Goodbye Piccadilly

by Goodbye Piccadilly (retail) (epub)

  Back in 1911, on the evening following Anne Moth’s death, having read an announcement of it in a Portsmouth paper, Victoria had written Jack a letter of condolence, which she went out to deliver personally a short while before she was due to catch a train to leave the town. As she approached the cottage, Jack Moth had come through the gate. He had looked so haggard and distraught that she would have had the earth swallow her up rather than intrude upon his grief. Suddenly, her note as she held it out to him had felt pathetic and formal.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you. I’m not yet really aware that it has happened.’

  ‘I read of it in the paper, I thought… I just wanted…’ She relinquished the note, ‘I wanted you to know what my thoughts are… I hope that you will not think it trite.’

  ‘Thank you, that is very kind.’ He looked directly into her eyes, and tears that had already been close to the surface brimmed and spilled over. Touchingly, the tall and broad, handsome young man made no attempt to dash away his tears, but stood looking at her in the orange glow of the setting sun.

  ‘I wish that there was something that I could do. One always feels so helpless in the face of someone else’s misery.’

  ‘You could walk with me. You do not have to talk, but I should be so glad of your company.’

  So she walked with him. From Garden Cottage where they had been standing, all around the perimeter of the Common and then across it, past the fountain where she had loaned him her towel, along the darkening promenade and back again, past the brightly-lit glass dome of the Leisure Pier where he had bought the comic postcards for his friends, then along the walled waterfront to the ancient Round Tower and to a little pebbled bay beneath the walls. Here, with their backs to the stone of the old fortifications, and by the light of street lanterns and an unclouded moon, they sat whilst the train on which Victoria Ormorod should have been travelling steamed out of Southsea Station.

  Whilst they had walked they had scarcely spoken. Once or twice he had looked at her and when necessary had politely handed her through gates or around rough patches of the pathway. On the sheltered curve of beach where waves and wash from vessels going in and out of harbour rushed back and forth, he began to toss small stones at the white crest of each approaching wave, becoming more and more violent with each throw until, almost mechanically, he was hurling pebbles, as large as his own hand, with great ferocity. Suddenly he ceased, and stood with his arms hanging loose, breathing harshly.

  Only then had she gone to him and taken his cold hand, sticky with salt from the pebbles, and drawn him back to sit on her shawl against the wall still warm from the day. There he had wept, and she had held his head against her breast until his racking sobs subsided. There, with her confident hand caressing his temple, he had felt his shock begin to ebb away. There he had at last raised his head and found that she had been willing to comfort him with kisses.

  She had stayed with him, holding him close until the tide had turned and they had no option but to escape via the archway through which they had reached the little hidden bay.

  Then she had walked with him until they were almost back to Garden Cottage, when she had kissed him briefly and said, ‘I will go. I know that you can now be strong for your family’, and had hurried off. He had never known that her luggage had awaited her at the station and that she had had some difficulty in regaining a room for the night at the Beach Hotel.

  When he returned to his studies, he began to take life more seriously. On the first occasion when he had sought her out, she had been formally polite to the point of remoteness. But to Jack the memory of that evening was a kind of icon stored in his memory. Whenever his mother came to mind, he touched the icon and was comforted.

  Whilst he was still at Cambridge, he went to parties and functions with young women, visited some foreign bordels and had brief and unserious love-affairs with equally unserious young women whom he met from time to time whilst visiting one or other of the Clermonts. But their caresses and kisses were as watered milk to Cornish cream when compared to Victoria Ormorod.

  The only other woman to come near to being Cornish cream was Otis Hewetson. He liked Otis: she had something of the forthrightness, and gave off the same air of confidence as Victoria, but she was as yet immature. Perhaps one day she would be cream, but so far it had not risen to the surface. It had been the confident maturity of Victoria Ormorod that had first attracted him and had gone on doing so to the extent that, with the exception of Otis, he scarcely found a flicker of interest in any woman who was not ten years older than himself.

  As he dressed to go out, Jack Moth thought how strange the house felt without Esther. She was as small and fair and light as their mother had been, yet somehow her presence, like his ma’s, appeared to fill the house. He listened to the water noises as the nurserymaid filled Kitt’s bath, he heard Kitt’s high shrieking laugh as she played chase to get him undressed. He wondered whether Father was in and concluded that he was not for, though he was heavier-handed, like Esther, one knew when he was in the house.

  With Esther away, Bindon Blood was not likely to call. Come to think of it, he had not been up from Southsea for some time. Jack assumed that most military types would have their free time curtailed now that there was not only an Irish problem for the army to sort out, but a European one too.

  He hummed as he knotted his tie, at the same time reading again the handbill announcing that the guest speaker at the next meeting of the Hampstead Fabians would be Blanche Ruby Bice. ‘Non-members welcome.’

  He heard the front door open and a heavy tread in the hallway that announced his father’s return. Unusually early, for his father was seldom in the house at this time of day.

  ‘Anybody there?’

