The Dreaming Suburb (57 page)

Thinking it over she reflected how unerring her instinct had been when it prompted her to give his home as a forwarding address, to that dreadful woman last night! At the memory of Audrey, and the shame and ignominy of her public spanking, she faltered a little, and had to thrust the recent past into the back of her mind, and return to a deliberate study of practicalities—i.e., the precise means of contacting Esme again, without first showing herself in the Avenue, where she must immediately come under the scrutiny of her mother, and Sydney.

She settled herself in the corner of her compartment, and lit a De Reszke ivory-tipped cigarette. Her mind began to experiment with phrases and artifices, and by the time she had reached King's Cross, Elaine was herself again. She was very good at thrusting unpleasant memories into the depths of her mind, where they were difficult to locate, and never found their way to the surface again without her help. She took from the past only that which was useful in the present.

1

ESME
took the letter from his jacket pocket and read it for the fifth time, running his eye down the widely-spaced lines, and forgetting a cigarette that he had lit on entering the carriage, at Woodside. The cigarette burned away, unsmoked, as the train rattled through. Clockhouse, Ladywell, and Sydenham.

He had recognised her handwriting immediately, although he had not seen it since Edgar Frith had showed him her two letters at Llandudno, years ago. He had not wanted to read it at breakfast, with Harold and Eunice looking on, and had
“suddenly remembered” that he must catch the eight-twenty, instead of his usual eight-fifty-five.

He had not hurried to the station, but had gone, instead, along the crescent, and into the “Rec”, to the seat he always associated with Elaine, the one near the tennis-courts. Here, with fingers that trembled a little, and with the familiar fluttering sensation halfway between breastbone and stomach, he had carefully slit the thick envelope, extracted three folded sheets of hotel notepaper, and smoothed them out on his knee, clearing his throat, as though he proposed reading the letter aloud to an audience of a park-keeper, and a pair of chaffinches, which hopped round his feet in search of yesterday's sandwich crumbs.

“My dear Esme,”
it began,
“I almost called you Launcelot, but decided that you would have forgotten my teasing after all this time, and imagined you were getting a letter intended for somebody else!”

He shivered a little. Was it possible to forget a thing like that? The memory of it was as bright now as it had been eight years ago, the evening he had shown her a picture of Elaine in his illustrated
Myths
, and she had jested: “What a pity you aren't called Launcelot, Esme!” From then on, she had sometimes used the name in fun, and told him that he had been born centuries too late, when all the dragons were dead, and all the ladies rescued.

He read on:

“I expect you will be staggered to hear from me after all this time, but this really is the first chance I have had to write.”

(Dear God, he thought, the first chance in eight years!)

“You will see I am now back in London, having left the stage for good, and lost touch with everybody during the last few years, after I was silly enough to try my luck on the road and turn my back on hotel work, which was
steady but so dull. The fact is, Esme, I want to get a good office job. I can still type, and I'm sure I can soon work up a shorthand speed. Sydney told me you were in a good job in London and I thought perhaps you knew of someone. Do you think we could meet and have a coffee somewhere? I've such heaps to tell you and knowing you I think a lot of it would make you laugh, and perhaps give you some stories to write about if you still write stories like you used to. Sydney did say you wrote stuff for the radio, and I was thrilled to hear it because I always knew you would if you kept on trying.

“I'm staying at this little hotel for a few days, as I still don't think I could stay at home and I'm still not sorry I left. You could ring up but the man who takes messages here is very deaf and would probably get the time and place wrong. Would you think me very silly if we met (providing you want to of course) under the dead poet picture in the Tate Gallery where we met once before? I've never forgotten that—his breeches were such a beautiful blue and it was romantic to meet there like that. In any case, I'll be there at one o'clock today (the day you get this)—and tomorrow as well, in case you can't make it. I was going to see the picture anyway, so even if you don't turn up it won't matter and I shall understand because it's a bit much for me to pop up suddenly like this and expect you to remember the same nice things I remember, you know —take everything for granted in this way.

“Goodbye for now, Esme dear. I'm terribly excited at the thought of seeing you again and wonder if you've changed as much as me,. not to look at I mean, but inside.

