He showered gifts on her, all kinds of gifts, and on every kind of occasion. He seemed to be able to lay his hands on everything that a girl was likely to need, but could never hope to buy on the miserable allocation of clothing coupons they issued nowadays. Her last book of coupons was still intact (it was the only complete book of coupons in the Avenue) for on Woolston’s weekly day off from the depot they usually spent the whole day in town and made a systematic round of the shops.
Woolston told her to buy whatever she wanted to buy and sat close at hand whilst she made her choices. He was unlike any other man she had met. Not only did he encourage her to spend but also showed an intelligent interest in her purchases. In addition his taste was excellent.
“Not that, Honey! That’s not you, Sugar! You want something a shade lighter. Try the ice blue, Lover!”
At first Elaine found this sort of thing exciting, but it astonished her to discover how quickly she learned to take it for granted. As the summer wore on, and they passed the first anniversary of their engagement, she began to wish that he would show her attentions of another kind, attentions that had nothing to do with the outward trappings of courtship, but could be regarded as evidence that she produced an effect upon him as a woman, and not simply as a well-groomed and expensively-dressed companion in a theatre or a restaurant.
She told herself that it was ridiculous to quibble with Fortune when she was basking in Fortune’s smiles, when any woman in the whole of wartime London would have rushed to change places with her, and enjoy his prodigal generosity, but despite his attentiveness, and the steady flow of expensive gifts, Elaine had begun to feel more and more uneasy about Lieutenant Ericssohn’s qualifications as a lover. She found it impossible to get used to his curious offhandedness when they were alone, and enjoying the privacy of Number Forty-Three.
Every man with whom she had been alone in the past had set out to make the most of it, but here was Woolston, to whom she was officially engaged and to whom, presumably, she was soon to be married, not seeming to mind whether he was alone with her or not.
She gave him plenty of opportunities. When he called for her to go out she usually greeted him in her underclothes, exuding, moreover, the expensive perfumes that he was always bringing her. She played soft, dreamy numbers on the gramophone until some of her records began to fault. When they returned, late at night, she mixed him drinks that would have encouraged most of the Englishmen she had known to pounce before she had time to turn on the gas-fire and warm the room! On two occasions she had called to him to bring her things she needed while she was in the bath, but he had only drifted in with a magazine in his hand and put the articles she had demanded on the chair, going out again without so much as a glance at her.
At first she put it all down to his Southern chivalry, to a code that strictly forbade him to take advantage of her until they were actually man and wife. Even so, it was disturbing to have to admit that he seemed in no hurry at all to get married, and that whenever she raised the subject he began to talk vaguely of prospects of being sent overseas at any moment, or stress the difficulties of coaxing the requisite permits and sanctions out of Uncle Sam.
All things considered he was the most baffling man she had ever encountered. With any other man, with anyone less generous, or less obviously pleased to be seen in her company, she might have resolved her doubts by openly inviting seduction, and thus bringing matters to a head but all her instincts warned her against taking this irrevocable step, for Great Providers, as she had already discovered to her cost, did not grow on the Avenue laburnums, and unless she could be absolutely certain of so arranging matters that they resulted in immediate marriage then perhaps it was better to be satisfied with a good night kiss in the hall, the kind of kiss that no man, not even Esme as a callow youth, had offered as a pledge of desire.
Matters stood like this on the night of the wolf hunt, the night that she was confronted with an aspect of the Deep South that had so far been confined to the cinema and the popular novel.
They had returned late to Number Forty-Three after a visit to the West End, to see the long-running farce Arsenic and Old Lace and she had gone into the kitchen to make coffee.
It was an airless night, so she opened the kitchen door and as she was getting milk from the pantry she heard a disturbance in the meadow behind the house. At first she took little note of it, the G.I.s were always skylarking out there with girls, but suddenly the vague sounds became sharper and a girl screamed above the growl of men’s voices. Because there was urgency in the scream she ran to Woolston, whom she surprised, peeping out through the curtains.
