He got up and called briefly to the dog. As he turned back towards the briar-strewn path he saw a young man mooching along ahead of him, hands deep in trouser pockets and shoulders hunched. He recognised him from the back as young Esme Fraser, of Number Twenty-Two, and his mind drifted away from international problems for a moment, to ponder on the boy next door, the one his girl Judith had once cared for so deeply. What did the boy do for a living? Why did he spend so much time up in that little room of his above the porch? Why had Judy suddenly cooled towards him, and flung herself so whole-heartedly into this horse-riding business?
He did not pursue these questions for they did not really interest him. His mind was still preoccupied with the mass rather than the individual, but before he forgot about Esme he reflected that the boy was of the age group most liable to be killed in the next war, as indeed were his own younger boys, Boxer and Berni.
He wondered, for a mere second or so, what Boxer and Berni were up to now. He had heard they had left the Speedway, and found themselves some sort of work in an Amusement Park. Then he smelled burning weeds, from a bonfire on the allotments beyond the woods, and the smell reminded him again of the pitiless war in Spain. They were forming an International Brigade he had heard, to fight for the People, whom some called Nationalists, and others called the Rebels. That was the trouble nowadays. Nothing had a proper label. Nothing was clear-cut, like the black-and-white issues of the 'twenties.
2
Jim might have spared a longer moment to reflect on the twins had he been aware of the exact nature of the “odd job” they had found themselves in an Amusement Park.
They were now stunt-riders, who travelled about with a Nine Days' Wonder known as “The Wall of Death”.
Five times nightly, and several times during afternoon shows, they climbed into a deep, metal well, lashed out at their kick-starts, and began to weave frantic patterns round and round the sides of the pit, crossing and recrossing at breathtaking speeds, to the horror and amazement of patrons who paid sixpence a time to peer at them over the fenced-in rim of the well.
They had quit Speedway racing as soon as it began to bore them, and they now earned better money for doing what looked so dangerous but was, to them, as safe as circling a track.
As time went on they improved on their performances, inventing little thrills for the benefit of the more blasé spectators, pretending to fight their way out of speed-wobbles, or folding their arms over their leather-encased chests as they roared up, down, and around the enclosed space. For a time, a very little time, the sport satisfied their craving for noise, movement, and public adulation.
They moved about the country with the promoter, who regarded them as his most valuable asset. They were billed as “The Suicide Twins” and between shows they had their pick of the local girls, who came to see them ride, and were flattered to be seen with them in seafront cafés and cinemas.
None of these mild flirtations developed into a romance, for the twins could never find their counterpart among the young women of the towns they visited. Sometimes Boxer found himself a girl whose company seemed worth cultivating, and sometimes Berni hovered for a moment or two on the point of falling in love, but they were never able to find the pair who could make up a cosy foursome, and it never seemed to occur to them to separate, and go separate ways, not even when the moon was up.
This sometimes proved embarrassing to the girls they invited out. Boxer would turn up with an adoring blonde, “with hair like Veronica Lake”, and propose an expedition to the cinema, but the young lady was invariably disconcerted by the permanent presence of Berni, who tagged along on the other side of her, holding long, technical conversations, about over-drives and expansion chambers with his twin.
It was just the same when Berni found a girl. He would make an appointment to take her out to supper, but when she appeared, dolled up for the occasion, she found two swains instead of one, and spent an evening trying to impress both of them, with the not unnatural result that she scored a low average with each, and was left on her doorstep without a subsequent date being arranged.
What would have proved ideal for the twins, who were just as susceptible to pretty faces and slim legs as any normal young men, would have been a pair of identical twins, like their sisters Fetch and Carry, These might have been interchangeable during the early stages of courtship, and perhaps, in due course, Bernard and Boxer might have come to prefer one to the other, but they never had the good fortune to meet such a pair. Largely on this account their spectacular career as the Suicide Twins came to an abrupt and somewhat muddled end, after Boxer had proposed to Jackie Gulliver during the Carnival Ball at Folkestone.