As ever,

Elaine.

P.S. Some things of mine in a parcel might arrive at your address. I had to give the number as I didn't want them to go home and there was nowhere else.

P.P.S. I meant to send a photo but haven't got a good one. I'm sure we'll be able to recognise one another.”

The right-hand corner of the last sheet; was turned back, and under it was a tiny cross.

He sat looking at the pages for so long that he had to run into Delhi Road, and most of the way to the station, in order to catch the later train.

He found it impossible to digest the letter, and all it implied, in spite of several readings, but as the train pulled into Charing Cross (he had an appointment in the West End that morning and did not leave at his usual terminus, London Bridge) one factor did emerge. That was the astonishing certainty that she had by no means dismissed him from her mind, as he had imagined himself to be dismissed all these years. Neither, it would seem, did she regard their immature courtship as a naive milestone in the process of growing-up, but had seemingly kept it fresh and green, looking back on it with flattering warmth, and recalling moments of it that even he might have forgotten—that Launcelot business, for instance, and their trysting place, under
The Death of Chatter-ton.

She even remembered the colour of Chatterton's breeches, and that kids' trick of putting a kiss under the turned-back corner of the page! Then there was the “Esme dear”, slipped into the final paragraph. To judge by this letter, indeed, she might not have been absent and silent for years on end, but simply returning from a separation of a few months at most. Was it really possible that he had misjudged her to that extent?

He found that he could not concentrate on work, and stopped at a kiosk in Trafalgar Square to make a phone call to his office and ask the typist to ring up and cancel his appointment. It was then nearly ten o'clock, and he had three hours to waste until one.

He drifted into the Mall, and thence into St. James's Park, where he sat watching the ducks for a time, trying to rationalise the jumble of emotions her letter had stirred in him. He was only partially successful. Every now and again a cold douche of caution swamped down on his elation, and his reason warned him that a person could not change to this extent, that he was reading into her letter things that were not there. But as soon as he had convinced himself of this
equally obvious points hurried to his rescue—the Launcelot joke, the “Esme dear”, the tender memory that prompted her selection of the point of reunion, the turned-back corner for the kiss. Surely this last must mean that she would still like to be kissed by him, that she still remembered those eager kisses of years ago.

It did occur to him that she had purposely introduced the nostalgic note into the letter, purely in order to encourage him to help her find a job. She was quite capable of such a thing, or had once been. Was she still? Or might she not have grown up, and changed to the extent of completely disproving Harold's assertion that she would never feel deeply about anyone or anything? Then he found himself resenting Harold's estimate. After all, what did Harold know of her? What did her father, or anyone but himself, who had once loved her so desperately, and had been unable to forget her in almost a decade?

And here Esme began to lie to himself a little, for in truth, he
had
almost forgotten her, since returning home and settling happily at the office. The encouragement of his employers, and the pleasure of actually receiving money from, such an august establishment as the BBC, had done a great deal to erase the memory of Elaine, and he was now old enough to ask himself whether his sustained longing for her was not a kind of crystallisation of all his adolescent ideas abput love. He was still an incurable romantic, so much of one that he had so far been unable to attach himself to any of the young women he met in the course of his work or recreation. He found that their slang and banality irritated him, and encouraged him to isolate himself. He would have been hurt, but not much surprised, to learn the estimate of the typist, Mavis, who described him to her friend Marlene as “nice, but just-the-tiniest-bit-stuffy-if-you-know-what-I-mean-dear”.

