The Dreaming Suburb (9 page)

“You're not shy are you, Big Boy?”

She suddenly seized his hand, and pressed it to her breast. Then Archie did a strange thing, something he was never to repeat in the presence of any woman he met in the future. He fell on his knees before her in a sort of obeisance. She looked startled for a moment and then, reaching out, she drew him closer to her and gently stroked his hair.

3

Rita remained Archie's mistress until the Spring of 1922. During that period she was completely faithful to him.

He, for his part, might have been married to her. Measured against Rita, the bobbed, tune-humming, flat-chested flappers of the Avenue were like strident children; and Rita, on her side, could never erase from her memory the mysterious gentleness he had shown her that first evening.

She soon came to know his shortcomings, his ridiculous confidence in himself as a millionaire in the making, his callowness, his silly, persistent lying about his age, his humiliating habit of taking her for granted, after the first month or so of their association, his thin Cockney accent, his general air of suburban vulgarity. All these things, however, meant less than nothing weighed against his slow, heavy strength, and his unbounded virility.

Their relationship was purely physical. He delivered himself, as it were, with the groceries, and after the maid had gone home to Belgium and had been replaced by a daily who left at five, he let himself in the back door two or three
times a week. They never went out together. It never occurred to them to go, for the pattern of their association quickly resolved itself into a sort of three-part-ritual, half-hour at a meal, half-hour in bed, and two or three hours pottering about the house, exchanging small talk. Then he went home, and let himself in with the key he had carried since he was fourteen. He never mentioned her to anyone, and nobody at Number Twenty dreamed of questioning Archie about his movements. Louise was somewhat surprised at his loss of appetite, but she concluded that he was finding plenty to eat at work, and during Jim Carver's long spell of unemployment, she was very glad of the reduced demands on the family larder. To Archie, there was soon no excitement in his visits to the house in Outram Crescent. Rita became a habit, like eating and shaving, and getting up and going to bed. It was much better this way, for it left his mind free to range on a more important matter, the acquisition, somehow, of a shop of his own. He accepted her gifts of clothes, and cuff-links, and cigarettes, in the spirit in which he picked up his wages on Fridays. They were part-payment for services, faithfully rendered, and when he made love to her he was neither demanding nor grateful, simply acquiescent, and dutiful, like the feminine partner of a mid-Victorian marriage. She made no emotional demands on him at all, and he never once paused to consider how this odd relationship might end, or indeed, if it would end.

This pleasant state of affairs might have continued indefinitely, had not Reggie Ramage died under his twelfth operation. He was buried in the North, and Rita was away making arrangements for more than a week.

On her return she made a proposal that was to upset the rhythm of their lives. She suggested that, from now on, Archie might as well move in, and live with her openly. There would be no scandal with her neighbours. The house was her own, and in view of the acute housing shortage, the people in the upper half were very unlikely to object. Such an arrangement, she pointed out, would relieve Archie of the necessity of contributing fifteen shillings a week to Louise's house-keeping purse.

Without being able fully to explain why, Archie felt violently
opposed to the idea. Somehow it made him feel cornered. He was, he explained, very well satisfied with the present arrangement, and much preferred that it should continue.

“We might as well be married,” he told her, “and that's never going to happen to me.”

She said little at the time, but his rejection of the offer rankled, and a note of strain crept into their partnership. One night they had an argument over what Archie claimed to be a lack of variety in the supper fare.

“Always fried, never nothing but fried,” he complained.

She hit back at him with uncharacteristic harshness.

“Never
anything
but fried!” she corrected. “When will you cease to talk like an errand boy?”

He chose to interpret this as a piece of possessive nagging. Getting up, he walked out of the house, and stayed away three days in succession.

He was surprised at the sense of freedom the break gave him, and the following week he stretched the interval to five days.

On the fifth day she was frantic. She bought him a sports-coat, and took it along to the shop. She had never called on him at his work before, and her presence there embarrassed him, even though she was careful to give the impression that she was a relative who had called with a birthday present.

