Trevor, William - Children Of Dynmouth

Timothy walked about the flat again, from one room to another, practising in front of the bathroom mirror, telling jokes in his falsetto, smiling at himself. ‘You’re easily tops, lad,’ Hughie Green was enthusing, putting an arm round his shoulder. The applause and the laughter gave off warmth, like a fire. The clapometer was bursting itself, registering 98, a record. ‘You’re bringing the house down,’ Hughie Green said.

2

That afternoon, while Timothy Gedge practised his act and the Featherston twins continued to be bored in the rectory, Stephen and Kate Fleming, aged twelve, returned to Dynmouth by train from London. At eleven o’clock that morning their parents – Stephen’s father and Kate’s mother – had been married in a register office, making the children, in a sense, brother and sister. Their parents were now on their way to London Airport, to honeymoon in Cassis. For the next ten days the children were to be on their own with Mr and Mrs Blakey in Sea House.

‘Let’s have tea,’ Kate said, putting down a book about three children who surreptitiously kept a turkey as a pet.

Stephen was reading last year’s Wisden. He had once scored seventeen runs in an over, against the bowling of a boy called Philpott, A. J. His ambition, unuttered, was to go in Number 3 for Somerset. He supported Somerset because it was next door to Dorset and because it had once looked as though Somerset might win the county championship. That hadn’t happened, but he’d remained loyal to the county and believed he always would be. He also believed, but did not often say, that Somerset’s captain, Close, was the most ingenious cricketer in England. Cricket interested him more than anything else.

In the empty dining-car they sat down at a table for two. They were still in their school uniforms – Stephen’s grey with touches of maroon, Kate’s brown and green – for the marriage had been arranged to coincide with the end of the Easter term. That morning Stephen had travelled down from Ravenswood Court in Shropshire and Kate from St Cecilia’s School for Girls in Sussex, two days before she should have.

Of the two, Kate was the less matter-of-fact. Her mind had a way of wandering, of filling sometimes with day-dreams. At St Cecilia’s she had been designated both idle and slap-dash. Romantic she had not been called, although that, more essentially, was what she was. Kate’s imagination can be fired, a sloping hand had once pronounced on an end-of-term report. At the moment she knew by heart ‘The Lord of Burleigh’, having recently been obliged to learn it as a punishment for firing imaginations herself: with the seven other inmates of the Madame Curie dormitory, she had been caught at midnight by Miss Rist performing rituals culled from a television documentary about the tribes of the Amazon. Her face was plump, with brown hair curving round it and eyes that were daubs in it, like blue sunflowers.

‘Home for the hols?’ a stout waiter waggishly enquired in the dining-car. ‘Tea for two, madam?’

‘Yes, please.’ Kate felt her face becoming warm, the result of being addressed so jauntily without warning.

‘I’ve seen him before,’ Stephen said when the man had gone. ‘He’s all right actually.’ He wasn’t a tall boy; he had a delicate look, although physically he wasn’t delicate in the least. His eyes were a dark shade of brown and remained serious when he smiled. His smooth black hair was an inheritance from his mother, who had died two years ago.

Kate nodded uneasily when he said the waiter was all right. She felt embarrassed because her face had gone red like that. Several times at the party that had taken place after the ceremony in the register office it had gone red, especially when people had jocularly enquired if she approved of the marriage. The party, in a lounge of a hotel, had been almost unbearably boring. She felt it had been unnecessary as well: after the ceremony there should immediately have been the journey back to Dynmouth, to the house and the dogs and Mr and Mrs Blakey. Ever since half-term, when she’d first heard about the marriage arrangements, she’d been greedily looking forward to being alone with Stephen in Sea House with only Mr and Mrs Blakey to look after them. In the Madame Curie dormitory it had seemed like a form of bliss, and it still did. No other friendship was as special for Kate as the friendship she felt for Stephen. She believed, privately, that she loved Stephen in the same way as people in films loved one another. When they walked along the seashore at Dynmouth she always wanted to take his hand, but she had never done so. She often imagined he was ill and that she was looking after him. She’d once dreamed that he had lost the use of his legs and was in a wheel-chair, but in her dream she loved him more than ever because of that. In her dreams they agreed that they would marry one another.

For Stephen the friendship was special too, though in a different way. Since the death of his mother it was with Kate more than anyone that his natural reticence most easily evaporated. At school he had never found it easy to initiate friendships and often did not want to. He was in the fringes of things, or even in the shadows, not unpopular with other boys and not aloof, but affected by a shyness that hadn’t existed in his relationship with his mother and didn’t with Kate. He found it easy to drift in and out of conversations with Kate, as it had been with his mother. It wasn’t necessary to make an effort, or to be on guard.

Other people sat down in the dining-car, a sprinkling at the empty tables. The stout waiter carried round a tray of metal tea-pots. The children talked about the terms they’d spent at Ravenswood Court and St Cecilia’s, and about the people at these two similar boarding-schools. The headmaster of Ravenswood Court, C. R. Deccles, was known as the Craw, and his wife as Mrs Craw; Miss Scuse was the headmistress of St Cecilia’s. At Ravenswood Court there was a master called Quiet-Now Simpson, who couldn’t keep order, and a master called Dymoke – Geography and Divinity – who was known as Dirty Dymoke because he’d once confessed that he had never in his life washed his hair. Quiet-Now Simpson had kipper feet.

At St Cecilia’s little Miss Malabedeely taught History and was fifty-four, bullied by Miss Shaw and Miss Rist. Miss Shaw was moustached and had a hanging jaw, all teeth and gums; Miss Rist was forever knitting brown cardigans. They were jealous because Miss Malabedeely had once been engaged to an African bishop. They often spoke of Africa in a disparaging manner, and when they were speaking of something else they had a way of abruptly ceasing when Miss Malabedeely entered a room. ‘We’ll go on with that later,’ Miss Rist would say, sighing while she looked at Miss Malabedeely. There were other teachers at St Cecilia’s, and other masters at Ravenswood, but they weren’t so interesting to talk about.

In the dining-car Kate imagined, as she often had before, Quiet-Now Simpson’s kipper feet and Dirty Dymoke. And Stephen quite vividly saw the fortitude on the face of little damson-cheeked Miss Malabedeely let down by an African bishop, and Miss Shaw’s landscape of teeth and gum and Miss Rist forever knitting cardigans. He imagined the bullying of Miss Malabedeely, the two women breaking off their conversation whenever she entered a room. That term, he said, a boy called Absom had discovered Quiet-Now Simpson and Mrs Craw alone in a summer-house, sitting close to one another.

‘You pour the tea,’ he said.

They went on talking about the schools and then they talked about the party that morning in the lounge of the hotel, at which there’d been champagne and chicken in aspic and cream cheese in bits of celery stalks and smoked salmon on brown bread.