All The Days of My Life (33 page)

What he did to get the old tenants out of his houses wasn't too pretty either. But one thing was certain – whatever Johnnie got from Nedermann there'd be nothing for me. I don't know what I wanted when I went to meet him, whether it was for him to go down on one knee in the cafe and say he was desperate to marry me or whether I just wanted a few quid towards the cost of the abortion. Or maybe just a “sorry” would have helped. But whatever I'd wanted I'd got nothing, not even the “sorry”, and when I left the place I walked and walked, feeling my feet were made of lead and my head full of cotton wool until finally I realized I'd be better off in a taxi.

On the way back we went through Soho and, because it was getting dark, there were all the girls out on the pavement already, in the drizzle, leaning up against walls and lamp posts, taking slow strolls up and
down their bits of pavement and the usual swarthy chaps in good clothes standing at a distance and watching. And sure enough, as luck would have it, I spotted Peggy Jones there, walking up and down outside a restaurant. She was heavily made up and I knew why she was there. Next I saw a man go up and say something to her. Then she went round the corner with him. I leaned back against the seat in the taxi feeling as sick as a dog. I remembered her as a backward kid in Framlingham staying with the vicar's mad wife. I remembered her from Meakin Street. Then they'd condemned Tom Totteridge's stable as unfit for habitation and the Joneses, mother and daughter, had disappeared. I thought, My God, she's hardly any older than I am. And I thought, Look at your life, Mary Waterhouse – one kid at sixteen by a chap who got himself hanged and now you're in the club again by the likes of Johnnie Bridges. You'd better pull yourself together, I told myself, or there's nothing to stop you winding up on the pavement beside Peggy. There's not too much standing between you and a beat in Soho.

So that was how I fetched up in a back room at Mrs Galton's on the other side of the High Street. I had to lie on the floor on the usual sheets of newspaper while she injected the usual syringe of soapy water, or whatever she used, into my womb – and then I had to hobble home. While she did it I thought, oh, you lie in the bed in your delight with your legs up and then you're on the floor on sheets of newspaper in the same position. See what I mean? The two things are similar? Then you, the wild rover, cripple off back to Mum. Afterwards, of course, you wait for the famous “something to happen.” Ivy was very good about it and Sid didn't say anything, although I knew she'd told him. He looked pretty grim, though. What I didn't know was that a few months before a girl had collapsed and nearly haemorrhaged to death on a bus he was on. She was going home from a backstreet abortionist's. Luckily the conductor of the bus was a woman and she'd spotted what was happening and made the driver go off route to get the girl to the nearest hospital. But Sid had seen the blood everywhere, and the girl stretched out on the floor, white as paper. No wonder he looked pale himself when he heard what was happening to me. He must have been terrified. It had to be getting on for Christmas, too.

Arnie Rose, master of good timing, turned up after my second flaming appointment in Mrs Galton's back bedroom. The syringe hadn't worked. “You're the sort that hangs on to them,” she remarked philosophically. I thought to myself, get out, you little bastard, and
leave me alone. I was very fierce about that kid. I didn't want it. I'd have jumped in the canal before I'd have had it.

Anyway, there was Arnie, standing in the front room doorway, smoking a big cigar and saying “Well, well, well,” and there I was lying on the settee, staring at him in horror, and wearing an old candlewick dressing-gown.

“I was going to suggest you and me going up West for a drink and a bit of dinner,” he said. “Just to show there's no hard feelings about that other business.”

“Nice of you, Arnie,” said Ivy, appearing behind him in the doorway, with a tea tray. “But as a matter of fact Mary's not well.” Behind her Shirley peered round to crane at Arnie, with his gold watchchain and cigar. Something to tell the girls at school in the morning. Ivy sent her upstairs to do her homework and gave Arnie a cup of tea.

“I can see she looks a bit peaky, Mrs W,” Arnie said. “What's the doctor say?”

Ivy broke all the rules which said that these things were women's secrets and never revealed to men. Some men never even knew their wives were pregnant or had had an abortion even though every other woman in the street knew it. But Ivy just said, “There's no doctor in this. Mrs Galton's the doctor here.”

I daresay Arnie had had some dealings with her in the past. He looked embarrassed, then incredulous. He said, “No –”

“I could kill that Bridges,” Ivy said fiercely. “I won't be at peace until he gets what's coming to him.”

