One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  Bella smiled and made the lifted hand sign, palm out, which Madge used for ‘Hello’.

  Jack put down his buckets to talk to her. She thought he said that he was glad to see her and that it was cold outside. Bella took a notebook out of the drawstring bag that hung from her belt, and by using signs and exaggerated lip movements and scribbling notes back and forth, she and Jack had some conversation.

  “Ere, Jackie!’ one of the women at the stove shouted. ‘That coal bin’s only half full. Deaf as a bleedin’ post,’ she said when he paid no attention, and all the women laughed.

  Jack did not do so well with Toby. His grin faded, and he moved backwards with a closed face.

  Will Morrison had come through from the classroom. ‘He’s a bit afraid of men,’ he explained to Toby with his face turned away from Jack, in case he could read his lips. ‘He seems to get on better with women.’

  ‘I don’t blame him, if he has the chance,’ Toby said.

  ‘He does. Too much.’ Will threw a sideways glance at Madge, but she was bent over the child in the makeshift tent and did not notice.

  ‘I must be off anyway,’ Toby said. ‘I’m meeting a man in the City. I should stop the inhalation now, Madge, and give her some water and honey. Try the steam again later.’

  Toby had brought Bella here, but apparently she was to find her own way home. So when he remembered to ask her if that was all right, she said, ‘I’m staying. Jack is going to show me some of his carpentry, aren’t you?’ She moved towards Jack possessively. A lot of the girls she knew would be afraid to be here among such coarse, unwashed people, and would not know how to make friends with this uncouth, wordless man. She was doing well. Perhaps she would come to the Settlement again.

  ‘Jack has work to do,’ Will said abruptly. He took Jack quite roughly by the arm and pointed to the coal buckets and then to the door where he had come in with them from the yard.

  Madge rescued Bella by taking her into the long hall and telling her she could help to feed the cripples.

  ‘I won’t know how.’

  ‘Don’t always say that, Bella.’ Madge hung an apron round her neck and pushed her towards a table where a woman was putting out bowls for the children. ‘Just do it.’

  ‘You were so rude to her,’ Madge told Will. ‘That wasn’t necessary.’

  ‘She was smarming round Jack like an idiot. Look, Maddy, don’t you understand that poor man has feelings and desires like the rest of us? Can’t you see how he’s teased by the attentions of women so far beyond his reach?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Madge said in her brisk Physical Drill voice. ‘Jack would never think of any of us in that way.’

  ‘You are so naïve, all you good women.’

  ‘And you’re so sophisticated, I suppose.’ Madge could always give a back answer.

  ‘It is naïve of you to think he can go out into the world armed only with a hammer and chisel, and those wild hand signs you and he use.’

  ‘They work,’ Madge said.

  ‘With you. But he ought to be learning a formal sign language.’

  ‘Where?’ Madge demanded. ‘From whom?’

  ‘Oh, I know.’ They had left the clamour of the hall where food was being served to dozens of people, and Will leaned against the cracked wall of the passage. ‘It’s hopeless.’

  ‘You never used to say that,’ Madge said sadly.

  Will was no longer the fierce young idealist who had drawn her into his own enthusiasm about what they were doing for those who had nothing, and what more could be done, for more and more unfortunates, until there would be no forgotten ones.

  He did not live at the Settlement now. He was going to take up his law studies again. He had neatened his shaggy red beard. Aunt Teddie’s husband, Ralph Wynn, had offered to take him into his chambers. He was not always there when Madge came to work at the Settlement. They no longer kissed when they could grab a moment alone. She did not think now that she loved him, or that he had ever really loved her.

  ‘Why do things always have to change?’ Madge shivered in the cold stone passage and wrapped her arms round herself, since Will did not put his own round her.

  ‘We lose some of our illusions,’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘I suppose I’m defeated by the vastness of the problem, Maddy. These people have unfathomable needs, but all we are doing here is putting a very small bandage on a very large wound. You don’t see it like that. You think you can save Angel if you love her enough, you and that quack friend of yours.’

  ‘Toby is a doctor.’