“You’d better go out there,” she said, “it sounds as if someone’s in trouble!”
At that moment the girl screamed again, and they heard the slam of their back gate and running feet on the path. Elaine hurried back into the kitchen just as a tousled girl in her late ’teens rushed in, slamming and locking the door, and putting her back to it.
Elaine recognised the girl at once. She was one of the Rawlingsons, from Number Seventy or thereabouts, a teeming, slightly rackety family, who had moved in to the Avenue from a bombed area nearer the city. The girl was badly scared and almost incoherent.
“What’s happening out there?” Elaine asked her. “What’s going on?”
The girl began to sob and Elaine led her away from the door and pushed her into a chair. Woolston came in from the sitting-room but even before the girl began to speak Elaine noticed that his expression was curiously bleak.
In a few minutes the girl calmed down sufficiently to pour out a story. She and a coloured American had been crossing the meadow from the wood when they had been set upon by a party of white Americans, half a dozen or so, and all apparently drunk. They had attacked Buck, the Negro, and two of them had held her and finally dragged her away from the group, and shouted at her to go home. She had run into Number Forty-Three because she saw a chink of light.
As she finished her story renewed uproar broke out from the meadow. There was the sound of scuffling, general shouting, and then one loud cry and the thud of running feet.
“Go out and stop it, Woolston,” said Elaine, “I’ll look after the girl.”
She stopped, for he did not move, and his expression hardened as he said:
“You get that broad outer here, honey! It’s just a wolf hunt, and that nigger had it coming to him, I guess!”
She stared at him, uncomprehendingly, and then, as she realised what was in his mind, she jumped back from the girl and faced him, angrily.
“You can’t just stand there and do nothing,” she shouted, “you’re an officer and you’ve got to stop them!”
“Honey, you wouldn’t understand! You just get that broad outa here, like I said!”
“If you won’t go, I will,” snapped Elaine and unlocked the door. He was beside her instantly, his hand on hers.
“Okay, okay!” he said, savagely, “but I don’t want to get mixed up in this business. I tell you that nigger was uppity and had it comin’ to him!”
He tore open the door and went into the garden. They heard his unhurried steps on the path as the last shouts subsided. Elaine turned to the Rawlingson girl.
“Are you all right? You sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” said the girl, beginning to snivel again. “I…I don’t know why they set upon him like that, he wasn’t doing anything…he was nice…!”
“You get on home as quick as you can.…Here, go this way through the front, and don’t say anything about this, d’you understand? If you like you can come and see me tomorrow, but don’t go near that camp again!”
She half-pushed the girl into the hall and opened the front door.
“Remember, don’t go near that camp again!”
The girl seemed dazed but Elaine pushed her out and shut the door, returning to the kitchen as Woolston came in. She was surprised to see that he was smiling.
“Well?”
“It was like I said, th
ey just beat him up a little.”
“Did you catch any of them?”
His eyes opened wide. “Catch them? No, honey, I didn’t aim to let ’em see me around!”
“But what’s happened to the Negro?” Elaine demanded.
“He’s still out there, I guess. I don’t figger he’ll neck any more white girls for the duration.”
“You mean…he’s injured?”
Woolston locked the door and remained with his back to it.
“Listen, honey, don’t you worry yourself over that nigger! He’s had it comin’ to him a long time and I guess the boys just got around to fixing him! Hi, where you goin’ now?”
“I’m going to ’phone the police,” said Elaine, flatly.
He jumped forward. “Police! Goddam it, you can’t bring civilians into a thing like this! Don’t you go near that ’phone, honey!”
She looked him up and down and there was contempt in the glance.
“Listen to me, Woolston. A man’s lying out there injured, and I don’t give a damn whether he’s black, white or khaki, he’s going to get attention so long as I know about it! Now then, do you notify the police and ambulance or do I?”
