Existence had battered him, he said, remaining where he was, seeming not to have heard her: there’d been a different child once. He paused and shook his head again. What use were services that recalled the Crucifixion when there was Timothy Gedge wandering about the place, a far better reminder of waste and destruction? What on earth was the point of collecting money to save the tower of a church that wasn’t even beautiful? He was a laughable figure, with his clerical collar, visiting the sick, tidying up.
‘You’re not laughable, Quentin.’
‘I can do nothing for that boy.’
He took his black mackintosh off, and his bicycle-clips. He came and sat beside her, saying that the story of Timothy Gedge seemed to be there to mock him. The story wasn’t fair. You couldn’t understand it and mockingly it seemed that you weren’t meant to: it was all just there, a small-scale catastrophe, quite ordinary although it seemed not to be. Wasn’t it just as neat and unlikely to blame the parents as it was to talk about possession by devils? Were the parents so terrible in their sins? Didn’t it seem, really, to be just bad luck?
She didn’t understand. ‘Bad luck?’ she said.
‘To be born to be battered. To be Sharon Lines or Timothy Gedge.’
‘But surely –’
‘God permits chance.’
Lavinia looked at her husband, looking into his eyes, which contained the weariness that his words implied. It wasn’t easy for him, having to accept that God permitted chance, any more than it was easy for him to be a clergyman in a time when clergymen seemed superfluous. He would pray for Timothy Gedge and feel that prayer wasn’t enough in a chancy world.
‘It depresses you,’ he said, and felt as he spoke that he’d be better employed packing fish in the fish-packing station than in charge of a church. His house of holy cards had collapsed through his own ineptitude. The opinion of the child that morning, and of Timothy Gedge, was an opinion shared by the greater part of Dynmouth: there were the shreds of a traditional respect for his calling, and then impatience, occasionally contempt.
It was hard to comfort him. Awful things happened, she said, feeling the statement to be lame; yet people had to go on. It was impossible to know the truth about Timothy Gedge, why he was as he was; no one could know with certainty. The Easter Fête would take place. They’d hope for a fine day. He had a wedding at half past ten and another at twelve. He should go to bed, she said.
‘He’s pretending he’s Miss Lavant’s child.’
‘Miss Lavant’s? But Miss Lavant –’
‘Miss Lavant’s and Dr Greenslade’s. A child that was given to Mrs Gedge to bring up.’
‘But where on earth did he get that idea?’
‘It replaces his fantasy about going on a television show.’
‘But he can’t believe it.’
‘He does. And more and more he will.’
There was a silence for a moment in the sitting-room, and then Lavinia said again that he should go to bed.
He nodded, not moving, not looking at her.
‘You’re tired,’ she said, and added that there was no point in gloom because gloom made everything worse. There were the good things, too, she reminded him. There were children who were loved and who were lovable. There were their own two children, and thousands of others, in Dynmouth and everywhere. It was only the odd one who grew a shell like Timothy Gedge’s.
He nodded again, turning to look at her.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so dreary lately,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re never dreary, Lavinia.’
They went to bed and when Lavinia woke in the night it was Timothy Gedge she thought of, not her lost child. Was it really impossible to know the truth about him? She wondered how he would be now if he’d been brought up in the Down Manor Orphanage. She wondered how he’d be if his father had not driven off or if his mother had shown him more affection. How would he be if on one of those Saturday mornings when he’d hung around the rectory she’d recognized herself the bitterness beneath his grin?
She couldn’t believe that the catastrophe of Timothy Gedge was not somehow due to other people, and the circumstances created by other people. Quentin was wrong, she said to herself. She was certain he was wrong, certain that it was not just bad luck in a chancy world; but she did not intend to argue with him. And doubting her husband on this point, she wondered if Timothy Gedge’s future was as bleak as he had forecast. She thought about it without finding any kind of answer, and then she thought about the futures of her nursery-school children and others among the children of Dynmouth. What men would her own two children marry, if they married at all? Would they be happy? Would the children of Sea House be happy? Would Stephen ever discover that Timothy Gedge had not entirely told lies? She did not visualize Kate as Kate had visualized herself, alone in Sea House, a woman like Miss Lavant. Quentin had said that for a moment Kate had reminded him of Miss Trimm, and for another moment Lavinia imagined that: Kate at eighty-two, passionately involved with God. That might be so, or not. Kate, and Stephen too, must be left suspended because children by their nature, with so vast a future, had to be. Little Mikey Hatch she thought of, suspended also, dipping his arms into water at the nursery school, and Jennifer Droppy looking sad, and Joseph Wright pushing, and Johnny Pyke laughing, and Tracy Waye being bossy, and Thomas Braine interrupting, and good Andrew Cartboy, and Mandy Goff singing her song. Their faces slipped through her mind, round faces and long faces, thin, fat, smiling, sombre. A whole array of faces came and went, of children who were at her school and children who had been there once. Would little Mikey Hatch become, like his father, a butcher? Would Mandy Goff break hearts all over Dynmouth, as people said her mother had? Would Joseph Wright in time become a Mr Peniket, or Johnny Pyke a Commander Abigail, or Jennifer Droppy a Miss Poraway? Would Thomas Braine, indulged by his parents already, one day turn on them, as the child of the Dasses had? Would Andrew Cartboy, so tiny and sallow, become a Dynmouth Hard? Would Tracy Waye’s bossiness turn into the middle-aged bossiness of a Mrs Stead-Carter?
The future mattered because the future was the region where their stories would be told, happy and unfortunate, ordinary and strange. Yet it was sad in a way to see them venturing into it, so carelessly losing innocence. The future was like the blackness that surrounded her, in which there weren’t even shadows. She stared into the blackness, and the faces and limbs of children, her own and others, again slipped about in her mind. And Timothy Gedge smiled at her, claiming her, or so it seemed. His face remained when the others had gone, sharp-boned and predatory, his eyes hungry, his smile still giving her the creeps.
12
On the morning of Easter Saturday the marquee, borrowed for the Easter Fête through Mrs Stead-Carter, arrived in the rectory garden and was erected by the men who brought it, as it always was. The twins watched. They could remember the Easter Fête last year. It was a glorious occasion.
At half past ten Mr Peniket arrived, with the stage for the Spot the Talent competition on a trailer behind his car, the timber boards and the concrete blocks and the landscape of Swiss Alps on hardboard. Then Mr Dass arrived with his lights and the blackout curtains that had been cleaned by the Courtesy Cleaners.
Chairs and benches and trestle-tables were delivered, borrowed from another firm through the offices of Mrs Stead-Carter. Mrs Keble arrived to set up her tombola and Mrs Stead-Carter with cakes for her cake-stall. Miss Poraway told the men who were unloading the trestle-tables that she would require a good one, because she ran the book-stall and always had. They’d made thirty-five pence last year, she said, which was considered good. Mrs Trotter set up her jewellery-stall, and Quentin and Mr Goff arranged the hoopla, the coconut shy, the bran tub, and the Kill-the-Rat. In the rectory kitchen Lavinia and Mrs Blackham and Mrs Goff buttered buns and cut up sponge cake and ginger cake and fruitcake, and arranged oatmeal fingers on plates. Dynmouth Dairies delivered forty pints of milk.