by Phillip Rock
Archie Foxe had been destined to make money and had never felt the slightest surprise that he had done so. He had never thanked God for his good fortune and was quick to point out that neither luck nor the Almighty had had anything to do with it.
“Hard work and a bloody good idea,” was Archie Foxe’s sole business philosophy. He was sixty years old and had been born in the slums of Shadwell in London’s East End on New Year’s Day, 1854. He would not talk about his childhood with anyone, not even his own daughter, nor had he done so with the woman he married late in life and who had died when Lydia was a child, an upper-class woman from Cumberland, who, had he told her, would not have comprehended his stories, or would have thought them mere Dickensian fictions. It had been a childhood of stinking hovels and workhouses, of a father drifting away in despair to gin-caused madness and a mother dying of consumption in a freezing attic. He could see the place of his childhood from the top-floor windows of Foxe House, the great serpentine stretches of the Thames below Blackfriars Bridge. It was not a distance that could be measured in miles.
Archie Foxe had been sent from a children’s house of detention to Bethnal Green at the age of nine to be an apprentice in a butcher shop in Smithfield Market. The butcher’s brother owned a bake shop, and Archie’s job was to chop up scraps of near-putrid beef and veal, which the bake-shop owner turned into gelatinous meat pies. The vileness of those pies inspired Archie to make better ones, which he did after quitting his apprenticeship at the age of seventeen. He entered into partnership with a middle-aged widow who owned a tiny bakery near Covent Garden. The two of them made the pies at night, and Archie took them around to various eating establishments and public houses and sold them during the day. They couldn’t make enough of them, and within a year they had rented a building and had ten meat cutters and pastry men working for them.
“It was just a question of pilin’ one thing on another,” Archie would tell a magazine writer many years later. The bakery growing, the acquisition of horses and delivery wagons, the expansion of product—beef and veal pies, beef pies with kidney, veal and pork pies, pork pies with currants and apple chunks. . . .
“And then the puttin’ of the pies in tins, shippin’ ’em to India . . . Australia . . . all round the bloody world.”
The widow sold her share of the partnership to Archie in 1880 to spend the balance of her days in a comfortable house in the country with four servants.
“ ’Avin’ it all to meself was really what did it. I could feel free like . . . just do what I ruddy well wanted.”
What he wanted were a few shops in strategic places on the corners of major thoroughfares—clean, well-lighted places where ordinary blokes could have a cup of tea or coffee and something good and filling to eat and be waited on by a pretty young woman dressed in a blue uniform with a starched white apron and a white cap and all for very little money. He wanted all these shops to look exactly alike so that people would recognize them instantly. He thought up the idea of painting the exteriors a glossy white, and the first of all the subsequent hundreds of White Manor tea shops opened its doors on the northwest corner of Ludgate Circus on June 3, 1883, the shop at Holborn and Gray’s Inn Road opening two weeks later.
“Men must eat, you see—that’s only nature. A man can go years on the same pair o’ boots, a woman can wear the same coat from one year’s end to the other, or ’ave the same ’ousehold furnishin’ for a lifetime, but they must eat, three squares a day and a cuppa char every few hours or so. That’s the natural thing about it . . . that’s why you can’t ’elp but make a bit o’ money at it, caterin’ to that natural fact, you see. Can’t ’elp it. . . . And the only trick to it is in givin’ just ordinary people decent grub at a fair price, because those are the people you want to sell, the people who’ve got to watch their pennies, see. . . . Because there’s a lot more of them kind of people than there are rich people, who don’t give a damn ’ow much they spend for a meal. I don’t care if they come into a White Manor or not—that is of no concern to me at all . . . not one bit . . . no. I built the White Manors with some bloke who clerks in an office in mind, with a shopgirl in mind. Yes. Only, of course, it grew a bit from that, you see. Got a bit more posh, you might say. Yes. There are White Manors where a navvy can hop in for his tea and two slices, and there’s the White Manors that got a ruddy six-piece orchestra and a duke couldn’t find fault with the Dover sole. But the price stays fair, you see. . . . That’s the whole bleedin’ trick—the price stays fair.”
