Marriages are Made in Bond Street

by Penrose Halson

  There are plenty of clients, and plenty of problems I hope you can help with.

  Problem 1: Reverend Hogg, remember him? A widower, sixty-six, we found him Mrs Joy, a nice respectable lady, just the wife he wanted, to stop him being pestered by all the parish widows. Mrs J. has been living in the rectory for over a year, and a friend of mine who lives in the next village says everyone calls her ‘Mrs Hogg’. They’re obviously living in sin. But when I asked him for the After Marriage Fee he wrote back that she’s ‘just my housekeeper’. He must think I was born yesterday! What shall I do?

  Problem 2: Miss Thora Palmer, twenty-seven, you interviewed her last year. She wants a gent but not a snob because ‘It is that kind with whom I have had so much trouble.’ What does she mean? Do you recall?

  Problem 3: Philip Baird, a new client who has no hands, due to an accident in an aircraft factory in the war. He is very confident and independent, says he can manage everything himself. He’s working class but superior, forty-four, tall and nice. Does anyone who could cope come to your mind?

  Problem 4: another new one, Mrs Lily Rose, forty, Ladyish, divorced because her husband got fed up with having her brother of forty-four and her elderly parents, now dead, in the house. The brother is mental but harmless, and useful in the bakery she inherited. She needs a man who’ll be sympathetic and kind to him, not another stinker.

  That’s enough!

  All love, Picot

  Heather immediately replied:

  Dearest Picot

  1. Yes, I remember the Reverend Hogg. Of course he should pay the A.F.M., the dirty dog! He quite puts me off religion. I’m disappointed in Mrs Joy, too, though perhaps she believes he’s paid. I shall write to him myself, politely, and if that doesn’t do the trick I shall tell him we must put the matter in other hands. He won’t like the idea of solicitors (nor shall we, of course, as it’ll cost us). I may know his Bishop, I’ll check.

  2. Miss Palmer: As I recall, she’s a Near Lady we introduced to a Gentish chap. They got on famously, but her mother thought him not good enough for her darling daughter so, feebly, Miss P. gave him up. It was not the man but the mother, an almighty snob, who caused the trouble. Miss P. is completely under her thumb, can’t say boo to a goose. Find her a nice Near Gent.

  3. Is the answer in Problem 4? Mrs Rose sounds like Mr Baird’s cup of tea, and she his. They both need an understanding spouse. Try it!

  You and Dorothy are doing a wonderful job, thank you so much. I can’t wait to be able to help you more.

  I enclose a photograph of Stella, a pretty little thing who does not cry much, thank goodness.

  Love, Heather

  In 1944 Heather had had a daughter, Stella, and was now about to give birth to her son, but motherhood did not enthral her so she relied heavily on a nanny. Perhaps echoing her own mother’s unhappy experience of motherhood (following Heather, a second baby had died at a few days old), Heather did not take kindly to domesticity, and was far happier devoting herself to the Bureau.

  Dorothy, always meticulous, hit problems when Picot was away on holiday. Puffing on cigarette after cigarette, she wrote anxiously to Heather:

  Dear Mrs Cox

  I have been very unhappy and very uncomfortable. When Picot took her holiday she left me in charge. I asked her to give me the key of her writing table drawer, as I am sure you will agree that if one is responsible for any money one should be able to lock it up, but Picot told me I couldn’t have it as it also locked something in her flat and she required it.

  Picot told me to get a little book to keep a record of the takings and an account of the Petty Cash, as she didn’t wish me to enter anything in the office books. As the various registrations came in I was most particular to enter them at once and then put the cheque or notes into the little box in the writing table drawer, but at the end of the week, when I counted the takings, to my horror they were £5. 5. 0. short. My receipts showed £58. 13. 0. and I only had £53. 8. 0.

  I have searched every imaginable place but have failed to find the money.

  I am afraid I cannot make it up in one lump sum, for as you know I only draw £3. 15. 0. each week. I felt I would rather write and tell you about this myself and ask you how you would like me to pay it back. I cannot tell you how upset I am, and it certainly is a mystery to me.

  I do hope the new nanny is proving a success, it will be such a relief to you if she is.

