The Children Of Dynmouth

by William Trevor

  As Mrs Abigail struggled through the morning, she was repeatedly reminded, as though this truth sought to mock her, that she had never wished to come to Dynmouth. In London there were the cinemas she enjoyed going to, and the theatre matinées. There were Harvey Nichols and Harrods to browse through, not that she ever bought anything. In Dynmouth the antiquated and inadequately heated Essoldo showed the same film for seven days at a time and the shops were totally uninteresting. With Miss Poraway chattering beside her, she reflected upon all this and recalled, as she had in the night, the course of her virginal marriage.

  They had been two small, quiet people; he’d been, at twenty-nine, a gentle kind of man. She hadn’t known much about life, nor had he. They’d both lived with their parents near Sutton, he already in the shipping business from which he’d retired when they came to Dynmouth, she working in her father’s estate agency, doing part-time secretarial duties and arranging the flowers in the outer office. Both sets of parents had been against the marriage, but she and Gordon had persisted, drawn closer by the opposition. They’d been married in a church she’d always gone to as a child and afterwards there was a reception in the Mansfield Hotel, near by and convenient, and then she and Gordon had gone to Cumberland. She’d been trim and neat and pretty. She’d powdered her face in the lavatory on the train, examining her reflection in the mirror, thinking she wasn’t bad-looking. Twice before she’d had proposals of marriage and had rejected them because she couldn’t feel for the men they came from.

  She hadn’t known what to expect of marriage, not precisely. They’d shared a bed in Cumberland and she had comforted Gordon because nothing was quite right. Everything took getting used to, she said, saying the same thing night after night, softly in the darkness. You had to learn things, she whispered, supposing that the activity which Gordon found difficult required practice, like tennis. It didn’t matter, she said. They went for long, pleasant walks in Cumberland. They enjoyed having breakfast together in the hotel dining-room.

  She remembered clothes she had then, on her honeymoon and afterwards: suits and dresses, many of them in shades of blue, her favourite colour, coats and scarves and shoes. They had friends, other couples, the Watsons, the Turners, the Godsons. There were dinner-parties, bridge was played, there were excursions to the theatre, and dances. Once a man she’d never met before, a man called Peter who didn’t seem to have a wife, kept dancing with her in the Godsons’ house, holding her very close, in a way that quite upset her and yet was pleasurable. A year later, when the war had started and Gordon was already in the Navy, she’d met this Peter in Bond Street and he’d invited her to have a drink, reaching for her elbow. She’d felt quite frightened and hadn’t accepted the invitation.

  After the war she and Gordon moved to another part of London. They didn’t see their pre-war friends again and didn’t replace them, it was hard to know why. Gordon seemed a little different, hardened by the war. She was different herself, looking back on it: she’d lost a certain naturalness, she didn’t feel vivacious. It was a disappointment not having children, but there were millions of couples who didn’t have children, and of course there were far worse things than that, as the war had just displayed.

  At no time had she ever felt that Gordon was perverted. At no time, not even vaguely, had such a notion occurred to her, nor did she even think that he was not as other men. Since other marriages were without children she presumed that other couples, in their millions, shared their own difficulty. And it was theirs, she considered, not simply Gordon’s. They were both at fault if fault it could be called, which she doubted: more likely, it was the way they were made. She didn’t think about it, it was not mentioned.

  But now it was everywhere, clamouring at her, shouting down the years of her virginal marriage. The bungalow they’d come to end their lives in was rich already with this new and simple truth, with a logic any child could understand. That Timothy Gedge, so awful in his drunkenness and apparently in himself, should have released it was even fitting. In his drunkenness he had seemed like something out of a cheap Sunday newspaper: her marriage was like that also, as her husband was, underhand and vicious in a small town. Only the truth had passed from Timothy Gedge, the unarguable strength of it, the power and the glory of it. She didn’t want to think about Timothy Gedge, to dwell on him or to consider him in any way whatsoever. Nothing could change the truth he had uttered, and that for the moment was enough.

