“Well, everyone,” he said, “I dunno what to say, except thanks for bein' zo good to us. I reckon we're too long in the tooth, the both of us, for this sort o' lark, but it's nice havin’ it just the same, and something to remember. Me an' Lou, we been kind of meaning to get married a long time now, but somehow we never got around to it. Well, now we have, as you c'n zee, and I reckon we oughter make a go of it Anyone could with Lou here, or he'd be dam' hard to please, that he would!”
He sat down, amid laughter, applause, and a discreetly wiped tear from the smiling Edith.
Later in the afternoon they all surged on to the pavement to speed the couple away on their honeymoon to Clacton, and in addition to the wedding party a sprinkling of Avenue folk drifted out to their front gates to watch the send-off. Archie's wife and family waited on the corner to wave, while Harold and Eunice came out from next door to shake hands, and join in the laughter as the inevitable old boot bumped out from under the rear axle. Esther Frith and Sydney did not emerge from Number Seventeen, but they watched the scene from their front-room window, and as the taxi moved off, to a chorus of shouting and laughter, Sydney said:
“I've always thought those Carvers were rather common!”
Esther said nothing, but went back to her needlework. Perhaps she was remembering another wedding, away in the remote past, long before the war, when she had driven for the last time down the ill-tended drive of her aunt's gaunt house, to meet Edgar, in his frock coat and topper, at the little chapel in the village. A thought may have crossed her mind that perhaps this was what had been wrong about her own marriage, it hadn't been common enough.
4
Old Piretta died that autumn. His chest had been giving him trouble for a long time, but now the doctor said it was his heart, and he must rest, and cease to play bears with his younger grandchildren, James and Juanita. Tony, the elder boy, was beyond the bear stage, but the old man still tired himself out making catapults, and bows and arrows for the boy.
The old Italian did not take his doctor's advice very seriously. In any case he did not consider that a few more years on a sofa, or in an armchair, were worth the sacrifice of his games with the youngsters.
They all loved him far more than they loved their father or mother, and he on his part, worshipped all three to distraction, and often cocked a speculative eye at Maria's ageing figure, to see if there was any likelihood of a fourth grandchild coming along. Juanita, the youngest, he reflected, was five now, and it was time somebody got busy.
From Piretta's standpoint the marriage had beep a great success. Archie had expanded the business beyond the old man's wildest dreams. He now had nine shops, all within twenty minutes' drive of each other, and all but the one at Ketley (where the manager had embezzled six crates of stock) were showing steady profit.
There was little or no affection between his daughter and her big husband, but Piretta did not set much store on affection between man and wife. The purpose of marriage, as he saw it, was to get extra help in the shop, and to beget children, and in these spheres everything had gone according to plan. It was true that Maria never seemed very pleased with her life. She hardly ever spoke, and moved about the house so quietly, as though someone was lying dead in one of the bedrooms, but then she had always been a vague, undemonstrative girl—that was how he came to have so much trouble finding a husband for her. She certainly loved her daughter Juanita, and turned her out for her little parties looking like a fairy on top of a Christmas Tree, all pink frills and blue bows, and with every black curl in its proper place.
Toni Piretta spent nearly all his time playing with the children these days. His daughter managed the corner shop and Archie, in addition to doing the books, superintended the chain of satellites.
One sunny morning in November the old man took little Juanita across to the meadow that separated the odd numbers of the Avenue from the woods. It was one of their favourite playgrounds and whenever they went there Juanita insisted that they should play “Buried Treasure”.
This was a game of Toni's invention. It had, he felt, the twin advantages of amusing the child and stimulating her acquisitive instincts. He would pretend to go away and search out a likely spot for treasure-seeking, and then, the moment her back was turned, he would ram half-a-dozen threepenny bits and pennies into the soft ground, and mark the spot with a heel clip.
He would then call her over and begin to scrabble in the ground close by, having first indicated to Juanita exactly where she should dig.
