The Dreaming Suburb (28 page)

“No, no,” said Edgar gratefully. “I'm often late, and my wife is away in hospital ... I should be extremely obliged, extremely so, Mr. Godbeer.”

Harold pushed open the primrose gate. It was the only primrose gate in the Avenue. All the others were painted chocolate-brown, slate-grey, or at best, a dull, hedgerow-green. Eunice liked unconventional colours. Under her direction Harold had last winter repainted all the interior woodwork of Number Twenty-Two in lilac, cerise, and what she always called “pastel shades of sweet-pea”. It was certainly the most original scheme in the crescent, and one of which Harold was just the tiniest bit ashamed.

He selected a key from a ring heavy with keys, yale keys, watch keys, safe-keys, cash-box keys, and padlock keys of deed-boxes.

“Eunice, my dear,” he announced from the narrow hall, “we have a visitor!”

He coughed twice, and tried not to notice Edgar's blink of surprise at the rainbow colours of the banister supports.

1

ELAINE
was the first to win liberation.

The bond between her and her father was undeclared, but it had existed for some years, beginning as a wary, defensive alliance, when Sydney began to grow old enough to influence his mother. It was not a very strong alliance, for Elaine was contemptuous of her father, but on his side there was a measure of sympathy for a young girl, whom he saw as someone cut off from all the normal enjoyments of youth, and driven in upon herself to feed, not on dreams, but on a hatred for Esther that she made little attempt to conceal.

As he watched the girl pass from childhood into her teens, Edgar could not help contrasting her with the daughters of other families in the Avenue, girls who now flaunted their post-war emancipation from the pillions of motor-cycles, who, in their shapeless, tube-like clothes, were beginning to look more and more like the youths who hung about their back gates, who came home with their boys in the small hours, and sometimes kept him awake, exchanging interminable and uninhibited good-night embraces, to the accompaniment of giggles, and scuffles, and, on several occasions, the throb of a ukelele.

Like most of his generation, Edgar was genuinely shocked by the new freedom, but it still seemed to him grossly unfair that Elaine should be the only young girl in the neighbourhood to whom it was not extended. He was not unaware of her contempt for him and, although it sometimes saddened
him, he did not actively resent it, for he knew that his surrender to Esther had been abject, and that his hasty retreats into the greenhouse, when edicts were issued by his wife, was the act of a craven. He knew that he could have, and should have, asserted himself sometimes, particularly on the occasions when Esther reached for the cane that had hung, for so long, behind “The Tempting Bait”, in the living-room; but the fact was that he never had interfered, not once, and he therefore deserved his daughter's opinion of him.

It did not take Elaine very long to realise that something stupendous had happened to her father. At first she attributed the new Edgar to the mere absence of her mother, but when his customary mood towards her changed from mild gentleness to one of clumsy jocularity, when he went so far as to tax her with “not getting out and about enough”, and “not meeting more people her own age”, she realised that life at Number Seventeen would never be the same again, not even when Esther came home. This realisation determined her to advance her own plans, plans that had now been maturing for more than two years.

Elaine Frith had not the smallest desire to become a flapper. Had she yearned to wear thigh-revealing skirts, to dash about on a pillion, to use make-up, and consort with the wide-trousered youths who flapped here and there as the suburb's corps of beaux, there is little doubt but that she would have long since extended her physical rebellion against Esther to the point of open mutiny, for she was no longer afraid of her mother.

She was taller and stronger than Esther, or Sydney, besides being, in her own smouldering way, a good deal more ruthless than either of them. Faced with defiance, Esther would have been obliged to take refuge in nagging, and choose between giving her daughter the freedom of the suburb, or advertising her impotence to the Avenue every evening. Neither Edgar, nor Esther, nor Sydney really understood the reasons for Elaine's unexpected passivity in this direction. How should they, when they had no inkling of how Elaine passed the time when she was out of the house, or was closeted for all those hours in her little room, over the porch?

