The Children Of Dynmouth (8 page)

‘Cheers, Commander,’ Timothy said when the Commander came into the kitchen with his swimming-trunks and towel, and his sodden brown overcoat on a coat-hanger.

‘Good afternoon, Timothy.’

The Commander unhooked the ropes of a pulley and released a wooden clothes-airer from the ceiling. He placed the coat-hanger on it and hung out the swimming-trunks and towel. He returned it to its mid-way position. The overcoat began to drip.

Mrs Abigail left the kitchen. A pool of water would spread all over the tiles of the floor. Gordon would walk in it and Timothy would walk in it, and when the dripping had ceased, probably in about an hour and a half, she’d have to mop everything up and put down newspapers,

‘And how’s Master Timothy?’

‘All right, Commander. Fine, thanks.’

‘Well played, boy.’

Timothy rinsed the sponge-cloth he was using, squeezing it out in his bowl of dirty water. He wiped the inside of the oven, noticed that it was still fairly dirty, and closed the door. He rose and carried the bowl and the sponge-cloth to the sink. He was thinking about the acquisition of the wedding-dress and the bath and the Commander’s dog’s-tooth suit. No problem at all, he kept saying to himself, and then he tried not to laugh out loud, seeing himself rising up out of the bath as Miss Munday when she should be dead as old meat.

‘Sherry when you’re ready,’ the Commander said, placing glasses and a decanter on a small blue tray. ‘In the sitting-room, old chap.’

Timothy scratched with his fingernails at the burnt tapioca in the saucepan that had been left for him. ‘Only fifteen years of age!’ cried the voice of Hughie Green excitedly.

He reached for a scouring cloth on a line that stretched above the sink. He rubbed at the tapioca with it, but nothing happened. He scratched at it again with his fingernails and rubbed at it with a Brillo pad. He then filled the saucepan with water and placed it, out of the way, on the draining-board. He’d explain to Mrs Abigail that in his opinion it needed to soak for a day or two.

‘Big hand!’ cried Hughie Green. ‘Big hand for Timothy Gedge, friends!’

To Stephen none of it was strange. For as long as he could remember he’d been coming to this house to play with Kate. The brown, bald head of Mr Blakey was familiar, and his slowness of movement and economy with speech. So were the dogs and the garden, and the house itself, and Mrs Blakey smiling at him.

He watched while Mr Blakey undid the ropes that secured their two trunks in the open boot of the car. It wasn’t raining any more, but the clouds were dark and low, suggesting that the cessation was only a lull. The air felt damp, a pleasant feeling that made you want to shiver slightly and be indoors, beside a fire. It was something his mother used to say about cold days in spring and summer, that it was a different kind of coldness from winter’s, pleasant because it wasn’t severe.

A fire was blazing in the hall. It was the only house he knew that had a fire-place in the hall. Kate said the hall was her favourite part of the house, the white marble of the mantelpiece, the brass fender high enough to form a seat of upholstered red leather, Egyptian rugs in shades of brown and blue spread over stone flags. On the crimson hessian of the walls a series of watercolours was set in brass frames: eighteenth-century representations of characters from plays. Neither of them knew what plays they came from, but the pictures were quite nice. So was the wide mahogany staircase that rose gently from the hall at the far end, curving out of sight at a window that reached almost to the wainscoting. He wondered if, in time, the hall would become his favourite part of the house too.

Mrs Blakey paused before passing through the door to the green-linoleumed passage, calling to them that supper would be ready in fifteen minutes. Stephen watched the door closing behind her and for a moment it seemed wrong that he should be here, standing in this house when his mother was dead. But the moment passed.

In the rectory the twins sat at the kitchen table with their parents, all of them eating poached eggs.

‘Horrible,’ Susannah said.

‘I said horrible,’ Deborah said. ‘I said horrible when Mummy.’

‘I said horrible when Mummy.’

‘I looked round and saw Mummy. Soon’s Mummy’s in the room I said horrible. You weren’t even looking, Deborah.’

‘When Mummy bringed the eggs I said horrible, Susannah.’

‘Mummy, Deborah’ll get dragons after her.’

‘Dragons and dragons and dragons and dragons and –’

‘You eat up your egg, Susannah.’

‘Too tired, Mummy.’

‘Now, now,’ Quentin said, finishing his own egg.

‘Too tired, Daddy. Mouth too tired, Daddy. Terribly, terribly tired. Terribly, terribly, terribly.’ Susannah closed her eyes, clenching the eyelids tightly. Deborah closed hers also. They began to giggle.

