Archie considered this aspect very carefully when he thought about his Chain. When he began forging it, he told himself he would have no managers as master links. A branch would consist of one or two assistants, carefully picked for lack of initiative and robust physique, and of premises that were sited in a back street near a housing estate, or among fields that would soon become a housing estate. It was a mistake, he thought, to choose premises on main roads. Motor traffic was getting heavier all the time, and it would not be long before parking problems began to affect turnover. South London was constantly expanding, and roads that were now main thoroughfares might not remain so for much longer; nor would they remain within easy shopping distance of the suburban population. What was wanted—what could be made to pay off handsomely if a man had foresight and patience—was a series of tiny shops in villages that would soon cease to be villages. Land and real estate was still cheap in these areas, and premises in village side-streets could be acquired for trifling sums, particularly when old folk died off, and their modest estates were sold up by impatient families.
In his mind Archie called these dream-shops “Pop-Ins”. Before he was thirty-five, he told himself, he would have at least a dozen Pop-Ins, all within a five-mile radius of his present business. He would pay each of them two visits a day, one to check stock and watch service, the other to check books, and satisfy himself that his employees still lacked his sort of initiative.
He made his first move in February 1930. He had never lost touch with Piretta's slightly shady solicitor, and it occurred to him that here was a man who might put him in touch with the sort of property-owners he was looking for. His hunch was correct. The solicitor put him on to two families, each with a small property to sell.
Archie donned his best suit, called, and made offers that were at once indignantly refused by both beneficiaries. He retired unruffled. He was an expert in sizing-up people and premises. Within ten days he had both the properties in his possession, and the chain of Pop-Ins was a two-link reality.
He did not consult Piretta about this, but he did have the foresight to buy both shops in his wife's name. Maria was called in to sign papers, and two small banking accounts were opened, also in her name.
By this time Maria had three children, two boys and a girl. She seldom appeared at the counter, where Piretta had once hoped she might find a husband among the Woodbine regulars,
She was occupied all day long, cooking and washing for the children, her father, and her husband. She said very little, except when she was alone with the little girl, Juanita. She talked to Juanita a great deal, but no one ever heard what she said to her. The baby, an attractive child, with her grandfather's mild brown eyes, watched her intently as she fussed about the cot and the play-pen. Juanita must have been puzzled why her mother was so silent in company and yet so talkative when they were alone.
Maria took little interest in the two boys, who were always playing with their grandfather, but she remained very dutiful in the performance of wifely obligations towards Archie. Archie accepted her ministrations in the same spirit as he accepted the services of a 'bus conductor, or bar-tender. He was never actively unkind to her, and never criticised her. He simply ate what she put before him, dressed in the clothes she laid out for him, and paid swift and silent court to her whenever he had been too preoccupied with business to call upon one of his mistresses.
It did not occur to him that both Maria and her father knew all about these mistresses; and if he had known he would not have shown the faintest concern, or troubled to make an excuse. He himself did not take them very seriously and was very careful to keep each relationship on an unemotional plane. He remembered Rita Ramage; having once learnt a lesson, he never forgot it.
Thus, Archie geared himself for the new decade, and was soon to be seen in his bull-nosed Morris Cowley, flitting between Addington, Wickham, and Shirley, a slightly thickening figure, with rapidly receding hair, and a confident way of carrying himself that was just short of a swagger. A businessman, a husband, a father, and a future Czar of South London Pop-Ins.
4
Louise remembered the Spring of 1930 because it was her first mating season.
At the age of thirty Louise was thin, flat-chested, and slightly stooping. Nearly two-and-a-half decades over sink and stove showed in Louise's figure, but not in her character, which was as sweet and pliant and motherly as it had always been.
Nobody had ever heard Louise complain about anything, and nobody ever caught her with her pursey little mouth puckered into a frown, or her prominent, grey eyes unsmiling. All her life she had been the steady provider of clean towels, and beautifully-ironed underwear for any Carver who needed towels or underwear, at any time of the day or night, and all her life she had performed a thrice-daily miracle of serving up hot, nourishing meals from the limited housekeeping money given her by Jim. It was on this account that all the Carvers had good teeth and excellent digestions, and each of them, in their own way, loved Louise for her gentleness and her monumental unselfishness. Perhaps this was why they welcomed Jack Strawbridge, notwithstanding the alarming possibilities his courtship presented at Number Twenty.
Jack Strawbridge was a jobbing gardener in the employ of whoever happened to be renting Stannard's nurseries, behind the Avenue. In the winter of 1929 he was sent to clear ground that had been left fallow for thirteen years, and the task of freeing the nursery from its acres of bramble, and bindweed and dandelion, seemed likely to occupy him for some considerable time.
He was a big, shambling man, with a brick-red face, and a large head on which was balanced a cloth cap at least two sizes too small for him. The cap always looked as if it would fall off at the first sweep of Jack's long-handled bill-hook, but it never did, and Judy formed the opinion that it was fixed there by some means unknown to her—a strip of adhesive tape perhaps, that linked the lining to Jack's shining pate.