Elaine had, in fact, travelled a long way since that far-off day when she had rescued
The Art of Marriage
from the trunk in the cistern loft. It might be said that the study of the little volume had changed her life, for since then she had perfected a complicated network of defensive deceit around her, and the smoke-screen that she added to her defences would have done credit to a depraved bishop, bent on leading a worldly life whilst remaining a spiritual example to his flock.

Outwardly, she spent much time studying text-books, relative to her commercial course. Her mother never even bothered to look into these text-books. Had she done so she might have been surprised to discover that every one of them belied its innocuous title. Gregg's
Shortened Course of Double-Entry Book-Keeping,
for instance, camouflaged Miss Elinor Glyn's
This Passion Called Love. Shorthand for Beginners
provided covers for Miss Dorothy Dix's advice to the lovelorn, and even Doctor Marie Stopes'
Married Love
had strayed into Elaine's commercial course, and was now carefully rebound between the blue covers of
The Secretarial Questionnaire.

No fiction was represented, beyond the inevitable one on the outside covers, but under the loose board, beside her washstand, Elaine had accumulated a sizeable fiction library, and in the hours supposedly spent in study she sometimes switched her mind from the technical to the romanticised aspects of love, beginning with Ethel M. Dell's
Way of an Eagle,
and graduating to
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
purchased tenth-hand from a student who had been on Easter Holiday in France. She had all manner of other books down there between the floor-joists, books on female costume throughout the ages, books on etiquette, books on cosmetics. They were all part of the master plan.

She spent a good deal of her time at the public library, but she never took out a book, passing the hours instead in the reference section, where she had long been accepted by the assistants as a fanatical medical student, too poor, it seemed, to attend university. To get here in the daylight she had to falsify her time-table, but this was accomplished easily enough by a bland announcement that she stayed on at
College one hour after other, and less conscientious, students had left, in order to “practise” on one of the establishment's typewriters.

She enjoyed lying to her mother. It gave her a sense of power, and of superiority over Edgar and Sydney. Every successful deceit was a personal triumph, and when she had accomplished something new in this sphere, she always went upstairs to her room, smiling like a cat, to savour her triumph alone.

But Elaine Frith did not spend all her hours of seclusion in reading.

Every night, as soon as the others had retired, she went through her ritual in front of the long mirror of her wardrobe.

The moment her mother's light had flicked out, she scrambled from bed, slipped out of her flannel night-dress, and shed her old personality like a snake sloughing its skin.

She began by re-dressing her hair, looping it in heavy coils over her wide brow, and wetting her fingers to fashion the kiss-curl in the centre. She had got the idea of the kiss-curl from a film poster outside the Granada, advertising
Barbed Wire,
starring Pola Negri. She discovered that kiss-curls suited her, and she bought a small bottle of fixing lotion, so as to be ready for the occasion that she knew would come, sooner or later, when she could emerge from Number Seventeen, and devastate all mankind.

When her hair was arranged to her satisfaction, she would stand before the mirror, carefully examining her body. She looked with satisfaction at her firm breasts, her flat stomach, her long, straight legs, and small feet. She admired the pale shine of her skin, the steep smoothness of the curves above her hips, the firm roundness of her behind, and the way it emphasised her surprisingly small waist.

Standing there, turning this way and that, glancing over her shoulder, posing hand on hip, and studying the reflection of her hundred and one expressions, from the demure to the sultry, from the arch to the downright provocative, she looked like a young, pagan priestess performing some mystic, solitary ceremony. She had the serenity and confidence of a priestess. She did not envy the Avenue flappers their freedom,
for she was aware that, in contradiction to the stridency of the decade, men did not really want flat-chested, comradely women, but the kind of woman she would be when her moment arrived. The books had taught her that the art of love was that of sustaining mystery, of promising so much and giving so little, until the time came when one could stupefy with generosity, and enslave the man who would pluck her from the tower, and instal her in a mansion or palace, where she could be done with subterfuge, and spend the livelong day radiating beauty, reigning over a whole troop of lesser men, each of whom would consider it a high privilege to die for her.

