He wondered why Archie should have gone to the trouble of seeking out Edith, instead of making a direct approach to himself. Perhaps it was because Edith had spoken up for him in the witness-box and he remembered her as a ‘soft touch’, or perhaps he needed help once again, and was reluctant to ask it of his father?
Frowning over these possibilities Jim knocked at the door of Number Forty-Three and was promptly admitted by Elaine, who greeted him cheerfully, and called up the stairs to Archie before showing him into the front room and asking him if he would care for a drink.
Jim said that he would like a beer and Elaine disappeared to get it, while Archie, in vest and trousers, and with lather drying on his broad, red face, came into the room and shook hands.
“I hear you’re looking for somewhere to live, Dad?” he said directly.
“That’s so and I just got your message from Edith. I didn’t know you knew about me and Miss Clegg, we’ve told hardly anyone down here as yet.”
“Oh, I get around,” said Archie, with a grin, “and I’d like to say right out that I’m all in favour! That old duck is an absolute sweetie-pie and if I can do anything for her I’ll do it, quite apart from helping you out of a jam! How would you like this place?”
“This place? You mean, this house?”
“Sure! Why not? You’d be near everyone you knew, everyone that’s alive and kicking that is!”
“Are you and…Are you moving?”
“We’re going out to Chislehurst the day after tomorrow. We’ve got a peach of a place out there, a small country house, standing in its own grounds. Southern aspect, easy garden, and one of the best views for miles around!”
“Didn’t it cost you a packet, a place like that?”
“No,” said Archie, with a mischievous grin that recalled to Jim how he had looked as a boy. “But we won’t go into that right now! The point is, this place is vacant as from Wednesday, and I’d like you and Miss Clegg to have it as a wedding present!”
Jim sat bolt upright, almost knocking over the glass of beer that Elaine was handing to him at that moment.
“Wedding present! You mean…you want to give us the house?”
“Now don’t go all high-hat, Dad,” growled Archie. “Look at it squarely from her point of view as well as your own! You’re not chickens, either of you, and you can’t afford to splash everything you’ve saved on a terrace house at present-day prices! You’ll be buying at a peak and you’ve got your old age to think of! No matter where you go you won’t rent a furnished place in or out of London that won’t set you back at least a fiver a week; and even then it won’t really be furnished, just dolled up with rubbish. I’d like to give you something, I never have, so far as I remember, and it’s like I said, Edith Clegg was wonderful to me when I was up against it, and I hate being in anyone’s debt! That’s one characteristic that I did inherit from you!”
Jim slowly recovered from the initial shock of the offer and said, slowly:
“Well, I must say it’s…it’s uncommonly generous of you, Archie, and I appreciate it, upon my soul I do! But I just couldn’t accept a wedding present from you that was the equivalent of two thousand pounds! You can’t afford to throw money about like that!”
“How do you know what I can afford?” demanded Archie, so sharply that Elaine at once intervened, sitting down opposite Jim and throwing one elegant leg over the other in a way that revealed to him a flurry of silk and lace.
It was curious, Jim reflected, that Elaine Frith always looked and behaved like a high-class tart, yet her parents had been so respectable and she couldn’t be half as bad as people made out, for this house must surely belong to her, having been made over to her by Esme at the time of their divorce.
She embarrassed him somewhat by appearing to have read his thoughts.
“It was my house,” she told him, “but it isn’t now! Archie bought it from me, a year ago and he paid cash for it with the first money he earned when he started up again. We both want you to have it, because you and Miss Clegg have had such a shocking run of luck lately.”
She smiled very sweetly, Jim thought and noticed for the first time that she was an exceptionally attractive woman.
“Now why don’t you just say ‘yes’ and let Archie feel that he’s done at least one thing in his life without making a clear profit? It’ll do him no end of good and it’ll solve your problem on the spot!”
“Well,” began Jim, already wavering, “I don’t know…. It’s extraordinarily generous of you both, but why not let me buy it at the price he paid you? Or better still, why not sell it for its pre-war price?”
“—!” said Archie, bluntly. “You’ll have it for nix, or you won’t have it at all! I’ll ’phone my solicitors and get the thing fixed up straight away.”
He turned to Elaine. “Give Dad another beer while I get on to Kirtlebury. You’ll have to go in and see him, of course. How about Monday, ten o’clock?”
“Monday’ll do,” said Jim, overwhelmed, “but….”
Archie abruptly left the room as Elaine got up to fill his glass.
“Has Judy had her baby yet?” she asked and, when he told her that it was a week overdue she went on to ask if Esme had been home lately and how little Barbara was settling down in Devonshire. She spoke without a trace of embarrassment, referring to her daughter Barbara as though she was a neighbour’s child.
Jim heard Archie talking rapidly on the ’phone in the next room and sipped his beer thoughtfully.
“I don’t know anything about people,” he told himself. “The older I get the less I know, and I suppose I’ll end up by knowing nothing at all, no more than the day I was born!”
It was all settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Jim brought his few personal possessions along the following day, and Archie and Elaine moved out before the end of the week. Edith accepted a pressing offer by Miss Baker to be married from Number One, and accordingly left her lodgings and returned to the Avenue two or three days before the wedding.
