The Children Of Dynmouth (26 page)

She didn’t understand. ‘Bad luck?’ she said.

‘To be born to be battered. To be Sharon Lines or Timothy Gedge.’

‘But surely –’

‘God permits chance.’

Lavinia looked at her husband, looking into his eyes, which contained the weariness that his words implied. It wasn’t easy for him, having to accept that God permitted chance, any more than it was easy for him to be a clergyman in a time when clergymen seemed superfluous. He would pray for Timothy Gedge and feel that prayer wasn’t enough in a chancy world.

‘It depresses you,’ he said, and felt as he spoke that he’d be better employed packing fish in the fish-packing station than in charge of a church. His house of holy cards had collapsed through his own ineptitude. The opinion of the child that morning, and of Timothy Gedge, was an opinion shared by the greater part of Dynmouth: there were the shreds of a traditional respect for his calling, and then impatience, occasionally contempt.

It was hard to comfort him. Awful things happened, she said, feeling the statement to be lame; yet people had to go on. It was impossible to know the truth about Timothy Gedge, why he was as he was; no one could know with certainty. The Easter Fête would take place. They’d hope for a fine day. He had a wedding at half past ten and another at twelve. He should go to bed, she said.

‘He’s pretending he’s Miss Lavant’s child.’

‘Miss Lavant’s? But Miss Lavant –’

‘Miss Lavant’s and Dr Greenslade’s. A child that was given to Mrs Gedge to bring up.’

‘But where on earth did he get that idea?’

‘It replaces his fantasy about going on a television show.’

‘But he can’t believe it.’

‘He does. And more and more he will.’

There was a silence for a moment in the sitting-room, and then Lavinia said again that he should go to bed.

He nodded, not moving, not looking at her.

‘You’re tired,’ she said, and added that there was no point in gloom because gloom made everything worse. There were the good things, too, she reminded him. There were children who were loved and who were lovable. There were their own two children, and thousands of others, in Dynmouth and everywhere. It was only the odd one who grew a shell like Timothy Gedge’s.

He nodded again, turning to look at her.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been so dreary lately,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re never dreary, Lavinia.’

They went to bed and when Lavinia woke in the night it was Timothy Gedge she thought of, not her lost child. Was it really impossible to know the truth about him? She wondered how he would be now if he’d been brought up in the Down Manor Orphanage. She wondered how he’d be if his father had not driven off or if his mother had shown him more affection. How would he be if on one of those Saturday mornings when he’d hung around the rectory she’d recognized herself the bitterness beneath his grin?

She couldn’t believe that the catastrophe of Timothy Gedge was not somehow due to other people, and the circumstances created by other people. Quentin was wrong, she said to herself. She was certain he was wrong, certain that it was not just bad luck in a chancy world; but she did not intend to argue with him. And doubting her husband on this point, she wondered if Timothy Gedge’s future was as bleak as he had forecast. She thought about it without finding any kind of answer, and then she thought about the futures of her nursery-school children and others among the children of Dynmouth. What men would her own two children marry, if they married at all? Would they be happy? Would the children of Sea House be happy? Would Stephen ever discover that Timothy Gedge had not entirely told lies? She did not visualize Kate as Kate had visualized herself, alone in Sea House, a woman like Miss Lavant. Quentin had said that for a moment Kate had reminded him of Miss Trimm, and for another moment Lavinia imagined that: Kate at eighty-two, passionately involved with God. That might be so, or not. Kate, and Stephen too, must be left suspended because children by their nature, with so vast a future, had to be. Little Mikey Hatch she thought of, suspended also, dipping his arms into water at the nursery school, and Jennifer Droppy looking sad, and Joseph Wright pushing, and Johnny Pyke laughing, and Tracy Waye being bossy, and Thomas Braine interrupting, and good Andrew Cartboy, and Mandy Goff singing her song. Their faces slipped through her mind, round faces and long faces, thin, fat, smiling, sombre. A whole array of faces came and went, of children who were at her school and children who had been there once. Would little Mikey Hatch become, like his father, a butcher? Would Mandy Goff break hearts all over Dynmouth, as people said her mother had? Would Joseph Wright in time become a Mr Peniket, or Johnny Pyke a Commander Abigail, or Jennifer Droppy a Miss Poraway? Would Thomas Braine, indulged by his parents already, one day turn on them, as the child of the Dasses had? Would Andrew Cartboy, so tiny and sallow, become a Dynmouth Hard? Would Tracy Waye’s bossiness turn into the middle-aged bossiness of a Mrs Stead-Carter?

