Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

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 Daily Telegraph 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.

‘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.