The Dreaming Suburb (49 page)

“You won't get him,” he said at last and with great deliberation, “you won't ever get Boxer, not while I'm alive!”

His tone, and the odd way he was looking at her, made her artificial temper seem ridiculous. She stopped moving about, and came closer to him.

“You don't understand,” she said, in a slightly more reasonable tone; “he loves me, and he's promised to marry me.”

“He doesn't love anyone, and he only promised when he was blotto,” said Bernard. “I don't reckon that counts. I don't reckon it would count anywhere!”

At once she snapped back into a blazing temper.

“You'll have to prove that,” she screamed. “I'll sue him for breach ... it'll be in all the papers, and if I have a baby he'll have to marry me, d'you hear?
He'll have to!”

Bernard rose slowly to his feet. She noticed that he was pale, and was curiously rigid, as though he was himself fighting hysteria, real hysteria. Suddenly she was very much afraid of him. He looked so squat, menacing, and implacable.

“You won't have a baby,” he said, “and if you did it wouldn't be Boxer's. You just remember that, Jackie Gulliver
... it wouldn't be Boxer's.
If you said it was you'd be sorry, and wish to God you never run across Boxer, or me either!”

She gave a little gasp and then, as he moved forward, stepped quickly aside to let him reach the door. Rage ebbed
out of her, and her knees began to tremble. By the time she had some sort of control of herself he was gone, and she heard him run down the steps, and stab at his kick-start. A moment later his powerful engine began to roar, and when she ran to the window he was already zooming into the distance.

She rang the visitors' bell, and presently an aged Boots shuffled in.

“Do you think you could get me a little brandy?” she asked shakily.

“I'll see, Miss,” said the Boots, and shuffled out again.

Jackie Gulliver sat down on the sofa, opened her handbag, and began to repair the ravages caused by her tears. She might be spoiled, and highly-strung, but she was no fool. She had already decided to forget Boxer, and make that cruise to the Med. with “Jumbo” Coombes-Bister, and his sister Joyce, the children of the Marmalade King, whom she had met at Le Touquet the previous April.

3

Louise and Jack Strawbridge were married at East Croydon Registrar's office that same autumn.

With Judith gone, and the twins Fetch and Carry out at work all day, there was no point in waiting any longer. She was thirty-five, and Jack was a year older. If they didn't marry now, she reasoned, what small chance they had of having children would be gone. The prospect of a childless marriage saddened Louise, for she had been attending to children from first fight until nightfall for as long as she could remember.

Her father tried to persuade her to get married at Shirley Church, but she said she was too old for that sort of wedding, and anyway it would cost too much. All she wanted was for Jack to move into Number Twenty, and eat his breakfast with them, before he went out to work in the Nursery. He had been eating his mid-day meals and his suppers at the house for years now, and they could share the bed she had shared with Judy for so long. In her eyes it was not really marriage at all, simply a domestic adjustment.

Judith came up from Devonshire to be her bridesmaid. They all thought she looked radiantly healthy. Her skin was tanned and clear, her thick, brown hair was waved for the occasion, her little figure trim and taut, after so many hours in the saddle. She brought them a canteen of cutlery as a wedding gift, and Louise was glad of it, for her table-ware had not been renewed since before the war, and the knife-handles were shrinking away from the thin blades.

Archie called round the night before the wedding. For the first time in ten years he and Jim sat in the kitchen together, while Louise made them both tea, and fussed about, putting finishing touches to the cake she had baked herself.

Father and son looked a little uncomfortable facing one another over the table, but honoured an unspoken agreement to bury the hatchet, at least for the time being, for Louise's sake.

Jack Strawbridge came round to show Louise his new, navy blue suit, bought for the occasion. He looked very odd in it, for none of them had ever seen him in anything but corduroys, an open-necked shirt, and a converted army tunic. His neck looked redder than ever wnere it strained over his stiff, white collar, and Louise, straightening his tie, said that if he took a really deep breath, fragments of serge and cotton would fly all over the kitchen. He sat down very carefully, and drank tea with the spoon still in the cup. He seemed horribly nervous, and Archie tried to reassure him.

