‘Only I thought the storm might last a few days, Mr Plant.’
Mr Plant nodded, not interested in what this boy might have thought about the weather. He whistled at his dog, who was sniffing at the boots of two old men on a seat. The dog limped hurriedly back to him, its head slung low in anticipation of punishment.
‘Lovely dog, that,’ Timothy said. He had dropped into step with Mr Plant, to Mr Plant’s discomfiture. ‘Like a gum, sir?’ He offered the tube he’d bought yesterday. Mr Plant shook his head. ‘Tike like one, would he, sir?’
‘Leave the dog be, son.’
Timothy nodded agreeably. He placed a blackcurrant-flavoured gum in his mouth and returned the tube to his pocket. He wanted to laugh because he’d suddenly remembered, rather faintly, that in his confusion last night he’d kept insisting that Miss Lavant was Mrs Abigail’s sister. He lifted a hand to his lips and kept it there for a moment, holding the laughter back. Mr Plant surveyed the sea, his eyes vacant and a little bloodshot, as they always were. Timothy said:
‘You’re out with a blonde, Mr Plant, you see the wife coming?’
‘What?’
‘What would you do, sir?’
‘Eh?’
‘The four-minute mile, Mr Plant!’
Timothy laughed, but Mr Plant didn’t. A silence developed between them. Then Timothy said:
‘Only I was anxious to have a word with you, sir.’
Mr Plant grunted, still surveying the sea. ‘I need your assistance, Mr Plant.’
It surprised the publican to hear this. He considered it a strange statement for a boy to make, and he wondered for a moment – without knowing quite why he wondered it – if the boy was going to ask him about the facts of life. Uncomfortably, he recalled the occasion when he’d been discovered in the Cornerways flat with only a shirt on.
‘I’m going in for the Spot the Talent, Mr Plant. At the Easter Fête.’
Mr Plant frowned at the horizon and then slowly turned his head and looked down at the sharply-featured face of Timothy Gedge. Beneath the short, nearly-white hair the eyes were earnest, the mouth smiled slightly beneath the suspicion of a pale moustache. As Mr Plant watched, the lips parted in a greater smile.
‘I’d like to tell you about it, Mr Plant,’ Timothy said, and did so as they walked. He went into detail, as he had for the Abigails, although in a different manner because he hadn’t had sherry and beer. He spoke of the brides of George Joseph Smith, and George Joseph Smith himself, who had bought fish for the dead Miss Munday, and eggs for Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty. He explained about how each of the brides would be struggling against the invisible hands of George Joseph Smith and how the stage would go black and when the light went up George Joseph Smith would be standing there, with jokes, in a dog’s-tooth suit.
‘You’re bloody mad,’ Mr Plant said, staring at the boy.
‘There’s an old bath down in Swines’ yard. I asked the foreman about it. Only we’d need your van to convey it, sir.’
‘Van? Who’d need the van? What’re you on about?’
‘Your little brown van, Mr Plant. If we could erect the bath up in the marquee on the Saturday morning. We could cover it with a sheet so’s nobody’d guess. We can get hold of a wedding-dress, no problem at all.’
‘You’re a bloody nutcase, son.’
Timothy shook his head. He sucked on his fruit gum and said he wasn’t a nutcase. All he wanted to do, he explained, was to go in for the Spot the Talent competition.
Mr Plant did not reply. He turned and began to walk back towards the town. His dog had gone to sniff a lamp-post. He called him to heel.
‘Shall I do you a woman’s voice?’ Timothy Gedge suggested.
Mr Plant wondered if she’d dropped the boy when he was a baby. You heard of that kind of thing, a kid’s head striking the edge of something when the kid was a couple of months old and the kid never being normal. Then, as Mrs Abigail had, he recalled that dressing up and putting on shows was an activity that was popular with children. He’d often sat with his wife watching his own two boys and two girls enacting a playlet they’d made up by themselves, some fantasy set in a country house or a railway station. The Gedge boy seemed to be intent on something like that only with a gruesome flavour, murders taking place in a bath. Sick they called it nowadays, and sick it most certainly was. In his entire life, he estimated, he’d never heard anything like it.
‘It’s in the yard on the left, Mr Plant, behind the timber sheds. I told the foreman you’d be coming for it. Today or whenever you had a minute.’
‘You did what, son?’ His voice was quiet, with a threat in it. He was staring at Timothy Gedge again. ‘No one’s going getting baths out of Swines’ yard. Today or any other time.’
‘I’m anxious for your assistance, Mr Plant.’
‘Hop it, son. Go on now.’
‘I said some time, Mr Plant. I didn’t say today specially. The Saturday morning, Easter Saturday –’
‘You’re up the chute, son.’
For the first time Timothy noticed that there was red hair growing out of the publican’s ears and nose. The hair was coarse and wiry, like the hair on his head. Women the age of his mother couldn’t pick and choose, he supposed. Nor could the women who let Plant get on the job in the Ladies in the Artilleryman’s car-park. He’d followed him in once and had listened to the sound of clothes being removed, and whispering. On another occasion, when he was watching A Man Called Ironside, he’d heard whispering and knew that his mother had taken Plant into her bedroom. He’d left the television on and gone to listen at the bedroom door. He’d looked through the key-hole and seen his mother without a stitch left on her, taking off the man’s socks. He reminded him now of this occasion, and of the occasion in the middle of the night.
‘You bloody young pup!’ Mr Plant exclaimed hotly.
‘All I mean is, we’ll keep the secret, Mr Plant. We have the secret between us, sir. I wouldn’t open my mouth to Mrs Plant.’
‘You bet your bloody life you wouldn’t. If you opened your bloody mouth you’d get a hiding that would cripple you.’
‘I’m saying I wouldn’t, Mr Plant. I’d never do a thing like that, sir. So if we could fix it for the Saturday a.m. and if you could get the bath in your little van, and don’t tell a soul so’s it’s a surprise. I’ve got the whole thing planned, Mr Plant –’
‘Well, get it unplanned if you don’t want to end up in a borstal.’
They had ceased to walk. Timothy listened, still sucking his fruit gum, while Mr Plant told him that he’d never heard anything as stupid or as pathetic in his life. No one was going to watch the kind of stuff that had been described to him, in a marquee or anywhere else. He spoke of a borstal again, he denied that he was an immoral man. He denied emphatically that the scene during A Man Called Ironside had ever taken place; or if it had, it had been some other man in the bedroom. On the night Timothy had seen him in a shirt he had come round to the Cornerways flat because Timothy’s mother had wanted his advice about a notice she’d had from the council regarding rent. He’d caught his trousers on a nail and had had to remove them in order that she could repair them. There was nothing wrong in that beyond what a dirty mind would make of it. ‘You want to be careful of that, son. Keep a clean nose on your face.’
Timothy mentioned the Ladies in the car-park, adding that he had repeatedly observed Mr Plant emerging a few minutes after a woman. He mentioned the time he’d heard clothes being removed, and the whispering. Mr Plant said he was mistaken. Then, suddenly, he laughed. He told Timothy not to poke about in things he didn’t understand. If he’d emerged from the toilet, he said, then maybe he’d been in there fixing a ball-cock, and there was no crime in removing an article of clothing in a toilet. Still laughing, he said it could happen to anyone, a pair of trousers catching on a nail.