The Dreaming Suburb (59 page)

As for Elaine, for the second time that month she felt momentarily helpless, so much so that she all but lost her head. She had lived and moved among the Eugenes, the Benny Boys, and the Tappertitts, for so long now that it required an immense effort to adjust herself to a person like Esme, at once so astonishingly naive, and so utterly sincere. She had remembered these aspects of him, of course, but had assumed that he would have outgrown them, that nobody in these days could remain so young, yet still be old enough to be yearning to kiss her.

Then a sense of reprieve shot out like a lifeline, and she clutched at it, frantically, and hauled herself back to reality, the changeless reality of three meals a day, money for good clothes, a soft bed at night, above all a base, and a breathing-space.

She reached across the table and caught his hand.

“Oh Esme, my dear, that's the most wonderful thing anyone's ever said to me, but you can't
know,
not like this, not so quickly....”

For answer he stood up, and snapped his fingers at the waiter, who was hovering close to the street door, hoping against hope that the drivelling couple at No. 4 table would get up, and leave in time for him to get a bet on the three o'clock at Sandown. He hurried over, scribbling as he ran, and allowed his worried features to slip back into their habitual, rubbery smile.

“Thank you, sir! Delighted to see you again, sir! There was no coat was there, sir?”

“No,” said Esme, “no coat,” and to Elaine, “Let's go out to Hampton Court, and then come back here to celebrate with a show.”

They moved out into the fruity smells and the sunshine,
and this time it was Esme who took her arm. Neither said anything until they reached Windmill Street, and then Esme suddenly excused himself, and skipped into a florist's, emerging a few moments later with an armful of yellow roses and pink and white carnations.

Then Elaine remembered that Hampton Court was a long way off, and that it was time that she did something as positive. So she leaned over the flowers as he thrust them towards her, and kissed him softly on the mouth.

An elderly prostitute, lazily swinging her bag, and enjoying the sunshine from a shuttered shop doorway, looked on with mild interest, and a street-vendor, in the act of rebuilding a pyramid of pears, paused to exclaim: “Say it wi' flahers, mate, say it wi' flahers,” and winked in the direction of the prostitute.

Esme did not even see them, he was shouting at a passing taxi. It braked, and they climbed in, Elaine grasping the flowers.

“I must take these to the hotel first, Esme—it's the Leicester Court, just off Sloane Square.”

“I know it,” said the driver, and reached out to slam the door.

Once the taxi was moving Elaine laid down the flowers, and turned to him, wordlessly, but he was swifter even than she, and had already buried his lips in her hair.

2

Esme and Elaine were married on the first day of October, in the same registrar's office as that used by Louise and Jack Strawbridge, but the Avenue was not as well represented as on the former occasion. There were only three witnesses, Harold, Eunice, and Elaine's father, who was eventually summoned by Esme after opposition from Elaine.

He failed in his half-hearted attempt to persuade her to relent in respect of her mother and Sydney, but regarding Edgar, who had been kind and hospitable to him when he had called on him in Wales during his travels, Esme was insistent It seemed to him a shabby trick to let the little man
hear of the wedding of his only daughter from outside sources.

The preliminaries as a whole were not without their stresses. Eunice badly wanted a church wedding, however small, and Harold privately disapproved of what he described to Esme as “the rather indecent haste of it all, old man.”

Esme's announcement, and his swift introduction of Elaine into Number Twenty-Two, was a shock to his mother and stepfather. Had he been a year or two younger, or less independent financially, they would probably have opposed the marriage tooth and nail, and this in spite of Elaine's extremely tactful handling of Harold.

Harold had by no means forgotten his long, midnight talk with Esme, on the subject of the bride, but although conventional in most respects Harold always loosened up a little when asked to pronounce upon the subject of love. His experiences as a solicitor had taught him the fatuity of looking for a logical reason in a particular man's desire to share life and income with a particular woman. He himself had been cosy enough in bachelor lodgings, and had been quite satisfied with life until Eunice had turned her china-blue eyes on him, and whispered: “But you have got such a
grasp
of things, Mr. Godbeer.” After that he had had no peace until they were married. He had little enough peace now, for when Eunice wasn't chattering she was usually badgering him to do some little job about the house. For all that he would never have returned voluntarily to bachelor lodgings, and he had never ceased to be proud of Eunice, particularly when he took her “Up West”, and watched men far younger than himself turn their heads and note her prettiness.

