They were altogether perfectly happy: it was Royal Wedding Year and Princess Elizabeth was planning her wedding to the dashing Prince Philip; London was in party mood, and very busy in every way; bombed theatres (most notably the Old Vic) were being rebuilt, and galleries and museums reopened, holding out their treasures proudly for inspection again, after years of fearful concealment. The social scene was frantic, as people struggled to re-create a normal pleasurable life; Julian and Letitia lunched, shopped and gossiped, went to the theatre (Letitia daringly bought seats for A Streetcar Named Desire, but actually confessed to preferring Brigadoon), and the cinema (Julian’s own special favourite being The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which he saw three times), and listened to concerts. Julian also launched himself on a lifetime passion for cars, and bought himself a prewar Wolseley saloon, scorning the Utility-style modern models, and feeling, as he settled into its soft deep leather seat, and behind its huge steering wheel, that this was for him precisely what First Street and the proximity of Harrods was for Letitia: a wholly desirable place to be.
And they entertained and were entertained tirelessly, a charming if slightly eccentric couple, providing in one deliciously simple package a single man and the perfect excuse to invite him anywhere. No hostess need fear she might appear herself to be pursuing Julian Morell, so charming, so handsome, so delightfully available, but still not quite yet a properly known commodity, or to be hurling him rather precipitately at her single women friends, when he could so easily and without any embarrassment be invited to dinner with his mother. And then such was Mrs Morell’s grace, wit and beauty that no dinner table could be other than adorned by her, no young people could consider her an assault on their fun.
It became a game in the early days, before the Morells were properly well known in London, for a hostess to tell her guests that she had invited a charming, single man to dinner, but that she had been obliged to ask his mother as well, as she was all alone in London; and then to watch the faces of her guests – particularly the men – braced with bright smiles, soften into pleasure, admiration and undisguised relief as Letitia came into the room. Another version of the same game, and one Letitia and Julian tacitly joined in, was for them to be introduced as Letitia and Julian Morell and to leave the rest of the gathering to try to fathom quite what their relationship was. Sometimes when the stakes were high, and there was a particularly pretty girl or attractive man at the table (for Letitia was enjoying her new social success quite as much as Julian), they would draw the thing out until well into the second or third course, waiting for precisely the right moment to drop the words ‘my mother’ or ‘my son’ into the conversation, and then savouring the various degrees of amusement, pleasure and irritation that followed. It was hard to say which of them was enjoying themselves more.
Letitia, looking back at the long, lonely years at Maltings, the stiff country dinner parties, the boring conversations about cattle and yield, land and horses, stock prices and servants, the red-faced men, stuffy when sober, lecherous when drunk, and their loyal, large braying wives, wondered how she had borne it. Suddenly the world was full of charming, amusing people and gossip; she would sit at supper, quite unable to swallow sometimes for pleasure and excitement and fear of missing a gem, or better still the opportunity to pass one on. She had a genius for gossip herself, she filed things away neatly in her head, cross-referenced under people and places, a treasure trove of meetings, conversations, glances, jokes, and she would produce a piece of it at exactly the right moment, knowing precisely how to silence a table with a wicked announcement, or how to intrigue a group with a perfectly innocent observation. She did it not only cleverly, but with great charm; she flattered those whose reputation she was shredding, bestowing virtues and beauty upon people who possessed neither and giving her conversations a deceptively benign air.
‘That little Serena Motcombe,’ she would say, ‘such a lovely girl, you know she paints quite beautifully, I saw her at lunch last week with Toby Ferranti, he was looking quite marvellous and did you know that Lady Brigstocke is learning to ride, she looks wonderful, I saw her in the Park on Tuesday with David Berner, I believe he’s trying to get back into polo, and of course William Brigstocke is the most marvellous player . . .’ and so it went on and on, a glittering wicked chronicle. But it was not malicious; Letitia had a shrewd eye and a tender heart and where she saw true love, real pain, she was friend, confidante, ally and counsel; she would provide alibis, divert suspicion, and even provide venues for meetings that could take place absolutely nowhere else.
She was having a glorious time.
So was Julian. He was now twenty-seven, with that ability to disturb that truly sexually accomplished men possess; another dimension beyond good looks, attractiveness or even ordinary sexuality. His entry to a room caused women to fall suddenly into confusion, to lose the place in their conversation, to glance at their reflections, to smooth their hair; and men to feel threatened and aggressive, to look sharply at their wives, to form a closer group, while greeting him at the same time most warmly, shaking his hand and inquiring after his health and his business.
With good reason; Julian was a most adroit adulterer, seducing quite ruthlessly wherever he chose with a careless skill, and he greatly preferred the company and attentions of married women, not only because of their greater experience in bed but because of the excitement and danger of getting them there. There was more than one marriage in London in the savage winter and glorious spring of 1948 ripped apart as a wife found herself propelled by a force she was quite unable to resist into first the arms and then the bed of Julian Morell.
