The Children Of Dynmouth by William Trevor Read Free Book Online Page A

another.
    For Stephen the friendship was special too, though in a different way. Since the death of his mother it was with Kate more than anyone that his natural reticence most easily evaporated. At school he had never found it easy to initiate friendships and often did not want to. He was in the fringes of things, or even in the shadows, not unpopular with other boys and not aloof, but affected by a shyness that hadn’t existed in his relationship with his mother and didn’t with Kate. He found it easy to drift in and out of conversations with Kate, as it had been with his mother. It wasn’t necessary to make an effort, or to be on guard.
    Other people sat down in the dining-car, a sprinkling at the empty tables. The stout waiter carried round a tray of metal tea-pots. The children talked about the terms they’d spent at Ravenswood Court and St Cecilia’s, and about the people at these two similar boarding-schools. The headmaster of Ravenswood Court, C. R. Deccles, was known as the Craw, and his wife as Mrs Craw; Miss Scuse was the headmistress of St Cecilia’s. At Ravenswood Court there was a master called Quiet-Now Simpson, who couldn’t keep order, and a master called Dymoke – Geography and Divinity – who was known as Dirty Dymoke because he’d once confessed that he had never in his life washed his hair. Quiet-Now Simpson had kipper feet.
    At St Cecilia’s little Miss Malabedeely taught History and was fifty-four, bullied by Miss Shaw and Miss Rist. Miss Shaw was moustached and had a hanging jaw, all teeth and gums; Miss Rist was forever knitting brown cardigans. They were jealous because Miss Malabedeely had once been engaged to an African bishop. They often spoke of Africa in a disparaging manner, and when they were speaking of something else they had a way of abruptly ceasing when Miss Malabedeely entered a room. ‘We’ll go on with that later,’ Miss Rist would say, sighing while she looked at Miss Malabedeely. There were other teachers at St Cecilia’s, and other masters at Ravenswood, but they weren’t so interesting to talk about.
    In the dining-car Kate imagined, as she often had before, Quiet-Now Simpson’s kipper feet and Dirty Dymoke. And Stephen quite vividly saw the fortitude on the face of little damson-cheeked Miss Malabedeely let down by an African bishop, and Miss Shaw’s landscape of teeth and gum and Miss Rist forever knitting cardigans. He imagined the bullying of Miss Malabedeely, the two women breaking off their conversation whenever she entered a room. That term, he said, a boy called Absom had discovered Quiet-Now Simpson and Mrs Craw alone in a summer-house, sitting close to one another.
    ‘You pour the tea,’ he said.
    They went on talking about the schools and then they talked about the party that morning in the lounge of the hotel, at which there’d been champagne and chicken in aspic and cream cheese in bits of celery stalks and smoked salmon on brown bread.
    ‘Toasted tea-cake, madam?’ the stout waiter offered.
    ‘Yes, please.’
    The conversation about schools and the wedding party was a way of filling in the time, or of avoiding what seemed to Kate to be a more important conversation: was Stephen as happy as she was about their parents’ marriage? It was more of an upheaval for Stephen, having to move with his father to Sea House, where she and her mother had always lived. As they ate their toasted tea-cakes it occurred to her that Stephen might never refer to the subject at all, that this single conversation might be difficult between them. His mother was dead: did he resent someone else in her place? Did he resent all of a sudden having a sister? Being friends was one thing; all this was rather different.
    They added raspberry jam to brown bread and butter. They watched a station going by, in a heavy, dismal downpour. Leaning on a brush, a damp porter looked back at them from the platform. Machine Engraving, it said on a poster, Archer Signs Ltd.
    ‘D’you