He met her eyes and realised there was no evading the issue. He sighed and hitched his belt.
“Okay, okay, but you’re playin’ with fire, honey!I’ll get on to the dee-pot since you insist, but right after that you an’ me got talking to do!”
He ’phoned the depot and within minutes they heard a car move along the cart track between Number Nineteen and the bombed site. He went out to the gate again but was back in a few moments. He found her in the sitting-room, swallowing a large gin.
“You got to get one thing straight, honey,” he told her, helping himself to a drink. “Where I come from you don’t stick your neck out when folks are taking it out on an uppity nigger! If you don’t want to take part yourself you don’t see nothing, and you don’t hear nothing, get me?”
She realised then that she was seeing a different Woolston, a stranger with eyes that somehow reminded her of the fanatical eyes of old Holy Joe, the suburb’s sandwich man, who throughout her childhood, had patrolled the streets with a sandwich-board bearing the crimson-lettered warning: ‘Beware of the Wrath to Come!’ She was aware, of course, of his attitude towards coloured people, and his laconic comments on the subject had been supplemented by odd references to the problem in books and newspapers, but until now she had never been aware that his approach was anything more than an idiosyncrasy on his part, and on the part of Southerners generally. It had never seemed a prejudice strong enough to sanction a brutal assault on another human being, or a callousness permitting an officer to leave one of his men lying injured and unattended in a field.
She was so shocked that she felt slightly sick and wanted to be rid of him as quickly as possible. She put down her glass and went into the hall.
“You’d better go now, Woolston. We’ll talk about it tomorrow!”
He nodded, slowly, as though he was relieved that she showed no further disposition to discuss the matter.
“Okay,” he said, shortly, “Good night, honey!” and he kissed her cheek with his customary detachment.
She went back to the kitchen and made some coffee, taking it into the bedroom and sitting in front of the gas-fire, brooding on the incident.
How could people be so inhuman as that? How could a person as mature as Woolston justify such an act in this day and age? What was it to him, or to those other men, that the girl Rawlingson liked to walk out with a coloured soldier? What would it be like in America, where this kind of thing was presumably commonplace? Wolf hunt! He had it coming to him! He was uppity, so beat him, kill him!
Suddenly, and with an odd sense of relief, she began to think of Archie, and Archie’s letter.
She wondered why he should suddenly come into her mind, at a moment like this, when she was feeling upset, confused and frightened. Could it be because, of all the men in whose arms she had lain, Archie alone seemed strong, sane, and predictable?
She found his letter, reading it again in the light of the bedside lamp. She knew then that she would go and see him, soon, as soon as it could be arranged, for there was no one else who could advise her about Woolston, the man whom she was supposed to be marrying, for somehow, from someone, she had to have advice, even if it meant going inside a prison to get it. She had never needed advice before, but she needed it now, and Archie was the only person qualified to give the kind of advice she sought.
She made up her mind instantly and, as always once she had made a decision, she felt better at once. She undressed quickly, finished her coffee, and turned out the light, listening. Presently, the sound she was waiting for came from the cart track, the slow crunch of tyres on loose gravel, as a vehicle pulled out of the track and turned right towards Shirley Rise.
By the time the beat of its engine had died away she was asleep.
The two radiant smiles that Elaine had bestowed upon the young prison officer showed an immediate profit. She was directed to the centre seat in the visitor’s room, where couples faced one another over the wire grill that topped a long counter, and the chair she was given was thus the chair furthest from the warders, who seated themselves one at each end of the long room.
Archie was already there awaiting her and she was agreeably surprised by his appearance. He had lost a good deal of his flabbiness and he looked, she thought, surprisingly fit and alert. The excitement of her visit had brought a heavy flush to his cheeks, and when she smiled at him through the wire mesh, his eyes lit up with pleasure and he braced his broad shoulders in a way she remembered him doing in the past whenever he was on the point of cracking a joke.
