All The Days of My Life (93 page)

“Sometimes,” Molly had replied, untruthfully, “I wake up in the middle of the night and wish I was back in the nick again.”

At the same time her daughter was covering the riots in Los Angeles and her new future son-in-law was, as she reported to her sister furiously, “just sitting on his bum all day in Hammersmith, calling meetings to discuss the future of the community.”

“Well he's – er – a community worker, isn't he?” Shirley had replied, looking at her sister wryly. Molly, seeing the point, had burst into laughter. “I think you're right,” she said. “Josie's got another one – I ought to get him down to Framlingham so he can join the famous Framlingham Rose Garden and Pension Scheme.”

“Thank God I'm married to a Chinaman,” was her sister's comment.

Molly often thought weakly that she should end her relationship with Richard Mayhew but like many a tired tycoon, she could not face disturbance. She was paying for stability and supposed vaguely that as long as Richard and Fred were happy laying bricks and digging in peat she should be grateful. Philosophically, she endured a life of mingled business anxieties and domestic impatience, telling herself that things would somehow change. They always did.

“What are you doing down South, Wayne?” Molly shouted. “You're supposed to be up North. I thought we had a complete smash-up on the front frame side? Have you sorted it out?”

“Never mind that,” he said grimly. “Get yourself down here.”

“What's happened?” she cried.

In the Meakin Street office her assistant stared at her.

“Nothing to worry about,” Wayne told her. “It's something George did. I don't even want to talk about it now.”

“What? On the phone?” she said, recognizing the voice of someone who thinks others may be listening in. “Is it an emergency?”

“Not the sort you mean,” he said. “Why don't you get down here?”

“OK,” she said. “I'm coming. What happened about that front frame assembly?”

“Kennedy's in charge,” Wayne said dourly. “He wants to participate.”

“Maybe you're right,” she said.

Somehow she expected signs, when she arrived, that there was a crisis afoot. Instead the house was the same, shrouded now in mist which stood a foot high on the ground as she pulled up outside. Putting her head in the drawing room door she found Isabel by the fire.

“They're out in the stables,” she said. “They're extremely excited about something. Fred refused to go to school this morning.”

Molly ran down the corridor to the kitchen. As she passed the long, large mirror in the hall she saw, in the old frame, a middle-aged woman, pale hair flying, and remembered her image as a little girl, caught in the same mirror, running to the kitchen. She ran through the mist to the old stable entrance and into the room where George worked. The walls were banked with instruments and there was a long Formica and enamel workbench in the centre. George, in a baggy
old brown suit, his long legs extended under the bench, was asleep. Beside his head, on the shiny surface of the workbench, was a round, glittering object, the size of a football, with a flattened top.

Wayne stood beside him, holding a mug of tea. He said, “I turned round to make him a cuppa and the next thing I knew he was like that. He's been up for the best part of a week.”

Molly studied the silver globe on the workbench and said, “That's it, is it? It works?”

Wayne nodded. Fred came in and paused in the entrance, seeing George asleep. Molly thought, if it works we'll all be rich. We can employ thousands of people. We can dictate our terms. She looked at Wayne, who read her eyes. He nodded. “He's cracked it,” he said. “I knew he would.”

She was almost too nervous to ask Wayne to hook up the new engine for a demonstration. It had been years, now, since George had told her that he was working on a scheme to power the Messiters electrically. Even Molly knew that to do this would mean a battery about half the size of the bike itself, but he told her he would not be thinking of using batteries, but, instead, energy stored by a flywheel working inside the new engine. There were, he said, three problems, the first concerned having a material for the flywheel resilient enough to stand the friction it created for itself in motion, and the second involved safety – if the flywheel broke loose while the bike was moving it would burst through the casing and then anything else in its way with the velocity of a bullet. The third was simply to achieve enough power and conduct it, without increasing the weight of the Messiter. In progress reports she learned over the years that George had decided on laminated steel, that he had solved the problem of energy storage, that he had decided that, to reduce wear and tear on the flywheel, he was mounting it in a cylinder, in a vacuum. As time went on he had worked out the best remodelling of the Messiter to allow the new engine to function properly – the chief problem was now how to ensure that if the drum containing the flywheel broke open and the flywheel came off its mounting, the result would not be a dangerous projectile. A too-heavy casing would be safe but would make the machine heavy. One which was too light might be dangerous. As all this had gone on Molly had sometimes followed it with scepticism; sometimes she had forgotten about it completely. She had admired the way George had solved problem after problem but she was not sure that ultimately he could produce independent electrical power for the bikes. Now, it seemed, he had. She looked
down at the tousled head, asleep beside the new power source and said, “Did he solve the safety problem?”

