Something Wholesale (3 page)

‘I will not have a Commère,’ she said firmly. ‘We must have a man.’

‘Young Mr Fumble?’

‘Young Mr Fumble is not fit for anything after lunch, as you should know, Flagstone.’ Miss Trumpet’s eyes were boring into me.

‘You’ve got a fine, deep voice,’ she said. ‘If you’ll do it I’ll show some of your models.’

At three o’clock the Parade began. Great changes had taken place since the morning. The platform was tastefully draped and banked with fern and chrysanthemum. In the background a three-piece orchestra from the tea lounge scraped away industriously. Three hundred chairs groaned as three hundred women leant back to enjoy something for nothing.

‘And this,’ said Miss Trumpet, towering over the microphone, ‘is Mortimer Fell of the B.B.C., who has come specially from London to compère our show … Over to you, Mortimer,’ she ended, roguishly.

I picked up the script. ‘The theme is “Back to Normal”,’ I said. All through what would normally have been the lunch hour I had rehearsed it. During this time Miss Trumpet had displayed the gentler side of her nature. I soon came to the conclusion that being cosseted by Miss Trumpet was an even more macabre experience than meeting her in the normal way of commerce with, as it were, the gloves off.

Almost at once the first model girl came prancing on. ‘Number One, FROU-FROU,’ I continued, looking down from my eminence on the platform on to the bald head of young Mr Fumble, asleep in the front row. ‘A neat little number, isn’t it? Suitable for COCKTAIL WEAR OR GOING ON SOMEWHERE AFTERWARDS. (What the devil did this mean?) Notice the detachable halter and CLEVER BEADING.’

FROU-FROU was followed by a terrifying looking woman
of ample proportions with blue hair. A vintage version of Bertha. ‘Number Two, Mrs Whistle shows TWO CIGARETTES IN THE DARK, a gown suitable for the woman who is a teeny bit larger.’ (I recognised one of our own productions here.) And so on to Number Seventy. Number Seventy was the Wedding Group. This had been carefully rehearsed. The string orchestra was to break into Mendelssohn and rose petals were to be scattered. It was to be the climax of the afternoon at Throttle and Fumble.

Number Sixty-Nine, SOIXANTE-NEUF, went loping off. ‘Number Seventy,’ I said, ‘GREAT DAY.’ The band plunged into the Wedding March; but the Wedding Group failed to appear.

I tried again. ‘Number Seventy, GREAT DAY.’ Nothing happened. The audience began to twitter. From behind the curtains came a gentle mooing sound. There was still one more line of script. I read it.

‘… And that brings us to the end. Throttle and Fumble hope you have enjoyed seeing these lovely things as much as they have enjoyed showing them.’

And young Mr Fumble still slept on.

‘Miss Trumpet has gone home,’ said Miss Flagstone, much later, as we sat together drinking tea among the ruins. ‘She was most upset about the Wedding Group. She’s not coming again this week.’

I asked her what had happened to it.

‘Never you mind,’ she said, darkly.

‘Did Miss Trumpet say anything about keeping any of the dresses?’

‘No.’

‘But they’re all covered with lipstick and the velvet one’s split up the back.’

‘Ah,’ said Miss Flagstone, ‘That Mrs Whistle, I always said she was a slut.’

Next day I sent a frantic telegram to the Adjutant in Ayrshire asking to be posted abroad.

Lane and Newby Limited, the family business of which my father was the patriarchal head and my mother a director was a commercial venture of a sort that is now extinct. By the time I visited Throttle and Fumble on its behalf in that first damp Autumn after the war nothing quite like it existed in the western world. Perhaps on the peripheries, in the coastal towns of Asia Minor and the Levant, a blurred pastiche of it might still be found in those agencies with British names managed by Armenians wearing grey flannel suits and club ties. In England it was probably unique.

It was unique because it was one of the first establishments of its kind – and now it was the last. In the nineties, when my father had gone into partnership with Mr Lane, their joint venture had been a novel one. At that time the idea of expensive women’s clothes being ready-made was almost unheard of. That a store buyer could be persuaded to visit premises situated in the West End of London, far from the vast, wedge-shaped warehouses that hemmed in St Paul’s Cathedral seemed a remote possibility. Nevertheless they prospered.

In 1945 Lane and Newby, by then shorn of much of its prosperity, occupied a house with an elegant eighteenth-century façade in Great Marlborough Street. The Partners had moved there in
the Twenties when Regent Street had been demolished to make way for the buildings that make it such a dreary, open ditch and which are now being dwarfed by even more outrageous structures. When they bought the lease Great Marlborough Street housed solicitors and firms that sold sheet music. It had not yet become the epicentre of that spectacular convulsion, the wholesale fashion industry, a dwarf counterpart of Seventh Avenue.

Mr Lane, the senior partner, was no more. The dissolution of the partnership and his departure from the firm had been preceded by an orgy of litigation from which the Newby faction had emerged in a state of near-financial collapse.

