One of the Family Read online

  If you were privileged to ascend the first wide flight and enter the drawing room, you would tread carefully over rugs upon rugs, all with fringes and one with a head and paws, splayed awkwardly before the marble fireplace. The high windows that surveyed Kensington Park Gardens at the front and lush Ladbroke Square at the back were rigged out in velvet and gold cords. Knick-knacks, photographs, shepherdesses, bon-bon dishes, snuffboxes – there was a forest of little tables, but nowhere to put down a teacup.

  Reflected in one of the gilt mirrors, Edwin Deedes, Bella Morley’s gentleman caller, still held his empty cup and saucer. Tea was over. Whisky had not been offered, although the decanter and siphon were on a side-table. Bella, her undissembling face heavy with boredom, uttered desultory criticisms of Lady Prout’s ball earlier that week. She had not enjoyed herself, so it must be the Prouts’ fault. Was Edwin going to Millie Scott’s wedding?

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Edwin gave a dissertation on his connection with Colonel Scott. ‘Are you to go?’

  ‘I might.’ Bella looked at her mother, who said, ‘We are going.’

  Would Bella like to come to a private view of the theatrical costumes exhibition?

  ‘No, thank you,’ Bella said, and her mother remarked to the air, ‘We had an invitation.’

  ‘I could fetch you, my dear Bella. It would be jolly.’

  Bella shook her head. Edwin Deedes, with a touch of dye on his side-whiskers and elasticated around the paunch, was at least fifteen years older than her, and out of whatever running there was.

  Mrs Morley stood up and held out a fatly ringed hand. ‘I must go up and change for dinner.’ Although Edwin Deedes was adequate, if all else failed, to escort her daughter to minor functions like charity concerts, he need not expect to get his legs under Charlotte’s table at will.

  As Deedes showed a tendency to linger, she swept him towards the door with a muttered, ‘Wer gehen soll, der geht,’ to which he bowed politely, not knowing that it meant ‘If you’re going, go’.

  In the front hall, poor Edwin was asked by the butler, ‘Not staying for dinner, sir?’

  ‘I have another appointment.’

  Edwin took his Homburg from the man and hurried out, as if he were late.

  At No. 72 Chepstow Villas, serving dishes were put on the table, as they had always been. At Ladbroke Lodge, dinner was more elegantly handed round, à la russe. The butler, Hurd, was assisted by the parlourmaid Crocker. Dinner, even with no guests, which was fairly rare since Hugo liked to entertain and Charlotte liked to show off her house, was a long-drawn-out affair of unnecessary ritual and too many courses.

  Bella fidgeted with the glass and silver and asked herself, as she had ever since she could remember, What am I doing here? Her mother ate immensely, after greeting what was on her plate with an upper lip raised suspiciously towards the fleshy parrot curve of her nose. In the intervals, speaking rather affectedly as she did about even very minor royalty, she told an involved story about a Middle European countess who had married someone called Prince Albert von Hoch Eisenberg und zu Auber. Hugo Morley, florid and breathing stuffily in his tight dinner clothes, made some statements on current affairs, authoritatively, which was how he stated everything, whether he knew anything about it or not.

  He had to bring in the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ to rattle Bella. ‘I say, “Keep hysteria out of politics”,’ he boasted, as if no one had ever said this before.

  ‘Politics is not the point now, Father. It’s not just about the vote.’

  ‘Then what is it about, pray?’ He ate a potato without looking at her.

  ‘Well everything. It’s about women’s education and property, and –’

  Her mother frowned and tapped the back of a knife against her wine glass.

  ‘And opportunity, and –’

  ‘And neurosis. The female disease.’ Her father cut meat with civilized savagery. ‘They should be put away.’

  ‘Hundreds of women are in prison.’ Bella stared at him across the table. ‘I’m not a fool. Talk to me seriously – please.’

  ‘Why don’t you join ’em?’ This was his idea of a joke.

  Charlotte laughed nervously, and said, ‘Give up, Bella. Let us talk of something more wholesome.’

  But Bella would never give up wanting her father to think her sensible and clever. He was proud of her elder brother Thomas. He had educated him and engineered his start in business and made over a handsome sum on his marriage. Did he not even want to be proud of Bella?

