The Children Of Dynmouth (21 page)

The setters ran away, sniffing the air excitedly. In the far distance they stopped, sniffing again, at a pink lump on the sand. It wasn’t her, it was Commander Abigail in his swimming-trunks. His lips were drawn back in a snarl of pain, his skinny white limbs were like a frozen chicken’s.

‘She’s over here,’ a voice shouted from the top of the cliff. He looked up. His father was pointing down at the rocks. The sea had gone out, his father shouted, but it hadn’t taken her with it because she hadn’t wanted to go. ‘She just wanted to die there,’ his father said, beginning to laugh. She had only herself to blame.

And then Mr Blakey stood among his rose-beds with his shears dripping blood, and her head lay in the soil. Her body without it walked away towards the house, staggering from side to side, blood flowing from the stump that had been her neck.

She had only herself to blame: she said that herself too, waking up in her deck-chair. She’d been silly, getting into an argument on the edge of a cliff and saying the wrong thing. But Stephen said it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter in the least if her strawberry jam didn’t set, no matter what his father said. In his dream he felt relief because she hadn’t died, because it had all been some other dream, because she was smiling in the sunshine.

Kate sat by the summer-house with the setters, hugging them and whispering to them, seeming small beside them. She brushed them with a brush that was kept in the summer-house, making them stand still, with their heads up. She wished people were like dogs, she said to them, and they looked at her knowledgeably with their big, drooping eyes. She sat between them on the steps of the summer-house, their chins on her knees, warmed by the heat of their bodies. It would be nice to breed dogs, she thought, and imagined setters running all over the garden, like the dalmatians in
The One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
She imagined living alone in Sea House, being quite old. She imagined puppies in the hall and a row of kennels at the side of the house, and people ringing the doorbell because they wanted to buy one of a litter. She would never have married because she couldn’t marry Stephen. She might even be like Miss Lavant. People would tell other people the story of the woman in Sea House who lived alone with dogs. They’d tell of a tragedy on the cliffs, a death that wasn’t what it had seemed to be. You couldn’t blame Stephen for hating Dynmouth, people would say, for going away from it and all its horrible reminders.

But later, in a different mood, she knocked again on his door. The future she’d visualized was silly, puppies and a row of kennels and being alone. It was probably acceptable enough. But it wasn’t a happy ending.

She could hear him in the room, yet he didn’t answer. Something dropped to the floor, there was a rattle of paper. He was causing these noises deliberately, so that she’d know he was there, so that she’d know he didn’t want to talk to her. His face had become cold and hard, like a face that could not smile and never had.

She knocked again, but still he didn’t answer.

Stephen wished she wasn’t always there. He wished she wasn’t forever tapping on the door of the room that was meant to be his, calling out to him when he didn’t answer. She was there every morning as soon as he left the room, on the stairs or in the hall. A sloppy look kept coming into her face. She was sorry for him.

‘Well, what are you two going to do today?’ Mrs Blakey had a way of saying, annoying Stephen because of the implication that everything they did had to be done together. She said it in the kitchen, on the Wednesday of that week, looking round from the Aga where she was frying bacon. She put the bacon on to two warmed plates and placed the plates in front of them. She asked again what they were going to do.

‘Shall we play Monopoly?’ Kate suggested, as though to please him.

‘Oh, now, wouldn’t you go outside?’ Mrs Blakey cried. ‘Go on one of your tramps, why don’t you? Make yourself sandwiches, dears.’

‘Shall we?’ Kate asked, looking at him.

He wanted to say that she should make sandwiches for herself and go on her own for what Mrs Blakey called a tramp. There was nothing stopping her. If she was stupid enough not to realize that Timothy Gedge would be waiting for her it wasn’t anyone’s business except hers. He returned her look, not saying all that. He wished he could be alone, he tried to say with his own look.

‘There’s bananas there for sandwiches, see.’ Mrs Blakey was already bustling about, taking butter from the fridge and putting it on the edge of the Aga to soften, taking a sliced loaf from the bread-bin. ‘Chicken-and-ham paste, Stephen? Liver-and-bacon? Sardine? Tomato? Apricot jam?’

