ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE
Hilary Bailey
For Sophie and Kate
Contents
Prologue
Mary Waterhouse
1945
1952
1955
1958
1964
1966
1967
Molly Endell
1974
Molly Allaun
1979
1980
1985
1996
PROLOGUE
1996
The wheels of Sir Herbert Precious’s black limousine came noiselessly (for the vehicle was powered by electricity) up the long, broad drive, with its rows of beech trees on either side, and stopped in the half-circle of gravel in front of a big red brick country house, Allaun Towers. Three wide stone steps, sheltered by a portico, led up to the front door. Yellow and white chrysanthemums, interspersed with clumps of low, green plants, cut back for the winter, stood tall in the flower beds along the walls of the house, like lines of shock-headed boys. On the other side of the car the lawn dropped down slightly towards a shrubbery. Beyond it a silver strip of lake glittered. In the distance lay fields. Far to the left were the misty hills. A late September sun shone over the trees and lake. The walls of the house were ruddy, glowing with light.
Before his chauffeur could reach the door of the car Sir Herbert had half opened it. As the man pulled it fully open and held it for him Sir Herbert got out and walked across to where the butler, who had earlier been at the front of the house, listening for the sound of wheels on the drive, was now waiting on the steps before the open front door. A tall, lean, agile man in his early sixties, Sir Herbert marched up the steps and, going into the house, said, “Hullo, Henderson. No hat. Coat’s in the car. I hope you’re well.”
“Pretty well, considering, Sir Herbert,” said the butler, shutting the door behind him.
“It’s nice to be back,” he said.
“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Sir Herbert,” said Henderson. “Lady Allaun is in the drawing room. Will you go straight in?”
“Wash my hands first,” said Sir Herbert. “Don’t worry, I’ll see myself in afterwards. Would you just tell her I’m here?”
He cast a glance at the doorway, which led to the drawing room, over which hung a portrait of some ancient Allaun, with pointed toe, one hand on his heart and the other on his long beribboned walking stick. Then he went swiftly across the marble tiles in the opposite direction, through an archway and into the cloakroom – there to pause, relax a little and, somehow, still his own, suddenly fast-beating heart before he had to join Lady Allaun in the drawing room.
“It’s the power of the past,” he thinks, as he pushes back his cuffs and runs a little cold water over the veins on the undersides of his wrists. “What a turmoil of old memories and old emotions! In the end, recollection has as much strength to disturb us as thoughts of the present when we were young, or our anticipations of the future. And on this particular occasion, how especially disturbing memory is!”
And he dries his hands, pulls his cuffs down, stares, blindly, in the mirror at his thick, brown-grey hair and long, pale face. Not as young as he used to be, he thinks, but he can still outwalk his son. He sees himself smile at his own vanity and turns from the glass. He takes a few long, deep breaths, to calm himself and then, quite collectedly, crosses the hall and goes with a springy stride under the picture of the old, seventeenth-century Allaun, down the short passageway, to where he is awaited.
After the butler’s announcement, and while Sir Herbert was washing his hands, Lady Allaun sits in an armchair, her back to the long windows which look out over the garden. She stares into the logs which burn in the wide fireplace. Beside her is a small table on which lies an open, many-tiered rosewood workbasket, full of cottons and silks. An embroidery frame, from which white linen falls in folds, stays neglected on her lap as she gazes unseeingly at the flames. To one side of her, opposite the fire, stands a long sofa, upholstered in the same soft grey as her own chair. On the other side of the fire, facing her, stands a second chair. As darkness comes the room slowly dims.
And so she sits, Lady Allaun, a tallish woman in her sixties, perhaps a little plumper than she used to be. Her hair, which must once have been blonde, is now both a little greyer and a little darker. Nevertheless, her eyes are still very blue in a plump and rosy face.