“Is my father about?” Lydia asked the pretty young receptionist.
“He went below, Miss Foxe,” the woman said. “But I can ring down and I’m sure we can locate him for you.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll just wait in his office. But if you hear from him, tell him I’m in there or I’ll be waiting forever!”
“Of course, Miss Foxe. And may I compliment you on your frock? It’s very lovely.”
“Thank you.”
“Most becoming. Not English, surely.”
“No. A Paris design.”
“Oh, yes. It does show, doesn’t it?”
Lydia could see the envy in the woman’s eyes. She was pretty, but her clothing was drab. A girl who worked in an office and lived with other girls who worked in offices in some crowded rooming house in Holborn. It was quite pathetic.
She liked her father’s office. It was what she imagined a judge’s chambers would be like, or the study of a dean at Oxford. The walls lined with oak, the flooring oak as well, polished to a satin luster with a fine old Oriental carpet to add the proper touch of color and warmth to the room. Comfortable leather chairs. The grand old Wellington desk. A few pictures on the walls. A landscape by Constable. Two modern paintings of London by Walter Sickert. And there were photographs in silver frames, on the walls and on the desk. Photographs of herself, her mother, George Robey—a music hall comedian of whom her father was very fond—Herbert Asquith, and David Lloyd George. (Archie Foxe’s nearly bottomless bankbook had been of great help to the Liberal party in the general elections of 1906, and the prime minister and his chancellor of the exchequer would never forget it.)
The framed enthusiastically inscribed photographs of the prime minister and Lloyd George made Lydia smile. She wondered what Lord Stanmore would do if he were in her shoes, standing alone with the images of those men confronting him. Toss them out the window probably—or smash them with his riding crop in righteous Tory rage.
There were some magazines on a table, and she sat in a chair next to the window and leafed through a copy of the Illustrated London News. There were pictures of the king and queen at Cowes, the king looking trim and fit in an admiral’s uniform, the queen looking beautiful and terribly austere in an ostrich-plumed hat. There were three pages of photographs of the rebuilding of a cottage in Derbyshire: an article by Mr. Hilaire Belloc on the French Revolution—the first of five articles—lavishly illustrated with old engravings of the period, and several pages on German army maneuvers in East Prussia: ranks of drably uniformed men with picklebaube helmets marching across fields; squadrons of gorgeously uniformed uhlans and hussars passing the Kaiser and the Crown Prince in review. How operatic and costumed they all looked. She wondered which of the Kaiser’s arms was withered. It was impossible to tell. She turned the page. An advertisement in halftone showed the newly completed White Manor in Charing Cross: “Three distinctly different restaurants for your dining pleasure . . . two orchestras . . . tango teas . . . saloon bar—”
“Well, this is a welcome surprise.”
She looked up, and there was her father coming into the room, full tilt as usual, nearly running, a gaunt-eyed pink-complexioned young man at his heels.
“Hello, Daddy,” she said.
“You can go, Thomas,” Archie Foxe commanded over his shoulder. “Get the Manchester directive in the post by five, that’s all that’s important. Give the rest to the typists.”
The young man visibly brightened. “Yes, sir,
I’ll do that.”
“Well, well.” Archie Foxe rocked back and forth on his heels and gazed at his daughter with obvious pleasure. He was a stocky man who looked younger than his years, with reddish hair parted and combed carefully to help conceal a round bald spot, like a monk’s tonsure. The East End was engraved on his puckish features, the face of a street imp grown old—and much wiser. “Well, well. What brings you up from the countryside? Money, I suppose.”
She was looking at him through narrowed eyes, a critical stare.
“You promised not to wear checked suits. They make you look like a tout.”