He had the stolid nature and soft burr of a Kentish countryman. Nobody ever discovered what had brought him to the suburb in the first place. He would have looked much more at home behind a plough or a lowing herd of cows. His movements were slow, deliberate, and immensely powerful. He could crack a Brazil nut between finger and thumb, and whenever he did so, or performed any similar feat of strength, he would show his delight by a short, rasping chuckle, that sounded rather like a St. Bernard's warning bark. His eyes were a vivid blue, and there was always a short, gingery stubble on his chin. He was as comfortable and as engaging as an old cart-horse, and when he made his ponderous way from the nursery into the Carvers' garden, via a gap in the rotting fence, he looked like one, recently relieved of its harness.
He and Louise might never have met had that gap in the fence been opposite any other back gate. He came blundering through the gap about eleven o'clock one morning, holding a forearm in a huge fist, and grunting somewhat with the pain of a four-inch gash, caused by the bill-hook.
He was losing blood rapidly when he reached the Carvers' kitchen door, and Louise, who happened to be hanging up washing, saw that there was no time to send for a doctor, and rendered first-aid on the spot.
They did not so much as speak until a tourniquet was fixed, the bandaging was done, and Jack was sipping hot, sweet tea at the kitchen table. Then she made use of an expression that was familiar to everyone who knew her, and fitted almost every situation in which she had found herself since babyhood. She said:
“There, now! What a pity it is!”
Practically everything was a pity to Louise—a stray cat's appetite, the dog Strike's suspicious barks at tradesmen, minor mishaps such as Jack's cut, or a train disaster involving the deaths of hundreds of passengers. The expression covered the entire range of humanity's ills, from earthquakes, plagues, and famines, to spilt milk, mosquito bites, and ingrown toenails.
Jack Strawbridge, sipping his tea, looked at her with interest. He did not see the sagging flatness of her figure, or the startling prominence of the eyes, only an immense compassion, th
at seemed to emanate from her like a lighthouse beam, and was now directed exclusively on him. For a few seconds he basked in its warmth, then he made up his mind.
“I'm a widower,” he said, simply and without ambiguity.
It seems hard to believe that their courtship was launched by that single remark, but such was the case. No man had ever made an approach to Louise, direct or indirect, and possibly this had something to do with the complete success of Jack Strawbridge's assault. Or it may have been that Louise, having so much to do about the house, found no time or opportunity to be coy, even at that first meeting. At all events, they made up their minds on the spot, and from that day on Jack ate all his mid-day meals in the kitchen of Number Twenty, and returned there, washed and changed, but not shaved, at precisely seven each evening, in order to take Louise for a stroll as far as the mill.
They never went further than the mill, and once they were out they never turned back before reaching it. If it was raining they sat in the kitchen and read the evening paper together. Occasionally they went down to the Granada and watched a film through twice from the nine-pennies. It was a placid undemanding courtship on both sides, and it was hard to see how it could ever progress towards marriage, for Jack supported an invalid mother on his two pounds fifteen a week, and Louise never once contemplated leaving her father and sisters to fend for themselves.
The strange thing about this static element in their association was that it did not appear to worry either of them, and in time Jim, Judy, both sets of twins, and Jack's mother (who never appeared on the scene at all) accepted it with the same equanimity as that of the two people most concerned. The Carvers liked Jack, and Jack liked the Carvers. That was all there was to it, and all, presumably, there ever would be to it. Whether or not his daughter embraced her suitor in the shadow of the old mill when they went for their walk, Jim never knew, and whether they would ever get married he did not know either. His elder daughter's admirer ate a good many meals in the kitchen, but his appetite was no strain on the household budget, because he more than made up for what he consumed by a steady supply of fresh vegetables, taken from the now cultivated nursery over the fence. After a time, when the south end of the plot was cleared and planted, Louise stopped buying vegetables altogether. This distressed her a little, for she hated disappointing the tradesmen who called for orders.
“I've got so much fruit, I don't know what to do with it,” she told the disgruntled greengrocer's van-man, throwing open the pantry door, and displaying apples, and plums, and gooseberries, and red currants, stacked neatly along the shelves in rows of boxes and punnets.
“Lumme, you 'ave, 'aven't you?” said the van-man.
“Yes,” said Louise apologetically, “it's such a pity!”
5
It did not take Judy Carver very long to discover that she had lost Esme for ever.
Her suspicions were aroused within hours of Esme's first kiss in the greenhouse, but a period of some weeks elapsed between the first nagging doubts, and the shattering realisation that her dream would always remain a dream, and that nothing short of a miracle would ever transform it into reality.
But by that time Judy had ceased to believe in miracles, ancient or modern, for she had ceased to believe in divine mercy and justice. She longed desperately to die, and be done with it all.
People of the Avenue saw their dreams recede and fade every day, and most of them rode out the shock wave within hours. But their cases were different. For them there were always new dreams.
Judy's dream was a good deal more insistent than the dreams of the other people of the Avenue. Some might even have called it an obsession. All along the crescent people had dreams but, for the most part, they were recognised as such, and kept handy for odd moments, when nothing much was doing. They were aspirins, not opium pipes, stage dressing, not the stage itself.
