One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  ‘What poor girl? Why didn’t you tell me at once? Did you make an appointment for her?’

  ‘Oh, not a patient. That girl in the maroon cloak like settee upholstery.’

  ‘Oh, her.’ Poor Bella. It was true, some clothes did make her look like furniture.

  ‘Yes, her. You want to know what I think, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What I think is this.’ She dug the nails of each hand into the palm of the other to press up her bosom, elbows out. Usually discreet and docile, she enjoyed giving him a piece of her mind occasionally. ‘I think you’ll get yourself into trouble one of these days, messing about with silly young innocents. At your age.’

  Toby was stung. ‘You’re older than me.’

  ’And I’ve got more sense.’

  The front-door bell was rung by the first patient of the morning. Mrs Drew picked up the breakfast tray and went downstairs.

  Messing about with silly young innocents? Not such a bad idea at that. Bella was crying out for it. It would help her to become the free woman she imagined herself to be, and she would never dare to tell the family.

  When the day’s work was finished, Toby went to No. 72 Chepstow Villas with some dried vegetable-broth mix for Flora Bolt, and then to Ladbroke Lodge to give Bella an invitation that brought the blood charging up her neck and face into her heavy cushion of hair.

  On Friday, he went ahead of her to Goring and walked along the towpath with food and wine in a rucksack. The ferryman took his money and hung a sack over the bell on the mooning post, which everyone knew meant No Ferry, picked a cabbage for his mother and walked off across the fields.

  Toby met Bella’s train. She stepped down from the carriage quickly, looking furtively right and left as they went out of the station.

  ‘What’s up, Belle?’ Toby laughed and put his arm round her, to put her at her ease. ‘Afraid of me?’

  ‘Oh no. Don’t do that. I mean,’ she glanced up at him with those puzzled round eyes, ‘I’m afraid someone might see me – the stationmaster, or one of the servants at Grandmother’s.’

  Bella was delighted with the cottage. ‘It takes my breath away,’ she said. She had been breathing rather fast as they came from the station. ‘Toby, it’s so-so –’

  ‘Romantic?’

  She dropped her head and turned her eyes up to him in the way she had, which made her look like a cow.

  ‘That’s all right, Belle. That’s why we’re here.’

  Oh Lord, this was going to be so pitifully easy. He opened the wine and they sat outside on the bank and watched a few late boats working upstream to Goring, or gliding swiftly down to Pangbourne. On the opposite bank, fat cattle stood motionless in the lush meadow, or knee-deep in the water at their trodden drinking place by the dead tree. Downstream, the lingering remains of sunset were a dying fire above the thick woods that marched down to the bend of the river.

  Bella did not say much. She drank her wine in jerks and rearranged her skirt, which Toby then disarranged, to get her used to the feel of his hands on her legs. If she had been Marie-May, they would have been lying in the grass together, and be damned to passing boaters. Bella was nervous when a boat came by, convinced that it carried an acquaintance of her grandmother’s. As twilight crept over the water and the cattle were only dim shapes, Toby lit the lamp on the windowsill in the front room so that a small square of light fell outside, and became bolder with the flustered girl until her protests grew faint and then ceased. By the time she was lying beneath him with her eyes screwed shut and her breath bursting its corsets, he knew he could do anything with her.

  Crickets were shrilling a chorus all round them. Midges were attacking his bare arms under the rolled-up shirtsleeves. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said.

  ‘It’s so lovely out here.’

  Toby had seen her glance fearfully through the open door of the little bedroom, and then quickly away.

  ‘Lie down again,’ she breathed, the part of her that was still sane thinking perhaps that all might yet be salvaged as long as she stayed away from the bed.

  He pulled her to her feet. She left her shoes outside.

  ‘Are we – are we going to have supper?’

  ‘Don’t be a silly child, Bella.’ He shut the cottage door, because she would worry about that, as if the whole world passed by this deserted spot, and pushed her into the bedroom, where he had exchanged the ferryman’s unappetizing blankets for a rug he had brought down.

