One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  When he opened the door of his house, a woman came out of a ground floor room into the hall. ‘Anything you need, Mr Taylor?’

  Bella turned her head away inside the high collar of her dark-red cloak.

  ‘No, you go to bed.’

  ‘I’ve left your tray upstairs.’

  In the comfortable salon, there was a plate of sandwiches and decanters of wine and whisky and a soda siphon.

  ‘What does she think?’ Bella asked nervously.

  ‘My housekeeper? I often bring friends home. That doesn’t make me a libertine.’ Toby laughed. Bella took off her cloak in a desperate way, as if she had nothing on underneath.

  Poor girl, she was so scared. She sat on the edge of her chair and pursed her lips to take tiny sips at her wine glass. Toby wanted to say: Relax, I’m not going to ravish you. But she might guess that he was laughing at her, and he did not want her to know that.

  What did he want? Why had he brought Bella Morley back here? Sorry for her? Sorry for himself because Marie-May was being difficult and evasive about the Frenchman, who might be rich enough to tempt her to disentangle herself from Toby, who could not bear to lose her?

  He sat down opposite Bella, leaning forward with his whisky glass in both hands, and told her that she had nice eyes. Under the heavy brows, her hazel eyes were large, though puzzled and a little unfocused. She looked down, and he said, ‘Look at me, Belle. Do you mind me calling you that?’

  ‘Nobody does.’

  ‘Well, I shall, because you are belle.’

  She had been unfortunate in her inheritance. Short thick figure, strong nose and lips from her Germanic mother, the family square chin which looked better on the male Morleys.

  ‘Poor Belle,’ Toby said, because she looked uncomfortable and nervous. ‘At the Royal Academy, you told me, “I want to make something of my life,” and I sensed in you –’ Hang it, Tobias, this is a nubile young woman you have here, not a patient – but he went on, sounding like an imitation of himself imitating Dr Boone’s gentle therapeutic manner. ‘I sensed a sadness in you.’

  ‘Why?’ Bella whispered. She put down her glass with a hand that shook, and spilled a little wine.

  ‘I don’t know why. I just know it’s there.’ He waited. ‘Well, I am sad,’ she faltered, ‘when I think that I – oh dear.’

  She put her face in her hands. Her large feet, which had been neatly side by side in the green satin shoes, splayed sideways. ‘Of course I’m sad,’ she burst out through her hands in a creaking sob, ‘because I can never – I’m never allowed to – I’ve tried all my life, but he . . .’ She stopped, took down her hands and worked her face into control.

  ‘Your father?’ Toby had heard Hugo Morley sharpen his dull, cruel wits on his daughter.

  ‘All I ever wanted,’ Bella said, looking very plain and blotchy and not at all belle, ‘was for him to be proud of me and to think I was worthy of my famous grandfather. I worked and worked with my dear governess, but then, instead of going to the clever school with Madge in Holland Park, I was sent away – my mother does everything he wants – and I hated it and it was cold and I got pneumonia and he used to sign his letters “Yours truly, H.W.W. Morley”.’

  She began to cry again, not covering her face, which might have been better. Toby made her drink her wine, and got up to pour her some more and to give her the clean handkerchief from his breast pocket. He laid a discreet hand on her disordered hair, and told her that he understood, was glad she had released some bad memories, and was honoured by her confidence, before he took her home.

  His motor hansom drove away down Kensington Park Gardens as the half-asleep, grumbling housemaid opened the front door of Ladbroke Lodge.

  ‘Bel-la!’ Charlotte, with her head huge in a puffed frilled cap, was at the door of her front bedroom. ‘That didn’t look like Mrs Gore-Brown’s carriage.’

  ‘There were too many of us. They brought me in a cab.’

  ‘And drove off without seeing you into the house? I’ll have to have a word about that.’

  Oh, please don’t, Bella begged silently, as she dragged herself up the next flight of stairs, clutching Toby’s handkerchief. ‘My father made me suffer too,’ he had confided. They were a pair.

  When Toby had infiltrated himself into the solid, likeable Morley family, he had not anticipated their underside: pathological Edwina, Leonard in need of a knight-errant, and now Bella in the confessional. Be still, my Baptist ancestors. I might be called to the priesthood.

