The Dreaming Suburb (23 page)

Simply that, as if Rudi had been a mere Balkan monarch, or a British Prime Minister. Valentino dead! And nobody even knew that he had been suffering from indigestion, or migraine.

Edith stopped, and gazed fixedly across the width of Shirley Rise. It was as though, after a single, terrifying thunder-flash, a yawning chasm had opened up beneath her feet, and the solid structures of the semi-detached houses on her immediate left had begun to bulge, crumble, and slide into rubble beside her.

She stood there for nearly a minute. Unheeding traffic moved up from Lower Road, stirring little eddies of summer dust. An odd pedestrian or two meandered in and out of Piretta's grocery shop, buying Monkey Brand, and Sunlight Soap, and tinned salmon, just as if the sun was still in the sky, and the world was still spinning on its course.

At last she was able to totter across to'the shop. She could not ask for a paper, but fumbled in her purse, and put a penny on the counter. Emerging into the bright sunlight again she knew that she could not go on to work. She turned back towards the Lane, found a fallen elm, and sat on it a long time, before she had sufficient resolution to look at the headlines.

To her intense surprise there was nothing in them concerning Rudi. The main headline dealt with the relatively minor event of Germany entering the League of Nations; and lower, down, the excessively trivial one of Spain leaving it. This lack of confirmation afforded her a brief spasm of hope. Perhaps it was all a cruel hoax, or a false rumour?

She began to hunt through the pages, scanning each column. Then she turned the paper over, and saw the stop-press, printed in red. There, at last, was the dreadful confirmation:
“Star's death. Rudolph Valentino, the film star, died after an operation in California today.”

Just that! Just the bald and terrible fact! Not a word about what kind of operation, or the shattering effect such a paragraph would have upon countless millions throughout the world.

She sat on the elm bole a long, long time. She could not remember feeling like this before, not even when Becky ran away, or was found, reclaimed, and brought home to the Vicarage, speechless, bruised, and half an idiot. On that occasion she had been able to act, to argue with her father and the Bishop, to nurse her sister, to throw herself into the
desperate search for Becky's lost wits. This was very different. There was nothing whatever she could
do,
not even send a wreath, not even attend the funeral.

At last she got up, and began to walk unsteadily down Shirley Rise towards the cinema. She felt that she had to talk to someone about it, and who better, who handier, than Mr. Billings, who had such a stake in Rudi? She felt light-headed, and faintly bilious.

At the junction of Delhi Road, Archie Carver came out of the shop carrying a tub of apples. He noticed her vacant look and called—as he called to all regular customers:

“Lovely afternoon, Miss Clegg!”

Edith neither heard nor saw him.

4

In a sense, Edith Clegg did attend Valentino's funeral. She bought every edition of every newspaper that came her way. She read every word describing the fantastic scenes at the morticians' parlour (what a funny way to describe an undertaker's shop !) and, unlike the mourners, described in millions of words that poured across the Atlantic, she did not need a slice of onion concealed in a handkerchief. She wept genuine tears all that week, and Becky, who helped her to hang the crepe over the signed photographs, wept in sympathy, although she had never seen a Valentino film, and regarded the author of all this grief as “a dear boy Edith had liked so much”.

When all was over, when Press releases from Hollywood began to filter down to the inside pages, Edith steamed Rudi's pictures from her walls, and put them carefully away in the drawer of her large wardrobe. There were many empty spaces in the gallery and—for the time being—she preferred them empty. Fairbanks was well enough, and Navarro had a good deal of Rudi's charm, but neither of them could take the place of The Sheik.

Nobody ever did.

THE
schooldays of most boys are lit by a single personality. Other men emerge, masters are remembered for an odd trick of speech, an idiosyncrasy of manner, a fad that singles them out as fair game for the Junior School mimic, but these men are seldom more than background figures. There is always one figure that dwarfs them, that remains centre stage, year after year, until his personality is imprinted on a boy's mind for all time.

