The Dreaming Suburb (17 page)

She did not understand much of what she read but it was at once obvious that she had stumbled on the key to something tremendously important. Life under Esther had taught her to think and act instinctively, in all matters of self-preservation. She knew at once that if she shared this secret with her brother it would be a matter of days at most before it was passed on to her mother, and that would mean, at the very least, the liberal application of the cane. Without another moment's hesitation she thrust the book down the neck of her dress, replaced the paper, closed the trunk, and stepped over the rafters to the aperture.

“There's nothing up here at all,” she told Sydney; “just a pile of old junk!”

Sydney's upturned face clouded. “She must burn the stuff as soon as she takes it from us,” he grumbled, and slouched away, not even waiting to assist her descent.

Elaine wanted him out of the way. She replaced the trapdoor, climbed down to the landing, and carefully removed all traces of dust and cobwebs from her clothes. She then sought him out, and made a great show of commencing her homework. When his attention was distracted, she ran up to her room, and stuffed the book between the mattress and the springs of her bed. Life with Esther had taught her something else. She had learned how to master impatience, how to control her most pressing desires until a safe and suitable opportunity arose to indulge them in secret.

That night, with the torch snugly hidden under the edge of the bedside rug (Esther sometimes looked under the pillows for various items of contraband) she waited until the house was silent. Then she recovered both book and torch, climbed back into bed, pulled the sheet over her head, and began to apply herself to a careful study of the Swedish doctor's interesting theories.

Many of the longer words drove her to her pocket dictionary, which she kept in her satchel beside the bed, but she was a very determined girl, and made steady progress, despite frequent checks. Having turned the final page, she carefully replaced the book and torch under the mattress,
and lay, hands clasped behind her head, thoughtfully digesting the information.

So that was what it was all about! That was the citadel of the forbidden city! That explained all, or nearly all that had been so obscure in her mother's eternal hints, glances, shush-ings, and sudden, inexplicable punishments. It was all to do with the difference between men and women, with their bodies, with—as she had long suspected—the birth of babies, and what happened before they were born.

She smiled to herself in the darkness, and in her smile there was triumph. She lay there savouring Jber stupendous victory, a victory over Sydney, over the older, more licensed, giggling children at school, above all, over secrecy, and her mother. She felt like a counter-spy who, after prodigious effort, has at last broken down an enemy's code, and deciphered his plans, not completely, perhaps, but sufficiently to promise a word-perfect interpretation in the near future.

She told herself that there must be other books like this one, books that would not require such frequent reference to a dictionary. Somehow, she would get them, and find a place to hide them, and study them in safety. Then, when she knew it all, when she had grown a little, and was strong enough to wrest the cane from her mother, she would use her knowledge to make people do whatever she wished, to buy her things, to compete for her friendship.

She now had something that none of the other girls at school possessed. She had what Eve in the Bible had been punished for, when she persuaded Adam to eat of the fruit from the tree. Eve had been caught, but she wouldn't be. God had found out about Eve, but nobody would find out about her. Elaine always identified God with her mother, a figure-head to be lied to, and hoodwinked; and if she could hoodwink her mother, as she had in the matter of the book, then she could certainly hoodwink God.

She fell asleep at last, but her brain was too fevered to enable her to rest. In after years she always remembered that this was the night she first dreamed of the water, vast, swirling cataracts of water, that poured over her, beating down, and sweeping away everything that stood between her and the flood.

She woke screaming, to find her father standing beside her in his pyjamas. It was almost dawn, and he looked even smaller and more pitiful than usual, with his sparse hair standing up on end, and his false teeth missing.

“What is it? You were shouting!” he whispered.

Even now, she reflected, he had to whisper, for fear of bringing her mother into the room. Sensing his fear, her own courage flowed back.

“I had a nightmare, I dreamt I was drowning,” she told him calmly. “It's all right now. What time is it?”

“Nearly five,” he told her. “Go to sleep, Baine, don't wake your mother—we don't want a scene!”

She turned away from him, comforted less by his presence than by the light that filtered in under the blind. She smiled quietly to herself as she remembered the book. Ah! If they knew ... if they knew what she knew ... what a gloriously final scene there would be!

