Read The Children Of Dynmouth for Free Online Page A

he would come back and let himself into the flat and wait until Rose-Ann returned from the Comprehensive and his mother from work. Before that he’d spent a lot of time with an aunt, a sister of his mother’s who was a dressmaker, who’d since moved to Badstoneleigh. He hadn’t cared for this woman. One of his earliest memories was not caring for having to sit in a corner of her work-room while she stitched or cut. All day long she had the radio going and when her husband came in from the sandpaper factory for his midday meal he’d say, always the same: ‘Good Lord, is that boy here again?’ It was particularly tedious having to sit in the room for another hour when his mother came to collect him, listening to the two of them talking. At all other times his mother was in a hurry, hurrying from the flat in the mornings, hurrying out again in the evenings for a break in the Artilleryman’s Friend or to Bingo. Once when he’d been waiting for her and his aunt to stop talking he’d broken a plate. He’d sat on it, pretending he didn’t notice it on the sofa, a plate that his aunt’s cat Blackie had had its dinner off. He’d been three and a half at the time, and he could still remember the agreeable sensation of the plate giving way beneath his weight. They’d both been furious with him.
    From time to time, when he was younger, his mother used to say that it was all his father’s fault. If his father hadn’t cleared off she wouldn’t have had to go out to work and everything would have been different. At other times she said she was glad he’d cleared off. ‘Shocking, the fights they had,’ Rose-Ann used to say. ‘Horrible he was.’ But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember a single thing about this man. When he was at primary school and Rose-Ann was still at the Comprehensive he’d often asked her because it was something to talk about in the afternoons, but Rose-Ann said curiosity killed the cat and would close herself into her bedroom. His mother and Rose-Ann were pally, sharing all sorts of conversational intimacies, rather like his mother and his aunt. ‘Three’s a crowd,’ Rose-Ann had had a way of saying when she was younger.
    He’d become used to three being a crowd and at least he was glad that he no longer had to spend days in his aunt’s work-room. Every Sunday now his mother went over to Badstoneleigh to visit her sister and at one time Rose-Ann had always gone with her, but this arrangement had changed when Rose-Ann’s Len arrived on the scene. Timothy declined to go on these excursions himself, plainly to his mother’s relief.
    There had, over the years, developed in Timothy a distrust of his mother, and of his sister also. He didn’t speak much in their company, having become familiar with their lack of response. He’d be the death of her, his mother used to reply when he asked her something, although he’d never been able to understand why he should be. ‘You’re a bloody little dopey-D,’ Rose-Ann had a way of saying when she wasn’t saying three was a crowd or curiosity killed the cat. It was all half joking, all quick and rushy, his mother laughing her shrill staccato laugh, Rose-Ann laughing also, neither of them listening to him. In the end he’d come to imagine that the atmosphere in the flat was laden with the suggestion that there’d be more room if he wasn’t there, more privacy and a sense of relief. Occasionally he felt that this suggestion peered at him out of their eyes, even when they were smiling and laughing, smoking their cigarettes. He listened to them talking to one another about things that had happened at the clothes shop and the Smiling Service Filling Station, and once he’d had a most peculiar dream: that sitting there listening to them he’d turned into his father, which was why, so he said to himself in the dream, they kept sticking forks into the backs of his hands. Whenever he could, he lay in bed in the mornings until they’d