One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Been too long, Flo,’ he said huskily, those rogue’s eyes teasing her.

  ‘Not long enough, Bill.’

  ‘I been up north, see. Got meself a good job, on the trains, and turned respectable.’

  ‘That’ll be the day. It hasn’t stopped your afternoon boozing, I see.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I fortify meself before coming to ask my girl to come up north and throw in her luck with me?’

  ‘You must be mad, Bill Bolt. I’m not leaving here. It’s my home.’

  ‘Got meself a little place, see, and enough money coming in to take care of you. You and me, Flo, we could –’

  ‘Bill, don’t, for God’s sake.’ Flora could not bear it. ‘Don’t ask me to –’

  In the basement passage, the front-door bell whirred across her distress. ‘I’ve got to answer it. You go away.’

  ‘I’ll wait. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Flora, are you all right?’ Bella asked. The maid was flushed, shoes off, and breathing fast.

  ‘I can’t run up them back stairs like I used to.’

  Bella was already beginning to find herself a little breathless if she hurried upstairs. That would get worse, as the baby grew. She would have to spend time off her feet. Why couldn’t Toby look after her?

  She knew he had lied about being married. Taken off his guard. She should not have sprung it on him out of the blue. Worried and unhappy, she had just written him a desperate letter, begging him to change his mind.

  He might not answer. She would send it anyway.

  ‘Is Mrs Morley at home?’ Bella had brought Aunt Gwen a light romantic novel that she hoped would cheer her up.

  ‘I’m sorry, she’s out.’

  Flora did not ask Bella if she would like to come in. She seemed preoccupied, as if she was busy, so Bella gave her the book and went down the steps, taking the letter to Toby out of her pocket to post in the pillar box on the corner of Denbigh Road.

  At the gate, she saw the deaf man, Jack Haynes, wandering up the street towards her, broad shoulders hunched, hands deep in the pockets of a patched and sagging coat.

  ‘I’m glad to see you.’ Bella pointed to herself, then to him, and clapped her hands. He looked over her shoulder at the house.

  ‘Are you going to see Madge?’ Jack did not know the concept of a question, so she made it a statement. ‘See Madge.’ He shook his shaggy head. ‘See Madge mother.’

  ‘Yah.’

  ‘She’s not there.’ Poor fellow, he must have come here to show sympathy for the family. ‘Dicky dead,’Jack was saying. Bella nodded, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Why? Someone kill him?’

  Bella drew him into the gateway. ‘They say it was Toby. T-O-B-Y T-A-Y-L-O-R.’ She wrote the name with her finger, in the air. ‘Doctor you met at Settlement.’ He nodded. He understood that. ‘Toby’s fault.’

  Bella began to cry. Tears had come too readily since Dicky had died. Jack clenched his fists and frowned.

  ‘Toby killed Dicky,’ Bella sobbed.

  ‘Bey-ya.’ He had always seemed attuned to her, this man who was so cut off from most of the world. He patted her arm and pulled his mouth down like a clown.

  Because she was crying, Bella was going to bring Jack away from the street into the garden, but suddenly she heard violent shouting and curses from the direction of the back door, and a wild-looking man charged up the passage and out through the gate, pushing Bella and Jack aside, and disappeared round the corner of the Portobello Road.

  Was this the terrible ‘Bull’ who had attacked Flora before? He had knocked the letter out of Bella’s hand. Jack bent to pick it up.

  ‘I’m going to post it.’ Anxious to get to Flora, Bella pointed at the pillar box down the street, and held out her hand. She did not want Jack to see the address on the envelope: Toby Taylor, Ferry Cottage, Goring-on-Thames.

  But Jack held on to the letter. ‘I do it,’ and went off towards the pillar box, as Bella ran to the back door to see if Flora was all right.

  Jack had not posted Bella’s letter. He had put it in his pocket. He knew what he must do. A large part of his life was spent not knowing what he was going to do, and when he had a determined goal, like this one, he felt happy and strong.

  He was familiar with the railways, and dodging the ticket collector. At Goring station, his eye quickly picked out a place at the end of the platform where he could duck behind goods wagons in a siding and cross the lines without going over the bridge. Although he was large, he had had plenty of practice at becoming invisible in his old days as a look-out for the East End gangs.

