Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

He appeared to be rambling again, but it was hard to be certain. He had seemed to be rambling when he’d first mentioned a wedding-dress and when he’d referred to Miss Lavant as her sister and to a gooseberry in a lift.

‘You’ve no right to spy on people,’ the Commander began to say. ‘You’ve no right to go poking –’

‘I’ve witnessed you down on the beach, sir. Running about in your bathing togs. I’ve witnessed you up to your tricks, Commander, when she’s out on her Meals on Wheels.’

He smiled at her, but she didn’t want to look at him. ‘I wouldn’t ever tell a soul,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t, Commander.’

She waited, her eyes fixed on the flowered tea-pot, frowning at it. Whatever he was referring to, she didn’t want to hear about it. She wanted him to stop speaking. She felt herself infected by her husband’s panic, not knowing why she felt like that. They would keep the secret, the boy said. The secret would be safe.

‘There’s no secret to keep,’ the Commander cried. ‘There’s nothing, nothing at all.’

She wished he hadn’t said that. If he hadn’t said it, they might have glossed over all the boy had said already. They might have pretended they were trying to help the boy, humouring him by agreeing there was some secret that affected them. They had been married thirty-six years, she said to herself, puzzled that that fact should have occurred to her now.

‘He’s talking nonsense.’ The Commander’s voice had dropped, his words were almost unintelligible.

She was a happy woman: she told herself that. She’d been perfectly happy making the supper, the chicken and the fig pudding. It didn’t matter if Gordon wanted to win arguments. It didn’t matter if his clothes dripped all over the kitchen. She’d devoted her life to Gordon. She didn’t want to hear. Whatever there was, she didn’t want to know.

‘Please don’t,’ she said, looking up from the tea-pot, looking across the table at Timothy Gedge. ‘Please don’t say anything more.’

Timothy smiled at her. It was a secret between himself and the Commander, he said. He rose unsteadily from his chair and moved around the table to where Gordon was sitting. Her instinct was to put her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it because it seemed so silly. One Sunday afternoon, watching suburban cricket in Sutton, he had asked her to be his wife, telling her he loved her.

Timothy whispered, but the whisper was clumsy because of the sherry and the beer: she heard distinctly, as though he were shouting. They would keep the secret, he said, he would never tell a soul that her husband went after Dynmouth’s cub scouts, intent on committing indecencies.

A storm blew through the town that night. The narrow streets were washed with rain, the canvas of Ring’s Amusements flapped in Sir Walter Raleigh Park, breakers crashed against the wall of the promenade. The town was deserted. The pink Essoldo was dead as a doornail, Phyl’s Phries had shut up shop at half past ten, the night-porter of the Queen Victoria Hotel slept undisturbed in his cubby-hole. The police-car that sometimes slipped through Dynmouth’s night streets was parked with its lights off in the yard of the police station. The Dynmouth Hards weren’t abroad, nor was Nurse Hackett in her blue Mini. Only the shop windows showed signs of life. Television sets recorded the soundless mouthing of a late-night news-reader. In harsh white light figures without eyes displayed twin-sets and dresses or sat on G-plan furniture. A cardboard couple smiled joyfully, drawing attention to a building society’s rates.

The rain rattled on the slated roof of the Artilleryman’s Friend, beneath which its proprietor lay, drowsily fulfilled. Half an hour ago Mr Plant had engaged in sexual congress with his stoutly built Welsh wife, and in the ladies’ lavatory of the public house car-park he had earlier indulged himself with the trimmer form of Timothy Gedge’s mother. As always, he had enjoyed the contrast, both in anticipation during his conjunction with Mrs Gedge and in retrospect while involved with his wife. For their parts, the women had appeared to be satisfied.

In the ivy-clad rectory Lavinia Featherston lay awake, sorry she’d been so cross all day. It was wrong to be upset by circumstances, by a fact of your life that could not be altered. She’d been cross again after she’d put the twins to bed. She’d protested quite sharply to her husband about the people who came so endlessly to the rectory, the town’s unfortunates, the dirty, the ugly, the boring, the mad. She was tired of listening to Mrs Slewy complaining about the social security man. Mrs Slewy with a cigarette perpetually on the go, leaning against the back door, asking for the loan of a pound. She was tired of Old Ape arriving on the wrong day for his meal. She must have made a thousand cups of Nescafé for Mrs Stead-Carter, being bossed all over the place while she did so. It was a relief that crazy old Miss Trimm had a cold, a respite at least from her belief that she’d mothered a second Jesus Christ. Miss Poraway made you want to scream. Quentin had listened to her quietly, saying it was all understandable, and in greater irritation she’d replied that it was typical of him to say that, and then she’d cried. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured at his sleeping form, knowing that tomorrow she’d probably be edgy too.

She lay there, thinking of her nursery school. Little Mikey Hatch getting his arms wet. Jennifer Droppy looking sad. Joseph Wright pushing. Mandy Goff singing her song. Johnny Pyke laughing, Thomas Braine interrupting, Andrew Cartboy being good, Susannah and Deborah throwing dough. She forced herself to think of them, and then to think about prices and to work out figures in her mind because one of these days a new Wendy house was going to be necessary. Her mind attempted to reject these calculations and to return to its brooding, but she refused to permit that. Mandy Goff’s father might offer to make a new Wendy house if she paid for the materials and offered to pay for his time. With hardly any prompting he’d made the rack for hanging coats on, and the slide. She dropped into drowsiness, thinking of the grey wooden slide and the children sliding down it.

In the room next door the twins looked happy in their sleep, their limbs similarly arranged. Two miles away, in the Down Manor Orphanage, the orphans without exception dreamed, frightening themselves and delighting themselves. So did the children of Lavinia’s nursery school, scattered all over Dynmouth, and the children of the Ring-o-Roses nursery school and the W R V S Playgroup, and the children of Dynmouth Primary and of Dynmouth Comprehensive and of the Loretto Convent, and the travelling children of Ring’s Amusements, and Sharon Lines who owed her life to a machine.

In the house called Sweetlea Mrs Dass lay sleepless in the dark, remembering the son who’d been the apple of her eye, a child she’d painfully borne, who had painfully rejected her. In her bedsitting-room in Pretty Street the beautiful Miss Lavant, who wished in all the hours of her wakefulness that she might have borne the child of the man she hopelessly loved, pored over the day’s blank space in her diary. Wet, she wrote and could think of nothing else to record: the day had passed without a sight of Dr Greenslade.

In Sea House Kate dreamed of the bedroom she slept in, its orange-painted dressing-table and orange-painted chairs, its blinds and wallpaper of a matching pattern, orange poppies in long grass. She dreamed that the stout waiter from the dining-car was standing in this room, offering her a toasted tea-cake, and that Miss Shaw and Miss Rist were bullying little Miss Malabedeely. A wedding took place in the room: an African bishop swore to honour Miss Malabedeely with his black body. He had the marks of a tiger’s claw on his cheeks. He said the toasted tea-cake was delicious.