All The Days of My Life (17 page)

“Ooh,” said Ivy through gritted teeth. “Ooh – I'll smash everything in this room if I don't get some sense out of you.” With that, she turned and lifted the clock off the mantelshelf and held it over the fireplace.

Liz Flanders' pale face flushed. “That was a wedding present.”

“Oh,” said Ivy, loudly and meaningfully, “it was a wedding present, was it? Well, that's what we're here trying to talk about, isn't it? I mean – you're here with this nice clock on the shelf what you got for a wedding present and my girl's throwing up every morning, expecting your boy's kid and no nice wedding presents there on her mantelpiece at the present moment.”

“Please sit down, Ivy. You're upsetting my nerves. I'm too shaken to talk like this.”

Ivy sat down but put the clock in her lap. “Right,” she said. “Now you're calmer, I hope.” There was a silence. “Well?” demanded Ivy. “What have you got to say?”

Liz Flanders hesitated. “Can't she get rid of it?” she said. “Wouldn't it be better –”

“Nice way to talk about your grandchild,” Ivy observed. “‘Can't she get rid of it?' Very nice. Touching. But, as it just so happens, no, she can't. Because it's too late. Because I'm not putting my girl in that kind of danger, getting rid of a kid at the stage she's at, for you or anybody. She's having it – and that's that.”

“Didn't tell you in time, then?” observed Liz.

“Two people didn't tell me in time,” said Ivy. “My daughter and your son.”

“If he's the father,” said Liz.

Ivy stood up and was about to hurl the clock into the fireplace when Liz said quickly, “I'm sorry. He's only a boy, Ivy. Don't do any damage.”

“I couldn't do as much damage in a week around here as what your son done to my Mary in five minutes,” Ivy said. “And as to being only a boy – he's almost twenty-one, Liz. My girl's just sixteen. I want your
guarantee, here and now, that they get married, otherwise this clock goes right through that telly –”

As the crooner on the TV set sang, “So won't you hurry home tonight, hurry home tonight,” Liz stood up to grab the clock, Ivy pulled it away, Liz grabbed a handful of her hair and, as Ivy twisted away, a chair fell over. At this moment Joe Flanders came in. Behind him, holding hands, were Jim and Mary. Mary still had an angry mark on her face where Ivy had hit her.

“My God!” exclaimed Joe. “What's going on in here? Elizabeth – sit down. Mrs Waterhouse – would you kindly put that clock back on the mantelpiece. It won't help to turn the place into a madhouse.”

“I'll keep the clock,” said Ivy. “Till I'm satisfied.”

“Do as you please,” Joe said. “Well, come on in, you two. Let's hear what you've got to say about all this.”

“There's nothing to say,” said Ivy. “We're here to plan the wedding, and that's that.”

“Who says there'll be a wedding?” said Liz Flanders. “I'm not sure that's the best way.”

“Perhaps you'll tell me what the best way is, then,” said Ivy. “I'd like to hear.”

“Joe,” said his wife. “Are you going to let this woman come round here, try to break up my home and threaten me and still stand there saying nothing? Where's Sid Waterhouse? Doesn't anybody think he should be here?”

“Sid's glued to the telly as usual,” Ivy said calmly. “It don't matter whether he's here or not. Your boy's got my girl in the club, they've got to get married and that's all there is to be said about it. You can get all the MPs in the House of Commons in this room and the facts won't alter so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“Joe!” Liz Flanders cried out.

“Don't seem to me there's any other way,” Joe Flanders said. “I've talked to Jim on the way here. He's not saying the baby's not his. He's willing to marry Mary.”

“Is this true, Jim?” asked Liz Flanders.

“That's right, Mum,” the young man told her. “Me and Mary have made a bit of a mess of it but we love each other and we want to get married.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” said Ivy. She put the clock back on the mantelpiece and added, “Seems to me there's not that much more to be said about it. It's a pity, but there you are. What's done's done and we
can't change anything. Mary and Jim can put up the banns at St Anthony's as soon as you like. We'll have a small wedding and a few people round to our house afterwards. Some people would make a party of it anyway but I'm too fed up to turn it into a circus.”

