The girls were agreeable. They re-pitched Archie's tent higher up the slope, and when they returned to the site that evening his blankets were dry.
Edna and Archie wandered off towards the lake, and Hilda remained behind contentedly to cook supper. There were no more thunderstorms, and all three continued to sleep comfortably. Edna's sleep was so much deeper than her sister's.
“It reminds me of that old joke about twin beds,” Archie told Hilda, as he wriggled in between them one night, and stretched himself out with a deep, contented sigh.
“Tell me,” said Hilda, fitting her head into the hollow of his shoulder.
“Couple put an advert in the paper—twin beds for sale, one almost new!”
“I don't think she'd mind if she knew,” Hilda giggled.
“Well, and why should she?” he demanded; “you're keeping me in the family, aren't you?”
3
Archie was not to remain family property for long.
On their return home, Archie realised that the Gittens family were now making impossible demands upon his time. Whereas he could always manage an odd evening or two with one sister, he found it irritating, and altogether too complicated, to plan a courting time-table for three. The result was that his enthusiasm for this concubinal triangle soon cooled, and he was seen less and less in the Avenue and Lane at dusk, but began seeking love-life further afield in Bromley, and sometimes as far away as Brighton. That was the advantage of a motor-cycle; it widened his fields in more spheres than that of commercial reconnaissance.
The girls did not pursue him through the late summer, and Archie had almost forgotten them when, one morning, as he was wheeling his motor-cycle from the alley, preparatory to setting off on another of his long-distance business surveys, he was stopped at the exit by little Mr. Gittens, five-foot four inches in his tram-conductor's uniform, and wheezing rather more agitatedly than usual.
Archie had seen Mr. Gittens pass his door for more than a year, but had never known who he was, and had never connected him with the girls at One-Hundred-and-Four.
“Name o' Carver, Archie Carver?” asked Mr. Gittens, apologetically.
He was a very apologetic little man, and spoke with a strong Lancashire accent. This, combined with his stature, and a general air of seeking to please, invested him with a faint aura of the music-hall.
Archie readily admitted his identity, and wondered impatiently what the little man could want. He was very soon enlightened.
“Ah'm Fred Gittens, from a hundred-and-four,” said the tram-conductor, very civilly. “You must be t'lad who's put both my girls in t'family way!”
He said it pleasantly, and conversationally, as though this line of talk was an everyday gambit between neighbours who had met unexpectedly in the street. It was his manner, as much as the information he imparted, that shocked Archie, His stomach contracted, and his jaw dropped. He had difficulty in holding his heavy cycle upright.
Mr. Gittens, however, was not disposed to press charges there and then. He was a very punctual little man, and had merely stopped by on his way to the tram depot. Without waiting for Archie to comment he went on, still very pleasantly.
“Eee, but tha's made a rare to-do in our house, lad, for it's plain enough tha can't marry both! As I said to missus, not an hour since, I said, 'He can marry one, and pay for t'other'; so you'd best coom round tonight, and have it out like! I'm on middle turn, and I get home about five.” And with that he touched his peaked cap, and twinkled off down the Avenue towards Shirley Road.
Archie gaped after him, not having uttered one word of denial or affirmation, for Mr. Gittens' lack of rancour had paralysed his tongue. It was almost as though Gittens, himself the father of a huge family, was applauding a casual stranger's virility, but was of the opinion, nevertheless, that certain economic arrangements must be entered into between parties, if only in order to tidy up the situation generally.
Archie stood stock still until Mr. Gittens had rounded the corner of the pillar-box. Then he slowly wheeled his motorcycle back into the shed, and set off on foot for the “Ree”. He had to think. He had to sit still and think, and think, and think.
Only one decision emerged from his numbed brain, and as he passed between the brick pillars of the “Rec” and made his way to a bench near the empty tennis-courts, this fact emerged from a sea of panic and stood out like a rock of salvation. It was simply this: whatever he did, or said, in the next few hours would determine the pattern of his life. One false word, one unconsidered step, and he was lost, for all time. There would be no shop, no income, no independence—nothing but years and years of counter-jumping, and pram-pushing, nothing ahead of him but the prospect of becoming a sort of male Louise, chained to the sink, flanked by rows and rows of nappies, and condemned to potter about a suburban garden, doing without cigarettes and ‘bus-rides, in order to make ends meet every Friday.
