The Dreaming Suburb (15 page)

Edith, who had understood no word of this, except the names of the musical items he had quoted, was grateful for the dark. She felt terribly nervous, but somehow elated, much as she had felt during her last essay into the unknown, the night that Ted had come to them as a lodger.

She sat down, cracked her finger-joints, and sailed into
Song of the Bells,
after which, without waiting for his comment, she played excerpts from all the scores he had mentioned.

Slowly, a wide, satisfied grin settled on Mr. Billings' round face. He knew he had picked a winner. He knew he had no need to tell this skinny little body anything more about the mysteries of audience mood-making, that, despite her old-fashioned appearance, she had got just what he wanted, right at her finger-tips. He would have been aghast had he been informed that this was the first time Edith Clegg had entered a cinema in her whole life.

Thus began a new life for Edith, a warm, exciting life, that had little connection with Becky, or Ted, and all the habits that had fenced her round in the past. She acquired, almost overnight, a new personality. From now on, she lived for the silver screen, and for its priesthood, the stars. She writhed on desert railroad tracks with ill-used ranchers' daughters. She danced minuets with John Barrymore. She trapesed about in the snow with Mary Pickford. She hung from skyscrapers with Harold Lloyd. She was wooed by the saturnine Valentino in tents and Cossack bivouacs, and she could hardly see the keys for tears of laughter, conjured up by Ben Turpin and Buster Keaton. She loved and cherished each and every one of them. They became, as time went on, far more real to her than the people of the Avenue, and she was soon driven to increase her intimacy with them by a close study of their private lives, their marriages, divorces, likes, dislikes, and private swimming-pools, in the film magazines.

Her memory for detail, associated with cinema stars, became phenomenal, and Mr. Billings, who came to regard her as his own personal discovery, often consulted her when he was planning foyer displays and special advertisements.

And with this worship of Edith's went a kind of pride, that grew and grew in her, until she became a sort of moving-picture public relations officer up and down the Avenue. Her enthusiasm overcame her natural shyness with people. She found she could talk glibly to neighbours on the subject of films, whereas, in the past, she had found it difficult to raise her eyes to acknowledge the lift of a neighbour's hat.

The Granada job solved all economic worries at Number Four, for Mr. Billings paid her, at first thirty shillings, and then two pounds a week. He told his wife, in an unguarded moment, that she was worth at least twenty pounds a week to him; but Edith did not assess her value in pounds, shillings, and pence. Had Mr. Billings but known it, she would have gladly played for him for nothing.

1

THESE
were the halcyon years for Judith Carver, the years when she had Esme Fraser all to herself, years before Elaine Frith, of Number Seventeen, moved between them, and elevated Esme—for a time at any rate—to the verge of Paradise
and by so doing consigned poor Judith to the limbo she was to inhabit for most of her 'teens.

Ever since the day they had played
Sleeping Beauty
in Manor Woods, Judy and Esme had been close friends, as close, in some ways, as Bernard and Boxer, and with something of the same relationship to one another.

In their case there were no preliminary consultations, as there were, however nominal they might be, between the twins. In the case of the boy and girl, the boy both proposed and disposed, and the girl merely tagged along, carefully gauging her enthusiasm by an unwavering observation of her lord, devoted to the point of death, unquestioning, unreasoning, enslaved.

As he passed from childhood to boyhood, Esme's dreamworld widened with his reading, from Henty to Scott, from the “B.O.P.” and “Chums”, to Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard. He was as much in need of an audience as Mr. Billings but, unlike the cinema proprietor, could manage comfortably on an audience of one. Judith was his audience, and paid him in the currency of utter devotion.

Her enslavement was no secret in the Avenue.

“There's Esme Fraser, and the little Carver girl,” people would say, as they drifted by, Esme, addressing his dark, Imperial scowl to the paving-stones, Judith a yard or so behind, like an Eastern wife without her burden.