He cracked one now, a small and ironic one, but a joke that lacked wryness.
“Well, Elaine, and how’s this for a nice, country seat? Big place! Takes a lot of your money to keep it up!”
“You look wonderfully fit, Archie,” she told him. “How are you doing?”
“Time,” he said cheerfully, “but not much more of it!”
“You mean you’ll be out soon?”
The eagerness in her voice did not escape him, and his grin broadened.
“In less than two months but what’s that to you? You’re tied up with a rich Yank, I hear!”
“Who told you that?”
“Oh, I heard it from the Old Man. He and I have more or less made it up, you know!”
“He’s been here to visit you?”
“No, he wanted to but I wouldn’t let him. He writes tho’, and so does that dear little body at Number Four, Edith Clegg.”
“Well, I never!” exclaimed Elaine, surprised without knowing why.
“Tell me about this Yank, Elaine. Is he really in the dough, I mean, apart from what those boys pick up in the forces over here?”
“He’s got plenty of money,” said Elaine, slowly. “He owns a lot of property in the South.”
“And I must say you look as if he was throwing it about!” said Archie, with a wink.
She was a little disconcerted by his manner. Without knowing exactly what to expect she had taken it for granted that he would be subdued by his circumstances, or, if he showed spirit (which she thought more than likely) then he would also show bitterness. As it was, his attitude indicated neither meekness or defiance. He was certainly not cowed, and he obviously did not resent her enjoying good luck, so much better luck than he had enjoyed of late.
She wondered if he had come to terms with his sentence and whether the experience had done anything to blunt the cutting edge of his aggressive egotism. Almost immediately he indicated that this was so. Looking straight into her eyes he said:
“Well, jolly good luck to you, Elaine! I’m glad one of us backed a winner!”
“I’m not at all sure that Woolston is what you’d call a winner,” she heard herself saying.
She had not meant to give so much away but somehow she had lost the initiative. “He’s got money,
Archie, stacks and stacks of it I imagine, but well…I don’t know.…!”
She stopped, biting her lower lip, uncertain how she could explain the impulse that had driven her to visit him. She realised that she could hardly discuss the wolf hunt or express the doubts about Woolston within hearing of prison officers, and all these other people conducting their low conversations on each side of her, but she nevertheless felt the need to give him some sort of hint, something to think about, and hope for, during the interval that must elapse before she visited him again, or their paths crossed again after his release.
“Well, Elaine?”
He was waiting, his face alight with interest.
“I don’t know…he’s…he’s so slow…. Sometimes I think he’s…well…almost…you know….”
“A queer?”
“Well, a bit of one.”
He threw back his head and laughed, and at the sound of his laughter the red-faced officer looked up sharply, and the tiny woman sitting beside Elaine glanced at Archie reproachfully, as though he was mocking the solemnity of place and occasion.
“I’m sorry, Elaine,” he apologised, “but it strikes me as so funny, you getting mixed up with that kind of monkey! Still….” Suddenly he was quite serious again. “I wouldn’t let that worry you, not if you can actually land him, of course! I’ve heard about marriages like that and they can be made to work, although that may seem a bit of a tall story! Maybe you could come to some kind of arrangement later on and that’s been known too, believe me!”
She was irritated now, and annoyed with herself for giving him such a splendid opening. She looked sideways at the warder, hoping that he would stand up and say it was time to go, but Archie was very quick to notice the change and at once set out to mend matters.
“Let’s forget the Yank, Elaine. Tell me about the Avenue. We’ve only got another minute or so!”
“There’s nothing you don’t know about the dreary old Avenue, if you’ve been hearing from your father and Miss Clegg,” she told him. “You’ll have heard all about the double wedding, of course. I saw Esme and your sister, Judy that day, and I wished them both luck. They’re going to be all right now. Esme’s over me completely and she’s madly in love with him. She always had been, you know.”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 51