The future mattered because the future was the region where their stories would be told, happy and unfortunate, ordinary and strange. Yet it was sad in a way to see them venturing into it, so carelessly losing innocence. The future was like the blackness that surrounded her, in which there weren’t even shadows. She stared into the blackness, and the faces and limbs of children, her own and others, again slipped about in her mind. And Timothy Gedge smiled at her, claiming her, or so it seemed. His face remained when the others had gone, sharp-boned and predatory, his eyes hungry, his smile still giving her the creeps.

12

On the morning of Easter Saturday the marquee, borrowed for the Easter Fête through Mrs Stead-Carter, arrived in the rectory garden and was erected by the men who brought it, as it always was. The twins watched. They could remember the Easter Fête last year. It was a glorious occasion.

At half past ten Mr Peniket arrived, with the stage for the Spot the Talent competition on a trailer behind his car, the timber boards and the concrete blocks and the landscape of Swiss Alps on hardboard. Then Mr Dass arrived with his lights and the blackout curtains that had been cleaned by the Courtesy Cleaners.

Chairs and benches and trestle-tables were delivered, borrowed from another firm through the offices of Mrs Stead-Carter. Mrs Keble arrived to set up her tombola and Mrs Stead-Carter with cakes for her cake-stall. Miss Poraway told the men who were unloading the trestle-tables that she would require a good one, because she ran the book-stall and always had. They’d made thirty-five pence last year, she said, which was considered good. Mrs Trotter set up her jewellery-stall, and Quentin and Mr Goff arranged the hoopla, the coconut shy, the bran tub, and the Kill-the-Rat. In the rectory kitchen Lavinia and Mrs Blackham and Mrs Goff buttered buns and cut up sponge cake and ginger cake and fruitcake, and arranged oatmeal fingers on plates. Dynmouth Dairies delivered forty pints of milk.

People arrived with jewellery for Mrs Trotter and cakes for Mrs Stead-Carter and prizes for the tombola. People came with books for Miss Poraway, tattered green-backed Penguins,
Police at the Funeral
by Margery Allingham,
Surfeit of Lampreys
by Ngaio Marsh, half of
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?,
the greater part of
Death and the Dancing Footman.
Someone brought an old Cook’s Continental Timetable and
V A T News No. 4
and
V A T News No. 5
. Someone else brought fifty-two copies of the
Sunday Times
colour supplement.

‘Susannah help with books,’ Susannah said. ‘Susannah can.’

‘Deborah can,’ Deborah said.

‘Oh now, how kind you are!’ Miss Poraway cried, and one by one the twins took volumes from a carton that Mrs Stead-Carter had carried from her car. ‘We sell them for a penny each,’ Miss Poraway explained. ‘Some real bargains there are.
Cow-Keeping in India
,’ she read from the spine of a volume that had suffered from damp. Never judge a book by its cover, she warned the twins. ‘
Practical Taxidermy
,’ she read from the spine of another.

In the kitchen Mrs Blackham said Lavinia looked a little tired and Lavinia said she was, a little. Being upset about Timothy Gedge had made her tired, but she was glad she’d been upset, for at least it made sense, not like moping over a baby that couldn’t be born.

That afternoon, on the loudspeaker system of Ring’s Amusements, Petula Clark sang ‘Downtown’. All over Dynmouth she could be heard because the volume had been specially turned up, the first indication that Ring’s were once again open for business.

Even though it was daylight the strings of coloured bulbs were lit up in Sir Walter Raleigh Park. The voices of the stall-holders jangled against one another, urging and inviting, different from the voices of the stall-holders at the Easter Fête. The Ghost Train rattled, amplified screams came from a record in the Haunted House, and amplified laughter from the Hall of a Million Mirrors. Yellow plastic ducks went round and round, inviting hoops to be thrown over them. Wooden horses and kangaroos and chickens went round and round also, a few of them with children on their backs. Wooden motor-cars and trains went round and round, more slowly. Empty chairs with harnesses swung violently through the air, high above people’s heads. Motor-cycle engines roared in the pit of the Wall of Death. ‘Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city,’ sang Petula Clark. ‘Linger on the sidewalks where the neon-signs are pretty.’