That night he warned her:

“Don't you ever come for me again. I don't like it! I don't like being chased!”

Rita fought down her panic. Her pride, as far as he was concerned, had long since disappeared.

“All right, Archie, let's not get edgy; let's go to bed.”

But they did get edgy, in spite of going to bed, and soon their edginess began to display itself in the bedroom. He would remain for ten minutes, staring moodily out of the window after she had undressed, and what frightened her even more was that he began to show a disposition to go home earlier, sometimes as early as ten o'clock.

One night, unable to stand the strain any longer, she challenged him:

“You don't like coming here any more, do you?”

Although she felt that she knew everything about him, she was shocked by the brutality of his reply.

“No,” he said bluntly, “I haven't liked coming for months. It's not the same any more.”

She felt sick with fear. With a great effort, she forced herself to sound reasonable.

“Don't come for a month. Then maybe you'll want me again. I'll go away, I'll close up the house and go abroad for a month. When I come back it will be like it used to be.”

“All right, Rita,” he said amiably, and it was agreed. She left that week-end, and at the end of a week he found that his powers of concentration were weakening. At the end of a fortnight he was in such a state of nervous depression that he lost his temper, and struck a counter-hand in the face for taking his raincoat from the cloakroom in error. Before the third week-end had arrived he had decided he could stand it no longer, and would have telegraphed her had he known where she was to be found. He did not, and so he consoled himself with the red-haired cashier, Lorna, who had tried, throughout several months, to attract his attention in and out of shop hours.

Lorna was only nineteen, and grossly inexperienced, but she was an attractive, warm-hearted girl, and after a few evenings in her company Archie decided that one woman was very like another, and that Lorna had the undeniable advantage of being there to be dropped and picked up again at will. He made up his mind at once. He was never going back to Rita, never in this world. He was not going to be cornered, certainly not by a woman old enough to be his mother.

Rita, however, did not surrender without a struggle, and for Archie the next two or three months were full of anxiety.

First of all, she wrote to him, her letters growing more and more hysterical until he took to dropping them, unopened, into the store-yard incinerator. Then she began to ring him up on the cash-desk telephone, and he had to persuade Lorna, the cashier, to stall for him. Lorna, the redhead, was an enthusiastic ally, but there came a time when even she was unable to resist the telephone siege without the manager, Mr. Brooks, discovering something of what was going on.
After Archie had been warned that incoming private calls must cease he wrote her a note, but he could scarcely have done anything more calculated to complicate the situation, for his blunt message brought Rita round to the shop, and after he had avoided her two or three times at the counter, she took to picketing the staff entrance.

It was here, in the unfortunate presence of Mr. Brooks, most of the staff, and several customers, that the first scene of the tragi-comedy was played out. Rita caught him, late one afternoon, as he came out into the yard, carrying a crate of soda-water syphons. She took full advantage of this, and when he backed away, hugging the crate, she followed him into the stock-room behind the shop.

“Archie, we've got to talk, we've
got
to! ...” she pleaded.

Archie set down the crate and regarded her with desperation. He was appalled at the change in her. Her eyes were red and her face puffy and infinitely strained. He could not imagine how he had ever found her desirable, and was quite unable to conceal his disgust.

“Not here, Rita, for Christ's sake!”

“Then where? When?”

“Tonight. I'll come round!”

“But you won't, you won't come! I know you won't!”

His voice rose, hysterically. “I will—for Pete's sake, leave me
alone;
why can't you leave me
alone?
I'm going with someone me own age, blast you!”

The taunt caused Rita to lose all control. The communicating door, between stock-room and shop, was wide open, and customers stood along each counter, not five yards away.

“Why, you bloody little whippersnapper!” she screamed, lashing out at him across the crate with a heavy shoulder-bag; “you have all you want month after month and then you walk out! I'll show you, you saucer-sucking little swine! When I picked you up you'd never laid hands on a woman. You didn't know what to do with one when you had one....”

At this point Mr. Brooks leaped into the stock-room, and slammed the shop door, to the intense irritation of counter-hands and customers alike.

