Molly

by Molly (retail) (epub)

  “Couldn’t you buy or hire motor vehicles of your own?” she asked. “It’s a dreadful shame that a firm as well thought of as Danbury’s should go to the wall.”

  The old man smiled sadly. “The day when goodwill was as good as cash in the bank has long gone, my dear. You can’t spend goodwill, nor will a man take it as collateral for a loan. I just don’t have the necessary capital now to invest in modernization.”

  “You don’t mean that you might have to close down altogether?”

  “It will almost certainly come to that, yes. Though I shall be sorry to see the old firm go.” He stood up. “This dog’s too old now to learn new tricks, Mrs Benton. New blood’s what the business needs, and with the two girls off and married I’ve no one to help me.”

  Molly extended her hand. “It was kind of you to come and tell us.”

  “Not at all. I felt it only right. I’ve never had the slightest complaint about your young ladies. I didn’t want you to think I was starting now.”

  Molly saw him out.

  Moments later she reached for her coat.

  * * *

  Charley sat in thoughtful silence.

  “Well?” Molly asked.

  “You want me to persuade our Jack to take up carting?”

  “No. Not exactly. I wanted first to know what you thought of the idea. It’s time for a change, Charley, and if Jack doesn’t do it now he never will. He isn’t happy; we all know it. He’s a moderate man; he hates the way things are going in the docks. In a couple of years there’ll be no place for him. We both know there’s more to Jack than a strong back. He’s clever, and he’s good with men. He deserves a chance to prove what he could do. There’s no future where he is.”

  “Aye. No one would argue that.”

  “Oh, Charley, isn’t it just exactly the kind of thing that Jack could do? Isn’t it?”

  “He’ll say he doesn’t know the business.”

  “He can learn, can’t he? How much did I know when I started the agency? George has been in the business all his life, he knows it well enough for two. What he needs is a man who can handle the men, a man with strength and common sense. Jack. I’ve got money in the bank doing nothing. It should be working for us. It would buy lorries, hire men. There’d be a job for Edward, wouldn’t there, as our mechanic?” The idea that had germinated as she had listened to George Danbury had grown, budded, burst fully into bloom. It was as if the seed had always been there, waiting. She was passionately convinced that she was right, impatient to convince everyone else. She was not blind to her own motives; she had faced them squarely as she had hurried through the busy streets this morning. To give Jack this opportunity was a way to make amends. For the child she would not give him. For the fact that she could never be the wife that he had expected. For Adam. Above all for Adam.

  “Tell me truthfully what you think.’’

  Charley nodded. “You’re right. It is a good idea. Our Jack could do it If you can convince him.”

  “That’s why I want you to talk to him. Will you, Charley. Please?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Thanks.” Molly kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  In rising, happy excitement she hurried back to the office. Back to the bombshell of an unopened letter.

  * * *

  “Expelled?” Jack looked from the letter to Molly’s face, in disbelief and dawning fury. “Danny? There must be some mistake.”

  “There’s no mistake. I went straight to the school this morning, as soon as I heard. Danny is to leave at the end of the week.” Molly was drained. She had neither tears nor anger left.

  “For stealing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Fetch him.”

  “Jack, wait. Wait till you’ve calmed down. Don’t get him down here while you’re this angry—”

  “Angry? I’m—” Jack ran a hand through his hair. “I just don’t believe it! Stealing? Stealing what?”

  “Money. A watch. Some other things.” Molly’s voice was expressionless. ‘There isn’t any doubt. When they found the things in his desk he owned up.”

  “Get him down here.”

  “Please, Jack, leave it till tomorrow. I know you’re angry. You’ve every right to be. But—”

  “But nothing.” Jack strode from the room to the foot of the stairs. “Daniel! Get down here! Now!”

  He came, small, red-eyed, defiant. Molly’s heart sank as she saw the look in his eyes.