He wanted to pick up something from the breakfast table and throw it on to the floor, the plate from which Mr Blakey had eaten his fry, the apricot jam, the tea-pot, the bundle of knives and forks that Kate had collected and put on top of the pile of green cereal bowls. Why did she collect the knives and forks and clear the table? She didn’t want to, nobody in their senses would want to: she did it because it was something her mother usually did. The feeling of anger increased, a choking in his throat. She’d stopped looking at him. She carried the cereal bowls and the knives and forks to the sink. She was about to wash them.

‘No, leave them, dear,’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘You make your sandwiches. And take apples. Granny Smiths in the cold room, Stephen.’

‘I don’t think Stephen wants to go out.’

‘Oh, Stephie, why ever not?’ Mrs Blakey cried.

He left the kitchen without replying. He passed through the green-linoleumed passage and into the hall. There was a smell of polish. There were daffodils in bowls. The fire hadn’t been lit yet, but soon it would be. The flames would flicker on the glass of the brass-framed pictures, enlivening the theatrical characters, making everything cosy.

He went to his bedroom and closed the door. He looked to see if there was a key in the lock, knowing there wasn’t because he’d looked before.

‘Essoldo Cinema, good morning, madam,’ a woman’s voice said.

‘Good morning,’ Mrs Blakey said into the telephone. ‘Who’s that, please?’

‘Essoldo box-office here. We’d like to speak to the kids, madam.’

‘Is that Timothy Gedge?’

‘Essoldo Cinema, madam. The kids was anxious about forthcoming attractions. Only we have a message to ring –’

‘You’ve a message to ring nowhere. D’you think I’m stupid or something? What do you want with them?’

‘Forthcoming attractions, as requested yesterday a.m. Could you get hold of the kids, please? Only there’s a queue forming.’

Mrs Blakey replaced the receiver. In the hall of Sea House she stood by the telephone, looking at it. She felt quite shaky. It had happened before, last night and yesterday morning. She hadn’t guessed then that the woman’s voice was Timothy Gedge’s. She’d gone and found the children and they’d refused to come to the telephone, which had surprised her. The calls had come from a call-box because there’d been the call-box signal before the money was put in. Yet yesterday it hadn’t occurred to her that there was anything wrong with such a sound coming from the Essoldo Cinema box-office.

As she stood in the hall, the recollection of the high-pitched voice seemed almost eerie to Mrs Blakey; so did the fact that she hadn’t bothered to think about the call-box signal. It was all absurd. It was absurd that she hadn’t guessed straightaway, and absurd that he should be standing in a telephone booth somewhere, talking about a queue forming. But the absurdity had something else woven through it, some sort of reality, sense of a kind. Because it was Timothy Gedge, with his loitering and his telephoning, who had caused the silence in the house. She’d sensed something when he’d first stood in the garden with the children; she’d sensed it when she’d opened the hall door to him.

‘That boy’d give you the creeps,’ she said, still shaky in the glass-house where her husband was working.

Mr Blakey raised his head from his seed-boxes. With soil-caked fingers he drew a handkerchief from a pocket and blew his nose. He did not say that a week ago the boy had been standing under the monkey-puzzle in the middle of the night, looking up at the windows of the house. It would have alarmed her if he had. She suffered slightly from blood pressure: there was no point in aggravating that. He said some kind of game was probably going on between the children and Timothy Gedge. ‘It’ll be nothing,’ he said. ‘Children have their ways.’

‘They’re not playing no game,’ Mrs Blakey said, her grammar lapsing as it did when she was distressed. She wanted to remain in the earthy warmth of the glass-house, watching him pricking out seedlings. She didn’t want to go back to the lies Kate told whenever she asked her what the matter was, to the telephone ringing and the queer, high-pitched voice insisting it was the box-office of the Essoldo Cinema.

‘Essoldo Cinema, good morning,’ it said again, as soon as she picked up the receiver in the hall.

Stephen walked about his room, thinking about the house he was in, about the garden and the brick wall that surrounded it, and the white iron gate in the archway, and the setters and the summer-house. He hated all of it. He hated the room he’d been given as his own, with the picture of Tony Greig that someone had taken from his room in Primrose Cottage and pinned up on the wall, and the pictures of Greg Chappell, who’d once played for Somerset, and Brian Close. He hated the kitchen and the elegantly curving staircase and the Egyptian rugs on the stone floor of the hall. He hated the big drawing-room, with its French windows. He wanted the days to pass so that he could be back at Ravenswood School, safe in the dining-hall and his classroom. He wanted to be in bed in his dormitory, in the bed between Appleby’s and Jordan’s.

