Dicky cringed against his father as screams and commotion came from the basement.
‘Don’t go, Flora!’ Gwen gasped, but Flora pushed among the guests, down the back stairs and panted along the passage through the disordered kitchen to the scullery in time to see Bill Bolt, with a twisted face of rage, struggling with Tat in the back doorway. The stumpy girl squared off and punched him in the stomach, and he knocked her over backwards, as Flora flew at him.
He grabbed both her hands in one of his great fists, as he had always been able to do, and laughed down at her with that old broken-tooth smile.
“Ullo, my love. I knew you was ‘ere.’
‘You get out, Bill Bolt.’ She kicked him on the shin bone.
‘Sod you, you bitch,’ he said admiringly. ‘I’m comin’ in.’
‘No, no, Bill, not here. They’ve gone for the Police.’ They probably had. ‘Don’t get in no more trouble.’
‘Meet me then.’ Still holding her, he had moved back over the doorstep.
‘I can’t.’ He twisted her wrists. ‘Well, I might. If you go now. I’ll – I don’t know . . . Go quick.’ She said anything, just to get him away.
He spat past her into the scullery and let go of her wrists. By the time Mr Leonard came muscling bravely through the scared women in the kitchen doorway, Bull had gone.
After Tatiana’s head had been bandaged and Dicky was put back to bed, he sat up for a long time with the curtain drawn back, staring out of the window at the leafless arms and fingers of the plane trees, moving across the lamp light. If he had been asleep before, he would not have seen the shadowy bulk of the fearful man slip through the garden to the passage at the side of the house. He must stay awake to keep watch.
He yawned and yawned. Watering eyes blurred the windowpane. He did not hear the grown-ups come to bed.
The sky was grey and the street lamp out when he woke in a panic, suddenly bolt upright and screaming. ‘He’s here!’
‘No, no, my darling. He’s miles away. He’ll never come back.’ His parents took him into the big brass bed between them for what was left of the night.
On Christmas day, the family gathered in Chepstow Villas. There would have been more room at Ladbroke Lodge, but nobody wanted Christmas there, and Hugo and Charlotte had never offered it.
The grandmother Adelaide was to have been with them, but when Teddie went down to Goring to bring her up on the train, she refused to be budged: so Teddie travelled back alone, shoulders metaphorically hunched against possible family blame.
Friends and neighbours came in for milk punch. Leonard’s police inspector friend Arthur French and his creamy-blonde wife walked up from farther down Chepstow Villas.
‘Slops!’ Tatiana saw him through the basement window. ‘Top slops!’ A constable on the beat, drinking stout in the kitchen with Mrs Roach, put on his helmet and left.
Arthur retailed a little crime gossip, which the women loved, even more than symptoms and remedies. Getting him alone, Leonard asked casually, ‘Ever had any experience with – things like threatening notes?’
‘Poison letters?’ Arthur’s creased face was drawn and tired. He had been up late last night, interrogating a suspected murderer.
‘Yes, that’s what they are. Poisonous.’
‘You had any?’ Arthur looked at him keenly.
Not knowing whether William Whiteley had contacted the police, Leonard said guardedly, ‘I know of some.’
‘Two a farthing, Morley, old man. We get dozens sent in, mostly harmless. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”’
The family practitioner, Dr Buckmaster, always dropped in at Christmas. ‘Little Bucky’ had made a few convivial calls already and was inclined to be obnoxious. When Dr Taylor arrived, with a present for Laura, a football for Dicky and flowers for Gwen, Bucky, on his third glass of punch, challenged, ‘Doctor, what kind of doctor?’
‘I have a practice as a naturopathic physician,’ Toby said, with Gwen’s hand on his arm. She could almost smell the aromatic herbs and hear the wind across the meadow grass.
‘Garlic and rhubarb pills,’ Bucky sneered. ‘New-fangled rubbish.’
‘Herbalism is as old as the world,’ Toby told him, and Gwen added, ‘Dr Taylor has worked and studied abroad, haven’t you, To-by?’
‘Indeed?’ Little Bucky sneered up at him with his bald, white-wreathed head tilted and his groggy eyes off the mark.
