All The Days of My Life (43 page)

“The evidence to convict me,” Steven added.

Wendy looked across sharply at Molly. “Have you got someone influential on your side?” she demanded.

“What do you mean?” Molly demanded.

“Because I think you're being protected,” Wendy said.

Molly thought about the idea. Then she shook her head. “Who'd look after me?” she asked.

“Clover,” said Wendy. “Or the Roses.”

Molly shrugged. “They can't stop me from giving evidence if I want to,” she said.

“They'll offer you money,” said Steven. “Take it if you like. I won't hold it against you.”

“I don't need money,” Molly said.

“No, but Johnnie does,” said Wendy Valentine quietly. The phone rang and Steven answered it. He came back and sat down. “Johnnie,” he told Molly. “He wondered where you were – says to come back quickly.”

“In a minute,” Molly said.

“He didn't sound very pleased,” warned Steven.

Molly was tired. She roused herself from her chair and went home. There was a row. Johnnie told her to leave Steven Greene and his troubles alone. Molly refused. Johnnie shouted. Molly wept. Johnnie threw a vase at the mirror and broke both. A middle-aged man came from downstairs and complained about the noise. That night Molly lay beside her lover anxiously wondering what had gone wrong.

The next day she stood beside Johnnie in a glass-scattered street in North Kensington. She looked up at the five-storey terraced house. Plaster on the portico had come off in large lumps. The window frames were unpainted, the front door peeling. Curtains were drawn or tacked over some of the windows. Old, limp net curtains hung at others. One of the panes was cracked and the line of the crack had been mended with sticky tape. Beyond the broken iron railings, on the trodden earth of the small front garden a dog nosed through the contents – papers, tins, scattered tea leaves – of an overturned dustbin. Up the cracked front steps Johnnie was hammering on the front door with his fists. “Mr Pilsutski!” he was calling. “Mr Pilsutski! It's Mr Bridges.” Molly walked up to join him, hoping that there would be no answer, that they could go away. “Stupid bugger,” Johnnie said, turning to her, “I sent him a postcard saying I was coming.” Inside the house a baby cried. Johnnie started hammering and calling again. Then there were slow footsteps and the door was opened a little. A black woman in an apron stood there. She opened the door wider. Through an open door to the left the heads of four black children appeared at different heights.

“Yes?” said the woman. “Who you want? Pilsutski?”

“That's right,” said Johnnie.

The woman looked contemptuous. “Downstairs – the basement,” she said. Molly, in the meanwhile, looked up and saw an elderly,
grey-haired woman coming slowly down the stairs, holding on to the banister.

“Downstairs – thanks,” Johnnie said to the black woman and led the way along the passageway to a small door on the left, under the stairs. As he banged on it and went in Molly heard the old woman say, “Mrs Higgins – my sister is ill. The children are being very noisy. Do you think –”

“This way,” Johnnie said brusquely to Molly and went down the stairs inside the small door. Upstairs, Molly could hear the black woman shouting.

At the bottom of the stairs an old man in carpet slippers stood on the worn linoleum. “Mr Nader's friend,” Johnnie said loudly. “I sent you a postcard.”

“Mr Nader?” the man replied, in a strongly accented English.

“Not Mr Nader,” Johnnie said, in the same loud voice. “I'm Mr Bridges. Mr Nader's associate. Can I come inside? We don't want the whole house to hear, do we?”

This seemed to produce a response. “Ah,” said the man. “No – no. In private. In private. Come this way.”

Opening a door he led them into a small, tidy room containing a three-piece suite and a table covered with a very white lace cloth. On one wall there was a crucifix and underneath another, smaller table, also covered with a white cloth. A fat, middle-aged woman came in.

“Sit down. Sit down, please,” said the man. “Maria – make some coffee.” She went out.

“My fiancee,” said Johnnie, waving at Molly. “I hope you don't mind me bringing her along, Mr Pilsutski.”

They sat down. Peering at Molly, Pilsutski said, “How could anyone mind such a pretty face? So you are to be married?”

“That's right,” said Johnnie. “Anyway – to business. I hope you don't mind me coming to the point but you realize I've several other properties to see.”