  After it was over, Toby rolled away from her off the bed without a word, and Bella thought that she passed into a kind of trance, or a blank sleep. When she came to her senses, naked under the soft rug, her body felt sore and battered, but at the same time floating, free and light.

  Oh, my dear God – I’ve done it. Oh, what will become of me? She inspected her mind for guilt and found none.

  She wrapped the rug round her and went into the lamplit room where Toby sat at the three-legged table with a glass of wine, eating cold pie.

  ‘All right?’ he asked. The intimacy of his questioning look! ‘Come and have something to eat.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t.’

  ‘It usually makes people hungry.’ He threw a piece of food to the dog.

  Bella went to the window and mooned out at the unseen river, which smelled of waterlogged ground and rotting leaves. ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Here.’ He handed her a glass of wine. ‘Drink this, Belle.’

  Yes, I am belle. She took the glass in a hand that somehow seemed finer and more graceful. There was a small silvered mirror over the fireplace. She raised the wineglass to this new and beautiful creature who felt herself, like fallen heroines in books, radiantly transformed by love.

  Her old Bella face looked back at her, hair everywhere, nose splodged, eyes puffy, one cheek red and creased. She turned away and put her glass on the table.

  ‘No, drink that. Doctor’s orders. Then I’m going to give you something with acacia in it, an ancient Egyptian nostrum which I have found quite useful for anxious female patients.’

  ‘What are they anxious about?’

  ‘Oh, heavens, Belle, how can you still be so innocent?’

  I am not innocent now. I am an old, old soul, steeped in the knowledge of love.

  He laughed at her. ‘Do you even know how babies are made?’

  Because Bella had been what Toby called ‘a good girl’, she was to go to Ferry Cottage again next week, just before her parents came home from France. Friday turned out to be wet and windy. Would they still go to the river? Bella had lived all week at such a pitch of excitement that disappointment now would break her heart.

  The telephone rang at lunchtime. ‘A gentleman for you, miss.’ The butler raised his circumflex eyebrows at this rarity.

  Bella was to go to Toby’s rooms in Egerton Terrace.

  ‘All right.’ Her perilous heart leaped at the cadence of his voice. She might have exulted, ‘I love you!’ into the little telephone trumpet if Hurd had not been pacing the tiles with his hands behind his back, as if he were taking measurements.

  Toby opened his front door himself and said, ‘Come along, we’re going out to dinner.’ Bella hoped that they would get a horse-cab, which would give her longer alone with him, but Toby always managed to hail one with a motor. She remembered watching his hand on his knee, coming back from the dance, aeons ago in the mists of innocent time.

  Because it was still light, they sat apart. Bella took off her glove and put her hand on the seat, and he put his over it.

  ‘Afraid?’ he asked, because the hand was trembling.

  ‘Not of you.’

  ‘Of what, then?’

  ‘Nothing, when I’m with you.’

  To make it possible to say that with some intensity, she did not look at him. When he did not react, she stole a glance and saw that he was gazing out of the window, his mouth pursed in a silent whistle.

  It was not true, in any case. After dinner, they would come back to his
rooms, and Bella was afraid. She both dreaded and longed to repeat the same shattering unravelling of soul and body which she had experienced in the ferryman’s sagging bed. Should she jump out of the cab now, as it stopped for the crossing? Would she do ‘it’ well enough? Would Toby call her a silly child? Would she retch and throw up if he made her drink that horrible acacia stuff again?

  She swallowed. ‘Where are we going for dinner?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  She hoped there would be several courses, to delay what would come after; yet how would she be able to eat anything, because of longing for what would come after?

  In her expensive petit-point bag, which her mother had bought last birthday when she wanted books, lurked like a loaded pistol a small but threatening cause of fear and embarrassment. She did know how babies were made, and when she knew that she was going to participate in a life of sin again today, she had been moved, in the madness of unreasoning love, to confide in her friend the parlourmaid Sybil Crocker.

  Sybil listened dispassionately while Bella babbled out her secret. ‘You’ll not tell anyone, will you?’

  ‘Safe as the grave, dear. You can tell me who he is. Anyone I know?’