Such a man, for Esme Eraser, was “Longjohn” Silverton, who reigned as headmaster of Godley Grammar School from the time he limped out of the hospital for plastic surgery cases, in the Spring of 1920, until many of his pupils were old enough to take part in the second round of Armageddon.

In some ways it was a tragedy for Esme that Mr. Silverton made no real impression on him until he had been a pupil at the Grammar School for more than two years. By that time Esme was rising fifteen, and his character was formed. The best that Silverton could do was to give Esme a push or two in a more promising direction, but by then it was nearly too late. The spell of the Carver twins had been laid upon Esme for several years.

Longjohn was not the conventional type of “popular” headmaster. His was not the hearty man-to-man approach, the back-slapping, rib-nudging, honour-of-the-school technique. He conjured up no visions of Arnold, or even Mr. Chips. He was lean, ravaged, silent, and terrifyingly down-to-earth in his approach to boys. The staff found him enigmatical, abstracted, and moodily aloof, and to most parents he was blunt to the point of rudeness. Fathers and mothers—particularly mothers—did not take to Mr. Silverton, and
many of them were afraid of him. Yet no boy was ever afraid of Silverton, and that was something that staff and parents found hard to understand.

In appearance, Longjohn was spare, frosty, and hardbitten. The plastic surgeons, whilst repairing most of the exterior damage wrought by a flammenwerfer at Bois des Buttes, had done little to improve his looks. The contours of his cheeks were uneven, and when he was tired, or exasperated, the taut flesh began to twitch. His eyes had miraculously survived the blast of flame. They were deep brown, and extraordinarily mild, but the shrinking of the skin on his forehead, and above the bridge of his nose, had deepened the sockets, and puckered the lids, so that the eyes now appeared sunken and apathetic. He had other injuries, causing a curious, shuffling walk, and an odd posture when he stood on the dais in the main hall, but he made very light of these, so light indeed that he drew no war pension after 1924.

Silverton had that curious sense of peace and balance that was a legacy of front-line survival. Emotionally he was difficult to disturb, but he could pretend to cold, devastating anger if he thought anger served a good purpose. He had a deep love of scholarship, and a strange abiding tolerance with every living creature under the age of eighteen. Beyond that notch, humanity could go hang, collectively and individually.

Esme moved within range of Longjohn when he was twelve-and-a-half. Eunice, his mother, overrode her second husband, Harold, on the subject of Esme's education. She would not contemplate the prospect of sending him away to school, although she was, perhaps, the one person in the Avenue who could have afforded public-school fees. Harold argued a little but ultimately gave in, as he gave in to Eunice on every issue once Eunice had really made up her mind. Esme was taken away from the private school in Lower Road, and after passing a viva voce examination, was accepted for Godley Grammar School, a fourpenny 'bus-ride north of the Avenue.

Until he attended the Grammar School, Esme had made no real friends among the children of the suburb. Judith was not so much a friend as a shield-bearing acolyte, and throughout his childhood Esme gained no pleasure from the companionship of boys his own age. He found them lamentably
lacking in imagination and on this account dull partners in his eccentric games of make-believe. Judy was better than the best of them. At least she never questioned his decisions, but did what she was told, with the minimum of error.

Esme was not interested in organised games, and his brilliant memory, for anything he cared to remember, might have resulted in his becoming a teacher's pet. What saved him from this stigma was his capacity to tell stories, and to make them sound more credible than those read in adventure books, together with an incurable romanticism that led him, more or less cold-bloodedly, into the more extravagant exercises of master-baiting. He soon acquired a reputation among the boys for solemn buffoonery and, without being exactly a butt, or a clown, he was able to provoke laughter on a slightly different level from that usually employed by the lower-form humorists. His half-girlish appearance assisted him in this field, for he looked quite innocuous, and it was some time before the staff penetrated his disguise. The boys discovered the real Esme almost at once, for, if he fancied himself humiliated, he could fight back like a tiger and did, more than once, during his first, turbulent term. The smaller boys in Lower School learned not to provoke him, and the bigger boys, like the elephantine Boxer, feared his biting tongue more than his sudden rages.