Outside in the fading light rooks caw and swoop through misty air over the sweep of land beyond the house, over the trees, the lawn, the lake. There is a sound as Sir Herbert opens the double doors of the drawing room, comes in, sees her…
Lady Allaun looks up. She cries, “Hullo, Bert.” She goes across the room, puts both hands on his shoulders and kisses him firmly on the mouth.
“Molly!” says Sir Herbert, holding her at arm’s length and staring into her face. “Not a day older, I swear. How long is it now? Five years?”
“Six,” she says, surveying him. “You’re not so bad yourself. Come and sit down. I’ve asked Henderson to bring in some tea. It’s lovely to see you again.”
“Thank you,” says Sir Herbert. “Well –” and he looks around the room.
“There seems so much to say.”
“We’d better say it, then,” says Molly Allaun in a practical but polite tone.
“Things, financially speaking, are going pretty well then?” Sir Herbert asks, equally evenly.
“Can’t complain,” Molly Allaun says with assurance. “It’s rolling in and in – enough to see me out at any rate.”
“You’ve been wiser than me,” Sir Herbert sighs.
“Ah – I’m so sorry,” says Molly.
“Well, I’m glad to hear you’re all right,” says Sir Herbert.
As Molly cuts him a piece of cake, he hands her his plate and says, “So you’ve no financial problems?”
“No,” she tells him.
“Then – to come to the point. Why the memoirs?”
“The memoirs,” says Molly and grins. “More like confessions –” She stares into the fire and says, after a pause, “Well, I don’t know why I made the tapes all about my life, really. I needed a change. It was something to do, something for me, myself. But I don’t think that was it. I never asked myself why I was doing it – not until recently, now I’ve finished. I started work after Johnnie died – Johnnie Bridges. I think that had a lot to do with it.”
“Ah – Johnnie,” says Sir Herbert.
“Poor Johnnie.” Then she says, “It was cancer – in the prison hospital at Brixton. He never thought to send for me till it was too late. Life’s all ragged ends, isn’t it?”
Sir Herbert sadly nods.
“Anyway,” Molly goes on, “that’s what started me off, I suppose. After all, it’s not just Johnnie – even at best we two haven’t got much time ahead of us and what’s to come is liable to be just more of the same. No changes. Ever think about that?”
“Of course I think about it,” he replies. “But it doesn’t worry me much.”
“Nor me – much,” Molly says. “But I’m getting old now. So are you. We’ve only got peace and quiet and a bit of contentment to look forward to. That’s natural but, face facts, it’s a path with no turnings, now.”
“What you’ve so tenderly described is a perfectly understandable exercise in recollection and understanding. But why publish – and why now?”
“I want to tell my story now, while I’m still alive. But it’s not to cause trouble, or for the money, or to start a scandal. Really, it’s because now’s the only time I know. It’s different for you. You’ve got a different attitude – your work, your old family, your farm – they’ve all got a footing in the past and the fu
ture. A feeling of continuity, that’s what you’ve always had – much good has it done you. It’s always been different for me. Now’s been the only time I’ve ever known, from a child onward. You ask me to wait – you’re asking the impossible. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe in the future. I want my story to happen now, the way everything’s always happened and always will. And I don’t want you, or anyone else, standing in my way. Here’s my offer. You take a copy of the tapes and listen to them. It’s all there. I’ve never felt much like writing. I’ve never been any good at it and it goes against the grain after all these years. You know my motto – never put anything on paper and if you do, don’t sign it.”
“All too well,” Sir Herbert agrees. “That’s what I’m worried –”
“Well,” she interrupts, “you take those tapes and if you can find one lie, or anything like it, you tell me. And, for the rest, listen hard and give me an opinion and I’ll hold everything until you give it. I’ll take you seriously, I won’t sign a thing, I promise you.”
