The Dreaming Suburb (60 page)

There could be no doubt about it, marriage to a man who adored her was the safest bet, particularly when he was not nearly so short of money, as most of the young men in the Avenue. Esme, she could manage, now and always. He was absurdly uncomplicated, at least as regards herself, and it was an additional stroke of luck that his mother and stepfather were equally manageable, and only too eager to shoulder the tiresome domestic responsibilities that seemed to attend this sort of compromise.

She would stay put for a year or so, and take careful stock of all the available possibilities. She knew the ground round here and, with all this war talk in the papers, who could say what fields might be opening up ahead?

Yet, for all that, Elaine was not wholly bogus. She was willing, up to a point, to give something in return for the tenancy of Number Forty-Three, and the respite it offered. Not lifelong fidelity, not wifely devotion as it was generally understood in the Avenue, but at any rate a strong, physical manifestation of gratitude, which was all that Esme was really interested in at the moment, notwithstanding his arm-fuls of flowers and pretty little avowals.

She would give him, she told herself, slightly more than his
moneysworth for the time being, but how long she would continue to give it she was not prepared to promise, certainly not till death did them part. If, in the not-too-distant future, he could provide the terrace, and the hammock, and the courtiers, the sports car, and the clothes to go with them, then perhaps she might even be willing to continue giving him his moneysworth indefinitely.

In the meantime there were to be no children.

They were married at 10 a.m., and afterwards Harold, Eunice, and Edgar travelled to Victoria to see them off on the Golden Arrow, for their ten-day honeymoon in Paris.

Esme's guess had been a good one. Elaine had always wanted to honeymoon in Paris, for somehow Paris went along with terraces, hammocks, courtiers, sports cars, and advertisements in
Vogue.
Benny Boy, doubtless for reasons of his own, had by-passed Paris when they had driven across the Continent to Biarritz, and Esme, whose foreign travel was limited to a week in Ostend, and two steamer-trips to Dieppe, and the Channel Islands, was delighted with the idea. He had always looked forward to visiting Napoleon's tomb, the Louvre, the Conciergerie, and Montmartre, by night.

Edgar had been very generous to them and had given them fifty pounds, as well as a serpentine chest, said to be worth at least another fifty, “and more if you hang on to it, my boy.” He had wrung Esme's hand with great feeling when the guard began to wave his flag, and Eunice had started to cry again, to be firmly patted by Harold, himself in a very emotional state.

Then their three wellwishers were out of sight, and Esme and Elaine were sitting beside one another at the table as the train rattled over points beyond Croydon. From the windows they fancied they could see the blurr of the wooded country south-east of the Avenue, but today the crescent was very remote from their world, and Esme said:

“I wish we'd had confetti. I'd like everyone on the train to know we're on our honeymoon, and that you really belong to me now, Elaine.”

And Elaine had made a bewitching little grimace with her
red, red mouth, and replied, as she drew off her long, tan gloves:

“I don't think anyone on the train will have the slightest doubt about us, darling,” and just to make sure had reached up, taken his face in her hands, and kissed him softly on the tip of his nose.

3

They had booked, through an Agency, at a hotel in the Avenue des Capuchins.

In the morning Elaine was the first to wake, and she lay still for a few moments, listening to the street noises, and wondering how Esme could continue to sleep through the defiant blare of horns and the agonising squeal of brakes.

As her eyes travelled slowly round the room, noting the old-fashioned brass bedstead, the wash-basin with the perished stopper, the heavy ormulu dressing-chest, and the print of Notre Dame in its heavy oak frame, they finally came to rest on Esme, lying on his back, his hair tousled, his breathing deep and regular.

She turned gently on her elbow, and regarded him objectively. He was, she decided, not bad-looking, with his short, straight nose, his small girlish mouth, and obstinate chin, that did not seem to belong to him, but to someone of far more determined character.

Apart from the chin he was very much like his mother, small-featured, and finely made. The chin, she thought, must have come from his father, the kilted officer, killed in the war, whose photograph still stood in the front-room of Number Twenty-Two, or perhaps from the grandmother, whose photograph stood on Eunice's what-not in the back room.

