The Dreaming Suburb (52 page)

Every yard of the locality had some association with his childhood and with growing up. He passed the seat near the tennis-courts, where Elaine had told him of her father's desertion, and the trim allotments, with their eternal artichokes, that had always been for him the beanstalks of fairy-tales.

When he reached the Lower Road it was still very early, but the suburb was slowly coming to life. A milk-float clanked at the corner of Outram Crescent, and a sparsely-filled ‘bus trundled by, its conductor lolling expertly against the stair rail as he pencilled his returns. All his memories, all those “little bonfires” Longjohn had talked about, began to smoulder, and although he still felt elated, he was conscious also of an undertow of fear. Dull this world might be, but it was safe, snug, and familiar, and he began to ask himself how long it would be before he felt the impulse to throw off this ridiculous knapsack, that was already making his shoulders ache, and come speeding back to the Avenue, where the
warm smell of summer privet stood for safety and permanence.

Then the Croydon ‘bus drew up, and he boarded it, and ran up the stairs and along to the front seat.

Sitting here he fought his panic. Longjohn was a romantic, and he had always thought of himself as one. Perhaps they were both wrong. Perhaps these people, who were boarding the ‘bus on their way to their shops, and offices, had the right idea after all. As the ‘bus swung along Old Orchard Road he admitted to himself that there was only one sure way of finding out.

Sane, comforting Harold, for insisting on that regular thirty shillings a week.

3

It would be unprofitable to accompany Esme on his wanderings. They occupied him the better part of three years, and carried him West as far as the Cornish coast, and over the Irish Sea to the stillness of Connemara; then North as far as Glencoe, and East as far as the Newcastle ship-building towns and the Norfolk Broads. He came back to the Avenue several times during the period, but the quest developed in him a restlessness that would not be denied. He was soon off again, stopping here and there, sometimes for a week, sometimes several weeks, and in Edinburgh, a city he came to love, a matter of six months, for it was there that he met the percipient Donald Shawe, who subsequently obtained for him the job that ultimately anchored him in London once again.

Many of his journeys were made on foot, as was the first, when he left the train at Salisbury, and walked, via the New Forest and the Dorset coast, as far as Honiton, and thence into the rich bracken and pine country of East and North Devon.

He followed Longjohn's instructions in most respects, but he soon tired of Norman churches, and castle ruins, avoiding almost by instinct the “quaint”, and the “musts” of the holiday tourists, though he often used their charabancs and excursion trains. In this way he passed within yards of Wordsworth's
Stone, at Grasmere, without turning aside to look at it.

Now and again he took temporary work to eke out his allowance, without which he must have returned home almost immediately. He sold a few articles to country newspapers. He spent three weeks in a West-country town doing clerical work for a timber-merchant. He was an undertaker's assistant in Central Wales, and a market-gardener's packer in Windermere. In the main, however, odd jobs were hard to find, and very poorly paid. In the Midlands the country was climbing out of the depression, but in the North, particularly in the Newcastle area, the apathy, and the visible distress of a vast army of unemployed, upset him so much that he almost fled across the border, heading for Edinburgh, where he found a more congenial job as a copyholder, and later proof-reader, on a small but lively newspaper, owned and edited by Donald Shawe.

Shawe took a mild liking to him. He was a hard-hitting, warm-hearted Scot, bitterly contemptuous of the failure of successive English parliaments to steer their own country and his, out of the economic slough, and extremely apprehensive of their blundering policies in the field of foreign affairs. It was Donald, and his son Keith, who introduced Esme to politics and political journalism, discovering to their surprise that the young man was woefully ignorant of what was brewing for him on the Continent.

Keith, who was sub-editor on
The Courier,
felt sorry for the lonely young man, and sometimes came into the readers' room when Esme was finishing a night shift, and invited him out for a glass of beer in a tavern frequented by journalists, off Princes Street. Like his father, Keith was shrewd, cool, and very much down-to-earth. He never quite got over the shock of learning there was an avowed deliberate purpose behind Esme's seemingly aimless wanderings.