  ‘Oh no, no, absolutely not. But the thing is, Sybil, suppose I – I mean, I never would, of course, but suppose it did happen that – because after all, things are different now, with people beginning to talk about Free Love and all that.’

  ‘Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?’ Sybil Crocker, Lady Domestic, used a surprisingly vulgar word. Bella blushed. ‘Have you, then?’

  ‘No, of course not, but I wanted to know –’

  ‘How not to get caught.’ Sybil Crocker laughed, also crudely. ‘Whoever could answer that a hundred per cent would make their blooming fortune.’

  She got up and looked outside the door of Bella’s bedroom. Spies were everywhere at Ladbroke Lodge, and she was one of them. She gave Bella some surprising tips, such as cocoa butter, and that if you did it standing up, you would be safe, because a man’s gism could not travel uphill.

  She later brought her this nasty little gadget which was now in the petit-point bag, provoking fear. How and when would Bella put it in? At Ferry Cottage, she would not have had time. Were you supposed to say, ‘Stop a minute,’ and fumble about with this ludicrous sponge on a string?

  The cab drew up outside a small hotel in a Bloomsbury back street.

  ‘Is this a restaurant?’

  ‘We’ll have something sent up to the room.’

  ‘I thought we –’

  ‘You think too much, Belle.’ Toby jumped lightly out and gave her his hand. ‘Just leave everything to me.’

  Bella tied her scarf over her hat to hide part of her face, and hovered behind a flaking pillar while he talked to a severe woman with keys on a leather belt, like a gaoler.

  ‘We’re married,’ Toby whispered as they followed the brutal belt up the stairs.

  Married! Bella’s foolish breast let out a great sigh that blew away university, career, independence, even Doing Good, that earnest Edwardian ideal.

  Their room was dwarfed by an oversized bed, impossible not to look at, or bump into, or put things on. Impossible for one of them not to sit on it, since there was only one chair.

  ‘You’ll send up something later?’ Toby had asked.

  ‘Ring the bell, sir.’

  After the door shut, Bella opened it again and went in search of the bathroom. That door was locked, so she squeezed into the tiny W.C., dabbed Sybil Crocker’s magic ointment on the sponge and made a desperate shot at shoving it inside herself.

  Toby drew the curtains and tenderly undressed her. It was lovely. Everything was lovely until he became more violent. When Bella gave an involuntary gasp, he said, ‘Shut up.’

  Were women supposed not to call out, ‘No, no, you’re hurting me!’? Toby swore. He tugged at the string and the wretched sponge plopped out with a sucking noise.

  ‘What the hell?’ He laughed, but harshly, not his amused To-by laugh. His face was sharp with bony planes and shadows and narrowed, glinting eyes. It was the face of a stranger. It was the body of a stranger, hard, impersonal, pitiless. As before, he hardly spoke.

  Making an excuse not to see her home, he put her into a cab and paid the ‘driver. Bella sank back on the squeaky leather seat, in a turmoil of astonished emotions.

  I am a woman of the world, she decided. This is what they call Free Love. Perhaps I shall learn to enjoy it. Driving through Cavendish Square past a tall house where bright lights spilled from every window and well-dressed men and women came laughing down the front steps, Bella thought, rather grandly: I am a mistress.

  But mistresses, in the novels of writers like E.A. Morley, gave their love in comfortable little houses with a carriage and two maids in sprigged cotton. Not in a shabby Bloomsbury hotel room with a bloated bed and an ill-disposed stain on the ceiling.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Tobias Taylor. Toby sometimes let the mirror chide him, since he had no parents to do it, and he enjoyed his handsome, engaging reflection. Will you never learn?

  Seduction of enlightened Edwardian women was all part of the game, the glorious game of life in your free and felicitous thirties; but bowling over an emotionally retarded and unawakened woman was never worth the clogging aftermath.

  ‘Don’t telephone me,’ he had had to tell Bella quite sternly. ‘Don’t tell anyone. ‘Don’t call round, and please don’t keep writing notes.’

  ‘Because of Mrs Drew? Why should you care what your servant thinks?’ Bella, deflowered, had taken to tossing her head in a clumsy attempt at insouciance, with an upward thrust of her square chin.

