The Dreaming Suburb (64 page)

He was on his hands and knees at once, gathering up powder-compact, keys, lipstick, and coins, in the light of his headlamps. She noticed his smart new suit, a blue pin-stripe, and it crossed her mind that nobody else in the Avenue wore those kind of clothes, just as nobody else owned a long, cream sports-car, instead of an old Morris Cowley, or a baby Austin.

She had always been mildly interested in Archie, having been aware of him ever since he had gone into partnership with that funny old Italian, who had collapsed and died in the meadow not long ago. She had heard that he was making money hand over fist, and had little branch shops all over the place, as far away as Bromley and Chislehurst. Suddenly she
began to feel less irritated with him, and his flashy sports car, reflecting that this might not be such an unlucky day after all.

He gave her the handbag.

“I think everything's there. Now what about me taking you home? You were on your way home, weren't you?”

“Yes, I was going home.”

She spoke slowly, as though she had hardly heard him, and he looked hard at her, his forehead wrinkled with worry.

“It's Number Forty-Three, isn't it?”

She nodded. He knew the number. Why? She hardly ever went into his shop, preferring to go shopping in Croydon, and he had never delivered at Number Forty-Three. Her ankle was throbbing painfully now, but she ignored it. Away at the back of her mind a familiar picture was forming, and as he helped her into the car the picture began to merge into a series of pictures, like the slowly revolving cards of the peepshows she had seen, on seaside piers. She was on her terrace again, in the gently swinging hammock, with the courtiers standing round, and in the background, smiling complacently, was the Great Provider. She was interested to note that he no longer looked like Esme, but much more like this man, in a smart West End pin-stripe, and she knew somehow that this sports car of his was parked somewhere in the background.

As he leaned forward to release the handbrake his eye fell on her ruined stocking.

“I say, that's a pity! But I daresay we can soon replace that, Mrs. Fraser.”

She smiled as the car shot forward. The peepshow faded, and she relaxed against the red leather cushions.

“It's nothing,” she told him, “you mustn't bother. It was my fault... I was thinking, and not looking out.”

She was even tempted, for a brief moment, to tell him her problem. He would know what to do about it all right. He was that sort of man, wise in the ways of the world. How else would he have acquired this car, and all those businesses? But she checked herself and said nothing more until he pulled up outside Number Forty-Three, and jumped out to open the door. Her mind was exploring all manner of interesting
possibilities, and at times like this it was always best to say as little as possible.

“Hadn't I better carry you in?” he said, hovering on the kerb.

“Good heavens, no, Mr. Carver; I'm not crippled, just a bit shaken.”

“Are you quite sure?”

He sounded as if he would very much like to carry her in, and her mind registered the fact.

“Quite sure, thanks.”

She got out, and smiled at him again, “You've been very kind.”

“Not a bit of it; you've been most sporting. Dammit, most pedestrians would have kicked up no end of a fuss.”

“I hate fuss,” she said simply, and went on up the short path, feeling in her bag for the key.

He stood by the gate while she opened the door and heard her call “Esme!”, as she looked over her shoulder, and smiled back at him. Then the door closed very softly, and she was gone, but her perfume lingered on in the car.

Thoughtfully he reversed down the Avenue towards the double doors of his yard and for once he was not thinking about his businesses.

3

Elaine's baby, a girl, arrived with a dramatic sense of timing, being born at the St. Helen's Private Nursing Home in the Upper Road, on the morning of September 1st, 1939.

Esme had behaved about it all just as she had known he would, outdoing all his earlier performances in a non-stop display of tenderness and gratitude. The whole business had been far less worrying and irritating than she had feared. Somehow the encounter with Archie had steadied her, so that she had been content to prolong her performance of a dutiful Avenue bride throughout the period of pregnancy, even to the extent of pretending to learn to knit, and asking her mother-in-law to choose a name.

Eunice chose “Guy”, of course, after the hero of the
Marne, but in the event it was Harold's choice, Barbara, that was used. Now they had all gone home, and the Nursing Home Staff was glued to the radio, or hanging about in the corridors discussing the news with the doctors, while Elaine had leisure to lean back on her pillows and let her mind range into a future that had nothing whatever to do with the wrinkled morsel asleep in the nursery across the passage.

