The Dreaming Suburb (27 page)

“You don't
know
about Esther,” he said, choosing his words deliberately. “She's ... she's never been a wife to me. There were the children, yes ... it still seems impossible, but it wasn't quite as it is now, not at the very beginning. She ... she'd never have much to do with me even then, but we
didn't
live
apart, not at the start It was only after Sydney came that ...”

His voice trailed away. Somehow, urgent as it was that she should understand, he found it impossible to relate the stark facts. It was like explaining something obscene to a child. The words that needed to be said could not be said, yet there were no substitutes, not if she was to understand in the way she must understand. How could he know that she already understood, that his very helplessness in this direction had contributed, in large measure, to her surrender to him?

She took her tea, placed it on the low stool, and settled down beside him, curling her legs under her, and leaning her delicious weight against his knees. The movement soothed him, and for a moment it was quite still in the room, with no sound save the pleasant song of the gas-fire.

“I think I know what your life has been, Edgar. I think I've known a long time,” she began, and then, before he could exclaim, “I
knew
as soon as I met you that you were wretched, and lonely, and despairing, and I suppose I knew that because I was the same way for so long, before I got over it, before I won out by
making
myself get over it.”

In his amazement he withdrew into the chair.

“That's impossible,” he argued; “you've never even been married....”

“I've had a child,” she said, simply. “I've got a daughter. She's nearly ten, now ... Pippa ... I want you to meet and like Pippa.”

He was not shocked and horrified, as he might have been, had she told him this astounding fact an hour ago. Now, in the warm glow of their love, he felt only tenderness, and kinship, and a strange, anticipatory excitement at the prospect of looking upon a child that had emerged from her body. It brought her, if that was possible, even closer to him. It hardened his joyful determination to protect her, for ever and ever.

“Was it... Philip?” he asked.

As he spoke the name another sharp spasm of jealousy pricked him, but the pang was momentary. He went on:

“Were you very much in love with him?”

“At the time, very much, Edgar.”

He was grateful for so much honesty. “And he with you?”

She shook her head, with one of her fleeting smiles.

“I don't think so, but that wasn't Pip's fault. You see, I imagine he knew he was going to die. It was a bad time to be a young man, Edgar, but perhaps you remember?”

He remembered very clearly, but not from a personal viewpoint. Quite early in the war, seeking escape, he had been rejected by three medical boards, and the war years to him did not mean shells, and gas, and water-logged ditches, but only ration books, and food queues, and patriotic songs. His most poignant memory of the war was the witnessing of a leave-train departure from Victoria on a foggy November night, in 1917. Almost everyone at the barriers had been drunk, weeping and desolate, chivvied by red-capped military policemen who, working in practised pairs, dragged flushed young men from the arms of wailing, tipsy women. It occurred to him that one of those young men might well have been Pip, the father of Frances's child, perhaps the one who had clung so desperately to the sliding metal frames of the platform entrance, cap askew, roaring out:

When this wicked war is overrrrr
Oh, how happy I shall beeeee...

Quietly, and without embarrassment, she told him about Pip.

Frances's mother had died when she was a child, and Philip had been a distant cousin, who spent odd leaves at her father's bungalow in Caterham. Her father, himself a retired Army officer, had encouraged the boy, particularly after Pip had been commissioned and decorated. Pip was just the sort of young man an ex-major of the Gunners would prefer his only child to marry, and the Major had pictured for himself, and for Frances, the sort of life they would lead after the war, occupying married quarters on hill-stations in India, and sending their boys home to be educated at Clifton, his old and cherished school.

Up to that time, Frances had had little or no opportunity of meeting young men. She was little more than a child when the war began, and all the eligible young men were carried
off, as though by plague. Pip was not much older, but he had matured very quickly, as young men did mature on the Somme, in 1916.

There were one or two country walks, and a quiet embrace or two on the downs, during his first leave; then a spate of letters, long and passionate letters from her, laconic and grubby notes from him, for it was difficult to compose love-letters in a roofless barn, shared with eight other mud-spattered men, when one yearned only for the oblivion of sleep from the cold and the dirt, and the lice, and the long-range shelling, that made up one's day-to-day existence.

