The Dreaming Suburb (3 page)

The wail of a cornet from the road brought him out of his reverie. From the bay window he saw one of the ex-Serviceman's street bands moving slowly along the Avenue. The cornet player, and a one-armed banjoist, his instrument buckled to his chest, were playing
Tipperary,
while a third member of the the team knocking on the doors, and jingling a cap in front of anyone who passed.

He saw young Archie go out and point upwards, towards the porch window. The man with the cap looked confused and hurried away. The music stopped, to start again further down the Avenue.

The incident helped Jim to concentrate on the present. The habit of discipline, of the will to survive, reasserted itself, and he began to grapple with immediate problems. Had anyone done anything about the funeral? How soon could he get demobilised? What kind of job could be found in a strange district? How were the eight of them going to fit into a three-bedroomed house, and what had happened to the latest twins, the girls he had never seen?

He kissed Ada on the brow and went out, locking the door. Before going downstairs he toured the upper floor, noting that a reshuffle of bedrooms would be necessary, now that there were four of either sex living in the house.

Louise called him from the kitchen.

“I've made a stew, Dad. You must be hungry!”

He clumped into the tiled kitchen, and found the children crowded round three sides of the table, with Louise already ladling from the saucepan.

He sat down, and for a moment nobody spoke. He realised they were waiting for a lead, and the awkward silence embarrassed him. He tried to think of something to say, but the utter inadequacy of family small talk kept him silent. Louise concentrated on the plates, and even Archie avoided his eye.

Suddenly Judith, the eight-year-old, burst into tears, and pushed her plate away. The odd tension broke as Louise's arm shot round her.

“Try, Judy—please
try,”
she pleaded. “Daddy won't like it if you don't; Daddy wants you to try!”.

The child's puffy face, framed in dark curls, touched Carver. He got up, and lifting Judith from her chair sat down in her place, putting the child on his knee. He spooned a slice of dumpling into her mouth and was absurdly gratified when she swallowed it, and smiled suddenly, nestling closer to him. He noticed then that she had brown eyes, like his own, and that her hair was deep chestnut, like his mother's. His contact with her melted something, far down in his breast, and he felt his eyelids twitch. Unable to speak, he twisted his mouth into a smile and immediately, to his intense relief, a ripple of smiles answered him from all sides of the table.

He cleared his throat and spooned up a mash of carrot and onion—there was barely a shred of meat on the plate.

“It's all right now,” he told them; “I'll be home very soon and everything's going to be all right.”

“Will we move again?” Boxer, the bull-headed twin, wanted to know.

Jim shook his head.

“I'm glad,” Boxer went on. “Me an' Berni like it here, don't we, Berni?”

Berni grinned, and Carver recalled then that Ada had written telling him that the six-year-olds, Boxer and Berni, although utterly unlike in appearance, had behaved as though they were a single individual from the moment they could crawl. Other fragments of her letters came back to him—Judith, the one on his knee, kissed his photograph every night before she was tucked up; Archie, the eldest boy, had taken to wearing coloured socks and going out with girls; Louise was such a help, and had been having trouble with her teeth —a mass of uncorrelated family gossip that he had read, primarily as a duty, in dugout and billet and base hospital over the years. Out there he seemed to have lost all touch with the children and if he thought of them at all it was as a group, not as individuals.

He went back to his own chair, and under cover of spoonfuls of stew he took a cautious look at them, noting that they were doing the same to him. Poor little devils, he thought; how much simpler it would have been if Ada had survived, and he had died out there. At least they would have had the pension.

Suddenly his eye met Boxer's and Boxer winked. It was a solemn, man-to-man, “this-is-a-bit-of-a-fiasco” wink. Jim grinned, and Berni, watching Boxer, outgrinned the pair of them.

All at once a curious sense of well-being possessed Carver and, with it, a ready acceptance of responsibility. So he had felt when a new draft of recruits had been handed over to him, before going up the line during the uneventful nights before the March push, but this time it was without the accompanying knowledge that, in a matter of weeks, days even, most of the youngsters would be dead, blinded, or maimed. These children would not be called upon to face a creeping barrage, and none of them would lie out on a clay bank, with machine-gun bullets embedded in their bodies. It was all over, and he had survived. There was some sort of future. He, and all the other survivors, would make quite sure there was a future, and that Private Barnes, No. 2727650, would be the last youth to throw away his life at the behest of a pot-bellied base Major. Without doubt, the very last one.

