‘You’ll stay to dinner?’
‘If I may.’
In the study, when Toby had told him the story he had woven out of facts and assumptions, Leonard protested, ‘But I can’t march in there and accuse the man of this. There is no definite proof.’
‘There is very strong suspicion, though. My feeling is that if you lay this in front of Mr Beale, he’ll crumble.’
Leonard looked distressed. ‘It would be playing his game. Smear against smear. I can’t do it.’
‘But I can.’ Toby had already thought of this.
‘You?’
‘Why not? I’m the one who has found him out.’ ‘But suppose there is nothing...’
‘If there was nothing between them,’ Toby was filled with a buoyant excitement, ‘if it was only an innocent drinking acquaintance in a shabby hotel, then why did Henry Beale never tell anyone that he knew of the existence of Horace Rayner? Let me take a chance, Leonard, will you?’
‘You won’t say that I sent you?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s my risk.’ They shook hands. Leonard smiled at last.
Toby liked to take risks. His whole life was a risk, in a way, because, although he was genuinely helping people who had real or imaginary illnesses, he did not really know as much as they thought he did.
He decided to deliver his guesswork-as-fact to Henry Beale at the store. It was best to let loose his lethal charge in a place where Beale could not shout or attack him or make a noisy scene.
‘Good day, sir. My clerk says you have a proposition to set before me.’ Henry Beale, in an offensively high collar that kept his jowls propped up so that he could look down on the world, offered Toby a chair with a ceremonial gesture. ‘Do I take it that you are an importer?’
‘You may take anything you want.’ Toby remained standing. ‘If I am an importer, the commodity I bring to you is something that you already possess, something very large and very simple.’
‘Don’t speak in riddles, sir.’ Beale ran his hands up and down his well-filled waistcoat. ‘I am a busy man.’
‘So am I. This is what I have to offer, Mr Beale.’ The Chief Buyer prepared himself to disparage, as a preliminary to bargaining. Toby put his hands behind his back. ‘Truth.’
‘Truth?’ Henry Beale scowled. ‘What are you playing at?’
‘The truth about the game that you played with one Mr Horace Rayner, illegitimate son of your employer, William Whiteley.’
To say that Henry Beale paled would only mean that he became a normal colour, instead of flushed. He looked at the door, and Toby stepped back to make sure it was closed.
‘I have been to that little hotel in Red Lion Street,’ he began. ‘The one on the corner, with the bar room whose entrance gives on to the mews.’ He stayed by the door, leaning against it with his arms folded and his ankles crossed, his brow lowered and his gaze directed at Leonard’s enemy, who was now his enemy also.
‘I don’t know it.’ Beale leaned a hand on the back of his chair. He looked as if he would like to sit down, but would not give Toby the advantage of height.
‘Strange. They know you there, Mr Beale, and they know that, since about last July or August, you talked several times with Horace Rayner, unacknowledged son of Mr William Whiteley.’
‘I have never met the man. Well – if I did, I didn’t know who he was. Now look here, sir ...’ Henry Beale began to bluster and interrupt.
‘Hear me out,’ Toby said. ‘It will be better for you if you do.’ Watching Beale very closely, he told him the story that he had deduced.
‘The first of the anonymous notes was received by Mr Leonard Morley, Assistant Manager of this store, in August, as he testified at the trial. I put it to you, Mr Beale –’ Toby enjoyed sounding like a barrister – I put it to you that after you discovered who Horace Rayner was, you and he conspired to get money out of his father.’
‘Oh, this is absurd.’ Henry Beale sneered at him. I won’t hear any more of this slanderous rubbish.’ He sat down heavily at his desk and put his large oily head in his hands. ‘Get out. I’ve got work I must do.’
‘So have I,’ Toby said pleasantly. ‘It is to ask you to tell me this, if you will. In the event that Mr Whiteley had met any blackmail demands, what percentage of the money did you expect to receive?’
This was Toby’s big risk, a pure guess, but he delivered it confidently. Had the shot hit home?
