One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  ‘He would.’ Toby gave a harsh laugh. ‘To cover his butchery. Bella,’ he said emotionally, ‘Bella, tell me. How is your poor, poor family taking it?’

  ‘They blame you too.’ Bella saw him through a curtain of tears. ‘That’s why I came. They are very angry.’

  She went back to his house two days later. She had to. Poor Toby, she was his only friend.

  ‘He’s gone.’ Mrs Drew began to shut the door.

  ‘Gone – where?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Abroad, he said.’ ‘How long for?’

  ‘How should I know? Rent’s paid up in advance, and my salary, in case you’re worried.’

  She stood and stared boldly from the open door, which was worse than if she had slammed it, forcing Bella to retreat under the fire of her gaze.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  For some reason, Austin wanted his little daughter to see the body. Dicky looked very beautiful, with his golden curls so alive round his head and his face of an angel pausing in flight; it would give Laura reassurance and strength. Austin himself had never been allowed to see anyone dead, not his famous grandfather, not his mother’s parents. He had been absurdly sheltered, he argued wildly, not making any sense.

  Laura stared in terror. She put out a finger and touched the cold still hand. Instantly she began to scream, as she had screamed when Dicky had told her at North Croft that he would be turned to stone.

  ‘The witch!’ she shrieked. ‘She’s done it! He said she would. How could you let her, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ She beat against her father’s legs. ‘She’s turned him to stone!’ She ran like a hunted rabbit and bolted herself in the upstairs Place. She was hysterical for days. No amount of gentle insistence that Dicky had gone to be with God could prevent her from suddenly staring into corners and shouting, ‘The stones have got him! He’s stone!’ Passing the old graves in the cemetery at the end of Kensington Park Gardens, she cried out, ‘All those stones are people!’ She was not brought to the funeral.

  Outside No. 72 Chepstow Villas, a small crowd had gathered in the heavy rain to see Whiteley’s hearse and the carriages drawn away by Flemish Blacks. Noah and his friend Tiger had come up the Lane with wet hair plastered over their peaked, frightened faces and fistfuls of limp flowers that had fallen from a market stall. When they saw that the procession was leaving, they dropped the flowers and ran after the hearse. The top-hatted driver looked behind him, then reached round with his long whip to lash the boys away.

  The mourning clothes of grey and black were quite becoming to Gwen, but she did not care how she looked. She only glanced in the mirror to remind herself that her ravaged face was a just punishment.

  She and Leonard were not usually given to guilt and to analysing their mistakes, but now, in the days and nights of their insane grieving, the guilt was the hardest torture to bear.

  Toby Taylor was not here to be blamed, so they blamed themselves for trusting him. ‘You told me to get Charlotte’s doctor, Leo,’ Gwen wept. ‘But I – I was the one who called for Toby instead.’ Her drowned eyes looked out of deep shadowed caves.

  Leonard could remember all the times when he had lost patience, not through the boy’s fault, but through his own absurdity. ‘I can hear myself saying on the lawn, that lovely day at North Croft, ‘I am quite angry.’

  ‘You only meant ‘somewhat angry’,’ Madge said.

  ‘But he could have taken it to mean "completely angry".’ Leonard dropped into a pew at the side altar of St Peter’s and prayed dementedly, ‘Grant me five minutes with him – just five minutes.’

  His safe, comfortable home in Chepstow Villas had turned into a morgue. People crept about in soft shoes. No one raised their voices. Visitors came and went, in a drift of murmurs and whispers. No one wanted to eat, but meals kept coming up from below stairs. Behind every closed door, someone was crying.

  Leonard could not cry. Hé had been turned to stone too, he thought. ‘Stay at home, my dear man,’ Frank Whiteley urged, but Leonard went back to work very soon, because he could not bear it at home. He remembered that when the old Chief was killed and everything had gone wrong at the store, his home had been his escape and refuge. Now Whiteley’s was his escape. He rose, washed, dressed and shaved like a machine, kissed Gwen, who stayed late in bed now, ate eggs and toast in silence, and hurried down the Villas and across Chepstow Road and along Westbourne Grove like a silly little frock-coated mannikin, drawn forward on a string.

