The Dreaming Suburb (6 page)

Saul had indeed “served her crool”, as Edith discovered the moment she began to wash her sister's limp body. There were long greenish bruises on both thighs, and more recent bruises over the whole area from left shoulder to elbow. One eye was slightly discoloured, and the back of her right hand was puffed and mottled, as though it had been struck with something flat and heavy, in warding off a blow aimed at the head.

Together they did what they could. Becky was dressed and led downstairs. A scrubby-haired youth, the son of the slut, went along the Embankment to fetch a cab, and as Edith was settling her sister inside, and preparing to enter herself, the landlady imparted one final piece of information.

“There was a kid, you know. Born dead, so I 'eard, a bit before time!”

That was all Edith was ever able to learn about Becky's brief absence from the vicarage. She never discovered whether Saul had actually married the girl, or whether the child had been still-born, or had died within days. When Becky made a partial recovery her mind resisted all attempts to probe into the immediate past. This could only be guessed at through her behaviour during her “spells”, the “getting-ready” spell, the “layette” spell, and, most upsetting of all, the “getting-supper-for-Saul” spell.

Apart from these flashbacks Becky's mind dwelt exclusively in the more distant past, in her childhood and girlhood days, up to shortly before the time she had met Saul during a tramp across the Doone Valley.

After a few half-hearted attempts to get at the facts Edith was content to let her sister remain there, chattering happily of half-forgotten croquet tournaments, and Sunday School picnics, and talking of long-dead parishioners as though, at any moment, they might call at the Vicarage to put up banns, or discuss a forthcoming bazaar. Even Lickapaw the cat did not really belong to the present, but was identified with a cat the sisters had owned, jointly, as children.

Edith had long since adjusted herself to moving in and out of this shadow world. She would converse with her sister gravely about an epidemic of scarlet fever in Devon, in 1890, as though it was a current topic and, a moment later, walk to the back door and deal with a tradesman, or hawker. Physically, her sister could do almost everything for herself, having relearned the habits of every-day life under her sister's patient tuition, during the long period they spent together in the rented bungalow at Simonsbath, soon after Becky's initial stay in hospital had ended.

Becky's mental age was now about seven, and it was only during a “spell” that Edith had to watch her closely. Sometimes a “spell” lasted all day, more often only an hour or so. They invariably followed the same pattern: a frenzied packing of clothes, an equally frenzied “spell” of knitting, and a tearful appeal to visit the shops in order to buy baby's clothes. A “getting supper spell” involved a general upheaval
in the kitchen, where Becky would solemnly pour everything she could lay hands on into a large bowl and, after a long stir, tip the mixture into a frying-pan, “because Saul will have everything, fried”!

Edith coped very well with the “spells”, but not quite so efficiently with the family finances. In one of his rare communicative moods, shortly before his death, Parson Clegg had said to her: “There'll be enough, Edie—not much, mind you, but enough, providing you're careful.” And then, a few moments before his death, he said a strange thing. Catching Edith by the hand he spoke slowly and clearly, straight into her ear.

“Look after
Edie
,” he said; and came as near to winking as matters. He must have meant to say “Becky”, of course, and Edith was relieved to hear him say it, for it implied forgiveness on his part, but she had never understood the solemn wink. In all the years they had lived together, she never recalled seeing her father wink and, even allowing for the circumstances, and the fact that he had only just emerged from a coma, the wink upset Edith more than his sudden death, and remained vividly in mind long after the pattern of the final scene had become blurred.

About the time Jim Carver came home, and Esme bewitched Judith in the gazebo of the old Manor, Edith Clegg received her first letter from the Barnstaple solicitors, who were executors for Parson Clegg's modest fortune.

She had to put on her steel-rimmed spectacles, and read the letter at least three times before she perceived, behind a number of finely-turned legal phrases, that the communication was a piece of well-meant advice to take stock of her financial position.

