The Dreaming Suburb (37 page)

She was excited and made no pretence of concealing her pleasure.

“Drummer! For
Al Swinger!
Then you must have broadcast!”

He told her, modestly, that he had broadcast on several
occasions, and added that in his opinion Al was “going places”.

“You were at the football club dance on Wednesday, weren't you? But this is marvellous ... do you mind if I fetch Mr. Cooper? He's our manager, and I know he'd like to hear you've been buying,” and, as he hesitated, not wanting to terminate their tête-à-tête, “... it'll do me no end of good ... 'specially if you ... you ... told him I put them over well!”

At this he could not refuse, and Mr. Cooper was fetched, introduced, and duly impressed. He patted his saleswoman with a proprietary air. “And what do you think o' my little plugger, Mr. Harper?” he wanted to know.

“I think she puts them over marvellously,” said Ted, watching the colour rush to Margy's cheeks. “She doesn't overdo it, like so many of them.... She lets the number
unwind
itself!”

Mr. Cooper thumped him enthusiastically between the shoulders, and launched himself into a disjointed conversation.

“That's exactly it!” he endorsed. “I couldn't have put it better myself ... just-a-minute-Miss-Gregson-I'm-busy-can't-you-see.... Now look here, Mr. Hartwell, you could do me an' Miss Shearing here a real turn if you put that in writing! You know—uns'licited testimonial—keep-your-eye-on-that-one-with-the-red-shopping-bag-Miss-Gregson-I-don't-like-the-look-of-her—coming from you, in the business. It'd be something for the area-manager to chew over. Between you'n me, I had a big job getting establishment for a plugger in this branch, and this about clinches it. What do you say, Mr. Harper?”

“I'll do it with pleasure,” said Ted, and was instantly rewarded by Margy's dazzling smile.

He wrote the letter and it gave him the freedom of the shop.

He began getting up earlier, and going down to the Old Orchard Road at 11 a.m. every morning. Sometimes he took up his position under the dais, but more often he stood well back, over against the confectionery counter, and heard Margy sing her way to the lunch-break.

He bought, on an average, two records a day, but he was a shy young man, with very little experience in courting, and it was difficult to know how he would have progressed had not Margy herself made the next move.

One morning, between plugs, she said: “I'd just love to do a cabaret number with your band, Ted.”

Her brown eyes made him reckless.

“Why not?” he argued. “I'll fix it with Al, he'd jump at it!”

“Would he? Oh,
would
he?”

“Sure! Why not, Margy?”

But it wasn't as easy as all that. Al Swinger was moving up in the world, and when Ted had finished singing Margy's praises to him, he remained doubtful.

“Woolworth's, you say? I dunno.... If we do have a vocalist she ought to have class. What's she doing, song-plugging at Woolworth's?”

“She's great, Al, great... she's ... she's
got
something... it's the way she puts them over!”

“Okay,” said Al, finally, “but as a favour to you, Ted, and if she doesn't come classy, she's out—understand?”

“She's classy,” said Ted, breathlessly, “she's the classiest plugger I ever heard. Dammit, Al, even the best of 'em have got to start somewhere!”

“Yeah,” said Al, cryptically, “but it doesn't have to be Woolworth's.”

Margy, however, while she did not produce the same devastating effect upon Al as she had on Ted, satisfied the band-leader that she possessed—or might come to possess, sufficient “class” to appear as solo vocalist at one or two of Al's minor engagements.

Her first engagement was a Rotary Club Dance, in the Lewisham area. She had the sort of voice that is ideal for dance lyrics, throaty and eager, with a trick of hanging on to the words at the end of each couplet, and, as Al put it, “making them drip!”

She was too slightly built to make a very impressive figure at the microphone, but she looked trim, and appealingly wistful, in a yellow silk frock, with her dark hair freshly waved, and her hard-working eyes roving among the couples
as she crooned
Moonlight on the River Colorado
and
If I Had a Talking Picture of You.

