The Avenue Goes to War

by R. F Delderfield

  Elaine knew men much better than this. She knew that in order to soothe him she would have to switch his mind right away from incendiaries and food stocks. Fortunately the means to achieve the diversion were at hand. She slipped out of bed, poured him a whisky and soda, let fall her pink nightdress, and offered the drink with a little curtsy.

  “Your refreshment, O Master!”

  He took the glass with a tired smile and began to sip it, but without taking his eyes from her.

  “I don’t know how the hell I’d cope without you, Elaine,” he admitted, “I look forward to coming here all the week.”

  She made a pert and familiar movement with her lips, and crossed to the stool, in front of the dressing-table. His eyes absorbed every part of her, as she intended they should. He noted her long, straight back, her big breasts, and pale, bear-shaped behind. She was sturdier and heavier, than most of the women who had attracted him in the past, particularly since he had outlived his twenties. Sometimes she reminded him a little of Rita Ramage, the wounded officer’s wife, in Outram Crescent, who had been his first mistress and had been so difficult to ditch. The similarity was purely physical, however. Elaine could be relied upon not to make a hysterical scene in public, supposing he suddenly stopped coming here; neither would she hold it against him if he took it into his head to seek relaxation elsewhere. She was like he once had been, a person able to live for the day, fearing no one.

  He finished his whisky, got up, and slipped his arm round her, brushing the top of her head with his thick lips.

  “I’m tired,” he said, “I’ll stay here all day tomorrow, if that’s okay with you.”

  “That’s okay, Archie.”

  Suddenly he caught her in his arms and began kissing her hair, cheeks, and shoulders. He had never kissed her like this before and it frightened him a little to realise how important she had become to him, how eagerly he was beginning to look forward to his Saturday nights with her, and how dull, and lonely, it would be in the Avenue without her.

  The ‘All Clear’ howled over the Avenue, but if they heard it they made no comment. Elaine turned out the light, and for an hour or more they lay still, listening to the new, small-hours sounds that the loom of war was weaving into the pattern of the suburb; Jim Carver, clumping off-duty in his heavy gumboots, the wail of sirens in distant suburbs, the clank of a fire-tender, climbing Shirley Rise on its way to the A.R.P. Centre, on the Upper Road. Then they slept, Archie’s head on her breast and Elaine’s plump arm thrown protectively across his broad shoulders.

  She brought him tea about midday. It was part of her service on the odd occasions that he stayed over. As he sat up to sip it she broached the subject that had been in her mind before she slept.

  “You ought to take a few days off, Archie. If you don’t, you’ll crack up.”

  His fears had gone with the darkness.

  “That’s crazy,” he told her, “I couldn’t leave here, and besides, where the hell could we go? Where does anybody take a holiday these days?”

  She noticed that he said ‘we’, and it pleased her. When she thought about it she realised that she too could do with a few days’ change.

  “Oh, there’s places,” she said, “and of course you can go! If anything did happen, being here wouldn’t make the slightest difference would it? You can get one of your branch managers to sleep over the road. Why don’t we go up to Blackpool, for a week?”

  He considered the proposal. Blackpool, so he had heard, was one of the few places in Britain where fun and games could still be had, albeit in limited doses. The R.A.F., and hordes of civil servants, were said to be billeted up there of course, but a commercial traveller had told him, only last week, that there was still plenty of entertainment available and that a few good hotels were still open to the public.

  The more he considered the idea the more it appealed to him. He had been to Blackpool on several occasions in the ‘thirties’, and had always enjoyed himself, as he knew how to enjoy himself when he did get away from his shops, and the vast amounts of paper work they entailed nowadays, unless, of course, one was prepared to hand over most of one’s profits to the Inland Revenue.

  Elaine saw that he had made up his mind.

  “We’ll go next week-end,” she said, “can you manage the petrol?”

  He chuckled. “I’ve got a reserve pool for the vans,” he told her, “so you don’t want to worry about petrol. How about Esme?”