Jackie Gulliver was a pretty, impulsive, determined young woman, reputedly an extremely good match, for she was the youngest child of Sam Gulliver, of Gulliver's Accessories, a well-known motor-cycle manufacturing firm, in the Midlands.
The twins were using Gulliver's machines at that time, and their dare-devil likenesses, reproduced upside down on streamlined 750-c.c. motor-cycles, appeared in all the trade literature issued by the firm, and in some of Gulliver's advertisements in the popular press.
Sam Gulliver was a genial, self-made man, and when Jackie confessed ta him that she had fallen hopelessly in love with Boxer, and had every intention of marrying him, he surprised her by raising no objection whatever. Sam, in fact, was fond of the twins himself, and he reasoned that a son-inlaw like Boxer would be more likely to prove a business asset than some of the spotty young men Jackie had already introduced into the house, gawky and spoiled youths, for the most part, who stood around calling him “sir”, and haw-hawing to Brenda, his wife, about drivelling novels, paintings, and similar nonsense.
Sam and Jackie had driven down to Folkestone for the summer carnival that year, and the Wall of Death was carrying a big spread of Gulliver advertising. Sam had even chartered an aeroplane to write “Gulliver's For Speed” in the sky above the Leas, and the promoter of the Wall of Death had laid on a special benefit show on behalf of the charities expecting to profit from the carnival.
At the carnival dance on Saturday night Boxer drank more than he could carry, which was quite a lot, and Berni, who made a habit of being two or three pints in arrears, would have persuaded him into the open and sobered him up had he been given the chance. Instead, Jackie Gulliver intervened, and accepted responsibility for him, getting her father's chauffeur to pilot the wavering Boxer to the back of her own Bentley sports-car, which was parked near the Pavilion.
Here Bernard was obliged to leave him, in order to 'phone Sam Gulliver, and inform him that his daughter was returning to London that night. Bernard was glad to convey such a message, for Jackie's possessive ministrations were beginning to irritate him. He and only he knew how to handle Boxer when he was drunk, and he resented assistance, however well-meant.
He made the ’phone call, but when he returned to the Pavilion parking-ground the Bentley was gone. He did not see or hear from Boxer again for the better part of a week.
Both he and the Wall of Death promoter made exhaustive enquiries. They even went to the police, and it was through them that they finally learned where Boxer had gone. It seemed that Jackie Gulliver had not gone home to London at all, but had spirited Boxer down to the Gulliver's week-end chalet, near Pevensey, there to make doubly sure that Papa succeeded in talking the less accommodating Mamma into accepting Boxer as a son-in-law.
Bernard was both furious and alarmed. To begin with he felt half-crippled without Boxer around. In all these years they had never been separated for more than a few hours at a time, and it occurred to Bernard that unless he did something to end this romance the present separation might prove but a foretaste of lonely years ahead.
As it happened, Boxer escaped from his idyll without any help, and turned up at their lodgings in Folkestone, looking more than a little sheepish. He found Bernard on the boarding-house steps, booted and spurred for a kidnapping trip to Pevensey.
�
��Wotcher, Berni?” he said, with a brave attempt at his wide, clownish grin; “I gave her the slip. I got out of the larder window early this morning, and hitch-hiked over here before she twigged I was gone!”
Bernard looked him over, anxious possibilities crowding his mind.
“You're a saphead, Boxer!” he grunted. “How far did you go with her?”
“Oh that? said Boxer carelessly; “all the way, I reckon—there was no holding her—but so what? I wasn't born yesterday, and neither was she, so you don't have to worry, Berni boy.”
The ‘phone interrupted this clinical discussion, and Bernard clumped into the corridor to answer it. He came back looking grave.
“It's her,” he said, “and she's coming right after you.”
“Jese!” said Boxer emphatically, “maybe we'd better move on. Whad'ysay Berni? Whad'ysay?”
Bernard weighed the chances, just as he had weighed them when Boxer had proposed to vary the tedium of “Knocking Down Ginger” with a game of “String and Parcel”.
