The Dreaming Suburb Read online

  Jim Carver, having no key, had to ring the front bell. While he was waiting for one of the children to let him in, his eye took in the house that Ada had written so much about. Its general appearance surprised him. The Carvers had never yet lived in a house with a front garden, or a festoon of dropping chains between front door and the pavement. They had never occupied a house with three bedrooms and a bathroom, or a house that was within easy reach of open country, and they had never expected to move into a neighbourhood where some of the houses had names as well as numbers.

  Studying the multi-coloured panes in the upper half of the front door, Jim thought he could appreciate Ada's references in her letters to the cost of living back home. He found it difficult to understand why she had moved the family right out here, and into a neighbourhood so obviously superior to the one they had left behind in Bermondsey.

  Louise let him in, her plain, pale face pinched with anxiety, and lack of sleep; Louise, the patient, the stand-by, the uncomplaining, her protruding blue eyes clouded with grief, her loose mouth, as always, slightly open, and her big, ungainly feet planted at a near-Chaplin angle, as though better to take the weight of family cares that had been piled on her shoulders since Jim went to war so long ago.

  He smiled at her absent-mindedly, for everyone was absent-minded towards Louise, and dumping his kit-bag beside the hallstand, said:

  “How is she, Lou? I'll go right up, shall I?”

  She called out to him before his long legs had covered three stairs.

  “Wait, Dad!”

  He turned then, and knew on the instant. At all times Louise found difficulty in expressing herself. Now, she was hopelessly out of her depth.

  He came back to her, and stood holding the newel-post of the banisters. He made no outcry. He was very familiar with death.

  “When did it happen?” he asked, very quietly.

  Louise moistened her lips but said nothing. At that moment Archie came out of the kitchen.

  “Yesterday,” he said, and left it at that.

  Jim went slowly upstairs, his clumsy boots skidding on the polished linoleum. Dear God, he thought, over here the people still polish floors, even while they're dying.

  He went in, and lifted the patched sheet from his wife's face, wondering as he did so if her angular features would touch him, as the dead boy's face had touched him, opposite the machine-gun nest outside Mons last November. When he found it did not, a tiny spasm of guilt gripped him, and then went away again. After all, Ada had lived over half the normal span, and that boy, sprawled on the clay bank, had hardly lived at all.

  He replaced the sheet and went over to pull up the blinds. It occurred to him then that the customs of a dead world, the world of Victorian and Edwardian England, were still practised here—blinds drawn for death, sheets laid across the faces of the newly-dead. It seemed to him incredible that people still did this sort of thing, almost as though they had never heard of places like Passchendaele and Messines Ridge, where the bones of the dead were welcome landmarks to the ration parties, and stretcher-bearers coming up from supports.

  He went back to the bed, and sat beside it, touching his dead wife's hand through the thin blanket. The vague sense of guilt returned, demanding that he should experience grief, but he felt none. Instead, his mind returned again to the dead boy at Mons, perhaps the last casualty of the war—and if not the last, then certainly the most pointless, for when the bullets cut him down, German emissaries were already driving to a rendezvous, with the white flag flying on the car bonnet.

  Perhaps it was this knowledge, acquired by Sergeant Carver during a call on Signals, the previous evening, that made the memory of the boy's death so poignant and bitter. The order to attack that particular post had been an act of murder. The two gaunt Bavarians manning it would have retired, Armistice or no Armistice, long before dawn. Yet, despite Carver's protest, despite his pointing this out to the pot-bellied Major, fresh from base, and thirsting for blood, the attack had been ordered. A few grenades had been thrown, there was a thin spatter of fire from the gun, and the section had crossed the bank with a single casualty—the kid.

  When the gun had been dismantled Carver went back over the captured ground. It was fortunate for the Major that he had returned to battalion headquarters immediately prior to the skirmish. If he had come upon “B” platoon sergeant when he was engaged in removing the kid's identity disc he might have been the final British casualty of the war.

  Carver never saw the Major again but he remembered what was inscribed on the disc—“Private Barnes, J. T. Number 2727650. C. of E.”. He remembered his face, too, and would always remember it, as a symbol of crass stupidity, and of a scheme of things that made such sacrifices possible.