The smile remained on her lips when she slept again.

Softly Edgar padded back to his room, and climbed into bed.

1

WHEN
Toni Piretta, the wheezing Italian grocer from the corner shop, sat down beside Archie in the “Rec”, as that young man was grappling with his insoluble problem of double paternity, Archie's response was terse to the point of rudeness.

“I'm busy thinking,” he grunted, ignoring the Italian's freckled, outstretched hand.

Toni was not abashed. He was accustomed to rebuffs on the part of the stolid islanders, among whom he had worked for so long.

“Si, si,
I know that a'ready, Mister Carver; I see it, when you screw up your face like this—” and Toni puckered his broad, sunburnt face, in comic imitation of Archie's glower, and then suddenly exchanged the grimace for his customary Southern smile.

Blast the old fool, thought Archie; what the hell does he want to come bothering me for? Haven't I enough on my mind at the moment?
Both
of them! Christ. Just think of it!
Both
of them. Edna, who must have been sound asleep when it happened, and that giggling sister of hers, who had it worked out from the beginning! Their fertility infuriated him. It was enough, he reflected, to drive a man into a monastery!

The Italian laid a gentle hand on Archie's knee.

“It's a-time you and me talka da business!” he said, with unexpected seriousness.

Toni had lived in England a long time, but he had never tried to rid himself of his traditional icy-creamo accent. He considered it a valuable business asset. It made people remember him and his wares. It singled him out from British competitors.

Archie's mind groped half-heartedly with the possible reasons Toni Piretta might have for wanting to discuss business with him, almost a stranger. He had a daughter, about Archie's age, but Maria Piretta was very plain, and already running to fat. She had a moist complexion, and prominent, unevenly-spaced front teeth. Archie had never given her more than a distasteful glance when he dropped into the shop now and again for Louise's groceries, or to buy cigarettes. He recalled, however, Toni's solicitous guardianship of his daughter's honour, in the days when they were all children, and Toni had kept a fish-and-chip saloon in Lower Road. The youths who patronised the shop for fish suppers often laughed at father and daughter, and sometimes, after a beer or two, mimicked Toni to his face.

Toni, in those days, was younger and much more excitable. Archie recalled that he had been given to sudden angry outbursts, when the young customers sought cheap entertainment at their host's expense.

“You come in here,” Archie had heard him roar, above
the guffaws of youths sitting at the tables, “you come in here, night after night, and whatta you do? Hey? Whatta you
do?
You spenda da sixpence, benda da forks, spilla da vinegar, and play with my little Maria!”

This protest always produced roars of laughter, and at the memory of it a sour smile puckered Archie's sullen face. Mr. Piretta interpreted the smile as a sign of Archie's willingness to talk business.

“They tella me you a grocer-boy, hey?” he pursued cautiously.

“I've worked in provision shops,” said Archie, with cold dignity. “What of it? What's that to you, Toni?”

Like most Englishmen of the suburbs, Archie was very proud of his nationality when he conversed with a Latin. Mr. Piretta ignored the snub, and became even more earnest.

“Then I maka da bargain with you!” he said flatly. “You worka for me, and I maka da bargain with you!”

Archie was interested, in spite of himself. Slowly he shook off his mood of self-pity. At the prospect of a commercial deal he found he could forget the Gittens' girls, at least temporarily. It was whispered along the Avenue that Toni Piretta was rich, that he had done extremely well at the corner shop he had opened shortly after Italy joined the ranks of the gallant Allies, and, by so doing, released him from the crippling limitations of an alien in a country at war. What sort of “bargain” could the old boy be contemplating? Some sort of insurance wangle possibly. A fire? Surely not? A claim on damaged goods, that needed some sort of independent verification? Groping with various possibilities, Archie forgot the Gittens' girls altogether.

“What are you getting at, Toni? I can be useful, why don't you speak out?” he asked the Italian.

Toni breathed hard. It seemed to Archie, regarding him closely, that he was very upset about something. He avoided Archie's eyes, and the conviction grew in the younger man that Toni Piretta was in some sort of a jam, and had approached him in a spirit of desperation.

