One of the Family Page 7

  Leonard read the card. ‘Tobias Taylor Esq., 42 Egerton Terrace, South Kensington.’

  ‘A good enough address,’ Gwen purred. ‘I liked him, didn’t you, Madge?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ Madge, not self-conscious or threatened by men, never pretended to belittle them.

  ‘I thought him attractive. Would he do for you, I wonder?’ Madge was twenty-three. Gwen did not think that she would ever marry Will Morrison, or the other way round.

  ‘He’s probably got a wife and several mistresses, Mother.’ Madge had seen the woman in feathers and furs who had beckoned to him.

  Gwen put Mr Taylor’s card into her sequinned bag. ‘Should I have given him my card, Leo? I can never remember what’s correct.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ Madge said. ‘That’s why I like you, Mama.’

  ‘Perhaps we should have invited him to Sunday luncheon today,’ Gwen mused.

  ‘Now that would not have been correct, since you want to know.’ Leonard’s professionalism made him aware of conventional etiquette. ‘It would be too early in the acquaintance. If it is going to be an acquaintance, which I doubt. A man like that has too many irons in the fire.’

  ‘What a pity. He could have met some of the family.’

  ‘Lucky fellow.’ Madge came into the large front bedroom in a scarlet wrapper and bare feet, which Leonard was not sure she should do while they were still in bed, although he liked the sight of her, with the red girdle embracing her supple waist. ‘But he could have been even luckier and met Jack. Will is bringing him today.’

  ‘Who is Jack?’

  ‘Mama, I told you. Jack Haynes, from the Settlement.’

  ‘The dumb one?’

  ‘Not dumb, I told you. Deaf.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Gwen had noticed the time, and was out of bed in her long cotton nightdress, collecting pieces of clothing, opening drawers, swaying about like a slender young bride among the dresses in the wardrobe.

  ‘It won’t be “Oh dear”. It will be delightful. Jack needs to get out into life. His deafness used to turn him in on himself, but the Settlement is teaching him to look outwards. He’s hungry for new experience. He needs to be fed on life and people – real people, not the riff-raff who used to take advantage of him.’

  ‘It’s very interesting, dear, but not when I haven’t got my clothes on.’ Gwen had gathered up an armful of garments and was on her way to the bathroom. ‘We’ll be late for church.’

  After the service, and a mercifully short sermon, which was why they made St Peter’s their parish church rather than the grander St John’s, patronized by Hugo and Charlotte, some of the men of the family turned up at No. 72 for Sunday morning stump cricket in the backyard. This was a game devised by Leonard and his eldest son when Austin had started to play squash at school. Gwen had always wanted to have the paved yard dug up and planted with a tiny lawn and flower beds, but the Sunday cricketers would not have it.

  The wicket was on a weighted stand in front of the open shed at the back of the house, which made the wicket-keeper’s job easy. If he missed what the batsman missed, the ball could only thud around the shed breaking flowerpots. It could not go anywhere, unless the house door was open, in which case he chased the ball down the basement passage to the kitchen.

  The bowler hurled an old tennis ball from the central grating and, without running, you scored off the walls which surrounded the backyard of No. 72. Two runs off the neighbours’ garden wall, four off the high brown brick wall of the Portobello Bakery, five if the ball landed in one of Gwen’s flower tubs, and six if you could clear the roof of the stable block in the mews.

  Austin had been twelve when the game started in 1890, therefore boys of that age could join the men. Not fair, said the girls, whether they wanted to play or not. This year, the age had been lowered to ten, so that Dicky could play. Not fair, said the girls, and the older boys.

  This morning, besides Austin, as enthusiastic and noisy as he had been at twelve, Hugo’s son Tom was here and Teddie’s son Greg, home for half-term. Leonard’s policeman friend Arthur French came from farther down Chepstow Villas almost every Sunday. His new wife watched from one of the back windows and waved, or clutched her hands to her mouth if someone slipped and fell or got hit by the ball, which could easily happen in the small enclosed space. When Arthur dropped an easy catch, she raised the window to lean out and join the jocular abuse with a shrill call: ‘He can’t catch criminals either!’

