The Dreaming Suburb (67 page)

When at last the lights went up she was converted. She tottered blinking into the sunshine, serene and uplifted, just as though, by some wonderful miracle, poor dear Rudi had been restored to her, and she had been watching
The Son of the Sheik
in Technicolour.

She almost bubbled as she tripped up Shirley Rise, and then she recalled, a little guiltily, that it must be long past Becky's and Jean's tea-time, but as she turned into the Avenue the reprieve caught up with her, as it were, and fell into step as far as the gate of Number Four.

“Well now,” she thought, “things seem to be in a terrible muddle, but there are always the pictures. Whenever things get unbearable I'll slip down to the Odeon, even if I have to come home before the supporting picture and the news.”

Judith returned to the Avenue when she had official confirmation of Tim's death.

She would have returned soon enough in any case, for Maud Somerton engaged a new assistant when Judy put her wedding forward from New Year's Day to September, on account of the war, and Tim's enlistment. But now, like everything else, the riding-school business was in the doldrums, and Maud was talking of selling off horses, and economising all round.

When she was told that Tim had been drowned in a
troopship off the Western Approaches, Judy had been unable to cry. Instead she had saddled up Jason, the big chestnut, and ridden out to the corner of Hayes Wood, tethering the horse to a tree, and sitting on the bank where she had first met Tim, such a little time ago.

It was early November by then, barely two months after their wedding and their three-day honeymoon. The beeches at the extreme edge of the wood were still in leaf, for autumn idled along down here, and the leaves were still green when they were brown and sere in the Manor Wood, at home.

It was very still at the corner of the wood. Sometimes the dead bracken rustled, and the feathered larches continued to gossip, although there was hardly any breeze. Here Judy found that she could think, if not clearly, at least with some hope of getting her future into some sort of perspective.

Their plan had seemed such a modest plan to begin with, but as crisis succeeded crisis it had been subjected to all manner of shifts and adjustments, even before they worked out its main details. If everything had gone as planned she would now be buying new cabin trunks and ordering wedding cards. Instead she was still using her old brown trunk, the one salvaged from the cistern loft of Number Twenty years ago, and she was not a bride-to-be but already a widow.

There had been the quick change of plan. Tim's enlistment, the wedding in the village church, attended by her father, her sister, and Maud (a mere three against the horde of Tim's relatives who drove gaily into the West for the occasion) and then three wonderful days in Cornwall, wonderful, but overshadowed, hour by hour, by impending separation.

Then he had sailed, not to Kenya, and not with her, but to Egypt, with hundreds of other young men, and a few days later she received the 'phone call, and a visit from the scarred old Colonel, his father, who had sat holding her hand in Maud's tackroom, and said, gruffly, but very gently:

“I suppose a father shouldn't have favourites, my dear, but Tim was mine, and his mother's too. Something about him, I suppose, always laughing, young devil, even at the things I brought him up not to laugh at!”

That was it. Tim was always laughing, and she could hear his laughter yet, ringing through the beeches on the edge of the wood, and as she listened she seemed to hear a message behind his laughter, telling her to snap out of it for God's sake, and to mount Jason and gallop off up the sunken lane, and into the future. For it was unreasonable to think of there being no future for a pretty woman of twenty-six.

Because she had loved Tim she listened to him, and presently, no longer dry-eyed, she got up, and did as he bid, feeling a great deal better for the hour she had sat there.

A week later she was back in the Avenue, and a month after that, during the endless frost, she joined the W.A.A.F. as a trainee plotter, and was sent off to a Training Centre in Gloucestershire.

When the summer came, with all its alarms, she had no reason to regret the impulse that had stampeded her into uniform, for she was posted to a South Coast Fighter Station, and down there it was difficult to mourn one death among so many.

