The Dreaming Suburb (33 page)

He and Louise might never have met had that gap in the fence been opposite any other back gate. He came blundering through the gap about eleven o'clock one morning, holding a forearm in a huge fist, and grunting somewhat with the pain of a four-inch gash, caused by the bill-hook.

He was losing blood rapidly when he reached the Carvers' kitchen door, and Louise, who happened to be hanging up washing, saw that there was no time to send for a doctor, and rendered first-aid on the spot.

They did not so much as speak until a tourniquet was fixed, the bandaging was done, and Jack was sipping hot, sweet tea at the kitchen table. Then she made use of an expression that was familiar to everyone who knew her, and fitted almost every situation in which she had found herself since babyhood. She said:

“There, now! What a pity it is!”

Practically everything was a pity to Louise—a stray cat's appetite, the dog Strike's suspicious barks at tradesmen, minor mishaps such as Jack's cut, or a train disaster involving the deaths of hundreds of passengers. The expression covered the entire range of humanity's ills, from earthquakes, plagues, and famines, to spilt milk, mosquito bites, and ingrown toenails.

Jack Strawbridge, sipping his tea, looked at her with interest. He did not see the sagging flatness of her figure, or the startling prominence of the eyes, only an immense compassion, that seemed to emanate from her like a lighthouse beam, and was now directed exclusively on him. For a few seconds he basked in its warmth, then he made up his mind.

“I'm a widower,” he said, simply and without ambiguity.

It seems hard to believe that their courtship was launched by that single remark, but such was the case. No man had ever made an approach to Louise, direct or indirect, and possibly this had something to do with the complete success of Jack Strawbridge's assault. Or it may have been that Louise, having so much to do about the house, found no time or opportunity to be coy, even at that first meeting. At all events, they made up their minds on the spot, and from that day on Jack ate all his mid-day meals in the kitchen of Number Twenty, and returned there, washed and changed, but not shaved, at precisely seven each evening, in order to take Louise for a stroll as far as the mill.

They never went further than the mill, and once they were out they never turned back before reaching it. If it was raining they sat in the kitchen and read the evening paper together. Occasionally they went down to the Granada and watched a film through twice from the nine-pennies. It was a placid undemanding courtship on both sides, and it was hard to see how it could ever progress towards marriage, for Jack supported an invalid mother on his two pounds fifteen a week, and Louise never once contemplated leaving her father and sisters to fend for themselves.

The strange thing about this static element in their association was that it did not appear to worry either of them, and in time Jim, Judy, both sets of twins, and Jack's mother (who never appeared on the scene at all) accepted it with the same
equanimity as that of the two people most concerned. The Carvers liked Jack, and Jack liked the Carvers. That was all there was to it, and all, presumably, there ever would be to it. Whether or not his daughter embraced her suitor in the shadow of the old mill when they went for their walk, Jim never knew, and whether they would ever get married he did not know either. His elder daughter's admirer ate a good many meals in the kitchen, but his appetite was no strain on the household budget, because he more than made up for what he consumed by a steady supply of fresh vegetables, taken from the now cultivated nursery over the fence. After a time, when the south end of the plot was cleared and planted, Louise stopped buying vegetables altogether. This distressed her a little, for she hated disappointing the tradesmen who called for orders.

“I've got so much fruit, I don't know what to do with it,” she told the disgruntled greengrocer's van-man, throwing open the pantry door, and displaying apples, and plums, and gooseberries, and red currants, stacked neatly along the shelves in rows of boxes and punnets.

“Lumme, you 'ave, 'aven't you?” said the van-man.

“Yes,” said Louise apologetically, “it's such a pity!”

5

It did not take Judy Carver very long to discover that she had lost Esme for ever.

Her suspicions were aroused within hours of Esme's first kiss in the greenhouse, but a period of some weeks elapsed between the first nagging doubts, and the shattering realisation that her dream would always remain a dream, and that nothing short of a miracle would ever transform it into reality.

But by that time Judy had ceased to believe in miracles, ancient or modern, for she had ceased to believe in divine mercy and justice. She longed desperately to die, and be done with it all.

