One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

‘Oh yes, I forgot.’ Bella had been so caught up with the weekend that she had not registered what else was going on.

  ‘And I’m going to be there to applaud him.’ Tobias Taylor came through the open drawing-room door, dazzlingly black and white with a ruched shirt front and swallow tails down his long slender legs. ‘I’m sorry you won’t be with us.’ He looked at her closely. Bella turned her head away. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does.’ His manner was so completely different to Gerald’s hearty indifference that Bella could have wept again.

  ‘You must always think that everything about you matters,’ Dr Taylor said seriously, and he stood in the doorway to watch her go up the stairs.

  Madge was dressing for the dinner. As she and Bella talked, she moved about her bedroom, putting on one dress and taking it off and trying another, banging a brush at her short glistening hair, rifling through her jewellery box and holding different brooches up to her bodice and grimacing at them.

  She tried to cheer Bella up briskly. ‘I never did much like the sound of the Lazenby fellow. Everything in the saddle and nothing in the head.’

  ‘No, Madge, there’s nothing wrong with him. He still likes me. But my outlook is changing.’ Coming miserably up in the slow Monday train, Bella had thought about this to cover failure. ‘I’m drawn to these, what do they call them, New Women, who aren’t satisfied with being just a wife and mother.’ She stood fiddling with things on the mantelpiece. ‘Even if I can never go to the University, I think I’d like to be independent.’

  ‘Do you want a job?’ Madge made a sceptical face at her. ‘I’m sure Daddy would get you into Whiteley’s, even if you had to start at the bottom.’

  Bella looked at her incompetent hands. It was safe to say, ‘I’m not afraid of work,’ knowing that her parents would never allow it. ‘I might give my life to serving others.’

  Madge laughed at her pious tone. Bella sighed. No one ever took her seriously.

  ‘I’ve not seen this.’ She held out a miniature alabaster birdbath. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Toby Taylor gave it to me. He knows I like birds. He brought it from Italy, or somewhere.’

  So! Casual Madge. Bella could have smashed the little ornament into the grate. A really nice man comes into the family and Madge snares him. Unto her that hath...

  A thunderous roar came from downstairs. ‘Gwen! Madge! What the devil are you doing?’

  ‘What’s the matter with Uncle Leonard?’ He was usually quite mild.

  ‘Coming!’ Madge opened the door and yelled down to the hall.

  ‘We’ll be late!’

  Aunt Gwen opened her door wearing a peignoir, with her hair still down.

  ‘What is all this silly shouting?’

  Back at her own house, Bella found her parents also about to leave for the dinner.

  Her father had fluffed out his greying side-whiskers and oiled his thinning hair across the dome of his head. His breast bore two medals awarded for some service to the Treasury. Her mother’s bore impressive jewellery. We are the Morleys. We are going to be the stars of this occasion.

  The butler opened the front door and Bella’s father went out to the car, where Grandmother, who had been driven up from Goring, was waiting.

  ‘I wish you were coming with us.’ Her mother hesitated. ‘If I’d known you would be back ...’

  ‘I wouldn’t have cared to come anyway.’

  ‘Of course you would,’ Charlotte contradicted automatically. ‘It’s a pity – I’m sorry that – but you know,’ she stumbled on, unfamiliar with maternal concern, ‘it’s not the end of the world to be disappointed in love.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, dear, Crocker has told me. She was worried about you.’

  What a friend. I’ll murder her. Bella went down the tiled hall and through a pair of pillars towards the back stairs, but Hurd had closed the front door and was on her heels.

  ‘Something I can get you, Miss Bella?’

  Yes, a new friend. Bella pretended that she was on her way to get a book from the study at the back of the house.

  Leonard had been shouting in the hall at No. 72 because he was upset. Although always punctual at work, he did not really mind arriving a little late at his father’s Memorial Banquet, organized by the E.A. Morley Admirers’ Association. There would be less time to stand about drinking sweet sherry with the motley assortment of men and women for whom it was not enough to read the books of the People’s Story-teller; they had to be keepers of the sacred flame.

