The Dreaming Suburb (51 page)

“You have to face the fact that, however encouraging she might have been when the mood took her, old chap, she quite obviously isn't the sort of person capable of deep feelings about anyone,” he said gently. “Confound it, old man, you can judge that from her attitude towards what's happened inside her own family! Most girls, I imagine, would be extremely upset by that sort of hash, yet you say she regards the break-up of her parents' marriage as a joke?”

“More or less,” said Esme glumly. “Sometimes I think there's a ... well a sort of
devil
in her. She seems to like hurting people.”

Harold nodded, as though he was all too familiar with devilridden women.

“I wouldn't tell your mother anything about this if I were you,” he advised, “but his working life as I'm glad you've told me. It's always good to have someone to talk to, even if you don't take much notice of anything they might have to say on the subject. Talking about it helps to clarify one's own ideas, and I suppose that's more than half the reason why people have lawyers.”

“Do you think she'll stay away always?” asked Esme.

Harold began to approach the matter as a solicitor.

“I think that depends entirely how she makes out earning her own living,” he said. “You know, Esme, deep down, if you can look at it objectively enough, you've got to admire the girl. It takes a great deal of courage to strike out on your own at her age. She's not as lucky as you, you know.”

Esme sensed gentle criticism in this. He was uncomfortably aware that, although Harold's attitude to his determination to write for a living had been a tolerant one, his stepfather did not altogether approve of a young man leaving school and remaining at home all day. He might well have opposed the idea had it not been for the knowledge that, at twenty-one, Esme would come into half his father's and grandmother's estates. There would be no lump sum to squander, and no sufficiency calculated to throw a young man off his balance, for the money had been invested in sound, unimaginative concerns long ago, and would feed a trust-account. For all that Esme would start his adult life with immense advantages over most young men. Harold estimated that his unearned income, less tax, would soon amount to rather more than three hundred a year, and this would certainly be doubled in the event of his mother's death.

“The point is,” went on Harold, sensing a slight advantage, “you'll do yourself no good at all sitting here moping. As a matter of fact, before this happened I was going to suggest that you came in with me, and read law, but your Headmaster was very frank about you the last time I talked to him. He told me flatly that you'd never make a solicitor, and that you ought to be encouraged to train for an artistic profession of one sort or another.”

“How
does
one train to be a writer?” asked Esme suddenly.

It was something he had been asking himself, ruefully enough, for the past six months. Sitting up there in his room, scratching away with a pen hour after hour, reading and re-reading pages he had covered with his neat but childish handwriting, he had become uncomfortably aware of the fact that it is far easier to dream romantic stories than to concoct them.

There was a curious flatness about his writing. It began well enough, but fell away steeply after the first few pages, and finally expired under the increasingly desperate pressure he applied to it. He had already commenced three books, a long school-story, a saga of a dragoon in the Peninsular War, and an Elizabethan seayam, but neither book had progressed beyond half the requisite number of words.

Harold was a wide reader. He had read a large number of biographies of writers, and was glad to take advantage of Esme's change of subject, edge away from the uncharted realm of women possessed of devils, and tread the firmer ground of English literature.

“Nearly all writers begin by being something else, Esme, and write their early stuff in their spare time. There was Dickens, for instance, he was a Parliamentary journalist, and in our own times Ian Hay, a schoolmaster, and Edgar Wallace, another journalist. There's Cronin, he's still a doctor, I believe, and Conrad and Masefield, both seamen. One could go on indefinitely. The only person I can recall who actually began as a poet was Browning, and after all, he was a bit of a genius, wasn't he?”

The obvious commonsense in Harold's line of talk did not make his avuncular approach more palatable to Esme. Now that he had laid bare his soul, and freely admitted to uncertainty regarding his future as a writer, he felt angry and ashamed, but his genuine liking for Harold, and the man's obvious desire to be helpful, compelled him to prolong the conversation.

“What you mean is, didn't I ought to get something to write
about
and
then
write ... go to sea, for instance, or join the army?”

