The Children Of Dynmouth (3 page)

‘Hi, Mr Feather,’ he said.

‘Hullo, Timothy.’

‘Nice day, Mr Feather.’

‘Well, I don’t know about nice –’

‘I was meaning for ducks, sir.’ He laughed. His clothes were wet. His short pale hair was plastered around his head.

‘Did you want to speak to me, Timothy?’ He wished the boy would address him by his correct name. He had asked him to, but the boy had pretended not to understand: it was all meant to be a joke.

‘I was wondering about the Easter Fête, Mr Feather. Did you know Ring’s will be opening up the same afternoon?’

‘Ring’s always begin on Easter Saturday.’

‘That’s what I’m saying to you, Mr Feather. Won’t Ring’s take the crowds?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. They haven’t in the past.’

‘I’d say you were wrong, Mr Feather.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to see. Thank you for thinking of it, Timothy.’

‘I was wondering about the Spot the Talent comp, Mr Feather.’

‘We’re having the Spot the Talent competition at two-thirty. Mr and Mrs Dass will be in charge again.’

More than a month ago the boy had appeared at the rectory one evening, quite late it had been, after nine o’clock, and had asked if there was going to be a Spot the Talent competition at this year’s Easter Fête because he wanted to do a comedy act. Quentin had told him he imagined there would be, with Mr and Mrs Dass in charge as usual. He’d later heard from the Dasses that Timothy Gedge had been to see them and that they’d written his name down, the first entry.

He was a strange boy, always at a loose end. His mother was a good-looking woman with brassy hair who sold women’s clothes in a shop called Cha-Cha Fashions, his sister was six or seven years older than Timothy, good-looking also, employed as a petrol-pump attendant on the forecourt of the Smiling Service Filling Station: Quentin knew them both by sight. In adolescence, unfortunately, the boy was increasingly becoming a nuisance to people, endlessly friendly and smiling, keen for conversation. He was what Lavinia called a latch-key child, returning to the empty flat in Cornerways from the Comprehensive school, on his own in it all day during the school holidays. Being on his own seemed somehow to have become part of him.

‘She’s a funny woman, that Mrs Dass. He’s funny himself, with that pipe.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. I must be off, I’m afraid, Timothy.’

‘Will it be in the marquee again, sir?’

‘I should think so.’

‘D’you know the Abigails, Mr Feather? The Commander and Mrs? I do jobs for the Abigails, you know. Every Wednesday night; I’ll be round there tonight. Funny type of people.’

Quentin shook his head. He knew the Abigails, he said; they didn’t seem funny to him. His right foot was on the pedal, but he couldn’t push the bicycle forward because the boy was slightly in the way, his knee touching the spokes of the front wheel.

‘The Commander’s having his bathe now. I call that funny. In the sea in April, Mr Feather.’ He paused, smiling. ‘I see Miss Lavant’s out on her stroll.’

‘Yes, I know –’

‘Out to catch a glimpse of Dr Greenslade.’

The boy laughed and Quentin managed to get the front wheel of his bicycle past the protruding knee. Some other time they’d have a chat, he promised.

‘I think I’ll call in on Dass,’ Timothy Gedge said, ‘to see how he’s getting on.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother.’

‘I think I’d better sir.’

Quentin rode away, feeling he should have stayed longer with the boy, if only to explain why there was no need for him to go bothering the Dasses. There’d been a period when he’d come to the rectory every Saturday morning, sometimes as early as a quarter to nine. He’d had an idea, as he’d explained to Quentin, that when he grew up he’d like to be a clergyman. But when Quentin had eventually tried to persuade him to join his confirmation class, he’d said he wasn’t interested and had in fact given up the notion of a clerical career. He hung about the church now, and about the graveyard whenever there was a funeral service. It particularly worried Quentin that he was always around when there was a funeral.

Timothy watched the dark figure of the clergyman pedalling away, thinking to himself that strictly speaking the clergyman was a bit of a fool the way he let himself be taken advantage of. All sorts of tricks people got up to with the man, extraordinary it must be, being a clergyman. He shook his head over the folly of it all, and then he forgot about it and surveyed the promenade. Miss Lavant had gone, the promenade and the pier were deserted. In the far distance, a speck on the beach beneath the cliffs, Commander Abigail ran towards the sea. Timothy Gedge laughed, shaking his head over the folly of that also.

He walked along the promenade, taking his time because there was no particular hurry. He didn’t mind the rain, he quite liked it when he got wet. He walked past the small harbour and a row of boats upturned on the shingle. He wandered into the yard of the fish-packing station, to the shed where freshly caught fish was sold to anyone who wanted it.
Dabs,
it said on a slate on one side of the door.
Lemon Sole
,
Mackerel
,
Plaice.
If there’d been anyone buying fish there he’d have loitered in order to listen to the transaction, but nobody was. He went into the public lavatories in the car-park, but there was no one there either. He turned into East Street, moving towards the area where the Dasses lived.