  Will Morrison did not turn up in time to play, being a duffer at games, and although Madge had said the cricket would be enjoyable to Jack Haynes, who was strong and athletic for a boy brought up in the slums, Will thought she was wrong, knowing this tribal family.

  They arrived at the same time as Hugo and Charlotte, who graciously directed them to the tradesmen’s entrance. Madge ran down the front steps to rescue them, and introduced Jack with some rather wild gestures. ‘My aunt. My un-cool.’

  Jack nodded stolidly. Will had told him that the family was too large to worry about who was who.

  ‘Why is Madge waving her hands about?’ Charlotte demanded.

  Jack, who could catch some of her words because she spoke clearly with a vigorous Germanic mouth, grinned and pointed to his ears.

  ‘Ach! This person is deaf and dumb, Hugo.’ She shouted at her husband to prove her point. ‘I will say one thing, Gwen, you never know whom you may meet here.’

  In the house, Charlotte leaned over the prow of her bosom to kiss her sister-in-law on both cheeks, which was fashionable this year, although difficult under their large church-going hats. Hugo went out to see the end of the cricket. With his son Tom, he had joined in when he was younger, but not since he had grown into a prosperous shape.

  Leonard called out, ‘Last over! Will you go and get the beer for us, Hugo? Flora will give you the jugs.’

  ‘Not I,’ his brother protested. ‘Get your own beer.’

  They packed up the game with a friendly dispute about who had won and took the big earthenware jugs to the public house down the Portobello Road for the ritual drawing of the Sunday beer.

  *

  On Sundays when it was cold luncheon, Flora and Tat put all the food on to the table and everyone helped themselves. Seeing how they enjoyed it and how much they ate, it had to be wondered why they bothered with the whole slow palaver of formally served meals on other days.

  Little orphan Tat, who was a bit of a rebel because of being cheated out of a mother and father, had wondered this and been jumped on by Flora; for if the old order of things was ever swept away, what would you have left?

  The order of Sundays at No. 72 stayed the same until the weather was too cold for the gentlemen’s silly bat-and-ball game out at the back. This Sunday was a bit different because of the chimpanzee that Madge had taken out of the jungle to do good to. She might have done more good by showing him off to the Morleys when Mr Hugo and Her weren’t there.

  She, in that shiny coal-scuttle hat and buttons as large as plates on her busty jacket, had obviously thought he would lunch in the kitchen. No doubt this Jack would have been happier there. Upstairs was too polite. Some people ignored him, some tried too hard, leaning forward with exaggerated speech, pushing out their lips like Hottentots. Not easy with a mouth full of food. Flora thought he would rather be ignored. To answer, he had to put down knife and fork, his keys to heaven, to manage his rough speech and make the mumbo-jumbo signs with his hands.

  Good little Dicky, nature’s naughty saint who might have simply stared or giggled, took it on himself to teach the poor fellow everybody’s name. When he found out that the ape could read a bit, he was tearing pages out of a notebook and writing names down.

  ‘Bel-la. Horse-tin.’ His baby name for his older brother. ‘In-spec-tor French. Greg, my cou-sin.’

  Dicky pointed. Cloth ears gave a grin and duck of the head, like a Punch-and-Judy puppet. The boy Greg grunted. He led his own life, Greg did, and wasted no words.

  Nor did Jack,
having so few of them. He leaned across Mr Will to tell Madge loudly, ‘Lot food. You rich.’

  She laughed and shook her head. The table had been shocked into staring silence, so Dicky tugged at the sleeve of the deaf man’s awkward charity jacket and fed him another name.

  ‘That’s Lizzie. Horse-tin’s wife.’ Poor girlie, she could hardly reach the table. She carried her babies all to the front.

  ‘Li-shee.’

  ‘Don’t call Elizabeth that,’ Dicky’s Aunt Charlotte ordered from under the black scuttle hat. ‘Only servants are called Lizzie.’

  Flora, bringing more bread, said, ‘I beg to differ, Mrs Hugo. My Irish cousin was in service where the daughter was Lizzie, so they had to change the scullerymaid’s name to Betty.’

  Flora’s own madam, at the end of the table in just the right sort of dove-wing November hat that put Mrs Hugo’s to ridicule, said with interest, ‘I didn’t know you had an Irish cousin, Flora.’

