People arrived with jewellery for Mrs Trotter and cakes for Mrs Stead-Carter and prizes for the tombola. People came with books for Miss Poraway, tattered green-backed Penguins, Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham, Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh, half of Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, the greater part of Death and the Dancing Footman. Someone brought an old Cook’s Continental Timetable and V A T News No. 4 and V A T News No. 5. Someone else brought fifty-two copies of the Sunday Times colour supplement.
‘Susannah help with books,’ Susannah said. ‘Susannah can.’
‘Deborah can,’ Deborah said.
‘Oh now, how kind you are!’ Miss Poraway cried, and one by one the twins took volumes from a carton that Mrs Stead-Carter had carried from her car. ‘We sell them for a penny each,’ Miss Poraway explained. ‘Some real bargains there are. Cow-Keeping in India,’ she read from the spine of a volume that had suffered from damp. Never judge a book by its cover, she warned the twins. ‘Practical Taxidermy,’ she read from the spine of another.
In the kitchen Mrs Blackham said Lavinia looked a little tired and Lavinia said she was, a little. Being upset about Timothy Gedge had made her tired, but she was glad she’d been upset, for at least it made sense, not like moping over a baby that couldn’t be born.
That afternoon, on the loudspeaker system of Ring’s Amusements, Petula Clark sang ‘Downtown’. All over Dynmouth she could be heard because the volume had been specially turned up, the first indication that Ring’s were once again open for business.
Even though it was daylight the strings of coloured bulbs were lit up in Sir Walter Raleigh Park. The voices of the stall-holders jangled against one another, urging and inviting, different from the voices of the stall-holders at the Easter Fête. The Ghost Train rattled, amplified screams came from a record in the Haunted House, and amplified laughter from the Hall of a Million Mirrors. Yellow plastic ducks went round and round, inviting hoops to be thrown over them. Wooden horses and kangaroos and chickens went round and round also, a few of them with children on their backs. Wooden motor-cars and trains went round and round, more slowly. Empty chairs with harnesses swung violently through the air, high above people’s heads. Motor-cycle engines roared in the pit of the Wall of Death. ‘Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city,’ sang Petula Clark. ‘Linger on the sidewalks where the neon-signs are pretty.’
Mrs Blakey heard the voice of Petula Clark, a faint whisper in the kitchen of Sea House. The atmosphere had gone from the house. At lunchtime the children had been normal, Stephen quiet but no longer looking drawn, Kate chattering about their parents’ return. She would not say anything, Mrs Blakey decided as she collected around her the ingredients of a steak and kidney stew for everyone’s supper. She wouldn’t mention the boy who’d made trouble unless for some reason she happened to be asked about him, and she felt she would not be. She hummed quite happily again, her two red cheeks exuding her interrupted cheerfulness.
Kate and Stephen went on the dodgems and then bought candy floss. They watched the Dynmouth Hards performing at the rifle range, their black-frilled girls loitering beside them, seeming bored. They watched Alfonso and Annabella on the Wall of Death. They walked through the Haunted House. They looked at themselves in the Hall of a Million Mirrors. They travelled on the Ghost Train.
They left Sir Walter Raleigh Park and walked to the rectory garden. Stephen won a coconut. Kate bought two tickets in Mrs Keble’s tombola. They paid to enter the marquee to see the Spot the Talent competition. It was due to start at four o’clock, but didn’t begin until twenty past due to a hitch. Last year’s carnival queen sang ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree’. Stout Mrs Muller, in her national costume, sang. The Dynmouth Night-Lifers, with electric guitars, sang. The man called Pratt who’d come to the Dasses’ house on a motor-cycle did his imitations of dogs. Mr Swayles did his conjuring. The manager of the tile-works played the mouth-organ. Miss Wilkinson did her Lady of Shalott. Mrs Dass come on in a fluffy magenta dress and awarded the first prize to last year’s carnival queen and the second to Mr Swayles and the third to Mrs Muller.
