The Passing Bells (7 page)

“Oh, we
talk.
That is, we open our mouths and words come out . . . but that wall is there and we both know it . . . and we both know what that wall is. Or rather I should say
who
that wall is.”

Hanna pressed the pencil against her pursed lips and then stood up and walked over to stand next to her husband.

“How pretty the garden is,” she said quietly. “So wonderfully ordered and neat. It's a pity that lives can't be arranged in the same manner, but they can't and you know that they can't. We can merely guide people . . . train them . . . and I believe that we've trained Charles very well. He will never do anything that isn't the right and proper thing to do. He's infatuated by Lydia, and always has been, but I know in my heart that when it comes to a decision, he will make the right one, the one that pleases you and me.”

“Perhaps,” the earl grunted, eyes fixed on the geometric plantings below.

“But we mustn't press him . . . at least,
you
mustn't press him into building this wall you refer to any higher. It was a mistake inviting Mary and Winifred. I told you that.”

“Winifred's father is—”

“A fine and honorable man,” she cut in. “Yes, I know all that, and it would be wonderful if Charles fell in love with the girl and married her. But let me put in a little Yankee common sense, if you don't mind. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Charles feels nothing for Winifred. Nothing at all. In fact, he probably hates the poor girl by now and if he does we're to blame. I made up my mind last night when I saw the expression on Charles's face when you
suggested
that he take Winifred down to see the new gazebo. I shall have a quiet heart-to-heart talk with Mary and stop this nonsense before it goes any further.”

“You can't tell the woman to leave and take her daughter with her. That wouldn't be right.”

“I won't tell her to leave, just explain the blunt facts. She may be flighty, but she does have four sons who have minds of their own. She'll understand Charles's feelings and she won't resent it one bit. Mary's an old and dear friend and we've always been candid with each other.”

“Well, all right,” he said in a pained manner. “Perhaps you're doing the right thing.”

“I will be doing the
only
thing.” She touched him gently on the shoulder. “I'm a mother
and
a woman. I understand Charles far better than you do at this period in his life. And what's even more important, I understand Lydia.”

“Oh, I feel so glorious!” Alexandra shouted, bouncing up and down on the car seat.

“Sit still,” Lydia shouted back, “or you'll fall out.”

Alexandra settled down firmly in the leather seat, keeping one hand pressed on the crown of her hat. Lydia, frowning slightly, concentrated on adjusting the controls until the engine stopped its stuttering roar and settled into a smooth, powerful howl. They were past the village of Abingdon, racing along a narrow road which curved in a succession of lazy S's through dense old woods and sunlit patches of hedgerowed fields.

“Gloriously happy!” Alexandra cried into the slipstream of wind buffeting her face. “Oh, Lydia, do you realize that by this time next year I might be having a baby! That is, if we have a short period of engagement. I don't believe in long engagements, do you? Don't you think they're horribly old-fashioned?”

“Oh, do be quiet, Alex,” Lydia said in vexation. “You're enough to make a saint swear. Honestly, you are.”

The younger woman leaned closer to Lydia to keep from shouting over the noise of the engine.

“I went into Mama's sitting room last night after dinner and stole a long peek at her lists. Oh, Lydia, she's inviting every devastatingly handsome bachelor in London.”

“How do you know they're
devastatingly
handsome?”

“I just know, that's all. Not a one under six feet . . . all destined for greatness . . . And one of them will sweep me off my feet and into his strong ravishing arms.”

Lydia rolled her eyes toward heaven. “What trashy novel did you steal
that
line from?”

“Jane Bakehurst—you don't know her, she was my very best friend at school this year—well, she bought this book by Elinor Glyn. . . . Frightfully racy.”

“Alex, you're impossible. The sooner you get married, the better.”

“I couldn't agree with you more. I can't wait to have babies, dozens of them—well, five at least—all fat, pink, gurgling things, and I shall stroll into the nursery every night with my devastatingly handsome young husband beside me, and Nanny shall parade them in front of us.”

“Are you planning on having all five at one swoop?”

“No, silly, one at a time . . . a decent interval between each. But seriously, I believe marriage and babies to be a holiness. I truly do.”

