The Dreaming Suburb (30 page)

“I don't think you ought to worry,” she told him, “you're very ‘light' indeed. No other partner I've had is half as light.” (What was that in
Eve's World
“Build up his confidence, make him feel bigger for having met you!” Well, she wasn't doing so badly for a beginner.)

“I say, can
you
Charleston?” he went on, enthusiastically.

“I have, tonight,” said Elaine, “and it's a lot easier than it looks.”

“But where on earth did you
learn?
”

“In a magazine,” she admitted; “then I practised with a chair in the bedroom.”

He laughed, and the laugh relaxed him. He saw, in her answering smile, that she had large dimples, and that her eyes were very blue, and prettily flecked, and as he noticed these things, as her lips parted to display her white, evenly-set teeth, a sensation like a mild spasm of cramp stole into his stomach. It caught him by surprise. At first he did not recall ever having experienced such a sensation before, and it occurred to-him at once that perhaps this was “it”, perhaps this was the thing that all the films were about, the “love-at-first-sight” that seemed to find its way into almost all the books, even straightforward adventure stories, the thing that poets and dance-tune composers wrote so much about, the thing that people said (in jest, he had always imagined) made the world go round. But then he told himself, this wasn't first
sight. He had seen Elaine in the Avenue for years, and had never given her more than a curious glance, and even those glances had been prompted more by the monastic reputation of Number Seventeen than by the girl's appearance or magnetism.

He wondered whether it was anything to do with the way she looked tonight, or with the soft wail of the saxophone that still issued from beyond the laurelled arch, or with the shaded lights that cast a pinkish glow over the crowded conservatory, or with the general background of laughter and excited voices that surrounded them.

Then it occurred to him that he
had
experienced the sensation before, or something very like it, oh the numerous occasions when he was standing outside Longjohn's study, having been sent there with the twins by exasperated form-masters. It was curious that the two sensations should be so similar, the one an anticipation of sharp physical pain, the other a feeling traditionally centred on the heart. The comparison appealed to his sense of humour, and he grinned across at her.

“I'm so glad I came,” he admitted, “I nearly didn't—it was my mother who bullied me into it.”

“I think your mother is very pretty,” she said. (“Praise his mother—that's always a good start.”) “She doesn't look nearly old enough to have a boy your age.” (“Stress her youth if possible.”)

“How old do you think I am?” he asked seriously.

She looked at him steadily. “I
know
how old you are, Esme. I know much more about you than you know about me. You're sixteen-and-a-half, aren't you? I know a lot about most people in the Avenue—our end of it, anyway. I've watched, you see, and guessed, and then watched again to see if I was right. I remember when you came, and when the Carvers came, and when the big boy Carver married the grocer's daughter, and went into the shop at the corner. A girl he went with had a baby. Lots of people never knew that, because the girl moved.”

Esme's eyes opened wide, and she acknowledged his surprise with a merry twitch of her mouth.

“He's got a new shop, now, at the bottom of Delhi Road,
and others in Wickham and Addington. And those old maids at Number Four—they don't have parlour concerts any more, because Mr. Hartnell, who lodges there, has joined a jazz band, and plays out every night. He's here now, playing the drums. I could tell you everything about the people in the Avenue, but most of them aren't worth talking about.”

He was suitably astonished. She went on:

“I'm never allowed out, you see, and I wouldn't be here now if my mother wasn't in hospital. Daddy's all right, when Mother isn't there; and anyway he's so different lately.” She had been skipping away from the etiquette books for some minutes now, and suddenly she went right off the circumscribed path. “I think he's fallen in love with somebody else, and it's made him ... made him kinder, I suppose.”

Esme was obviously shocked. The people in the Avenue weren't the sort of people who conducted themselves in that way. Fathers went to work, and came home at dusk; mothers stayed home in the mornings and cooked, or went shopping, and took the children to and from school; sons and daughters passed in an out of the houses with their satchels and music-cases. There was an unchanging rhythm about each house in particular, and about the Avenue as a whole. Fathers didn't fall in love just like that—not people like her father at any rate, not funny little men with bald patches, and grey, drooping moustaches. She must be what everybody told him
he
was, a romantic, who had had her nose in too many books for too many years.

