‘Dynmouth people can’t mind their own business,’ she heard Timothy Gedge saying. ‘They’re always like that, gassing their heads off in a public shop. The best place for Dynmouth people is in their coffins.’ Laughter rippled from him, quite gently, softly. ‘D’you ever go to funerals, Kate?’
‘Funerals?’
‘When a person dies, Kate.’
She shook her head. They progressed in silence for a moment. Then Timothy Gedge said:
‘Ever read books, Stephen? The Cannibal’s Daughter by Henrietta Mann?’
He laughed and they laughed also, a little uneasily. In a woman’s voice he said:
‘When’s it unlucky to have a cat behind you?’
They said they didn’t know.
‘When you’re a mouse. See it, Stephen? Cross an elephant and a kangaroo, Kate? What d’you get?’
She shook her head.
‘Dirty great holes all over Australia, Kate.’ He smiled at her. He said he was going in for the Spot the Talent competition at the Easter Fête. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’m looking for a wedding-dress. I have an act planned with a wedding-dress.’
‘You mean you dress up as a bride?’ Kate said.
He told them. He told them about the bath in Swines’ building yard. He repeated the information he’d passed on to the Abigails and to Mr Plant: that George Joseph Smith had bought fish for the late Miss Munday, and eggs for Mrs Burnham and Miss Lofty. They didn’t comment on any of it.
‘I often saw your dad about the place, Stephen,’ he said. ‘With a pair of field-glasses.’
‘He’s an ornithologist.’
‘What d’you call that, Stephen?’
‘He writes books about birds.’
‘Is your mum’s wedding-dress in a trunk, Stephen?’
Stephen stopped, staring down at the sand. The toe of his right sandal slowly drew a circle. Kate looked from one face to the other, Stephen’s screwed up with bewilderment, Timothy Gedge’s smiling pleasantly.
‘I saw your dad with it, Stephen.’ He spoke softly, his smile still there. ‘I was looking in the window of that Primrose Cottage.’
They didn’t say anything. Both of them were frowning. They moved on again and Timothy Gedge went with them, swinging his carrier-bag.
‘You didn’t mind me looking in at the window, Stephen? Only I was passing at the time. Your dad was packing his gear up. He took the wedding-dress out of the trunk and put it back again. A faded kind of trunk, Stephen. Green it would be in its day.’
There was another silence, and then they ran away from him, leaving him standing there, shocked to stillness by their abrupt movement. He couldn’t understand why they were suddenly running over the sand. He thought for a moment that it might be some kind of game, that their running would cease as suddenly as it had begun, that they’d stand like statues on the sand, waiting for him to catch up with them. But they didn’t. They ran on and on.
He took a fruit gum from what remained of the tube. He stood there sucking it, watching the seagulls.
6
‘I think I’m going to try and cut the grass,’ Quentin Featherston said as he and Lavinia washed up the dishes after the Mothers’ Union tea-party, which had been even more trying than usual. When Miss Poraway had mentioned a Tupperware party Mrs Stead-Carter had gone much further than she’d ever gone before. She’d pointed out that it was stupid to talk about Tupperware parties as a means of raising funds since funds raised at Tupperware parties naturally went to the manufacturers of Tupperware. Miss Poraway said there were other parties of a similar nature, at which suede jackets and coats were modelled, and sometimes underclothes. In greater exasperation Mrs Stead-Carter said she’d never heard anything as silly in her life: the Mothers’ Union in Dynmouth had neither Tupperware nor suede clothes nor underclothes at its disposal, Miss Poraway’s whole line of conversation was a waste of time. She failed to see, Mrs Stead-Carter finally declared, why it was that Miss Poraway, who had never been a mother, should concern herself with the Mothers’ Union in the first place. Miss Poraway had at once become tearful and Lavinia had had to take her to the kitchen. Mrs Abigail, she’d told Lavinia, had called her a fool that morning just because she dropped a tin plate when they were doing Meals on Wheels. Dynmouth was becoming a nasty kind of place.
‘Poor Miss Poraway,’ Quentin said as they washed the tea dishes, and Lavinia – not feeling agreeably disposed towards Miss Poraway – did not say anything. She wished she could say she was sorry now, not in the middle of the night when he was asleep. It wasn’t his fault; he did his best. It wasn’t easy for him, all those women bickering and only a handful of people out of Dynmouth’s thousands ever setting foot in his church, and Mr Peniket sighing over the decline of church life. She wished she could say she knew she was being difficult and edgy, taking it out on him because she’d been denied another child. But although she tried to speak, actually tried to form words and force them out of her mouth, no words came. They washed and dried in silence, and then the twins appeared with lemon cake all over them.
‘Tidying,’ Susannah said.
‘No, that’s not true,’ Lavinia protested. ‘You’ve been eating cake.’
‘Tidying on the floor,’ Deborah said.
‘Tidying crumbs,’ Susannah said.
‘I wish just once you’d tell the truth.’ Lavinia was angry. A day didn’t pass now during which it failed to occur to her that she had borne two congenital liars. Jam fell like rain, cake had to be tidied on the floor. ‘Mouses making buns,’ Deborah had said the afternoon before when flour and raisins had been discovered in a corner. ‘Mouses can have party,’ Susannah had added. ‘And games,’ Deborah said. ‘Mouses can have games if they want to.’
Lavinia, still scolding, wiped the crumbs from their cardigans.
‘Twins didn’t eat one crumb,’ Susannah assured her.
‘Mouses did,’ Deborah explained. ‘Two mouses came out of the chair.’
‘You come and watch me cutting the grass,’ Quentin suggested, but the twins shook their heads, not understanding because such a long time had passed since there’d last been grass-cutting. They suspected, however, that whatever it was their father intended to do the activity would prove dull to watch. Watching wasn’t often interesting.
Already Quentin had begun to tidy up the garden for the Easter Fête. He’d pulled up the first spring weeds from the flower-beds, little shoots of dandelion and dock and Scotch grass. He’d poked at the soil with a hoe to give it a fresh look. He’d cleared away a lot of last autumn’s leaves.
In the garage he examined a machine called a Suffolk Punch, a lawnmower that was now exactly ten years old. It had been lying idle since a Saturday afternoon in October, with begonia tubers in its grass-box and a bundle of yellowing newspapers balanced on its engine. The bundle was tied together with string and had been left there and forgotten one morning when Lavinia was in a hurry. She collected old newspapers and milk-bottle tops and silver paper for the Girl Guides.
Quentin hated the Suffolk Punch. He hated it especially now as he dragged it out of its corner in the garage, squeezed it between his Vauxhall Viva estate car and the twins’ tricycles, and rolled it on to the uneven surface in front of the garage doors. He pulled at the starting device, a coil of plastic-covered wire that snapped obediently back into position after each attempt to engage the engine. No sound came from the engine, no promising little cough, and naturally enough no roar of action. You could spend all day pulling the plastic-covered coil, the skin coming off your hands, sweat gathering all over you. You could take the plug out and examine it, not knowing what you were looking for. You could poke at it with a screwdriver or a piece of wire and wipe it with a piece of rag. You could take it to the kitchen and put it under the grill of the electric cooker in order to get it hot, without knowing why it should be hot.