“There's absolutely nothing to it, Jack. It only takes about a hundred seconds. They pass the couples through on a sort of conveyer-belt!”

He was not far wrong. The ceremony occupied just over three minutes, from the moment they were beckoned into the inner office by the clerk, to the moment they emerged into the autumn sunshine, and Bernard and Boxer scattered hand-fuls of confetti over them, while Judith stood back smiling, and Jim opened the taxi door.

“Aren't you and Judy riding home with us?” asked the bride, as he closed it again.

“Not today, Lou; we wouldn't be seen dead with you, would we, Pop?” said Archie, grinning.

“Well follow on,” Jim told her. “Miss Clegg will have everything ready.”

Edith opened the door to them when she heard the taxi. She was wearing the same tight, green costume that she had worn at Teddy's wedding, and it still smelled of camphor and lavender. Edith loved a wedding and had been delighted when Jim asked her to act as hostess. They all crowded round the table in the front room, and all their jovial protests could not prevent Louise getting up to help Edith serve the cold chicken and trifle.

After Archie had proposed a toast Jack was given permission to take off his collar, and only then could he be persuaded to get up and make a speech. It was the first and last of his life.

“Well, everyone,” he said, “I dunno what to say, except thanks for bein' zo good to us. I reckon we're too long in the tooth, the both of us, for this sort o' lark, but it's nice havin’ it just the same, and something to remember. Me an' Lou, we been kind of meaning to get married a long time now, but somehow we never got around to it. Well, now we have, as you c'n zee, and I reckon we oughter make a go of it Anyone could with Lou here, or he'd be dam' hard to please, that he would!”

He sat down, amid laughter, applause, and a discreetly wiped tear from the smiling Edith.

Later in the afternoon they all surged on to the pavement to speed the couple away on their honeymoon to Clacton, and in addition to the wedding party a sprinkling of Avenue folk drifted out to their front gates to watch the send-off. Archie's wife and family waited on the corner to wave, while Harold and Eunice came out from next door to shake hands, and join in the laughter as the inevitable old boot bumped out from under the rear axle. Esther Frith and Sydney did not emerge from Number Seventeen, but they watched the scene from their front-room window, and as the taxi moved off, to a chorus of shouting and laughter, Sydney said:

“I've always thought those Carvers were rather common!”

Esther said nothing, but went back to her needlework. Perhaps she was remembering another wedding, away in the
remote past, long before the war, when she had driven for the last time down the ill-tended drive of her aunt's gaunt house, to meet Edgar, in his frock coat and topper, at the little chapel in the village. A thought may have crossed her mind that perhaps this was what had been wrong about her own marriage, it hadn't been common enough.

4

Old Piretta died that autumn. His chest had been giving him trouble for a long time, but now the doctor said it was his heart, and he must rest, and cease to play bears with his younger grandchildren, James and Juanita. Tony, the elder boy, was beyond the bear stage, but the old man still tired himself out making catapults, and bows and arrows for the boy.

The old Italian did not take his doctor's advice very seriously. In any case he did not consider that a few more years on a sofa, or in an armchair, were worth the sacrifice of his games with the youngsters.

They all loved him far more than they loved their father or mother, and he on his part, worshipped all three to distraction, and often cocked a speculative eye at Maria's ageing figure, to see if there was any likelihood of a fourth grandchild coming along. Juanita, the youngest, he reflected, was five now, and it was time somebody got busy.

From Piretta's standpoint the marriage had beep a great success. Archie had expanded the business beyond the old man's wildest dreams. He now had nine shops, all within twenty minutes' drive of each other, and all but the one at Ketley (where the manager had embezzled six crates of stock) were showing steady profit.

There was little or no affection between his daughter and her big husband, but Piretta did not set much store on affection between man and wife. The purpose of marriage, as he saw it, was to get extra help in the shop, and to beget children, and in these spheres everything had gone according to plan. It was true that Maria never seemed very pleased with her life. She hardly ever spoke, and moved about the house so quietly, as though someone was lying dead in one of
the bedrooms, but then she had always been a vague, undemonstrative girl—that was how he came to have so much trouble finding a husband for her. She certainly loved her daughter Juanita, and turned her out for her little parties looking like a fairy on top of a Christmas Tree, all pink frills and blue bows, and with every black curl in its proper place.

