before it was over.

‘Cheers!’ Timothy Gedge said, coming up behind them.

His presence wasn’t a surprise. They didn’t reply to his greeting. He was carrying the same carrier-bag and for some reason they found it impossible not to stare at it. It swung lightly in the air, the Union Jack gay against his pallid clothes, seeming imbued with his own anticipation.

He walked away from the army display with them, offering them fruit gums and chattering. In his woman’s voice he repeated two conversations between waiters and men ordering plates of soup. He drew their attention to the goods in shop windows, to the cooking-stoves and washing-machines in the windows of the electricity showrooms. These electrical gadgets were all good value, he said, nodding his head repeatedly: the South-Western Electricity Board was an honest organization. ‘If your mum’s after a washer,’ he advised Kate, ‘she’d best move in while the sale’s on.’ In everything he said there were wisps of mockery.

‘Why are you following us?’ Stephen asked, knowing the answer to the question.

‘I need the dress for my act, Stephen.’

He smiled his smile at them. They stopped, waiting for him to walk on, but he didn’t.

‘We’ve told you we’re not going to get a wedding-dress for you,’ Kate said.

He began to whistle beneath his breath, a soft sound without a tune, as if he were attempting to imitate the rushing of wind through trees. He ceased it in order to speak again.

‘It’s great being friends with you,’ he said. He pointed at meat in a shop window and said it was good value. ‘Did you ever notice,’ he said to Kate, ‘Miss Lavant has bad teeth?’

They walked on, not speaking, not reacting to what he was saying. He asked them why elephants didn’t ride bicycles and explained that it was because they hadn’t any thumbs to ring the bell with. George Joseph Smith, he told them, had spent a night in Dynmouth one time, at the Castlerea boarding-house, still in business.

‘Were you ever in Tussaud’s, Kate? They have the bath set up on the floor there, you can reach a hand out and touch it. They have Christie in Tussaud’s, Kate. And this bloke called Haigh that sent his clothes in to the model-maker so’s they wouldn’t have the trouble of faking them. And another bloke that used to drink his own Number One.’ He laughed. He’d read up about George Joseph Smith, he said, after he’d got his idea for a show. ‘I read up about a lot of them, Kate. This Maybrick woman who finished her hubby off with fly-papers. And the Thompson woman who was administering glass for eight months, only it didn’t take, so Freddie Bywaters had to stick a knife into the man near Ilford Station. And this Fulham woman who was administering arsenic, only all that was happening was her hubby was getting a tingling in his feet.’ He laughed again. A lot of it was comic, he explained, you definitely had to smile. You’d go mad if you couldn’t smile at things, you’d go mad without a sense of humour.

‘You should see a psychiatrist,’ Stephen said.

‘Freddie Bywaters definitely stuck the knife in, Stephen.’

‘I’m not talking about Freddie Bywaters. We think you’re insane.’

‘Did I mention the Dasses to you?’

‘We don’t want to hear about them.’ Stephen’s voice had risen, as it had that morning in the garden, and again Kate thought that he was trying not to cry. He was afraid of Timothy Gedge.

‘Let’s go in here, and I’ll show you that bath.’

They were passing a builder’s yard.
A. J. Swines,
it said on high brown doors that were standing open so that lorries could pass in and out.
Builders and Plumbers,
it said.

‘It’s just there. Behind the timber sheds.’

It would not be there, Kate thought. It would be like opening the trunk and the wedding-dress not being there. He would lead them into the yard and behind the sheds, and then he’d point at nothing and say there it was. It would at least be an explanation, a confirmation of his madness. Stephen hesitated and then followed the other two.

They passed a cement-mixer that was being operated by two men with cement dust on their caps and dungarees. Timothy Gedge smiled at the men and said it was a nice day. He led the way behind some sheds in which planks of timber were stored. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘How’s about that then?’

It was badly chipped and covered with rust marks. Timothy Gedge said it was made of tin. Quite light really, he explained, lifting up one end, not like a cast-iron one. ‘I thought you’d like to see it,’ he said as they left the yard. ‘Shall we walk up to the house now?’

They didn’t answer. He said again that it was great being friends with them.

‘We’re not your friends,’ Stephen replied hotly. ‘Can’t you get it into your head? We don’t like you.’

‘I often go up, Stephen. I go up to the place it happened: to remember the way it was, actually.’

They didn’t ask him what he meant. They were in Fore Street now, busy with afternoon shoppers. As in Badstoneleigh yesterday, he pushed his way through them.

‘I witnessed it,’ he said. ‘I was there in the gorse.’

They knew what he was referring to, and Kate resolved that whether Stephen liked it or not she was going to tell Mrs Blakey. She’d tell her every single thing, all he’d said about Commander Abigail and all about the bath and the wedding-dress and what he was saying now, about witnessing the accident. Mrs Blakey would immediately tell her husband and Mr Blakey would immediately go to wherever it was this boy lived and warn him that if he didn’t stop the police would be informed. And that would be the end of it.

They turned into Lace Street, walking by the side of the Queen Victoria Hotel. They crossed a zebra-crossing when they came to the promenade and turned right, leaving the harbour and the fish-packing station behind them. Ahead of them was Sir Walter Raleigh Park and in the distance, the highest point on the cliffs, Sea House. Miss Lavant, with her wicker shopping basket, was out for her afternoon turn on the promenade, prominent among the other strollers, in scarlet. The beach, stretching endlessly away beneath the cliffs, was a narrow strip of shingle now, for the sea was fully in.

‘Tipped,’ Timothy Gedge said, the word appearing to have been chosen at random.

‘Listen, will you shut up?’ Stephen cried. ‘Will you shut up and go away? Will you clear off?’

‘I witnessed it, Stephen. I saw her tipped down that cliff.’

Stephen stared at him, ceasing to walk. He frowned, unable to think, unable to grasp immediately what was being implied.

‘Tipped?’ Kate repeated after a moment.

‘What d’you mean, tipped?’ Stephen demanded, not intending to ask the question. ‘What’re you talking about?’

He said the council had put up a wire fence at the place on the cliff-path. After the tragedy a couple of men had gone up with concrete posts: he’d watched them at it. The place was supposed to be dangerous because the path was too narrow between the gorse bushes and the edge: it stood to reason, she stumbled over in the wind. He put a fruit gum in his mouth. The truth was, all that was a load of rubbish. ‘Your dad tipped her down, in actual fact.’

Stephen tried to shake his head, but found it hard to do so. It was meant to be some kind of joke. It was meant to be funny.

‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ Kate said. Her voice was shaky, her eyes had become round and dull with astonishment. It didn’t seem to her that Timothy Gedge was trying to make a joke, yet it was amazing that he was saying all this just to pay them back for not being friendly or because he wanted a wedding-dress they wouldn’t give him, or for any reason at all.

‘She was shouting out your mum’s a prostitute, Kate. Then he tips her down and she’s screaming her head off. I was there in the gorse, Stephen. I followed them up.’

‘That’s not true,’ Kate cried. ‘None of it’s true.’

‘My mother’s death was accidental. She was alone. She went for a walk alone.’

‘It’s horrible what you’re saying,’ Kate cried.

‘We’ll keep the secret, Kate. He tipped her down because he was head over heels on your mum and she was calling your mum a prostitute. There’s always a reason why a person performs the murder act. They were on the job, see, your mum and Stephen’s dad. He was black as thunder when she said your mum was a pro. You’d be black yourself, Stephen, if someone said the same thing about Kate.’

Stephen began to walk on again. Kate said they’d tell the Blakeys and the Blakeys would go to the police.