All The Days of My Life (16 page)

“Never mind,” she says. “It was lovely.” Even at that moment Jim knows it should have been Mary, expressing the regret.

“We shouldn't have,” he says again. “Did it hurt?”

“Not much,” she says. “But it does now. The ground's hard.” Then, totally belying what she had just said, her hand comes round his cock again.

“Better go, Mary,” he says.

“All right, then,” she says.

They struggle into their clothes and walk off the bomb site, hand in hand, in silence. Now they seem strangers to each other. The act has emphasized their differences. Moreover, they have to part now. Jim has to go to his house. Mary has to go to hers. They reach the end of Wyckender Street. “I'd better tidy myself up before I go in,” Mary says. “Ivy'll kill me if I turn up like this.” She begins to straighten her stocking seams and pat at her hair. Suddenly she feels awful. She wants Jim to say something loving to her, but somehow he will not, or cannot. What he says is, “Be in bed, won't they?”

“Most likely,” Mary says, “but they've got the TV now.”

“Keeps them out of bed, I suppose,” Jim says. And Mary replies glumly, “It's the novelty of it.”

They walk up Meakin Street in silence. On the step Jim says, “Oh, Mary. I love you, you know.”

“I love you, too, Jim,” Mary says.

“Come round for you after work?” he asks.

“Oh, yes,” she says. They embrace and he goes off down the silent street. At the bottom of the street, rounding the corner, he waves to her.

The house is dark when she gets in. She can see through the open doorway of the front room that Jack has not come in. He now sleeps on the front room settee as there is no room for him upstairs. As she gets to the landing Ivy's voice calls sleepily from the other bedroom, “You in, Mary?”

“Yes, mum,” she calls back.

Mary undresses in the cold, pulls on her nightdress and gets into bed. Shirley, three feet away, in the other bed, does not stir. She is very tired, Mary, as she lies there, feeling the stickiness on the inside of her thighs, and gazing through her little cold window pane at the hazy stars in the hazy London sky. She wishes Jim were there beside her, warm in bed. But she is happy, just the same.

“So that's it,” she thinks languidly. “It's lovely, really. Easy. Natural. So that's what they all go on about. Better keep it from Ivy.” Then she thinks, “I do love Jim. I really do.” Feeling contented, happy and safe, Mary Waterhouse falls asleep.

“She hated her wedding – got stinking drunk on a big glass of sherry the night before,” reports Ivy, standing in the street, with her shopping bag, to her friend, Lil Messiter.

“I loved mine,” says Lil. “Thought I was the Queen of England. I soon found out otherwise,” she adds, looking down at the bulge below her waist. Ivy's eye follows hers. Neither woman says anything. A fifth child at the age of thirty-eight is no good for a woman, especially one in Lil Messiter's state of health. It is so bad, in fact, that you can't say anything about it. Even in 1952, with better medical treatment and care for everyone under the National Health Scheme, an exhausted and slightly undernourished woman can still have a bad time, even die, in childbirth and both the women know it. Ivy reflects, standing in the hot, dusty street, that in Lil's shoes she would have got rid of the kid, no matter what the cost, just like she did before once, after Jack and before Shirley. In fact she would not have
become pregnant in the first place. There is free contraceptive advice nowadays and Ivy takes it. She has got herself a job in a breadshop, and she is buying a television on the instalment plan. But this is not the time or the place to state her attitudes or point out her own, luckier, position. All she says is, “Who'd be a woman?”

“Well,” says Lil, shifting her shopping bag from one thin hand to the other, to take the weight off one arm, “your Mary should be all right in that way, at her age. Does the hospital say she's all right?”

“Yes,” says Ivy. “She's healthy enough, so I suppose that's something to be thankful for. Silly cow – I told her to stop messing about with Jim Flanders. Now she's having a kid, at sixteen years of age.”

“They don't listen to you,” says Lil. “Oh, Gawd. I'd better go. They'll be back from school soon, wanting their tea.”