‘I have spent some time abroad,’ Toby said coolly, as if it were France or Germany, or even the United States of America. Well – Wales was abroad, a foreign country in many ways.
‘Come, child.’ Dr Buckmaster turned away to Teddie’s daughter Sophie, pulling her up from the stool where she was reading Little Folks’ Album to one of the children. ‘You haven’t put on any weight, I see.’ Sophie crossed her arms over her chest. ‘I hope you’re not caught up in this ridiculous slimming craze?’
‘It’s such fun.’ Sophie’s Aunt Vera drew attention away from her. ‘Everyone’s talking about it. I want to try these new capsules. “Svelte”, they call them. They advertise miracles.’
‘No wonder,’ Toby called across the room to her. ‘Do you know what’s in them? Tapeworm eggs.’
‘Fella’s a quack,’ Bucky mumbled, but Toby and Vera, laughing, were off on their running joke about the man with the electric massage belt that had sent a tram off the rails, and his shocking wife who had electrocuted herself with a bottle of Dr Walford Brodie’s Highly-Charged Liniment.
‘Throw away your crutches and surgical boots!’ Dicky crowed. He read the advertisements too. They were the best part of the magazines, because they sometimes showed ladies in their underwear.
After his terror of last night, Tatiana, whose father was rumoured to have been a Roman Catholic, had come upstairs this morning to give him her picture of the Madonna to hang over his bed.
Aunt Teddie, stuffily Anglican, disapproved. Such a crude, garish picture, too. A religion of peasants, and the girl had no business coming up from the kitchen with that bandage round her thick skull. They were all waiting now for the roast-goose dinner to be brought up. Teddie did not know how the women could keep up their idle chatter for so long. Her husband Ralph and some of the other men had gone off to the study. Left alone in an isolated chair, Teddie had nothing to say and nothing to do, except roll and unroll her neck ribbons and hope that Whiteley’s goose would not be as fatty as last year.
Dr Taylor came over, and since there was no other chair, went on one knee in rather an absurd position to talk to her.
‘I just wanted to say goodbye, Mrs Wynn, before I leave.’
‘You’re not staying for Christmas dinner?’ The man seemed to have pushed his way far enough into the family, heaven knew.
‘I wish I could, but I have another engagement.’
Oh, naturally. This humdrum family feast would not be entertaining enough for him.
‘I wish you a merry Christmas,’ he said.
‘I don’t care for Christmas very much, I’m afraid.’
‘Only the children do, really.’
‘Oh no, everyone else always seems to be enjoying themselves absurdly.’
‘Perhaps they just put up a good show.’
That was a new idea for Teddie. She did not want to explore it, so turned it back to herself. ‘And I don’t.’
‘Why should you, if you don’t want to?’
That was also a new thought, among people who constantly exhorted her to ‘Buck up, old girl!’
‘It started all wrong anyway, this year.’ The man was still on one knee, but apparently quite comfortable, so she told him about travelling all the way to Goring because no one else in the family would go, and her mother, who had bidden her to come, turning stubborn and refusing to leave the house.
‘Was Lady Morley not well?’ This Taylor person was listening to her. He did not get up and go.
‘She pretends,’ Teddie admitted. ‘But I’m always afrai
d she will really have a heart attack one day, to make me feel guilty. I mean, I would be guilty.’
Confused, she looked down, her fingers making pleats in her brown skirt; but he said, quite unlike a man, ‘That’s difficult for you.’ So she went on, ‘It was impossible, I felt torn in two. My mother thought I should stay with her, but Ralph and the children wanted me here with them. At least, I think they did.’
‘Mrs Ralph.’ He did get up, then, and gave her a nod of farewell. ‘Do you ever do what you want to do?’
Chapter Twelve
Aunt Teddie still felt very low and discouraged after Christmas. The start of 1907 promised her nothing, and she was not able to make a New Year resolution to ‘Buck up, Teddie!’
She felt so tired all the time that she thought she must be ill. She sent for. Dr Buckmaster. He charged two shillings a visit, but she did not have the energy to take herself to his surgery in Lansdowne Crescent, too far to walk from Campden Hill, too near to waste money on a cab.
