All The Days of My Life (50 page)

Anyway, things went from bad to worse. I was lucky in a way not to be married to him. Because if I had, when the crash came he'd have tied me up in the firm as a nominal director of all these banana republic companies he had, I'd have been technically the owner of half his slums – it would have taken years to get out of it and I'd have come out with a business name like Dick Turpin's.

I don't know why I never married him. At first I used to make silly excuses, then he seemed to lose interest in the idea – and there were times, over the last eighteen months to a year, when he wasn't thinking about me, he was too worried. When he did he was usually angry and ratty, out of pure nerves. It was about that time I tried to help sort things out – but it was no good. He wouldn't stop doing what he was doing and he wouldn't take any notice of me. Instead he listened to the others – and they were all out for themselves…

The truth is that Nedermann, apart from his weaknesses as a businessman, was out of date. The election of a Labour government, which my father and I had anticipated for at least six months beforehand, put an end to his racketeering. There was a general sense that people were no longer content with corruption and shady dealings on the margins of the law. That all seemed to belong to the post-war period, when commodities like foodstuffs and clothing were still rationed and nearly everything else was in short supply. It was an atmosphere conducive to petty crime and corruption – the purchase of black market nylon stockings or bottles of whisky, cans of paint smuggled out of the back door of a factory, the sweeteners to the Council officials for ignoring unlicensed building work on properties, bribes to renting agencies for tip-offs about flats, “key money” paid to landlords for allowing tenants to move in. Nedermann thrived in that atmosphere. He was providing housing at a time when it was very scarce. That was probably one of the reasons why he was tolerated. Housing authorities, public health and safety officers, even the police, appeared to take little notice of complaints made against him. He must have been paying some of these blind eyes to stay closed. Then the time came
when everyone grew tired of this. At that moment he ran out of control. The situation became alarming. He bought and bought, trading one mortgage against another like a child playing Monopoly. He would buy a house with one payment and agree to pay off the rest on a mortgage, often privately raised at high interest, sometimes as high as 25%. After that the affair would become a question of scrambling to keep up the payments on the place, using the rents from one building to pay the mortgage on another. Almost all transactions were in cash and half of them were never recorded. Gradually his affairs became more complicated, and at that point he began to sell off properties to his subordinates, who often took the rents and left him with trailing responsibilities in terms of mortgages or dealings with increasingly vigilant local councils. As the housing regulations began to be more applied, many of the tenants took to appealing to local rent tribunals, who had the power to reduce rents considered to be unfair. But as the empire collapsed many of the tenants became less and less certain who their landlords were – one way of evading the law was to register the property in question with a company in the Bahamas or somewhere else. The buildings people lived in could change hands as often as once a month. There was no one to go to in cases of grievance and, worse than that, after months of not collecting rents the invisible landlords could evict them on grounds of non-payment of rent. The whole situation had become an open scandal. Nedermann was no longer useful. His day was over.

Quite what happened that November night I don't know. What is certain is that it is just as well Ferenc Nedermann died then. My impression is that he could not have coped with the combination of financial disaster and disgrace which threatened him. He was probably too proud, and too insecure, to have borne both.

Nevertheless, you can imagine the horror for us as it became plainer and plainer that Nedermann was about to be ruined …

It looks inevitable now, but then things do afterwards, don't they? Many a business thriving now has gone through patches where it's only managed to stagger on by a miracle. If it had collapsed then everyone would have said the crash was inevitable.

