One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  He felt unravelled. ‘I wouldn’t do your job for anything,’ he told Dr Boone in his circular room in one of the towers. ‘How do you keep your sanity?’

  ‘Well,’ Dr Boone considered this, ‘I’m not quite sure what sanity is. But there are rewards for me at The Keep. The new men are only interested in the acute pathologies, but some of the forgotten chronics do respond, you know, if you take the trouble.’ He was busy with his pipe. ‘And Mrs Boone and I do enjoy our house on the grounds.’

  Toby usually brought him a case or two to discuss. He told Dr Boone about the dreamy, fair-skinned boy whose outdoor father did not want to believe he was normal (‘Treat the father, not the lad, Taylor’), and something about sad, tired Edwina Wynn, and the tentative groping towards honest communication.

  ‘I’m not sure yet what’s wrong. I’ll have to go carefully. I don’t want to make a mistake, as I did with that neurotic, fainting woman who turned out to be diabetic.’

  ‘No, that was unfortunate.’ Dr Boone looked at him through fragrant smoke. ‘You do send people for medical tests if necessary, don’t you, Tobias?’

  ‘Of course. I’m with the professionals, not against them. But so often clients come to me because of unsatisfactory medical or surgical treatment.’

  ‘I know.’ Dr Boone sighed. ‘Me too. But by the time they are committed here, a colossal amount of damage has been done. This melancholic lady of yours – no doubt she has been a gift to the medical and pharmaceutical community since adolescence.’

  ‘And nothing really wrong with her physically, beyond the expectable female complaints of the forties.’

  ‘You might start with those.’ Dr Boone, though not adventurous, had grasped the sexual content of Freud’s new thought.

  ‘It’s difficult with these inhibited middle-aged women. They steer you away quite cleverly.’

  ‘Give her time, Tobias. Melancholia builds up for years. It takes time to break down.’

  ‘But I want instant miracle cures!’ Toby admitted. ‘Sometimes I think I should have been a faith healer. Arise and walk! That will be one guinea, thank you very much.’

  Dr Boone smiled, tolerant of Toby as of any deranged person. ‘As long as you do no harm ...’

  ‘I’d like to have that framed on the wall, but it might give the customers ideas.’

  ‘Go slow. Have that framed. Be content with small results. And show the patients how to be, also.’

  *

  Towards the end of the January sales, Whiteley’s staff was exhausted. Thousands of shoppers thronged the store every day, many of them rougher and cruder than the usual customer. Pockets were picked and merchandise stolen. If goods disposed of did not tally with cash receipts and account billings, it was the responsibility of the Department Buyer, who, if mean-natured, like Miss Maple in Gloves and Scarves, might pass the blame on to a harried assistant.

  When the sales were over, Miss Maple, like some other buyers, would have to cut down the department staff. Two sisters, thin pale girls who looked underfed, and older than their years, ventured upstairs to the offices to appeal against the sack, or what Henry Beale called ‘having their employment terminated’. Beale, as Chief Buyer, backed up Miss Maple. On January 23rd, the sisters came to Leonard Morley, washed out and tearful.

  ‘We’ve been here longer than others in Gloves and Scarves, some that were only taken on before the Christmas rush.’

  ‘What are Miss Maple’s reasons for asking you to leave?’ Leonard did not particularly like the Gloves Buyer, who had a straight mouth with negligible lips, but she was efficient, and apparently fair.

  ‘She doesn’t ask, Mr Morley sir, she tells. She’s picked on us, consistent. She’s blamed us for things gone missing from counters where we was not even serving. If we lose the job,’ the elder sister said, ‘we lose the dormitory room as well.’ William Whiteley housed many of his unmarried female staff in nearby terrace houses that he had bought or built.

  ‘What does Mr Beale say?’

  ‘The decision st-stands, sir.’

  ‘Then it must stand with me,’ Leonard had to say. Beale backed up Maple, and he must back up Beale. That was how the management chain held together.

  ‘Couldn’t you ask Mr Whiteley for us, sir?’ Two pairs of moist eyes clung to the edge of their last hope.

