The Dreaming Suburb (18 page)

The question was, how far would the Italian expect him to go? Would it be possible to get in on Toni's business without actually marrying Maria? He decided not, almost at once. A man who would go to these lengths to procure a husband for his daughter was certain to demand safeguards. The Italian was at once more shrewd, and more haphazard than tram-conductor Gittens. Like Archie himself, and unlike Mr. Gittens, he had a business training, and Archie realised that if the bargain was ever to progress beyond the discussion stage he would have to be as frank with Piretta as Piretta had been with him. Sooner or later, he realised, the claims of the Gittens' sisters would be common knowledge up and down the Avenue, and Piretta, from his strategic position behind the counter of the corner shop, would be one of the first to hear about it. In the absence of frank confession the news would create too much suspicion in the Italian's mind, and he might start looking farther afield for a young man. Pondering this, while Piretta continued to wheedle, Archie decided in favour of a blunt admission of his own problems. It had one advantage, presenting as it did incontrovertible proof of the prospective husband's virility. It made the ultimate appearance of a Piretta grandchild almost a certainty.

One of the more likeable traits of Archie's character was that he hated to beat about the bush. It wasted time, and time was currency. He made up his mind on the spot.

“I'll marry Maria, providing you cut me in fifty-fifty on the business,” he told Toni, who was so surprised at the blunt-ness of this statement that he stopped short in the middle of a sentence, and sat with his mouth wide open, looking like a grizzled frog.

“There's one thing, though,” Archie went on, before Toni
could utter a word; “I'm already in trouble, big trouble. You know the Gittens' tribe, at a hundred-and-four? They shop in your place. Old Gittens called on me this morning, and he says ...”

Suddenly the Italian recovered his urbanity. He raised his hand, silencing Archie with a decisive gesture.

“Oh,
si, si,
I a'ready hear about it! Why else should I follow you in here, and talka da business with you?”

It was now Archie's turn to gape.

“You
heard
about it? But hell, it was only this morning that ...”

Toni spat. He was not addicted to the habit, and reserved it for occasions demanding special emphasis.

“That Gittens' family, they no good to you, son! They breeda like rabbits, yes; but whatta they live on? Whatta they eat? You donna know? Then I tella you! They never cook a good meal, not even Christmas! Tins it is, nothing but tins!
I
tella you this, and I serva them all da time!”

Archie pondered this, and all that it implied. Obviously Mrs. Gittens had been discussing her daughters' condition in public, probably with other housewives, as they waited at Toni's counter to be served.
But Toni didn't mind!
He didn't mind in the least! Archie realised that he had sadly underestimated him. Perhaps it was the very fact that he was the alleged father of two that had decided the Italian to seek him out and put forward this fantastic proposition.

Almost at once Archie began to feel more serene. Things looked like working out, providing he said the right thing, and did nothing at all in too much of a hurry.

“I'm supposed to marry one of 'em and pay for the other,” he told Piretta, watching closely in order to note how this tacit admission of responsibility would affect the Italian.

The grocer folded his hands over his broad stomach.

“You don't hava to do that,” he said with authority. “I gotta the lawyer, and he's a-good, he's smart. He fix it. You leava this to me, you leava Maria to me, you leava everything to Toni!”

Archie felt himself lifted on a tide of relief. His heart warmed towards Toni. He did not even want to question him
as to how he would fix things, how he would cope with the Gittens, how he would begin to explain the situation to Maria. He was convinced that, in all these things, the little Italian was completely sure of himself, that this was no haphazard shot in the dark on his part, but the final, triumphant unfolding of a long, carefully-planned campaign to secure a son-in-law, a lively young partner, and an heir at one stroke. And in this supposition he was quite correct, for Toni Piretta had had an eye cocked in Archie's direction for more than a year, and this encounter in the “Rec” was simply the direct result of a chance remark he had overheard the previous afternoon, whilst serving Mrs. Baines, of Number Eighty-Seven, with half a pound of streaky.