  “What’s this, then?” Jack slapped the table hard with the letter he held in his hand.

  Danny did not speak.

  “Well?”

  The child looked at his mother.

  “I’m asking you a question. What’s this?” said Jack roughly, shaking the paper in front of Danny’s face.

  “It’s what it says.” White-faced challenge. Molly winced.

  “It is, is it? It’s a report that my son’s a thief, is it? That he’s been expelled from school. Is that what it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what have you got to say for yourself?”

  The boy lifted a bright head, stared sullenly.

  “Jack—” began Molly.

  “Leave this to me.”

  Danny sucked his lip, took a small step backwards.

  “Well? Nothing to say?”

  He shook his head.

  “You took those things?”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “Why? Why?”

  The words stuck for a moment, then tumbled in a torrent: “They had more than me. All of them. More money, more nice things. I hated them. Hated them!”

  “And you think that gives you the right to thieve from them? To take things that aren’t yours?” Jack’s voice was heavy with disgust.

  Silence again.

  “A good thrashing’s what you deserve. By God, I’ve been too soft with you.”

  “Jack!”

  At the sound of Molly’s voice Danny’s panic overcame him and he tried to run to her, but tripped, knocking a chair flying, almost falling himself. Jack’s hand fastened on his shoulder before he could regain his balance.

  “Let me go! Let me go! I want my Mum!”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  The child lashed out with his feet. “Get away from me! You can’t touch me! You can’t! You’ve no right. You’re not my father. I know you’re not!” He was crying hysterically, his breath sobbing in his throat. Molly and Jack stood staring at him as if paralyzed.

  “What did you say?” Molly dropped to her knees beside her son, caught him by the shoulders, shook him gently. “Danny, stop it. Calm down.”

  “He isn’t my father. I know he isn’t. I heard him say. He doesn’t want me. I don’t care.” He flung himself, sobbing, onto Molly’s shoulder. “I don’t care. I don’t care.”

  Very carefully Jack righted the chair that Danny had knocked over, sat on it, his elbow on the table, his mouth resting on a huge bunched fist.

  Molly rocked the child, holding him to her. “Come now, my Danny, come now.”

  “I’ll run away. And you’ll never find me. You’ll be sorry then.” The words were barely coherent.

  She lifted his chin with her finger. “Don’t be silly now, we’ll have no talk like that.”

  He glanced at Jack from the corner of his eye. “I’m not going back to that school tomorrow. I’m not, so there. He won’t make me. I don’t care what he does. He’s not my father. He can’t make me.”

  Jack’s slight movement was one of sharp, physical pain.

  Molly sat down, lifted Danny onto her lap. “You must stop saying that, Danny. It isn’t true.”

  Brilliant, sullen eyes met hers, absolutely unconvinced. Harry’s eyes.

  “I heard him say—”

  “You misunderstood,” she interrupted. “You aren’t grown up enough yet always to understand what grown-ups are saying. If – Dad – isn’t your father, then who do you th
ink is?”

  Tears ran down already tear-drenched cheeks. “I don’t know.”

  “There you are, then.” Molly was having difficulty in controlling her own voice. “Now off you go to bed and we’ll talk about it in the morning. No one’s going to thrash anyone, and no one’s going to run away. You know, don’t you, how wicked it is to steal?”

  He hung his head. “Yes.”

  “And you know, too, that when you’re wicked you hurt not those you hate, but those who love you?”

  “I s’pose so.”

  “Then will you promise me faithfully that you’ll never take anything ever again that doesn’t belong to you?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Then off you go. I’ll be up to tuck you in later.”

  He slid from her lap, walked to the door, his eyes on the carpet, and then they heard his light footsteps mounting the stairs.

  “Bloody hell,” Jack said tightly as soon as it was quiet again.

  Molly was crying openly now. Slowly Jack stood up and encircled her shoulders with his arm. “There, lass, there.”

  “I told him a lie,” she said.

