Alfred and Emily (14 page)

Alfred was saying, ‘These two boys of mine, well, you've known them since they were born. I don't have to say any more. They've been fighting over there, in more than one war. And then in South America, and in Africa. You tell them…Tom.' Tom took it up. ‘You see, living here, we are so ignorant
about what it's like over there. We aren't anything special, Michael and I, just the education we got here, but if you get into a village, let's say in the Transvaal or in Bolivia, you realize how much we get that others don't. You go into a village, and you are a wonder, what we know. Michael and I set up classes in all kinds of things. You'd be surprised…

‘And if we had a nurse with us, let alone a doctor…' broke in Michael.

‘Yes. And to cut a long story short —'

Alfred took it up: ‘We are going to set up a battalion. It's to cut out the recruiters – if a youngster wants to go out of England now the recruiters are waiting for them.'

‘The battalion will go, equipped with medics, particularly to the places they can do some good. And that's where we need your help.'

‘Oh, you aren't going to ask for my signature,' smiled Emily, who very much liked what she had heard.

‘That, too,' said Alfred. ‘No, it's your expertise. We have to raise money, you see.'

Emily said: ‘I can tell you what Cedric told me – he's our expert. If you can, keep everything under your own control. But that depends on how much money you've got.'

‘Not much. But we can raise a good bit around here. No one wants their sons going off to their damned wars.'

‘You need Cedric,' said Emily. ‘He'll fix you up.' ‘To get the young ones out of England, that's the thing,' said Alfred. ‘Did you know what a laughing-stock we are? Our bloody class system, our fits of silly public morality…'

Emily did not think it worthwhile to say again that she was not responsible for the recent scandal.

‘They laugh at us,' said Alfred. ‘This is a silly, petty, pettifogging little country, and we're so pleased with ourselves because we've kept out of a war. But if you ask me I think a war would do us all the good in the world. We're soft and rotten, like a pear that's gone past its best.'

Here, his sons and his wife began softly clapping at what they had heard too often. They laughed. They were laughing at angry Alfred, who said, ‘Oh, laugh, then. But I'm right. If we did have a bit of a war, I mean, not much of one, we wouldn't be so insufferably in the right about everything.'

Emily was not listening to Alfred. The baby, grizzling, was being rocked in those rosy arms. Ivy was smiling, so pretty, in her element, the centre of attention. What a picture, thought Emily, watching how the babe's tiny hands clutched at Ivy's woolly jumper.

So pretty, they are…and her heart ached. Why did it? There was no reason for it to, surely.

The sight of that young mother and her tiny child was going to make Emily cry again, if she wasn't careful.

‘I know I've only just come but if you knew what a day I've had,' excused Emily. ‘They wear you out…And you really must get Cedric on to this, Alfred. It's essential. No, I'm going. I'll just run along.'

General embraces and handshakings. Emily was out in the wind again, which could be blamed
for her wet eyes and cheeks. She said goodbye to Mr. Redway. She left.

Emily did not drop in to Mary's: Daisy was there. Mary and Daisy were not getting on – had they ever? Emily did not want to sit in on a bitter little conversation.

Daisy was saying that Ivy was being rewarded for wrongdoing. It wasn't right. She was going to live in this house and be looked after by Mary. Anyone would think that Ivy had done something wonderful and clever. Emily knew that Daisy did not really think like that: she did when she was with her mother. Mary was not really so condemning, as she was now, of her daughter. ‘How can you be so censorious?' and so on.

Emily went to the station and into the waiting-room. A few people waited for the London train.

Emily sat in a corner, and wept.

When Alistair died she had wept, and thought, Of course, one weeps when a friend dies. But it was very different now. She wept because until Alistair had died, and was gone, she had had no idea how much she cared for him. How was that possible? There was something wrong with her. The man had loved her. Now she admitted she had loved him. In the five years they had known each other he had asked her in a hundred different ways to stay with him, had written her delightful little notes and – here was a fact that did not go away – a hundred times could he and she have gone to bed, but for her this had seemed impossible. Why? She did not know. She did not know herself. To sit miserably crying, your
heart broken, well, many people have done that. But to sit weeping full of rage, of real fury, at yourself, well, perhaps that is less common.

The station master, between trains to and from London, returned to the waiting-room where a girl stood by the urn that held boiling water, and he and she chatted, and sometimes called out greetings to people in the waiting-room they knew.