  ‘I’m going to march in a procession next week,’ she muttered defiantly.

  ‘Why?’ he said in his distant voice.

  ‘Because petitions only end up in ministers’ waste-paper baskets.’

  ‘So they should.’

  ‘Well, I’m going. They might let me carry a banner.’

  Bella’s mother said, ‘I forbid it, child.’

  ‘I’m twenty-three, for that matter.’

  But Charlotte had found a new worry. ‘What would you wear?’

  After the raspberry bavaroise, Bella pushed back her chair and asked permission to leave.

  ‘You’re too restless.’ Charlotte’s face often wore a frown for her daughter under the padded swoop of grey hair that reared above her forehead like a breaking wave. ‘Stay and have some nuts. Whiteley’s has got the first hazels over from France.’

  She leaned the vast slope of her bosom over the table to disparage the nuts in their fluted silver bowl, because France was suspect, since the war with Prussia, and Whiteley’s too, since her brother-in-law Leonard worked there and brought down the tone of the family. ‘They may be all right.’

  ‘They gripe me.’

  Bella’s mother tilted her large head slightly towards the butler, but he never appeared to be interested in anything but his duties. If you addressed him during a meal, his stiff pose and detached reptilian face would be disturbed by a slight start, to show he had not been listening.

  Bella got up clumsily, dropping her napkin on the floor, and worse, bent to pick it up, as if there were no servants in the room. ‘I’m going to 72.’

  ‘You spend too much time there,’ her mother said.

  ‘I’m not really going.’ Bella lied easily from years of practice. ‘I just said that to annoy you.’

  ‘Where are you going, then, if one may ask?’

  ‘To see Beatrice.’ Bella named a local nincompoop on Campden Hill who was approved of.

  ‘Her mother lent me a book about Elizabeth of Bohemia,’ Charlotte said. ‘You can return it.’

  ‘Have you finished it already?’

  ‘You can say I have.’ Charlotte got along better with magazines than with books. ‘It’s in the morning room. And I wish you to come home before dark,’ she added, as if Bella were thirteen.

  The butler narrowed his eyes at Bella as she passed, and she had a muttered word at the door with the parlourmaid Crocker, who remained prim and official, although they were supposed to be friends. Bella took the Queen Elizabeth book upstairs, left it in a drawer in her bedroom and went out.

  With a hand on the flat head of a princely leopard for luck, she turned right from the wide bottom step. Instead of going straight across to Chepstow Villas, in case her mother or one of her paid spies was watching, she turned right at the corner past the Ladbroke Square railings, then crossed Kensington Park Road further up and ducked back to her cousin Madge’s house.

  Madge opened the door. Bella could never answer her own front door, even if it was someone special like Gerald Lazenby, for whom she would like to fling open the door, flushed and welcoming. But when the big brass knocker descended, echoing off the hollow pillars, and she ran down the stairs, the butler would manifest himself silently into the hall. ‘Are you dissatisfied with the service, Miss Bella?’

  Madge pulled her into the welcoming, familiar hall, smelling of Ronuk polish and dinner, and took her up the stairs.

  ‘Let’s go up to my room. Mama and Daddy have gone out. I’m so
glad you’ve come.’

  From the top of the stairs, Dicky shouted, ‘Bella! Come and see my construction – quick!’

  No wonder Bella spent as much time as she did at No. 72. She was always welcome, sure of the love and approval she had desperately sought and never found from her preoccupied, pretentious mother and the cold, critical father who had made her childhood wretched and forced her to rely on lies and fantasy.

  Ladbroke Lodge was chill and uncomfortable and oppressive. No. 72 Chepstow Villas was warm and full of life and laughter.

  ‘I’m sorry about this toffee dress.’ Bella used a word from their childhood, when they had made fun of ‘toffs’. Charlotte had made Bella put on the accordion pleated silk to receive Edwin Deedes, who was nobody, but at least an unmarried male nobody.