  A boy dangling bare feet in the high river was fishing from the boat wharf below the bridge.

  Jack showed him the envelope.

  ‘Ferry cottage?’ The boy jerked his head to the left, and Jack started off on the path that ran alongside the river. Such a different river from the one he knew that idled its broad way through London, black and greasy and foul with sewage and rubbish and the bloated bodies of dead cats and dogs, and sometimes people. Here, ducks and even a pair of swans cruised on the sweet clear water between bushes and trees that trailed wet branches along the stream. There were no houses. He came at length to a solitary cottage, outside which a man was sitting in a boat, baling water out of it with a tin bowl. He was heavily bearded, but when he looked up, Jack saw that it was the doctor who had been at the Loudon Street Settlement giving steam treatment to the child called Angel. She had died too.

  He got out of the boat, this man who had killed the Morleys’ boy, who had killed laughing Dicky and made Madge and Bella so sad. He was saying something. Red lips moved within the beard.

  Jack stood on the grass bank above him, holding a heavy piece of wood that he had picked up on the path. The man Bella called Toby threw down the bowl and stepped up towards him. He was not expecting to be hit, so when Jack swung the piece of wood it caught him on the side of the head and knocked him down. Before he could get up, Jack was on him. After a struggle, he got his hands under the man’s thick cloak and, kneeling on top of him, was able to strangle him until his astonished face turned blue and purple and he stopped breathing.

  Jack got up and looked around. The broad-bottomed ferryboat rocked heavily on the swollen river. Two or three ducks hurried by downstream, their feathers ruffled forward by the wind. Jack dragged the man Toby to the bank, where he pulled him upright, bent him double and threw him into the river after the ducks.

  Toby kill Dicky. Jack kill Toby.

  Sybil Crocker had been biding her time. She was waiting to see what Miss Bella would do before unloosing her powerful ammunition to best effect. When she saw that Bella was going to do nothing except drift about in a feeble kind of panic, whispering, ‘Promise you won’t tell!’, as if the addition to the population of Bayswater would go away if it wasn’t mentioned, Sybil made her move. The effect was gratifying.

  ‘You promised not to tell!’ Bella was dissolved in tears, her hair tumbling down and her big nose red as a strawberry. ‘My mother is beside herself and my father is going to kill me! You promised you wouldn’t ever tell.’

  ‘I always keep my promises,’ Sybil intoned high in her nose, righteous in the knowledge that Mrs Hugo Morley would not give her daughter the satisfaction of knowing that she listened to servants’ gossip.

  ‘Then how –’

  ‘Listen, dear, your mother’s got eyes, same as the rest of us. How long did you think you could hide your little secret?’

  Hugo was so disturbed with rage that his wife was afraid he was going to have a stroke. Dr Foley, who was in line for a knighthood, had warned him about arterial tension. The things he said to Bella were so savagely cruel that Charlotte, in her muddled way, wanted to take Bella’s side, but she was terrified to do that for fear of sending Hugo over the edge.

  When he screamed at Bella, ‘Out! Out! Out of my house. I wish you had never come into it!’, Charlotte’s first instinct was to put her arms round her daughter and lead her awa
y. But when she moved towards Bella, Hugo shouted, ‘Charlotte!’ and she stopped and turned away and could not respond when Bella sobbed despairingly, ‘Help me, Mother!’

  Everybody in the family very quickly knew that Bella was going to have a baby. Everybody’s servants knew. Hugo had forbidden it to be talked about, but that was not possible in this family.

  The Morleys fancied that they were unfolding admirably into the new liberalism of the twentieth century. The patriarch, E.A.M., had pushed aside some of the Victorian taboos to create prostitutes and criminals and the riff-raff of the canals as fascinatingly human as his middle-class characters with their dark secrets and yearning aspirations. The People’s Story-teller had said, ‘This is how life is,’ but never, ‘It ought not to be like this.’ His descendants, however, to whom he had given the lead, fell down at the first real challenge. They were scandalized by Bella. Even Vera and her husband, who told risqué jokes, could not laugh this one off.

