The Dreaming Suburb (13 page)

They were both up and about long before Edna climbed out, yawning. Archie's tent was put up, and his blankets were laid out to dry in the morning sun. They breakfasted quietly, Hilda humming to herself, and occasionally winked at Archie over the fire. Edna, who had a lazy woman's healthy appetite, carefully disposed of all the food that was left over. Then Archie had a bright idea.

“Why don't we camp here all the week, and go day trips on the bike?” he suggested. “It'll save pitching somewhere new every night, and give my stuff time to dry.”

The girls were agreeable. They re-pitched Archie's tent higher up the slope, and when they returned to the site that evening his blankets were dry.

Edna and Archie wandered off towards the lake, and Hilda remained behind contentedly to cook supper. There were no more thunderstorms, and all three continued to sleep comfortably. Edna's sleep was so much deeper than her sister's.

“It reminds me of that old joke about twin beds,” Archie told Hilda, as he wriggled in between them one night, and stretched himself out with a deep, contented sigh.

“Tell me,” said Hilda, fitting her head into the hollow of his shoulder.

“Couple put an advert in the paper—twin beds for sale, one almost new!”

“I don't think she'd mind if she knew,” Hilda giggled.

“Well, and why should she?” he demanded; “you're keeping me in the family, aren't you?”

3

Archie was not to remain family property for long.

On their return home, Archie realised that the Gittens family were now making impossible demands upon his time. Whereas he could always manage an odd evening or two with one sister, he found it irritating, and altogether too complicated, to plan a courting time-table for three. The result was that his enthusiasm for this concubinal triangle soon cooled, and he was seen less and less in the Avenue and Lane at dusk, but began seeking love-life further afield in Bromley, and sometimes as far away as Brighton. That was the advantage of a motor-cycle; it widened his fields in more spheres than that of commercial reconnaissance.

The girls did not pursue him through the late summer, and Archie had almost forgotten them when, one morning, as he was wheeling his motor-cycle from the alley, preparatory to setting off on another of his long-distance business surveys, he was stopped at the exit by little Mr. Gittens, five-foot four inches in his tram-conductor's uniform, and wheezing rather more agitatedly than usual.

Archie had seen Mr. Gittens pass his door for more than a year, but had never known who he was, and had never connected him with the girls at One-Hundred-and-Four.

“Name o' Carver,
Archie
Carver?” asked Mr. Gittens, apologetically.

He was a very apologetic little man, and spoke with a strong Lancashire accent. This, combined with his stature, and a general air of seeking to please, invested him with a faint aura of the music-hall.

Archie readily admitted his identity, and wondered impatiently what the little man could want. He was very soon enlightened.

“Ah'm Fred Gittens, from a hundred-and-four,” said the tram-conductor, very civilly. “You must be t'lad who's put both my girls in t'family way!”

He said it pleasantly, and conversationally, as though this
line of talk was an everyday gambit between neighbours who had met unexpectedly in the street. It was his manner, as much as the information he imparted, that shocked Archie, His stomach contracted, and his jaw dropped. He had difficulty in holding his heavy cycle upright.

Mr. Gittens, however, was not disposed to press charges there and then. He was a very punctual little man, and had merely stopped by on his way to the tram depot. Without waiting for Archie to comment he went on, still very pleasantly.

“Eee, but tha's made a rare to-do in our house, lad, for it's plain enough tha can't marry both! As I said to missus, not an hour since, I said, 'He can marry one, and pay for t'other'; so you'd best coom round tonight, and have it out like! I'm on middle turn, and I get home about five.” And with that he touched his peaked cap, and twinkled off down the Avenue towards Shirley Road.

Archie gaped after him, not having uttered one word of denial or affirmation, for Mr. Gittens' lack of rancour had paralysed his tongue. It was almost as though Gittens, himself the father of a huge family, was applauding a casual stranger's virility, but was of the opinion, nevertheless, that certain economic arrangements must be entered into between parties, if only in order to tidy up the situation generally.

Archie stood stock still until Mr. Gittens had rounded the corner of the pillar-box. Then he slowly wheeled his motorcycle back into the shed, and set off on foot for the “Ree”. He had to think. He had to sit still and think, and think, and think.

