The Dreaming Suburb (5 page)

“I always thought,” she said, “that this place must be like the Sleeping Beauty's palace and now I've seen it it is.”

The word “palace” interested him. He knew about the Sleeping Beauty, but could not, for the moment, recall her connection with a deserted palace.

“Tell me about the palace,” he demanded.

She sat down on the last of the terrace steps and hugged her knees.

“They all went to sleep in a place like this. They slept for a hundred years before the Prince came, and cut his way through to them. He woke her up,” she went on, appreciably lowering her voice, “with a kiss!”

“What,” he wanted to know, “did he cut his way through? Was it Guards?”

“No, just briars and things, like here,” she said, pointing to the red scratches on her bare legs.

He remembered now, but still vaguely. “Did they
all
wake up?” he wanted to know.

She nodded. “We could play that,” she went on, but without much hope.

She was astonished by his enthusiasm. “It would mean getting inside,” he said and then, noting the look of fear in her eyes, “but I'm unarmed!” He was able to dismiss his own fears with such a cast-iron excuse. “We could play it in the summer-house, though. I'll tell you what; you go in there and lie down, and I'll go into the thicket and then fight my way out.”

There seemed no help for it. With dragging steps she left the sunny safety of the lakeside, and crossed the terrace to the ramshackle gazebo. Its windows were still glazed, and thick with cobwebs. The floor was sagging, and grass sprouted between the boards.

The sun had not yet passed beyond the beechwood, and in here there was deep shadow, and the smell of mildew, and mouldering woodwork. As she entered she looked back, and was horrified to discover that he was nowhere in sight. She would have run out, and fled back to the terrace, but she suddenly recalled that, without his help, she could never climb the wall, so she stood trembling, on the very edge of the threshold, her feet planted on the rim of sunlight.

“Esme!” she cried out, “Esme, where are you?”

There was a long, heavy silence in which she was able to fight down her panic. He was not the boy to leave a game half-finished. He would come for her, so long as she played her part.

She retreated further into the shadow and curled herself against the damp wall. She lay still for a moment, listening to her wildly beating heart, then, turning over on her back, she screwed up her eyes so tightly that she saw brilliant sunpatterns. Suddenly, something brushed her lips, and she opened her eyes to find him kneeling immediately above her. A small crooked branch was stuck in his belt, and in his left hand he held a length of hazel twig, with a cross-piece tied to it with his handkerchief.

“It's all right,” he told her, “I found a pistol, and made this. I'm not sure they
had
pistols,” he said doubtfully; “I should have to look it up. Have you got the book at home?”

She said nothing, but continued to stare up at him with
shining eyes. In kissing her he had transformed her into a real Princess. She knew now that she would marry him, would never contemplate marrying anyone else and she knew with an intuitiveness beyond her years, that this was not the time to tell him, but the time to tread warily, and let him realise he had a ready-made audience for any venture he might pursue in the future. How lucky it was that he lived next door, and because of today, no one else should ever have him, no one, boy or girl, never, never, never. That was to be her reward for not running away.

Soon afterwards they took the path home. On the way, once the mansion was safely beyond the trees, she asked him who could have lived there.

“Why, the Squire,” he said; “Squires always lived in manors. They had hundreds of scullions, and heaps of horses. They had big dogs that bit poachers, and when they grew old, they put great, thick bandages on their feet, and cursed people who banged against them.”

“Do you mean they cut their feet purposely?” she asked, immensely impressed by his vast store of knowledge, and assuming that the bandaged feet were part of a strange, manorial ritual.

For the first time since their meeting he confessed to half-ignorance.

“I don't know what the bandages were
for,”
he admitted, “but they always had them. It was a sign of being a squire. Perhaps it was chilblains.”

And then, as they emerged from the wood, and into the meadow,
“I'm
going to be a Squire when I grow up, and perhaps I'll live there.”