‘How dare you?’ Beale lumbered to his feet and pushed back the chair. ‘Get out!’ He moved towards Toby. ‘Out of my office before I call the police and have you thrown out!’
Toby stood his ground, but he unfolded his arms. If the infuriated man struck out at him, he would let him have it back. He was lighter, but fitter and quicker of movement than Henry Beale, who was breathing like a bull, his face beginning to glisten with sweat.
‘Are you going to get out?’ Beale asked menacingly.
Toby shook his head.
‘Then I shall send for the police.’ The man stepped back towards the telephone on his desk.
‘But do you really want the police here?’ Toby teased him with a conversational tone. ‘Do you want me to tell them how, by conspiring with Horace Rayner to write and deliver those criminally threatening notes, you also tried to ruin the career of your colleague, Leonard Morley?’
‘God damn you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Henry Beale sat down again, his face half turned away, as if to collect himself. ‘What has this got to do with Mr Morley?’
‘His good friend, Inspector French, might answer that. I understand,’ Toby lied, ‘that fingerprints have been found on one of the notes that wasn’t torn up.’
‘The murderer’s, of course.’ Beale swung round, biting his fleshy lip.
‘Or yours.’
‘You’re mad. You’re – you’re a liar and a lunatic, and a – and a –’
The gross, sweating man in the chair was beside himself, slobbering, stammering with rage, and what Toby triumphantly believed was guilt. He must go now, while he was on top. Keeping his eyes on Beale, he picked up his hat from the chair by the door and delivered his parting shot calmly.
‘I shall leave you now to think this over, while I consider how best to break the news to William and Frank Whiteley, who, God knows, have endured enough already.’
‘Now look here!’ Henry Beale sprang up. ‘Come back, sir, I haven’t finished with you. Come back, you filthy liar, or I –’
Sweat it out, Beale, Toby told the door as he closed it behind him.
There were staff about in the corridors, and shoppers crowded him as he made his way downstairs. He had to contain his insane glee until he reached the street, where he could strut up Queen’s Road to the park, swinging his stick and grinning with triumph and raising his hat in a gesture of goodwill to anyone who smiled at him.
Henry Beale did the gentlemanly thing, for once in his career. He resigned. The brothers William and Frank decided not to pursue the investigation and prosecute. Whiteley’s had suffered too much notoriety already.
The Board of Directors would appoint Assistant Manager Leonard Morley to the post of Managing Director. A new Assistant would be hired, and the Head Buyer would move up to replace Henry Beale as Chief Buyer.
‘So who did write them notes, then, when all’s said and done?’
Madge said, ‘We’ll probably never know, Flora, and it doesn’t matter.’
From overheard bits of conversation, filled in by Madge, Flora had the whole dramatic story to retail below stairs and to her mother and friends in Notting Dale. She tried to tell Bill Bolt how happy she was for the family, but Bull was not interested in them.
‘You’re happy,’ he said, “cos you got me comin’ in through that perishin’ narrer window once in a while to give you what for.’
‘You mustn’t come no more.’
‘Har, har.’
‘I’m afraid.’
‘They won’t find out.’
‘No, afraid
of you. No, Bull, no – you’re hurting me!’
Leonard started up stump cricket again in the backyard, with the big Sunday lunches: a welcome sign that everything was back to normal. Toby Taylor turned up almost every Sunday to score flashy boundaries by hitting the ball over the high back wall and the stable roofs into the mews.
‘A tanner!’
He paid Dicky and Laura sixpence each to retrieve the ball.
He was the family hero.
So that when poor little Sophie, put out by his popularity, decided belatedly to reveal her terrible and humiliating experience at The Clinique, nobody believed her. Her mother, who formerly was always ready to believe the worst about anybody, would hear no word against her favourite physician. Dr Taylor himself dismissed Sophie’s story as ‘a common hysterical delusion of young female patients’, and everyone believed him.
Gradually, after that, she began to eat food again in a slightly more normal manner.