“He's using two casings,” Wayne said. “The interior one is resin-impregnated glass fibre and the exterior's laminated steel. It's impossible for both cases to crack right open in normal circumstances – even a bullet wouldn't produce cracking. Only a bomb'd smash it and if that happened you wouldn't bother about a flywheel screaming past your ear.

“So the power's running from that casing, which we've got mounted in the same position as the other engine, through to the back wheel?” she said.

“He'd like to alter the shape of the bike but I said, ‘Leave it,'” Wayne told her. “He reckons, get rid of the pushbike design, forget the pedals and chain – all it needs is two bars for the rider's feet – and I told him, stick to the old design for now. Maybe people like new things to look like the old ones for a bit, maybe the old design is more practical than you know – all that's for later. The point is – he did it.”

“Aren't you going to hook it up, Mum?” said Fred, still in the doorway. He came in.

“Haven't we got a bike to mount it on?” demanded Molly, still trying to put off the moment when she had to believe George had managed to work out a way of producing enough power from a silver globe the size of a football to take a small machine up the road at 15 mph.

“Have to fix it up tomorrow,” Wayne told her. “It's too dark to play around out there now, anyway.” He added, “Molly – do you want to see this or not?”

Molly picked up the engine and handed it to him. “It must weigh three pounds,” she said. George, as she picked it up, had stirred and woken. His eyes went to Wayne, who linked the engine up to a control panel on the wall and said to Molly, “Watch the needle on the panel over there.”

Molly watched as the static needle arced steadily across the face of the dial. Fred, in the corner, raised his hands above his head and shouted “Yeah!” Molly put her hand on George's head and found herself saying, “My God, George. Your mother would've been so proud of you.”

His eyes were red as he looked up at her. “I don't know what to say,” she said. “I'm speechless. I can't believe you did it.”

“Wait till tomorrow – you can ride it,” George said.

“Come in the house and have something to eat, George,” she told him. “Then I'm driving you home. I want you to get some sleep.”

They all walked out. She was about to shut the door when she turned and said, “Christ! Don't leave that thing in here!”

“What's the matter?” George asked.

“It's worth bloody millions,” Molly told him. “So are your plans and notes. They've got to go in a safe place till you've taken out the patents.”

“Oh – yes,” George said vaguely. “Well – where are we going to put it all?”

“I've got a safe in my room,” declared Fred. “I got it off a boy at school whose father's a lawyer. He was putting in a new one. It cost me fifteen quid.”

“I hope you haven't forgotten the combination,” Molly said. They carried the engine and some of the drawings back to the house and locked them in the safe in Fred's room.

They ate in silence. Molly produced a bottle of champagne but there was something in George's pale, thin face, in his air of complete exhaustion which inhibited a real celebration. In the end she got up saying, “Congratulations, George, and thanks. I'll see you in the morning.” She turned in the doorway and said, “Better say nothing about all this – till we've thought what to do.”

Fred had gone upstairs to his room. Molly joined Isabel in the drawing room. She was watching a soap opera on TV and Molly sat down silently, wondering what Wayne and George were saying to each other. She began to realize what a lonely life George must have been leading in Framlingham since Wayne and his wife had moved north. He was lodging in the village with a niece of Vera Harker's. He had no interests and, it always seemed, no close relationships. Cissie came down for a week occasionally to visit him and that was all. From now on he would be wealthy and she wondered what he would do with his money – nothing, perhaps. It seemed sad. She waited until the programme was over and asked, “Where's Richard?”

“Oh,” Isabel said, “didn't he tell you? He went away suddenly to see a film producer in Berlin – about a script.” Molly nodded.

“Anything the matter?” asked Isabel.

“No,” said Molly.