  However, there had been another note. It had been almost three months since the last dark message, and Leonard had begun to believe that the madman had been arrested, or swerved off into a different aberration.

  But the note said:

  He has forgotten me. I have not forgot and nor will you, arse-licker. Because if you don’t make him send me the money, the disaster will be your fault.

  The Assistant Manager was not going to risk the Chief’s wrath with this. Mr Whiteley had put the earlier notes out of his mind, Leonard was sure. He was genially involved with the surge of business before Christmas, spending more time out on the floor, encouraging the staff, beaming at the clamouring children in the toy department, as if he were the spirit of Christmas itself. New staff had been taken on, there would be a New Year’s bonus for everyone, if sales met his expectations. Customers were satisfied. William Whiteley was doing no harm to anybody. Why couldn’t this evil lunatic leave him alone? Why couldn’t he leave Leonard Morley alone?

  Leonard’s mother was already installed in the Waldorf Hotel Banqueting Suite, holding court. Leonard, feeling less agitated now that he was here and committed to this annual event, took Gwen and Madge over to her, and introduced Dr Toby Taylor, to whom she accorded the same suspicion with which she viewed the Morley Admirers and their proprietary attitude to her late husband.

  But Toby would not have that. This man was becoming a good friend of the family, and he had been eager to meet its matriarch. Bending over her chair, he talked to her quietly in his pleasant voice, and the old lady seemed to be thawing. She was too stiff and stout to lean forward from the depths of the wide tapestried chair in which she had been installed, but the aigrette in her sequinned evening cap inclined a little.

  ‘Is it true,’ Leonard heard Toby say in his most liquid tones, ‘that the captivating Mrs Davenport in A Small Country Town is based on yourself, Lady Morley?’

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘I read that in a reprint of the Illustrated London News Retrospective about your husband.’

  ‘Well, I dare say it’s true.’ Her beaded choker was too tight to allow her to nod, but she gave him one of her quite roguish smiles. ‘I was not always this size, Dr Taylor.’

  ‘Our bodies change all the time,’ he said, ‘just as our minds expand and develop. I like that idea.’

  ‘You won’t, young man, when you’re my age, and have lost those scandalously good looks.’

  ‘But then I shall possess qualities that you have now and I have not.’

  ‘Ah yes, that’s true.’

  Dear old Mama, usually instinctively hostile, like dog meeting dog in the park, seemed to approve of Toby. She beckoned Leonard and told him he might bring his friend to Goring some Sunday.

  Even Hugo thought better of him now, it seemed, since the ‘bit of a bounder’ was here to witness honour done to Hugo Morley as head of the family and spokesman for his famous father on this literary occasion.

  The E.A. Morley Admirers, a very mixed collection, with the odder ones dressed as characters from the novels, insisted on some of the family being here, but at the same time rather resented them, since the Morleys’ claim to the great man was only by accident of birth, whereas theirs was by choice of taste and appreciation. Hugo, who loved public speaking, was only allowed to introduce the real after-dinner speaker, a professor of literature who would expound on ‘Ernest
Austin Morley and the Late-Victorian Novel’.

  Leonard observed Hugo as he got into his stride. Head back so that he was looking slightly down at his audience, white waistcoat convex as the side of a barrel, one hand on lapel, medals catching the light. A cruel man, Leonard knew, selfish, self-important, a snob with nothing to be snobbish about: my brother.

  For tonight, and perhaps to steal some of the professor’s thunder, Hugo had looked up some allusions to other writers contemporary with his father. He threw out familiarly such names as George Moore, du Maurier, Rider Haggard. But if he had read them, or read his father’s books carefully enough to understand the soul of them, Leonard thought, he might be a more humane man. If E.A.M. were still alive, he would not countenance the victimization of poor Bella.

  Hugo had already gone past his five minutes. The professor was fidgeting. A man sitting opposite, dressed as the publican in The Gambler, had pulled out a watch from his canary waistcoat.

  ‘It has been said that my revered father was the immediate forerunner of H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, George Gissing, in paving the way for the revolution of the common man.’

  ‘What is he talking about?’ Lady Morley was heard to inquire.