  ‘Well, I do think it’s a lot, you know,’ Miss Poraway was remarking. ‘Forty dinners for just two pairs of hands.’

  Mrs Abigail, taking another couple of plates from the back of the van, was aware only that her companion was speaking; the content of her statement did not register. All during the night, over and over again, she had found it absurd that she’d ever considered herself a happy woman. And in the same repetitious way she had recalled the scene she’d interrupted the evening before by announcing that supper was ready: Gordon and the boy seated in the sitting-room before the cosy glow of the electric fire, drinking sherry.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miss Poraway!’ she cried as another rice pudding slipped from Miss Poraway’s fingers. ‘What kind of fool are you?’

  On his walk, in his brown overcoat, not carrying his towel and swimming-trunks, Commander Abigail was upset also. At breakfast nothing had been said, which perhaps wasn’t unusual, but afterwards she’d left the house without saying anything either. On a Thursday there was invariably some instruction about the lunch she’d left him, since Thursday was her day for doing her charity with the elderly. Yet not only had she not said anything but as far as he’d been able to ascertain she hadn’t left him any lunch.

  Like his wife, the Commander hadn’t slept. Lying awake in the room next to hers, the episode with the boy had kept recurring to him, the sweat running on the boy’s face and his hands protruding from the sleeves of the dog’s-tooth suit and his voice making its extraordinary statements. When they had eventually managed to get him out of the house he’d helped her to carry the remaining dishes from the dining-room, a thing he never did. He’d repeated several more times that everything the boy had said was drunken nonsense. He’d said he was sorry the incident had occurred and had asked her if she’d like him to make her some Ovaltine. As far as he could remember, she hadn’t replied to anything except to shake her head when he mentioned Ovaltine.

  As he walked on the sand, the Commander attempted to reassure himself. He had often watched the cub scouts playing rounders on the beach. The Gedge boy, who apparently spied on the entire population of Dynmouth, had no doubt seen him. But there was nothing furtive or dubious about watching a crowd of lads playing a game on the sands, any more than there was about carting food to the elderly. The boy’s unfortunately unsober condition and his inadequate ability to express himself had clearly made for confusion. Without a shred of evidence he had employed an innuendo when what he should have said was that any normal English person could not but approve of the sight of young English lads in their uniforms, and would naturally pause to observe how they played a game.

  But with all this argument, contrived for his own reassurance and for retailing to his wife, the Commander failed in the end to convince himself. The truth kept poking itself up, like a weed in a garden. You pushed it away to the back recesses of your mind, but it crept and crawled about and then annoyingly broke through the surface again. The truth was that the unfortunate boy had somehow pried his way into an area that was private, an area that naturally didn’t concern anyone else. Commander Abigail didn’t even like the area: it caused him shame and guilt to consider it, he tried not to think about it. That occasionally it ran away with him was a simple misfortune, and was always distasteful in retrospect.

  Progressing slowly, seeming older by years than he had seemed on this beach the day before, more bent and huddled, the Commander shook his head in time to the steps he took. It puzzled him beyond measure that the boy should have stumbled upon this private area. He racked
his brains, he cast his mind back. Pictures he did not wish to see passed before him in dazzling procession. Voices spoke. He saw a figure that was himself, the villain of his peepshow. His own face smiled at him and then the pictures ceased. Again, more in control of matters, he cast his mind back.

  When the boy had first come to the house he’d been more of a child and had naturally been treated as a child. Once or twice, when gesturing him into the dining-room for supper, he’d laid a hand on his shoulder. Once or twice, while the boy was squatting on the floor polishing the linoleum surround, he had playfully touched his head, as in passing one might pat the head of a dog. There was a game they’d played a few times when Edith was out of the house, a rough-and-tumble sort of thing, perfectly harmless. There was Blind Man’s Buff, and a thing called Find the Penny, in which he himself stood like a statue in the centre of the sitting-room while the boy searched him all over, rifling through his pockets for a hidden coin. A perfectly harmless little game it was, and had afforded both of them amusement. Naturally enough, they hadn’t played it since the boy had entered adolescence.