“Where are the babies?” he suddenly demanded. “Why aren't they here? Who's looking after them?”

“The District Nurse took them down to the Settlement, and said they could stay,” faltered Louise. “When Mum was so ill I couldn't manage ... they kept crying....”

He reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

“You've been fine ... fine, Lou. I'll get somebody before I go back. I don't know where or how, but I'll get somebody. Here, I expect you'll need this,” and he pulled two folded pound notes out of his breeches pocket, and laid them beside her.

Boxer's eyes widened, and he nudged the steadily gulping Berni.

“Look, Berni ... it's money!”

Jim's mouth twitched, this time involuntarily. There was something irresistibly comic about Boxer's bullet head, and the way his pink ears stood out, reminding Jim of a ditched ammunition lorry with both doors swinging free.

“That's housekeeping,” said Jim; “this is for you—new ones!” And his hand emerged once more from his breeches pocket, holding a pile of new sixpences. Ceremoniously he placed a coin in front of each twin, and a third in Judith's free hand.

Archie, who had said nothing so far, put his hand in his pocket and jerked it to and fro. He drew it out and scattered a pile of coppers on the cloth.

“Share 'em out, kids,” he said, getting up suddenly. He winked, heavily, in Jim's direction, and at that moment yet another fragment of one of Ada's letters came back to Carver.
“Archie's earning, and never seems to be short. He's saving for a motor-cycle. He helps me sometimes.”

Archie got up, stretched, and lit a cigarette from a packet of Goldflake. He performed these movements with studied nonchalance. Watching him out of the corner of his eye, Jim marked the challenge in the way the boy blew smoke through his nose. There was something aloof and vaguely contemptuous in Archie's attitude, almost as though, after four years' reign as the man about the house, he resented his father's return, and was by no means ready to abdicate. “He helps me sometimes”—Jim wondered grimly how often, and quietly prepared for battle.

1

THE
Frasers, mother and son, moved into Number Twenty-Two the week Mrs. Carver died, and Esme, from his mother's bedroom, watched the funeral party leave for Shirley churchyard.

Although only eight years old, Esme was no stranger to death, and a funeral was not a new experience.

Less than a month ago they had buried Grannie Fraser, and Esme himself had ridden with his mother in the first carriage that had set out from the tall house in Kensington, where he had grown up, to Waterloo Station, and thence to Woking.

A few days later the Kensington house was sold, and they came to the Avenue, the house having been found, and purchased on their behalf, by Mr. Harold Godbeer, managing clerk to Stillman and Vickers, the solicitors who administered the estate of Grannie Fraser, and that of her son, the late Lieutenant Guy Fraser, sometime of the London Scottish Regiment.

Guy Fraser had been killed on the Marne, in 1914, and ever since, his pretty widow and their only child had lived with the Lieutenant's mother.

There was enough money, from the two estates, to have kept the Kensington house going, but Mr. Harold, who seemed to be taking rather more than a professional interest in the affairs of pretty Eunice Fraser, had persuaded her that this would be both uneconomical and inconvenient, and that a far more sensible course would be to find a little house in a
pleasant outer suburb, somewhere not too far from his own bachelor lodging in Lucknow Road, Addiscombe.

Eunice had let herself be persuaded. Bewildered by the abrupt demise of her husband, who seemed to be beside her in a fetching new uniform one moment, and nothing more than a photograph on the piano the next, she had promptly moored herself to the ample bosom of her formidable Scots mother-in-law, and weathered out the remaining years of the war in Mrs. Fraser's well-staffed, well-ordered, town house, emerging only to tend a stationery stall at a war charities bazaar, or take little Esme to see Peter Pan's statue in Kensington Gardens.

Eunice was quite unused to fending for herself and floated through the days pleasantly enough, occupying herself, and such mind as she possessed, in looking pretty, playing simple pieces on the piano, gazing into shop-windows, and reading the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood, particularly
East Lynne,
in which she saw herself as Lady Isobel, prior to that heroine's elopement with the wicked Captain Levison.