Judy's dream had never been tailored to fit a plan, like Archie's, or Elaine Frith's, whose dreams were always being adapted to meet expanding opportunities. Their dreams confined themselves to the present and the future, but Judy's went back into the past, back to the hot summer morning, ten years ago, when she and Esme had played Sleeping Beauty in the gazebo beside the Manor Lake. Fundamentally, it had not changed in all that time, it was still centred on marriage to Esme. Only the scenery had been changed a little as Judy passed from childhood to adolescence.
In the beginning they were to marry in a Cathedral, later, more modestly at Shirley Church, and later still, after Esme had expressed certain doubts concerning his spiritual beliefs, the wedding moved to the Register Office, in East Croydon. In the same way, the threshold that he was to carry her over had been modified, to keep it in line with practicalities. Once, they were going to share a Manor, like the old mansion in the woods, later a country cottage, with diamond-latticed panes, lupins, and an undulating thatched roof where swallows nested, but by the time Esme had left school the cottage had become one of the new semi-detached villas that they were beginning to build in the new roads half-way between Wickham and Shirley Church Road. In the end, had circumstances demanded it, it might have become a caravan, or a hut on one of the allotments. It was Esme that mattered, Esme and the child—the “cherub”, as Judy called her, for the child was a girl, who could wear pretty little poke bonnets, and suck her thumb gravely as she bounced along in her shiny new pram, pushed by Judy, an unusually silent child, who saved all her gurgles for Esme's evening homecomings.
All these years Judy had been waiting for a sign. Sooner or later, she reasoned, her dream must communicate itself to Esme. At the magic of the password or countersign it would then unfold, like the miraculous dragonfly in Water Babies, and their future would merge, as it was fated to merge from the very beginning, from the first touch of his lips in the gazebo. God had promised her, and God did not lead the devout and the prayerful up garden paths. Judy still said her prayers out of bed, even in the depths of winter, and Esme's name had never been dropped from those prayers, not once, since the day they had met.
Sometimes it had seemed as though God were giving Esme a gentle nudge. There was the day when she sprained her ankle, and he carried her for a mile home through the woods. There were the occasions when they both attended the same Avenue parties, and he called her out in “Postman's Knock”, or blinked solemnly at her in “Winking”. There was the recent and more mature moment, when he had talked to her of his ambitions during their picnic on Shirley Hills. These were the modest peaks of Judy's love-graph and, while the field was still open, she asked for no more than the limited reassurance they brought her. It was the day following the Stafford-Fyffe dance that the graph took its first plunge; after that it went on plunging until it shot off the page.
Judy had half-hoped that Esme would come in and tell her about the dance before she went off to work that morning. When he did not, when her lunch hour went by, and she had seen nothing of him, she made up her mind to call after tea, and hear his account first-hand.
Since leaving school the previous year, Judy had been working as a counter-hand at Boots, at the corner of Cawn-pore Road. She liked it well enough. The shop had a certain aura of luxury, absent at other chemists. Most of the girls who worked there came on from the Grammar School, and Judy, who had remained at Lucknow Road Council School until she was fifteen, was agreeably surprised by their friendliness and lack of snobbery. She worked in the toilet department, selling soap, toothbrushes, and hot-water bottles, and there was a chance of graduating to cosmetics in time. It was what her father had described as a “clean job”, with some sort of prospects, providing “she didn't get uppity, as so many of the flappers did nowadays.”
About six o'clock that evening Judy slipped next door via the fence. As the former bridesmaid she was on excellent terms with Eunice and Harold, and Eunice invariably made her very welcome, for the years with Esme had made Judy a good listener, and Harold usually spent the two hours following supper with The Times, which he read page by page, resenting interru
ptions.
Esme, Judy learned, was in his study, and had asked not to be disturbed.
“How did he enjoy last night?” she asked.
Eunice sighed and pouted. “I haven't been able to get a word out of him, have I, Harold dear?”
Harold grunted, and Eunice ran on: “Come to think of it, Judith, he's been very odd all day; he was moody at breakfast—well, not exactly moody—preoccupied would describe it better perhaps, preoccupied and ... and distrait, you know?”
Not knowing the precise meaning of “distrait”, Judy said loyally: “I suppose he was tired. Mr. Hartnell, the bandsman, didn't get home until very late. I heard him come in.”
“Well, dear,” said Eunice, “after all the fuss and bother I had to get him to go, I was looking forward to hearing all about it. If you can't go to dances yourself”—she looked reproachfully at Harold's paper—“you can at least hear about them! Perhaps you can get it out of him. He'll tell you what he wouldn't tell me! Now why don't you slip up and ask him? Then you could tell me, couldn't you?”
Harold looked up from his paper. “Esme said he was writing, and didn't want to be disturbed.”
“Yes, I know he did, dear,” said Eunice placidly, “but you men always say that when you've got something worth talking about, it just saves you bother. Sometimes, Judy, you'd hardly believe me, but sometimes a whole evening goes by, and neither of them says a word!”
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