When Little Bucky was shown into her bedroom, where Teddie wore a loose peignoir to show that she was ill, he strutted across to the window and opened the curtains.
‘The sun is so bright.’ She put up a hand. ‘It hurts my eyes.’
‘You don’t want to mope in the half dark. Do you more good on this glorious day to get out and walk across Hampstead Heath.’
This was one of his stock remedies, but she took it seriously. ‘I’m not up to that, Dr Buckmaster.’
‘What’s wrong?’ He took her pulse, tapping a natty boot impatiently, and knocked a perfunctory knuckle on her hollow breastbone.
‘I don’t know. Everything. I’m always tired.’ She raised her eyes to him in what Ralph called her bloodhound look. ‘Sometimes I’m afraid I might have an incurable disease.’
‘You shouldn’t joke about things like that.’
‘Oh no, I –’
‘Nothing wrong with you, Mrs Wynn, that a little more gumption couldn’t cure. If you could see some of my patients ...’ He shook his bald, white-fringed head. ‘I’ve just come from a poor dear lady . . . eaten away with cancer.’
‘Oh dear,’ Teddie said dutifully. ‘But sometimes I –’
‘Never gives up. Spirit of a lion.’
Teddie felt worse. ‘If I could just explain to you, Dr Buckmaster. Sometimes I think I –’
If he had sat down on the other boudoir chair and allowed her to talk, she might have told him, ‘Sometimes I think I am losing my mind.’ But he said briskly, ‘My dear Mrs Wynn, I am a very busy general practitioner. I’m afraid I haven’t got the time for a cosy chat. If you are really suffering from fatigue, I can give you some more iron tonic.’
‘Iron constipates me.’
‘Or the cocaine pills as a pick-me-up.’
‘They make me feel funny.’
‘Do you find comfort in your church?’
She shook her head. She hardly knew what he was talking about.
Dr Buckmaster took up his bag. Teddie rang the bell, and watched wretchedly as he went out with the maid.
‘How was Dr B?’ Ralph asked when he came home.
‘He was all right, I suppose. I wasn’t. He made me feel worse, really, because he wouldn’t listen.’
‘Doctors never do.’ Ralph picked up The Times and took it into his study.
He was right. Doctors did not listen. They took you over and told you what was wrong or not wrong with you, but they did not let you tell them. No one listened to Teddie, because she was a bore. The only person who had listened to her lately had been that unusual man Dr Tobias Taylor, at Christmas.
‘Do you ever do what you want to do?’ she could hear him asking with that musical upward lift to his voice. She had thought quite a lot about his words in the last two weeks. Her whole upbringing, her marriage, her position as a woman, half Victorian, half Edwardian, had not prepared her for them.
Since she felt no better after Bucky’s visit, she forced her flagging self to take action. She and Ralph had installed the telephone, but she hated using it, so she wrote a letter to Dr Taylor:
I would like to visit you professionally next week, if convenient.
He was not a conventional doctor, she knew. He dealt in treatments she did not know about. He was sophisticated, very involved in London life. He knew all kinds of people. He was from a different world. If he answered that he could not see her, or did not answer at all, that was that, and Edwina would have made a spectacle of herself once again.
He answered by return of post, giving her an appointment for the following Monday.
Teddie was very much afraid that he would tell the family about this, since he was so well in with them. If they teased her, she would not keep the appointment. She would say it had been a misunderstanding.
No one said anything, so after Ralph had left for the Temple she told the servant to call her a taxicab and travelled to Egerton Terrace, without telling anyone where she was going.
When the housekeeper, a full-lipped, knowing woman in a plain dress and long flowered apron, had shown her into the consulting room, and Tobias Taylor rose from a chair by the fire, Teddie said at once, ‘No one knows I’m here.’ It felt like an assignation. ‘You didn’t tell anyone about my letter?’
‘Of course not.’ Dr Taylor motioned her to another chair, but she was too nervous to sit down. ‘Confidentiality is golden.’
‘I was afraid the family would laugh at me.’