Basically, if it hadn't been for the police, it wouldn't have mattered about the Roses. And if it hadn't been for the Roses the police wouldn't have mattered. And if Ferenc hadn't got so wound up about everything
over the previous year I daresay he could even have survived both attacks. As it was the police had decided to get him for being the landlord of a brothel – he always claimed he had no way of knowing what was going on in his houses but I was never sure if that was true. So the police were coming to arrest him. The other bit of the story is complicated but I think it went like this. He bought two blocks of four houses each, from the Church Commissioners. To get the deal through he'd used a proxy – an old whiskied-up colonel he had on the payroll. Colonel Devereux. That was because he thought the Church Commissioners might be fussy about who they sold to. Now to get even the deposit on these houses together he'd had to mortgage Orme Square. And even then there wasn't enough, so then he mortgaged two houses which weren't even paid for, though the bank didn't know he'd done it. And even worse – you'll never believe it – he'd sold one of the houses the week before for cash, to a man called Gerry Armstrong. I don't know whether he thought he could get away with all this for the time being and make good the loss afterwards – I think by that stage his memory had begun to go. He never put anything on paper unless he had to, on account of the Inland Revenue – they were after him then, too, needless to say. And the real clincher to all this was that Armstrong found out that the house he'd paid cash for was already mortgaged – there was about £5,000 owing to the previous owner. Then he found out about the other mortgage. Then – here's the horror story – Ferenc found out Armstrong was a nephew of Norman and Arnold Rose. He's their only sister Marie's boy. I was terrified when I heard this. The general idea was that if you stood accidentally on the foot of a neighbour of a second cousin of the Roses, it was a good idea to apologise on the spot and make sure to send flowers next day. But Ferenc wasn't very worried. When I said I was frightened he told me we'd take the car out that night and go round the clubs and find them and tell them the whole thing had been an accident and we'd soon make good the loss. At the time I thought I believed him. Then I found I was on the phone to Ivy, saying what had happened, and when she advised me to put Josephine in a cab straight round to Meakin Street I went ahead and did it. Ferenc was furious again, when he found Josephine was gone.

That was when I tried to talk some sense into him. I said the best thing was for him to clear out and I'd try to straighten up the books with the accountant while he was gone. The accountant was a quiet little man who let Nedermann have his way because he was afraid of
the bullying. I thought if I gave him some peace and quiet he could start a sort-out. That taught me one thing anyway – not to employ an accountant you can frighten. Anyway, Ferenc refused. We began this horrible car-ride, looking for Norman and Arnie. We did the pubs and clubs, asking for them, but it got plainer and plainer nobody wanted to know – in fact they wanted us to go away. That was when I got really scared. Ferenc tried to pretend he wasn't until we got to the Prospect of Whitby, in Wapping. The barman behind the bar didn't have to be asked. He just handed us the drinks we'd ordered and said, “If you're looking for anybody, Mr Nedermann, don't worry. They're out looking for you.”

So Ferenc said politely, “Thank you.”

And the barman replied, in the same quiet polite way, “But excuse me, Mr Nedermann, the boss would be grateful if you and the lady could just finish up your drinks – in your own time, of course, we don't want to rush you, and – and, well, go home.” He added, to palliate the bluntness of the final part of the message, “I'm sure you understand. It's nothing personal.”

“I understand,” Ferenc told him. “We'll do what you say.”

“Thanks, Mr Nedermann,” said the barman. “There's no charge for the drinks, of course. On the house.” And he retreated to the other end of the bar and pretended to take an order from a customer who wasn't ordering.

Ferenc's face seemed to collapse after that. He had plenty of nerve, though. He drank his brandy as if he had all the time in the world. He and I even managed a bit of cheery conversation, like two people who had come out to enjoy themselves. We said goodnight to the barman and left like the King and Queen.

Then we didn't know what to do. We drove the car up beside the docks and sat there, watching some boats go up and down the river. It was getting foggy and the hooters of the ships were sounding up and down the Thames. I said, “Look, Ferenc. Why don't you disappear for a day or two? I've known Arnold and Norman since I was small. I'll go to them and explain. Maybe they'll listen to me.”

And he told me, “All three of us are businessmen. We can meet and talk and arrange matters between us.”