  Bella stayed away from her Uncle Leonard and Aunt Gwen because she was ashamed. Madge was the only person with whom she felt safe, because Madge treated her as if she was the same person as before, whereas everyone else, even those who tried to be charitable, behaved as if she were someone different.

  ‘I’m afraid of my father. He would like to kill me,’ Bella moaned up in Madge’s room.

  Instead of saying, ‘No, no, of course he wouldn’t,’ Madge said thoughtfully, ‘Yes, I expect he would. What good does he think it could do to be so brutal and vicious now? It’s hard to believe he is my father’s brother. You couldn’t find two men more different.’

  ‘He has threatened to beat me until I tell him who the –’ Bella had difficulty with the word ‘baby’. ‘Who its father is.’

  ‘And you won’t.’

  ‘He can beat me insensible. I’ll never tell.’

  ‘Never tell anyone? Even your best friend? Even me?’ Madge was as curious as everyone else. ‘I suppose it’s someone I don’t know.’

  Bella shook her head. ‘You know him.’ She longed to tell. Even though Toby was the villain now to all this family, Bella was still proud that it was she and no one else whom he had chosen for a love affair.

  When she did whisper, turning her face up out of Madge’s pillow, ‘It’s Toby,’ Madge’s eyes opened wide and she coloured up and drew a great breath to be angry, so Bella said quickly, ‘He’ll marry me, I know he will.’

  ‘Where is he, then?’

  ‘Abroad. He’s abroad, doing medical research.’ ‘He’ll never come back,’ Madge said. ‘He will.’ Bella sat up and pleaded. ‘He will come back and marry me.’

  In late December, Toby’s body was found farther down the river, trapped by the sodden cloak in the posts and chains of Pangbourne weir. The landlord of the Swan Inn at the side of the weir recognized him as the temporary ferryman, and he was identified as Tobias Taylor by papers found at Ferry Cottage, where a prowling, hoarse-throated brown terrier attacked the men who went into the house.

  Jack Haynes saw the story in a news sheet by the flare of a coffee-stall lamp. He did not want to wait until the police came for him. He turned himself in with a fair degree of pride – ‘Toby kill Dicky. Jack kill Toby.’ – He had done the right thing. The police had some difficulty understanding him and getting him to understand them. Asked whether someone could speak for him, he wrote down Madge Morley’s name and address.

  When she came to the police cell and stood on the other side of the barred gate with her golden head bare and her eyes brimming, she did not ask him why he had killed the man. She said, ‘Because of Dicky,’ and wrote the name in the air.

  Jack gave her his good grin. ‘I,’ he said, thumping his chest, ‘did it for you.’ He pointed at Madge through the bars and there was just room for her to take his hand.

  Bella’s father sent her away to a home in the country which secreted the fallen daughters of gentlefolk, at some expense, through the waiting time and confinement.

  Bella did not put up any resistance. Hugo’s hatred had battered her almost into a sleep-walking state. Madge came to say goodbye to her and to tell her about her visit to Jack in the police cell.

  ‘He is not trying to hide anything, because he’s quite proud of what he did, poor Jack, the only way he knew to do something for us. He did it for Dicky.’

  ‘And because I was so unhappy,’ Bella said self-centredly. ‘When I met him at the house, he couldn’t bear to see me so unhappy.’

  Chapter Twenty-fourteen

  On New Year’s Eve 1907, Madge decided to marry Guy Davidson. They were at a party together, and Madge made him stay until midnight so that they could be a part of the singing and embracing and foolish sentimental mixture of tears and laughter. They drank champagne and Guy asked her, ‘What’s in store for you this year, Madge?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Madge could not look far ahead. Jack’s trial would be coming up in a few months. One day he and I will be in court together, Will had said, although he could not possibly have foreseen that innocent, confused Jack would be the third victim of the stupidity of Madge and her family.

  ‘I do know,’ Guy told her seriously, under the New Year noises. ‘You’re going to marry me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not? What else are you planning?’‘I don’t know.’ ‘All right, then.’

  It was to be a small quiet wedding. Leonard and Gwen tried very hard to be pleased about it, although Guy with his halting walk and his pale, ironic face and offhand manner was very far from the noble, chivalrous bridegroom Leonard had liked to imagine at Madge’s side at a splendid reception at the Piccadilly Hotel, catered by Whiteley’s.