He gritted his teeth and formed, then and there, an implacable resolve. This wasn't going to happen to him. To anyone else but not to him. Never, never, never, not if every female in the Gittens' family produced triplets, named him the father, and handed him a sheaf of affiliation orders.
He was sweating with the intensity of this resolution when, for the second time that morning, a semi-stranger addressed him in almost the identical terms employed by Mr. Gittens.
“You're Archie Carver, aren't you?”
He looked up, startled, straight into the sad brown eyes of Toni Piretta, the Italian proprietor of the corner shop, that stood at the junction of the Avenue and Shirley Rise.
Mr. Piretta was beaming even more genially than usual. He held out a plump, freckled hand.
CHAPTER VIII
New Worlds For Edith
1
WHEN Ted Hartnell, Edith Clegg's jazz-minded stonemason lodger at Number Four, came home one evening in the autumn of '23, confessed that he had been sacked, and told her shamefacedly that he would have to leave the area in search of a job and cheaper lodgings, Edith Clegg turned very pale, and went straight up to her room for a quiet cry.
Edith was very happy with her lodger and, by this time, looked upon him as a son. The impact of his cheerful personality upon her sister Becky had been wonderful. For years, before Ted came to live with them, Becky had been rather less than half-witted. She seldom said or did a rational thing, and Edith never quite knew when another “spell” was coming. Becky's spells could lead at best to embarrassing complications with neighbours, and at worst to another visit from the doctor, and a renewal of the frightening discussions regarding the advisibility of “sending Becky away”.
The absorption of Ted Hartnell, his gramophone, and his banjolele, into the household, had changed all that. Ted and Becky got on famously, and Becky had not had a serious “spell” for years, if one discounted her periodical appeals to the errant Lickapaw from the boundary fence.
Ted had never seemed to realise there was anything seriously the matter with Becky. Lately, he had taken to calling her “Aunt Becky”, as he had called Edith “Aunt Edith” ever since he had first carried his gramophone downstairs, and played jazz tunes to them in the kitchen.
Despite Becky's “spells”, Number Four had always been a very placid home, but now, with the three of them on such gay and affectionate terms, it was among the happiest in the Avenue. There was never so much as a spurt of irritation to spoil the harmony. Edith put her pianoforte pupils through their pieces whilst Ted was at work, and after they all had their high tea, at 7:30 p.m. they cleared away, and Ted entertained them with his gramophone or, less frequently, with his mouth-organ, and banjolele.
When they played the gramophone, they all sat in the warm kitchen, with Ted tapping out a lively rhythm on the table-top and saucepan lids. When they decided upon an impromptu concert they all went into the front room. Ted provided sheet music, of which he had nearly a trunkful, and Edith accompanied him on the yellow-keyed cottage piano.
Before Ted came to them Edith had never played a
dance-tune. She was familiar with the decorous parlour songs of her girlhood, and could accompany any rendering of the sort of number so popular between speeches at public diners, songs like The Golden Vanity, Glorious Devon, and Come in to the Garden, Maud, but she had never sat down to play the sort of music that Ted introduced into the house. His music had its outside covers decorated with love-lorn young ladies, wearing bandeaux, or couples sitting out under a sickle moon, and palm trees, and his songs all had oddly similar titles about moonlight in Georgia or cabins in Nevada, and lyrics that rhymed “June”, “moon”, and “soon”, or “love” and “above”. The scores had familiar crotchets and quavers, but in addition, little gratings, half-filled with dots, that Ted told her were the ukelele accompaniments, and showed him just where to put his fingers when he strummed.
Becky joined in these little soirées with an eagerness that made Edith's heart swell, and sometimes brought a lump into her throat. She even learnt the words of the songs, and bobbed about the front-room, to the utmost peril of the plant-stands, and the carefully-balanced Goss china on the mantelshelf.
