by Maggie Ford
Henry lifted his gaze from the tureen from which Susan was ladling soup on to his plate and, signalling her away, frowned over towards his mother in a rather whimsical way that held just a touch of annoyance.
“Mother…” When he and his mother agreed and all was well, he’d call her “Mater”, playfully. When he was annoyed he called her “Mother”. That should have been enough warning of his irritation. “I spent two years of my life frittering it away in the trenches.”
“Other than that,” she countered, matching his glare. “The war ended over a year ago. It needs to be forgotten, and you need to think a little more seriously about your future. One day the business will be yours. Yours and Geoffrey’s. Geoffrey seems to understand that. Why can’t you?”
Henry found himself wondering, as he listened to her speaking of Geoffrey as though he were not here, whether his brother minded that.
Didn’t she realise that rather than being understanding, as she put it, Geoffrey was very good at making people believe he was; he was very good at pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, letting them think that he was quite adult, and all the time having too much fun to bother himself with inheriting his father’s business. He’d told Henry as much himself, had been quite open about that.
“But as far as Mater is concerned, I’m the cherub of the family,” he had grinned saucily before looking deeply into Henry’s eyes, adding, “And you’d do well, dear brother, to emulate me, or you’ll get yourself into too much hot water for your own good. Use your noodle, Henry. Keep your nose clean, as I do, even if you are having it off with every Tammy, Dilys and Hilary.”
“I understand you haven’t been near the place for weeks,” his mother interrupted his reverie now. “How can you know how a restaurant is run if you don’t show yourself? I gather you were out again all last night. Nor did we have one glimpse of you on New Year’s Eve.”
“I was at a party.”
“Nor on New Year’s Day. Only yesterday were we finally privileged to be allowed your company. You may have come of age, Henry, but you still owe this family a debt of respect. You treat this house as some kind of hotel and I won’t have it. Where were you all day yesterday and all night too?”
All night in bed with Mabel. He was tempted to say it, but his mother must already guess where he’d been; she wasn’t a cloistered nun. Having spent the morning of New Year’s Day with a friend he had then gone to see Mabel. They had spent the day together, shopping, dining, going to the theatre. Then they’d gone to a hotel room together. And now he was madly in love with Mabel Thomhurst-Hill, totally and madly.
“It was too late to get all the way back here, so I stayed in London with some friends.”
His mother’s lack of reply was fraught with accusation. Pushing her plate away she remarked testily, “This soup is lukewarm.” At which Atkinson signalled to the maid to take the plate away and, with the rest of the family having finished, remove theirs and commence serving the next courses, an assortment of cold meats and salad followed by cheese and fruit. A light lunch, as Estelle Lett always preferred on Saturday, it was now being taken in silence, her disapproval of her eldest son lying like a blanket over them all, her thin frame in its pastel blue gown stiff and painfully upright.
As they made to leave the table for their various afternoon pursuits, she took her eldest son aside, her tone very quiet as she said, “Henry, I wish a word with you, please. In the drawing-room.”
Following her across the hall deferentially, for the word “please” had held a note of domination, he stood while she seated herself in her favourite armchair, placed where the sun could touch her somewhat pallid cheeks. From there she looked up at him, her features stem.
“On Monday, Henry, you go with your father to the restaurant. There you will begin to apply yourself properly to the running of the business.”
“Can’t Geoffrey go?” he ventured.
“I want you to go, Henry,” came the reply. “Your brother is three years your junior. At eighteen he is too young yet to be expected to settle himself down in order to learn the smooth running of the place.”
“It runs pretty smoothly on its own,” Henry said sourly.
“It runs smoothly because the wheels are oiled by your father’s own hand. It does not run itself as you seem to imagine. The administration would go to blazes without your father behind it. It is he who presides over everything, who keeps the place running without problems.”
“I thought that was the restaurant manager’s job.”
He was being very bold, but his mother’s expression did not alter.
“And do you know the restaurant manager’s name? No, of course you don’t. Nor that of the chef de cuisine. Nor any the waiters. Nor the office staff. Your father knows the name of even the lowliest temporary kitchen hand. And that is what you are going to do – to know everyone by name, who they are, how they work, if they are efficient or lazy. That is what your father knows and that is what you will have to learn before you can ever dream of taking over the restauraunt when your father is no longer able. As I said at table, you have frittered away your days for long enough. You and Geoffrey are your father’s heirs, and your father is not getting any younger. Henry…”
As she broke off suddenly, the stiff posture began to crumple, almost as if her frame was collapsing. Henry saw her eyes begin to glisten and her lips to work. Becoming aware that he had noticed the change in her composure, her back instantly stiffened again. One blue-veined hand lifted to indicate the sofa opposite her.
“Henry, sit down. I have to tell you something, and I need you to be sitting in order for me to tell you.”
Mystified, he moved to comply, this being not an order as were most of her demands, but a request.
