In the meantime there was Elaine to play with, for a man must have some fun sometimes, Elaine, whose ripeness and realism fascinated him. It was strange, he reflected, that such fruit had been hanging over his garden wall all these years without his noticing it. They had to meet far afield, of course, and at irregular intervals, but it ought to be easier now that young Fraser had joined up (and not before time, thought Archie! Dammit, somebody had to man the guns, didn't they?). The great attraction about Elaine was her complete lack of humbug, the kind of humbug that had hitherto cluttered all his extra-professional relationships with women. She sold her time to him just as he sold packets of Rinso, and pounds of self-raising flour over the counter, and he liked it that way; there were no arguments, no complications, and no danger of domestic boomerangs.
He still had his worries, of course. Maria and the two younger children whined from the distance, and Maria, who did not seem to like Somerset, had developed a distressing habit of popping up when he least expected her, and of ferreting about the corner premises, as though she was looking for something, he knew not what. Tony, his elder boy, was due to leave school next year, and talked a lot of hot air about going into the Tank Corps, which was something he would have to deal with when the time came, and he could snatch a day or two from his crowded life to run down to the school and discuss the matter with Tony's headmaster.
So we leave Archie, the ex-errand boy of the multiple store, who had learned his way around so much more expertly than his neighbours in the Avenue. He was rich now, rich in money, and rich in the promise of power. The only real problem confronting him was which he was to choose in the immediate future? More money, or more power? Possibly a judicious combination of both?
Along at Number Forty-Five, Margy Hartnell was facing a personal problem that obscured much of what was happening all around. Her smokescreen had dispersed, and her dream had gone into a deeper freeze than most, for the Hartnell eight was no longer an eight. It wasn't even a six or a five. Four of its musicians had been swept away by the Enemy Aliens Act, and were now playing patience in the Isle of Man, with the prospect of a trip across the Atlantic in the offing. As if this wasn't enough, Ted, the Eight's Kingpin, was almost out of her reach, baby notwithstanding, for the hurly-burly of Dunkirk had coaxed his conscience out of its winter sleep, and persuaded him to sign on with the Royal Ordnance Corps for the duration of the present emergency. He was now hanging about the house, blowing odd, inconsequent notes on an old saxophone, or strumming stray choruses of hoary old numbers like Always, Souvenirs, and even Red Red, Robin, whilst awaiting his papers. Margy could do little or nothing with him, and because they seemed to have lost touch with each other the prospect of the baby, due at any moment, did not seem nearly so important as it had seemed a few short months ago.
He still loved her, of course, but not in the personal sense any more, at least, so it seemed to her at the moment. She wondered rather dismally what would become of them all, now that the number that had been so popular last autumn, the one about hanging washing on the Siegfried line, was so hideously dated.
Then, at times like these, her natural cheerfulness of disposition would fly to her rescue, and she would say to herself: “It isn't for ever, Margy. The last war lasted four years, and we've already had nearly a year of this one. People will always want rhythm. People will always want to dance. And the Ordnance Corps is a sort of packing department, isn't it, where the men aren't expected to fix bayonets and charge anyone?” Then she would force herself to smile, and call from the bedroom where she was resting:
“Ted, Ted! Play something more up to date for the love of God, and then make us some tea!”
Thank God there was always tea; tea, Ted, and rhythm.
Over at Number Four Becky was having her spells again.
Edith thought it must be the worry, and the noise, and the tiresomeness of it all. She had been for many years now without a real spell, so long indeed that Edith had almost forgotten how to cope with them. Then, one day in May, when everyone was talking and talking about something that was happening at a place called Dunkirk (was it the same, Edith wondered, as the town she remembered from history books that was spelled with a “q”?), Becky came home, and set about mixing things in a bowl on the kitchen table. When Edith asked her what she was doing she had said, quite quietly: “I saw Saul today, and he'll be in directly! I must start his supper. Saul will have everything fried!”
