The Dreaming Suburb

by R. F Delderfield

  People, often professional people, began to canvass his opinions about pictures and china at the sales and views. “Would you go for that, Mr. Frith?” “Is it really Doctor Wall, or is it much later, Mr. Frith?”, and under this modest flattery he began to expand, like a wispy little plant in strong sunshine. And Frances, noting as much, was proud and glad.

  Frances he treated like a young wife in the first flush of married courtship. He brought her flowers—freesia, cream roses, and huge, golden iris. He held back little pieces of antique jewellery that he came across at the sales, brooches, cameos, and earrings, and presented them to her not as anniversary gifts, but small, unexpected tokens of his love, offering them with reverence, like a pagan worshipper expressing gratitude for a rich harvest, or a male firstborn.

  When his ardour showed no signs of cooling, when she was sure that his devotion had little to do with physical gratification, but was simply the outward manifestation of a great humility, she was able to see him as she had never previously seen him, a small man, with an infinite capacity to create happiness in people around him, a little man with vast reserves of patience, and a rare, male gentleness, that made him seem so much bigger than most of the men she had known. When she saw him like this she sometimes wondered about Esther, his wife, and, because she was herself both generous and gentle, the realisation of all that Esther had missed, and all that Edgar must have suffered during the sterile years of his marriage, made her a little sad.

  When the business was fully established, and when Elaine (whose catlike smile frightened Frances somewhat) had left their little flat over the shop, and gone her way as a living-in receptionist at The Falconer, over at Colwyn Bay, Frances sent down into Kent for Pippa, her twelve-year-old daughter. Pippa arrived, wide-eyed and wondering, with just enough coltish curiosity to ask embarrassingly direct questions about “Uncle Edgar”. This questioning phase did not last very long, for Pippa loved the Middle Ages and learning this Edgar took time off from his sales to conduct her on personal tours of the local castles. He need not have bothered to revisit Conway and Beaumaris, for he won Pippa's confidence and affection on the first of these expeditions to Caernarvon, introducing her, as it were, to an Edward the First who obligingly stepped out of the history text-books in order to explain to her just why he came to Wales and why he built the castles.

  After that there were no more questions and no more lifted eyebrows on her part when Edgar jumped up to anticipate the slightest wish of her mother, or display old-world courtesy in piloting Frances to a chair near the fire, lifting her feet to place them on the humpty.

  Pippa was a good-tempered child, grateful for the smaller mercies of life. She had not been very happy in her aunt's spotless bungalow, at Sevenoaks, and had been very bored there during the week-ends, when Aunt Phoebe spent so much of her time at church. Aunt Phoebe, she reflected, seemed to know very little history, only a few facts about the Protestant Martyrs, while “Uncle Edgar”, who made such a fuss of mother, seemed to know almost everything, and never answered a question with “Because it is so!”, not even when it was close to bedtime.

  Whenever he was explaining anything to her, Pippa noticed that her mother listened and smiled, her feet on the humpty, her book lowered to her lap, and the child came to the conclusion that she smiled because Edgar's patience with questions was one more proof that he was hopelessly in love with her. She did not fully understand how this state of affairs could exist. Aunt Phoebe had told her that the man mummy had “gone into partnership with” was married, and lived in London, and these facts were difficult to reconcile with the knowledge that he obviously lived there, with her mother, and had nothing whatever to do with a wife in London or anywhere else.

  The mystery, however, intrigued her more than it worried her, and after a time she came to take Uncle Edgar for granted, supposing that certain business partnerships demanded a closer collaboration than others, and that some partners even had to share a bedroom in order that business projects might be discussed far into the night.

  Perhaps life with Aunt Phoebe, who was a spinster, and Chairman of the St. Andrews' Church Guild, had left Pippa more naïve than most twelve-year-olds. Perhaps both Edgar and Frances encouraged her in her views on the partnership, or perhaps they were all three too happy to bother, one way or the other.

  4

  Elaine Frith stayed on as receptionist at The Falconer for nearly two years after she had left the flat over the antique shop at Llandudno, in order to make way for Pippa.

  She was a good receptionist, popular with guests and management, and she might have stayed at the hotel much longer than two years, had it not been for the arrival, in the Spring of 1934, of the Great Eugene, illusionist and spellbinder, who stayed at the best hotels whenever he was playing, whether he could afford it or not.

  The Great Eugene swept into the foyer of The Falconer with a swish of his crimson-lined cloak, and an imperious tapping of his gold-headed cane upon Elaine's glass-topped reception desk. He tapped because Elaine, at that moment, was working the telephone switchboard, and had kept him waiting a moment or two. When she looked up and saw him she abandoned the switchboard, and turned upon him that demure, yet oddly provocative look that had once caused the middle-aged males of the Avenue to glance over their shoulders at her slowly receding figure as she passed to and from Number Seventeen.

  The Great Eugene was not specially privileged in this respect. Every unaccompanied male who shewed up at Elaine's reception desk was the target, for a few fleeting seconds, of this curiously disturbing look, a glance that hovered somewhere between extreme feminine modesty, sweet feminine submissiveness, and the merest hint of something a little more up-to-date.