He realised then that he would have to act quickly, and he already knew exactly what instructions he would give to Messrs. Hibson and Corke, the slightly shady solicitors he had employed in the purchase of his shops. He had one supreme advantage, that of knowing Mrs. Gittens, her daughters, and tram-conductor, Gittens. He knew that they too, in their casual, indolent way, were realists, and would assess the value of a lump sum far above that of an affiliation order, or two affiliation orders. He knew all about maintenance and affiliation orders, and how difficult they were to execute on a footloose young fellow like Archie, who could stand up in court and lie or could, in face of the dual claim, find a glib solicitor to plead a family conspiracy on the part of the sisters, or, if pressed too hard, would simply vanish, or emigrate.

Like Archie he made up his mind on the spot. One hundred pounds he would offer. Not a penny more, not a penny less.

And so Archie was never saddled with the fatherhood of the Gittens' babies, and the whole episode came to nothing, at least, in so far as he was concerned.

In the event Toni paid twice as much as he need have done, for Hilda's child was still-born, and Edna soon afterwards married a Danish hairdresser, at her place of employment. The same year the whole family moved to another district, on the far side of the Lower Road, and were seen no more in the Avenue.

2

For Archie, however, the alarm had much more practical results. He went to work for Piretta that very week, and the Italian had no reason to begrudge the dispensation of his hundred pounds, for Archie soon proved his worth, both as a counter-hand and a bringer of colour to the pale cheeks of little Maria, whom he wooed, somewhat off handedly, in the living-room above the shop, and married at the Church of the Sacred Heart at Lewisham that same September.

Maria herself played a very minor role in these occurrences. All her life she had done exactly as her father told her, removing the verdigris from the tea-urns, slicing pounds of potatoes in the crusher, submitting dutifully to having her bottom pinched by regular customers' greasy fingers, parcelling up groceries, and now marrying this broad-chested, florid young man that her father had suddenly introduced into the business, a young man who seemed to be so worried about Mrs. Armstrong's week-end order, even when they were slumped together on the horse-hair sofa, and he was absent-mindedly fondling her breasts.

She said nothing, and did nothing to encourage or discourage him. She accompanied her father to a dentist in Lucknow Road, and had her worst tooth extracted and another, less independent denture, screwed firmly in its place.

Then, as it were, she stood quietly aside, to watch herself being fitted for a wedding gown, to ride to the Church of the Sacred Heart beside her beaming father, sweating in his unaccustomed collar and tie, to listen to toasts proposed by Italian cousins, all the way from Gateshead, to move Toni and Toni's things into the chalet at the botom of the garden, and at length, to climb into bed with a man who despite all this preliminary bustle, was still practically a stranger to her.

In this detached, contemplative mood she watched Archie pour himself a large double whisky before he hung up his new doublebreasted jacket, and folded his trousers carefully over the back of the bedside chair. She knew, of course, that he was not in love with her, in the way she always imagined people who got married were in love, but her previous experience with lovers was negligible, and she soon grew accustomed to his long silences, and put them down to his almost fanatical preoccupation with the business.

He and her father seemed to get along very well and that, after all, was the important thing. In any case, religion taught her that the main purpose of marriage was the procreation of children and, within weeks, she was expecting a child, the first, she supposed, of a number she would produce as the years went by.

Maria Piretta had been born in the shadow of great poverty, and had grown up in a very hard school. One of the lessons she had learnt in that school was that only three things in life really mattered: health, food, and shelter, in that order. Given health one could usually procure food and shelter and from now on she looked like having all three in abundance. To expect anything more was to tempt the Virgin to withhold from her all three.

1

THERE
was another wedding in the Avenue that autumn. Harold Godbeer, self-appointed champion of the widowed and the fatherless, finally won his fair lady, and won her, be it said, by a deed of daring, as spectacular, in its modest way, as a chivalric deed in the lists.