“Well,” he prompted, “what's the matter? What have you been up to now, Toni?”

This time Toni met his amused glance steadily.

“I been uppa to nothing. I'm doing a'right down there. It's a good business. I talk to you not about me but abouta my girl, my little Maria.”

Archie suppressed a dry chuckle. So it was Maria? Not unnaturally, Archie, today of all days, could think of only one source of anxiety regarding Maria that might account for a father's concern.

“You mean she's in the family way?' he asked incredulously.

The Italian shook his head impatiently. He was npt insulted, as an English father might have been.

“I wisha she was,” said Toni, deliberately. And then, without reserve, and with his eyes filling slowly with tears, Toni Piretta opened his heart to Archie, as he had opened it to nobody since he left Naples, as a ship's boy, forty years ago.

His had been a hard struggle, he said. There had been but bleak prospects of getting rich, and founding a family, in his own country. Like many of his neighbours he had headed for America, but chance had brought him instead to the East End, where, for a few years, he had fought for work on the wharves in the company of thousands of other aliens. Later he went North, to the shipyard towns, and here he acquired at long last a half-share in an ice-cream cart, progressing thence to full ownership of a hand-propelled snack-wagon, in the Gateshead dock area. He had the strong commercial instincts, and the resilience and physical toughness of all Neapolitan slum-dwellers. Eventually, after Homeric efforts, he had scraped together sufficient money for a shop, the chip shop Archie remembered in the Lower Road, and from this, in 1915, he had moved on to the corner grocery store. Now he considered himself highly successful, and had taken out naturalisation papers.

There was one aspect of his career, however, that left him with a sense of bitter frustration. He had only one child, a daughter, and no prospect of a larger family, for his wife had died during the lean years at Gateshead, and Toni had no inclination to marry again solely for the purpose of begetting a son. Until recently, he had relied upon Maria to provide a
grandson, but he was a realist, and was beginning to doubt his chances of perpetuating his line through Maria.

Maria was now twenty-four, and almost middle-aged by his standards. He had to admit it, Maria did not attract men, no matter how persistently he pushed her forward when young men came into the shop for cigarettes and mineral waters. Somehow, her prominent front teeth got in the way of her welcoming smile, and young men simply paid for their purchases and went out again, unimpressed.

Toni had watched them for years, from his ambush behind the till, and, bitterly reluctant as he was to admit it, Maria did not seem at all likely to rope a husband from his side of the counter. When she was still in her teens there had been hope. Youths had cracked jokes with her as she set down the plates of hake and rock salmon on the marble-topped tables. One or two had even pinched her behind, and brought a faint blush to her moist cheeks, but nothing came of these gallant encounters. The young men grew up, and married, but none married Maria. To date, no one had gone so far as to call round and ask her out for a walk.

This, Toni admitted, was a routine problem for the father of a daughter, but the real trouble lay much deeper, in the defeatist attitude of Maria herself; she had grown apathetic and listless, pining, as she undoubtedly was, for a man, almost middle-aged, and not even responsive to his suggestion of getting her over-prominent teeth extracted and replaced.

Back in Naples, Toni had seen what happened to women who passed the age of thirty without getting a man. They turned sour. They grew gaunt, instead of plump and comfortable. They nagged, and became awkardly punctilious about religious observances. They despaired of life, and with very good cause. Toni loved Maria. She was all he had, apart from the shop, and that still carried a small mortgage. He did not want this sort of fate to overtake his child and there was really no reason why it should, for, apart from her teeth, she was not an ill-favoured girl, and her father was on the way to becoming a man of substance.

Archie, who was very quick to follow the drift of the conversation, listened open-mouthed. At first he shied away
from the prospect of getting involved, even as a confidant. He recalled Maria's lack-lustre eyes, and the droop of her thickening figure as she reached over the counter, but as Toni continued to talk, softly, and with a Neapolitan's compelling eloquence, he began to listen more attentively, and it came into his mind that here, right at his feet, there might well exist a very practical answer to his problem regarding business premises.