The Dreaming Suburb (54 page)

One way and another Archie was doing pretty well, but he had his share of worries, and he made his small quota of mistakes. One mistake was the fire that broke out in the
corner store, with all that money, largely in paper, directly underneath the blazing crates. No fireman ever worked more heroically to quench a fire and he put it out without even calling the Brigade, but the incident led to his purchase of fireproof cash-boxes, each small enough to go inside the oil-drums.

Another error was his sad misjudgment of character regarding Alf Blissaker, who got away with six cases of tinned goods. But by far his worst mistake, and one for which he could never really forgive himself, was that of trying to combine business with pleasure in the person of Gloria Hazelwood, a girl who graduated from counter-hand to concubine, and achieved the unique distinction of being the only person who ever got the better of Archie, and succeeded in laughing in his face.

Gloria was a cheerful, red-headed girl from Thornton Heath, where her father was a lamp-lighter, and there was something about her that lit lamps in the hearts of all the people she met, even on drizzling Mondays in November. This, and her habit of performing duties at a brisk, tireless trot, recommended her to Archie's attention, when he pulled up at a set of traffic lights, opposite her place of employment, that he happened to pass every day during his rounds. Once or twice he caught her eye, and she winked at him, not provocatively, but in the most friendly way imaginable, so that it was not long before she was installed as manageress of a little branch he had opened near the Addington estate, and was soon doing her trotting on his behalf, at first during the day, and later during occasional week-ends, when Archie, unable to earn money, was bored and lonely.

She was a lusty, open-hearted girl, with a strong sense of fun, and had she been less successful in the shop, Archie would probably have regularised the association by setting her up permanently in a little houseboat he had bought, and moored at Thames Ditton. Indeed, this is what Gloria hoped he would do, and when he did not, when it became painfully obvious to her that, notwithstanding her broadmindedness and pink curves, he valued her far more highly with her overall on than off, she made up her mind to settle for a cash bonus and try elsewhere.

Had she known about the oil-drums it is probable that Archie would have found her the most expensive frolic he had ever engaged upon, but fortunately she was unaware of the cache although, as events were to prove, she was extremely well-informed about the methods he used in building it up.

She knew, also, that Archie was in the habit of carrying large sums of money about with him. It was not always convenient for him to make deposits in his Avenue vault as soon as he had accumulated money, and so, at times, Archie's wallet was stuffed with the week's gleanings. She had seen the wallet often, during their week-ends at the houseboat, and its very thickness fascinated her, so much so that she was sometimes unable to take her eyes off his jacket when it was hanging on the chair beside the bed.

When he began talking of transferring her to the newest of his premises, and using her as a kind of new broom at each branch he opened, she began making her own plans She chose her time well, selecting the evening of Whit Monday, when Archie had been unable to complete his customary round the previous Saturday, and had something over a hundred pounds folded into his wallet.

It had been a sultry day, and Archie had gone off into the village for drinks, leaving her to lay out supper in the airless little cabin. Because it was so hot he had gone in his shirtsleeves, leaving his sport's-coat on the bed.

It was all done in less than five minutes. Gloria extracted the money from the inner flap of the wallet, and replaced it with wads of toilet paper. To be on the safe side she camouflaged the paper with one of the two five-pound notes she found. She did not touch the odd pound notes in the outer flap.

She knew that he was unlikely to require money until they parted the following morning, and that even if he did he was certain to have loose change in his trouser pockets.

Her plan was flawless. When he came back with the drinks she was waiting, with cold supper laid. They had their meal, bathed, listened to the radio, and went to bed as usual. He did not put his jacket on again until they climbed into his big,
black Austin, and began their drive back to work the following morning.

He had intended dropping her off at her shop, for this was their usual practice, but as they were passing through Nor-bury she asked him to stop outside East Croydon Station. Her request irritated him. He liked his shops to open sharp on time.

“It's twenty to nine now,” he warned her. “What the devil do you want to stop at the Station for?”

