All The Days of My Life

by Hilary Bailey

  “I’m supposed to sort all this out singlehanded?” demanded Ivy. “Why don’t I find a cure for cancer in my spare time? What will you be doing while I solve it all? Sitting in that chair, I suppose. You’ve got a nerve, lecturing me. I suppose all this is supposed to be my fault?”

  Sid did not reply. Ivy studied his face and her own face went paler still. Two red spots burned on her cheeks. “You think it is, don’t you? You’re blaming me for all this. That’s always the way, isn’t it? Things go wrong and it’s the woman’s fault – she’s got to put everything to rights. Of course, if the kids are doing well the man goes down the pub and boasts about it.”

  Again, Sid said nothing.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Ivy. “And you were as much in favour of it as I was. My God – you men are traitors to the core, every man jack of you. Let a woman take the responsibility – if it turns out right you take the credit. If it turns out wrong the woman takes the blame.”

  “My job’s to put bread in their mouths,” Sid told her. “And that I have done and I’m still doing.”

  “Lovely,” said Ivy. “You organize a few buses and I have to organize all the people. I know which I’d choose if I had my time all over again.”

  “No choice for either of us,” Sid said and went off to make a cup of tea. He brought Ivy a cup but, to her surprise, did not immediately sit down in front of the television with his own. Instead he went out of the room and she heard his tread on the stairs, going up to Mary’s room.

  Her nerves were so jangled that all she thought was, “He’ll upset her. He’ll make more trouble. He blunders about like a bull in a china shop. He’s hopeless.” She lit a cigarette and tried to relax until the baby cried again, or Sid made some impossible demand or Mary appeared in her dressing-gown to sit, silent and withdrawn, in front of the television.

  “All right – I’ll get you a bloody TV,” boomed the distorted voice of Jim Flanders through Mary’s head. “I’ll get you a washing machine. I’ll take you to the pictures every night –” Inside her head, flat on her pillow, looking towards the window, she heard the bang, like an explosion, of the front door. She lay there, rigid, with the film of her life with Jim unrolling behind her eyeballs.

  Mary’s fair hair had grown longer, and duller. Her eyes were blank and pale, her face expressionless as pictures went through her head – of the angry young man leaving Meakin Street in a rage – the door banging, the heels of his shoes hard on the pavement outside. Then came images of a body, like a rag doll at the end of a string, swinging at the end of a rope. She saw Jim getting naked out of bed in Meakin Street and bending to kiss her. She saw him in his Sunday suit, shoes well polished, hanging, with his face turned blue and his tongue lolling out. It had probably not been like that, she knew, but that was what she saw. She saw, then, her own hands twisting in her swollen lap as she sat in court, watching Jim in the dock as he stumbled and faltered under the cross–questioning.

  “Better when the baby’s born – better be – I’ll get you a bloody TV –” came the distorted voice, finally cracking and shouting “– wish to God I’d never met you –” Then the banging of the door.

  Tears came down Mary’s face, cooling on her frozen cheeks as she lay there motionless. Poor Jim. Dead. And the nightwatchman dead, too. Poor old man, beaten over the head by Jim, as if he had turned on the innocent old fellow instead of his wife, who had nagged and nagged – and the judge had said society could not tolerate these violent young men, deprived of proper parental discipline during their formative years, going about like wild beasts in the jungle, taking what they wanted without thought or mercy. The verdict of the jury would determine whether or not the nation was prepared to countenance the wave of violence and lawlessness sweeping the country. Poor Jim. Poor old man. In the end the jury had decided Jim Flanders was guilty but made a strong recommendation for mercy because of his youth, personal circumstances and his previous good record. The judge had told them they were not entitled to add recommendations of any kind and had sentenced Jim to hang. The jury realized, too late, that they had condemned to death a young man whom none of them wanted to see die. Not that there was any doubt of his guilt. He had been seen running away from the warehouse by two people. Only a few minutes later a policeman had discovered the nightwatchman unconscious, bleeding from the head. He had died shortly after and the weapon, a heavy meathook, found beside him had carried Jim Flanders’ fingerprints.

  Mary, blurry, puffy-faced and heavily pregnant, had been knocked up at three in the morning by the police. A hastily summoned policewoman broke the news to her. She did not respond at first because she could not believe what they told her. When, finally, they made her understand that Jim had been arrested all she said was, “Find Harry Smith.” She knew that Jim alone would never have conceived the idea of robbing the warehouse. Moments later, as the Detective Inspector and his sergeant began to question her closely about Harry Smith, she realized she had made a mistake and refused to say any more. If Harry Smith had been involved he was not going to admit it. If he did, Jim would be no better off. It was no surprise to hear later that the entire Smith family had decamped the day after the robbery. No one knew where they were except Mary, because Harry had confided to her the secret of the caravan in an Essex field which proved so useful as a holiday spot and hide-out when creditors were after them. But Mary, overcome with the horror of what, so arbitrarily, seemed to be taking place, saw no point in sending the police to Essex after the Smiths. She did not react to anything during the rest of the time up to, and after, Jim’s death. After the trial a middle-aged woman in a dusty black coat came up to her and tried to wish her, and the coming child, a better future. As the woman stumbled through her thought-out phrases, “No point in dwelling in rage and pain, what’s done is done, now we must all get on with the future,” Mary merely muttered “Thank you” and walked away. It was left to Ivy to express her thanks to the nightwatchman’s daughter for her forgiving behaviour.

