Jim could think of no comment to make. Tony was his eldest grandchild and secretly he had been very proud of him, although his long estrangement from Archie had meant that he had never had more than an occasional glimpse of the boy. He knew that Tony had been commissioned, and was serving abroad, but he had never seen him in uniform. Now he would never get to know him and for a moment the bitterness of this realisation checked his natural sympathy for Archie.
He saw Edith reach out and touch Archie’s sleeve. The movement did not go unnoticed by the policeman at the door, who half turned into the room.
“I’m afraid time’s up,” said the officer.
“I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry, Mr. Carver,” said Edith, ignoring the policeman’s interruption, and Archie turned away quickly but not quickly enough, for Jim saw the muscles of his throat contract and then realised why his son had looked so vague and disinterested throughout his trial. He understood that well enough. Even a charge of manslaughter must seem insignificant beside the certainty of never again setting eyes on one’s eldest child, of knowing that young Tony, whom Archie had been at such pains to convert into an English gentleman, was now dead and buried under sand, thousands of miles away!
The constable touched Jim’s elbow. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave now,” he said.
“Have you notified the boy’s school?” asked Jim, suddenly.
“No, but I should have done, they’ll be very proud of him up there. Will you write a line for me?”
“Of course,” said Jim, and suddenly shot out his hand in Archie’s direction.
“After this we’ll…we’ll try and manage to see a bit more of one another, son?”
He hardly had time to notice the pressure of Archie’s hand before he found himself walking along the corridor, with Edith close beside him. Edith was saying:
“You see, it was all for the best Mr. Carver. It’s dreadful I know but it was all meant to happen. You’re friends now, you’re much closer than you’ve ever been, so in a way it’s been worth it, don’t you think?”
Jim said nothing. He felt desperately ashamed of the choking sensation in his throat and the blur of tears that prevented him from negotiating the stone staircase without stumbling. Edith took his arm and they found their way out into the street.
She led the way across to the café, where they had lunch.
“What you need is a nice strong cup of tea, Mr. Carver. Our train home isn’t until 8.15. I remembered to check it on a timetable this morning.”
He looked at her as she was giving the order, and marvelled at her composure, at the steadiness and confidence that seemed to radiate from her stocky little body, and broad, pink face.
“I’ll never forget how you’ve been over this, Edith,” he said, hoarsely and was surprised by the blush that followed his first use of her Christian name.
CHAPTER XXIV
Elaine Versus The Deep South
ELAINE WAS FINDING the conquest of the Deep South a more difficult task than she had imagined.
It had been very simple to improve upon her chance acquaintance with Lieutenant Woolston Ericssohn, adjutant of the U.S. Transport Depot, stationed so conveniently close to the Avenue. He was easy to get to know, but not nearly so easy to bring to the boil. Indeed, in some respects he was proving the most difficult prospect that Elaine had ever tackled, and there were times when he seemed outside the range of her experience.
The trouble with Woolston was his background. To see him cross the meadow, and enter the gate of Number Four, where he shared a billet with his superior officer, Major Sparkewell, one would have had difficulty in identifying him for what he was, a Southern gentleman, who would have ridden north with Lee, and west with Fighting Joe Johnston and Beau Beauregard. He did not look like a Southern gentleman. It was difficult to picture him in a linen suit and Panama hat, drinking mint julep under his magnolias, as he discussed with other southern gentlemen the theory that Negro slavery was authorised by Holy Writ. Indeed, in appearance he had more in common with, say, a studious middle-aged clerk, content, perhaps, to rub along on a modest sixty dollars a week, earned in a Chicago insurance office, or even a mid-western store. He was thin, pale, slightly below average height, inclined to stoop, and had scrubby fair hair that did not seem to answer to any lotion on sale at the PX counter.
He was also near-sighted, and wore rimless spectacles, so that altogether he was a long way removed from the traditional picture of a Confederate officer, inspired by the cinema and popular fiction.
Elaine knew all about these officers. Not only had she seen ‘Gone with the Wind’ twice (she felt a strong kinship with Scarlett O’Hara, although she was unable to share her passion for Ashley Wilkes) but she had also read a large number of current American novels, in which heroes called Buck or Red, or Abner, pursued heroines called Kitten, Ellie, or Charmaine. These heroes were always rangey, and raven-haired, with insolent eyes but chivalrous manners. Not one of them looked like Lieutenant Ericssohn although, as she got to know him better, she had to admit that if one could overlook his physical shortcomings he had the role fairly pat, and had obviously put a great deal of work into its study.
This aspect of Ericssohn had at first occasioned doubts in her mind regarding his bank balance and his ability, if called upon, to fulfil another role that awaited him, the role of Great Provider, but Elaine was not the kind of person to leave a thing like this to chance and lost no time in making enquiries among Ericssohn’s associates, with the object of establishing whether his reputed wealth was as substantial as his drawl.
The result of these enquiries reassured her. All the officers and N.C.O.s whom she met at the ‘Welcome America’ socials and dances in the suburb that summer, confirmed the fact that Ericssohn was indeed ‘loaded’, and that his late father, of Hintonville, North Carolina, had been reckoned a wealthy man, even by U.S. standards.