  That had been, and was, their innocent relationship. Yet the boy had insinuated so knowingly that the Commander had begun to wonder if perhaps he suffered from lapses of memory. Had their rough-and-tumbles not been as he recalled, had their Blind Man’s Buff ended differently? Or could it be that the boy had taken his spying into the Essoldo Cinema? He pushed that from his mind, and his mind filled instead with the face of a lad on a bicycle who’d once been friendly, and the face of another who didn’t mind playing Find the Penny in the hut on the golf-course. There was the red-haired cub scout who liked talking about his badges.

  He turned and walked, more slowly still, back towards Dynmouth.

  Like Dynmouth’s Essoldo, the Pavilion in Badstoneleigh was old. Swing-doors on either side of the box-office in the small foyer led to an inner foyer, carpeted and dimly lit. On brown walls there were large framed photographs of the stars of the thirties: Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, Annabella, Don Ameche, Robert Young, Joan Crawford. There were cigarette burns on the carpet, and here and there the brown of the walls had been rubbed away to reveal a pinkish surface beneath. There was a kiosk which sold confectionery.

  The auditorium itself was rather similar, brown-walled and patchy. Lights were kept low, to cover a multitude of small defects. The upholstery of the seats had once been crimson: it had faded to a faint red glow, balding, springs occasionally exposed. Pale curtains with butterflies on them had once been a blaze of colour but now were nondescript. The smell was similar to the Essoldo’s smell: of Jeyes’ Fluid and old cigarette smoke.

  In the stalls Timothy Gedge sat three rows behind the children from Sea House, with the carrier-bag by his feet. Having eaten two packets of bacon-flavoured potato crisps, he had purchased another tube of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums, which he was now enjoying while waiting for the lights to dim. Once Stephen looked round and Timothy smiled at him.

  The dim lights were dimmed some more, and advertisements for local shops and eating places began. There was a film about the construction of a bridge in Scotland, two trailers, a list of future attractions, and then Dr No. The plot, familiar to Timothy, presented no new depths on a second investigation. Attempts were made to destroy James Bond by shooting him, placing a tarantula in his bed, poisoning his vodka, and drowning him. Each attempt failed due to the mental and physical inadequacies of its perpetrator. The story ended happily, with James Bond in a boat with a girl.

  The lights went up and a picture of the confectionery kiosk appeared on the screen. An attached message announced that sweets, chocolate and nuts were available in the foyer.

  Timothy rose when Stephen and Kate did, glad that they had decided on refreshment. ‘Cheers,’ he said, standing behind them in a queue.

  They knew him by sight. He was a boy who was always on his own, often to be seen watching television programmes in the windows of electrical shops. He always wore the same light-coloured clothes, matching his light-coloured hair.

  ‘Hullo,’ Kate said.

  ‘I see you over Dynmouth way.’

  ‘We live in Dynmouth.’

  ‘You do.’ He smiled at them in turn. ‘Your mum just married his dad.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  They bought packets of nuts, and Timothy bought another tube of fruit gums. When he returned to the stalls he sat beside Kate. ‘Care for a gum?’ he said, offering them both the tube. They took one each, and he noticed that they nudged one another with their elbows, amused because he had offered them fruit gums.

  Diamonds Are Forever took the same course as its predecessor. James Bond ran a similar gamut of attempts to bring his life to a halt. He again ended with a girl, a different one this time and not in a boat.

  ‘We’d easily get the half-five bus,’ Timothy said, offering his gums again, blocking their passage and the passage of two elderly women who were endeavouring to pass into the foyer.

  ‘Come along then, please,’ an usherette, elderly also, cried. ‘Move there, sonny.’

  In a bunch the women and the three children passed through the swing-doors into the brown foyer.

  ‘We’re going back by the beach,’ Kate said.