“Henry,” she said again as he sat. “I shall have to tell you this before long. Geoffrey doesn’t know yet, but he will have to be told, too. Your father is not a well man. In fact he has… he has not long to…”
The normally self-assured voice faltered. Realising that something was very wrong, Henry found himself automatically leaning forward to take hold of her hands. They were icy cold, and he now noticed that they were screwed into fists, the outline of the knuckles gleaming colourlessly through the tight skin. She let his hands lie on hers and seemed to take strength from the firm comfort of his touch.
“Your father has been to see his doctor. He has been having some amount of pain in his throat for quite a while and lately he has been experiencing difficulty in talking for any length of time.”
Yes, he had noticed that his father said little to him – or anyone – of late, where once he had been a great teller of tales, of the old days, of the people he had met in his life, the tricks he and old friends had got up to in his youth and the events of the times. Henry felt he knew Letts as if he had lived those times himself; had often been forced to stifle a bored yawn while his father repeated himself with such enthusiasm that his stentorian voice filled a room as though his audience were at the opposite end of it.
The new taciturn man of the last few months had left Henry imagining himself in his father’s bad books for his casual love of life and refusal to apply his mind to its more serious aspects. Now hearing what his mother was saying, he was sobered.
“Dr Griffith recommended your father see a Harley Street specialist. It was found your father has advanced cancer of the throat and nothing can be done. The specialist gives him a year, maybe less.”
Her words had come out in a flood as if she wished to be rid of them forever and never be compelled to mention them again. In turn Henry could find nothing to say. The shock of what he had heard seemed to paralyse his whole body, his voice, his thoughts, his vision, every part of him.
From some way off he became aware that his mother was speaking again, her voice softer and gentler than it had been heard since he was a child. Yet it remained firm.
“The pain will get worse. He has pills to help dull it. But we have a terrible year ahead of u
s. We must do all we can for him, to lighten his suffering. And you must consider that perhaps by next year the business will have passed to you and Geoffrey. As the eldest son the responsibility falls on your shoulders. Geoffrey is very young, and he will need your guidance. So you, my dear, will have to learn to settle down and put your mind to leaving your carefree life behind you. It comes to us all, I am afraid. We have to learn that life is not a bed of sweet roses. It can be very harsh and very exacting and, at times, very cruel.”
Well, he knew that. He’d been in the trenches. He had grown up then. But since then he’d been determined to make light of life for as long as he could. Having fought and seen death, he felt he deserved no less – and now had come this, to be told his father was dying and he must grow up.
Well, yes, he agreed with her. It was daunting, but he would shoulder the responsibility his mother was handing him, for two reasons; so that his father would never have cause to be disappointed in him, and so that he might convince his younger brother that life wasn’t all fun and games and that he needed to knuckle down and help. Where the restaurant had once needed only one mature, level-headed man to run it, in the future it would probably need two of his and Geoffrey’s calibre, not yet blooded in the hard-headed world of business.
Sitting very still, he saw his mother heave a deep sigh. “In any case, first we must take care of your father. The drugs will not give him all the ease he will need over the coming months. I will pray he does not suffer too much and for too long. I don’t want to be without him but I shall pray I lose him quickly.”
Listening, Henry felt his own eyes mist over. Unable to speak for the emotion, the varying pressure of his hand on hers speaking for him, it took a while to find his voice, and then it came hoarse with grief.
“I’ll do whatever you want, Mother.” There was only sadness this time in his address of her. “I promise. And you mustn’t…” Whatever else had been on his lips he himself was not sure of, and he let it trail away. There were no words. There could only be deeds now.
Thus Henry Lett began taking over the reins of the business, moving from a world of pleasure into one more formidable even than the trenches, where his fear had been basic, tangible, an animal fear, fleeting and forgotten in times of respite. This would prove to be amorphous and lasting, like his father’s cancer itself, eating into the mind night and day, refusing to be got rid of. At times he didn’t think he’d ever be able to cope. But cope he did over the next months.
Slowly he began to get to know Letts, the staff, from the most exhorted to the most humble, as his father had. He came to know young William Goodridge who, around Christmas, had caused a ruckus about wanting some skivvy employed; had gone to his father directly just before Christmas, improperly, over the heads of his superiors, to plead for a permanent job, just a menial one, for the destitute young girl on whom he’d taken pity.
The chef de cuisine, Mr Samson – he now knew his name – had been beside himself with rage, embarrassed by Henry’s father’s refusal to employ her. The sight of her rags had prompted a no to Samson, only for him to say yes a little later to William Goodridge, a mere commis de rang.
It seemed the man had made a practical nuisance of himself, but his boldness on behalf of a less fortunate creature, rather than earning him the sack, had touched the old man’s heart. Very odd, that, for in his time Henry’s father had been a hard-headed businessman, like his father before him. It was how the business had thrived. To relent as he had over some nameless ragged urchin was against the nature of the man Henry knew as his father. It could only be his illness that had made him so soft-hearted. The girl had stayed. Henry learned her name was Mary Owen.
The story of Goodridge’s selfless audacity pricked his curiosity so that he made a point of making the man’s acquaintance, much to the scowls of Ketteridge, the maitre d’hôtel, who saw his standing in this establishment as being somewhat insulted. Perhaps he was right. One did not consort with the lesser employees except to acknowledge a “good morning, sir” with a tight little answering smile of authority.
