The Dreaming Suburb (48 page)

Things were worse instead of better by the time the beech leaves turned green again.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the idiotic farce of Non-intervention, the vision of the boy on the bank faded completely, and Jim began to have the gravest doubts about pacifism, the League, the Kellogg Pact, and every other topic of so many street-corner orators.

Here was an entire people struggling against a feudalism that had held them in thrall for centuries, and here were madmen like Hitler and Mussolini pouring in men and material to beat them to their knees. Standing aside, like two elderly parsons who were the unwilling spectators of a murder, were his own country and Republican France, both terrified of becoming involved, and doing nothing except to direct a few pious, and none too emphatic protests at the criminals. Eden and Duff Cooper resigned in disgust, and Jim never forgot their courageous action. For a brief moment hope had flared up in Jim, when public opinion failed to swallow the cynical Hoare-Laval plan to partition Abyssinia, but the flame soon died down again. In sullen rage Jim wrote to the headquarters of Canon Dick Sheppard's Peace Pledge Union, demanding the return of his card, the card on which he had pledged himself never again to fight for King or Country.

When it arrived, with the Union's regrets, he tore it up and threw the pieces into Manor Lake. The dog Strike cocked an
ear, puzzled by the flimsiness of the object he was expected to retrieve. Jim noted his expression and his face cleared a little.

“Don't go in after that, Strike,” he told him; “that's no use to anyone any more. Try this boy—after it!”

And he threw a length of stick, perhaps the very piece Esme Fraser had stuck in his belt for a pistol all those years ago, at a time in history when everyone was agreed that another war was unthinkable, and children thought of weapons in terms of pistols, rather than poison-gas, and high-explosives dropped from aeroplanes.

He got up and called briefly to the dog. As he turned back towards the briar-strewn path he saw a young man mooching along ahead of him, hands deep in trouser pockets and shoulders hunched. He recognised him from the back as young Esme Fraser, of Number Twenty-Two, and his mind drifted away from international problems for a moment, to ponder on the boy next door, the one his girl Judith had once cared for so deeply. What did the boy do for a living? Why did he spend so much time up in that little room of his above the porch? Why had Judy suddenly cooled towards him, and flung herself so whole-heartedly into this horse-riding business?

He did not pursue these questions for they did not really interest him. His mind was still preoccupied with the mass rather than the individual, but before he forgot about Esme he reflected that the boy was of the age group most liable to be killed in the next war, as indeed were his own younger boys, Boxer and Berni.

He wondered, for a mere second or so, what Boxer and Berni were up to now. He had heard they had left the Speedway, and found themselves some sort of work in an Amusement Park. Then he smelled burning weeds, from a bonfire on the allotments beyond the woods, and the smell reminded him again of the pitiless war in Spain. They were forming an International Brigade he had heard, to fight for the People, whom some called Nationalists, and others called the Rebels. That was the trouble nowadays. Nothing had a proper label. Nothing was clear-cut, like the black-and-white issues of the 'twenties.

2

Jim might have spared a longer moment to reflect on the twins had he been aware of the exact nature of the “odd job” they had found themselves in an Amusement Park.

They were now stunt-riders, who travelled about with a Nine Days' Wonder known as “The Wall of Death”.

Five times nightly, and several times during afternoon shows, they climbed into a deep, metal well, lashed out at their kick-starts, and began to weave frantic patterns round and round the sides of the pit, crossing and recrossing at breathtaking speeds, to the horror and amazement of patrons who paid sixpence a time to peer at them over the fenced-in rim of the well.

They had quit Speedway racing as soon as it began to bore them, and they now earned better money for doing what looked so dangerous but was, to them, as safe as circling a track.

As time went on they improved on their performances, inventing little thrills for the benefit of the more
blasé
spectators, pretending to fight their way out of speed-wobbles, or folding their arms over their leather-encased chests as they roared up, down, and around the enclosed space. For a time, a very little time, the sport satisfied their craving for noise, movement, and public adulation.

They moved about the country with the promoter, who regarded them as his most valuable asset. They were billed as “The Suicide Twins” and between shows they had their pick of the local girls, who came to see them ride, and were flattered to be seen with them in seafront cafés and cinemas.