‘I knew you would come to your senses at last,’ crowed her mother, who in some ways was even harder to stomach now that she seemed to be emerging from her gloom.
You know nothing, Sophie thought. I didn’t have any of the éclairs yesterday, and you didn’t even notice. But if no one’s going to believe me about Dr Taylor, or pay any attention to what happens to me, there’s no point in starving, because obviously, no one cares.
Chapter Eighteen
The family decided to forget Sophie’s aberration, but Bella remained intrigued. She agreed with everyone that the girl had made the whole thing up, but part of her mind furtively asked: Could it possibly be true? Everyone knew that Toby Taylor was a ladies’ man, but Bella had not interpreted that in a physical sense. Now, after Sophie’s story – ‘He did, Bella!’ ‘Oh, he couldn’t have.’ ‘No one believes me!’ – she had to think of him in a new way. She could not help stealing glances at his hands and wondering guiltily: had those hands ... ?
‘How’s Miss Sophie, then?’ the butler leered, when Bella was visiting Sybil Crocker in the servants’ sitting room.
When upstairs was unpleasant, which it was at the moment, because Bella’s father had called her a hopeless disappointment, and her mother was sulking because the Lord Chamberlain had turned down her request for an invitation to the state visit of the King’s nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II, downstairs was a refuge. She did not think she was always welcome, but if you believed in democracy and a classless society, which Bella did in theory, you had to practise it.
‘What do you mean, Mr Hurd?’ Upstairs, the butler was Hurd, but in his own domain he was Mr. ‘Why do you ask after her?’
He hooded his eye at Sybil like a snake. They knew. How?
Informers in Phillimore Place, or, God forbid, Chepstow Villas? Scandal ran from basement to basement like rats.
‘She will come to no good, that one.’ Sybil was mending a black stocking, with her little finger crooked above the needle. ‘I always thought she had a common streak.’
‘I don’t know why,’ Bella said. ‘She’s very quiet and ladylike.’
‘Ha!’ The butler enjoyed this. ‘That don’t signify. You ask my aunt in Pottery Lane. They come to her, you know, these high society girls, when they’re in trouble.’
Bella did not want to hear any more, but was loath to leave, because she knew they would talk about her behind her back. She began to say, ‘Thank you for the tea,’ when a shrill clamour split the air in the passage outside.
‘Oh, bells, bells, bells – she’s at it again!’ The parlourmaid put down her darning and got up. ‘No offence, Miss Bella.’ She went off with a hypocritical flounce.
Charlotte Morley had been excluded, not only from the Kaiser’s reception, but from the Royal Academy Private View as well. Piqued, she would not go to the Summer Exhibition on an ordinary day, but she did eventually agree to go with Bella in June, when no one they knew would be there to witness their shame.
Someone was, however. When her mother was lingering over some particularly uninspiring portraits, Bella went back once more to try to decipher the ‘problem picture’, titled enigmatically, Predicament.
In a cluttered room, where you could see detailed ornaments and every petal and tendril on the wallpaper, a young woman in outdoor clothes wept, head on table. An older man brooded by the mantelpiece, pipe in hand, small dog cowering on the hearthrug. A maid’s head in cap and streamers looked anxiously round the door.
‘What do you think, Bella?’ A hand on her shoulder. She turned and found herself face to face with Toby Taylor.
‘Oh – good afternoon. What do I think?’
‘About the picture.’
‘I really don’t know.’ She was not going to risk saying something he could think stupid.
‘Predicament. You must have some opinion.’
‘Well ... I think her father is forbidding her to see a certain man. But the maid might be coming in to say he’s actually there in the hall?’
‘No. She’s his wife, not his daughter. She’s sinned,’ he said with glee. ‘He’s got to turn her out, dog and all, and he wonders if he’s wrong, because she’s been the light of his middle age. But too late! The maid is saying her taxicab is at the door. It’s a dreadful picture anyway, with all that claustrophobic detail. I don’t know why people waste time on it. What are your favourites this year?’
