One of the Family Read online

  MONICA DICKENS

  ONE OF THE FAMILY

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter One

  On an August evening in 1906, Leonard Morley walked home from work, the toes of his polished boots turned out in measured acknowledgement of this familiar pavement. His obliging, beardless face showed no sign that the vile, mysterious letter from the afternoon post was tormenting him from his trouser pocket.

  The busy evening streets still held the heat of the day in dusty, used-up air that made him want to take off his high collar. Working men in open shirts and waistcoats had their sleeves and trouser bottoms rolled up. Even smart young City jokers, swinging off a bus opposite the Royal Oak, were in braces with jackets slung over a shoulder; but Leonard Morley, Assistant Manager of William Whiteley’s great department store in Bayswater, could not remove his stuffy frock-coat, nor even carry his hat until the crossroads.

  ‘Rich man Whiteley is your boss,’ sneered the horrible note in his pocket. ‘He is filthy scum.’

  Three girls from Millinery were chattering on the corner of Queen’s Road and Westbourne Grove, pecking at each other like chickens, sliding their eyes about to see who was passing. When one of them chirped, ‘Good night, sir!’ Leonard was too preoccupied to respond. ‘Good night, Mr Morley!’ He turned his head and smiled, and the girls exploded in giggles as he put his stick to his hat brim in salute.

  They would not have dared to hail William Whiteley, whose paternalism had a tyrannical Victorian edge. Scum? Never. A vile pervert... ? What a lying and slanderous attack on a great man.

  Among the homeward crowds in Westbourne Grove, Leonard was greeted here and there by shopkeepers and local residents and by the well-dressed shoppers who were drawn to newly fashionable Bayswater by the wondrous Mecca of Whiteley’s.

  Two pouter-breasted ladies in soaring hats stopped him. ‘You were absolutely right about the Chinese red divan, Mr Morley,’ the older one confided.

  Leonard lifted his topper and inclined his head slightly, but not far enough to seem servile in the street. ‘Mrs Robbins. Miss Robbins.’ Part of his art was remembering names.

  ‘My mother is quite pleased with the divan,’ the younger one condescended.

  ‘You have made my whole evening complete, Miss Robbins.’

  She believed it. In a job such as Leonard’s, you were seldom suspected of having any life outside the store.

  Small greengrocers and newsagents were still open, but most of the shops were rattling down shutters and padlocking iron bars across their doorways. At the five-way crossing, Bradleys had already drawn thick cream blinds over all their windows. Whiteley’s plate glass was uncovered and lighted until midnight to show the inviting displays, but haughty Bradleys had not thought that passers-by might want to look at their etiolated mannequins and furs, or did not care.

  Once across the wide road that was the boundary between Bayswater and North Kensington, Leonard took off his hat and ruffled up his straight sandy hair, sticky from the heat and the hat. Sportier gentlemen wore boaters in the high summer. Leonard kept to his silk top hat, which was ironed every other day by Whiteley’s hatters.

  He undid the buttons of his coat and waiscoat as he walked into the golden intensity of the sun along his own street, named Chepstow Villas by the Welsh property developer who had built these comfortable stucco dwellings a century earlier on the outskirts of what was then a village. He had given each its own small plot of ground, so that businessmen could live quite rurally here and drive to work in Westminster and the City. Houses begat houses. Roads became streets and were paved with tarry woodblocks. Before the end of the nineteenth century, trains and buses and the underground railway had drawn North Kensington into the sprawling metropolis.

  Traces of the Welshman’s rural retreat still lingered among old trees and quiet gardens. Thick-leaved, the limes and skewbald plane trees hung breathless over the pavement where Leonard walked. Front gardens were full of blossom. A bed of tall white nicotiana sent heady perfume over a wall. Tubs of scarlet geraniums . . . Blood money! He was jerked sickeningly back to the poisonous note.

  He managed a smile and a greeting for the men walking towards him from the buses and trains at Notting Hill Gate, who stopped for a word. His friend Arthur French was just reaching the gate at No. 44 as Leonard came up Chepstow Villas from the other direction. ‘Evening, French.’ ‘Evening, Morley.’ Arthur was a policeman, not a copper on the beat nor a detective in a curly bowler hat, but an inspector, quite high up at the baronial fortress of New Scotland Yard.

