‘Is Miss Lavant her sister, sir? Only Lavant’s fancied Dr Greenslade for twenty years and he won’t lift a finger in case he’d be struck off. Isn’t it awful, Miss Lavant wasting herself on a married man? Isn’t it a terrible story, Mrs Abigail? Your sister in a predicament like that?’
She nodded, not knowing what else to do.
‘There’s worse than that in this town. The time she gave me the sweet I thought maybe she was going to kidnap me. I thought she was after a ransom, two or three thousand –’
‘My wife has no sister. Will you kindly cease, boy.’
‘Miss Lavant’s the one I mean, sir. She gave me a sweet –’
‘Miss Lavant is not her sister.’
Mrs Abigail dragged her eyes away from the child, startled by the note of panic in her husband’s voice. He wasn’t enjoying being angry any more. His face was blotchy, his lips quivered as he shouted, his eyes were quivering also. Something was happening in the room, something that had more to do with Gordon than with the child dressed up in his clothes. She could feel it gathering all around her, cloying and thick and heavy. Gordon was hunched, appearing to be terrified, his eyes staring. Timothy Gedge was smiling pathetically. She wanted to weep over both of them, to ask Gordon what on earth the matter was, to ask Timothy the same question in another kind of way.
Still smiling, he spoke again. He’d witnessed all sorts, he said: the dead buried, kids from the primary school lifting rubbers out of W. H. Smith’s, Plant on the job with his mother, his legs as white as mutton-fat. He’d witnessed Rose-Ann and Len up to tricks on the hearth-rug, and others up to tricks in the wood behind the Youth Centre, kids of all ages, nine to thirteen, take your pick. He’d seen the Robson woman from the Post Office buying fish and chips in Phyl’s Phries with Slocombe from the Fine Fare off-licence, and Pym, the solicitor, being sick into the sea after a Rotary dinner in the Queen Victoria Hotel. He’d seen the Dynmouth Hards beating up the Pakistani from the steam laundry in a bus-shelter, and spraying Blacks Out on the back wall of the Essoldo. He’d seen them terrorizing Nurse Hackett, the midwife, swerving their motor-cycles in front of her blue Mini when she was trying to go about her duties at night-time. There was wife-swapping every Saturday night at parties on the new estate, Leaflands it was called, out on the London road. He’d looked in a window once and seen a man in Lace Street taking out his glass eye. He’d seen Slocombe and the Robson woman up on the golf-course. In Dynmouth and its neighbourhood he’d witnessed terrible things, he said.
He appeared to be rambling again, but it was hard to be certain. He had seemed to be rambling when he’d first mentioned a wedding-dress and when he’d referred to Miss Lavant as her sister and to a gooseberry in a lift.
‘You’ve no right to spy on people,’ the Commander began to say. ‘You’ve no right to go poking –’
‘I’ve witnessed you down on the beach, sir. Running about in your bathing togs. I’ve witnessed you up to your tricks, Commander, when she’s out on her Meals on Wheels.’
He smiled at her, but she didn’t want to look at him. ‘I wouldn’t ever tell a soul,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t, Commander.’
She waited, her eyes fixed on the flowered tea-pot, frowning at it. Whatever he was referring to, she didn’t want to hear about it. She wanted him to stop speaking. She felt herself infected by her husband’s panic, not knowing why she felt like that. They would keep the secret, the boy said. The secret would be safe.
‘There’s no secret to keep,’ the Commander cried. ‘There’s nothing, nothing at all.’
She wished he hadn’t said that. If he hadn’t said it, they might have glossed over all the boy had said already. They might have pretended they were trying to help the boy, humouring him by agreeing there was some secret that affected them. They had been married thirty-six years, she said to herself, puzzled that that fact should have occurred to her now.
‘He’s talking nonsense.’ The Commander’s voice had dropped, his words were almost unintelligible.
She was a happy woman: she told herself that. She’d been perfectly happy making the supper, the chicken and the fig pudding. It didn’t matter if Gordon wanted to win arguments. It didn’t matter if his clothes dripped all over the kitchen. She’d devoted her life to Gordon. She didn’t want to hear. Whatever there was, she didn’t want to know.
‘Please don’t,’ she said, looking up from the tea-pot, looking across the table at Timothy Gedge. ‘Please don’t say anything more.’
Timothy smiled at her. It was a secret between himself and the Commander, he said. He rose unsteadily from his chair and moved around the table to where Gordon was sitting. Her instinct was to put her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it because it seemed so silly. One Sunday afternoon, watching suburban cricket in Sutton, he had asked her to be his wife, telling her he loved her.
Timothy whispered, but the whisper was clumsy because of the sherry and the beer: she heard distinctly, as though he were shouting. They would keep the secret, he said, he would never tell a soul that her husband went after Dynmouth’s cub scouts, intent on committing indecencies.
A storm blew through the town that night. The narrow streets were washed with rain, the canvas of Ring’s Amusements flapped in Sir Walter Raleigh Park, breakers crashed against the wall of the promenade. The town was deserted. The pink Essoldo was dead as a doornail, Phyl’s Phries had shut up shop at half past ten, the night-porter of the Queen Victoria Hotel slept undisturbed in his cubby-hole. The police-car that sometimes slipped through Dynmouth’s night streets was parked with its lights off in the yard of the police station. The Dynmouth Hards weren’t abroad, nor was Nurse Hackett in her blue Mini. Only the shop windows showed signs of life. Television sets recorded the soundless mouthing of a late-night news-reader. In harsh white light figures without eyes displayed twin-sets and dresses or sat on G-plan furniture. A cardboard couple smiled joyfully, drawing attention to a building society’s rates.
The rain rattled on the slated roof of the Artilleryman’s Friend, beneath which its proprietor lay, drowsily fulfilled. Half an hour ago Mr Plant had engaged in sexual congress with his stoutly built Welsh wife, and in the ladies’ lavatory of the public house car-park he had earlier indulged himself with the trimmer form of Timothy Gedge’s mother. As always, he had enjoyed the contrast, both in anticipation during his conjunction with Mrs Gedge and in retrospect while involved with his wife. For their parts, the women had appeared to be satisfied.
In the ivy-clad rectory Lavinia Featherston lay awake, sorry she’d been so cross all day. It was wrong to be upset by circumstances, by a fact of your life that could not be altered. She’d been cross again after she’d put the twins to bed. She’d protested quite sharply to her husband about the people who came so endlessly to the rectory, the town’s unfortunates, the dirty, the ugly, the boring, the mad. She was tired of listening to Mrs Slewy complaining about the social security man. Mrs Slewy with a cigarette perpetually on the go, leaning against the back door, asking for the loan of a pound. She was tired of Old Ape arriving on the wrong day for his meal. She must have made a thousand cups of Nescafé for Mrs Stead-Carter, being bossed all over the place while she did so. It was a relief that crazy old Miss Trimm had a cold, a respite at least from her belief that she’d mothered a second Jesus Christ. Miss Poraway made you want to scream. Quentin had listened to her quietly, saying it was all understandable, and in greater irritation she’d replied that it was typical of him to say that, and then she’d cried. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured at his sleeping form, knowing that tomorrow she’d probably be edgy too.