  ‘Fear not, brethren.’ That’s what Hugo should have been – a bishop! ‘Fear not, for there will be no revolution. It is not needed. Equality, enlightenment, brotherhood, all are already here.’

  Madge caught her father’s eye, and choked into her wine glass. Bring in a Bolshevik with a bomb, Leonard thought.

  ‘The revolution, you might say,’ Hugo boomed on, ‘was quietly effected by those men who, like my father, understood so well that emotional propaganda could gloriously succeed where violence would wretchedly fail.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Adelaide said very clearly. ‘Sit down and be quiet, Hugo, for God’s sake.’

  It was the season of banquets. Before Christmas, Leonard had to attend another kind of family affair: William Whiteley’s annual staff dinner at the Cecil Hotel.

  At noon that same day, one more squalid grey envelope came through the post for Leonard. He wanted to tear it up and throw it away unread, but knew that it would haunt him more disturbingly than if he faced it.

  Tell him I shall be there. You are both in danger.

  Guests and staff had cards of invitation to show at the door. Not very likely that a stranger could get in. However, as Leonard was crossing the pavement with Gwen to go up the steps of the hotel behind Mr Whiteley, shouts and scuffling made him whirl round quickly, his heart in his mouth. He clutched Gwen’s arm, as he saw a man run across the street between the carriages and disappear into the small crowd in the shadows beyond the entrance lights.

  ‘Leonard, don’t grab me.’ Gwen pulled away. ‘What’s the matter? You’re as white as a sheet.’

  When a shot comes at you out of nowhere, what does it feel like? The terror of pain may be worse than the actual impact.

  ‘Come along, Leo, you’re in people’s way.’

  ‘I thought I saw . . .’

  ‘“He thought he saw a banker’s clerk descending from the bus,” ‘Gwen quoted cheerfully, ‘“he looked again and found it was–”’

  ‘“A hip-po-pot-a-mus!” ‘Leonard laughed with her, and relaxed.

  But inside the hotel, he stayed nervously close to Mr Whiteley, scanning the lively, familiar crowd like a policeman.

  ‘Don’t nursemaid me, Morley,’ W.W. said irritably. ‘Give me some room. Why are you dogging me and looking so grim?’

  Leonard told him. Behind a pillar, he showed him the frightening note.

  ‘Same sender?’

  ‘I suppose so, sir. I saw that there was a small disturbance in the street as you arrived. Did you see –’

  ‘Some shouting, that was all. The usual crowd of hang-abouts with nothing better to do.’

  Henry Beale was descending on them, already full of a greasy conviviality. Mr Whiteley pocketed the note. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he said, but too vaguely.

  ‘Shall you inform the police?’

  The old man nodded and walked away, with his determined, plodding stride.

  ‘A top-hole good evening, sir!’ Henry Beale saluted his employer, and showed no surprise at being ignored. ‘Having a good time, Morley?’

  ‘Of course. Aren’t you?’

  ‘You don’t look like it. Why do you have to pull the poor old guv’nor away to talk business even on a festive occasion – trying to gain kudos?’

  ‘It wasn’t business.’

  The man was half drunk already. ‘What, then, to make you look so anxious?’

  Once again, it nagged at Leonard. Could it possibly be this invidious man who had been writing the notes? He was tempted to challenge him with, ‘Isn’t that how you want me to look?’ and follow it up. Beale would deny it, but once the suspicion had been voiced, he would be impossible to work with, and the Christmas frenzy was still at its height, and the chaos of January sales to come.

  William Whiteley’s after-dinner speech was better than Hugo’s, and more sincere. He stood up to prolonged applause. Admiring friends were there, and some politicians and notables whom he cultivated, but it was his staff who gave him the warmest welcome. He was still a Victorian, an employer of iron discipline, but he was also a patriarchal figure. Here he was at seventy-five, an upright man who had been forgiven long ago for separating himself from his wife and small children, a self-made gentleman, known all over the world. In nearly fifty years of hard work, he had forged ahead from one shop peddling ribbons and yard goods to a giant retailing empire which sold everything from a tap washer to a fleet of steamboats for an Indian prince.