There was nothing original about Julian’s approach; but he was simply and pleasurably aware of the fact that women became suddenly and uncomfortably sexually tautened by the most mundane conversation with him, and that by the end of a dinner party at his side or even an encounter at a cocktail party, or a theatre interval, would feel an extraordinarily strong urge to take their husbands home to bed and screw them relentlessly. (Indeed, husbands in the early stages of their wives’ affairs with Julian Morell had rather more reason to be grateful to him than they would ever know.) This made his progression into lunch and from there into long afternoons in bed extraordinarily easy. He knew exactly how to distract and discomfort women, how to throw them into a passion of emotional desire; long before he turned his attention to their physical needs, he would talk to them, and more than talk, listen, laugh at their jokes, look seriously on their concerns, encourage their thinking. He would send flowers with funny, quirky messages, make outrageous phone calls pretending to be someone else should their husbands answer the phone, hand-deliver silly notes, and give small thoughtful presents: a record of some song or piece of music they had heard together, a tiny antique pill box with a love letter folded up tightly inside it, a book of poetry with some particularly poignant piece carefully marked – the kind of things, in fact, that most women eating out their hearts in the sweet agony of an illicit love affair yearn for and which most men entirely fail to give them or even consider.
He was a brilliant lover in precisely the same way: it was not just his sexual skills, his capacity to arouse, to deepen, to sharpen sexual pleasure, to bring the most tearful, the most reticent women to shatteringly triumphant orgasm; it was his tenderness, his appreciation, his patience that earned him their gratitude, and their love.
The gratitude and the acquiescence were one thing, the love quite another; in his early days Julian found himself in quite extraordinarily delicate situations as poised cool mistresses suddenly metamorphosed into feverish, would-be wives, ready to confess, to pack, to leave husband, children and home and follow him to whichever end of the earth he might choose to lead them. It took all Julian’s skills to handle these situations; gently, patiently, through long fearful afternoons in slowly darkening bedrooms (it was another factor in Julian’s success that he was at this point in his life partially unemployed) he would persuade them that they would be losi
ng infinitely more than they would gain, that he was making a sacrifice just as big as their own, and he would leave them feeling just sufficiently warmly towards him to prevent them speaking too harshly of him, and just humiliated enough to be unwilling to reveal the extent of their involvement to any of their friends.
For his first six months or so in London this was the high wire he walked, permanently exhilarated by his success, his only safety net his own deviousness. After that, he grew not only more cautious but busier, involved in the birth of his business and the development of his talents in rather more conventional and fruitful directions. It was a perfect time for him; the boom he had prophesied had finally arrived, and there was a bullish attitude in the country. Investment was available for sound propositions, ideas were the top-selling commodity.
Perhaps most happily for Julian, fashion was being reborn. Not just clothes, not foolish frivolity, nor even a burgeoning industry, it was a serious matter, one worthy of sober consideration and artistic merit. The Royal College of Art had opened its school of fashion design in 1948 with Madge Garland, an ex-editor of Vogue, as its professor. People talked about fashion and the design of clothes as something seriously important. Moreover, it was big business. The effect of M. Dior’s New Look had been staggering. Not only was it revolutionary in look, but in attitude. In three dizzy hours in the February of 1947 it spelt the end of economy as a virtue and of fashion as a sin; after six years of skimpy skirts and square shoulders, here were clothes that caressed the body, clung to the waist and swirled around the ankles in glorious extravagance. Women didn’t just like it, or even want it, they yearned for it, they demanded it, they had to have it. The rich flocked to Paris; the ready-to-wear houses copied it within days and it sold and sold and sold.
It was considered unpatriotic, which only lent it more glamour; questions were not quite asked in the House, but Sir Stafford Cripps called a meeting of the major British designers to try to persuade them to keep the short skirt popular, and another of fashion editors to tell them to instruct women to ignore the long; and Mrs Bessie Braddock, the stout and aggressively unfashionable Labour MP, took women to task for caring so passionately about something so frivolous. Princess Margaret promptly negated any impression Mrs Braddock might have made by appearing constantly in the New Look. It all added up to a defiant, almost reckless approach to anything to do with clothes and looks; and made it an excellent time to be involved in cosmetics.
The Morell empire began life as a cough mixture. It was a perfectly ordinary cough mixture (called unimaginatively, if graphically, Morell’s Cough Linctus), in three flavours: lemon, cherry, and blackcurrant, but it had two important selling points. The first was that it tasted extraordinarily good, and children therefore loved it; the second was that it worked. Given to tired children in the night by tireder parents, it had them asleep again in ten minutes, their coughing silenced, their throats soothed. The reason for both factors was in the formulation, for which the parents and the children had to thank an old man working in the back room of a pharmacie in a small town near Deauville, but this was long before a Trades Description Act could prevent anybody from saying anything very much, and Julian had an ingenious and laterally thinking mind. Thus the linctus bore the legend ‘specially formulated for night-time coughs’.
There was no question of there being any money for advertising, and the labels stuck on the bottles by the hands of the bored housewives of West Ealing, where Morell Pharmaceuticals had its headquarters in an ex-WRVS canteen, were simply printed in white on red, with no embellishments of any kind except a border of medicine spoons twisted together, which was to become the Morell company logo. Nevertheless, the simple message was successfully and powerfully conveyed.