In the early days of their association her family had teased her about him: “Hurry up, Judy; Esme's coming out!”, or “Judy won't want any breakfast; Esme's finished his,” but Judith, although she blushed a little, did not resent this sort of badinage. Why should she? They could all be forgiven a little teasing. They hadn't got Esme.

Judith's family never found out anything really important about the association—the diary for instance, or the “Esme-Box”, that she kept hidden under her hair-ribbons in the lower drawer of the chest she shared with Louise. She never wrote in the diary, or opened the box, unless she was fairly certain that she would not be disturbed.

The entires in the diary were bald statements of fact:
“Thursday: Esme was Lancelot and rescued me. We were
late for dinner and Louise didn't mind.” “Saturday: Esme was Blackbeard, and set his whiskers alight. He told me about the lady pirate, Mary Read.”

These were summaries of the way in which they spent their hours together, usually in Manor Woods, or in the wide ploughland and copses, along the Kentish border. Sometimes they wandered further afield in search of settings. Esme always had to have the correct settings.

Almost incidentally Judith learned a great deal about books, and the romantic episodes of British history. There was always a role for her in Esme's dreams, Maid Marian, the Lady of Shalott, Queen Dido (this frightened her a little on account of the funeral pyre she had to sit upon), the serving-wench who brought Turpin news of wealthy travellers leaving the inn, women pirates, like Anne Bonney and Mary Read, Llewellyn's wife, who was severely scolded, for leaving the dog to guard the baby, Jack Sheppard's moll, who smuggled files into Newgate, and so on; endlessly she ranged across the centuries, comforting, aiding, bandaging, smuggling, and getting small enough thanks for it from a hero who was very quick to censure an anachronism (as when she sent a pie containing a pistol into Richard the Lionheart's dungeon), the very sparing in praise, even when her loyalty had whisked him from the very shadow of Tyburn Tree.

“Faster! Faster! They've got fresh horses!” “Down! Down! Your heels are showing, and they'll be shot off, like Lord Roberts's were!” So she ran, holding tight to his hand, through briars, and across bogland, or lay, sobbing for breath, in a deep bed of nettles, while Edward the First's cavalry probed for them among the undergrowth.

Desperately she studied and trained to fit herself for these posts of honour. Anxiously she watched for his pale glance of contemptuous anger, when she handed him the wrong key, or gave the wrong pass-word. It was exacting work, all of it, but there were many, many compensations —an odd word of approval, the pressure of his fingers on her shoulders, his blazing fury when he “found” her tied to a tree, awaiting the Minotaur, and the one ecstatic occasion when she sprained her ankle jumping from a high bough, and was
carried on his back a whole mile, to the door of Number Twenty.

The “Esme-Box” in her drawer contained carefully collected souvenirs of these occasions: a wild rose she had thrown to him on his instructions, when he was about to tourney in her honour, and which he had subsequently abandoned on the field of honour after being dismounted by his fourth opponent; a few blurred snapshots of him, the result of his one brief incursion into the twentieth century with a box camera, given him by his mother's ever-hopeful suitor; a mother-of-pearl hair-slide he had found, and presented to her, as part of his goodwill when visiting Tartary, on behalf of the West.

These things she showed to nobody, not even Louise, but most days she went quietly upstairs, and took them all out, laying them in a row on her bed, with the open box handy, in case she should hear footsteps on the stairs.

Not once during these days did Esme say or do anything to clarify their true relationship. Never did he touch upon the Paradise which, deep in her heart, she had decided they would ultimately enter; and she on her part was very careful never to broach the subject not even in jest, for her instinct about him was very shrewd, and she knew that, when at last it did come, it must come from him, it must be yet one more game—the final one. One day, one great and glorious day, he would let slip the words. One day he would say, quite casually, as though proposing to dramatise another anecdote from the books: “When we are married”, or “After we are married ...” Then it would be merely a matter of growing up, and of cooking and sewing for him, as Louise cooked and sewed for the boys and the babies. Then she would feel the weight of his arm on her shoulder, not as the sorely-wounded Arthur, being assisted to the barge on the margin of the lake, but as a husband and lover, as the person who would emerge from Shirley Church beside her, to duck laughingly beneath the shower of confetti and hustle her into a beribboned taxi, like those that passed the end of the Avenue so frequently at Easter-time.