She wondered, still looking down on him, what he would think about it all this morning, and whether his recollections would be sufficiently clear to realise that he had had the benefit of her not inconsiderable experience. If they were then he would be very unlikely to comment on the matter. One of Esme's advantages, she decided, was that he would never probe her past. They had made a bargain about that, only a day or two after they had met in the Tate. She had
been reasonably frank with him, a good deal more frank, she felt, than most prospective brides would have been, and now, if he did suffer on that account, he would have to suffer in silence. After all, he was good at suffering in silence, having done so, it seemed, ever since the night they had met at the Stafford-Fyffe's ball.

Remembering him there, in his prim little dinner-jacket, and recalling his pathetic eagerness to benefit by her earlier lesson, the lesson in dancing the Charleston, she felt genuine affection for him. He seemed so young, surely not one year, but twenty years younger than herself. Nevertheless, it was nice to be coveted, to the extent that he coveted her.

She leaned forward an inch or so, and let her heavy curls brush across his face. He stirred, and opened his eyes, looking straight up into hers, and even before sleep had faded from them a great light of happiness shone in his face.

“Well?”
she said, with a teasing laugh.

He stretched, and then turned suddenly, catching up a handful of her hair, and stroking it very gently before pressing it to his lips.

“Have you been awake long?” he asked.

“Ages! Listen to those hooters! It must be wonderful to be able to sleep through that uproar.”

“I was tired. You should know!” and he grinned, like the schoolboy he seemed.

“What's the time?” he wanted to know.

“It doesn't matter what time it is. We're on a honeymoon. You never wind clocks when you go on a honeymoon!”

He sat up, laughing, loosing her hair, and pulling her close to him.

“I love you, Elaine, more than anyone ever loved anyone, and more than you'll ever know! Marrying you is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me, and if it all finished today I'd go on thinking the same about it, and about you. Do you believe that?”

She smiled, and slowly traced a finger-tip down the length of his face.

“It won't end today, Esme. Tomorrow, or the day after perhaps, but not today. This I promise.”

He laughed again, and held her very close, rocking her slightly, so that her curls fell away, and piled up on the pillow.

Below the tall windows the hooters honked and honked, reminding him of startled pheasants in the Manor Wood when they soared up from the bracken beside the path, squawking their raucous
Kark! Kark! Kark!

It was strange, he thought, that they had never yet walked in Manor Wood together. In the Lane, in the copses, in the “Rec”, and all over the West End, but never in the Wood,
his
wood. Well, that could be remedied now perhaps.

1

CHRISTMAS WEEK
, 1939. The decade had just over a week to run, and along the Avenue, a crescent at war yet not at war, the families waited and wondered.

The first snow had fallen, a heavy fall for the time of year. The drifts had piled up under the dwarf walls; and the open sky, between the backs of the odd numbers and the Manor Wood, was slate-grey with the certainty of more snow. The front gardens in the crescent looked pinched, and even smaller than usual, beyond their rows of looped chains, and at night the entire sweep of the Avenue was still and lifeless behind makeshift blackouts.

Only at Number Four, where Becky either could not or would not understand about the blackout, did an occasional beam of light flash from the porch-room, a beam strong enough to encourage Grandpa Barnmeade, of Number One Hundred and Two, to scurry along the pavement in his capacity as Air-raid Warden, and scream:
“Light! Light! Put out that light!”
, as though German aircraft were already hovering over the Avenue, awaiting Becky's signal to loose their avalanche of bombs.

Yet no bombs had fallen, despite Becky's carelessness. The Avenue was still intact, although many of its inhabitants were already scattered far and wide, a few never to return.

Christmas 1939, the last Christmas of the ‘thirties, and here was Europe at war again. Nobody could really believe it, for there were more than a hundred people still living in the Avenue who could remember the Christmas of 1914, with its terrifying casualty lists, its marching songs, and saucy slogans. This present business was neither the war they remembered, nor the war they had expected. There were no casualty lists, and no air-raids, which was odd when one remembered how often the politicians had promised them death in generous measure, should war break out despite Mr. Chamberlain's efforts.

