One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Upstairs, Dicky darling.’ Mrs Roach was slow-moving and not rattled, but she was breathing hard and had tied a cloth round her forehead to catch the perspiration. ‘I’ve got cutlets cooked for you.’

  ‘Let me stay and chop celery.’ Cook took the knife away from him.

  Tat, said to have been christened Tatiana because her mother had devoured romances of the Russian aristocracy, carried a tray up to the nursery. Dicky ate the breaded cutlets and fried potatoes with his fingers, wiping them on the rough side of the oilcloth table-cover.

  Tat had run his bath water. He played childishly with boats until his older brother Austin arrived with his wife Elizabeth and came to hurry him up. Nostalgic for No. 72, Austin sat on his old bed, now Dicky’s, to see the well-remembered view of the Chepstow Villas street through the plane-tree leaves, then slid down with him on the banisters.

  It was raining when Aunt Teddie arrived with her sixteen-year-old twins for her birthday party. Her husband Ralph Wynn held up an umbrella as she came from the car in her brown lace and taffeta dress, but rain or wind was a malevolent personal affront, directed at her personally.

  ‘You should have one of those glass arcade roofs over the front path and steps’ was her greeting, as her brother Leonard came affably to greet her in the hall.

  ‘They’re ugly. The porch is dry anyway.’

  ‘By the time one gets there.’

  Edwina, always known as Teddie, carried negativism about with her like an armour against being suspected of enjoying life. Her barrister husband Ralph, who had originally fallen for what he thought was a girlish romantic melancholy, paid little attention to her persistent gloom, and got on with his own pleasures. Teddie, self-centred like most people who are discontented with themselves, took no interest in Ralph’s divertissements.

  Teddie’s elder brother Hugo and his wife Charlotte were at the Albert Hall for a farewell performance by the prima donna Madame Patti.

  ‘And what is my birthday to that, pray?’

  ‘But, we’re here, Aunt Teddie, dear.’ Hugo’s daughter Bella kissed her stiff aunt, which was like embracing a post. ‘So don’t feel insulted.’ Bella had come with her brother Thomas and his wife. She quite liked this gruesome aunt, because no one else did. And she was no threat.

  Aunt Vera, youngest of the generation of Hugo, Leonard and Teddie, was a little threatening to Bella, because she was smart and witty and go-ahead. She wore nouveaux colours and swung long Bohemian beads and drank whisky and smoked cigarettes and did not care what people thought.

  Brought up with her mother’s motto of Was würden die Leute sagen (What would people say?), Bella both craved and resented others’ freedom.

  Vera’s husband Charles Pope was a gnome of a man with a giggle. Their two daughters were Henrietta of the sparky violet eyes and more serious-minded Helen, who saw herself as the intellectual of this bourgeois family.

  Aunt Teddie’s gifts were piled on the piano in the drawing room and presented by Dicky, who enjoyed anyone else’s birthday almost as much as his own. ‘What’s this, what’s this, a beautiful scarf! Here, put it on. Look, a photograph frame, Aunt Teddie, do look, it’s for you! A clock with a musical alarm – listen, it works like this.’

  He had no childish jealousy, since he sunnily owned the world.

  Teddie had her own version of appreciation: ‘You shouldn’t have.’ ‘That’s much too grand for me.’ ‘I couldn’t wear that colour, Vera.’ ‘Oh dear, did you forget I can’t eat hard centres?’

  ‘How is your dyspepsia, my dear?’

  Gwen and Vera, with the normal hypochondria of their times, seized on the symptoms and enjoyed a conversation with Teddie about medicines, and who swore by what Bile beans before or after meals, or during? Clarke’s Blood Mix versus Steel-drops. Vera had discovered a sensational new laxative.

  ‘It goes straight through you.’

  ‘Don’t be coarse, Vera. The young might hear you.’

  ‘Try it, my dear. “Clean inside and out.” They show a picture of Circe stepping into a woodland pool.’

  There was always some new nostrum advertised, one of the miracle remedies in which they loved to believe. Pharmaceutical chemists did a better trade than doctors, who had less to offer.