“I've got a train to look up,” she told him.

He grunted, and pulled in outside the booking-hall.

“Hurry up then,” he said, and began to light a cigarette.

But she did not hurry into the hall to make an enquiry, neither did she examine the trains advertised on the boards. Instead she stood looking at him from the pavement, with an expression of mild concentration, and when he glared back at her, all she said was:

“I'm going now, Archie.”

“Going? Going where?”

“I don't know exactly,” she said; “abroad, I think, for a little while. I've always wanted to go to the Riviera, but they say it's terribly expensive, and I'll have to leave myself enough to get back, and keep me going till I get another job. Perhaps it'll be somewhere nearer.”

He stared at her, his unlit cigarette hanging on his lip.

“Are you out of your head?” he demanded.

“Archie,” she said very softly, “you'd better look in your wallet before we say ‘goodbye'.”

He braced up on the word “wallet”, and tore it from his inside pocket, plunging his hand into the silk folds, and bringing out a five-pound note and a fistful of toilet paper.

For a moment he said nothing, but simply stared and stared at the wallet on his knees, and then at Gloria, who still stood meekly alongside the car, now regarding him with mild amusement.

“Why you ... you bloody little fool,” he shouted at length, “you'll never get away with this! There was more than a hundred in that wallet. Give me my money, you bitch!” And he jerked the handle of the car, so that the door swung open, and the breeze swept a few sheets of toilet paper into the
gutter under the feet of people hurrying in and out of the hall.

She shook her head very slowly, and something in the unconcerned way in which she stood there, gently swinging the handbag he had given her last Christmas, stopped him from leaping out of the car.

“You won't miss that much, Archie,” she said, speaking deliberately, “and if you try and get it back I'll explain how you got it, and then everything'll come out, won't it—you know ... all that fiddling you do!”

“Fiddling?”
was all he could manage.

“I kept some of the old till rolls,” she explained. “You ought to have burned them. They always burn that kind of evidence in thrillers, but you didn't, you just screwed them up, and tossed them in the yard incinerator, before it was lit You can make a hundred almost every week one way or another, with all the mugs there are about to make it for you. You wouldn't want all the fuss of a police court over one hundred, and anyway, it isn't a hundred, it's only ninety-odd. I put a fiver back, it isn't
all
toilet paper!”

He could say nothing to this. There was nothing one could say to such a monstrous confession. He could only sit there, with the car door swinging open, the wallet on his knee, and the toilet paper eddying about on the floor. After looking at him for a moment more she hitched her handbag higher up her arm, and smiled.

“Well, goodbye, Archie,” she said, and, turning into the stream of travellers, disappeared almost immediately.

For a long time he sat there, hunched and brooding, like a glowering husband awaiting an overdue wife, but he was not thinking about Gloria. His thoughts concerned himself, and his monumental folly in laying himself open to such an ambush. He did not really blame Gloria for taking such an advantage of him. When he stood aside, and carefully reviewed his own errors, there was no blame left over for her, it was all used up on himself. Those till-rolls! Irrefutable evidence! Thrown into an unlit incinerator, for anyone to smooth out and keep, as a weapon against which there was no defence! And this wallet on his knee! How many times had he taken off his jacket, and flung it down on a crate, or a
chair, when he had been working among men and women who counted their pocket money in sixpences? It was a miracle that he had not been blackmailed or robbed of thrice the sum years ago, and here was a devastating object lesson that had cost him a mere ninety-seven pounds. Damn it, he ought to be grateful to the little bitch!

As he thought this his face cleared, and slowly he let in his clutch, and moved off into the Upper Road. He discovered that be could close the door on Gloria and her ninety-seven pounds, not slam it perhaps, but close it. He was a man who was well accustomed to weighing profits against losses, and it seemed to him that this was a cheap enough price to pay for an invaluable lesson. And it was not all loss either, not when one took into account Gloria's company over several weekends.