Perhaps this was a contributory factor towards the mastery of her grief, or perhaps she had learned something important as she walked her horses along the high-banked lanes and over the windy commons of the West country, or maybe she had always had a generous share of Jim's sound common-sense and, what was more to the point, his capacity to pity. At all events, she was soon able to distinguish herself at her work, and to earn commendation, and with it the promise of rapid promotion, and here we leave Judy, with her memories, good and bad, well under control. As yet no new dreams had invaded the vacuum left by the one she had lost, a dream that had, after all, led by a somewhat roundabout route to a wedding in a village church, even though the fairies had let her down rather badly in the matter of the semidetached at Wickham.

Esme was on a Southern R.A.F. Training Station most of that summer, and he and Judy might have met but did not, for a slight defect in his vision resulted in Esme being rejected for air-crew. At the moment he was in an orderly-
room, fighting the war with an ancient Oliver typewriter and a set of stencils.

He had not yet recovered from his surprise at finding himself in uniform. His interest in political events over the years had been very lukewarm despite his association with the Shawe family, who had succeeded in converting him to their own particular brand of Celtic Liberalism.

The invasion of Poland had caught him off guard, but after the first shock he too had yawned his way through the phoney war, waking up with a start when Fleet Street seemed to go raving mad, in the last days of May. Then, at last, he saw things as they were, and did his best to make amends. It was not his fault that he acted with an impulsiveness that startled old Shawe, his employer, and threw up his job overnight to enlist. Old Mr. Shawe had been sceptical of his chances of coming to grips with Hitler.

“Och, Laddie,” he said, “do ye not know they've more men than they can handle? Ye'll be kicking your heels in some hole-in-corner this time next year, and how am I to replace ye?”

But Esme was lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you regard it, for on the strength of fast typing, and his knowledge of shorthand, he was spared the long period of deferment that attended most enlistments in these days, and was summoned within a fortnight to the R.A.F. Recruiting Centre at Uxbridge.

Elaine seemed to take it all as a matter of course, and Esme was vastly relieved when Eunice offered to look after the baby in Devon. Once this was arranged everything seemed to happen in a flash. One day he was catching one train for the office, and the next he was catching another for the Reception Centre at Cardington, and sharing a bell-tent with nine other young men, in the shadow of the huge hangar that they told him had once housed the ill-fated R.101.

In these early days, before he became bogged down in paper work, he found the community life far more to his liking than he had imagined possible. He discovered that he could laugh at the hoary army jokes about parades, and ill-fitting kit, and hoarse-voiced corporals, who darted about among them like sheep-dogs, yet who were, he discovered,
far more patient and far less aggressive than they appeared to be in their handling of thousands of volunteers, whose qualifications as airmen were limited to good health and enthusiasm.

He missed Elaine, of couse, and little Barbara, whom he had recently taken to bathing, and who looked at him gravely, with huge, grey eyes, when he lifted her from her cot, or tried to amuse her by making a noise like a train, but he was by no means sure that Elaine would miss him as much as he felt himself entitled to be missed.

During twenty months of married life he seemed to have learned almost nothing new about her, neither had he been able to inspire in her anything more rewarding than a purely physical response to his devotion. She was still the Elaine she had always been, despite that brief glimpse he had had of her as the tender, submissive, dutiful creature during the interval between their reunion under “The Death of Chatterton” and their return from the Paris honeymoon. He never once knew, or could guess, the pattern of her thoughts, when they were alone at meals, or sitting by their fireside. She never nagged him, and such tiffs as they had were trivial, even for newly-weds. But if there were no quarrels, neither was there any real accord between them, and although he was conscious of this, he was helpless to alter it in the smallest degree. When he made love to her she was all and more than one could expect of a wife who had never pretended that she was in love with him, and if her preparation of his meals and the care of the house left something to be desired, then that too was something he had half-expected, and had settled for in advance.

As time wore on, and there were so many external things to worry about, he was able to adjust himself to her aloofness, and if it worried him at odd moments he was always able to thrust it into the back of his mind, where he kept all his disappointments, and they were many..