  ‘Is he? That’s nice.’ He threw the subject of Toby away. ‘You think you can make poor Jack into a social creature. You’ll break your heart. When he leaves here, how will he stay out of trouble? One day, Jack and I will be in court together.’

  ‘Jack will never need defending.’ Madge swung back her hair and put up her chin.

  ‘Actually,’ Will said, quite nastily, ‘I’ll be prosecuting.’

  Bella was just beginning to get the hang of putting more soup into the child than over its clothes or hers when Madge took her away. ‘Come on, we’re going home.’ Madge’s colour was high and she seemed angry about something.

  ‘Have you had a quarrel with Will?’ Bella asked, as they walked to Mile End tube station.

  ‘He’s impossible.’

  ‘Don’t you love him any more?’

  ‘I don’t know why I ever did. When you’re in love, men look better than they are. When you’re not, they look worse.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’ But Gerald Lazenby still looked quite good to Bella. She had cut his photograph out of a society magazine. ‘Have you and Will broken up then?’ she asked, as they waited on the platform of the Central London line. Madge nodded. Sitting in the train, which was too noisy to talk, Bella found that she was, unworthily, rather glad. She had expected that Madge would marry Will, with her family’s blessing, although he was not rich, and with Bella as an elderly bridesmaid of twenty-four.

  The little girl Angel died early one morning in a choking agony. The women in the dormitory had swaddled her up and taken her away for their own burial rites by the time Madge came to work, and had put another child, a boy deformed by rickets, into the box cart.

  Madge could not weep in front of their no-nonsense attitude of, ‘Plenty more where that one came from.’ She could not sorrow to Will, who had told her many times, ‘You’re too emotionally involved with the child.’ So she wept to Toby Taylor, who, amazingly for such a busy man, turned up that day at the Loudon Street Settlement to see how Angel was.

  ‘I kept – I kept on with the stea – the steam. But it didn’t –’ Madge felt quite natural crying in front of Toby in the big clothes cupboard, where she had gone to see if she could find something warm for the rickets boy. He did not panic, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry,’ as most men did. He did not run his finger embarrassedly round his collar and say, ‘I expect you’d rather be left alone.’ He said, ‘Get your coat, dearest bereaved Madge, and I’ll take you out for a hot breakfast.’

  After that, she went out with him two or three times, to a tea dance, and to The Merry Widow, with supper afterwards at the Trocadero, where Toby Taylor was greeted by quite a few smart people, including an actress with heavily mascaraed lashes and gossamer hair. He asked Madge to come up to his rooms over The Clinique in Egerton Terrace, but she would not.

  How easy would it be to seduce this tall, forthright, golden girl? Toby wondered. Or rather, how difficult? A young woman brought up like Madge Morley in a bourgeois Bayswater family would need more than several glasses of wine, or an opportune weak moment, like the tears in the damp clothes cupboard, where there had been room for them to stand together with her silky head on his shoulder, but not for much else.

  Nowadays, when many young women were growing up less inhibited, there were those who Did, or could be persuaded to Do, but still plenty of those who Did Not, for various reasons.

  It was b
etter to leave Madge with her reasons. His friendship with the family was too precious a thing, more valuable to his life than the flashier contacts he cultivated. It was warm and genuine on both sides and part of his increasingly respectable reputation as a naturopathic healer. He would do anything he was privileged to do for Leonard and Gwen in this painful, uncertain time after William Whiteley’s murder. He would not try (and perhaps fail) to seduce their daughter.

  After supper with Madge at the Trocadero, he woke up his housekeeper, Neelie Drew, to come upstairs to his bedroom. Neelie was married to a club steward who lived in at his job, as she did in the basement of Egerton Terrace. They saw each other on Sundays. It was a good arrangement. Neelie, well paid, was a competent cook and housekeeper and a neat, polite receptionist, and a mistress only when needed. She had no claims on Toby and no jealousy, although she sometimes pouted her full lips at Marie-May Lacoste, just short of rudeness.

  ‘Who was the Pear’s soap virgin with the Dutch-doll bob at the Troc?’ Marie-May was stagily jealous of other women of Toby’s, although she herself had a husband and assorted short-term lovers. He told her.