  ‘We don’t talk about her much.’

  ‘You talk about everything else,’ snapped Mrs Hugo, a snob with her own staff, who despised her and robbed her blind. Madge and Bella sometimes tried to bring the old girl into the twentieth century, but Flora thought it was too late. If she did ever think to treat her servants like members of the human race, they’d be dead suspicious. That crooked butler and the parlourmaid Crocker and them, they’d think She had found a new way of cutting wages and lengthening hours.

  No one liked change really, whatever Madge and her East End lot believed. Even poor Bella might take fright if her parents suddenly started being nice to her. She had got used to being happier at No. 72 than she was at Ladbroke Lodge.

  All this Flora saw. She did not miss much. Her stepbrother Ben wanted her to be something better than a skivvy – ‘Oh, yes, such as a criminal, working for you?’ – but she would miss the drama of it, the free sideshow.

  She saw that Bella was out to show her parents how good she was with the deaf specimen. She was usually shy with a strange man, but Jack didn’t count. She smiled and talked into his face, like Madge had shown her, and he repeated her name loudly, ‘Bey-ya.’ Look! They had made friends.

  But as everyone got up from the table and Jack put out a hand to pocket another apple, Flora heard Madge mutter to Bella, ‘You’re trying too hard. Don’t patronize him.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s you who are patronizing, Maddy,’ Mr Will said when Bella had put out her tongue at Madge and taken Jack off to the piano, and Madge and Will had gone into the study for a cigarette. ‘I know you want to give him a chance, but don’t lose sight of reality.’

  ‘Jack is my friend,’ Madge said. ‘Everyone brings their friends to No. 72.’

  The door was open and Flora, hurrying to finish clearing the table because it was her free afternoon, could hear them.

  ‘All right, but don’t get too involved,’ he said, stern as a judge.

  Madge laughed. ‘That comes well from you. The Settlement is your life.’

  ‘That’s different. Our duty is not to damage in any way the people who need our help.’

  ‘Oh – so sanctimonious.’

  ‘No, Maddy, I’m right. I know you’ve done a lot for Jack, and he relies on you. But that’s just the point. Watch that it doesn’t become anything more than that.’

  ‘You’re jealous!’ Good old Madge laughed again, which must have been hurtful to the poor gingery young man, because jealous was what he was, even if he didn’t know it.

  ‘Madge, come in here!’ Bella called across the hall. ‘Jack can get the rhythm when I use the loud pedal. Come and hear us sing!’

  With her elbows out, Flora got her arms braced to the weight of the loaded tray and waddled down the hall to the back stairs with her hips steady and her feet out, as you had to do with half a ton of silverware and china. When she went out, later, she stopped in for a talk and a laugh with one or two old friends in Notting Dale and took a bottle of lemonade to her grandmother, who was in the last-call ward at St Charles’s Hospital.

  At No. 7 Talbot Close, Daddy Watts was asleep with his calico kerchief over both eyes after a Sunday pork dinner, so Flora and her mother drank tea and made toast by the fire in the front room, where her mother slept on the settee so as to hear her husband in the night.

  ‘If I was you, I’d let him yell himself blue.’

  ‘You’re hard, Flo. That’s why you’ve lost one man and not likely to get another.’

  ‘I didn’t lose Bull. I didn’t want him. Better off without.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Six of one and half a dozen of the other.’

  Like many of the women they knew, they needed men and suffered from them.

  Violet was out singing in the choir at a special church service for the Girls’ Friendly Society.

  ‘Bad luck for the Friendlies,’ Flora said. Vi’s voice was high, but not what you’d call pure.

  ‘She wants you to go and see that Mr Slowpoke for her. She promised to write a letter for him.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she keep her own promises?’

  ‘Flo, she’s at church.’ Mrs Watts, like most of her neighbours, never went to church, but revered the idea of it, and was a stickler for the trappings. Vi’s christening, Flora’s wedding to Mr Bolt, the funeral of the stillborn baby after Violet, the last gasp of her womb, had all been grand occasions.