The countryside gave way to the suburbs—Epsom, Cheam, Merton, and South Wimbledon, rows and rows of little brick houses, and semidetached villas of mock Tudor design. The traffic became heavier when they reached Lambeth and Southwark: cars, lorries, buses, and ponderous horse-drawn wagons. They crossed the river via Westminster Bridge and so on into Mayfair. The House of Ferris, couturier, occupied an elegant Georgian edifice in Hanover Square. Lydia stopped in front of it, and a doorman dressed in the livery of a Victorian coachman hurried from the entranceway to open the car doors.

“Good day, Miss Greville . . . Miss Foxe,” he said, touching the brim of his hat. “Shall I have a boy park your motorcar, Miss Foxe?”

“Not today, thank you. I'm not staying.”

Alexandra sprang from the car like a fluffy Persian cat. “Don't you dare pick me up before three. I don't want you to see my gowns until they're free of basting stitches. Promise?”

“Promise,” Lydia said flatly. After the doorman closed the car door, she put the Benz into gear and roared off in the direction of Oxford Street.

Foxe House was one of the largest, most modern office buildings in England. It had been designed by an American architect and completed in spring 1912 to a flurry of controversy. Letters had poured in to the
Times
, the bulk of them decrying the erection of such a building within viewing distance of Nash's pristine Regent Street façades. But after a few months, Londoners began to grow used to, and then fond of, the oblong multistory limestone-faced building near Oxford Circus. It had long been Archie Foxe's dream to have all the varied departments of his vast enterprise under one roof instead of scattered hither and yon about the city. The efficiency of what Archie Foxe called “the Yank method” had been more than proved during the two years of the building's occupancy, and several of the larger British corporations were constructing massive office buildings of their own. The skyline of London was beginning to change, and that was just what Archie Foxe liked to see.

Lydia turned into the entranceway of the subterranean garage, where a boy in a smart blue uniform took the car from her. She removed her linen motoring coat and left it on the seat, then walked to a lift, which whisked her upward. The lift stopped at several floors and people got in and out—secretaries, office boys, mail clerks, men and women from advertising, marketing, the White Manor division, the Foxe's Fancy division, the legal and real-property departments. Lydia was instantly recognized by most of them and politely wished a good day, but she knew only one of her fellow passengers, a tall ruddy-faced man named Swinton, who was chief of the advertising department. He had gotten on at the first floor, a pipe jutting from his mouth and a large portfolio of drawings under his arm.

“Hallo, Lydia,” Swinton said cheerily. “Come to take the guv'nor to lunch?”

It was a little joke they shared. Archie Foxe had never been known to have lunch. Once, long ago, Lydia had insisted that he join her at lunch at the Savoy Grill and Archie had sent Swinton in his stead.

“No,” she said with a smile. “Just come to pay my respects.”

“He's busy as a beaver. We're opening the new place at Charing Cross next week. Like to take a look-see at these?” He opened the portfolio to reveal half a dozen watercolors, rough sketches for advertising posters.

“They're very good.”

“Thank you,” Swinton said. “We're attracting some first-rate artists these days. The Slade School has finally stopped turning its nose up at us and we're getting some damn brilliant chaps from there . . . women, too. Any particular one strike you?”

“That night scene is very eye-catching.”

Swinton slipped it from the portfolio and held it up. It was an impression of a London street on a rainy night, great blobs of brilliant color shimmering in reflection on the wet pavement. People, heads bent against the wind-driven downpour, were scurrying shadows. Amid the gloom rose a brightly lit two-story building with the words White Manor illuminated across the front of it. At the bottom of the sketch—which would be even more effective when done in oils—was a slogan in black ink:
GET OUT OF THE WET AND INTO A
W
HITE
M
ANOR
.

“Yes,” Lydia said, “I like it very much.”

“So do I. It's for the winter campaign. Well, ta-ta.” He stepped out of the lift on the fourth floor and Lydia continued upward to her father's office.

Archie Foxe had an office of his own, complete with a desk that had once belonged to the Duke of Wellington when he had been Prime Minister, but he rarely spent time there. He was a roamer, a compulsive walker, going from office to office and desk to desk from the ground floor to the top, overseeing, supervising, suggesting, demanding, criticizing and praising, as the case might be, every one of his employees, from clerks to members of the board. Trailing after him would be one of his harassed stout-legged male secretaries, a shorthand notebook and a pencil constantly at the ready. One filled notebook represented a very slow day indeed.