This was the traditional destiny of all beautiful women. This was her dream and her plan.

2

It was Edgar's nominal membership of the local branch of the Conservative Association that enabled Elaine to stage-manage her own coming-out.

About a week after his promising talk with Harold God-beer, when he strode humming about the house, maddening Sydney with unsatisfied curiosity, and leaving them both alone in the house during his unexplained absence at the week-ends, Edgar suddenly presented Elaine with a printed invitation that had been delivered, by hand, to every paid-up Conservative in the Avenue.

It was an elegantly printed invitation from the Honourable Mrs. Stafford-Fyffe, who occupied one of the last of the big manor houses near Chislehurst.

Everybody in Shirley knew Mrs. Stafford-Fyffe, who saw herself as a political hostess, a latter-day Lady Holland; whose husband was not only the prospective Conservative candidate for a Potteries constituency and twenty years her senior, but also fabulously rich. Mr. Stafford-Fyffe still held a controlling interest in a famous jam firm that had become a household word during the war, and in the early 'twenties he took to speculating in real estate on the outskirts of Birmingham, where he was said to have scooped up another fortune.

The Stafford-Fyffes lived in considerable style, and took a very active interest in local politics. Jim Carver, of Number Twenty, knew them as war-profiteers, and the rest of the Avenue knew them by their huge Rolls Royce, that was often to be seen outside the Unionist Headquarters, in the Upper Road.

About the time that Elaine was perfecting her plans, and Esme was on the point of leaving school, Mrs. Stafford-Fyffe launched a vigorous campaign among the youth of the suburb, on behalf of the Junior Imperial League. Being young, gay, and extremely attractive, she had come to terms with post-war youth, and was ready to cover her political pill with large spoonfuls of her husband's jam, or the dividends therefrom. She decided to open her campaign by inviting every young person in the district to a monster party, at “Hillcrest Court”, her Chislehurst home. The local association prepared lists, and volunteers delivered the invitations. One for Judy and two for the twins came through the letter-box of Number Twenty, but Jim found them and tore them up with a full-mouthed oath, so that his children did not hear about the party until Esme, who had accepted, mentioned it casually to Judy, over the garden fence. Judy was piqued that she had not been invited, but she knew her father well enough to refrain from raising the subject, and starting a family rumpus.

Judy was not making much progress with Esme these days—indeed, it sometimes seemed to her that she was retrogressing a little, for Esme no longer needed her as a shield-bearer in his games of make-believe, and had taken to spending a good deal of time in his bedroom, now fitted up by Harold and Eunice as a “study”. Here, he informed her, he was engaged in writing a book, and Judy sometimes waved to him from the bottom of the garden, when she was on her way out shopping, via the back lane.

Once, he had run down, and read her a page or two of his work, a boys' adventure story about highwaymen, and one Saturday afternoon he had actually asked her to accompany him to Shirley Hills, where they had attended so many bank-holiday fairs together.

That afternoon was one of her happiest memories, and she
longed in vain for endless repetitions of the occasion. Up there, under a cloudless August sky, they had picnicked on the pebble slopes, and he had talked to her as never before, all about his ambitions, and his hopes for the future, how he would soon become a famous novelist, and
write
adventure stories instead of reading them, how he would travel to the uttermost ends of the earth, seeking material for his books, and checking up on his backgrounds. He still failed to use the plural when describing his daydreams, and never once said
“we
shall go”, instead of
“I
shall go”, but it was nevertheless reassuring to be his confidante again. Clearly he had not mentioned these things to anyone else, not even his mother, or step-father, and after all, he was still at school, and at sixteen Judy could afford to take a slightly more realistic attitude as to their future. No matter what happened, she reasoned, they could not be married for years. According to Esme, it took several to establish oneself as a professional writer of books. However, she could wait. She had waited ten years already, and there was still no sign of any competition in the field. She had made sure of this by a judicious questioning of her brothers, Boxer and Bernard, who had attended the same school as Esme all these years. Boxer had snorted at the bare idea of Esme having a sweetheart.