  ‘Great.’ He blinked against the sudden glare of sunshine on the street. He could see they were surprised that he’d latched on to them, but it didn’t matter. He walked beside them on the pavement, three abreast, so that pedestrians coming towards them had to step out into the street. He swung the carrier-bag with the Union Jack on it. It was hard to know what to say to them. He said:

  ‘D’you know that Miss Lavant? She fancies the doctor, Greenslade.’

  They’d seen Miss Lavant on the promenade and about the town, always walking slowly, sometimes with a neat wicker basket. Kate had often thought she was beautiful. She hadn’t known she was in love with Dr Greenslade, who had a wife already, and three children.

  ‘She fancied the man for twenty years,’ Timothy said.

  It explained Miss Lavant. There was a nervous quality about her, which was now explained also: her nerves were on edge as she slowly perambulated. Her eyes, always a little cast down, were being well behaved, resisting the temptation to dart about in search of Dr Greenslade.

  ‘She’s in a bedsitting-room in Pretty Street,’ Timothy said. ‘To the left of the hall door.’ He laughed remembering again how he’d insisted that Miss Lavant was Mrs Abigail’s sister. ‘I looked in the window once and she was eating a boiled egg, with another boiled egg in an egg-cup across the table from her. She was chatting sixteen to the dozen, entertaining Greenslade even though he wasn’t there. Three o’clock in the afternoon, everyone out in their deck-chairs.’

  He had a funny way of talking, Kate thought. Yet he made her feel sorry for Miss Lavant, a woman she’d hardly thought about before. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the bedsitting-room in Pretty Street, on the left of the hall door, and the two boiled eggs in two egg-cups.

  Stephen felt sorry for Miss Lavant also, and resolved to examine her more closely. She never walked on the beach, and without ever thinking about it he had assumed she didn’t because she didn’t want to spoil her shoes. He thought he’d once heard someone saying that about her, but it now seemed that reason wasn’t the right one: the beach was hardly the place to catch a glimpse of Dr Greenslade, with his black bag and his stethoscope, which he sometimes wore round his neck on the street.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a beer,’ Timothy said, adding that the only trouble was that the Badstoneleigh supermarkets wouldn’t serve a person who was under age. ‘There’s an off-licence in Lass Lane,’ he said, ‘where the bloke’s half blind.’

  On the way to Lass Lane they told him their names and he said his was Timothy Gedge. He advised them not to come into the off-licence with him. He offered to buy them a tin of beer each, but they said they’d rather have Coca-Cola.

  ‘You eighteen, laddie?’ the proprietor enquired as he reached down a pint tin of Worth
ington E. He wore thick pebble spectacles, behind which his eyes were unnaturally magnified. Timothy said he’d be nineteen on the twenty-fourth of next month.

  ‘Gemini,’ the man said. Timothy smiled, not knowing what the man was talking about.

  ‘You often get loonies in joints like that,’ he remarked on the street. ‘They drink the sauce and it softens their brains for them.’ He laughed, and then added that he’d been drunk as a cork himself actually, the night before. He’d woken in a shocking state, his mouth like the Sahara desert.

  They walked towards the seashore and sat on the rocks, beside a pool with anemones in it. They drank the Coca-Cola and Timothy consumed the Worthington E, saying it was just what he needed after being on the sauce the night before. When he’d finished he threw the beer-tin into the pool with the anemones in it.

  They began to walk towards Dynmouth. The sea was coming in. There were more seagulls than there had been that morning, on the cliffs and on the sea itself. The same trawler was in the same position on the horizon.

  ‘Are you at school then?’ he asked, and they told him about their two boarding-schools. He knew they were at boarding-schools, but it was something to say to the kids. He said he was at Dynmouth Comprehensive himself, a terrible dump. There was a woman called Wilkinson who couldn’t keep order in a bird-cage. Stringer, the headmaster, was rubbish; the P.E. man went after the girls. Sex and cigarettes were the main things, and going up to the Youth Centre to smash the legs off the table-tennis tables. There was a girl called Grace Rumblebow who had to be seen to be believed.