‘I like the Sickert woman in the mirror, and the Colliers.’ She played safe. ‘His people are so very alive. You feel you – you feel you know them.’ There were pictures at home, in which the people sometimes seemed more real and approachable than those with whom she lived.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘And you want to know them better, and to be in the places where they are. Come along and I’ll show you some of the ones I especially like.’
They looked at a tall narrow painting of a busy London street. ‘Listen.’ He put his head on one side. ‘You can hear the traffic, and the shouts of those men on the corner.’ In the next gallery, they skirted the crowd looking dutifully at Sargent’s Lady Sassoon, Portrait of the Year, and were alone in a corner with an unpretentious landscape in which a low stone house stood at the edge of a field whose long grasses were threaded by a wandering path of trodden darker shades.
‘I’m walking down that path,’ Toby said dreamily.’
‘So am I. I can feel my hands brushing the tops of the grass.’
‘That’s what painting is for,’ he said, ‘to draw you powerfully in to be a living part of what the artist saw.’ A woman in a hat like an iced cake had stopped to frown at his intense, persuasive voice, but he paid attention only to Bella. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’
She looked up at him with her head slightly lowered. She had seen women do this, to make their eyes look larger.
‘Have you ever studied art, Bella?’
‘With my governess, I did. She was very clever and original, but when I was sent away to school, it wasn’t in the curriculum. However.’ She raised her head, because it was tiring to keep looking up from under her brows. ‘I would hope to make it one of my subjects, if I ever could go to a university.’
‘That’s your ambition, isn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘Somewhere like Leeds, where women can go to lectures, but not have to take a degree.’ ‘What is keeping you back then?’
‘Well ...’ Somehow it seemed too trivially domestic to say: My parents. ‘Well, I might not be accepted, for one thing.’
‘Have you put yourself forward?’
‘Not yet. One day I will, though.’ He was much taller than her. She looked up at him, as she hoped, fearlessly. ‘I want to make something of my life!’
‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘This country needs more educated women.’
‘I think so too.’ Bella basked in his approval. ‘It’s a time of freedom and opportunity for us, and I would like the chance to grasp it.’
‘I have contacts in the academic world,’ he murmured. ‘Perhaps I can help.’
’Could y
ou? Oh dear, there’s my mother.’ Charlotte had a stout arm up, beckoning over the hats. Bella turned away into the crowd. Toby Taylor did not follow her.
But a week later, he came up to her at a dance in Belgrave Square.
‘Hallo!’ He seemed glad to see her, ‘You look elegant in that dress.’
Bella knew she did not look elegant in anything, especially the expensive pale green overdecorated satin, but she repeated the trick of ducking her head and raising her eyes, which were her best feature.
‘Are you having a good time?’ he asked her.
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘It was all right at first, but my partner went off to another ball to get a second supper,’
‘The cad.’
‘Oh, they all do that.’ There were still dozens of men on the floor, but they were not dancing with Bella.
‘Come on, then.’ Toby Taylor pressed her gloved hand.
‘Let’s escape. I haven’t a partner either. I was an extra man at a dinner party.’
‘But your programme –’
‘We’ll throw it away. And yours.’
Bella slid the little white and gold programme off her wrist and stuffed it into the green satin bag that matched her dress, before he could see the empty spaces in it. She told her dinner party hostess, Mrs Gore-Brown, that her father’s chauffeur had come for her – ‘Oh, indeed? I wish I had known about these arrangements’ – and went downstairs to get her cloak, half afraid that Toby would not wait for her, and she would have to grovel to Mrs Gore-Brown.
In the taxicab, she asked him, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Not to Ladbroke Lodge. They would want to know why you were back early. Come and see my home for a change.’
Oh, my God. Bella knew this was not right, not the right thing to do at all. In the light from a street lamp as they stopped at a corner, she saw his hands – those hands! – resting on the knees of his perfect evening trousers. He was so relaxed and casual, she could not protest, ‘Oh no, I mustn’t.’ He would despise her as a silly, shrinking girl.
One of the Family Page 19