It was not such a quiet wedding after all. Archie and Elaine joined Edgar Frith, and his wife, Frances at the church, and a small group of the older residents, from the big-number end of the Avenue, called in to drink their health. Among the droppers-in were Philip and Jean Hargreaves, now Jim’s next-door neighbours, and there was quite an old-fashioned send-off when Jim and Edith quitted Number One for the station.
They intended leaving London from Waterloo, on their way down to Exeter. Edith had expressed a desire to show Jim the village on the North Devon coast, where she had grown up and which she had not visited for ten years, but they did not go directly to the station, for they had an important call to make en route, and the taxi driver had instructions to convey them to the local station.
Jim shouted: “Hi!” when the hire-car driver took them speeding past Woodside, but the driver grinned and called over his shoulder: “The gentleman told me to take you all the way to Waterloo and paid me in advance, sir!”
“That must have been Archie again,” said Edith. “He’ll never have a penny to bless himself with if he carries on like that!”
“But we don’t want to go to Waterloo yet,” Jim told the driver, “we’ve got to look in on someone at Westminster Hospital!”
“Oh, dear, I’d quite forgot poor Mr. Godbeer,” said Edith. “Drop us to the Westminster Hospital and we’ll get a taxi on from there, driver.”
Jim had paid Harold a weekly visit ever since he had been fit enough to receive visitors. Harold was making slow but steady progress, and could now hobble about the ward on crutches but Jim was increasingly worried by his friend’s occasional fits of depression and had been fighting them for several weeks.
They had managed to save Harold’s legs but the chest wound had almost caused his death during the relapse, in October. Harold’s chest had always been his weak spot and when he developed pneumonia, after two months in hospital, Jim gave him up for lost and had only just convinced himself that Harold would, despite e
verything, ultimately recover from the terrible injuries he had received when the blast had flung him across the garden into the Nursery.
Harold shared his surprise and in his more cheerful moments he even joked about it.
“I’ve been lying here thinking how much it takes to kill a man,” he told Jim, one afternoon. “Here’s me, still alive after all that, yet I can remember the time when I thought I was committing suicide by going down to Woodside without a scarf on a frosty morning!”
“The Hun certainly had it in for you and yours, Harold,” said Jim, doing his best to sound jocular, although the surgeon had told him privately that Harold would be unlikely to recover the full use of his legs. “You must be as tough as hickory, in spite of all that fussing and dosing and gargling you used to do before you caught your train every morning!”
Harold had been pleased about the wedding and had asked Jim to bring Edith to the hospital before they went away. Visiting hours, however, did not officially begin until afternoon, and so he had to cajole special permission from the senior sister.
He was granted the favour and was awaiting them in his wheel-chair when they were shown into a side ward, whither Harold had propelled himself as soon as morning dressings began in the General ward.
Jim felt a little shy presenting Edith as his wife, but Edith at once took the initiative and planted a big, motherly kiss on Harold’s pale forehead.
“You never thought this would happen, did you, Mr. Godbeer?” she exclaimed, and Jim reflected that her entire personality had changed since his Christmas proposal at Caernarvon. He had been conditioned, more or less gradually, to full recognition of her worth in a crisis, but from the moment he had suggested that they should get married all her natural hesitancy of speech and manner had evaporated like mist in sunshine. Where she had apologised and sometimes stammered, she now bubbled and beamed; her appearance had changed too, for she already looked younger and much more alert. At all the other Avenue weddings that she had attended she had worn her tight green costume, bought in the ‘twenties’ and not only sadly out of fashion, but faded and strained at the seams. The old green costume was not having its customary wedding airing today. Instead, she looked smart and trim in a new, tailored two-piece, with hat, gloves, shoes and handbag to match.
Harold was quick to notice the change and teased her, gently.
“My word, Miss Clegg, it looks to me as if you’ve been buying clothing coupons on the black market!”
“Oh, but I have,” replied Edith, unblushingly, “the woman at the place where I was lodging sold me eight of them for two pounds! Was that a fair price do you think?”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know,” said Harold, chuckling, “I always made do on my issue! Will you two be seeing our Judy while you’re in the West?”
“It depends,” Jim told him. “She’s expecting her baby any time now and I’ve arranged to ring her from Exeter. We shall go up to North Devon first and try and see her on the way back, at the week-end. How are you coming along, Harold? You look mobile enough in that odd contraption.”
Harold’s invalid testiness returned.
“Oh, I can move around,” he said glumly, “but I get so damned bored! Do you know how long I’ve been cooped up here now?”
Jim did know, to the very day, but he quickly by-passed the subject and told Harold how Archie had made them a wedding present of Number Forty-Three and that they would therefore continue to live in what was left of the Avenue. Harold whistled but Jim, who knew him very well by this time, noticed a look of sadness steal over his face.
“Oh, well, I suppose I shall have to go back into digs,” he said, dismally, “and I can’t say I like the idea at all, but there’s no sense in buying another house at my time of life.”
Edith decided that she did not like this line of talk at all.