  Poor little Sophie Wynn, Ralph and Teddie’s daughter, who was guiltily familiar with purgatives, which she took when she was punishing herself for eating rich food, listened to the talk, biting the sore skin at the corner of a nail, and watched her elders’ faces from under her hair.

  At sixteen, she was getting round-shouldered from trying to conceal her developing bosom. She did not want to grow up, and yet she did not want her critical mother to treat her like a child. She did not know what she wanted.

  The men, who were also interested in magic potions, but more privately, talked about Ralph’s new Lancia and Hugo’s Mercedes Benz, the first motors in the family.

  Vera’s daughters Helen and Henrietta were bored. Helen’s present to her aunt had been picked up by Dicky with an approving whistle, but Teddie had not looked at it yet, because it was a book.

  It was an 1872 gold-embossed edition of an early novel by their late patriarch Ernest Austin Morley, father of Hugo, Leonard, Teddie and Vera and grandfather of Helen, who revered his memory.

  Sir Ernest Morley had been a successful merchant with a chain of small household shops in the Thames Valley towns. In his forties, he unexpectedly wrote a novel about a prostitute which, astonishing to him, was published and – even more astonishing – became very popular at W.H. Smith’s and Mudie’s libraries.

  His success surprised him less as he wrote on, eventually selling his business to give all his time to what he thought of as his ‘story-telling’. He wrote mostly about ordinary men and women, and in an age of superheroes, when novelists were dizzyingly preoccupied with magical and exotically religious themes, he involved his readers in real-life dramas that just might have happened to them. Once released, his stored-up feeling for England and its people poured out in scenes that somehow seemed more real than reality. ‘Life as it ought to be’ was how Harper’s Monthly announced their E.A. Morley serializations. No preaching or moralizing. Good and bad brought to life so humanly that an enchanted reader could believe: Yes, we are all fascinating creatures of infinite potential. Even me!

  He was ‘The People’s Story-teller’. Queen Victoria made him a knight and invited him and Lady Morley to tea. After his death in 1896, in the middle of Narrow Boats, a tale of rumbustious life on the river barges, his books continued to be read, and admirers continued to make pilgrimages to his home in Goring-on-Thames, where they were patronized by Adelaide Morley, his stout widow.

  The rest of the family more or less took him for granted, as families of great men do. His granddaughter Helen Pope did not, because she was ‘a writer’, with the first chapters of a novel on a shelf under her dressing-table skirt, like Jane Austen. Secretly she felt that if genealogists were right, and exceptional talent was passed only to one person, then she was that person. One day she would complete the unfinished Narrow Boats for her grandfather.

  Dicky had already read snatches of the novels. He followed the birthday girl about the drawing room, holding the book open and nagging, ‘Look, Aunt Teddie, please look! It’s beautifully illustrated. Look, here’s the bit where the lady throws herself off the bridge! “Long after the slender body had slipped below the surface of the river, the petals of the horse-chestnut blossoms fell softly, like a fragrant white shroud.”’

  ‘Do you allow this child to read morbid scenes, Gwen?’

  ‘Well, it is by his grandfather.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ Teddie peered. She had not been listening to what Dicky and Helen had told her.

  ‘Haven’t you read it?’ Dicky asked.

  ‘Of course, child.’

  ‘What’s it about then?’ The boy was not rude, but his sense of fair play would not allow a grown-up to cheat.

  ‘Don’t torment me.’

/>   ‘Buck up, Teddie.’ This was the only attention she got from her husband, who was trying to flirt with his niece Henrietta.

  Leonard Morley echoed, ‘Buck up, old girl! You’re only forty-six and life looks wonderful.’ He was happy at home here with the clan, being the centre of the family.

  ‘It may do to you.’ His sister turned her shadowed eyes to him heavily. ‘Playing at Shops all day at Whiteley’s, without a care in the world,’

  Leonard caught Gwen’s eye. She waved across the room. She had forgotten about the frightening anonymous note. Blood money! Leonard could not forget.

  Flora Bolt sounded the brass gong in the hall. When it was only family, she did not send in Winnie Stokes to announce, ‘Dinner is served’, in her superior accent. They all moved into the dining room, and Dicky went unwillingly up to bed.