“That's not going to work, Boxer,” he said slowly. “She says you promised to marry her next Saturday. She's ‘phoned through and told her old man.”
“Jese!” said Boxer unhelpfully.
“Well, did you?”
Bernard kept his eye on his twin as he spoke and Boxer, unable to meet the accusation in it, dropped his glance to the rubber mat on the boarding-house porch.
“I... I dunno, Berni, honest I don't. She says so, she kept on saying so. I might have, but then again, I might not, and if I did, like she says, it was the night I passed out. I never promised anything after that, honest!”
He looked so much as if he was going to burst into tears that the familiar spasm of pity gripped Bernards heart. He reached out, and laid a soothing hand on Boxer's massive, hairy wrist.
“Don't you worry, Boxer, I'll take care o' this. You ... you clear off back home, and tell Dad we're taking a holiday. You let me fix it. Whad'ysay, Boxer?”
What could Boxer say? He had not made an independent decision in twenty years, not since the day he had decided to test the ice on the pond in the lane. He winked gratefully at his twin and then, without a word, lumbered off down the steps towards the railway station. Bernard called after him.
“Hi! You got money for the fare?”
Boxer hadn't, so Bernard ran after him, and gave him three pound notes. Then he went slowly back into the frowsty sitting-room, to wait thê arrival of Jackie Gulliver.
She roared up about an hour later, and ran lightly up the steps of the boarding-house calling:
“Boxer, darling! Are you there, Boxer-pet?”
She threw open the door of the guest-room and saw Bernard, sitting stiffly on a horsehair sofa, and regarding her with cold hostility.
“He's gone,” said Bernard, and somehow made it sound as though Boxer was now senseless and shackled in the hold of a West Indian banana boat.
“Gone where?” demanded Jackie, her lips quivering.
“Just gone,” said Bernard, without taking his hard, blue eyes from her.
Jackie flew into one of her tantrums, but nevertheless she continued to observe Bernard very closely. She believed sincerely in Napoleon's maxim of never letting rage mount higher than the chin. She had discovered, as a small child, thai a tantrum paid a dividend if you did this.
“You're hiding him! You don't want him to marry me! But he's going to, he promised to .. he's ... he's got to now; Daddy'U see to that! So just you tell me where he is, or I'll get you the sack! Ill get straight on the ‘phone to Daddy, and get you the sack!”
Sam Gulliver was not the twins' direct employer, but the threat was not an idle one. A word from Gulliver to the Wall of Death promoter would have certainly sent them packing, but Bernard remained unmoved. He sat there, hands on knees, watching her stamp about the room, with tears of rage coursing down her powdered cheeks. If anything was needed to strengthen him in his resolve to get Boxer out of this situation Jackie Gulliver was providing it, here and now, for Boxer, he decided, would be better off at the bottom of the frozen pond than married to this spoiled, hysterical vixen.
“You won't get him,” he said at last and with great deliberation, “you won't ever get Boxer, not while I'm alive!”
His tone, and the odd way he was looking at her, made her artificial temper seem ridiculous. She stopped moving about, and came closer to him.
“You don't understand,” she said, in a slightly more reasonable tone; “he loves me, and he's promised to marry me.”
“He doesn't love anyone, and he only promised when he was blotto,” said Bernard. “I don't reckon that counts. I don't reckon it would count anywhere!”
At once she snapped back into a blazing temper.
“You'll have to prove that,” she screamed. “I'll sue him for breach ... it'll be in all the papers, and if I have a baby he'll have to marry me, d'you hear? He'll have to!”
Bernard rose slowly to his feet. She noticed that he was pale, and was curiously rigid, as though he was himself fighting hysteria, real hysteria. Suddenly she was very much afraid of him. He looked so squat, menacing, and implacable.
“You won't have a baby,” he said, “and if you did it wouldn't be Boxer's. You just remember that, Jackie Gulliver ... it wouldn't be Boxer's. If you said it was you'd be sorry, and wish to God you never run across Boxer, or me either!”
