Another of Archie’s characteristics that attracted Elaine was his normality. She had the strongly-sexed woman’s contempt for mattress frivolities, the kind that were often paraded as freedom from inhibitions, and she knew enough about the male’s sexual habits to recognise these tricks for the exact reverse of what they pretended to be. She preferred her lovers to observe certain fixed rules of conduct and to refrain from making a drama of the relationship. Archie never attempted to make an issue of it, he simply got down to business, in a sane, healthy manner, and once the act was accomplished, he never referred to it again until next time. She found this approach restful yet refreshing, for it left her mind free to explore other fields. Some of the men she had made free with had half-persuaded her that no other fields existed.
Up here, with so many airmen about, all marching to and fro in their ridiculous little caps and turning this way and that under the hoarse commands of jerky little N.C.O’s, Elaine found herself remembering Esme now and again. She wondered how he had reacted to these idiotic manoeuvres, when he had been a recruit in Blackpool, the previous summer. Very sulkily, she imagined, like that man with hornrimmed glasses, who kept getting it all wrong, and attracting the invective of the one with the stripes tied to his arm!
Watching the training of recruits was one of Blackpool’s free shows in 1941, and the numerous civilians about the town took full advantage of it. Their presence was sometimes resented by the hard-pressed N.C.O’s. One morning, when Elaine and Archie were leaning casually on a bandstand rail, watching a squad perform an energetic exercise known as ‘feet-astride-jumping-arms-upward-raising’, the corporal in charge, a hardbitten regular, barked the order:—“Stead-eee!”, and then looked directly at his audience. In the silence that accompanied this scrutiny he suddenly exclaimed: “Oi! You there in the gran’-stand! Come back after break, and you c’n all throw bleedin’ nuts at us!”
Archie was stung by this remark, but Elaine only laughed, as the crowd of sheepish bystanders melted away.
“Well, we did rather ask for it, didn’t we?” she remarked to the glowering Archie.
Her attitude was, perhaps an indication of the subtle difference in their respective outlooks on war. Elaine was that rare person able to cruise along quite untroubled by conscience. Never once had it occurred to her that the men in uniform were anything more than a troop of clowns, performing these antics for a fixed rate of pay.
Archie, on the other hand, found the presence of so many men in uniform slightly irritating. Their enthusiasm, and their plight, also, reminded him of his son Tony, who would soon be one of them. Deep, deep in the heart, securely anchored by the profit-urge and the fear of insecurity that had fed his go-it-alone philosophy all these years, was the instinct of a fighting animal, the instinct that had prompted him to go out and win independence in the first instance. It is probable that, under different circumstances, he might have developed into a first-class resistance fighter, and had there been no such thing as military discipline, or the necessity of submitting to it, Archie might even have been in uniform himself. He had more physical courage than most men and, in addition, a certain pride in his physical fitness. At forty he was still a lusty, agile man, and he told himself that, had he cared to enlist, his worth would have been instantly recognised by his superiors. He had, however, a whole battery of arguments to convince him of the folly of enlisting, and against these arguments his aggressive instinct was powerless, or almost so. His outlook was based, in the main, on his powers of observation, and whenever he needed to extinguish the faint spark of patriotism that glowed in him, he had only had to remind himself of his father’s desperate hunt for work, when he returned from World War I, or of the parties of ex-servicemen, legless and armless some of them, whom he had seen drifting along the pavements of the suburb, begging to the tune of ‘Keep The Home Fires Burning’.
They returned to the Avenue on Thursday evening. Archie left her at the junction of Lower Road, and Shirley Rise, in order to give her time to walk up the hill and let herself into Number Forty-Three, before he drove into his yard and garaged the car.
It was dusk when she turned into the crescent and a glance told her that no disaster had overtaken her end of it during the interval. Strips of paper were still pasted over the windows and the dwarf walls, shorn of their swinging chains and iron supports in the scrap-iron drive of previous months, were otherwise intact.
She let herself in and pulled at the front-door blackout curtain, before switching on the light. The house felt damp, and she shivered, hurrying into the bedroom with the intention of lighting the fire and pouring herself a drink. Then she stood still, seeing that the bed had been disturbed, and noting, in the same glance, the presence of Barbara’s blue bonnet on the dressing-table stool.
For a moment she stood with her hand on the light-switch, her mind sorting the various possibilities suggested by the turned-back coverlet and the presence of the bonnet. The bonnet told her that somebody had brought the baby home from Torquay and Elaine’s first reaction was irritation. Then she felt momentarily confused, for her eye, surveying the room, took in the blue-grey haversack, and service respirator both hanging on the chair-back near the window. She called, softly:
“Esme? Are you there Esme?”
She heard him then, moving about in the porch room upstairs and expected the eager rush of feet on the landing. When he seemed in no hurry to descend she went into the hall, and called again:
“Esme darling…it’s me…Elaine…I’ve been away, dear!”