They were formally engaged, of course, when he came on his final leave, in March, 1918. It was her nineteenth birthday, and he was one year older. There was a little party in the Caterham bungalow, a bottle of war-time champagne, a cake piped with their initialled hearts, and a good deal of reminiscent speech-making on the part of the Major and his cronies.

Then came the telegram, recalling Pip to the Line, where Ludendorff was punching huge holes round St. Quentin. That night, in the small hours, he had crept into her room, and when she started up, alarmed, he was standing there, mutely, already half a ghost, but a greedy one, greedy for that minute part of life that was left to him and demanding it, wordlessly, but with a pitiful urgency.

She was sure then that he would never return, that there would never be an arch of swords at Caterham Parish Church, a hill-station billet, or sons at public schools, but equally sure that these things were remote, and irrelevant when balanced against his need to be comforted, and the inevitability of the troop-train in the morning. He went off, sombrely enough, after breakfast, and they never heard of him again. He just disappeared into the welter of the German army's advance towards the Channel ports.

Pippa was born during the first Christmas of the Peace, and the shock killed her grandfather. He did not subscribe to the new morality, having been born and reared under a Victorian code. It seemed to him, already enfeebled by a war that had destroyed almost everything, yet denied him an opportunity to serve, that every convention had been violated,
the sanctity of woman, the canons of hospitality, the very decencies for which, up to that time, he had supposed they were all fighting.

He took to his bed during the 'flu epidemic, and it was clear from the outset that he would neither recover, nor forgive her. There was a tiny income, and she could have that. She would need it, he supposed, for bread, when all decent doors were closed to her.

Pippa was born in the house of an aunt at Sevenoaks, and when Frances realised that she could not keep the child, and also earn a living, she agreed to her aunt's virtual adoption of Pippa. She herself moved closer to London, spending more than she could afford on week-end trips down to Sevenoaks, too tired, after a fifty-hour week in a bookshop, to compete with her aunt's living-in housekeeper for Pippa's affection.

She lived for a long time in a furnished room near her work, but shortly before answering Mr. Chaffery's advertisement she had made a great effort to pull herself together, and chase the drabness from her life. She began by mortgaging her income to buy a tumbledown cottage at Addington, and the cottage—or rather the absorbing work of restoring it—had given her a new interest in life. It was her search for suitable pieces of furniture that had led her into the junk shops, and stimulated her interest in the trade. She was now determined to become a dealer herself, and regarded her job with Chaffery as a form of apprenticeship.

Edgar listened to her story with close attention, but even as she talked his mind raced ahead, for Frances now filled his life, leaving no room for Esther, the children, his potted hyacinths, or his stamp-collection. Esther would have to divorce him, on any terms, and he would then make over to her and the children as much as he could afford. At some time in the future, he and Frances would move right away, and open their business, but in the meantime they would have to continue as employees of Mr. Chaffery, and their relationship, he decided at once, must remain a close secret from Chaffery, and the other dealers. Edgar had heard Chaffery discuss women, and flushed at the prospect of the sniggers and innuendoes he might expect as soon as Frances was out of earshot.

The important thing, he decided, was to do nothing precipitate, to think out each move well in advance, to sound out Esther, perhaps, to begin saving, to work and work towards the fulfilment of a dream that was delicious to contemplate, a dream of going back over the lost years, and starting all over again. At his time of life this might be difficult but with Frances it was not impossible. Nothing was impossible with a woman who cared, who welcomed his capacity to love, and cherish, and protect. This was the one important factor, and, in the ultimate reckoning, the only one that mattered.

“We ought to begin planning, Frances,” he began, “we ought to begin now.”

She took his hand, and laid it alongside her cheek.

“Don't let's go into all that, Edgar, not now, not yet ... it isn't important, really. What is important is that we've found one another. I want you to meet Pippa, and I want you to see the cottage. It isn't very far from you. You could walk there, one evening.”

