Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

‘Is Stephen all right, dear?’ Mrs Blakey asked her as they cleared the plates from the table, when Stephen had gone. Kate pointed out that Stephen was always a little on the silent side.

‘You’ve gone silent yourself, Kate.’ Mrs Blakey spoke in a sudden, laughing kind of way, seeming relieved because she’d received an answer of a kind. Would she have collapsed into a heap if she’d learnt that Stephen was silent because he was wondering if his father had murdered his mother? His father who mended the broken wings of birds, his mother who had loved him for his gentleness? Was it really true? Had his mother shouted and screamed on the edge of a cliff, calling her own mother a prostitute? People quarrelled horribly. People were cruel, like her father had been before the divorce, like Miss Shaw and Miss Rist were to Miss Malabedeely. Yet of course it wasn’t true. Of course she hadn’t screamed like that.

In the drawing-room of the house that because of death and marriage had become his home Kate watched him while he, in turn, watched the coloured rectangle of the television screen. His intensity was contrived; already he had closed himself away from her. Like a physical presence, she could feel that between them.

Bullets ricocheted off the surface of a boulder, chipping pieces out of it but missing Kid Curry and Hannibal Hayes, alias Smith and Jones. Dismally she thought that nothing would be the same again. After all this ugliness, like a slime around them, he would resent her because she knew about it, because in sharing it she’d become part of it. She closed her eyes, wanting to cry but preventing herself.

‘You’re Hannibal Hayes,’ the voice of a sheriff roared from the television drama, and the voice of the cowboy quietly retorted, denying that he was. When she opened her eyes the cowboys were no longer crouched by the boulder. They were astride a single horse, tied back to back, being led along a skyline by the sheriff’s posse. Still hiding in pretended concentration, Stephen watched as though his life depended on it.

Ghosts were exorcized, there was a special service. There was the casting out of devils, which sounded similar. If the devils were cast out of Timothy Gedge, would everything miraculously be different? Would she and Stephen be sitting just as they were now and be suddenly unable to remember anything that had happened because nothing would have been real? Would the idyll she had dreamed of be there again, not smashed to pieces as it seemed to be?

It had been smashed to pieces because Timothy Gedge had followed them. Timothy Gedge, with his hollow cheeks and his gawkiness, had picked on them even though he didn’t know them, even though they’d done him no harm. Did he hate them because they lived in Sea House, because there was the garden and the setters, because they were friends and he had no friends himself? Or did he really just want a wedding-dress? Had she really screamed like that?

8

The sun trickled around the blinds in Kate’s bedroom, falling in narrow shafts over the poppies on the wallpaper and on the orange-painted dressing-table. It was warm in the room when she awoke and for some seconds she was aware of pleasurable anticipation, before the revelations of the day before came flooding in on her. Higgledy-piggledy they came, without rhyme or reason. Unwillingly she marshalled them into order, beginning with the moment when she and Stephen had stepped out of the French windows, apprehensive because Timothy Gedge was in the garden. Stephen had been friends with her then. He had been friends while they talked in the spinney, and while they made the dam on the stream and read their paper-backed books after they’d eaten their sandwiches.

She got up, pulling back the bedclothes and releasing the blinds on both windows. The sea was calm. No breeze disturbed the budding magnolias or the tree mallows, or the azaleas for which the garden was noted. Mr Blakey stood among his cropped rose-beds, pondering something. In their favourite morning resting place, warm in the sunshine by the summer-house, the setters reclined with dignity, like sleepy lions. In Dynmouth the clock of St Simon and St Jude’s chimed eight. She took her nightdress off and quickly dressed.

That day, a Saturday, was a horrible day. They didn’t leave the house. In Kate’s room, hardly speaking, they played draughts and Monopoly and Rickety Ann and Switch and Racing Demon. She hated the silence and felt subdued by it, and in the end defeated. When she tried to be cheerful she ended up flustered and red-faced, clammy all over. At lunchtime in the kitchen she tried to cover the silence up by chattering about anything that came into her head, but her chattering made the silence more obvious. Stephen didn’t say a single word. Mrs Blakey became worried, and it showed.

They watched a Saturday-afternoon film on television, All This and Heaven Too. Afterwards they read. They played Monopoly again. From the window of Kate’s room they watched Mrs Blakey on the distant seashore throwing driftwood for the setters. They watched her returning, passing through the gate in the archway of the garden wall, the setters’ mouths drooping open from excitement and fatigue.

They were still at the window when Timothy Gedge appeared a few minutes later. He peeped through the white ornamental iron-work of the gate. He looked up at the windows of the house.

Days went by like this, Sunday and Monday and Tuesday. On Saturday their parents would be back.

On all these days Timothy Gedge appeared at the gate in the garden wall. On the Monday and the Tuesday he came to the front of the house and rang the hall door bell. ‘There’s that Gedge boy wants you,’ Mrs Blakey said in a puzzled way on each occasion, and on each occasion they replied that they didn’t wish to see him. When he came again Mrs Blakey said he must not return. The children hadn’t found his penknife, she said.

For Kate, the passing of time made the silence chillier, until it felt like an icy shroud around her. For Stephen, time was a tormentor. Thoughts formed in his mind, images occurred. In the newspapers there’d been an army officer’s wife who’d disappeared while the army officer was engaged in a liaison with a woman in the army catering services. This woman had become the army officer’s second wife. His first wife had gone to Australia, he had claimed in the dock, but there was doubt about that. There’d been photographs of these people’s faces in the newspapers, but Stephen had forgotten what the faces looked like. Now faces appeared in his mind, with features that were grotesque in their exaggeration of innocence and evil.

There was another face then, which didn’t have to be invented: a moustached face that had recently and endlessly appeared on the television news, the face of a man who was accused of battering to death the nanny of his children, of attempting to do the same to his wife. ‘A kind and generous person,’ a woman on the news said. ‘He loved people for what they were.’ He was missing and wanted for murder. His car was found with bloodstains on the steering-wheel. ‘He couldn’t possibly do a thing like that,’ his best friend said. In France and South Africa, all over the world, the police were looking for him. Had he, too, mended the broken wings of birds?

His father had the same seriously intent eyes and the delicate look that Stephen had. But he was brown-haired and his smile was different. His smile came slowly, beginning at the corners of his mouth and creeping all over his face, wrinkling the flesh of his cheeks, lighting up his eyes. Stephen’s smile was jerky and nervous, coming quickly, in flashes, and quickly evaporating. His father had a way of losing himself in some private absorption, of not hearing when people spoke to him, and then of apologizing concernedly. He would watch the movements of birds for hours through his binoculars without ever assuming that this activity could be interesting to other people, without ever promoting it as a topic of conversation. His privacy in this matter, and in others, had thrown Stephen and his mother together. That had seemed natural to Stephen, the way things should be: his father working and then emerging from his work, all three of them walking on the beach, or walking to Badstoneleigh to go to the Pavilion, or having tea on Stephen’s birthday in the Spinning Wheel, or going to see Somerset play.