Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

The man said he’d heard about the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête. He was new to the neighbourhood, he and his wife had come to live in Paltry Combe, eighteen miles away. They’d ridden over on the bike as soon as they’d heard, on the chance that they wouldn’t be too late to fill in an entry form. He did imitations of dogs, he said.

He was a stocky man with a crash-helmet on his head and leather gloves tucked under his arm. He gestured with his head in the direction of the woman by the motor-cycle, confirming that she was his wife. He went in a lot for competitions, he said, villages, resorts, it didn’t matter to him. He asked about the prize money when he’d finished filling in the entry form, and wrote down the amounts on the back of an envelope. ‘An old pro,’ Mr Dass remarked in the sitting-room after he’d gone. ‘Makes eleven in all. Two up on last year.’ Yesterday had officially been the last day for entries, but he’d seen no reason to turn away the man’s fifty p.

The doorbell of Sweetlea rang again, and Mr Dass said if it was someone else who wanted to enter he’d again stretch a point. Imitations of dogs weren’t exactly going to set Easter Saturday alight, and everything else looked like yesterday’s buns with a vengeance. Contrary to his speculations, however, their visitor wasn’t another late entrant.

‘Cheers,’ Timothy Gedge said, and then reported that he’d spoken to the clergyman about the curtains and that the clergyman had been at his wits’ end to know where to lay his hands on some.

Mr Dass looked at the boy, determined not to let him into his house. It was intolerable, having your privacy invaded at all hours, for no reason whatsoever.

‘Is that all you came about, curtains?’

‘I thought you’d like to know, sir.’

Mr Dass, about to ejaculate angrily, did not say anything. He peered at the boy through his spectacles, thinking that he seemed to be off his head.

‘Funny the way your son doesn’t ever come back to Dynmouth any more, sir. Funny he wouldn’t want to see his mum. I remember the night he cleared off, sir.’

‘Now look here, boy –’

‘Mr Feather said definitely come over to you, Mr Dass. There isn’t a curtain to be had in the place, sir. Nor high nor low, sir, the church, the rectory –’

‘I told you,’ Mr Dass said in a level voice. ‘I told you not to come calling at this house. You’re a damned pest, if you must know. Will you kindly get it into your head that I do not intend to supply curtains for that stage? If there are no curtains on that stage, then we must manage without. Now will you please go away?’

The boy smiled at him and nodded. He’d followed his son, he said, on that particular night. He’d followed him from the Queen Victoria Hotel, interested in him because he’d been staggering. He’d followed him all the way to his house. He’d listened at the window of the dining-room and had overheard the conversation that had taken place.

‘Who is it?’ Mrs Dass called gently from the sitting-room and, quite unlike himself, her husband did not reply. For nineteen years Nevil had seemed fond of them, fonder than most sons in a way, and then in a matter of moments he’d spurted out his awful truth. She’d had a sardine salad ready in the dining-room for supper, and instead of watching Nevil enjoying it she had heard herself despised. Nevil had always found it difficult to work and had spent long periods at home doing nothing. They’d known even then that he’d perhaps been a little indulged by both of them, but on that awful evening he’d turned their indulgence into a crime, bitterly referring to the long periods he’d spent at home, eating their food and accepting pocket money. They’d ruined him. They’d wanted to keep him for ever in the house they boringly called Sweetlea. They’d made him fit for nothing, they’d made allowances for his failures when they should have told him to get on with it. It had been tedious beyond words, he said, living with all that: all his life, for as long as he could remember, he’d been bored by them. He had no love for her, he said to his mother; no love had been bought. They’d treated two daughters in a sensible manner; why couldn’t they have been sensible with him? In a matter of moments he had broken his mother’s heart.

‘It would upset her to know a stranger heard,’ the boy said, smiling as though in sympathy before he turned to go away. Any mother would be upset, he added, to know that a stranger had overheard remarks like those. ‘But we could keep the secret, Mr Dass. We would keep it from her. Only I couldn’t perform the act on a stage without curtains.’

5

They clambered down the cliff-path from Sea House and set off in a western direction along the beach to Badstoneleigh. They wore fawn corduroy jeans, sandals and jerseys, Kate’s red, Stephen’s navy-blue. Mrs Blakey had spoken of anoraks, and the children had obediently collected these from their rooms. But not wishing to have the bother of carrying them, they’d left them on a chair in the kitchen.

The sea was out. It pattered quietly in the distance, each small wave softly succeeding the next. Near its edge the dark, wet sand was a sheen on which footsteps kept their shape for only a minute or two. Closer to the shingle, the children walked on sand that was firmer.

Kate related her dream about little Miss Malabedeely being bullied again by Miss Shaw and Miss Rist and then Miss Malabedeely’s marriage to the African bishop, who’d promised to worship her with his body. He couldn’t remember if he’d dreamed, Stephen said.

They might have exchanged, again, the people of their two schools, but to Kate these people seemed for the moment irrelevant. So were the Blakeys and her mother and Stephen’s father honeymooning in Cassis. Only she and Stephen were relevant. She wanted to ask him if he liked being alone with her, as he was now, on the quiet seashore on a nice day, but naturally she did not.

‘I’d say we’d gone two miles,’ Stephen said.

There were worms of sand where they walked, and here and there embedded shells. Fluffy white clouds floated politely around the sun, as though unwilling to obscure it. Far out to sea a trawler was motionless.

For a moment she had a day-dream. They were in a sailing boat, as far out as the trawler, both of them older, eighteen or nineteen. Stephen wasn’t different except for being taller; she was prettier, not round-faced. He said she was interesting. She made him laugh, he said, and in any case prettiness didn’t matter. She was witty, she had an interesting mind.

‘Further,’ she said. ‘More than two miles, I’d say.’ She asked him to test her on fielding positions, and he marked out on the sand the two sets of stumps and the ten fielding positions around them. ‘Silly mid-on,’ she said. ‘Silly mid-off, square leg, slips, long-stop. Wicket-keeper, of course.’

He told her the others and she tried to memorize them, the positions and the titles. He explained how the positions would change according to the kind of bowler, fast, slow, medium, or according to whether leg-breaks were being bowled or off-spin employed. They would also change according to the calibre of the batsman, and whether or not a batsman was left-handed, and the state of the wicket. Some batsmen, included in a team because of their bowling, might find themselves crowded by close slips. Others, in powerful form, would force the fielders to the boundary. Kate found it all difficult to understand, but she wanted to understand it. She only wished she was any good at the game herself, which unfortunately she wasn’t. She’d always preferred French cricket, although she’d naturally never told Stephen that.

They walked on, and after what they reckoned to be another mile they paused again and looked back at Dynmouth. It was now a cluster of houses with the pier protruding modestly into the sea and, unimpressive on the cliffs, the house they lived in themselves. On the beach a speck moved in the same direction as they did.