‘For seeking help? They should praise you. Please sit here, Mrs Wynn. Try to relax. We have plenty of time.’
She sat on the edge of an armchair, her gloved hands clasped tightly. He sat near her, with his face half turned, not looking at her intently. There was no intimidating desk to keep doctor and patient apart, no fearsome examination couch, no apparatus, no charts, no amorphous things in jars on top of the bookcase. But Teddie was not going to be able to talk. She had got herself here, but she wasn’t going to say anything.
He waited. Presently she ventured, ‘You said I was seeking help. How did you know?’
‘I could see you were in trouble.’
‘I’m all right,’ Teddie said flatly through half-closed lips. Then she said, without looking at him, ‘I’m losing my mind.’
‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘But you feel as if you were.’
Teddie stayed with him for more than an hour. The housekeeper brought hot chocolate and gingerbread, and made up the fire. When she looked back on that morning, Teddie could not remember a lot of what had been said. She knew that she had told him that Dr Buckmaster made her feel a fool.
‘Perhaps there is nothing wrong with me. But there’s something wrong with me. Vera thinks I’m going senile.’
He smiled. ‘In your – what is it – early forties?’
‘I shall be forty-seven this year.’
‘Vera usu-ally likes to make jokes,’ he said in that voice that was part question, part statement.
‘They all do, but I’m afraid I have no sense of humour.’
She remembered that he had asked how she slept, and she had said, ‘I mustn’t complain,’ and then told him about waking at three and not being able to sleep again. ‘If I take laudanum, I can’t wake in the morning.’ She told him what she had told Bella: ‘Sometimes getting up is like crawling out of my own grave.’
She was sitting back in the comfortable chair when he asked her, without emphasis, ‘Are you still upset about what happened when you went to Goring at Christmas?’
Bother. She had told him about that at No. 72. Now she had to re-live it. Taking the station fly and keeping it waiting while she went into Heron’s Nest and found her mother not packed, not even dressed. When she had finally slunk out, feeling like a punished child, and driven back to the station, she had had to pay the whole bill for the fly, which had waited nearly two hours in the cold.
‘Upset?’ Her voice had raised itself in Dr Taylor’s quiet, softly lit room. ‘I should be used to her torture after all these years.�
� She beat her fists on her knees, a child beating on her locked bedroom door, and almost shouted, ‘I will never grow up until she’s dead!’
She stood up, horrified. Somehow she got herself out of the room and down the stairs and into her elephant-grey coat, and would not wait for a cab to be called.
She might come back. She might not. Toby could not guess. Either way, when he met her again with the family, those flat bruised eyes of hers would glance at him fearfully, and he would reassure her, with one of his practised intimate smiles, that nobody would ever know. Meanwhile, he sent round to her Campden Hill house some ginseng capsules for the nerves, with dried hop flowers to infuse for an un-drugged sleep.
People had grown so conditioned to being given a bottle of this or that by the professional pill-pedlars – which is what so many doctors had become, with the advances in chemical remedies – that they did not believe that good could be done without a prescription.
Toby almost always prescribed something, even when it was obvious that the body’s natural forces were going to restore health without extra help. It gave the clients confidence, and the herbal mixtures that Glyn made up for him could do no harm, even when they did not actually do any good.
He made a journey to the institution outside London to see his mother and talk to Dr Boone, the psychiatrist there who had helped him to develop some commonsense psychology.
His mother did not know him. She had shown no recognition for a long time now, but he sat by her poor wasted form, dying with the cruel slowness of a degenerative disease, and held her bird-claw hand and talked to her. He had brought her a present, a brightly coloured toy animal made of soft wool. She would not look at it or touch it. As always, he looked carefully into her eyes and flicked fingers in front of them to make sure she was not blind. He left the toy on the pillow of the bed to which she was confined, and hoped one of the nurses would not steal it.
As he walked down the long ward between the wretched wrecks of human beings, some of the women called out to him and beckoned, or made obscene gestures. In the corridors, inmates kept stopping him, wanting to talk, clamouring to tell him something that never got told, grabbing at his clothes, following him with entreaties.
One of the Family Page 12