The comfortable safe haven of No 72 Chepstow Villas, solid and creamy in the pale spring sun, and the company of Madge and Dicky were Leonard’s best comforts these days. He had bothered Gwen too much with his difficulties at work. She would cry gently at first when he came home unhappy, but after a while she seemed only to half listen to him, as if she were protecting her own sensitivity. Although she had been a Victorian girl, brought up without a father in a tear-washed family of women, Gwen did not like to cry. It gave her neuralgia. She had to send Madge or Flora upstairs for the salicylate.
With the news that the store’s General Manager would definitely not return from his prolonged sick leave, Henry Beale was determined that he would beat Leonard for the job. He toadied up to William and Frank Whiteley, as he had to their father, and stepped on the Assistant Manager’s toes whenever he could. Was it Leonard’s anxious imagination that the brothers were cool to him? Henry had never let go of the subject of the anonymous notes. Were they listening to his poison? Did they still wonder whether Leonard could have saved their father? He could hear Arthur French saying, after the inquest, in his speculative Scotland Yard way, ‘One might almost imagine that Mr Beale wanted to accuse you of being an accomplice to murder.’
Madge was often out these days, and Leonard did not burden Dicky with his grievances about the dastardly Beale, but the child seemed to sense when he was down. He would not sink down with him, like Gwen with her hurt tears, but would try to pull his father up with jokes and silly tricks and his own fresh young energy.
One of his favourite childish jests was to play about with the speaking tubes that connected the ground floor rooms with the basement. He blew the whistle in the mouthpiece of the tube in the kitchen, and when his father answered, put on a spectral voice or a comic foreign accent to make him laugh.
Leonard was indulgent, but he warned, ‘Don’t overdo it.’ Dicky did it once too often. His father shouted back at him down the tube, ‘You stop that, young Dicky, I mean it. I’m angry with you!’
Soon he heard the heavy front door slam. Going to look out of the window, he saw Dicky’s tam-o’shanter bobbing along beyond the front wall.
‘Where has the boy gone, Gwen?’
‘Out with his friends.’ She did not look up from the beautiful pheasant’s tail she was embroidering on a cushion cover.
‘You’re too lax with him.’
‘Don’t be a bear.’ She smiled up at his angry face. ‘He never gets into trouble.’
*
Toby Taylor, walking from Notting Hill Gate to pay a call at No. 72, saw a fiercely moustachioed policeman with Dicky Morley outside the corner house, and crossed Chepstow Villas quickly.
‘What’s wrong, Constable?’
‘Brought this young gent home, sir.’ Dicky was dishevelled. He had no hat, and the reinforced knees of his black stockings were snagged and muddy.
‘What has he done?’
‘Nothing.’ Dicky kept his head down, golden hair tangled over his eyes.
‘An old person complained of being harassed, sir. Master Morley and his young mate – who I have my eye on – were following this person in the back streets in a sinister manner.’ The policeman bit his lip so as not to return Toby’s involuntary smile. ‘I’m just going to have a word with his father.’
Poor Leonard. He had trouble enough without this. ‘I’ll take him in, Constable,’ Toby said. ‘I’m a good friend of the family.’
‘You’ll see that he gets a talking to, sir?’
‘Oh, yes.’
When the policeman had turned away, Dicky looked up, and Toby winked at him.
‘What will you tell my father?’
‘Nothing.’ They went up the front steps.
‘Thanks, Uncle Toby. You’re a topper.’
Chapter Sixteen
A good friend of the family, Toby was glad to be able to save Dicky’s father from extra aggravation. Leonard was pleased to see him. Gwen was very welcoming. ‘You’re like Mercury shimmering into our dull lives, To-by!’ Dicky was his friend for life. Only Edwina Wynn, also visiting No. 72, greeted him with more embarrassment than enthusiasm, and made an excuse to leave soon after he arrived.
Since Edwina had told him about the traumas of her confinement, Toby Taylor had shared the revelation with his friend Dr Boone at The Keep.
