‘When I was a little boy,’ he said to her, ‘you sang to me when I was in bed, do you remember? “Yes, I sang sad Welsh songs that you liked. You never wanted jolly ones.” And Dr Taylor,’ he asked her, ‘do you remember Dr Taylor?’ She had always called his father that. ‘With his square beard and the veins in his nose? “Of course I remember my own dear husband, you silly boy.”’
‘Talking to yourself?’ One of the few attendants, a blowsy harridan with brutal eyebrows, passed by with an armful of fouled bedding. ‘It’s catching, ain’t it? If you come here often enough, Mr T., we’ll have to lock you up with the other loonies.’
‘I’m determined to make her know me.’
‘Pigs might fly!’ She cackled as flatly and dottily as any of the inmates.
‘Lock her up, won’t we, Mother?’ Toby leaned towards the rocking bag of bones when the nurse had gone. ‘I’ll strap her in your chair and take you away with me – fly away, escape, back to the river – cast out a line, paddle in the eddies – shallwe, shall we?’
Staring into her face was like hurling yourself against nothing. The bones looked so brittle, the pale flesh frail as tissue paper, the eyes like a small animal at bay, and yet you could not penetrate to the real person.
Was there any real person left? Toby wondered, as he dejectedly went away. Perhaps the real Nora Taylor had quite cunningly departed from this body before it was locked up.
She will never know me. She will never give me any love. And I, thought Toby, walking outside the high wall of The Keep through the rain to the station, I shall go on collecting it from other women.
Good excuse, eh? He raised his head more jauntily, and rain fell off his hat down his neck. Not that I need an excuse for charitable causes like Bella, who got more out of it than I did. But she’s had all she’s going to get, poor Bella. I shall drop her gently but firmly, before she gets euphoric ideas about telling my beloved Morley family.
‘If your mistress would only come back to me,’ he said to the little dog trotting through the puddles, wet as a fat seal, ‘I could stop collecting women. Marie-May, come back Marie-May...’ ‘Pigs might fly.’ He answered for the impermeable dog, as he had invented replies for his insensate mother.
His patient, Mrs Marcus, loved him anyway. The sensible diet, the renunciation of brandy nips and the laudanum which was Hampstead Garden Village’s idea of a harmless sedative, the powdered inner bark of slippery elm, laced into fennel tea, had made her a new woman. She was still a great bore – there were no herbal cures for that, but she sent several friends to the inestimable Mr Taylor, whether there was anything wrong with them or not. Toby prescribed for them. That was one of the many benefits of medicinal herbs. Even if they did you no good, they would not actually do you harm.
Dicky announced a mouse in his stomach when Gwen and Leonard were going out to dinner one chilly October night.
‘Oh dear, I knew I shouldn’t have let you go out after school. You must have caught cold. I’ll get you a good little Beecham’s.’
‘Noah wanted to go and play at the Scrubs.’
‘What did you eat?’ his father asked. ‘Were you buying those cheap sweets down the Lane?’
‘It was Noah’s birthday.’
‘Then Noah has probably got a mouse in his stomach too.’ Leonard laughed.
‘Don’t, Daddy. It hurts.’ Dicky screwed up his face. I don’t want you to go out.’
‘Oh, I see. It’s one of those “Don’t go out to dinner” pains, isn’t it, old son?’
Dicky snuggled his face into his mother’s fur coat, being given its first outing of the winter. ‘Ugh – camphor.’
‘I used to love the camphor smell of my mother’s coats,’ Gwen told him. ‘It made me feel safe and wintry and snug.’
‘It was all right for you.’ Dicky pouted. ‘Grandmama never went out in the winter.’
‘She did. My parents were always going to balls and banquets.’
‘She was too old.’
‘Only when you knew her, silly. When I first knew her, she was quite young.’
Dicky had lost interest. He never liked to hear about his mother or father as children. He wanted them always this age, existing only as the parents of an eleven-year-old boy.
‘You are so spoiled,’ Madge told him, ‘that I might not even play draughts with you.’
‘If you don’t, I’ll have a worse pain.’
‘The boy takes after my mother,’ Leonard said with some pride as they went down the steps of No. 72 to the waiting cab.