“But d'ye mean to stand there and tell me it was your ain dominie who put the daft business into your head, man?” he exclaimed, running his fingers through his stiff, rust-red hair.

“In a way, yes,” Esme told him, “but I daresay I'd have done it anyway. The point is, Mr. Shawe, I came into a small
income when I was twenty-one, and I always knew the money was there. If I hadn't I suppose I should have found a job like anybody else, and settled for it. As it was, the only thing I really wanted to do was write, and this seemed to be the best way of doing it.”

“And have ye written much since ye set out?” Keith wanted to know.

“Nothing except journalism, and odd jottings,” admitted Esme.

“Then it doesna occur to you that you're not cast for a writer?” said Donald heartlessly.

“It does, very often,” said Esme ruefully, “but I can't do anything else any better. At least I've found that out.”

Keith emptied his tankard and ordered another. He was intrigued by Esme's story, but irritated by the boy's lack of design.

“Would you no' like me to speak to ma father aboot takin you on here as a junior reporter?” he asked. “Maybe that's what you need most, something a wee bit more permanent.”

“It's very kind of you,” said Esme gratefully, “but I don't think I'd be much good as a reporter. I'm not nearly as observant as I thought I was, and I don't make friends easily enough.”

“Och, we'll see aboot that,” grunted Keith, who had scant sympathy with theory, and that was how Esme ultimately found a permanent post, not in Scotland, as a reporter, but in the small London Office that the Shawes had recently opened in Blackfriars.

Donald wanted someone who knew London well, yet was familiar with his paper, and its patriarchal background. Esme was offered the job of advertisement manager, at a starting salary of £300 a year, with a promise of steady increases if he made good.

He accepted gladly enough, for by this time he was heartily sick of an Odyssey that seemed profitless and, although he hardly realised it, he was homesick for the suburb.

For in one important respect he had been cheating Longjohn all the time. He had filled his notebooks, but not with impressions of people he met, and places he had visited.
There was nothing at all in his notebooks about factory-hands whose grandfathers had worked at village cottage-looms and through all his jottings ran a thread, that led him directly back to the Avenue, and this thread led only to Elaine, who had somehow become identified with the Avenue, even though she was no longer there, nor likely to be in the future.

Over and over again Esme argued with himself about this. Sydney Frith had left him in no doubt but that Elaine's ultimate return home was an extreme improbability, that she was now on the stage (what, in Heaven's name, thought Esme, could she be doing on the stage?) and that she had never once written to her mother since going off to join her father in Wales. Even her father had no sure knowledge of where she was, or what she did. The hotel people, for whom she had worked, had told him she had left Colwyn Bay with a conjurer, who had stayed there one week, but beyond one or two scrappy letters, from towns in the Midlands, Edgar Frith had received no word from her, and when Esme, passing through Wales, had called at their smart little antique shop the wanderer recorded:

Llandudno. July.

“
Saw Elaine's father today, and met the ‘other’ woman Frances, the one Elaine told me about. They seem very happy. The woman's daughter lives with them, and they have an antique shop up here. I told him about Elaine and myself—he seemed to understand, so much better than I imagined he would, and so did Frances, whom I liked very much. They showed me two letters they had received from her, several months old. One was from Nottingham, and the other from Hereford, but neither said what she was doing. Both were about things she wanted sending on. I can't help feeling that old Harold was right that night—she seems absolutely incapable of feeling deeply about anyone or anything. You might almost say she never feels anything at all...
”

From this extract two things are obvious. One is that Esme had forgotten or ignored Longjohn's admonition to keep
soul-searching out of his notebooks, and the other is that Elaine still occupied the central position in his thoughts.

Perhaps this was what was the matter with him and was the reason behind his hopeless inability to profit from his Odyssey. For the truth is there was little but Elaine in his notes. Thus, in his jottings on Exmoor:

Doone Valley. April.