‘She could not love the twins.’ After the usual hopeless visit to his mother, he found the doctor sitting by the narrow railed bed of a catatonic woman who had moved and made a sound, and might awaken. ‘And I think she still cannot care for them, not normally. Could this, just possibly ...’ He hesitated: he must not sound too facile with the meticulous psychiatrist. ‘Do you suppose this could be a key to her persistent melancholia?’
‘I have known of it, Tobias, although I’ve never treated a case. I have heard of women killing their babies, even when there was no reason for wanting to be rid of them.’
‘If you were me,’ Toby said diffidently, ‘how would you proceed?’
‘You can’t undo what has happened.’ Dr Boone leaned over the bed rails to pull down the lower lid of the catatonic woman. Her flat blue eye looked at him, startlingly, without apparent sight. ‘You can only, as with any troubled patient, try to undo some of its effects.’
‘Well look, she thinks she is helpless, you see?’ When he was at The Keep, near his mother, Toby sometimes found himself slipping into a Welsh accent.
‘Of course. And so your task, like my task here with many of the hysterics, is to open the eyes, very slowly, to the incredible truth of the body’s own power. The nervous system has all the answers for itself, if only the perverse mind would listen. Lead your lady gently to listen to herself, Tobias.’
Toby was anxious to see Mrs Edwina again, but he had not heard from her. Was she afraid that she had revealed too much? If she would risk another visit, he would not urge her to go over the painful memories again. He would indicate as much, if he saw her with the family, but there were no gatherings at No. 72 while Leonard was still in a stew over Whiteley’s. Should he telephone? Edwina had said, ‘I hate the instrument,’ although she and Ralph had had the telephone for a year. ‘It’s an intrusion. I never can think of what to say.’
One afternoon, when Toby was walking up pleasant Campden Hill on his way back from visiting a healthy hypochondriac in Holland Park Avenue whom he was dosing with flower essence placebos, which she thought were strong drugs, he crossed the end of Phillimore Place, where the Wynns lived. He had been to other Morley houses – Ladbroke Lodge, Vera and Charles’s in Chelsea, Austin’s noisy narrow house in Addison Road. He had lunched with Ralph Wynn at his club, but he had never been invited by Teddie, who entertained as little as possible.
It was a decent brown brick house with white windows, but the curtains behind them seemed to be impenetrable screens of muslin and lace. The maid who opened the door looked even glummer than her mistress.
‘Mr Taylor? Madam’s not expecting you,’ she said negatively when Toby handed her his card.
‘Ask Mrs Wynn if she’s at home.’ Toby smiled. The maid did not.
The hall in which he waited was panelled in dark wood. The carpets were rich, but sombre. The high window at the turn of the stair was thickly netted against daylight. The bulbs in the heavy wall fittings were too dim, and the electrolier in the hall ceiling still looked blackened from the days when it burned gas. The house looked like Edwina, not Ralph. It was obvious that he was not at home enough to bother about bringing in light and colour. Poor Sophie. No wonder her twin brother Greg had spent the Easter holidays on a school walking tour in Scotland.
When Toby followed the maid to the drawing room, he found Edwina standing by the mantelpiece mirror, fussing at her hair and dress. A chair was askew by the jigsaw table in the shrouded window, as if she had jumped up in a fluster.
‘I was passing by, so I thought I would look in. I’ve not seen you for so long, Mrs Edwina.’
‘I’ve been busy,’ she said
defensively. ‘I’ve been caught up in the difficulties of poor Leonard and Gwen.’
‘How are they?’
‘All right, I suppose.’
Toby knew they were not all right, but Edwina’s mind was not on them, so he went back to her. ‘You like jigsaws?’
‘They pass the time.’
‘What do you like, Mrs Edwina?’ He asked it lightly.
‘Oh – the usual things, I suppose. Will you – er, will you sit down? Some tea?’ She looked confusedly at the bell pull and then at him, moved towards a chair, but did not sit in it. She was obviously wondering whether this was à social call or a doctor’s visit.
Toby was trying to make it easier for her when Sophie came in from her ladies’ academy. When she saw Toby, she stayed by the door.
‘Don’t lurk, child. Come in and shake hands. What will Dr Taylor think?’ Mother and daughter laid cheek against cheek.