While speaking to William Goodridge put more than a few backs up, including his father’s, it sparked off a surge of fellow feeling, as Henry asked him about the episode of the ragamuffin. It also allowed him to see those who worked there in a different light than his father had always done. These people were human, not just names. In no time at all Goodridge had him laughing at the near free-for-all in the kitchen during the Mary Owen episode.
Henry did feel, however, that Goodridge’s pity for the girl had probably been misguided. Once she had herself enough money she’d be off spending it on drink or whatever, and her poor champion would feel dreadful having risked his own job for some thankless hussy.
* * *
Samson had been furious. “You don’t go over people’s heads. All right, Mr Lett has taken her on due to your interference, but you mark my words, lad, it won’t serve you no good in my books. From now on you watch yourself.”
William had said nothing, but the gratitude that shone in the eyes of Mary Owen, still working solidly and industriously weeks after Christmas and New Year had come and gone, did his heart good. He was prepared to be bad in anyone’s books – in the books of the king himself, for that matter – for one smile from Mary Owen.
“You’re getting on well,” he told her. “Perhaps if you work hard, in time you might be given a better job.”
“There aren’t any better jobs for girls, not in places like this. Places like this don’t have women cooking and being waitresses. Those jobs are only for men.”
He had no argument for that. Women had shown their worth in so many ways during the war, taking on the jobs men had left behind to go and fight: had become clippies on the buses, even driven them, and ambulances too. They had taken up more prestigious office work than they had ever been allowed to do before the war. They had trodden in the footsteps of absentee postmen, had come into their own at last as skilled workers in factories where once they had been thought fit only for mindless, menial tasks. There were even lady newspaper reporters now, young women training to be doctors and lawyers. Women over thirty were now allowed to vote, yet he had to admit there was still a hard core of jobs closed to women, jealously guarded by men.
“You never know,” he said sagaciously, and hurried off to his own duties to escape the – was it adoring? – look in those hazel eyes, because if it was adoring it had suddenly embarrassed him somewhat.
It was hard to get her out of his mind. It worried him that she worked long and hard. Contrary to Chef’s opinion that she wouldn’t last a week - and to prove it, he had loaded all he could on her – March saw her still scrubbing floors, at other times bent over heavy iron pots and pans that Fred Dodds appeared now to have been let off doing by Chef himself.
William would watch her elbows, not quite so thin and sharp as they had been now that she had a little money to feed herself properly, going up and down like pistons, and his heart would go out to her. He would study her expression, taut with weariness as she worked, her small light frame hardly seeming up to the job – yet it apparently was, for she hardly ever let up to rest, and his own muscles would ache in sympathy.
Another seemed to be having feelings towards her, he noticed. Fred Dodds, these days doing the lighter tasks of removing used pots, scraping food off plates, stacking them for washing and putting them away after drying, ogled her constantly, promoting a strange sense of discomfort in William’s mind.
Ten weeks after she had started, Dodds, with one eye trained on Chef, who was otherwise engaged, took the moment to sidle up to her, his tone a hoarse whisper that, hopefully, Chef would not hear. “Fancy comin’ art wiv us ternight, Mary?”
She shook her head, continuing to scour the inside of a large iron pan with scouring powder and wire wool. “I’m too tired after all this. All I want to do is go home.”
“Don’t yer ever go art wiv blokes?”
“Never had time. Too busy trying
to make ends meet.”
“It’s time you ’ad a bit of fun. Yer mum an’ dad’ll let yer art fer one night, surely. Maybe I’ll see yer after work.”
She didn’t answer, and after work grabbed her threadbare coat from its hook in the single toilet she was forced to share with the male staff and made off into the darkness of the Saturday night before he could catch her. Seeing Dodds’s bewildered frustration, William felt a thrill of what felt like triumph run through him. If he had any say in the matter it would be Dodds’s last invitation to take her out.
The following Monday it was he who managed to get near her as she dried her chapped arms on a scrap of towel before beginning again on a new batch of grease-caked pans.
Taking his courage in both hands, he said casually, and quickly, because Chef would have no one loitering in his kitchen who wasn’t working there: “Do you ever have any leisure time to yourself after work?”
Mary nodded. “Sometimes.”
William took a deep breath, one eye on Chef coming through the long kitchen aisle in their direction. “Would you let me take you to the pictures?”
To his surprise and joy she nodded, but Chef, coming towards them, his ponderous gait displaying belligerence, allowed no time to make any sort of arrangement to meet.
His duties finished – early, thank goodness, with Monday seeing very few customers – he waited outside the restaurant for hers to be completed. Aware that his chance might dwindle before hardly having presented itself, he was looking to take her out this very evening but it seemed that the time for going to the pictures was growing less and less.
Finally she emerged, pulling her thin coat around her against the cold March wind. She looked surprised to see him. “You’ve been waiting here? You must be frozen.”
It had been blowing steadily all day and now it was dark, he really was chilly with all that standing around.
