One of the Family Page 10

  Her unpractised face moved into its difficult smile and she went out with Mrs Drew.

  ‘Head!’ he said, and she jerked it up manfully as she went through the door.

  Young Mrs Ackerley and her husband had been to Italy in October. ‘Just as you told us to do, Mr Taylor.’

  ‘I didn’t exactly tell you, did I? I suggested that it might be just the change you needed.’

  Patients heard what they wanted to hear. He did not give orders, nor lay down hard and fast opinions, like some of the godlike doctors whom they had trusted and feared. But when patients had made up their own minds about what they wanted to do, they often liked to think it was what Toby had told them.

  ‘Well,’ said young Mrs Ackerley, pouting prettily against the veil of her hat, ‘it’s wather the same thing.’ Since her ugly skin condition had improved, she had begun to practise some flirtatious little tricks, like fluttering eyelashes, and cheek pulled in to make a dimple, and smudging her Rs.

  ‘The veil?’ Toby asked.

  It had taken two visits and the best part of a third to get her to raise the veil. He had had to peer through it at the skin rash which had been rubbed raw by a specialist’s revolutionary new corrosive ointment.

  She lifted it daintily over the brim of her hat, and sat slightly sideways, with her elbow on the arm of the chair and her small pale hand under her chin, as if Toby were going to paint her portrait.

  ‘Bew-tee-ful,’ he breathed. This was not strictly true, except in comparison with how she had first come to him. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she, Mr Ackerley?’

  Her young husband, who always came to The Clinique with her, because he did not let her go anywhere alone, sat silent in the other chair and sucked the ivory knob of his cane.

  He had never said much in the year it had taken to heal the ravages of the drastic treatment, which had promised a new skin for old, and to allow the herbal salves to do their work.

  Mrs Ackerley only needed to come to The Clinique now for fresh supplies of her mallow-root gel and the beech-tar paste with which she masked her face like a religious ritual during the relaxation siesta after her special diet lunch.

  ‘I continue to follow your regimen strictly, Mr Taylor.’ She produced the dimple. ‘It has been my miracle.’ She fondled the jar of ointment supplied by Toby’s herbalist. ‘My mysterious miracle, whose secret you will never tell.’

  He smiled at her enigmatically, and she said, ‘It’s only herbs, isn’t it? Dandelion and thistle seed, like a witch’s brew. Why are herbs always tied up with myths and magic?’

  ‘Because many of them can be toxic. The myths were woven centuries ago to keep the ignorant from poisoning themselves and other people with home-made remedies.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’ Young Mrs Ackerley pulled down her veil so as to give him an innocent siren’s eye from behind it. His eyes responded suitably. Did she ever practise these puny wiles on her blank husband? Would he even notice?

  ‘Every healer has had some disastrous followers,’ Toby said. ‘Look at Dr Mesmer and the harm that was done in his name.’

  ‘Magnetism. My gwandfather was very taken with that. He used to make hotel staff move his bed all over the room until he could be sure it faced north-east. Or was it west? Should we move our bed, do you think, William?’

  Her husband lifted his mouth from the cane to grin his wet lips at her quite lasciviously. A good sign. Toby thought that the improvement in young Mrs Ackerley’s skin was due not only to his salves, but to the confidence they – and he – had given her to behave like a woman.

  In gratitude for her miracle, she had brought him a small parcel wrapped in green paper. ‘I bwought you a little something from Italy.’ It was a tiny alabaster model of a birdbath, complete with four doves on the edge.

  Toby was careful to include them both in his graceful thanks. Mrs Ackerley bridled a little. Mr Ackerley continued to suck the knob of his cane. If I was to push his head down, Toby thought, I’d knock out his front teeth.

  After them, he saw a man with a floating liver who had been bled and purged and prodded and lectured by doctors who could not help him until he stopped drinking, but who would not stop drinking if he could not be helped. Either more or less intoxicated, he would reel into The Clinique to talk about death. Toby did not talk to him about life. He gave him a strong whisky and water.

