The Dreaming Suburb (39 page)

He stared at her, petrified with wonder, the desire of a moment ago ebbing from him; then, with a little sob, he bent
his head, and kissed her breast—not as he had kissed her mouth in their first embrace, but softly, and very reverently.

She stood quite still, her head flung back, her hands loose beside her, as though his kiss was an act of homage, respectfully given, indifferently received. It was only when he reached out, and drew the folds of her housecoat back on to her shoulder, that she suddenly drew away from him, her back pressed to the frame of the little cistern.

“What's the matter? Don't you want me?”

His mouth puckered like a child's. He was appalled at the hardness of her tone.

“Not want you? I'm terribly in love with you, Elaine ... surely you must...”

She braced herself away from the frame.

“But you
don't
want me—not like this—not as a
woman!”

“Elaine ... darling ...”

He could barely speak as the terms of her challenge penetrated to him.

“Can't you
begin
to understand ...”

“No, I
can't!”
She was almost shouting now. “No woman could! I don't want to be loved like that ... like a ... like a statue or something! I want to be wanted for myself—like any woman!”

Her fingers were wrestling furiously with the tiny buttons, and her voice was hard and grating.

“But not
here,
Elaine—not like
this
... not yet, Elaine—”

She finished her rebuttoning.

“Then it's never, Esme!
Never!
Do you understand?” She drew a long breath. “I'm going away! Tomorrow! So it's never!

For the second time in a few minutes Esme's universe exploded. Her voice seemed to reach him from an incredible distance.

“Going away ... tomorrow.... Where? ... Why?”

“I made up my mind. I'm sick of all this, sick of being watched, and spied on, and having nothing to look forward to in this awful house! I'm going to my father. He's got a job for me, a job where I can meet people! I mightn't have gone, if you'd been different—but you never
will
be different, not
about me! I don't
want
to be worshipped! Can't you understand a simple thing like that? I want to be wanted, every minute of every day.... I want you to look at me all the time, and want me, and want me!
Now
do you see?”

He did not see, not till much later.

At the moment, at seventeen, her needs were far beyond the range of his experience and comprehension. This was little to be wondered at, for he had known only one woman, his mother, and she, so like himself, saw life in terms of knights, and steeds, and princesses in towers. He had tried to explain this to her so many times and had failed. Tonight his failure had been so spectacular that he saw quite clearly that he had sacrificed all chances of convincing her in the future. Even the crushing weight of misery in his heart could not extinguish that spark of truth. He said very quietly:

“When? When are you going, Elaine?”

“I told you—tomorrow!”

“Doesn't your mother know?”

She chuckled, and seemed to recover her humour in an instant.

“Of course she doesn't! I shall go to work as usual only I won't really go, I'll go to the station instead. I've got a letter ready to post, in case she asks the police to start looking for me when I don't come home after tea. This time tomorrow I shall be in Llandudno, and I'm going to be an hotel receptionist. What do you think of that?”

He thought nothing of it, being incapable of coherent thought.

“Then I won't see you again?”

She considered, pursing her lips, and a little of his misery touched her.

“I don't know—it depends—perhaps.”

“I could write ... can't I write to you?”

“Yes, of course, if you want to. I'd like to have someone to tell about everything.”

Suddenly he saw a tiny glimmer of hope. “I could get a job there ... there must be jobs going in a place like that ... especially in summer....”

“No! Esme.” She was very definite. “This time I want to
do something myself. Don't you see, I've never done anything for myself before.”

“Then you can't love me at all, and you couldn't have done from the start.”

She regarded him steadily, and without pity.

“I don't know how you can say that, not after just now. You could have had all of me, and I'd have loved you for wanting to, for not being able to stop yourself. It's just that we're different, Esme—you don't want a girl like me, really. I even frighten you, don't I? There must be heaps of girls who'd suit you better than I do. That Carver girl, for instance, the one that was always following you around when you were young.... Why don't you fall in love with her?”

He made a little gesture of hopelessness.

