‘Forget the story you’ve made up about Miss Lavant, Timothy. It’s childish, you know.’
‘When she smiled at me yesterday I could see a resemblance. Did you ever notice the doctor’s cheek-bones? He has sharp cheek-bones, like a person I could mention not a million miles away.’
‘Please, Timothy.’
‘If you tell me to forget it I will, Mr Feather. I’ll put it out of my mind. I’ll promise you that, sir.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Easy as skinning a cat, sir. All right then, Mr Feather?’ He moved towards the television set. He waited with his hand on a knob, politely.
‘I’m always there,’ Quentin said, and Timothy laughed. He turned the light out as the clergyman left the room.
He secured the flat cardboard box on the carrier of his bicycle with a piece of string that was tied to the carrier for such a purpose. He hung the bag with the Union Jack on it from the handle-bars.
He cycled to High Park Avenue and rang the bell of Number Eleven. When Mrs Abigail answered the door he handed her the box, saying he believed it was her property. He was sorry, he said, unable to think of anything better to say. He was sorry Timothy Gedge had been a nuisance. With some reluctance Mrs Abigail took the box from him. It didn’t matter about Timothy Gedge, she said, as long as he never came to the bungalow again.
He cycled to Sweetlea and there, too, said he was sorry that Timothy Gedge had been a nuisance. It was very kind to have supplied curtains for the stage. ‘Curtains?’ Mrs Dass exclaimed softly, from her sun-chair in the bow window, and her husband confessed that he’d found an old set of blackout curtains that were just about right for size.
It wouldn’t be necessary, Quentin told Mr Plant, to convey the bath from Swines’ yard to the rectory garden: Timothy Gedge’s act would not be included in the Spot the Talent competition because it wasn’t suitable. Mr Plant seemed doubtful when he heard that. He’d promised the boy, he said, he never liked to break a promise. ‘I’ve talked to the boy,’ Quentin said. ‘I’m sorry he was a nuisance, Mr Plant.’ But Mr Plant denied that Timothy Gedge had been a nuisance in any way whatsoever. He liked to do his bit, he said, for the Easter Fête or for any other good cause. If a bath needed moving he was only too willing; if it was to stay where it was, no problem either.
‘I think this is yours,’ Quentin said in Sea House, handing Stephen the bag with the wedding-dress in it.
He felt foolish, doing all that. He saw himself: an ineffectual clergyman on a bicycle, lanky and grey-haired, a familiar sight, tidying up. He remembered the child’s face when he’d tried to explain to her about devils. Timothy Gedge had used him to practise a fantasy on.
‘Almighty God, we beseech Thee graciously to behold this Thy family,’ he said in his church, murmuring the words in the presence of a small congregation. There was a smell of prayer-books and candle-grease, which he liked. ‘For which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross.’
It was true, it had the feel of truth: the woman hadn’t just fallen over a cliff. Yet what good came from knowing that a woman had killed herself?
The children who had suffered a trauma would survive the experience, scarred by it and a little flawed by it. They would never forget that for a week they had imagined the act of murder had been committed. They would never see their parents in quite the same way again, and ironically it was apt that they should not, because Timothy Gedge had not told lies entirely. The grey shadows drifted, one into another. The truth was insidious, never blatant, never just facts.
‘God be merciful to us,’ he said, ‘and bless us: and show us the light of His countenance.’
The boy would stand in court-rooms with his smile. He would sit in the drab offices of social workers. He would be incarcerated in the cells of different gaols. By looking at him now you could sense that future, and his eyes reminded you that he had not asked to be born. What crime would it be? What greater vengeance would he take? The child was right when she said it was people like that who did terrible things.
The church was without flowers because of Lent. Old Ape was in the shadows at the back, Mrs Stead-Carter looked impatient at the front.
‘The peace of God,’ he said, ‘which passeth all understanding, be with you and remain with you, tonight and for evermore.’
Their heads were bowed in prayer and then they slowly raised them. They shuffled off, Mrs Stead-Carter brisker than the others, Miss Poraway waiting to say good-bye. Mr Peniket collected the prayer-books and straightened the hassocks.
As he disrobed in the vestry, Quentin paused more than once, glancing at the closed door, as though expecting the boy to appear with his smile. He thought he might because evening prayer on Good Friday was in a way a funeral service. But the boy didn’t come. Quentin took his black mackintosh from a hook and put it on.
In the empty church more truth nagged, making itself felt. It didn’t belong in the category of murder, or of suburban drama with sex or filial rejection. Yet it seemed more terrible, a horror greater than the Abigails’ marriage or the treatment of the Dasses by their son, greater even than the death of Stephen’s mother because Stephen’s mother had sought peace and at least had found it. It filled his mind, and slipped through the evening streets of Dynmouth with him as he rode his bicycle back to his ivy-clad rectory. It kept him company on Once Hill and as he pushed the bicycle into the garage and leant it against the Suffolk Punch.
In the sitting-room Lavinia listened.
‘Horror?’ she said, bewildered by her husband’s emotion. He stood with his back to the sitting-room door, leaning against the door-frame. His bicycle-clips were still around his ankles. ‘Horror?’ she said again.
Two people had derived a moment of pleasure from the boy’s conception. The mother you could see about the place, hurrying on the streets of Dynmouth, a woman with brass-coloured hair who sold clothes in a shop. The father was anonymous. The father had probably been unhappy with his wife; he’d probably set up another family somewhere. The boy had become what he was while no one was looking. The boy’s existence was the horror he spoke of.
Lavinia wanted to say she was sorry for Timothy Gedge, but did not because it didn’t seem true. An image of Timothy Gedge hovered, smiling in his irritating way. She knew what the child had meant, saying he had devils in him. She remembered how he had given her the creeps.
‘I should have been honest with that child this morning.’
‘Of course you were honest, Quentin.’
He shook his head. He said he should have said that morning that if you looked at Dynmouth in one way you saw it prettily, with its tea-shops and lace; and that if you looked at it in another way there was Timothy Gedge. You could even drape prettiness over the less agreeable aspects of Dynmouth, over Sharon Lines on her kidney machine and the world of Old Ape and Mrs Slewy’s inadequate children and the love that had ruined Miss Lavant’s life. You could make it all seem better than it was by reminding yourself of the spirit of Sharon Lines and the apparent contentment of Old Ape and the cigarette cocked jollily in the corner of Mrs Slewy’s mouth and the way in which Miss Lavant had learnt to live with her passion. But you couldn’t drape prettiness over Timothy Gedge. He had grown around him a shell because a shell was necessary. His eyes would for ever make their simple statement. His eyes were the eyes of the battered except that no one had ever battered Timothy Gedge.
‘But surely,’ Lavinia said, beginning some small protest and then not continuing with it. ‘Come and sit down,’ she urged instead.