  Yours very sincerely

  Dorothy Harbottle

  Dorothy eventually discovered that a new secretary had refunded a client’s registration fee and forgotten to enter it in the accounts book, but the incident added to Heather’s craving to return to the Bureau, to be in charge again. Fortunately her husband, Michael, agreed that with the war over they should move from distant and lonely Scotland to Kent, from where Heather could commute to London. ‘Michael went ahead in the car, with a lot of the luggage, following the furniture van,’ Heather wrote later.

  I left Perth by train with another mountain of suitcases, two children, a nanny, a nursery maid, my own maid and her husband, who was the farm mechanic and part-time chauffeur, their daughter and their niece. My little dog Cupid, one child and I shared a sleeper, nanny and the other child in an adjoining one. My maid, her husband, daughter and niece shared a four-berth compartment, and the nursery maid was in another, with the greyhound and two other passengers, who unfortunately had a cat. The greyhound was a well-known chaser of cats, so they all had a harassing night. I couldn’t help, as the minute I even see a cat my face swells up like a balloon and my eyes become fountains. Added to this we were four hours late at Euston. But it is bliss to be back in civilization.

  The new nanny was a success, so Heather started to spend three days a week in the Bureau. One of the first post-war clients left an indelible impression on her. She only caught a glimpse of John Paul when he came to be interviewed by Dorothy, but remembered ‘a very nice-looking, spruce type, not very tall but with an upright bearing. He turned out to be by far the most difficult customer we ever had to suit. He was the bane of our lives for four years, during which we introduced him to forty-eight young women.’

  Bottle had a particularly soft spot for widowers and was all sympathetic ears. In 1929, aged twenty-two, Mr Paul had married Anne, whose parents were very old friends of his parents. Both families were delighted (though unsurprised) when they got engaged. They were well suited and had an easy, comfortable life together until the birth of their daughter, Viola, when Anne developed TB. Five years later war broke out and Anne died.

  While Mr Paul was soldiering in Italy he dreamed of the war ending and seeing his daughter again. He survived unscathed and was now back in civvy street, working as an advertising executive. Viola was living with an aunt and about to go to boarding school. Her father wanted a home for her, and a wife for himself.

  One Sunday Mr Paul, lunching with his sister, had glanced through a pile of her women’s magazines, whose advertisements were of business interest to him. He noticed a piece about the Bond Street Marriage Bureau and the advantage of starting off without the usual illusions concerning one another. ‘That made a lot of sense to me,’ Mr Paul confided to Bottle, ‘because I wanted companionship and a domesticated, adult type who, without being stodgy, was well over the starry-eyed stage.’

  He mentioned the Bureau to two colleagues. ‘Can’t do that, old boy,’ harrumphed one of them. ‘Can’t think of it. Can’t buy romance like . . . like a new car or something!’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ pondered the other. ‘Matter of fact, we were talking about it the other day. Arranged marriages can be a good thing, don’t you know. The chap doesn’t feel he’s being pushed into it, and the girl isn’t marrying because she just has to.’

  The next day Mr Paul walked down Bond Street, past the fashion shops and art galleries, and joined the queue by the sign marked ‘MARRIAGE BUREAU. DIRECTOR, HEATHER JENNER. STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL. SECOND FLOOR’. Suddenly he realized that everybody was w
aiting not for the Marriage Bureau but for lunch at the Lyons Teashop on the ground floor. He scurried past the dumpy, sallow waitress, with a napkin over her arm, who was gazing at him through the glass of the teashop door, no doubt smirking at the idea of an old geezer trying to fix himself a marriage. At the top of the stairs he entered a little room filled with great vases of roses and lilies and carnations.

  ‘What immediately caught my eye,’ recalled Mr Paul, ‘hanging on the wall behind the door, was the usual Company Certificate such as one sees in any office. That reassured me, and I was wondering about the Articles governing a marriage bureau when a husky, gentle voice called out, “Do come in – it’s Mr Paul, isn’t it? How nice. I was expecting you.” And Miss Harbottle took me in hand like a spoiling aunt.’