  Good morning, good morning. Oh, Mr Morley, sir, how are you? Good morning. Yes, I’ve a lot of work to do. Thank you.

  He pushed the door of his office shut behind him just in time before he fell into the chair and dissolved on to the unwelcoming ridges of the rolltop desk, in an ocean of tears.

  After a while, he was able to pull himself together. He raised his head and wiped his face with a handkerchief, and made himself look at the framed family group above the desk, from which Dicky, perched on the arm of the backyard bench, laughed back at him.

  Leonard straightened out his clothes, brushed his nondescript hair, checked his tie and collar wings in the small hand glass he kept for that purpose, and went out on to the floor.

  This was where he belonged. Not as a king roving in power through his dominion, like William Whiteley, but as the regulator of the whole fabulous display of merchandise and its acolytes, the sellers and the buyers, moving in his own element, eyes everywhere, ready with a smile or a frown of concern, oiling the huge machine with attentiveness and goodwill.

  He missed nothing. ‘Excuse me, madam, please don’t touch the Chinese porcelain.’ ‘Mrs Betts, I think the chrysanthemums are just a little tired ...’ ‘Made up your mind, then, have you, sir?’ A click of the fingers. ‘Mr Hoiles, forward!’

  Hugo said that Leonard had the soul of a shopwalker, and Hugo was right. There was plenty of office work to be done upstairs, but this was safer, out among the people in his familiar role, allowing himself a brief pause in which he did not think about Dicky.

  He stood on the main stairs, a few steps up from the ground floor, his favourite vantage point to get the whole detailed bustling picture of crowds moving in and out between shop and street, threading along the counters, clustering by a special display. A tall man brushed past him going up the stairs, and apologized, and the past rushed into the present with the memory of that pleasant genial voice: ‘I say, I’m most desperately sorry.’ This was where Toby Taylor had first come into his life.

  Leonard moved quickly down to the floor. ‘Good morning, madam.’ ‘Yes, can I help you?’ ‘Good day to you, Lady Walker. How is Sir Alistair?’ ‘No, I’m sorry, lacquer-ware has moved upstairs, madam, while we redecorate.’ Shoppers smiled and nodded and appreciated him. From behind counters, the assistants, men and women, watched him covertly. They knew. The customers could see the black armband, but it might have been for a distant relative.

  ‘Mr Leonard Morley.’ A beautiful woman whose name he did not know stood in front of him. ‘I heard about your – your son.’ She dropped her voice. Leonard bent his head. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

  He looked up at her. Behind the veil, such compassion was in her eyes and in her soft pink mouth. He bit his lips.

  ‘I remember a few years ago, seeing him here with you – Dicky, wasn’t it? I gave him my box of peppermints – parading about with you so confidently. Forgive me. Are you all right, Mr Morley?’

  Leonard nodded, gave his infinitesimal bow and moved off along the crowded aisle.

  Toby had decided quickly to go to Paris. He would hide there, lie low, perhaps find Marie-May Lacoste, perhaps move on into Germany or Italy, and return to his practice when the fuss had died down and there was no risk to his good name.

  It was ironic that in a major crisis of life, some very small detail could hold you up. The dog Bounce. Neelie Drew despised it. He could not leave it with her.

  The ferryman at Goring would take it. Todd liked dogs and he might be pleased to have this energetic little barker
staying with him at the lonely towpath cottage. Toby left his bags in the cloakroom at Victoria, where he would collect them for the boat train tomorrow, and went with the dog to Paddington. It was a cold, windy day at the end of October. Toby, raw from Dicky’s death and his own searing guilt, did not want to be recognized. He had wrapped himself in his old dark-green serge cloak, acquired in one of his medical student winters to keep him alive on the freezing run across the courtyards from his lodgings, when he was called to the wards or the operating theatre at night. He put a muffler round his neck and jammed his old broad felt fishing hat low on his head. The dog still wore its collar studded with fake glittery gems, which he had bought to amuse Marie-May. They must look a bizarre pair.

