He pulled the coil of plastic-covered wire forty times, pausing between every ten or a dozen efforts. A smell of petrol developed, as it usually did.
‘All right then, Mr Feather?’ the voice of Timothy Gedge enquired.
The boy was standing there, smiling at him for the second time that day. He attempted to smile back at him, but found it difficult. The same uneasy feeling he’d experienced that morning returned, and he realized now why it came: of all the people of Dynmouth this boy in his adolescence was the single exception. He could feel no Christian love for him.
‘Hullo, Timothy.’
‘Having trouble with the cutter then?’
‘I’m afraid I am.’ In the garage there was a kind of spanner, a hexagonal tube with a bar going through it, that was designed to remove plugs from engines. He went to look for it, remembering that he had used it a couple of times since October, trying to take the plugs out of the estate car. He disliked the estate car almost as much as the Suffolk Punch, which was why he preferred to make his way around the streets of Dynmouth on a bicycle. He disliked the English Electric washing-machine in the kitchen, especially the button which was meant to operate the door-release and quite often didn’t. He disliked the transistor radio he’d saved up for to get Lavinia for her birthday three years ago. No sound had emerged from it for six months: spare parts were hard to get, Dynmouth Hi-Fi Boutique informed him.
To his surprise, he found the hexagonal spanner on the ledge in the garage where it was meant to be. He returned to the lawn-mower with it. Timothy Gedge was still standing there. The way he kept hanging about him, Quentin wondered if he had perhaps decided to become a clergyman again.
‘You find what you want then, sir? Only I spoke to Dass about the curtains, Mr Feather.’
‘Curtains?’
‘I mentioned curtains to you this morning, sir.’
Quentin unscrewed the brass nipple on the end of the plug and disengaged the lead. He fitted the hexagonal spanner around the plug and turned it. The plug was wet with petrol and oil. There was a shell of carbon around the points. He never knew if there should be carbon there or not.
‘Dass is going to donate them, sir.’
‘Donate?’
‘A set of curtains, sir.’
‘Good heavens, there’s no need for that.’
He returned to the garage and tore a piece from one of the yellowing newspapers. He wiped the points of the plug with it. ‘I shall have to heat it up,’ he said.
Timothy watched him as he went hurriedly towards the house. He hadn’t even listened about the curtains. For all the man cared, the competition mightn’t take place, nor the Easter Fête either. He began to follow the clergyman into the house, and then changed his mind. No point in taking trouble with him; no point in explaining that he’d walked all the way up to the blooming rectory to set his mind at rest. Stupid it was, saying you had to heat up a thing out of a lawnmower.
Old Ape ambled past him on the way to the back door for his dinner and his scraps, carrying a red plastic bucket. Timothy addressed him, gesturing, but the old man ignored him.
‘Hullo,’ a voice said, and then another voice said it.
He looked and saw the clergyman’s two children, known to him from past association.
‘Cheers,’ he said.
‘We got cake,’ Susannah said.
‘We ate lemon cake,’ Deborah said.
He nodded at them understandingly. Any cake they could get hold of he advised them to eat. He said they could have a picnic if they brought some cake out into the garden, but they didn’t seem to understand him.
‘We’re good girls,’ Susannah said.
‘You’re good definitely.’
‘We’re good girls,’ Deborah said.
He nodded at them again. He told them a story about a gooseberry in a lift and one about holes in Australia. ‘You’re out with a blonde,’ he said, ‘you see the wife coming?’
They knew it was all funny because of the funny voice he put on. He was doing it specially for them.
‘Ever read books?’ he said. ‘Tea for Two by Roland Butta?’
They laughed delightedly, clapping their hands together, and Timothy Gedge closed his eyes. The lights flickered in the darkness around him, and then the limelight blazed and he stood in its yellow flame. ‘Big hand, friends!’ cried Hughie Green, his famous eyebrow raised, his voice twanging pleasantly into his microphone. ‘Big hand for the boy with the funnies!’ All over Dynmouth the limelight blazed on Dynmouth’s television screens, and people watched, unable not to. ‘Big hand for the Timothy G Show !’ cried Hughie Green in Pretty Street and Once Hill and High Park Avenue. Like a bomb the show exploded, the funnies, the falsetto, Timothy himself. Clearly they heard him in the Cornerways flats and in Sea House and in the Dasses’ house and in the lounges of the Queen Victoria Hotel. From the blazing screen he smiled at the proprietor of the Artilleryman’s Friend and at his mother and Rose-Ann and his aunt the dressmaker and at his father, wherever he was. He smiled in the Youth Centre and in the house of Stringer the headmaster and in the house of Miss Wilkinson with her charrada. He smiled at Brehon O’Hennessy, wherever he was too, and in the houses of everyone in 3A. He thanked them all, leaning out of the blaze in order to be closer to them, saying they were great, saying they were lovely.
In the rectory garden the twins still laughed and clapped, more amused than ever because he was still standing there with his eyes closed, smiling at them. The most marvellous smile they’d ever seen, the biggest in the world.
Commander Abigail was not a heavy drinker, but after his gloomy morning walk he had felt the need of consolation and had found it in the Disraeli Lounge of the Queen Victoria Hotel. He had entered the lounge at twenty past two and had ordered a sandwich and a large measure of whisky, which he’d consumed quickly. He had attempted to obtain more whisky, but was informed that the bar was now closed until five-thirty. Unable to face his wife in the bungalow in High Park Avenue and fearful of meeting her in one of the shops if he hung about the town, he set off for another walk along the beach, striking out this time in the opposite direction from the one he’d taken that morning. With the passing of time, he began to think that he’d taken far too glum a view of the situation. His foremost maxim – of never admitting defeat, of sticking to your guns through thick and thin – came to his aid and offered the first shreds of comfort since the unpleasantness of the night before. At half past five he returned to the Disraeli Lounge and at ten to eight, his spirits further lightened by his intake of whisky, he entered the bungalow, whistling.
‘Where on earth have you been, Gordon?’ she demanded as soon as he appeared in the sitting-room. She was half-heartedly knitting, with the television on, the sound turned low.
‘Walking,’ he replied briskly. ‘I reckon I walked twenty miles today.’
‘Your dinner’ll be as dry as dust.’ She rose, sticking her knitting needles into a ball of blue wool. Laughter emerged softly from the television set as a man hit another man in the stomach. She could smell the whisky even though the length of the room was between them.
‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.
‘If you’re drunk, Gordon –’
‘I am not drunk.’
‘There’s been enough drunkenness in this house.’
‘Are you talking about young Gedge?’
‘I’ve been sitting here worried sick.’
‘About me, dear?’
‘I’ve been waiting for you for six hours. What on earth am I to think? I didn’t sleep a wink last night.’
‘Sit down, my dear.’
‘I want to leave Dynmouth, Gordon. I want to leave this bungalow and everything else. I thought I’d go mad with that woman this morning.’