There had been that first terrifying warning, within minutes of the Prime Minister's solemn declaration on the radio. Nobody in the Avenue possessed a real shelter, so that on the first wailing note of the siren they had scrambled beneath tables, and into cupboards under the stairs. Only Mr. Basker-ville, of Number Eighty-Four (he of the 1926 four-valve set, who always went one better than anyone else in the Avenue) had been able to shepherd his family into a “bomb-proof” shelter, at the bottom of his garden. There the Baskervilles had crouched, all six of them, praising father for his foresight and his energetic Saturday afternoons, until they heard wheeled traffic passing up and down the crescent. They had crept out, feeling rather foolish, as Mrs. Jarvis, of Eighty-Six, poked her turbanned head over the fence, and shouted:

“It's a false alarm! Mr. Harrison 'phoned from the Post, ten minutes ago!”

Some of the outward trappings of war could be seen in and around the suburb. There were plenty of posters, urging the Avenue to save, to dig, and, above all, to keep the closest possible counsel about troop movements and any military plans they found lying about. There were plenty of tin-hats to be seen. Grandpa Barnmeade had one, and almost everybody carried a little cardboard box, slung with string, containing a respirator. Grandpa Barnmeade did not have one of these, but strode about with a much more military-looking appliance that fitted into a khaki-coloured haversack. He also
wore an armband, such as the Specials had worn during the General Strike, and he carried a torch almost as big as a mace.

There were fewer children about the Avenue. The two younger Carvers, Archie's children, had accompanied their mother down into Somerset, and several other young families had disappeared in groups into the remoter provinces, with identity labels pinned to their jackets and blouses. Other children had departed, more decorously, with a parent, or parents, just as though they were setting off for a holiday to the seaside.

Apart from these superficial changes, however, the Avenue was outwardly much the same. The menfolk, or by far the greater number of them, still hurried along towards Shirley Rise, to catch the eight-ten, and the eight forty-five at Wood-side. The women still went down to the Lower Road to shop, but took rather longer to fill their string bags and baskets, and often shopped further afield, sometimes as far as High Street, Croydon. At eight, one, six, and nine o'clock they listened, half-heatedly, to the news bulletins, but these provided little or no war news to gossip about over the fences. There was only the sinking of the
Graf Spee
(a typical German scuttle), and the capture of the
Altmark
, with its vaguely comforting battle-cry of “The Navy's here!”

Nothing else had happened, or seemed likely to happen. The French were snug in their Maginot Line, and everyone in the Avenue had been told it was quite impregnable. The British Expeditionary Force had apparently settled down in the same villages as their fathers had occupied, when people were singing
Mademoiselle from Armentieres,
and
Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy.
People talked of their sons being “somewhere in France”, just as they had done in 1914. The people in the Avenue imagined they were all sitting it out in trenches and dugouts, waiting, like everyone eles at home, for someone to call off this ridiculous war that wasn't a war, or alternatively, to get busy, and put that idiotic little house-painter in his place, and stop him, once and for all, from being such a monumental bore.

The only real inconvenience the Avenue had suffered so far arose from the blackout, against which people were
already beginning to murmur. The great, floppy frames, and the depressing curtains, were difficult to make, yet easy to overlook. One either had to fit them in every room in the house, or resign oneself to groping about in the gloom, barking shins, and smashing ornaments whenever there was occasion to move out of the back room or the kitchen.

As for Grandpa Barnmeade, someone must have waved a wand over him, for he changed overnight from a garrulous, old dodderer into a pettifogging, old tyrant, and was forever hammering at their front doors and theatening them with long terms of imprisonment. Some of the least charitable in the Avenue were beginning to wish that Hitler would drop at least one bomb, just a little one, powerful enough to eliminate Grandpa Barnmeade, together with his torch, armband, and respirator. It would be, they reasoned, a happy release, for surely the old fool could not last out the severe winter, trotting up and down at his age, climbing on to porches, and up trellisses, in order to smash windows and unmasked light-bulbs?