  When they walked from Goring station, under the railway bridge and round the first bend of the river’s double curve, Toby saw the big ferryboat on the other bank, where a barge horse was being loaded. The barge, taking felled trees upstream, had been poled across the river and was tied up to piling outside the low red-brick cottage, which squatted like a mushroom on the soggy bank.

  The dog, a real opportunist Londoner, ran about excitedly exploring all the new seductive smells, and then stood by Toby at the landing stage, defying the approaching rowboat and the floating horse with short shrill barks. Bringing the boat round parallel with the bank, the ferryman looked over his shoulder.

  ‘It’s me, Todd. Mr Taylor,’ Toby called to him. ‘Come to ask you another favour.’

  ‘Ah?’ There had been good money in it before.

  ‘I’ll pay you well,’ Toby got to the point at once, ‘If you’ll look after my dog for me while I go abroad.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘That’s settled, then. Good.’ Toby reached down for the boat’s bow rope and looped it over the post at the landing.

  There was no bargeman holding the horse, which was obviously an old hand at the ferry. It was shifting its huge shod feet, adjusting its balance to step placidly up on to the bank, when the damned dog, the rotten, arrogant terrier, made a dash at it, jumping into the boat and nipping at its legs.

  With a lot of clatter and splashing, the horse kicked out and the stern of the boat swung out into the stream. The horse was half in and half out of the river, floundering up the bank with a great churning of mud.

  The two men on the barge were shouting and cursing. The starboard oar was in the water, and the ferryman was slumped in a heap, his hands clutching his head.

  A burly bargeman took the horse by the bridle and kicked the dog into the river, where it swam neatly back to shore and ran off among the bushes. ‘All right, Toddy?’

  The ferryman groaned. Toby, knelt on the landing boards and pulled the man’s hand away from his head. The temple was smashed, and pulpy with blood. They lifted him out on to the grass, and Toby padded a rag from the bottom of the boat and tied it to the wounded head with his muffler.

  They carried him, unconscious now, and laid him in the cabin of the timber barge. The horse was hitched up and shouted at. He leaned into his collar and plodded off on the slow haul to the station to get Toddy on a train to the cottage hospital in Wallingford.

  Toby watched them out of sight round the bend. He went into the cottage and made up the fire to boil the kettle for some tea. He was suddenly very tired. Stricken and shocked from the tragedy of Dicky, he had scrambled together his hasty plans, and was in a suspended state, halfway between England and France, the future just as unreal as the immediate past.

  Now he had caused another tragedy by bringing the wretched dog here. The ferryman might die. If he lived, he would not come back for a long time, to row his heavy boat back and forth across the river. His livelihood would go, perhaps the house, too, and the boat, if they did not belong to him. So here was another life ruined by Tobias Taylor, great humanistic healer, to add to the shattered lives of the beloved family, whom he might never see again. He drank his tea out of a grubby mug, and because he could not yet bear to think about the Morleys, he thought about the ferryman, laid out along the carriage seat on his way to find a doctor. A doctor! If anyone in Paris calls me ‘doctor’, they will get my fist in their face. All doctors are useless para-sites.

  In his mind, he damped down the fire, threw away leftover food for the ducks, made the boat secure bow and stern, brought in the oars, locked up the little house and set off up the towpath for the station. If the dog did not return, he would leave it here to be found, or to find someone. It was a self-reliant little pig. His thoughts performed these necessary tasks, but his body still sat slumped by the fire.

  The ferry service did not cease because poor Todd was badly hurt. Toby stayed on at Ferry Cottage with the dog. He let his beard grow, and wore his shapeless hat and kept the cloak wrapped round him, inside out, the black lining soaked and muddy, as he rowed across the river for the barge horses and few November passengers, and his gendeman’s hands grew hard calluses. Bounce barked for him when the ferry bell rang on the dead tree. The dog rode in the bow of the boat, balanced four-square with his front legs on the thwart, and yelped stridently at any other boats that came by. He had lost his jewelled collar. Toby thought that one of the men on the barge had stolen it.

  Arthur French came up the road to No. 72. He or his wife dropped in on the family almost every day, anxiously, as if they were children who should not be left alone.

  ‘I have a bit of news for you, Leonard.’ Arthur cleared his throat. ‘I didn’t want to tell you, because it has nothing whatsoever to do with your – situation, but you would read it in the paper anyway.’