She gave a little gasp and then, as he moved forward, stepped quickly aside to let him reach the door. Rage ebbed out of her, and her knees began to tremble. By the time she had some sort of control of herself he was gone, and she heard him run down the steps, and stab at his kick-start. A moment later his powerful engine began to roar, and when she ran to the window he was already zooming into the distance.
She rang the visitors' bell, and presently an aged Boots shuffled in.
“Do you think you could get me a little brandy?” she asked shakily.
“I'll see, Miss,” said the Boots, and shuffled out again.
Jackie Gulliver sat down on the sofa, opened her handbag, and began to repair the ravages caused by her tears. She might be spoiled, and highly-strung, but she was no fool. She had already decided to forget Boxer, and make that cruise to the Med. with “Jumbo” Coombes-Bister, and his sister Joyce, the children of the Marmalade King, whom she had met at Le Touquet the previous April.
3
Louise and Jack Strawbridge were married at East Croydon Registrar's office that same autumn.
With Judith gone, and the twins Fetch and Carry out at work all day, there was no point in waiting any longer. She was thirty-five, and Jack was a year older. If they didn't marry now, she reasoned, what small chance they had of having children would be gone. The prospect of a childless marriage saddened Louise, for she had been attending to children from first fight until nightfall for as long as she could remember.
Her father tried to persuade her to get married at Shirley Church, but she said she was too old for that sort of wedding, and anyway it would cost too much. All she wanted was for Jack to move into Number Twenty, and eat his breakfast with them, before he went out to work in the Nursery. He had been eating his mid-day meals and his suppers at the house for years now, and they could share the bed she had shared with Judy for so long. In her eyes it was not really marriage at all, simply a domestic adjustment.
Judith came up from Devonshire to be her bridesmaid. They all thought she looked radiantly healthy. Her skin was tanned and clear, her thick, brown hair was waved for the occasion, her little figure trim and taut, after so many hours in the saddle. She brought them a canteen of cutlery as a wedding gift, and Louise was glad of it, for her table-ware had not been renewed since before the war, and the knife-handles were shrinking away from the thin blades.
Archie called round the night before the wedding. For the first time in ten years he and Jim sat in the kitchen together, while Louise made them both tea, and fussed about, putting finishing touches to the cake she had baked herself.
Jack Strawbridge came round to show Louise his new, navy blue suit, bought for the occasion. He looked very odd in it, for none of them had ever seen him in anything but corduroys, an open-necked shirt, and a converted army tunic. His neck looked redder than ever wnere it strained over his stiff, white collar, and Louise, straightening his tie, said that if he took a really deep breath, fragments of serge and cotton would fly all over the kitchen. He sat down very carefully, and drank tea with the spoon still in the cup. He seemed horribly nervous, and Archie tried to reassure him.
“There's absolutely nothing to it, Jack. It only takes about a hundred seconds. They pass the couples through on a sort of conveyer-belt!”
He was not far wrong. The ceremony occupied just over three minutes, from the moment they were beckoned into the inner office by the clerk, to the moment they emerged into the autumn sunshine, and Bernard and Boxer scattered hand-fuls of confetti over them, while Judith stood back smiling, and Jim opened the taxi door.
“Aren't you and Judy riding home with us?” asked the bride, as he closed it again.
“Not today, Lou; we wouldn't be seen dead with you, would we, Pop?” said Archie, grinning.
“Well follow on,” Jim told her. “Miss Clegg will have everything ready.”
Edith opened the door to them when she heard the taxi. She was wearing the same tight, green costume that she had worn at Teddy's wedding, and it still smelled of camphor and lavender. Edith loved a wedding and had been delighted when Jim asked her to act as hostess. They all crowded round the table in the front room, and all their jovial protests could not prevent Louise getting up to help Edith serve the cold chicken and trifle.
After Archie had proposed a toast Jack was given permission to take off his collar, and only then could he be persuaded to get up and make a speech. It was the first and last of his life.
The Dreaming Suburb Page 37