“I couldn't do that,” replied Edith, firmly, but illogically, “it would always be dear Teddy's room, whoever had it!”
“What else can he do?” asked Jim. He was quite ready to help Miss Clegg with advice, but he had an eye on the clock. He was due at a meeting in fifteen minutes.
“He can sing and play.... I ... I could teach him the piano!” said Edith, desperately.
It had often occurred to her that Ted could be taught to play the piano but, until now, she had never put the thought into words. Jim Carver was scornful. He had the manual worker's contempt for the arts as a means of earning bread.
“There's not much money in that,” he said. “Millions of people can sing and play!” He rose heavily to his feet. “I'll tell you what I'll do. Let him stay on for a week or so, and I'll make some enquiries at my depot. Maybe I can find him some sort of job down there, just something to keep him going. You'd better ask him to call in and see me tomorrow evening.”
“It's terribly kind of you, Mr. Carver,” said Edith. “I knew you'd think of something immediately.”
“I wouldn't count on anything,” said Jim, guardedly. “Whatever it is, it won't be much of a job, I can tell you that now!”
But in Edith Clegg's mind, as she went blithely back to Number Four, the matter was as good as settled, and her drooping spirits were quite restored. She and Becky and Ted sat down to a mackerel tea as usual, and afterwards they celebrated the reprieve with a concert.
Coming home after dark that night Jim Carver passed the cutained window of Number Four, and heard them all at the piano. They were playing and singing Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up.
Jim did not possess a strong sense of humour, and rarely smiled, but a bubble of laughter rose to his lips at the vision of the Misses Clegg and their lodger, greeting the uncertain future, with a decorous rendering of Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up.
2
In the event it was both Edith and Ted who found jobs.
Jim Carver secured part-time work for Ted as auction-hand in the sale-room of the firm for which he worked. Ted donned a green baize apron, and stood round the lots on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, afterwards assisting in the deliveries to dealers. He was paid seven-and-six a day, and Edith accepted twelve-and-six of his earnings for board. Ted would have gladly given her the whole sum, but she steadfastly refused it, pointing out that a young man had to have something left over for new gramophone records.
Notwithstanding, it was a struggle to keep him on such a pittance, and when the financial strain became apparent to her she made the most important decision of her life. She took a job as cinema pianist at the Granada, in the Lower Road, and, having taken it, glided into a new and wonderful world.
Now that Ted was home for half the week, she had much more freedom of movement. Becky could be left, and Edith took to going out for her shopping, instead of relying upon tradesmen to call. She found she could shop more economically this way, and also enjoy the occasional change of scene.
It was on one of these shopping expeditions that she' saw the notice on the iron gates of the Granada, a small, ramshackle cinema, that had once been a Methodist Chapel, and was now run by an enterprising gentleman called Billings.
It was a very unpretentious cinema, with a capacity of about 150, one of a small chain run by Mr. Billings, in the outer suburbs, and employing a projectionist, an aged pianist, a cashier, and a single usherette.
Mr. Billings called twice a week to enter up books, bank the takings, and superintend front-of-house publicity. The remainder of the time the premises were nominally in charge of Mr. Billings's nephew, a sleek, hollow-cheeked young man, called Eddie.
On the day Edith happened to be passing, Mr. Billings was featuring a big, forthcoming attraction, Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and had been interested to discover, among the publicity sent on to him by distributors, a free copy of the theme song, Song of the Bells.
Now Mr. Billings was not one of these latter-day motion-picture magnates, whose entry into the profession is brought about by their sound knowledge of accountancy. He was a showman, whose experience dated back to the old bioscope days, and he was, moreover, a serious student of audience reaction. He was also an unashamed sentimentalist, and made a habit of sitting through his own pictures, weeping and guffawing alongside his regular customers. His yardstick, as a professional purveyor of mass entertainment, could be found in the word “mood”. He believed that the success of any entertainment lay, not in any qualities it might or might not possess, but in the subtle stimulation of the mood of the audience watching it Such stimulation he accepted as his own responsibility. He did not, in other words, leave such essentials to Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin. They had their jobs and he had his, and at each of his cinemas, be it ever so lowly, he went out of his way to engage a good pianist, in order to ensure the creation of moods in the correct order.
