The Children Of Dynmouth (12 page)

‘Yes, yes, of course, Mr Peniket.’

‘Better to be safe, sir.’

Mr Peniket was a conscientious bachelor of late middle age, devoted to St Simon and St Jude’s. He polished the pews and the brass and personally washed the tiles. He was in no way hostile to Quentin, but he often spoke of the time when old Canon Flewett had been the rector, when many more people had come to church and church life had thrived. He was aware that times had changed, yet somehow when he spoke about Quentin’s predecessor Quentin always felt that he believed that if old Canon Flewett were still in charge the change would not have been so drastic.

‘I’ll just tidy around,’ the sexton said now, and Quentin nodded, stepping into the vestry.

‘Really good that was,’ Timothy Gedge said, entering the vestry a minute or so later with his carrier-bag. ‘Really nicely done, Mr Feather.’

Quentin softly sighed. The boy had recently developed this habit of walking into the vestry without knocking, usually to announce that a funeral service had been nicely conducted.

‘I’m disrobing, Timothy. I like to be alone when I’m disrobing, you know.’

‘I’ve come in for a chat, sir. Any time you said. Isn’t it a pity about Mr Rine, sir?’

‘He was very old, you know.’

‘He wasn’t young, sir. Eighty-five years of age. I wouldn’t like to live as long as that, Mr Feather. I wouldn’t feel easy about it.’

Quentin began to disrobe since it was clear that the boy wasn’t going to leave the vestry. He removed his surplice and hung it on a peg in a cupboard. He unbuttoned his cassock. Timothy Gedge said:

‘A very nice man, Mr Rine, I often had a chat with him. God’s gain, sir.’

Quentin nodded.

‘The son’s in the fish-packing station. An under-manager. Did you know that, Mr Feather? There’s fish in the family.’

‘Timothy, I wish you wouldn’t call me by that name.’

‘Which name is that, Mr Feather?’

‘My name is Featherston.’ He smiled, not wishing to sound pernickety: after all, it wasn’t an important point. ‘There’s a “ston” at the end, actually.’

‘A ston, Mr Feather?’

He hung the cassock in the cupboard. There was a Mothers’ Union tea that afternoon, an event he had to brace himself to sustain. Nineteen women would arrive at the rectory and eat sandwiches and biscuits and cake. They’d engage in Dynmouth chatter, and he would call on God and God would remind him that the women were His creatures. Miss Poraway would say it would be a good thing if something on the lines of a Tupperware party could be arranged to raise funds, and Mrs Stead-Carter would coldly reply that you couldn’t have anything on the lines of a Tupperware party unless you had a commodity to sell. Mrs Hayes would suggest that not all the funds raised at the Easter Fête should go towards the church tower, and he’d have to point out that if salvage work didn’t start on the church tower soon there wouldn’t be a church tower to salvage.

‘What’s it mean, ston, sir?’

‘It’s just my name.’

He lifted his black mackintosh from a coat-hanger and locked the cupboard door. The boy walked behind him when he left the vestry and by his side on the aisle of the church. Mr Peniket was tidying the prayer-books in the pews. It embarrassed Quentin when Timothy Gedge came to the church and Mr Peniket was there.

‘This bloke in a restaurant, Mr Feather. “Waiter, there’s a rhinoceros in my soup –” ’

‘Timothy, we’re in church.’

‘It’s a lovely church, sir.’

‘Jokes are a little out of place, Timothy. Especially since we’ve just had a funeral.’

‘It’s really good the way you do a funeral.’

‘I have been meaning to mention that to you, Timothy. It isn’t the best of ideas to hang round funerals, you know.’

‘Eh?’

‘You seem always to be at the funerals I conduct.’ He spoke lightly, and smiled. ‘I’ve seen you in the Baptist graveyard also. It’s really not all that healthy, Timothy.’

‘Healthy, Mr Feather?’

‘Only friends of the dead person go to the funeral, Timothy. And relatives, of course.’

‘Mr Rine was a friend, Mr Feather. Really nice he was.’

Mr Peniket was listening carefully, doing something to a hassock. He was bent over the hassock in a pew, apparently plumping it. Quentin could feel him thinking that in Canon Flewett’s time schoolboys wouldn’t have come wandering into the church to discuss the recently dead.

‘What I mean about going to funerals, Timothy –’

‘You go to the funeral of a friend, sir.’

‘Old Mrs Crowley was hardly a friend.’

‘Who’s Mrs Crowley then?’