Toni Piretta spent nearly all his time playing with the children these days. His daughter managed the corner shop and Archie, in addition to doing the books, superintended the chain of satellites.

One sunny morning in November the old man took little Juanita across to the meadow that separated the odd numbers of the Avenue from the woods. It was one of their favourite playgrounds and whenever they went there Juanita insisted that they should play “Buried Treasure”.

This was a game of Toni's invention. It had, he felt, the twin advantages of amusing the child and stimulating her acquisitive instincts. He would pretend to go away and search out a likely spot for treasure-seeking, and then, the moment her back was turned, he would ram half-a-dozen threepenny bits and pennies into the soft ground, and mark the spot with a heel clip.

He would then call her over and begin to scrabble in the ground close by, having first indicated to Juanita exactly where she should dig.

Her excitement, when she turned up the first penny, never failed to delight him, and he would caper about shouting bis congratulations, and urging her to dig deeper, and “finda da throopnies” that “musta be there”. In the meantime, he would dig, with many exclamations of disgust, in his own barren claim, and when he failed to find anything would slap his face in despair, and shout “Poor Toni, poor Toni, he newa hawa da luck!”

On this occasion he buried three sixpences, and when Juanita had uncovered the last of them he tore her wooden spade from her, and flung himself into a frenzy of digging a yard or so away. Juanita, rubbing her sixpences with the corner of her handkerchief, watched him gleefully. She knew that he would never be lucky. He never was.

Suddenly he stopped digging, and tried to stand upright. The spade fell from his hand, and she saw that his face was purpling. She gave a little squeal of terror and ran to him, but he made a stiff gesture with his arm, warding her off. Then, as he fell forward on his knees, he pointed towards the houses.

Juanita was an alert little girl. She understood at once, and fled across the meadow towards the Avenue, bursting into the shop, where Maria was handing Louise Strawbridge her week-end groceries, and screaming: “Come quick, come quick! Grandpa's going blue!”

When they reached him he was unconscious. They got help, and carried him home, but although he recovered consciousness he never spoke again. They propped him up in the biggest bedroom, overlooking Shirley Rise and the big clump of elms that screened the entrance to the Lane. The doctor came, then Archie, then a nurse, but he gave no signs of recognising anybody.

That evening they brought the children in to see him. His eyes smiled but he made no other sign. The children bent over the bed, and kissed his bluish cheeks, but beyond the smile in his eyes he gave no indication of pleasure.

The truth was that he had recognised them but in the last few hours seemed to have moved a vast distance away from them and away from everything in the present, as though he was looking at them all through reversed binoculars. He was not seriously interested in them, for his mind was now occupied with the past, and the phases of his life drifted by like galleons in convoy.

He saw the fruit market at Naples, a riot of colour and cries, under brilliant Italian sunshine. He saw the gleaming galley of the cargo-boat on which he had worked his passage to England, and smelled again the rank, oily smell of the Tower wharves, where he had once fought for work for a few pence an hour. He saw his dead wife, her face infinitely strained, as she helped him to haul their first ice-cream barrow up the steep, grimy terraces of Newcastle, and he sniffed the cloying smell of fat that issued from her clothes as she stood beside him, peeling potatoes in the little scullery behind their first fish-shop. He saw Maria, sidling past
guffawing youths in the Lower Road shop, and then, at the very tail of the procession, he saw Archie's clouded profile, as he had sat beside him on the bench in the “Ree” oh the day he had made the proposal that had changed their lives, and brought joy into his heart.

As he recognised Archie he slowly puffed out his breath, so that the wisps of his heavy moustache stirred, and settled again. They had forgotten to pull the curtains and he could see the full moon riding behind the elms, and even make out the black blobs that were last year's rookery. Then a shredded bank of cloud closed over its face, and he shut his eyes, and slept.