Flora was glad when Madge came back to Chepstow Villas to visit, and they could talk freely as they used to, although Madge was now supposed to have the dignity of a married woman. She could not see her parents as often as she would like, because Guy had not been well and she was busy, but Flora guessed that, poorly or not, that dot-and-carry husband of hers would be the type to be jealous of her family attachments.
‘I have to do more nursing than I expected,’ Madge said when she and Flora met at the Express Dairies teashop in Notting Hill Gate, because Flora wanted to get out of the house on her afternoon off. ‘One of his old leg wounds has gone septic again. I haven’t been able to go to the Settlement for a while.’
‘If ever.’ Flora wiped cream off her chin. They were working their way through a plate of gateaux.
‘I’ll have to see how he is. Do you know what his mother told me, Flora? At the wedding, she said it. She said the doctors didn’t expect him to live very long.’
‘What wicked rubbish!’
‘I know. But he’s not very sensible about his health. Sometimes he’ll stay in bed for nothing and want me to wait on him hand and foot. Sometimes he insists on going out with his cane when he’s weak and exhausted and can hardly stand up, and shouts at me for trying to ‘baby’ him.’
Ah, men! It did not need saying.
‘I do love him, Flo.’ Madge leaned forward anxiously. ‘You know that, don’t you? But when he’s feeling rotten and being difficult, he – well, he drinks too much, you know.’
‘Oh lor’,’ Flora said. ‘What’s wrong with these men of ours? What’s wrong with us, Madge, that makes us pick ‘em?’ The words ‘sacrifice ourselves’ were in Flora’s head, but she would not use them to Madge, although she did think that was what Madge had done, as she had herself, barmily, for Bull Bolt.
The waitress brought more hot water and Flora poured them another cup and said in a low voice, because there were domestic spies in Notting Hill Gate as well as everywhere else, ‘Shall I tell you something disgusting?’
‘Of course.’ Madge tilted her head into her hand to listen. Her short gold hair had lost some of its brilliance. Her eyes were lightly shadowed now, in a thinner face.
‘Well, you know when Bill come in through my window and cut me up?’ Madge nodded. ‘I’d invited him.’ There, it was said. What a relief. And Madge had not changed her expression. ‘He’d been sneaking in a bit regular. Remember that night when you lost your key? That give me the idea. But Tat had said she thought she’d heard a noise, and then you was all coming back from the country, so I said to him not to visit no more. That was why he cut me. He always carried a knife, you see.’
‘Poor Flo.’
‘Stupid Flo.’
‘Would you ever go back to him?’ Madge asked. She knew about the kind of perverse, wayward love that didn’t get you anything much but trouble.
‘I’m daft enough. Good thing, I suppose, that I don’t know where he is.’
In May, at the home for wayward girls, Bella gave birth to a small, neat baby boy with thin dark hair and eyes like boot buttons.
Would she keep him or let him go? ‘Life is very difficult for the upper classes,’ Flora observed. ‘If it was our Violet now – and I wouldn’t put it past her, the way she’s carrying on – my mother would bring up the poor little fellow like her own. But Madam Muck – can you see her!’
Charlotte had no intention of even going to Surrey to see her new grandson. Gwen and Madge went down when he was about a week old, with Helen Pope, who was fond of Bella, and anxious for any new experience.
They found Bella alone with her son in a small room kept for mothers with babies. It was sparsely furnished with a bed, an undraped bassinet, a wash-stand and slop bucket and a nursing chair and footstool. An improving print hung over the small stingy grate. ‘The coal scuttle is rather small,’ Gwen said.
‘At least it’s there.’ Bella held the baby awkwardly against her shoulder. ‘Before your baby is born, you don’t get a fire in your bedroom unless you’re ill.’
They all took turns to hold the small, passive baby, who turned his beady eyes from one to the other, as if he could already focus. Who did he look like? Bella had insisted that the father was nobody the family knew, but Gwen and Helen could not help speculating on the straight black hair (not sandy Gerald Lazenby, obviously), the bright round eyes. Madge thought to herself that she caught something of Toby in him, but that was only because she knew.
