The Dreaming Suburb

by R. F Delderfield

  In the meantime she saw a good deal of him offstage. They lunched together at another hotel, and shared a bottle of champagne in his dressing-room on Thursday night. He was due to move on to Chester on Sunday, and throughout Saturday evening, when she was on late shift, and he was at the theatre, she wondered what further approaches he would make in the short time left to them.

  She looked back on the week with pleasure. It was some time since she had been able to purr at the hunger in a man's eyes. She did not count Esme, who had always made her feel like a marble statue in a museum, but there had been two or three promising flirtations with married men at the office, and three brief associations with hotel guests during the previous season. None of these flirtations had amounted to much. The men at the office had proved too timid when it came to the touch, and the manager of the hotel actively discouraged staff associations with visitors. She had not wanted to lose the job, and had been discreet, but since meeting Eugene, and since hearing the burst of applause when he took her hand as she wriggled from the guillotine, the reception desk at The Falconer had lost much of its original attraction. She suddenly realised how terribly bored she was with keys and bills and idiotic requests for hot-water bottles on summer nights. In fact, the job that had once promised so much looked like becoming a dead end, whereas the stage was surely the traditional springboard for beautiful young women, anxious to beguile men out of their senses. Suppose Eugene was to offer her a position as his assistant? Surely it would not be long before she was noticed by somebody bigger, wealthier, and more personable? She had discerned, in his conversations, a hint or two in the right direction, but the fact that he had not enlarged upon the possibility, yet was due to catch the train for Chester next morning, began to depress her. It would have been nice, she reflected, to decline his offer, or temporise, even if commonsense did tell her the whole idea of going on the stage was preposterous.

  She was aware that she interested him physically for she had never had any difficulty in recognising the patterns of speculative thought that began to be woven in the minds of most men she encountered. As far back as the Avenue days she had always been able to sort out the mildly intrigued from the frankly sensual. There was a scale in her mind for measuring this kind of speculation, and Eugene's thoughts regarding her could be read in clear print. His courtly approach was something left over from his act, and she was never in the least doubt as to what he was after, from the very first moment she looked up at him from her telephone switchboard. What did puzzle her was that he seemed to have snarled up on something, as though he had sensed in her response, or lack of it, a physical distaste for him that she did not feel, as though he imagined that the moment he ceased to flirt in the Edwardian sense of the word and said or did something slightly more definite, he would get his face slapped, and there would be an end to it. On the other hand, he was not the sort of man a girl could encourage with impunity, for he wore his considerable experience with women like his cloak. Again, as with this spectacular mantle, he used his experience to throw dust into the eyes of his audience, never quite relinquishing his hold upon courtesy, and striving hard to create an impression that he was really a man of honour as far as the ladies were concerned.

  Altogether she found him a difficult nut to crack, and one so far quite outside her experience. She spent the last hour before midnight rehearsing her farewell speech to him, but she went upstairs to her room in a sulky mood when she had no opportunity to deliver it. For although she waited until 12.30, pretending to busy herself with bills, he did not come strutting through the revolving doors, so that she finally decided to wait no longer, and punish him with pertness in the morning.

  For once Elaine was caught off guard. When she opened her door, and turned on the light, he was sitting in her little armchair, in front of the dressing-table. It took her at least thirty seconds to recover her poise and shut the door.

  He sprang up and bowed the moment he saw her. His cloak and opera hat were lying on the bed and he had beside him a bottle of champagne and two tumblers, thick and chipped, that he had obviously borrowed from the theatre. She saw at once that she had misread his diffidence, that he could read her as well, or better, than she could read him. This called for an entire reassessment of the situation at a moment when she was tired and he had a distinct advantage over her.

  “Forgive me, my dear, there was no other alternative,” he said crisply. “You were on duty until midnight, and I must leave on the ten-five tomorrow. This week has been a very delightful one for me, and I did not want it to fade out, as it looked like doing. Is it presumptuous of me to imagine that you sympathise with that viewpoint?”

  He was giving her an opening and she took it, gracefully.

  “It's been a very happy time for me, Eugene,” she said. (It was the first time she had ever addressed him as “Eugene” and not “Mr. Eugene”.) “All the same, you shouldn't be here. You must know that.”

  He laughed softly, and she decided that he looked much younger when he laughed. His teeth were good, and his eyebrows were eyebrows consistent with laughter.

  “I feel sure, my dear, that both you and I will always be the sort of people who get the most fun out of being where we shouldn't be when we shouldn't. I brought champagne, but you must forgive the glasses. Perhaps you would prefer your tooth-glass?”

  No, she told him, the tumbler would do, and he opened the bottle with the air of a man who has opened an infinite number of bottles, and with another bow from the waist handed her the least chipped tumbler.

  The champagne relaxed her. For a moment or two they talked about the show that night. Then she kicked off her shoes, and curled her legs under her on the bed. It passed through her mind then to ask him outright about the possibilities of entering show business, but her instinct told her to wait, that it must come from him. So all she said was: “How did you find my room?”

  He looked at her steadily. “I found it the first night I was here. I watched you go in, and tonight I came here an hour ago, through the side entrance, and up the service stairs. Nobody saw me, you can be quite sure of that. After all, I'm a professional at disappearing acts.”

