Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

‘Cheers,’ he said to a couple of old-age pensioners who were tottering along together, clinging to one another on a slippery pavement, but they didn’t reply. He paused beside three nuns who were examining a shop window full of garden tools while waiting for a bus. He smiled at them and pointed out a pair of secateurs, saying they looked good value. They were about to reply when the bus came. ‘It’s the friendly boy Sister Agnes mentioned,’ he heard one of them comment, and from the inside of the bus all three of them waved at him.

The Dasses lived in a semi-detached house called Sweetlea. Mr Dass had been the manager of the Dynmouth branch of Lloyd’s Bank and was now retired. He was a man with wire-rimmed spectacles, tall and very thin, given to wearing unpressed tweed suits. His wife was an invalid, with pale flesh that had a deflated look. She had once been active in Dynmouth’s now-defunct amateur dramatic society, the Dynmouth Strollers, and when Quentin Featherston had decided to hold his first Easter Fête to raise funds for the crumbling tower of St Simon and St Jude’s, Mrs Stead-Carter had put forward the idea of a talent competition and had suggested that Mrs Dass should be invited to judge it. The talent competition had become an annual event, Mrs Dass continuing to accept the onus of judgement and Mr Dass entering into the spirit of things by seeing to the erection and lighting of a stage in the tea marquee that was borrowed annually through the Stead-Carters, who had influence in the tenting world. The stage itself, modest in size, consisted of a number of timber boards set on concrete blocks. There was a wooden frame, knocked up by Mr Peniket, the sexton, which supported a landscape of Swiss Alps painted on hardboard, and the stage’s curtains. Each year the curtains were borrowed from the stage of the Youth Centre, and it was Mrs Dass, artistic in this direction also, who had been responsible for the all-purpose scenery. In his devotion to his wife and knowing more than anyone else about her invalid state, it pleased Mr Dass that the Spot the Talent competition was now an established event at the Easter Fête: it took her out of herself.

‘Only I was passing,’ Timothy Gedge said, having penetrated to the Dasses’ sitting-room. ‘I was wondering how things was going, sir.’

Mrs Dass was reclining on a sun-chair in the bow-window, reading a book by Dennis Wheatley, To the Devil, a Daughter. Her husband was standing by the door without his jacket, regretting that he’d admitted the boy. He’d been asleep on his bed when the bell had been rung, and the ringing hadn’t immediately wakened him. It had first of all occurred in a dream he was having about his early childhood, and had then been repeated quite a number of times before he could get downstairs. It had sounded important.

‘Things?’ he said.

‘The Spot the Talent comp, sir.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Only I was speaking to Mr Feather and he said I’d best look in at Sweetlea.’

In her sun-chair in the bow-window Mrs Dass put down To the Devil, a Daughter. For a moment she watched the sparrows in the small back garden and then she closed her eyes. She’d smiled a little when her husband had brought Timothy Gedge into the room, but she hadn’t spoken.

‘Everything’s A1,’ Mr Dass said. He hadn’t thought about the stage or the lighting yet. The stage would be where Mr Peniket and he had left it last year, in the cellar beneath the church where the coke was kept. The lights were in three cardboard boxes, under his bed.

‘We’ve had quite a few entries,’ he reported. Stout Mrs Muller, the Austrian woman who ran the Gardenia Café, went in for the competition every year, singing Austrian songs in her national costume accompanied by her husband on an accordion, in national costume also. A group called the Dynmouth Night-Lifers strummed electric guitars and sang. The manager of the tile-works played tunes on his mouth-organ. Mr Swayles, employed in a newsagent’s, did conjuring. Miss Wilkinson, who taught English in the Comprehensive school, had done Lady Macbeth and Miss Havisham and was down to do the Lady of Shalott this year. Last summer’s carnival queen, a girl employed in the fish-packing station, had never before entered the Spot the Talent competition. In her queen’s white dress, trimmed with Dynmouth lace, and wearing her crown, she was scheduled to sing ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree’.

‘Mrs Dass all right is she, sir?’ Timothy Gedge enquired, glancing across the room at her, thinking that the woman looked dead.

Mr Dass nodded. She often liked to lie with her eyes closed. He himself had moved across the room and was now standing with his back to a small coal fire. He took his pipe from a trouser pocket and pressed tobacco into it from a tin. He wished the boy would go away.

‘Only there’s not long till the Easter Fête, sir.’

To Mr Dass’s horror, the boy sat down. He unzipped his damp yellow jacket, settling himself on the sofa.

‘I was saying to Mr Feather, Ring’s is getting ready again. They’ll be opening up Easter Saturday.’

‘Yes, they will.’

‘Same day as the Easter Fête, Mr Dass.’

‘Yes.’

‘Only I was saying to Mr Feather they’ll take the crowds.’ Mr Dass shook his head. The crowds went from one attraction to the other, he explained. The opening of Ring’s Amusements on Easter Saturday brought people from outside Dynmouth: the Easter Fête actually benefited from the coincidence.

‘I wouldn’t agree, sir,’ Timothy said.

Mr Dass didn’t reply.

‘It’s bad weather, sir.’

Mr Dass said it was, and then asked if he could be of help in any way.

‘What’s he want?’ Mrs Dass suddenly demanded, opening her eyes.

‘Afternoon, Mrs Dass,’ Timothy said. Funny the way they wouldn’t give you a cup of tea. Funny the man standing there in his shirtsleeves. He smiled at Mrs Dass. ‘We were on about the Spot the Talent comp,’ he said.

She smiled back at the boy. He began to talk about a sewing-machine.

‘Sewing-machine?’ she said.

‘For making curtains, Mrs Dass. Only the Youth Centre curtains got burnt in December. New curtains are required is what I’m saying.’

‘What’s he mean?’ she asked her husband.

‘The Youth Centre curtains are apparently unavailable for the Easter Fête, dear. I don’t know why he’s come to us about it.’

Mr Dass lit his pipe. He had let the boy in because the boy had said he had an urgent message. So far no message had been delivered.

‘I’m afraid my wife is not in a position to make curtains,’ he said.

‘We’ll have to buy some then, Mr Dass. You can’t have a stage without curtains on it.’

‘Oh, I imagine we’ll manage somehow.’

‘I definitely need curtains for my act, sir.’

‘Mrs Dass will not be making curtains.’ A note of asperity had entered Mr Dass’s voice. As the manager of the Dynmouth branch of Lloyd’s Bank he had regularly had occasion to call on this resolute tone when rejecting pleas for credit facilities. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he added, taking his pipe from his mouth and pressing the smouldering tobacco with a thumb, ‘we are extremely busy this afternoon.’

‘I’m worried about the curtains, sir.’

‘That’s really Mrs Featherston’s pigeon, you know.’

‘Mr Feather said you’d supply new curtains, sir.’

‘Mr Featherston? Oh, I’m sure you’re quite wrong, you know.’

‘He said you’d definitely donate them, sir.’

‘Donate curtains? Now, look here –’

‘I think it’s a kind of joke,’ Mrs Dass said. She smiled weakly at Timothy Gedge. ‘We’re not good on jokes, I’m afraid.’

Mr Dass moved from the position he’d taken up by the fire. He leant over Timothy on the sofa. He spoke in a whisper, explaining that his wife liked to rest in the afternoons. It embarrassed him having to say all this to a schoolboy, but he felt he had no option. ‘I’ll see you out,’ he said.