Sir Herbert left next day, towards evening. Only as the car went through the big gates at the bottom of the drive did he settle his long body comfortably into the upholstery and realize how uneasy he had felt as the car swung down between the trees, and how tired he was. He suffered regret at leaving the comfortable life of Allaun Towers, and the company of his friend, and a feeling of deep release as he finally left the grounds. Flashes of the past days came to him – of the candles in their silver candelabra on the table, of the arrival of the great platter of pheasant, of Molly Allaun throwing herself back in her chair and laughing, of their quiet walk round the rose garden at the back of the house where flowers still bloomed, of their talking by the fire in their deep armchairs, late into the night. But all the time, he realized, the remembrance of the past had been running, like an underground river, below the surface of the present. Perhaps, he thought, it was all those memories, not produced for the conscious mind to recognize but there, all the same, like sights seen from the corner of the eye, noises almost out of hearing, waves of perfume evoking a response, but no specific association, which had tired him so much. But he had the tapes, and tonight he would start listening to them.
As the car moved through the countryside Sir Herbert began to think that he need not just sit and listen to Molly Allaun’s version of the truth. Surely he could shed some light on some of the events, correct a few of the errors she would almost undoubtedly have made? In fact, he thought, some comment and criticism, some corrections, even some additional information might be extremely useful before the final and, he now thinks, irrevocable, revelations she had decided to make.
He opened the leather case of cassette tapes on the seat beside him and removed the first. Immediately the car fills with the familiar voice.
And tonight, thinks Sir Herbert, and all the next day, Molly Allaun will be raising the dead for him.
Mary Waterhouse
1941
Mary Waterhouse sat on the train. There were six other children in the compartment. She was nearly five and they were all bigger than her. They scuffled their feet on the tops of the crumpled newspaper which had wrapped their sandwiches and was now lying on the floor. They had been squabbling, about who was entitled to the last few mouthfuls from the bottle of Tizer which was being passed round. The girls sat on one side, facing the way the train was going. Cissie Messiter was making a cat’s cradle from the string which had been round the newspaper in which her sandwiches had been wrapped. Beside her, Peggy Jones, her mouth open in her big, fat face, stared across to where Frank Jessop and James Hodges were standing up and bouncing on the seats opposite her. James’s sister, Win, in the corner by the corridor, was asleep. Ian Brent was lying in the luggage rack. Mannie Frankel, in the corridor, was leaning out of the window shouting at any house or cottage they passed. “Oy! Cows!” he cried out. “Wotcher! Cows!” The bottle of Tizer landed in the newspapers on the floor, with a thud.
But Mary Waterhouse, in the corner by the window, was alone, staring out at the brilliant sunburnt heath, at trees and bushes and fields, at the long, drying grass and foxgloves growing in the earth and cinders of the railway embankments, which blurred, as the train swept them on, into long streaks of yellow-green and small streaks of dull red. She could feel the heat on her face as the train hurtled forward, and the scratching of the hot, plush seats on the backs of her thighs. Her mouth and the back of her throat were dry, but she did not think about getting a drink. She had never been so fast, seen so much green, so many things growing, so much open sky, such a wide landscape, going on, in its variety of fields, small winding roads, hills and dales and open, fern-filled common land. It was like a dream, or a picture in her book. What could it be like, she thought, to live in one of those houses with gardens full of flowers and things growing, opening into fields? You could get up in the morning and walk straight out into a field, feeling the grass under your feet and the sun on your back. Or, she thought, perhaps you’d be allowed to pick a flower whenever you liked, if it really was your garden outside your house. She felt her arms, prickling full of flowers, and sensed the smell, like passing a flower-seller in the street, right under her nose. No one to tell you to get your hands off. You’d have to be rich, thought Mary, sitting in her flimsy maroon dress with the mustard-coloured flowers on it, very rich to pay the landlord of a house like that, with a garden.
It must be like magic, like turning the pages of her book, going further and further into the picture of the lady in the long dress in the deep forest.
