The Dreaming Suburb (16 page)

The physical contrast between man and wife seemed to have been reproduced in the children. Sydney Frith was a pale, narrow-faced replica of his father. He had about him a strange, furtive air, and seemed to walk on tiptoe, as though terrified of being observed. On the other hand, his sister Elaine, who was some eighteen months his senior, looked everybody she met straight in the eye, with a directness that most people found disconcerting, for there was a challenge in her glance, particularly when she looked at men. Those who met her eyes were always impressed by her striking looks, which did not seem to belong in a London suburb, but were almost Spanish, or South American. She was not pretty, with the delicate, well-formed features of her mother; her face and figure were too plump, even at fifteen, and her complexion, although quite clear, had that waxen quality that sometimes goes with jet-black hair, and blue eyes. Her mouth, however, was very full and red, and she moved with a grace and deliberation unusual in an adolescent, and particularly noticeable alongside the creeping gait of her brother, and the short strides of her father, whom she already topped by several inches.

The Avenue folk might well be intrigued by the Friths, for Number Seventeen was possibly the most unusual household in the crescent. It was certainly the unhappiest, for within it the four occupants lived under great strain, the source of which lay in the cold tyranny of Esther Frith, née Esther Rumbolde, once of Oxted Great Park, Surrey.

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Esther Frith was the only surviving niece of the Hon. Mrs. Guy Rumbolde, a woman of considerable means, and undoubted eccentricity. She had lived with her aunt ever since she could remember, her parents having died in India when she was a child.

She grew up in a vast, dingy mansion, where her aunt had lived out most of her life as a virtual recluse, her sole interest centring in her cats, of which she maintained over two score.

Esther's grandfather, a near relative of the Surrey Rum-boldes, a distinguished Anglo-Indian family, had been a man of considerable wealth. Having made several fortunes in the jute trade he had retired to England in the eighteen-fifties, purchased Oxted Great Park, and crammed it with van-loads of hideous furniture, and massive, ancestral potraits.

The one attractive feature of Oxted Great Park under the Rumbolde regime was its library, which had been bought in with the estate, and it was to this library, a huge room filled with strong-smelling calf-bound books, that Esther Rumbolde owed her marriage, and her social descent to the Avenue.

Shortly before her aunt died, in 1907, the family's solicitors had to make an inventory of the house, and Edgar Frith, who was then employed by a local antique-dealer and bookseller, was sent along to re-edit the library catalogue.

He spent whole weeks perched on the high stools in front of the shelves, and here, driven by her desperate loneliness, Esther found him, hardly daring to raise his eyes from his neat sheets of foolscap, and accepting with pathetic gratitude the mid-morning cup of cocoa she brought him on a tin tray.

As the weeks passed, Esther began to spend more and more of her time assisting him in his work, and they became mildly attached to one another, for no stronger reason than that there were no other living creatures about the place, apart from the crazy old woman, a stone-deaf cook-general, and forty-three cats.

Esther Rumbolde had scarcely ever travelled beyond the village outside the park gates, and her experience of men was
limited to a few taciturn gardeners, and visiting tradesmen's boys. She found little to attract her about Edgar Frith, but on the other hand nothing at all to deter her from getting to know him better. He, on his part, was immensely flattered by her obvious desire for his company.

He was a very shy little man, and had entered the big gloomy house with a great deal of awe, hardly lessened by the jocular advice of his employer to “watch his step with the crazy old dame and her perishing menagerie!”.

It could hardly be said that the friendship between Esther Rumbolde and Edgar Frith blossomed into love. Even after their marriage, it did not emerge from the bud, but remained static and half-frozen, like a plant nipped to death by an April frost.

There would certainly have been no marriage had it not been for the Hon. Mrs. Rumbolde's sudden death, and her extraordinary will, for she died before Edgar had completed his inventory, leaving everything she possessed to an animals' dispensary.