‘We can’t stay in for ever, Stephen. We can’t not ever go down to the beach again, or to the spinney.’

Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra,
he read,
was completed in 1613 and is one of the most important monuments of its kind in India.

‘You go down. You do what you like.’ He spoke without taking his eyes from the print.
The Mausoleum combines Hindu and Moslem art forms in a remarkable manner,
he read, lying on his bed.

The evening before, the carrier-bag had been at the foot of the monkey-puzzle, propped up against the trunk, facing the house. It had been placed there when Mr Blakey had finished in the garden. Stephen had seen it from the window of his room, its red, white and blue vivid in the twilight.

‘If we told the Blakeys,’ Kate began to say, ‘if we just said –’

‘Are you insane or something?’ He was shouting, suddenly glaring at her. His face was flushed. He looked as though he loathed her. ‘Why d’you keep saying it?’

‘Because we can’t just stay here. Because it’s silly to stay locked up in a house just because you’re afraid of someone.’ She was angry herself. She jerked her chin up. She glared back at him.

‘I’m not afraid of him,’ he said.

‘Of course you are. He’s a horrible person –’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, stop saying he’s a horrible person!’

‘I’ll say it if I like, Stephen.’

‘Well, don’t say it here. This is my room. It’s meant to be private.’

‘There’s no need to quarrel.’

‘What’s it like for me, d’you think? Locked up in a house –’

‘You’re not locked up. There’s no need to be locked up.’

‘Locked up in a house with people I don’t even like.’

‘You do like us, Stephen.’

‘I don’t like you and I don’t like your mother. Everything was perfectly all right until your mother came along.’

‘She didn’t come along. My mother was there all the time –’

‘She came along and the trouble started. I don’t want to talk about it to you.’

‘We have to talk about it, Stephen. We can’t just leave it there, hanging there.’

‘Nothing’s hanging there. I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘You can’t just not talk to me.’

‘I can do what I bloody like. This is my room. I’m reading a book in it.’

‘You’re not reading a book. You’re lying there pretending.’

‘I am reading a book. Sikandra is five miles from Agra if you want to know. The entrance to Akbar’s tomb is of red sandstone with marble decorations.’

‘Oh, Stephen!’

‘I want to be left alone. I don’t like you. I don’t like the way you’re so bloody silly.’

She began to say something else and then changed her mind. She said eventually:

‘Don’t let it upset you.’

‘Nothing’s upsetting me.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t know what you mean and I don’t want to. We don’t have to do everything together. I’m sick of Mrs Blakey talking about Granny Smiths. I’m sick of everything.’

‘You don’t have to hate me.’

‘I’ll hate you if I want to.’

‘But you don’t and I don’t hate you –’

‘I don’t mind if you hate me.’

She looked at him lying on his bed, pretending to read. She wanted to cry and she imagined the tears flowing down her cheeks and dripping on to her jersey and how he’d probably say that she should go somewhere else to cry. She felt silly standing there. She wished she was grown-up, brisk and able to cope.

‘You do mind if I hate you,’ she said.

He went on pretending to read and then he suddenly looked up and stared at her, examining her. His face was cold, that same unsmiling face, pinched and thin, his dark eyes cruel, as if he dared not let them be anything else.

‘You’re always going red. You go red for the least little thing. You’ll be fat like Mrs Blakey.’

‘I can’t help going red –’

‘You’re ugly, even when you’re not red you’re ugly. You’re unattractive. It’s just silly to think you’re going to grow up and be pretty.’

‘I don’t think that.’

‘You said so. You said you wanted to be pretty. I don’t care if you want to be pretty. I don’t know why you tell me.’

‘I said I’d like to be. It’s not the same –’

‘Of course it’s the same. If you’d like to be it means you want to be. It’s stupid to say it doesn’t.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Why don’t you say what you mean then?’

‘I do say what I mean,’ she cried with sudden anger. ‘Why are you being so horrible to me? Why d’you keep away from me? Why can’t you even speak to me?’