Archie Foxe had been destined to make money and had never felt the slightest surprise that he had done so. He had never thanked God for his good fortune and was quick to point out that neither luck nor the Almighty had had anything to do with it.

“Hard work and a bloody good idea,” was Archie Foxe's sole business philosophy. He was sixty years old and had been born in the slums of Shadwell in London's East End on New Year's Day, 1854. He would not talk about his childhood with anyone, not even his own daughter, nor had he done so with the woman he married late in life and who had died when Lydia was a child, an upper-class woman from Cumberland, who, had he told her, would not have comprehended his stories, or would have thought them mere Dickensian fictions. It had been a childhood of stinking hovels and workhouses, of a father drifting away in despair to gin-caused madness and a mother dying of consumption in a freezing attic. He could see the place of his childhood from the top-floor windows of Foxe House, the great serpentine stretches of the Thames below Blackfriars Bridge. It was not a distance that could be measured in miles.

Archie Foxe had been sent from a children's house of detention to Bethnal Green at the age of nine to be an apprentice in a butcher shop in Smithfield Market. The butcher's brother owned a bake shop, and Archie's job was to chop up scraps of near-putrid beef and veal, which the bake-shop owner turned into gelatinous meat pies. The vileness of those pies inspired Archie to make better ones, which he did after quitting his apprenticeship at the age of seventeen. He entered into partnership with a middle-aged widow who owned a tiny bakery near Covent Garden. The two of them made the pies at night, and Archie took them around to various eating establishments and public houses and sold them during the day. They couldn't make enough of them, and within a year they had rented a building and had ten meat cutters and pastry men working for them.

“It was just a question of pilin' one thing on another,” Archie would tell a magazine writer many years later. The bakery growing, the acquisition of horses and delivery wagons, the expansion of product—beef and veal pies, beef pies with kidney, veal and pork pies, pork pies with currants and apple chunks. . . .

“And then the puttin' of the pies in tins, shippin' 'em to India . . . Australia . . . all round the bloody world.”

The widow sold her share of the partnership to Archie in 1880 to spend the balance of her days in a comfortable house in the country with four servants.

“ 'Avin' it all to meself was really what did it. I could feel free like . . . just do what I ruddy well wanted.”

What he wanted were a few shops in strategic places on the corners of major thoroughfares—clean, well-lighted places where ordinary blokes could have a cup of tea or coffee and something good and filling to eat and be waited on by a pretty young woman dressed in a blue uniform with a starched white apron and a white cap and all for very little money. He wanted all these shops to look exactly alike so that people would recognize them instantly. He thought up the idea of painting the exteriors a glossy white, and the first of all the subsequent hundreds of White Manor tea shops opened its doors on the northwest corner of Ludgate Circus on June 3, 1883, the shop at Holborn and Gray's Inn Road opening two weeks later.

“Men must eat, you see—that's only nature. A man can go years on the same pair o' boots, a woman can wear the same coat from one year's end to the other, or 'ave the same 'ousehold furnishin' for a lifetime, but they must eat, three squares a day and a cuppa char every few hours or so. That's the natural thing about it . . . that's why you can't 'elp but make a bit o' money at it, caterin' to that natural fact, you see. Can't 'elp it. . . . And the only trick to it is in givin' just ordinary people decent grub at a fair price, because those are the people you want to sell, the people who've got to watch their pennies, see. . . . Because there's a lot more of them kind of people than there are rich people, who don't give a damn 'ow much they spend for a meal. I don't care if they come into a White Manor or not—that is of no concern to me at all . . . not one bit . . . no. I built the White Manors with some bloke who clerks in an office in mind, with a shopgirl in mind. Yes. Only, of course, it grew a bit from that, you see. Got a bit more posh, you might say. Yes. There are White Manors where a navvy can hop in for his tea and two slices, and there's the White Manors that got a ruddy six-piece orchestra and a duke couldn't find fault with the Dover sole. But the price stays fair, you see. . . . That's the whole bleedin' trick—the price stays fair.”