‘What was it like,’ Helen asked, avid with curiosity, ‘him being born?’
‘Dreadful.’ Bella took the baby from her quickly and rocked him in her arms, with a softer, more comfortable expression on her face than any of them had ever seen.
‘Oh, Bella.’ Madge felt very touched. ‘How can you bear to part with him?’
‘I’m going to keep him.’
‘But your parents –’ Gwen began uncertainly.
‘He’s not their baby. He’s mine.’
‘Good for you.’ Madge kissed her. They all showed that they were glad, and promised her help and support. Bella was pleased to have done something right.
She gave them a tour of the austere mid-Victorian house, carrying the child wrapped up in the soft blue shawl Gwen had brought from Whiteley’s Babywear. A custodian with keys on a thong round her neck stopped her in the corridor.
‘Come, come, Mrs Morley.’ You were called ‘Mrs’ after your baby was born; before that, your pregnancy was disregarded, except by the issue of roomier smocks. ‘You know baby is supposed to be down in his cradle at this time.’
‘I can’t leave him in the room alone.’
‘Why not? He’s got to learn.’
‘He’s asleep anyway,’ Helen told the woman, ‘so what is the difference?’
‘That shawl will have to be washed before it is used.’ The woman trod away in heavy black shoes like a nun.
They saw the sewing room and the dining hall and the sitting room where a small group of young women in identical smocks quickly gathered up cards as the door opened.
‘Oh, it’s only you.’ They clamoured round Bella’s baby, who woke up and let himself be petted. Their own would be taken away and put to a wet nurse as soon as they were born.
‘Why?’ Madge asked outside the room.
‘They are told it’s for the child’s own good,’ Bella said, ‘and most of them are such ninnies, they believe it.’
‘Baby farming.’ Helen looked fiercely at an aproned custodian who crossed the hall with a tight grip on the arm of a weeping girl. ‘This place is loathsome. I’m going to write about it and expose it.’
Helen had recently written a newspaper piece about the scandal of worn-out old horses shipped live to Belgium for slaughter. A newspaper had printed it, and she was now hell-bent on saving the world through journalism.
She was still giving off puffs of outrage as they left Bella and went out to where the Popes’ chauffeur waited with the car.
‘I didn’t think the place was so very bad,’ Gwen said pla-catingly.
‘Not very bad! It’s a disgrace.’
‘Well.’ Gwen leaned forward to shut the sliding glass between them and the driver. ‘Those girls did get themselves into trouble, after all.’
‘The men did nothing?’ Madge and Helen rounded on her. ‘Why should they get away with it?’
‘Now, Madge,’ Gwen said, ‘that’s not the kind of talk for a married woman.’
‘It’s married women who do talk like that,’ Madge said, and Helen added, ‘The last protest meeting I went to, where a woman was lashing about with a whip, I felt pathetically young. Most of the suffragist women now are married, Aunt Gwen.’
‘Then they should have something better to do.’ Gwen Morley had never cared for the Suffragettes.
‘The only reason my mother would like to have the vote,’ Madge told Helen, ‘would be so that she could refuse to use it.’
The few babies who were not farmed out by the home were
christened as soon as possible, in case their feckless mothers neglected this duty later. Bella had caused her child to be christened Hugo, in a last hopeless attempt to please her father.
‘He’ll not allow it,’ Charlotte said.
‘It’s the child’s legal name, Mother.’
‘Well, call him something else with the same initial. Why not Howard? Quite a respectable name.’
Bella shrugged. She did not tell her mother, or anyone, that she had given her son the middle name of Tobias.
Charlotte, disguised by a heavy veil, had visited the new little family in Maida Vale, where she had set Bella up in an inconspicuous house, with a cook-general and a nursemaid. She came once more, without telling her husband, but not again after that.
Bella was barred from Ladbroke Lodge, with or without little Howard, but they were both always welcome at No. 72 Chepstow Villas. Sometimes she would leave the nursemaid there with the baby while she went shopping or paid a visit to Madge. Flora heard her say to her aunt Gwen, ‘It’s nice for you to have a little one about,’ and was furious that any member of this family, even gormless Bella, could be so stupid.