Pilsutski nodded. “Well then,” said Johnnie. “My colleague Mr Nader would obviously like to see the tenants' rent books. Any chance of making them available?”

“Rent books – ah,” said Pilsutski slowly. “Well, you must see, Mr –er –”

“Mr Bridges,” supplied Johnnie.

“Yes, Mr Bridges,” agreed the old man. “Rent books are not always possible in premises like this. With the comings and goings and the
defaultings – and if I supply them, the tenants lose them. So – we manage without them.”

“Of course, of course,” Johnnie said comprehendingly. “I can see your point of view. But obviously, with the property for sale, my associate Mr Nader would like to have some idea of what the place is bringing in.”

The woman appeared with coffee and a cake on a plate. As she served them Pilsutski said, “I wouldn't be parting with this property, like I told Mr Nader, but the doctor told me, ‘Mr Pilsutski, the worry of that house is making your wife ill. The best thing you can do is sell it and go and live quietly somewhere in the country, or near the sea.' A man's wife, Mr Bridges, is more precious to him than any business – have some cake, miss,” he said to Molly. “It's very good. Not like that,” he said to his wife, who was offering Molly the milk. “The lady hasn't got three hands. Pour it in for her.” He said something sharply to her in a foreign language. She poured milk into Molly's cup, took her own and went off to sit by the window.

“Yes,” Johnnie said sagely. “Property's no joke these days. It's all worry. Interference from this one and that. Worse if you live on the premises. That way you get all the tenants coming to you with their complaints.”

“That's right,” said Pilsutski. “Every little blocked toilet, every little dispute between them – and there they are banging on the door. Day and night, night and day. You are supposed to look after them like babies in their cradles. It's not worth it. Money is good but not as good as health.”

“You said it,” said Johnnie. “You just said it. I couldn't agree with you more. Now – I'm afraid I have to ask you some personal questions. We haven't got any rent books. I don't suppose you keep receipts –”

“Well – I'm a busy man –” said Pilsutski.

“Very understandable,” said Johnnie. Molly was puzzled at first, then realized that without rent books or receipts no tenant could prove he had paid rent, or even that he was a tenant at all. This made eviction easy. She listened to the two men as they talked.

“So – ground floor,” said Johnnie. “Black family – man and a woman and plenty of children. Anybody else?”

“His brother – bus conductor,” Pilsutski said.

“How much for their room?” asked Johnnie.

“Seven pounds ten a week,” Pilsutski replied.

“Hm,” said Johnnie, noting it down. Molly absorbed the information. Sid and Ivy paid five pounds a week for the house in Meakin Street.

“The other doorway on the ground floor?” Johnnie was asking.

“Ah, that,” Pilsutski told him. “An old man. Controlled tenant. Now then – upstairs –”

“This old man,” interrupted Johnnie. “How much does he pay?”

Reluctantly, Pilsutski told him, “Ten shillings a week.”

Johnnie tutted. “Disgraceful, isn't it. Another trial for the land-lord.”

“The landlord is paying them to live in his house,” Pilsutski said. Then, rage conquering discretion, he said, “Upstairs – more bloody control' tenants. Two rooms, first floor, best rooms in the house – big rooms, big windows – old lady and her sister. Do you know what they pay? Two pounds a week. Two lousy pounds.”

“You could be getting twenty,” Johnnie said. “Or more. They got a bath?”

“Toilet,” responded Pilsutski. “Plenty of room for a bath. It could be a luxury flat. But, no – two pounds a week.”

“Ladies in good health?” enquired Johnnie.

“The sister's sick at the moment,” he said. “But she'll recover. You know old ladies. They –” Looking at Molly he changed his mind about what he was going to say and fell silent.

“Never mind. Never mind,” Johnnie said. “Perhaps things look better upstairs. How about the second floor? What's that like?”

“At the front – three Irishmen – workers,” said Pilsutski. He shrugged. “Three – four – five – I don't know. I ask no questions. Eight pounds a week, they pay. They give no trouble.”

“Get drunk and act a bit noisy sometimes, I expect,” Johnnie suggested.

Pilsutski looked at him cautiously, then saw the point, and nodded. “Terrible, sometimes,” he said. “Falling upstairs, shouting, banging doors. Sometimes fighting. You can hear them down here.”