“Elaine ... you ... you ... just don't fall in love like that.... That just proves you could never have been in love. If you had, you couldn't believe that. I'll never love anyone but you—never.”

She was not disposed to argue with him. The draught from the door was blowing on her, and her feet were getting cold.

“I must go now,” she told him, “I've more packing to do.”

At once he became desperate. “I'll come to the station with you—you'll have luggage, I'll see you off....”

“No! Esme.” Again she was adamant. “I've sent most of my stuff on in parcels, and I'd rather you didn't come to the station. I told you—I want to do this on my own.”

She took his hand and squeezed it.

“I'd still sooner we parted friends, Esme, and I'd like you to wish me good luck. You'll do that, won't you?”

“I'll write, like I said,” he told her, withdrawing his hand. “You'd better go now; you'll get cold, and it's late.” He opened the door for her, and held it.

She moved one step, and smiled.

“Won't you even kiss me goodbye?”

He hesitated for a brief moment and it occurred to him that even now it might not be too late. If he shut the door, took her in his arms, made love to her in the way she demanded to be loved, then she might change her mind, and stay on in the Avenue after all, just to be near him.

She read his thoughts with the facility she had read them so many times before.

“It's too late for that now, Esme. It wasn't quite true what I said just now—about me not going if you'd been different—I made up my mind to go weeks ago, and I'll go anyway. Besides, I don't feel that way any longer, and you can't really blame me, can you? No woman would, not after being refused.”

There was no kind of answer to this. They went out and down the path, and he watched her let herself in. She turned on the threshold, and blew a kiss to him. Even in the agony of the moment he noticed how gracefully she made the gesture, sweeping her arm in an arc, like a ballet-dancer.

He had turned away, when she called: “Esme!”

He hesitated, trying to force himself to go.

“When you get in, creep across the landing, and sit in the porch-room for a moment. Will you promise? In about ten minutes?”

He nodded dumbly. He did hot notice the bubble of laughter in her voice.

He crept back across the moonlit Avenue, and into the deep shadow of the alley, between his own house and Number Twenty-Four.

As he crept through the kitchen, and up the stairs, he raised his hand to his face, and brushed away the first tears he had shed since he was a child.

But he had not finished with her, not even then. Not quite.

He sat glumly on his bed for a few moments, and had begun to take off his clothes when he recalled her last words to him—“Sit in the porch-room for a moment.” He jumped up, his heart leaping with hope. Why had she said that? What might it imply? Perhaps after all, she had no real intention of going, perhaps—oh God make it so—the whole thing was an elaborate tease!

He tiptoed quickly across the landing, grateful for Eunice's fitted carpet, and into the “study”, standing close to the window, and peering out across the moonlit Avenue to the porch-room window that was hers. The light was on. He could see that, although the heavy curtains were tightly drawn. He imagined her moving about, smiling to herself as
she stuffed things into her attaché case, putting the finishing touches on the letter she was to send her mother.

Then, when he least expected it, the left-hand curtain was suddenly whipped back, and he saw her stand, for a few fleeting seconds, within inches of the pane. He could see her very clearly.

She stood quite still, facing directly across at him, her weight poised lightly on hands that rested on the narrow window-ledge, her head held slightly forward, with a dark mass of hair tumbling across her shoulders. She was stark naked.

Before he could gasp she had slipped back into the room, and the light went out. He saw a white arm flash, and the curtain was re-drawn.

Suddenly he was seized with a fit of violent shivering. He felt defiled, as though she had screamed something obscene across the Avenue, as though she had shouted
“Here I am! This is me! This is what you spurned! Take a good last look at me, silly little man!”

She had said her farewell, and its ruthless mockery made him cry out in despair.

There was a swift movement immediately behind him, and his light flicked on.

Esme choked back a cry, and swung round to see Harold standing there, tousled, and blinking short-sightedly without his essential spectacles.

“What is it, old chap? What's happened?” he said sleepily. Then, seeing Esme's expression, he stepped swiftly over the threshold, and touched his shoulder.

“You're not ill, old chap?'

“No—Harold,” Esme managed to croak, “I'm not ill.”

