The Dreaming Suburb (47 page)

“Let's Put Out the Light and Go to Bed?”

“That was it! Well, it's a relaxed number, and you've got to swing
with
it, not against it. You could put it over, Margy! You could put it over swell!”

It was an odd conversation for honeymooners, comfortably in bed, and enfolded in one another's arms, but Ted and Margy had settled for one another long ago, and stood in small need of fresh adjustments.

She purposely avoided mentioning her plan until the honeymoon was practically over. Then she launched it at him, sure of herself, and sure of his reaction to it As the train moved out of Crewe she said:

“We're not going back to Al, Ted.”

He stared at her, overwhelmed by the announcement.

“Not going to Al ... you mean we've left Al... ? Margy love, you're dreaming!”

She opened her new handbag, and took out a folded sheet of newsprint. It was a page torn from the trade periodical, and one of the “Wanted” advertisements was ringed. It read:

Wanted for auditions. Instrumentalists specialising in dance-music. New Orchestra. Good prospects. Write c/o Mrs. E. Hartnell, c/o 71a Cawnpore Road, Addiscombe, Surrey.

He read it slowly, and then waited, while she handed the collector their tickets to punch.

“This is crazy, Margy! You need capital for a thing like this, and we've spent practically everything we've got on the furniture and the honeymoon.”

“We haven't, Ted; at least, I haven't. Look!”

She dived into her bag again, and gave him a post-office savings book. It was totted up in pencil and he saw that there was a credit balance of £260.

“Where did you get two hundred and sixty pounds?” he asked faintly.

She squeezed his hand. “Aunt Dolly gave me one hundred pounds that I didn't tell you about She said it would be a nest-egg for a baby, but we just can't have babies—not yet, Ted. Dad gave me another ten pounds, and the rest is what I've saved. It's enough to start with. We need down payments on instruments, and an advertising campaign. We'll make out, you see if we don't!”

He contemplated her with awe and admiration.

“Margy, you're wonderful, but suppose we don't get any engagements, how will we pay the people we engage?”

“Well, that's a silly way to start a business!” she exclaimed. “You just make up your mind that you'll get engagements. Al always got them, didn't he? And we're going to be a lot better than Al. We're going to
have
class, not just
tell
people we've got it.”

She patted him, like a mother reassuring a small boy on his way to begin first term at Boarding School. “Don't worry, Ted, leave everything to me.”

He did worry, all the way to East Croydon Station, but he need not have done, for on arrival at her home they found, in addition to scores of requests for auditions, an invitation, sponsored by Margy's father, to quote for a string of socials organised by the area branches of the British Legion. They quoted low, even before the orchestra was selected, and then paid a month's rent in advance on a local rehearsal room. The day their tender was accepted by the Legion Ted took the final plunge, and fixed the day for auditions.

One of the first musicians to appear was Al. He was seeking not an audition but an explanation. Margy had sent in their notices from Blackpool, but Al knew Ted, and was confident that he could talk him round.

“You can't go through with this, pal,” he told him. “I gave you your first chance, didn't I?”

Ted was wretchedly embarrassed, but Margy was at hand
to do the talking for him. She stood squarely in front of Al.

“Everyone's got to get a first chance from somewhere,” she snapped, “and Ted would have been a drummer no matter what! Your finding him was just your good luck, not his!”

“Oh, I dunno, Margy ...” protested Ted miserably. “Al and me ...”

“Shut up, Ted,” said Margy, very firmly.

Al tried a flank attack.

“I never could stick seeing a man run by his missus,” he said, an unlit cigarette wobbling slackly on his lower lip, “and I must say you seem to have handed over your trousers even quicker than most honeymooners, pal!”

It was the last exchange of conversation that was to pass between them, and it was terminated by a slap from Margy that brought a vivid flush to Al's pale cheeks, and sent him staggering back against the piano.

Margy then followed him up, ignoring Ted's yelp of protest.

“Don't, Margy ... don't do that to Al!”

