“You getting off, or what?”
Startled, we looked up to the front of the bus. The vehicle had stopped, apparently at random, fifty yards clear of the first dishevelled houses that stood on the land side of the road.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Bus stops here.”
I turned to Susan, and we laughed.
“What, it doesn’t go the extra hundred yards into the village?”
“Stops here,” the man said again. “Make your mind up.”
We clambered rather huffily down out of the bus onto the side of the road. Before the door was fully shut, the driver had the bus in reverse. He executed a three point turn at greater than his usual driving speed, and then sped off up the road away from the village.
“Extraordinary man,” said Susan.
“Extraordinary git, more like.” I turned and looked over the low wall we had been dumped beside. A stone ramp of apparent age led down to a stony strip of beach, against which the grey water was lapping with some force. “Now what?”
From where we stood the coast bent around to our left, enabling us to see the whole of the village in its splendour. Houses much like those just ahead accounted for most of the front, with a break about halfway along where there appeared to be some kind of square. Other dwellings went back a couple of streets from the front, soon required to cling to the sharp hills which rose less than two hundred yards from the shore. An air of gradual decay hung over the scene, of negligent disuse. The few cars we could see parked looked old and haggard, and the smoke issuing thinly from a couple of chimneys only helped to underline the general air of desertion. Susan looked contrite.
“I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come.”
“Of course we should. The answering machine will be half-full of messages already, and I’m glad it’s listening to them and we’re not.”
“But it’s so dismal.” She was right. Dismal was the word, rather than quiet. Anywhere can be quiet. Quiet just means that there isn’t much noise. Dawton was different. Noise wouldn’t have been an improvement.
“Dawton’s dismal,” I said, and she giggled. “Come on. Let’s find a disappointing guest house that doesn’t have a TV in each room, never mind tea and coffee-making facilities.”
She grabbed me by the hand, kissed my nose, and we turned to walk. Just a yard in front of us, obscured by sand and looking much older than the one on the wall we had seen, another swastika was painted on the pavement. Again it was the wrong way round. I shook my head, puzzled, and then walked over it on our way towards the houses.
***
“We could try this one, I suppose.”
“What d’you reckon?”
“It doesn’t look any nicer than the other one.”
“No.”
We were standing at one corner of Dawton’s square, outside the village’s second pub. We had already rejected one on the way from the guest house. We weren’t expecting a CD jukebox and deep-fried camembert, but we’d thought we could probably find better. Now we were beginning to doubt it.
Susan leaned forward to peer through the window.
“We could go straight to a restaurant,” I suggested.
“If there is one.”
In the end we nervously decided to have a quick drink in the pub. If nothing else the landlord should be able to tell us where the town restaurant was. Susan pushed the heavy wooden door, and I followed her in.
The pub consisted of a single bare room. Though it was cold no fire burned in the grate, and the predominance of old stained wood failed to bring any warmth to the ambience. A number of chairs surrounded the slab-like tables, each furnished with a tattered cushion for a seat. The floor was of much-worn boards, with a few faded rugs. There was no one to be seen, either in the body of the room or behind the bar.
After a searching look at each other, we walked up to the bar, and I leaned over. The area behind was narrow, almost like a corridor, and extended beyond the wall of the room we were in. By craning my neck I could see that there appeared to be another room on the other side of the wall. It could have been another bar except that it was completely dark, and there were no pumps or areas to store glasses. I pointed this out to Susan, and we frowned at each other. At the end of the bar area was a door, which was shut. After a pause, I shouted hello.
It wasn’t much of a shout, because I was feeling rather intimidated by the sepulchral quiet of the room, but it rang out harshly all the same. We both flinched, and waited for the door at the end of the corridor to be wrenched open. It wasn’t, and I said hello again, a little more loudly this time.
A faint sound, possibly one of recognition, seemed to come from behind the door. I say “seemed” because it was very faint, and appeared to come from a greater distance than you would have expected. Loath to shout again, in case we had already been heard, we shrugged and perched ourselves on two ragged barstools to wait.
The situation was strangely similar to that which we had encountered on entering the guest house in which we would be spending the night. We had only walked about ten houses down the line from where the bus had deposited us before we saw a sign nailed unceremoniously to the front of one of them, advertising rooms for the night. We’d entered, and loitered for a good few minutes in front of a counter before an elderly woman creaked out of a back room to attend to us.
The room we were shown was small, ill-favoured and faced away from the sea. Naturally it had neither a television nor drink-making facilities, and you could only have swung a cat in it if you had taken care to provide the animal with a crash helmet first. As the rest of the house seemed utterly deserted we asked the woman if we could have a room with a sea-view instead, but she had merely shaken her head. Susan, fiendish negotiator that she is, had mused aloud for a moment on whether a little extra money could obtain such a view for us. The woman had shaken her head again, and said they were “booked.”
I discovered a possible reason for this when down in the sitting room of the house, waiting for Susan to finish dressing for the evening. It was a dark and poky room, notwithstanding its large window, and I would not have chosen to spend much time there. The idea of simply sitting in it was frankly laughable. The chairs were lumpy and ill-fashioned, their archaic design so uncomfortable it seemed scarcely conceivable that they had been designed with humans in mind, and the window gave directly out onto a gloomy prospect of dark grey sea and clouds. I was there only because I had already seen enough of our small room, and because I hoped I might be able to source some information on likely eating places in the village.
At first I couldn’t find anything, which was odd. Usually the guest houses of small towns on the coast are bristling with literature advertising local attractions, produced in the apparent hope that the promise of some dull site thirty miles away might induce the unwary into staying an extra night. The house we were staying in, however, clearly wished to be judged on its own merits, or else simply couldn’t be bothered. Though I looked thoroughly over all the available surfaces, I couldn’t find so much as a card.
I was considering without much enthusiasm the idea of tracking down the old crone to ask her advice when I discovered something lying on the sill in front of the window. It was a small pamphlet, photocopied and stapled together, and the front bore the words Dawton Festival. It also mentioned a date, the 30th of October, which happened to be the following day.
There was nothing by way of editorial on the Festival itself, bar the information that it would start at three o’clock in the afternoon. Presumably the unspecified festivities continued into the evening, hence the drabness of our berth. The guest house’s more attractive rooms had obviously been booked for two nights in advance, by forthcoming visitors to what promised to be the west coast’s least exciting event.