The dinner party was in Sussex Gardens, mostly couples they knew, with Dr Buckmaster, also the family physician here, as an extra man to balance the hostess’s unmarried sister.
‘My dear lady.’ Gwen did not like the way he smarmed over her hand. She sometimes thought of changing their doctor, but did not know any others, and Leonard believed the old saw about the devil you know. Little Bucky was too familiar. Arrogant and sly, his manner suggested that he knew something about you that you would prefer not known. Gwen had a fear of contracting something which would enable him to see her without her clothes on. ‘Radiant as ever. One could swear you were a young girl. And the captain of commerce himself! And your delightful family?’
‘Very well, thank you.’ She had to beam graciously at the insufferable little man, because guests were watching her.
Gwen knew that when she came into a room people looked at her, and other women smoothed their waists and touched up their hair. She liked to make her impression early, and then relax and enjoy the evening, putting herself out or not, as she chose. ‘Dicky complains of abdominal pain, but you know him:
‘Yes, I know him.’ Little Bucky had dropped the smarm in favour of his usual truculence. ‘He’s abominably spoiled.’
As the evening went on, Dr Buckmaster, attendant on many Bayswater families, became quite offensively drunk.
When a messenger arrived to call him out to a woman in labour, he laughed, wet-lipped. ‘She’s produced six already. She ought to know how to do it by now.’ This was heard in the smoking room by Leonard, who retailed it to Gwen: ‘But if he had gone staggering off to the poor woman, I would have forcibly restrained him.’
Dicky still seemed a little off colour when he came home from school next day.
‘Have you been to The Place?’ Gwen knew it was usually that with him.
‘I got up too late and there wasn’t time.’
‘One tiny cascara tonight. Eno’s in the morning. Your breath is not very sweet, dear.’
‘Hah!’ He huffed at her. ‘My dragon breath can kill at twenty yards.’
‘Oh, woe!’ His mother obligingly keeled over backwards and Dicky fell on top of her on the sofa. She was always ready to drop a serious subject, even her pet nostrums, in favour of a giggle.
When Noah appeared at the back door – ‘Come down World’s End, Dick, see my uncle’s monkey’ – Dicky refused.
‘Shan’t ask you no more.’
‘Don’t, then.’
Dicky stuck his tongue out. Noah kicked an empty milk bottle and broke it. Flora grabbed for him, but he ran off: not through the front gate, but over the wall into the next garden and over another wall, which was his and Dicky’s favourite way of travelling. Flora shouted after him, her voice still slightly thickened from the damaged nerve that had left her with one corner of her mouth pulled down.
At dinner, Dicky banged his boots on the rung of his chair. ‘You know I don’t like liver and bacon.’
‘I know you do.’ Flora put the plate in front of him. ‘With Mrs Roach’s velvet gravy.’
‘Ugh!’ He pushed the plate away.
‘That’s enough.’ Leonard would not tolerate food fads. ‘Here, I’ll cut up the meat for you and you’ll eat it all.’
‘Shan’t.’
‘You will.’
Gwen wished Leonard would not start these little contests, because he did not always win. When he forked a piece of liver into Dicky’s mouth, the b
oy chewed it for a moment, his eyes watering, and then brought it back up.
‘Wilful, you see, Gwen.’ The child was quite skilled at making himself sick. ‘Go to your room, sir.’
‘I’ll come up with you, dear,’ Flora said.
‘No, you won’t,’ Leonard snapped. ‘You’ll stay and dean up this mess.’
Dicky stamped up the stairs, kicking the carpet rods. Flora scooped up napkin and plate and banged out of the door. Gwen was sorry that Leonard had managed to upset both of them.
Dicky did not get up for school the next day.
‘You’ve been eating sweets.’ Gwen found the evidence in his room.
‘I was hungry.’
‘There you are, you see, because you didn’t eat your dinner. Tatiana shall bring you a bowl of Benger’s.’
When Leonard came back from Whiteley’s, he told Gwen that she should get the doctor.
‘Not Bucky, no,’ she said quickly. ‘After the other night, I don’t want to see him ever again.’
‘Then who? What about that new generalist Charlotte is so taken with? She says he’s in line for a knighthood, but I think she invented that to make Hugo let him lance that boil. You’d better go round and get his name.’
