The Children Of Dynmouth (11 page)

Mr Blakey, awake above the garage, listened to the crash of breakers. Sudden gusts fiercely rattled the windows, driving the rain in sheets against the panes. Beside him, his wife was content in her unconsciousness.

Mr Blakey slipped out of bed. Without turning a light on he drew a brown woollen dressing-gown around him and left the room. Still in darkness, he passed through a small sitting-room and down a flight of stairs to a passage that led to the kitchen. He brewed tea and sat at the table to drink it.

In the outhouse where they slept the dogs barked, a distant sound that Mr Blakey paid no attention to, guessing it to be caused by the storm. He left the kitchen and passed along the green-linoleumed passage, into the hall. A window might be open, a door might be banging in the wind on a night like this. There was no harm in looking about.

He switched a light on in the hall, illuminating the theatrical figures on the red hessian walls. He listened for a moment. No sound came from the house, but the dogs still faintly barked and the sea was louder than it had been in his bedroom. Drawn by the sound of rain on the French windows, he moved into the drawing-room. Enough light to see by filtered in from the hall, though not enough to draw colour from the gloom. Wallpaper and curtains were greyly nondescript, pictures and furniture were shadows.

The sea was noisier in this room than anywhere else in the house, yet through the wide French windows there was nothing to be seen of the storm. He strained his eyes, peering into the dark for the familiar shapes of trees and shrubs, wondering what damage was being wrought. But when a shaft of moonlight unexpectedly flashed it wasn’t damage to his garden that startled his attention. A figure moved beneath the monkey-puzzle. A child’s face smiled at the house.

4

The storm died out in the night. At breakfast Mrs Blakey asked the children what they were going to do that day and Kate said that if Mrs Blakey would agree to have lunch early they’d like to walk the eight miles to Badstoneleigh. The attraction was
Dr No
and
Diamonds Are Forever
at the Pavilion. Mrs Blakey, while quite agreeable to providing an early lunch, pointed out that this double bill was due at the Essoldo the following week, but Kate said they’d rather not wait.

It was quite nice, Stephen thought, having breakfast without any fuss in the big lofty-ceilinged kitchen, with Mr Blakey not saying anything while he ate his sausages and bacon and an egg. He thought it might be quite nice to be like Mr Blakey, slow and silent and looking after a garden. It would be nice to have played cricket for a county first, so that you could think about it when you were growing dahlias and lettuces, fifty-seven not out against Hampshire, ninety against Lancashire, four for forty-one in a one-day Gillette Cup final versus Kent. Mr Blakey was happy, the way often people weren’t: you could tell by the way he sat there at the table. ‘You must try and be happy again,’ his father had said to him. ‘She’d want us both to be.’

It was a long time ago now; there wasn’t really a reason not to be happy. He knew there wasn’t. He knew it was easy to feel resentful just because his father had married again. But unhappy people were a bore and a nuisance, like Spencer Major who cried whenever there was fish, who was afraid of Sergeant Mcintosh, the boxing instructor.

In the garden after breakfast they played with the setters, throwing a red ball and a blue ball on the damp grass of the lawns. There was no way of telling if you’d ever be good enough to bat for a county. You just had to wait and see, pretending a bit in the meanwhile.

‘Nice morning, Mr Plant,’ Timothy Gedge said on the promenade, where the publican was taking his ritual morning outing with his dog, Tike. Mr Plant was a large, red-fleshed man, the dog a smooth-haired fox-terrier, hampered by the absence of a back leg.

‘Hullo,’ Mr Plant said. His spirits, which had been high, sank. Because of his relationship with the boy’s mother, Timothy Gedge embarrassed him.

‘Nice after the storm, sir.’ He was carrying an empty carrier-bag with a Union Jack on it. He’d woken up at a quarter to eight with his mouth as dry as paper. He’d lain in bed, waiting for Rose-Ann and his mother to leave the flat, waiting for the two flushes of the lavatory and his mother’s hurrying feet and her voice telling Rose-Ann to hurry up also, and the smell of their after-breakfast cigarettes that always penetrated to his bedroom, and the abrupt turning-off of the kitchen radio, and the bang of the door. He’d got up and taken four aspirins from his mother’s supply and drunk nearly two pints of water. He’d gone back to bed and lain there, going over the events of the night before, trying to remember. When eventually he’d got up he’d had to iron his jeans and his zipped jacket because they’d become creased when they were damp. He was feeling a bit better now, but if he received an invitation to step down to the Artilleryman’s Friend so that he might restore himself further with a glass of beer he would accept it eagerly. No such invitation was forthcoming.

