The Children Of Dynmouth (7 page)

The clergyman put his hand on Stephen’s shoulder. ‘You’re a brave little boy,’ he said.

His father drove him all the way back to Ravenswood Court, and the silence of the journey made him realize why his father hadn’t wanted him to come home for the funeral. ‘I’ve got a few sweets,’ Miss Tomm whispered in the hall of Ravenswood. ‘Lime and lemon sherbet. D’you like sherbet, Stephen?’

Miles of landscape had gone by, the silence in the dining-car had been a lengthy one. The stout waiter broke it by asking if everything had been all right. He flicked a page of the pad he held and swiftly wrote them out a yellow bill. ‘Obliged to you, sir,’ he said, giving it to Stephen.

They each placed money on the table, and the waiter collected it up and thanked them. Out of the ugliness of the divorce and the death it seemed only fair to Kate that there should come this happy ending. Her mother had been deserted. Stephen’s father had suffered a horrible tragedy. She loved her mother, and she liked Stephen’s father better than her own. She liked him because he was quiet and gentle. He had a smile she liked, he was clever: an ornithologist with a passion for the birds he wrote books about. With Stephen, she’d watched him cleaning oil from the feathers of seagulls. He’d shown them how to set a stonechat’s broken wing.

In the house they were to share all four of them deserved their happy ending: an idyll, Kate had said to herself ever since she’d known about the marriage that had been planned, repeating the word because she loved the sound of it. All the pain there’d been would be soothed away, since that was what idylls were for.

There were two approaches to Sea House, one from the road that rose steeply from Dynmouth and led to Dynmouth Golf Course and then on to Badstoneleigh, the other from the seashore, by a path that rose more steeply still, sharply winding around the contours of the cliff-face. The latter surfaced at the eleventh green and continued by the turf’s edge until the turf gave way to a high wall of weathered brick, touched with Virginia creeper. This bounded a garden that was uniquely rich, a streak of acid soil in the surrounding lime, a fluke of nature that generations in Sea House had taken advantage of. Set in an archway in the wall, a white wrought-iron gate led to a path through the shrubbery of azaleas for which the garden was reputed but which, in April, was only a mass of green. Magnolias and tree mallows stood starkly, with dripping leaves; rhododendrons glistened, heavy with buds. Ahead, the garden inclined upward, stretching extensively over three levels, with steps and banks of heather separating one surface from the next. Only daffodils and crocuses were in bloom now, and spring heathers and some winter jasmine. In the distance, to the left of the house and behind it, glass-houses leant from the high brick wall, with vegetable-beds around them; nearer, a paved herb garden had box hedges and a sundial. There were rose-beds and a white summer-house. A monkey-puzzle stood solitary on a wide expanse of lawn.

Sea House itself was a long, low Georgian manor, two storeys of old brick. A row of six French windows opened directly on to grass, beneath twice as many windows upstairs. The window-frames were white.

Two dappled English setters nosed about the garden on this damp Wednesday afternoon, their huge frilled tails thrashing the air, their grey and white coats wet, their mouths exposing handsome fangs and long pink tongues. They ran and sniffed by turn, looking for frogs in the long grass beneath the tree mallows. They settled for a while by the summer-house, leonine, eyeing one another. They rose and stretched, and nosed their way around the house and down the gravel drive that curved between further lawns to iron entrance gates. They returned with their tails less vigorous, satisfied that all was in order on their territory. In front of the white hall-door they settled again, between two pillars and urns containing tulips.

Within the house Mrs Blakey made raisin-and-stout cake in the kitchen. Her husband had gone to Dynmouth Junction to meet the children off the six-forty train. They’d be on the way back by now, she reflected, glancing at the clock on the dresser, and for an instant she imagined the two contrasting faces of the children, and the children themselves sitting in the back of the old Wolseley, and her husband silently driving because silence was his way. She tipped the brown cake-mixture into a baking tin, scooping the last few spoonfuls out of the bowl with a wooden spoon. She placed it in the top oven of the Aga and set a timer on the dresser to buzz in an hour.

Mrs Blakey, with busy eyes and cheeks that shone, possessed a nature which had been formed by a capacity for looking on the bright side. Clouds were there for the harvesting of their silver linings, despair was just a word. The kitchen of Sea House, where she spent the greater part of her day, seemed quite in keeping with all this: the Aga burning quietly, the lofty, panelled ceiling, flowered plates arranged on the dresser, the commodious wall-cupboards, the scrubbed wooden table. The kitchen was comfortable and comforting, as in many ways Mrs Blakey herself was.