His pianist at the Granada was an aged musician called Stubbs, known affectionately as “The Professor”, who could be relied upon to regulate the emotions of the audience, much as an experienced janitor regulates the steam-heat of a block of flats.
Mr. Billings thought a great deal of Mr. Stubbs, having himself shed many a tear in the privacy of the one-and-threepennies, while witnessing Lilian Gish mount the steps of the guillotine, or sob on the bosom of Ramon Navarro, and the moment Mr. Billings's eye fell on Song of the Bells he shouted hoarsely for Eddie, his nephew, and told him to send the maestro up to the office, which was sited alongside the projection-loft.
“Professor” Stubbs did not appear. Instead Eddie himself looked in, a limp cigarette hanging from his lower lip.
“The old Prof's in hospital,” he told the astonished Mr. Billings. “Went there night before last. Ain't comin' back, neither, if you ask me. Looked half-dead when they took him off, smack in the middle of the Custard-Pie!”
This was grave news, and caused Mr. Billings to chew his ragged moustache.
“What you do without him las' night?” he wanted to know.
Eddie shrugged his padded shoulders. “Got a kid in; She played pieces through both houses. Trouble was, she kep' stoppin' to look at the film. Bloody awful it was. Proper shambles!”
“Well,” said Mr. Billings finally, “we gotta get someone fer the Hunchback, and they gotta be good. No pianer-player, no mood! No mood, no 'ouses! Simple as that, Eddie!”
They found somebody, and they found somebody good, so good indeed that Mr. Billings never again made the mistake of judging an employee's worth on his or her outward appearance.
In later years it made him shudder to think how close he came to denying Miss Edith Clegg the opportunity of proving how well she understood the moods of cinema audiences. He interviewed her because she was the only applicant attracted by the card that he hung on the iron gate, and he decided at a glance that she was too nervous, too dowdy, and obviously quite inexperienced. It was his disparaging glance, however, that put Edith on her mettle. She anticipated his gloomy dismissal, by saying with a peftness that surprised him:
“I can play anything, and play it in the dark. Why don't you try me?”
He was struck by her unexpected forth rightness, and jerked his head towards the dim auditorium. Ahead of her he padded down the central aisle to the tiny railed-off pit, where a cottage piano stood at an angle of forty-five degrees to the screen.
“You don't 'ave to play in the dark,” he told her, “you get a pilot light, see?” and he switched on the light beside the score bracket.
The 15-watt bulb glowed eerily, giving Edith the impression that the cinema was as big as a cathedral. Mr. Billings opened Song of the Bells, and placed it reverently on the bracket.
“It's not just a question of playing,” he warned her. “It's a question o' mood. You gotta foller the story without follering it, if you see what I mean. You gotta be ready to switch moods at 'arf-a-sec's notice, to 'ave ‘em drippin' into their handkerchiffs one minute, ‘oldin' the edge o' their seats
the next, and fair bustin' wiv laughter the one after that, see? Now this ‘ere Song o' the Bells is a noo one on me. They don't usually send along a special like this, but mindjew, it's a good idea. They oughter do more of it. If the toon's good it get under everyone's skin, see? And when they ‘um it after, when they come out, what do you think of? Tell me that, now? What do they think of? They think of the picsher—an' that's what we want, ain't it?”
Edith murmured an agreement, but he was not really listening. He was launched on his favourite theme and, because she was his audience, he found himself warming towards her.
“Now the ‘Prof, he ‘ad routines, see? 'Earts ‘n' Flowers for the sob-stuff, ‘Andel's Water Music whenever a stream or a river comes on, and Minuet and Yewmer-esk for costume—always remember that—they got used to it be now, see? Minuet and Yewmer-esk for wigs and knee-britches, but he flipped about a bit, mindjew, fer the action stuff—William Tell fer chases, ‘Untin' Song fer ‘untin', and whatnot, but fer straight love, wi' no-niggers-in-woodpiles, and all through the kisses, he plumped fer Blue Danube, every time. Got me?”