Harold winced a little. It occurred to him that Esme's announcement that he was going to sea, or joining the Army,
on his stepfather's direct recommendation, would involve him, Harold, in a situation with Eunice that might deny him the undisturbed perusal of
The Times
for a hundred nights in a row.

“Well ... er ... no, not exactly, old chap!” he protested. “There's no need to go to extremes. Look here, why dont you trot around in the morning and have a chat with that Head of yours? Quite frankly, he struck me as a rather arty type of cnap, but I got the distinct impression that he was very fond of you, and had high hopes of you in one direction or another.”

Esme considered. It was strange, he thought, that such an idea had not occurred to him before. He had not seen Longjohn since he had left school, and had not even written to him.

Having neatly passed the buck Harold yawned, and got up, piling the tea-cups on a tray, and carrying them out into the scullery.

“We'd better wash these up, son,” he told Esme, “or your mother will begin asking awkward questions in the morning.”

They washed up and went softly upstairs. On the carpeted landing Harold said, without any bint of patronage:

“Feel any better, old chap?”

Esme did feel better, if only because he had more than Elaine to think about now.

“Yes, I do, Harold, and thanks, thanks a lot”

Harold glowed inwardly. He loved helping people, any person, and it was immaterial to him whether he was paid for it or not.

“Any time, old man, any time. Hang it, that's what I'm here for, isn't it? Goodnight, Esme.

“Goodnight, Harold.”

They crept into their “rooms, Harold to slip noiselessly out of his dressing-gown, and inch himself cautiously into bed beside his sleeping wife, and Esme to take down bis school satchel, and commence filling it with the manuscripts of bis three half-finished stories. When he had done this he took down his copy of Browning, got into bed, and forced himself to begin reading
Sordello.
He had used
Sordello
as a soporific
ever since he and Eunice had seen
The Barretts of Wimpole Street,
and had never yet got beyond the third page. He progressed well beyond it that night, for the memory of Elaine's brief, mocking appearance at her window was too clear to be banished by the verse of perhaps the only man in English letters who actually began his working life as a poet.

2

Esme left the manuscripts at the school with a note, apologising for them in advance, and asking if Longjohn would see him when he had had an opportunity to read the work. He received a summons within forty-eight hours, and was soon seated once more in the famous leather armchair, in the room where he had so often stood, with shrinking stomach, during his first years at school.

Longjohn, shrouded as usual in blue and pungent tobacco smoke, took the manuscripts from his desk drawer.

“Well, Fraser, I've read them without skipping a page,” he said, “and I'll tell you what's good, about them first. You can write readable English, but I knew that a long time ago, and you do seem to have avoided the routine pitfall of most beginners, the purple passages!”

“But they're kind of flat aren't they, sir?”

“No, not exactly flat imitative perhaps, but that isn't nearly so depressing. Every writer of your age is bound to be imitative. It's a good deal easier to draw on a retentive memory than a store of experience, particularly when you haven't any! I came across paraphrased Stevenson, paraphrased Dumas, and even bowdlerised Henty, but that shouldn't worry you; at least your subconscious had enough sense to mix ‘em up a bit! What I
am
interested to know is why you didn't finish any one of them? They might, just possibly, have interested a minor agent and got you started.”

Esme considered, then answered the question truthfully.

“Because I was bored with them, sir.”

Longjohn chuckled. “Well, that's a hopeful answer anyway,” he said, with a twinkle. “If you'd ploughed on regardless
you might have had me worried.” He settled forward on his creaky, swivel chair. “Now this is how I see it, Fraser. Every man-jack who puts pen to paper in obedience to a creative impulse has a Niagara of dirty water to get off bis chest. You started getting yours off pretty smartly, partly because you began young, but mostly because you're naturally impatient. Have you ever considered what that misnomer ‘inspiration’ really is?”

“I suppose a sudden idea that must be got on with,” suggested Esme.

“But how does the idea originate?” asked Longjohn.

Esme considered: “Well, sir, I imagine it just hits you, like something flying by, and then sticks.”

“That's a very popular misconception,” said Longjohn. “The fact is the impulse that starts you writing, or painting, or shaping something with your hands is only the spark igniting the bonfire of ideas, usually ideas that have been piling up in your mind ever since you could toddle.”

