‘You mind your own bloody business, son,’ he said, not amused any more, ‘unless you want a fat lip.’ He lifted a large hand in the air and held it up in front of Timothy Gedge’s face. He told him to look at it and to remember it. It would thump him to a pulp. It would thump the living daylights out of him if he ever again dared to open his mouth as he had just now, to anyone.
‘You don’t get the picture, Mr Plant –’
‘I bloody do, mate. You’ll be left for dead, son, and when they get you to your feet you’ll do five and a half years in a borstal. All right then?’
Mr Plant walked away with his dog hobbling beside him. Timothy did not follow him. He stood on the promenade, watching the publican and his three-legged pet, bewildered by the man.
‘Ashes to ashes,’ intoned Quentin Featherston in the churchyard of St Simon and St Jude’s. A small piece of clay, dislodged from the side of the grave, clattered on the brash new wood of a coffin containing the remains of an aged fisherman called Joseph Rine. Attired in black, the elderly wife of the fisherman wept. A sister, bent with rheumatics, wept also. The old man’s son considered that his father had had a good innings.
Quentin shook hands with them at the end of the service and walked to the church with the sexton. Quietly, Mr Peniket remarked that the Rines were a good family, even if they didn’t go to church much. He’d had to order more coke, he added, although he’d hoped not to have to do so until the autumn. He hoped that was all right.
‘Yes, yes, of course, Mr Peniket.’
‘Better to be safe, sir.’
Mr Peniket was a conscientious bachelor of late middle age, devoted to St Simon and St Jude’s. He polished the pews and the brass and personally washed the tiles. He was in no way hostile to Quentin, but he often spoke of the time when old Canon Flewett had been the rector, when many more people had come to church and church life had thrived. He was aware that times had changed, yet somehow when he spoke about Quentin’s predecessor Quentin always felt that he believed that if old Canon Flewett were still in charge the change would not have been so drastic.
‘I’ll just tidy around,’ the sexton said now, and Quentin nodded, stepping into the vestry.
‘Really good that was,’ Timothy Gedge said, entering the vestry a minute or so later with his carrier-bag. ‘Really nicely done, Mr Feather.’
Quentin softly sighed. The boy had recently developed this habit of walking into the vestry without knocking, usually to announce that a funeral service had been nicely conducted.
‘I’m disrobing, Timothy. I like to be alone when I’m disrobing, you know.’
‘I’ve come in for a chat, sir. Any time you said. Isn’t it a pity about Mr Rine, sir?’
‘He was very old, you know.’
‘He wasn’t young, sir. Eighty-five years of age. I wouldn’t like to live as long as that, Mr Feather. I wouldn’t feel easy about it.’
Quentin began to disrobe since it was clear that the boy wasn’t going to leave the vestry. He removed his surplice and hung it on a peg in a cupboard. He unbuttoned his cassock. Timothy Gedge said:
‘A very nice man, Mr Rine, I often had a chat with him. God’s gain, sir.’
Quentin nodded.
‘The son’s in the fish-packing station. An under-manager. Did you know that, Mr Feather? There’s fish in the family.’
‘Timothy, I wish you wouldn’t call me by that name.’
‘Which name is that, Mr Feather?’
‘My name is Featherston.’ He smiled, not wishing to sound pernickety: after all, it wasn’t an important point. ‘There’s a “ston” at the end, actually.’
‘A ston, Mr Feather?’
He hung the cassock in the cupboard. There was a Mothers’ Union tea that afternoon, an event he had to brace himself to sustain. Nineteen women would arrive at the rectory and eat sandwiches and biscuits and cake. They’d engage in Dynmouth chatter, and he would call on God and God would remind him that the women were His creatures. Miss Poraway would say it would be a good thing if something on the lines of a Tupperware party could be arranged to raise funds, and Mrs Stead-Carter would coldly reply that you couldn’t have anything on the lines of a Tupperware party unless you had a commodity to sell. Mrs Hayes would suggest that not all the funds raised at the Easter Fête should go towards the church tower, and he’d have to point out that if salvage work didn’t start on the church tower soon there wouldn’t be a church tower to salvage.
‘What’s it mean, ston, sir?’
‘It’s just my name.’
He lifted his black mackintosh from a coat-hanger and locked the cupboard door. The boy walked behind him when he left the vestry and by his side on the aisle of the church. Mr Peniket was tidying the prayer-books in the pews. It embarrassed Quentin when Timothy Gedge came to the church and Mr Peniket was there.
‘This bloke in a restaurant, Mr Feather. “Waiter, there’s a rhinoceros in my soup –” ’
‘Timothy, we’re in church.’
‘It’s a lovely church, sir.’
‘Jokes are a little out of place, Timothy. Especially since we’ve just had a funeral.’
‘It’s really good the way you do a funeral.’
‘I have been meaning to mention that to you, Timothy. It isn’t the best of ideas to hang round funerals, you know.’
‘Eh?’
‘You seem always to be at the funerals I conduct.’ He spoke lightly, and smiled. ‘I’ve seen you in the Baptist graveyard also. It’s really not all that healthy, Timothy.’
‘Healthy, Mr Feather?’
‘Only friends of the dead person go to the funeral, Timothy. And relatives, of course.’
‘Mr Rine was a friend, Mr Feather. Really nice he was.’
Mr Peniket was listening carefully, doing something to a hassock. He was bent over the hassock in a pew, apparently plumping it. Quentin could feel him thinking that in Canon Flewett’s time schoolboys wouldn’t have come wandering into the church to discuss the recently dead.
‘What I mean about going to funerals, Timothy –’
‘You go to the funeral of a friend, sir.’
‘Old Mrs Crowley was hardly a friend.’
‘Who’s Mrs Crowley then?’
‘The woman whose funeral you attended last Saturday morning.’ He tried to speak testily but did not succeed. It annoyed him when he recalled the attendance of Timothy Gedge at Mrs Crowley’s funeral, a woman who’d been a resident in the town’s old people’s home, Wisteria Lodge, since before Timothy Gedge’s birth. It annoyed him that Mr Peniket was bent over a hassock, listening. But the annoyance came softly from him now.
‘I’d rather you didn’t come to funerals,’ he said.
‘No problem, Mr Feather. If that’s the way you want it, no problem. I wouldn’t go against your wishes, sir.’
‘Thank you, Timothy.’
At the church door Quentin turned and bowed in the direction of the altar and Timothy Gedge obligingly did the same. ‘Goodbye, Mr Peniket,’ Quentin said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Featherston,’ the sexton replied in a reverent voice.
‘Cheers,’ Timothy Gedge said, but Mr Peniket did not reply to that.
In the porch, full of missionary notices and rotas for flower-arranging, Quentin bent to put on his bicycle-clips.
‘Funny fish, that sexton,’ Timothy Gedge said. ‘Ever notice the way he looks at you, sir? Like you were garbage gone off.’ He laughed. Quentin said he didn’t think there was anything funny about Mr Peniket. He wheeled his bicycle on the tarred path that led, between gravestones, to the lich-gate.
‘I went up to see Dass, sir. Like you said.’
‘I didn’t actually say you should, you know.’
‘About the Spot the Talent competition, Mr Feather. You said the Dasses was in charge.’