His heart began to beat violently. “Any time, this Saturday ... it's easy now, while ...”

He was going to say “while Esther is in hospital” but checked himself just in time. She rescued him, with another of her swift smiles.

“You needn't worry about neighbours,” she said. “I haven't any, and I'll cook you a supper. What do you like? What do you like especially?”

He abandoned planning in favour of the novel and delightful experience of having his appetite explored. He told her he liked sweetbreads, and kidneys and all manner of savouries, that he preferred potatoes baked in their jackets, and rarebits, and pasties, and apple-and-blackberry tart. For the moment they discussed only the immediate future. It was enough that they would eat supper together—her supper, in her cottage, and that this was no longer a wildly improbable day-dream, but a glorious, established fact, as real and reliable as a railway time-table!

When it was dusk they locked up, and he escorted her to the 'bus stop, standing to watch the receding vehicle until its tail-light winked out in the autumn dusk.

Then he set out to walk home, swinging the neatly-furled
umbrella he carried as a boy swings a stick at thistles in a country lane.

It was not until he was passing the “Rec” gates in Lucknow Road, that his step began to lose its spring, and his mood the boyish ebullience with which he had set out. For here he was passing into the orbit of the Avenue, and Esther, and without being conscious of it his stride began to shorten, until he found himself hardly moving.

Then he remembered that Esther was not there, but still in the ether-smelling ward of the hospital. Illogically, this did not encourage him, and he began to wonder how long it would be before she came home—how long before he must confront her with the demand for a divorce?

And as he thought this a chill struck him, and he admitted to himself that he did not know Esther, that he had never known her, that she might well be capable of anything, of withholding a divorce, of finding some way to destroy both him and his dream.

The rush of fear stopped him dead. Alone, and without the soft pressure of Frances against his knee, it was not so easy to dismiss Esther, even an Esther tucked away in hospital. He felt a desperate need to confide in someone, someone who was neutral, who had experience of these matters, who could explain what to do, what to say, and what not to say.

He had reached the corner of the Avenue, and was loitering in the shadow of the laburnum that dwarfed the front garden of Number One-Hundred-and-Eight, when a man of about his own age passed, moving briskly down the Avenue towards the shorter even numbers. As the passer-by walked into the shadow of the street lamp, Edgar recognised the neat pin-striped trousers, and level-set Homburg of Mr. Harold Godbeer, of Number Twenty-Two. Harold gave him a sidelong glance, and automatically touched his hat. He was one of the very few people in the Avenue who knew Edgar to speak to, for occasionally, when Edgar had business in town, the two had walked down Shirley Rise together, on their way to catch the 8.40. On one occasion they had even travelled up to London Bridge in the same compartment, so that Harold wondered briefly what Mr. Frith could be doing, standing alone, and uncertainly, beneath the laburnum of
Number One-Hundred-and-Eight, on a chill, autumn evening.

He was within a few yards of his own gate, when he heard trotting steps behind him. Mr. Frith caught him up, and laid a nervous hand on his sleeve.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Godbeer,” he said, a little breathlessly, “but ... but I understand you are a practising solicitor!”

Harold regarded the little man with surprise that was not far from alarm.

“Well, I'm ... er ... I'm managing clerk to a
firm
of solicitors,” he said, “Messrs.——”

Before he could announce the name of his firm, Frith interrupted, even more breathlessly.

“I have ... I have a matter of some urgency ... I should be extremely grateful if you could advise me,” he said.

Ordinarily Harold would have protested that matters of urgency, once brought to the attention of solicitors' clerks, were not discussed in the light of street-lamps, but something in Frith's anxious eyes, and the tremor in his voice, touched his warm heart and he smiled politely.

“Will you come inside, and drink a cup of tea with me?” he asked. “My wife ...” Harold could never manage to keep the pride out of his voice when he referred to Eunice as his wife—“my wife will have it ready now—but perhaps you're expected home?”