Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

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.’