“Er... what sort of ideas?” asked Esme.

“How should I know? Sounds, smells, colours, snatches of conversation you weren't meant to overhear, street-scenes, the exasperated look a mother gives her child when he throws a cake out of the pram, the steam rising from the wet clothes of a ‘bus queue, the patterns of frost-rime on hedgerows—this is the raw material of a writer's bonfire, and the ‘thing-flying by’, as you put it, merely sets it off. You can't really start writing until the bonfire's showing red. Do I make sense?”

“Yes, sir, a great deal. It rather ties up with my stepfather's suggestion. He said I ought to take an ordinary job and sort of graduate. The point is, sir, what sort of job, and would it have to be one that left me time for writing?”

Longjohn puffed out three clouds of smoke before answering. Esme had forgotten how strongly everything about Longjohn stank of his coarse tobacco, and it occurred to him that some of the parents who called on him must find the atmosphere of the study insupportable.

“That's what most writers do I admit,” he said at last, “but I don't think it suits your book, not yet at all events. What you need is a travelling apprenticeship. I think that would
show a richer dividend than a steady job, whatever the job happened to be.”

“You mean travel abroad, sir?” said Esme, hopefully.

“No, I don't,” said Longjohn emphatically. “I mean travel
here,
among your own people! Damn it, man, London's stiff with half-baked ‘moderns’, who have spent a few, jaded months on the Left Bank, and come back here, where publishers pay them money to sneer at us! I don't mean that at all. Even supposing you could afford to travel, and possibly live abroad for a time, what would we get from you? A few second-hand opinions from shifty boulevardiers, embedded in a mash of sex. For God's sake give us more honest writing! Tell us what the Industrial Revolution has made of the people whose grandfathers drifted into the Northern and Midland towns from the farms and cottage looms. Distil for us some of the traditional humour of the Cockney, and the Lancashire people. Find us a latter-day Weller, or Micawber,
That's
the sort of shot in the arm that English fiction needs today, and I think you're a person who could do it! Go on a journey, an
English
journey! Don't stick at one job too long, irrespective of whether it pays off or doesn't. Drift about, and keep a notebook rather than a soul-searching diary. Don't scrabble for stuff, let it come to
you,
and soak into you, as the stink of my foul tobacco sinks into everything in this room! That's my advice, Fraser, for what it's worth, but you'll have to square it with your family. They might have other ideas, and you're off my hook now. Well?”

Esme thought for a moment Then he said:

“My father left me some money, sir, but I don't get it until I'm twenty-one. Should I wait until then?”

“Not if you can help it boy. With even a little money in your pocket you won't see half as much as you will if you're broke! Besides, you're more absorbent now than you'll ever be. If you're going, go right away, and if you feel like writing to me write, but don't spend yourself in letters. No one's going to pay you for writing letters, and remember Johnson's dictum—no one but a born fool writes for anything other than money!”

That was the gist of Longjohn's interview, and it was the springboard from which Esme began his two-year Odyssey.

It threw Eunice, his mother, into a dither that fulfilled Harold's gloomiest prophecies regarding his leisure to absorb the leading articles of
The Times,
but, to his credit, he ultimately ranged himself behind Esme, and even insisted on mailing him thirty shillings a week, wherever he might be.

Eunice wept and Eunice argued, but Harold was no longer fighting a lone battle, as he had when he lost the fight to send Esme away to school. Esme himself took slow fire at Longjohn's suggestion, and the early summer of that year saw him fitting himself out with strong brogues, a good mackintosh, a capacious knapsack with innumerable pockets, and a supply of maps and notebooks.

It was early May when he left the Avenue and set out on his adventure. He had been twenty the previous February and as he walked the length of the Avenue, to cut across the “Rec” into Delhi Road, he was aware of the suburb as he had not been since Eunice had brought him there when he was six. Lilac was flowering in the front garden of Number One Hundred and Twelve, laburnum in the garden of Number Ninety-Seven opposite, and dew gleamed on the swinging chains linking the gate-posts above the curving dwarf walls.