‘We’re more civilized now.’
‘We couldn’t be. He wouldn’t be alive if we were more civilized.’
‘Kate –’
‘He shouldn’t be alive. It’s that that shouldn’t be permitted.’ She screamed the words at him. He let a silence fall. Then he said:
‘You mustn’t say that, Kate.’
‘I’m telling you the truth.’
There was another silence, only broken by her sobbing. She wiped her face with his handkerchief and then held the handkerchief tightly, squeezing it in her fists. He said there was a pattern of greys, half-tones and shadows. People moved in the greyness and made of themselves heroes or villains, but the truth was that heroes and villains were unreal. The high drama of casting out devils would establish Timothy Gedge as a monster, which would be nice for everyone because monsters were a species on their own. But Timothy Gedge couldn’t be dismissed as easily as that. She had been right to say it was people like that who do terrible things, and if Timothy Gedge did do terrible things it would not be because he was different and exotic but because he was possessed of an urge to become so. Timothy Gedge was as ordinary as anyone else, but the ill fortune of circumstances or nature made ordinary people eccentric and lent them colour in the greyness. And the colour was protection because ill fortune weakened its victims and made them vulnerable.
While he spoke, he saw reactions in the child’s face. She didn’t like what he said about shades of grey, nor the suggestion that villains and heroes were artificial categories. It cut across her child’s world. It added complications she didn’t wish to know about. He watched her thinking that as he spoke, and then he saw everything he’d said being summarily dismissed. She shook her head.
She spoke of an idyll and said that God would not permit it now. She would go back to Sea House and tell Stephen that his father had been on a train at the time of his mother’s death. The nightmare was over, but in its place there was nothing. They would be friends again, but it wouldn’t be the same.
‘I can’t explain,’ she said, quite recovered now from her passion and her tears.
She meant he wouldn’t understand. She meant it wasn’t any good just talking, sitting there beneath a cross that hung on a wall. She meant he might at least have promised to have a go at shaking the devils out, even if he didn’t quite believe in them; he might at least have tried. No wonder clergymen weren’t highly thought of. All that was in her face, too.
She walked away from the rectory, up Once Hill and then on to the narrow road that wound, eventually, to Badstoneleigh. If they’d told the Blakeys a week ago the Blakeys would have said what the clergyman had said: that Stephen’s father could not have been responsible. She kept thinking of that, of their telling Mrs Blakey in the kitchen and Mrs Blakey throwing her head back and laughing. They’d all have laughed, even Mr Blakey, and then quite abruptly Mrs Blakey would have said that Timothy Gedge deserved to be birched.
‘You like a cuppa, Mr Feather?’
Quentin declined the offer. The boy was alone in the flat in Cornerways. He’d explained that his sister was on the pumps at the Smiling Service Filling Station, even though it was Good Friday. His mother was over in Badstoneleigh for the day, seeing her sister, the dressmaker. He led the clergyman into a room that had the curtains drawn. Deanna Durbin was singing on the television screen.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Quentin said.
‘Is it about the competition, Mr Feather?’
‘In a way. The little girl from Sea House came to see me. Kate.’
Timothy laughed. With annoying irrelevance it occurred to Quentin that the name of the film on the television screen was Three Smart Girls, which he’d seen about thirty-five years ago, when he was a child himself.
‘Do you mind if we have the television off, Timothy?’
‘Load of rubbish ’s matter of fact, sir. TV’s for the birds, Mr Feather.’ He turned it off. He sat down without drawing back the curtains. In the gloom he was only just visible, the gleam of his teeth when he smiled, his pale hair and clothes.
‘You’ve upset people, Timothy.’
‘Which people had you in mind, Mr Feather?’
‘I think you know.’
‘There’s some upset easy, sir. There’s Grace Rumblebow down at the Comprehensive –’
‘I’m not talking about Grace Rumblebow.’
‘I give her a prick with a needle. You’d think I’d cut her foot off. D’you know Grace Rumblebow, Mr Feather?’
‘Yes I do, but it isn’t Grace Rumblebow –’
‘Unhealthy, she is, the size of her. She’s obsessed on doughnuts, did you know? Forty or fifty a day, three gallons of beer, drop dead one of these days –’
‘Why have you caused this trouble, Timothy?’
‘What trouble’s that, Mr Feather?’
‘Those two children.’
‘They’re tip-top kids, sir. Friends of mine.’
‘Timothy –’
‘The three of us went to the flicks, over Badstoneleigh way. James Bond stuff, load of rubbish really. I bought the kids Coca-Cola, Mr Feather, as much as they could drink. I explained to them about the act I’ve got.’
‘I’ve been told about your act. I’m afraid it isn’t suitable for the competition, Timothy.’
‘You haven’t seen the act, sir.’
‘I’ve heard about it.’
‘That kid’s talking through her umbrella, sir. It’s a straight routine, sir, it’ll bring the place down. D’you ever watch Benny Hill, Mr Feather?’
‘What happened to those three women wasn’t funny.’
‘It’s a long time ago, Mr Feather.’
‘I’d like you to give me the wedding-dress you got from the children.’
‘What wedding-dress is that, sir?’
‘You know what I mean. You terrorized those children, you bullied them into getting a wedding-dress for you.’
‘I got a dog’s-tooth off the Commander. Dass come up with the curtains, they’re down in the Courtesy Cleaners. I have Plant coming up with a bath.’
‘You’ve been telling lies.’
‘I definitely told the truth, Mr Feather. The Commander’s gay as a grasshopper, old Dass’s son walks in and tells them they make him sick to the teeth. I only reminded Dass about that, sir. I only explained I was listening in at the time. I didn’t make anything up.’
‘That boy imagined his father was a murderer. You made him imagine that. For no earthly reason you caused him to believe a monstrous lie.’
‘I wouldn’t say it was a lie, Mr Feather. George Joseph Smith –’
‘It has nothing to do with George Joseph Smith. The child’s father was on a train. He was nowhere near that cliff when his wife was killed. Nor were you, Timothy.’
‘I was often in the gorse, Mr Feather. I like following people about.’
‘You weren’t in the gorse then. And a murder did not take place.’
‘I heard them having a barney, Mr Feather. A different time this is, if you get me. She’s calling the girl’s mum a prostitute. I heard her, sir: “Why don’t you throw me down?” she says. He told her not to be silly.’
‘Timothy –’
‘I’d call it murder, Mr Feather. If the man was on two thousand trains I’d call it murder.’
‘She fell over a cliff.’
‘She went down the cliff because he was on the job with the other woman. He was fixing to get rid of the first one in the divorce courts. I was up at Sea House one night, looking in through the window –’
‘I don’t want to know what you were doing.’ He shouted angrily. He jumped up from the chair he was sitting on and knocked something on to the floor, something that must have been on the arm.
‘You knocked over an ash-tray, Mr Feather.’
‘Look, Timothy. You told those children terrible lies –’
‘Only I wouldn’t call them lies, sir. “I’m afraid of what she’ll do,” the man says when I was looking in through the window, and then the other woman goes up to him and starts loving him. She’s stroking his face with her fingers, a married man he was, and then the next thing is –’