‘Cheers,’ he said to a couple of old-age pensioners who were tottering along together, clinging to one another on a slippery pavement, but they didn’t reply. He paused beside three nuns who were examining a shop window full of garden tools while waiting for a bus. He smiled at them and pointed out a pair of secateurs, saying they looked good value. They were about to reply when the bus came. ‘It’s the friendly boy Sister Agnes mentioned,’ he heard one of them comment, and from the inside of the bus all three of them waved at him.

The Dasses lived in a semi-detached house called Sweetlea. Mr Dass had been the manager of the Dynmouth branch of Lloyd’s Bank and was now retired. He was a man with wire-rimmed spectacles, tall and very thin, given to wearing unpressed tweed suits. His wife was an invalid, with pale flesh that had a deflated look. She had once been active in Dynmouth’s now-defunct amateur dramatic society, the Dynmouth Strollers, and when Quentin Featherston had decided to hold his first Easter Fête to raise funds for the crumbling tower of St Simon and St Jude’s, Mrs Stead-Carter had put forward the idea of a talent competition and had suggested that Mrs Dass should be invited to judge it. The talent competition had become an annual event, Mrs Dass continuing to accept the onus of judgement and Mr Dass entering into the spirit of things by seeing to the erection and lighting of a stage in the tea marquee that was borrowed annually through the Stead-Carters, who had influence in the tenting world. The stage itself, modest in size, consisted of a number of timber boards set on concrete blocks. There was a wooden frame, knocked up by Mr Peniket, the sexton, which supported a landscape of Swiss Alps painted on hardboard, and the stage’s curtains. Each year the curtains were borrowed from the stage of the Youth Centre, and it was Mrs Dass, artistic in this direction also, who had been responsible for the all-purpose scenery. In his devotion to his wife and knowing more than anyone else about her invalid state, it pleased Mr Dass that the Spot the Talent competition was now an established event at the Easter Fête: it took her out of herself.

‘Only I was passing,’ Timothy Gedge said, having penetrated to the Dasses’ sitting-room. ‘I was wondering how things was going, sir.’

Mrs Dass was reclining on a sun-chair in the bow-window, reading a book by Dennis Wheatley,
To the Devil, a Daughter.
Her husband was standing by the door without his jacket, regretting that he’d admitted the boy. He’d been asleep on his bed when the bell had been rung, and the ringing hadn’t immediately wakened him. It had first of all occurred in a dream he was having about his early childhood, and had then been repeated quite a number of times before he could get downstairs. It had sounded important.

‘Things?’ he said.

‘The Spot the Talent comp, sir.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Only I was speaking to Mr Feather and he said I’d best look in at Sweetlea.’

In her sun-chair in the bow-window Mrs Dass put down
To the Devil, a Daughter.
For a moment she watched the sparrows in the small back garden and then she closed her eyes. She’d smiled a little when her husband had brought Timothy Gedge into the room, but she hadn’t spoken.

‘Everything’s A1,’ Mr Dass said. He hadn’t thought about the stage or the lighting yet. The stage would be where Mr Peniket and he had left it last year, in the cellar beneath the church where the coke was kept. The lights were in three cardboard boxes, under his bed.

‘We’ve had quite a few entries,’ he reported. Stout Mrs Muller, the Austrian woman who ran the Gardenia Café, went in for the competition every year, singing Austrian songs in her national costume accompanied by her husband on an accordion, in national costume also. A group called the Dynmouth Night-Lifers strummed electric guitars and sang. The manager of the tile-works played tunes on his mouth-organ. Mr Swayles, employed in a newsagent’s, did conjuring. Miss Wilkinson, who taught English in the Comprehensive school, had done Lady Macbeth and Miss Havisham and was down to do the Lady of Shalott this year. Last summer’s carnival queen, a girl employed in the fish-packing station, had never before entered the Spot the Talent competition. In her queen’s white dress, trimmed with Dynmouth lace, and wearing her crown, she was scheduled to sing ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree’.

‘Mrs Dass all right is she, sir?’ Timothy Gedge enquired, glancing across the room at her, thinking that the woman looked dead.

Mr Dass nodded. She often liked to lie with her eyes closed. He himself had moved across the room and was now standing with his back to a small coal fire. He took his pipe from a trouser pocket and pressed tobacco into it from a tin. He wished the boy would go away.

‘Only there’s not long till the Easter Fête, sir.’