  It was a relief, at the end of the afternoon, to take off his stiff collar and jacket and stop being courteous and charming. To address discreet Mrs Drew as Neelie, and shout at her down the stairs to hurry up with his coffee and cakes.

  As his practice had grown, by word of mouth, since he was not registered as an acceptable referral for professional medical men, he was seeing several patients a day, often productively, sometimes not, and constantly learning from his failures and successes.

  He knew that, had things been different, he would have been a wonderful doctor, a leading man in his field, fetched to Buckingham Palace in a carriage with footmen. His ambition had been thwarted, but as this pleasant humanistic, naturopathic practice prospered, he began to see that being expelled from the London medical school could have been a stroke of luck.

  After all, hadn’t he been pushed out because he was too clever? After two years of study, he had felt himself to be more effective than some of the dry-as-dust prehistoric professors who had been teaching the same principles and practices since the middle of the nineteenth century. He rebelled against the limitations imposed, even on senior students. When no one was looking, he behaved like a doctor. Patients on the wards liked him. He answered their questions and they talked to him, timid sick people who were afraid to open their mouths before one of the whiskery great men. Toby Taylor had been evicted from the hospital because he did too much and told too much. That unfortunate business with the nurse – that was just another weapon they used against him.

  Luckily – Toby believed his life was full of luck – this had happened after the death of his father, who would have been savagely furious. The old man had been an irascible physician in Swansea. He hated being called out at night – it interfered with his drinking – and he did not like his patients, so he had moved into research, and muddling about in the confused waters of local health programmes.

  His wife, whom he considered inferior and had always dominated, had been too unsure of herself to give Toby enough childhood security. He and she were close, because they were both victims, and they had shared some love and innocent good times together, but Toby stayed away from home as much as he could, to avoid drunken rages or black glooms, and the fleshy vulgar women his father began to bring home, to torment his already unbalanced wife. As soon as he could, Toby had lied and charmed his way into a place at the London medical school, to escape the drinking and the scenes and the women, one of whom had initiated him expertly at the age of fifteen.

  When Toby went back to Glamorgan after his father’s death, he found his widowed mother stranger than she had already been when he left home, and wandering dazedly down the road to insanity. He had taken a job as a hospital attendant in Swansea, which had taught him a lot of practical, down-to-earth things medical students never learned, and had managed, with help from a local old totty, to take care of his mother. It was during this time that he had made friends with Glyn, the gentle genius herbalist who had taught him some basics of his craft and now supplied The Clinique with nature remedies.

  The kitchen manager at the hospital, where Toby was at that time on the Almoner’s staff, went to London to work with a faddist physician who believed food to be the cause and cure of all illnesses. Toby followed her, was soon the faddist’s assistant, and added some knowledge of diet to his repertoire.

  His mother could not live alone, so he had her certified and moved to an institution within reach of London. On his visits there, he talked with one of the few genuine psychologists on the staff of this huge pinnacled institution called The Keep, an idealist who gave time to studying the individual, rather than cla
ssifying diseases of the currently voguish central nervous system. He encouraged Toby to read Sigmund Freud, and taught him something about the psychology of human behaviour.

  Picking up smatterings from everywhere seemed to Toby to be far more valuable than giving your life in depth to the pursuit of only one kind of knowledge. By his late twenties, he had begun to see how he could present himself as a man of healing.

  Six years ago, he had started his naturalist practice with few misgivings and a sincere desire to help his fellow man. If he made money along the way, that would only strengthen his dedication. Believing in luck was really a belief in yourself and your ability to grasp opportunity. His patients, men as well as women, wanted to believe in him. He was handsome and engaging and clever and attentive, unlike any doctor they had known. Charm was an important tool of his trade. He gave people what they wanted. Doctors gave them pills, and assaulted them with treatments that were often humiliating or painful. Toby’s gift was to make them feel better about themselves. He prospered.