  Leonard did not trouble the Chief with staff problems. In the old days, W.W. had been meticulous and too strict. Now that he was old and tired, he was distanced from individual causes, but the strictness was still there. All Leonard could say was, ‘I’ll look into it.’

  The eyes did not brighten. He had let the sisters down. Sometimes he wished that he could exchange his demanding dominion for lowly service on the screws and nails counter. But then he himself would risk elimination by Mr Ludlow of Ironmongery.

  When he came away from a fruitless visit to the office of Henry Beale – ‘If you cannot rely on the integrity of our middle administration, the whole edifice crumbles. Surely you know our precepts, Morley?’ ‘Don’t lecture me, Beale.’ – a small grey envelope lay on his desk.

  Last chance. He comes through or I kill myself. Damn you all.

  If he does, there will be no more letters, Leonard thought with deliberate calm. He folded the scrawled paper, knelt to open the combination of the safe, and added the note to the other two that he had kept.

  Edwina Wynn did return to The Clinique in Egerton Terrace, a week after Toby had seen her at a musical evening at Vera Pope’s house, when she would hardly acknowledge him and seemed more than usually downcast – ‘Buck up, Teddie, they’re going to play a cancan now. We might want you to dance.’

  His housekeeper, Neelie Drew, took two telephone messages: one desperate from a consumptive lady whom Toby would not see because of the infection, and one hesitant from Mrs Ralph Wynn, making an appointment but qualifying it with, ‘unless I’m unable to keep it’.

  She sat on the edge of the chair, looking round the room, as if for spies. Toby wished that repressed women like this would take off their hats. It was difficult to get down to realities when they sat there with the neck rigidly supporting some overpowering creation like Mrs Wynn’s wide brown matador headpiece, weighted with grosgrain rosettes.

  ‘Would you prefer to remove your hat?’ He sometimes tried this out, but it was no more welcome than if he had asked, ‘Would you like to remove your bloomers?’

  Edwina pretended that she had only come for some more of the hop-flower infusion, which she had found soothing. ‘I keep a spirit lamp in my room to brew it up in the early hours, if I can’t sleep.’

  ‘That doesn’t disturb your husband?’ Toby took his opportunity to get a foot in the door of the marriage chamber.

  ‘Oh no, he sleeps in his dressing room now, you know. It’s a much more convenient arrangement.’ She looked down, so that Toby could only see the ugly stiff rosettes erupting from the hat. ‘It would not be dangerous for me to continue taking the tea?’ She looked up anxiously, as if the hops were opium.

  ‘No, of course not, Mrs Wynn. I’ll put you up another package.’ Toby Taylor, humanist naturopath, knew better than to give it to her at once. ‘May I ask,’ he said, leaning back in his opposite chair, hoping to induce her to lean back too, ‘whether you and Mr Wynn decided to occupy separate rooms after you seemed to lose energy, as you have told me, and joy in life?’

  ‘Possibly.’ She paused for a long time, drawing in her pale lips in a constricted way which tensed her jaw. ‘Perhaps.’ She frowned and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘A happy marriage?’ Toby ventured.

  Edwina was surprised that he should ask. ‘Oh no, Dr Taylor.’ She looked at him without expression under the overpowering hat. ‘People don’t marry for happiness, do they? Ralph Wynn married me because I had a famous and successful father. He needed that status, you see, as a struggling young lawyer.’ Pause for a sigh. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘Everything
we talk about is confidential, Mrs Wynn.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. Everyone knows about Ralph and me. Everyone knows everything in our family. The women gossip so.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Whatever I say, it’s usually the wrong thing.’

  ‘Surely not?’ Toby gave her an encouraging smile, but she had shut herself up inside herself again.

  He went back to the marriage, to try to winkle her out, but when he inquired, ‘Your parents were pleased?’ she asked quite belligerently, ‘Why should you want to know?’ and he was afraid that she was going to demand the hop-flower tea and get up and leave.

  ‘I am trying to help you, Mrs Wynn.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you asked me.’

  ‘Did I?’ She was back to her usual defeated drone. ‘Well, it’s no use.’

  ‘Your parents . . . ?’