Parson Clegg had left uninvested capital of about £2,500 (to her dying day Edith never discovered its source: it could never have been saved from his stipend), and each Friday, since the old man's death, Edith had drawn a cheque on the local bank for fifty shillings. Only on rare occasions was she left with more than a copper or two when the week ended, and in her simple, uncomplicated mind she put this down to careful housekeeping on her part. She made no allowances for the rising costs of living after 1914; indeed, it is doubtful if
she was more than half aware of them, for she never bought a newspaper. All her war news came through the agency of Mr. Piretta, the rosy-faced, ever-smiling grocer, in the corner shop.

Occasionally, however, there were lump-sum expenditures—a tweed costume, a chair-cover, settlement of rates and, every quarter, the rent. To cover these contingencies Edith drew a monthly cheque of ten pounds, so that her expenditure ran into something under three hundred a year. Parson Clegg died in 1909, so that his capital had now dwindled to just over £1,000. It was pointed out to Edith that if she continued spending at the present rate, she would be penniless in less than five years.

The letter, once she had thoroughly understood it, brought her up with a severe jolt. She was not a fool, and realised immediately that she must invest the remaining money, and then set about earning some more. Never having earned a penny in her entire life, she sought advice from the nearest source, the local bank manager.

This gentleman, who had that sound common-sense proverbial among managers of small banks, promptly invested her £1,000 in gilt-edged and, after questioning her for over an hour on the limited possibilities, advised her to set up as a music-teacher, and let one of her bedrooms.

Once she got used to the idea the prospect of earning her living delighted her, and she went about the preliminaries with a promptness that took the bank manager (convinced until then that he was dealing with an impoverished aristocrat) by surprise. She advertised for pupils in the local paper, and for lodgers in the drawing-room window. The results were immediate and gratifying. In less than a month she had twelve music pupils at two guineas a quarter, and had let her back bedroom to Ted Hartnell.

Edith had chosen a propitious time to advertise for music pupils. All over the suburb mothers were dragging their children to the piano-stool. There was a boom in scales and short pieces. Tin-Pan Alley was cock-a-hoop. More sheet-music was being sold than at any time in history and, of all musical instruments, the piano far outstripped all others in suburban popularity. At any time between the hours of 4 and
7 p.m. a passer-by, pausing outside almost any of the detached, semi-detached, or terrace houses between the Lower Road and Shirley Rise, could hear a cacophony of blundered scales issuing from the open windows of the drawing-rooms (as parlours were now known) for every other house possessed a cottage piano, at which two or more of the family took turns to pick their way through the shorter and simpler excerpts of Schubert, or the inevitable
Down on the Farm
jingles. On a summer evening in 1919 one might have heard half a dozen renderings of
A Merry Peasant Returning from Work, L'Orage,
or
Autumn Ride
in the Avenue alone, and the leather music-case, in the hands of sullen-faced boys or their pig-tailed sisters, became as familiar in the street as the school satchel.

Edith, who had been soundly taught as a child, divided her hour-long lessons into thirty minutes theory and thirty minutes practice, and was thus able to cope with two pupils at once. She relied almost exclusively on a fat book of scales, and a
Down on the Farm
for beginners, for the latter tinklings possessed for her, an exiled country-woman, a strong nostalgic flavour, and she never grew weary of hearing
In a Quiet Wood
or
Now All is Sleeping.

She quickly learned to distinguish between those of her flock who would never progress beyond the musical farmyard, even when anxious mothers guaranteed regular practice with the help of twopenny canes, sold in bunches at all ironmongers along the Lower Road, and those who, with a little patience, would soon master elementary theory, and absorb as much as she could teach them.

Among her first dozen there were only two who did not regard the weekly lesson, and its accompanying obligation of at least half-an-hour's daily practice, as a monstrous inroad into their playtime. Of these two, Esme Fraser, of Number Twenty-Two, was one. The other, little Sandra Geering of Lucknow Road, subsequently obtained her L.R.A.M., but that was years later, when she had far outgrown Edith's methodical “One-two-three, one-two-three's a straight back dear, and don't, oh
don't
encourage lazy fingers!”

Edith found a curious sense of fulfilment in these music lessons and, as time went on, they came to mean more and
more to her, for they brought her out of the tiny world in which she and Becky had been living since they left Devon, a world in which the only breaks in the routine of getting up, housekeeping, shopping, reading, and going to bed, were Becky's occasional spells, and the migrations, and prodigal homecomings of Lickapaw, the cat.