People of the Avenue saw their dreams recede and fade every day, and most of them rode out the shock wave within
hours. But their cases were different. For them there were always new dreams.

Judy's dream was a good deal more insistent than the dreams of the other people of the Avenue. Some might even have called it an obsession. All along the crescent people had dreams but, for the most part, they were recognised as such, and kept handy for odd moments, when nothing much was doing. They were aspirins, not opium pipes, stage dressing, not the stage itself.

Judy's dream had never been tailored to fit a plan, like Archie's, or Elaine Frith's, whose dreams were always being adapted to meet expanding opportunities. Their dreams confined themselves to the present and the future, but Judy's went back into the past, back to the hot summer morning, ten years ago, when she and Esme had played Sleeping Beauty in the gazebo beside the Manor Lake. Fundamentally, it had not changed in all that time, it was still centred on marriage to Esme. Only the scenery had been changed a little as Judy passed from childhood to adolescence.

In the beginning they were to marry in a Cathedral, later, more modestly at Shirley Church, and later still, after Esme had expressed certain doubts concerning his spiritual beliefs, the wedding moved to the Register Office, in East Croydon. In the same way, the threshold that he was to carry her over had been modified, to keep it in line with practicalities. Once, they were going to share a Manor, like the old mansion in the woods, later a country cottage, with diamond-latticed panes, lupins, and an undulating thatched roof where swallows nested, but by the time Esme had left school the cottage had become one of the new semi-detached villas that they were beginning to build in the new roads half-way between Wickham and Shirley Church Road. In the end, had circumstances demanded it, it might have become a caravan, or a hut on one of the allotments. It was Esme that mattered, Esme and the child—the “cherub”, as Judy called her, for the child was a girl, who could wear pretty little poke bonnets, and suck her thumb gravely as she bounced along in her shiny new pram, pushed by Judy, an unusually silent child, who saved all her gurgles for Esme's evening homecomings.

All these years Judy had been waiting for a sign. Sooner or
later, she reasoned, her dream must communicate itself to Esme. At the magic of the password or countersign it would then unfold, like the miraculous dragonfly in
Water Babies,
and their future would merge, as it was fated to merge from the very beginning, from the first touch of his lips in the gazebo. God had promised her, and God did not lead the devout and the prayerful up garden paths. Judy still said her prayers out of bed, even in the depths of winter, and Esme's name had never been dropped from those prayers, not once, since the day they had met.

Sometimes it had seemed as though God were giving Esme a gentle nudge. There was the day when she sprained her ankle, and he carried her for a mile home through the woods. There were the occasions when they both attended the same Avenue parties, and he called her out in “Postman's Knock”, or blinked solemnly at her in “Winking”. There was the recent and more mature moment, when he had talked to her of his ambitions during their picnic on Shirley Hills. These were the modest peaks of Judy's love-graph and, while the field was still open, she asked for no more than the limited reassurance they brought her. It was the day following the Stafford-Fyffe dance that the graph took its first plunge; after that it went on plunging until it shot off the page.

Judy had half-hoped that Esme would come in and tell her about the dance before she went off to work that morning. When he did not, when her lunch hour went by, and she had seen nothing of him, she made up her mind to call after tea, and hear his account first-hand.

Since leaving school the previous year, Judy had been working as a counter-hand at Boots, at the corner of Cawn-pore Road. She liked it well enough. The shop had a certain aura of luxury, absent at other chemists. Most of the girls who worked there came on from the Grammar School, and Judy, who had remained at Lucknow Road Council School until she was fifteen, was agreeably surprised by their friendliness and lack of snobbery. She worked in the toilet department, selling soap, toothbrushes, and hot-water bottles, and there was a chance of graduating to cosmetics in time. It was what her father had described as a “clean job”, with some sort
of prospects, providing “she didn't get uppity, as so many of the flappers did nowadays.”

About six o'clock that evening Judy slipped next door via the fence. As the former bridesmaid she was on excellent terms with Eunice and Harold, and Eunice invariably made her very welcome, for the years with Esme had made Judy a good listener, and Harold usually spent the two hours following supper with
The Times,
which he read page by page, resenting interruptions.

