Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

‘I love Stephen,’ she said, and then she repeated it, her tears returning. ‘I can’t bear it, seeing Stephen so frightened.’

He knew who Stephen was. He remembered him at the funeral of his mother. He remembered speaking to him, saying he’d been brave. The parents of these children were now married. The man was an ornithologist.

‘There’s no need for anyone to be frightened, Kate.’

She said she had prayed because it was impossible for people to live in a house like that, with lies everywhere, as there would have to be. In desperation she had prayed. She said:

‘You have to exorcize devils. Could you exorcize the devils in Timothy Gedge?’

He was taken aback, and more confused than he’d been a moment ago. He slightly shook his head, making it clear he didn’t intend to exorcize devils.

‘When I prayed,’ she said, ‘I promised. I said, if it wasn’t true, then the devils would be exorcized. I promised God.’

‘God wouldn’t want a promise like that. He doesn’t make bargains. I can’t just exorcize a person because he tells a lie.’

‘Lie?’

‘Stephen’s father wasn’t in Dynmouth the day the accident happened. He came back from London and someone had to tell him at the station. He was actually on a train when it happened.’

She looked at him, her eyes opening wider and then wider. Tears still glistened on one of her cheeks. Her lips parted and closed again. Eventually she said:

‘I prayed and He changed things.’

‘No, Kate. Nothing has changed. Before you prayed it was true that Stephen’s father was not here that day.’

‘You must exorcize Timothy Gedge, Mr Featherston.’

He tried to explain. He didn’t believe in the idea of people possessed by devils, because it seemed to him that that was only a way of trying to tidy up the world by pigeon-holing everything. There were good people, and people who were not good: that had nothing to do with devils. He tried to explain that possession by devils was just a form of words.

‘I told him he had devils,’ she said.

‘You shouldn’t have, Kate.’

‘I promised God. God wants it, Mr Featherston.’

She cried out, her tears brimming over again, red in the face. The brown hair that curved in around her cheeks seemed suddenly untidy.

‘I promised God,’ she cried again.

She was still sitting down, leaning forward in her chair, burning at him with her round eyes. It was like being in the room with Miss Trimm yet again confiding that she’d mothered another Jesus Christ. Miss Trimm had talked about her son as an infant, how he had blessed the fishermen on Dynmouth Pier, how he had emerged from her womb without pain. In her days as a schoolteacher she’d been known for the quickness of her wit and her clarity of thought. But in her lonely senility her eccentric belief had been unshakable, the world had become impossible without the closeness of God. This child in her distress appeared to have discovered something similar.

Yet he was unable to help her, unable even properly to converse with her. God’s world was not a pleasant place, he might have said. God’s world was cruel, human nature took ugly forms. It wasn’t God who cultivated lily-of-the-valley or made Dynmouth pretty with lace and tea-shops or made the life of Jesus Christ a sentimental journey. But how on earth could he say that, any more than he could have said it to Miss Trimm? How could he say that there was only God’s insistence, even though He abided by no rules Himself, that His strictures should be discovered and obeyed? How could he say that God was all vague promises, and small print on guarantees that no one knew if He ever kept? It was appalling that Timothy Gedge had terrified these children, yet it had been permitted, like floods and famine.

‘He’ll do something terrible,’ she said, weeping copiously now. ‘It’s people like that who do terrible things.’

‘I’ll talk to him, Kate.’

Faintly, she shook her head. She was huddled on her chair, her small hands clenched, pressed against her stomach, as though some part of her were in pain, her face blotched. He felt intensely sorry for her, and useless.

‘He loves hurting,’ she said. People had done him no harm, the Dasses, the Abigails. He laughed when he mentioned the name of the Dasses’ house. ‘Mrs Abigail didn’t know about her husband. He went and told her. He got drunk on beer and sherry –’

‘So you said, Kate.’

‘He thinks it’s funny.’

‘Yes.’

‘He thinks it’s funny to do an act like that.’

‘His act won’t be permitted.’

‘He made us think a murder had been committed. We both believed it. Don’t you see?’ she cried. ‘We both believed it.’

‘I do see, Kate.’

‘They’d have driven a stake through him. They’d have burnt his bones until they were cinders.’

‘We’re more civilized now.’

‘We couldn’t be. He wouldn’t be alive if we were more civilized.’

‘Kate –’

‘He shouldn’t be alive. It’s that that shouldn’t be permitted.’ She screamed the words at him. He let a silence fall. Then he said:

‘You mustn’t say that, Kate.’

‘I’m telling you the truth.’

There was another silence, only broken by her sobbing. She wiped her face with his handkerchief and then held the handkerchief tightly, squeezing it in her fists. He said there was a pattern of greys, half-tones and shadows. People moved in the greyness and made of themselves heroes or villains, but the truth was that heroes and villains were unreal. The high drama of casting out devils would establish Timothy Gedge as a monster, which would be nice for everyone because monsters were a species on their own. But Timothy Gedge couldn’t be dismissed as easily as that. She had been right to say it was people like that who do terrible things, and if Timothy Gedge did do terrible things it would not be because he was different and exotic but because he was possessed of an urge to become so. Timothy Gedge was as ordinary as anyone else, but the ill fortune of circumstances or nature made ordinary people eccentric and lent them colour in the greyness. And the colour was protection because ill fortune weakened its victims and made them vulnerable.

While he spoke, he saw reactions in the child’s face. She didn’t like what he said about shades of grey, nor the suggestion that villains and heroes were artificial categories. It cut across her child’s world. It added complications she didn’t wish to know about. He watched her thinking that as he spoke, and then he saw everything he’d said being summarily dismissed. She shook her head.

She spoke of an idyll and said that God would not permit it now. She would go back to Sea House and tell Stephen that his father had been on a train at the time of his mother’s death. The nightmare was over, but in its place there was nothing. They would be friends again, but it wouldn’t be the same.

‘I can’t explain,’ she said, quite recovered now from her passion and her tears.

She meant he wouldn’t understand. She meant it wasn’t any good just talking, sitting there beneath a cross that hung on a wall. She meant he might at least have promised to have a go at shaking the devils out, even if he didn’t quite believe in them; he might at least have tried. No wonder clergymen weren’t highly thought of. All that was in her face, too.

She walked away from the rectory, up Once Hill and then on to the narrow road that wound, eventually, to Badstoneleigh. If they’d told the Blakeys a week ago the Blakeys would have said what the clergyman had said: that Stephen’s father could not have been responsible. She kept thinking of that, of their telling Mrs Blakey in the kitchen and Mrs Blakey throwing her head back and laughing. They’d all have laughed, even Mr Blakey, and then quite abruptly Mrs Blakey would have said that Timothy Gedge deserved to be birched.