  ‘Oh, I see. Your respectable, salt-of-the-earth friends that you keep on about. Well, we needn’t worry about her, need we, Bounce?’

  They were sitting on the soft fur hearthrug with the shrill, tight-skinned little terrier she sometimes brought with her. She fed it choice scraps from the table, and wanted it up on the foot of the quilt when she and Toby were in bed together.

  ‘You needn’t worry about anyone, Marie.’ She was ‘between plays’ at the moment, so he was seeing more of her. ‘There is nobody like you, nobody.’

  ‘That’s true, Toby dear, and I love you for saying that.’

  But her kind of love was different from what he had grown to feel for her, although he would not spoil their good times by voicing it.

  *

  Now that she and Will were no longer close, Madge was seeing other men, as well as Toby. With her father too tired and anxious to be his usual sociable self, the atmosphere at No. 72 was rather muted, so Madge bought one of the dashing ‘American length’ evening frocks in crêpe de Chine, and was out two or three times a week with Malcolm or Huntley or faithful Francis, childhood friend, who had never given up hope.

  Her father always waited up for her, but one evening, when he had come home late from work, he looked so exhausted that she persuaded him to go to bed early and give her the key to the front door.

  ‘But I’m always up for you, dear one. We have cocoa.’

  ‘Not tonight. Don’t bother with the Thermos, Flora.’

  ‘No cocoa?’ Leonard’s face fell. ‘You mean, you’ve only been drinking it for my sake?’

  ‘Oh, Daddy, please.’ If the situation at Whiteley’s did not resolve itself soon, she might have to marry Francis, to get away from home. ‘Give me the key, and I promise to have a gay time at Lucy’s dance, knowing you’re sound asleep.’

  Lucy Vidler’s engagement dance was not exciting. The pianist and the strings were not always in time with each other, and Madge had some dull partners. Francis was not as good a dancer as Toby, nor so witty. After the speeches and toasts to Lucy and her soldier, he became so sentimental that she had to laugh at him, which gave him an excuse to drink too much, which was one of the many reasons why Madge would never marry him.

  He was handsome and amiable, with a good family name and money. Uncle Hugo and Aunt Charlotte approved of him enviously, but Madge had never managed to pass him on to her cousin. He had once taken Bella in a coach to the Derby, but she had been perversely silent and sulky.

  ‘You are a hopeless person!’ Madge had raged at her when she heard about it. ‘How are you ever going to get a man?’

  ‘Perhaps I don’t want one.’ Bella set her jaw. ‘And certainly not your cast-offs.’

  After the dance, Francis took Madge to the Kit-Kat Club, where they drank more champagne and kissed at the table in a dark alcove. They were good old friends, after all.

  Francis was tipsily half asleep on the way home. Madge told the cabby to stop two doors down from her house, so the engine would not wake her father, and told him where to take her friend.

  ‘Oh, but I say, Madge –’ Francis grabbed for her, and she shut the door.

  No. 72 waited peaceably, a light showing behind the glass panels on either side of the front door. Through the plane-tree branches, thickening with the promise of new leaves, the street lamp diffused a yellow glow on the front steps. In her mind, as she hunted for the key in her beaded bag, Madge projected herself into the familiar atmosphere of thick carpets, Ronuk polish, the savoury ghosts of dinner, dying fires, Gwen’s lavender bowls, the crack of the stairs expanding, the slow beat of the grandfather clock.

  The key was not in her bag. Standing on the top step, Madge shook everything out onto the seat at the side of the porch. She remembered that Francis had waggishly fumbled in the bag for her dance programme, to cross out names and write in his own. He must have pulled out the key and dropped it on the floor.

  It was nearly two o’clock. If she rang the bell, it would wake everybody in the basement and probably her parents as well. Madge went back down the front steps and round the side of the house to the solid wooden gate that shut off the backyard. It was locked. Beside it, the high wall between No. 72 and No. 74 had broken glass set into the top.

  She put her face to the back door and said quietly, ‘Flora,’ but the maid could not hear her from her room beyond the scullery. Madge had climbed over the yard gate as an agile child, but not in an expensive dress. She took off the amber crêpe de Chine, and with one foot on the scullery windowsill and the other on the gate latch, scrambled over in her petticoat and stays and bloomers. Like this, with the dress over her arm, she tapped at the window of Flora’s half-basement room.