Only one decision emerged from his numbed brain, and as he passed between the brick pillars of the “Rec” and made his way to a bench near the empty tennis-courts, this fact emerged from a sea of panic and stood out like a rock of salvation. It was simply this: whatever he did, or said, in the next few hours would determine the pattern of his life. One false word, one unconsidered step, and he was lost, for all time. There would be no shop, no income, no independence—nothing but years and years of counter-jumping, and pram-pushing, nothing ahead of him but the prospect of becoming a sort of male Louise, chained to the sink, flanked by rows and rows of nappies, and condemned to potter about a suburban garden, doing without cigarettes and ‘bus-rides, in order to make ends meet every Friday.

He gritted his teeth and formed, then and there, an implacable resolve. This wasn't going to happen to him. To anyone else but not to him. Never, never, never, not if every female in the Gittens' family produced triplets, named him the father, and handed him a sheaf of affiliation orders.

He was sweating with the intensity of this resolution when, for the second time that morning, a semi-stranger addressed him in almost the identical terms employed by Mr. Gittens.

“You're Archie Carver, aren't you?”

He looked up, startled, straight into the sad brown eyes of Toni Piretta, the Italian proprietor of the corner shop, that stood at the junction of the Avenue and Shirley Rise.

Mr. Piretta was beaming even more genially than usual. He held out a plump, freckled hand.

1

WHEN
Ted Hartnell, Edith Clegg's jazz-minded stonemason lodger at Number Four, came home one evening in the autumn of '23, confessed that he had been sacked, and told her shamefacedly that he would have to leave the area in search of a job and cheaper lodgings, Edith Clegg turned very pale, and went straight up to her room for a quiet cry.

Edith was very happy with her lodger and, by this time, looked upon him as a son. The impact of his cheerful personality upon her sister Becky had been wonderful. For years, before Ted came to live with them, Becky had been rather less than half-witted. She seldom said or did a rational thing, and Edith never quite knew when another “spell” was coming.
Becky's spells could lead at best to embarrassing complications with neighbours, and at worst to another visit from the doctor, and a renewal of the frightening discussions regarding the advisibility of “sending Becky away”.

The absorption of Ted Hartnell, his gramophone, and his banjolele, into the household, had changed all that. Ted and Becky got on famously, and Becky had not had a serious “spell” for years, if one discounted her periodical appeals to the errant Lickapaw from the boundary fence.

Ted had never seemed to realise there was anything seriously the matter with Becky. Lately, he had taken to calling her “Aunt Becky”, as he had called Edith “Aunt Edith” ever since he had first carried his gramophone downstairs, and played jazz tunes to them in the kitchen.

Despite Becky's “spells”, Number Four had always been a very placid home, but now, with the three of them on such gay and affectionate terms, it was among the happiest in the Avenue. There was never so much as a spurt of irritation to spoil the harmony. Edith put her pianoforte pupils through their pieces whilst Ted was at work, and after they all had their high tea, at 7:30 p.m. they cleared away, and Ted entertained them with his gramophone or, less frequently, with his mouth-organ, and banjolele.

When they played the gramophone, they all sat in the warm kitchen, with Ted tapping out a lively rhythm on the table-top and saucepan lids. When they decided upon an impromptu concert they all went into the front room. Ted provided sheet music, of which he had nearly a trunkful, and Edith accompanied him on the yellow-keyed cottage piano.

Before Ted came to them Edith had never played a dance-tune. She was familiar with the decorous parlour songs of her girlhood, and could accompany any rendering of the sort of number so popular between speeches at public diners, songs like
The Golden Vanity, Glorious Devon,
and
Come in to the Garden, Maud,
but she had never sat down to play the sort of music that Ted introduced into the house. His music had its outside covers decorated with love-lorn young ladies, wearing bandeaux, or couples sitting out under a sickle moon, and palm trees, and his songs all had oddly similar titles about moonlight in Georgia or cabins in Nevada, and
lyrics that rhymed “June”, “moon”, and “soon”, or “love” and “above”. The scores had familiar crotchets and quavers, but in addition, little gratings, half-filled with dots, that Ted told her were the ukelele accompaniments, and showed him just where to put his fingers when he strummed.

