One of the Family by Monica Dickens

Author:Monica Dickens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1993-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

‘Now I’ll never know who wrote those accursed letters,’ Leonard fretted to Gwen.

‘What does it matter, Leo? They’re finished, done with. Forget them.’

‘I can’t.’

Two months after his old employer’s death, Leonard’s mourning had reached the stage where sick regret had taken over from crisis, to delay the restoration of happier memories from the past. Whiteley’s was recovering, business was buoyant, but that could not lighten Leonard’s sombre mood. He had lost weight. He thought his sandy hair was thinning. He could not get rid of a chesty cough, which Little Bucky’s mustard plaster did not dislodge. No. 72 was haunted by icy draughts. The high Georgian windows rattled, and you could hear the wind penetrating the gaps. The huge bathroom with the double basins and the eccentric geyser was freezing. The ventilation grilles on the Gents and the upstairs Place had to be stuffed with newspaper. Pipes in the servants’ basement Place congealed. All the inmates of the house had colds or chilblains. Everyone smelled of camphor oil and eucalyptus.

Whiteley’s was steam-heated. Customers’ furs piled up in the cloakroom. No wonder Leonard could not shake off his cough, scolded Dr Buckmaster. The contrast between indoors and outdoors was too savage. Coughing, muffled in a scarf on perishing mornings, Leonard longed to be comfortably inside the store; but the old Chief’s absence had left such a bitter void that coming to work was nothing like the joy it used to be. Leonard could not forget. Why did everyone else seem to have forgotten so quickly?

He liked it when a customer, seeing him patrolling the floors with his black silk cravat and wide armband, wanted to talk about William Whiteley, and to cluck about the sadness of it all.

‘It must be hard for you, Mr Morley,’ the elder Miss Moffat said perceptively, ‘to see it all going on like this,’ she nodded round the echoing tiled dairy hall, ‘as though nothing had happened.’

‘Thank you, madam. But we must remember’ – he had formulated a pompous little public disguise for his gloom –’that continued active trading is our best memorial.’

‘It is what he would have wanted.’ But Miss Moffat was not fooled. ‘Oh poor Mr Whiteley. I knew him for more than twenty years.’

Her eyes were moist. Leonard coughed into a large handkerchief.

Day to day trade was thriving. The lure of spring round the corner stimulated shoppers to spend money. The fashion showrooms and ready-made departments were crowded with women anxious to cast off sombre winter clothing and try out the new textiles and lusciously named colours. Aertex (’It breathes!’), stockinet, loganberry pink, aubergine. The new ‘health corsets’ were sold out as soon as a fresh order came in. Engineered to thrust the padded bottom out and the broad triangular bosom forward like a fearsome stuffed bird, they were no healthier than last year’s models, and probably even worse for the internal organs. But they were the thing!

That was important now. The old man’s sons, with all respect, knew that they must look ahead, not back.

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