“I thought you looked rather preoccupied,” Isabel said.

“No,” Molly told her. “Just thinking about something.”

“I'm sure he said he would leave a message for you at the office in London,” Isabel said.

“It's not that,” Molly said. Isabel looked a little disconcerted. Molly supposed that if she and Richard parted the rose garden plan would be spoiled. And Isabel got on well with Richard. She would be lonely without him. Then, somehow feeling she was interrupting Isabel's viewing she stood up and said, “I think I'll go and read in the library.” She could hear George and Wayne talking in the dining room where they had eaten, and the sound of the TV and even Fred's record player, coming faintly from upstairs. She lay by herself on the sofa in the library, staring at the dark windows and letting thoughts run round her head. If she were to exploit the new engine she would need a great deal more capital. It would mean a new factory, or factories. And after she had thought that she began to wonder about the wider implications of George's discovery. Her musings made her sit bolt upright, groaning aloud, “Oh, my God – is it true?” She slept very little that night, was up at dawn and had cooked Fred's breakfast too early. “What I'm thinking, Mum,” he said, surveying his dried-up sausages, “is you'd better get another safe somewhere else for all that stuff. I don't want my room turned over by agents from Dallas just as I've got all my tapes organized.”

Molly nodded numbly at him. “There's such a thing as industrial espionage, you know,” he informed her.

“I've heard about it, Fred,” she said.

“Give Isabel a shock, see,” he said. “Arabs sneaking round the house trying to get in to steal the plans. Can we have security guards?” he added hopefully.

“And Alsatian dogs?” she said.

He nodded with enthusiasm. “What a world you kids are growing up in,” she said. But she was impressed that Fred had come spontaneously to the same conclusions as herself. George did not see the new engine in this way and Wayne, if he saw it, had said nothing. She had reminded them to take the engine from the workshop. But Fred had followed her line of reasoning on from that point. Now she told him, “If we have to take precautions some of them might not be much fun for you.”

“I don't mind having a minder,” he told her.

George and Wayne arrived before half past eight. Molly stood in a corner of the workshop while they mounted the engine on the new Messiter. “If it comes off, what happens?” Molly asked. “It lies on the
ground,” Wayne told her. By eleven thirty she was sitting on a stool, dozing, when Wayne said, “Molly – do you want first ride?”

“George first,” she said.

“I've had one,” George said. “When I thought the casing was dodgy. I had to prove it worked –”

“I'll get on,” said Molly. She gripped the handlebars and wheeled it into the yard. “You've got to keep controlling the speed with this,” said George showing her the lever on the handlebars. “It controls the output of power. But it's sluggish so while you're doing it, left for less power, right for more, keep your other hand on the braking system on the other side. If you have to stop quickly you can't cut the power fast enough so you have to rely more on braking than with the petrol-driven engine.”

Molly thought she would drive through the entrance to the yard, along the narrow path to the area in front of the house, then take the machine down the drive to the road beyond. George gave her a push, she turned on the engine, pedalled a little and, before she reached the entrance to the stable yard felt the machine begin to pull. She found she was careering through the entrance and turned the handlebar on the left. As he had said, the response was sluggish. She had reached the semi-circle of gravel in front of the house before the bike slowed down. She went smoothly along the drive, hearing only the crunching of the gravel beneath the wheels. She turned into the road and travelled through the misty air, so silently and so effortlessly that she felt she was flying. She half expected the little bicycle to take off under her and sail into the air. Making a half-circle, rather recklessly, to get back on to the other side of the road she found the machine turned sharply and was in danger of being hit by a car which had swept round a bend further up. She sailed on, with the fields on one side and the wall of Allaun Towers on the other, quite unwilling to go back. She dismounted outside the house and said, “It's really fun – George – it's really fun. There are a lot of other things about it but – I can't explain it. I can't see anyone not wanting one of these. You feel like a kid when you've first learned to use roller skates. Or ride a bike, for that matter.” She looked affectionately at the little bike and, discharging these thoughts, said, “It looks dirt cheap to produce. What I haven't got is figures for the small modifications to the frame and the different brakes and so on. Any idea, Wayne? I humbly ask – I don't expect anyone to tell me these things.”