Marriages are Made in Bond Street

by Penrose Halson

  Heather particularly cherished the memory of a paralytically shy young woman, who had sat in the interview room blushing furiously, twisting her handkerchief, curling her legs under the chair, staring down at the desk, only just managing to stammer, scarcely audibly, that she wanted to meet a quiet, steady young man. Nobody party-loving or flash or noisy. Unhelpfully, in the presence of any male at all Miss Shy was so overcome that she could scarcely utter a word. So she took herself off to be treated by a psychologist, and returned to the Bureau released from all inhibitions and demanding a husband with an exciting, adventurous job. The Bureau accordingly introduced her to a robust and intrepid explorer, who the next day appeared in the office a nervous wreck. Miss Shy-No-More had run him ragged with non-stop scintillating talk, wild dancing and traipsing from nightclub to nightclub. She had outraged him with suggestions verging on the lewd, and it had taken all Heather’s diplomacy to soothe him, assuring him that Miss S-N-M was not typical of the Bureau’s female clients.

  Heather subjected the bruised explorer to her entire battery of cajolery and persuasion, until he agreed not to broadcast his unhappy experience, and to meet the adventurous but demure young lady she proposed. At last he departed, leaving her exhausted. Some weeks later she read with relief a letter from Miss Shy-No-More cancelling her registration since in a nudist camp she had met a Czechoslovakian doctor as uninhibited as she, and was now rapturously, nakedly, married.

  ‘Miss Shy-No-More would certainly make the party go,’ judged Heather, ‘but she would be quite capable of turning up in the buff, and very likely with her Czech husband in tow, and equally stark-staring. We shall not invite them.’

  On the Bureau’s tenth birthday the office walls were covered in congratulatory telegrams, and great vases of flowers teetered on every horizontal surface, as crowds of well-wishers crammed the stairs and squeezed into the small rooms where Heather and Dorothy presided benignly.

  ‘Remarkable, quite remarkable!’ thundered Colonel Champion as he steered his bride of nine years, the former Miss Easter, towards Heather.

  ‘We are so happy, and eternally grateful to you,’ echoed Mrs Champion. ‘You gave me not only a wonderful husband but also a beloved daughter. She is twenty-four now and quite the career girl, but if she is not married soon I shall send her to you!’

  ‘Our two children are still too young, aren’t they, darling?’ joined in Angela Paul, smiling up at John Paul, who had chosen her after years of introductions. ‘And they get on so well, John’s daughter and my son, that I sometimes wonder if they might marry each other – it would be entirely legal.’

  ‘Our baby is of such a beauty she vill always find men who luff her!’ proclaimed Polish Teddy, his aquamarine eyes blazing with uncontainable pride. He was less skeletal than when he had come to the Bureau eight years previously, no longer haunted by the horrors he had suffered, but radiating contentment with his new-born daughter and his heart’s delight, Gertrude, recovered from the trauma of Nazi Germany.

  Standing regally in the middle of the interview room, whose desks had been evacuated to the furrier’s shop downstairs, Heather welcomed clients from the very early days of the Bureau. Commanding monarch of her little kingdom, she accepted a huge bouquet of red roses from Mr and Mrs Baldwin – ‘in memory of that diabolical secretary of yours!’ winked Mr B. She greeted Percival and Florence, who had travelled from Coventry for the occasion, with real pleasure, remembering the complicated journey she had made to the war-ravaged city to advise Percival on furnishings for his new bride. She accepted their earnest invitation to come and see that her designs were still in place. Behind them she spotted Winifred and Gyles, who reduced her to sobs of laughter as they relived their wedding, at which Heather had saved the day by diplomatically taking an elderly drunken guest in hand.

  Dorothy held court to the affectionately grateful clients who flocked to her side. ‘Dorothy regards each and every client as her special charge,’ Heather later wrote in her book Marriage is my Business:

  and to her, getting people married is a mission in life, and she even spends her days off visiting the couples she has introduced and are now wed. They write to her on their honeymoons, she acts as godmother to their babies, and never tires of listening to their problems. She is, indeed, the clients’ confidante and fairy godmother. I am not like Dorothy. I regard my matchmaking as my job and my profession, while to her it is a vocation.