  For more than four years Sergeant Carver, tanner, meat salesman, and trench veteran, had fought the German Kaiser. On the final day of the war he changed sides. From now on he was to fight his own people.

  The wail of a cornet from the road brought him out of his reverie. From the bay window he saw one of the ex-Serviceman's street bands moving slowly along the Avenue. The cornet player, and a one-armed banjoist, his instrument buckled to his chest, were playing Tipperary, while a third member of the the team knocking on the doors, and jingling a cap in front of anyone who passed.

  He saw young Archie go out and point upwards, towards the porch window. The man with the cap looked confused and hurried away. The music stopped, to start again further down the Avenue.

  The incident helped Jim to concentrate on the present. The habit of discipline, of the will to survive, reasserted itself, and he began to grapple with immediate problems. Had anyone done anything about the funeral? How soon could he get demobilised? What kind of job could be found in a strange district? How were the eight of them going to fit into a three-bedroomed house, and what had happened to the latest twins, the girls he had never seen?

  He kissed Ada on the brow and went out, locking the door. Before going downstairs he toured the upper floor, noting that a reshuffle of bedrooms would be necessary, now that there were four of either sex living in the house.

  Louise called him from the kitchen.

  “I've made a stew, Dad. You must be hungry!”

  He clumped into the tiled kitchen, and found the children crowded round three sides of the table, with Louise already ladling from the saucepan.

  He sat down, and for a moment nobody spoke. He realised they were waiting for a lead, and the awkward silence embarrassed him. He tried to think of something to say, but the utter inadequacy of family small talk kept him silent. Louise concentrated on the plates, and even Archie avoided his eye.

  Suddenly Judith, the eight-year-old, burst into tears, and pushed her plate away. The odd tension broke as Louise's arm shot round her.

  “Try, Judy—please try,” she pleaded. “Daddy won't like it if you don't; Daddy wants you to try!”.

  The child's puffy face, framed in dark curls, touched Carver. He got up, and lifting Judith from her chair sat down in her place, putting the child on his knee. He spooned a slice of dumpling into her mouth and was absurdly gratified when she swallowed it, and smiled suddenly, nestling closer to him. He noticed then that she had brown eyes, like his own, and that her hair was deep chestnut, like his mother's. His contact with her melted something, far down in his breast, and he felt his eyelids twitch. Unable to speak, he twisted his mouth into a smile and immediately, to his intense relief, a ripple of smiles answered him from all sides of the table.

  He cleared his throat and spooned up a mash of carrot and onion—there was barely a shred of meat on the plate.

  “It's all right now,” he told them; “I'll be home very soon and everything's going to be all right.”

  “Will we move again?” Boxer, the bull-headed twin, wanted to know.

  Jim shook his head.

  “I'm glad,” Boxer went on. “Me an' Berni like it here, don't we, Berni?”

  Berni grinned, and Carver recalled then that Ada had writ
ten telling him that the six-year-olds, Boxer and Berni, although utterly unlike in appearance, had behaved as though they were a single individual from the moment they could crawl. Other fragments of her letters came back to him—Judith, the one on his knee, kissed his photograph every night before she was tucked up; Archie, the eldest boy, had taken to wearing coloured socks and going out with girls; Louise was such a help, and had been having trouble with her teeth —a mass of uncorrelated family gossip that he had read, primarily as a duty, in dugout and billet and base hospital over the years. Out there he seemed to have lost all touch with the children and if he thought of them at all it was as a group, not as individuals.

  He went back to his own chair, and under cover of spoonfuls of stew he took a cautious look at them, noting that they were doing the same to him. Poor little devils, he thought; how much simpler it would have been if Ada had survived, and he had died out there. At least they would have had the pension.

  Suddenly his eye met Boxer's and Boxer winked. It was a solemn, man-to-man, “this-is-a-bit-of-a-fiasco” wink. Jim grinned, and Berni, watching Boxer, outgrinned the pair of them.

