He forgot his tea and threw back the clothes, swinging his long legs to the floor.
“Are you sure? Are you certain, Harold?”
“Of course I’m sure,” said Harold indignantly, “I wouldn’t joke about a thing like that would I?”
“I’m not suggesting you’re joking,” said Jim, “but did you get it right? Are you sure you’ve got it right?”
Harold looked offended. “I say, old chap,” he protested, “there’s nothing wrong with my hearing is there? And anyway, that insurance chap from Number Sixty-Two heard the eight o’clock from the beginning. I daresay there’ll be more of it by this time. You’d better drink your tea and come downstairs.”
Jim gulped his tea and tore downstairs in his pyjamas. He fiddled with Harold’s set and finally tuned in to a special bulletin. He sat there for the better part of an hour, constantly shushing Harold, who was rattling crockery in the kitchen as he prepared breakfast, and as the information was fed to him Jim’s mind conjured with the vast possibilities the new development presented.
When finally he had turned off the set, and obeyed Harold’s repeated requests to ‘get something inside him old man,’ he was as jubilant as a schoolboy on the last day of term. Harold had never seen him so cock-a-hoop, and he listened, smiling tolerantly, while Jim expounded theories involving the collapse of Fascism all over the world.
“I tell you it’s the beginning of the end, Harold! The man’s raving mad…absolutely raving mad! The Germans will bleed to death in that vast country! Look what happened to Napoleon, and he was a professional soldier, not a piddling little house painter, with intuitions! They’ll simply lead him on and on, the way they always do. His armour’ll get bogged down in those forests for the winter, and then God help them! God help every one of them! They’ll never get out, never! We can attack from this side, and crack ’em wide open, just like a nut! I tell you Harold, this is the beginning of the end!”
Harold was by no means so confident, but he did not say so, for he regarded Jim Carver as a superior strategist and a man who had actually fired weapons in anger and taken part in great battles. In addition he had an uncomfortable suspicion that any comment he might make on Russia generally would blunt the fine edge of his friendship with Jim, who had been recognized as the Avenue rabble-rouser ever since the days of the General Strike.
Harold had voted Conservative in more than a dozen consecutive elections. He had always been persuaded that Russia was every bit as undemocratic as Germany, and his suspicions, he felt, had been amply justified by Stalin’s behaviour in 1939, and 1940. It would take him a long time to get used to Russia as an ally, and to Stalin and Molotov as champions of free speech and free elections. He had heard it said that Russia had concentration camps on a scale unheard of in Germany, that nearly half its population worked under the lash and the revolver, in Siberia. He had read that the M.K.V. was the parent of the Gestapo and that people who raised their voices against Communism disappeared even more abruptly than those who protested against Fascism. It was not easy to shed these convictions at the peep-peep of the time signal, prefacing the news. Winston Churchill, whom he revered above all men, might announce over the air that any enemy of Hitler was a friend of Britain’s, but Harold’s mind did not possess a politician’s elasticity, and he had military as well as political misgivings. The papers had derided the efforts of the Red Army to overcome little Finland a few months ago, and if it took the Red Army months to reach Helsinki, Harold asked himself, how long would they spend on the road to Berlin?
He pondered these things as he ate his powdered egg, bacon, and fried bread, but he let Jim run on about the certainty of another retreat from Moscow, for Jim Carver’s friendship, and his presence here in Number Twenty-Two, was far more important to Harold than ten thousand Red Armies, with or without guns mounted on sledges, and hordes of women snipers, who, so Jim told him, would now scatter into the birch forests and snipe the Germans unmercifully.
It might have been a very happy week for Jim, had it not been for a few lines of print in an issue of the News of the World, a day or so after this jubilant Sunday morning.
They had kept the identity of Elaine’s co-respondent from him for as long as possible. Nobody wanted to be the first to tell him that his eldest son, besides being a war profiteer, had been instrumental in breaking up a Serviceman’s home across the road. Harold had wanted to tell him on numerous occasions, and had even tried to persuade Esme to tell him, when he came home for a few days’ leave at the end of his air-gunnery course, in the Isle of Man. Esme’s moods, however, were puzzling Harold these days for the boy’s whole attitude to the divorce seemed very casual, and when they had discussed the matter Esme did not appear to regard Jim Carver’s knowledge of the facts as in any way important.