Julian sold the product into the chemists’ shops himself, driving huge distances in his Wolseley saloon, its big boot and passenger seats crammed with samples. The pharmacists, used to being fobbed off by crass young salesmen, were charmed by the intelligent, courteous man who could discuss formulae with them and who would always meet orders, even if it meant him personally driving hundreds of miles overnight to do so; originally reluctant to stock the medicine, those who did so invariably came back for more, and because of the conversations they had had with Julian about formulae, would recommend it to distracted mothers and worried grandmothers and anxious nannies with rather more confidence than usual.
The worried mothers, having experienced its considerable effectiveness and coughs being a constantly recurring problem in the pre-antibiotic era, came back for more and still more, recommended it to their friends, and took to keeping a spare bottle permanently in their medicine cupboard, a suggestion added to the original label as a result of one of Julian’s overnight delivery drives, the time he always had his best ideas.
They trod a delicate path, he and Letitia; their capital had all gone and they lived very much from hand to mouth. The pharmacists were slow to pay, and he had difficulty getting credit for his raw materials. They fortunately had paid cash for their factory building, and had First Street on a mortgage; but for two months they were unable to meet the payment on that. ‘It’s too ridiculous,’ said Letitia cheerfully, over breakfast one morning, looking up from a pained letter from the building society, ‘here we are, dining out every night with the very best people in London – just as well or we’d be quite hungry a lot of the time – and we are threatened with having the roof removed from over our heads.’
Julian looked at her warily. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What I say, darling. The building society are threatening to repossess the house.’
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘What on earth do we do now?’
‘You don’t do anything,’ said Letitia firmly, ‘just get on with delivering today’s orders and pressing them all for payment. I’m the financial director, I’ll go and see the bank.’
Which she did; Julian never quite knew what she said to the manager, but he saw her leaving the house, a suddenly much smaller and drabber figure in her oldest clothes, her face devoid of make-up, a plentiful supply of lace-trimmed handkerchiefs in her shabbiest handbag, and returned to his duties as sales manager feeling the future of the company and the home of its directors were in very safe hands.
Before going out to dine with the Countess of Lincoln that night, they drank to their modestly generous new overdraft facility in gin and tonic minus the gin, and Letitia assured him they had a breathing space of precisely two months and one week before their cash-flow situation became critical once more.
‘And now I am going to go and get ready; I’ve bought a most lovely new dress, with a hundred yards of material in it and a pair of those marvellous platform soles exactly like Princess Margaret’s, just wait till you see them.’
‘Mother, how can you possibly afford new clothes when we can’t buy gin or pay the mortgage?’ said Julian, laughing.
‘Oh, darling, I have my account at Harrods and they are dreadfully patient about payment, and we certainly can’t afford to go round looking as if we haven’t got any money.’
‘Mother,’ said Julian, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing working for this company. I’m surprised you’re not chairman, or whatever a woman would be, of the Bank of England.’
‘Oh,’ said Letitia, ‘I very likely will be one day. I’m just doing my apprenticeship. Now, what you have to do, Julian, is take a very hard look at those customers of yours and which ones aren’t paying you quickly enough. We can’t afford charity.’
Julian was certainly not over charitable with his customers, nor was he yet in a position to refuse delivery to slow payers (although he had learnt which of his customers warranted more time and attention than others); but he was learning pragmatism in places other than the bedroom. One of his very first orders came from an old man called Bill Gibson in a small chemist shop in North London; he had taken two cases of the cough linctus and paid Julian on the spot; moreover he had told other friends in the business to see him and take some of his
wares as well. Julian owed him a lot and he knew it. Bill had a struggle to keep his shop going, but it was the only living he had, or knew how to manage, and he had no pension to look forward to, it was literally his lifeblood. Besides he loved it, and was proud of it, it gave him a footing of immense respectability and responsibility in the neighbourhood and since the death of his wife it was literally all he had. He lived in permanent dread of his landlord realizing the asset he had and selling his premises over his head.
Six months after launching his company, Julian had still not managed to break into any of the big or even even medium-sized chemist chains; he knew that not only would it make all the difference to his cash flow as well as his order books, it would give him a stature in the industry that so far he lacked.
One night over dinner he met a man called Paul Learmount, who was building up a nice line of business in outer London, buying run-down shops at cheap prices and converting them into cut-price chemist shops; he was looking for another in Bill Gibson’s area, did Julian know of any? Julian said he did, that he happened to know a place that exactly fitted Paul’s description, and moreover he could put him in touch with the landlord. Four weeks later, Bill Gibson was served notice on his premises, a brash young manager arrived to refurbish the shop, and Julian got a huge order from Learmount’s central buying office.
He took Bill Gibson out to lunch, commiserated with him over his bad luck and insisted on giving him a cheque for fifty pounds to keep him going ‘until you find your feet again. I’ll never forget what I owe you, after all, Bill.’ To his dying day, Bill Gibson spoke glowingly of Mr Morell and the way he never forgot to send him a card at Christmas time.
Old Sins Page 6