Judy too had dreams, but, unlike her lord and master, she saw no occasion to rehearse them, save in her mind's eye.

2

The majority of the people of the Avenue managed to maintain balance between the excessive house-to-house neighbourliness of the small town and village, and the isolation of detached houses in more prosperous districts, such as those of Lucknow and Delhi Roads.

Within these limits they recognised one another in the street, and occasionally chatted over the fences that separated their narrow back-gardens, but they were not the sort of people who were constantly entering one another's kitchens, in order to borrow sugar, or discuss the news they heard over their crystal sets.

Even Mr. Baskerville, the radio enthusiast, who had installed a fabulous four-valve set in the front room of Number Eighty-Four, and thus became a sort of courier to the houses stretching half-a-dozen deep on each side of him, was not an excessively neighbourly person, and had never once crossed the threshold of the Carver or Clegg homes, but confined himself to quickening his step when he saw Jim Carver walking down Shirley Rise towards Woodside Station, and saying: “That chap Lenin's dead! Heard it from a foreign station last night”, or to passing on some other item of news that he thought might prove a more interesting beginning to a conversation than the customary comment on the weather.

In spite of this reticence, however, most of the householders knew a little about their neighbours—where they worked, how many children they had, where their children went to school, and so on.

When a bride left one of the houses on her way to the church, or when a coffin was carried out to a hearse stationed in the Avenue, the householders paid the centre of attraction the compliment of stepping out on to their porches and watching the procession move off. Sometimes they sent a wreath, and sometimes, when one of their number was sick, they called without social preliminaries, but on the whole they were neither gregarious nor aloof, but something in between.

The Friths, at Number Seventeen, were the exception.

Number Seventeen stood on the open side of the Avenue, at the corner of the unpaved track that had once been a carriage drive to the Manor itself. It was from this point that urban expansion across the meadow to the woods would begin, for the overgrown track offered natural facilities for the cutting of a new road, and was the sole break in the sweep of the crescent.

The Friths had moved into Number Seventeen long before the war. Nobody knew anything about them, where they came from, or what they were like as people. They were not on speaking terms with the Avenue families, not even with their one next-door neighbour, at Number Fifteen, and the only time they were seen as a family was at 10.15 every Sunday morning, when they emerged from the house-in formation, and set off, two by two, for a Methodist Chapel in a neighbouring suburb, presumably the suburb from which they had come.

Every Sunday morning their exodus was closely observed from several windows. They headed for Shirley Rise at a brisk, even pace, Mr. and Mrs. Frith in front, the son and daughter a few paces behind, all wearing neat, sober clothes, and with their eyes fixed immediately ahead. Nobody ever saw them speak to one another. Nobody ever saw them smile, and the frigidity of the little group fascinated people at this end of the Avenue.

As the years went by, and there was no sign of a thaw at Number Seventeen, the Carvers, the Cleggs, the Frasers, and all the other families on the Nursery side of the Avenue that looked across to Number Seventeen, began to be interested in spite of themselves.

No sounds ever came out of the doors and windows of Number Seventeen. The lights went out by nine in winter, by ten in summer. The children never came out into the Avenue to play.

Singly, the Friths were observed more closely. Mr. Frith was over forty, short, balding, and wearing pince-nez spectacles. He reminded Jim Carver vaguely of the late Dr. Crippen, and was seen to catch the Croydon 'bus at 8.45 a.m. every morning.

Mrs. Frith was a rather slender woman who must, at one time, have been attractive, for she still had a good figure, masses of blue-black hair, and a very clear complexion. She was sometimes seen at the shops in the Lower Road. She was several years older than her husband, but no one would have guessed it, indeed, Archie Carver, who often thought about such things, could never decide why a handsome woman like Mrs. Frith had married such an undersized little nonentity as Mr. Frith in the first place, and had decided long since that it must have been on account of money he once had.