Emily, her head in her hands, found a cup of tea sliding towards her and the station master was saying, ‘I know who you are. It is hard to see you so low.' And he brought out a flask of something – yes, whisky – and offered it, poised over her teacup. She nodded, thank you. ‘My niece was working in your Bristol school,' went on this kindly man. ‘It did everything for her. It is a wonderful thing you have done.'

Emily felt redeemed by the tea and the whisky and smiled at her rescuer, who then said that when she heard the train, she must sit right where she was until he came for her. Which he did, taking her out to the platform, his arm around her, until he found the guard, indicated Emily and, with a few whispered words, guaranteed a comfortable journey to London.

Back in Beak Street, she rang Cedric, who at once said, ‘So, you are back, Emily.'

And Emily said, ‘Cedric, I need to ask you something.'

And he said, ‘I know what you are going to ask. I'm psychic – no, it is Fiona. You are going to ask me how much money you have.'

‘Yes, that's it. How did Fiona know?'

‘Well, armed with my psychic foreknowledge, I looked up your account. You don't have as much as when William left you a tidy little sum, but who is your financial manager? Yes, it is I, Cedric, and you have nearly as much as you did then.'

‘Thank you, Cedric. I thought there would be much less.'

‘And now Fiona and I have been discussing what you want it for. She says you might be thinking of giving every girl who gets herself into trouble a big sum, enough to catch a husband. I, on the other hand, guessed you might be thinking of starting a refuge – am I right? Well, you have enough money for a really good house, staffed comfortably…'

‘I'm not having any of those ghastly God-bullies,' said Emily.

‘Quite right. That's what I told Fiona.'

‘I am surprised I am so predictable.'

‘Delightfully so, Emily. Like a knight of old, if there is a wrong you are going to right it. Mind you, you don't have enough money to start an empire, like the Martin-White schools, but you could have, let's say, three good refuges. I take it you don't want to go down the road of bishops and debs?'

‘Absolutely not. My money, and I'll be sole arbiter.'

‘And who could be better?'

‘Did your psychic flair tell you about Alfred Tayler and his Good Samaritan battalion?' ‘Alfred rang me and asked. If they are going to raise the money themselves, then all he'll need is an accountant: I shall recommend one. Have you decided what to call your refuges?'

Emily told him about Ivy Smith, and how she had quoted the parable of the woman taken in adultery, and had hit the nun who hit her.

‘Very good,' said Cedric. ‘Well, you can't call it the First Stone, which is what instantly springs to mind. Fiona has already suggested Ruined, after the Hardy poem. The trouble is that finding names, particularly for a dodgy enterprise, always leads one into the temptations of happy ribaldry. Are you crying, Emily?'

‘Yes, I can't stop.'

‘Have you thought of taking a really good holiday?'

She could not at once speak: since she had known Alistair, she had gone up to see him, stay with him, if she needed to rest.

After a while she said, ‘Cedric, I am a very stupid woman and I have only just understood it.'

‘Luckily, most of us don't have our stupidities brought home quite so painfully, poor Emily.'

‘I shall be very busy starting off the first refuge. I won't have time to think about what a silly woman I am.'

That wasn't exactly true. Since she had seen that girl Ivy, sitting there cuddling the very new infant, the picture hardly left Emily's mind, stabbing her to the heart – which was already overblown with grief. She, Emily, had had a mother, but she had died. All her life Emily had been saying, ‘I didn't really have a mother, she died when I was three.' Emily Flower, her mother, had been considered such a disaster there wasn't even a photograph of her.
Emily Flower had cared only for frivolity and enjoying herself…Wait a minute – she had had three babies one after another, and died in childbirth with the third. Did that leave much room for frivolity and fun? But here was Emily's new thought. Had it left much time to cuddle and dandle her first baby, little Emily? Had her mother ever actually held and cuddled and dandled her, as Emily had seen Ivy do with her new infant? Did she want to think about it? At least she must decide if she wanted to think about it. What she did not want was for grief to rush out of the dark pit it lived in and fasten on her heart, as had happened with Alistair.

She had to admit that, sitting there in Alfred's house, opposite that girl with her new baby, smiling, defiant, she, Emily, had wanted to kill her. Yes. Why had she? She had certainly never felt anything like that with Fiona and her infants.

Cedric said, ‘You shouldn't worry too much about Ivy Smith. If there was ever a girl who could look after herself…'

‘She didn't do too well looking after herself with us, did she?'

‘True. She nearly split the Martin-White Foundation down the middle. But surely the fault is with our delightful British public, not with her.'

‘Probably.'

‘Why don't you come and see me in the morning and we will arrange absolutely everything? I don't mind if you cry. Cry as much as you like.'