  Jack had never fathomed why his father should call out when he came in, for certainly Esther or one of the maids would hurry to greet him and take his hat and cane and hang up his overcoat. The temporary housekeeper could be heard dutifully enquiring about the requirements of the master’s mealtime, then his springy step taking the stairs, as always, two at a time, as though he was not over forty years of age and not above fifteen stone in weight. Then the squeal of Kitt’s excitement as he was surprised in his bath by his father.

  Jack decided to go along to the nursery too, for he found great pleasure in playing with his pixie-like brother as he splashed with his boats and ducks.

  ‘Look, Jack, look!’ Kitt pointed to a tin seal which George Moth was winding up for him. The inspector, kneeling and with his shirtsleeves rolled up, placed the toy in the water where it whirred and paddled its way towards Kitt. Although he smiled at Kitt and again at his elder son, Jack thought that his father looked tired.

  ‘A live seal? Lord save you, Kitt, just you watch he don’t nip your bott,’ Jack said, kneeling also – and in his newly-pressed trousers.

  ‘’Tisn’t real, Jack. Look at him, isn’t he splendid? Dada got him from Hamley’s.’

  ‘Splendid’ was, at the moment, Kitt’s latest and most loved word.

  The nurserymaid sat on a stool, moving only to add more warm water from time to time, and watched the two men – each well above six feet in height, and brown-haired, long-legged and broad-shouldered – as they joined in the watery games with her slight, blond-headed charge. When she read the lurid reports of the many murder investigations in which her employer was involved, she could hardly believe that the awesome Inspector Moth and little Kitt’s Dada were the same man. Almost as strange was the knowledge that Kitt’s Mama, whom she knew only from daguerreotypes and portraits of her, should be the mother of Master Jack. On the occasions when Miss Esther and Master Jack took Kitt out on to the Heath, anyone could believe that they were in fact the parents, for Kitt was very like his sister.

  When there was no more hot water, the two men rose reluctantly from their knees and left the nurserymaid to put Kitt into his nightshirt. As they descended the stairs together, Jack looked down at his wet and crumpled tro
users. ‘Damn. I was going to wear these.’

  For a second the father looked momentarily crestfallen. ‘Out this evening then?’

  ‘Yes, later.’

  ‘Ah. Pity. For once I’ve got an evening at home.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Father, but I’m expected.’

  ‘Oh it’s all right, all right. It is only that it is a long time since we talked, and I thought…’

  Jack nodded, surprised, because they had seldom ‘talked’ in the way his father now inferred. The last time, as Jack recalled, was when he was about to come down from Cambridge and his father had asked him about his plans. Compared to some fellows’ fathers, his own had been exceptionally non-interfering: he would give advice if asked, but rarely offered it gratuitously.

  When Jack said that he proposed going in for law, his father had said, ‘But not in my sort of game, I imagine.’ Surprised, because he had never thought of his father as being involved in ‘The Law’, Jack had replied that he meant the law proper, not police work. At which his father had merely raised a wry eyebrow and said, ‘At least we shall be on the same side of it.’ To which Jack had made the right reply by saying, ‘I shouldn’t like to be on the wrong side if I came up against you, Father.’

  And when Jack had asked whether they could afford for him to continue his studies without any prospect of return for years, George Moth had said, ‘What I have is mostly from your mother, Clermont money, and there’s a deal more Clermont in you than there is in me, so why shouldn’t you have some of it?’

  They reached the landing of Jack’s room. Jack stood back to allow his father to pass, but he did not do so. Sensing that his father did not want to go, he felt guilty at his own insistence. ‘Well, excuse me then, Father, I must change.’

  ‘Is it all right if I come in?’

  ‘Heavens, yes… of course it’s all right.’

  While Jack changed, his father sat and watched him, sized him up, whilst Jack watched too, noticing small signs of some agitation, a thing his father rarely showed. ‘If there is some Clermont in you, m’boy, I can’t say that it shows. Pure-bred Moth those limbs and shoulders.’

  Jack smiled at the note of pride in his father’s tone. ‘The only one of the three of us who is. Esther and Kitt take after Mother.’

  ‘A pity the Force didn’t win you, a young man with brains and education can go to the top these days.’

  ‘Not whilst the best appointments are made by civil servants from men outside.’

  George Moth did not reply, knowing that Jack was only quoting his own words. It was unlikely that George Moth’s own rank would ever be much higher than superintendent.

  ‘Never fear on that score, Jack, the Clermonts always look after their own.’

  ‘Then why is it you never expect to hold high rank in the police force?’

  ‘An intruder, Jack. Something that the society of hunt-ball families finds it hard to forgive. I persuaded your mother to marry outside her own circle – beneath it in their eyes – which was entirely unforgivable. This country is in the hands of a few families, which is why I shall never hold high rank in my career.’

  ‘Then it’s a wonder the Clermonts haven’t cold-shouldered Esther and me.’

  ‘You are a fact of their lives, lad. No matter what, you, Kitt and your sister are an entry in the Clermont family archives, you appear as branches on their family tree, you are of the blood. No matter what, your future is in bond with theirs.’

  Many times since his mother had died, Jack had wanted to talk with his father about her family, but he would never open up. This evening, Jack felt, it was as though he had come home purposely to unburden himself of the Clermont family. Why else had he asked to come into Jack’s room?