Poor Edith had wept when she realised that it might be beginning all over again, and she had gone straight upstairs to jubilant Jean Mclnroy, the lodger, who was still drawing the ideal British male, now in an A.R.P. outfit, like the Chief of the Auxiliary Fire Service at the Upper Road depot, where she was working part-time.
For Jean had at last located her Ideal British Male, or his nearest approximate, and she scuttled off to fire-drill three nights a week like a 'teenager going to her first dance. Once arrived at the station, in her neat navy-blue uniform and tin-hat, she would sit watching First-Officer Hargreaves demonstrate the use of a stirrup pump, and memorise, not his instructions, but the long, sweeping lines of his jaw, so that she could transform him, on her return to Number Twenty, into an Infantry officer in the magazine story she was illustrating. The agency had sent along the story and captions for the drawings and today's read: “Anthony had no faith in seeing Madeline again, but he wanted to remember her as she looked then, adorable, enchanting, and with the promise of everlasting love in her eyes.”
Poor Edith had no such dream to escape into. In the old days she had wished only for life to remain the same, with Becky and Ted to look after, and Lickapaw to see to when he came home from his wife-hunts in the Nursery. But life never did remain the same for long. Becky was still with her, but Ted was married, and would soon be off to the war, dear Lickapaw was dead, and all the little music pupils had gone into the country to escape the bombs everybody said would come if Britain didn't give in. Jean Mclnroy was well enough as a substitute lodger, but she was not going to be much good if Becky began having real spells again. All the nice people in the Avenue seemed to be splitting up, and moving out, and one could hardly expect the new ones to be as quiet and respectable, even if there were any new ones to move into the empty houses.
It was a relief indeed that dear, worried Mr. Carver was still about. She trotted along to Number Twenty almost every day now, to enquire whether he had had word of the twins, who had not come home with the other young men after that awful Dunkirk or Dunquerque business.
No, he told her each day, he had received no word beyond the official notification that they were missing, believed prisoners, but one day he had other news, very sad news. The tall, young man that his girl Judith had brought home the year before was dead, torpedoed, they thought, on his way to Egypt in a troopship. Edith wept to think of it, remembering now that Judith had told her only last summer that they planned to be married on New Year's Day, and were then going out to Kenya, where her fiancé—what was he called, Ted, or Tom, or Timothy?—intended buying a farm.
That Frith boy, from Number Seventeen, had gone too, leaving his poor mother all alone. First her husband left, then her daughter, now her son. Edith had felt sorry for her too, and seeing Sydney depart, in his smart, new uniform, she had nerved herself to cross the road and knock timidly at the door. But Mrs. Frith did not come out to answer it, although Edith knew that she was inside, and after knocking twice Edith had gone home feeling hurt and disappointed, but telling herself that the poor woman was probably far too upset to receive anyone, however sympathetic they might be.
So it went on, with people leaving all the time, and more and more For Sale, and To Let notices going up along the sweep of the crescent. Would it end by Number Four being the only occupied house in the Avenue?
The prospect so distressed Edith that she had to leave Becky in the charge of Jean for an afternoon, and go down to the Lower Road among people, and traffic, and shops. Here, as the sun sometimes breaks through a cloud
-bank when least expected, she was caught up in her old and comforting dream again, for she happened to pass the old Granada, now an Odeon, and pause for a moment to inspect the front-of-house publicity.
They were showing the much-advertised epic, Gone With the Wind, a book that Edith had always been meaning to read, but had somehow never found time to borrow from Carter's Twopenny Library, at the corner of Cawnpore Road. The stills in the gilded frame fascinated her, taking her back more than ten years, when the display frame, a mere plywood affair, had enclosed similar stills of Gloria Swanson, and Alice Terry, and poor, dear Rudi, whose occult eyes still gleamed out from her scrapbook.