None of these mild flirtations developed into a romance, for the twins could never find their counterpart among the young women of the towns they visited. Sometimes Boxer found himself a girl whose company seemed worth cultivating, and sometimes Berni hovered for a moment or two on the point of falling in love, but they were never able to find the pair who could make up a cosy foursome, and it never seemed to occur to them to separate, and go separate ways, not even when the moon was up.

This sometimes proved embarrassing to the girls they invited out. Boxer would turn up with an adoring blonde, “with hair like Veronica Lake”, and propose an expedition to the cinema, but the young lady was invariably disconcerted by the permanent presence of Berni, who tagged along on the other side of her, holding long, technical conversations, about over-drives and expansion chambers with his twin.

It was just the same when Berni found a girl. He would make an appointment to take her out to supper, but when she appeared, dolled up for the occasion, she found two swains instead of one, and spent an evening trying to impress both of them, with the not unnatural result that she scored a low average with each, and was left on her doorstep without a subsequent date being arranged.

What would have proved ideal for the twins, who were just as susceptible to pretty faces and slim legs as any normal young men, would have been a pair of identical twins, like their sisters Fetch and Carry, These might have been interchangeable during the early stages of courtship, and perhaps, in due course, Bernard and Boxer might have come to prefer one to the other, but they never had the good fortune to meet such a pair. Largely on this account their spectacular career as the Suicide Twins came to an abrupt and somewhat muddled end, after Boxer had proposed to Jackie Gulliver during the Carnival Ball at Folkestone.

Jackie Gulliver was a pretty, impulsive, determined young woman, reputedly an extremely good match, for she was the youngest child of Sam Gulliver, of Gulliver's Accessories, a well-known motor-cycle manufacturing firm, in the Midlands.

The twins were using Gulliver's machines at that time, and their dare-devil likenesses, reproduced upside down on streamlined 750-c.c. motor-cycles, appeared in all the trade literature issued by the firm, and in some of Gulliver's advertisements in the popular press.

Sam Gulliver was a genial, self-made man, and when Jackie confessed ta him that she had fallen hopelessly in love with Boxer, and had every intention of marrying him, he surprised her by raising no objection whatever. Sam, in fact, was fond of the twins himself, and he reasoned that a son-inlaw
like Boxer would be more likely to prove a business asset than some of the spotty young men Jackie had already introduced into the house, gawky and spoiled youths, for the most part, who stood around calling him “sir”, and haw-hawing to Brenda, his wife, about drivelling novels, paintings, and similar nonsense.

Sam and Jackie had driven down to Folkestone for the summer carnival that year, and the Wall of Death was carrying a big spread of Gulliver advertising. Sam had even chartered an aeroplane to write
“Gulliver's For Speed”
in the sky above the Leas, and the promoter of the Wall of Death had laid on a special benefit show on behalf of the charities expecting to profit from the carnival.

At the carnival dance on Saturday night Boxer drank more than he could carry, which was quite a lot, and Berni, who made a habit of being two or three pints in arrears, would have persuaded him into the open and sobered him up had he been given the chance. Instead, Jackie Gulliver intervened, and accepted responsibility for him, getting her father's chauffeur to pilot the wavering Boxer to the back of her own Bentley sports-car, which was parked near the Pavilion.

Here Bernard was obliged to leave him, in order to 'phone Sam Gulliver, and inform him that his daughter was returning to London that night. Bernard was glad to convey such a message, for Jackie's possessive ministrations were beginning to irritate him. He and only he knew how to handle Boxer when he was drunk, and he resented assistance, however well-meant.

He made the ’phone call, but when he returned to the Pavilion parking-ground the Bentley was gone. He did not see or hear from Boxer again for the better part of a week.

Both he and the Wall of Death promoter made exhaustive enquiries. They even went to the police, and it was through them that they finally learned where Boxer had gone. It seemed that Jackie Gulliver had not gone home to London at all, but had spirited Boxer down to the Gulliver's week-end chalet, near Pevensey, there to make doubly sure that Papa succeeded in talking the less accommodating Mamma into accepting Boxer as a son-in-law.