He came downstairs very slowly and she saw at once that something had happened to change him since their last meeting. His small, delicate features were frozen in an expression that was half sullen and half pained. She had seen the expression before, during some of their lopsided quarrels, quarrels in which she had steadfastly refused to engage and had thus ensured putting him in the wrong, whatever the cause of the tiff. She realised that he was annoyed at coming home unexpectedly and finding the house empty, and her mind instantly began to grapple with the means to deal with the situation.
She smiled up at him, a warm, welcoming smile.
“All right Esme, you needn’t look so tragic! How was I to know that you’d be home? You said you wouldn’t get any leave until the course finished, in April.”
He reached the foot of the stairs, but he did not advance and throw his arms about her, showering kisses on her hair, and cheeks, and mouth, as she expected him to do. He stood stockstill, on the bottom stair, with his left hand clasping the smooth wooden ball that terminated the bannister.
“Mother’s been killed,” he said slowly. “I’ve brought Barbara home!”
She started, violently, catching her breath. She was fond of Eunice, in some ways an ideal mother-in-law, but because Elaine was fundamentally a generous person, her own sense of loss was at once swamped in a rush of sympathy for Esme and for poor old Harold, across the road.
“Oh, God,” she exclaimed… “God! Poor Eunice…How…When…?”
“Last Thursday,” he said, “in a hit-and-run raid, on Torquay. She was buried on Monday. Where have you been, Elaine?”
Half her mind absorbed the tragic fact of his news, while the other half fumbled wildly for a plausible explanation of her week’s absence. Thursday, he said…that meant he must have come home on Thursday night or at latest, early on Friday morning, only a few hours after she and Archie had begun their journey up to Blackpool. He must have been awaiting her the better part of a week!
She tried to stall for time by asking questions.
“Where have you been…? Did you go down…? Did Harold go down with you? Was Barbara with her, when it…when it happened?”
“We both went down,” he said, and she was disconcerted by the steadiness of his eyes. “Barbara was with her when Jerry came over, but she’s okay. The point is, where the hell have you been?”
“To Blackpool,” she said, flatly, and then, before he could exclaim, “I…I got fed up with th
e bombing, and they said Blackpool was the only place to go for a break.”
“Who said so?”
This was unlike Esme. He was not in the habit of asking unpleasantly pointed questions like that, so she fell back on impatience, her panic getting the better of her shock.
“What does it matter who said so…somebody did—anyway, I went! After all, how was I to know you’d come? You said you wouldn’t have any leave.”
“But you didn’t tell anyone you were going! You didn’t even tell Harold! Nobody knew where you were, I even rang your father, to see if you were there.”
“I’m terribly sorry I wasn’t here Esme. I just went off on impulse. I was sick and tired of that siren, and of all the muddle, and fuss…I…I hadn’t been sleeping too well.”
She saw that she was making some sort of progress, for his features relaxed a little, and he began to look worried and harassed, rather than tragic, and accusing.
Then the telephone bell in the front-room rang, and she made the tactical error of leaping sideways to answer it. Ordinarily she would never have made such a mistake, but her mind was a turmoil of conflicting emotions, grief, anxiety, irritation, and bewilderment, all struggling to assert themselves. He at once noted her eagerness, and she saw that he had noticed it.
“I’ll get it,” she said, moving quickly towards the open door, but he was a split second ahead of her.
“No, I will, Elaine!”
He strode across the threshold, and snatched the receiver.
As he did so Elaine knew that she was adrift again, that this odd but convenient marriage would dissolve at the breezy crackle of Archie’s voice, and even as she heard Archie begin to speak it occurred to her that a girl never stopped learning in this business and that, if any ringing was to be done, it would have been so much wiser if she had arranged to ring Archie. In the dim light of the shaded hall lamp she studied Esme’s face, as Archie said: “Hello there? I’ve just got in! What’s new? Did any complications pile up while we were away?”
She felt a slight but distinct impulse to giggle. Any complications! Eunice dead, the baby home, Esme here, holding the telephone, after demanding to know where she had been all the week! Any complications?
“Who is that?” asked Esme, and his voice seemed to her to be shrill, like a small boy’s, angry, but pleading.
“Who…?”
Just that one word, then a metallic click, as Archie swiftly replaced the ’phone. He wasn’t very bright either, she reflected. They had both handled the situation like hopeless amateurs.
“Don’t you know who that was?” she asked, suddenly tired of melodrama.
“No, how should I? Only that it was the person you’ve been with, all the week.”
She found this the most incredible aspect of the farce. Esme didn’t even recognize the voice, or connect her absence with Archie Carver, the grocer, across the road. He did not even link the voice with that huge casket of fruit that had arrived at the nursing home, when Barbara was born, or with the steady supply of rationed goods that had trickled into Number Forty-Three since rationing first began. Quite obviously it had never crossed his mind that there might be an arrangement behind such prodigality, that some kind of payment might be expected for all the butter and cheese that he had eaten during his leave periods and crafty week-ends.
“It was Archie,” she said, “Archie Carver, from across the road.”
“You’ve been away with him? With Carver?”
She nodded, and then, recognising the futility of further discussion, she left him standing just inside the front-room, and went into the bedroom that had once been their dining room.
He followed her and watched her reach into the cupboard, and yank out the gin bottle and a half-bottle of lime cordial.
“I need a drink,” said Elaine calmly, “and I expect you need one too!”
She found two glasses and began to pour, but when she looked up he was gone from the doorway. She heard him clump upstairs, in his ugly Service boots, and walk across the floor of the back bedroom, immediately overhead.
She wondered, as she sipped her gin, what he would do now, whether he would walk out of the house, or stay up there by himself, trying to come to terms with the situation and plot a new course if he could find one. She heard him opening and shutting drawers, and decided that he was going to decamp, here and now, that he would probably go straight across to Harold, pour out his tale and set about writing her one of his long, drivelling letters.
Her moment of sympathy for him had passed. Their association had already lasted too long, much longer than she had meant it to when they had married in the autumn of 1938. She was no good to him anyway, with his quaint romantic notions of Arthurian chivalry, and his pitiful attempts to mould her into his kind of bride, an enchained, unsullied bride, for ever menaced by dragons.
Swiftly, as she poured her second gin, she went back over their relationship from the very beginning, from the moment of their first encounter at the Stafford-Ffoulkes Junior Imperial Ball, when he was sixteen, and she a year older.
He had been out of date even then and he was just as out of date now. She had taught him the Charleston and had been trying to teach him something more profitable ever since—how to impress a woman, how to dominate a woman, how to see life as it was and not as it might have looked to a high-minded knight, riding under a balcony in Camelot!
It had been useless, all of it, and she had known that within a week of their Paris honeymoon. People like Esme never learned the kind of things she could teach because they did not want to learn them. They were afraid of reality, afraid to name their fears. They persuaded themselves that reality was ugly and that the colours of romance had faded once women took to riding bicycles and going out to work. Some people could get away with this lifelong pretence at living, but not many. Those who did were usually women, like poor Eunice, from whom, no doubt, he had inherited all this tiresome flapdoodle. Well, even Eunice hadn’t got away with it in the end. The machine-age had at last caught up with her and killed her, and probably the same thing would happen to Esme, unless he woke up.
She heard him coming downstairs again, treading carefully, as though heavily laden. She put down her glass and moved into the hall. She was on the point of saying something to deter him from carrying melodrama to the point of absurdity and walking out into the night like a wronged husband in a bad film. She had been going to say; “Oh be your age, Esme! There’s a war on, and people are fed up! They need fun…!” or something like that. Then she noticed that he was carrying Barbara, who was still asleep, and wrapped in an eiderdown and a cot blanket.
“Where on earth are you going with her at this time of night?” she demanded.
He made no reply, but half-turned to twist the knob of the front door, raising his knee to support the bundle he carried. She had another impulse to giggle, for here, it seemed, was the Victorian novelette in reverse, a man leaving the house with a whimpering bundle, while the woman of the story remained behind in the warm, sipping gin and lime.
Then he got the door open and went out, hooking it closed with a back-kick, and leaving her standing there, looking across the empty hall.
“Well, if that’s how you feel…”, she shouted, and then, recoiling from the prospect of Harold calling on her to cajole, reason, and condemn, she shot the bolt of the door and went back into the bedroom, slamming the door after her.
She kicked off her high-heeled shoes and wiggled her toes in the luxury of freedom. She turned on the radio and wondered for a moment if she should ring Archie and tell him what had happened. Then she decided to postpone this irksome necessity until the morning, for she was by no means sure of Archie’s reactions and needed time to think.
The Small Provider had gone and The Great Provider had yet to be found.
CHAPTER IX
Baby In Camp
ELAINE WAS WRONG in her guess that Esme marched out of Number Forty-Three and crossed the road to Harold, at Number Twenty, in se
arch of sympathy. She was unaware that Harold was at that time running a high temperature, but even had his stepfather been in his normal health it is doubtful whether Esme would have hurried to confide in him at that particular moment.
Esme was facing a personal problem that could not be solved by advice or sympathy from anyone. Years ago, when Elaine had told him of her intention to leave the suburb, and to follow her dream along paths that he was not invited to tread in her company, he had carried his troubles to Harold and had received good advice, but Esme had not followed it, for Elaine remained in his thoughts throughout his entire adolescence and they had married after all, soon after she had returned to the Avenue, in 1938.
No amount of self-deception on Esme’s part could persuade him that the marriage had been a success, and since he had left home to join the R.A.F., he had become increasingly aware that their relationship was deteriorating. He knew this, but he had been unable to come to terms with the fact. Over the years he had had ample opportunity to study Elaine’s attitude to men in general and to himself in particular. Harold had once said that she was incapable of entertaining deep feelings about anyone, or anything, and Harold had been quite right. Yet Harold himself had been beguiled by Elaine during the weeks preceding her marriage to Esme and had been more than half-convinced that he had misjudged her, and that her tawdry experiences in vaudeville had taught her the hidden values of domesticity in the suburb. Esme, who had wanted so badly to be hoodwinked, had been an even easier victim.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 11