Esther was so shocked, and so frightened at the prospect of being thrown upon her own resources, that she immediately confided in Edgar. It was the one occasion in his life that he saw her in tears. Summoning up every ounce of courage he possessed, he at once proposed marriage to her. He never quite recovered from the shock of her ready acceptance.

Oxted Great Park and its contents were sold by auction, and the couple were married within three months, Edgar taking a rather better-paid post with a firm of antique dealers off the Cherry Orchard Road, a twopenny 'bus ride from the Avenue. He had been a careful saver, and was later able to buy Number Seventeen outright. There they settled and there the two children, Elaine and Sydney, were born.

The marriage was a dismal failure from the very beginning. It did not take Esther very long to enlarge her experience of the world, and Edgar did not gain in the process. She found him timid, hopelessly indecisive about everything and excessively dull, but these were not the defects that deprived her of all chance of making the best of a bad job, and adjusting herself to married life. The marriage foundered in a single week, on the shoals of their joint inexperience as lovers.

There never were two people less qualified to go on a honeymoon together. Neither had had so much as a nodding acquaintance with romance in the past, both were approaching thirty when they met, and both were modest to the point of prudery, Edgar naturally so, and Esther because of the extreme seclusion of her life up to the time she married Edgar.

What little she knew about sex had been gleaned from the hastily-turned pages of musty books. She knew, of course, that when people married they slept together, but, in the gloomy seclusion of Oxted Park her imagination had carried her no further than that, and Edgar was the last person on earth to make her initiation a natural process.

The result was what might have been expected under the circumstances, frustration and bewilderment on his part, horror and incredulity on hers.

After his first clumsy approaches, during their week's honeymoon at Bournemouth, Esther lay awake night after night, unable to believe that this was the sort of thing to which she was expected to submit for the rest of her life, and longing, bitterly and futilely, for the privacy of her virginal bedroom at Oxted Park, where at least one could rely on the privacy of a bathroom that need not be shared with a hesitant, shortsighted little man, who had thin, hairy legs, and padded about on the ugliest pair of feet she had seen, or had ever expected to see.

Edgar, who was a very well-meaning little man, attributed her lack of response to his own lack of experience, and even went so far as to buy a book he saw in a shop window whilst purchasing his allowance of tobacco for the week. The book was called
The Art of Marriage,
and was said to have been written by an eminent Swedish doctor, with a long string of letters after his name, but when Edgar tried to apply some of the lessons he learned from the book, particularly those found in a disturbingly frank chapter headed “Mutual Stimulation”, he found himself unable to frame the solicitous questions set down by the author as a necessary preliminary to the exercise. He tried several times, but the words simply refused to be uttered.

In desperation, he left the book beside Esther, when she
was making up for sleep during an afternoon, but when he returned from a walk along the sea-front the book had disappeared, and he subsequently found it in his trunk, carefully re-tied in its original wrapping. It was quite obvious, as he learnt from his renewed attempts towards the end of the honeymoon, that Esther had put it from her without opening it.

In spite of such an unpropitious beginning, Elaine was born within a year of their marriage, and Sydney eighteen months later. After the birth of the second child Esther Frith made her decision. Never again would she submit to the indignity of Edgar's approaches. By this time she had got the measure of him, and knew that he would never have the strength of character to oppose her successfully, and she was right. When she told him that, henceforth, they would occupy separate rooms—he the back and she the front—he mumbled something inaudible, and then drifted into the garden to syringe his roses, whilst she went upstairs, moved all his clothes into what had been the nursery, and then carried Elaine's cot into the little room over the porch. She kept Sydney's cot alongside the dressing-table in her own room. In a year or so she would have to make other arrangements, but she would think of that when the time came. In the meantime she would never have to look at Edgar's feet again, and there would be an end to his apologetic fumblings after he had switched out the light.