Edith, who had understood no word of this, except the names of the musical items he had quoted, was grateful for the dark. She felt terribly nervous, but somehow elated, much as she had felt during her last essay into the unknown, the night that Ted had come to them as a lodger.
She sat down, cracked her finger-joints, and sailed into Song of the Bells, after which, without waiting for his comment, she played excerpts from all the scores he had mentioned.
Slowly, a wide, satisfied grin settled on Mr. Billings' round face. He knew he had picked a winner. He knew he had no need to tell this skinny little body anything more about the mysteries of audience mood-making, that, despite her old-fashioned appearance, she had got just what he wanted, right at her finger-tips. He would have been aghast had he been informed that this was the first time Edith Clegg had entered a cinema in her whole life.
Thus began a new life for Edith, a warm, exciting life, that had little connection with Becky, or Ted, and all the habits that had fenced her round in the past. She acquired, almost overnight, a new personality. From now on, she lived for the silver screen, and for its priesthood, the stars. She writhed on desert railroad tracks with ill-used ranchers' daughters. She danced minuets with John Barrymore. She trapesed about in the snow with Mary Pickford. She hung from skyscrapers with Harold Lloyd. She was wooed by the saturnine Valentino in tents and Cossack bivouacs, and she could hardly see the keys for tears of laughter, conjured up by Ben Turpin and Buster Keaton. She loved and cherished each and every one of them. They became, as time went on, far more real to her than the people of the Avenue, and she was soon driven to increase her intimacy with them by a close study of their private lives, their marriages, divorces, likes, dislikes, and private swimming-pools, in the film magazines.
Her memory for detail, associated with cinema stars, became phenomenal, and Mr. Billings, who came to regard her as his own personal discovery, often consulted her when he was planning foyer displays and special advertisements.
And with this worship of Edith's went a kind of pride, that grew and grew in her, until she became a sort of moving-picture public relations officer up and down the Avenue. Her enthusiasm overcame her natural shyness with people. She found she could talk glibly to neighbours on the subject of films, whereas, in the past, she had found it difficult to raise her eyes to acknowledge the lift of a neighbour's hat.
The Granada job solved all economic worries at Number Four, for Mr. Billings paid her, at first thirty shillings, and then two pounds a week. He told his wife, in an unguarded moment, that she was worth at least twenty pounds a week to him; but Edith did not assess her value in pounds, shillings, and pence. Had Mr. Billings but known it, she would have gladly played for him for nothing.
CHAPTER IX
Elaine Frith And The
Facts Of Life
1
THESE were the halcyon years for Judith Carver, the years when she had Esme Fraser all to herself, years before Elaine Frith, of Number Seventeen, moved between them, and elevated Esme—for a time at any rate—to the verge of Paradise and by so doing consigned poor Judith to the limbo she was to inhabit for most of her 'teens.
Ever since the day they had played Sleeping Beauty in Manor Woods, Judy and Esme had been close friends, as close, in some ways, as Bernard and Boxer, and with something of the same relationship to one another.
In their case there were no preliminary consultations, as there were, however nominal they might be, between the twins. In the case of the boy and girl, the boy both proposed and disposed, and the girl merely tagged along, carefully gauging her enthusiasm by an unwavering observation of her lord, devoted to the point of death, unquestioning, unreasoning, enslaved.
As he passed from childhood to boyhood, Esme's dreamworld widened with his reading, from Henty to Scott, from the “B.O.P.” and “Chums”, to Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard. He was as much in need of an audience as Mr. Billings but, unlike the cinema proprietor, could manage comfortably on an audience of one. Judith was his audience, and paid him in the currency of utter devotion.
Her enslavement was no secret in the Avenue.
“There's Esme Fraser, and the little Carver girl,” people would say, as they drifted by, Esme, addressing his dark, Imperial scowl to the paving-stones, Judith a yard or so behind, like an Eastern wife without her burden.
In the early days of their association her family had teased her about him: “Hurry up, Judy; Esme's coming out!”, or “Judy won't want any breakfast; Esme's finished his,” but Judith, although she blushed a little, did not resent this sort of badinage. Why should she? They could all be forgiven a little teasing. They hadn't got Esme.