  “You don’t have to worry about him, either,” said Elaine, “poor Esme’s on a course, and he won’t get leave until it’s over.”

  Archie stretched himself and rolled out of bed. He felt relaxed and excessively good-humoured, so much so that he could spare Elaine’s long-suffering husband a sympathetic thought. This was rare, for ordinarily they never mentioned Esme to one another.

  “Why the blazes don’t you divorce that poor blighter?” he asked suddenly.

  Elaine called, from the kitchen.

  “Why should I? I’ve got nothing against Esme!”

  He laughed outright, whilst in the act of donning his trousers.

  “You’re a pretty hard case, Elaine! Damn it, he must have rumbled you by now!”

  “He’s in love with me,” said Elaine, coming in with a breakfast tray containing toast and fresh tea, “but you wouldn’t understand that, would you dearest?”

  “No,” said Archie, soberly, “I’m jiggered if I would, but I’d sooner be with you than any woman I know, and that’s a step towards it isn’t it?”

  “It satisfies me,” said Elaine shortly. “Do you want marmalade?”

  Elaine had oversimplified Archie’s worries that evening. It was true that Archie feared for his stocks, and his hoard of notes, but these were occupational risks, and when he was not overtired he faced them boldly enough. At the moment his principal worry had nothing whatever to do with his businesses, it was a purely personal problem, and concerned his elder son, Anthony.

  The difference between Elaine and Archie was that Elaine was an uncomplicated soul and Archie Carver was not. Most people, Elaine included, would have judged him so, and written him down as a person to whom the piling up of money, in one form or another, was the only thing that mattered.

  There had been a time when this estimate would have been an accurate one. This was in what Archie now called his ‘middle period’, that is, the years immediately following his alliance with old Toni Piretta, and the forging of the first few links in his chain of pop-ins about the suburbs. It was before Anthony, his elder boy, had begun to occupy his thoughts. Up to the time that the Munich evacuation had separated him from the family. Archie had hardly noticed the boy and even now he was barely aware of his younger son, James, or the girl, Juanita. Since his last visit to Tony’s school, however, he had found himself thinking a great deal about his elder boy and had begun to relate his own efforts in the sphere of business to the boy’s future, as his partner, and successor.

  Ever since he had been his own boss Archie had been a supreme individualist. The money he made, and such power as he acquired, was for him, and him alone. His family had never entered into his calculations. They were simply a tiresome by-product of his bargain with Old Toni, whose terms had been, in effect ‘Marry my Maria, give me some grandchildren, and we go fifty-fifty on everything!’

  Both men had fulfilled their sides of the bargain, and from both their standpoints it had been a fruitful and satisfactory arrangement. Neither Toni, as a father, nor Archie, as a husband, however, had ever viewed it from Maria’s point of view, and as the years went by, and the children, growing up, had occupied more and more of her time and kept her out of the shop, she had drifted outside the orbit of Archie’s activities. There had never been an open quarrel, not even after Toni had died, but sometimes almost a week would pass without the exchange of more than a few monosyllables…‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Sure’, ‘Can’t’, ‘Might’.

  She knew as much as she wanted to know about his casual infidelities. She
knew also, and this interested her far more, that he had cash stacked away somewhere and not in his banking accounts. She did not know where this money was hidden but simply that it was there, within yards, perhaps, of their parent shop, at Number Two, The Avenue.

  He did not keep Maria short of money, for meanness had never been one of his characteristics, but his indifference to her and to her children, had soured her during the first years of marriage, so that now she had come to regard Archie as the representation of all men, in all places, and all countries, and her antipathy to men as a sex extended to her own male children. She reserved all her natural warmth and tenderness, for Juanita, the twelve-year-old girl, who lived with her in Somerset.

  From time to time Archie went down to visit them for a few hours, and on these occasions he usually drove the few miles further west, to Hearthover, where young Tony was at school.

  Archie, who had left a Council school when he was thirteen, in order to begin work as an errand boy at a multiple grocer’s, was fascinated by Hearthover. To him it was the epitome of all the schools that he had once read about in boys’ magazines, schools with elm-fringed quadrangles, tuck-shops with fat boys and lithe, young adolescents who looked you straight in the eye, and had pretty mothers, who sometimes attended speech days wearing big, floppy hats.

  Hearthover and everything Hearthover stood for, was, so to speak, the chink in Archie’s cash-box, and money could run through that chink as fast as it liked. Such romantic inclinations as he had once possessed had been ironed out of Archie during his errand-boy days in World War One, and in the course of his struggles to acquire wealth and power in a chosen sphere of business, but somehow his romantic notions about the public schools of twopenny magazines had survived, and because of this he approached Hearthover with the reverence of a pilgrim entering a hallowed shrine.

  To Archie, Hearthover was Harrow, the Glorious Fourth, Greyfriars, and Billy Bunter. It was more, for Archie, who scorned patriotism, unconsciously identified Hearthover with Britain’s Glorious Past and if he envied anyone at all it was Tony, his own boy, who had the immense privilege of being a cog in Hearthover and an important cog too, for the boy had done very well there, both academically and on the games field. He was now in the Sixth, a prefect, and in the running for the post of Captain of the School, providing he stayed on for a term following his eighteenth birthday.

  Tony Carver’s progress at Hearthover and at the Eastbourne preparatory school that had preceded his entry there, was a triumph of the alchemy of environment over that of ancestry.

  Tony had been born in a room over a suburban shop. His father had begun life as a grocer’s errand boy, and his grandfather on an even lower social plane—barefoot, in the slums of Naples. His mother, Maria, had once served fish and chips in the Lower Road, and had had her bottom nipped night after night by high-spirited customers but no one would have suspected these ancestral backgrounds had they witnessed young Tony Carver winning the mile at the inter-schools sports meeting, or regaling his fellow prefects with a detailed account of a fumbled pass as he sat, ministered to by adoring fags, at his study tea-table in Chiver’s cock-house at Hearthover.

  He looked and behaved, exactly like the typical public schoolboy of the school classics. He would have earned an approving nod from Doctor Arnold, and any of H. A. Vachell’s heroes would have courted his friendship. He said the right things in the right accent. His opinions and his outlook, were as orthodox and uncomplicated as those of a mid-Victorian foreign secretary. He believed in God and in democracy, a carefully-graded democracy, of privilege, patronage, and class-comradeship, that belonged to the age of Liberal supremacy in the first decade of the century. His body was well washed and so were his thoughts. He was feared by the louts and the frowsters, particularly those who made a habit of dodging the games practices, and was worshipped by the juniors, who fell over one another in their eagerness to oil his cricket-bats, or scrape mud from the studs of his football boots. He was attentive, but not particularly studious in class, maintaining a judicious position between the head and the tail of his cadre, but winning an occasional prize. He was sometimes chosen to recite the Latin ode on Speech Days. He was clean, fearless, honest, truthful, loyal and terribly, terribly dull.

  In view of all this it is not surprising that Archie was worried by the letter he had recently received from Tony’s headmaster, a letter in which he expressed his desire to discuss Tony’s future with his father.

  It was obvious, from the tone of the letter, that the boy had been more frank with his headmaster than he had been with his parent, for Archie had on several occasions tried to bring their hesitant conversations round to the subject of Tony’s career, but the boy had failed to respond, and had given Archie no opportunity to say that Tony was, in due course, expected to come into the business, as Crown Prince of the Pop-In Empire.

  There was, of course, the hurdle of the call-up to be negotiated. Tony would be eighteen in June, and would be obliged, therefore, to join one or other of the Services. But Archie had anticipated this and had worked out a scheme involving indefinite postponements, occasioned by an extension of Tony’s technical education. This extension was ostensibly directed towards making Tony a more useful officer when, at length, he was moved to join the colours.

  Archie had given a good deal of thought to Tony’s enlistment and no one was better aware than he of the existence of several loopholes, available to the knowing and the prudent. There was the Catering Corps, for instance, the officers of which required a long course at the depot. There were several technical units that required even longer spells at a University. There were the government laboratories, where one might, if fortunate, avoid a uniform altogether. All these possibilities had been studied by Archie, and he only awaited the boy’s preference, before making up his mind which of them to pursue.