  ‘I’m a Moth, Father. One has only to look at Grandfather Moth and Uncle Dick and Uncle Fred and Cousin Joe and then see me to know I’m no Clermont.’

  ‘If your blood were to be spilled, lad, the Clermonts would expect it to run out blue. And they might well be right. I see your mother in you every day.’

  Jack smiled inwardly and concentrated on re-arranging his hair. Every day? They could go for a week and not see one another. But his father had always had this sentimental streak in him. Jack had suspected long ago that this sentiment was part of the reason why his father could keep on and on searching doggedly for some man who had killed a girl with his fists. In his father’s heart, Jack suspected, a young dead prostitute was a girl not very different from Esther, except for the circumstances that put the one girl on the streets and kept the other within the bosom of her family. Jack was almost right, except that it was sensibility rather than sentimentality that he observed in his father.

  Having made himself ready to go out, Jack turned and leaned against the wardrobe. ‘I must go soon, Father, but I shan’t be late back.’

  George Moth nodded his understanding, but continued as though he had not heard. ‘The Clermonts have always been a military family, Jack.’

  Jack smiled. ‘With all those portraits of red coats and gold braid at Mere, one can scarcely avoid that conclusion.’

  ‘Do you like Mere?’

  ‘It’s fine for a holiday. I shouldn’t like to live there. I’m a Londoner, Father. I should die of boredom if I had to spend longer than a month in Lyme Regis.’

  ‘But what if you had no choice?’

  ‘But I would have a choice. There is no law that can compel anyone to live where they don’t wish to.’

  ‘What if you were to inherit Mere?’

  ‘Inherit it? How could I, when there are all the Clermont cousins?’

  ‘But you are a Clermont cousin.’ He paused and then plunged on, ‘And I happen to know that you will inherit from Sir Norbert. Your mother has always known and so, naturally, have I known from her. I believe that is why she willed her own property to Esther.’

  Father and son looked at one another for long seconds, George seeing genuine astonishment, his son seeing veracity. And something else – concern.

  ‘Did your mother never hint?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No need to snap off my head.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t intend…’

  ‘I dare say I should have chosen a better time, but we so seldom…’

  ‘I know. It wouldn’t have made much difference, it would have come as a shock to me whenever I discovered it. Are you sure?’

  ‘I am sure. You don’t seem delighted at the prospect.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Most young men would be overjoyed to inherit a prosperous estate like Mere.’

  ‘I am not most young men. How did you feel about inheriting from Ma?’ Jack knew that he was entering what might well be a minefield, for his father had a very masculine pride and, as far as he knew, his father had never used a penny except to continue to pay the necessary fees to put himself into Law.

  George Moth stood up and, with his hands thrust into his trousers pockets, walked to the window and stared down into the street below. Without turning he said, ‘Belittled!’ He pressed his forehead against the glass. ‘I loved your mother, and she loved me. Had she not, then I should never have taken her away from those people – her people. They thought that I must be a fortune hunter – they don’t seem able to comprehend a poor man who can love a rich woman and not want her wealth. But I never did, and still do not. If she had been a factory girl or a dairy-maid I should have wanted her. Wanted her. That was what they could not understand.’

  Jack understood. He knew scarcely anything about Victoria Ormorod except that she was involved in protest and politics and that her world was as alien and distant from Jack Moth’s as Anne Clermont’s had been from George Moth’s. And quite suddenly he knew that if he did not secure Victoria for himself now, then he might lose her. He took his topcoat from the wardrobe.

  ‘You’re going?’ George Moth asked, as though he had not seen his son’s earlier preparations.

  ‘Yes.’

  George Moth took a
brush from the dressing-table and brushed his son’s shoulders. ‘Norbert Clermont is dead.’

  For a brief moment they both seemed to stop breathing.

  ‘Sir Norbert? Uncle Norbert?’

  The father took a broad sweep of the brush from shoulder to hem of his son’s coat. ‘Discovered in St James’s Park with a young guardsman. Both drunk. Arrested. Damn fool of a station sergeant – should have known better than to leave a sodomite unattended in a cell with anything he could tie about his neck – especially one with a title.’ At last George Moth looked directly at his son.

  The son removed from his father’s hand the clothes-brush that had been working as though powered by a machine. ‘Sir Norbert? A pervert?’

  George Moth heaved a sigh and sank down on the bed, his large hands hanging loose between his heavy thighs. ‘Yes, lad. Sir Norbert high-and-mighty Major-General Clermont when he’s at home. Buggered a lower rank in a public place and couldn’t face the music. Topped himself with his own braces.’

  ‘Sir Norbert has committed suicide?’

  ‘Yes, Jack, yes, the damned fool. St James’s Park of all places. The man must have been an idiot! Half the London force knows already, the rest will know by tomorrow. It will be hushed up, of course. I dare say the word will go out that he was found dead of a heart attack in St James’s Park. Your Clermont inheritance will be pure as the driven snow.’

  ‘Clermont inheritance be damned! I want nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I understand your feelings, m’boy, but if you’ll take my advice then you will do nothing in haste. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in twenty years, it is never to jump in with both feet. Give yourself pause and think about the consequences.’