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 worki
ng 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.
CHAPTER VI
Mutiny At Havelock Park
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.
They would often go for weeks without knocking at doors, or pulling up carrots and radishes from the allotments, but they never tired of the string-and-parcel game. As dusk fell on the suburb they would select a new house-brick from one of the building sites, and make it up into a neat brown-paper parcel, attach a thin piece of twine to one end, and lay it carefully in a pool of lamplight, just outside one of the boundary walls of the big, detached houses, in Outram Crescent, or Lucknow Road.
Then, from their ambush among the laurels, they would sometimes wait for as long as twenty minutes for a passerby. Always the gullible pedestrian would pause, bend, reach out for the parcel. Then they would jerk the twine, and the parcel would slide out of the lamplight, and the pedestrain would either straighten up and sheepishly make off, or switch his attention to his bootlace, as though he had never seen the parcel in the first place.
Occasionally they would vary this routine by substituting a purse for bait. They would then pull hard at the line, and whisk the purse right out of sight. This was always more rewarding if the victim was a woman, for a woman usually screamed, and Boxer, almost inarticulate with mirth, would gurgle; “Set it again, set it again! Whad'ysay, Berni; whad'ysay?”
Bernard would always pretend to think before answering this question. Finally he would shake his yellow head, and propose a variation of the sport. “Let's do the criss-cross,” he would suggest, and Boxer would bubble over at the prospect of fastening loose strings to letter-box knockers, on each side of the Avenue, in order to watch exasperated neighbours summon one another in rapid succession, as the string of Number Eighty-Four tugged the knocker of Number Seventy-Three immediately opposite, and the opening door of Number Seventy-Three rattled the knocker of Number Eighty-Two.
In spite of these and other routine annoyances, the Avenue folk were fond of the “Unlikes”—a name they acquired when their twin sisters were old enough to be labelled “The Likes”. Perhaps the true secret of their popularity lay in the boys' unswerving devotion to one another. This appealed to the womenfolk, most of whom were resigned to violent squabbles between their children. Sometimes they would quote the twins as an example of how brothers ought to behave one to another.
This relationship had its origin in an incident dating back to the early childhood of the pair, an incident that came to have an almost religious significance to Bernard, the introvert of the pair. For Bernard, at the age of six, had saved Boxer's life, and had guarded the secret ever since.
It happened in the hard frost of February, 1920. The twins' favourite playground was “the Lane”, that leafy left-over from the Old Manor's home farm, that now led to the golf-club headquarters.
The Lane was marked out by long lines of elms, and where it curved, about half-way down, there was a large duckpond, shallow in summer, but all of eight feet deep after winter rains.
During a short, sudden frost, the duckpond froze over, and the elder Carver twins were the first to discover this exciting fact. Louise was early riser, and the Carver boys were always abroad nearly an hour before the other children of the Avenue had finished their Saturday breakfasts.
On this particular morning, they went out early to comb through the long grass near Number Four green for lost balls. They seemed to be much luckier than most children in stumbling upon almost new Silver Kings in this particular area. Possibly their good fortune had something to do with their keen vision in following the flight of a ball, but more probably it was related to the fact that a birch coppice ran close to the green, and swift movement, in and out of this coppice, was screened from the eye of approaching golfers by the big bunker, hard by.
However, on this occasion the twin did not reach the green, but paused at the bend of the Lane to test the strength of the ice on the duckpond. Boxer hesitated on the edge of the water, and looked across at Bernard, who had moved round to the opposite bank.
“Whad'ysay, Berni?” he asked, as usual.
Berni gave a crossing his sanction.
“Try it, Boxer,” he said, and watched tensely as his brother inched across the frozen surface, arms outspread like a tightrope performer, mouth set in a tight, nervous grin. He was exactly halfway across when the ice gave way. He staggered, and then, urged on by Bernard, made a run for it, slithering towards the high brick coping, here Bernard stood reaching out to grab him.
The ice split in every direction. Boxer fell on his knees and lurched down into the brown water, his hands flailing for support, and grasping, in the final split second, a thin, tenuous twig, that hung low over the water from a hazel clump on Bernard's immediate right. Miraculously, the twig held, for a mere ten seconds, but this was time enough for Be
rnard to act. With the speed and precision of a young baboon, he flung himself at the elm branch immediately above him, and swung out, hand over hand, to the spot where Boxer was shoulder deep in jagged fragments of ice. He reached him just as the twig gave way, and Boxer made a despairing grab at his brother's ankles. They hung there, one below the other, for the better part of a minute, and then Bernard, with a strength he could never afterwards believe that he possessed, drew himself high enough to get his chin over the bough, and prevent his grasp being torn away.
An inch or less at a time Bernard edged himself towards the parapet, dragging the floundering Boxer in his wake. He had covered more than half the distance when his will could no longer command his fingers and he fell, the two of them rolling together in the soft, churned-up mud under three feet of water.
When Bernard got his head above it, he discovered that he was alone. Boxer was doubled up at his feet. With a sudden access of strength he bent under the water and grasped his twin by the collar of his overcoat, dragging him bodily with one hand towards the bank while, with the other, he smashed at the ice, clearing a passage.
Somehow, they won the firm mud crust, where Boxer opened his eyes and was promptly sick. They lay together gasping for a few minutes. Then Bernard got slowly to his feet.
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