She was, indeed, rather like a mid-nineteenth-century wife from the leisured classes; there had always been a Mr. Carlyle to cosset her, pay her bills, and encourage her belief that life, for all but the collarless manual workers, was a gentle, downstream drift in an Arthurian barge.

The only girl in a large family, she had been spoiled by her father and brothers. At seventeen she had met Lieutenant (then plain “Mr.”) Fraser, and at eighteen she had married him, and shared his modest private income in a small country house his mother had owned near Ascot.

She was petite, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, utterly trusting, and quite stupid. Understandably her husband had adored her, for she possessed, in generous measure, that characteristic feminine helplessness sought after by the chivalrous.

Lieutenant Guy was chivalrous to a fault, so chivalrous in fact that he was blown to pieces by a grenade, whilst kneeling to hold a water-bottle to the mouth of a wounded enemy. In the autumn of 1914 there were still a number of men who saw war in terms of Rupert Brooke's poetry, and the Battle of Zutphen. Even so, Lieutenant Fraser's action, in the midst of a precipitate scramble for cover, so amazed his Company
Sergeant Major that he too stopped dead in his tracks, and was shot through the knee by a sniper.

At eight-and-a-half little Esme was beginning to look like his father. He had the same narrow, sensitive face, large and serious grey eyes, and excessively romantic disposition, part inherited, and part cultivated by the bedtime stories of his gentle mother, and the nineteenth-century romances he pored over in his grandmother's house, from the moment he could tackle three-syllabled words.

Like his mother Esme was never really aware of the present, but unlike her his mind was not a comfortable vacuum. On the contrary it seethed with action, ranging from single-handed captures of Spanish settlements, to participation in thundering cavalry charges, alongside Rupert of the Rhine, and Warwick the King-maker.

Gertrude, the old Nannie who had charge of him throughout the Kensington part of his childhood, had been put to some pains to bring him out of these engagements in time for his meals, and his passion for dressing up as a Cavalier, or the right-hand man of the Scarlet Pimpernel, played havoc with his mother's extensive wardrobe.

He was fond of his mother in the way one is fond of an attractive spaniel bitch wont to curl up cosily out of range of one's feet in front of the fire, but his romantic idealisation of his soldier father claimed a larger share of his thoughts, ousting even Rupert, Jack Shepherd, and the Nevilles. He saw Lieutenant Fraser, not as a quixotic Territorial, whose life was untidily snuffed out in a muddy French turnip field, but as the embodiment of Arthurian manhood who went singing into battle, was killed opposing fantastic odds, and was subsequently borne away by mourning queens to a Flanders Avalon.

Without even knowing it, his mother gave positive encouragement to the colourful illusion, and consequently Esme was spared, throughout his entire childhood, the bewilderment of a child who has no recollection of his father. Not until he was in his late 'teens, and had read books like Aldington's
Death of a Hero,
did Esme see Guy Fraser as he actually was at the moment of his death.

From the time of their settling in Number Twenty-Two,
Esme had disliked Harold Godbeer, the over-solicitous solicitor's clerk, and as time went on, and Harold became a daily visitor to the house, the boy's resentment grew into a repugnance that was altogether disporportionate to the earnest little man's shortcomings.

Harold was spare, eager, bespectacled, and physically frail. He was also fussy, pedantic, and inclined to be pompous. His pomposity was that of a man who had always been unsure of himself, and was at an additional disadvantage when dealing with a woman whose china-blue eyes, and tiny rosebud mouth, caused him to stammer every time he began to speak to her.

Basically, Harold was kind, amiable, and genuinely sympathetic towards a woman whose abysmal ignorance of money matters, he sensed, was certain to lead her to penury if somebody with a business training was not on hand with good advice.

Harold was very conscious of Esme's sour dislike, and did what he could do combat it, even bringing him little gifts from time to time, and going so far as to read two chapters of
Huckleberry Finn
to the boy the night that he and his mother moved in, and Esme had to sleep on cushions in the back bedroom.