  He was silent for a moment, looking round over the hundreds of faces turned to him, his keen grey eyes smaller now as they had receded under the bushy white brows, his features broadened by the full white whiskers and squared-off beard. He stood firmly, solid and familiar as a civic statue.

  He gave his audience a brief report on trading for 1906: turnover, one and a quarter million pounds sterling, ten per cent net profit. Six thousand employees, one hundred and sixty departments, including the new Lending Library, and nearly three hundred acres of land close to London, for farms, market gardens, warehouses and laundries.

  ‘You know my motto,’ his north country voice concluded. ‘“Add conscience to capital.” Total that up and you can see that I have quite a nice little property to pass on to my sons.’ Frank and William, on a dais with him at the high table, looked suitably amused and proud. ‘But they will have to wait. Retirement? I don’t know the word, I am still your Universal Provider for many more years!’

  A storm of applause. Leonard’s anxiety had subsided. He was proud of the Chief, and proud to be his right-hand man.

  Next morning, he walked down Westbourne Grove in a chill driving rain from the east that cleared his head of claret fumes, and was busy from eight to eight, swamped with crowds and work.

  Chapter Eleven

  That young man. of Madge’s, Will Morrison, that she worked with at the East End Settlement, had gone off to Newcastle to see his family, so Flora Bolt was not surprised to open the front door on Christmas Eve to the deaf chimpanzee, Jack Haynes.

  ‘I got here,’ he told Flora, with his gaping grin that made you want to shove a banana into it.

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘Don’t be rude, Flora.’ Madge came hurrying through the stained-glass door into the small outer hall.

  ‘He can’t hear me.’ If he could, Flora would have asked him, ‘What do you think the door mat’s for?’ She felt especially free and easy today. There was something about Christmas.

  ‘Finding his own way here is part of his training to live a normal life,’ Madge informed her. ‘Well done, Jack!’ She clapped her hands in applause, then took the sleeve of his lumpy jacket with the poacher’s pockets – watch the ornaments, Madge! – and steered him in to the drawing room.

  ‘Hullo, Jack!’ ‘Come in, come in!’ Bella and Mrs Morley
raised their voices exaggeratedly. Dicky rushed to greet him, gabbling away and moving his hands like a madman, his favourite trick since Madge had shown him some of the signs.

  Next thing Flora knew when she came in with the teapot and caddy and hot-water jug for Madam to brew, Bella was pounding out a carol on the piano and Jack was dragging his off-key bass roar after Dicky’s choirboy voice.

  When Flora came back with more crumpets, Jack was dwarfing a chair, holding his cup and saucer in his thick hands like a gentleman. When she came back with more hot water – up and down them stairs all day long, wouldn’t it kill you – he was sitting on the floor by the decorated tree like a child, playing with the tin soldier who shot a penny into the darkie’s mouth.

  That evening, when Flora went up to put the stone hot-water bottles in the beds, she found Dicky still awake. Downstairs, some of Madge’s young friends had come in for a small party, but the child was not allowed to stay up, because of tomorrow.

  When Flora tucked Dicky up and turned to go, he said, to keep her there, ‘Don’t you want to have Christmas with your mother and Vi and your brother and Daddy Watts?’

  ‘Save us.’

  ‘What about Bill Bolt?’

  ‘Save us with knobs on.’

  ‘Are you still married to him?’

  ‘I dunno, dearie.’

  ‘You wouldn’t leave us to go and live with Bull?’ What made this sharp-witted nipper think it ever crossed her mind? ‘If you bring me up a mince pie, Flo, I’ll tell you something.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘My friend Noah saw a bad man hanging round this corner.’

  ‘There’s always bad men up and down the Lane. Bull don’t know where I live.’

  ‘Noah saw him twice.’

  ‘He’s a liar.’

  ‘When will it be tomorrow?’

  ‘Never, if you don’t go to sleep.’

  Flora was clearing up in the dining room when a piercing shriek came from upstairs. Dicky was out of bed and on the landing.

  ‘He’s here!’ Flora ran up the first flight. ‘I saw him.’ Dicky stumbled passed her down the stairs. Doors opened. People were in the hall. ‘I saw that man!’