On her way to the door, Gwen turned back and went to the telephone. In the precise, affected voice with which she spoke into this demanding new gadget, she asked the operator to put her through to Toby Taylor’s number.
‘I’m a little worried about Dicky, To-by.’
‘What’s the bad boy done now?’
‘A bilious attack, I think.’
‘Let me come and have a look at him. I’m having quite a success with digestions these days.’
‘Oh, would you?’ This was what she had hoped for, but they had never used Toby as a doctor, and she did not know if it was all right to ask.
Toby brought some laxative herbs. Dicky dribbled up a little of the infusion, but drank some more and lay still, his hand on his sore stomach. When Leonard came home, he found good Uncle Toby reading aloud one of the cowboy yarns that had replaced the Hugh Walpole school stories since Dicky had been to the American Bioscope shows at Notting Hill Gate.
‘He’ll be right as rain tomorrow. I’ve given some psyllium seeds to lubricate. Never fails.’
‘You are so good.’ Gwen and Leonard were lucky to have such a friend as this charming, clever man who sat so reassuringly by Dicky’s bed in the little room over the front door.
The next day, when the herbs had not worked, Toby agreed that Gwen might try castor oil, ‘when all else fails’. Dicky was pale and frightened, his blue eyes stricken, his fingers turning over and over the little tin car his uncle Charles had given him.
Mrs Roach squeezed two oranges, and they poured the incompatible mixture into the boy. The oil lay on top of the juice. It clung round his protesting mouth, and some of it came up in a compulsive heave. Toby was reassuring Gwen that enough had stayed down to be effective, when the tin model car was flung to the floor as Dicky was convulsed by an agonizing pain.
‘It’s all right, old fellow, it’s all right.’ Toby massaged him gently, and sat by him while he was shaken by chills and went in and out of a feverish sleep. Feverfew was given, and later that evening he woke in a drenching sweat.
‘The fever is breaking,’ Gwen and Leonard told each other. Dicky lay doubled up. He was still alternately flushed and chilled, his breathing shallow and sour-smelling, but the pain was better. Toby’s hand on his troubled brow felt that his temperature was down.
‘He’ll be all right.’ Toby got up.
Leonard, Gwen and Madge whispered to him on the landing. ‘We can’t thank you enough. Dr Buckmaster would never have given us all this time. You’ve done so much.’
‘For friends? It can never be enough. And I love this boy, too, don’t forget.’
A scream woke Gwen and Leonard in the middle of the night. Dicky was sitting up in bed, staring at the window. The street outside was quiet, but he could hear the men. ‘They’ve come for me!’ Shrinking back against the pillow, he made the coughing, retching sound that he had heard the drunks make, reeling down from the Sun in Splendour on Saturday nights.
He was like a mad creature. He did not know his parents or Madge. He croaked for water through dry, cracking lips, but could not swallow.
Gwen sat on the bed and held him while he fought her feebly. ‘Ring up Toby. Tell him to come round here.’ But Leonard went down Chepstow Villas and woke up his policeman friend Arthur French, who knew what to do.
Mr Vernon Brett was assistant to Sir Frederick Treves, who had operated on King Edward for appendicitis. He saw that there was no time to get the child to the hospital. The kitchen table was scrubbed. Quantities of water were boiled, and walls and dresser and range were hung with carbolic-soaked sheets. Vernon Brett took off his coat and tied a long apron over his waistcoat and trousers. Rubber bands held back his rolled shirtsleeves. He chewed on his moustache. His eye had a fierce glint.
Leonard and Austin were allowed to be in the kitchen. Gwen and Madge and Flora clung together in the scullery. Mrs Roach and Tatiana trembled, praying and bewailing in the basement passage. Leonard was standing by his half-conscious son on the big table, talking to him, stroking his arm through the sheet in which he had been wrapped.
‘Hold him for me, please.’ Mr Brett’s assistant poured chloroform on to a pad and held it over Dicky’s face. Dicky twitched, jerked convulsively and then was limp and still, his strong boy’s body suddenly tiny and insignificant under the white kitchen light pulled down low on its pulley over the table.
