Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

‘You’re not locked up. There’s no need to be locked up.’

‘Locked up in a house with people I don’t even like.’

‘You do like us, Stephen.’

‘I don’t like you and I don’t like your mother. Everything was perfectly all right until your mother came along.’

‘She didn’t come along. My mother was there all the time –’

‘She came along and the trouble started. I don’t want to talk about it to you.’

‘We have to talk about it, Stephen. We can’t just leave it there, hanging there.’

‘Nothing’s hanging there. I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘You can’t just not talk to me.’

‘I can do what I bloody like. This is my room. I’m reading a book in it.’

‘You’re not reading a book. You’re lying there pretending.’

‘I am reading a book. Sikandra is five miles from Agra if you want to know. The entrance to Akbar’s tomb is of red sandstone with marble decorations.’

‘Oh, Stephen!’

‘I want to be left alone. I don’t like you. I don’t like the way you’re so bloody silly.’

She began to say something else and then changed her mind. She said eventually:

‘Don’t let it upset you.’

‘Nothing’s upsetting me.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t know what you mean and I don’t want to. We don’t have to do everything together. I’m sick of Mrs Blakey talking about Granny Smiths. I’m sick of everything.’

‘You don’t have to hate me.’

‘I’ll hate you if I want to.’

‘But you don’t and I don’t hate you –’

‘I don’t mind if you hate me.’

She looked at him lying on his bed, pretending to read. She wanted to cry and she imagined the tears flowing down her cheeks and dripping on to her jersey and how he’d probably say that she should go somewhere else to cry. She felt silly standing there. She wished she was grown-up, brisk and able to cope.

‘You do mind if I hate you,’ she said.

He went on pretending to read and then he suddenly looked up and stared at her, examining her. His face was cold, that same unsmiling face, pinched and thin, his dark eyes cruel, as if he dared not let them be anything else.

‘You’re always going red. You go red for the least little thing. You’ll be fat like Mrs Blakey.’

‘I can’t help going red –’

‘You’re ugly, even when you’re not red you’re ugly. You’re unattractive. It’s just silly to think you’re going to grow up and be pretty.’

‘I don’t think that.’

‘You said so. You said you wanted to be pretty. I don’t care if you want to be pretty. I don’t know why you tell me.’

‘I said I’d like to be. It’s not the same –’

‘Of course it’s the same. If you’d like to be it means you want to be. It’s stupid to say it doesn’t.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Why don’t you say what you mean then?’

‘I do say what I mean,’ she cried with sudden anger. ‘Why are you being so horrible to me? Why d’you keep away from me? Why can’t you even speak to me?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘You’re boring.’

He returned to his encyclopedia. She had to pause before she could speak because there were tears behind her eyes, her voice would be clogged with them. Blinking, she fought them back, aware of their actual withdrawal. It was horrible to be called boring. She said:

‘I’m going down to the beach.’

‘You don’t have to tell me.’

‘Stephen –’

‘I don’t care where you’re going.’

She went away, and after a minute or two he got up from his bed and went to the window. She was in the garden with the setters on their leads. He watched while she approached the gate in the wall, while she went through it and then passed out of sight. Ten minutes later she appeared on the distant seashore. As he watched her, he suddenly thought how childish it had been to imagine you could play number three for Somerset just because you’d once made seventeen in an over off the indifferent bowling of Philpott, A. J.

He took the carrier-bag from a drawer. He opened the door and paused for a moment, listening for sounds of Mrs Blakey. He crossed the landing and mounted the narrow stairs to the attics. When he opened the faded green trunk the wedding-dress was there, at the bottom, beneath clothes that were familiar to him.

On the seashore Kate threw two balls for the dogs, the red one and the blue one. She kept wanting to cry, as she had with Stephen, as she had for so much of the time since Timothy Gedge had come into their lives. The dogs bounded about her, obstreperously wagging their tails. Again she felt – and more vehemently now than she had felt it before – that Timothy Gedge was possessed.

‘I missed seeing you,’ he said, coming from nowhere.

She told him then, unable to help herself: he was possessed by devils. He revelled in the idea of murder, he wanted to glorify the violence of murder in a marquee at the Easter Fête. He wanted people to applaud because harmless women had been killed. It would give him pleasure to make jokes that weren’t funny while he was dressed up in the wedding-dress of a woman he claimed had been murdered also. He went to funerals because he liked to think of people being dead in coffins. There was nothing about him that wasn’t unpleasant.

‘Devils?’ he said.

‘You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know the unhappiness you cause.’

He shook his head. He didn’t smile, as she’d expected he might. He said he only told the truth. He followed her when she moved towards the cliffs and began to climb up the path that curved and twisted on the cliff-face. She asked him not to follow her, but he took no notice. He said:

‘At half past eleven on a Thursday morning I had the idea in Tussaud’s.’

He was talking nonsense. He was mocking and pretending, even though he wasn’t grinning any more. His act with the brides in the bath was an excuse. His wanting the wedding-dress was an excuse for saying all the things he’d said. Nothing was as it appeared to be with him.

‘Devils?’ he said again. ‘D’you think I have devils, Kate?’

She didn’t reply. The setters walked sedately on the cliff-path, beside the eleventh green. Ahead of them the weathered brick of the garden wall, touched with Virginia creeper, looked warm in the morning sun.

‘Devils,’ he murmured, as if the sound of the word pleased him. He’d thought he’d die himself, he said when they came to the white iron gate, he’d thought he’d die when he’d heard the woman’s scream, sharp as a blade above the whine of the wind and the rain. Kids should be protected from stuff like that, he said. You read it in the papers: it could ruin you for life, witnessing a murder.

9

The Holy Week that had passed so harshly for the children in Sea House had passed less fearfully in Dynmouth itself. The saints’ days had been noted by Quentin Featherston, St Walter’s, St Hugh’s, St Bademus’s. St Leo the Great, that year, claimed Maundy Thursday.

The town has changed since Easter last year, Miss Lavant wrote in her diary, but only in small little ways, not worth recording. Out walking this morning I noticed Dr Greenslade on his rounds. Mrs Slewy has been in trouble for taking the cancer-box from the counter in Mock’s.

The orphans from the Down Manor Orphanage progressed each day of that week in a crocodile from Down Manor to the beach. In pairs, the nuns from the convent walked on the promnade. Old Ape received his Thursday hand-out at the rectory. The Dynmouth Hards rampaged by night, wives were swapped on the Leaflands Estate, old Miss Trimm was buried. A niece of Miss Vine’s bought her a new budgerigar.