She said nothing, but it occurred to her how wonderful it would have been it he had said “
We'll
live there”, instead of “
I'll
live there”. On reflection, however, this struck her as ungrateful to God, for giving her such a wonderful morning, and the courage not to run screaming when she had found herself alone in the gazebo. Perhaps, in time, he would invite her to join him on an estate. In the meantime, she must say nothing to anybody, not even Louise, and strive only to please him.

They reached the Avenue and crossed it.

“This is my house.” he told her, pausing outside Number Twenty-Two.

“I know,” she said, and with singing heart turned into Number Twenty.

1

THE
Misses Clegg, Edith, and Becky, qualified as the Avenue's oldest inhabitants. This was not on account of their age, for in 1919 Edith was forty-six and Becky forty-three, and the doyen of the Avenue was Grandpa Barnmeade, of Number One Hundred and Two, who had served at Omdurman, but because the Misses Clegg had moved into the Avenue as long ago as 1911, when the “Rec” end of the Crescent was still unbuilt.

The Cleggs came from a tiny parish in North Devon, where their father, the Rev. Hugh Clegg, D.D., had been vicar for over forty years. When he died, they had good reasons for moving far away from the area in which they had been born and brought up, and Edith chose the Avenue because it was the most rurally situated terrace house offered her by the London house-agents.

At first she had been very homesick for the open skies of Exmoor, and the thin, misty rain that fell so persistently throughout eight months of the year, but as time went on she found herself preferring the casual neighbourliness of the suburb, and the undoubted convenience of the shops, to the stifling intimacy of the Devon village, and the wretched isolation of the grim old parsonage in which they had lived so long.

Moreover, the Avenue seemed to suit Becky, whose “spells” had become far less frequent in the last few years, and were
now limited to less than one a month, not counting those brought on by the spring air-raids of 1917.

All along the Avenue Becky was known as “the dippy sister.” This was chiefly on account of her occasional appearances, in the garden of Number Four, in a flannel nightdress, with her thick chestnut hair hanging down her back, but Becky's immodesty in this respect had nothing to do with her “spells”; they were occasioned by genuine anxiety for her cat, Lickapaw.

Lickapaw was a huge, sullen-faced Tom, who repaid his mistress's frantic devotion by disappearing for long periods, in search of fresh wives. He sometimes stayed away a week, but he always came home in the end, to nurse his damaged whiskers and renew his spent vitality, on heaped-up platefuls of fresh fish and saucer after saucer of milk, spooned from the top of the can.

Under Becky's ministrations Lickapaw quickly recovered from the effects of his sporadic debauchery, putting on flesh again, and sleeping, for days at a stretch, in the best armchair. Sometimes he slept for more than a week, occupying the chair all day, and the foot of Becky's bed at night, and on these nights she sometimes stayed awake until the small hours, delighting in his weight on her feet, and hardly daring to move for fear of disturbing his recuperative slumbers.

Ultimately, however, he always went off into the nursery garden again, and then, night after night, Becky would “fish” for him, standing on a box placed against the fence that divided the Avenue gardens from the nursery, and dangling a piece of hake, or a kipper, from the end of a long string.

These moonlit matinées were a source of great delight to the Carver boys, and to other children living lower down the Avenue. They would stay out late, risking good hidings on their return, solely for the pleasure of seeing Miss Clegg, looking a little like Lady Macbeth, jerk her kipper over the six-foot fence and call: “Lickapaw! Lickapaw! Come away from those nasty strays!”

Edith, Becky's sister, jeopardised the popularity her natural warmth and generosity had earned among the children, by seeking to cut these entertainments short, and by tugging
gently at Becky's nightdress, until she reluctantly stepped down from the box, and went disconsolately to bed.

Poor Edith spent most of her life tugging her sister's garments, in one way or another, but she would not have had it otherwise, for her loving care of Becky, besides being a sisterly obligation, was part of a lifelong penance, imposed by the conviction that it was she, in large measure, who was responsible for Becky's periodical lapses.

On nights like these, and those during Becky's “spells”, Edith's memory reconstructed every detail of that soft June night nearly twenty years ago, when Becky, a radiant young girl madly in love, had been compelled to confide in her sister because she needed money to elope with Saul Cooper, the painter who had bewitched her.