Like a good many mild-mannered, conventional men, who have entered upon their forties with wild oats unsown, Harold was still very susceptible to a pretty face and a good figure, and Elaine, recognising this at a glance, soon overcame his initial opposition to an immediate wedding.

“After all,” he told Eunice, when she wept intermittently on the night that Esme had come home with his news, “the boy's twenty-six, and he's been in love with the girl ever since he was an adolescent.”

“How can you possibly
know
that, Harold?” she wailed,
brushing away at her soft hair, as she sat before the dressing-table mirror.

“I know it,” Harold had replied, with pardonable smugness, “because Esme confided in me from the very first! I told you I'd be a father to the boy, and I have! He trusts me. He's always trusted me,”

“But you never even
whispered
it to me,” complained Eunice, laying down her silver-backed brush, and turning to him where he lay, his peaked face just showing above the sheets.

“There are occasions, my dear,” he replied, “when matters between father and son must be regarded as strictly confidential, even to the exclusion of mothers! Esme has been faithful in essence, for many years, and it is now quite obvious that having had what it usually termed a “fling”, this girl has brought herself to recognise the full merit of such fidelity.”

“I simply don't understand you when you talk in that solicitor's way,” grumbled Eunice. “I never have, and I believe that's why you do it! Why can't you say what you want to say in ordinary English?”

Harold sighed. Sometimes Eunice could be agonisingly stupid, and he was always more prone to notice it when he was sleepy, as now.

“I simply mean, my dear, that he's very much in love with her, and I think she has now appreciated the fact. I don't know how I can simplify it further, but I do wish you would turn out the light and get into bed!”

Within a matter of days, however, Eunice was reconciled to the loss of Esme, although by no means approving of the manner in which the wedding was to be carried out. She wanted a party, with everybody in smart, new clothes, and floppy hats, with plenty of champagne, and silly speeches, and a photographer to take group pictures in the garden. It is possible that, under other circumstances, Elaine might have accommodated her in this respect, but Esther lived just across the road, and, regarding her mother, Elaine was implacable. She therefore fell in readily with Esme's proposal for a register-office ceremony. Eunice made no attempt to conceal her disappointment.

“It's so ... so
shabby”
she complained, “and it's only once
in a lifetime. I think you
owe
it to yourselves to have something to remember. There's no need to make it a big wedding, and you can go to the church early in the morning, but for heaven's sake let's have
something
—not just a ... a ...
‘bus-ride
into Croydon, and a lot of forms to fill in.”

Harold again came to the young couple's rescue.

“It isn't quite so simple as that, my dear,” he reasoned. “Elaine was very unhappy with her mother, Eunice,” and turning to Elaine, “so unhappy that you ran away, didn't you, my dear?”

“Yes, I did, Uncle Harold,” said Elaine, contriving to look as though, prior to her escape, Esther had kept her locked in an attic, and had only disturbed her solitude at regular intervals, with rations of bread, water, and birch-rod.

“There, you see,” went on Harold persuasively, “it wouldn't be very nice for Elaine to have to invite her mother, and of course she would have to invite her if the ceremony was public and we had any sort of reception here afterwards. I don't mind telling you, my dear, I've had some professional experience with Elaine's mother, and under such circumstances she might prove a difficult woman!”

So all was arranged to the general satisfaction, and even the opposition from Eunice began to lessen under the stimulus of a gigantic shopping spree, carried out along the entire length of the Croydon High Street.

This expedition, or series of expeditions, began with the avowed object of buying Eunice's wedding costume and Esme's present, but it ended in Eunice buying an entire houseful of new furniture and household fittings, down to the shoe-scraper for the back door, a set of “humane” mousetraps, and the rustless, metal toilet-roll holder.

Elaine accompanied her prospective mother-in-law on the first two of these expeditions, but subsequently excused herself, and went off to the pictures. When Eunice once entered a large shop there was no knowing when she would emerge, and it did not take Elaine very long to discover that she herself had no instinct for home-making, whereas she thought it best to conceal her boredom under a modest avowal that “Eunice would make Esme's money go so much further.”