  That successful old charlatan Mesmer, who had the gullible moving their beds about all over Europe – he knew about charm. He resurrected the word charisma. His magnetism had not all been the kind displayed by a compass. Trading on old daydreams and extravaganzas of long ago, he added the mysteries of planets and loadstones to ordinary nervous excitement. At healing ceremonies, he wore a sweeping lilac gown and held a wand over female supplicants, while young male assistants massaged spines and induced ‘magnetic fluid’ by applying fingertip pressure to breasts . . .

  But the old Teutonic mountebank had discovered some truths. He knew that ‘one man’s energy affects another’s sensibility’. That spoke very clearly to Toby.

  Although somewhat drained of charm and energy at the end of a busy day, he had restored both with tea and whisky by the time Mrs Marie-May Lacoste came in on her way to the theatre.

  Glorious Marie-May was in the second act of a Beerbohm Tree drama, so she sometimes came to Egerton Terrace for an early light meal, or after the performance for a late supper. Sometimes Toby went to the theatre and hung about in the dressing room before taking his mistress with the frosty fair hair out to supper. Although she was married, after a fashion, it was always to a restaurant and at a table where they would be seen. Marie-May, on the ascent in her stage career, needed to be seen in the cobwebby gowns which, with her astonishing cloud of hair, made her seem to float. Toby Taylor, on the ascent as a practitioner, needed to be seen with her.

  It was a useful as well as an exciting affair, although lately it had acquired a frisson of the danger that, although he subscribed to ‘He travels the fastest...’, Toby might be falling in love.

  Mrs Neelie Drew, wearing a tight face, showed her up to the first-floor salon where the fire had just the right glowing life and the small round table was set for two before it. Although Neelie Drew was sometimes required to bring breakfast to the bedroom for both of them, they waited until the door closed behind her before embracing – gingerly, since the actress would not have time to repair her hair or ivory porcelain face before going down to the waiting cab.

  Her mouth tasted of peppermints and the sea. She took off her gloves and furs and sat down at the table, where candles were lit and the cold food already set out. Toby took a bottle from the hearth and poured the wine.

  Marie-May, though delicate as a dandelion puff, was always hungry. She began to eat at once, as they exchanged friendly gossip, Toby about patients, she about the theatre.

  With the edge off her healthy appetite, she sat back and held her wine glass in both ringed hands. None of her rings was from Toby. Bracelets, brooches, pendants, but not rings. She was very definite about that.

  ‘How is your family?’ she asked.

  ‘Very well, bless ’em.’ Since he had no family, except his poor mother hidden in The Keep, Toby had begun to think of the Morleys as that. ‘Peter Pan was a huge success. Thank you, dearest Marie, for getting the seats. They couldn’t have been better. The children especially were in heaven.’

  ‘Never mind the children. What is there about this family for you?’ She narrowed her pale blue eyes, the colour of flax flowers in an early morning mist. ‘Are they potential lucrative patients?’

  ‘I don’t mix business with friendship. And anyway, there is nothing wrong with them.’

  ‘Then what advantage are they to you?’

  Toby leaned over the small table and filled her glass. ‘None,’ he said, with his face close to hers, ‘if you will believe that.’

  The lamps in the room were dim. The candle light made a halo of her fine flyaway hair. ‘Then why are you so taken up with them?’

  ‘I like them,’ he said simply. ‘They supply something I need.’

  Marie-May raised her glass to his. ‘Underneath the sophistication, the success, the wonderful-Mr-Taylor-he-cured-my-piles, the social élan, the glamorous actress . . . you are really an old Welsh bourgeois, Tobias Taylor.’

  Chapter Ten

  After the weekend of the Lord Lieutenant’s ball, Bella had arranged to come home on Tuesday morning. On Monday she sent a telegram to Ladbroke Lodge to say she would return that afternoon. The Friday and Saturday and Sunday evenings had been bad enough. She could not endure another.

  Two weeks before the ball, Gerald’s mother had belatedly telephoned Bella’s mother. ‘Did that bad boy of mine never get in touch with your daughter? Please ask her to forgive him, Mrs Morley.’

