The Children Of Dynmouth (23 page)

‘Say things, does he?’ Mrs Blakey asked as casually as she could, pushing a packet of wafer biscuits towards Kate.

‘He says horrible things.’

She ate a biscuit and drank more cocoa, Mrs Blakey asked what kind of things, and she said just horrible things, things about people having secrets. He looked in people’s windows, like Miss Lavant’s. He followed people about. He listened to people’s conversation. He harassed people with jokes that weren’t funny.

She would not go into the detail that Mrs Blakey urged her towards. ‘Unless you explain to us, dear,’ Mrs Blakey began. ‘Unless you could say –’

‘He’s possessed, he’s not a normal person: you can tell that when you’re with him.’ She told them about the disturbed girl at St Cecilia’s, the girl called Julie who performed feats of levitation, and about the girl who could read a page of a newspaper and remember it, and Enid who could hypnotize with a fountain-pen top. She repeated what Rosalind Swain had said about odd things happening in adolescence, about adolescents harbouring poltergeists. Devils could get into children because children were weak and didn’t know what was happening to them. In the past there’d been cases of children who were witches.

Mrs Blakey, only a little less sceptical than her husband of this line of talk, nevertheless recalled how Timothy Gedge had affected her when he’d come on to the telephone with a woman’s voice, and her bewilderment when the silence had first begun in the house. Yet it was hard to believe that the explanation for all this was that a schoolboy was in the hands of devils. Hypnosis and levitation and poltergeists were all very well, and so was remembering the page of a newspaper, but what on earth did devils mean? A hundred years ago they might have made sense, due to ignorance: like the child said, there’d been talk of witches. In Africa they were probably believed in even today, because of drum-beating and that. When she thought about them, she saw devils as small creatures with hooves and a tail, horned and two-legged and yet at the same time resembling tadpoles. It was extremely difficult to imagine an association between such creatures and a Dynmouth boy.

Yet Mrs Blakey continued to sense the unease she’d been aware of on the telephone, which she’d first of all sensed when she’d looked out of the landing window and seen the boy with the children in the garden. The boy had waved at her. In retrospect his yellow clothes had seemed, just for a moment then, an outward sign of some disorder.

‘It had nothing to do with a penknife, had it, Kate?’

‘Penknife?’

‘You said he’d lost his penknife.’

Kate shook her head. Mrs Blakey smiled encouragingly. It would help to know in what way precisely he maligned people, but the child remained as mum as a mute, one hand gripped tightly into a fist, the other holding the mug of cocoa. ‘Don’t tell Stephen,’ was all she’d say. ‘Don’t tell him I told you.’

‘Stephen went off with a carrier-bag, dear.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Has it to do with Timothy Gedge? The carrier, Kate?’

Kate shook her head again, saying she didn’t know, and Mrs Blakey was aware she wasn’t telling the truth. You always knew when a child was lying, by the light in the child’s eyes, as she’d discovered twenty-seven years ago with her own Winnie.

Kate finished her cocoa, listening to Mr Blakey breathing while he drank his tea beside her. She wasn’t sorry she’d told them what she had. ‘I missed seeing you,’ Timothy Gedge’s voice said again, as it had on the beach. It had echoed after she’d left him, as she’d turned into the archway in the wall and passed through the shrubbery of azaleas and magnolias and tree mallows, as she’d passed through the drawing-room and the hall. ‘I missed seeing you,’ it had kept saying, just like it was saying now.

‘Mr Blakey’ll speak to him,’ Mrs Blakey said. ‘Mr Blakey’ll read the riot act if ever he shows his face again.’

Kate nodded, but didn’t feel reassured. What good were riot acts being read? What could you say to a person who was possessed since being possessed was a mystery? You couldn’t know anything about a person who was possessed. All there was was the voice, going on like a weapon, confusing and tormenting.

There was a secret, Mrs Blakey said, they were keeping a secret. ‘Won’t you tell us, dear?’ she pleaded, but Kate said it wasn’t her secret to tell.

That night in bed, not able to sleep, she remembered she’d once knocked on Miss Malabedeely’s door and when Miss Malabedeely hadn’t answered she’d just gone in. Miss Malabedeely had been kneeling by a chair, praying, and Kate had thought immediately that she’d been asking God to stop Miss Shaw and Miss Rist being so unpleasant to her. Miss Malabedeely had looked embarrassed, discovered on her knees like that, but it hadn’t mattered because of her niceness.