The children left the marquee. They saw Miss Lavant in a suit with buttercups on it, strolling about among the stalls, her downcast eyes occasionally glancing up. But Dr Greenslade was not at the Easter Fête. They saw Commander Abigail, with his rolled-up towel and bathing-trunks under his arm, buying cake from Mrs Stead-Carter. Timothy Gedge’s sister, Rose-Ann, was there with her boyfriend, Len. His mother was there, her hair freshly styled, hurrying round the stalls with her sister the dressmaker, whose hair looked smart also. Mr Plant and his wife and children were there, but when he met Mrs Gedge face to face near the hoopla they passed as if they were strangers. Mrs Slewy slipped a bottle of sherry, third prize in the raffle, into a plastic hold-all.
The Easter Fête was for the birds, Timothy Gedge said. The Spot the Talent competition was a load of rubbish again. As he spoke, Kate could feel the devils. She could feel them coming towards her from his eyes and his smile, but they were different now, quieter, triumphant. He had won a victory. God had changed things but God had been defeated: she would believe that for ever, she would go on repeating it to herself to anyone else who ever wanted to know. A miracle had happened but the miracle had fallen flat because you couldn’t have miracles these days, because nobody cared, not even a clergyman. He’d see them around, Timothy Gedge said, but they knew from his tone of voice that they were of no further use to him. ‘Cheers,’ he said, not following them when they moved away.
They looked at Miss Poraway’s books. Practical Taxidermy had not yet been bought. ‘Such a lovely fête!’ Miss Poraway said. Susannah handed Stephen a book about bridge, grinning at him. Deborah handed Kate Cow-Keeping in India. ‘Only a penny!’ Miss Poraway cried, but Kate explained that Indian cow-keeping didn’t much interest her.
They left the fête and wondered for a moment about returning to Ring’s. While they paused on Once Hill, Mr Blakey approached in the Wolseley, on his way to Dynmouth Junction to fetch their parents from the station. He stopped when he saw them and asked if they wanted to come with him. They got into the back of the car.
He drove slowly, with old-fashioned care, easing the Wolseley through the Saturday shoppers in the centre of the town. Two nuns lifted cartons of groceries into the back of their new Fiat van. The Down Manor crocodile chattered in Lace Street, the orphans on their way to the Easter Fête and the Amusements. A waiter came out of the car-park of the Queen Victoria Hotel. People loitered outside the Essoldo Cinema, examining photographs that advertised The Wizard of Oz. Old Ape rooted in the dustbins outside Phyl’s Phries.
In the kitchen of the rectory Lavinia and Mrs Goff speedily washed cups and saucers which were immediately used again. Now that the Spot the Talent competition was over teas were being served in the marquee. Mrs Stead-Carter had sold her cakes and was hurrying between the kitchen and the tea-tables. So was Mrs Keble, who’d taken eight pounds odd on the tombola. Mrs Blackham was buttering more buns.
He would come regularly to the rectory now, Lavinia thought. Not to play with the twins, not for solace or scraps or to complain about the social security man, but simply to be a nuisance since being a nuisance was his way: to say again that he was the child of Miss Lavant. He would take the place of the rectory visitor who had died, mad Miss Trimm, and the place of the child which had not been born. After her long wakefulness in the night there was no escaping that thought, there was no escaping the suggestion of a pattern: the son who had not been born to her was nevertheless there for her. Believing still that the catastrophe had been caused by other people and the actions of other people, believing it as firmly as Kate believed that it had been caused by devils and Quentin that it was part of God’s mystery, Lavinia saw a spark in the gloom. It was she, it seemed, not Quentin, who might somehow blow hope into hopelessness. It was she who one day, in the rectory or the garden, might penetrate the shell that out of necessity had grown. As she changed the water in her washing-up bowl, the feeling of a pattern more securely possessed her, the feeling of events happening and being linked, the feeling that her wakeful nights and her edginess over her lost child had not been without an outcome. Compassion came less easily to her than it did to her husband. She could in no way be glad that Timothy Gedge would come regularly to the rectory: that prospect was grim. Yet she felt, unable to help herself, a certain irrational joyfulness, as though an end and a beginning had been reached at the same time. You could not live without hope, some part of her woman’s intuition told her: while a future was left you must not.