“
This is a wonderful country. It always seemed wonderful in ‘Lorna Doone'. Elaine reminded me of Lorna in the old days, and I always had a picture, at the back of my mind, that I might bring her here, perhaps to Lynmouth, perhaps even to get married in Oare Church. I haven't much doubt that she would disappoint me like hell if I did, for she isn't really like Lorna. Lorna was small and gentle, and so grateful for being looked after. Elaine isn't like that at all, and sometimes I'm amazed at myself for feeling about her the way I do, for she isn't my type at all. Perhaps it's just that she was the first, or perhaps, its because she's so wonderfully pretty, and her hair is exciting to touch.
...”

Poor Esme! It was just the same in the Lake District.

Derwentwater. October.

“I came out to Friar's Crag today, and looked out across the lake. This place has become even more famous than it was since Wal pole's ‘Hemes’ series was published. They say it's a great place for honeymooners. I wonder if Elaine would be bored here, or whether the colour of the woods on the far shore would touch her, as it does me. I imagine she would want to go to a gay place on her honeymoon, somewhere like Paris, or Cannes. But maybe she's already had her honeymoon. I wish to God I'd never met her...
”

And finally, when he was back in London, beginning his job, and living at Number Twenty-Two permanently once more:

“I saw Sydney Frith again today, and asked after Elaine. They still haven't heard. Nobody ever hears, least
of all me. I haven't mentioned her to Harold. He probably thinks I've forgotten all about her. As if one could? Or is it pure masochism on my part? Its years now since that night, and it should be abundantly clear, even to me, that she doesn't give a damn, and probably looks back on it all as I look back on a Grammar School crush.
...”

After that, however, Elaine disappears from the diary. Indeed, the diary soon ceases, and it looks as though Esme is settling into his job at Blackfriars and adopting a more realistic attitude towards his dream of becoming a writer. About this time he sold his first feature programmes to the Empire. Broadcast Section of the BBC, and earned some of his first, freelance guineas.

Perhaps it was this, his first gleam of success, that put Elaine out of mind for a time, or possibly a slightly earlier entry in his diary had a little to do with it, for the Christmas before he returned to the Avenue for good his path crossed Judith Carver's again, and he wrote.

London. Christmas.

“
I ran into Judy Carver in The Lane today. She seems very grown up, and struck me as having an unusual kind of tranquillity. I had forgotten all about her, and how much fun we had as kids on this very spot. She is quite pretty in a way, tho' a bit open-airy, and blown about. This is odd, because she used to remind me of a Rossetti heroine, all pinched, and solemn-eyed. She was surprised to hear that I had been quite close to her place in Devon, where she helps run a riding-stable, and she told me I ought t g have called in. I didn't like to explain that 1 didn't even know she was living down there, but I think she probably guessed it. She was a good, sporting kid, and seems so sane about everything. I quite like talking to her.
”

After that, nothing. It is to be regretted that Judy Carver no longer kept a diary, her last entry having been made years ago, the night before Esme came into her shop on the Lower Road to buy a powder-compact for Elaine. It was a pity also that she attributed Esme's friendly eagerness to naturally good manners, and failed to press her slight advantage that Christmas.

Had she done so, it is just possible that she might have saved Esme a great deal of heartache.

BY
the Spring of 1937, when the Spanish agony was at its height, and Munich was still more than a year away, Jim Carver, socialist-pacifist, had resigned himself to World War II, and had even rejected a chance to escape it by emigrating to Canada.

He chose, instead, to fold his arms and await Armageddon, freely admitting to himself that he was crazy, that none of his children, save possibly the younger set of twins, stood in the slightest need of him, and even these two had been included in Jacob Sokolski's offer.

The Russian Jew often discussed the news with his employee. Since their experience in the Hunger March scuffle they had become close friends, and although Jacob had no patience with Jim's gospel he was grieved when Jim rejected his offer to escape while there was still time.