Harold stood blinking at him. The utter wretchedness of the boy's face alarmed him and he shook off his drowsiness.

“If there's any way I can help, I'd like to,” he said. “Suppose we go downstairs, and make some tea? Your mother's sound asleep. She won't butt in, old chap.”

Esme said nothing, but nodded. Harold hesitated a moment longer, then winked solemnly, strictly as one man to another.

1

BECAUSE
Jim Carver was dedicated to suffering humanity he seldom devoted much thought to that section of it that constituted his own family. Whenever he did he derived little satisfaction from his reflections.

They were not, as he was obliged to admit to himself, a bad set of kids as a whole, but neither were they much to write home about. Individually, they seemed to him to possess average intelligence. Collectively, they were a little disappointing, and better left to their own devices.

It would have shocked him very much to discover that they interpreted this attitude on his part not as tolerance, but as lack of interest. Not one of them would have considered coming to him for advice, in the way that Miss Clegg, of Number Four, sought him out whenever she was faced with a problem. He had always gone his way, and they had gone theirs. Apart from his single brush with Archie, he had never tried to mould the political outlook of any one of them and, if he had thought about it at all, he would have concluded that they had no views at all, beyond a bland acceptance of life as something to be lived day by day.

He had broken with Archie, presumably the most original of them, on the third day of the General Strike, and the rupture had never healed, although they had decided, independently of one another, that it would be childish to pass one another as strangers in the street. Accordingly they nodded, and perhaps exchanged a vague handwave on the rare occasions that they did meet in Shirley Rise, or in the Lower Road.

Jim never went into the corner shop, although Archie was hardly ever there these days, and Archie never came to the
house when Jim was likely to be about. Jim heard a little of his son's business expansion through the girls, chattering over their meals at Number Twenty, but he made no attempt to expand the odd scraps of news that he picked up from this source. He had never cared for Archie since receiving those letters from his wife, when he was still in the trenches, and the boy's thinly veiled contempt for him had put Jim on the defensive long before Archie married, and set up in business with the Pirettas.

He had much more respect for Louise but, like everyone else at Number Twenty, had long since taken her for granted, and this attitude now extended to Louise's suitor, Jack, who still hung about the house of an evening. Louise was a good, kind, hard-working girl, but not the sort of daughter a man needed to think about, unless, of course, clean pants were not to be found in the airing-cupboard, or there was no soap in the bathroom basin.

The twins, Berni and Boxer, Jim had written off as typical products of a speed-crazy age. Their scholastic career had been punctuated with minor irritations for him, beginning with that crazy attack on the Headmaster, at Havelock Park, and ending with the Grammar School Headmaster's laconic comment on their final school report. Longjohn had simply written: “They are lazy, but fundamentally decent boys. They will never be persuaded to act independently of each other.”

Since they had left school, and gone out to work, Jim had seen even less of them than he saw of Archie.

Judy, his second daughter, had always been his favourite, ever since she had burst into tears on the day he came home from Germany to find his wife lying dead, and he had been able to coax a smile out of her with a newly-minted sixpence, but even Judy seemed to have moved off into a world of her own since she had grown-up, and stopped following that Fraser boy about. He saw a good deal more of her than he saw of the boys, for she still lived at home, but she was always out of the house before he had finished shaving in the morning, and if he missed her at his evening meal she was in bed before he came home from the Unemployed Workers'
Club, or from political meetings at Lewisham, or Clock-house.

He thought her rather pretty, and trim, in her well-worn jodhpurs, and roll-neck sweater (he never saw her wear anything else these days), and he sometimes wondered why she never seemed to bother with boys, but spent all her waking hours up at that stable. It never occurred to him to link this fact with the abrupt ending of her friendship with Esme, next door. He was, in fact, like all men with strong political convictions, concerned with the mass, rather than the individuals who make up the mass. He would have shown immediate concern if any of his children had seemed obviously unhappy, but nobody at Number Twenty ever appeared to be anything more than moderately content, and each was quite capable of looking out for himself, even as Archie had done from earliest childhood.