To Mr Dass’s horror, the boy sat down. He unzipped his damp yellow jacket, settling himself on the sofa.

‘I was saying to Mr Feather, Ring’s is getting ready again. They’ll be opening up Easter Saturday.’

‘Yes, they will.’

‘Same day as the Easter Fête, Mr Dass.’

‘Yes.’

‘Only I was saying to Mr Feather they’ll take the crowds.’ Mr Dass shook his head. The crowds went from one attraction to the other, he explained. The opening of Ring’s Amusements on Easter Saturday brought people from outside Dynmouth: the Easter Fête actually benefited from the coincidence.

‘I wouldn’t agree, sir,’ Timothy said.

Mr Dass didn’t reply.

‘It’s bad weather, sir.’

Mr Dass said it was, and then asked if he could be of help in any way.

‘What’s he want?’ Mrs Dass suddenly demanded, opening her eyes.

‘Afternoon, Mrs Dass,’ Timothy said. Funny the way they wouldn’t give you a cup of tea. Funny the man standing there in his shirtsleeves. He smiled at Mrs Dass. ‘We were on about the Spot the Talent comp,’ he said.

She smiled back at the boy. He began to talk about a sewing-machine.

‘Sewing-machine?’ she said.

‘For making curtains, Mrs Dass. Only the Youth Centre curtains got burnt in December. New curtains are required is what I’m saying.’

‘What’s he mean?’ she asked her husband.

‘The Youth Centre curtains are apparently unavailable for the Easter Fête, dear. I don’t know why he’s come to us about it.’

Mr Dass lit his pipe. He had let the boy in because the boy had said he had an urgent message. So far no message had been delivered.

‘I’m afraid my wife is not in a position to make curtains,’ he said.

‘We’ll have to buy some then, Mr Dass. You can’t have a stage without curtains on it.’

‘Oh, I imagine we’ll manage somehow.’

‘I definitely need curtains for my act, sir.’

‘Mrs Dass will not be making curtains.’ A note of asperity had entered Mr Dass’s voice. As the manager of the Dynmouth branch of Lloyd’s Bank he had regularly had occasion to call on this resolute tone when rejecting pleas for credit facilities. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he added, taking his pipe from his mouth and pressing the smouldering tobacco with a thumb, ‘we are extremely busy this afternoon.’

‘I’m worried about the curtains, sir.’

‘That’s really Mrs Featherston’s pigeon, you know.’

‘Mr Feather said you’d supply new curtains, sir.’

‘Mr Featherston? Oh, I’m sure you’re quite wrong, you know.’

‘He said you’d definitely donate them, sir.’

‘Donate curtains? Now, look here –’

‘I think it’s a kind of joke,’ Mrs Dass said. She smiled weakly at Timothy Gedge. ‘We’re not good on jokes, I’m afraid.’

Mr Dass moved from the position he’d taken up by the fire. He leant over Timothy on the sofa. He spoke in a whisper, explaining that his wife liked to rest in the afternoons. It embarrassed him having to say all this to a schoolboy, but he felt he had no option. ‘I’ll see you out,’ he said.

‘All right is she?’ Timothy asked again, not that he cared: it was his opinion that Mrs Dass was a load of rubbish the way she affected herself, lying there like a dead white slug when there was nothing the matter with her.

Mr Dass opened the hall door of Sweetlea and waited while Timothy zipped up his jacket again.

‘You didn’t mind me asking about her, sir? Only she looked a bit white in the face.’

‘My wife’s not strong.’

‘She misses what’s-his-name?’

‘If you mean our son, yes, she does.’

‘He hasn’t been back in a long time, Mr Dass.’

‘No. Good-bye now.’

Timothy nodded, not leaving the house. He’d known their son well, he said. He enquired about the work he was doing now and Mr Dass was vague in his reply, having no wish to discuss his son with a stranger, especially since his son had been at the centre of a domestic tragedy. The Dasses had two daughters, both of them now married and living in London. Their son, Nevil, born when Mrs Dass was forty-two, had taken them by surprise and as a result had been indulged in childhood, a state of affairs that the Dasses now bitterly regretted. Three years ago, when Nevil was nineteen, he had quite out of the blue turned most harshly on both of them and had not been back to Dynmouth since. He’d been particularly the apple of his mother’s eye: his rejection of her had gradually brought about her invalid state. The Dynmouth doctors had pronounced her condition to be a nervous one, but it was no less real for being that, as her husband in his affection for her realized. The whole unfortunate matter was never mentioned now, not even within the family, not even when the two daughters came at Christmas with their children and husbands. Every year a place was laid for Nevil on this festive occasion, a gesture more than anything else.