  “You'll have to go now,” she said firmly, “and I hope you'll be just as clever at getting out.”

  “I must know something first,” he said, and she was suddenly aware that he was flushing, and it needed an effort to keep his voice steady.

  “Well?”

  “Are you happy in this job? Do you think you're getting anywhere?”

  She bit her lip, reflecting that it was irritating to be as transparent as all that, but she answered honestly enough:

  “No, I'm not getting anywhere, Eugene, but I'd reconciled myself to that before I met you!”

  His hesitancy left him. He got up from the chair, re-seated himself on the edge of the bed, and took one of her hands in both of his, regarding her earnestly, but affectionately.

  “My dear, you're such a waste, stuck in that little glass box downstairs. You should have adventure while you're young! The world's waiting to play in! Have you ever thought of that?”

  She had expected him to be much more original. This speech, she thought, might have been lifted from one of the first batch of paper-backed reprints that she had once hidden under the floor of her bedroom, at Number Seventeen. He did not even look like a lover, pleading his cause, but more like a family doctor, prescribing a convalescent holiday.

  She left her hand limply in his. “Where could I go, and what could I do?” she wanted to know.

  “You could come with me. You could join me next week, before I move on to Shrewsbury. I need somebody like you in the act; the fact is, I'd get much better bookings with a girl like you.”

  She was surprised to hear him say this. She had imagined, until that moment, that he used his act as a bait for mistresses, that an invitation to join him in show business was merely his shop window, of a kind employed by all men of the theatre with designs upon women much younger than themselv
es. It was so in the books, and all she had to go upon as yet were the books.

  “But what would I have to do?” she demanded with a directness that he, in turn, found irritating.

  “The same as you did at the matinée, but we should improve on it of course. With you I could work up new business”—he used the word “business” in the entertainer's, not the tradesman's sense—“and an act like mine is always enhanced by the presence of a pretty woman, whether she takes an active part, or simply stands around, handing me the things I need.”

  As he spoke he saw her in the kind of costume he would provide for her out of an agent's advance, an ice-rink costume, perhaps, of tight satin, trimmed with fur, or better still an extravagent, feminine parody of an early nineteenth-century military costume, with rakishly-tilted shako, and skintight breeches, and half-length Russian boots. Benny Boy, his agent, would like that, he might even pay for a set of photographs to display in the foyer. He would tell her just how to stand and just how to turn upstage with a slight flounce. Her next question cut harshly into his speculations.

  “How much would I get?”

  He shrugged. “What do they pay you here?”

  She told him, thirty-five shillings and full board. It was the truth. Usually she only lied to her mother.

  “I could do better than that, even on Number Two circuits,” he told her.

  “But it wouldn't be steady, not like this job.”

  “No, that's true, but at least you'd be free to go where you liked, and do what you liked on seven mornings and five afternoons a week,” he reminded her.

  There certainly was that about it. She had already timed his act—twenty minutes, twice nightly, and an extra forty minutes for matinées. In all only three-and-a-half hours a week!

  He watched her working out the sum, and suddenly decided that he had sadly underestimated her intelligence. He was sure now that she would accept his offer as an assistant on stage, but beyond that he was sure of nothing. How long might he have to support her in separate hotel rooms? How likely was she to make a fool of him by forming a romantic association with another and younger artiste, so that he would be faced with the prospect of paying for somebody else's fun? He began to panic a little. Perhaps he had been too hasty, perhaps she would be wildly indignant when she discovered that he was already supporting a wife and child, neither of whom he had seen for years, and was, in addition, contributing irregular sums towards the maintenance of another child, not many years younger than herself? After all, she had no theatrical background, and probably did not understand these things. Her accent told him that she had been brought up in a London suburb; even suppose he did, after a tedious spell of wooing, manage to get her to bed, wasn't she the type who would expect him to marry her on that account? He had neither time nor money to waste on wooing. He was getting on, and good bookings weren't too easy to find.

  He made up his mind to put everything to the touch. It might end in a scene, but he was accustomed to scenes, and an expert in escaping from them. It was better than this uncertainty, and far safer than the terrifying risk of saddling himself with a dud, who might easily develop into a dismal obligation.

  He got up, and took her other hand, raising them slowly to his lips, and looking down on her.

  “This is a very big decision to make, my dear. Perhaps you should sleep on it. I am not sure how much you understand of these things?”

  She understood far more than he had imagined, as her next action proved beyond doubt. Firmly she withdrew her hands and swung her legs round to the floor. For a moment he thought that she was going to walk out on him, and his mind, trained in such reflexes, grappled with the physical problems of getting clear before she could call the manager. He even began to rehearse high-toned rebuttals of the hysterical accusations she might make, should he fail to escape.

  But it was her turn to surprise him. She crossed the little room, turned the key in the door, and came straight back to him. He looked so astonished that she laughed, outright.

  “I'm not a child, Eugene,” she said, “and even when I was I always understood ‘these things', as you put it!”