‘The woman whose funeral you attended last Saturday morning.’ He tried to speak testily but did not succeed. It annoyed him when he recalled the attendance of Timothy Gedge at Mrs Crowley’s funeral, a woman who’d been a resident in the town’s old people’s home, Wisteria Lodge, since before Timothy Gedge’s birth. It annoyed him that Mr Peniket was bent over a hassock, listening. But the annoyance came softly from him now.

‘I’d rather you didn’t come to funerals,’ he said.

‘No problem, Mr Feather. If that’s the way you want it, no problem. I wouldn’t go against your wishes, sir.’

‘Thank you, Timothy.’

At the church door Quentin turned and bowed in the direction of the altar and Timothy Gedge obligingly did the same. ‘Goodbye, Mr Peniket,’ Quentin said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Goodbye, Mr Featherston,’ the sexton replied in a reverent voice.

‘Cheers,’ Timothy Gedge said, but Mr Peniket did not reply to that.

In the porch, full of missionary notices and rotas for flower-arranging, Quentin bent to put on his bicycle-clips.

‘Funny fish, that sexton,’ Timothy Gedge said. ‘Ever notice the way he looks at you, sir? Like you were garbage gone off.’ He laughed. Quentin said he didn’t think there was anything funny about Mr Peniket. He wheeled his bicycle on the tarred path that led, between gravestones, to the lich-gate.

‘I went up to see Dass, sir. Like you said.’

‘I didn’t actually say you should, you know.’

‘About the Spot the Talent competition, Mr Feather. You said the Dasses was in charge.’

‘I know, Timothy, I know.’

‘Only the curtains in the Youth Centre got burnt, Mr Feather. Two boys burnt them in December.’

‘Burnt them?’

‘I think the boys had been drinking, sir.’

‘You mean, they just set light to them?’

‘They put paraffin on them first, sir. They were making an effort to burn the place down, sir.’

He remembered. There had been an attempt to burn the Youth Centre down, but he hadn’t known that the curtains of the stage had been at the point of ignition. It was true, though: the curtains hadn’t been there for ages. He’d wondered why a couple of times.

‘Only I need curtains for my act, Mr Feather. I need darkness in the marquee and the curtains drawn twice. I explained to Dass. I have quick changes to do.’

‘I’m sure Mr Dass can rig something up.’

‘He says he can’t do curtains, Mr Feather. No way, he says.’

‘Well, we’ll find something somewhere.’ He smiled at the boy. He pushed his bicycle across the pavement and on to the road. He had a list of shopping to do for the Mothers’ Union tea.

‘Dass says he couldn’t supply curtains on his own, sir, on account of the expense. Only I think he’s maybe in financial trouble –’

‘Oh, we couldn’t have Mr Dass spending money on curtains. I’m sure we’ll find some somewhere. Don’t worry about it.’

‘You can’t help worrying, sir.’

Astride the saddle of his bicycle, the tips of his toes touching the ground in order to retain his balance, Quentin said again that curtains would be found for the Spot the Talent competition. He nodded reassuringly at Timothy Gedge. He felt uneasy in the presence of the boy. He felt inadequate and for some reason guilty.

‘You’re out with a blonde, sir, you see the wife coming –’

‘I’m sorry, Timothy, I really must be on my way now.’

‘It’s a joke when I call you Mr Feather, sir. Like a feather in a chicken, if you get it.’

Quentin shook his head. They’d have another chat soon, he promised.

‘I don’t think that sexton likes us, sir,’ Timothy Gedge called after him. ‘I don’t think he cares for either of us.’

At half past eleven that morning a man and a woman on a motor-cycle asked the way to the Dasses’ house, Sweetlea.

‘Name’s Pratt,’ the man said when Mr Dass answered the doorbell. Beneath a street-light that was still flickering from the night before the motor-cycle was propped up by the kerb. A woman in motor-cycling clothes and a helmet was standing beside it.

The man said he’d heard about the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête. He was new to the neighbourhood, he and his wife had come to live in Paltry Combe, eighteen miles away. They’d ridden over on the bike as soon as they’d heard, on the chance that they wouldn’t be too late to fill in an entry form. He did imitations of dogs, he said.

He was a stocky man with a crash-helmet on his head and leather gloves tucked under his arm. He gestured with his head in the direction of the woman by the motor-cycle, confirming that she was his wife. He went in a lot for competitions, he said, villages, resorts, it didn’t matter to him. He asked about the prize money when he’d finished filling in the entry form, and wrote down the amounts on the back of an envelope. ‘An old pro,’ Mr Dass remarked in the sitting-room after he’d gone. ‘Makes eleven in all. Two up on last year.’ Yesterday had officially been the last day for entries, but he’d seen no reason to turn away the man’s fifty p.