“You talk cheap and you
are
cheap,” she shouted at the band leader. “I've always thought so, right from the first day I sang for you, and now Ted's going to have a real band, not a half-baked imitation of a Yank set-up like yours! You get out of here! We've paid for our rehearsal rooms and that's something you never did until you were County Courted!”

Al regarded her steadily for a moment, then slowly withdrew his hand from his injured cheek and hitched his narrow shoulders.

“Ted, old boy,” he drawled, “I'm real sorry for you, brother! You seemed to have hitched yourself to a first-class bitch!”

He turned, intending to drift out through the wide door, and for a couple of yards he moved at his accustomed pace, half-roll, half-slouch. But as he crossed the threshold his exit was suddenly accelerated, not by Margy, but by Ted, who suddenly shot past the piano, and planted his toe squarely, and with terrible force, into the seat of Al's dirty flannels.

It was the first time either of them had seen Al move fast.
He seemed to fly horizontally out through the door, and half-way along the entrance passage, slithering to a stop, face down, at the feet of a spare, bespectacled young man, who was on the way in, a violin case tucked under his arm. He was on his feet again in a flash, and before Ted could lay hands on him he was gone, with the violinist still poised on the doorstep, his eyebrows raised in an expression of quizzical interest.

“Was he
that
bad?” he asked Ted, and then, hearing Margy's peal of laughter, “I do hope I make a rather better impression!”

From that moment nothing seemed to go wrong.

It was as though the final brush with Al had released in Ted some secret store of energy, converting him, in a matter of seconds, from a shambling, good-natured, patient drudge, into an alert, cool-headed executive, a fit mate for the dynamic Margy, who hereafter made all the decisions. She simply passed them in private to Ted, so that the Hartnell Eight, as they came to be known, were never quite sure from whom the real power originated, and learned to obey man or wife with equal promptness.

There was nothing jazzy about the Hartnell Eight. They never appeared in fancy uniforms, like other dance orchestras, but wore sober, well-pressed dinner-jackets, and addressed one another in quiet, sober tones between the numbers. They soon acquired a local reputation for sobriety and deportment, but there was no stuffiness about their work on the platform. Their time and their harmony were faultless, and they obviously put in plenty of hard work at rehearsals.

Margy accompanied them to all their engagements, though she was not officially included in their number. Sometimes she sang an interval number, and sometimes she played the sax solo. Sometimes, when Ted was back with the drums, she made announcements, and judged competitions.

Wherever she went she always seemed to bring them luck, and to make friends that led to other engagements, but most of the time they were playing she stood quietly beside the piano, looking across at Ted. Arthur, the violinist who had witnessed Al's expulsion, often saw a glance pass between them, initiated by Margy. Arthur was a very observant young man, and it seemed to him, at times like these, that Margy was simply saying:

“I told you! We're on our way up, Ted, so don't worry about it. Leave everything to me.”

1

LICKAPAW
, the prodigal cat of Number Four, died suddenly in the mid-thirties.

He was, according to Becky Clegg's reckoning, fifteen years old, and all things considered he had worn very well, for although, in the years of his decline, he spent much more time at home, and left the roofs of Delhi and Cawnpore Roads comparatively free for younger bloods, he enjoyed a brief Indian summer of romance, and in his extreme old age set out on a last hegira for the purpose of discovering new wives.

Whether he actually found any or not it is impossible to say, for after a few days' absence he was discovered dying in the Nursery by Louise's fiancé, Jack Strawbridge, who carried him into Number Twenty, for Jim to take home to Becky.

He died in the kitchen of Number Four, surrounded, like some feline Charles II, by respectful courtiers, and Becky, the chief mourner, dug a grave over against the highboard fence that divided their garden from the Nursery.

Jim Carver, who was very fond of Becky, made her a little cross with
Lickapaw,
1919-35 scored on it with a red-hot poker.

The dog Strike did not die. Strike seemed to have lapped the elixir of permanent puppyhood, for he never quieted down, and took to wheezing in his basket like other old dogs,
but continued to prance madly about the kitchen the moment Jim returned from work. Jim had half-trained him to fetch slippers and cany newspapers, but he was never very good at this sort of thing. He gambolled and wriggled too much, and seemed unable to forget the lively circumstances in which they had met at the Elephant and Castle.