If Ted Hartnell had needed a pushover he would have received it that first night, watching her from behind the drums, and tapping out the rhythm with his unemployed left foot. Her two numbers earned generous applause, and from then on she became a feature of the band, working part-time through the summer, and giving up her daytime job when the season got under way in October.

Al paid her generously, more than twice as much as she had received song-plugging, but she never forgot that she owed her opportunity to Ted Hartnell, and because of this they seemed to drift together, without any of the customary preliminaries.

She liked his modesty and his sunny temperament, but not his lack of ambition, and his willingness to let Al make all the decisions, or his tendency to underrate himself as a professional.

In the Spring of 1931 Ted was introduced to her family. They lived in one of the terraced streets, off the Millwood Lower Road, and the house seemed to be full of brothers and sisters, all tumbling round the four-valve wireless set, and humming snatches of popular hits. It was the sort of house in which Ted could not fail to feel at home, and it wasn't long before they became engaged, Al Swinger himself making an interval announcement of the news at the Licensed Victuallers' Ball, in Croydon.

It seemed to Ted then, as he took her by the hand, and announced her solo number above the clatter of glasses and ice-cream saucers, that he had everything a man could possibly desire, a well-paid job with a dance-band, a comfortable lodge, and Margy—Margy, who kissed him gently when the taxi dropped them off at her gate round about 2 a.m. that morning, and said:

“I love you, Ted, and you've always been sweet to me. Now I'm going to start being sweet to you. I'm going to see that you get somewhere. Like you deserve.”

He was mildly surprised that the prospect of marriage should set her thinking along these lines.

“Aw, I'm happy enough with Al, Margy,” he told her.

She pressed her cheek against his. “Oh, Al's all right for a start, Ted, but some day, soon, you're going to have a band of your own, you'll see.”

A band of his own! He had never yet let his imagination carry him that far, and he put it down to her exuberance of the moment.

He held her for a moment and then, laughing for sheer joy, lifted her and swung her over the low railing of her front garden.

“I don't want a band of my own, Margy. I want things to go on as they are, for ever and ever. That's all I want, Margy.”

She said nothing to this, but leaned over the railing, kissed him once more, and quietly let herself in.

He went off towards the Avenue, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind.

Lying awake, Edith heard him turn in from Shirley Rise, whistling
Happy Days are Here Again.

Dear Teddy, she thought to herself; how long has he been here ... twelve years? Good heavens, he must be over thirty, and he still looks such a boy! I wonder if he'll ever get married, and go away? I hope not ... oh, I hope not!

1

ESME FRASER
also heard Ted Hartnell come whistling home on the night of his engagement.

He was sitting in the porch-room, where, sleepless, he had drifted to look out across the Avenue at Number Seventeen, the house where his beloved had lived for so long, but lived no longer. The crisis had come and gone at Number Seventeen, and Elaine had departed, in the wake of her father.

Esme had been sleeping very badly during the last few
weeks. He would try and tire himself, physically, by long solitary walks, and then go to bed well before midnight, but usually he was awake again by 2 o'clock, and at this hour, when there was nothing to distract him, his brain was helpless against the memories and regrets it had accumulated since Elaine had decided to anticipate his rescue, and effect her solitary escape from the tower.

For this was how he had always seen her—a captive princess in a tower, waiting to be snatched from dragons below, and carried away on his saddle-bow as a bride, hard won, and suitably grateful. This was how he had regarded her since the early, idyllic days of their courtship; it was his private tragedy that she had always seen him, and herself, in a somewhat more prosaic light.

Lying awake, on a bed that had become lumpy, between sheets that had rucked and wrinkled, or ultimately getting up and mooching into the study, he slipped into the profitless habit of going back over every detail of their association, from the first moment he saw her in the “Paul Jones” at the Stafford-Fyffes' Dance, to the dismal night when she suddenly informed him of her decision to go north and join her father.

He recalled, a little bitterly, just how she had told him, lightly and gaily, as if she was setting out on a high adventure, and he had been obliged to admit at last that they had been moving on different planes from the very beginning, that while he had seen her as a goddess, she had seen their association as a kind of experiment, an experiment in love.