Having satisfied herself in this respect Elaine dismissed from her mind unworthy doubts regarding Lieutenant Ericssohn’s intention to deceive, and at once set about modelling herself into the kind of belle that a Southern gentleman would flirt with before leading home to porticoed mansion.
Up to a point she made rapid progress, for she was half-convinced that here, at long last, was a Provider whose provision promised to be limitless, someone who, besides being able to fix her up with terrace, hammock, yacht, sports car, mink, and martinis, was also of a sufficiently manageable disposition to suffer the presence of any number of more exciting courtiers, without making tiresome scenes, or imposing impossible conditions upon his wife.
The thing to do, she told herself, was to marry him quickly, before some other suburban huntress had assessed his possibilities, and cooled off the more engaging of his associates, younger men with broad shoulders and Clark Gable profiles, but who were not quite so ‘loaded’ as Lieutenant Ericssohn.
The point to which Elaine did progress during those first few weeks was that step in Southern courtship where the belle is kissed lightly upon the cheek, an inch or so below the nearest eye.
It took Elaine a certain amount of time to adjust herself to the tempo of Southern wooing. She was not accustomed to being kissed below either eye, or to having the tips of her fingers pressed and then decorously released when men said good night to her at the front gate of Number Forty-Three.
Even Esme’s Arthurian wooing had been more venturesome than this, for while Esme too had placed her on a pedestal it had remained a mere pedestal, and had never become the dome of the Capitol.
She was tempted, on several occasions during the early stages of their friendship, to take the initiative, and drag the Lieutenant across the threshold of love. Once there she was confident of producing acceleration on his part, but there was something about him that made her hesitate and play for safety.
Meantime, night after night, she cast about for a plan, one that would shift the onus of pace-making to him, and subject his Southern chivalry to a real test. That she did eventu
ally hit upon such a plan and managed, despite all, to bring it to a successful conclusion, was a far greater tribute to her patience than to her ingenuity.
The real difficulty lay in the fact that Ericssohn’s masquerade as a gentleman of the Deep South was not really a masquerade at all. It was not and never had been, a deliberate attempt on his part to pretend to anything other than what he believed of himself. Ever since the day, at the age of thirteen, that he had first gazed upon a magnolia, he had been the slave of a dream as demanding as the one Elaine had been serving since she was fifteen. Ericssohn dreamed of a lost civilisation, the civilisation of the Old and Martyred South, and because he had money at his disposal he had already provided himself with a setting for the dream. He was on the point of converting this dream into reality when the first shots descended on Fort Sumpter (in his case, Pearl Harbour) and he hurried away in response to a bugle call, just as any Southern gentleman would have done, without so much as pausing to swat a blue-tailed fly!
To understand Woolston Ericssohn, and the difficulty poor Elaine had with him, it is necessary to know a little of the Lieutenant’s actual background, apart from the one he had created for himself.
His grandfather was a Swedish carpenter, who had come to the States in the early ‘seventies’, and had prospered, if modestly, as a cabinet maker’s foreman, in Chicago.
His younger son, Axel Ericssohn, abandoned cabinet-making for real estate, and in the expansion years prior to the First World War he made a limited amount of money, later drifting south-east, a latter-day carpet-bagger some might have said, in order to share in the first of the post-war real estate booms.
Ericssohn senior was a shrewd man, shrewd enough to sell out and move further south into Carolina, long before the market crashed. It was here, in a town called Hintonville, that he finally settled, investing his capital in high-grade timber, which was something he understood better than most people, certainly most people in Hintonville.
Woolston, his eldest son, was a shy young man, much given to study, and to dreaming. It is not known where he first acquired his white-hot passion for the Confederacy, but it was probably as a teenager in local libraries rich in the legends of the South. Woolston was not in the least interested in his father’s business ventures, he left that to his younger brothers, Gustave and Frederick. He himself had other plans, mainly concerned with the resurrection of a civilisation, blotted out by Sherman and his blue-bellies, nearly forty years before Woolston was born.
He would be, he told himself, a perfect Southern gentleman, and he set about making himself one with a single-mindedness that astonished his family and fascinated the entire community in and around Hintonville.
He first spent a term at a Southern military academy, where he learned to ride, shoot and develop a Southern drawl almost indistinguishable from the speech of people who had been born in the South.
His father died in the late nineteen-twenties and left him some money, but when his mother died a few years later Woolston inherited a very considerable sum and was able to return home and purchase a small plantation, at once commencing to build upon it the kind of house that Jefferson Davis would have recognised as the ideal home of a hero of Bull Run.
It was a long time building, and was only two-thirds erected when the bugles shrilled and Woodston forgot all about his splendid new house in his eagerness to rush into battle. It was a pity, he felt, that Sherman was dead, and that he was now called upon to fight side by side with Yankees against such unfamiliar adversaries as Hitler and Hirohito, but there was obviously glory to be won, and perhaps a beautiful belle into the bargain, so he lied about his age and pulled strings to be included in an early draft, thus arriving in England with the American vanguard.
Since then the prospects of glory had faded. He had been bogged down in a dull, London suburb, filling out endless forms, and signing thousands of grubby chits, and doing so, Godammit, at the beck and call of a coarse-mouthed, regular officer who came from Maine.
They told him that things would improve in time, but he was feeling very depressed and homesick on the morning that he met Elaine humping her suitcase from Woodside Station.
Elaine attracted him from the first, winning smile. Not only was she dark and winsome, just like the girls who had sewn sashes and embroidered banners for the heroes of Shiloh, but she was also the first British woman to pay him the compliment of a second glance.
When he began to encounter her regularly, as he passed to and fro along the Avenue, he noticed that she always smiled before lowering her eyes to the pavement, and the time soon came when he nerved himself to speak to her.
He found her shy and demure, but nonetheless extraordinarily patient with him. After their third conversation he began to feel less homesick, for there was much about her that reminded him of the South, her carriage, her low-pitched voice, her shyness and, above all, her obvious deferment to the male. She was the kind of woman, he told himself, who would always remain dependent upon him, and was so different from most of the girls whom he had seen skylarking with the troops in the Recreation Ground and the Manor Wood. He made up his mind to pursue his advantage with her but cautiously, and in a manner befitting a Southern gentleman. He would behave, in fact, just as was prescribed for him in the booklets they were now issuing to the enlisted men, manuals entitled: How to Behave in Britain.
It was fortunate for Elaine that Woolston’s experience with women were limited to one High School flirtation, and a somewhat anaemic romance with the sister of a cadet at the military college he had attended. Had he been as experienced as most of his comrades at the Depot he must have smelled powder within a week.
There was a quiet desperation about Elaine’s stalking of Lieutenant Ericssohn the ‘loaded’ Southern gentleman.
She was now over thirty, and the Great Provider still eluded her. This, she told herself, might well be her last chance, but it also looked like being her best chance, and she was nervous of making a mistake.
It took her a long time to appreciate the fact that here at last was a man whom one could not play too slowly. The merest hint that she was the kind of woman who welcomed familiarity would, she felt certain, scare him back into a shell, from which he might not emerge until he was posted overseas. On the other hand, no man alive, she felt, could remain satisfied for very long with the pace of their wooing to date, and the deep shadow that hung over her during this stage was the possibility of his hearing Avenue gossip about her divorce. After all, he lived with the Clegg sisters, at Number Four, and although Becky was half-witted, and Edith was anything but a gossip, Edith was friendly with Jim Carver, who was actually sharing a house with Esme’s stepfather, besides being the father of the co-respondent in her case. The risks were therefore considerable.
After due thought she decided that it would be better to tell him about her divorce, and get her story comfortably planted before someone else whispered in his ear.
She told him one night when they were walking back from a social at the Institute Hall in the Lower Road, and at first she was shaken badly by his reception of the news.
“You been married? You actually been married? Heck, that’s kinda of a shock, honey! Tell me about it! How-come you didn’t stay married?”
She mastered her panic and decided to appeal to his Southern chivalry.
Even Elaine was surprised by the success of this approach. Her impromptu account of her marriage put quite a strain on her powers of invention. She was not a practised liar, never having found it necessary to lie to men once she had let them kiss her, and it was difficult to present poor, lovesick Esme as a vicious wife-beater, or Archie Carver as an honest John Bull, maliciously manoeuvred into the role of co-respondent.
She was a better liar than she had realised. He believed the more readily because the story heightened his own role as protector. Just as Elaine had exhibited those qualities that had once convinced Esme that she was awaiting rescue from her tower at Number Seventeen, so Woolston had no difficul
ty in seeing her as the long-suffering victim of a sadistic husband.
“He had the most jealous temper imaginable, and whenever he saw me show conventional interest in another man he seemed to go quite mad,” she told him. “He would often,” she added, almost casually, “pick this kind of quarrel with me and then beat me!”
“You don’t say, honey,” gasped Woolston. “What did he lam you with, honey?”
“A dog-whip,” said Elaine, without hesitation.
“You got a dog,” he asked, irrelevantly.
“Not now,” said Elaine, promptly, “he had mine destroyed!”
“He sure sounds a sonofabitch,” said Woolston.
At first Elaine told these stories half in jest, for at that stage in their association she had not become fully acclimatised to his almost limitless credulity, but later on, when she realised that she was furthering her cause, she embroidered her tale with graphic details of the kind of scenes that were commonplace in Number Forty-Three when Esme came home on leave, and had worked himself up into one of his jealous frenzies. She also told him more about Archie, who became ‘a kindly grocer across the road’, and a man who had incurred her husband’s enmity by helping her eke out her miserable rations whilst she was living alone through the horrors of the blitz.
“Poor Archie,” she sighed, “he had to sell up, and go away on account of the scandal, but his wife didn’t divorce him, and I always felt that this was proof that she at least didn’t believe any of the things that Esme and his folks spread around about us. Still, the judge did and they took my little girl away from me. I’ve never set eyes on her since. I could, of course, for they couldn’t stop me seeing her every now and again, but I wouldn’t want to confuse the poor kid, and I’ll just have to wait for her to grow up before she hears the truth about me.”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 38