Then I could see what she was up to when she told him.

“You'll be at peace soon enough, then, Ivy,” Arnie told her. “Quite a few of us have got scores to settle with him.” Then he looked at me and said, still embarrassed, “Well – I'd better be off and leave you to – er – here –” and he got his wallet out of his jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of fivers. “Take it, Ivy,” he said. “I'd like to help – plenty more where that comes from.”

Ivy was shocked. There are rules about who pays for abortions – and Arnie was not the father of the child, nor a member of the family: What he was, or had been, was a man who had paid for plenty of abortions for the girls he ran. So this gesture, which included me among Arnie's business girls, put Ivy right off. She refused and said Sid could look after me. So Arnie handed over a fiver before he left and said to get something for little Josie and this time Ivy took it.

As the door clicked behind Arnie, she tucked the money behind the clock on the mantelpiece and said, “A nice thing – gangsters coming to call on you. I don't know what people must think.”

“They'll feel all right if you tell them who paid for the doll's pram,” I told her. I was leaning back feeling horrible and wondering when the pain would start. “They'll all say, oh, well, for all his way of life, Arnie's got a heart of gold when it comes to little kids. Kind to his old mother, too.”

“I'd like to be a fly on the wall when they catch up with Johnnie,” Ivy said vindictively. But I was too depressed to see it like that. The pain had started now, and like all pain it was made worse by my feelings – here I lay on the settee while the man who had helped to make the baby I was getting rid of had let me down.

It happened that night, with Ivy trying to comfort me and putting newspaper under me to absorb the blood. I won't forget the look on her face when it was over – oh, Christ, the look on a woman's face when she's seen her daughter suffer the consequences of being a woman needs to be seen to be believed. Generations, thousands of years of them have looked like that, passed it on to their daughters, who pass it on to theirs. That face is full of pity but it tries to will a bitof courage into the girl. It says, that's the way it is, but you don't have to let it ruin you, girl.

Of course Johnnie had rejected me when I needed help, but, of course, he turned up when I was all right. Some people are like that – the exact opposite of the person who's always there when you need them. They're the sort that are never there when you just fell off the bus and always around if you won the pools. He ducks in, looking all round like a kid who's been nicking sweets from Woolworth's, and sits down to talk about marriage and love and a better life when he's got things straight with the Roses. I said, “Go away and leave me alone, Johnnie,” because Ivy was in the room but, do you know, if Ivy hadn't been in the room I'd have fallen on his neck, just as usual, and agreed to anything he said. Like I said, I'm sure half of it's like a relationship between a torturer and the person he's torturing. It's that, and of course that you always hope to wipe out the past and set the record straight and have everything back the way it was before. But Ivy wasn't having anything to do with Johnnie and she told him now he'd seen I was all right he could go. He didn't hang about arguing when she pointed out Josie's fiver still on the mantelpiece and told him who it came from and wasn't Arnie kind to drop in and see how I was
keeping. Johnnie flashed out the door like greased lightning. Even I had to see the funny side – Ivy and me laughed so much I had to tell her to stop me. I thought I'd do myself a mischief, the state I was in
.

It was in February, as Molly stood in the park pushing her daughter on the swing, that a thickset man of medium height came up to her and asked, very politely, “Mrs Flanders?” She looked into an ivory face, with very black, slightly slanted eyes and said, after a hesitation, “That's right. Who are you?” His eyes then turned to the swing, where little Josie was bending herself to and fro to try and keep it in motion, now that Molly had stopped pushing, and he said, almost absent-mindedly, “My name is Ferenc Nedermann.” In his thick black overcoat, middle-aged and rather shy, he did not give the impression of being the notorious slum landlord he really was. She said, “How can I help you, Mr Nedermann?”

“I wondered,” he said, in his slightly accented English, “if you would be able to tell me where Johnnie Bridges is?”

She shook her head and told him, “No. I wouldn't know where to find him. I haven't seen him since before Christmas.”

“You haven't got any idea where he might be?” he said. “At the moment the matter is desperate. He's borrowed money from me and I now need it badly.”

