Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

Stephen agreed that they must tell Mrs Blakey. If they didn’t tell Mrs Blakey he would continue to follow them with his carrier-bag, talking. You could kick him and hurt him, you could hit him on the face and on the eyes so that he couldn’t see, but he’d still manage to torment you. His conversation would never cease. He’d smile and say it was great being friends with you. He’d go on telling lies.

‘He’s a horrible person,’ Kate cried with renewed vehemence, and looked behind her as if contemplating a continuation of her assault. He was standing where they had left him, a long way back now, gazing after them. It was too far to make out his smile, but she knew the smile was there.

‘Come on, Kate.’

As she turned to walk on she shivered, affected by a chilliness that seemed to be an expression of her revulsion.

‘We’ll only say,’ Stephen said, ‘he keeps following us about. We’ll say he wants clothes to dress-up in. No need to tell her everything.’

Kate agreed with that. There was no need to tell Mrs Blakey everything because so much of it just didn’t make sense.

The men of Ring’s Amusements whistled and shouted, still preparing the machinery in Sir Walter Raleigh Park. Fifty yards ahead a bus, in shades of silver, slowly drew up. A man who appeared to be passing with a camera took a photograph of it.

The sea slurped over green rocks, at the bottom of the promenade wall. It was beginning to go out again, calmly withdrawing, as though trained. ‘Look,’ his mother had said, making him watch with her while a tide spent itself. She had loved watching the sea. She’d loved walking by it. She’d loved the stones it smoothed, and its wildness when it flung itself over the promenade wall, scattering gravel and driftwood. Like anger, she’d said.

Elderly people climbed slowly out of the silver bus, women in brown or cream or grey, old men in overcoats and hats. They stood uncertainly on the promenade, as if alarmed. They murmured to one another, and then they laughed because the bus-driver leaned out of his cab and made a joke. The man who’d taken a photograph of the bus asked if he might photograph the old people also, and the bus-driver told him to wait a minute. He put aside a newspaper he’d been going to read and jumped out of his cab. ‘Everyone for the gentleman’s photograph,’ he shouted, lining the elderly people against the side of the bus. ‘Cheese please, Louise.’ All the elderly people laughed.

‘It’s called harassing,’ Kate said. ‘You harass people by not leaving them alone. I’d say it was against the law.’

Stephen nodded, not knowing if it was against the law or not, and not much caring. The clothes of people who died were naturally left behind; he hadn’t ever thought of that. He hadn’t wondered where her clothes were when he’d returned to Primrose Cottage at the end of that autumn term. Other things had still been there, lots of her things. But even without looking he’d known that her clothes – all her dresses and her coats and her cardigans and her shoes – were no longer in her wardrobe or in the chests of drawers she shared with his father in their bedroom.

‘What happens to dead people’s clothes, d’you think?’

She said she didn’t know. His father wouldn’t burn them. It would be cruel to burn them since people needed clothes, refugees in India and Africa. His father was too nice and too charitable. She thought that but did not say it. His father would have given them to Oxfam, or to a jumble sale.

‘But not the wedding-dress?’

‘You wouldn’t give a wedding-dress.’

‘You wouldn’t put it on a bonfire, either.’

‘It wouldn’t be right to do that.’

The wedding-dress was in the faded green trunk, just as he’d imagined it in the night. It was as real as the bath behind the timber sheds. She’d stowed it away there, his father had found it. The boy had seen because he was always looking to see what people were doing.

They had almost reached the end of the promenade. Behind them the elderly people poked their way about in twos and threes, careful on the concrete surface. Farther behind, the scarlet figure of Miss Lavant moved past the façade of the Queen Victoria Hotel, towards the harbour and the fish-packing station. Timothy Gedge was nowhere to be seen.

At the end of the promenade they could take a flight of steps down to rocks that were slippery with seaweed, and clamber over them until they reached the shingle. They could make their way over that and eventually up the cliff to the eleventh green of the golf-course, to the gate in the garden wall. Or they could fork to the right, up Once Hill, past the rectory and on to the steep, narrow road that wound over the downs to Badstoneleigh, off which the entrance gates of Sea House opened. They were considering this choice when they were abruptly aware of Commander Abigail.

He made his way down the narrow road, huddled like a crab within his familiar brown overcoat. But his step was not his familiar jaunty one, nor did he carry his rolled-up towel and swimming-trunks. He moved as the elderly people from the bus moved, but without their caution because a red Post Office van had to swerve to avoid him. He stood for a moment on the promenade in the same huddled way, and then he made his way slowly towards a green-painted seat and sat slowly down on it.

They walked by him, looking at him because they couldn’t help themselves. But their staring didn’t matter because he didn’t notice it. His face was parched. His eyes were dead, as if the Post Office van had mowed him down and killed him. His hands were clasped together as if to comfort one another. There was a chalkiness about his lips and his eyelids. His ginger moustache was vivid.

It was true, they thought, still looking at him: he was a married man who went homo-ing about, who had been exposed to his wife when Timothy Gedge was drunk. All that was easy to believe now, it was easy to imagine the drunkenness, and Timothy Gedge letting the facts slip out because he didn’t care, because he’d find it enjoyable, even better than going to a funeral.

They left the promenade and on the sleek tarred surface of the road Stephen walked in front, Kate behind him. He changed his mind about telling Mrs Blakey. He said they mustn’t, not adding that the sight of Commander Abigail on the green-painted seat made all the difference. And as he hadn’t at first referred to the wedding-dress, last night or until they’d reached the spinney that morning, so he didn’t refer now to the fantasies of Timothy Gedge that were turning out not to be fantasies at all.

They sat in the kitchen at teatime, an awkward occasion, with Mrs Blakey’s beaming face puzzled by their silence. If he were possessed by devils, Kate thought, it would be a simple explanation. In her first term at St Cecilia’s there’d been a girl who’d had the gift of levitation, a disturbed girl called Julie who had been able to float eight feet above the ground, whom Miss Scuse had eventually had to have removed. Girls often had gifts like that, Rosalind Swain had said at the time, especially in adolescence. A girl called Enid could hypnotize other girls with the aid of a silver-coloured fountain-pen top. Another girl could read a whole page of a newspaper and immediately repeat it. Rosalind Swain said she wouldn’t be able to when she’d finished growing up. Adolescence was mysterious, Rosalind Swain explained. Adolescents often harboured poltergeists.

Mrs Blakey kept on asking them what they’d done that day. As if he hadn’t heard her, Stephen didn’t answer. Kate said they’d gone to the army display and mentioned the rations that were taken on Antarctic expeditions. If he were possessed by devils, you couldn’t fight against him: devils could possess people in the same way as other people were made to harbour poltergeists or were haunted by ghosts. Were they like vapours that rustled through him, devils owning him while he was unaware, making him smile his smile? Did he know what he was doing?