Indeed, when it came to the point, neither Esme nor
Elaine had much to do with the setting up of their new home. This was not far distant—just across the road in fact, for Harold had persuaded Esme to buy Number Forty-Three, partly because it was going very cheap (Mr. Thorburne, the previous occupant, had just been declared a bankrupt), and partly as a concession to Eunice.

Esme himself had no wish to move away from the Avenue. Since returning to the suburb, after his cheerless wanderings up and down the country, he had recaptured some of the enchantment it had held for him in childhood. It gave him pleasure now to think that his “study” window, at the back, looked out on an uninterrupted view of the meadow and his beloved Manor Wood.

He had been very doubtful at first whether Elaine would agree to begin her married life so near to her mother and Sydney, and had expected considerable opposition to the proposal. In the event he encountered none. Elaine thought the house “very nice”, and confessed that she was only too happy to be within such close call of Uncle Harold and Eunice. She called her “Eunice” now, having remarked, during one of their later meetings, “I can't very well call you ‘Mum', or ‘Mother', can I? You look too much like my little sister!”

This naturally delighted Harold, and it was “Eunice” from then on.

It was no wonder that Esme walked about in a trance these days! Had he had his wits about him he might have thought that Elaine s willingness to leave the entire planning of Number Forty-Three to her mother-in-law was a little strange in an ardent bride-to-be, but Esme was now infinitely removed from a state of mind where he could contemplate curtain-runners and kitchen linoleum, and even further removed from the somewhat weightier matters then engaging Mr. Chamberlain's attention at Berchtesgaden and Bad Godesberg. He drifted about, to and from his office, and in and out of Numbers Twenty-Two and Forty-Three, like a young saint anticipating swift transition to Paradise, and he only emerged from his daydream, and then but briefly, when he and Elaine were alone.

He had never imagined that dreams could be so quickly
and unexpectedly translated into ecstatic realities. Where Elaine had once been pert and mocking, she was now gentle and pliant. Instead of having to speculate on her mood, as in the days when she had stolen out of Number Seventeen to meet him at some prearranged place in the Lane or “Ree”, he could now rely, with complete certainty, on laughing affability and impulsive embraces. At all times, and to all three of them, she was soft-spoken and dutiful, and to him, when they were alone, she was either tender or rapturous, according to the place where they happened to be. Sometimes, when he was holding her, he thought his heart would burst, and because he was bewitched he had no difficulty at all in reconciling the Elaine that was with the Elaine of the present, happily writing off the transformation as a byproduct of her unhappy past, an exchange of uncertainty for security. For even now he could not really believe that she was in love with him as he understood love; but nonetheless felt that he could await the future with confidence.

He was probably about halfway towards the truth. For the moment, for a year or so at least, Elaine had had more than enough of insecurity. She had turned her back on the circus to look for a base. Miraculously she had found one almost at once, one that promised to be warm, cosy, and securely entrenched against the disasters that had overtaken her with Benny Boy and Tom Tappertitt. She was certainly not in love with Esme, nor ever likely to be, but his adoration pleased her, as it had always done, and gave her confidence in the future.

In her touring days she had never looked ahead for more than a week or two “... sufficient unto the day are the bookings thereof, Eugene used to say, and the liquidation of Benny Boy, and all he stood for, had been so sudden that all her powers of concentration were centred on providing for existence, without returning to Esther, or to the boredom of a nine-till-six occupation.

It was the sudden eruption of Audrey the Amazon, and the contemplation of her own utter loneliness when the circus party had left her standing in the rain, that brought her so sharply up against the facts as she now saw them. It seemed to her now. that a woman could choose between a humdrum
job, the capture of a man with money, or the compromise of a marriage such as the one she was about to make with Esme Fraser. The first alternative, a job like the one she had at The Falconer, was not to be thought of, for there was certainly no future in that. The second, a limited liability partnership, with an older man like Benny Boy, or Tom, was all very well in its way, but one could never be sure how and when it would end, leaving one penniless in a strange country, or face down on a hotel bed, having one's bottom tanned by an irate wife. Of course, few wives would be likely to possess Audrey's weight of muscle, but there were plenty of other forms of retaliation—divorce courts, damages for enticement, blackmail, and heaven knew what else. Even if she steered a course between these hazards, what could protect her from the whims, of these experienced philanderers, who might pack their bags and be off at a moment's notice, leaving her to pay the hotel bill, as Eugene had done on at least two occasions.