Kate remembered all that, and then she said to herself that she had been meant to remember it. She began to pray to God herself, seeing God quite clearly, as she always did when she said prayers, a robed, long-haired, bearded figure, partly obscured by clouds. She hadn’t thought of praying before. For all the week that Timothy Gedge had been tormenting them it hadn’t once occurred to her, which surprised her as she prayed now. She began to go through the whole thing in her prayer and then realized that God of course would know anyway, so she simply asked if it could be that Timothy Gedge was possessed by devils. The bearded face went on staring at her, the eyes not blinking, the lips not moving. But Kate knew she was being told she was right, that Timothy Gedge was possessed by devils and that before anything else could happen the devils must be taken out of him. Everything would be different if the devils were taken out of Timothy Gedge because God could do anything. He could perform miracles. He could turn what had happened into a dream. She could wake up and find that it was still the night of their parents’ wedding, that only that afternoon she and Stephen had been on the train. She could lie there thinking about a most unpleasant nightmare, thanking God that it wasn’t true.

She closed her eyes and communicated again with the figure. She promised that the devils would be cast out of Timothy Gedge, as it said in the Bible. When she concentrated, urging a reply, she was certain she was told that in return for her promise the facts of the last week would be altered, that yes, of course, a miracle was possible.

*

He smiled when Stephen came to him. He nodded and smiled, not reaching for the carrier-bag, waiting for Stephen to hold it out to him. He was sucking a gum. His sharp-boned face was lit with pleasure.

‘I’ll never forget it,’ he said, ‘the sound of your mum going over that cliff, Stephen.’

11

It being Good Friday, the shops in Dynmouth were mostly closed. Fore Street and East Street were quiet, Pretty Street and Lace Street deserted. No one was about in the suburban roads and avenues.

In Sir Walter Raleigh Park, however, the activities of Ring’s Amusements were reaching a crescendo: tomorrow afternoon, at one forty-five, the booths and stalls and whirligigs would welcome the public. The shouting of the dark-faced men was louder, the bustle more urgent, the dismantled machinery for the most part back in place again. A dozen or so extra men had made their appearance in Sir Walter Raleigh Park, with wives and children who now assisted with the preparations. Lines of washing hung between the caravans, transistor radios played loudly. There was a smell of frying.

The Queen Victoria Hotel and the Marine, the Duke’s Head and the Swan were livelier with visitors than they had been. The Queen Victoria was full for the Easter weekend, the others nearly so. Some of these visitors strolled along the promenade; a few penetrated to the beach; none ventured on to the cliffs. Children eyed the closed Essoldo; a handful of golfers moved briskly on the golf-course. Quentin Featherston cut the grass of the rectory lawns again. It hadn’t grown much since he’d cut it a week ago, but he wanted the lawns to have a shaved appearance for the Easter Fête.

As he operated the Suffolk Punch, his thoughts wandered idly, in and out about his parish, through the poverty in Boughs Lane, among the inadequate children of Mrs Slewy. He’d woken up at a quarter past four that morning to find Lavinia awake beside him, as often she was now in the middle of the night. She said she was sorry she’d been so cross about Timothy Gedge. She worried about the twins, she said. The twins had wandered out of the rectory garden and had been missing for twenty minutes. They’d played with matches in their room, lighting a fire in the garden of their dolls’ house. All children, he’d begun to say, but she’d cut him short. Another thing, she didn’t feel she was good any more at running the nursery school. Indignantly, he’d told her what nonsense that was. Her nursery school had a waiting list a mile long. Everyone said it was better than the Ring-o-Roses, where there was no discipline of any kind whatsoever. And the playgroup that the W R V S ran was stodgy. In the end, to his own surprise, he had quite successfully smoothed away her early-morning blues, and she’d returned to sleep without having mentioned once the child she’d lost.

As he walked behind the lawnmower he didn’t care for, he remembered the first time he’d ever seen her. He’d met her on the beach walking with a dog, a wire-haired terrier called Dolly which had come sniffing up to him. He’d told her he’d come to Dynmouth to help old Canon Flewett. He’d loved her immediately, without any hesitation.