  The arm tightened. “No, you didn’t. Everything you said was absolutely true,” he said, laying his face against her curly hair, “If I’m not his father, then who is?”

  In that moment Molly realized that they were closer than they had been for a very long time.

  * * *

  It took a lot of persuasion to get Jack to go and see George Danbury. Molly, encouraged by Charley, had gone before and prepared the way and George Danbury had been delighted at the idea of a partnership. Talking Jack round was taking rather longer, as Molly had known it would.

  “I’m a stevedore, Molly. What do I know about carting?”

  “As much as I do. Which is enough. I’m not suggesting that you get out there hauling with your bare hands. It’s a manager that George needs. Someone with a bit of common sense, someone who can handle men. Someone who can negotiate with unions without causing a riot. The carters are well organized. George seems to think they run rings round him.”

  “More than likely. What makes you think I’d be any better?”

  “Oh, Jack! You know how the men think, know what they need, understand their language. Think about it. Are you going to spend the rest of your life in the docks? What future is there in that? Are you going to wait until a cargo slips, or you fall and cripple yourself for life? Or worse still, wait until you’re too old and they throw you on the scrap heap? You’re thirty-five years old. Now’s the time. If you don’t take this chance you never will.”

  “I’ll think on it.”

  One evening, with the children in bed and the house quiet, Molly tried a last effort. Jack listened to her in silence, sucking an empty pipe.

  “—it isn’t today I’m thinking about, but tomorrow, the day after. Danny’s future. The girls’. And especially yours. Oh, Jack, are you even listening?”

  “Aye, I’m listening.” He took the pipe from his mouth and regarded it, Molly thought irritably, as if he had never seen it before. “I was at a meeting yesterday,” he added, apparently irrelevantly.

  She watched him, waiting.

  “Clever young feller, the lad who was speaking. Syndicalist. Just back from France, or some such. Very fiery. Very persuasive. The democratic process is too slow for these lads. They want—” he paused, quoted wryly, “‘a dictatorship of the proletariat’.”

  “Jargon,” Molly said.

  “Dangerous jargon.” Very deliberately he filled his pipe, tamped it down.

  Knowing him, Molly held on to her patience, fetched a box of Swan Vestas from the mantelpiece. “So?”

  He lit his pipe, watched the flame of the match burn down almost to his fingertips before he shook it out. “So it wouldn’t have taken much to make me turn my card in there and then.”

  She said nothing, afraid to push him.

  “You’re really keen to see me try this job at Danbury’s, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He tapped his finger thoughtfully on the table.

  “Something’s still bothering you,” she said.

  “Aye.”

  She knew the stumbling block, had known it from the start. “The money? You don’t want to use ‘my’ money?”

  He leaned back in a cloud of fragrant smoke.

  “Well, if that’s what’s worrying you, then borrow it, for heaven’s sake. Take it as a loan. A business proposition.”

  His smile was slow and wide. “It took you a long time to get there, lass, but you made it in the end. That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear. You’ve got a deal.” He extended his hand across the table.

  Delightedly she grasped it. “Oh, that’s marvellous! Let’s celebrate. A glass of port—”

  “Wait on.” She was about to pull excitedly away, but he held on to her hand. “All legal, mind. Contracts. Interest, going rate—” she made a negative gesture “—and I say yes. Or no deal. We’ll do this my way or not at all.”

  “Yes, Jack.”

  “We’ll go to the bank tomorrow. And then to George Danbury.”

  “Yes, Jack,” she said again, demurely.

  “Enough of your cheek, woman. Get us that drink.”

  * * *

  In May Molly went, as she always did at this time of the year, to visit John Marsden in Southend. This trip, to keep the old man in touch with the business, had become a formal yearly ritual that they both enjoyed enormously.

  As Molly looked from the train window across the placid, sunlit waters of the estuary, she reflected with real pleasure that the report she had to deliver today was the best ever. And John would no doubt still treat her as if she were a precocious child with ideas above her station. The thought made her smile.