  He was still seeing Edwina Wynn once in a while. Like the frog in the well, she slipped back from time to time, and had to be reminded who was in control of her life.

  When she could not believe in herself, she tried God. ‘I’ve been to church again,’ she told Toby, watching from under a low, crinkled hat brim to see if he was angry, since perhaps he wanted to be God. ‘I mean, not just to Matins on Sundays with Ralph and the twins, because everyone does that, but for a prayer. I couldn’t pray before, because God had turned his face away, like everyone else. I pray for myself, and for poor Sophie not to be tempted to any more lies by Satan.’ Since she had begun to believe in the deity again, she could also believe in the devil.

  She had revealed to her relations how much that clever Dr Taylor had helped her, which was why she had sent naughty Sophie to him – ‘And look, the child is eating again!’ – and this added to Toby’s popularity with the family. The old girl really did seem to have bucked up at last. She made her servants take down and clean the hall electrolier. She stood up to her mother, who had demanded that Teddie accompany her to Buxton Spa for a course of hydrotherapy.

  ‘What shall I do?’ she asked Dr Taylor.’I don’t want to go.’

  ‘What shall you do? Simple, Mrs Edwina. He looked her full in the eye. ‘Remember that no one else can tell you what you have to do.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Adelaide was angry and ‘hurt’, which was why Aunt Teddie did not go to Goring for the annual Morley Regatta in June. This was no rival to the formal Goring-and-Streatley Regatta, which attracted rowers from the Oxford and Henley clubs, but a boating picnic downriver for a family who liked to have days out together.

  This year, they were in three punts and a small steam launch hired by Vera’s husband, Charles Pope. His daughter Henrietta brought her young man to drive the launch, and Madge came with her faithful standby Francis. Her new love interest, Guy, was an ex-officer who had suffered severe leg wounds in a Boer ambush, and could not get in and out of boats. Madge’s latest lame dog. He played backyard cricket from a wheeled chair and had replaced Will Morrison at Sunday lunches.

  Toby Taylor was invited to the river picnic as an honorary member of the family. Bella was nervous, half abashed because of her late-night tears, half excited to see him again. She had carefully washed his handkerchief and dried it stretched on the marble of her washstand, since she could not let one of the maids iron it and see his initials. She would return it after the picnic, when he and she would take a stroll along the river bank. They never did, however, because he brought an astonishing woman with him to the Morley Regatta.

  Toby had kept his two lives separate, but Marie-May had been nagging at him to introduce her to the Morleys. He wanted to please her, and it was a chance to dazzle the family. She was a fairly well-known actress. Bella had seen her on the stage, and so had Leonard and Gwen and Madge. Dicky gave a whistle at sight of her, and got a smack from his brother Austin. ‘This brat has spent too much time in the Portobello Road.’ Francis cried, ‘I say, how ripping!’ when he found out who she was, and she smiled and purred at them all and was quite dauntingly decorative in a sailor blouse of radiant white muslin trimmed with peacock blue, and a tiny straw boater set on her amazing spun-sugar hair.

  She brought along her shrill little dog Bounce, who wore a collar set with sparkly stones and barked at every mallard and coot on the water, and attacked the poor smelly old dog Maxwell, when he turned up with grandmother Adelaide in the
wicker pony chaise. Women shrieked in various pitches, but young Helen Pope plunged fearlessly in to separate the snarling tangle. When she was shouted at: ‘Never interfere in a dog fight!’, she said, ‘They won’t bite me,’ and handed the rubbery brown terrier back to Miss Lacoste, already displayed to best advantage against the cushions of a punt. ‘He probably doesn’t get enough exercise.’

  ‘Probably.’ The actress patted the cushions. ‘Come and sit by me, my dear, and tell me all about your life.’ Her way of defusing competition from fresh glowing youth.

  ‘I’m a writer, you know,’ Helen said before she had even sat down. ‘That’s going to be my life.’

  ‘Delicious.’ Miss Lacoste made her bewitching cat face. ‘You shall write a play for me.’

  From the wharf, Adelaide announced that she had only driven down from Heron’s Nest because she knew they would not bother to come up and visit her, and she had no intention of setting foot in a boat.