Judith's family never found out anything really important about the association—the diary for instance, or the “Esme-Box”, that she kept hidden under her hair-ribbons in the lower drawer of the chest she shared with Louise. She never wrote in the diary, or opened the box, unless she was fairly certain that she would not be disturbed.
The entires in the diary were bald statements of fact: “Thursday: Esme was Lancelot and rescued me. We were late for dinner and Louise didn't mind.” “Saturday: Esme was Blackbeard, and set his whiskers alight. He told me about the lady pirate, Mary Read.”
These were summaries of the way in which they spent their hours together, usually in Manor Woods, or in the wide ploughland and copses, along the Kentish border. Sometimes they wandered further afield in search of settings. Esme always had to have the correct settings.
Almost incidentally Judith learned a great deal about books, and the romantic episodes of British history. There was always a role for her in Esme's dreams, Maid Marian, the Lady of Shalott, Queen Dido (this frightened her a little on account of the funeral pyre she had to sit upon), the serving-wench who brought Turpin news of wealthy travellers leaving the inn, women pirates, like Anne Bonney and Mary Read, Llewellyn's wife, who was severely scolded, for leaving the dog to guard the baby, Jack Sheppard's moll, who smuggled files into Newgate, and so on; endlessly she ranged across the centuries, comforting, aiding, bandaging, smuggling, and getting small enough thanks for it from a hero who was very quick to censure an anachronism (as when she sent a pie containing a pistol into Richard the Lionheart's dungeon), the very sparing in praise, even when her loyalty had whisked him from the very shadow of Tyburn Tree.
“Faster! Faster! They've got fresh horses!” “Down! Down! Your heels are showing, and they'll be shot off, like Lord Roberts's were!” So she ran, holding tight to his hand, through briars, and across bogland, or lay, sobbing for breath, in a deep bed of nettles, while Edward the First's cavalry probed for them among the undergrowth.
Desperately she studied and trained to fit herself for these posts of honour. Anxiously she watched for his pale glance of contemptuous anger, when she handed him the wrong key, or gave the wrong pass-word. It was exacting work, all of it, but there were many, many comp
ensations —an odd word of approval, the pressure of his fingers on her shoulders, his blazing fury when he “found” her tied to a tree, awaiting the Minotaur, and the one ecstatic occasion when she sprained her ankle jumping from a high bough, and was carried on his back a whole mile, to the door of Number Twenty.
The “Esme-Box” in her drawer contained carefully collected souvenirs of these occasions: a wild rose she had thrown to him on his instructions, when he was about to tourney in her honour, and which he had subsequently abandoned on the field of honour after being dismounted by his fourth opponent; a few blurred snapshots of him, the result of his one brief incursion into the twentieth century with a box camera, given him by his mother's ever-hopeful suitor; a mother-of-pearl hair-slide he had found, and presented to her, as part of his goodwill when visiting Tartary, on behalf of the West.
These things she showed to nobody, not even Louise, but most days she went quietly upstairs, and took them all out, laying them in a row on her bed, with the open box handy, in case she should hear footsteps on the stairs.
Not once during these days did Esme say or do anything to clarify their true relationship. Never did he touch upon the Paradise which, deep in her heart, she had decided they would ultimately enter; and she on her part was very careful never to broach the subject not even in jest, for her instinct about him was very shrewd, and she knew that, when at last it did come, it must come from him, it must be yet one more game—the final one. One day, one great and glorious day, he would let slip the words. One day he would say, quite casually, as though proposing to dramatise another anecdote from the books: “When we are married”, or “After we are married ...” Then it would be merely a matter of growing up, and of cooking and sewing for him, as Louise cooked and sewed for the boys and the babies. Then she would feel the weight of his arm on her shoulder, not as the sorely-wounded Arthur, being assisted to the barge on the margin of the lake, but as a husband and lover, as the person who would emerge from Shirley Church beside her, to duck laughingly beneath the shower of confetti and hustle her into a beribboned taxi, like those that passed the end of the Avenue so frequently at Easter-time.
The Dreaming Suburb Page 11