“You can't possibly
know
that, Elaine,” he told her earnestly, “you're just imagining it.”

She gave her shoulders an odd little shake, and he interpreted the gesture as impatience on her part to waste precious time talking about dull people in the Avenue.

“The Interval's over now, Esme,” she said. “Let's have our dance. It's another waltz.”

They had their dance, and all the other dances, for the cider-cup had further enlivened the already boisterous company, and experiments could now be tried out on the floor without fear or shame. In a corner, beneath the dais, a sweating Ted Hartnell beamed down on Elaine and Esme gravely learning to Charleston, and bobbing about in a small
orbit to the exhilarating evolutions of the Heebie-Jeebies, and as he watched he noticed that they smiled into one another's eyes, with chaos all round them, and moved to brisk accompaniment of Elaine's commands.

“Both
hands on my shoulders—that's it—now twist the left foot from the toes, and throw the right out—
that's
it—no,
twist
it... hold me a little closer, so that we go up and down on the same beat....
No,
Esme, bob from the waist; your feet don't leave the floor in this one!”

And as the evening progressed, and Mrs. Stafford-Fyffe, expertly squired by the young man from the Foreign Office, glided among the young people with shining eyes, the tide of hilarity began to ebb a little. Bobbed heads were seen to nestle on braided lapels, and moist powder exchange cheek for cheek, trips to the cloak-room became more frequent, in order that swift repairs could be made, and not a moment of such an evening wasted.

Eleven o'clock, midnight, one o'clock. Al Swinger received his instructions to play
Good-night, Sweetheart,
but determined to give generous measure managed to sandwich
I'll See You in my Dreams
and
Ever So Goosey
between the command and the last waltz.

A stuttered vote of thanks to Mrs. Stafford-Fyffe and her diplomatic M.C.,
Auld Lang Syne,
with plenty of billowing forward and back,
The King,
and a rush for coats and scarves, for it was snowing outside, or had been, they said. Then it was over, with a tide of eager young voices exclaiming delight, as they poured out on to the snow-covered drive, and piled into the cars and the taxis that moved up to the brightly lit portico.

Shouts, laughter, and more squealing from the girls, most of whom had now tied coloured scarves under their chins, and were letting their coats swing free. The last taxi slipped away, and Mrs. Stafford-Fyffe turned ecstatically to the young diplomat:

“How many new members, Aubrey, darling?”

He told her nearly two hundred, with the promise of more to come when subscribers had small change about them.

“Topping! Oh,
topping!”
she exclaimed, and you were a pet, Aubrey, a
perfect, perfect pet!
”

4

Elaine and Esme had not ordered a taxi, but neither minded the walk home through the soft snow, certainly not Esme, who glowed with delight when Elaine slipped her gloved hand through his arm, and fell into step with him, just as though he had been walking her home through the crisp night for years without end.

It was a perfect night for new lovers. The stage might have been set for them, at least, so thought Esme, dumb with wonder, as they came out from behind the beech clump, and saw the old Shirley Mill silvered in bright moonlight on their left.

The wind had dropped, and the light snowfall made the night very still. Now and then a car glided by, its wheels making no noise beyond a pleasant scrunch, and when they reached the decline, at the crest of Shirley Rise, Elaine's fingers took a firmer grip upon his, lest she should slip in heels that were not made for walking in snow.

They spoke very little, just an odd, occasional remark about the weather, or the dance, and it was not until they had turned into the Avenue that Elaine said:

“I've got to go in the back way. Daddy left the key under a flower-pot in the greenhouse.”

The moonlight here was so bright that every house in the Avenue stood out clearly, looking like gabled cottages in a pantomime scene. Not a light showed along the wide sweep of the crescent, and snow had blown into shallow drifts under the dwarf walls of the even numbers.