  Dorothy was so lacking in inches that she was always lost in a crowd, so was receiving admirers from a tall chair. She was thrilled to talk to Cora and Cyril King, who had married a few months earlier. Skilful treatment was slowly restoring Cyril’s scarily scarred face, which Cora could see almost 100 per cent clearly with her near-perfect eyes, now filled with tears as she thanked Dorothy for the nth time for bringing them together. Dorothy too was filled with emotion by the incandescent happiness which illuminated the couple, and mentally blessed her own good fortune in having come to work in the Bureau. The bitter loneliness after her mother died had made her able almost to smell the sadness in others; she had sometimes felt drawn to sorrow as a hound to the scent of a fox. There was no dearth of sadness among the clients, and when a successful introduction brought joy, Dorothy too rejoiced.

  ‘’Ere, come on, chin up!’ chuckled a familiar voice. Alf tapped Dorothy on the shoulder. ‘I thought you was going to turn on the waterworks!’

  ‘Oh, no, dear Alf. It’s just that I’m so happy! And I hope you are too?’

  Alf had registered with the Bureau in 1939, and though he had had little success in finding a wife, he had adopted Heather, Mary, Picot, Dorothy and every other interviewer, receptionist and secretary, calling in frequently to check on ‘my marriage girls’ as he went on his Special Constable rounds. Alf was always ready with a joke and a practical solution to niggling problems: he mended the swivel chairs when they refused to turn, the filing cabinet drawer which stuck, the unstable coat stand, the faltering electric fire. He was now caretaker in a block of Mayfair flats, where every day he chatted with a spirited cockney, Doris Hudson, who came in to ‘do’ for a wealthy resident.

  ‘I’ll bring Doris in to see you one fine day, Miss Harbottle,’ promised Alf. ‘We got an understanding, if you know wot I mean. She’s a very independent kind of a woman is Doris, but I’m working on ’er an’ I’ll wear ’er down soon. Now there’s a whole lot more people wanting ter talk ter you, so I’ll say cheerio!’

  Alf made way for Ivy Bailey. After the shattering suicide of her soulmate Archie she had clung to the ever-responsive Dorothy, whose maternal heart bled for the stricken girl. They had spent many evenings away from the Bureau, Dorothy listening while artfully easing the pain of Ivy’s past by dropping the merest of hints about a future. She discovered that Ivy loved music, took her to some concerts and surreptitiously inveigled her into joining a local choir. Nudged by Dorothy, Ivy moved from the bleak, decaying house where she knew nobody to a room in a girls’ hostel, where she made friends with whom she went to the theatre, high up in the cheap seats in the gods. At a tortoise pace Ivy crawled towards stability, until one day she flung her arms round Dorothy.

  ‘Oh Miss Harbottle! Oh! Oh! Such a nice man, a departmental manager in the store, has asked me to go out with him! He wants to take me to an opera – not Covent Garden, I mean, it’s an opera he’s singing in himself! He’s called Harold Winter and I’ve often noticed him in the store, and talked to him a bit, and thought he was ever so pleasant. Oh, Miss Harbottle, whatever shall I wear?’

  Swelling the party numbers were friendly journalists who had followed the Bureau’s prodigious progress, and were sharpening their pencils for the next instalment. Heather’s theatrical friend Picot, who had helped to keep the Bureau alive in the worst of the war, visualized the dramatic scene as glamorous Rhoda Clarkson retold the story of how she had come to the Bureau after walking out on her loathsome husband. Picot then had her ear bent by Miss Burton, who had been both indignant and inconsolable when Mr He
adley, whom she had transformed from a rustic ragamuffin into a presentable suitor, had gone off with a woman who shared his interest in petrol pumps. Petrol pumps!

  Miss Blunt, the Bureau’s ultra-efficient secretary until she was called up, was recognized with pleasure by Mr Gentle, the match-makers’ splendidly helpful bank manager. Together they toasted the Bureau, he silently congratulating himself on not having been shocked by the eccentricity of the project laid before him a decade previously, when Heather had wandered casually into his bank and emptied out a brown paper bag of takings in front of the incredulous cashier. Another early stalwart, Heather’s solicitor chum Humphrey, stood chatting to Miss Plunkett, who had ‘married out’ to an old boy-friend, but had remained a great admirer of the Bureau despite the shock of her first introduction to the obnoxious Cedric Thistleton.

