The lights went up and a picture of the confectionery kiosk appeared on the screen. An attached message announced that sweets, chocolate and nuts were available in the foyer.
Timothy rose when Stephen and Kate did, glad that they had decided on refreshment. ‘Cheers,’ he said, standing behind them in a queue.
They knew him by sight. He was a boy who was always on his own, often to be seen watching television programmes in the windows of electrical shops. He always wore the same light-coloured clothes, matching his light-coloured hair.
‘Hullo,’ Kate said.
‘I see you over Dynmouth way.’
‘We live in Dynmouth.’
‘You do.’ He smiled at them in turn. ‘Your mum just married his dad.’
‘Yes, she did.’
They bought packets of nuts, and Timothy bought another tube of fruit gums. When he returned to the stalls he sat beside Kate. ‘Care for a gum?’ he said, offering them both the tube. They took one each, and he noticed that they nudged one another with their elbows, amused because he had offered them fruit gums.
Diamonds Are Forever took the same course as its predecessor. James Bond ran a similar gamut of attempts to bring his life to a halt. He again ended with a girl, a different one this time and not in a boat.
‘We’d easily get the half-five bus,’ Timothy said, offering his gums again, blocking their passage and the passage of two elderly women who were endeavouring to pass into the foyer.
‘Come along then, please,’ an usherette, elderly also, cried. ‘Move there, sonny.’
In a bunch the women and the three children passed through the swing-doors into the brown foyer.
‘We’re going back by the beach,’ Kate said.
‘Great.’ He blinked against the sudden glare of sunshine on the street. He could see they were surprised that he’d latched on to them, but it didn’t matter. He walked beside them on the pavement, three abreast, so that pedestrians coming towards them had to step out into the street. He swung the carrier-bag with the Union Jack on it. It was hard to know what to say to them. He said:
‘D’you know that Miss Lavant? She fancies the doctor, Greenslade.’
They’d seen Miss Lavant on the promenade and about the town, always walking slowly, sometimes with a neat wicker basket. Kate had often thought she was beautiful. She hadn’t known she was in love with Dr Greenslade, who had a wife already, and three children.
‘She fancied the man for twenty years,’ Timothy said.
It explained Miss Lavant. There was a nervous quality about her, which was now explained also: her nerves were on edge as she slowly perambulated. Her eyes, always a little cast down, were being well behaved, resisting the temptation to dart about in search of Dr Greenslade.
‘She’s in a bedsitting-room in Pretty Street,’ Timothy said. ‘To the left of the hall door.’ He laughed remembering again how he’d insisted that Miss Lavant was Mrs Abigail’s sister. ‘I looked in the window once and she was eating a boiled egg, with another boiled egg in an egg-cup across the table from her. She was chatting sixteen to the dozen, entertaining Greenslade even though he wasn’t there. Three o’clock in the afternoon, everyone out in their deck-chairs.’
He had a funny way of talking, Kate thought. Yet he made her feel sorry for Miss Lavant, a woman she’d hardly thought about before. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the bedsitting-room in Pretty Street, on the left of the hall door, and the two boiled eggs in two egg-cups.
Stephen felt sorry for Miss Lavant also, and resolved to examine her more closely. She never walked on the beach, and without ever thinking about it he had assumed she didn’t because she didn’t want to spoil her shoes. He thought he’d once heard someone saying that about her, but it now seemed that reason wasn’t the right one: the beach was hardly the place to catch a glimpse of Dr Greenslade, with his black bag and his stethoscope, which he sometimes wore round his neck on the street.
‘I wouldn’t mind a beer,’ Timothy said, adding that the only trouble was that the Badstoneleigh supermarkets wouldn’t serve a person who was under age. ‘There’s an off-licence in Lass Lane,’ he said, ‘where the bloke’s half blind.’
On the way to Lass Lane they told him their names and he said his was Timothy Gedge. He advised them not to come into the off-licence with him. He offered to buy them a tin of beer each, but they said they’d rather have Coca-Cola.
‘You eighteen, laddie?’ the proprietor enquired as he reached down a pint tin of Worthington E. He wore thick pebble spectacles, behind which his eyes were unnaturally magnified. Timothy said he’d be nineteen on the twenty-fourth of next month.
‘Gemini,’ the man said. Timothy smiled, not knowing what the man was talking about.
‘You often get loonies in joints like that,’ he remarked on the street. ‘They drink the sauce and it softens their brains for them.’ He laughed, and then added that he’d been drunk as a cork himself actually, the night before. He’d woken in a shocking state, his mouth like the Sahara desert.
They walked towards the seashore and sat on the rocks, beside a pool with anemones in it. They drank the Coca-Cola and Timothy consumed the Worthington E, saying it was just what he needed after being on the sauce the night before. When he’d finished he threw the beer-tin into the pool with the anemones in it.
They began to walk towards Dynmouth. The sea was coming in. There were more seagulls than there had been that morning, on the cliffs and on the sea itself. The same trawler was in the same position on the horizon.
‘Are you at school then?’ he asked, and they told him about their two boarding-schools. He knew they were at boarding-schools, but it was something to say to the kids. He said he was at Dynmouth Comprehensive himself, a terrible dump. There was a woman called Wilkinson who couldn’t keep order in a bird-cage. Stringer, the headmaster, was rubbish; the P.E. man went after the girls. Sex and cigarettes were the main things, and going up to the Youth Centre to smash the legs off the table-tennis tables. There was a girl called Grace Rumblebow who had to be seen to be believed.
‘D’you know Plant?’ he said. ‘Down at the Artilleryman’s?’
‘Plant?’ Stephen said.
‘He’s always hanging about toilets.’ He laughed. ‘After women.’
He explained to them what he meant by that, about how he’d run into Mr Plant in the small hours, wearing only a shirt. He described the scene he’d witnessed in his mother’s bedroom, during A Man Called Ironside.
They didn’t say anything, and after a few moments the silence hardened and became awkward. Kate looked out to sea, wishing he hadn’t joined them. She stared at the petrified trawler.
‘Your mum on a honeymoon?’ he said.
She nodded. In France, she said. Smiling, he turned to Stephen.
‘Your dad’ll enjoy that, Stephen. Your dad’ll be all jacked up.’
‘Jacked up?’
‘Steaming for it, Stephen.’
He laughed. Stephen didn’t reply.
His face was like an axe-edge, Kate thought, with another axe-edge cutting across it: the line of the cheek-bones above the empty cheeks. His fingers were rather long, slender like a girl’s.
‘Your mum has a touch of style, Kate. I heard that remarked in a vegetable shop. I’d call her an eyeful, Kate. Peachy.’
‘Yes.’ She muttered, her face becoming red because she felt embarrassed.
‘He knows his onions, Stephen? Your dad, eh?’
Again Stephen didn’t reply.
‘Did you mind me saying it, Stephen? He’s a fine man, your dad, they’re well matched. “It’s great it happened,” the woman in the shop said, buying leeks at the time. “It’s great for the children,” she said. D’you reckon it’s great, Kate? D’you like having Stephen?’
Her face felt like a sunset. She turned it away in confusion, pretending to examine the grey-brown clay of the cliff.