  When Madge went down to Surrey to tell Bella the news, her cousin, self-centred as ever, said at once, ‘I won’t be able to be there.’

  Madge showed her the unusual antique ring on her left hand. That was what you did when you were engaged. ‘Are you glad for me?’ she asked.

  Bella answered in her unenthusiastic voice, ‘You wouldn’t have done it if Toby were still here.’

  ‘What do you mean? Toby and I were never anything more than friends.’

  ‘You would have liked to be.’ Bella looked out of the window at the sad winter garden where a few girls walked with a tall, chilly-faced custodian. Then she put on a small self-satisfied smile and said, ‘But he chose me, didn’t he?’

  Poor Bella, in this hideously furnished house, scrubbed and polished within an inch of its cheerless life, carrying a baby she seemed not to imagine ever being a separate physical reality, and deluding herself that Toby had loved her.

  In one way, Madge thought drearily, as she walked down the drive to get the station bus, Bella was better off with Toby dead, and only the stuff of dreams.

  After Madge had married and gone to live with Guy at his rooms in Brook Street until the house that was being decorated for them was ready, Leonard and Gwen both felt older than they were.

  During the critical time after William Whiteley’s murder last year, when Leonard did not know whether his job was secure, they had enjoyed a resurgence of their love life. Since Dicky’s death, they had only held each other in bed for comfort and courage. They had never in their married lives talked about sex; they had only enjoyed it and exchanged secret glances the next morning. Does sex peter out in your fifties? Leonard wanted to ask Gwen. Is it like that for everyone?

  One night, they had been to dinner with Austin and Elizabeth, and Madge had been there with Guy. Elizabeth was a charming little hostess and quietly funny. Austin was noisy and cheerful, and Guy had been so friendly and agreeable that his parents-in-law sat down with the wine decanter when they got home and stayed up late to talk contentedly about Austin’s good marriage, and Madge’s honest, refreshing influence which might after all transform the war-embittered soldier.

  Daydreaming thus, hungry for happiness again, they drank more wine than usual, and finished up rediscovering each other in the big soft bed.

  Sex did not peter
out in your fifties, thank God. Leonard felt younger, walking briskly down Westbourne Grove the next morning, with a muffler over his chin against the east wind.

  William and Frank Whiteley, who, although in their thirties, were always known as Young Mr William and Young Mr Frank, had acquired a good grasp of the business during the last year. They were making active plans to redesign the whole complex of connecting departments into one mammoth emporium with an imposing entrance in Queen’s Road. They showed Leonard some architect’s designs. Pillars, massive white stone facing, broad plate-glass windows, galleried levels round the sweeping curves of a pearly marble staircase such as had never been seen in a public building in London. Over all, a high glass dome would spread light on to the splendid marble staircase and ground-floor halls where customers would move in space and radiance.

  ‘We’d like to be ready to open about 1911. The old order changeth, eh?’ Mr William watched Leonard’s face.

  ‘To something a bit too pretentious for me,’ Leonard admitted. ‘Perhaps it will be my cue to retire.’

  This would relieve the minds of the young gentlemen, if they were wondering how they would ever get rid of ‘Our Mr Morley’. But they said at once, ‘Don’t you dare!’, which pleased him, whether they meant it or not.

  The cold weeks of chests and chilblains crawled on with the perennial slowness of February and March. In the servants’ hall at Ladbroke Lodge and the kitchen at No. 72 Chepstow Villas, they continued to talk about Bella and her condition. It was not worth letting the subject drop, because before you knew it, that poor baby would get itself born, with the subsequent to-do of what would be done with it. Bella had talked wildly about keeping it, but the general opinion was that it would be discreedy adopted and never seen again.

  ‘Shocking, innit, poor little mite,’ Mrs Roach droned in the wicker chair during the dark afternoons before it was time to start dinner. ‘I’m quite shocked.’

  ‘You must be,’ Flora answered, although she privately knew that the death of the cook’s sister in childbirth was a fiction, like the sister herself. It was Mrs Roach who had once read Russian romances, and Tatiana was actually her daughter. She had kept it dark in order to ensure a roof over their heads.