I remember seeing Mr Lane on one occasion only; when, as a small boy, I had been on my way to Wimpole Street to have a gumboil lanced. With his great beard he had looked to me like Moses.

There the resemblance ended. For Mr Lane was a man of uncertain tastes. His exploits were always referred to in hushed whispers. In my presence words descriptive of practices of which, at the age of seven, I had not the slightest inkling, were spelled out laboriously by my parents in order to render them doubly unintelligible.

As the years passed my father and Mr Lane became very distant indeed. Both were sportsmen – but of a different kind. My father took his exercise in the open air.

My father was obsessed by rowing. When he was forty-five he married one of his model girls, who was twenty-five years his junior, not an unusual thing to do in the business in which he was engaged; but instead of allowing her to gain the upper hand and run to fat, as is customary, he taught her to row and reconstructed her into one of the most stylish oarswomen on the River Thames.

The best man, who was subsequently to become my Godfather,
viewed the impending marriage with misgiving. He was himself a dedicated rowing machine who had won the Diamond Sculls at Henley and the Olympics at Stockholm. He and my father were owners of a double-sculling racing shell which, when they were properly bedded into it, was one of the fastest things on the river between Putney and Mortlake.

It was not the union itself the best man objected to. He himself had married the previous year, probably because he felt that a rowing man, like an ocean-going submarine, needed the equivalent of a depot ship to return to. It was the implied threat to their partnership in the double-sculler that worried him. His fears were groundless.

The wedding reception was held at Pagani’s, a now long-defunct restaurant whose knives and forks survived until recently in a public house in Great Portland Street, W.1, still the great throbbing heart of the dress trade. Only a few guests were invited. My father lacked the necessary courage to inform Mr Lane that he was depriving the business of its best model girl; and in retrospect the wedding day can be regarded as the beginning of what modern historians refer to as A Time of Troubles. As nothing else could, the ceremony underlined the disparity of interest that separated Mr Lane from my father.

As soon as the cake was cut, my Godfather suggested a workout in the double-sculler.

‘The train isn’t for hours yet,’ he remarked. The honeymoon was to be spent at the Lotti in Paris, where the senior partner thought my father was going in order to buy models from the Autumn collections.

‘There’s plenty of time to get down to Hammersmith. It’s just coming on to high water.’

‘We can take a cab,’ he added, improvising recklessly to suit the occasion. And they did. ‘We had a jolly good blow,’ was how my
father described it when he returned to his bachelor chambers at Queen’s Club, long after the departure of the boat train, to find his bride in tears, supported by her best friend, who had herself made the mistake of marrying the best man and could offer little but cold comfort.

In the following ten years my mother devoted herself to raising me; enjoying herself with my father after office hours and getting on with her rowing. She had abundant opportunity to get on with her rowing.

In the evenings on week days in the Summer, when he was not travelling with the Autumn collection, my father used to row in eights; on Sunday mornings he used to scull ten miles. This Sunday morning ritual was a great trial to everyone as he used to return to the house, which he had taken at Hammersmith so as to be near the river, at half past two in the afternoon, roaring for hot roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Because of the timing we rarely had servants; even in the Twenties only the most feudal-minded domestics would wait until mid-afternoon to serve lunch.

This unseasonable food despatched, he used to order his motor, a modest open Citroen (he had a great dislike for ostentation) to be brought round to the door where the chauffeur loaded it with baskets containing ‘the tea’. Then, together with my mother, who by this time was in a state of nervous prostration, we would set off for Richmond.

Even this short journey of five miles or so was memorable. My father was a back-seat driver in excelsis; at the slightest real or imaginary provocation he used to stand up in the open machine and deliver broadsides of vituperation at any other road user who endeavoured either to pass him or, if a pedestrian, simply to cross the road.

He himself had driven only on one memorable occasion. On that afternoon, returning from what he always referred to in
retrospect as ‘my trial spin’ he had placed his foot inadvertently on the accelerator instead of the brake when about to enter the garage and had destroyed the façade.

In the Twenties Richmond still preserved some of the idyllic atmosphere of an earlier, more leisured age, and on a warm summer afternoon the Thames flowing quietly at the foot of the hill had something of the quality of a painting by Claude Lorraine, an illusion that was heightened by the misty blueness of the shadows among the trees and the grotto-like entrances to the boathouses of the mansions whose gardens ran down to the river, which were overgrown with vegetation, dim, mysterious and cool.

My father’s private boat was exactly what you would have expected him to own if he hadn’t been in the wholesale business. It was a really big double-sculling skiff built of mahogany and beautifully maintained. In 1926, when I first remember it, it was already fifty years old and I was still using it in 1959 when an unusually oafish, so-called waterman broke its back putting it in the water; by which time it was over eighty years old. Now for the first time in memory our family is without a river boat.