  Through the open window came the acrid smell of steam, a drift of salt air from the sea. A child in a full-skirted sailor suit danced down the platform of a station they passed swinging a bucket and spade, face alight with excitement. Molly leaned back comfortably. It wasn’t often that she had the chance to sit still for this length of time at a stretch. On the narrow shingle beaches children played, paddled in the high, lapping water. She remembered the day they had brought Danny to the beach as a very little boy, remembered his fear of the vast, moving expanse of the sea. Jack had carried him into it, dabbled his toes in the creaming waves. Molly’s fingers drummed lightly on the small portmanteau that rested on her lap. Danny was settled at a new school now. He had never again mentioned the subject of his relationship with Jack. The shattering episode might never have happened. But it haunted Molly. Often she looked at the child and realized that, for all her love, she barely knew him. His behaviour at the new school was impeccable, for the first time in his life he was working to his full capacity, apparently enjoying it and certainly getting very good results. To all intents and purposes he had learned his lesson. Molly stirred a little in her seat. Why did she have misgivings?

  The train slowed and, hissing, steamed to a stop. Doors slammed like an irregular volley of rifle fire, and Molly joined the gay crowd shuffling along the platform towards the ticket office.

  John Marsden’s delight at seeing her was, as usual, well-disguised beneath crotchety gruffness.

  “Train late, was it? Been expecting you for the last hour.” He had changed very little over the years, the craggy face, brown and weatherbeaten from his daily walk along the pier, was a little more lined, his movements stiffer, his wheezing, death’s-door cough exactly the same as it had always been. Molly had come to the conclusion long before that he would outlast them all.

  She delivered her report in his pleasant little sitting room that overlooked the front. Even John Marsden could find no complaint to make about the cheque with which she presented him. Business over, they took tea. Sun streamed through the window. Far out in the estuary great ships steamed past, the occasional sailing barge, graceful in the lifting breeze, beat her way upriver, little cockle boats from
nearby Leigh carried their tasty loads to the sheds to be cooked and hawked all over East London. In the tiny walled front garden beyond the window a small mounted telescope testified to John’s interest in the passing sea-trade.

  “Yes, I like it well enough here,” he agreed grudgingly to Molly’s comment. “Though it’s better in the winter, when the blessed trippers stay at home.”

  Molly suppressed a smile.

  “You can’t take a step in the summer without falling over someone sucking a stick of rock or looking for what the butler saw. Can’t blame them, I suppose,” he added, gloomily. “They might as well enjoy themselves while they can. How about a breath of air? The little lad down by the pier saves the papers for me. I always pick them up about now.”

  Molly strolled beside him in the sunshine amongst the other promenaders. “What did you mean ‘enjoy themselves while they can’?” she asked curiously. “What do you think is going to stop them?”

  He looked at her sideways, in pure disgust. “Another one who never reads a paper.”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “Then you don’t understand what you read. I’m disappointed in you, girl. Thought you had a bit of perception.”

  “There’s no need to be rude,” she said mildly.

  “Tell that to the German Navy,” he said, waving an arm in the direction of the peaceful waters, “when you see them riding at anchor out there. Invading people is rude,” he added sarcastically.

  “Oh, John, don’t be ridiculous. You don’t believe in all this warmonger talk, do you?”

  He made a dismissive noise, half-grunt, half-snort. “You’ll see. The Kaiser isn’t building dreadnoughts for fun. He’s hell-bent on war, that’s what. And he doesn’t need a navy to get to France, does he? If the Russians hadn’t been so gutless we’d have been at war already, over Turkey, you mark my words.”

  “But I can’t believe—” Molly stopped. “What’s going on? There’s a terrible crowd. What is it?” Around the newsstand was gathered a crowd, solemn, quiet, passing newspapers from hand to hand. A woman was crying quietly.