When they turned the corner by Number Seventeen they were able to look across the meadow, towards the dark mass of Manor Woods, now a blue-black strip between the untrodden snow of the field and the stars. Esme thought he had never seen the woods look so still or so beautiful. Away in the far distance, towards the City, a goods-train rumbled, but there was no other sound as Elaine lifted the latch of the garden door, and beckoned to Esme to follow her inside.

He did so, the cramp in his stomach returning, as she
picked her way down the short path to the tiny greenhouse against the boundary wall.

“It's here,” she said, lifting a hyacinth pot from one of the slatted shelves, and slipping the key in her pocket.

He expected her to turn, close the greenhouse door, and walk past him down towards the back door, but she remained standing inside.

“It's always warm in here,” she told him, “Daddy must have lit the stove. He's terribly fussy about his old plants. Come inside.”

He stepped in, and she pushed the door closed with her foot. The moonlight filtered through the sloping glass roof, and a beam touched her hair, so that it seemed to sparkle like frost rime. There was a heavy, pleasant scent from Edgar's early hyacinths, ranged in dozens of pots along the wall.

“Thank you for being so sweet, Esme,” she said, and then, in her low, level voice, and with a little ripple of laughter: “Don't you want to kiss me goodnight?”

He wanted to very much indeed. He was not quite a stranger to kissing. In the last few years he had attended dozens of Christmas parties in the suburb, and there were always plenty of kissing games—winking, and sardines, and murder, and postman's knock. He had often kissed Judy at these parties, but somehow those kisses, and the clumsy embraces that accompanied them, had never seemed worth remembering on the way home. When it came to the actual meeting of lips, neither he, nor the girl he was kissing, seemed able to melt into one another, as the stars did so effortlessly on the Granada screen. It was one of those things that looked easy but wasn't. He knew that party kisses would be little use to him now, just as he knew that Elaine would never kiss the way other girls kissed, stiffly, jerkily, and stifling an embarrassed giggle.

Neither did she.

Her theory was much more sound. He reached out for her, but, as on the dance-floor, it was she who took charge. There was a deliberation about her that was almost frightening. She put one arm round his waist, and the other along his shoulder, with her palm open against the back of his head,
and thus drew him towards her gently, but with unquestionable firmness.

She kissed him softly, and then returned his kiss, with lips that were slightly parted. She held him like that for a few seconds, and when he shuddered a little she let her weight incline towards him, not very definitely, but enough to make him conscious of a faint eagerness on her part. Nobody had ever kissed him like that before. When she drew away from him, smiling, he remained quite still, his face burning, his heart hammering as never before. Her lips, he thought, were like petals, and he wanted now to remember and remember their freshness, and texture, and warmth. He seized her hand, and pressed it hard against his mouth.

“Elaine....” Now it was intoxicating to speak her name aloud. “Oh, Elaine ... you're wonderful, wonderful.... I never dreamed ...”

She withdrew her hand, and reached past him for the knob of the flimsy door. She did this with the same gentle decisiveness that she had demonstrated in shutting the door and in the act of kissing him.

“I'll have to go in now, Esme.”

(“A few moments the first time ... he must walk home remembering one kiss—not one of twenty”)

“Yes, of course—but tomorrow ... couldn't we go somewhere? I'd like ... I could come over and—”

“No!”
She was very emphatic. “You must never call here, Esme. Mother will be home.”

“But you said the day after tomorrow!” There was real distress in his voice.

“I shall be busy getting ready for her ... you could write—but not here, to the College.”

“I will, I will!”

They were walking swiftly down the garden path towards the back door.

“Goodnight, Elaine—”

“Goodnight, Esme!”

She relented at the very last possible moment, and turning, blew him a kiss. He remained staring at the door for more than a minute, until he saw the reflection of the landing light in the kitchen windows. Then he went slowly out into the
Avenue, and across the road to Number Twenty-Two. He stopped at his gate, and stood regarding his own home for a moment. All these years it had been just a place to live. Now it was the ante-chamber to paradise, within cooing distance of the lady in the tower, who (could it be possible?) lived immediately opposite!