  ‘And tomorrow some of these buggers will be back for Sunday lunch,’ short, squat Tatiana grumbled, stout legs planted on the scullery duckboard, up to the elbows in green jelly foam. ‘Hardly worth putting them plates away, Mrs Salter.’

  ‘We don’t use the best china for Sunday lunch.’ Flora thumped her fist on the top of Tat’s low-level head as she passed on her way to her room behind the scullery. ‘As you should know as well as anyone. As you would know too, if your upbringing had been different. The Morleys like to be together. If more families were like this lot, the world would not be sliding to hell on a tin tray.’

  ‘Auntie!’ the girl called through to the kitchen. Hints about Tat’s dead mother and unknown father were not fair.

  But the cook, who had poor blood, had gone to her room, and by the time Tatiana got there, she would be sprawled diagonally across their shared double bed.

  After he had been woken by the carriage wheels and the horses and the explosive engine of Uncle Ralph’s new motor, Dicky lay not sleeping, and he heard his parents and Madge come up to their rooms, and then heard the Saturday drunks roaring down from the Sun in Splendour at the top of Portobello Road.

  Howling for his blood? He knew that one night he would hear them stop by the corner and growl and spit about what they would do to him. He knew that one of them would be the terrible Bill Bolt, the man Flora called ‘The Bull’, ‘strong as an ox and cruel as the horned devil. If he ever come looking for me ‘ere...’

  If he did, he would look for Dicky first. Is he here? He lifted his head to try to look through the plane-tree leaves and detect the bellow of the horned man among the blurred curses. His body was tense with fear. He nerved himself to courage. Even when the mob had crossed Chepstow Villas, fighting, and were fading down the Lane, he still lay stiffly with his fists clenched by his sides. Had his hero brother, deep-voiced, grown-up Austin once lain like this and listened when he was a boy in this same room? Dicky could never ask him. Had Austin called out? Dicky would never call, though Madge and his mother and father would all come running to comfort him. He lay, still listening to the distant sounds of battle, his eyes on the ghostly dripping leaves in the mist round the gaslight. He would not be the baby of the family.

  Chapter Five

  The upstairs room again. Standing close to the tall, smiling man, the woman raised her large bright eyes trustingly his face.

  ‘How are the palpitations?’ he asked her.

  ‘I feel a great deal better. You helped me so much last time I was here.’

  ‘I’m glad. And how can I help you now?’

  ‘Oh, my dear...’ She put a hand tenderly on his arm. ‘I think you know.’

  ‘Wait a minute. No, look here –’ He backed away from her. ‘You must understand. The last time, I was merely trying to help your breathing.’ This should teach him to keep his hands off hysterical women.

  ‘Oh,’ she persisted, ‘but I do understand.’

  As she came towards him, the man took another step backwards and knocked a lamp off a small table. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Sit down. I shall prescribe you something to calm your nerves.’

  After she had gone, he bent to pick up the broken pieces of the glass lamp, and wondered whether he should send her a bill for it.

  Some people disliked going back to work after the weekend.

  ‘Monday is the invention of the devil,’ Henry Beale, the Chief Buyer, maintained.

  Leonard loved Mondays. Whiteley’s was his heart’s delight. He had been fascinated with stores and selling since he used to do the rounds of his father’s shops as a child. When this methodical, secretive man had unexpectedly sold his places of business and retired to a writing-table in the window of the house on Goring’s High Street, the child Leonard had mourned for merchandise, and recaptured it as soon as he was old enough to get a sales assistant job. Had his father been proud that he had risen to the top in a much grander field than Streatley or Wallingford or Pangbourne? Who could know? Ernest Austin Morley did not hand out praise. His elder son Hugo had inherited that from him, as his younger son had inherited retailing.

  When success came to E.A. Morley – his novelist’s title – and he built a large white house in the hills above Goring with a vast leather-topped desk and a view of his own sloping lawns instead of the busy village street, he was too absorbed in his ‘story-telling’ to be more than vaguely aware of his children growing up and pursuing their own ends.