Strike was getting plenty of exercise these days, for Jim Carver was wrestling with his conscience, and when Jim did this he felt compelled to march. Whenever he had a problem on his mind Jim did not walk, but marched, as he had once marched to and fro along the greasy
pavé
in France.

Jim's conscience was giving him a great deal of trouble nowadays, so much in fact that it was upsetting his entire conception of Brotherly Love and International Socialism. For seventeen years now Jim had been a passionately convinced pacifist, a very militant pacifist it is true, but still a pacifist, that is, one who had pledged himself never again to fight for King, Country, and Empire and one who was opposed, to the point of bloody revolution, to rearmament and the traffic in weapons of war. His feelings regarding these matters had once been the burning convictions of a convert, not in any way subject to the fluctuations of the international scene. He had seen the boy on the bank at Mons and had therefore seen the light. War was a capitalists' racket. War was a profiteers’ ruse. War was fought by the masses, who were the inevitable losers thereby. Therefore war was wrong. All wars were wrong.

But were they? What happened in cases like those of Manchuria and Abyssinia? What must a democrat do when Democracy itself was challenged, when the machinery for the outlawing of war was seen to be outmoded and useless? What did a man do when faced by the kind of challenge already looming up from Germany, where thousands of pacifists, as earnest as himself, were being torn from their beds, thrust into camps, and left to rot and starve, or to die under the bullets of uniformed thugs? What happened in one's own Avenue, when a young fool like Sydney Frith, the boy opposite, donned a black shirt and topboots, and promised to start the same sort of thing over here? In other words, where did one
draw the line between doctrinaire pacifism and downright cowardice?

To find answers to these questions Jim began taking long evening walks in Manor Woods, and in the winding paths that converged on the derelict manor he found, ultimately, some sort of compromise. It was quiet in here, especially down by the broken terrace in front of the lake, where the weed had multiplied with the years, and water-lilies still floated about round the rotting pagoda.

All these years Jim had leaned heavily upon the League, and while the League remained pacifism seemed practical. More than fifty nations had signed their willingness to accept Jim's ideas about war, and surely it was not possible to flout more than fifty nations, with their sanctions, and shrill threats of diplomatic ostracism? Unfortunately Mussolini, and before him the Japanese War-lords, had shown that such a thing was indeed possible. Japan had carried full-scale war into Manchuria four years ago, and Mussolini was obviously not going to allow the League's frowns to frighten him out of Abyssinia. Meantime, Hitler, the noisiest lunatic of them all, was behaving as though the League of Nations was an elderly spinster aunt, who disapproved of rough games but need on no account be taken very seriously.

The point was, where would this defiance end and did it mean that, in order to preserve world authority, Geneva would have to become an arsenal? Would loyal signatories be obliged to go to war to stop a war, to kill Italians in order to save Abyssinians?

For several weeks Jim put his faith in sanctions, but when Mussolini swept gleefully into Addis Ababa, and the sad-eyed Negus began wandering cheerlessly about Britain, Jim's vision of the boy on the bank began to fade; he became very strident, even for a pacifist, in demanding instant action against the people who were playing ducks and drakes with his conscience.

Unfortunately for him he was a very just and reasonable man. For sixteen years he had been howling for disarmament and, unlike most pacifists, he could follow the arguments of the Tory politicians when they said that wars could not be fought with rolled-up Order Papers. The election of the
autumn of 1935 was the most wretched Jim had ever entered upon, for here was Baldwin, pledging support for the League, yet asking for a mandate to rearm, while here was Jim's candidate, trotting out all the familiar clichés about capitalist arms barons, but coupling them with a noisy demand to sit on Mussolini! Small wonder that Jim took to the woods, and when tired of marching sat moodily on the terrace, throwing sticks for Strike.

Meanwhile the beeches behind him turned bronze, and russet, and crimson, and yet more plaster trickled from the facade of the old, blind-eyed Manor, that seemed to Jim to stand waiting, ringed in woods, for the Armageddon that had moved up in the queue, and taken the place of the Social Millennium.