  ‘Nonsense, Mama.’ Charles Pope, who was good with his mother-in-law, manoeuvred her with jokes and flattery out of the little carriage and into a seat under the awning of the launch.

  With Leonard and Austin and Francis poling the punts, they all negotiated the Sunday traffic out into the stream, with instructions from Adelaide to both her family and the boatman. ‘Push the bow out, Hadland. Austin, what are you doing? Keep your own water!’

  The clouds moved away from the sun, and Austin allowed Dicky to punt under the railway bridge, where he and Laura hooted at their own echoes. Leonard’s boat, with Gwen and Helen and Toby and the actress, pulled over to the left bank by Ferry Cottage to call the ferryman out to take Madge and Bella, who were riding their bicycles along the towpath, across to the other side of the river. Because of a wide right-hand bend downstream, the towpath had to change to the inside of the curve, so that barge horses would not trample away the outer bank, where the current scoured it on the turn. Horses were unhitched by Ferry Cottage and rowed over in the wide heavy boat, while the barge was poled across.

  ‘Before the town bridge was built, was this the only connection between Goring and Streatley?’ Toby Taylor asked.

  ‘If you’d been a Roman, Uncle Toby,’ Dicky called across from the other punt, of which, in his jaunty yachting cap, he was now Captain, ‘you could have walked across where the Ridgeway meets the Icknield Way. The old causeway stones are still under the water.’

  ‘Your son is adorable.’ Marie-May turned to beam up at Leonard.

  ‘We think he’s precocious,’ Helen told her.

  Precocious or not, it was almost Dicky’s eleventh birthday, so the picnic spot was his choice, in the water-meadows above Pangbourne where the multicolour Jacob’s sheep grazed. Madge and Bella, who had had to wait for the slow ferryman, caught up on their bicycles as the boats were moored and everyone disembarked.

  ‘Now tell me about you.’ Marie-May invited Bella to sit by her on the tartan rug, but Bella said, ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ and became busy helping to unpack food from the hampers.

  Adelaide would not leave the launch. ‘My rheumatics would kill me if I tried to step up on to that treacherous bank you’ve chosen. That daughter of mine doesn’t know – or doesn’t care – that I’m in pain,’ she told Toby, when he brought her a plate of chicken and a glass of sparkling wine. ‘She refuses to take me to Buxton Spa.’

  ‘But you can go anyway, with Margaret Biddle,’ Vera called from the meadow.

  ‘I don’t think I care to,’ replied Mama in a martyred voice. Vera rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. Toby picked up their message: if her rheumatism gets worse, it will be Teddie’s fault.

  He could be heard saying smoothly to Adelaide, ‘But if you don’t take the cure, Lady Morley, it might make Edwina feel guilty, and I know that you, as a mother, wouldn’t want that.’

  Toby Taylor, where have you been all our lives? He did have a way with the matriarch. He took his own plate of food to the launch and told her about nux vomica for rheumatism, instead of the drastic quinine and mercury with which her doctor had assailed her.

  ‘Dr Maitland – wicked old fool – says if I don’t stop complaining, he will try blisters. As if I were a horse.’ She pulled her mouth and chins wretchedly down into the stiffened lace collar that cut into the folds of her neck.

  ‘If you were my patient, I would wrap you and the pain in warm blankets and leave you alone.’ To this comforting suggestion, Toby added that he had recognized the heavily wooded hill above the curve of the river as the place where two of her late husband’s characters had held tryst in A Small Country Town.

  ‘“Where the trees,”’ he quoted, ‘“drop down to embrace their own reflections in the summer stream.”’

  Bella hoped that Marie-May Lacoste was put out because he was taking so much trouble to please her grandmother, but the actress was occupied with the other men. Francis showed off larkily, and Uncle Leonard, in his best white flannels that had shrunk a little (shame on Whiteley’s famous steam laundries), was being very attentive and gallant in his ‘Our Mr Morley’ style.

  Adelaide insisted that Toby should make the return trip with her in the steam launch, which gave Marie-May the chance to sit by the old lady and say, ‘Please do tell me all about your life with your famous husband, Lady Morley,’ and then talk about herself.