“Oh, God,” said Molly. She felt sick, tired and depressed suddenly. She never wanted to hear of Johnnie or his complications again. She had still not recovered from his refusal to help her. Meanwhile Nedermann went on staring at Josie, who was now turning her head of brown curls towards Molly and crying out, “Push, Mum. Push.”

Nedermann, after a pause, said, “It was five thousand pounds. He swore he had a way of paying me back by the middle of last month. At another time I would not mind the delay. But at the moment I need to call on every penny I have.”

“Five thousand,” Molly said. “He told me it was two.”

“To pay off the Roses,” Nedermann agreed. “Then he borrowed a further three.”

“Why did you lend him so much?” said Molly. “A man who'd already cheated the Roses. What made you think you'd do any better?”

Nedermann shrugged, then moved forward to push the swing – a little push, so that Josephine would not fall off. He turned his head to look at Molly. “He did me a small favour,” he said. “And his plans for getting the money to return to me seemed sound.”

“You mean you lent him the money to go out and do a job,” Molly said bitterly. “And then it failed and he disappeared. That's the story, isn't it?”

“More or less,” agreed Nedermann. “People told me Johnnie Bridges never failed.”

“That used to be true,” she agreed. “Have you tried the police stations?”

“He's not in the hands of the law,” Nedermann told her. He gave Josephine a large push, to keep her swinging, and stepped back to look at Molly. “You've no idea where he is – not a clue?”

“I'm telling you the truth,” she said. “I don't know where he is.”

Josephine then fell off the swing and began to cry. Molly ran to get her, picked her up and returned to Nedermann, who said instantly, “Is she hurt?”

“Just a graze,” Molly told him and then said bluntly, “Mr Nedermann – I don't want anything more to do with Johnnie or the Rose brothers. And I can't help you.” She thought that she wanted no more to do with him either, although she felt sorry for him. He seemed a lonely man. He had been cheated by Johnnie. She had heard of his evictions, his West Indians crammed together, whole families to a room, paying inflated rents and unable to complain because they might not be able to find anywhere else to live. She had heard of his houses run as brothels, the fires caused by faulty wiring, the damp, his practice of doing what they called “putting the schwartzes in” – letting flats in houses to West Indians, who would have noisy parties all night long and wear down the old people who lived there so much that they left. She knew all this but still she thought he was a sad and rather pathetic man.

“I must go now,” she said hastily, “and give my little girl her tea.”

She let herself thankfully into the little house. But the brief meeting with Nedermann had brought a whole crush of memories back to her
mind. She ironed Sid and Jack's shirts and Shirley's school blouses. She put a chicken in the oven. And remembered walking with Johnnie along the canal, and the clubs and Frames and, reaching further back, had a vision of Allaun Towers at Christmas – the long, old building, the old rust-red bricks, the lawn, the bare trees, the big fire at the back of the house – and then, Johnnie again, bending over her as she lay in bed, smiling at him. She felt his body, which she had tried hard to forget. She stood at the sink with a potato in one hand and a knife in the other. Tears of misery and boredom began to drip from her face.

Josephine said, “I lost golly,” four times. But Molly did not hear her until at last she looked down into the child's face and said, “What am I going to do?” and burst into tears herself.

“I lost golly. Find golly,” demanded her daughter. Molly sat and cried. When Shirley came in from school Molly went upstairs, saying she was unwell, and sat there by herself as the noise of the others coming in began. Nineteen Meakin Street was now badly overcrowded. Although Jack was living with a family near the docks, where he worked, there was not room for Josephine's cot in the bedroom, so she slept in Shirley's bed and Molly in the other, while Shirley had taken up Jack's old position on the front room settee. At weekends, especially if Jack was there with his girlfriend, there was no room in the house at all. Ivy, who had got back her old job in the breadshop, was tiring under the strain. Molly, still living on what the family had saved from her wages and tips, knew that she would have to leave. It would mean getting a job which paid her enough to cover the rent and the cost of a minder for Josephine. That might be difficult, but would not be impossible to manage. The worst thing was her sudden craving for some movement, some excitement, a bit of life. She saw nothing ahead but a Council flat, if she could get one, and a job in a shop or perhaps an office. She did not know what she wanted but she did not want that. She was nineteen and a half. She had a small child to look after and few choices. She went downstairs and sat in the front room while the family had their supper.