His dreams were mostly ghosts now, keeping silent company with the cohorts of childhood, the cavaliers in their feathered hats, and the Arthurians in their plate-armour. He was not, and was aware now that he never would be, a great
and popular writer of fiction, but he had earned good money by freelance writing and that, he decided, would have to suffice for the time being, at any rate until sanity had been re-established in the world.

Of all the dreamers in the Avenue, it is probable that Esme alone was conscious of putting his dreams into cold storage; this was because his dream was fundamentally unchanged.

By what still seemed to him a miracle he had accomplished the rescue of his lady-in-a-tower, and he was not prepared to see her exchange her wimple and stomacher for a siren-suit or a battle-dress, no matter how alarmingly the sanctuary rocked and shuddered.

In his limited free time, during his six weeks recruit training, he sat down in the N.A.A.F.I. and billet to write her long and passionate letters. But married life with Elaine had brought him closer to realism than all his wanderings, and he was aware by this time that tender words meant nothing at all to her, and that the purely physical manifestations of tenderness were all that she was prepared to give, or to receive. So that letters beginning
My Own Darling Wife
seldom continued in this strain, but trailed off into animated descriptions of the men around him and the life he was leading, and the love letters that he intended should rival Napoleon's outpourings to Josephine never got written after all.

He carried her photograph about with him in his pay-book, a favourite studio portrait, taken just before their marriage, showing her with her hair in a pageboy bob, curled at the ends, her oval face, half-smiling, looking over her bare shoulder. It was an impressive likeness, and his tent-mates whistled when he showed it to them. He made no attempt to conceal his pride in her, but he was beginning to ask himself if this was sufficient to sustain him for a lifetime, and whether or not he had a right to expect something more from her in the years ahead.

Then it struck him that perhaps there were no years ahead, for any one of them. It was strange that a thought like this did not worry him as much as it seemed to worry everybody else.

There was a minor event in the Avenue towards the end of June that succeeded in bringing the people of the crescent together in a way that nothing had done since the war commenced.

The twins, Boxer and Bernard turned up, more than a month after all the other Dunkirk survivors of the suburb had spent their leaves, told their stories, and gone into fresh training for another challenge.

The reappearance of the twins was celebrated in the Avenue like a local Mafeking.

They dropped off the 'bus one day at the bottom of Shirley Rise, and wandered slowly up the hill in stained and bulging, battle-dresses, each with a haversack stuffed full of N.A.A.F.I. chocolate and battered packets of cigarettes.

They did not think of themselves as heroes, and they certainly did not regard their escape across some three hundred miles of enemy-occupied territory as in any way miraculous, or even extraordinary.

To them, so long as they were together, it had been more like a prolonged, pastoral ramble, punctuated with occasional games of string-and-parcel with the Panzers. They came across a dump of antique French mines in an abandoned village, and laid some in front of German tanks, concealing themselves close by, and watching the first tank explode with the same glee as they had once watched an unsuspecting pedestrian stoop and grab at a half-brick, neatly tied up in brown paper.

It was exhilarating to crouch behind the burned-out frontier post, and watch the tank soar into the air, like an exploding Chinese cracker. Boxer nearly had hysterics.

“Let's nip across that field, and lay some more where the road forks,” he gurgled, through his laughter. “Whatd'ysay, Berni, whadysay?”

Berni had looked quickly at the rapidly-reversing Number Two tank, before nodding his blond head.

“Okay, Boxer, but look lively, before the silly sods come out and see what's hit 'em!”

They laid another mine, and narrowly avoided a stream of machine-gun bullets. Then they moved on, crossing mile after mile of parched countryside, stopping to pass bits of news to
distraught refugees, and unarmed poilus, whom they met in shattered villages, and whooping with delight when they came upon an abandoned N.A.A.F.I., with its stores and even its till intact.

Boxer disliked the N.A.A.F.I. “Let's set it on fire, and watch it burn,” he suggested, after they had helped themselves to everything they could carry. “Whatd'ysay, Berni, whadysay?”

But Berni had sympathy for the hundreds of civilians who were now well behind them, and had slowly shaken his head.