A
LFRED
T
AYLER
was a very old man when he died. He came from a long-lived family.

E
MILY
McV
EAGH
saw some boys tormenting a dog and went to remonstrate. They turned on her. It was believed that her shock at this was more the reason for her heart-attack than the blow she received on her head. She was seventy-three years old. Hundreds of people came to her funeral.

You can be with old people, even those getting on a bit, and never suspect that whole continents of experience are there, just behind those ordinary faces. Best to be old yourself to understand, if not one of those percipient children made sensitive by having to learn watchfulness, knowing that a glance, a tiny gesture may mean warnings or rewards. Two old people may exchange a look where tears are implicit, or say, ‘Do you remember…' signposts to something worth remembering for thirty years. Even a tone of voice, a warmth, or irritation, can mark a ten-year love affair, or an enmity. Writing about parents, even alert offspring or children may miss gold. ‘Oh, yes, that was when I was living in Doncaster that summer with Mavis.'

‘You were
what?
You never mentioned that.'

Writing about my father's imagined life, my mother's, I have relied not only on traits of character that may be extrapolated, or extended, but on tones of voice, sighs, wistful looks, signs as slight as those used by skilful trackers. More than once did my father say, with a laugh, talking
about some girl in his youth, ‘But I liked her mother even more.' From there came Alfred's intimacy with Mary Lane.

Bert was his childhood friend, a young man's mate. They had good times together in boys' pastimes and when Bert went with my father to the races, ‘Oh, I did so love the horses,' said my father. Meaning the animals themselves. ‘Bert and I went up to Doncaster when we could. But I was on my guard – I could easily be taken over by it all – those horses thundering down the straight with the sun on their hides, the smell of them, the slippery run of your hand on a rump. But Bert wasn't so cautious, not in that or in anything. I used to have to watch for Bert. He didn't care enough about himself.'

Once in Banket, in Rhodesia, for no reason I can remember, there was a Danish woman visiting. She was a large, laughing, ruddy-faced woman and I remember to this day sitting as a small girl on her lap, in her arms, thinking, She likes me, she likes me better than my mother does. And my father most certainly did like her. From that afternoon so long ago came Betsy, Alfred's wife: I enjoyed giving him someone warm and loving.

William, Emily McVeagh's husband, came from the little picture of my mother's great love that lived on her dressing-table. But, strange, it was a cutting from a newspaper in that leather frame, not a portrait from a studio or a friendly snap. Yet she talked as if she and he were to be married. It was a sensitive, cautious face, the sort of face you'd cast in a film as the lover too shy to speak his love, or whose first love died young, leaving him grieving and for ever unable to love
another. Even as a child I would look at that face and think, Well, you wouldn't have had much fun with that one. Meaning fun, the kind of good times my father talked about in London before the war.

Daisy was my mother's great friend all her life until, after many decades of writing England to Africa, Southern Rhodesia to London, they met again and I think did not find much in common. Daisy in life did not marry, but she was of the generation that did not find husbands: they were killed in the war, the war to end all wars.

Both Emily and Alfred, when young, knew how to make the most of London. They went to the theatre – my father loved the music hall; my mother enjoyed concerts; they had supper at the Trocadero, and the Café Royal. What energy they had, both of them. Cricket, tennis, hockey, picnics, parties, dances.

Cedric and Fiona, the young couple who liked Emily, were suggested by the couples, younger than she was, who befriended my mother. She always had admirers, younger, sometimes much richer, who liked her energy, her humour, her flair, her impetuous way with life. She also had male admirers. The one place in my mother's imagined life where I have taken serious liberties is her friendship with Alistair. He loved her but she did not know it, or didn't want to know it. This was suggested by the time after my father's death when my brother and I tried to persuade her to marry again. It was partly selfish: we made no excuses about wanting that formidable energy directed away from us. But there was also concern for her. She had had that long bad time, nursing
– years of it – with nothing in her life but a very sick man, her husband, who needed her every minute. Now there were men who wanted to marry her, sensible, quite impressive men, one a bank manager – surely up her street – another a well-off farmer. She could at last stop worrying about money, have decent holidays, companionship. But our attempts were met not only without enthusiasm but as if what we were suggesting was out of the question. But why? demanded my brother. Why not? I pressed and persuaded. It was her incomprehension that silenced us. That we should suggest such an impossible, inconceivable thing! How could we? ‘How could I marry anyone but your father? And besides, I must devote myself to my children.' Who were grown-up, with lives well away from her.