  Then Gerald, darling Gerald, had met her at the country station in the dog-cart. ‘I say, Bella, you are a good sport to come.’ Everything would be all right. On the high seat of the two-wheeled cart, bowling along in the wind, he did not talk much. Bella tied a scarf over her hat and kept looking at his manly profile, the weathered young skin, full lips red under the gold moustache, confident big hands on the reins, while he pointed out corking great ditches he had jumped and coverts where hounds had found.

  At tea before the huge log fire in the reassuringly shabby hall, she met the other guests, who were not too threatening: married couples, Gerald’s sister’s fiancé, a dowdy cousin, two dull men of indeterminate age, one horsey, one balding with freckles on his head.

  Disaster began when she came down in the green moiré for dinner. A small witty girl with a deceptive cherub’s face had arrived and boldly taken over Gerald. Worse, he was happy with this arrangement. Bella went upstairs and applied more Poudre d’Amour, and changed the coral necklace for tomorrow night’s grander pearls; but Gerald and Babs joked and fooled about and threw bread at each other and danced to the gramophone after dinner in a quite sickening way that would not be countenanced at Ladbroke Lodge.

  Babs and Gerald were a couple for the weekend. Bella hardly slept. When she forced herself downstairs for breakfast, it became clear that she was to be coupled to the man with freckles instead of hair on his head. Another of the failed, fortyish unmasculine bores who was invited here and there as an extra man. His shaven top lip was drawn in as narrowly as a flute player’s. The bottom one was a pale worm. Bella knew almost nothing about men, or their kisses. She had never speculated on their mouths before Gerald had kissed her on the stairs at Hamilton House.

  Freckles, in a frog-green hairy suit, helped her to porridge and kidneys and mushrooms and then put on an Inverness cape with a silly round collar and drove with her in the wagonette to the meet, whither Gerald and Babs had long since ridden off in scarlet coat and burgundy riding habit.

  At the ball, Bella did dance with other men besides Freckles, but only once with Gerald, who fell over her large feet and made hunting noises. He disappeared before the end of the evening, and Bella heard from another Heck-worth guest over late-night hot chocolate that he had been brought home drunk after running his car into a tree.

  Early on Monday morning, Bella walked to the village and sent her telegram.

  The chauffeur met her train. ‘Changed your mind about your young man, Miss Bella?’ He took her suitcase and looked at her inqui
sitively. She made some excuse. ‘I was to have the half day off after fetching Mr and Mrs Morley from their luncheon engagement,’ he remarked as they walked to the car. Ordinarily, Bella would have apologized, or at least felt guilty, but she felt nothing at all.

  She was unpacking listlessly when the parlourmaid came up to her bedroom.

  ‘Let me help you.’ Sybil Crocker was out of uniform and inclined to be kind. ‘I’m so sorry, dear,’ she said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘It went wrong, didn’t it? Herbert said you seemed quite upset.’

  ‘Herbert should mind his own business.’ Not much chance of that when everybody below stairs knew everything. ‘I had a lovely time.’

  She kept her voice high and light, but it broke, and Crocker sat down on the bed and held out her arms and said, ‘There now, come to Sybil, that’s right, have a good cry, then.’

  Bella did. She spilled out the pain of her thwarted love and hopes, and Crocker understood. She was a friend. It was safe to tell her, although from now on, Bella decided, as she blew her nose and caught sight of her hideous blubbery face in the dressing-table mirror, she would let it be known that Gerald Lazenby had been a passing fancy which she had now dropped.

  When Sybil Crocker had gone away with the empty suitcase, Bella went out of the house and across Kensington Park Road and Portobello Road to see Madge at No. 72 Chepstow Villas.

  ‘Hullo, Bella.’ Flora Bolt opened the front door. ‘How was your country weekend with the Great Lover?’ It was not only the staff at Ladbroke Lodge who knew everything. It was the whole family.

  ‘Very nice, thank you.’

  ‘We thought you wasn’t coming back till tomorrow, or they’d have made you go with them to the memorial dinner.’

  ‘What memorial?’

  ‘Come on, your own grandfather’s birthday, the great wa-hoo himself, and your father to make a speech.’