  She shrugged her sloping shoulders, made even droopier by the double yoke of her heavy winter dress. ‘My father didn’t mind, I suppose. Mama didn’t really expect me to marry anybody. She thought I would stay at home and be her Mother’s Girl.’ She put a wry expression on a face that had too many dry lines and fissures on it for her mid-forties.

  ‘But you escaped.’ Toby was proud of himself for keeping cynicism out of his voice.

  ‘There is no escape.’ Edwina sighed, determinedly negative.

  He could see why her irritated family plagued her with, ‘Buck up, old Teddie!’ She must drive them mad with her pessimism. She would drive Ralph Wynn mad if he paid any attention to her. No wonder his life was mostly his showy work in the law courts and his well-known affairs with quite prominent ladies. But as Dr Taylor (sometimes he almost believed in his illicit title, since the Morleys clung to it), Toby’s mission was not to be driven mad by this sad, dowdy woman with the face of a weary horse, but to try to find the key to her melancholia. Dr Boone had talked to him about this affliction, which weighed down many of the inmates of The Keep. ‘They have imprisoned themselves,’ he said. ‘Once in a while, you may be lucky enough to discover in them the key to unlock the door.’

  To discover the key to Edwina’s melancholia, and – dazzling thought – the cure for it. Why not? She was a hard nut to crack, but ‘It’s never too late’ Dr Boone believed. If Tobias Taylor could find a way to lighten this poor lump of unrisen dough, what couldn’t he do? He might get a specialist following in la femme triste.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Dr Freud believes...’ He must go carefully to keep her in her seat. ‘You have heard of the great Sigmund Freud?’

  ‘I have heard Dr Buckmaster describe him as a sex maniac.’

  He would. ‘Dr Freud has propounded that none of us are aware how many of our psychological problems are rooted in childhood.’

  Edwina nodded, her eyes on his. She could encompass that, knowing herself to be her mother’s victim.

  ‘And also,’ Toby added looking delicately off to one side of the forbidding hat, ‘in our sexual experience.’

  Edwina dropped her head quickly. Her gloved hands clutched her skirt. Toby could see that she would never talk – perhaps not even think – about what she had probably experienced as the ghastly traumas of the marriage bed. He moved on to, ‘And childbirth, too, can be an extension of that.’

  Edwina said at once, ‘I had a perfectly horrible time,’ and called him ‘doctor’, to justify mentioning the subject. ‘No one will ever know.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Toby said quietly. He had heard Dr Boone say this to distressed inmates who were still capable of communicating.

  ‘Well, doctor.’ Edwina looked up again at this invitation to talk about something that she had never been able to discuss. ‘I was terrified out of my wits. The twins nearly killed me. When it turned out there was a second one coming after the first, I wanted them to kill me. The chloroform was useless. I begged the midwife to put a pillow over my head, so that I would be dead before Sophie was born. Isn’t that despicable, Dr Taylor? I’m ashamed to have told you. I don’t know why I did, because I expect it wasn’t so bad after all. They said it wasn’t. They said I was neurasthenic’

  ‘I expect you’ve told me the truth.’ Toby spoke levelly, but excitement was growing within him. A clue, a clue – she’s given me a clue!

  ‘I cried and cried,’ Edwina said quite proudly. ‘For weeks, I cried. It was like living under water. I didn’t – this is wicked – I didn’t like the babies. The nurse was so shocked. “I shan’t leave Madam alone with them,” she said. I was thought to be an unnatural mother. You don’t want to hear any more. I’ve told you what really happened, as you said. That is what happened to me.’

  ‘It could explain many things.’ Toby leaned forward, but she was leaning back now, limply, the hat pushed by the cushioned back of the chair even farther over her eyes.

  ‘It happened because –’ She paid no attention to him. ‘Because I was not a good child. Not what my mother wanted. Not what God wanted either. I didn’t say my prayers. When I die, I hope He will say to me, “I’ve already made you pay for your wickedness,” and give me a ticket to come in.’

  Edwina Wynn left The Clinique without her packet of dried hop flowers. She was too exhausted – almost sleepwalking – to remember, and Toby was too excited.