As she mused she reflected what a great deal of nonsense people talked about motherhood and babies. To begin with they always gave one to understand that birth itself was an agonising experience, but that the moment one looked at one's child, all memory of the pain was submerged in wave after wave of joy, love, and fulfilment. They said that, no matter how ugly a child looked when first born, it was sure to seem radiantly beautiful to its mother, and then they drivelled on and on and on, about “the exquisite joy of holding and feeding the baby, for the very first time.”

She knew now, as she had suspected long ago, that not a word of this was true. The birth had not been agonising. Uncomfortable perhaps, but, as far as she could recall, not nearly so bad as an abscessed tooth she had had in Edinburgh, when she was playing the Royal with poor old Eugene. Then again, not by any stretch of imagination could a sane person describe the mottled, puckered, brick-coloured thing they had held up to her as beautiful. To her it looked like a small piece of raw beef, and when they had given it to her to feed, she had derived no satisfaction in
that
, finding the process almost as uncomfortable as having the baby.

Now that she was alone, and everyone was chattering and chattering about something Germany was doing to Poland, and something we were going to do to Germany in return, her thoughts were occupied neither with the baby, nor the international situation. These did not interest her in the slightest, but what did was a huge basket of fruit the nurse had just brought in, fortunately after Esme, Harold, and Eunice had beamed their way out of the ward, looking, she thought, like a trio of Chinese coolies, bowing themselves out of an ancestral shrine.

It was the largest basket of fruit she had ever seen, a towering pyramid of rosy apples, oranges, tangerines,
bananas, peaches, and pineapple, gathered into an enormous yellow basket, with huge curved handles, all twined about with evergreen, and finished off at the top with a vast bow of broad, pink ribbon. It stood by the window, dwarfing the pitiful little bouquets that Harold and Esme had brought in, and she looked again at the card that had accompanied it, propped up against a vase on her bedside table.

The card read:
“Congratulations—Archie Carver”
, and on the back, in his bold, flowing handwriting:
“May I pop in and see you one day next week? I'll 'phone first.”

She looked at the basket for a long time. It was, she decided, the sort of basket that went with cream sports cars and chains of grocery shops, and it might go very well with a lot of other things, a terrace, perhaps, and a hammock, and a cloud of courtiers, all standing by with iced drinks and bushels of flattery.

4

Not everyone along the Avenue was cast down by Hitler's activities that September morning.

Over at Number Seventeen, where Sydney Frith and his mother had lived so quietly all these years, there was unaccustomed bustle, and a great deal of running up and down stairs, as Sydney emerged on to the landing and called imperiously for shirts, and studs, and clean underwear, using the authoritative voice he had acquired since Edgar had abdicated in his favour.

Sydney was very excited that morning, as he tugged at the straps of his new valise, and glanced at himself sideways in the mirror of his wardrobe door, excited and extremely pleased with himself for being so clever as to anticipate events. So accurately had he anticipated them that he was the very first man in the Avenue to don a uniform and, at the same time, insure himself against the risks of an uncomfortable war.

For Sydney was already an officer, with the expectation of receiving smart salutes from any rankers who crossed his path, even such bounders as those motor-cycling maniacs over at Number Twenty, and all the chaps at the office, who
(lacking his foresight) were now liable to be thrust into uniforms for which they had not been measured at Simpson's, in the Strand.

It had been a bit of a gamble, of course. If there had been no war he might have been faced with the prospect of sitting in a draughty Nissen hut two nights a week, and throughout occasional week-ends. That was the risk Alec Cartwright, his friend, had foreseen, and explained to him, during the uncertain weeks that followed the Munich crisis, and every young man at Claxton and Wragg's, Holbora Way, was looking over his shoulder at the headlines.

“Get on a Squadron now,” Alec had advised, “and keep on putting in regular appearances at H.Q. until something definitely happens. If it doesn't, then you're stuck with it for a spell, but if it does you'll be commissioned, and you'll have fixed yourself nicely for the duration!”