  All at once a curious sense of well-being possessed Carver and, with it, a ready acceptance of responsibility. So he had felt when a new draft of recruits had been handed over to him, before going up the line during the uneventful nights before the March push, but this time it was without the accompanying knowledge that, in a matter of weeks, days even, most of the youngsters would be dead, blinded, or maimed. These children would not be called upon to face a creeping barrage, and none of them would lie out on a clay bank, with machine-gun bullets embedded in their bodies. It was all over, and he had survived. There was some sort of future. He, and all the other survivors, would make quite sure there was a future, and that Private Barnes, No. 2727650, would be the last youth to throw away his life at the behest of a pot-bellied base Major. Without doubt, the very last one.

  “Where are the babies?” he suddenly demanded. “Why aren't they here? Who's looking after them?”

  “The District Nurse took them down to the Settlement, and said they could stay,” faltered Louise. “When Mum was so ill I couldn't manage ... they kept crying....”

  He reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

  “You've been fine ... fine, Lou. I'll get somebody before I go back. I don't know where or how, but I'll get somebody. Here, I expect you'll need this,” and he pulled two folded pound notes out of his breeches pocket, and laid them beside her.

  Boxer's eyes widened, and he nudged the steadily gulping Berni.

  “Look, Berni ... it's money!”

  Jim's mouth twitched, this time involuntarily. There was something irresistibly comic about Boxer's bullet head, and the way his pink ears stood out, reminding Jim of a ditched ammunition lorry with both doors swinging free.

  “That's housekeeping,” said Jim; “this is for you—new ones!” And his hand emerged once more from his breeches pocket, holding a pile of new sixpences. Ceremoniously he placed a coin in front of each twin, and a third in Judith's free hand.

  Archie, who had said nothing so far, put his hand in his pocket and jerked it to and fro. He drew it out and scattered a pile of coppers on the cloth.

  “Share 'em out, kids,” he said, getting up suddenly. He winked, heavily, in Jim's direction, and at that moment yet another fragment of one of Ada's letters came back to Carver. “Archie's earning, and never seems to be short. He's saving for a motor-cycle. He helps me sometimes.”

  Archie got up, stretched, and lit a cigarette from a packet of Goldflake. He performed these movements with studied nonchalance. Watching him out of the corner of his eye, Jim marked the challenge in the way the boy blew smoke through his nose. There was something aloof and vaguely contemptuous in Archie's attitude, almost as though, after four years' reign as the man about the house, he resented his father's return, and was by no means ready to abdicate. “He helps me sometimes”—Jim wondered grimly how often, and quietly prepared for battle.

  CHAPTER III

  Prince Wakes Beauty

  1

  THE Frasers, mother and son, moved into Number Twenty-Two the week Mrs. Carver died, and Esme, from his mother's bedroom, watched the funeral party leave for Shirley churchyard.

  Although only eight years old, Esme was no stranger to death, and a funeral was not a new experience.

  Less than a month ago they had buried Grannie Fraser, and Esme himself had ridden with his mother in the first carriage that had set out from the tall house in Kensington, where he had grown up, to Waterloo Station, and thence to Woking.

  A few days later the Kensington house was sold, and they came to the Avenue, the house having been found, and purchased on their behalf, by Mr. Harold Godbeer, managing clerk to Stillman and Vickers, the solicitors who administered the estate of Grannie Fraser, and that of her son, the late Lieutenant Guy Fraser, sometime of the London Scottish Regiment.

  Guy Fraser had been killed on the Marne, in 1914, and ever since, his pretty widow and their only child had lived with the Lieutenant's mother.

  There was enough money, from the two estates, to have kept the Kensington house going, but Mr. Harold, who seemed to be taking rather more than a professional interest in the affairs of pretty Eunice Fraser, had persuaded her that this would be both uneconomical and inconvenient, and that a far more sensible course would be to find a little house in a pleasant outer suburb, somewhere not too far from his own bachelor lodging in Lucknow Road, Addiscombe.