  ‘Great day, Morley.’ Ebullient, talkative, Arthur French was never an inscrutable guardian of the Law. ‘The court finally allowed us to exhume the body of Edwin Dryden. Yes, that Edwin Dryden. Husband of Theresa, who stated, “When I took him up his cup of tea, he never drank it.” Why? Because he was already dead.’

  ‘You’ll be searching for poison?’ Leonard loved the orderly parade of Whiteley’s days, but he thrilled at once to the drama of domestic crime.

  ‘Following my first instinct.’ Arthur nodded eagerly, his creased troll face alight. ‘Back to the churchyard. We built a shed round the grave and got the poor man away under a tarpaulin, but there were dozens of sightseers sprung up from nowhere. I had two of them taken in for questioning. Looked too familiar for my liking. How’s the emporium? Have you caught that watch-lifter yet?’

  ‘We will. One of your men was around the jewellery counters today. Big florid face like a toadstool with whiskers. Enough to scare off any thief.’

  ‘An undercover man.’ Arthur let out his brief bark of a laugh which could open his whole mobile face and then close it down into hard-jawed severity in a second; very disconcerting for a suspect being interviewed.

  ‘Hardly.’ In Jewellery this afternoon, Leonard’s hand had slid into his coat pocket to close over the grey paper of the horrible note, as if the bolting, bloodshot eyes of the policeman could see through the material. He wanted to tell Arthur French about the dangerous letter, but shut his mouth on the impulse. William Whiteley was where his loyalty lay. He had got to make himself tell him first. It was Mr Whiteley’s business.

  Arthur put a hand on his front gate and vaulted lightly over. The puffed-out hair and sleeves of his new young wife could be seen behind the muslin at her front window. When Arthur’s first wife had died three years ago, it was only the reputation of the Force that had kept him from blowing his head off. Now he was reborn.

  Leonard went on past the red-brick convent school and across Denbigh Road – the nationalist Welshman again. Walking with his head thrown back to the splendour of the lowering sun, he did not see Dicky rush at him out of the open gate of No. 72, hurtling into his stomach.

  ‘Pick up my hat, blast you!’

  The boy swooped on the top hat and put it on his head, where it obliterated his eyes like a cylindrical black snuffer.

  Gwen, Leonard’s wife, had planted bright flowers in the urns at the bottom of the front steps. Othe
rwise the garden, supporting only a few indestructible plants and bushes under the plane trees and the spiky may, remained something she was going to do something about. Gwen was divinely indolent, while appearing to be quite busy. She could put on a bustling face and little trotting walk to get to nowhere in particular, or pass the back of a hand tensely across her brow, raising distracted floating wisps of hair, even while reclining, relaxed, on a sofa.

  Leonard protected her too much, his older children said, but he had undertaken to do so twenty-eight years ago, when he had married this woman so blissfully unlike his mother, and it had continued to suit them both.

  He followed Dicky into the outer hall, shut the heavy front door with a satisfying thud that shook the square solid house from attic to ice cellar – Master’s home! – wiped his boots unnecessarily on the hotel-sized mat sunk into the floor and dropped his stick neatly among the umbrellas and parasols in the green majolica jar from Whiteley’s Art Imports.

  In the long inner hall, he automatically took out his watch to check it against the grandfather clock. A Whiteley’s red and purple Persian carpet surrounded by highly polished russet linoleum in a trefoil motif led to a red stair-carpet in a different pattern, bordered by the thick-layered glossy cream paint that also smothered the banister posts and dados and window frames and held this house together like glue.

  Whiteley’s Masterpiece Prints climbed the high walls. The garlanded plaster ceiling was far above, with the chandelier chain too short, so that the hall was poorly lit in winter. The dark-brown doors were very tall, like giants’ doors at the pantomime, with heavy embossed brass knobs which could work loose to foil a maid with a knee under a loaded tray outside the dining room.