Her excitement, when she turned up the first penny, never failed to delight him, and he would caper about shouting bis congratulations, and urging her to dig deeper, and “finda da throopnies” that “musta be there”. In the meantime, he would dig, with many exclamations of disgust, in his own barren claim, and when he failed to find anything would slap his face in despair, and shout “Poor Toni, poor Toni, he newa hawa da luck!”
On this occasion he buried three sixpences, and when Juanita had uncovered the last of them he tore her wooden spade from her, and flung himself into a frenzy of digging a yard or so away. Juanita, rubbing her sixpences with the corner of her handkerchief, watched him gleefully. She knew that he would never be lucky. He never was.
Suddenly he stopped digging, and tried to stand upright. The spade fell from his hand, and she saw that his face was purpling. She gave a little squeal of terror and ran to him, but he made a stiff gesture with his arm, warding her off. Then, as he fell forward on his knees, he pointed towards the houses.
Juanita was an alert little girl. She understood at once, and fled across the meadow towards the Avenue, bursting into the shop, where Maria was handing Louise Strawbridge her week-end groceries, and screaming: “Come quick, come quick! Grandpa's going blue!”
When they reached him he was unconscious. They got help, and carried him home, but although he recovered consciousness he never spoke again. They propped him up in the biggest bedroom, overlooking Shirley Rise and the big clump of elms that screened the entrance to the Lane. The doctor came, then Archie, then a nurse, but he gave no signs of recognising anybody.
That evening they brought the children in to see him. His eyes smiled but he made no other sign. The children bent over the bed, and kissed his bluish cheeks, but beyond the smile in his eyes he gave no indication of pleasure.
The truth was that he had recognised them but in the last few hours seemed to have moved a vast distance away from them and away from everything in the present, as though he was looking at them all through reversed binoculars. He was not seriously interested in them, for his mind was now occupied with the past, and the phases of his life drifted by like galleons in convoy.
He saw the fruit market at Naples, a riot of colour and cries, under brilliant Italian sunshine. He saw the gleaming galley of the cargo-boat on which he had worked his passage to England, and smelled again the rank, oily smell of the Tower wharves, where he had once fought for work for a few pence an hour. He saw his dead wife, her face infinitely strained, as she helped him to haul their first ice-cream barrow up the steep, grimy terraces of Newcastle, and he sniffed the cloying smell of fat that issued from her clothes as she stood beside him, peeling potatoes in the little scullery behind their first fish-shop. He saw Maria, sidling past guffawing youths in the Lower Road shop, and then, at the very tail of the procession, he saw Archie's clouded profile, as he had sat beside him on the bench in the “Ree” oh the day he had made the proposal that had changed their lives, and brought joy into his heart.
As he recognised Archie he slowly puffed out his breath, so that the wisps of his heavy moustache stirred, and settled again. They had forgotten to pull the curtains and he could see the full moon riding behind the elms, and even make out the black blobs that were last year's rookery. Then a shredded bank of cloud closed over its face, and he shut his eyes, and slept.
The nurse came up after supper and felt his pulse. She stood looking at her watch for a moment, and then slipped her hand inside his pyj
ama jacket, noting, with detached interest, a faded tattoo sketch of a simpering woman, with an exaggerated hour-glass waist, that covered half his broad chest. Finally she laid both his hands on Maria's beautifully starched sheets, and went to the top of the stairs, calling:
“Mrs. Carver! Are you there, Mrs. Carver? Please come at once!”
There were hurrying feet on the stairs as she turned back to the bed. Toni opened his eyes again but he did not see them crowd into the room, or hear Maria's sobs, and Archie's questions. Instead he heard the voices of boys singing a ditty of long ago, half a jeer and half a greeting, as he pushed his painted cart up the Newcastle terraces, and the urchins sang, in their thick, Geordie brogue:
Oh, oh Antonio,
You left me on my own-y-o !
The moon over the Lane elms sailed out behind the cloud-banks, and in silent wonder he watched it ride. Then the grey hairs of his moustache stirred once again and were still.