“Now just you stop that, Mr. Godbeer,” she said, severely. “You’ve as many years ahead of you as we have and you know very well that if you want a little place to yourself you can always have part of our house. We should all get along very well together, I’m sure!”
The idea appealed to Jim and he said so at once, but Harold shook his head. Despite the happy occasion he seemed very cast down, thought Jim.
“I couldn’t do that,” he said, “although it’s very kind of you both to offer. You see, the surgeon’s told me about my legs and I don’t want to be a nuisance to anyone. If I did make a fair recovery I’d have to get a place of my own somewhere, and teach myself to stop relying on other people. You understand that, don’t you, Jim?”
Jim did. It was exactly how he would feel in Harold’s circumstances but he said:
“There’s no doubt about you making an almost hundred per cent recovery, Harold, so snap out of it! When they discharge you from here you’d better arrange to spend a few months with us, at least until you find your feet again!” Then, warily: “Exactly what did the surgeon tell you?”
“That the best I can hope for is to be able to get up and down stairs but that I should never be able to do without irons and never be able to walk more than a short distance at a time. It seems that my left leg is now over an inch shorter than the right.”
“People have got about with worse,” said Jim. “Look at Miss Baker, in Number One.”
“Yes, I think of her a good deal,” said Harold, wistfully, “but look here,” he made a determined effort to shake off his gloom, “this isn’t a day for my troubles, I’ve got something for you! One of the probationers went out and bought it for me and if you don’t like it, say so, and we’ll send her out to get something else!”
He fumbled in the folds of the plaid rug that lay across his knees and his hand emerged, holding a long flattish carton, carefully wrapped in Christmas greetings’ paper.
“May we open it here?” asked Jim, after Edith had expressed delight.
“I think you’d better,” said Harold, “you may want to change your minds. It’s a bit unusual but I wanted to give you something more personal than a toast-rack or a pyrex dish!”
The gift was a set of four exquisitely-painted miniatures in oils, all landscapes, and each framed in spinet keys. Jim gasped with surprise and Edith took refuge in a stammer.
“Why they’re bbbbeautiful, Mr. Godbeer! Quite bbbbeautiful! I’ve never had a present anything like that but, bless you, they must have cost a dreadful lot of money and it’s nnnaughty of you, very naughty indeed!”
Harold made little clicking noises with his tongue. “They’re by a chap called Kirkwright, a pupil of Isabey so I’m told. I checked up on them with Edgar Frith, he knows all about such things, and he says they weren’t all that expensive! They aren’t old masters, or anything, but I…well …liked them, and I thought they’d look nice on each side of your fireplace. Little landscapes like that make a room look furnished, if you know what I mean.”
A little probationer with fair hair and china blue eyes peeped into the side ward and addressed Harold with the brittle gaiety that young nurses reserve for male patients who have passed the age of fifty.
“Come along, Mr. Godbeer! It’s your turn now! We mustn’t keep Mr. Hobson waiting, must we?”
Harold, who had been enjoying his dispensation up to then, glowered at her. “I’ll keep him waiting as long as I damn well please,” he growled, so sourly that Jim and Edith exchanged puzzled glances.
“Now, now, Mr. Godbeer, we don’t want a tantrum do we?” said the girl, hovering at the door.
“That’s how they address you in here,” grumbled Harold, completely ignoring her. “Just as if you were about nine and having your tonsils out! ‘We must brush our teeth, mustn’t we?’ ‘It’s time for our supper, isn’t it?’ You put up with it at first, but in time you revolt, that is if they haven’t cut your spirit out on one of their damned operating tables!”
Jim had never heard Harold talk or behave in this way, and thought he would try and sweeten the atmosphere with a little joke.
“Is he a terribly diffi
cult patient, nurse?” he asked, smiling.
“He wasn’t, until he was allowed up,” said the probationer, unsmilingly. “Now do come along, Mr. Godbeer, or you’ll get me into trouble with Sister!”
Harold had now lapsed into a sulk and he looked so much like a thwarted adolescent that Jim had great difficulty in keeping a straight face.
“Pop on down and get a taxi, Edith,” he said, “I’ll bring him along in one minute, nurse!”
The probationer shrugged and left, Edith giving Harold another kiss and following her, after receiving a sly nudge from Jim.
When they were alone, Jim said:
“You’re a good deal lower than you were last week, Harold. Is there any special reason?”
“Yes, there is,” said Harold, who now looked a little ashamed of himself.
“Well?”
“I didn’t tell you everything just now. The fact is that Hollandby, the top surgeon, was here on Monday. He says he could promise a much better recovery if I submitted to another operation in a few weeks’ time.”
He avoided looking at Jim and his fingers plucked nervously at the folds of the rug. Jim saw that his hand shook and that the taut skin of his forehead was glistening with perspiration. He put his arm on Harold’s shoulder and at his touch Harold shuddered.
“I can’t face up to another, Jim, I can’t! It may sound dam’ silly to you but it’s the truth! I’ve had as much as I can stand! All I want is to get out of here and make do, even if I have to crawl about on hands and knees!”
Jim kicked the door shut. “Tell me! Tell me exactly what difference this new op is likely to make! Come on, you can tell me, old chap.”
With a big effort Harold pulled himself together.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 61