The doorbell of Sweetlea rang again, and Mr Dass said if it was someone else who wanted to enter he’d again stretch a point. Imitations of dogs weren’t exactly going to set Easter Saturday alight, and everything else looked like yesterday’s buns with a vengeance. Contrary to his speculations, however, their visitor wasn’t another late entrant.

‘Cheers,’ Timothy Gedge said, and then reported that he’d spoken to the clergyman about the curtains and that the clergyman had been at his wits’ end to know where to lay his hands on some.

Mr Dass looked at the boy, determined not to let him into his house. It was intolerable, having your privacy invaded at all hours, for no reason whatsoever.

‘Is that all you came about, curtains?’

‘I thought you’d like to know, sir.’

Mr Dass, about to ejaculate angrily, did not say anything. He peered at the boy through his spectacles, thinking that he seemed to be off his head.

‘Funny the way your son doesn’t ever come back to Dynmouth any more, sir. Funny he wouldn’t want to see his mum. I remember the night he cleared off, sir.’

‘Now look here, boy –’

‘Mr Feather said definitely come over to you, Mr Dass. There isn’t a curtain to be had in the place, sir. Nor high nor low, sir, the church, the rectory –’

‘I told you,’ Mr Dass said in a level voice. ‘I told you not to come calling at this house. You’re a damned pest, if you must know. Will you kindly get it into your head that I do not intend to supply curtains for that stage? If there are no curtains on that stage, then we must manage without. Now will you please go away?’

The boy smiled at him and nodded. He’d followed his son, he said, on that particular night. He’d followed him from the Queen Victoria Hotel, interested in him because he’d been staggering. He’d followed him all the way to his house. He’d listened at the window of the dining-room and had overheard the conversation that had taken place.

‘Who is it?’ Mrs Dass called gently from the sitting-room and, quite unlike himself, her husband did not reply. For nineteen years Nevil had seemed fond of them, fonder than most sons in a way, and then in a matter of moments he’d spurted out his awful truth. She’d had a sardine salad ready in the dining-room for supper, and instead of watching Nevil enjoying it she had heard herself despised. Nevil had always found it difficult to work and had spent long periods at home doing nothing. They’d known even then that he’d perhaps been a little indulged by both of them, but on that awful evening he’d turned their indulgence into a crime, bitterly referring to the long periods he’d spent at home, eating their food and accepting pocket money. They’d ruined him. They’d wanted to keep him for ever in the house they boringly called Sweetlea. They’d made him fit for nothing, they’d made allowances for his failures when they should have told him to get on with it. It had been tedious beyond words, he said, living with all that: all his life, for as long as he could remember, he’d been bored by them. He had no love for her, he said to his mother; no love had been bought. They’d treated two daughters in a sensible manner; why couldn’t they have been sensible with him? In a matter of moments he had broken his mother’s heart.

‘It would upset her to know a stranger heard,’ the boy said, smiling as though in sympathy before he turned to go away. Any mother would be upset, he added, to know that a stranger had overheard remarks like those. ‘But we could keep the secret, Mr Dass. We would keep it from her. Only I couldn’t perform the act on a stage without curtains.’

5

They clambered down the cliff-path from Sea House and set off in a western direction along the beach to Badstoneleigh. They wore fawn corduroy jeans, sandals and jerseys, Kate’s red, Stephen’s navy-blue. Mrs Blakey had spoken of anoraks, and the children had obediently collected these from their rooms. But not wishing to have the bother of carrying them, they’d left them on a chair in the kitchen.

The sea was out. It pattered quietly in the distance, each small wave softly succeeding the next. Near its edge the dark, wet sand was a sheen on which footsteps kept their shape for only a minute or two. Closer to the shingle, the children walked on sand that was firmer.

Kate related her dream about little Miss Malabedeely being bullied again by Miss Shaw and Miss Rist and then Miss Malabedeely’s marriage to the African bishop, who’d promised to worship her with his body. He couldn’t remember if he’d dreamed, Stephen said.

They might have exchanged, again, the people of their two schools, but to Kate these people seemed for the moment irrelevant. So were the Blakeys and her mother and Stephen’s father honeymooning in Cassis. Only she and Stephen were relevant. She wanted to ask him if he liked being alone with her, as he was now, on the quiet seashore on a nice day, but naturally she did not.