  The Great Eugene, a specialist in illusion of every kind was not fooled by it for an instant, but he nevertheless stopped tapping, stood back, and bowed from the waist, recognising at once that Elaine was not the kind of receptionist one tapped for.

  He then reciprocated her look by turning upon her his full battery of charm, a charm that had coaxed shy young ladies out of their seats and into his stage sentry-box all the way from Fort William to Sheerness, simply in order that they might disappear and reappear at the staccato clap of his hands. This clap usually prefaced heartier clapping from the auditorium, for the Great Eugene, at his best, had been a very popular turn, and his guillotine trick had been said to conjure screams of horror from strong men and once, on the Northern Circuit, cause a retired Major-General to faint into the arms of a programme-seller.

  All this, however, had happened some time ago, before the talkies and the radio had tapped his audiences. He was past his best now, still impressive, still unrivalled in the field of ironic patter, and still almost handsome in white tie, tails, and crimson-lined cloak, but perhaps a little too heavily veined about the nose and cheeks, and a little too obviously breathless if second-house patter was demanded too soon after the interval.

  Elaine looked at him with lively interest. She had seen him billed about the town during the previous week, and there was no, mistaking his spare, impressive figure, his Mephisto-phelian eyebrows, and trim, French Imperial.

  “Have you a booking, Mr. Eugene?”

  She knew, none better, that he had no booking, but she wanted to show him that he was recognised. She had met a number of people in show business since coming to work at The Falconer, and soon learned that this was the best method of impressing them.

  His hooded eyes held her in a warm smile.

  “You know me? But this is flattering, this is balm, dear lady!”

  He always addressed young women in this way. It was a kind of double bluff, a means of informing them that he was quite prepared to pretend that he was modest, but that they must never let themselves be persuaded that he actually was.

  “But of course I know you, Mr. Eugene! You were at Llandudno last week, and Rhyl the week before. Everybody knows you!”

  She did not tell him that she made a point of reading the show column in th
e local weekly, but let it be assumed, without exactly saying as much, that she followed his career breathlessly, week after week. Perhaps because he was getting old and tired, he began to glow, and took her plump hand in his, raising it to his lips with an air of restrained bravado.

  “You are kind, most kind,” he said, “and there is not so much kindness abroad but that it should go unrewarded! Tell me, dear lady, what do you say to us making an exchange of bookings? You will book me, in your best single with bath, and I will book you, in the best stall unsold?”

  “I think that's a lovely idea, Mr. Eugene.” She smiled into his eyes, and made a pretence of looking at the sheet in front of her, moving her forefinger up and down the columns before adding: “Number Twelve! That's our best single. It's on the side, but it has a wonderful view of the woods.”

  She rang the bell for the page, and unhooked a key. While her back was turned he took a ticket from his pocket, and scrawled “Complimentary—Eugene” across it, in handwriting that matched his cloak.

  “This is for tonight,” he said, with another little bow. “Perhaps, if you are amused, you may wish to come a second time. Is tonight convenient?”

  It was quite convenient Elaine had a choice of three nights a week off during the early part of the season, and seven-thirty found her settled in the front row of the stalls, waiting impatiently through a juggling act, the turn of a Lancashire comedian, and a tenor who. sang Boots and then The Road to Mandalay as an encore, until at last the Great Eugene swept on from the wings. He struck a conventional attitude while the stagehands wrestled with his gilded paraphernalia, and the orchestra obliged with excerpts moderately suggestive of snake-charmers, caravans, nautch-girls, bazaars, dromedaries, and the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir.

  Elaine was surprised to find herself liking the act. There was, it was true, nothing very original about his performance as a whole. A young woman wearing tights and a glacial smile appeared and disappeared with bewildering rapidity, coloured handkerchiefs were produced by the dozen from transparent jars, strings of razor blades dripped steadily from Eugene's mouth, and a duck, protesting bitterly, was whisked from beneath the brown trilby hat of a volunteer, who might or might not have been a stand-in.

  It was all very polished and effective, but Elaine had a feeling that either she had seen it all before, or, she had once heard someone describe it, movement by movement.

  It was his guillotine act that made the audience sit up and gasp. From where she was sitting Elaine was able to make the maximum allowance for the part played in the performance of this trick by Eugene's swirling cloak, which interposed between audience and pinioned girl at inconvenient moments. Nevertheless, she cried out with the rest when the knife went “clonk”, and a head—somebody's head—bumped into the gilded basket, at the very moment the victim sat up and shouted “Hoi!”, without so much as disturbing her exact smile.

  It was in the performance of this particular trick that Eugene's showmanship revealed itself. Although alone on the stage, except for his strapped victim, he seemed to be in every corner at once, declaiming his patter in French, in English, and in a mixture of both languages. But although he impressed Elaine, she could not help comparing this splendidly confident figure with the slightly pathetic man who had handed her the complimentary ticket that morning. Up here, in front of his audience, Eugene was great indeed, twirling, pattering, skipping, and clapping his hands. He was the kind of man, she thought, whom any girl might be happy to accompany to a smart London restaurant, or even a Paris boulevard, and he was not far short of the man of her dream, the one who would eventually carry her off, and install her in a mansion, with a terrace for the swains to swoon upon. It was a pity that she had met him in mufti, when the tiny network of nasal veins were visible from the far side of the reception desk, and the steaks of grey showed in the magnificent eyebrows. Still, for all that, he might be worth encouraging—just a little, just enough to launch her one more step in the direction she had made up her mind to go when she became a receptionist two years ago.