At other times she accepted Ted as though he had been living with them since girlhood days, and had been bound up with their life at the Devon Vicarage, long before the coming of Saul, and the cloud that had blotted out all that had happened since.
And now Ted had been sacked, and was talking about finding cheaper lodgings. Suppose he left? What could she tell Becky? How could she begin to explain that Ted would never again sit down to his high tea with them, that there would be no more gramophone recitals, no more songs and junketings round the cottage piano?
Up in his back room, the room he had slept in for more than three years, but had never yet used as a sitting-room, Ted was equally despondent. Edith and Becky meant more to him than anyone in his past, and the billet was certainly the most comfortable he had ever heard of, much less occupied.
The thought of packing his belongings, and moving off into the inhospitable world again, depressed and frightened him. He could not bring himself to begin putting his things into the hold-all that he had dragged from the cistern-loft where it had remained, gathering cobwebs, since he came to Number Four, in the autumn of 1919.
He sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on knees, and cursed himself over and over again for losing his job on account of a piece of downright stupidity, for which he could blame no one but himself.
Ted's abrupt dismissal from the stonemason's yard had a strong element of farce.
It was Ted's habit, when chiselling the pencilled inscriptions on a tombstone, to regulate his taps with the beats of whatever popular tune that happened to be syncopating in his mind at the moment.
Hundreds of tombstones that had stood in cemeteries all over South London had received their inscriptions to the catchy rhythms of Alexander's Ragtime Band, and Yes, We Have No Bananas. Scores of verses from the Scriptures had been chiselled out of marble to the tap-tap of The Sheik of Araby, or the slow, more painstaking rhythm of Missouri City Waltz and Bubbles. When he was at work, Ted never sang these songs aloud. He hummed them, or crooned them over and over in his head, as his seamed fingers adjusted their measure to the letters he was shaping.
Then, unaccountably, a particularly tappy tune had let him down, and landed him in the Labour Exchange queue.
Beating out the words “Asleep in the arms of Jesus”, in memory of one, Thomas Hitchcock, “who fell asleep on May 23rd, 1922”, and who was, it claimed, “secure in the hope of a glorious resurrection”, Ted Hartnell's jazzy jinx selected The Red, Red Robin as an over-all accompaniment.
Ted went right on bob-bob-bobbing long after he should have laid aside his tools, and shifted his position to begin another line. He did not even notice his error until he heard Mr. Foster, his employer, exclaim from his end of the bench. Then he paused on the words “his own sweet song”, to brush away the dust, and study his handiwork.
He knew at once that there was something odd about the tablet, but for a moment or two he could not decide what was amiss.
By then, however, Mr. Foster had sidled round to Ted's end of the bench, and was gazing at the stone with horror.
“You've run off the line,” he kept repeating, “you've gone and run off the ruddy line!”
Ted had done rather more than run off the ruddy line. He had concluded the words “Asleep in the arms of Jesus” with, not one, but a whole crop of inverted commas, setting them at slowly descending levels, reaching slantwise to the very edge of the block. The remorseless rhythm of the red, red robin had bewitched him. He had been hypnotised into the act of beating away with his mallet, until he had literally syncopated his way off the tablet!
Ted immediately offered to pay for it, but Mr. Foster was not to be mollified. By habit an ardent churchgoer, and by persuasion a great upholder of memorials to the dead, he was profoundly shocked. The ridiculous association of red, red robins and the late Mr. Thomas Hitchcock's expectations of glory, was more than he was ready to forgive. It savoured too much of blasphemy, and Ted was given notice on the spot. Had he been a good'stonemason he might have talked himself out of the scrape, but it had been obvious to Mr. Foster for some time past, that Ted's heart did not repose in memorial tablets. When he considered the matter, in the light of the ruined stone, he concluded that his own work was beginning to deteriorate, under the merciless drip of Ted Hartnell's hummings, jiggings, and bob-bob-bobbings. He was not a vindictive man, and gave Ted a final piece of well-meant advice:
“Get yourself a job in a jazz band, lad. Maybe someone will pay you to bob-bob-bob from morning to night!”