  Mary’s attitude disappointed, and partly alienated, the neighbourhood. At first everyone was ready to be sympathetic to the poor girl, to give her more than her due, in fact, for being the heroine of a drama dignified by proceedings at the Old Bailey. But Mary, refusing to talk to reporters or to sympathetic, if curious, well-wishers, gave no satisfaction to her waiting audience. She would not appeal to their sentimentality as the young, pregnant widow of the hanged man. She would not arouse their self-righteousness by responding to remarks about the strangeness of the Smiths’ sudden disappearance the day after Jim’s arrest. It may have been dissatisfaction with Mary’s general behaviour which led to the mutterings about Jim having been driven to crime by his wife and even suggestions that she, a notorious dare-devil, had actually thought up the plan for the robbery and sent him out to do it.

  Meanwhile Mary lay day by day upstairs in her bedroom, hearing her baby cry, Shirley get into bed, the noises of the household, through a fog of despair. She heard Elizabeth Flanders’ voice as she left the court, leaning on Sid’s arm, “You killed my boy. He died because of you.” Tears welled from her open eyes. She looked out into the darkness.

  She was startled when Sid said, from the open door, “Here’s a cup of tea, Mary. I want you to get up.”

  “I can’t, Dad. Not now,” she replied.

  “Yes, you can,” said he, prepared for a long battle.

  Mary sighed a long sigh and turned over in bed to look at him. She pulled herself into a sitting position.

  “All right,” she said. “Never mind the tea. I’ll come down and drink it.”

  “See you in a minute, then,” he said.

  Downstairs Ivy said, “Go and listen at the foot of the stairs, Sid. I’m afraid she may do something desperate.”

  “If she doesn’t, I will, if this goes on,” Sid told her. He added calmly, “Anyway she’s out of it, now.”

  Ivy was almost convinced. “I hope you’re right,” she said.

  Mary washed
her face and cleaned her teeth and came down while Sid and Ivy waited nervously. Ivy was afraid she would kill herself if Sid was brutal to her. Sid was bent on having the matter out whatever the consequences. And Mary, although she did not know it, had recovered. During the long months of depression, as she had endured the constant replaying of Jim’s departure, the arrival of the police and the horrors of the trial, as she had, like a child, winced and flinched from the vision of Jim’s body being eaten away in a lime-filled grave in a prison, she had without realizing it been thinking about, and working out, the life open to her as the widow of a convicted murderer and the mother of a small child. She could easily see what the terms were.

  She certainly could not go on living with Sid and Ivy. There was no room for her and the child. It would be a strain on all of them. She would be the shameful creature who is returned to her family to be sheltered and forgiven. But if she was lucky, within a few years she could have a job and a Council flat. If she was luckier a man would come along and marry her and take away the stigma of the past. They could move to another area. She could have another child.

  Mary felt she couldn’t face her parents. She had to get out. After she had gone Jack opened his eyes and said, “I thought she was coming round.”

  “Nice to see her dressed for the first time for months,” Sid remarked.

  “It’s like having an unexploded bomb right in the middle of the room,” Ivy complained. “I daren’t open my mouth.”

  Jack was more confident than his parents. If it came to it, he was sure he could handle Mary. “Leave her alone,” he said. “And stop thinking about her like a cuckoo in the nest. She’s doing the best she can. You can’t expect too much of her – look at the size of her. She weighs nothing. She’s close to being very ill. Is anyone going to pour that tea out?”

  Mary came back, looking far from ill, and said, “Mum – Dad. I’ve settled with the landlord. I’m taking over the Smiths’ house at number 4. He’ll pay half the decorating – will you help me clean it up?”

  “How are you going to cope with the rent?” Sid asked immediately.

  “I’ve got a widow’s pension,” Mary told him. “I’ll get a little job somewhere. Stands to reason I can’t go on living here. There isn’t room. You can get your job back, Mum.”

  “You’ll live there all alone?” said Ivy. “In the whole house?”

  “That’s right,” Mary told her. “I’d ask you to come, Jack, but I want to be on my own for a bit to see how it goes.”

  “All right,” said Jack patiently, although he had thought instantly that he would be more comfortable if he moved in with Mary.

  “You can come and study there, see,” she said. “And keep an eye on Josephine some evenings, while I’m working.”

  “That’s all right,” he said.

  Sid and Ivy, faced with their half-grown children organizing themselves so efficiently, sat filled with misgivings. Sid finally remarked, “I don’t see how you’re going to cope with the expenses –”

  “I’ll be all right,” said Mary. “I’m moving Monday.”

  Jack looked at her suspiciously. He knew Mary had been up to something. “I’ll help you,” he said.

