The Dreaming Suburb (25 page)

“Yes, sir,” said Esme again.

It was all he could think of to say. His mind was in a
ferment, his throat was parched, and in his heart was a strange surge of love and of gratitude for this spare, ravaged man, who spoke to him as if they were equals, as if they had been through the fire together. He knew of the Head's war record and fleetingly Esme thought of his father, and wondered vaguely if their paths had ever crossed in battle.

As if reading his thoughts, Longjohn said:

“Your father was killed in the war, wasn't he?”

“Yes, sir, on the Marne, in 1914. He ... he was an officer, sir.”

As he said it Esme felt pride quickening within him. He did not think of his father often nowadays, but it was good to feel that he and Longjohn had once stood up to a common enemy, on common ground.

“Then you never knew him at all?”

“No, sir; my mother married again.”

The headmaster remained by the window a moment longer. Then he moved over to the large roll-topped desk that occupied an alcove, and foraged in the centre drawer, taking out a file bulging with clipped, foolscap sheets. Esme instantly recognised them as written examination papers. Longjohn thumbed through them until he found what he sought, a few sheets, covered with Esme's cramped writing.

“You'll be wondering how I know so much about you, Fraser,” he said, with one of his swift, schoolboy grins. “Well, here it is, an essay you wrote more than a year ago. Do you remember it?”

Esme remembered it very well. It was a terminal composition exercise, four pages on
“Books I enjoyed”.
He remembered how much he had enjoyed writing that paper, how he had dipped into the memory of the hours and hours of happiness he had extracted from Stevenson, Twain, and Hen-ty. The paper had occupied him ninety minutes that had passed like five.

“I dare say there's hardly one of us who doesn't imagine he can write at your age, Fraser,” pursued Longjohn. “Hardly any of us can, of course. We mistake tricks of memory for genuine inspiration. But there's a sentence here ... where is it... listen... right at the end:

“The books I liked, I think, are the books that people liked writing. You can tell this somehow. It's like humming a tune, that sticks in your mind. You know that what they are writing about was in their minds a long time before it was written down?”

That's the spark I told you about, Esme. Stop treading on it and try blowing on it for a change!”

Esme was dumb with the wonder of it, that a man like Longjohn, until fifteen minutes ago immeasurably remote, should have sat in his holy-of-holies, reading an examination paper written by a boy in 3-C, and then, having read it, filed it away, in a place where he could lay instant hands upon it. It seemed to him, both then and later, the greatest compliment that had ever been paid to him.

He said, “I'd ... I'd ... like to write, sir. I'm not much good at anything else.”

Longjohn looked at him steadily, puffing away at his pipe and filling the space between them with smoke so acrid that Esme's eyes smarted.

“You'll write, Fraser,” he said; “nothing I could say would ever stop you. You'll write, and write, and write. You'll collect hundreds of rejection slips, but that shouldn't worry you. You'll have had your fun, writing. And I haven't the slightest doubt but that you'll arrive with drums in the end. If you want any blue-pencilling, either now or when you've left here, keep in touch. I'm a professional blue-penciller!”

He stood up, signifying that the strange interview was over.

Esme hesitated near the door.

“You'd better get your things, and bring them back here,” said Longjohn; “I'll take you along to Mr. Setchell right away.”

Esme still hesitated.

“That thousand lines,” he stammered finally, “it's ... it's ... not fair the twins should have that, sir. I ... I was with them, I gave Carver One the bunk up.”

“You've got a point there,” said Longjohn; “we'll make it fifteen hundred—five hundred apiece. When shall we say? By Monday?”

“Thank you, sir,” said Esme, and hurried out into the hall, without closing the door.

Boxer and Bernard were still standing under the clock, and Bernard turned expectantly towards him as he crossed the hall to Middle School corridor.

Esme winked twice and then, without a word, moved on towards the classrooms.

1

SOMETIMES
more than a decade would pass without anything out of the ordinary occurring inside certain of the houses to break the rhythm of passing years.