He loved her still, with just the same passion. ‘You’re to be good with Mummy,’ he’d commanded the twins after breakfast. ‘Do you understand now?’ He’d regarded them unsmilingly, as ferociously as he could. If there was trouble of any kind whatsoever that day, either the lighting of fires or leaving the rectory garden for a single instant, they would not be permitted to attend the Easter Fête. They would be put in two separate rooms, with the curtains drawn. Humbly they had promised to be good.

He emptied the grass-box, depositing the cuttings in a corner. He said to himself that there was nothing wrong with cutting grass on Good Friday. There’d been services in St Simon and St Jude’s every day this week. There’d been Holy Communion at eight this morning, and afternoon prayers. Later there’d be evensong. Yet a few of his older parishioners, passing by the rectory wall and hearing the engine of the Suffolk Punch, might consider it odd that grass should be cut by a clergyman on the day of the Crucifixion. Mr Peniket would certainly consider it odd and would again recall the days of old Canon Flewett. Nothing would ever be said, but the activity would be seen as part of a clerical decline. It would sadden Mr Peniket and the older parishioners, and it saddened Quentin to think it would, but he saw no point in sitting in a chair and meditating all day.

His name was called, and he turned his head and saw Lavinia waving at him from the porch. Beside her stood a child, not either of the twins. He turned the engine of the lawnmower off and waved back. He began to walk towards them.

The child was a girl, wearing corduroy jeans and a red jersey. Lavinia was wearing a tartan skirt and a green blouse and cardigan. He apologized when he was close enough, because he guessed he hadn’t been able to hear Lavinia calling to him above the noise of the Suffolk Punch. The child had brown hair, curving about a round face, and eyes that were round also.

‘Kate wants to speak to you,’ Lavinia said.

She must have once been a child of the nursery school. He looked more closely at her, remembering her: she was the child from Sea House, her parents were divorced. She didn’t come to church, or to Sunday school. Faintly, he remembered Lavinia once saying that the little girl from Sea House was going to come to the nursery school next term. Before the twins were born it would have been, seven or eight years ago, the nursery school’s earliest days.

‘Well, Kate?’ he said in his study, a small room with a cross over the mantelpiece. He was alone with the child because Lavinia didn’t ever remain when a visitor came to see him. ‘It’s that boy, Timothy Gedge,’ Lavinia had said, and then had called out to the twins, who were clamouring for her upstairs somewhere. ‘I’m here in the hall,’ she’d shouted as Quentin closed the study door.

It was a rigmarole, a muddled torrent of words, not easy to follow and yet startling. Timothy Gedge had looked through the window of Miss Lavant’s bedsitting-room and had seen her pretending to give Dr Greenslade a meal. Timothy Gedge had met Mr Plant half undressed in the middle of the night. Timothy Gedge had become drunk in the Abigails’ bungalow. He’d been annoying the Dasses. He’d said to Mrs Abigail that her husband went homoing about the place. The act he’d devised for the Easter Fête was a black mass. Timothy Gedge was possessed.

‘Possessed?’ He was sitting behind his desk. Beside him there was a calendar with a square red frame around yesterday’s date. He moved the red frame and felt its magnetic base gripping the surface again. ‘Possessed?’ he repeated, as calmly as he could.

She didn’t answer. She was facing him across his desk, sitting on the dining-room chair that was specially placed for visitors with troubles. She said that the act Timothy Gedge had devised had to do with the Brides in the Bath. He planned to dress up as each bride in turn and also as their murderer. It was all only an excuse. It was because he liked the idea of death, because he wanted to talk about it. The place for the people of Dynmouth, he’d said, was in their coffins.

The child had begun to cry. He went to her and bent over her, giving her a handkerchief. He put an arm around her shoulders and kept it there for a moment. Then he returned to his desk and sat behind it. He thought of the funerals Timothy Gedge hung around. ‘Really good,’ he’d said again, in the vestry, after Miss Trimm’s. The child said he claimed to have witnessed a murder, and had been affected by it. Stephen’s mother hadn’t fallen from the cliff-path in a gust of wind: she had been pushed by Stephen’s father.

‘I love Stephen,’ she said, and then she repeated it, her tears returning. ‘I can’t bear it, seeing Stephen so frightened.’

He knew who Stephen was. He remembered him at the funeral of his mother. He remembered speaking to him, saying he’d been brave. The parents of these children were now married. The man was an ornithologist.