One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  ‘That’s very innaresting.’ Mr Loomis swallowed and drew breath. ‘I don’t happen to agree, but I’ll be glad to debate that with you.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ Bella’s round brown eyes, her best feature, shone with an eagerness she did not usually risk.

  But if this Monday was not Leonard’s day it wasn’t Bella’s either. When, to emphasize a point made by Lloyd Loomis’s flatteringly serious attention, she reached out to include the head of the family with, ‘Isn’t that right, Father?’, Hugo replied with a crushing, ‘Why are you dominating the conversation about a subject of which you know almost nothing?’

  The table was struck into silence. Bella gasped, jumped up with her hands to her mouth and ran from the room.

  Charlotte made her Queen Victoria face. Gwen, next to Hugo, laid a reproving hand on his stiff arm. His Lordship had a quiet little choke. Mr Loomis stared, chewing at the mousse as if it were steak. Thomas said, ‘Look here, Father, that’s a bit much, even for you,’ and pulled out his watch again.

  Leonard was so furious that he excused himself abruptly to Charlotte and followed Bella out of the room. He could not find her. A maid told him that Miss Bella had gone banging hysterically down the back stairs in her mustard dress and out into the gardens of Ladbroke Square.

  He did not like to follow her out there. Curtains were not yet drawn. There was still enough light for him to be seen from houses round the square chasing a young girl into the bushes.

  In the drawing room, Gwen rescued him to go home as soon as the gentlemen came up from their port. He was still so angry that, although he thought the American was a crashing bore and probably a fake as well, he told him, in Hugo’s hearing, ‘I’ll be visiting Goring next weekend, Loomis. Since you’re such an admirer of my late father’s work, would you care to come and see his house?’

  ’Would I?‘ By God, Lloyd Loomis was telling himself, I’m in the big time here!

  The man would be tedious for a whole afternoon, but to Leonard, it was worth it to get back at Hugo. His brother’s eyes protruded, as they did when he was puffed out with umbrage. Lloyd Loomis was his discovery, and he was the head of the family of E.A. Morley.

  The following Sunday, it was Aunt Teddie’s turn to have a rotten day. Her mother Adelaide, Sir Ernest’s widow, had become increasingly demanding of her four middle-aged children, as she waddled through her seventies. Hugo was too selfish to respond enough, Leonard was too busy and Vera too nonchalant. Poor old Teddie, who used to be Mama’s girl, was now too often Mama’s martyr.

  They all loved the river. Several of the family were taking the train to Goring station to visit the grandmother and take punts out on the quiet, tree-laden reach of the Thames above the bridge.

  They met Lloyd Loomis, as arranged, in the murky vaulted splendour of Paddington Station: Leonard and Gwen and Madge and young Dicky, in white flannels with snake belt, and small boater on the back of his gold curls; their elder son Austin and his wife Elizabeth and little daughter Laura in a sailor dress; cousin Helen Pope, dispatched as a substitute for her mother Vera, who had something better to do.

  Madge had tried to get her cousin Bella to come. Lloyd Loomis was a new man for her, even if he was as tedious as her father had warned. But Bella was taken up with a young hero named Gerald Lazenby, whom she fancied might call on her or telephone today. In any case, she did not want to re-encounter the American, in front of whom she had been so humiliated.

  Mr Loomis, too smart for the occasion in a pale grey suit, a mulberry cummerbund, polished boots and a stiff new faux-panama hat he believed was essential for the river, was a little nonplussed by the small crowd waiting for him on platform number six.

  ‘Is it a special day – an anniversary? I have brought my humble esteem for Lady Morley, but should I have purchased a birthday gift?’

  ‘No, this is just a family that likes to go everywhere in droves,’ Gwen said.

  ‘You mustn’t mind us,’ Dicky told the American, with the friendly confidence he showed to strangers. ‘Look, there’s more coming! Well, it’s only my aunt.’

  Teddie was behind time, as usual, having risen late. She had once confided to her niece Bella that getting up in the morning was ‘like crawling out of my own grave’.

  ‘My sister, Edwina Wynn.’ Leonard wished she had not worn her mud-coloured jersey coat on this good September day, but Loomis would not notice. He was in a rapture about meeting yet one more direct descendant of the great man. ‘And with the gift of words also, for sure?’