  That evening, he went to the theatre to see Marie-May Lacoste in her dressing room before the play. He tried to tell her something of his exhilarated sense of achievement, but when she was making up, staring hypnotized at the mask of her face in the mirror, she was too preoccupied to listen.

  She was not free to go out with him later for supper.

  ‘The old viscount?’

  ‘A new one. A duke. He owns half Staffordshire.’

  It had to be accepted that she went out with a lot of other men, just as she accepted, more easily, Toby’s other women.

  He invited lecherous Leila, who shared the dressing room, but she had other plans, so Toby went to the Haymarket Rooms and played billiards restlessly, and then found two girls he knew in the bar-lounge of the Empire and spent the rest of the night with the younger one.

  When he awoke, and walked home through the frosty, stirring streets, he still felt electric, like Vera’s man with the vibrating corset. As soon as he could, he would go out to The Keep to find out from Dr Boone something about the pathology of women and childbirth.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Thursday, January 24th, 1907, on his morning rounds, Leonard avoided the Gloves and Scarves department, in case two pairs of doleful eyes were raised to him in mute appeal. He would send for the sisters later in the day. If he had to convey bad news, it was only proper to do it himself.

  This morning, he had something else on his mind. He had decided to tell W.W. about the last note, or at least try to find out from him whether he had received any recent communications from blackmailers.

  If this person was really going to commit suicide ... Leonard had struggled with this question through a wakeful night. What was the right thing to do? What was correct in his position? Different considerations, but both important to him. The death of a stranger might not touch Leonard, but should he not at least inform the Chief, in case he knew him?

  At about half past twelve, he took the note out of his safe. If William Whiteley rejected him contemptuously, as he had before, at least he would have given him a chance. In the corridor between the counting house and William Whiteley’s office, he met Daniel Goodman, the Chief Cashier.

  ‘Is Mr Whiteley busy?

  ‘There is someone with him at the moment.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The gentleman told me he had come from Mr Whiteley’s solicitor, Sir George Lewis. He is probably the managing clerk, come to pick up some papers.’

  ‘I’ll go in and see if they’ve finished.’

  With the note in his hand, Leonard did not want to wait. He knocked and went into the office, where Mr Whiteley and the young solicitor’s clerk, who wore a shabby suit and silk hat, were
both standing up.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. I’d like a word with you, if it’s convenient.’

  ‘I can’t see you now.’ The old man looked slightly rattled. Was he in some legal trouble? ‘I’ll see you presently.’

  Leonard nodded to the visitor and went outside to talk to Goodman. From the counting house, he saw the office door open. Mr Whiteley came out, looking pale and agitated.

  He called out breathlessly, ‘Go and fetch me a policeman!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Daniel Goodman went off at once.

  A policeman to get rid of the young man? What on earth –? As Leonard stepped into the corridor, he heard the visitor, behind the old man in the doorway, say loudly, ‘Come back inside!’

  ‘No, go away. I’m fetching a policeman.’

  ‘Is that your final word?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you are a dead man, Mr Whiteley.’

  It was all said very quickly. As Leonard hesitated for a moment, paralysed with shock and surprise, there was the crack of a pistol shot, then another, and then fainter, from within the room, a third.

  Everybody seemed to arrive at once, but nobody could save William Whiteley, the Chief, the grand old man. He lay dead on the floor, with blood welling up from a wound in his left cheek and another behind his ear. Inside the office, the young stranger sprawled, badly wounded, his mangy hat tumbled away into the corner by the wastepaper basket.

  ‘Who is the man? Who is it?’

  After the police had come, and two doctors, and the body of poor William Whiteley had been removed to the mortuary, and the wounded man taken to St Mary’s Hospital in Praed Street, everyone kept asking each other uselessly, ‘Who is he? Where did he come from? What did he want? Why did he do it?’ All customers had been asked to leave, and the whole place was closed; but many of the staff still lingered in the buildings or in the street among the excited, curious crowd who had come to stare at the hastily printed notices in the shop windows: ‘Owing to the death of Mr Whiteley, this establishment is closed for the remainder of the day.’