He touched the loudly patterned jacket with his heavy, blunt hands. “I like checks—an’ touts. Smartest bloke I ever met in me life was a tout at Newmarket.”
“Oh, Daddy.” She sighed. “You’re quite impossible.” She stood up, walked over to him, and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ve missed you. Can’t you come down for a few days?”
“There’s been too much to do . . . but I’ll try and manage. You keepin’ busy?”
“Oh, yes, with one thing or another. I drove Alexandra up for a dress fitting.”
“How is the girl?”
“Excited. Hopes to be married any minute.”
“Oh? Who’s the lucky gent?”
“She hasn’t met him yet, but I gather any man will do as long as he’s tall, handsome, and can walk on water.”
“Seems to me that walkin’ on water is your ruddy standard.” He took a leather case from an inner pocket and extracted a long Cuban cigar. “That and curin’ lepers and raisin’ the dead.”
She turned away from him and walked stiffly to the windows. London had never looked so beautiful, almost like a picture postcard rendition—a too-blue sky, a perfectly formed nimbus of white fleecy cloud framing the dome of St. Paul’s. How wonderful it would be to fly above the city. . . . Not in an airplane—she had done that and it was far too noisy for enjoyment—but as a bird flew, on silent wings.
“I find your impatience with me depressing, Daddy.”
“Oh, do you?” he snorted, biting the tip off his cigar and propelling the fragment toward a shiny brass cuspidor. “Well, my girl, it’s normal for a man to want kids—his own kids or grandkids. Natural fact that, ask anybody.”
“I wish I’d been born a boy.” She sighed. “It would have made everything so much simpler.”
He came up behind her and rubbed the side of his hand against her neck. “Yes, Foxe and son right from the start. Only thing, see. He would ’ave looked like me instead of his mother. I would ’ave ’ad a short, ugly, redheaded nipper instead of a bloomin’ ravin’ beauty of a girl.”
She turned with a smile and put her arms around him, hugging him, inhaling his scent of fine woolens and good tobacco.
“You’re a dear. I’ll give you scads of little nippers one day, Daddy. I promise.”
“I’ve never doubted it, but I wish you’d hurry up and get started.”
“I have plans,” she said quietly. “Really quite wonderful plans.”
Hanna gave some thought to her nephew as a maid brushed and combed her hair for her.
“Would her ladyship like it swept up this morning?” the maid asked. “With a few curls on the sides?”
“I think so, Rose . . . yes, the way you did it the other day.”
“Very well, your ladyship. I’ll just heat up the iron.”
The cablegram, sent from New York, was in the center of her desk: WILL ARRIVE CUNARD SS LACONIA DOCKING SOUTHAMPTON FRIDAY JUNE 12 STOP EAGERLY AWAITING SEEING YOU AGAIN REGARDS TO ALL MARTIN RILKE.
Just thinking of the wire made her smile. It was so American. So filled with uninhibited eagerness and friendliness, a pat on the back and the big hello—the Chicago manner. Give my regards to all. Only a midwesterner would cherish such presumptions toward people he had never met, nor even corresponded with, simply because they were family. She could understand his attitude, because although she had left Chicago at the age of nineteen, to return there only once for the briefest stay, she had never lost her awareness of American attitudes. It would have seemed perfectly natural and right for him to send such a wire—“give my regards to all”—to Uncle Tony, cousins Charles, Alexandra, and William. Indeed, it would have seemed wrong, in his mind, not to do so. The unfortunate fact was that her husband and her children would have been bewildered had she passed on such sentiments to them. She had merely said, after receiving the wire, “My nephew will be arriving on the twelfth. He is looking forward to meeting all of you.” That, of course, was understandable. They were, in a mild fashion, looking forward to meeting him. (William, not having been home and knowing nothing about it, was excluded.) She had told them two months before that Martin would be coming to England, to stay for a week or two before traveling on to France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, so that the announcement of a specific time and place of arrival had come as no surprise.