The arrival of Ted Hartnell, the lodger, provided a sharper and more permanent break with the past.

2

It might be said that, through Ted Hartnell, Edith found, and grasped, the thread of purpose that she had lost the day she left the Vicarage to fetch Becky home. Perhaps she realised this. Perhaps that was why she came to love him....

Ted knocked on the door of Number Four one evening in early autumn and Becky, who answered the knock, looked him over, shuffled back into the kitchen, where Edith was making loganberry jam, and said: “It's a man! I think it's Mr. Fosdyke's boy!”

Edith wiped her hands very carefully. She knew, of course, that it was not Mr. Fosdyke's boy; Mr. Fosdyke's boy, George, had been killed on the Somme, in 1916, but she remembered him well enough—he had sung in the choir for years, and was once very sick in the middle of
For All the Saints.
Edith's long habit of translating Becky's curiously accurate recollections from past to present told her, at least approximately, what the man on the doorstep would look like. He would be dark, sleek, and probably about nineteen, for that would be George Fosdyke's age when Becky ran off with her painter.

This was indeed a physical approximation of Ted Hartnell in the autumn of 1919. He was short, narrow-shouldered, pink-cheeked and brown-eyed, with lavishly brilliantined hair, and well-cared for off-the-peg clothes. Edith's first impression of him was that he was rather like a young rook. His dapper jauntiness sat upon him rather nervously, as though, at any moment, he would spread his neatly-folded wings, and soar across to the next elm, where he would sit, head thrown back, chest puffed out, swaying slightly in a high wind.

He was hatless, and carried a large canvas hold-all in one hand, and a short black music-case in the other. At first glance Edith mistook him for a new and adult pupil, who was under the mistaken impression that she gave violin lessons as well as pianoforte lessons. His hands, she noticed, were the only part of his person that looked uncared for, being rough and seamed, like the hands of a bricklayer, or pick-wielder.

“It's about that room, Miss,” he began; “they said you got one.”

Now that it had actually come to the point of inviting a young man into the house, not to drink tea, like the plumber's appentice, but to live with them, a spasm of nervousness shook poor Edith. She hesitated and, noticing as much, a clouded, almost hunted look showed in his brown eyes.

“There's the card ...” he began, and stopped when she smiled.

“Of course; come in,
do
,” replied Edith, consciously pulling herself together. She spread her hands and added incongruously, “I was making jam. We had lots of loganberries this year.”

She slipped across the hall, and shut the kitchen door on Becky. He walked upstairs behind her, still gripping his holdall and instrument case, still not too sure of his welcome, and neither of them said anything more until she had displayed the back bedroom, overlooking the old nursery.

He was obviously impressed with its spotlessness, and its unexpectedly open view. Edith had laid out nine pounds to get the room ready, and she had purchased wisely. There was a mahogany chest of drawers, wanting three drawer handles, an oak washstand, carefully draped cretonne curtains, a narrow but solid-looking bed, a bamboo night-table, new linoleum, and a strip of patterned carpet beside the bed.

Everything in the room was second-hand, but Edith, in her new role as business-woman, had not been fobbed off with rubbish. Over the bed Edith hung her own contribution—a framed sampler she had worked when she was ten. Its message was simple and direct. “God,” it said in royal blue, “is Love” in faded crimson.

“How much all in?” he wanted to know, as soon as a decent interval had elapsed. She bit her lip. Her stomach was
making low but very distinct rumbling noises, and making them so persistently that she was sure he could hear them. He came to her rescue immediately, and she decided there and then that he must be a kind and very sensitive young man.

“I take sandwiches mid-day. I'm a stonemason at Kidd's, in Shirley,” he volunteered.

“A stonemason? That must account for the hands. He didn't
look
like a stonemason. A clerk or a shop assistant, but certainly not a stonemason.

“I ... we ... decided a pound, bed and breakfast ... we didn't expect to cater,” she said, suddenly quite nervous of frightening him away. “I ... I suppose I
could
do an evening meal. We have ours about seven, not dinner, you know ... just ... just something warmed up or ... or ... an egg.”