Leonard stepped back away from the sickly sweet smell. He stood in a corner by the window and would not look. From outside, light was showing through the curtains. A few early horses went by, a motor. Birds began to sing. Austin made himself look. What else could he do for his little brother except not be afraid and sickened?
The surgeon’s clean pink hand pressed gently on the knife, through the delicate skin, through whatever was beneath, until Dicky’s secret insides yielded up a gush of blood and putrid pus. The assistant dripped more chloroform on to the pad. Austin turned his head away, dizzy and faint, but made himself look back (‘I watched, I didn’t shrink from it,’ he would tell Elizabeth, to whom he told everything, in a way he had never been able to do with his parents).
Mr Brett, his eyes flinty, showed Austin a small handful of inflamed intestine and then, worst of all nightmares, the ruptured appendix snipped off and lying in his palm, blackly oozing.
Austin had fainted backwards against his father, so he did not see the quick stitching and bandaging. He was in the study with his parents and Madge and Mr Vernon Brett, who was standing on the hearthrug with a small glass of brandy, while the rest of them were sitting, weak and blank. ‘The vermiform appendix ruptured, probably yesterday.’
Austin knew that he could not tell Elizabeth what he had seen in the kitchen. Would he ever be able to eat another meal in this house, cooked down there?
‘Thus, the abdominal cavity is inflamed. What we call peritonitis.’ They looked at him like a kindergarten class. ‘The situation is very grave.’ Mr Brett finished the brandy and then sucked it off his moustache with his bottom teeth.
It was Madge who asked courageously, ‘He might die?’
The surgeon nodded.
‘He will die?’
He turned his hand over, this way, that way, and shrugged. ‘Why did you not send for a doctor sooner?’
‘A friend of ours,’ Gwen whispered, ‘who is a doctor, he was here, treating the bilious attack. Psyllium seeds to – to lubricate?’ She looked up hopefully.
‘When did he last see the boy?’
‘Yesterday. He said Dicky would be all right.’
The surgeon growled, and moved towards the door, so as not to have to look at them. ‘I think he may have killed your son.’
All day, No. 72 was full of people, sitting about, waiting, talking in safe cliches, picking up mag
azines and putting them down, moving from room to room. The house seemed transitory, like a railway station. Bella came, Vera, Teddie, Charlotte and Hugo, wanting to have coffee made. Austin and Elizabeth and Laura, who whined to see Dicky, Arthur French’s wife, Mr Frank Whiteley from the store, come to lay an arm round Leonard’s shoulders and tell him to take as much time off as he liked. Nurses, messengers, Mr Vernon Brett again, newly shaved, coming down from Dicky’s room to drink a cup of tea in the drawing room and turn the glint of his eye on the family, and then turn it away. Quite soon after he had left, in a big polished car with two chauffeurs that impressed Hugo, Dicky died.
Bella slipped away and ran up Kensington Park Road to Notting Hill Gate. There were no cabs, so she took an Underground train to South Kensington and walked, dry-eyed and staring,’ not seeing where she was going, only avoiding people on the pavement because they got out of her way. She did not look at Mrs Drew, but pushed past her and went straight upstairs and into Toby’s consulting room.
‘Bella – what on earth?’ He got up from the desk. ‘I might have been with a patient. What do you want? How’s Dicky? I’m going over to 72 as soon as I’ve finished these letters.’
‘Don’t go.’ Bella stood by the door, clutching her coat round her as if she were in a winter storm. ‘Oh, Toby.’ Tears suddenly poured down her face into her shuddering mouth. She had not cried yet, not when everybody burst out weeping, and Flora could be heard on the back stairs, bawling and blaspheming, not when she was on the train, staring at her muddled reflection in the opposite window.
Toby got up and came over to her. Oh, Toby, put your arms round me! She implored silently. He gave her his handkerchief. ‘Stop that snivelling and tell me what’s happened.’
Bella took a gasping breath and told him that Dicky had died after an operation for acute appendicitis.
‘He can’t have – what are you saying, Bella?’ Toby’s shock and distress flared into anger. I saw him yesterday. He was better – ‘I swear he was better!’
Bella looked at him in agony. ‘The surgeon blames you for not seeing what was wrong.’
One of the Family Page 24