It had fixed rowlocks and fixed seats, each with a perforated felt pad for the scullers to sit on. The sculls were the original set made when the boat was built and were the most perfect I have ever handled. The craft was equipped with a boathook, what is called in river parlance a hitcher – actually a paddle-cum-hitcher with a long handle, which was very useful for getting in and out of locks – and a mast and a sail which was never used. The only times we used the mast were on the rare occasions when we towed the boat, which my father and I sometimes did, employing a sort of double harness of webbing. But even in the Twenties the towing path along the bank of the river had ceased to be used for its proper function; horses were no longer employed to tow barges, vegetation had sprung up and our efforts at towing usually ended
in our becoming caught up in a blackberry bush. Why we should want to tow the boat at all was never clear to me. My father said it made a change and my mother, who used to steer, took the blame when anything went wrong.

The internal appointments were sumptuous. Up in the bows there was a long, fitted cushion of dark-blue plush with buttons on it, on which one could lounge at full length. The seat on which my mother sat while steering had a plaited cane back like the body of an Hispano-Suiza motor car; aft there was another long cushion. The carpets were of fine quality and matched the cushions. The boat was varnished and was the colour of fine old furniture. It was lined out with real gold leaf and beneath the rowlocks inboard there were black and gold transfers of sphinxes’ heads. On the bow were my father’s initials. Everything had its place; the picnic baskets were specially made to fit the boat and there were mahogany table tops that fitted across the gunwales, with holes in them for plates and glasses so that the contents would not spill ‘in a heavy sea’. If any china got broken replacements had to be specially made – a process that took months, even years, as the holes were of an unusual size. There were hidden lockers and drawers for such things as loose change and tickets for going through locks; there was even a wicker holster affair, similar to the things mounted policemen keep their truncheons in, intended to hold a parasol – my mother kept an umbrella in it. Altogether the skiff could hold five people comfortably for an afternoon. It was also a camping boat. Iron hoops fitted into brass sockets in the thwarts to form a skeleton frame over which fitted a green tarpaulin cover. By day this cover was brailed up, but at night or during bad weather it could be let down to form a tent over the whole boat. This produced a sort of half-light which turned the occupants a curious shade of green. The same kind of cover is still fitted to punts on the Thames. In spite of their colour,
or perhaps because of it, punt covers have the property of making young Englishmen amorous which, under normal circumstances they seldom are, except in liquor at three o’clock in the morning.

Our clothes matched our craft. My father wore white flannel trousers with a narrow black stripe, turned up to show his black-and-pink club socks. He wore white buckskin shoes and he had a magnificent blazer of cream flannel with five buttons up the front. None of the clothes made by his tailor ever wore out. They belonged to a period before the First World War when a button once put on was on for ever. My mother always contrived to be extremely elegantly turned out and at the same time workmanlike as she needed to be.

Normally the least sensitive of men to what others wore, my father was extremely put out if anyone turned up for an afternoon on the water in what he described as ‘the wrong sort of clobber’. There was an occasion when a detective from Scotland Yard was invited to accompany us. My father had an extraordinarily wide acquaintance and I think he hoped that the presence of a real live detective would please me. For days before I was consumed with excitement, but when he finally appeared, in scorching weather, the detective wore a black suit, black boots and, when he took off his jacket and waistcoat, displayed a thick flannel shirt and rather grubby braces. He lent an air of gloom to an otherwise happy outing. From that time onwards my father always referred to him in the past tense as ‘that fellow who wore braces’.

At Messum’s boathouse, when we finally arrived at Richmond, there was always a tremendous palaver about putting the skiff in the water. An experienced boatman would be in charge of the operation and apprentices were routed out of the dark recesses of the building to help with the launching. The wicker baskets were stowed away; there was a great business of putting on and taking off sweaters; at the last moment the leathers of the sculls
would have to be greased. Finally we were away, my mother steering, I in the bows trailing my hand in the water and being told to ‘sit her up’ by my father, who was sculling strongly, ‘to get her up a bit’ as he put it. He was shoving her through the green water – for at that time Thames water was not the barely diluted sewage it is today – past Glover’s Island, that beautiful little island with the noble trees growing on it that makes the view from Richmond Hill; Eel Pie Island; Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, and Strawberry Hill where Horace Walpole lived; until somewhere by the sluices at Teddington Lock, where the Thames ceases to be tidal, we would have our picnic tea.

In those days our skiff was not an anachronism. There were friends of my father whose private boathouses held at least a dinghy, and sometimes a punt and skiff as well, friends whom he used to salute and before whom I made my best efforts with the one scull I was allowed to use as a mighty oar. The only interlopers were what my father used to call ‘trippers’, who came down on the bus from London and hired a boat for an hour or so. They were usually to be found in midstream and, if they were in a punt, happily paddling from both ends in opposite directions, trying to tear the thing apart.

It was not so much the social implications of their performance that upset my father, although the idea of a punt being propelled by anything other than a pole must have been repugnant to him, it was the menace to his property.