Parson Clegg's wife had died when Becky was born, and the tubby little man had resisted all the efforts of his parishioners to get him married again. Instead, he had sunk into a morose half-life, content to perform the barest minimum of his parochial duties, and devoting the greater part of his time to building model ships.

His study, where he should have been writing sermons, became his workshop, and dozens of calf-bound theological works were pulled from the shelves to make room for the exquisitely-made galleons, and carracks, and clippers, he fashioned. He seldom addressed more than a word or two to his daughters, and throughout her adolescence Edith had been obsessed by the fear that the Church Authorities would dismiss him for neglect of duty, and throw them all into the street.

They never did, however, and she came to believe that he must have had some influence with them, of which she was unaware.

One winter morning, on his way back from a funeral, he staggered and fell as he passed through the lych gate, dying an hour or so later of coronary thrombosis.

That was in 1909, years after the Saul Cooper scandal, and Edith had had the two of them on her hands ever since she found Becky abandoned in London, and had successfully fought her father, and parish busybodies, on the issue of
bringing Becky home again, and not sending her to an institution.

Edith was never able to discover anything of importance about the man who had shattered Becky's health, and had reduced her, in the space of a few months, to a semi-imbecile. Nor, for that matter, was she ever able to learn much of what happened after the night Becky stole into her room, kissed her, took the wash-leather bag containing fifteen gold sovereigns, and said: “I'm going now, Edie darling!”

In the morning there was the terrible scene with her father, the meeting with the vicar's warden and, later, with the Bishop; the futile visits of Parson Clegg to the police in Barnstaple, and ultimately, the ill-spelled letter from a stranger, who kept a boarding-house in Lambeth.

Even now Edith shuddered when she recalled her arrival outside that boarding-house. It was a shabby stucco villa, in a sunless street off the Embankment. Inside the narrow entrance passage there was a strong smell of cabbage, and rancid cooking fat. The stairs were so dark that Edith had to grope her way up, despite the services of the elderly slut who admitted her, and on the uncarpeted landing, where the pervading stench suggested something more unpleasant than cabbage water, the landlady had wheezed her version of events.

“She's in there now. Can't get nothing out of her. Been bashed about, she has.
He's
gone, owing three weeks. Never saw much of 'im when he was here. Heard 'em ‘avin' a fight or two, but never took much note. Get used to it in my line o' business. Learn not to stick your nose in too far!”

“How did you find my address?” Edith had asked, fighting her nausea, and trying hard to control her trembling limbs. “Did my sister tell you about me?”

“Not her,” said the slut, with a mirthless chuckle. “
She
ain't in no state to tell nothing. See for yourself!” And she flung open the door of a back bedroom and, marching in, flipped up the blind and let daylight into the hideous little room.

Becky was sitting on the bed, naked except for a short cotton chemise. Her beautiful chestnut hair was loose, obscuring the greater part of her face. Her brown eyes, eyes
that had always been so full of laughter, were fixed on the distempered wall immediately opposite, in a stare so blank that Edith knew at once it would be hopeless to expect recognition.

She made a supreme physical effort, and turned back to the landlady.

“Has she had a doctor?”

The woman snorted, “Doctor? I told you, he went off owing three weeks!”

“What about food?”

“She 'asn't touched nothing, not fer days; I tried to feed her once, but she knocked the bowl out of me 'and. Look, you c'n see, if you don't believe me!”

The woman pointed to a large stain on the edge of the filthy blanket. Edith noted, too, that there were faint traces of what appeared to be porridge on Becky's chin. She opened her chain purse, and took out three half-sovereigns.

“Will this pay what she owes? It's all I can spare; I've got to leave enough to get home.”

The sight of the money eased the strain from the woman's face. Truculence gave way to coarse amiability as she reached for the money.

“That'll about cover it. I did right to tell you, didn't I? He must have served her crool. Still, that's men all over, ain't it? I'll get her things together, while you wash an' dress her. There's no trunk. He took that, I reckon.”