“Oh, scrub it, Harold,” he told his stepfather, when the latter had taken advantage of Jim’s absence on duty to raise the matter that was bothering him. “What the hell does it matter who made a monkey out of me? If I’ve put it out of my mind why can’t everyone else? It’s all over and done with! Barbara’s okay in Llandudno, and I’ve managed to get clear of the ruddy orderly room at last, and do something a bit more useful than type a stencil of ‘Officer’s Behaviour in the Anteroom!’”
So Harold did put the matter out of his mind, half hoping that Louise, or Jack Strawbridge, or even Jim’s younger daughter, Judy, would break the news to Jim before the divorce found its way into the papers.
Perhaps, he reflected, it never would. There were so many divorces, and nothing very special about this one, so that perhaps after all Jim wouldn’t hear about it until it was all too far in the past to matter.
Jim might not have heard about it, for he read only the war news as a rule, and when the divorce was made public, and Esme was granted a decree nisi, with the custody of Barbara, the bare facts were sandwiched into a quarter-column announcement embracing dozens of undefended cases; Esme’s case occupied but two lines of small print, just names and addresses.
Then, to Harold’s embarrassment, that old fool, Hopner, at the A.R.P. Post, had to blurt it out, just as Jim was going off duty one morning.
“I say Jim, is that your boy who’s mixed up in that divorce?”
Jim made a natural mistake. “No, Charlie, it’s the stepson of the chap I dig with…Damned disgusting business…The wife lives just over the road from me.”
“Oh I know her,” pursued the unwary Hopner, “she’s practically a tart. She’ll kip down with almost anyone, so they tell me, but I’m right sorry that she got your lad involved. It must be extra rations she was after, I suppose! Marvellous what some women’ll do nowadays, for a pound of granulated and a tin of pineapple chunks, isn’t it?”
Jim stared at him, bleakly. “What the hell are you drivelling about?” he asked. “What’s my boy, Archie got to do with it?”
Hopner realised, too late, that he had put his foot in it, but he was fond of Jim and anyway it was impossible to back out now.
“I say, I’m sorry, old chap,” he said, “I didn’t realise you didn’t know! It’s in the paper…look,” and he passed Jim a folded copy of the News of the World.
Jim read it carefully, and when he had absorbed the announcement he remained quite still for a few minutes. Hopner, watching him out of the corner of his eye, pretended to be busy repacking his respirator. At length Jim turned to him:
“Have you finished with this paper, Charlie?”
Hopner nodded. “You can take it, Jim.”
Jim put it carefully into the pocket of his leather-faced jacket, and left without another word.
“Lumme!” murmured Hopner to his relief, “have I dropped a clanger!”
Harold was brushing his clothes, preparatory to hurrying off for the 8.40., when Jim strode into the narrow hall, slamming the front-door behind him, and whipping the paper from his pocket. He flourished it angrily under Harold’s nose.
“Did you know about this, Harold?”
Harold
blinked, then nervously cleared his throat.
“Well yes…actually I did…I’ve known about it from the start.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you hint that the chap was a stranger?”
“I don’t know—I suppose because I knew it would upset you!”
“You knew I was bound to find out sooner or later?”
“Not necessarily, and anyway, it wasn’t really my business to tell you, Jim.”
Jim recognised a note of pleading in Harold’s voice.
“No, I don’t suppose it was,” he said grudgingly, “but all the same, I’d much rather have known. Does everybody else in the Avenue know?”
“Everybody who is interested,” admitted Harold. Then, quickly: “But who is interested in that sort of thing nowadays?”
“I am,” said Jim, quietly, suddenly peeling off his jacket, and unbuckling the broad leather belt that he always wore in addition to braces.
“What…what are you going to do, Jim?” enquired Harold, forgetting that he had a bare ten minutes to get to Woodside in time to catch the 8.40.
“I’m going round to belt some decency into that bloody son of mine,” said Jim shortly.
Harold acted instinctively. He reached out and grabbed the buckle of the belt, holding on to it tightly.
“You aren’t going to do any such thing,” he declared. “That won’t help anybody, and it’ll only get you into trouble! Besides, Archie’s bigger than you, and a good deal younger, so you wouldn’t be capable of doing it, anyway.”
“I’ll have a bloody good try,” roared Jim, tugging hard at the belt, and jerking Harold halfway across the hall. “Let go of that buckle, damn you!”
“No,” squeaked Harold, “I won’t! I’m not going to let you make such a fool of yourself, Jim!”
“You’ve just said it was none of your business! Let go, blast you!”
“No, I won’t, and it is my business. I think you’re behaving stupidly, and I’m going to stop you if I can! You’ve been a good friend to me and….”
He was unable to complete the sentence, for Jim’s fist struck him on his long, thin nose, and he crashed back against the hallstand, losing his balance, and sliding to the floor.
The hall-stand ricocheted from the wall, and fell forward on his shoulders, bouncing off, striking the bannister, and finally coming to rest as a barrier between the two men. The belt remained swinging in Jim’s hand.
For a few seconds neither of them moved. Then Jim peered over the hall-stand and regarded Harold with dismay. With his spectacles suspended from one ear Harold was groping for his handkerchief. Blood from his nose gushed over his white shirtfront, and dripped down his jacket on to the polished linoleum. The sight of the blood restored Jim’s self-control.
“I say…I’m sorry Harold…I lost my temper…! I didn’t mean to hit you like that! Here, take this handkerchief! You’re bleeding all over the blasted hall!”
Without a word Harold reached up for the handkerchief, as Jim lifted the hall-stand, replacing it against the wall, and began gathering up an assortment of walking-sticks and umbrellas that had rattled from its racks.
Harold rose slowly to his feet, dabbing his nose, and breathing heavily through his mouth.
“I think I’d better go into the scullery,” he said. “I’ve missed the 8.40 now and just look at me! Just look at my coat!”
Jim followed him into the scullery, and turned on the cold tap. For a few moments Harold dripped into the sink; then Jim said:
“You’d better lie on the floor and give it a chance to clot.”
Harold obediently lay on the floor, and Jim bent over him, gently sponging chin and coat with a dish rag. When the bleeding had stopped Harold sat up and Jim, without another word, put on the kettle for tea.
As soon as it boiled they sat down facing one another. Harold smiled.
“Well, I stopped you, didn’t I?”
Jim made no reply.
“You do see that you’d have made a fearful idiot of yourself, don’t you, old man?”
“Yes,” said Jim gruffly, “I see that, but it doesn’t make me feel any better, I can tell you that!”
“Look here, old chap, I’d like to talk frankly if I may. May I?”
Jim grunted and Harold accepted the grunt as an affirmative.
“Well, it’s like this, Jim! Here’s a marriage that’s gone on the rocks because of a war. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves. We say it only happened because a husband went to the Forces, and a civilian moved in and took his place. But the fact of the matter is that it isn’t the real reason at all! This was one of the marriages that would have gone on the rocks, anyway!”
“How can you assume that?” asked Jim.
“Because I know the girl, and I know the family! Hang it man, I acted for Elaine’s father, years ago and she’s a bad egg, Jim, bad right through! I’ve known that for some time, not from the beginning I grant you, because I don’t mind admitting that at first she fooled me as much as she fooled Esme, but the fact remains that she’s no good, and never will be. If it hadn’t been your Archie, then it would have been someone else!”
“Is that supposed to make me proud of being Archie’s father,” growled Jim. “However, go on, since you seem determined to make light of it all.”
“I am not,” said Harold, in his best courtroom voice, “making light of it! I am simply attempting—and at considerable personal risk so far as I can see—to prevent you from washing a second lot of dirty linen in public before the first lot’s dry! Go ahead! Make a newspaper story of this by assaulting your son! That way you’ll expand the two lines in that paper to a front-page story for the whole country to read about!”
“Ah,” said Jim, slowly, “you’ve got something there, Harold. I admit I hadn’t looked at it like that. But by God, I’d like to tell Archie what I think of him, sitting there piling up money, and then shutting his shop and climbing into bed with your boy’s wife!”
“Well,” said Harold, beginning to feel more sure of himself, and pressing his advantage, “there’s nothing whatever to prevent you from telling Archie what you think of him, but do it in private, with the edge of your tongue, and not in public with the buckle-end of what looks to me like a road-mender’s belt!”
“I’ve always known Archie was a wrong ’un,” said Jim gloomily, ignoring Harold’s feeble joke, “he took a wrong turn somewhere, ’way back, when he was a boy, and he’s left it too late to straighten himself out! I suppose that’s the price a man pays for four years away in the trenches, when his kids are growing up, and he should be around keeping an eye on them! It’ll be the same with half the kids today, you see if it isn’t! The women too, they need the business end of a strap, some of ’em! It makes a man sick, when we’re supposed to be fighting a war for national survival!”
“The war hasn’t all that to do with it, Jim,” said Harold. “I saw plenty of this sort of thing before the war. If people are born without a sense of responsibility they’ll make a hash of marriage, war or no war. As for Esme, I can’t help thinking that the boy is well rid of her, and I think he knows it. That’s why he talked himself out of a safe job, and volunteered for air-gunner.”
Jim set down his cup. “He’s done that? Young Esme, put in for air-crew?”
“Didn’t your girl, Judy tell you? She’s still at the same camp isn’t she?”
“No, she didn’t tell me,” said Jim, thoughtfully, “but I think I see what you mean about Esme. That’s a direct result of his mother being killed, and then his wife letting him down?”
Harold shook his head. It was queer, he thought, how much better he was beginning to understand people, and people’s notions lately. It was as though, through all these years, his blind devotion to Eunice had stood between him and everybody around him. Six months ago he too would have concluded that Esme’s determination to volunteer for air-crew was a mere defiant gesture, something prompted by grief and bitterness, but now he knew that this was not so
, that it was simply a part of Esme’s growing up and was therefore inevitable.
“No, Jim, this is nothing to do with heroics,” he said. “Esme tried for air-crew right at the beginning, but they turned him down on account of a slight defect in his vision. They’re not so fussy now it seems. I remember thinking that he was relieved at the time, and settled gladly enough for an office job, but now he’s beginning to see things as they really are, and that makes him want to play a more active part in this business. You see, Esme’s a romantic, and until quite recently he’s been content to see life as he wanted to see it, and as he’d always seen it, right from the time he was just a little chap. He always seemed to be shying away from life as it was, and creating a world for himself to live in. You remember how he was always dressing up, and pretending to be someone out of a book?”
Jim remembered. “My girl, Judy was a bit like that,” he said. “It’s a pity they didn’t marry each other, and go right on living in a dream! God knows, there’s enough of the so-called practical people about. We could all do with a bit more chivalry and make-believe. When I think of that son of mine….”
Harold, anxious to keep the discussion in the abstract, hastily interrupted.
“You have to let people like Archie and Elaine go their own way for as long as they’re able, Jim. They’ve got it coming to them, believe me! It’s the decent people that are going to win out in the end and if I didn’t believe that I’d cease to believe in everything!”
“‘As ye sow, so ye shall reap’. Do you really believe in that any more, Harold, do you really believe in payment deferred?”
“Yes, I do,” said Harold, emphatically, “Because it’s being proved all round us! Look at the way this country pulled up its socks when it had to, last year, and look at the way the people round here weathered the blitz, and held on until things began to look a bit brighter! They aren’t Archies and Elaines, Jim, they’re the majority, and that’s what’s important! If the majority has guts and decency what does it matter if a few here and there don’t pull their weight? What does anyone gain by turning aside to knock sense and decency into them? If it isn’t there to begin with it’s a waste of time trying to put it there! Now do you see what I’m getting at, Jim?”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 16