Mrs Blakey heard the voice of Petula Clark, a faint whisper in the kitchen of Sea House. The atmosphere had gone from the house. At lunchtime the children had been normal, Stephen quiet but no longer looking drawn, Kate chattering about their parents’ return. She would not say anything, Mrs Blakey decided as she collected around her the ingredients of a steak and kidney stew for everyone’s supper. She wouldn’t mention the boy who’d made trouble unless for some reason she happened to be asked about him, and she felt she would not be. She hummed quite happily again, her two red cheeks exuding her interrupted cheerfulness.

Kate and Stephen went on the dodgems and then bought candy floss. They watched the Dynmouth Hards performing at the rifle range, their black-frilled girls loitering beside them, seeming bored. They watched Alfonso and Annabella on the Wall of Death. They walked through the Haunted House. They looked at themselves in the Hall of a Million Mirrors. They travelled on the Ghost Train.

They left Sir Walter Raleigh Park and walked to the rectory garden. Stephen won a coconut. Kate bought two tickets in Mrs Keble’s tombola. They paid to enter the marquee to see the Spot the Talent competition. It was due to start at four o’clock, but didn’t begin until twenty past due to a hitch. Last year’s carnival queen sang ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree’. Stout Mrs Muller, in her national costume, sang. The Dynmouth Night-Lifers, with electric guitars, sang. The man called Pratt who’d come to the Dasses’ house on a motor-cycle did his imitations of dogs. Mr Swayles did his conjuring. The manager of the tile-works played the mouth-organ. Miss Wilkinson did her Lady of Shalott. Mrs Dass come on in a fluffy magenta dress and awarded the first prize to last year’s carnival queen and the second to Mr Swayles and the third to Mrs Muller.

The children left the marquee. They saw Miss Lavant in a suit with buttercups on it, strolling about among the stalls, her downcast eyes occasionally glancing up. But Dr Greenslade was not at the Easter Fête. They saw Commander Abigail, with his rolled-up towel and bathing-trunks under his arm, buying cake from Mrs Stead-Carter. Timothy Gedge’s sister, Rose-Ann, was there with her boyfriend, Len. His mother was there, her hair freshly styled, hurrying round the stalls with her sister the dressmaker, whose hair looked smart also. Mr Plant and his wife and children were there, but when he met Mrs Gedge face to face near the hoopla they passed as if they were strangers. Mrs Slewy slipped a bottle of sherry, third prize in the raffle, into a plastic hold-all.

The Easter Fête was for the birds, Timothy Gedge said. The Spot the Talent competition was a load of rubbish again. As he spoke, Kate could feel the devils. She could feel them coming towards her from his eyes and his smile, but they were different now, quieter, triumphant. He had won a victory. God had changed things but God had been defeated: she would believe that for ever, she would go on repeating it to herself to anyone else who ever wanted to know. A miracle had happened but the miracle had fallen flat because you couldn’t have miracles these days, because nobody cared, not even a clergyman. He’d see them around, Timothy Gedge said, but they knew from his tone of voice that they were of no further use to him. ‘Cheers,’ he said, not following them when they moved away.

They looked at Miss Poraway’s books.
Practical Taxidermy
had not yet been bought. ‘Such a lovely fête!’ Miss Poraway said. Susannah handed Stephen a book about bridge, grinning at him. Deborah handed Kate
Cow-Keeping in India.
‘Only a penny!’ Miss Poraway cried, but Kate explained that Indian cow-keeping didn’t much interest her.

They left the fête and wondered for a moment about returning to Ring’s. While they paused on Once Hill, Mr Blakey approached in the Wolseley, on his way to Dynmouth Junction to fetch their parents from the station. He stopped when he saw them and asked if they wanted to come with him. They got into the back of the car.

He drove slowly, with old-fashioned care, easing the Wolseley through the Saturday shoppers in the centre of the town. Two nuns lifted cartons of groceries into the back of their new Fiat van. The Down Manor crocodile chattered in Lace Street, the orphans on their way to the Easter Fête and the Amusements. A waiter came out of the car-park of the Queen Victoria Hotel. People loitered outside the Essoldo Cinema, examining photographs that advertised
The Wizard of Oz.
Old Ape rooted in the dustbins outside Phyl’s Phries.

In the kitchen of the rectory Lavinia and Mrs Goff speedily washed cups and saucers which were immediately used again. Now that the Spot the Talent competition was over teas were being served in the marquee. Mrs Stead-Carter had sold her cakes and was hurrying between the kitchen and the tea-tables. So was Mrs Keble, who’d taken eight pounds odd on the tombola. Mrs Blackham was buttering more buns.