Becky joined in these little soirées with an eagerness that made Edith's heart swell, and sometimes brought a lump into her throat. She even learnt the words of the songs, and bobbed about the front-room, to the utmost peril of the plant-stands, and the carefully-balanced Goss china on the mantelshelf.

At other times she accepted Ted as though he had been living with them since girlhood days, and had been bound up with their life at the Devon Vicarage, long before the coming of Saul, and the cloud that had blotted out all that had happened since.

And now Ted had been sacked, and was talking about finding cheaper lodgings. Suppose he left? What could she tell Becky? How could she begin to explain that Ted would never again sit down to his high tea with them, that there would be no more gramophone recitals, no more songs and junketings round the cottage piano?

Up in his back room, the room he had slept in for more than three years, but had never yet used as a sitting-room, Ted was equally despondent. Edith and Becky meant more to him than anyone in his past, and the billet was certainly the most comfortable he had ever heard of, much less occupied.

The thought of packing his belongings, and moving off into the inhospitable world again, depressed and frightened him. He could not bring himself to begin putting his things into the hold-all that he had dragged from the cistern-loft where it had remained, gathering cobwebs, since he came to Number Four, in the autumn of 1919.

He sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on knees, and cursed himself over and over again for losing his job on account of a piece of downright stupidity, for which he could blame no one but himself.

Ted's abrupt dismissal from the stonemason's yard had a strong element of farce.

It was Ted's habit, when chiselling the pencilled inscriptions
on a tombstone, to regulate his taps with the beats of whatever popular tune that happened to be syncopating in his mind at the moment.

Hundreds of tombstones that had stood in cemeteries all over South London had received their inscriptions to the catchy rhythms of
Alexander's Ragtime Band,
and
Yes, We Have No Bananas.
Scores of verses from the Scriptures had been chiselled out of marble to the tap-tap of
The Sheik of Araby,
or the slow, more painstaking rhythm of
Missouri City Waltz
and
Bubbles.
When he was at work, Ted never sang these songs aloud. He hummed them, or crooned them over and over in his head, as his seamed fingers adjusted their measure to the letters he was shaping.

Then, unaccountably, a particularly tappy tune had let him down, and landed him in the Labour Exchange queue.

Beating out the words “Asleep in the arms of Jesus”, in memory of one, Thomas Hitchcock, “who fell asleep on May 23rd, 1922”, and who was, it claimed, “secure in the hope of a glorious resurrection”, Ted Hartnell's jazzy jinx selected
The Red, Red Robin
as an over-all accompaniment.

Ted went right on bob-bob-bobbing long after he should have laid aside his tools, and shifted his position to begin another line. He did not even notice his error until he heard Mr. Foster, his employer, exclaim from his end of the bench. Then he paused on the words “his own sweet song”, to brush away the dust, and study his handiwork.

He knew at once that there was something odd about the tablet, but for a moment or two he could not decide what was amiss.

By then, however, Mr. Foster had sidled round to Ted's end of the bench, and was gazing at the stone with horror.

“You've run off the line,” he kept repeating, “you've gone and run off the ruddy line!”

Ted had done rather more than run off the ruddy line. He had concluded the words “Asleep in the arms of Jesus” with, not one, but a whole crop of inverted commas, setting them at slowly descending levels, reaching slantwise to the very edge of the block. The remorseless rhythm of the red, red robin had bewitched him. He had been hypnotised into the
act of beating away with his mallet, until he had literally syncopated his way off the tablet!

Ted immediately offered to pay for it, but Mr. Foster was not to be mollified. By habit an ardent churchgoer, and by persuasion a great upholder of memorials to the dead, he was profoundly shocked. The ridiculous association of red, red robins and the late Mr. Thomas Hitchcock's expectations of glory, was more than he was ready to forgive. It savoured too much of blasphemy, and Ted was given notice on the spot. Had he been a good'stonemason he might have talked himself out of the scrape, but it had been obvious to Mr. Foster for some time past, that Ted's heart did not repose in memorial tablets. When he considered the matter, in the light of the ruined stone, he concluded that his own work was beginning to deteriorate, under the merciless drip of Ted Hartnell's hummings, jiggings, and bob-bob-bobbings. He was not a vindictive man, and gave Ted a final piece of well-meant advice: