“Chemistry?” The Head seemed genuinely puzzled. “Why chemistry, Mr. Carver?”
“Because I don’t want him killed if I can help it,” said Archie bluntly. “I didn’t work all these years to see my eldest son’s life thrown away by some clot of a general, and if I can keep him out of harm’s way I intend to do it.”
The Head coughed. He was unused to frankness of this sort, for among the visitors who had occupied the leather armchair, now filled by Archie’s capacious behind, had been a number of generals, clots and otherwise, and even a stray admiral or two. He spoke seriously, weighing his words.
“I don’t think you’re going to be able to do anything like that Mr. Carver, not with old ‘Butcher’. You see, he’s a very spirited lad and he seems to have his future pretty well worked out. As a matter of fact, I had a chat with him on Monday, after callover, and that was why I wrote to you.”
“How do you mean, he’s got things ‘worked out’?” asked Archie. “How can a kid like that work anything while he’s tucked away down here?”
“It seems that he wants to make a career of the Army,” said the Head, watching his visitor carefully.
Archie was so surprised that he forgot himself. He had never forgotten himself on previous visits to the school. When he visited Hearthover he always made a great effort, for Tony’s sake.
“Christ!” he said, and his face flushed.
“Are you so very much against it?” pursued the Headmaster, politely ignoring the exclamation.
“Why of course I’m against it,” roared Archie, “and so should you be! What sense is there in it, at a time like this? Even supposing he survived the war, what sort of future is there in the Army, these days?”
“I imagine we’ll always have to have an army,” said the schoolmaster, stiffly, and wondered how it was possible that this coarse, irritable tradesman and ‘dear old Butcher’ came to be father and son.
For a moment Archie was disposed to argue with the man, then he realised that he would find it far too difficult to keep his temper while he did so and that he might say something he would regret.
“I think I’d better see Tony before we pursue this subject,” he said, levering himself out of the deep chair.
“By all means,” said the Head very much relieved at Archie’s decision, “I’ll send a runner for him now. He’s probably on Lower Side, watching the match.”
He touched a bell, and the duty monitor came in, a fourteen-year-old, with freckles and stiff red hair.
“Give Carver my compliments, and ask him to meet his father in his study now,” said the Head, shortly.
“Yes, sir,” said the boy, and after a single swift glance at the Great Carver’s governor, he skipped out of the room.
“I daresay your boy will entertain you to tea,” said the Head. “In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll find somebody to take you along to the studies. Perhaps we can meet again after callover, when you’ve had a talk with him.”
Father and son had their talk, and it was a sterile one from Archie’s point of view.
There were no recriminations, and neither raised their voices, but Archie left Hearthover without resuming his discussion with the Head.
He drove away with sullen anger in his heart, for Tony had been unexpectedly obstinate, and had flatly declined to consider any alteration in plans that he had already made for himself, made, Archie reflected bitterly, without consulting either of his parents.
“I couldn’t wriggle out of it like that, Gov,” he had told Archie, when the various avenues of evasion were outlined to him. “Hang it, the Hun has already wiped out fifteen Hearthovereans! What sort of example would I be setting the kids here, if I spent the rest of the war frowsting in a bugs lab? I can get into a good regiment, if I decide to make a career of it. Take Frobisher-Clarke, he left only last term, and he’s already at Sandhurst! Take Levison II! He’s going into the Guards, of course, and I don’t imagine I could swing that, but it ought to be easy enough to wangle the Tank Corps, and if I muff that I shall try for a fighter-pilot.”
Archie felt no disposition whatever to take Frobisher-Clarke or, for that matter, Levison II. He felt baffled and defeated in this atmosphere of aggressive patriotism. He argued and reasoned for ten minutes more, before giving up. He had sold too many pounds of groceries, to too many housewives, not to recognise a stonewall sales-resistance when he encountered it. He said his final piece about the businesses, but Tony barely paid him the compliment of listening. As soon as a bell clanged, from somewhere down the corridor, the boy got up and opened his study door.
“I’ll have to go now, Gov, I’m taking callover. Will you be staying in the locality overnight, with Mummy?”
It was curious, thought Archie, as he was escorted past scuffling groups of boys in the draughty quad, it was curious that someone on the point of enlisting in the Tank Corps, should still use the word ‘Mummy’. Perhaps it was a fad—these places were full of fads. One term it was ‘folks’, and ‘mater’, the next ‘people’, and ‘Mummy’. The whole set-up was beyond him, as remote from his counters and his coupons, as the present age was removed from feudalism.
He shook hands, climbed into his car and made up his mind to put Tony and Hearthover out of mind for a few days. He was very glad now that Elaine had talked him into taking that little holiday.
During the drive home he tried hard to forget Tony but he did not wholly succeed. There was little traffic on the road and under hooded headlights the journey seemed unusually long and cheerless. Somehow his visit to the school, his talk with the Head, and the hour or so he spent in Tony’s study, had combined to put his past and future into a much sharper focus than he preferred. All these years he had been absorbed in making money, but now, he asked himself, what did it all amount to? Tony wanted neither the money nor the businesses. Measured alongside his childish eagerness to come to grips with scuttle-helmeted Germans, Archie’s chain of pop-ins, and all they represented in terms of toil and hard cash, were too trivial to merit a single thought on his part, for the boy hadn’t even bothered to listen to him, so obsessed was he with dreams of active service. Those other young idiots he had referred to, Frobisher Something-or-other, and Levison II, meant far more to him than Archie, his money and his pop-ins put together! What was the point of building up a business and a fortune if, when one began to fatten and tire, no one was interested in nursing it, or preventing it from disintegrating? What could he do with all that money in the tins, except throw it away on women like Elaine in return for a tumble or two on a bed, or a few hours’ company?
He wondered, for the first time, whether he had made a mistake in sending the boy to a place like Hearthover. Wouldn’t it have been wiser to have put him to work in the shop, at fourteen, and teach him that the only protection against the buffets life had in store for you was a credit balance at the bank and a secret cash reserve? If he had done this, would Tony still have wanted to go out in search of a military funeral?
He realised that he could only guess the answers to these questions. Tony’s patriotic urges, a sentiment obviously shared by all his schoolfellows, and actively encouraged by that slovenly idiot of a Headmaster, were so alien to Archie that he could not even begin to understand them. Such friends and acquaintances as he possessed, were of his own kind, men who, at best, paid lipservice to the struggle going on around them and men who, if truth were known, had welcomed the war, with all its personal risks and inconveniences, as the one sure route to quick and easy profits. Like Archie they were aware of the sacrifices others were making—some of them even had sons and brothers serving in the Forces—but the popular issues did not touch them, never would, and never could touch them. It was as though, Archie reflected, the contestants were not really divided into Fascists, and Democrats, Germans and British, but simply into two races of individuals, those who believed anything and everything they heard on the radio, or saw in print, and the others, who had learned long ago that each man’s duty was t
o himself and that all else was claptrap.
His mind went back to his first meeting with Rita Ramage, the officer’s wife he met and lived with when he was only seventeen. Because he was well grown she had imagined him to be of military age and had asked him, during their first meeting, why he was not in uniform. He had immediately recognised her for one of his own kind, and had replied: “Because I don’t believe in it!” She had laughed outright, and replied: “Neither do I, and what’s more I never have, not even poor Little Belgium!”
Well, that was more than twenty years ago, and now, instead of Poor Little Belgium, it was the poor little Jew, or the poor little Pole. Yet youngsters fell for it just as they had in 1914, and some of them couldn’t wait to get within range of the guns. And all the time fools like that Headmaster stood by waving flags! That was what one paid nearly three hundred a year for—the privilege of having a boy taught to take everything that he read in a penny newspaper at its face value!
He drove into the Avenue and through his double-gates just after midnight. A patrolling warden, caught in the headlights, stood aside and touched his cap, respectfully.
“Quiet tonight, sir!”
Too damned quiet, thought Archie, who, for once, would have preferred to have seen the sky criss-crossed with searchlights and have heard the bombs thud and the siren screech. He felt lonelier and more depressed, than he had felt for years and the prospect of getting himself a cold supper, and going to bed in the empty house, was too bleak to be contemplated. He yearned to talk to someone sufficiently adult to class the war, and the principles it involved, with toy soldiers and nursery rhymes, but there was no one like that in the Avenue except Elaine and it was Wednesday, not Saturday.
Oh, to hell with it, thought Archie, I’ll pop over and tell her we’ll go to Blackpool tomorrow, instead of Friday! Who cares if the blasted incendiaries set the place alight while I’m away? What point is there anyway, in working oneself to death simply to hoard money in tins, under the floor?
He crossed the road, too impatient, and too irritated, to take the usual precaution of making a circuitous approach, via Shirley Rise. Fifty yards down the crescent he slipped into the alley, between Number Forty-Three, and Number Forty-One.
The warden, who saw him go, cocked an eyebrow, and murmured ‘Ha-Haaa!’, as he hunched his shoulders, and continued his solitary beat along the Avenue.
CHAPTER VII
Eunice Watches Boats
EUNICE GODBEER, WIFE of Harold Godbeer, of Number Twenty-Two, and formerly Mrs. Fraser, widow of Lieutenant Fraser, killed on the Marne, was enjoying her exile from the Avenue. She enjoyed living beside the sea, and she enjoyed even more her responsibilities as nurse and guardian of little Barbara, Esme’s baby, now seventeen months old.
It had never taken very much to make Eunice happy. At forty-nine she had the mind, as well as the features, of a placid girl of fourteen. No wisp of grey hair showed in her carefully-coiled, honey-coloured ‘earphones’, themselves a relic of her youth in the early ‘twenties’. No frown had worn a furrow across her smooth, white forehead, or puckered the corners of her small, ripe, sweet-tempered little mouth.
After upwards of twenty years of life with Eunice, Harold had at last concluded that his wife’s girlish appearance was the direct result of mental vacuity. Although he was very proud of what he sometimes called her ‘Dresden shepherdess prettiness’, it sometimes annoyed him to reflect that her freshness and charm were legacies of a lifelong habit of letting other people do her worrying.
He could not recall a single instance of her worrying about anything more serious than the delay of bread deliveries, or a bank of cloud that threatened to spoil a projected picnic. When he had first met her he imagined that she must have worried when her soldier husband was killed and she was left to bring up Esme alone, but he had since learned that this was not so. A scrutiny of her personal papers, soon after they were married, had told him that all the worrying on that occasion had been done by her Scots mother-in-law and after the old lady had died he himself had taken over Eunice’s life, first as her solicitor, subsequently as her husband.
It was the same apparently, with her evacuation into the country, for this did not seem to worry her either. Since she had taken little Barbara to Torquay, on September 4th, 1939, they had met once a month, but she always greeted him as though he had just returned to the Avenue, on the 5.25, after a normal day at the office. It was not, he told himself, that she lacked affection. She could be very affectionate indeed whenever he wanted her to be and he had never had the slightest doubt but that she loved him dearly and would miss him very much if he was killed by a bomb. In the same way, of course, she would grieve over Esme, or little Barbara, should anything unpleasant happen to either of them, but nonetheless he had an unworthy suspicion that, should circumstances widow her a second time, she would not remain unsolaced for very long. Someone, some big, patient male, would soon become aware of her inability to memorise the times of buses, or the day of the week, and would melt under a helpless glance of those china blue eyes and hurry forward, with an eager offer of assistance. This, thought Harold gloomily, would inevitably lead to the altar and then the same thing would begin to happen all over again.
In a sense (although Harold did not know it) it was already happening. Eunice and little Barbara occupied a pretty thatched cottage, on the outskirts of Torquay, and down the road was a large shop, temporarily housing an R.A.F equipment depot. Dozens of officers were attached to this depot, and by no means all of them were of the type solicited by poster artists, in their fly-with-the-R.A.F. recruiting efforts. One particularly, Wing Commander Glynne, the Commanding Officer of the Depot, had already made the acquaintance of the pretty little evacuee and her baby, and regularly performed a number of small services for her, such as fitting blackout curtains in the cottage, detailing men to clean the cottage windows, or running both her and the baby, in and out of the town for their daily shopping.
Wing Commander Glynne was a very courteous officer, and expected little or nothing in return for these little services. He was satisfied with a sweet smile from Eunice, and a fond gurgle from the baby, or sometimes, when he was really in luck, a grateful pat on the back of the hand, as he helped Eunice in or out of his Vauxhall and promised to ‘keep an eye open for her’, if he saw her standing at the bus stop on his way home.
Eunice spent the greater part of her day in the shopping centre. All her life she had been able to occupy herself for hours at a stretch by drifting along pavements and gazing rapturously into large, plate-glass windows. It was by no means necessary to her enjoyment actually to enter a shop and make a purchase. In some ways she preferred not to, for this always put a period to the expedition, and she was obliged to spend the remainder of the afternoon at the counters. When this happened she was usually spotted and claimed by Wing Commander Glynne, with a little parcel swinging from each finger and thumb, and nothing but coppers in her handbag.
Once inside a shop Eunice was a wonderful customer, open to every suggestion made by the assistants who served her. She was the kind of woman whose mere presence in a shop improved the relationship between manager and staff. The dullest and most impatient shop assistant could sell her anything, from a packet of pins to a beach outfit, from a small bottle of perfume to an electrical gadget for removing a roll of flesh under the chin that had yet to reveal itself.
When she wasn’t in a shop, or had wandered away from the windows, she chattered gaily to little Barbara, the baby. Barbara looked adorable, with dark ringlets peering from poke bonnet and huge brown eyes, that reminded Eunice so poignantly of Esme before he took to playing rough games, but in addition to looking so bewitching the baby was an excellent listener. Her vocabulary was still limited to an odd word or two, and she therefore made no demands on her grandmother’s inventiveness and Eunice did not have to cast about for fresh topics of conversation, an exercise that exhausted her.
Sometimes Eunice would wedge the pram against a s
eat on the Marine Parade, and the two of them would spend a pleasant, placid hour, looking down on the boats moored in the harbour. Eunice would describe what they saw, in simple, uncomplicated terms: “There’s a blue one, with a man in a jersey! What’s he doing? Tying a rope I think! I wonder what for? To catch fish? I shouldn’t think so, Baba, he’d have to go out to sea to do that wouldn’t he?”
They made an enchanting picture sitting by the quay and no one ever identified them for what they were, grandmother and granddaughter. Elderly people would hover as they passed and smile down at them, and occasionally someone would ask after the baby’s father and whether he was abroad, fighting. Eunice was always flattered by these implications and never enlightened people as to the true relationship. It was very pleasant, she felt, to be thought young enough to be a soldier’s bride in a second World War after having actually been one in the first! Sometimes she almost thought of herself as Barbara’s mother, for it seemed to her, as she watched young men in uniforms go swinging by, that time had stood still, and that she was back in Kensington Gardens, in the spring of 1915, with Esme instead of Baba in the pram, and squads of young men marching and countermarching about the park, as she sat throwing crusts to the ducks in the Serpentine.
She liked best her long, peaceful evenings, after Baba had been put to bed, and she could settle by the fire, with East Lynne, or an Ethel M. Dell. She read the books of Mrs. Henry Wood, and Miss Dell, over and over again. She had a dreadful memory and they always seemed fresh to her. She wrote to Harold twice a week, and to Esme once a week, but she had to make herself perform these duties, for writing letters did not come easily to her. She never knew what to say and sometimes she sucked the pen for ten minutes, after writing ‘My Own Darling’, an introduction that served for each of them.
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