In the summer, Bella took up with the kind of man with whom she would never have made friends, hardly even spoken to, in the old days. Dominick Owles, several years older, was a master builder, a man who had done well in his profession and thought himself the equal of Bella Morley, so-called widow of an unspecified victim of tuberculosis. He and his men were working on a house three doors down from Bella’s. He had always lived at home, and never seriously courted. He fell genuinely in love with Bella. That was the important point that people overlooked when they were offended by her being involved with someone so common. In her twenty-sixth year, Dominick Owles was the first man who had ever loved Bella.
Dominick had been brought up in a narrowly religious style. His attachment to Bella Morley could just about condone her past – although he sometimes saw her as a charity case and admired his own nobility – but could not extend to the baby. He would not dandle, smile or coo. If he looked at Howard, it was with a serious face, and Howard stared back at him. On the nurse’s half day when Bella looked after the child, Owles did not like taking second place. He sometimes spoke rather pompously to Bella about becoming her husband, but not of becoming the stepfather of Howard, to whom he referred righteously as ‘another man’s child’. The nursemaid began to find herself robbed of some of her time off. Since her young man was, in his impetuous way, also rather demanding, the occasional coin palmed to her by Dominick Owles did not quite compensate.
Chapter Twenty-five
There was no Morley Regatta on the river Thames this year, but Leonard’s summer holiday from Whiteley’s came round as usual, and he and Gwen took a house in the country for three weeks, because that was what they had always done.
‘Life must go on,’ people told each other, and Gwen tried not to answer, ‘Why?’ Eight months after Dicky’s death, the family was out of mourning, and she was supposed, by those who did not know her well, to be ‘all right’ again.
Austin brought his family to Sussex. Madge and Guy were too busy moving into their new house.
‘Or is that his excuse?’ Teddie wondered.
She came with Greg and Sophie, who had grown into such a normal young girl that it seemed a waste of time to have got so worked up about her short flirtation with neurasthenia. She was already informally engaged to a very suitable young man of good family and substance, which allowed Aunt Teddie to queen it a bit over her sister and sister-in-law, whose daughters were less satisfactory.
Madge ... oh well, Madge had made her bed and must lie in it, although it was questionable, Aunt Teddie hinted, with the prurience of the unsexual, whether the poor crippled man could actually ... as it were ... ‘Excuse me.’ A clearing of the throat like sandpaper on rust.
Teddie might be quite disappointed when she learned that Madge was adding on a nursery to the new house at the top of Putney Hill. It was a modern stucco bungalow with the rooms all on one floor for Guy’s convenience, and a garden that led on to the Heath; Guy was working with a fund for disabled servicemen, helping to raise money, and goad the Government. The office was not far from the new house, in a nursing home for ex-officers, where he himself could get treatment if he needed it.
By September, Bella had become quite rattled by the demands of a four-month-old baby with a chronic rash and the unreasonable attitude of her ‘Dommie’ Owles, and decided that she could no longer be expected to cope with a life that seemed to her unfairly irksome. She closed up the Maida Vale house and moved into No. 72 Chepstow Villas with the baby.
Hugo stayed away from his brother’s house. Charlotte walked down from Ladbroke Lodge in one of her best hats. She was embarrassed with Gwen and Leonard, not knowing whether to be disapproving or grateful. She criticized the nursemaid, and the baby for persisting with his rash, and started a terrible quarrel with Bella, which shook the house.
When the nursemaid failed to come back after a Sunday off, Gwen cajoled out of retirement the old nanny who had looked after Austin and Madge and then Dicky, until he grew too old for her.
Nanny Morley talked incessantly about Dicky, which released in Gwen a secondary state of weeping that frightened Leonard. He thought Gwen must have cried enough, until he saw that these tears, with comfortable old Nanny to cluck, ‘There, there, don’t take on so,’ were a natural washing away of some more of the pent-up grief.