  Horace Rayner, who had murdered William Whiteley almost a year ago, had attempted to take his own life in Pentonville prison. ‘He cut his wrist very deeply, I heard. If the officers had not found him when they did, he would have bled to death.’

  ‘He should have,’ Leonard said dully. ‘Do you remember, after the death sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, he said that he would rather die than spend the rest of his life behind bars. Why didn’t they let him die?’

  ‘Why didn’t he die, instead of Dicky?’ Gwen said irrationally, and began to cry again. She still cried every day, three or four outbursts at different times, and when she was taken away to lie down, she fell asleep.

  She went out shopping, to Whiteley’s or Arthur’s Stores, but not any more down the Lane, and not by herself. She went with Madge or Bella or one of her sisters-in-law, because she was too uncertain. She saw her grandchildren, but not for very long, and muddled through some of her usual jobs: counted the laundry wrong, mislaid bills, or paid them twice, washed china ornaments in the pantry with Tatiana, and did not mind when she broke something.

  Formally in mourning, the family did nothing social and saw only each other. Leonard had been to Goring to talk to his mother. She wanted him to stay at Heron’s Nest with her, and when he would not, insisted that he take her back with him to Chepstow Villas. She was quite a nuisance there, selfish in her grief and critical – as if they needed to be told that Dicky had died because of their stupidity, and it was a relief when her companion Margaret Biddle came in a hired car and fetched her back.

  ‘You can say this for Her Ladyship.’ Flora stood on the top step with Madge to see her leave. ‘Her departure has given us all something to be glad about.’

  Aunt Teddie’s grief was mostly centred on herself, since the changes in her had not been fundamental. Dicky’s death was a personal affront: ‘Just when I was beginning to feel life was worth living,’ which she made worse by adding, ‘and no Dr Taylor to cheer me up.’ Austin was in a terrible state. Six-year-old Laura, who had always been an easy child, had suddenly become rude and difficult, demanding attention, resenting time spent by her mother and the nurse with her small brother, and her father’s time spent at Chepstow Villas, where nobody wanted to play games with her any more. She threw tantrums and sulks and invented unspecific ailments. ‘My ankles won’t bend. My hair hurts.’ She would not go upstairs at No. 72, where she had seen Dicky turned to
stone. She never spoke of him, but sometimes she tried, in an ineffective way, to be tomboyish. Austin had to scold her for whistling in the street.

  By the end of November, Madge had gone back in a haphazard way to help at the Loudon Street Settlement. She hoped to be able to do something for Jack Haynes, because she felt guilty about having taken him up in such a big way last year, and then neglected him; but Jack was not staying at the Settlement any more, and the cabinetmaker who was training him had not seen him for a long time. Madge was once more seeing a lot of Guy Davidson, and was torn between his demands and the needs of her parents, who often seemed more like her children now. Guy sometimes seemed like a stern, domineering father. He was only four years older, but he thought himself more experienced and sophisticated than Madge, who had always been so confident in her energy and intelligence. When they went out together, she sometimes pushing his chair if he was not up to standing or walking, he wanted her to be the best-looking woman; yet he did not like it if men admired her.

  ‘I’m not your slave,’ Madge had told him, when he had clicked his fingers across the room for her.

  ‘Bitch,’ he muttered. She had never heard a man say that about any woman. His powerful hand was tense and trembling on the arm of his chair. When he was angry, his eyes were flat and frightening. When he was in a good mood, he could be exciting company, laughing and joking outrageously, with the air about him of reckless adventure that Madge had seen in his boyish pictures when he took her to visit his parents. When he was low-spirited, or in pain, he told her that he would die if she ever left him.

  Madge did think about breaking free. But then I’d have nothing, she cried to herself, as the grandfather clock soberly greeted her late at night in the shadowed hall. I must have something!

  Going upstairs without her shoes was a weary climb. Dicky used to leave his door ajar when she was out. He was always insensibly asleep, but she would creep in and leave on the bed whatever she had brought home: a chocolate or a party favour, or a gardenia buttonhole, or a theatre programme, or a rosette from a protest meeting.