Esme, Judy learned, was in his study, and had asked not to be disturbed.

“How did he enjoy last night?” she asked.

Eunice sighed and pouted. “I haven't been able to get a word out of him, have I, Harold dear?”

Harold grunted, and Eunice ran on: “Come to think of it, Judith, he's been very odd all day; he was moody at breakfast—well, not exactly moody—preoccupied would describe it better perhaps, preoccupied and ... and
distrait,
you know?”

Not knowing the precise meaning of “distrait”, Judy said loyally: “I suppose he was tired. Mr. Hartnell, the bandsman, didn't get home until very late. I heard him come in.”

“Well, dear,” said Eunice, “after all the fuss and bother I had to get him to go, I
was
looking forward to hearing all about it. If you can't go to dances yourself”—she looked reproachfully at Harold's paper—“you can at least hear about them! Perhaps
you
can get it out of him. He'll tell
you
what he wouldn't tell me! Now why don't you slip up and ask him? Then you could tell me, couldn't you?”

Harold looked up from his paper. “Esme said he was writing, and didn't want to be disturbed.”

“Yes, I know he did, dear,” said Eunice placidly, “but you men always say that when you've got something worth talking about, it just saves you bother. Sometimes, Judy, you'd hardly believe me, but
sometimes
a whole evening goes by, and neither of them says a word!”

She got up. “I know—I'll make the coffee, and you shall take it up, just to surprise him!”

Had Judy been less curious to hear about the dance she would have declined this invitation, but the announcement
that Esme was writing reassured her. She knew of Esme's need for an audience and imagined that he would be glad to read aloud what he had written.

She took the tray, containing her own coffee and his, mounted the stairs, and knocked softly on the porch-room door.

There was no answer, and so she went straight in. He was sitting crouched over his desk, and her entry surprised him—so much so that he seemed to her to start up, and bite back an angry exclamation. At the same time his hand shot protectively across the page he was writing, but not quickly enough to mask the size of the note-paper. She had time to see that it was a small sheet, and obviously a letter, for Judy remembered that he always wrote his stories on foolscap.

His nervousness communicated itself to her. She set down the tray, trembling a little.

“It's just your coffee, Esme, your mother thought——”

He flung himself round on her. He had never looked at her, or spoken to her like this before. His face was clouded, almost sulky, his tone tetchy, and complaining.

“Hang it, it's impossible to get any privacy in this blasted house!” he shouted, and then, seeing sudden misery in her face, “—it's not you, Judy, it's ... Mother. She ... she will
poke
into everything! It's enough to drive a man mad!”

Judy remained uncertainly by the door. She was always at a loss when Esme flared up, but he had never been quite like this. Her eye returned to the edge of the half-written letter under his hand. Hastily he tucked it inside a blotter. His action made her heart leap.

“It was just that we ... we wanted to hear about the dance, Esme,” she faltered. “Was there anyone you knew?”

He was clearly feeling very uncomfortable about something, for he found it difficult to meet her eye, and turned sharply away, drifting over to the window.

“Yes, there was someone,” he said in a low voice. “It was Elaine.”

“Elaine?”

“Elaine Frith, the girl opposite. I didn't like the show at first, but later on it warmed up.” He turned back to her, but still failed to look her in the face. “It was a pretty marvellous
‘do,' Judy ... must have cost them a small fortune. Look—would you mind, I ... I've got to work now? Would you tell Mum I meant what I said about not being disturbed?”

Yes, of course.”

She took her cup and went swiftly downstairs. She was confused rather than alarmed by his information and irritability. He obviously resented being questioned about the dance. He was writing a letter that he wanted no one to see. Could he have got into some sort of trouble last night? Was he writing an apology to Mrs. Stafford-Fyffe, or the someone to whom he had been rude? Elaine Frith, the girl opposite? That was incredible, surely? She was never allowed out for a walk, much less to a dance, scheduled to end at 1 a.m. Her mother was in hospital.
That
might account for Elaine being at the dance, but why should Esme be writing to her, when she only lived at Number Seventeen, immediately opposite?