‘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 smelclass="underline" 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.