Lavinia felt weary. She snapped at her daughters, telling them not to be tiresome.

‘Supper,’ Mrs Abigail announced in Number Eleven High Park Avenue, entering the sitting-room and discovering that Timothy had taken no notice whatsoever of her request about the sherry. He’d put his zipped jacket on again and was sitting on the sofa on one side of the electric fire. Gordon was in his usual armchair, on the other. The curtains were drawn, the fire threw out a powerful heat. Only a table-lamp burned, its weak bulb not up to the task of fully illuminating the room. The effect of this half-gloom was cosy.

‘Oh, time for another.’ Commander Abigail gave a brief little laugh, expertly aiming the sherry decanter at Timothy’s glass and speaking to his wife as he did so. ‘Sherry, dear girl? Take a pew, why don’t you?’

She stood by the door, one foot in the hall, the other on the patterned sitting-room carpet. ‘Don’t mind if I do, sir,’ she heard Timothy saying after Gordon had refilled his glass, as though he had totally forgotten what she’d said to him. He even smiled at her through the gloom. ‘Yes, take a pew, Mrs Abigail,’ he even said, the words sounding foolish on his lips. The very sight of him was foolish, a child with a glass of Cyprus sherry in his hand, awkwardly holding it by the stem.

‘It’s just that it’ll all be overcooked,’ she said quietly, and her husband replied – as she knew he would – that they wouldn’t be more than another five minutes. She also knew that he’d enjoyed inviting her to take a pew in that casual way when everything was ready to eat. He gave the child sherry in order to irritate her. It was a pity he was like that, but it couldn’t be helped.

She closed the door and returned to the kitchen. She turned on the wireless and washed up some dishes. Voices were chatting their way through a word game. An audience laughed noisily at what was being said, but Mrs Abigail didn’t find any of it funny. Quite a few times in their marriage it had been suggested that she didn’t possess a sense of humour.

Mrs Abigail had married her husband because of his need of her and because, in her sympathy and compassion, she had felt affection for him. There was an emptiness in her marriage but she did not ever dwell on it. For thirty-six years he had been at the centre of her life. She had accepted him for better or for worse: in no way did she permit herself to believe that she was an unhappy woman.

She ladled pieces of chicken and vegetables on to three plates and placed them in the oven. On the wireless the word game came to an end and a play began. By the time she’d strained the peas and scooped the mashed potatoes from the saucepan into a dish she heard her husband’s voice in the hall, talking about pride.

‘A certain pride,’ he repeated as he sat down at the dining-room table. He smoothed the ginger of his small moustache with the forefinger and thumb of his right hand. ‘You were proud to be an Englishman, Timothy, once upon a time.’

‘Cherryade?’ she offered, poising the bottle over Timothy’s glass.

‘How about a glass of ale?’ the Commander suggested. ‘Watney’s Pale all right for you, old chap?’

She thought at first she had misheard him, but knew of course that she hadn’t. Never before had he brought beer into the house. He claimed not to like beer. At Christmas he purchased a bottle of Hungarian wine in Tesco’s. Bull’s blood he called it.

‘Nothing like a drop of ale.’ He opened the sideboard, took from it two large bottles marked Watney’s Red, Pale Ale and removed the caps. ‘Fancy a little yourself, dear?’

She shook her head. She could tell from the size of the bottles that they each contained a pint. With that amount of beer on top of two glasses of sherry the child could hardly be expected to remain sober. She voiced this fear, knowing it was unwise to do so.

‘Oh, no, no, dear girl.’ He laughed in a way he had. Filling his glass, Timothy laughed also.

‘A sense of peace,’ the Commander said, sitting down again. ‘In towns like Dynmouth you felt a sense of peace in those distant days. On Sundays people went to church.’

Timothy listened, aware that familiar developments were taking place around the table. Extraordinary couple they were. Extraordinary of the Reverend Feather to say they weren’t a funny type of people. Bonkers, the pair of them.

‘You’d find a shilling in your pocket, Timothy. Enough to take you to the pictures.
Fire Over England!
,
Goodbye, Mr Chips.
First-class fare. You’d pay for a seat and you’d have enough left over for a bag of fish and chips. God’s own food, the way they cooked it before the War.’

‘So I heard, sir.’ He spoke politely because he wished to please. The man liked to be addressed like that, and she liked you to smile at her. She was grumpy at present, but she’d soon cheer up.