She had not been inside the Granada, or any other cinema, since the boom of Sonny Boy, and she found herself wondering what films were like nowadays. A sleek young man, wearing a dinner-jacket, was standing at the top of the steps, and he smiled down at her.
“Wonderful picture,” he said; “takes over three hours. Starting now.”
Edith hovered a moment, heart in mouth, and then suddenly made up her mind, and climbed the once-familiar steps to the greatly enlarged foyer. She bought her ticket, and went on through the double doors as far as a new brass rail, where a childlike usherette took charge of her, and piloted her down the centre aisle into what had once been the nine-pennies.
The music rolled as Edith looked about her in wonder. It was all so much bigger and more majestic than it used to be in her day, and the film, when it began, was actually in colour. As she watched she felt the old magic returning, though it was strange not to recognise any of the actors or actresses. Within minutes, however, Edith had stopped making comparisons, and allowed herself to be carried along breathlessly on the tide of the narrative. Soon she was groping for her handkerchief, and weeping silently, and ecstatically, for poor dear Melanie, poor dear Ashley, poor, headstrong Scarlett O'Hara, and the poor ravaged South.
When at last the lights went up she was converted. She tottered blinking into the sunshine, serene and uplifted, just as though, by some wonderful miracle, poor dear Rudi had been restored to her, and she had been watching The Son of the Sheik in Technicolour.
She almost bubbled as she tripped up Shirley Rise, and then she recalled, a little guiltily, that it must be long past Becky's and Jean's tea-time, but as she turned into the Avenue the reprieve caught up with her, as it were, and fell into step as far as the gate of Number Four.
“Well now,” she thought, “things seem to be in a terrible muddle, but there are always the pictures. Whenever things get unbearable I'll slip down to the Odeon, even if I have to come home before the supporting picture and the news.”
Judith returned to the Avenue when she had official confirmation of Tim's death.
She would have returned soon enough in any case, for Maud Somerton engaged a new assistant when Judy put her wedding forward from New Year's Day to September, on account of the war, and Tim's enlistment. But now, like everything else, the riding-school business was in the doldrums, and Maud was talking of selling off horses, and economising all round.
When she was told that Tim had been drowned in a troopship off the Western Approaches, Judy had been unable to cry. Instead she had saddled up Jason, the big chestnut, and ridden out to the corner of Hayes Wood, tethering the horse to a tree, and sitting on the bank where she had first met Tim, such a little time ago.
It was early November by then, barely two months after their wedding and their three-day honeymoon. The beeches at the extreme edge of the wood were still in leaf, for autumn idled along down here, and the leaves were still green when they were brown and sere in the Manor Wood, at home.
It was very still at the corner of the wood. Sometimes the dead bracken rustled, and the feathered larches continued to gossip, although there was hardly any breeze. Here Judy found that she could think, if not clearly, at least with some hope of getting her future into some sort of perspective.
Their plan had seemed such a modest plan to begin with, but as crisis succeeded crisis it had been subjected to all manner of shifts and adjustments, even before they worked out its main details. If everything had gone as planned she would now be buying new cabin trunks and ordering wedding cards. Instead she was still using her old brown trunk, the one salvaged from the cistern loft of Number Twenty years ago, and she was not a bride-to-be but already a widow.
There had been the quick change of plan. Tim's enlistment, the wedding in the village church, attended by her father, her sister, and Maud (a mere three against the horde of Tim's relatives who drove gaily into the West for the occasion) and then three wonderful days in Cornwall, wonderful, but overshadowed, hour by hour, by impending separation.
Then he had sailed, not to Kenya, and not with her, but to Egypt, with hundreds of other young men, and a few days later she received the 'phone call, and a visit from the scarred old Colonel, his father, who had sat holding her hand in Maud's tackroom, and said, gruffly, but very gently:
“I suppose a father shouldn't have favourites, my dear, but Tim was mine, and his mother's too. Something about him, I suppose, always laughing, young devil, even at the things I brought him up not to laugh at!”