CHAPTER XXIV
Edith And The House Of Windsor
MANY of the Avenue folk trailed up to the West End in May 1935 and spent an amusing, uncomfortable night on the pavements, awaiting the Jubilee procession.
On the whole they were mildly impressed by the spectacle, and more so by the warm domesticity of the occasion, but the older ones among them went home a little disappointed, declaring that, as a spectacle, it was not to be compared with Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.
Neither was it, thought Jim, reflecting that in June, 1897, when the Avenue was not even built, the Cockneys who lined the streets to see the little old lady pass had never heard of Depressions and Strikes, or Mons and the Somme. They had thought of the German Emperor as a huge joke, much funnier (yet somehow built on a much grander scale) than his successor, even now screaming away at the Berlin Chancellery, and looking more like Charlie Chaplin than someone out of a Wagnerian opera, and wearing a clipped moustache, instead of that ridiculous, eagle-crested helmet the Kaiser had worn.
Everything, indeed, had been on a greatly reduced scale: the street decorations, good as they were, the uniforms of the troops, and even the monarch himself. Yet the Avenue would not have had him any different, for they felt that a personal relationship existed between this King and themselves. Victoria had always seemed to them an exalted, aloof Lady-of-the-Manor, whereas this kind and earnest man spoke to them all so naturally over the radio each Christmas Day, and went to Bognor, just as they did, when he needed a convalescent holiday.
Most of the Avenue were there, and cheered lustily, particularly when the Prince of Wales came past their pitch, and no one gave him a louder cheer than Edith Clegg, who was responsible for the outing, having persuaded Jim Carver to organise a party from their end of the Avenue, and travel up the night before, in order to be sure of an uninterrupted view.
Edith had always loved young Edward, whom they had usually called ‘Bertie' in her younger days. In her affections he ran a close second to poor, dear Rudi, and, in some ways, of course, one must even put him in front of Rudi, for had he not travelled all over the world on their behalf, and given the generals, it was said, so much worry during the war, by insisting upon going within range of German shells, which was something kings and princes (not to say generals) never did these days?
So when the Prince rode by, soon after the little Princesses in their pretty pink bonnets had passed, and smiled at her from under his enormous bearskin (it must be teribly hot for him on a day like this, thought Edith), she stood on tiptoe, and asked Jim to steady her, so that she could continue to wave her Union Jack until he was cut off from her view by the Lancers and Hussars, who followed him.
Then the roar of the crowd, thought Edith, sounded like the winter breakers under the cliffs at Hartland so long ago, and Jim told her laughingly that she must reserve a little energy for the King and Queen, who had certainly earned a cheer after all these years of stress and strain.
The day after the Jubilee Edith and Becky set out on their first holiday in more than twenty years. Ted and Margy Hartnell made this possible by inviting them to ride in the back seats of their new Morris, for a short orchestral tour of the West.
Edith accepted gladly, not only because she would have gone anywhere with dear Teddy and his busy little wife, but because she was curious to discover what effect a visit to the West country would have upon her after so many years in the suburb.
It was a very sentimental journey for Edith and Becky. The “Hartnell Eight” established their headquarters at Exeter, playing at a string of seaside resorts close by each night, but on most afternoons Edith and Becky took charabanc trips to all the places they remembered as children. They even visited their father's little parish, now not so little, and rather spoiled, Edith thought, by rows and rows of red-roofed bungalows, a huddle of caravans, and hordes of tall, sunburned girls, with long, bare legs, who walked shamelessly up and down the village street, and powdered their noses at the lych gate of the old, grey church.
They laid some flowers on their parents grave, and Becky dabbed her eyes a little while they were doing it, but Edith was content to click her tongue, and say “There, there, Daddy!” It was all so long ago, and so much had happened since, and she was quite sure that dear Daddy was far happier where he was now that half-naked girls were powdering their noses on the threshold of his church.
They were back in the Avenue again long before the King began to ail, and they heard the radio announcer say that his life was drawing peacefully to a close, as they sat over the little portable set that Margy had given them for Christmas that year.