The Blakeys had come to live at Sea House in 1953, the year their daughter Winnie married, the year after their son had emigrated to British Columbia. Before that they’d come up from Dynmouth every day, to work in the garden and the house. The work was part of them by now, and they were part of the house and garden. They remembered the birth of Kate’s mother. There’d been the deaths, within six months, of Kate’s grandparents. Although he never said it, Mrs Blakey knew that her husband sometimes felt, through his affection for it, that the garden was his. He had dug more soil in it than anyone else alive now, and year by year had watched more asters grow. He had changed the shape of the herb garden; forty-one years ago he had created two new lawns. He knew the house as well, and felt a similar affection for it. It was he who cleaned the windows, inside and out, and cleared the gutters in the spring and repainted, every three years, the white woodwork and the drainpipes and the chutes. He replaced slates when storms blew them from the roof. He knew the details of the plumbing and the wiring. Five years ago he had re-boarded the drawing-room floor.

The tyres of the Wolseley crunched on gravel, a sound which carried faintly to Mrs Blakey and caused her face to crinkle with pleasure. She left the kitchen and moved along a corridor with springy green linoleum and green walls. She passed through a door that had baize of the same green shade on the side that faced the corridor. In the hall she could hear Kate’s voice telling the dogs not to jump up. She opened the hall-door and descended three slender steps to greet the children.

3

‘Cheers, Mrs Abigail,’ Timothy Gedge said, stepping into the Abigails’ bungalow in High Park Avenue. ‘Rain’s started up again.’

She made a fuss, saying that the rain had soaked through his jacket. She made him take it off and hang it on a chair in front of the electric fire in the sitting-room, two bars glowing above an arrangement of artificial coal. She made him stand in front of the fire himself, to dry his jeans.

Mrs Abigail was a slight woman, with soft grey hair. Her hands and the features of her face were tiny; her eyes suggested tenderness. It was she who had knitted Timothy Gedge a pair of ribbed socks one Christmas, feeling sorry for him because he had turned out awkwardly in adolescence. Feeling sorry for people was common with Mrs Abigail. Her compassion caused her to grieve over newspaper reports and fictional situations in the cinema or on the television screen, or over strangers in the streets, in whom she recognized despondency. When she’d first known Timothy Gedge he’d been a child with particularly winning ways, and it seemed sad to her that these ways were no longer there. He’d called round at the bungalow a week after she and her husband had moved in, nearly three years ago now, and had asked if there were any jobs. ‘Boy scout are you?’ the Commander had enquired. ‘Bob-a-job?’ And Timothy had replied nicely that he wasn’t actually a boy scout, that he was just trying to make a little pocket money. He’d seemed an engagingly eccentric child, solitary in spite of his chattering and smiling, different from other children. He’d spent that first morning helping to lay the dining-room carpet, as cheerful as a robin.

In every way Mrs Abigail had found him a delightful little boy, and in the transformation that had since taken place it sometimes seemed to her that a person had been lost. The solitariness which had lent him character made her wonder, now, why it was that he had no friends; his chatterbox eccentricity struck a different note. But on Wednesday evenings he still came to do jobs, and in fact to share the Abigails’ supper. Under the Commander’s supervision he worked in the small front garden and in the back garden also. He’d assisted the winter before last in the painting of the larder. Mrs Abigail believed it was not impossible that the loss which had occurred might somehow be regained.

‘Commander still out on his swim, is he, Mrs Abigail?’

‘Yes, he’s still out.’ She wanted to say that it was foolish of her husband to stay out in all weathers, that it was foolish to go bathing at this time of year in the first place, but of course she couldn’t, not to a child, not to anyone. She smiled at Timothy Gedge. ‘He won’t be long.’

He laughed. He said: ‘Good weather for ducks, Mrs Abigail.’

Steam rose from his yellow jeans. Soon he would be shaving. Soon he’d have that coarse look that some youths so easily acquired.

‘Care for a fruit gum?’ He held out the Rowntree’s tube, but she declined to accept one of the sweets. He took one himself and put it in his mouth. ‘I see Ring’s setting up in the park,’ he said.

‘Yes, I noticed this morning.’