  ‘Bleedin’ Jesus!’ She heard a gasp and a creaking commotion as Flora stood on the bed. The window opened at once.

  Madge threw in her dress and crawled over the sill, dropping on to the pillow from the window high up in the wall.

  ‘Anyone with you?’ Flora stood on the bed to peer out into the dark, cat-smelling yard. ‘Cor, Madge, I never thought of Mr Francis as an unbuttoner.’ She brought her tousled head inside with a big laugh, clapping her hand over her mouth for fear of Mrs Roach.

  ‘I lost the key.’ Madge struggled into her dress. ‘Good thing there are bars only on the front windows, not at the back.’

  She tiptoed up the bare linoleum of the back stairs with the gold slippers in her hand and her dress undone. In the long dim hall, where the light from the outer lobby came through the coloured glass of the inside door in blurred blobs of blue and yellow, the massive clock ticked very solemn and loud, like a measured scolding.

  A few days before Madge’s late night escapade, Flora had seen her so-called husband Bill Bolt in the sooty gardens behind St Mary-of-the-Angels, where she had wheeled the baby she was minding for her sister Violet, who was supposed to be looking after it for her church work.

  Oh God. Again that lurch of the soul and body towards him. Would she never be free? Bill was cleaner, better dressed, his eye was bright, the tilt of his cropped head cocky.

  He told her that his wife had died. She did not believe him. ‘Unless you killed her.’

  ‘Ask no questions, you’ll hear no lies. We’re legal, Flo.’ He put an arm round her waist, and bent to make a gruesome face into the pram. ‘You can’t go having other men’s brats.’

  ‘Get away! You know it’s not mine.’

  ‘I wish it was ours.’ His hand moved up to her breast.

  Don’t let him make you go weak at the knees, she thought.

  But oh ... Oh, Bill... ‘Not here, you bastard!’

  Flora’s mother would not have him in her house. ‘I’ll come to Chepstow Villas,’ he had whispered to Flora behind the sad laurel in the garden.

  ‘After what you done to Tat? Mrs Roach would never let you in.’

  ‘
I’ll come to the front door,’ he swaggered.

  ‘You dare and I’ll have you arrested.’

  But now ... Madge’s words came back to her: ‘Good thing there are bars only on the front windows.’ Flora realized with a shiver that he could come to her back window, and no one would know.

  Flora went down through the Portobello Road market to see if her stepbrother Ben knew where Bill Bolt was hanging out. She could not find him or his mate, and their curio stall was not pitched today. They must be at the races. She saw one of Dicky’s street friends, quick-fingered Noah with the hair like sweepings under a bed. He saw her and dodged away from the sweet stall, but Flora caught hold of him.

  ‘Turn out your pockets,’ she growled.

  ‘No, honest, I never.’ He had chocolate round his mouth.

  ‘I don’t care what you done. You want a copper?’ He held out a grubby hand. ‘You know a man called Bill Bolt?’

  ‘On the buses, innee? ‘Im what they call Bull.’

  ‘You know where to find him?’

  ‘Might.’

  ‘Tell me.’ He shook his head, looking at his broken, oversize boots. ‘Give him a message then, Noah. Tell him, “Sunday. St Mary Gardens.’”

  ‘Wossat mean?’

  ‘He’ll know.’ Flora put the penny into Noah’s waiting hand. ‘And it’s a secret, mind. Don’t tell nobody.’

  ‘I don’t never tell nobody nothing.’

  ‘Where are you going, Flo?’ Dicky saw her bustling to clear the Sunday lunch.

  ‘See my Mum.’

  ‘And Daddy Watts?’ Dicky was fascinated by the chesty old pirate with the red kerchief over one eye who was allowed to spit into a chamber-pot. ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘You’re not. And don’t follow me neither.’

  ‘Noah and I are good at stalking. We’re going to set up as private detectives.’

  Flora put a coat over her black uniform dress, and slipped out while Dicky and the Master were fighting a battle with tin soldiers on the drawing room floor.