Mr. Brooks was a religious man, and the situation appalled
him. Never, in his wide experience as a branch manager, had he encountered its like, and because his knowledge of such matters was extremely slight, he immediately concluded that this violent, vulgar woman was a common prostitute.

“Leave these premises immediately!” he sputtered. “Get out, before I ...” he paused, his mind groping for a threat sufficiently strong to frighten a prostitute—“... before I fetch a policeman!” he concluded triumphantly.

Rita calmed a little, just enough to turn aside and swear at him. Rita had an extensive gutter vocabulary, acquired in her obscure youth, and she made full use of it now. The words she used, and the venom with which she spat them at him, took the manager's breath away. Until that moment, he had never heard a man use them, much less a well-dressed woman, and that in his own stockroom, within hearing of at least eight suburban housewives. Having silenced him, Rita turned back to Archie, who was perspiring freely, his back to the wall.

“All right!” she screamed at him. “This is it! This is the finish! But I wonder if this poor little bastard knows how much you've had out of the till during the years you've been working here?”

Their expressions told her there was absolutely no need to amplify the statement, and she tasted, for a brief moment at least, the full flavour of revenge. It had the effect of steadying her, and she was able to collect herself sufficiently to walk into the yard, and out into the side-street that led to Lewisham Road.

Archie was the first to recover. When she had passed beyond the big gates, he turned desperately to the trembling manager.

“It's just a woman who's been chasing me, Mr. Brooks. She's ... she's just barmy with jealousy ... she just
said
that. I've not had anything out of the till; honest to God, I haven't!”

It took Mr. Brooks a full minute to regain a little of his branch-managerial poise.

“Come into the office, Carver,” he said hoarsely.

1

OF
all the children of the Avenue throughout the 'twenties, the eldest pair of Carver twins, Boxer and Bernard, were the most popular.

This was partly because of their marked dissimilarity, and partly because they were almost never seen apart. It also had a little to do with the varied and zestful ways they had of entertaining themselves.

No one ever took them for twins, just as, once they had emerged from the pram, no one ever mistook the girl twins, Fetch and Carry, for anything but twins. Boxer and Bernard were not even recognisable as brothers. Boxer, senior by twenty-five minutes, was broad-chested, and bullet-headed, with dark brown hair, like all the other Carvers, and a low fringe that gave him a faintly mediaeval look. One always felt that Boxer should have issued from Number Twenty wearing a pointed cap, and pied hose, and shuffled along, one foot in the gutter, whistling hey-nonny-nonny staves instead of
Everybody's Doing It,
which was the twins' signature tune, and a warning to householders in the Avenue to be prepared for a little jollying-up of one sort or another. It also warned the patient Mr. Piretta, proprietor of the corner shop, that it was time for one of the twins' facetious demands on his stock.

These demands ranged from poker-faced requests for glass-hammers, to appeals for sticks of liquid glue, or pots of elbow-grease.

Boxer—whose original name Maurice had been conveniently forgotten by everyone—possessed a cheerful aggressiveness that adults found at once irritating and amusing. To those who knew the twins by sight and reputation, Boxer
appeared the dominant partner, but his family and their few intimates knew that this was not so, that it was Bernard who led the way both in and out of trouble.

Bernard was thin, narrow-faced, and wiry. His hair, as yellow as new straw, stuck up in short, sawn-off tufts, accentuating the vivid blue of his eyes. He weighed nearly half-a-stone less than his twin but, like his father, concealed unsuspected strength in loose, shambling limbs. Acting as one, they were a formidable team, Boxer having the necessary solidity for defence, and Bernard the agility, and élan for darting attacks. They were on friendly (but never intimate) terms with the other children of the Avenue, finding all the companionship they needed in each other. They never joined a gang, or joined in the games played by Avenue children in the Lane, or the “Rec”. Instead, they thought out, and engaged in, their own private diversions, such as knocking-down-ginger, allotment raids, and the string-and-parcel game, a pastime usually reserved for the early dusk of winter evenings.