“Right-ho, Ivy,” said Jim's father. “All right by you, Liz?”

“I suppose so,” said Liz Flanders. She bent her head angrily towards the television, where a comedian was telling jokes in an American accent.

There was a silence in the room. “Well, then,” said Ivy briskly. “We'd better go and tell Sid.”

“Drink before you go?” Joe suggested weakly.

“No, thanks,” said Ivy. “We'd better be setting off.” She sounded as if she and Mary were about to travel the length of London, not just walk down Meakin Street. In the doorway Jim Flanders whispered to Mary, “Same place tonight, Mare?” Mary just nodded and walked past him. In the street she said to her mother, “I don't want to get married, Mum.”

“Should have thought of that earlier,” was Ivy's reply.

“For two pins I'd run away,” Mary said.

“What's the point – you wouldn't be running alone,” said Ivy grimly. She felt defeated. She had had hopes for her clever, pretty Mary. She could have married well, got something out of life. Now all she had was an early, forced marriage to Jim Flanders, a nice enough lad, but not the sort to set the Thames on fire. That was it, she thought, you did your best and broke your back and this was the outcome in the end. If Mary had come to her sooner maybe something could have been done – as it was, the silly bitch was nearly five months gone when she finally told the truth. There was no way out, now. And there was still Sid to tell. He'd shout the odds and then disappear down the Marquis of Zetland and get drunk. A big help. Feeling very old, Ivy led Mary into 19 Meakin Street. “Get upstairs, Mary,” she told her daughter flatly, “while I break it to your father.”

Upstairs, Mary sat on her bed in the summer heat and stared at the upper windows of the houses opposite. She felt tired and numb. She could not believe, really, that she was going to have a baby, nor that she was going to marry Jim Flanders. She knew things like that were not supposed to happen to her. Her stomach felt very heavy. Perhaps, she thought, this was how things did happen to people – suddenly, without their wanting them to, without any plans being made.

Numbly, she thought it seemed like a dismal prospect, looking after
Jim and cooking his meals and minding the baby. But other girls didn't seem to mind – the trouble was she had never seen herself like that. There must, she thought desperately, be some way of not being bored and poor and depressed. She asked herself whether she loved Jim and decided it was a stupid question now, anyway. She didn't love him as much as she had before she found out about the baby, or even, really, before she fell for the baby in the first place. She supposed having a baby put you off love and perhaps, afterwards when she'd got it, she would be in love again. Anyway, Ivy said she had to get married so she had to get married. What else could she do? Now Dad was going to go on and on at her and maybe have a row with Joe Flanders in the street and she felt so tired, so tired …

It must, she thought sleepily, have been the night of the break-in. They'd all had a few drinks and the boys, on pints, while the girls had Babychams, had got bold and boastful in a pub up West. Jim Flanders had been one of the boldest, she thought, not like he was when she told him about the baby. Then he'd been angry and afraid, thought if they ignored it it would somehow go away. She'd known better, in her heart of hearts, but had gone along with the idea because he was older. Which was stupid. She could see now that it did not matter whether you were older or not. It was whether the thing was growing in your body, or somebody else's. But there it was. He had thought the problem would disappear. She had believed that somehow, miraculously, it would all turn out to be a dream. Nothing would happen in the end. A friend of a friend of Cissie Messiter's, Mary thought, was supposed to have had a baby in the ladies' at Charing Cross Station because she didn't know what it was all about. “Didn't want to know, most likely,” Cissie had said. “Hid it from herself, that's what.” It had been Cissie who had detected her own pregnancy, in the end. It was Cissie who had told her firmly she must tell Ivy. “A girl's best friend is her mother in this type of situation,” she had said. “And Ivy'll make him marry you. You can't pick and choose, Mary. You've got nothing else to do.” She had ended her remarks on a typical note, “You've no one to blame but yourself.”

Well, it was that night of the break-in, Mary thought, when they had strolled in the darkness down a cobbled mews near Grosvenor Square, where the old stables were being converted into small, expensive houses. “Aren't they sweet,” Cissie had said. “I wouldn't half like one of them.” Then Harry Smith, from up the street, had said, “Fat hopes, my love. These aren't for the likes of you and me,” and had added,
“No – careless, though, aren't they. Look at that – ladders all over the place, scaffolding everywhere and no light but that little one at the end of the street. Asking for trouble, though, aren't they?”