‘Only I thought the storm might last a few days, Mr Plant.’

Mr Plant nodded, not interested in what this boy might have thought about the weather. He whistled at his dog, who was sniffing at the boots of two old men on a seat. The dog limped hurriedly back to him, its head slung low in anticipation of punishment.

‘Lovely dog, that,’ Timothy said. He had dropped into step with Mr Plant, to Mr Plant’s discomfiture. ‘Like a gum, sir?’ He offered the tube he’d bought yesterday. Mr Plant shook his head. ‘Tike like one, would he, sir?’

‘Leave the dog be, son.’

Timothy nodded agreeably. He placed a blackcurrant-flavoured gum in his mouth and returned the tube to his pocket. He wanted to laugh because he’d suddenly remembered, rather faintly, that in his confusion last night he’d kept insisting that Miss Lavant was Mrs Abigail’s sister. He lifted a hand to his lips and kept it there for a moment, holding the laughter back. Mr Plant surveyed the sea, his eyes vacant and a little bloodshot, as they always were. Timothy said:

‘You’re out with a blonde, Mr Plant, you see the wife coming?’

‘What?’

‘What would you do, sir?’

‘Eh?’

‘The four-minute mile, Mr Plant!’

Timothy laughed, but Mr Plant didn’t. A silence developed between them. Then Timothy said:

‘Only I was anxious to have a word with you, sir.’

Mr Plant grunted, still surveying the sea. ‘I need your assistance, Mr Plant.’

It surprised the publican to hear this. He considered it a strange statement for a boy to make, and he wondered for a moment – without knowing quite why he wondered it – if the boy was going to ask him about the facts of life. Uncomfortably, he recalled the occasion when he’d been discovered in the Cornerways flat with only a shirt on.

‘I’m going in for the Spot the Talent, Mr Plant. At the Easter Fête.’

Mr Plant frowned at the horizon and then slowly turned his head and looked down at the sharply-featured face of Timothy Gedge. Beneath the short, nearly-white hair the eyes were earnest, the mouth smiled slightly beneath the suspicion of a pale moustache. As Mr Plant watched, the lips parted in a greater smile.

‘I’d like to tell you about it, Mr Plant,’ Timothy said, and did so as they walked. He went into detail, as he had for the Abigails, although in a different manner because he hadn’t had sherry and beer. He spoke of the brides of George Joseph Smith, and George Joseph Smith himself, who had bought fish for the dead Miss Munday, and eggs for Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty. He explained about how each of the brides would be struggling against the invisible hands of George Joseph Smith and how the stage would go black and when the light went up George Joseph Smith would be standing there, with jokes, in a dog’s-tooth suit.

‘You’re bloody mad,’ Mr Plant said, staring at the boy.

‘There’s an old bath down in Swines’ yard. I asked the foreman about it. Only we’d need your van to convey it, sir.’

‘Van? Who’d need the van? What’re you on about?’

‘Your little brown van, Mr Plant. If we could erect the bath up in the marquee on the Saturday morning. We could cover it with a sheet so’s nobody’d guess. We can get hold of a wedding-dress, no problem at all.’

‘You’re a bloody nutcase, son.’

Timothy shook his head. He sucked on his fruit gum and said he wasn’t a nutcase. All he wanted to do, he explained, was to go in for the Spot the Talent competition.

Mr Plant did not reply. He turned and began to walk back towards the town. His dog had gone to sniff a lamp-post. He called him to heel.

‘Shall I do you a woman’s voice?’ Timothy Gedge suggested.

Mr Plant wondered if she’d dropped the boy when he was a baby. You heard of that kind of thing, a kid’s head striking the edge of something when the kid was a couple of months old and the kid never being normal. Then, as Mrs Abigail had, he recalled that dressing up and putting on shows was an activity that was popular with children. He’d often sat with his wife watching his own two boys and two girls enacting a playlet they’d made up by themselves, some fantasy set in a country house or a railway station. The Gedge boy seemed to be intent on something like that only with a gruesome flavour, murders taking place in a bath. Sick they called it nowadays, and sick it most certainly was. In his entire life, he estimated, he’d never heard anything like it.

‘It’s in the yard on the left, Mr Plant, behind the timber sheds. I told the foreman you’d be coming for it. Today or whenever you had a minute.’