Bernard was both furious and alarmed. To begin with he felt half-crippled without Boxer around. In all these years they had never been separated for more than a few hours at a time, and it occurred to Bernard that unless he did something to end this romance the present separation might prove but a foretaste of lonely years ahead.

As it happened, Boxer escaped from his idyll without any help, and turned up at their lodgings in Folkestone, looking more than a little sheepish. He found Bernard on the boarding-house steps, booted and spurred for a kidnapping trip to Pevensey.

“Wotcher, Berni?” he said, with a brave attempt at his wide, clownish grin; “I gave her the slip. I got out of the larder window early this morning, and hitch-hiked over here before she twigged I was gone!”

Bernard looked him over, anxious possibilities crowding his mind.

“You're a saphead, Boxer!” he grunted. “How far did you go with her?”

“Oh
that?
said Boxer carelessly; “all the way, I reckon—there was no holding her—but so what? I wasn't born yesterday, and neither was she, so you don't have to worry, Berni boy.”

The ‘phone interrupted this clinical discussion, and Bernard clumped into the corridor to answer it. He came back looking grave.

“It's her,” he said, “and she's coming right after you.”

“Jese!” said Boxer emphatically, “maybe we'd better move on. Whad'ysay Berni? Whad'ysay?”

Bernard weighed the chances, just as he had weighed them when Boxer had proposed to vary the tedium of “Knocking Down Ginger” with a game of “String and Parcel”.

“That's not going to work, Boxer,” he said slowly. “She says you promised to marry her next Saturday. She's ‘phoned through and told her old man.”

“Jese!” said Boxer unhelpfully.

“Well, did you?”

Bernard kept his eye on his twin as he spoke and Boxer, unable to meet the accusation in it, dropped his glance to the rubber mat on the boarding-house porch.

“I... I dunno, Berni, honest I don't.
She
says so, she kept on saying so. I might have, but then again, I might not, and if I did, like she says, it was the night I passed out. I never promised anything after that, honest!”

He looked so much as if he was going to burst into tears that the familiar spasm of pity gripped Bernards heart. He reached out, and laid a soothing hand on Boxer's massive, hairy wrist.

“Don't you worry, Boxer, I'll take care o' this. You ... you clear off back home, and tell Dad we're taking a holiday. You let me fix it. Whad'ysay, Boxer?”

What could Boxer say? He had not made an independent decision in twenty years, not since the day he had decided to test the ice on the pond in the lane. He winked gratefully at his twin and then, without a word, lumbered off down the steps towards the railway station. Bernard called after him.

“Hi! You got money for the fare?”

Boxer hadn't, so Bernard ran after him, and gave him three pound notes. Then he went slowly back into the frowsty sitting-room, to wait thê arrival of Jackie Gulliver.

She roared up about an hour later, and ran lightly up the steps of the boarding-house calling:

“Boxer, darling! Are you there, Boxer-pet?”

She threw open the door of the guest-room and saw Bernard, sitting stiffly on a horsehair sofa, and regarding her with cold hostility.

“He's gone,” said Bernard, and somehow made it sound as though Boxer was now senseless and shackled in the hold of a West Indian banana boat.

“Gone where?” demanded Jackie, her lips quivering.

“Just gone,” said Bernard, without taking his hard, blue eyes from her.

Jackie flew into one of her tantrums, but nevertheless she continued to observe Bernard very closely. She believed sincerely in Napoleon's maxim of never letting rage mount higher than the chin. She had discovered, as a small child, thai a tantrum paid a dividend if you did this.

“You're hiding him! You don't
want
him to marry me! But he's going to, he promised to .. he's ... he's
got
to now; Daddy'U see to that! So just you tell me where he is, or I'll
get you the sack! Ill get straight on the ‘phone to Daddy, and get you the sack!”

Sam Gulliver was not the twins' direct employer, but the threat was not an idle one. A word from Gulliver to the Wall of Death promoter would have certainly sent them packing, but Bernard remained unmoved. He sat there, hands on knees, watching her stamp about the room, with tears of rage coursing down her powdered cheeks. If anything was needed to strengthen him in his resolve to get Boxer out of this situation Jackie Gulliver was providing it, here and now, for Boxer, he decided, would be better off at the bottom of the frozen pond than married to this spoiled, hysterical vixen.