‘It’s nice to see you.’ Toby took the girl’s thin, cool hand. ‘How was school today?’
‘The same.’ She shrugged.
‘You don’t like it?’
‘Not much.’
‘Oh, Sophie,’ her mother said in the exasperated voice her daughter seemed to provoke. ‘After all the trouble your father and I took to find you the best finishing school. Music, art, theatre, outings, culture. Girls these days,’ she told Toby, ‘are quite too blasées. When I was at school in Henley –’
‘Yes, Mother, we know.’ Toby was glad to see the girl show some spirit.
‘I’ll have them send your tea up to the schoolroom,’ her mother said.
‘I didn’t know you’d be here, Dr Taylor.’ Sophie, innocent and disturbingly ravishing in her severe school blouse and tie, gave Toby one of her rare, transforming smiles. ‘Or I would have –’ She pushed at the sides of her plain grey skirt disdainfully.
‘I just dropped in,’ he said, his eyes enjoying her, ‘to pay a brief social call.’
But when Sophie had left the room, he said at once, ‘That was a white lie, Mrs Edwina. This is not a social call. It’s a visit from your practitioner, but your family doesn’t know about that, do they?’
‘They mustn’t know.’
‘Why?’
‘Well.’ She wanted to say, ‘It would spoil it,’ but that would sound too intimate, and after she had made a fool of herself at The Clinique, she had not planned on there being any more of this association to spoil.
‘Well,’ she said again. She often began a sentence with ‘Well’. She could hear herself doing it. It gave her time to think, or rather to put off giving the wrong answer. ‘Well. I wouldn’t want them to know what happened to me.’
‘You mean about the difficult twin births?’
‘That’s ancient history. No, I mean about descending into hell and not being able to climb back up.’
‘You talk about things “happening” to you, Mrs Edwina, as if you were passive and helpless against an outside punitive force. I believe that people are more in control of their lives than they think.’
This was upsetting. Teddie wished that the conversation was not taking place in her own drawing room. She wished that she were wearing a hat. You were more in command of the situation, in a hat.
‘Control? That’s only a word.’ She must not accept everything this assured man said to her. ‘Leonard is not in control of what is happening to him at Whiteley’s.’
‘But Leonard is not ill.’ Dr Taylor looked very relaxed, sitting there in her Heal’s tapestry chair, but his deep brown eyes were watching her attentively. Teddie’s heart began that fluttering trick it played on her.
‘Am I ill?’ She caught her breath.
Toby Taylor considered this, looking at the fan arrangement of ornamental paper and dried flowers which was in the grate, since Teddie always stopped fires on April 1st, whatever the weather.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you are, to an extent, ill.’ He looked at her with his eyebrows raised, to see how she would take this. It was a shock, true, but not a blow.
Ill. Her heart slowed down. ‘Ill?’ The word was familiar and reassuring, like not going to school and being in bed in the daytime with an eiderdown full of dolls, and Meggie, the long-ago maid at Goring, bringing milk and bread with the crusts off. ‘If I am ill, then my, my . . .’ What word was there for the weighted inertia that cut her off from human contact? ‘My difficulties are not my fault, as you say they are.’
‘I didn’t say “fault”. Let’s forget that word. “Blame” and “fault” should be cut out of the dictionary. I said “control”. If something is wrong, you know, it may be in your power to put it right.’
‘Oh no, doctor.’ That just showed how little he knew about her. It proved that nobody, not even he, understood her at all. I am a stranger on the earth, Teddie thought miserably.
‘Mrs Edwina.’ Oh heavens, he did what he had done that Christmas Eve at No. 72 Chepstow Villas. He crossed the space of burgundy hearthrug between them and was on one knee beside her chair. ‘Believe me, my friend, and I think you are my friend, it is time to tell you this. I know that you suffer from melancholia a lot of the time, and feel tired and discouraged, but – no, don’t get up.’ He rested a hand lightly on her knee (how dare he?). ‘Just listen. Your problems have not been imposed upon you by an implacable deity. You put them in, unknowingly, and now, with knowledge, you can take them out. Mrs Edwina, you have it in your power to stop feeling like this any time you want.’