  ‘Not I.’ Teddie gave him her dead-fish handshake. ‘It’s all I can do to write a letter these days. This is my daughter Sophie, one of my twins. She’s cleverer than me.’ A doctor had told Teddie that the child might start eating properly if she was given enough praise. ‘Come and shake hands, Sophie, like a rational being. Don’t skulk like that.’

  Nostalgic pleasure began for Leonard with the first sight of the river at Reading, and intensified as they walked out into the soft sleepy air under the fretted wooden canopy of Goring Station. It was officially Goring-and-Streatley, but not in this family. Picturesque Streatley on the other side of the river, mostly owned by a brewing family, was as foreign as if there were no ha’penny toll-bridge between the two villages.

  As a child, Leonard would have crossed the railway line towards the brick house on the High Street, from where he could run down to the towpath, or the seductive backwater under the rotting piles at the end of the old wooden bridge. Now the troupe of Morleys turned the other way up the chalky private road to the house in a fold of the hills to which the People’s Story-teller had retreated from the advance of trippers, and Pre-Raphaelite ladies painting Streatley Mill.

  Heron’s Nest, named after the mysterious house on the marsh in E.A.M.’s sensational novel The Caged Bird, which feminist readers had claimed could only have been written by a woman, was hidden round a sharp bend. Intruders could not stare at the low white house from a safe distance. They must approach and have bristly yapping dogs set on them.

  There was only one dog left now, old and mangy, and as fat and uncertain on its pins as its mistress. Young Helen crouched at once by the basket to pet it, but when Lloyd Loomis dutifully stretched out his hand, it growled and showed a few rotting teeth.

  ‘Leave Maxwell alone,’ Adelaide Morley said sharply. There had always been a canine Maxwell since the hero of her husband’s lucky first book.

  ‘Mother, this is Mr Loomis, from Pennsylvania,’ Leonard said. ‘He’s a buff.’ He winked at her. They knew about buffs.

  ‘Lady Morley – this is such a great honour.’ Loomis was working himself up into an oration of homage, which she brushed aside with an imperious hand, nearly knocking the spectacles off his obeisant face.

  ‘Who is this?’ Suspicion glinted in her large hooded eyes.

  ‘He’s a friend of Hugo’s.’

  ‘Where is Hugo?’ The matriarch was always more concerned with who had not come than who had.

  Helen was here, being nice to the unsavoury dog, her hair tied back from her narrow intense face as if she were still a green girl, but she was asked, ‘Where is your mother?’ When Sophie bent to be embraced by the suffocation of rosewater and scarves and podgy old flesh, her grandmother said, ‘You’re skinnier than ever, child. Where is Greg?’

  ‘Grandmother, we don’t go everywhere together, just because we’re twins.’

  ‘My mother was a twin, as you must have been told, and she had to.’

  ‘That was in the Dark Ages, Gran,’ Dicky butted in.

  ‘You rogue.’ Adelaide was no more immune to Dicky than anyone else. ‘Where is Bella?’ She looked around. ‘Twisted her ankle on the front step, like last time?’

  Leonard did not remind her, ‘Because you were leaning on her.’ He invented: ‘She sent you her love and I shall tell her you sent yours.’

  He was always dutifully polite, but he was sick of Bella being automatically cast in the fool’s role, and still angry with his brother
Hugo for his cruelty. Mr Whiteley had been difficult all week, driving his staff unreasonably, and Leonard was edgy, dreading another threatening letter which he would have to keep secret. He was in no mood to put up with nonsense from the old lady.

  He fetched her two ivory-handled canes and pulled her up from her great velvet chair, whose footstool had been stitched by Teddie at seventeen, when she should have been out enjoying herself.

  ‘Oh,’ she groaned. ‘Argh – my rheumatics!’

  ‘I thought they were better, poor Mama.’

  ‘I am tormented with ten thousand hells.’

  ‘Is Lady Morley sick?’ Lloyd Loomis put on a deep, concerned voice. ‘Am I out of line in hoping for a tour of the memorabilia?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ Leonard ambushed his mother by adding smoothly, ‘My mother always insists on being the one to show my father’s study.’

  ‘The sanctum sanctorum,’ breathed Loomis, as many others had before him.