Such a house was Number Seventeen, where the four Friths had lived since before the war. It was a very silent house, and its front door, or the back gate that led into the Manor Meadow cart-track that was the sole break in the crescent, were only opened and closed at specified times, when one or other of the family entered or left the house for a specific reason—to go to work, to go shopping, to attend chapel. Even on these occasions their neighbours did not address them and observed, moreover, that members of the family seldom addressed one another.

Then, one October evening in 1928, Number Seventeen erupted. Lights flashed on and off in windows over which the curtains had yet to be drawn for the night. Mr. Frith dived from the front door, ran down to use the telephone kiosk in Shirley Rise, and was back again only minutes ahead of the doctor's car. Later an ambulance called, and after more scurrying about somebody was carried out, but it was too dark to see who was on the stretcher, and who was bobbing
about round the porch. The even numbers opposite, and Mrs. Crispin, of Number Fifteen next door, sat up and took notice then, but the ambulance had moved off, and the front door had closed, before somebody plucked up enough courage to make enquiries. Then the Avenue learned that Mrs. Frith had been whisked off to Croydon Hospital with acute appendicitis, and was said to be in a very bad way indeed. From that moment, the veil that had shrouded Number Seventeen for so long was lifted, and although it soon dropped again, there was always a chink in it wide enough for such of the Avenue who were interested to peep through, and guess at what was going on inside.

Very little worth recording had in fact occurred at Number Seventeen since the Friths first came to live there. The house was always dark at 10 p.m., and its inhabitants were only seen as a family when they issued from the front door at 10.30 a.m. each Sunday, and walked, two by two, to the corner of Shirley Rise, and down the hill towards their Chapel.

Edgar Frith, the little man whom Jim Carver thought to look so much like the late Dr. Crippen, always emerged at 8.20 sharp each week-day morning, and boarded the Tilling 'bus for his antique shop, in the Cherry Orchard Road. Occasionally—about once a month—he caught the 8.40 from Woodside for the City.

Esther Frith, his wife, tall, slender, and utterly unbending, emerged to do her shopping in the Lower Road, mid-mornings. She spoke to no one, either en route, or at the counters.

There were, however, one or two small, outward changes over the years.

Elaine Frith, now a shapely girl of sixteen, with masses of dark hair, plaited into decorous “wireless coils”, instead of its being shingled, like that of all the other girls in the Avenue, no longer walked to and from school with an attaché case, but went instead to a Commercial College, in East Croydon, five days each week.

Sydney, the boy, was still at school, but he stayed on at an Addiscombe private establishment, and wore a cap with an
orange ribbon round it, instead of the dark blue and silver, worn by all the Grammar School boys in the suburb.

Sydney was seen about the most. He had inherited his father's undistinguished looks and, to some degree, his father's poor physique. His front teeth protruded, and his complexion was pale, without the waxy pallor that made his mother's and sister's complexions assets. Sydney's complexion was poor. At fourteen he was much troubled with pimples and, because his front teeth were large, and unevenly spaced, his mouth was usually slightly agape, revealing a moist, lower lip. His legs were thin, and his knees prominent. He still walked with a slight, furtive stoop, and his head, over-big for his body, was never still, but weaved this way and that on a long neck, as though searching out hidden assailants. He was not popular at school, and led a rather solitary life. He was known to weep very easily and, if sufficiently goaded, to flout the sacred canon of every British schoolboy by marching boldly up to the nearest authority and reporting his persecutors by name, delivering his complaint in a flat, non-accusative voice, like a bored bailiff serving a writ.

He had, of course, been bumped, and pelted, ostracised, and even thrashed for this unheard-of breach of juvenile etiquette, but there was within him a tough streak of obstinacy, and he persisted, with the result that authority usually felt obliged to institute half-hearted reprisals.

He was a clever boy, and exceptionally bright in all branches of mathematics, but there was something about the promptness with which he answered questions, and the meticulous neatness of his written work, that disturbed his teachers, and made them cautious in their dealings with him. His quiet arrogance was a bubble that no one was able to prick, and the fact that he was very seldom in trouble with those in authority never quite convinced them that this was due to a law-abiding disposition, but left them with an unhappy conviction that Sydney had yet to be caught out.