  In spite of Leonard’s go-ahead younger sister Vera – ‘Show your naked wood, for God’s sake. The Queen is dead’ – the wall tables were still draped with light velvet rugs under the vases of plumed pampas grass and magazines and variegated baskets for letters and gloves and cards.

  Leonard went to hang up his formal braided frock-coat by the stairs. Dicky threw the top hat neatly up on to a peg and slid past his father under the coats and capes like a jungle animal towards the lavatory at the top of the kitchen steps.

  ‘No,’ Leonard said. ‘That’s the Gents.’ Sacrosanct, like a smoking room.

  ‘Aren’t I a gent?’

  ‘You use The Place upstairs.’

  ‘That’s for women and children.’

  Leonard did not say, ‘You are a child.’ Dicky could behave like his ten years, or younger, when it suited him. Mostly, he thought of himself as one of the grown-ups, with equal freedoms.

  Dicky was an afterthought – not even thought of, since Gwen had no idea that she could conceive a baby at forty. Madge was thirteen when her second brother was born in the big bed upstairs, and Austin almost sixteen. Dicky had turbulent golden hair, like his father’s years ago before it thinned and dulled and flattened. His blue eyes were brighter than Leonard’s had ever been.

  If Leonard mused indulgently that Dicky was worth waiting for, Madge would knock him down with, ‘You mean, Austin and I were substandard goods?’

  ‘Just trial castings.’

  You could say anything to Madge, because she was that rare kind of young woman who did not take herself seriously enough to put on sensitive airs or take offence. She had assumed without effort the fin-de-siècle independence of the New Woman, but without the strenuous oratory. She had cut her shining blonde hair this year above her ear lobes, which made her look even taller, her graceful neck longer. The short hair was not a defiant modern pose, but a genuine convenience for washing out the dirt and dust of her place of work.

  Madge was an energetic volunteer at the Loudon Road Settlement in the East End. While most of those who had discovered The Poor ranted about exploitation and inequality, and her rich cousin Bella up the road in Ladbroke Lodge talked earnestly about what needed to be done, Madge went ahead and did it.

  Leonard had hoped to get a moment alone with his wife to tell her about the poisonous letter; but he was late home, because Mr Whiteley, who never watched the clock, had kept him talking, and now the gong called the family into the dining room.

  Because Leonard and Gwen Morley had some natural good taste without worrying about what taste was, this square high-ceilinged room with embossed wallpaper and chocolate dados had never succumbed to late Victorian excesses. Since vulgarity was calming down, they were somewhat in style. The brown velvet curtains hung straight from the rail with no swags or swoops. The oak table bore only the necessities, grouped round the silver flower-boat that had been made for Leonard’s father. Above, a wheel of small lights was skirted with a plain burgundy pleated silk.

  ‘Young Will not here?’ Leonard started to drink turtle soup with a vast spoon. Whiteley’s, who imported turtles for their own exquisite clear soup, had just begun to stock this cheaper line, and he had brought home some tins to try.

  Madge’s friend and co-worker Will Morrison often came home with her for a good meal. ‘He’s sleeping at the Settlement dormitory now,’ she said. ‘It seems like a good idea. I might do that sometimes too.’

  ‘Would that be proper, dear?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s thought we could be a civilizing influence on the Stepney people.’

  Leonard, Gwen, Dicky, Madge herself and Flora Bolt, fiddling at the sideboard, had a healthy laugh at the idea of revolutionary Madge civilizing anyone.

  When the house-parlourmaid, big breathy Flora, had collected the plates, Gwen said, ‘There’s something not quite right about that soup.’

  ‘It’s mock, ‘m,’ Flora answered. ‘Made of calf’s head.’

  ‘Will the customers buy tinned dishwater, Leonard?’ Gwen asked, as if she had ever tasted that, or even had her hands in it.

  ‘I told Mrs Roach she’d watered it down too much,’ Flora said.

  ‘Why did she?’

  ‘Make it go farther, sir.’

  ‘I brought enough home.’

  ‘Not for downstairs.’

  ‘My apologies.’ Leonard sharpened the long thin knife and carved the gammon joint expertly at the table.

  ‘Quite all right, sir,’ Flora told him briskly. She had been with the Morleys about six years, since she had left her husband when she was twenty-five. Her policy had always been: you play fair with me, I’ll play fair with you.