‘You did what, son?’ His voice was quiet, with a threat in it. He was staring at Timothy Gedge again. ‘No one’s going getting baths out of Swines’ yard. Today or any other time.’

‘I’m anxious for your assistance, Mr Plant.’

‘Hop it, son. Go on now.’

‘I said some time, Mr Plant. I didn’t say today specially. The Saturday morning, Easter Saturday –’

‘You’re up the chute, son.’

For the first time Timothy noticed that there was red hair growing out of the publican’s ears and nose. The hair was coarse and wiry, like the hair on his head. Women the age of his mother couldn’t pick and choose, he supposed. Nor could the women who let Plant get on the job in the Ladies in the Artilleryman’s car-park. He’d followed him in once and had listened to the sound of clothes being removed, and whispering. On another occasion, when he was watching
A Man Called Ironside,
he’d heard whispering and knew that his mother had taken Plant into her bedroom. He’d left the television on and gone to listen at the bedroom door. He’d looked through the key-hole and seen his mother without a stitch left on her, taking off the man’s socks. He reminded him now of this occasion, and of the occasion in the middle of the night.

‘You bloody young pup!’ Mr Plant exclaimed hotly.

‘All I mean is, we’ll keep the secret, Mr Plant. We have the secret between us, sir. I wouldn’t open my mouth to Mrs Plant.’

‘You bet your bloody life you wouldn’t. If you opened your bloody mouth you’d get a hiding that would cripple you.’

‘I’m saying I wouldn’t, Mr Plant. I’d never do a thing like that, sir. So if we could fix it for the Saturday a.m. and if you could get the bath in your little van, and don’t tell a soul so’s it’s a surprise. I’ve got the whole thing planned, Mr Plant –’

‘Well, get it unplanned if you don’t want to end up in a borstal.’

They had ceased to walk. Timothy listened, still sucking his fruit gum, while Mr Plant told him that he’d never heard anything as stupid or as pathetic in his life. No one was going to watch the kind of stuff that had been described to him, in a marquee or anywhere else. He spoke of a borstal again, he denied that he was an immoral man. He denied emphatically that the scene during
A Man Called Ironside
had ever taken place; or if it had, it had been some other man in the bedroom. On the night Timothy had seen him in a shirt he had come round to the Cornerways flat because Timothy’s mother had wanted his advice about a notice she’d had from the council regarding rent. He’d caught his trousers on a nail and had had to remove them in order that she could repair them. There was nothing wrong in that beyond what a dirty mind would make of it. ‘You want to be careful of that, son. Keep a clean nose on your face.’

Timothy mentioned the Ladies in the car-park, adding that he had repeatedly observed Mr Plant emerging a few minutes after a woman. He mentioned the time he’d heard clothes being removed, and the whispering. Mr Plant said he was mistaken. Then, suddenly, he laughed. He told Timothy not to poke about in things he didn’t understand. If he’d emerged from the toilet, he said, then maybe he’d been in there fixing a ball-cock, and there was no crime in removing an article of clothing in a toilet. Still laughing, he said it could happen to anyone, a pair of trousers catching on a nail.

‘You mind your own bloody business, son,’ he said, not amused any more, ‘unless you want a fat lip.’ He lifted a large hand in the air and held it up in front of Timothy Gedge’s face. He told him to look at it and to remember it. It would thump him to a pulp. It would thump the living daylights out of him if he ever again dared to open his mouth as he had just now, to anyone.

‘You don’t get the picture, Mr Plant –’

‘I bloody do, mate. You’ll be left for dead, son, and when they get you to your feet you’ll do five and a half years in a borstal. All right then?’

Mr Plant walked away with his dog hobbling beside him. Timothy did not follow him. He stood on the promenade, watching the publican and his three-legged pet, bewildered by the man.

‘Ashes to ashes,’ intoned Quentin Featherston in the churchyard of St Simon and St Jude’s. A small piece of clay, dislodged from the side of the grave, clattered on the brash new wood of a coffin containing the remains of an aged fisherman called Joseph Rine. Attired in black, the elderly wife of the fisherman wept. A sister, bent with rheumatics, wept also. The old man’s son considered that his father had had a good innings.

Quentin shook hands with them at the end of the service and walked to the church with the sexton. Quietly, Mr Peniket remarked that the Rines were a good family, even if they didn’t go to church much. He’d had to order more coke, he added, although he’d hoped not to have to do so until the autumn. He hoped that was all right.