  ‘Oh, I did like him,’ remembered Bottle. ‘He was a perfect pet! Definitely a Gent For Here. Such good manners, and he listened. Most men just talk at you, but he was interested in what I thought. He wanted to meet a young woman under thirty-five, not more than five foot three tall, single – not a widow, and certainly not an unmarried mother, nor a divorcee, not even a plaintiff, because although he himself was not very religious, his grandfather had been a bishop and his family did not hold with divorce. He preferred an upper- or upper-middle-class background, public school like himself, but said a penniless waif would do nicely! He had a private income and a high salary, and wasn’t at all worried about the cost of keeping a wife. He didn’t mind if she wanted to work after marriage, in any case he had a housekeeper, but his wife wouldn’t need a job and he didn’t imagine she would want one.’

  Bottle assessed Mr Paul as a relaxed person who saw himself as cheerful and confident, easily able to establish good relations with all sorts of people. He admitted that he was inclined to manage, and to fuss about details that he felt only he could get right. But he insisted that he could laugh at himself, and that if Miss Harbottle could find him a young woman who was not ‘grand or elaborate’, but honest, loyal, reliable, calm, with a sense of humour and fun, who liked a basically fairly simple life in town, enjoying parties and theatres and an occasional ball at the Savoy, they would all have a wonderful laugh together.

  A stream of young women flooded into Bottle’s mind. She felt confident that she would very quickly get him off. ‘But,’ she remembered wryly, ‘seldom have I been so wrong.’

  It was rapidly brought home to the match-makers that Mr Paul did indeed desire to manage things. He was always writing to say that Miss Harbottle had got the wrong end of the stick: ‘No, I am sorry, dear lady – but she is not what I am looking for.’ He dismissed women in his own line of work as unattractive and hard-boiled even though lively and efficient. Others were too pitifully lonely, or excessively shy, or over-eager and embarrassingly demonstrative. ‘Miss P. is too large and florid,’ he wrote about an adorably pretty, plump, milk-maid type of girl with pink cheeks and a dear little dimple; and about a clever girl: ‘Miss T. failed to stir my ossified emotions.’

  Miss D. was no beauty, but quite presentable, and Bottle knew that her superior manner and slightly affected voice grated less as you got to know her. So Mr Paul’s biting rejection – ‘She sent cold shudders down my back’ – was so exaggerated and unfair that in an uncharacteristic rage Bottle vowed to cross him off the books. But, sensing that he had gone too far, Mr Paul pressed the charm button and swept into the office bearing a bouquet of flowers and several packets of cigarettes, apologizing most humbly and smiling winningly until she could not resist, and was restored to her usual kindly and concerned self.

  Mr Paul’s ideal woman was to be a lady of taste and refinement, yet also soft, and not pushy. Looks were very important. Of Miss H. he wrote:

  She is most charming, but I do not think I shall ever feel matrimonially disposed towards her, though I hope to see her again, and I write this against my own feeling and only at your request – she is rather too tall, not pretty enough, rather too old in that she looks her age, walks badly, and her legs, though very passable, are not perfect. I know that this is a revolting physical catalogue, and mentally she is delightful. However, the physical is of vital importance also.

  Bottle’s irritation flared up again. ‘Blast the smug, conceited dolt!’ she ranted, waving her cigarette wildly in the air. ‘Such odious, nauseating vanity!’ Mr Paul, however, remained calm, confident that, having been so blessed with his first wife, one day he would make another happy marriage.

  When he met a girl Mr Paul always gave her a double Martini, to help break the ice. The ice invariably melted as the girl launched into the sea of her troubles. He wrote to Dorothy:

  I should, if I may, advise any girl meeting a man with a view to marriage not to start off by telling him why she really must get married, for example because she can’t stand living with the family any more, or doesn’t get along with her mother or sister, or is too hard up, or dislikes her job. Whatever the reason, she should keep it to herself, at least for the time being, as it makes a bad impression on the man and makes him feel he may be used merely as an escape, which of course is only too often the case. Please pass this advice on to your clients, dear lady.