The change of life came early to Esther, and with it a curious intensification of existing traits in her frigid personality. In place of what had been a kind of sullen acquiescence to the marriage, an ice-cold fury took possession of her, not specially directed towards Edgar, whom, for the most part, she ignored, but towards his children, particularly the girl. It was as though she herself had played no willing part in their creation, but regarded them as living evidence of the indignities she had suffered, as witnesses of the silent, stealthy affronts meted out to her by Edgar, during the first three years of their marriage.

Co-existent with this frigid hostility towards the children there glowed in Esther a fiery concern for the welfare of her immortal soul.

She had been brought up a strict Methodist, and perhaps the mad Rumbolde blood in her favoured the growth of something not remote from religious mania. Her unpleasant experiences resolved themselves into sins, not sins of her making, but transgressions that had been thrust upon her, and she became convinced that she was answerable to God for her children's concepts in this particular sphere.

The effect of this obsession on her part was to cut off her family from all normal contact with other children, and it revealed itself in a number of other ways. She set out to regulate their reading matter, their conversation, their very thoughts, in a frantic endeavour to isolate them from the horrid contamination of sex.

In the case of Sydney the task was not difficult. He had inherited his father's timidity, and because he was never quite sure when he would be charged with an unspecified misdemeanour, he was very careful to do and say as little as possible in his mother's presence.

In the case of Elaine, however, the task of supervision was more complicated. Elaine had spirit, and never submitted tamely to the tyranny of her mother. Sometimes, when there was a clash between them, Esther thought she could detect hate rather than fear in the girl's eyes, and in the lines of her ripe, pouting mouth.

When Elaine was nine, and Sydney was approaching eight, Esther bought a cane, and kept it tucked behind a picture in the dining-room. It was seldom used but it was always there, its curved handle projecting above the heavy oak frame of “A Tempting Bait”, one of those prints, so popular in the Avenue, portraying the idyllic childhood of manorial children against an early Victorian background.

The children's attitude towards their father was negative. He did not enter into the scheme of things at Number Seventeen. He was either away at work, or pottering about his greenhouse, and sometimes whole hours went by without any of them breaking the silence of the house.

Anything the children brought into the house to read was always submitted to Esther, and either grudgingly approved, and handed back, or confiscated on the spot. This supervision made both children curious to discover what it
was in certain books that must never be seen, and by the time Elaine was twelve she had reached a point where the fragmentary knowledge gained at the small private school she attended had, to be supplemented by one means or another.

She had a shrewd idea that the books confiscated by her mother were not destroyed, but were secreted somewhere about the house, and after awaiting a suitable opportunity, she began a thorough search of the premises, beginning in her mother's room, and ending, via the airing cupboard, among her father's few belongings at the back. She found nothing to interest her in either room, and the only place left to search was the small loft above the landing.

One afternoon, when her father was at work, and her mother was shopping, she decided to complete the search by getting the step-ladder, and climbing in through the ceiling-trap.

As this operation could not be carried out in secrecy whilst Sydney was about, and as she was never likely to be left alone in the house, she was obliged to take her brother into her confidence.

There was no bond of sympathy between brother and sister. Esther's principle had always been to divide and rule, and she had encouraged Sydney to act as informer, but Elaine judged correctly when she assumed that Sydney's curiosity was equal to her own, and he readily agreed to partner her in the enterprise. They carried the steps up to the landing and Elaine, mounting, raised the tray and climbed in. With the help of a small electric torch she found a pile of odds and ends alongside the cistern, but the only object that offered any hope was her father's leather trunk, which she at once set about unstrapping.

There was little enough inside but, after rummaging for a moment, she came across a thin book, wrapped in brown paper. She pulled off the wrappings and applied the torch, picking out the title in the thin beam. The book was Edgar's honeymoon purchase,
The Art of Marriage,
long since abandoned and forgotten.

At first glance it did not seem very promising. Sydney called from the landing as she hastily flicked the pages. Then she came across one of the diagrams, and at once knew she
was on the right scent, and began reading a passage or two at random.