Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

She drove to the Heathfield estate, to Mr and Mrs Budd’s bungalow, and to Seaway Road, to Mrs Hutchings’, and then to the elderly poor of Boughs Lane. All the time Miss Poraway talked. She talked about her niece, Gwen, who had just married an auctioneer, and about the child of another niece, who had something the matter with his ears. When they arrived at Beaconville, where three elderly people lived together, Mrs Abigail gave her one dinner to carry but she dropped it while trying to open the hall-door. In every house they called at she forgot to collect the money. ‘It’s dangerous, a cold when you’re your age, dear,’ she said to Miss Trimm. ‘Don’t like the look of her,’ she remarked loudly in the hall, forgetting that despite her other failings Miss Trimm’s hearing had sharpened with age. They’d buried old Mr Rine that morning, she added, and old Mrs Crowley on Saturday.

As Mrs Abigail struggled through the morning, she was repeatedly reminded, as though this truth sought to mock her, that she had never wished to come to Dynmouth. In London there were the cinemas she enjoyed going to, and the theatre matinées. There were Harvey Nichols and Harrods to browse through, not that she ever bought anything. In Dynmouth the antiquated and inadequately heated Essoldo showed the same film for seven days at a time and the shops were totally uninteresting. With Miss Poraway chattering beside her, she reflected upon all this and recalled, as she had in the night, the course of her virginal marriage.

They had been two small, quiet people; he’d been, at twenty-nine, a gentle kind of man. She hadn’t known much about life, nor had he. They’d both lived with their parents near Sutton, he already in the shipping business from which he’d retired when they came to Dynmouth, she working in her father’s estate agency, doing part-time secretarial duties and arranging the flowers in the outer office. Both sets of parents had been against the marriage, but she and Gordon had persisted, drawn closer by the opposition. They’d been married in a church she’d always gone to as a child and afterwards there was a reception in the Mansfield Hotel, near by and convenient, and then she and Gordon had gone to Cumberland. She’d been trim and neat and pretty. She’d powdered her face in the lavatory on the train, examining her reflection in the mirror, thinking she wasn’t bad-looking. Twice before she’d had proposals of marriage and had rejected them because she couldn’t feel for the men they came from.

She hadn’t known what to expect of marriage, not precisely. They’d shared a bed in Cumberland and she had comforted Gordon because nothing was quite right. Everything took getting used to, she said, saying the same thing night after night, softly in the darkness. You had to learn things, she whispered, supposing that the activity which Gordon found difficult required practice, like tennis. It didn’t matter, she said. They went for long, pleasant walks in Cumberland. They enjoyed having breakfast together in the hotel dining-room.

She remembered clothes she had then, on her honeymoon and afterwards: suits and dresses, many of them in shades of blue, her favourite colour, coats and scarves and shoes. They had friends, other couples, the Watsons, the Turners, the Godsons. There were dinner-parties, bridge was played, there were excursions to the theatre, and dances. Once a man she’d never met before, a man called Peter who didn’t seem to have a wife, kept dancing with her in the Godsons’ house, holding her very close, in a way that quite upset her and yet was pleasurable. A year later, when the war had started and Gordon was already in the Navy, she’d met this Peter in Bond Street and he’d invited her to have a drink, reaching for her elbow. She’d felt quite frightened and hadn’t accepted the invitation.

After the war she and Gordon moved to another part of London. They didn’t see their pre-war friends again and didn’t replace them, it was hard to know why. Gordon seemed a little different, hardened by the war. She was different herself, looking back on it: she’d lost a certain naturalness, she didn’t feel vivacious. It was a disappointment not having children, but there were millions of couples who didn’t have children, and of course there were far worse things than that, as the war had just displayed.

At no time had she ever felt that Gordon was perverted. At no time, not even vaguely, had such a notion occurred to her, nor did she even think that he was not as other men. Since other marriages were without children she presumed that other couples, in their millions, shared their own difficulty. And it was theirs, she considered, not simply Gordon’s. They were both at fault if fault it could be called, which she doubted: more likely, it was the way they were made. She didn’t think about it, it was not mentioned.

But now it was everywhere, clamouring at her, shouting down the years of her virginal marriage. The bungalow they’d come to end their lives in was rich already with this new and simple truth, with a logic any child could understand. That Timothy Gedge, so awful in his drunkenness and apparently in himself, should have released it was even fitting. In his drunkenness he had seemed like something out of a cheap Sunday newspaper: her marriage was like that also, as her husband was, underhand and vicious in a small town. Only the truth had passed from Timothy Gedge, the unarguable strength of it, the power and the glory of it. She didn’t want to think about Timothy Gedge, to dwell on him or to consider him in any way whatsoever. Nothing could change the truth he had uttered, and that for the moment was enough.

‘Well, I do think it’s a lot, you know,’ Miss Poraway was remarking. ‘Forty dinners for just two pairs of hands.’

Mrs Abigail, taking another couple of plates from the back of the van, was aware only that her companion was speaking; the content of her statement did not register. All during the night, over and over again, she had found it absurd that she’d ever considered herself a happy woman. And in the same repetitious way she had recalled the scene she’d interrupted the evening before by announcing that supper was ready: Gordon and the boy seated in the sitting-room before the cosy glow of the electric fire, drinking sherry.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miss Poraway!’ she cried as another rice pudding slipped from Miss Poraway’s fingers. ‘What kind of fool are you?’

On his walk, in his brown overcoat, not carrying his towel and swimming-trunks, Commander Abigail was upset also. At breakfast nothing had been said, which perhaps wasn’t unusual, but afterwards she’d left the house without saying anything either. On a Thursday there was invariably some instruction about the lunch she’d left him, since Thursday was her day for doing her charity with the elderly. Yet not only had she not said anything but as far as he’d been able to ascertain she hadn’t left him any lunch.

Like his wife, the Commander hadn’t slept. Lying awake in the room next to hers, the episode with the boy had kept recurring to him, the sweat running on the boy’s face and his hands protruding from the sleeves of the dog’s-tooth suit and his voice making its extraordinary statements. When they had eventually managed to get him out of the house he’d helped her to carry the remaining dishes from the dining-room, a thing he never did. He’d repeated several more times that everything the boy had said was drunken nonsense. He’d said he was sorry the incident had occurred and had asked her if she’d like him to make her some Ovaltine. As far as he could remember, she hadn’t replied to anything except to shake her head when he mentioned Ovaltine.

As he walked on the sand, the Commander attempted to reassure himself. He had often watched the cub scouts playing rounders on the beach. The Gedge boy, who apparently spied on the entire population of Dynmouth, had no doubt seen him. But there was nothing furtive or dubious about watching a crowd of lads playing a game on the sands, any more than there was about carting food to the elderly. The boy’s unfortunately unsober condition and his inadequate ability to express himself had clearly made for confusion. Without a shred of evidence he had employed an innuendo when what he should have said was that any normal English person could not but approve of the sight of young English lads in their uniforms, and would naturally pause to observe how they played a game.