By the time that he reached home he was grinning.

All that was behind him now. He never made out new till rolls, but simply erased the figures on old ones. He checked his expansion, and even contracted a little, by letting off two shops where private housing development had been halted on account of the international situation.

The ploughlands, and the woods between Shirley and Addington, were mostly filled in now, and all his premises were within five minutes' walk of the ever-increasing population. What was even better, he had got in first, well ahead of the company shops, and his staff had established themselves with their regular customers.

So he went on buying and buying stock, against the day when the rain would find its way through Mr. Chamberlain's umbrella.

1

THAT
season, early autumn 1938, saw someone else from the Avenue come in out of the rain, for in August of that year Elaine Frith returned to the Avenue. In the first week of October, before the beech leaves of Manor Wood had changed colour again, she moved into a house of her own, on the uneven side of the crescent, with a back bedroom window looking out over the meadow to the trees. It was Number Forty-Three, to be precise, a mere twelve houses along from her mother and Sydney, and next door to the house occupied by Ted Hartnell, and his wife Margy.

Elaine had seen much and travelled far since the night she had decided to throw in her lot with the Great Eugene. That partnership had lasted nearly two years, just long enough for Elaine to grow thoroughly bored with her share of the act, and for Eugene to wish he had never been born.

For Elaine, once she had found her feet, and donned her tights (spangled ones they were, for she would have none of his Hungarian pantaloons), had led him the merriest of dances. It turned out just as he had feared, when his desire for her had swept away his caution that night in her room, at The Falconer, Colwyn Bay.

He had misjudged her in every respect. She had never insisted on separate hotel rooms at the Number Two towns they visited, and as a mistress and a stage assistant he could make no serious complaints against her. He could have wished, perhaps, for a little more enthusiasm in the first role, and rather less in the second. Once she was utterly sure of him her physical responses were no more than dutiful, whereas,
on the stage, she went out of her way to divert the audience's attention from his swinging cape and ironic patter, pirouetting when there was no real need to pirouette, and flashing a smile at boiled shirts in the stalls when she should have been flashing one at chokers in the gallery.

On the whole, however, it was in neither of these respects that she distressed him. What did was her generosity towards every footloose artist, and every middle-aged agent whom they met in the course of their travels—and they seemed always to be meeting lusty young acrobats, and spry young comics, while they ran into Benny Boy, Eugene's agent, at almost every turn of the road.

Poor Eugene soon began to wonder if Benny Boy had ever returned to his office, in Dolman Street, after the day he had first ushered Elaine into the room, when Benny Boy had carefully wiped his glasses, and then suggested that they all had lunch together, a courtesy he had never extended when Eugene had called on him in the old, carefree days.

He tried the hoary routine of seeking to make her jealous by paying marked attention to a soprano, who also recited excerpts from
Othello
and
Macbeth
, but Elaine showed her broadmindedness by actively encouraging both him and her. The result was that he was stuck with the talented lady for nearly a week in Leamington Spa, and only escaped from her by letting it be known that they were booked at Aberdeen the following week, when in reality they had a free week, followed by a week at Boscombe.

He had it out with Benny Boy, and threatened to change his agent, but Benny Boy called his bluff, and said that this might be quite an idea, providing he left Elaine behind him. He tried reasoning with her, threatening her, and even pleading with her, but in vain, for she did not seem to possess any of the finer feelings to which he could appeal, and as for being frightened of him, she was obviously frightened of nothing, not even a Saturday night house in Portsmouth when the Fleet was in.

At last he gave up the struggle, and drifted with the tide, grateful for the time she spent with him when all the other men in the company were travelling with their wives, or were
otherwise engaged, and Benny Boy was on a rare visit to London, attending to his neglected clients.

She finally abandoned him in Morecambe, and went off with Benny Boy for good, leaving him to slip from the Number Two dates to the Number Three, and from thence to the “Die-the-Death” seaside towns, with very long names, and very short piers.