  Beyond the heavy oak door, soundproof, since E.A. Morley’s children had been still quite young when he moved here, the large panelled room was intact. Sir Ernest had been halfway through Chapter Ten of Narrow Boats when his life-blood suddenly gushed out of him and he was gone. The desk and carpet had of course been cleaned, but there it all was.

  In the bay window, the solid expanse of tooled leather desk-top looked out to the famous vista of garden and meadow slope and woods, on which the poor sportsman Anselm, crippled by a steeplechase fall, had brooded so bitterly in Village World, before he caused the high stone wall to be built, cutting off the mocking view from his wheeled chair.

  Here was the writer’s chair with the carved arms and back in which photographers had liked to pose him, the bookshelves from floor to ceiling stacked with his collection of classic novels, large reproductions of The Day of Reckoning and Her Mother’s Voice and other pictures which told a story, the pens, the blotter, the spectacle cases ranged as neatly as tinned fish, the Literary Machine – a tall reading-stand given to him by the E.A. Morley Admirers Association – all the paraphernalia of this famous man whose growing children had hardly known him.

  Lloyd Loomis continued to make a frothing ass of himself. Adelaide Morley, even stouter standing up, watched him closely under deep-mauve lids to see he did not pocket anything.

  She was proud of her late husband, but she had known him for years as Ernest Austin Morley of Thames Valley Stores, who drove his own dog-cart and liked a cut of boiled gammon with turnips on Sundays. Apart from her title and the money which still came in, she took Ernest’s fame calmly, and had little patience with zealots like this American.

  Adelaide had various ways of disciplining people. Today, she chose exclusion. At lunch, she was exaggeratedly maternal, a spread hen gathering her brood close to her, to make Loomis feel an outsider. She was even quite solicitous of Margaret Biddle, her companion. ‘Poor dear Margaret is so anxious about her father’s illness. Pour Margaret some wine, Austin.’

  Loomis had trouble with the trout bones. He put up a brave show of, ‘So inspiring to see the congeniality of Sir Ernest passed on to his family.’ When Madge was helping the elderly maids with the plates, Adelaide muttered to her audibly, ‘Take him away.’

  As the family set off for the boathouse, its matriarch dropped the tribal performance in favour of another.

  ‘Oh no, Edwina.’ She caught Teddie changing into soft shoes. ‘You can’t leave me alone like this.’

  ‘Like what?’ someone asked. Dicky was already running ahead down the drive in his billowy white shirt, and the others were gathering up wraps and tea baskets.

  ‘You can see I’m not well.’ The old lady had consumed lunch as usual. Leonard and Gwen and the younger ones pretended not to hear. Teddie tied her laces and turned back to her mother like an automaton. ‘Take me to bed, Edwina.’ Adelaide raised deep tragic eyes. ‘I shan’t get up again today.’

  At the boathouse by Goring bridge, Lloyd Loomis, who now felt not only de trop but guilty about imposing on a sick woman, was taken aback by the narrowness and instability of the punts. His shiny boots were quite unsuitable, too hard and slippery.

  Arranging themselves in two punts, joking with their friend the boatman, Gwen with her dotted muslin and ruched parasol in her perfect setting among the low cushions, the family, close-knit in this traditional pleasure, were relieved to see Mr Loomis set off for the station to take a train back to London.

  That evening, when Leonard and Austin walked back to Heron’s Nest to fetch Aunt Teddie, they found her downcast, and experiencing nervous tremors. Adelaide had told her that she was releasing her companion to visit her sick father. Teddie must stay here with her, as she had so often been obliged to do before.

  ‘It’s the dressmaker’s day tomorrow, and then Ralph was taking me to the Egyptian exhibition at the British Museum.’

  ‘Come on, old dear.’ Leonard patted her slumped shoulder. ‘Come with us. Mother is perfectly all right here with the maids, and she can get the doctor to come if she’s really not well.’

  ‘But I’m always afraid she’ll have a heart attack, and it will be my fault. Will one of you take Sophie home and explain to Ralph? Not that he’ll mind.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ Austin fumed, as they went back to the station. ‘Why does Grandmother make a martyr of that poor woman?’

  ‘She knows she can’t get away with it with the rest of us.’

  ‘Why does Aunt Teddie let her?’

  ‘Why does a fish swim?’ From the hill, Leonard savoured a last streak of light on the swift flat stream above the weir. ‘It’s all she knows.’