“No lights on in half these houses, the completed ones,” Jim had said, going a little further down the mews.

“Quite an opportunity for a likely lad,” Harry said, following him.

Cissie, from the far end of the mews, said, “I'd have thought you wouldn't be bothered to think like that, Harry. With your father put away again, like he is.” For Harry's father had no sooner been released from the German prisoner-of-war camp than, after being caught trying to open a safe in a house in Knightsbridge, he was back as a prisoner again, this time in a British jail. And that sentence had been followed by another. But red-headed Harry's swagger in the darkened mews, his defiant, “Shut up, Cissie,” proved that he had learned nothing from his father's example.

“I'm getting out of here,” Cissie called down the mews. She turned to the others with her. “Come on,” she said. “That lot are going to get themselves into trouble. Come on, Mary. Don't hang about here.”

“Oh – I'm stopping for a while,” said Mary casually. She moved forward and stood next to Harry at the bottom of the mews, where three old stables had been converted into elegant little houses.

“No law against looking, is there, Cis?” Harry called.

“Here,” said Mary to the red-headed lad. “Look at that up there. He's left his bedroom window open. No trouble to get in up that drainpipe.”

“We're going home, Mary,” Cissie said loudly from the other end of the mews. “Don't blame me if something happens.”

“I won't, Cis,” Mary called cheekily, over her shoulder.

“Look here,” said Jim Flanders, standing now beside Harry and Mary. “Cissie's right. Let's go.”

“No,” said Mary in a dreamy voice. “Look at it, though. Ever so easy to get in and take a look round. We won't take nothing.”

“What happens if we're caught?” asked Jim.

“Caught, caught, caught,” mocked Harry. “Where's your guts, Flanders? Down in your boots?”

“We're leaving,” said Cissie. “And Mary – I'm telling your mum on you.”

“Tell her you saw me standing in a street looking at a building,” said Mary. “She'll be shocked. I should think she'll give me the cane.”

Cissie and the others went off grumbling together that no good would come of this adventure.

“Thank Christ for that,” Harry remarked.

“Missed your goodnight kiss from Susan though, haven't you,” said Jim.

“I can stand it,” said Harry.

They stood together on the cobbles, looking up at the open window. Suddenly the sky, as if someone had opened a trap door in it, was full of floating snow flakes. Snow drifted down, quickly covering the cobbles with whiteness. The flakes fluttered round the lamp post in the light.

“Ooh – pretty,” cried Mary in delight. She put her arms round Jim and gave him a big kiss. She grabbed his hands and they did a sliding jive in the snow.

“Where's Harry gone?” Jim said, staring round.

Mary realized. “He's over there,” she said, pointing to the right, where the scaffolding was. “He's fetching a ladder. Silly fool,” she added. “How can we leave a ladder propped up against a window – the cops'd be banging on the front door in one minute. Look – hold me shoes.”

“Mary!” protested Jim. But she thrust her high-heeled shoes into his hand and was quickly on to a ledge which ran about three inches above the ground, all along the wall. Pushing herself up high with one leg she grasped the point where two exterior pipes joined, hauled herself up and, standing on one foot on the join in the pipes, reached sideways for the window ledge of the open upper window. Then, in her stockinged feet, she inched slowly up the pipe which ran, at an angle, up the wall. Seconds later she had her knees on the window ledge and was toppling herself in. Her shoulders hit thick pile carpet. The dark bulk of furniture stood round the room. Putting her head out of the window she heard the others whispering,

“Put that ladder back – Mary's in there.”

“What?”

She whispered down, “I'll let you in through the front door. Wait a minute.”

Mary crept across the carpet, her heart banging. Suppose there was someone in? There could be somebody asleep in the next door bedroom – what would she do if she was collared, as Harry's father once had been, by an ex-serviceman with a revolver in his hand. The man had been so angry he'd threatened to murder Harry's dad. As she
opened the door cautiously she thought – so what? Who cares?