  He drove down to Hearthover a few days before beginning his holiday with Elaine and turned his long, white sports car into the West Avenue, steering between the long lines of beeches, that led up the hill, to the huge mass of grey stone that was the school.

  As he dropped down into second gear and passed the playing fields on his right, Archie felt the old magic of Greyfriars and St. Jim’s steal over him. A Rugby match was in progress on Lower Side, and Archie could hear the wild cries of the touchline spectators…“Pass, idiot, pass!”, “Get it back, oh, get it back! Then, after a brief silence during a line-out, the long, dolorous, organised cheer of shivering juniors, chivvied by stump-wielding seniors and house-colours: “Come alonnnnnng Schoooool!”

  He grinned, parked his car and went through the wicket-gate into the field. The visitors had just scored a try and he arrived at a distressing moment for the home supporters. Almost the first boy he saw was Tony, his face clouded with worry and disappointment, as he strode up and down the touchline, looking like a young general witnessing the crisis of a battle on which hung the fate of his country and the chastity of his wife and daughters. He frowned when he saw Archie.

  “Hullo, Gov…heard you were coming…excuse me a minute, this second-fifteen game is dicey…Heslopp has just muffed a punt and they rushed him and touched down between the posts…Ohhhh, hell…” as the try was neatly converted, “That’s eight down! Pull yourself together school, for heaven’s sake! Pull yourselves together…!”

  Archie had never played rugby football and did not understand a word of his son’s complaints but he looked at Tony with quiet pride and noticed how all the smaller boys made way for him, and looked after him, as he bustled down the field towards the further goalposts.

  The game was less than halfway through, so Archie thought that he might as well have his chat with the Headmaster and see Tony later. He strolled back to the school and was shown into the chilly visitors’ room, and from thence, in due course, into the great man’s study, that looked out over tennis-courts and miles of rainswept moor.

  “Ah, Mr. Carver, make yourself comfortable…glad you could come…bit of a break for yo
u, I imagine. News isn’t too good is it? I hear they’ve been hammering non-stop up in town. Have you been blitzed yet?”

  No, Archie told him, not yet, but that was a chance that every Londoner had to take. The man’s faint air of patronage irritated him and he realised that his awe of Hearthover did not extend to its staff and headmaster. He had always found schoolmasters fussy and irritating. They were inclined, he thought, to treat all parents as if they were new boys, just settling in. He decided to speed up the interview.

  “You wrote to me about my boy,” he said, flatly.

  “Yes I did…and a fine boy too, Mr. Carver…a credit to you, and a credit to us! I He’s done well here, as well as any lad I ever recall having.”

  “I’m glad,” said Archie, “then what is it you wanted to see me about? Should he stay on here a term or two?”

  The Headmaster slewed round in his swivel chair and as they came face to face it crossed Archie’s mind that the headmaster of a school like Hearthover should take more pains with his clothes. The Head’s dark grey suit sagged and bulged over his paunch. He wore no suspenders and a few inches of hairy shin were revealed as he threw one short leg over the other.

  “It seems that you have got something lined up for the old ‘Butcher’,” said the Head, with a warm smile that was meant to put this rather testy parent at his ease. Then, noting Archie’s puzzled frown, “I’m sorry—we all call Carver ‘The Butcher’ here…‘Carver’—‘Butcher,’ d’you see? They nearly all have some sort of nickname like that, at least, all the successful ones do. Sometimes it’s dubbed on them the first week. I’m not supposed to use it, of course, at least not until they get into the Sixth! After that it’s optional.”

  “He never told me he had a nickname,” said Archie a little sulkily, and proceeded to dismiss the subject, which he considered childish. “Yes, I’ve got something ‘lined up’ as you say…I want him to come into my business ultimately, but I realise that he’ll have to go into something else while the war lasts. Is he any good at chemistry?”