All The Days of My Life (44 page)

“Out? Out?” said Pilsutski. “He can't go nowhere – sh – I can hear him coming.”

There was a shuffling, scraping sound from inside the room. The door opened slowly. A very old man, his face grey and his eyes red-rimmed, looked round. He was leaning on a crutch.

“What do you want?” he gasped.

“Looking round, looking round, Mr Harris,” said Pilsutski.

“Third time this week,” said Harris, turning on his crutch so that they could follow him in. The others moved behind him slowly. As he advanced into the room Molly, from behind the others, could hear his breath wheezing in and out of his lungs. There was a tumbled bed, with grey blankets, a table, on which stood a loaf of bread on a breadboard, and a block of margarine, a pot of jam, a packet of tea, a milk bottle,
half full. The floor was covered with old linoleum, red and cracked. An old armchair with wooden arms stood beside a small, hissing gas fire. Mr Harris faced Pilsutski and Johnnie, hanging from his crutches. He had no left leg. The other ended in a carpet slipper. He wheezed, waiting for them to speak.

Molly could bear it no longer. She said, “I'll wait in the car, Johnnie.” He did not hear her.

“Nice size of room,” he said to Pilsutski.

“Give me the keys,” she said more loudly, but all he said was, “Make a nice double bed-sit.”

Molly turned and left the house quickly. She banged the door behind her and stood on the steps breathing in the relatively fresh air. The tall houses opposite her, with their cracked and broken plaster mouldings, broken window ledges and fallen railings, had almost all the same air as the house she had left. Here and there was a tended garden, fresh paint, neatly curtained windows, but on the whole all the houses were as derelict as this one. Ten children were swarming over abandoned cars in a turning opposite her. She ran down the steps quickly determined not to wait for Johnnie. She'd get a cab, or a bus, she thought. But behind her she heard the sound of a window being pushed up. “Hey – lady,” called the black woman. She had managed to shove up the window of her room and was calling down the steps. Molly reluctantly climbed up and heard her say, “What happening? Is your man buying this place?”

“Thinking about it,” said Molly. Behind the woman a girl of about four was grinning through the open window at her.

“Who he, then?” asked the woman.

“None of your business, is it?” Molly told her. The little girl poked out her tongue.

“Why not?” the woman said. “We got to live here. The landlord is our business. I have four children. I should know what's going on here.”

Molly hesitated. She said, “He works for a man called Ferenc Nedermann –”

“Oh God, oh Lord,” the woman cried out. “Nedermann – he the worst, the wickedest landlord in this place. He push us in the street. Pilsutski, he bad, but Nedermann make him look like an angel. Look,” she said fiercely to Molly, “you get that man of yours to leave us alone. This house is rubbish anyway. Rubbish,” she repeated. “If Nedermann gets his hands on this place – oh, my God, we finished.”

Behind her the little girl was looking round her mother's head to study the expression on her face.

“Finished?” Molly asked numbly.

“Out in the street, I'm telling you,” the woman said emphatically, trying to make Molly understand. “And that poor old man with one leg – the old ladies – don't you understand? He raise the rents on the ordinary tenants and he get rid of the controlled ones, like the one-leg man. He do anything – frighten them with big dogs, send men with guns, put men in the house to terrify them. Anything so they leave and he can have the place and charge more rent.”

Molly stood there, staring into the big, black face of the woman. Behind her the little girl had unconsciously taken on the same earnest, energetic expression.

“Nice girl like you can do a lot,” the woman said encouragingly. “Tell him to say the place in worse condition than it is and all the tenants are controlled – that way Nedermann will go and get another house. All you have to do is make your man say the house is no good.” An idea struck her. “He can say, too, there a lawyer living on the first floor. That way Nedermann think he get too much trouble whatever he do.”

“I can't do it,” said Molly. “Johnnie won't take any notice of me.”

A child began to cry in the room. “Then you got trouble, too,” said the woman and banged the window down. She lifted the girl from the chair she was standing on and turned away. Molly saw her walk into the middle of the room and bend over an invisible child. Molly walked blindly down the steps and up the street. The pavements were uneven and sprinkled with broken glass.