  Chapter Seven

  September and the river were past, and a windy October had almost blown itself out. There had been no more sinister grey envelopes on Leonard’s desk, thank God. No more lunatic malevolence to upset the busy equilibrium of his days.

  Mr Whiteley had dropped the terse, wary manner that had marred their relationship for a time. The Managing Director was convalescing abroad from his heart attack, so Leonard was still pretty much in charge. Henry Beale tried some mean little games of going direct to William Whiteley, leaving Leonard in the dark about important business, but W.W. was too sharp not to catch on. If Beale came to him with ‘confidential’ information, the Chief would summon Leonard in to hear it.

  Once he said sharply to Leonard, ‘You wonder why I keep Mr Beale on, don’t you?’

  ‘No, sir, I, er –’ Mr Whiteley was God. Under his keen protuberant gaze, you did not doubt him.

  ‘He’s valuable in his position. He knows his job thoroughly, and I know him ... thoroughly.’ He was too discreet to specify items like stimulants or roving hands. ‘He knows that I know, which ensures me control.’

  The old Chief was very much in control, and business was thriving. On the first floor, alterations for the new lending library were under way behind a canvas screen boldly stencilled: ‘The Universal Provider will soon provide you with your Literary Choice of Buying or Borrowing.’ New stock was coming in to all departments. Gowns and Mantles had its own French designer. The Belgian patisserie was open. Big advertisements were splashed in all the newspapers. More assistants were being taken on. The Christmas catalogue had forty-four pages. Van deliveries spread north and south of London. Extra motor omnibuses were running on the Westbourne Grove route. A German band played every day on the Queen’s Road corner. It seemed the whole world was at Whiteley’s.

  Leonard was quite often recognized on social occasions. ‘Oh – fancy. Well, good evening to you, Mr Morley. How nice to see you – off-stage, as it were.’

  ‘Enchanted, madame.’ Leonard’s versatile small bow was gentlemanly. His ‘madame’ was very different from his ‘madam’ for customers.

  In the aftermath of a charity musicale, to which he had taken Gwen and Madge, they were moving down to the foyer of the hotel when a tall, well-made man with a sophisticated air about him said, ‘Good evening, sir. We talked briefly a month or so ago.’

 
‘Indeed?’ That amused, unhurried voice was vaguely familiar. ‘Where was that?’ Leonard asked politely.

  ‘At your place of business. In Whiteley’s, to be exact.’

  Gwen and Madge, descending shallow steps with their trains over their arms, stopped and looked round inquiringly.

  ‘I clumsily knocked into you on a fruitless quest for a lamp. I apologize again.’

  ‘No, no.’ Oh heavens, it was the Whiteley’s customer on the stairs with whom Leonard had lost his professional civility because of the rage still simmering over the anonymous note, and W.W., and Henry Beale. ‘It’s for me to apologize. I’m afraid I was less than helpful, Mr –’

  ‘Taylor. Tobias Taylor.’

  Leonard remembered: engaging, humorous face, dark brilliant eyes, thick, well-groomed wave of hair.

  ‘I hope it didn’t put you against the store, Mr Taylor.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’ Madge was intrigued.

  ‘I’m afraid this gentleman caught me at the end of a rather bad day.’ Because Leonard had drunk a fair amount of wine, he had the bravado to add, ‘A little matter of a hostile madman.’

  ‘Oh? Trouble at the ironworks, Mr Morley? “The distant rumble of revolution’s rough wheels”?’ Tobias Taylor raised an eyebrow. This bright spark had learned not only Leonard’s name, but his parentage, and knew something of E.A. Morley’s 1880 factory novel.

  The bright spark was introduced to Gwen and Madge. He joked about the fat tenor’s passionately trembling high notes and made them laugh and toss their heads a little, Madge’s hair swinging free and shining, Gwen’s sweetly crowned with delicate flowers from Whiteley’s Floral Arrangements.

  ‘I hope we may meet again.’ Mr Taylor seemed delighted with them. ‘May I give you my card?’ He bowed, keeping his eyes on their faces, and moved away to join someone among the crowd.

  ‘Who was that?’ Gwen asked as they waited under the hotel portico for Mr Beggs, the livery man who drove, them in a hired brougham.