  It was just possible, she decided, that the Great Eugene, carefully handled, might compensate her for two almost wasted years behind the reception desk, years that had promised much but given, as yet, very little.

  5

  In the meantime Eugene had been making plans of his own, and Elaine might have been disturbed to learn how important a part she was playing in them.

  The Great Eugene was not like other vaudeville artists, his vanity having little to do with his art as an entertainer. It never had, not since the earliest days, when he had been climbing to the top of the bill of the Number Two circuit. He was vain only in respect of his conquests, and as middle-age and insecurity overtook him it became more and more important to him that he should make new conquests, and make them among younger women. For Eugene saw himself not as Houdini, or a Maskelyne, but as a Juan or a Cellini, a man whose finesse in the lists of love no woman could resist, so bold, yet so calculated, was his initial approach, so novel, yet so practised, his ultimate technique.

  In the years leading up to the Great War, when he was in his early 'thirties, and at the peak of his earning powers, he had enjoyed a very considerable success with women, particularly among women of the theatre. They were amused by his macaw-like flamboyance, and often agreeably surprised by his virility. Over the years Eugene had kept a diary, and in that diary were the names of fifty-seven women with whom he had shared a bed for seven or more consecutive nights. He did not bother to enter up casual encounters, being of opinion that mere promiscuity deserved no laurels. He had no particular preferences for one type or another. He had, in his time, consorted with Poles, Hungarians, Creoles, Finns, and even Chinese. He had been married, for a time, to an Italian trapeze artist, and had exchanged her, in Macclesfield, for a French seal-trainer. He himself had never been to France, or anywhere abroad, not even to Dieppe or Boulogne, but he had masqueraded as a Frenchman for so long now that he almost believed himself to be a native of Nantes, whose father and grandfather had been magicians before him, and whose secrets were derived from Cagliostro.

  He spoke with a slight French accent, even when asking the time, and he thought of himself as a French lover, a man to whom the current affaire was the most important thing in the cosmos. In his more successful days he had loved outside the profession, but now that this free range was denied him for economic reasons he practised a somewhat limiting combination of business and pleasure. In short, his mistress had to be his assistant as well, and be guillotined twice nightly in exchange for the privilege of sharing his bed, board, and patronage.

  His arrival in Colwyn Bay coincided with his parting from Maggie, the girl with the glacial smile, for when the curtain descended on the second house at Llandudno the previous Saturday, Maggie had given him notice. She was marrying, she told him, her childhood sweetheart, now a master-baker in Doncaster, and had received from him a firm proposal earlier that week.

  They parted without rancour. In some ways he sympathised with Maggie's need for security, and could well understand why she sought it in a baker's shop in Doncaster. There had been times, particularly of late, when a few slices of bread, with or without the butter, would have been a welcome addition to his own menu whilst he was “resting” between engagements.

  Maggie was a generous girl, and promised to see him through the opening night at Colwyn Bay. She had even persuaded a stagehand to stand-in for her until a new girl assistant could be engaged for the act. Like most of her predecessors of late she felt rather sorry for him. He tried so hard, and it was not his fault that he was half way through his fifties.

  “You'll soon find somebody, Eugene,” she comforted him, in the tiny dressing-room they shared that night.

  Eugene could not bear to be pitied.

  “I already have, my dear,” he snapped, and wondered vaguely how much a week The Falconer paid its receptionist, and whether she was likely to be sufficiently stagestruck to be interested in a certain proposition h
e had in mind. He continued to ponder along these lines during his walk home, and was still abstracted when he passed in at the revolving doors of the hotel.

  There was nobody to warn him that, notwithstanding the fifty-seven names in his diary, which included a Finn, he had yet to encounter anyone as cold-blooded as Elaine Frith, who was even now placing a large double whisky and a chicken sandwich in his room, with a note thanking him for “a wonderful wonderful evening at the theatre”.

  It was all very much easier to manage than he had supposed. A few light-hearted conversations over the reception desk, and a pleasant tête-à-tête in a café on the Pier during her afternoon break, and she had consented to replace Maggie's stagehand at the Wednesday matinée. He told her that it was all perfectly simple, and indeed it was, for all she had to do was march up from the audience, and do everything he said the moment he said it. She was unable to satisfy her curiosity regarding the mechanics of some of his tricks on this occasion, for most of the time she was either shut up in his sentry-box, or lying, face downward, on his guillotine. But the audience gave her a very sporting hand when Eugene gushed his thanks, and the experience as a whole proved enormously stimulating. She went again the following evening, and again to the Saturday matinée, Eugene readily providing the tickets, but not calling upon her to assist him for fear that it should get abroad that his appeals for volunteers from the audience were bogus.