Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

He closed the window and latched it.

‘Whatever’s going on?’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘Whatever’s Timothy Gedge want?’

He’d lost a penknife on the beach, Kate said. He was wondering if they’d found it.

There was a spinney they’d made their own, by the river. They went there in the middle of that morning, passing through the gate in the garden wall and along the cliff-path for a few hundred yards and then on to the golf-course. Rapidly they crossed fairways, by greens and bunkers and tees. They passed behind the club-house, leaving the golf-course behind them. They went through a field where sheep grazed, and then through bracken that sloped down steeply to the River Dyn. They wore Wellington boots, their corduroy jeans and the same jerseys as yesterday, Kate’s red, Stephen’s navy-blue.

Stephen walked ahead of her on the river bank. He led the way around the edge of a marsh and then through drier land, with limestone boulders on it. Ferns grew among the boulders, and further on the spring undergrowth was already dense. At a twist in the river lay the spinney, a clump of birch saplings sprouting through a thicket of bramble. It wasn’t large and never attracted other people. A stream ran through it to the river.

In the middle of the undergrowth, unseen either from the river or the bank on the other side, they had built a hut with lengths of fallen wood and some corrugated iron they’d found. It was a private lair, and though they’d often wished to have a fire they’d never done so – not because they feared for the dry wood of the spinney but because they knew that rising smoke would sooner or later be investigated.

They crawled into their hut. Outside, the sun glanced through a lacing of branches and bramble and scattered light in patches. Inside it was almost dark. They didn’t speak. Kate’s arms were clasped around her knees in an attitude she often took up. Stephen lay flat, gazing out at the patterns of sunlight, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. They hadn’t spoken to one another about Timothy Gedge, either last night or since Stephen had closed the French windows in his face, several hours ago. They hadn’t said to one another that they couldn’t understand his talk about the Abigails and the Dasses and Mr Plant of the Artilleryman’s Friend. They had attempted to visualize his world, as they had so often visualized each other’s boarding-schools. But they knew too little about him and what they knew was bewildering. They tried to imagine him acting in a comic manner the part of a man who had murdered three wives in a bath. They tried to imagine people watching this gruesome comedy.

‘He’s making it up. The wedding-dress isn’t even there.’ Kate spoke softly, shaking her head in denial.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s there.’ He remembered waking up in the middle of the night, and then he remembered Miss Tomm walking into the dormitory and saying that the headmaster wanted to see him and Cartwright saying: ‘Eee, what’s Fleming done?’ He remembered his father in his tweed overcoat in the Craw’s study, his father saying later how it had happened, and then the funeral in the rain. Timothy Gedge had said he’d seen him there. He’d said the best place for the people of Dynmouth was in their coffins.

Stephen suddenly wanted to hit him. He wanted to hit him all over the face with his fists, to smash away his stupid smile, to stop him talking.

‘I think we should tell Mrs Blakey,’ Kate said.

‘No.’ He shook his head, still gazing at the patterns of sunshine on the grass outside the hut. ‘No,’ he said again, closing the subject.

They made a dam on the stream, which was something they often did when they came to the spinney. They could feel the chill of the water through the rubber of their Wellington boots. Their hands, piling up stones, became red with cold.

Kate watched him, glancing sideways without turning her head. In the garden that morning she’d thought he was going to cry because of the memory of his mother’s death. She’d thought he was going to turn his back on Timothy Gedge and on herself and run into the house so that they wouldn’t see his tears. She’d felt his unhappiness and she felt it now. She wanted to say that he’d feel all right when a little time had passed, just like you did at school when you were homesick at the beginning of term. But she didn’t because she didn’t know that that would happen. She didn’t know what would happen, she didn’t know what was happening now.

They ate the sandwiches they’d made before they’d left the house, and then lay in their shelter and read two paper-backed books they’d brought with them. In the middle of the afternoon they decided to walk back to Dynmouth. There was an army display on for one day only, Mrs Blakey had said at breakfast: the car-park behind the fish-packing station had been taken over for it.

*

‘Hullo there,’ a sergeant said. ‘Come to see for yourselves, then?’

Boys were playing with machine-guns, swivelling them this way and that, peering through the sights. Bored soldiers were showing how various mechanisms operated and explaining the rate at which bullets could be discharged. Other boys climbed in and out of tanks or queued outside a caravan which advertised a film about combat in the jungle. A second caravan contained an exhibition of recruitment leaflets and in a third one there was an exhibition of army rations for Antarctic expeditions. Amplified pop music was playing.

‘This looks the best,’ Kate said, determinedly leading the way to the rations caravan. ‘Look, tinned rice pudding. And Spangles. Imagine taking Spangles to the Antarctic!’

There was meal to make porridge with in the Antarctic, and sugar and powdered milk, and biscuits and powdered soup, and tinned stew.

‘Whatever next?’ Kate tried to giggle, reading out the directions on the stew, but nothing seemed funny. ‘I think they’re pampered,’ she said lamely.

They went to the recruitment caravan, and to the film about combat in the jungle, which they left before it was over.

‘Cheers!’ Timothy Gedge said, coming up behind them.

His presence wasn’t a surprise. They didn’t reply to his greeting. He was carrying the same carrier-bag and for some reason they found it impossible not to stare at it. It swung lightly in the air, the Union Jack gay against his pallid clothes, seeming imbued with his own anticipation.

He walked away from the army display with them, offering them fruit gums and chattering. In his woman’s voice he repeated two conversations between waiters and men ordering plates of soup. He drew their attention to the goods in shop windows, to the cooking-stoves and washing-machines in the windows of the electricity showrooms. These electrical gadgets were all good value, he said, nodding his head repeatedly: the South-Western Electricity Board was an honest organization. ‘If your mum’s after a washer,’ he advised Kate, ‘she’d best move in while the sale’s on.’ In everything he said there were wisps of mockery.

‘Why are you following us?’ Stephen asked, knowing the answer to the question.

‘I need the dress for my act, Stephen.’

He smiled his smile at them. They stopped, waiting for him to walk on, but he didn’t.

‘We’ve told you we’re not going to get a wedding-dress for you,’ Kate said.

He began to whistle beneath his breath, a soft sound without a tune, as if he were attempting to imitate the rushing of wind through trees. He ceased it in order to speak again.

‘It’s great being friends with you,’ he said. He pointed at meat in a shop window and said it was good value. ‘Did you ever notice,’ he said to Kate, ‘Miss Lavant has bad teeth?’

They walked on, not speaking, not reacting to what he was saying. He asked them why elephants didn’t ride bicycles and explained that it was because they hadn’t any thumbs to ring the bell with. George Joseph Smith, he told them, had spent a night in Dynmouth one time, at the Castlerea boarding-house, still in business.