She must have fallen into that four-year-old’s daze, awake but dreaming, for Mr Burns’s angry voice came at her suddenly, as he shouted, “Look at this filthy mess –” and she realized suddenly that all the children had snapped to attention. She had even heard, at the back of her dream, Ian Brent plop down from the luggage rack like a ripe apple from a tree, and land, somehow, in his proper place in a sitting position. Now he sat stiffly, arms folded, eyes straight forward, in the position Mr Burns insisted they assume in the classroom. All the children had their arms folded and looked ahead of them. Cissie Messiter was straightbacked, but right on the edge of her seat; was trying, unobtrusively, to kick the newspapers into the narrow space underneath. Only Peggy Jones, beside her, had her head turned witlessly towards the corridor, where Mannie Frankel was holding the side of his head and crying.
Beside him Mr Burns, red-faced and sweating, went on shouting into the compartment, “I told all of you, before you got on this train, to behave yourselves. You’re not in the slums now. You’re going to a decent place, to meet a decent set of people, country people, not pigs, like all of you. If I catch you with your head out of the window once more, my lad,” he said, turning to the blubbering Mannie, “you won’t have any head left to put out. Is that understood?”
Mannie, conditioned to expect that tone of voice to be followed by a blow, cried all the harder.
Mr Burns bent over him, took his ear in his hand, put his face ogreishly against the boy’s and said again, “Understand?”
Mannie Frankel let out an earsplitting scream.
Mr Burns released him suddenly, so that he stumbled backwards.
All the children in the carriage, except Peggy, continued to stare straight ahead of them, not daring to meet each other’s eyes. Mary’s thumb, as she heard Mannie’s walking run along the corridor of the moving train, moved up, slowly and steadily, from her lap into her mouth. She did not know what was going to happen. She felt very frightened. Mr Burns, sweating in his shiny black suit, his collar and tie, at the carriage door, might come in and make them all put out their hands and hit them with his long wooden ruler. He had broken a girl’s finger once, her brother Jackie had told her. Just as bad was the loss of her magic dream, like getting a toffee and having Ivy snatch it away, unwrap it and put it in her own mouth. Great big red lips, yellow teeth, pink tongue sucking round her toffee.
“Take your thumb out of your mouth, Mary Waterhouse,”
came the shouting voice. “You’re not a baby now.” She took it out.
“As for the rest of you guttersnipes – get this carriage cleaned up. Ugh – it smells. Didn’t your mothers give you a wash before you came?” And he disappeared.
“Ivy washed me,” Mary said into the rustling noise as the children collected newspapers from the floor. She was remembering the cloth, grey and part of an old shirt, which had gone wet and stale-smelling, round her neck and ears, before she set off for the school, where all the children, with paper bags or brown paper parcels containing their clothes, had mustered in the playground before leaving for the station. She remembered the way Ivy’s chest, on a level with her own head, moved in and out in sharp jerks. She panted as she wiped. “Don’t move your bloody head,” she had cried, as Mary turned away to avoid her breath. “Little madam,” she had muttered crossly, but Mary did not know exactly what she meant.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all this lot,” said sharp-faced Cissie, standing up, clutching a heap of screwed up newspaper to her bony little chest. “Old Burns just thinks he’s better than what we are. Just because he’s a rotten schoolteacher. My mum says she remembers him coming to school with no boots on. She reckons he used to live down Wakefield Street and there were eight of them in the family. And they didn’t have no blankets in the winter time,” she concluded triumphantly and stood there, peaky and small, in the middle of the jolting carriage, wearing a grey woollen skirt too long for her and a skimpy, faded blouse with flowers on it. “Here, Peggy,” she said. “Chuck these out the window.”
Peggy, who was still sitting down, stood up slowly and took the papers. The others watched her.
At the window she said, “I might get into trouble.”
Mary stood up and, standing on tiptoes, began to help her push the newspapers out. They were whisked off, down the side of the train. Peggy joined her at the window and laughed as the newspapers were half-torn from her grasp.
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