The Children Of Dynmouth (27 page)

Authors: William Trevor

BOOK: The Children Of Dynmouth

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He would come regularly to the rectory now, Lavinia thought. Not to play with the twins, not for solace or scraps or to complain about the social security man, but simply to be a nuisance since being a nuisance was his way: to say again that he was the child of Miss Lavant. He would take the place of the rectory visitor who had died, mad Miss Trimm, and the place of the child which had not been born. After her long wakefulness in the night there was no escaping that thought, there was no escaping the suggestion of a pattern: the son who had not been born to her was nevertheless there for her. Believing still that the catastrophe had been caused by other people and the actions of other people, believing it as firmly as Kate believed that it had been caused by devils and Quentin that it was part of God’s mystery, Lavinia saw a spark in the gloom. It was she, it seemed, not Quentin, who might somehow blow hope into hopelessness. It was she who one day, in the rectory or the garden, might penetrate the shell that out of necessity had grown. As she changed the water in her washing-up bowl, the feeling of a pattern more securely possessed her, the feeling of events happening and being linked, the feeling that her wakeful nights and her edginess over her lost child had not been without an outcome. Compassion came less easily to her than it did to her husband. She could in no way be glad that Timothy Gedge would come regularly to the rectory: that prospect was grim. Yet she felt, unable to help herself, a certain irrational joyfulness, as though an end and a beginning had been reached at the same time. You could not live without hope, some part of her woman’s intuition told her: while a future was left you must not.

Coming into the kitchen, Quentin saw these thoughts reflected in his wife’s face and said to himself that no matter what else had recently happened in Dynmouth, Lavinia had at least recovered from her discontent. His faith, to a degree, had dissipated his own, imbuing with a little fresh strength his run-down role. It was a greater task to be as he was in his given circumstances than among God-fearing people: in that fact itself there was an urge towards determination, and a hint of comfort. From across the kitchen Lavinia smiled at him as though to reassure him, as though stating again that he did not seem laughable. He slightly shook his head, hoping to imply that it wasn’t important how he seemed.

‘More butter, have we, Mrs Featherston?’ Mrs Blackham enquired, and Lavinia said there were half-pounds in the door of the fridge.

On the loudspeakers of Ring’s Amusements Petula Clark sang her song again. Everything was waiting for you, she pointed out, and everything was going to be all right.

‘Dynmouth’s livening up,’ Timothy Gedge remarked, falling into step with an old-age pensioner on the way down Once Hill, smiling and laughing. Things always livened up, he went on, when Ring’s opened; things got set for the season. The Whitsun visitors would follow the Easter ones; in no time at all the hotels would be jammed to the doors. He told the old-age pensioner two jokes. He revealed that he’d been intending to do an act at the Easter Fête but had abandoned it because he’d decided it was a load of rubbish. He asked the old man if he’d ever worked in the sandpaper factory and added that he’d probably be going to work there himself when he’d finished at the Comprehensive. He wasn’t sure, he said, you never could tell. He asked the old man if he knew Miss Lavant, if he’d seen her at the fête, in clothes with buttercups on them.

His companion, who’d attempted to interrupt before, successfully did so now: it was no use trying to have a conversation with him because his deaf-aid had fallen to pieces.

Timothy Gedge nodded sympathetically. It was a beautiful story, he said, the story of Miss Lavant and Dr Greenslade. It was beautiful, two people loving one another all these years and Dr Greenslade being too much of a gentleman to leave his wife and family, and Miss Lavant giving birth to a baby and the baby being handed to a Dynmouth woman. It was beautiful how they’d laid it down that the baby should be brought up in Dynmouth so that they could always see it about the place. Miss Lavant looked great in all the different clothes she had, her scarlet outfit and her green and her blue, the beautiful buttercup thing she was wearing today. Fifteen years ago they’d decided to be circumspect, they’d brought their love affair to an end because the baby had been born. He was an elegant man, Dr Greenslade, a handsome man in his grey suit and his smooth grey hair, not at all run to fat, like Cary Grant almost. If you closed your eyes you could imagine them together on the promenade, arm-in-arm like they should be, the doctor with a silver-knobbed stick, loving one another in a public place.

He raised his voice even though the old man continued to indicate that he could not hear him. It would always be a secret: even if the doctor’s wife died and the doctor married Miss Lavant it would still be a secret about the child that had been born, because they’d never want it to be known out of respect for the dead. It would be a secret carefully kept, never mentioned by the people it concerned. It would just be there, like a touch of fog. He had said to the clergyman that opportunity wouldn’t knock, but you never knew and you definitely had to keep your spirits up or you’d go to the wall. One minute you discovered you could do a falsetto, the next that there was a reason why a woman had given you a sweet. Everything was waiting for you; for a start you could get money left to you in a will. He smiled at the old-age pensioner and wagged his head. ‘Really good,’ he said, referring to the voice of Petula Clark.

The old-age pensioner could not hear it, but for everyone else it continued to throb with the promise of its message, drifting over Dynmouth on the breeze that blew gently from the sea.

‘How can you lose?’ sang Petula Clark. ‘Things will be great.’

Table of Contents

The Children of Dynmouth