“Please,” I said. “Please, Ferenc.” But he wouldn't listen. Then he told me that if I was frightened I should leave. I refused. Then he ordered me to leave – that was when I knew he was frightened. I still refused to go but all I could see in my mind's eye while we were sitting
there on the dock was two weighted sacks being heaved off the end of it and sinking to the bottom of the river. Arnie and Norman had been known to dispose of people that way – some of them weren't even dead when they hit the water.

Finally I managed to convince Ferenc that the Rose brothers would never harm a hair of my head, no matter what. I wasn't sure myself. You can never be quite sure what people like that are going to do. And we went back to Orme Square, went to bed, made love and, believe it or not, Ferenc Nedermann, with the Rose brothers looking for him, said, “Goodnight, darling,” put his head on the pillow and fell into a dreamless sleep. Like a baby. I'm sure of it. I ought to have known because while he was lying there peacefully snoring I was lying awake listening for Norman and Arnie's friends. They weren't going to come and knock on the door politely. They'd send blokes in over the roof if they felt like it. You wouldn't know what happened to you till it'd happened. So I'm lying there with the house creaking and groaning round me, the way they do when you're scared, when the phone rings. Ferenc didn't move. I was out of bed and across the floor like a cat on hot bricks. At first I didn't know who it was, let alone what the voice was saying, but then I managed to make out that it was Colonel Devereux, dead drunk as usual, ringing from some club he used to go to in Pimlico. Mumble, mumble, mumble – I nearly went mad. I was going to put the phone down when I heard him say, “Tell Mr Nedermann. It's important.”

“What's important?” I'm yelling. “What's important?” And still Ferenc didn't stir which I suppose was a sign. But I didn't think about it then because the next thing is that somebody, a man, had taken the phone from Devereux. A voice I didn't recognize just said, “Tell Mr Nedermann the Vice Squad has entered number 14 Routledge Square and discovered it to be a brothel. They're on their way to Orme Square now to arrest him.” From the voice, I guessed a policeman. He must've been on somebody's payroll besides the Met's, but there you are – by that stage he could have been anybody's.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I went over to Ferenc where he was lying in the bed and I shook him a couple of times to wake him up. Then I shook him a couple of times more and called his name. But I knew, really, he was dead. And it's not to my credit but at that particular moment I never shed a tear. I'm surprised how fast my brain worked – all I thought, straight away, was that I had the cops coming in from one side and the Rose brothers from the other and that I was
likely to get caught in the middle. Ferenc had escaped – but I hadn't.

I'm still amazed I was so hard, after living with him for nearly six years, and he was lying there stone dead. I'll be honest, while I was dressing at top speed I was opening my jewellery box and stuffing the jewellery in my handbag at the same time. There wasn't too much of the good stuff left by then. I'd pushed it all at him on odd occasions when he needed ready money fast. I've never had much of a talent for hanging on to the tom. Some women never part with a ring or a brooch they've been given. Look at Isabel Allaun. She hung on to her rings through thick and thin – she'd have seen a baby starve before her very eyes rather than part with the gems – still, there it was, I grabbed what was left and then I got the bunch of keys off the dressing-table, ran downstairs with my shoes in my hand and opened the safe, grabbed all the money in it and stuffed that in my bag, too. I'd handed back the houses he gave me during another crisis and a few hundred was all I got out of the safe – then I took my coat and sneaked out of the house, looking round all the corners and I'm off, creeping through the mist, into Bayswater Road, in a panic, because I was conspicuous, walking around like that at three in the morning and then, thank God, along came an all-night bus. I'm on it, with my bulging handbag, still dry-eyed, still not taking in the fact that Ferenc was dead, and paying my fare to the black conductor like someone who's been out to dinner with a few friends and stayed a little later than usual.

What a performance. It's amazing how cold and callous you can be when you're in danger. I suppose not stopping to mourn the dead in a crisis is what's kept the human race going over all these millions of years. If we'd all stopped to cry over Uncle Harry we'd have been caught in the sabre-toothed tiger's second strike, when he came back wondering if there was any more to eat. Still, it makes you feel rotten afterwards when you know you behaved like that.