‘How dare you!’ Teddie stood up, quivering. Her heart was at it again. With a hand on her chest, she reached for the fringed bell pull and summoned the maid.
Damn, Toby thought, hurrying away from Phillimore Place. That’s done it. I thought the time was ripe to take a chance with her, but look here, Tobias Taylor, bull in a china shop, you didn’t know what you were doing. He jammed his hat down on his head and strode down the hill towards Kensington High Street.
Looks as if I’d lost that game. Lost Mrs Edwina, just as I lost the Captain last month by offering him psychology when he wanted expensive miracle pills.
Oh, well. He got on a 49 omnibus which would take him to South Kensington. Plenty more patients where they came from, as long as I haven’t lost the rest of the Morleys along with their weakest member. But if she squawks to them, they will be on my side. They’re not fools. Nor is she, all evidence to the contrary. She is still the daughter of the great Ernest Morley.
At least I’ve given her something to think about. If she ever does think, the sad old sow. He had felt kindly towards Mrs Edwina when she was hanging on his words and making a little progress. Now that she had rejected him in outrage, he could contemplate, as he walked along Brompton Road, how much he disliked her.
Toby was thrown off balance when Edwina Wynn turned up meekly at The Clinique about a week later, and he had to start feeling kindly towards her again. She was wearing a spring hat, a starched straw that hid her eyes.
‘You’re angry with me, Dr Taylor.’
‘No.’
‘Yes you are, I know you are.’
Don’t tell me how I feel! She would make him angry if she kept on. Talk about control. She had as keen a taste for it as the next woman.
He took a deep breath and said, ‘You look better.’ She would not normally want to hear that. She preferred to look as bad as she felt.
But she smiled. ‘Thank you. I’ve been thinking,’ she said, quietly, but not humbly. ‘What you said about power and control. Perhaps it is time for me to do something for myself at last. Will you help me, Dr Taylor?’
By the end of May, Mrs Edwina was showing a little progress. A glimmering of self-esteem began to emerge from beneath the stones that had crushed it for so long. If she talked about her mother, it went under again, so they did not talk about her mother.
She was making a small effort. She kept slipping back into the familiarity of gloom, but she did report a few actively happy moments.
‘At Vera’s the other evening, I drank wine and I
said I had enjoyed a stroll in the park. They looked at me as if I had suddenly started swearing.’
Toby looked piercingly into her eyes, like Dr Mesmer, and said, ‘Life is good, and so are you.’
‘I wish you would tell my daughter Sophie that, Dr Taylor. She’s so sulky and difficult, and she’s still not eating enough to keep a sparrow alive.’
‘I wish I could help.’ Toby would like to have the pure young girl up here for a session. ‘She’s a lovely child.’ Steady, Toby. She is also a Morley – forbidden fruit.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ Teddie said grimly.
‘Can you get her to agree to see me?’ Oh hell, I’ll risk it.
‘Dr Buckmaster’s colleague threatened to put her into a hospital and feed her through her nose, like the Suffragettes. She’ll do what I say.’
‘But it would be better if she came of her own accord.’
‘Dr Taylor.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘You have never been a parent. You are not equipped to judge things like that.’
‘You show a good spirit, Mrs Edwina!’
‘Do I?’ She did not quite glow and beam, because her face was not made in that style, but she looked positively pleased with him, and with herself.
In bed in her room, her face turned towards the wall, Sophie Wynn lay curled in a ball, hugging her cold ankles, and went over and over what had happened in Dr Taylor’s room at The Clinique. This was how she would tell it, when she told it, if she ever could tell it.
‘How did it go with Dr Taylor, dear?’ Sophie had been accompanied by the maid, having refused to go with her mother.
‘It was all right, Mama.’ Arms across chest, shoulders hunched.
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘Why are you blushing?’
‘Let her blush,’ Sophie’s father said. ‘It’s very becoming. Probably the first time she’s been alone in a room with a man.’
I suppose it was, ran the imaginary narration in Sophie’s head. I mean, with a man who behaved like a man.
What was he like? her listener would ask, whoever her listener might be – Madge? Bella?
One of the Family Page 17