  She picked up his hat and cloak, and tossed them on the armchair. Methodically, and without the slightest sign of haste or embarrassment, she began to unbutton her highnecked blouse.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Progress For Two

  ABOUT the time that Elaine was being fitted for her hussar costume, and Sydney was introducing his typist girl-friend to his mother, a beribbonéd taxi drew up outside Number Four, and the Misses Clegg, both dressed in green costumes, smelling strongly of camphor and lavender, issued sedately from the gate and rode off in chirrupy high spirits to attend dear Teddy's wedding, at the Outram Crescent Primitive Methodist Chapel.

  There were, indeed, active stirrings in several of the houses at that end of the Avenue, as the big lilac at Number One Hundred and Fourteen began to bloom, and tiny, white flowers appeared on the privets behind the looped chains that linked the gateposts of the crescent.

  It was the Spring during which Esme Fraser set out on his three-year Odyssey and the month that Jim Carver took to ruminating in Manor Woods, which he had seldom had time to visit throughout these committee-studded years; it was the season that his younger daughter, Judith, moved away from the Avenue, and went down into Devonshire, with that hatchet-faced employer of hers, in order to start a new riding-school on the edge of the moors, overlooking the Channel. It was also the season that Louise decided she could regulate her cooking time-table by inviting her silent fiance to take up permanent residence in Number Twenty, instead of having him come in from the Nursery at mid-day, and cause her to begin cooking all over again at six p.m. when Jim returned for his evening meal.

  These events might appear to be unrelated to one another. They were, after all, the outcome of unrelated dreams, on the part of the individuals who ordered them, but in another sense they were related. It was the bustle of Teddy's wedding, to which she and her father had been invited, that had stirred the placid Louise into considering her own prospects of marriage, and it was Louise's decision that decided Judy to accept Maud Somerton's invitation to accompany her to Devonshire.

  Similarly, it was Edgar Frith's letter to Sydney, telling him that Elaine had thrown up her hotel job and gone on the stage, that finally decided Esme to accept his former Headmaster's advice, and set out on his writer's apprenticeship journey around Britain. Sydney knew all about Esme's hopeless infatuation for his sister, and was unable to resist passing on the astonishing news of her second flight, if only for the pleasure of watching Esme's expression when he realised that Elaine had now passed out of his life for ever. Sydney often went out of his way to pass bad news on to acquaintances. He had never quite found a substitute for the little spurts of pleasure he had once derived from reporting delinquents to the Headmaster, when he was head boy of the private school in the Lower Road.

  So Esme and Judith disappeared from the Avenue for a period, and Jim Carver took time off from his party rallies and open-air meetings in order to marshal his thoughts regarding the state of the world as he walked the cool aisles of the Old Manor beeches. But Ted Hartnell, to Edith's unspeakable delight, did not disappear from the Avenue. He took Harold Godbeer's advice, and made a down-payment on Number Forty-Five, not two minutes' walk down the Avenue; here he brought Margy, his bride, when they returned from their honeymoon in Blackpool, to set up a dance orchestra with a style, and a sound of its own, more ambitious, and more original than Al Swingers’ “Rhythmateers”. For so Margy had decided, and Margy was now sole custodian of Ted's future.

  Neither the bride nor the groom were Primitive Methodists. Margy had never been inside a church since she was christened, and Ted spent his Sundays rehearsing, or playing gramophone records. Margy's “comfortable” aunt, however, was an active Primitive Methodist. As it was she who provided the wedding breakfast, and gave them a walnut bedroom suite for a wedding present, they felt they owed it to her to
be married in the church for which she had also provided hassocks and hymn-books, and where the Reverend Owen B. Hughes, resident minister, regarded her as more essential than all his worshippers lumped together.

  It is to be wondered, perhaps, what the Reverend Owen B. Hughes thought of the arch of band instruments under which the happy couple walked when they emerged from the Chapel, with his nuptial advice ringing in their ears. Jazz bands were not encouraged among the congregation of the Outram Crescent Chapel. True, jazzy orchestras of sackbuts, dulcimers, and timbrels cropped up in the Old Testament from time to time, but these were almost invariably played upon by unbelievers, or at times during the active persecution of the elect, as on the occasion when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrust into a fiery furnace. However, the bride's aunt was a very generous friend of the Chapel, and even had she not been, Al Swinger and his boys had served no formal notice on Mr. Hughes that they intended to regard the wedding of their drummer as an occasion to make merry and advertise the band.

  Accordingly, the minister was obliged to stand aside with a tolerant smile while flash-bulbs sparked off on his church steps, and Ted and Majgy paused for photographs under an arch of saxophones and drumsticks. Then they went rushing into the taxi, and shot off down Outram Crescent with a “Just Married” notice on the luggage grid, and the remains of an old kettledrum trailing on ten yards of string.

  Edith Clegg wept during the ceremony. She had, by now, both met and approved Teddy's wife, a pleasant, animated little thing, she thought, nothing like as pretty as her new lodger, Jean Mclntyre, but just the kind of wife dear Teddy needed—someone to plan for him, and to make sure that he got somewhere, someone to offset his willingness to be used, as that horrid, pasty-faced Al Swinger had used him so shamelessly all these years.