Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

6

‘I think I’m going to try and cut the grass,’ Quentin Featherston said as he and Lavinia washed up the dishes after the Mothers’ Union tea-party, which had been even more trying than usual. When Miss Poraway had mentioned a Tupperware party Mrs Stead-Carter had gone much further than she’d ever gone before. She’d pointed out that it was stupid to talk about Tupperware parties as a means of raising funds since funds raised at Tupperware parties naturally went to the manufacturers of Tupperware. Miss Poraway said there were other parties of a similar nature, at which suede jackets and coats were modelled, and sometimes underclothes. In greater exasperation Mrs Stead-Carter said she’d never heard anything as silly in her life: the Mothers’ Union in Dynmouth had neither Tupperware nor suede clothes nor underclothes at its disposal, Miss Poraway’s whole line of conversation was a waste of time. She failed to see, Mrs Stead-Carter finally declared, why it was that Miss Poraway, who had never been a mother, should concern herself with the Mothers’ Union in the first place. Miss Poraway had at once become tearful and Lavinia had had to take her to the kitchen. Mrs Abigail, she’d told Lavinia, had called her a fool that morning just because she dropped a tin plate when they were doing Meals on Wheels. Dynmouth was becoming a nasty kind of place.

‘Poor Miss Poraway,’ Quentin said as they washed the tea dishes, and Lavinia – not feeling agreeably disposed towards Miss Poraway – did not say anything. She wished she could say she was sorry now, not in the middle of the night when he was asleep. It wasn’t his fault; he did his best. It wasn’t easy for him, all those women bickering and only a handful of people out of Dynmouth’s thousands ever setting foot in his church, and Mr Peniket sighing over the decline of church life. She wished she could say she knew she was being difficult and edgy, taking it out on him because she’d been denied another child. But although she tried to speak, actually tried to form words and force them out of her mouth, no words came. They washed and dried in silence, and then the twins appeared with lemon cake all over them.

‘Tidying,’ Susannah said.

‘No, that’s not true,’ Lavinia protested. ‘You’ve been eating cake.’

‘Tidying on the floor,’ Deborah said.

‘Tidying crumbs,’ Susannah said.

‘I wish just once you’d tell the truth.’ Lavinia was angry. A day didn’t pass now during which it failed to occur to her that she had borne two congenital liars. Jam fell like rain, cake had to be tidied on the floor. ‘Mouses making buns,’ Deborah had said the afternoon before when flour and raisins had been discovered in a corner. ‘Mouses can have party,’ Susannah had added. ‘And games,’ Deborah said. ‘Mouses can have games if they want to.’

Lavinia, still scolding, wiped the crumbs from their cardigans.

‘Twins didn’t eat one crumb,’ Susannah assured her.

‘Mouses did,’ Deborah explained. ‘Two mouses came out of the chair.’

‘You come and watch me cutting the grass,’ Quentin suggested, but the twins shook their heads, not understanding because such a long time had passed since there’d last been grass-cutting. They suspected, however, that whatever it was their father intended to do the activity would prove dull to watch. Watching wasn’t often interesting.

Already Quentin had begun to tidy up the garden for the Easter Fête. He’d pulled up the first spring weeds from the flower-beds, little shoots of dandelion and dock and Scotch grass. He’d poked at the soil with a hoe to give it a fresh look. He’d cleared away a lot of last autumn’s leaves.

In the garage he examined a machine called a Suffolk Punch, a lawnmower that was now exactly ten years old. It had been lying idle since a Saturday afternoon in October, with begonia tubers in its grass-box and a bundle of yellowing newspapers balanced on its engine. The bundle was tied together with string and had been left there and forgotten one morning when Lavinia was in a hurry. She collected old newspapers and milk-bottle tops and silver paper for the Girl Guides.

Quentin hated the Suffolk Punch. He hated it especially now as he dragged it out of its corner in the garage, squeezed it between his Vauxhall Viva estate car and the twins’ tricycles, and rolled it on to the uneven surface in front of the garage doors. He pulled at the starting device, a coil of plastic-covered wire that snapped obediently back into position after each attempt to engage the engine. No sound came from the engine, no promising little cough, and naturally enough no roar of action. You could spend all day pulling the plastic-covered coil, the skin coming off your hands, sweat gathering all over you. You could take the plug out and examine it, not knowing what you were looking for. You could poke at it with a screwdriver or a piece of wire and wipe it with a piece of rag. You could take it to the kitchen and put it under the grill of the electric cooker in order to get it hot, without knowing why it should be hot.

He pulled the coil of plastic-covered wire forty times, pausing between every ten or a dozen efforts. A smell of petrol developed, as it usually did.

‘All right then, Mr Feather?’ the voice of Timothy Gedge enquired.

The boy was standing there, smiling at him for the second time that day. He attempted to smile back at him, but found it difficult. The same uneasy feeling he’d experienced that morning returned, and he realized now why it came: of all the people of Dynmouth this boy in his adolescence was the single exception. He could feel no Christian love for him.

‘Hullo, Timothy.’

‘Having trouble with the cutter then?’

‘I’m afraid I am.’ In the garage there was a kind of spanner, a hexagonal tube with a bar going through it, that was designed to remove plugs from engines. He went to look for it, remembering that he had used it a couple of times since October, trying to take the plugs out of the estate car. He disliked the estate car almost as much as the Suffolk Punch, which was why he preferred to make his way around the streets of Dynmouth on a bicycle. He disliked the English Electric washing-machine in the kitchen, especially the button which was meant to operate the door-release and quite often didn’t. He disliked the transistor radio he’d saved up for to get Lavinia for her birthday three years ago. No sound had emerged from it for six months: spare parts were hard to get, Dynmouth Hi-Fi Boutique informed him.

To his surprise, he found the hexagonal spanner on the ledge in the garage where it was meant to be. He returned to the lawn-mower with it. Timothy Gedge was still standing there. The way he kept hanging about him, Quentin wondered if he had perhaps decided to become a clergyman again.

‘You find what you want then, sir? Only I spoke to Dass about the curtains, Mr Feather.’

‘Curtains?’

‘I mentioned curtains to you this morning, sir.’

Quentin unscrewed the brass nipple on the end of the plug and disengaged the lead. He fitted the hexagonal spanner around the plug and turned it. The plug was wet with petrol and oil. There was a shell of carbon around the points. He never knew if there should be carbon there or not.

‘Dass is going to donate them, sir.’

‘Donate?’

‘A set of curtains, sir.’

‘Good heavens, there’s no need for that.’

He returned to the garage and tore a piece from one of the yellowing newspapers. He wiped the points of the plug with it. ‘I shall have to heat it up,’ he said.

Timothy watched him as he went hurriedly towards the house. He hadn’t even listened about the curtains. For all the man cared, the competition mightn’t take place, nor the Easter Fête either. He began to follow the clergyman into the house, and then changed his mind. No point in taking trouble with him; no point in explaining that he’d walked all the way up to the blooming rectory to set his mind at rest. Stupid it was, saying you had to heat up a thing out of a lawnmower.