“Is he, now?” her husband had said. “So soon. Well, we shall have to send Ross down to the docks to pick him up . . . and one of the footmen to help with the luggage.”
“I think it would be nicer if Charles went also.”
“Yes, quite so, my dear, by all means.”
Charles had shown a certain reluctance: “It’s not as though I knew the chap, Mother. . . .” But her will had prevailed.
“I just hope to heaven he’s not like that other Rilke who descended on us last year.”
“No, dear,” she had said, “I’m sure that he isn’t. He’s my brother William’s son. You remember my telling you about him.”
Charles had nodded in the affirmative, but she doubted whether he remembered very much of what she had told him in bits and pieces over the years, of her brothers William and Paul and of the polar distance between them. Paul successful and rich, William a failure, poor—and now dead. It had been Paul’s son, Karl, who had come over the previous summer for a brief visit before going on to Paris and Berlin. A contentious, brash young man, who had prefaced almost every sentence that he uttered with the words, “Well, at Yale we . . .” They had all grown rather irked at the Yale standard for everything by the time he left. Now another young Rilke was coming from across the sea and she could not guarantee that he would be any different from the last one, although she had sensed by the letter he had written to her in March telling her of his plans for travel in Europe that he was very different indeed. Willie’s son. They had met for the first time in Chicago when she had gone back for Aunt Ermgard’s funeral in the summer of 1903. He had been twelve years old then, a month younger than Charles. A quiet, polite boy who had rather startled her by quoting a passage from Goethe in a German untainted by New World idiom or accent. But why should that have been a surprise? Willie’s son, after all. It was impossible to think of her dead brother without feeling a tug at the heart.
“Keep steady, madam,” the maid cautioned. “The iron is quite hot.”
After her hair was fixed to her satisfaction, the maid helped her into a morning dress of white lawn, and she left her room and started down for her breakfast, passing her son’s room on the way. The door was closed, and she hesitated in front of it for a moment, then rapped gently. She distinctly heard him call out, “Go away,” but she ignored the directive and opened the door.
“Good morning, Charles,” she said cheerfully.
He was on the bed, fully dressed, his back against the headboard. A breakfast tray, the food barely touched, was on the bedside table. He closed the book he had been reading and smiled in apology.
“Sorry, Mother. I didn’t know it was you.”
“I’m going down for breakfast. Have you eaten?”
“I was brought something, but I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t you feel well? You look a bit pale.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Mother, quite sure.”
How gaunt he has become, she was thinking, his face like that of a troubled man. She could see the
unhappiness in his eyes and that hurt her deeply. He was her firstborn, and they had always had a special relationship, a closeness.
“Can we have a little talk, Charles?”
He looked away from her and tossed the book onto the bed.
“What about?”
“Winifred Sutton, among other things.”
“Ah,” he said with a thin smile. “Winifred.”
“I convinced your father this morning that there is no possible chance of your becoming attracted to the girl and that any dreams he may have had about the two of you are simply that—his dreams, not yours. I intend to be quite candid about the situation with Winifred’s mother.”
“Well, that’s a step in the right direction, I must say.” He sat on the edge of the bed and placed his hands on his knees, a pose that always reminded her of her husband. They were so alike in looks and mannerisms—the same long legs and slender body, the same clean features—and yet so opposite in character. The room reflected his tastes, just as her husband’s apartment reflected his. Books were everywhere—stacked, piled, some open, some closed with scraps of paper jutting from the leaves. She had no idea of his purpose in all that reading. He had mentioned in an offhand manner his interest in the Seven Years War and the expansion of the British Empire. Did he intend writing a book? It seemed to her like an odd subject to devote one’s time to.
“You look instantly better,” she said.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I am.” He grinned at her. “And I’m quite sure that Winnie will feel better as well. I frighten her. Do you know that? It’s true. She told me . . . last night down at the gazebo. She called me moody and intense. There’s quite a simple, passionate soul beneath all that embonpoint. I’m not the man to bring it out and she knows it.”