This was a fair estimate of Esme Fraser, at twenty-six. Nice, but stuffy; not stuffy in the accepted sense of the word, but stuffy in a way that made no appeal to the level-headed young women who had replaced the flappers of the 'twenties. In one way they found him naive, and in another almost middle-aged. He was a highbrow, but without the sophistication that distinguished a highbrow, and made him pleasant to
exhibit to one's girl friends at dances and staff socials. Other girls, Avenue girls, had assessed Esme in disparaging terms. Freda Geering, for instance, of Number Five, whom Esme had once taken to a dance, put it another way, when replying to a question put to her by an exasperated mother, who had heard exaggerated reports of Esme's inheritance “Why don't I go out with him again, Mum? Well, in the first place because he's never asked me, but even if he did, I'd think twice about going. He's odd, and kind of moody, and ... well ... unpredictable. That time we went to the Club dance, do you know, what he talked about? Some silly old revolution or other ... no, he's not a Bolshie, Bolshies are often quite interesting; this revolution happened millions of years ago, in Rome, or somewhere, and was started by a lot of martyrs, or gladiators. I remember now, they were all crucified, like Jesus. I mean to say, who wants to hear about people being crucified when you're dancing a tango?”

There were, of course, plenty of girls available to Esme with whom it might have been possible to discuss crucified gladiators, and kindred subjects, but like most romantics under thirty, Esme wanted cake and ha'penny too. He wanted a girl who looked like Elaine, but was still able to provide him with a readily available audience of one, as Judy Carver had done so patiently in days gone by. He had, in fact, already made the depressing discovery that girls who were equipped to discuss Spartacus had a tendency to wear hornrimmed glasses and lisle stockings, and a man did not always want to be talking about gladiators' revolts.

At eleven o'clock he left the Park, and climbed Clive Steps into King Charles' Street, walking thence to Parliament Square. At the corner of Whitehall he decided that he needed a drink, and went into a basement bar near Scotland Yard, ordering a double brandy, which he sipped slowly. As Big Ben struck twelve he climbed to the street again, and began to make his way towards the Tate, arriving at the Gallery at ten minutes past twelve.

It was some years since he had visited the Tate Gallery. His tastes in art, he was informed, were lamentable, for he demanded incident, rather than power, colour, or design. He did not much care “what the artist was getting at”, and was
obstinate in his defence of the Pre-Raphaelites. His preferences infuriated Aubrey Caseman, one of his Bloomsbury associates at the office. “If you want bloody stories with your pictures why the hell don't you go out and buy a magazine?” he demanded, when Esme chipped into discussions on modern art.

Esme was sorry about this. He would have liked to have gone all the way with Aubrey, and enthused over Picasso and Matisse, but he was a very honest young man, and found it impossible to pretend to enthusiasms he did not feel. It was the same with poetry. He still preferred Tennyson, Masefield, and Rupert Brooke, to the poets Aubrey was always trying to sell him, young men whose verses had alternately short and long lines, and who appeared to dispense with old-fashioned metre and rhymes.

He found
The Death of Chatterton,
and stared at it for five minutes, trying to discover the mystical link, if such link existed, between the vivid blue of the breeches and Elaine, and wondering what it was about the picture that had imprinted itself so firmly on her memory. Then it struck him that they did have one thing in common. Both the artists' colour and Elaine had magnetism. On entering the gallery it was Chatterton's breeches that caught and held the eye, to the exclusion of the pictures on either side, and, indeed, to the detraction of the subject as a whole. Elaine, as he remembered her, had always had the same effect on people when she entered a room. It was not that she was strikingly beautiful—simply vivid and exciting, in the way that this splash of colour was vivid and exciting.

He found the idea so fanciful that he smiled to himself, as he moved on to have another look at his favourite picture,
Derby Day
. He had been attracted by
Derby Day
ever since Eunice and Harold had first brought him there as a child, and he supposed that this was because people interested him so much more deeply than abstract ideas. Aubrey Caseman, of course, would snort at this; in
Derby Day
there was not one story, but a baker's dozen: the penniless young dupe, the card sharper, the girls in the phaeton, and so on. Studying it, section by section, he forgot Elaine, and after a few minutes drifted round under the begrimed dome, to a gallery where
hung another old favourite,
April Love
. It was a picture that would have sent Aubrey Caseman groping for the brandy bottle, depicting as it did a young girl, awaiting her lover, in a conveniently rural setting. But Esme had always liked it, and it seemed to him an appropriate sort of picture to inspect that day, although he had to admit that Elaine and the principal subject had very little in common. He was, indeed, methodically comparing their differences, when a voice at his elbow said: