He was mildly disappointed. This was his big night and distance prevented him from spending it with Frances. It was, however, not the night to spend alone in a house, eating ham, pickles and tomatoes, before drifting off to bed in an unheated back room.
Suddenly he remembered his promise to Harold and the junketings that were still going on across the road.
“I think I’ll ’phone Frances, and then pop over and spend an hour or so with Mr. Godbeer,” he told her. “He was very interested in the Cupid, and by the way, they’ve all had very good news over there today!”
“About Esme?” She showed only the mildest flicker of interest.
“No, about the Carver twins. It seems that they’re prisoners of war after all! The little one, Bernard isn’t it, he’s had his arm amputated by the German doctors.”
“Well, I’m glad they’re okay,” said Elaine, offhandedly. “They were cautious, those two! Hey up,” (as the bell rang) “that’ll be my beau!” and she opened the door, dressed just as she was, but if Woolston felt any embarrassment he did not show it.
He gave her a spray of orchids and she accepted them as offhandedly as she did most things.
“Thanks, Sugar. Now fix yourself a drink and have your little talk with Daddy while I finish dressing.”
Edgar accepted a drink, although he knew that he would suffer for it, and the two of them chatted for a spell in the front room. They did not touch upon the engagement, but discoursed generally about the war, and Edgar was relieved when Elaine swept in, looking, he thought, as beautiful and as exciting as an Anthony Hope heroine. Woolston, who had shown no special interest in Elaine in her lingerie, now jumped up so suddenly that he almost knocked Edgar’s glass from his hand.
“Gee, honey! You look swell, real swell! Don’t she look good enough to eat, Mr. Frith, don’t she now?”
Edgar smiled. The news, the party at Number Twenty, and the American’s stiff martini had mellowed him.
“I’ve always thought her very beautiful,” he said, “but of course, I’m prejudiced!”
She kissed him lightly on his forehead and swept up her gloves and bag.
“Come on, Sugar, let’s go places,” she said, and they went out, leaving him to dial ‘trunks’ and, as Chaffery might have said, “put the missis in the picture.”
The neighbours had stopped calling by the time he returned to the Carvers, so Harold suggested that he should share their supper at Number Twenty, for Louise had already had ‘a rare day of it’ and Jack, her husband, could never stay awake after ten o’clock.
Pippa was in bed and asleep, having already written and posted a letter to Bernard. Jim had slipped off to the local to buy beer, and when he returned all three of them climbed through the fence to Number Twenty and sat down to a hash of spam, powdered egg and fried bread in the kitchen, where Harold explained his newspaper maps of the various fronts that were pinned to the larder door, and staked out with a complex assortment of flag-day emblems.
“This is our G.H.Q., Mr. Frith,” he told Edgar, adjusting a cluster of markers around Stalingrad. “We like to keep up with things and see how we stand from day to day, don’t we, Jim?”
Edgar was staggered by their detailed knowledge of the fighting on all fronts. Up in Wales he and Frances had not regarded the war in this light, but merely as a kind of backcloth to their everyday lives, and the business of buying and selling stock, or combating the Ring. Now he half-wished that he was living in the Avenue again and in day-to-day touch with people like Harold and Jim, or the boisterous Mr. Baskerville. He would have given much to have dropped in of an evening and talked over the prospects of recapturing Tobruk, or beating the submarine menace. He understood now why Pippa preferred to live in London and merge herself into the war, rather than dream it away in the Welsh hills, or read about it in newspapers and periodicals. He felt, for the first time in his life, a close kinship with the Carvers, the Cleggs, and the Baskervilles, for it struck him that there was infinitely more neighbourliness in the Avenue now than had existed when he and Esther had lived over the road. He even remarked on this and was interested by Harold’s frank reply.
“Yes, that’s so, isn’t it, Jim? If the war’s done nothing else it’s certainly brought us all closer together! We were all inclined to be a bit too stuffy in the old days, don’t you think?”
Jim removed his pipe from his mouth and smiled.
“Harold and I lived next door to one another for more than twenty years,” he said, “and I don’t think we said more than ‘Good evening’ to one another until the week of Dunkirk, did we, Harold?”
“To tell the truth, I always thought Carver a bit of a Bolshie,” added Harold, grinning.
“And I used to quote him as that famous fire-proof character, a Tory working-man, too bloody green to burn!” chuckled Jim.
“Well, I’m still a Conservative in spite of it all,” said Harold.
“And I’m still a Socialist, so you see that ours is strictly a wartime coalition, Frith,” added Jim.
They sipped their beer and smoked their pipes in an air of rich contentment, until presently Harold said:
“You don’t want to go back across the road and play gooseberry to that daughter of yours, when she comes home with her American! Why don’t you stay here with us? You can have the porch room, and there’s a very comfortable divan in there.”
Edgar did not need much persuasion. He was enjoying himself so much that it seemed a pity to put a term to it. It would be great fun, he thought, to have Sunday breakfast in such pleasant company.
He made a formal protest about being a nuisance to people, but they pooh-poohed his objections and soon persuaded him to run across for his bag.
When he returned they had a final beer and trooped up to bed, and after Harold had brought him a hot-water bottle, Edgar settled himself on the divan, locked his hands behind his head, and reflected what a delightful day it had been. His final thought, as he drifted off to sleep, was how well his digestion had stood up to the terrible buffeting it had received since he had set foot in the Avenue that afternoon. Tea, cocoa, cheese-spread, martini, spam, powdered egg, fried bread, and bottled beer, all in the space of a few hours! Such reckless gluttony would have all but killed him a few days ago, but tonight he knew that he would sleep like a child and he did too, for almost eight hours, until he heard a door bang downstairs and then Jim’s rumbling voice and Harold’s high-pitched monosyllables answering it.
Presently there was a rattle of tea-cups and the sound of feet on the stairs and Harold came in, beaming, and behind him, Jim, with a Sunday newspaper in his hand.
Both men were in high spirits and he soon discovered why, for Jim threw the Sunday Express on the bed and exclaimed:
“Read it! We’re ashore in North Africa! Damn it, it’s marvellous! Don’t you see that Rommel’s caught between two fires, and the whole of the French Colonial Empire will come in with us? Look here, Harold, I’m going to have another go at that blasted radio downstairs, and if I can’t get anything by the time we’ve had breakfast I’ll step down to Baskerville! He’s sure to have the latest, with that damned great set of his!”
Harold smiled, indulgently, like a parent pretending interest in a twelve-year-old’s latest enthusiasm, thought Edgar.
“That’s Jim, Mr. Frith,” he said, as he poured Edgar’s tea, “it’s just like living with a great schoolboy! But he’s not a boy when it comes to action, old man, he’s an absolute lion! I don’t know what I’d have done without him during the blitz!”
Edgar read the newspaper as he sipped his tea. He felt no ill effects from his outrageous diet of the previous day, only a lazy content to be here among men of his own age, and his own social status, men who seemed eager to give him something that he had never enjoyed before, friendship on equal terms.
The morning sun rose high over the line of Manor Wood and a broad beam stole through the chink in the curtains. An odd fancy struck him that if he and Esther had bought a house on thi
s side of the Avenue, where the morning sun poured in the front instead of the back, then their whole lives might have been as mellow as Jim’s and Harold’s. Then the thought seemed disloyal to Frances, alone with the baby in Wales, and he dismissed it, jumping out of bed and peeping across at the mound that had been his home.
Harold called from the hall: “Breakfast in ten minutes, Mr. Frith!”
“Thank you,” he called, “thank you…I’ll have a quick wash and shave if I may!”
He pulled the curtains aside and the winter sunshine flooded the little room. The smell of frying drifted up from the kitchen and as he scraped away at his chin he tried to whistle.
It was many years since Edgar Frith had whistled in the act of shaving.
CHAPTER XXVI
New Year Roundabout
TWENTY MINUTES TO midnight, on the last day of December, 1942, and the Avenue nearly half-way through its fourth year of war.
The great hump of rubble, that had been Numbers Thirteen, Fifteen and Seventeen, now possessed a familiar outline, and had become as much a feature of the crescent as the corner shop, or the leaning laburnum in the front-garden of Number Ninety-Seven. Even the presence of G.I.s in the Avenue had lost its novelty and the Avenue rump, at the small-number end, had come to regard them as permanent residents, just like Mr. Baskerville, or Mr. Westerman. Some of the younger residents had even begun to absorb their idioms of speech.
Margy Hartnell, sometime co-director of the Hartnell Eight, saw in the New Year from her former home, at number Forty-Five.
She had left behind a roomful of belongings when she let the house to the Hargreaves, shortly before Philip and Jean were married, and had since written from the North, where she was touring with E.N.S.A., to ask if she could collect them when she returned to London.
She came to the Avenue as dusk fell, on the last day of the old year and Jean, hearing that she had made no arrangements to book a room, insisted that she remain for the night, and packed up her things in the morning.
Margy was much changed these days. Before the war she had been a high-spirited and energetic little woman, driving her husband and his dance orchestra as if they had been an eight-horse team in a rodeo event, herding them from engagement to engagement, popping up beside the drums to sing a number, then descending among the dancers to fish for future dates among committee-men and social secretaries.
She still appeared on public platforms, indeed, she was in great demand as an artist with E.N.S.A. bands touring the camps. Not only was her organising ability much appreciated by E.N.S.A., but her contralto voice had improved and she sang numbers like ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ and ‘Lovely Weekend’ in a way that was obviously acceptable to audiences of men uprooted from home and family. This was strange when one thought about it, for Margy Hartnell had never possessed good looks, or the kind of figure that earned the wolf-whistle.
She was small-boned and slightly sallow. Her dark hair was greying a little at the sides, and she never used any of the tricks in the armoury of the popular pin-up vocalists, the slight catch in the voice, or the sudden tearful biting of the lower lip used to regulate the ‘drip’ of a lyric. She sang her numbers simply, and unpretentiously, and her male audiences accepted the songs for what they were worth. Margy’s singing put no strain on their emotions.
She had to make the effort to come home and sort out her things in Number Forty-Five because she was on the point of going abroad on an extended tour.
When she first joined E.N.S.A. she had steadfastly refused to accept engagements that were likely to involve her in an overseas tour, for Ted, her sea-going husband, arrived and departed at irregular and unpredictable intervals.
Sometimes she had no word from him for months at a stretch and then, without warning, she would receive a wire or ’phone call, telling her to jump on a train and make her way to Liverpool, or Barry, or Harwich, and spend a few days with him before he sailed away again.
She lived for these abrupt summonses. Often they were the only proof she had that Ted was still living and not washing about at the bottom of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, but once the first ecstasy of their reunion had spent itself they almost invariably began to bicker, until Ted grew sullen, and Margy was in tears. Then they would make it up again, and tell each other that it was madness to waste their few precious hours in a quarrel, and they would take a drink or two, and play old records on a portable gramophone, and dance solemnly around a hotel bedroom to the old-fashioned beat of tunes like ‘Always’, and ‘Missouri City Waltz’, before going to bed and lying awake hour after hour in one another’s arms.
They always quarrelled over the same thing, Ted’s obstinate refusal to leave the Merchant Navy and organise another dance band ashore.
Ted had changed too. He had never been the same man since a German violinist had told him about what went on in Dachau and Sachenhausen. After his own terrible experiences adrift in the South Atlantic, Margy thought he would have had enough of adventure and been glad to come ashore, as he might have done with honour, having won himself a medal and passed beyond the age limit of compulsory service. But the medal only seemed to stimulate his martial ardour and after three weeks at home he found himself another berth and sailed off to Quebec.
On the way back his convoy was attacked by aircraft in the Bay of Biscay, and Ted actually operated a gun but he did not tell her about this until much later, after he had taken a short gunnery course, sailed on a Malta convoy, and been shipwrecked for the second time.
He told her very little about his travels and adventures, knowing how bitterly she opposed his participation in the war. He could never persuade her to share his disgust with Hitler and Hitler’s methods of waging war. She continued to regard the war as a dreadful bore, a mere nuisance that had been the means of breaking up the orchestra, and sending more than half its members to the Isle of Man. By this time, however, he had learned to accept her attitude, and to write it off as a woman’s inability to concern herself with anything outside her purely personal sphere, but it did make things very difficult when it came to saying good-bye again, and it often saddened him to think, as he could not help thinking, that their unique comradeship as business partners and man and wife had been ruined, and could never recover its prewar harmony.
He was away now, on an Arctic convoy to Murmansk, and she was forced to put him out of mind for days at a time, for the awful risks that he must be running up there in the northern mists simply did not bear thinking about! She therefore absorbed herself in her tours, trailing about from camp to camp in the company of middle-aged musicians, ageing comedians, and bottom-pinching baritones, until the succession of Sunday trains and dismal one-night billets, began to depress her so much that she almost wished she was dead and done with it, and that Ted was dead too, for she told herself that she was not generous enough to think of him married to anyone else after the war.
It was in this wretched frame of mind that she volunteered to join a company about to embark on a North African tour, even though this meant that when Ted came home again she would not be there to join him, wherever he might land. She wondered whether this would annoy him, or whether it would provide fresh fuel for his raging fires of patriotism and give him the chance to boast to his messmates that he now had a wife engaged in overseas combat with Hitler.
Jean Hargreaves felt very sorry for her, particularly as she herself was so settled and happy, in spite of the war and all the upset it had involved. Her baby (already known in advance as ‘Winston Hargreaves’ along this end of the Avenue) was a few days overdue, and still kicking inside her, instead of in the glossy new pram that awaited it under the stairs, but he could not be long in arriving now, and although she found difficulty in going up and down stairs she felt far better in health than she had ever felt, and Philip, sweet thing, was so wonderfully gentle with her, just like the husbands she had sketched for the magazine illustrations during her ten-year search for the Ideal British Male.
Sometimes
, when she answered his quiet smile from the other side of the fireplace, she found it difficult to believe that her quest had ended so spectacularly and that she had actually found the pot of gold under the rainbow.
During the first few weeks of their marriage she had retained a nervous fingertip on the handbrake of happiness, half-certain that, sooner or later, this delicious coast along the levels of content would end at the switchback of disillusion. She would soon, she thought, be brought face to face with some dreadful defect in Philip’s character. He would suddenly reveal himself as a secret drinker, or a drug addict, or, if not that, at least display some unpleasant and hitherto unexpected characteristic that destroyed his flawlessness as a mate, a mulish obstinacy perhaps, or clumsiness as a lover, or perhaps just an irritating habit, like the scattering of cigarette ash on her polished floors.
Nothing like this happened, however, and now, to crown her happiness, she was going to have Philip’s Winston, and there would probably be a young Philip, or a young Jeannie to follow, so that whole vistas of delight stretched endlessly ahead of them, particularly now that Philip had been invalided from the A.F.S., and held a responsible post with the London Bridge Insurance Company, with a salary and commission of eight hundred a year!
She stayed up with Margy to hear the New Year in on the radio and Philip made tea and brought it in to them on a little tray, spread with a doily!
As the stokes of Big Ben boomed out and 1943 began, he came and sat on the arm of her chair and gently stroked her hair, whilst poor Mrs. Hartnell whose own husband was so far away and in so much danger studiously avoided looking at them but sipped her tea in silence as the strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ issued from the portable.
At a quarter-past twelve when Philip was helping her up the stairs, Jean experienced her first pain and in an instant the serenity of Number Forty-Five was shattered. Margy was called in to assist in getting Jean ready for transfer to the Nursing Home by ambulance and Philip, his firm male poise reduced to a vague dithering that sent him running all over the house with his hands full of “Things-Jean-might-need-at-the-home”, was eventually despatched next door to telephone for the doctor, while Margy took firm charge of operations. She was glad to have something practical to think about.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 42