Ivy watches her friend, very gaunt, moving up the road in an old, bulging, black skirt and faded blouse. She herself is wearing a new, bottle green rayon suit with the skirt at a long and fashionable length. Her hair is still blonde and her lips are still red. She walks up to number 3 Meakin Street, next to the pub, and knocks twice on the door. After a pause there are feet on the stairs and her daughter, Mary, opens the door. She is wearing a narrow black skirt and a maternity smock covered in red roses. Her hair is still short but the cunning bubble cut is growing out. She is pale, and a little puffy in the face, like a flower which has half-opened and now is beginning to droop.

“Come in and have a cup of tea, Mum,” she says, glad of the break.

“Thought you might like a few oranges – they're good for you,” says Ivy, following her up the stairs to the two rooms in which Mary and her husband, Jim, now live. In the room they go into there is an old, plum-coloured moquette suite of a sofa and two armchairs and that, apart from a small table, is all. The small window looks out on to the backs of the other houses. Mary makes a pot of tea in the little kitchen opposite this room. She brings it in and puts it on the table. Her mother goes and fetches the cups, the milk and the sugar. The kitchen, with its ancient gas stove, small sink and second-hand kitchen cupboard, is clean enough for a hospital but the whole flat, Ivy thinks suddenly, looks bare, as if it had been got ready for letting. There is not an ornament, not a bit of knitting, not a pair of shoes lying about to convince a stranger that anyone actually lives there. It looks unnatural, thinks Ivy.

The bedroom, into which she peeps on her return from the kitchen, is even more discouraging. There is the bed, with its grey blankets,
neatly made, pillows side by side, and there is the wardrobe, door shut, and there is the chest of drawers, drawers closed, top well dusted. The corners of Ivy's mouth turn down. Thought so, she says to herself.

“What are you doing, Mum?” Mary calls angrily from the other room.

“Nothing, Mary,” says Ivy and goes into the little front room. “How are you?” she asks, as she put the cups down.

“All right,” says Mary. “It's depressing, all this.”

There is nothing left of Miss Mary of Allaun Towers – nothing left of bad Mary, terror of the railway sidings, from Meakin Street, either. There's just Mary Flanders now, sixteen years old and pregnant.

She could have done anything with her life, thinks Ivy, her mother. Instead here she is with Jim Flanders, garage mechanic, with a baby on the way. Just sixteen. Poor Mary. Done for, unless she has some luck, poor little cow.

The truth was that the post-war years had made a difference to the way Ivy Waterhouse thought about life. World War II had in some ways broadened people's horizons. Many of Ivy's friends and relations had seen foreign countries, at the government's expense. Everyone had had the chance to look round the inside of other people's houses, broken open by German bombs. For five years stress had been laid on equality – equal struggle, equal fear and equal rations. Anyone in Meakin Street could see the difference between today's children, bred on allocations of milk, orange juice and dried egg, and yesterday's, bred on the dole, scanty wages and desperation. The war ended and a socialist government was returned overwhelmingly. A massively egalitarian programme of reforms was introduced. This, coupled with a boom in all trades due to post-war reconstruction, meant that working-class people were richer and more confident of their rights. As far as the Waterhouses were concerned the increased wages meant a better standard of living.

The rights meant that they could call in a doctor, free, when someone was ill, that bright little Shirley would be able to go to a grammar school later and learn Latin if she wanted to, that even Lil Messiter, with her poor health and household of children, would have an allowance of money for the younger children, no matter what her husband did with his wages, and would get proper medical care when the time came for her to have the new baby.

So it was small wonder that Ivy regarded her daughter Mary so
gloomily. Things were better now. Girls didn't have to be trapped in an early marriage because there was no alternative. And from what she saw, Ivy concluded that Mary was not even happy in her folly. She'd been better off playing the giddy goat up West, like she had, Ivy thought to herself as she walked back down Meakin Street after her visit to Mary. Better doing time in prison for that matter. Surest way to sentence someone for life, that was, she thought – to saddle them with a husband and kid at sixteen years old. At least she, Ivy thought, had had something before it all started – a couple of day trips to Brighton, staying daringly at a boarding house, wearing a brass ring from Woolworth's and pretending to be married – cockles and mussels and going to the fair, dancing on the pebbles on the beach. And she'd been in love with Sid, too, and from what she saw Mary was not in love with Jim Flanders now, and probably never had been, worse luck for both of them. At this point Ivy suppressed the memory of Mary's sobbing confession, in the kitchen one day when she came home from work, and of her own scream – “You stupid little bitch!” She also forgot the smacking blow round the face she had delivered, which had sent her daughter staggering back against the wall. Then she had flung on her coat and run up the street to Joe and Elizabeth Flanders' house. She had begun to knock repeatedly on the new doorknocker, shaped like a galleon, on their newly-painted door. By that time heads were coming out of windows. The Smith boys, loitering home, paused on the pavement to stare at Ivy Waterhouse, her coat unbuttoned, flying up the street to the Flanders' house. “Whoops-a-daisy,” said Harry Smith to his brother, “Mary's been and gone and done it, now.”