  Slowpoke, whose name was Koslawpek, lived in a room papered all round with used postage stamps in a block of streets beyond Convent Gardens known as Jews’ Island, where refugees from pogroms in Russia and Poland had settled. Although they had infiltrated the shops and market trading, many of them still could not read or write English. After Flora had made the best job she could of two business letters for him, she refused the tuppence he usually paid her sister, and went up the broken iron steps from his basement area.

  The lamp-lighter came round later here, because there were no tips. The streets were already dark. Flora intended to go to some friends at Westbourne Park, who always played cards on Sundays. In All Saints Road, she passed a public house which was not open, but there was light in an uncurtained downstairs window. Inside, a man sat sideways at a table, a man with cropped hair and jutting jaw dented with the cleft of an old wound.

  Her heart lurched. She stood for an instant paralysed with fear and sickness. Bull Bolt, her husband, lawful or not, she did not know, since no one was sure whether his first wife was alive or dead. Her face was quite close to the lighted window. For a moment they stared at each other, then his mouth opened square and black.

  ‘Flor-rer!’ He banged on the frame of the window, fit to break it.

  She turned away, stumbled off the kerb and across the street and ran in a funk, not to Westbourne Park but back through the network of small streets towards Chepstow Villas, her home, her safe place.

  Mrs Roach and Tat would not understand, but Madge was there, and she left the book she was reading to take Flora up to her room, out of breath, gasping, sobbing, shaking with fear, and something else she hated.

  ‘Save me.’

  ‘He won’t come here. He can’t hurt you.’ Madge hugged her, tall and strong, and Flora was conscious of her own smell of sweat.

  ‘I know. But it’s me. A bit of me still – still – oh, Madge, it’s disgusting.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Madge said sensibly. ‘It’s sex.’

  None of Flora’s women friends down Notting Dale would have said that. They were crude enough, but they made out to be fearfully proper. Madge was the real friend.

  She calmed Flora and joked with her and asked, ‘What shall we do with the mad bull?’

  ‘Nothing, I suppose.’ Flora went to the window. Beyond the back of the house, rows and rows of roofs and chimneypots piled away one upon the other into the smoky darkness. Somewhere in the streets below, he was there.

  ‘We’ll have to find you a new man,’ Madge said.

  ‘I don’t want a new man. I’m done with men. But Madge ...’ F
lora said with her back turned. ‘Would you kill me if I ever went back to Bull?’

  ‘No point.’ Madge laughed and came to draw the curtains. ‘He’d do that for me, I expect.’

  ‘Madge, would it be all right –’

  ‘Don’t ask me to judge what’s wrong and what’s right. You know how I feel about that.’

  ‘Would it be all right for me to have a wash in the bath before they come up?’

  Chapter Eight

  On Saturdays when there was no rain, or wind funnelling through the streets from the heights of north London, it was often Gwen Morley’s pleasure to go shopping down Portobello Road. This November morning she was accompanied by her son Dicky and five-year-old granddaughter Laura, brought over for a treat by Austin, from Addison Road.

  Gwen’s Portobello Road was a different thing from the Lane of Dicky’s adventures, and she had never penetrated into the meaner streets and the forbidden stews of Pottery Lane. She did not buy at the market stalls, but she knew many of the small shopkeepers and enjoyed a leisurely gossiping progress from dairy to butcher to ironmonger, inquiring after babies and ancient parents and stopping to chat in the street with housewives like herself, as if it were a village.

  Dicky was greeted, discreetly because of his mother, by a different population of cunning, grubby boys and stallholders who knew him as an occasional lookout for Flora’s stepbrother. He saw Noah outside the fried-fish-shop and winked at him, to disassociate himself from his proper Norfolk suit and tam-o’-shanter, but he had to stay close to Gwen and Laura, and carry the shopping basket.

  They visited the grocer, where the children were allowed to take a handful of sultanas out of the sack in the back room, and bought lamb cutlets from the straw-hatted butcher and some kidneys for Mrs Roach to devil for Sunday breakfast. Although milk churns came round to No. 72 in the painted cart like a chariot, the children wanted to go to the Alderney Dairy, where podgy Miss Evans let Laura work the iron cow for customers. You put in a penny and the spout poured milk into your jug. On the way home, Gwen bought candles at the oil-shop, in case Kensington’s temperamental electricity faded out again, before Dicky steered them towards the sweetshop.