‘I don’t expect you and the Commander would ever fancy the Amusements, Mrs Abigail. Slot machines, dodgems, type of thing?’

‘Well, no –’

‘Rough kind of stuff, really.’

‘It’s more for young people, I think.’

‘Slot machines is for the birds.’

He laughed again, imagining for a moment Mrs Abigail and the Commander playing on a slot machine, or in a dodgem car, being pitched all over the place by the Dynmouth Hards, who were notorious in the dodgem rink. He mentioned it to her and she gave a little laugh herself. He began to talk about the Easter Fête, saying it was a pity that Ring’s Amusements opened for the first time on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, the very same time as the fête. It would take the crowds, he said. ‘I was saying that to the Reverend Feather and to Dass. They didn’t take a pick of notice.’

She nodded, thinking of something else. When Gordon returned from his swim he would offer the boy sherry. He’d done it before, the last three Wednesdays. She’d said she didn’t think it was a good idea. She’d said that tippling away at glasses of sherry wasn’t going to help the boy through a difficult adolescence, but Gordon had told her to learn sense.

Timothy went on talking about the Easter Fête because he didn’t want her to suggest it was time for him to begin on his jobs. One Wednesday he’d managed to go on talking for so long that the jobs hadn’t got done at all and she’d forgotten they hadn’t when the time for payment came. He said he was really looking forward to the Spot the Talent competition, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He was disappointed when a moment later she said that this week she wanted him to clean the oven of the electric cooker and to scour a saucepan that had the remains of tapioca in it. He far preferred to perform tasks in her bedroom because he could go through various drawers.

‘When the Commander offers it just say no, Timothy.’ She spoke in the kitchen, while he sprayed the oven with a cleansing agent called Force. ‘Just say your mother’d rather you didn’t.’

‘What’s that then, Mrs Abigail?’

‘When the Commander offers you the sherry. You’re under age, Timothy.’

He nodded, with his head partly in the oven. He said he was aware he was under age, but the law, he reminded her, applied only to persons under age being supplied with alcohol in a public house or an off-licence. He didn’t himself see any harm in a glass of sherry.

‘One thing I’d never touch, Mrs Abigail, and that’s a drug.’

‘Oh, no. Never, never take drugs. Promise me, never, Timothy.’

‘I’d never touch a drug, Mrs Abigail, because I wouldn’t know how to get hold of it.’ He laughed.

She looked down at him kneeling on a
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in front of the stove. His jacket was still drying in front of the sitting-room fire. There was a smudge on one of his wrists, where it had brushed against the half-congealed gravy in the oven. Laughing had caused the skin of his hollow cheeks to tighten. The laughter drifted away. His mouth still smiled a little.

‘Do it for me, dear,’ she whispered, bending down herself and smiling back at him. ‘Don’t take the sherry, Timmy.’

He sniffed her scent. It was a lovely smell, like a rose garden might be. At her neck a chiffon scarf in powder blue blended with the deeper blue of her dress.

‘Please, dear,’ she said, and for a moment he thought she was maybe going to kiss him. Then the Commander’s latch-key sounded in the lock of the front door.

‘Remember now,’ she whispered, straightening up and moving away from him. ‘Timothy’s here, Gordon,’ she called out to her husband.

‘Oh, well played,’ the Commander said in the hall.

Commander Abigail, who had served at that naval rank for five months during the Second World War, was a scrawny, small man, bald except for a ginger fluff at the back of his head and around his ears. A narrow ginger moustache grew above a narrow mouth; his eyes had a staring quality. He was sixty-five and hampered in damp weather by trouble in the joints of the left side of his body. When he’d retired from a position in a London shipping firm he’d decided to come and live in Dynmouth because of his devotion to the sea. As well, he’d hoped the air would be bracing and with a tang, cold rather than wet. His wife had pointed out that the area had one of the highest rainfall records in England, but he had argued with her on the point, categorically stating that she had got her facts wrong. When an estate agent sent him a notice of the bungalow in High Park Avenue he’d announced that it was just what they wanted, even though he’d in the meantime discovered that she was right in her claim that the Dynmouth area was one of the wettest in England. You must never admit defeat was one of Commander Abigail’s foremost maxims: you must stick to your guns even though the joints on the left side of your body were giving you gyp. It was sticking to your guns that had made England, once, what England once had been. Nowadays it was like living in a rubbish dump.