Ted was not disposed to take this advice very seriously. No one was likely to hand him the keys of Paradise on a spoiled headstone.
Hitherto he had striven to keep his life in two separate compartments—those of beating out memorial tablets by day, and pursuing hot-rhythm by night. He was unaware, until the moment he had spoiled Mr. Hitchcock's tablet, how rapidly the one was encroaching on the other, how surely the tide of syncopation was engulfing him, and how little room there was in his mind for anything unconnected with cabins in pines; and moons over Colorado. It had never occurred to him to try and convert his obsession into a means of livelihood. How did one make a living from jazz? Who would employ anyone whose soul might be in pawn to the saxophone, but who had never yet handled one, whose musical accomplishments indeed were limited to a few chords on the banjolele, and a certain facility with the mouth-organ?
His sombre musings were cut short by a gentle knock on his door, and “Aunt” Edith came in. Her face was puffy with grief. In her eyes, however, was a glint of resolve.
“I've decided, Teddy; you mustn't leave here. It would be very bad for Becky; besides, wherever you go, they won't let you play your gramophone. I'm going in to talk it over with Mr. Carver! Go down now, and play something for Becky. She's in the kitchen shelling peas.”
She did not wait to hear if Ted had any suggestions, but let herself out of the house, and went along the Avenue to Number Twenty.
In the last two or three years she had made a habit of “talking things over” with Mr. Carver. She had respected his judgment in worldly matters ever since the day he had taken her to see the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, in Westminster Abbey, and explained to her the full significance of the phrase: “They buried him among the Kings, because his soul was great.” She looked back with quiet pleasure on this, her first visit to the Abbey, and her very first expedition “up West” with a man.
Back in November 1920 it had needed considerable effort on Edith Clegg's part to knock on the door of Number Twenty, and ask Jim Carver to take her to see the Unknown Warrior's Tomb, but he had been very understanding about it, and so kind in getting his daughter Louise to look after Becky while they were gone.
“You see, Mr. Carver,” she had said to him that first day they had spoken to one another, “it's almost like going to the funeral of somebody you knew and liked. I might have known him. Lots of the boys who c
ame to the Vicarage when I was a girl went to the war, and I expected some of them were killed, poor dears.”
Jim Carver had agreed that she might well have known him; and later, when they had shuffled together past the open grave, and glanced at the silent guard of honour, leaning on their reversed arms inside the barrier, he had let his mind range over the possibility that he too might have rubbed shoulders with the man who was buried among the kings. It was not so impossible after all. Perhaps they passed one another on the way up the line with a ration party, or in some crowded estaminet, where men were singing Keep the Home Fires Burning, or even as the stretcher parties staggered back from the shambles of some sector like Mametz Wood, carrying the Unknown to a field-dressing station to breathe his last, and be laid in a temporary grave to await immortality.
Jim was touched by this twittery little spinster's eagerness to identify herself with the national symbol, and all that wintry afternoon he had gone out of his way to be gentle, and mildly gallant towards her. He would have been surprised if he had known that this single encounter had elevated him in her mind to the level of a sage.
He now discussed her new problem readily and realistically: “He'll have to get a job, Miss Clegg, and apart from Kidd's there isn't another stonemason's yard round here that I know of.”
“But he mustn't go,” Edith insisted; “it would be so bad for Becky. Having him has made such a difference, you'd hardly believe! Besides, he's ...” she broke off, blushing, “... he isn't a gentleman-boarder any more, he's a sort of ... well ... nephew.”
She was going to say “son”, but checked herself at the last moment. It crossed her mind that even dear Mr. Carver might misconstrue their true relationship.
“Well,” said Jim, flatly, “I don't know your means, Miss Clegg, and I don't know whether you are in a position to feed and board him indefinitely for next to nothing. If he stays on here without a job, he'll only get his dole money. Besides, you'll have to let his room to someone else, won't you?”
The Dreaming Suburb Page 10