  Heather and Dorothy often wondered fearfully what had become of Cedric and his decisive bride, the Hon. Grizelda, and to her father, Lord W., and his new wife. They had sailed off to Malaya just as war broke out, and only two years later the Japanese had invaded and ravaged the state. It was highly likely that the quartet had been interned, in damnable conditions. Heather had tried to discover what had befallen them, but their fate remained a mystery. She could no more invite them than she could Martha Webb, who had met Frederick Joss when he returned from Nigeria after the war, had become engaged, moved with him ‘to Ireland’, she said – and disappeared off the face of the earth. Letters sent to her parents’ home were returned marked ‘Not known at this address’, and enquiries about Frederick at the Colonial Office, for which he had worked in Nigeria, were politely rebuffed.

  So to Dorothy’s grief and anxiety, for she had taken the gravely damaged girl to her expansive heart, Martha and Frederick, together with Mr and the Hon. Mrs Thistleton, and Lord and Lady W., were consigned to the Bureau’s ‘Mystery’ file. In it lay also Picot’s account of her dealings with the police about the murdered man who had the Bureau’s name and address in his pocket. The weary policeman had sweated up the stairs to question Picot a second time, but since no enquirer of the Bureau seemed to fit the case, and nobody had reported such a person as missing, the victim’s identity remained tantalizingly shrouded, and the verdict had been ‘unlawful killing by person or persons unknown’.

  Out of the corner of her eye Heather glimpsed a mountainous silver fox fur slinking its way towards her through the throng. Cocooned inside was the Lady Chairman of the baby show Heather and Mary Oliver had judged ten years previously.

  ‘Did you not invite my dear friend Etheldreda?’ enquired the Lady Chairman in ringing tones, as if giving a speech to a deaf audience in a packed hall.

  ‘But of course,’ purred Heather. ‘But I believe she and the Brigadier had a previous engagement, so regrettably they cannot give us the pleasure of their company.’

  Heather smiled to herself as she told this glib lie. She had indeed invited the former Mrs de Pomfret and her Brigadier but, though very happy with her fourth husband, Etheldreda could not bring herself to accept the manner in which she had met him. Introductions through a marriage bureau, like interviews, she considered fit only for servants. Heather doubted that the Brigadier would share this view and suspected that, although he believed himself in command, his formidable wife had kept the invitation card out of his sight.

  As the last guests were leaving, and Alf was preparing to restore the furniture to the office, a boisterous ‘Hiya, honey!’ resounded up the stairs.

  ‘Hank!’ shouted Heather, clapping her hands and rushing to hug the tall American striding through the door.

  ‘Hank the Yank!’ echoed Dorothy, immediately remembering the favourite client whom Heather had married off during the war, and who had always kept in touch. ‘You’re the man who gave Heather that piece of a German plane!’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am,’ acknowledged Hank.

  ‘It was me wot ’ung it outside the window,’ interpolated Alf. ‘I fixed it good an’ strong, but it rusted a bit, an’ every now an’ again I seed it was a bit smaller. An’ one day I seed it wasn’t there no more, so I reckon that like them Nazis it just give up. I should—’

  Alf was interrupted by an eerily sepulchral sound which seemed to be echoing up the stairs, growing gradually louder.

  ‘Twit, twoo! Twit, twoo!’

  Heather’s face lit up. ‘It’s Miss Owl! Wonders never cease!’

  The office door was pushed open to reveal a pretty, laughing young woman who rushed into Heather’s welcoming arms. Operator Wireless and Line Margaret Fox, trained in the war to send and receive Morse Code and to operate wireless sets, field telephones and switchboards, had become a Bureau favourite. She had been plucked out of the Women’s Land Army, where her technical ability was wasted, and blossomed into a highly skilled OWL, working such long hours that she had no time to find a husband. So immediately after the war she had registered with the Bureau, and in 1947 had married Patrick Badger, provoking innumerable jokes about animals scenting one another.