In due course, and solely on account of his age, he became head boy at the school, and from then on his complaints, once classified as sneaking, had to be recognised as evidence of zeal in an overseer. As he grew older he began to display more and more confidence in himself, and the somewhat
seedy staff at the private school he attended found themselves, without quite knowing why, delegating more and more authority to him, until at length he was in possession of more real power than anyone excepting the Headmaster, who was principal shareholder of the establishment.

Sydney enjoyed himself during his last year at school. His one regret was that he was not allowed to beat smaller boys, and had to remain content with getting them beaten, the more the merrier, and as often as possible. Everybody, including, it must be admitted, the Headmaster, was very relieved when he finally left, to take up a trainee's post in an accountant's office, in Norwood.

At home he had, to a limited extent, picked up the reins of authority abandoned by his father when Sydney was still a child and throughout his teens Esther leaned heavily upon him in matters of business and finance. He completely ignored his father, and was barely civil to Esther. His sister he hectored until one day, in a cold, pitiless fury, she plunged a pair of scissors into his forearm. After that he went out of his way to avoid her, and so helped to increase—if that were possible—the stealthy, almost macabre atmosphere of the house, a house in which meals were often eaten without a word being exchanged, and whole evenings sometimes passed without any remark being offered by anyone, except, maybe, an odd word or two between Sydney and Esther, concerning insurance, or the price of household goods and groceries.

Sydney worked out tables for all this sort of thing, and was able to save Esther a good deal of money over the years, simply by proving that some articles could be bought cheaper at Gudgeon's, in the Lower Road, than at Piretta's, across the way. Esther nursed a secret pride in Sydney's ability to add up columns of figures in his head and translate the latest stock-market prices from the evening paper. There was no real affection between them, but at least there was mutual trust, and their alliance shut out Elaine and Edgar, throwing each of them back upon their own limited resources.

Edgar spent practically all his waking hours at home in his greenhouse at the bottom of the garden. Here he raised a wide variety of indoor plants that must have given him, vicariously, some of the colour and variety so lacking in his
everyday life. When it was too dark to work in the greenhouse there was always his stamp collection, now worth, according to his careful reckoning, at least £500, exclusive of the Mauritius set, worth at least another £100.

Between his stamps and his greenhouse, Edgar was able to efface himself completely from the family circle. He was nearing the fifty mark now, and hungered for nothing, except money to instal a small, central-heating plant in his greenhouse. This, he felt, he would achieve in time, for he had never told Esther about his last rise in salary, a rise given him by his, employer, Mr. Chaffery, when they opened their new branch at Purley.

Edgar's resignation to this mockery of his home-life may well have had something to do with Mr. Chaffery. Chaffery was a huge, amiable extrovert, who had made a great deal of money in post-war property and antique deals. He was a lively and astute business-man, but shop life bored him. He had to be up and about, dodging in and out of sales, sizing up derelict property, ruminating on the possible financial gain to be derived from corner sites, making a pound or two here, a hundred or two there, talking to people, cozening old ladies, and jocularly abusing other dealers; in short, playing a very positive part in life. Nevertheless, he was obliged, by reason of his business, to have a permanent base, and Edgar had proved himself an excellent executive over the last fifteen years. Chaffery recognised him as a good judge of current values, a stonewaller with dealers on the make, and a scrupulously honest handler of cash. He therefore treated him well, paid him adequately, and reposed considerable trust in him.

When the new shop was opened at Purley, Edgar's business routine was slightly altered. On the instructions of Chaffery he was now obliged to leave the Cherry Orchard Road shop in charge of the full-time cabinet-maker for three afternoons a week, and take a short 'bus-ride over to Purley, in order to “see how Frances was getting on”.

Miss Frances Hopkins, the new assistant, was a shy little woman, of thirty or thereabouts, with pale gold hair, a slightly receding chin, and a self-effacing manner that somehow impressed customers with the genuineness of the article she was trying to sell them. Chaffery, a shrewd judge of character,
had selected her for this very reason, for she was what he liked to call “genteel” and, as he pointed out to Edgar the first day they installed her, “nothing shifts a doubtful bit like a touch of gentility on our side of the counter!”