  ‘I don’t care, but you must think of your family. I wouldn’t want you involved in any scandal, Belle.’

  But he did care about Neelie Drew clenching her hands under her bosom and crowing, I told you so!’

  He was still a frequent visitor at No. 72 Chepstow Villas, where none of that friendly conventional family would ever suspect him of being a despoiler of one of its virgins. Poor nervous little Sophie, whose life was improving as her mother’s did, had long ago given up trying to describe Toby’s Dr Mesmer demonstration, since nobody believed her. Dear old Leonard was always welcoming and glad to see him, saving up prime Whiteley’s customer anecdotes to amaze him. Flora Bolt greeted him with a special lopsided smile at the front door, because he had been attentive to her when she was wounded, and he always paused in the outer hall to ask her how she was.

  ‘All the better for seeing you, sir.’ She had recovered her cheeky familiarity. ‘And I don’t say that to every man!’

  ‘Especially not that brute with the knife?’

  “E’s out of me life.’ Flora took Toby’s hat and passed a fond forearm over the nap. ‘I’m available, if anyone asks.’

  Gwen still softly flirted, grey eyes skimming his as lightly as a dragon-fly. He and Vera joked and smoked together. Young Dicky gave him sauce just short of insolence, and put up his fists with a shout of delight when Toby squared off to discipline him.

  Bella was often there when he was, or because he was, watching him slyly, laughing too much at his jokes, trapping him in a corner to breathe heavily, ‘When, Toby, when?’

  ‘Soon. I promise you. Soon.’ He fobbed her off, but a girl like this, too dense to know she was being fobbed, could be deadeningly persistent.

  Since the family could not help but notice Bella’s flushed and moony air, Toby spread it about that she was ‘in love’, and hinted at a mysterious romance, which Bella took to be their secret code.

  ’Ach, I wish that were true.’ Her mother retracted the shiny nostrils of her parrot nose in a sniff. ‘But if it were, I should be the first to know.’

  ‘More likely the last, I think, Mrs Hugo.’ Toby had never attempted to call her Charlotte. ‘But Bella and I tell each other things. We are like brother and sister.’ Bella did not even notice the cruelty of this.

 
; Ordinarily, Madge would have been quick to spot what was going on, or forced her cousin Bella to tell her; but Madge was not normal either, preoccupied with Guy, waiting for his summons on the telephone recently installed among the coats in the back hall, often over at his Brook Street rooms when she should have been at family occasions like Teddie’s birthday dinner.

  ‘Good health, old girl!’ Leonard raised his glass to his sister. ‘Life begins at forty-seven, doesn’t it? A bit different from this time last year.’

  He included Toby in the toast. It was open knowledge now that Dr Taylor, by some magical process, had helped Teddie out of her doldrums, although she herself had progressed to the stage where she maintained either that there had never been anything wrong with her, or if there had been, that she had effected the cure all by herself.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Toby admitted to Dr Boone on a visit to The Keep, ‘I’m a bit huffed by her ingratitude.’

  ‘Don’t be so unprofessional, Taylor.’ Dr Boone always treated him as a colleague. ‘Isn’t that what you’ve been working for all these months? The very climax of self-esteem: “There’s nothing wrong with me that I can’t put right all by myself!” The lady is a walking credential to your skills. It’s a pity you can’t use her in one of those before-and-after testimonials, like the truss advertisements.’

  Today, Toby imagined that perhaps his mother knew him. She was sitting up in a high-backed rocking chair, tied in with a canvas restraint to stop her wandering. She could not walk now without support, but she had been known to crawl away on her hands and skinny knees, to be found under a bed, or in a cupboard.

  With her grey hair pulled back into an untidy braid, she had one bare foot tucked under her and one on the floor, rocking, rocking, a perpetual pendulum. As she tipped forward, she stared at her son and he stared intensely back, trying to force recognition into those trapped, tormented eyes.

  He spoke to her, as he always did, as if she could understand him, as if she would answer. Sometimes, for his own sake more than hers, he supplied her end of the conversation, as people do with their dogs.