  The punts were slow, working their way upstream, and the launch was quite far ahead when Henrietta’s practical young man had some trouble with the engine. It spluttered and coughed and would make no speed. Toby went to help, and when the pressure-relief valve opened with a gush of steam, he jerked back his hand and knocked it against the exhaust pipe, which gave him a severe oily burn. The engine recovered, and since they were just downstream of Ferry Cottage, they stopped there to clean the hand. Marie-May, dramatically concerned, went into the little house with Toby and helped him to wash the dirt from the burn and bandage the hand with a strip of clean cloth.

  The cottage was tiny, two small rooms on one floor, neat and clean, with a rainwater pump and primitive washroom at the back. The roof was one low wide gable, overhanging a white wooden arch with a set-back doorway. Decorated with two tall odd-shaped chimneys and a roof-ridge of dogtooth tiles, it was like a fairy-tale cottage, framed by thick bushes and briars, with geraniums in pots on the doorstep porch and only a narrow slope of grass between it and the river.

  Marie-May was enchanted.’Oh, how I envy you,’ she gurgled to the monosyllabic ferryman. ‘I would like to live here all the rest of my life!’

  The man gave her an impenetrable look and went off to row his broad boat across the river, where Madge and Bella were ringing the bell that hung on a dead tree to summon the ferry.

  And perhaps, dreamed Toby, if he could ever take Marie-May off somewhere in the country, away from the theatre and the artificial excitement of London, perhaps she would live contentedly there with him ‘for the rest of her life’. But that was only an ephemeral fancy. She would never want to live away from the stimulation and bright lights of a city, and nor would he. That was not what he had left Wales for.

  But she had been happy and lovely all day on the river, and those times with her had become increasingly rare. The French impresario was talking of a part for her in a Spectacular. There were more and more evenings when she was too busy to see Toby, or would cancel a supper engagement with him. She was making it obvious that she had bigger fish to fry. This was a new situation for Toby Taylor, who usually managed to be the big fish with other people, like the Morleys, and some minor social hostesses, and his patients, whom he did not discourage from dependence.

  One of them, Mrs Marcus, declared that she had never digested a meal comfortably before she discovered The Clinique and Mr Taylor. He had not pointed out that she had possibly never eaten the right kind of meal. He put her on a sensible diet, and soothed her maltreated system with slippery elm and infusions of meadowsweet and fennel.

  She came in almost every week to renew the herbs. When he had obtusely as
ked her, ‘Shall I ask my herbalist to make you up larger packages so that you don’t have to keep coming down from Hampstead?’ she had said, ‘Oh no, I need the excuse to be here.’ Of course. After that, he learned to give some female patients their medicine in small packets and jars and bottles.

  ‘So’s you can get a fee every time they come,’ Neelie Drew observed. But it was not only that. The attention was just as necessary for many people as the medicines.

  But today, sitting near the open back window with Mrs Marcus, the sky a washed blue above the Kensington roofs and his small flower garden sending up perfumed messages, Toby’s mind was drifting away from the humourless account of meals consumed and flatulence resulting. Marie-May had been enraptured with Ferry Cottage on the river bank. Suppose he could offer her a night there, just the two of them, in that picturesque little romantic retreat ...

  ‘... and my husband doesn’t really like rice pudding, you know, because it reminds him of a dreadful nanny he once had, but I insist on its being served two or three times a week, instead of those rich cream desserts.’

  ‘Or perhaps you could have just a small rice pudding baked for yourself.’ Toby came back to reality. ‘To avoid fuss and aggravation.’ Mr Marcus paid the fees. Might as well keep him happy too.

  As soon as he had got rid of his last patient of the afternoon, a young man with chronic eczema on whom he was trying Paracelsu’s ‘Doctrine of Signatures’, a paste made from analogous plants that were themselves scaly and resinous, the humanist herbalist took a motor hansom to Paddington and a train to Goring and walked along the towpath in soft evening light to Ferry Cottage.

  The man, Todd, was still monosyllabic, but agreeable. His mother lived in a cottage at Gatehampton. He would be willing to spend an occasional night with her for a financial consideration.

  ‘And if anyone wanted the ferry?’

  ‘They can do what they do when I has the hump. Wait for me to feel like taking out that dratted boat.’