“Very unpleasant for the old ladies,” Johnnie said.

“They complain,” said the landlord, “but what can I do?”

“Nothing,” Johnnie said.

“At the back there,” Pilsutski went on, “small room, very quiet man, very clean, works for the Council. Pays three pounds.”

Molly sat quietly, drinking her coffee, as the two men, leaning forward towards each other, went on with the inventory of tenants.
Finally Johnnie, with a doubtful face, made a calculation and said, “Well, then. Something in the region of thirty pounds a week? Not a lot, really, is it Mr Pilsutski. Your main problem is these controlled tenants. Without them you'd be getting double.”

“Don't I know it, Mr Bridges? Don't I know it?” cried Pilsutski. “But there it is, that's life, what can you do?”

“What indeed,” said Johnnie, standing up. “Now perhaps you'll show me round.”

“With pleasure,” answered Pilsutski and led them up the stairs, back along the passageway and then, after a rapid knock on the door, into the room the black woman had entered. The room was full of beds and small children. A pot steamed on a double gas ring in the corner. The woman, holding a toddler up at the sink while she washed the child's face, swung round when the party trooped in. “What you want now?” she asked Pilsutski sharply.

“Just taking a little look around, madam,” Johnnie said smoothly. “See if there's anything we can do for you.”

Behind him Molly smelt the odour of the room where about eight people slept, lived and ate. It was a combination of children's urine, stale cooking and sweat but it added up to more than all that, helped, she thought, by lack of ventilation and damp walls. It wasn't the woman's fault that things were like this. She suddenly remembered Ivy's patches of weariness and despair, when she would come home from school and find no tea ready, the washing up not done and everything in a muddle, while Ivy sat at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking cups of tea and saying, “It's no good. It's heartbreaking. I can't cope with any more.” And she thought for the first time that if Jim Flanders had been alive she herself might be stuck in the same two rooms in Meakin Street, with several children, and that her life might not be unlike the black woman's. She now stood with her hands on her hips, looking hard at Johnnie and Pilsutski and saying, “This room is damp and the ceiling coming down in the baby's carrycot. And if you,” she said turning to Johnnie, “are thinking about buying this rotten house I advise you now, go and look in that toilet in the hall – the pan coming away from the wall. It don't flush. Then you go and ask that woman on the top floor how many pans and buckets she have to put out when the rain come flooding through his rotten, leaking roof. You going to do something for us?” she said to Johnnie. “Don't make me laugh.”

“Thank you very much, madam,” Johnnie said smoothly, ignoring
the hostility as if he were used to it. The toddler went over to an old carrycot on an iron-framed bed and poked the baby inside. The baby wailed. As they all went out the woman, going to the carrycot to comfort the baby, shot a look at Molly. It said, too plainly, that she, the black woman, despised her for her association with the other two – that she, a woman, should know better than to get mixed up with them. Molly, embarrassed, followed Johnnie and Pilsutski down the passageway.

“Poor old man,” confided Pilsutski as he hammered on another door. “Only one leg – the other one's no good now.” He banged again shouting, “Mr Harris! Mr Harris! It's Mr Pilsutski!”

“Got quite a temper – the lady back there,” Johnnie said.

“And the husband,” Pilsutski said. “You should hear them some nights, screaming and banging. And the children crying. Still,” he said philosophically, “it's the way they live, isn't it?”

“Really noisy, then?” enquired Johnnie.

“Oh – noisy. You couldn't imagine.”

“Hm,” said Johnnie, sounding almost impressed, as if some special feature of the house like a new bathroom, or a recently papered ceiling, had been pointed out to him.

“Mr Harris! Mr Harris!” Pilsutski called, turning the handle of the door impatiently. “Locked – locked,” he said, turning to Johnnie. “The times I told him. ‘What if there's a fire,' I say. ‘There'll be a tragedy one day – '” He banged on the door again, saying, in a lowered voice, “My opinion is, he's finished. He got a certain look. I can tell – I seen plenty in Poland, during the war.”

“Dear, dear,” said Johnnie. “Looks as if he's gone out, though.”