Harold, a slight, short-sighted man, concealed within his pigeon-chest the tenacity of many weak and physically insignificant people. He was, without knowing it (for he was modest to a degree), of the breed of clerks and shopkeepers who had recently defied the Prussians in the water-logged fields of Flanders for years on end, and he had never abandoned hope of persuading pretty Eunice Fraser to legalise his
role as provider and protector at Number Twenty-Two. He held on because, throughout these years, he had never ceased to tremble when she laid a shapely, white hand on his sleeve, and murmured:

“You're so
clever,
Harold.... You're so
sweet
to me.”

But in all this time the romance remained suspended, never having progressed beyond the sleeve-stroking stage. Never had Eunice gone on to say, as he always hoped she would: “If only you were here
all
the time, Harold; if only you were a
real
father to Esme!”, or something along these lines that would afford him, a professional in the matter of recognising an opening when he saw one, the chance to spit on his hands, look to his priming, and storm on to victory.

He was aware, of course, of what held her back, and it had been some small consolation to him that her reluctance to marry him had nothing to do with his qualities as a lover. Left to herself she would have capitulated long ago. Eunice was over thirty now, and far too delicately bred to let her mind dwell on his qualifications, or lack of them, as a mate.

What she required, what she had gladly accepted from him since the day she had drifted into his office in St. Paul's Churchyard a year or so after she was widowed, was someone to organise her life, study her rate demands, watch over her modest investments, launch Esme on the first stages of a career, bring her a cup of tea in thin china at 8 a.m., teach her how to live within her income, and when day was done, read Mrs. Henry Wood to her, beside a rustling, winter fire.

Harold was willing, nay, he was extremely eager to do all this and more, but Eunice, although by no means an intelligent woman, was a sensitive one. She had little commonsense, but there was nothing wrong with her instincts, and she was aware, as Harold knew only too well, that marriage with Harold would sever her already tenuous link with her difficult thirteen-year-old son.

Ever since Esme had grown from childhood to boyhood she had been aware of the inadequacy of their relationship. It was not, she felt, the sort of relationship that should exist between widowed mother and fatherless boy. Either Esme should adopt a protective attitude towards her, like Harold's, or he should submit more readily to her cosseting. As it was,
he regarded her as he might have regarded an older but admittedly stupid sister, retreating further and further into his dignified dreams, and showing her even less affection than he showed that adoring and adorable little girl, who was for ever following him about.

Watching them, as they crossed the Avenue and took the path across the meadow to the Manor Woods on Saturdays, Eunice wished a little forlornly that Esme had been a girl, who could have come ‘up West' with her, and shared her serene scrutinies of shop-windows. If Esme had been a girl, she reasoned, the child would have been quick to appreciate the solid worth of Harold, and the little man's comforting knack of being in the right place when he was wanted, and of withdrawing the moment he was not Even her first husband, from what little she remembered of him, had lacked Harold's discernment in this last respect, and had been inclined to hang about, making conversation, when she would have preferred to day-dream.

Esme, alas, was not a girl, but a strange, proud, aloof little boy, who was growing all too rapidly, into an introspective young man, with his nose in a book (and such bloodthirsty books) whenever he was indoors, which was by no means as often as she could have wished. Contemplating the situation, balancing the risks that attended a decision one way or the other, Eunice did what she had done in the face of every crisis throughout her life, she passed, and left the decision to somebody else, in this case to Esme himself.

2

Harold Godbeer won his bride, appropriately enough, with a bag of confetti—or rather, with an entire trayful of confetti, advertised on a huckster's stall at one penny a bag.

Every Bank Holiday the children of the Avenue trudged up to the Shirley Hills to the fair, that was held each public holiday (Christmas and Boxing Day excepted) on the pebble slopes beyond the last houses.

It wasn't much of a fair, just the usual assortment of swings, roundabouts, side-shows, and freak-peeps, but it attracted, in addition to a few hundred local children and
young couples, a swarm of hucksters, who paid small sums to the promoters for the privilege of setting up stalls, and selling balloons, mechanical toys, and confetti.