  With the fruit, when Madge and Dicky had left the table and Flora Bolt had at last finished clattering and gone below, Leonard took the terrible letter out of his pocket, where it had weighed like lead all afternoon.

  ‘Read this, Gwen.’ The note was a thick black spiky scrawl, the handwriting probably disguised. Because the small grey envelope had been marked ‘Private and Personal’, one of the correspondence clerks had given it to Leonard for him to open.

  Rich man Whiteley is your boss. He is filthy scum. He won’t listen, but you can tell him he is a vile pervert and must pay for what he’s done. Blood money! I demand it. Or else.

  Gwen looked for her glasses in vain, read the note with her beautifully arched brows raised, then lowered them to read it through again.

  ‘Oh dear.’ She shuddered. She folded the harsh grey paper in its creases and gave it back to her husband. ‘What is a pervert, Leo?’

  ‘Well... it’s a vicious slander. The whole thing.’

  ‘What does W.W. say?’

  ‘I haven’t shown it to him. I’ve not had the heart. It’s twenty years, Gwen, since those devastating fires at the stores, and four years since the laundries blaze. It’s all over, the envy and hatred of local shopkeepers, and everything is going so well. The Chief’s an old man, but he’s still at the peak of success. He’s probably the most respected man in London.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Gwen laid her soft unblemished hand on Leonard’s arm and searched her husband’s face with fond, misty grey eyes. ‘This is only a madman. A vicious madman.’

  ‘I saw Arthur French on the way home, and almost t
old him about it. But the last thing W.W. would want is any sort of police investigation now. It’s bad enough when there is shoplifting, or dishonest staff to be charged. He doesn’t enjoy that as he used to.’

  ‘Who could feel like this about him? The incendiarists – whoever they were?’

  ‘After all this time? A disgruntled ex-employee, perhaps, carrying an unhealthy grudge.’

  ‘But why send this horrid thing to you?’

  ‘To upset me, as well as the Chief.’

  ‘But why you?’

  ‘Because the Manager is away. Wait – whoever it is must know he is away. That’s bad.’

  ‘Has it upset you?’

  Leonard nodded. It was hard for him to talk about emotions. The letter had also made him afraid, but he did not tell Gwen that.

  ‘They shan’t, on a beautiful evening.’ She came behind him with her bare arms laid downwards along his upper arms and her imprisoned breast pressing into the back of his neck. ‘Forget this stupid thing.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s like a dead weight on my mind. What does it mean, Gwen?’

  ‘Oh, pooh – nothing.’ She had a wonderful way of banishing anything disagreeable. ‘You’re so hot, dear, are you ill? I’ll get you some Arctic Pills.’ Gwen Morley, the darling of the patent-medicine advertiser, had pills and powders for everything.

  He turned his head to smile up at her. ‘I’d rather take you on the river.’

  ‘It’s much too late. We’ll get a cab and go to the Serpentine and stroll about in your linen hat and my girlish sailor, and people will think we are young lovers.’

  Chapter Two

  Leonard’s older brother Hugo lived at Ladbroke Lodge, a hundred yards up the road from No. 72 Chepstow Villas, and a much grander establishment, four storeys high, with its own private gate into the desirable gardens of Ladbroke Square. It irked him that Leonard, a mere shopwalker when all was said and done, had been able to buy a key to the gardens.

  Hugo, who was a financier, commanded a fair salary for amorphous duties on the board of two City companies. His wife Charlotte, born Carlotta Müller of Magdeburg, had money of her own, which compensated for the traces of Prussian speech that Hugo had gradually dislodged, along with the original version of her name. Charlotte believed in the worthy Victorian principle of: ‘If you’ve got it, show it.’ Beyond the great stone leopards, black and princely, which guarded the front steps, varnished double doors with enough brass on them to sprain a footman’s elbow admitted you to a daunting hall, hung with bought trophies and tasselled weapons. Statues smirked in niches between barley-sugar pillars. Over the banister at the turn of the grand stair, a Kashmir shawl descended like a gold-encrusted waterfall.