Because he was “different”, and because he quickly came to be regarded as something of a crank, his schooldays might have been very lonely, but he was rescued from isolation by the twins, with whom he formed a curious alliance, a bond (it was hardly a friendship) that was to endure most of the time he was at school. He made no impression at all upon the rock-like unity of the Carver boys, but they had a marked effect upon him, not as individuals but as a team, much as they impressed the adults of the Avenue.

The alliance was forged at the end of Esme's first term, which happened to coincide with the end of the school year, and its anvil was the impending, and seemingly unavoidable, separation of Boxer and Bernard—the one destined for the “C” forms, the other, Bernard, for the slightly superior grade of “B.”

This would have meant that they occupied different classrooms
all the way up the school, and it was a prospect not to be thought of by the Inseparables.

Unlike each other in physical appearance, the twins were also unmatched in mental ability. Bernard was average. He would never be brilliant, but was capable, if he exerted himself, of moving steadily up the school to the Certificate Fifth. It was equally clear that Boxer, without vigorous help, would eddy about in the lower forms until school-leaving age, and by the time he lumbered into 4C would be surrounded by boys two, or even three years his junior.

Boxer excelled at every activity outside the classroom. He was a member of the First Football Eleven by the time he was fourteen, and his successes in athletics ensured his popularity from the moment he ran his first circuit of the playing-field. He could swim, shoot, box, sprint, kick far and straight, throw a ball half as far again as any boy in Middle School, and shin up the gymnasium ropes in two seconds under the bogey set by the games master, Mr. Trevlow. He was a great favourite of Trevlow's, and a considerable asset to the school in all competitive contests. Perhaps it was on account of his usefulness as an athlete that Mr. Silverton tolerated the alliance for so long, but this was something Esme was never able to discover.

The bargain between Esme and the twins was mooted on their way to the main road that last day of term. They took the same way to the 'bus stop in the Cherry Orchard Road. On the way down the Embankment Road, Esme addressed Bernard.

“3-B for you and me next term, Carver Two!”

The twins were always known as “Carver One” and “Carver Two”. Nobody was encouraged to use the term of address they invariably employed for one another—Berni and Boxer.

Apparently, Esme's innocent remark had unwittingly touched a hidden spring in Bernard's mind. He stopped short, and turned to Esme. There was desperation in his frown.

“They're going to split us up, young Fraser. Boxer's going to 3-C. I saw the list.”

Esme, who had lived next door to the twins for years, was no stranger to their mutual devotion, but even he was mildly surprised by the urgency in Bernard's voice, and the
matching gloom in Boxer's genial features. He saw a chance to move in, and took it on the instant. He needed friends, powerful friends like these two, and it occurred to him at once that they would regard any help he gave them now as an immeasurable service, never to be forgotten. He was a shrewd, observant boy, at once more mature and more childlike than the Carver twins.

“If we got together we could
stay
together,” he said, very deliberately.

Bernard made a gesture of irritation. “I tell you I've seen the list! I looked in Snowball's register, when he was called out yesterday. Boxer's in ‘C', and you and me are in ‘B’.”

“I dare say,” said Esme, with elaborate nonchalance, “but we don't have to
stay
in ‘B’, do we? Look at Brett-Thomas. He went into ‘B’ straight off, and they put him down again, soon as he failed the start-of-term test. We don't
have
to pass it, do we? We don't even have to try. There's harder work in ‘B’, and you can't muck about with ‘Sarky’. He sends you to ‘Longjohn’ for the slightest thing. If you fail the first test they put you down again, like Brett-Thomas.”

Bernard's face cleared, but only for a moment.

“We
could
do that once,” he objected, “but it'd be the same again next term—we couldn't keep on doing it.”

“We wouldn't have to,” said Esme, “not if we got into 3-C and sat near Carver One, and that's easy enough, as long as your brother bashes anyone who tries to bag the seats next to the hot-water pipes.”

Boxer had taken no part in this conversation. Most of it was too involved for him. He plodded along beside them, idly twirling his satchel at the full extent of its strap. Now he spoke.