  Eunice had let herself be persuaded. Bewildered by the abrupt demise of her husband, who seemed to be beside her in a fetching new uniform one moment, and nothing more than a photograph on the piano the next, she had promptly moored herself to the ample bosom of her formidable Scots mother-in-law, and weathered out the remaining years of the war in Mrs. Fraser's well-staffed, well-ordered, town house, emerging only to tend a stationery stall at a war charities bazaar, or take little Esme to see Peter Pan's statue in Kensington Gardens.

  Eunice was quite unused to fending for herself and floated through the days pleasantly enough, occupying herself, and such mind as she possessed, in looking pretty, playing simple pieces on the piano, gazing into shop-windows, and reading the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood, particularly East Lynne, in which she saw herself as Lady Isobel, prior to that heroine's elopement with the wicked Captain Levison.

  She was, indeed, rather like a mid-nineteenth-century wife from the leisured classes; there had always been a Mr. Carlyle to cosset her, pay her bills, and encourage her belief that life, for all but the collarless manual workers, was a gentle, downstream drift in an Arthurian barge.

  The only girl in a large family, she had been spoiled by her father and brothers. At seventeen she had met Lieutenant (then plain “Mr.”) Fraser, and at eighteen she had married him, and shared his modest private income in a small country house his mother had owned near Ascot.

  She was petite, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, utterly trusting, and quite stupid. Understandably her husband had adored her, for she possessed, in generous measure, that characteristic feminine helplessness sought after by the chivalrous.

  Lieutenant Guy was chivalrous to a fault, so chivalrous in fact that he was blown to pieces by a grenade, whilst kneeling to hold a water-bottle to the mouth of a wounded enemy. In the autumn of 1914 there were still a number of men who saw war in terms of Rupert Brooke's poetry, and the Battle of Zutphen. Even so, Lieutenant Fraser's action, in the midst of a precipitate scramble for cover, so amazed his Company Sergeant Major that he too stopped dead in his tracks, and was shot through the knee by a sniper.

  At eight-and-a-half little Esme was beginning to look like his father. He had the same narrow, sensitive face, large and serious grey eyes, and excessively romantic disposition, part inherited, and part cultivated by the bedtime stories of his gentle mother, and the nineteenth-century romances he pored over in his grandmother's house, from the moment he could tackle three-syllabled words.


  Like his mother Esme was never really aware of the present, but unlike her his mind was not a comfortable vacuum. On the contrary it seethed with action, ranging from single-handed captures of Spanish settlements, to participation in thundering cavalry charges, alongside Rupert of the Rhine, and Warwick the King-maker.

  Gertrude, the old Nannie who had charge of him throughout the Kensington part of his childhood, had been put to some pains to bring him out of these engagements in time for his meals, and his passion for dressing up as a Cavalier, or the right-hand man of the Scarlet Pimpernel, played havoc with his mother's extensive wardrobe.

  He was fond of his mother in the way one is fond of an attractive spaniel bitch wont to curl up cosily out of range of one's feet in front of the fire, but his romantic idealisation of his soldier father claimed a larger share of his thoughts, ousting even Rupert, Jack Shepherd, and the Nevilles. He saw Lieutenant Fraser, not as a quixotic Territorial, whose life was untidily snuffed out in a muddy French turnip field, but as the embodiment of Arthurian manhood who went singing into battle, was killed opposing fantastic odds, and was subsequently borne away by mourning queens to a Flanders Avalon.

  Without even knowing it, his mother gave positive encouragement to the colourful illusion, and consequently Esme was spared, throughout his entire childhood, the bewilderment of a child who has no recollection of his father. Not until he was in his late 'teens, and had read books like Aldington's Death of a Hero, did Esme see Guy Fraser as he actually was at the moment of his death.

  From the time of their settling in Number Twenty-Two, Esme had disliked Harold Godbeer, the over-solicitous solicitor's clerk, and as time went on, and Harold became a daily visitor to the house, the boy's resentment grew into a repugnance that was altogether disporportionate to the earnest little man's shortcomings.

  Harold was spare, eager, bespectacled, and physically frail. He was also fussy, pedantic, and inclined to be pompous. His pomposity was that of a man who had always been unsure of himself, and was at an additional disadvantage when dealing with a woman whose china-blue eyes, and tiny rosebud mouth, caused him to stammer every time he began to speak to her.