There could seldom have been a more complicated romance, or one more fraught with lies and deceits, with fictitious friends she was supposed to meet at fictitious rendezvous, with stolen moments, subterfuges, and alibis—but all this, according to her, had been imperative on account of her mother, whose discovery of the affair, she declared, would have put an end to it altogether.

Deep down, and far from willingly, Esme had never altogether believed this. He sometimes had an uncomfortable suspicion that Elaine was using her mother as a bogey, in order to subject his devotion to a series of excruciating tests, and this, in fact, was a fairly accurate assessment of the position. He could hardly be blamed for failing to guess that
her motives were even more complicated and that she had now come to regard every stolen moment with Esme as a secret blow at Esther, a penny, so to speak, off the account of all her years of seclusion and prohibition, of rule by cane and edict in a court of no appeal.

Elaine had been gone three months or more now.

Sitting on the window-seat of the porch-room in the small hours, Esme thought back over the past year, and wondered if his own account balanced, if the joy and fulfilment of those first weeks had been worth the misery and the frustration of the weeks that followed. He was inclined to think not; if this was love, he reasoned, then they could have it for all he cared.

There had been good times, of course, like the day they spent at the Crystal Palace, when he had told her about the prehistoric monsters, and basked in her appraisal of his vast store of general knowledge. There had been the lovely afternoon they had gone up West, and seen a matinée of
Autumn Crocus,
and afterwards had tea in Lyons, and a compartment to themselves all the way from Charing Cross to Woodside. There had been the dozen or so stolen walks on warm summer evenings, when Elaine had slipped out of the side gate, and they had met by appointment at the bend of the lane, crossing the field to the copse behind Wickham. There had been plenty of kisses, depending more on her mood of the moment than the intervals of privacy they could expect on these occasions, for Elaine, if she felt like kissing, was never deterred by a passer-by.

In fact it was her moods that governed the tempo of each occasion. He had never dreamed that a woman could have so many moods or, possessing them, could employ them with such devilish skill, for the sole purpose, it would appear, of producing matching moods in her companion. They had so little time together that Esme felt they should have wasted no single second in bickering over trivial issues, but Elaine did not see it this way, and he could never really admit to himself that the bickering was all part of the experiment, like her sudden impulses to run up and down the scale of his emotions, or enfold him in an embrace so fierce and uninhibited that it frightened him.

Sometimes he parted from her feeling like a cork that had been swept along in a tide-race. Sometimes he felt humiliated, and defeated by it all, but sometimes he was uplifted and half-demented with gratitude, with no adequate way of expressing it. Usually it was her talk that shocked him, but he dared not show as much, lest she should think him naïve. Yet, for all this, he thought of little but her when they were apart, and as time went on, his long ride on an emotional switchback did a good deal to mature him.

The day she shocked him most deeply was the day she told him of the latest developments at Number Seventeen.

It happened one Saturday afternoon, when they had met by appointment in the “Rec”.

Saturday was their best day for meetings, Elaine having given her mother the impression that she left her work at one o'clock, whereas she was often able to get home by mid-day. This was one of her smaller deceits, without which, she assured him, they could never have met at all.

She came down the main avenue of the “Rec”, smiling, and sat down beside him on the seat furthest from the tennis-courts.

“Daddy's gone,” she said flatly.

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Why, gone off with his mistress, the one at the shop!”

She enjoyed the startled expression she produced on his face.

“Mother's not going to give him a divorce,” she went on, in a voice that conveyed the blandest satisfaction; “she says she's not going to make it easy for him to fornicate!” Here she threw back her head and laughed. “Mother gets those words out of the Bible, and I've always thought she likes saying them. It's funny ...”—she now seemed to be talking more to herself than to him—“... but I think she's always been a bit sexy, but not with Father, if you see what I mean! I think it went sour on her, soon after they were married, and she turned to religion as a sort of second-best. People do do that sometimes, Esme. I've read about it.”