Gwen became drier and brisker. There was more for her to do, with Bella and Howard and Nanny in the house. She began to take Laura down the Portobello Road on Saturdays and to stroll with Bella and the perambulator along Westbourne Grove to Whiteley’s food halls, instead of letting Mrs Roach give the orders at the back door.
She was on the telephone again to Vera every morning at nine-thirty, leaning against the coats in the hall, absorbedly chatting back and forth about nothing.
How had women filled their mornings before Alexander Graham Bell empowered them? Leonard had been unsure whether the craze would last, but more and more business was done over the wires, and Whiteley’s were selling domestic phones from America in curious and ornate designs as fast as they could be shipped across the Atlantic.
In early October, Bella took off. She told Uncle Leonard and Aunt Gwen that she was going back to Dominick Owles to make her life with him. They said, ‘No, no, you can’t do that, Bella, you have a child now. You’re not a free agent.’ But she went anyway, leaving Howard behind.
Charlotte told Gwen, on Hugo’s orders, ‘You can’t possibly keep that child.’
‘Will you take him, then?’ Gwen asked pertly.
Charlotte did her imitation of a cock pheasant surprised out of a hedge.
‘Calm down,’ Leonard said. ‘We’ll do what we think best.’
‘But you can’t!’ Charlotte stamped her foot. She obviously did not want to go back to Ladbroke Lodge and tell Hugo, ‘They’re holding on to that baby.’
‘Bella will be back soon, I’m sure,’ Gwen said. ‘We’re just looking after Howard until then.’
The little boy was thriving. Bella had become tired of breast-feeding him after the first few weeks, and Nanny was now varying the Mellin’s Food with broth and groats and coddled eggs. He grizzled less as his stubborn rash at last began to fade. Nanny had accused it of being ‘Maida Vale rash, bound to clear up when you get him out of that damp valley’, although most of Maida Vale was on the side of a hill. And Vera had brought in a jar of chamomile cream that Toby had given her last summer for the painful sunburn with which Henrietta had returned from an ill-advised trip to the Italian lakes.
‘Did Toby Taylor give you this?’ Gwen asked suspiciously.
Vera hedged, but the label on the jar bore the name of the man in Wales who had supplied The Clinique.
‘Take it away.’
‘No, it might work. Why deprive poor little Howard?’
Gwen bit her lip, her knuckles clenched white on her sk
irt.
‘It’s not the baby’s fault,’ Vera said gently, and she took the cream up to the nursery.
Soon, there would be another addition to the family. Austin’s wife Elizabeth was expecting her third child in another few weeks.
Laura had resented her brother John, but she was not bothered this time by the idea of another baby. She had become too settled in her new independent, boyish ways. After she was able to come to No. 72 again without hanging back and shivering and being sick, she played different games there. No more lead soldier shooting the penny into the blackamoor’s mouth. No more dancing to the piano, or cut-out paper dolls with her grandmother. She wanted to play with Dicky’s trains and puff billiards game. But when she came down with an armful of rails and began to fit them together on the floor by the drawing-room window, Gwen dropped her book and took off her spectacles, and Laura saw that she was crying again.
‘What’s the matter, Grandma?’
‘Dicky’s trains . . . Oh, Laura, I can’t bear it!’
‘Will it always be like this?’ Laura asked Austin. ‘Will I always have to live in the shadow of my cousin’s death?’
Shocked by the dramatic maturity of this, Austin took refuge in a diversion. ‘Dicky wasn’t your cousin, you know. He was your uncle.’
‘Wasn’t! He was only a bit older than me.’
‘Yes, and soon you’ll be the same age as Dicky was when he left us. You could – look, Laura, you could, in a way, live his life for him.’
Austin knew he did not always say the right thing, but this was inspired. It gave Laura leave to be boyish when she wanted, and Austin began to do more things with her that he would do with a son. He helped her to dig her own plot in their narrow back garden, he took her to the races, and arranged with Madge for riding lessons on Putney Heath. Leonard had been persuaded to start stump cricket again in the backyard of No. 72 and Austin was working on his father to let Laura be the first girl to be allowed to play.
One of the Family Page 28