  ‘Oh rot, anything will do here,’ Madge said, as if her cousin were in rags. Madge wore a rather grubby skirt, drooping at the back, and an old shirtwaist blouse with unpressed tucks and rolled-up sleeves. Dicky, his blithe face unwashed, was in pyjamas a size too small.

  He dragged Bella off to see a complicated structure of wood and string taking up one corner of the disordered front room that was still called the nursery. As Bella began dutifully to try to understand what it was, Dicky became tired of that and demanded to play a game.

  ‘No,’ Madge said, ‘Bella came to see me. You’re supposed to be in bed anyway.’

  ‘Not till we’ve played a game, kind, lovely Madge.’

  Dicky, child king, thirteen years younger than his sister, got away with murder, but was none the less charming for it.

  He chose Ludo, because it took a long time. He was very competitive, like the whole family. When Bella dropped the dice and Madge thought she was cheating against herself by misreading it under the table, she said, ‘No – don’t let him win.’

  Bella, who was actually hoping to cheat in favour of herself, pleaded, ‘He’s only ten,’ to sound indulgent.

  ‘He’s got to take his chances like the rest of us.’

  Dicky won anyway, which got him sent off to the narrow bedroom between the nursery and his parents’ room, where the bed just fitted from wall to wall on a level with the window ledge. In her bed-sitting room at the back, which used to be the night nursery, Madge made tea on her spirit stove, and she and Bella shouted back at Dicky when he called to them that a man with a wooden leg was being chased on the pavement, or the flickering gas lamp outside was going to explode, until he finally fell asleep from one moment to the next.

  After they had looked in on the beautiful sleeping boy, Madge said fondly, ‘One day, I’ll have some of them.’

  ‘Not girls?’

  ‘Oh yes, some of those too.’

  ‘Shall you marry Will?’

  ‘Heavens no, we’re much too good friends.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘I’ll find someone.’ Madge was superbly confident. If she went shopping, she found the right dress at once. People were always at home if she called. The sun shone on her birthday. Men came to her because she did not look for them.

  ‘Madge. Have you and Will ever . . . ?’

  ‘No, silly.’

  ‘You would tell me if you did? What it’s like, I mean.’

  ‘You’d be better off finding out for yourself.’

  ‘When I marry...’ Bella hoped she meant that. ‘If I do. It’s all right to be a single woman nowadays. Especially if you’re doing something worthwhile.’ She still nursed the fantasy that she would be a pioneer woman at a university and have a significant career.

  ‘Like saving the world?’ Madge smiled.

  ‘I hope so.’ Bella sat on her cousin’s bed with her shoes off and stroked her bony ankles and feet, which felt more graceful than she thought they looked. ‘Medicine. . . science. I was good at that at school, in any case. I might have an important role to play, if I could just get the chance.’

  ‘You’re twenty-three and you haven’t done anything yet,’ Madge said bluntly. She and Bella were always honest with each other.

  ‘Where does one start? So many people are so dreadfully poor and needy while so many other people are disgustingly rich. That’s too vast a problem to solve.’

  ‘Only if nobody tries. Come to the Settlement with me and you’ll see where to start – just helping a few people in small ways.’

  ‘What could I do, in any case?’

  ‘You could teach, work with the children. Play the piano. Serve lunch to the cripples. Help to feed them. Some of them can’t use their hands. They put their faces into the bowl like little dogs.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Bella grimaced.

  ‘There’s this little girl – Angel we call her. She had been curled up in the corner of a dark room, never went out, because her mother didn’t want anyone to see her. We’ve had her six months now, and the change! She used to grunt. Now she laughs and tries to sing. Will and I took her to Victoria Park last week. It was such a joy to watch her rolling about on the grass.’

  ‘One child out of thousands,’ Bella said, but with less conviction than before.

  ‘I know we can’t help everybody, but, oh, Bella, when something works, it’s so wonderful! Come with me. Come tomorrow.’ Madge leaned forward, searching her cousin’s face to see if this was the right time to try to ginger Bella up again. Her short fair hair swung forward on her peachy cheeks.

  Bella put up a hand to her own dull brown nest and teased out the sides with her fourth finger. ‘I can’t tomorrow. I’ve got too much to do.’