It had been good advice, and Sydney was very glad indeed that he had taken it, and signed on as a volunteer clerk (accounts) at the Lucknow Park depot of a Balloon. Squadron. He had, it could now be admitted, been very doubtful at first, for he had had a strong aversion to all uniforms since his career with the Blackshirts had ended in a brick kiln. But Alec's information had been sound, for here he was, after only a few months as a volunteer, credited with thirty-five pounds to spend on kitting himself out as an Acting Pilot Officer, and with the virtual certainty of quick promotion as war-time expansion got under way. In addition he had authority, authority over all latecomers, both volunteers and Grade II men, pulled in by the call-up.

In the meantime he had steered clear of heroics. The ante-room at Lucknow Park was already crammed with eager young men, shouting for “cans-o'-wallop”, and exchanging information on “Spits”, and “Hurrys”, “prangs” and “wizard shows”. Sydney listened to them attentively enough to learn the new slang, but he did not experience the slightest desire to change places with the most splendid of them, having learned his lesson in heroics long ago. They were anxious to become “flying types”, and he was quite content to remain a “wingless-wonder”. They could have their Spits, and their Hurrys, by the hangar-full. He was happy enough with his
loose-leaf ledgers, his trestle tables, and his bespectacled L.A.C. assistant.

Now the future was bright indeed. If they were going to have trenches in this war he wouldn't be expected to stand in one, and if they bombed the Balloon Centre he could always carry his ledgers down to the bomb-proof shelter, and put a “Business-As-Usual” card on the door.

In the meantime, he could walk about the suburb with his chin up, watching, out of the corner of his eye, for any unsuspecting “brown jobs” and “erks”, with their hands in their trouser pockets.

Before he kissed Esther's cold cheek, and humped his new valise to the 'bus stop in the Lower Road, he had just sufficient time to send one of his infrequent letter-cards to his father, up in Llandudno, informing him that Edgar could continue to direct his monthly remittances to Number Seventeen, but that henceforth they must be addressed to
Pilot Officer Frith, S. RAF. V.R.

5

Edgar Frith pursed his lips over Sydney's letter-card, received the Monday after war had been declared. He knew nothing about the different branches of the R.A.F., and to him a Pilot-Officer was an officer who piloted an aeroplane. He could not help wondering when, where, and how Sydney, whom he recalled as an excessively timid boy, had mastered the technique of such a hazardous calling.

The war news had given Edgar a severe bout of indigestion, and throughout the week-end Frances had been mixing him frequent draughts of his special bismuth medicine, so frequent indeed that he was quite unequal to attending a sale, at Menai Bridge, for he feared that he would burp too often and too obviously during the bidding.

All that week Edgar was in very low spirits. They said that a war would paralyse the antique trade, and they were probably right, for it was a luxury business, and people didn't go in for luxuries in war-time, but made do until it was over, and then prices soared and it became almost impossible to acquire fresh stock.

It was a great pity that things should come to this after all. These had been smooth, prosperous years, and very happy ones indeed for Frances, Pippa, and himself.

Pippa had just come into the business, and now helped Frances look after the shop, giving Edgar ample time to go further afield to auctions and private sales. In the mid-thirties he had made three or four lucky purchases, and sent them to Christie's. He had also bought, and held back, thirty to forty choice little pieces to furnish the house they had intended buying, before it had been requisitioned by the Council for evacuees and migrating Government clerks.

Now every plan they had was suspended for the duration, and Glyn Davies, the kindly auctioneer, told him that there would be very few sales until things sorted themselves out a bit. By the time they did, he reflected, he would probably be too old to get about-and compete with younger dealers who were beginning to drive up from town in their dozens, and assist in the search for “genuine bits” for the American market.

Frances said he wasn't to worry but he did worry. He couldn't help worrying, for he was getting on in years, and if anything happened to him what was to become of Frances and Pippa?

He passed the letter-card to Frances, and watched her eyebrows lift.