She found there were tears in her eyes. So that was Johnnie's wonderful new, honest job. It was from this work that he came home in his hand-made suits, his impeccable shirts and the shoes he had made for him by a cobbler in Covent Garden. It was after treading through the wreckage in these houses, buying slums for Nedermann, threatening and evicting the tenants, that he returned looking so prosperous and respectable. This job was his idea of going straight. “But it's worse – far worse – than safe-breaking,” she thought, realizing she had thought the same about his frauds at Frames.

On a corner she opened the expensive crocodile handbag Johnnie had given her. She found her purse and realized she had not got enough for a taxi, just her bus fare back to the West End. At the same time she remembered that he had not given her any money for weeks. Standing
at the bus stop she looked for her post office savings book and realized how little money she had left. It was just as well Steven Greene had refused the money she had offered him. If he had accepted she would have had to sell one of her last two remaining pieces of jewellery. Apart from that she had five pounds. She had unthinkingly bought food and drink for herself and Johnnie, paid the rent on the flat from time to time and now she was broke. Other, worse, thoughts came to her as she stood waiting for the bus. The black woman had seen what was happening to her. She had looked past the expensively piled-up hair, like a golden beehive, and the fur coat and the expensive bag and shoes. She had seen a woman who had no power to persuade her lover not to buy the house – not to do anything. Why not? Because, Molly supposed, he did not love her. Or, if he did, and she supposed in some ways he did, then it was not the love of people who share their lives and pay real attention to each other's thoughts and feelings. Not like Sid and Ivy, for example. She had her hair done and drank champagne and went to clubs but she was disregarded when it came to anything important – must be, or she would have had some idea, by now, about the sort of work Johnnie did. She was Johnnie's ornament, the focus for his romantic feelings, his lover. But she was worse off than Ivy, who had her say, often loudly, about everything involving Sid or herself.

Behind her she thought she heard one of two middle-aged women, with shopping bags, mutter, “Bit of brass.” Molly, pretending not to hear, thought to herself, “That's about right. That's about the truth.” Self-protective resentment arose. She thought that if she'd been rich she wouldn't be discussed behind her back at bus stops by worn-out old bags. But a fur coat on a girl like her was still the price of surrendered virtue. Decent women had children and worries and bad girls had fur coats, that was the rule, as it always had been.

Once inside the bus, which smelt of cold, and damp, and stale cigarette smoke, Molly lit a cigarette and brooded. She told herself that you couldn't have everything. Did she want to be tied to a sink, a husband who might turn out to be rotten, a gang of children, all her life? So that, with any luck, when she got to nearly forty she'd be able to go out and get a job in a breadshop, like Ivy, and get herself a few new clothes and start saving up for a spin drier? Johnnie was handsome and sexy and generous. She had a posh flat – what more could anyone ask? Then she remembered what he had done when she was pregnant, remembered how she had covered up his thefts at the club, remembered his girlfriend Amanda. And now, she thought, he was
living on the profits made out of slums. It seemed worse, she thought, because he was really only an employee. He was like Nedermann's overseer on a slave plantation – he went about evicting and bullying because someone else was paying him to do it. She decided that Johnnie didn't really understand what he was doing. But it was with a shock that she realized Johnnie had never really been poor, as the Roses had, or Ivy, who could remember being given rice puddings made with water to eat, or Sid, who could recall a winter when he and his brothers had gone to school without shoes on their feet. Even she and Jack and Shirley had seen a few plates of chips in front of them without an accompanying fried egg or sausage. She didn't think Johnnie's mother had ever given him a plate of chips for tea or that he had ever shivered through nights when there not only weren't enough blankets for the beds, but not enough overcoats and jackets to pile on them either. Had Johnnie's mother ever sat in the house with her children telling them to shut up about food until their father came home with the wages and she could dash to the fish and chip shop and buy them some supper? She doubted it. And perhaps that was why he didn't worry about those broken-down houses, or the coughing babies and old ladies dragging themselves up and down damaged staircases.

Suddenly, as if to console her, the vision of Allaun Towers, long and low, built of old red brick, weathered to russet, came into her head. She was a small child, standing in the drive on a summer afternoon, with the canopy of branches overhead making patches of brightness and darkness on the ground. She was looking towards the house, where a setting sun threw light over the roof tiles, turning them brilliant. The whole house glowed in the light. She recalled the sound of her feet on the drive, walking through the dapples made by the light, and the silence, the sound of the birds going to roost, the strangeness of coming from under the last trees at the edge of the drive, into the crescent of gravel in front of the house.