That was it. Tim was always laughing, and she could hear his laughter yet, ringing through the beeches on the edge of the wood, and as she listened she seemed to hear a message behind his laughter, telling her to snap out of it for God's sake, and to mount Jason and gallop off up the sunken lane, and into the future. For it was unreasonable to think of there being no future for a pretty woman of twenty-six.
Because she had loved Tim she listened to him, and presently, no longer dry-eyed, she got up, and did as he bid, feeling a great deal better for the hour she had sat there.
A week later she was back in the Avenue, and a month after that, during the endless frost, she joined the W.A.A.F. as a trainee plotter, and was sent off to a Training Centre in Gloucestershire.
When the summer came, with all its alarms, she had no reason to regret the impulse that had stampeded her into uniform, for she was posted to a South Coast Fighter Station, and down there it was difficult to mourn one death among so many.
Perhaps this was a contributory factor towards the mastery of her grief, or perhaps she had learned something important as she walked her horses along the high-banked lanes and over the windy commons of the West country, or maybe she had always had a generous share of Jim's sound common-sense and, what was more to the point, his capacity to pity. At all events, she was soon able to distinguish herself at her work, and to earn commendation, and with it the promise of rapid promotion, and here we leave Judy, with her memories, good and bad, well under control. As yet no new dreams had invaded the vacuum left by the one she had lost, a dream that had, after all, led by a somewhat roundabout route to a wedding in a village church, even though the fairies had let her down rather badly in the matter of the semidetached at Wickham.
Esme was on a Southern R.A.F. Training Station most of that summer, and he and Judy might have met but did not, for a slight defect in his vision resulted in Esme being rejected for air-crew. At the moment he was in an orderly- room, fighting the war with an ancient Oliver typewriter and a set of stencils.
He had not yet recovered from his surprise at finding himself in uniform. His interest in political events over the years had been very lukewarm despite his association with the Shawe family, who had succeeded in converting him to their own particular brand of Celtic Liberalism.
The invasion of Poland had caught him off guard, but after the first shock he too had yawned his way through the phoney war, waking up with a start when Fleet Street seemed to go raving mad, in the last days of May. Then, at last, he saw things as they were, and did his best to make amends. It was not his fault that he acted with an impulsiveness that startled old Shawe, his employer, and threw up his job overnight to enlist. Old Mr. Shawe had been sceptical of his chances of coming to grips with Hitler.
“Och, Laddie,” he said, “do ye not know they've more men than they can han
dle? Ye'll be kicking your heels in some hole-in-corner this time next year, and how am I to replace ye?”
But Esme was lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you regard it, for on the strength of fast typing, and his knowledge of shorthand, he was spared the long period of deferment that attended most enlistments in these days, and was summoned within a fortnight to the R.A.F. Recruiting Centre at Uxbridge.
Elaine seemed to take it all as a matter of course, and Esme was vastly relieved when Eunice offered to look after the baby in Devon. Once this was arranged everything seemed to happen in a flash. One day he was catching one train for the office, and the next he was catching another for the Reception Centre at Cardington, and sharing a bell-tent with nine other young men, in the shadow of the huge hangar that they told him had once housed the ill-fated R.101.
In these early days, before he became bogged down in paper work, he found the community life far more to his liking than he had imagined possible. He discovered that he could laugh at the hoary army jokes about parades, and ill-fitting kit, and hoarse-voiced corporals, who darted about among them like sheep-dogs, yet who were, he discovered, far more patient and far less aggressive than they appeared to be in their handling of thousands of volunteers, whose qualifications as airmen were limited to good health and enthusiasm.
He missed Elaine, of couse, and little Barbara, whom he had recently taken to bathing, and who looked at him gravely, with huge, grey eyes, when he lifted her from her cot, or tried to amuse her by making a noise like a train, but he was by no means sure that Elaine would miss him as much as he felt himself entitled to be missed.
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