‘Delicious potatoes, Mrs Abigail,’ he said, smiling widely at her. ‘Really nice they are.’

She began to say something, but the Commander interrupted her.

‘You’d go out hiking at the weekend. You’d take an early-morning train from London, you’d be in the middle of Bucks in half an hour. Packet of Woodbines in your back pocket, wet your whistle in a nice old pub. You couldn’t meet a soul, except some ancient labourer maybe, who’d raise his cap to you. Damned interesting, some of those old chaps were.’

‘So I heard, sir.’ He was feeling really good. Faintly, he was aware of applause, as though it were actually in the room. He closed his eyes, savouring the sensation of hearing something which he knew wasn’t really there. He concentrated on the sound. It flowed, softly and warmly, like a tepid sea. In the darkness behind his eyelids lights pleasantly flashed. He felt a hint of pressure on his left shoulder, as though someone had placed a hand there, in all probability Hughie Green. He was surprised when he heard the voice of Mrs Abigail, talking about steamed pudding. He opened his eyes. More time than he imagined appeared to have passed.

‘Fig, Timmy?’ she was saying. ‘Steamed fig pudding? You liked it last time.’

She held a knife above a brown lump of stuff on a plate, asking him how much he’d like.

‘D’you know what a york is?’ the Commander was enquiring.

‘Timmy?’

‘Delicious, Mrs Abigail. Really good, fig pudding is. A town is it, sir?’

‘It’s a strap that used to be worn by a farm labourer, around his trouser-leg.’

‘Custard, dear?’

‘Great, Mrs Abigail.’

She poured custard on to his pudding for him, fearing he would spill it if she handed him the jug. He wasn’t sober. Even before he’d taken more than a few sips of the beer she’d noticed that his movements weren’t co-ordinating properly. Sweat had begun to form on his forehead.

‘Time was,’ the Commander said, ‘when you could go into a grocer’s shop and there’d be a round-bottomed chair up by the counter for a customer to sit on. What d’you get now? Some child in a filthy white coat picking the dirt out of her nose while she’s working a till in a supermarket. No, I’ll not have any of that, dear girl.’

‘All right, Timmy?’ she whispered.

‘Cheers, Mrs Abigail.’

‘Some of those girls press half a million buttons a day,’ the Commander said.

Timothy drank more beer, washing down a mouthful of fig pudding and custard with it. He remembered a time when he was eight or so, walking along the wall of the promenade and Miss Lavant coming up to him and saying he shouldn’t because it was dangerous. She was a beautiful woman, always fashionably turned out: you wouldn’t mind being married to Miss Lavant. When he’d climbed down from the wall in order to please her she’d given him a sweet, holding out a paper-bag so that he could choose, Mackintosh’s Quality Street. The one he’d taken had green silver paper on it, a chocolate-covered toffee. All you had to do was to smile at women like that and it pleased them, like it pleased this woman now. He tried not to laugh, thinking of Miss Lavant in her expensive clothes, going up and down the promenade, giving people sweets. But he was unable to keep the laughter back and had to say he was sorry.

After that he lost track of time again. He noticed that she was on her feet, clearing their pudding plates away, putting them on the tray she always used, a brown tray made of imitation wood. She put the remains of the steamed pudding on it, and the custard. She was still looking grumpy, not smiling, not even trying to smile. Miss Lavant did that sometimes because for all her beauty she had bad teeth. He wondered if Miss Lavant was her sister. They were both small women, neither of them possessed children.

Timothy sat back in his chair and finished his beer. She’d be back in a few minutes with flowered cups and saucers and a flowered tea-pot, and cake. She’d sit down, trying not to listen to the Commander going on with his rubbish. She’d offer him a piece of McVitie’s fruitcake, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t ask her if Miss Lavant was her sister. It would please her, a question like that. It would please her if he told her a couple of funnies from
1000 Jokes for Kids of All Ages.
He laughed and saw the Commander looking across the table at him, laughing himself, a tinny sound as though the man had something wrong with him. ‘Cheers, Commander,’ he said, waving his glass at him. ‘Any more Watney’s Pale, sir?’

‘My dear fellow, of course there is. Well played, old chap.’ The Commander rose at speed and crossed to the sideboard, from which he withdrew two further pint bottles. He was feeling sunny, Timothy guessed, because it would annoy her when she came in and found more beer on the table. ‘Forgive my inhospitality,’ the Commander said.