Free The Dreaming Suburb by R.F. Delderfield Page A

possession of him. He kept reminding himself that she was a married woman, married to an officer, and that he was just Archie Carver, a glorified errand-boy. Nevertheless she wanted him, far more urgently than any girl his own age had ever wanted him. It was hard to understand.
    She stood with one plump arm on the low mantelpiece, bathing her body in the dancing firelight. Outside, the wind whipped up, and January sleet slashed across the windowpane.
    “Come over here, Big Boy,” she said, in the same authoritative voice.
    He moved across the room and put out his hand tentatively, as though to stroke a strange cat. She smiled then, and he noticed her white teeth, and heavy pink underlip. In after years, whenever he thought of Rita Ramage, he always remembered her excessively heavy underlip, and came to judge the accessibility of women accordingly. If they had fleshy lower lips, like those of Rita, they were all right. If their lips were balanced, they were not. He found this was a very reliable criterion.
    “You're not shy are you, Big Boy?”
    She suddenly seized his hand, and pressed it to her breast. Then Archie did a strange thing, something he was never to repeat in the presence of any woman he met in the future. He fell on his knees before her in a sort of obeisance. She looked startled for a moment and then, reaching out, she drew him closer to her and gently stroked his hair.
    3
    Rita remained Archie's mistress until the Spring of 1922. During that period she was completely faithful to him.
    He, for his part, might have been married to her. Measured against Rita, the bobbed, tune-humming, flat-chested flappers of the Avenue were like strident children; and Rita, on her side, could never erase from her memory the mysterious gentleness he had shown her that first evening.
    She soon came to know his shortcomings, his ridiculous confidence in himself as a millionaire in the making, his callowness, his silly, persistent lying about his age, his humiliating habit of taking her for granted, after the first month or so of their association, his thin Cockney accent, his general air of suburban vulgarity. All these things, however, meant less than nothing weighed against his slow, heavy strength, and his unbounded virility.
    Their relationship was purely physical. He delivered himself, as it were, with the groceries, and after the maid had gone home to Belgium and had been replaced by a daily who left at five, he let himself in the back door two or threetimes a week. They never went out together. It never occurred to them to go, for the pattern of their association quickly resolved itself into a sort of three-part-ritual, half-hour at a meal, half-hour in bed, and two or three hours pottering about the house, exchanging small talk. Then he went home, and let himself in with the key he had carried since he was fourteen. He never mentioned her to anyone, and nobody at Number Twenty dreamed of questioning Archie about his movements. Louise was somewhat surprised at his loss of appetite, but she concluded that he was finding plenty to eat at work, and during Jim Carver's long spell of unemployment, she was very glad of the reduced demands on the family larder. To Archie, there was soon no excitement in his visits to the house in Outram Crescent. Rita became a habit, like eating and shaving, and getting up and going to bed. It was much better this way, for it left his mind free to range on a more important matter, the acquisition, somehow, of a shop of his own. He accepted her gifts of clothes, and cuff-links, and cigarettes, in the spirit in which he picked up his wages on Fridays. They were part-payment for services, faithfully rendered, and when he made love to her he was neither demanding nor grateful, simply acquiescent, and dutiful, like the feminine partner of a mid-Victorian marriage. She made no emotional demands on him at all, and he never once paused to consider how this odd relationship might end, or indeed, if it