But that was yesterday, she told herself, as she sat on top of the bus. And this was now. She was supposed to be getting married after Christmas. And now she would have to sell the gold bracelet Lord Clover had given her and take some money to Ivy and tell her that she was about to marry Johnnie Bridges. She could imagine what Ivy would say. Which would be worse because she would have to tell Ivy that she could not have Josephine with her. Johnnie did not want her. He had offered to take in Josephine but so reluctantly that Molly knew it would never work. So Ivy would be faced with a daughter who was
marrying a man she hated and a granddaughter she would have to continue to look after indefinitely.

Again, her mind switched to the stream, the fields and the dusty country paths in summer. And saw the clouded air and wet pavements of Oxford Street, the people struggling on the pavements to do their Christmas shopping, the lights and glitter of commercial Christmas. “Why does it have to be like this?” she thought to herself.

From the back of her mind somewhere a hard voice told her, “It doesn't have to be like this.” She ignored the voice and went on feeling the same.

In the event it was a month after Christmas, and two days before the beginning of the trial of Steven Greene, when pneumonia solved Molly's problem.

Molly had been ill for a week but her feeling of physical weakness had been masked by distress. She had tried to tackle Johnnie about working for Nedermann but he brushed off her arguments and said, all too truly, that she was living well on the proceeds of his work. But he had not liked the challenge or the criticism. He had become brusquer, less generous and less affectionate. And yet he was still eager to marry, although from the way he behaved Molly sometimes thought he disliked her. Because she was so uncertain she suggested they leave the wedding until April, when the weather would be better and they could have a honeymoon in Paris. “Be nice,” she had said to him eagerly, hoping to placate him. But she saw him begin to sulk at the delay. It was hardly a surprise when he started coming home late, saying he had been with friends. Perhaps if she had been feeling better she could have coped with this more cheerfully. As it was, she wept, felt ill and believed that her depression was causing the sensations of sickness. She began to realize this was not so one day in the flat. That night Johnnie did not come home at all and it was the following morning, as Molly was trying to telephone the doctor, that the doorbell rang. Molly put down the phone and crept along the wall to the door. She got it open to find Ivy there. As Ivy launched into recriminations, “Tracked you down at last!” she said. “No point in expecting a visit from you –” Mary fell. Ivy managed to catch her, dragged her inside and put her on her bed.

“Where's Johnnie?” Molly moaned in delirium. Ivy phoned the doctor, who came and diagnosed pneumonia. Molly would have to go to hospital, he said. “Where's Johnnie?” moaned Molly because women in these situations always call for the men in their lives and, the worse the villain, the more desperately they call, perhaps because he is
almost never there. She had a temperature of 104°F and her left lung was very badly affected. “Where's Johnnie?” she called as they put her in the ambulance. Ivy clambered in. “Fetch Johnnie,” she said. “All right, love,” said Ivy gently, “I'll try to find him later.” She caught the ambulanceman's eye. He shook his head sadly. Ivy sighed.

Three days later the trial of Steven Greene began. Mary was in hospital, still almost too weak to move. Johnnie Bridges had gone back to the flat at last and was just asking himself where Molly could be when the doorbell rang.

He did not know who the men were who hit him. The punches, and later the kicks, as he lay on the hall floor, were delivered by three strange men, who circled him viciously. They did not speak to each other and the business was all over in four minutes. It was only as they were leaving, and he lay bleeding and moaning on the carpet, that one turned and said, “That's a present from Jack Waterhouse. There'll be another one if you go near his sister again.” It was only then that he realized he recognized the grim-faced man who had kicked him remorselessly as he lay on the floor. Even Ivy had not known that Jack and his two docker brothers-in-law were going to beat up Johnnie Bridges. She was not told about it afterwards, either. She heard the news from a cousin of Lil Messiter's who worked as one of Nedermann's builders. She was with Sid in the Marquis of Zetland one night when the man said, “Nasty business about Johnnie Bridges' accident.”