  ‘Ladies’ luncheon?’ Madge shook back her hair and bared her white even teeth. ‘Shopping? The poor will have to wait. You’re always spouting theories, but you never do anything.’

  Bella, who had dropped back against the pillows under the abuse, sat up to attack with some spirit. ‘Well, you’re a fake. You only go to your precious Settlement because you like it there.’

  ‘True. Sacrifice isn’t required.’

  ‘And because Will is there.’

  ‘True again.’

  Bella fell back, irritated. After all these years of being confidante cousins, she had not found a way to wipe the easy smile off Madge’s face.

  She saw her own reflection in the mirror at the foot of the bed: round puzzled brown eyes under heavy brows, strong nose and lips, short neck carrying square chin. ‘Handsome’ was a compliment she did not care for.

  ‘Why can’t I be pretty instead of you,’ she asked Madge, ‘since you don’t seem to care whether you’re pretty or not? Why can’t I even be tall? Dumpy women are out of style.’

  ‘You’re petite,’ Madge said hopefully. She got up and sat on the bed by Bella’s large knees.

  ‘You’re a liar,’ Bella said.

  ‘What are you two laughing at?’ Dicky appeared in the doorway, ruffled, blurred, half blind with sleep. ‘You woke me up.’

  Chapter Three

  If Leonard Morley and his daughter left home at the same time in the morning, he often made a detour for the pleasure of her company up to Notting Hill Gate, then doubled back down Pembridge Villas to Westbourne Grove.

  They walked fast up Kensington Park Road, both with the same long legs, both eager to get to work.

  ‘Bella accuses me of only going to the Settlement because I enjoy it,’ Madge told her father.

  ‘Quite right. Like me and Whiteley’s. Like W.W. himself. He’d rather be there than anywhere else. Unlike my discontented Chief Buyer, Henry Beale, who would rather be almost anywhere else, except on pay day.’

  ‘I met him at the Cecil Hotel.’ William Whiteley held an annual banquet for senior staff and business colleagues, and Madge had gone last year instead of Gwen. ‘He said he was the Chief’s favourite. He drank too much and had bad breath and told me – I swear he winked – that his wife is suspicious of him and the female staff.’

  ‘She needn’t be, poor woman. He’s not as popular as he thinks he is.’

  ‘Even with W.W.?’

  ‘He butters the o
ld man up because he’s after promotion, but he’s malicious behind his back. My God!’ Leonard stopped dead outside the bullet-shaped window of Funeral Furnishings, where Kensington Park Road curved sharply round into Pembridge Villas.

  ‘My God, what?’

  ‘A sudden nightmare thought.’ But the idea of Henry Beale, pompous taskmaster and secret buttock-stroker, sending the poisonous letter, now locked in a drawer in Leonard’s study, was insane. ‘I must be going mad.’

  ‘Oh, is that all? Bye, Dad!’ Madge was striding across the busy street with her sunlit head up, dodging among the motor cars, buses, horse-vans and the bicycles of delivery boys towards the tube station.

  Madge’s Aunt Charlotte, who supposed you could throw money at the poor and leave them alone to pick it up, accused the organizers of the Settlement of self-interest.

  ‘You are mollycoddling the masses,’ she told Madge, ‘to try to ward off revolution.’

  But there was nothing either coddled or revolutionary about the East Enders who came to the Loudon Street Settlement looking for learning, for relief, for some shred of beauty, for new hope.

  Other enterprises had been started by church groups or political reformers, and had continued to do good work while force-feeding salvation or socialism. The Loudon Street Settlement was organized as a democratic fellowship, with beneficiaries on the committee along with benefactors, and no strings attached.

  The meeting hall and the classrooms and the kitchens and dormitory had been adapted from disused factory buildings, round a large sooty courtyard where games were played and races run and vegetables grown in old cisterns and bath-tubs. It was a dirty, scrappy jumble of a place, with a man’s club and a children’s playroom and books from the Literary Institute and classes which varied according to what was wanted, as well as teaching the basics of reading and writing. There were always men up ladders painting and hammering, and women preparing food in great steam coppers, and often some music to liven this tiny corner of the sad sordid warren of East London.