We actually discussed it, my brother and I, though chat about the emotions was not really our habit. ‘But why not one of them?' demanded my brother. ‘So-and-so – he's a perfectly decent chap, isn't he? What is the matter with Derek, then, or Charles? I think he loves her, you know,' said Harry, blushing at this inordinate use of language. ‘Why shouldn't she have something nice happen to her at last?' But no. Anyone would think we were suggesting she should mate with King Kong.

‘You know,' my brother tried again, in a fever of embarrassment, ‘you know, Mother, I think Charles is really keen on you.'

‘You really are so funny, you two,' said my mother, briskly.

From
The London Encyclopaedia
, edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, 1983

Royal Free Hospital, Pond Street, Hampstead, NW3

Founded by William Marsden, a young surgeon who was inspired with the idea of free admissions to hospitals when he found a young woman dying on the steps of
ST ANDREW'S
CHURCH IN HOLBORN
and was unable to get admission for her at any of the London hospitals which all then demanded letters of recommendation from a subscriber. On 14 February 1828, Marsden met members of the
CORDWAINERS' COMPANY
at the Gray's Inn Coffee House where they resolved to found the first hospital to admit patients without payment or a subscriber's letter. The hospital opened on 17 April 1828 under the patronage of King George IV and with the Duke of Gloucester as its first President. It has continued to receive royal patronage ever since. The original site was a small rented house at No.16 Greville Street,
HATTON GARDEN
, with only a few beds. The hospital, though familiarly called ‘The Free Hospital', was officially known as the London General Institution for the Gratuitous Care of Malignant Diseases. In 1837, when Queen Victoria became Patron, she asked that it
should henceforth be known as the Royal Free Hospital. In the first year 926 patients were treated. In the second year the hospital dealt with 1,551 cases. In 1832 over 700 cholera patients were treated. A matron and nurse were employed while the epidemic lasted. In 1839 another house was acquired and the number of beds rose from 30 to 72.

With rapidly growing public support, a larger building was necessary, and in 1843 the hospital moved to a site in
GRAY'S
INN ROAD
which had formerly been the barracks of the Light Horse Volunteers. The lease was purchased on 31 August 1843. The hospital extended its facilities on the new site, the Sussex Wing being opened in 1856 in memory of the Duke of Sussex. In 1877 the teaching of students began, and thus the hospital became one of the first of the London undergraduate teaching hospitals. The Victoria Wing with an out-patient department was added in 1878; and the Alexandra Building was opened by the Prince of Wales in 1895. The numerous benefactors included Lord Riddell, Sir Albert Levy, Free-masons, and several of the
CITY LIVERY COMPANIES
. Apart from the pioneer principle of its inception, the Royal Free took a leading part in two other important aspects of hospital work, the introduction of women medical students in 1877 and of a Lady Almoner in 1895. The admission of women to study medicine was the most momentous step in the history of the hospital and the provision of clinical facilities for women students marked the triumphant climax of a struggle for recognition that had been going on for some years by a small group of brave and deter
mined women led by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake. Until 1894 all the medical members of the consultant and resident staff were men, but in that year Miss L.B. Aldrich-Blake was appointed as honorary anaesthetist. In the following year she obtained the MS London, the first woman to secure this qualification, and she subsequently became a distinguished surgeon on the hospital staff. In 1901 women were accepted as resident medical officers.

In 1921 it became the first hospital in England to have an obstetrics and gynaecology unit. In 1926–30 the Eastman Dental Hospital was built to the designs of Burnet, Tait and Lorne. The Royal Free suffered severe damage in the Second World War, with considerable loss of beds. In 1948, with the inception of the National Health Service, the Royal Free Hospital became the centre of a group of hospitals which included the
HAMPSTEAD GENERAL HOSPITAL
, the
ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON HOSPITAL
, the London Fever Hospital (Liverpool Road), the North West Fever Hospital (Lawn Road) and subsequently also New End and Coppetts Wood Hospitals. The
ELIZABETH GARRETT
ANDERSON HOSPITAL
later separated from the group while the
HAMPSTEAD GENERAL
, North West Fever and London Fever Hospitals were incorporated with the parent hospital and its medical school in the new Royal Free Hospital, which was built on its present site to the designs of Watkins, Gray, Woodgate International. The first patient was admitted in October 1974; the hospital was in full use by March 1975; and was officially opened by the Queen on 15 November 1978.
There are now 1,070 beds comprising 852 in the new building, 144 at New End Hospital (New End, NW3) and 74 at Coppetts Wood Hospital (Coppetts Road, muswell hill, N10).