  Bottle often relived her outraged reaction to this letter. ‘As if I didn’t know my job!’ she spluttered, grinding her cigarette ferociously into the ashtray while aiming a sharp kick at the much-dented desk. ‘If that blithering idiot hadn’t generally been so pleasant and polite I would have struck him off then and there. He did at least behave well inasmuch as he met all the young women to whom I introduced him, so I never got, “He never contacted me” complaints. Nor did he make passes at them. On the other hand, he had the usual tedious, stupid, clod-hopping male certainty that he would know at first sight if the girl was right for him or not, and if she wasn’t, he immediately lost interest.’

  Bottle gritted her teeth as she scoured the records for a Mrs Paul. Her delight when he met one girl three times was dissolved by the letter in all-too-familiar writing:

  She announced that of course she could marry dozens of men; thirty were in love with her and wanted to become engaged. She started to string off a list of names and, to my horror, she ended up with my own name. ‘And now there’s YOU!’ she exclaimed triumphantly. That was the last she saw of me. So once more I am sorry, dear lady. Would you be so kind as to try again?

  ‘You are a saint, dear Bottle,’ purred Heather. ‘I am sure you will get him off in the end.’

  The next few young women got in first and turned Mr Paul down. One thought him too old – getting on for forty! – another that he was too highbrow. One very attractive and wealthy girl, living in a beautiful house off Park Lane, dined with him at his favourite little Continental restaurant in Soho, and reported, ‘Such a queer place he took me to, so different. Usually I dine at Claridge’s.’

  Mr Paul complicated Dorothy’s job further by changing his mind: from girls under five foot three inches to tall ones; from no mention of languages to a demand that she speak Spanish and French; from only single girls to widows, though none with more than one child.

  Luckily, several lovely young war widows were registering, among them Angela Smith. Heather cherished the memory of interviewing Angela:

  She was awfully nice, an absolute poppet. Small and slim, pretty in an elfin way, with enormous blue eyes. Not a fashion plate but neatly dressed, in a red suit with a little hat just tipping over her fringe. A Lady For Here – probably would have become classic Home Counties if it hadn’t been for the war. She was very concerned that a man should like her son, whom she doted on. She admitted that she used to think being tall, dark and handsome was everything in a man, but now didn’t mind about his looks or his height, just wanted someone kind, reliable, good-tempered and trustworthy – and fun too. She rather liked the idea of a man who smoked a pipe.

  After school Angela had taken a secretarial training. Her father thought it a waste of time and good money, but her mother persuaded him that modern girls should be trained, and able to do
a job, because you never knew what might happen. Mrs Smith had married at eighteen, and pensively envied her daughter’s life outside the home, and the money she earned.

  Angela thrived as a secretary in a big City trading company, so different from her all-girls’ boarding school and secretarial college. She proved to be an asset as she could speak French (the family always summered in Nice). Her boss, Pierre, was half French, clever, tall and good-looking. They had a lot in common, laughed and talked away nineteen to the dozen, and in 1935, when Angela was twenty-one, they were married. Company rules forbade her working in the same firm as him, but anyway she wanted to stay at home and look after the house and – three years later – their baby boy, Robert. They were very happy until the war, when Pierre joined the Resistance in France and was killed while blowing up a bridge.

  Angela’s parents begged their grieving daughter to come home and live with them, but she remained obdurate: she was an independent married woman, with her own house and child and a passionate resolve to combat Hitler. So her mother looked after Robert while Angela got a job in the War Office, working with some urbane and eligible men who often took her out, and became good friends. She enjoyed the camaraderie of the office, and felt that, despite the tragedy of losing her husband, her life had been a lot more interesting than her mother’s. And she revelled in earning money.

  When Robert was eight he went to boarding school, so Angela had time on her hands, and was clinging less fervently to Pierre’s memory. A single girl-friend who wanted to join the Bureau, but was scared of doing so by herself, talked Angela into accompanying her to 124 New Bond Street.

  Angela was greatly impressed by Heather, who pointed out in a matter-of-fact way that some men would shy away from a widow with a child, and might want to have children of their own. Angela responded that at thirty-five she was much too old for that, and didn’t want to anyway, but she would happily take on an existing child. She didn’t want to meet a Roman Catholic, because he might want to have children and because it would upset her father, who was convinced that the only church on God’s earth was the Church of England.