“Looks like it,” said the other. “Silly cow.”

In the meanwhile Joe Flanders had come to the door and was saying to Ivy, “Ivy! Nothing wrong, is there?”

“Not unless you call your son making my daughter pregnant ‘wrong',” Ivy cried. “I do – where's his mum? I want to see her.” And with that she rushed past Joe in the narrow hallway and burst into the front room where Elizabeth Flanders sat knitting and watching the news on TV. The little grey figures flickered as Elizabeth Flanders looked up, startled, and her husband burst in behind Ivy saying, “Ivy! What are you saying?” But Ivy was there first. Standing in front of Elizabeth Flanders with her hands on her hips she cried, “Mary's having a baby and your Jim's the father. What are you going to do? I hope you'll tell him to marry her.”

Elizabeth Flanders looked at her in astonishment and fear. She was a
small, grey woman, and at forty years old she seemed more like someone of fifty. Her aim in life was to live as quietly and inoffensively as possible, never interfering, never being interfered with, never doing anything and therefore never making mistakes. Her father, a fierce police sergeant, who now lived in Deal, bullying his roses as once he had bullied his family, had made sure that Liz Flanders would spend her life trying not to offend. This was why Joe Flanders now put his hand on Ivy's shoulder and said, “Sit down, Ivy, and let's talk this over sensible.”

“Hah!” snorted Ivy. “Sensible is it? I'd like to see you being sensible if your daughter was in the family way. It's not sense we need – it's action. Where is he, anyway? Don't you think he ought to be here?”

“He's due back from work any time,” said Liz Flanders. “But – but, if Mary's expecting as you say, what's to say the baby's my Jim's?”

“What's to say-what's to say,” spluttered Ivy. “He's her boyfriend, isn't he? She says it's him. What are you trying to say?”

“That don't mean –” said Liz Flanders in a failing voice.

“Oh – I see,” said Ivy. “You're trying to tell me my Mary's a liar, are you? And she's playing about with hundreds of them, eh? Every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes along. Now, see here, Elizabeth Flanders – one more word out of you and you'll regret it, I can guarantee you that.”

“Stand behind me, Joe,” came Elizabeth Flanders' small, rather childish voice. “She's going to strike me.”

“No she won't, Elizabeth,” said Joe Flanders. “Ivy's come here in good faith –”

“My Jim's a good boy,” said his mother. “I can't believe –”

“How dare you sit there and defend him?” cried Ivy. “And where the hell is he, anyway? He should have come with Mary to tell me himself, instead of me having to drag it out of Mary like I did. He must be a nice coward – he can do it all right but he can't take the consequences. 'Course, he's lucky – he's got a mother to hide behind who thinks her son isn't like every other man in the world – oh, no – her son's an angel sent from God who doesn't know the difference between a boy and a girl. My poor girl,” Ivy said melodramatically – and then suddenly thought of Mary's pallor, her confusion, her inability to understand fully what was happening to her – and burst, herself, into tears. Tears for herself, for Mary and for all women.

“Don't take on, Ivy,” said Joe. “I think we all need a drink and a talk.”

“Never mind the drink,” said Ivy. “You go and fetch that boy here instantly.” She gave a huge sniff.

“Perhaps if Sid was here you'd be better able to control yourself,” said Liz.

“Don't sit in that chair telling me to control myself,” sobbed Ivy.

“I'll go and get him,” muttered Joe, leaving the room.

“Why isn't Sid here?” said Liz in her little voice. “It would be such a help –”