  Patrick, a lawyer, worked in Germany on the grisly job of trying Nazi war criminals, and Heather had heard very little since their honeymoon, graphically described by Margaret. In the Dolomites, just north of Lake Como, her new husband had woken her every day at 4 a.m. to don her shorts and Land Girl shoes (all she had) and climb a mountain. They took salami, some hard grey bread and a bottle of strong red wine, and had to reach the top by midday in order to get back down before all-obliterating darkness fell. With luck, they returned to their primitive hut, more bread and sausage, and a more or less sleepful night huddled on the unyielding wooden slats of their bunk beds.

  Margaret dined out on her Horror Honeymoon, gaily blaming it all on Heather. Now she was back in England, waiting for Patrick to join her. The couple had been invited to the party but the invitation had not reached them, so she had simply taken a chance on turning up at the Bureau.

  ‘What a coincidence!’ Heather rejoiced. ‘You couldn’t have picked a better moment!’

  ‘Lucky for me,’ rejoined Margaret. ‘Another lucky day, like the one when I came here in 1945, and was introduced to Patrick. You really did start something, Heather, all those years ago. You’ve made so many people wonderfully happy!’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ said Hank, ‘I’m another lucky one.’

  ‘And so am I!’ came a small but firm voice.

  Heather, Hank, Alf and Margaret all turned to look at Dorothy, who returned their gaze as she went on, ‘It’s the staff too. I don’t know what on earth would have become of me if I hadn’t had the luck to find the Bureau. It saved my life, and I love it.’

  Heather’s customary coolness was vanishing. She raised her glass, her voice faltering slightly as she addressed her small audience: ‘The Bureau was not my idea. It came from Mary Oliver, my first partner, who was given it by her Uncle George. I’ve never met Uncle George, but we are all indebted to him. So on this auspicious occasion I give you a toast: Uncle George, thank you!’

  ‘UNCLE GEORGE!’

  APPENDIX

  Requirements of female clients 1939–c.1949

  * A real pal and friend, who is willing to share the good and evil of life with equal cheerfulness.

  * Australian, New Zealander or Canadian with job abroad or in country (not Australia). Not too serious as I am shallow emotionally.

  * Broad-minded. Should drink, smoke and be capable of swearing.

  * Serviceman, but must have a commission.

  * Dark, not very good-looking. Large poultry farmer, accountant, civil engineer, solicitor or other good profession.

  * Someone interested in doing good in the world. Connected with church, schools, children etc.

  * Nobody who wants me to help him in his business.

  * Someone who loves children and would be a good father to my baby. I took the name of my baby’s father by D.P. [Deed Poll] I will provide for my baby’s education etc. Her father allows me £2 per week at present.

  * A bon viveur who
likes his coffee and liqueur, give me a man, a connoisseur, then he should be alright. NICE HANDS rather important.

  * Dutch or Dutch interests or partly Dutch.

  * A homely man with just a theatre or cinema now and again.

  * Clean living, fastidious but not faddy. Not a schoolmaster, clerk or parson.

  * Must not be deaf.

  * Someone interlectual [sic], not effeminate type.

  * Sensible but not stodgy. Not living in or near Southport.

  * Must be a gent, never let you down.

  * With creative talent, who understands something of art; a well-stocked mind and charming personality rather than just good looks.

  * No working man or shopkeeper.

  * Only tender-hearted.

  * Full understanding of world problems.

  * An idealist. Someone with vision. I have £1,000 capital and will inherit a third of my father-in-law’s business at his death. (She aged 34.)

  * I don’t mind how ugly.

  * Not working class. Not one who works with his hands, as I like well-kept hands because I have been a film artist.

  * Must be a gentleman by birth, preferably a clergyman (if broad-minded) or at any rate a believing Christian, not too worldly.

  * Introductions in Johannesburg or as near as possible.

  * Straight and honourable. A man, not a ‘pansy’.

  * If in politics, must be ‘progressive’. An unsociable man slightly preferred.

  * If age is nearly forty, his figure must be well preserved and independent.

  * Fresh and good to look at.

  * A gentleman of respectability as I am very lonely.

  * Not too portly, not helpless, not a recluse.

  * Gently bred.

  * Educated. Good looking. Self-assured. Mechanically minded. Handy round the house. Must have wavy hair.

  * Engineers preferred but any really well-educated man except actors or theologists.