  On a Monday in September, Leonard went in to Whiteley’s early, as usual, and took a tour of all the departments, setting up for business before the store opened. This was a chance to exchange a few words with the dozens of different buyers and to make a note of their grumbles, which was more gratifying to them than just being listened to, however attentively. He wished everyone good morning, using their names, with a special word for a nervous new employee, and a young widow in Children’s Footwear, and the mother of a sick child in Embroidery, and grizzled, boatered Mr Raish at the fish counter, who had just won a long-service award.

  Leonard passed through all the departments on the ground and upper floors of the extensive store which had started nearly fifty years earlier as one modest drapery shop. One by one, William Whiteley had bought up more than twenty separate shops in Westbourne Grove, added others in Queen’s Road, often in defiance of cautious local authorities, and connected them up as departments of one giant emporium.

  Leonard paced happily through the hundred and sixty little kingdoms: Boots, Gents Outfitting, Sporting Goods, Pets, Bicycles, Toys, Layettes, Costumes, Gowns and Mantles, Furs, Millinery, Curtains, Towels, Whitewear, Foreign Silks, Wickerwork, Pianos, Art Goods, Stationery, Books, and so on. The famous marble food halls, whose coming had angered local provision shops, were fragrant with the smells of baking and fresh meat and fruit and vegetables from Whiteley’s own farms, and pungent spices and peppery salami and festooned German sausages. Aprons were starched and bleached, straw hats jauntily but not insolently angled. The butcher with the hussar moustache was cutting chops. A good-looking young lady was setting up a table to demonstrate a new household gadget.

  ‘Shall I buy one for my kitchen?’ Leonard stopped to find out about it.

  ‘Ask your wife, Mr Morley.’

  ‘I will.’ Gwen hardly ever went into the kitchen, and Mrs Roach would not use things like electric coffee grinders or patent mixers.

  It was opening time by now, and an early arrival, Sir Rawdon Filey, still charged up with last night’s wine, waylaid Leonard by the lift with an imperious demand to ‘send a man’ to Sussex about new lighting fixtures for the Castle.

  ‘I will look into it, Sir Rawdon.’ The Filey account already bore a large sum outstanding.

  ‘I mean today, Morley.’ Sir Rawdon looked as if he had not been to bed.

  Upstairs, Assistant Manager Morley, steward of all this while the General Manager was on sick leave, called in at the counting house and paid a social visit to the funeral offices and the domestic agency and the refreshment room, which were not his business. Before long, when the store came to full teeming life, he would return downstairs on the first of his slower, more comprehensive
tours among the customers.

  The whole place never ceased to amaze and enthral him. Nearly fifty years ago, a young Yorkshireman with ten pounds in his pocket, inspired by the dazzling displays of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, had dreamed of a vast emporium of the world’s trade. Now he had it. The biggest store in London, the biggest store in the whole of England, that could supply anything for anybody. Rich customers had migrated from Shoolbreds and Heal’s and Maples in the Tottenham Court Road to patronize hitherto unfashionable Westbourne Grove, now at the hub of commerce. William Whiteley, ‘The Universal Provider’, exported luxury goods to princes and rajahs, lit up Nelson’s monument on Trafalgar Day, and monopolized huge contracts for catering at great events, like the wedding of Prince George and Princess May of Teck.

  Leonard looked in to the Chief’s office to tell him about Sir Rawdon’s expansive order.

  ‘Hm. Does he know that we can’t extend him any more credit?’

  ‘He has been advised of that, sir.’

  ‘Advise him again woonce mower.’ The Universal Provider had never quite cast off his Yorkshire speech.

  A sales assistant from Trunks came breathlessly up the stairs. Mr Morley was summoned below by Mrs Forrester.

  Mrs Vernon Forrester was one of the grand old ladies in antique furs who had never come to terms with Whiteley’s innovation of fixed, clearly marked prices. In her day, you were not expected to pay the asking price. You bargained. She was refusing to pay ten guineas for a tropical trunk in which her nephew would convey his effects to Singapore.

  ‘You’re not the Manager. Send me the Manager.’

  ‘He’s away, madam. I am here in his place.’

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘Certainly, madam. I helped you with your granddaughter’s bridal gift.’