Edith would have liked to have gone to Westminster, to see the King lying-in-state, but the weather was so bad, and Jim persuaded her not to go, and perhaps it was just as well, for poor, paralysed Miss Baker, of Number One opposite, caught influenza that winter, and nearly died after the day-nurse had left, so that Edith was at hand to look after her throughout January. By Springtime Miss Baker was about again, and could be seen from her downstairs window, looking out through lace curtains on the Shirley end of the Avenue, and thereby restoring a sense of permanence to this end of the crescent.
There was no real permanence, however, for soon that awful business of the Abdication ravaged the odd and even numbers, setting one house against another with a venom that Edith found distressing, for she herself was rabidly pro-Edward, and was always becoming involved with people who seemed to forget everything the poor boy had done for the Empire, ever since he was a child.
The “Domestic Crisis”, as the papers called it, might have passed off in a few indeterminate tiffs and growls, had it not been for Mrs. Rolfe, a cross-grained woman, who had recently moved into Number Eight. She now set herself up as a kind of censor of royal morals, thereby causing Edith, who had always thought twice about swatting a fly in the kitchen, to commit the single physical assault of a blameless lifetime.
It happened in the twopenny library, at the corner of Cawnpore Road, on the morning after Edward VIII had made his farewell speech over the wireless.
Edith, feeling unusually depressed, had gone to the Lower Road, hoping to find a novel that would take her mind off the dismal news, and here she heard Mrs. Rolfe holding forth on the Abdication, to an unwilling audience of Mr. Carter, the proprietor, and his two girl assistants.
“All I can say,” said Mrs. Rolfe, “is Good Riddance! It's the best thing he could have done, and it'll make everyone happy!”
Edith heard herself addressing Mrs. Rolfe in a cold, edgy voice.
“It doesn't make me happy,” she protested, “not one little bit, and I'd go so far as to say it shouldn't make anyone happy, losing a fine man like that, and making all this stupid, wicked fuss over the poor woman he wanted to marry !”
Mr. Carter, sensing a strained atmosphere between two regular customers, chipped in with a “Now, now, ladies ...”, and the girl assistants began to giggle, but Mrs. Rolfe was the kind of woman who very much enjoyed a friendly argument, particularly with such a poor opponent as the little s
pinster from Number Four, and she swung round on Edith with:
“So you agree with it, eh? You agree with it? Well, I must say that's a fine thing, coming from someone I always thought of as respectable, not to say a bit behind the times, if you don't mind me being so frank, Miss Clegg !”
Edith began to tremble, as she invariably did when she was drawn into a quarrel, however mild, but she was by no means ready to back down and abandon her championship in front of three uncommitted witnesses.
“All I say is that everyone's been most ungrateful,” she said, her voice shooting up a key under the stress of emotion. “Last week nobody would hear a word against him, and this week everybody's running him down! That's not fair ... it's ... it's ...” she struggled for the right word, and found it, “it's downright sanctimoniousl That's what it is, sanctimonious! And you're not the one to talk either, Mrs. Rolfe, seeing as you've been divorced yourself, so there!”
It was a very reckless speech to make in public, and for a moment Mrs. Rolfe was too surprised, and too outraged, to reply. Edith took advantage of her momentary triumph, to try and effect a rapid exit, but Mrs. Rolfe, who was built on generous lines grabbed her by the arm as she made for the door, and screamed:
“How dare you! How dare you! What's my being divorced got to do with it? And me the innercent party! Don't you run off, Miss Clegg! I've got more to say to you! Don't you run off!”
Mr. Carter tried, half-heartedly, to intervene, but Mrs. Rolfe shouldered him aside, with a “You stay out o' this, it's nothing to do with you!”
“Kindly let go of my arm,” said Edith, still shaking a little, but with ice-cold rage rather than fear. “If you don't let go of my arm, Mrs. Rolfe, I shall hit you!”
Mrs. Rolfe guffawed. She was, in the opinion of the Avenue, a little too raucous for the neighbourhood, and she had no friends among her neighbours.
“Haw! You will, eh? You and who else? Mrs. Simpson maybe?”
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