  So next day Ivy and Mary marched down Meakin Street with the pram, across which lay a new mop, by way of advertisement. They carried buckets and brushes and got the keys from the woman next door in order to let themselves in. They boiled a huge black kettle on the gas stove to get hot water for the task of cleaning up the house. “Faugh,” said Ivy fussily, throwing open the kitchen window and door to let in blasts of icy air. “What a stink. It looks as if they never put a damp cloth to anything all the time they were here. Look at this lino – you can’t see the colour for the dirt. Put on that bucket full of water, Mary. We’ll need gallons. I can smell that toilet from here.”

  A pale sun filled the little yard outside, where grass grew in the cracks of the asphalt. An elderberry bush grew from a gap in the broken wall. The women scraped grease from the ancient gas stove, scrubbed floors, tore the dirty, tattered net curtains from the windows. As they threw spirits of salt down the lavatory pan of the outside toilet the sky clouded and sleet began to fall. “It’ll take days,” said Ivy, who was in her element – triumphant, vigorous, scouring out the stone sink in the kitchen, dragging a stained mattress downstairs and propping it outside for the dustman. Here was her damaged daughter, now moving into her own home, not two hundred yards from her own front door. It might have looked better if her brother had also moved in but you couldn’t have everything, reasoned Ivy.

  “I’ll mobilize Jack and your dad at the weekend,” she told Mary. “They can start decorating. There’s some nice wallpaper going cheap down the market –”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get it,” Mary said.

  “It’s your home,” said Ivy discontentedly.

  She did not approve of Mary’s lightly striped wallpaper, nor her insistence on pale paintwork all over the house. She nearly exploded when her daughter had a big bedstead with brass knobs on it delivered by a van. “People will think you’re setting up house with a man,” she said. Nevertheless, she had to admit, when the house filled with pale, early sunshine, that it was a cheering sight. And by that time Ivy badly needed some signs that things were improving.

  What baffled and worried both her and Sid was where Mary’s money came from. Finally Sid confronted Mary and accused her of going to moneylenders, who would persecute her if she did not repay. Mary, child of her generation, which had never heard of the tight grasp of the local moneylender on poor neighbourhoods, laughed at him. “If you must know,” she told him, “I rang the local pub near where the Smiths are hiding out and I told old man Smith if he didn’t send me a hundred pounds I’d let on Harry was with Jim that night when they did the robbery. I know he was because I looked out the window after Jim left and I saw them talking on the corner. Anyway, Harry told Jim about the load of cigarettes they were delivering there and asked him to go out and do the job with him. Only Jim refused. They knew there were two men there that night, and they took fingerprints. It could be nasty for Harry if I said anything – I couldn’t be bothered at the time.”

  “Mary!” exclaimed Sid. “It’s blackmail!”

  “The Smiths won’t miss a hundred pounds,” said Mary calmly. “It was Harry led Jim astray – now they can pay for a bit of a home for his widow and kid, that’s what I say.”

  Sid was shocked, not so much by what Mary had done as by her cool and ruthless attitude. But he went on repairing the light in the hall, muttering, “I hope you’re not going to make a practice of blackmail, my girl.”

  When Ivy came into the house with some shopping Sid told her what Mary had done. Ivy said, “Good for her – I’d have done the same, I hope.”

  “You women are bloody criminals,” Sid told her.

  “We’ve got to be,” was Ivy’s only reply.

  Jack came round to help Mary lay the new dark blue carpet in the parlour. Sulkily pulling his end towards the window he said, “I don’t like this, Mary. Tugging this bit of ill-gotten gains about. What do you think you’re doing, taking money from thieves?”

  “Rather I took it off honest people, Jack?” his sister asked. She pulled her end into a corner and nailed it down.

  “Don’t nail it yet,” he said irritably. “It’s not straight at this end.”

  “It would be if you concentrated on getting it straight instead of lecturing me about where it came from,” said Mary, “And if you’re so fussy why don’t you go away? I can do it on my own.”

  “I don’t approve of blackmail,” he said. At this point the baby, in her pram in the hall, began to cry. Mary went to pick her up and stood in the doorway.

  “What do you expect me to do, Jack?” she asked. “Sit on my bum in Mum and Dad’s house, waiting for something to turn up? I’ve copped a hundred, that’s all, off a gang of thieves who copped it off some other sucker. What are you going to do – tell the vicar?”
/>   “You’re starting to get hard, Mary,” said her brother.

  “It’s that or go under,” she told him. “I’m not going under and nor’s my daughter.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “You’ve got your whole life before you. You’re a pretty girl. You can find a decent bloke who won’t mind about Jim. You can marry again.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mary said. “I’m supposed to sit and wait in poverty until my prince comes along and kindly rescues me. With any luck he’ll only tell me a few times a year, when we have a row, how nice it was to take me on, with a baby, a murderer’s widow. If I just sit tight and keep my nose clean I can have that, eh, Jack? How would you like it yourself?”

  “I wouldn’t let yourself get bitter, Mary,” he advised.

  Mary put the baby, now sleeping, back in the pram, and said, “Thanks for the tip. But if this is the price of getting some help with the carpet I’ll skip it. No hard feelings, Jack, but you’d better go home.”

  “Get back up your end,” he said, “and shut up.”

  They got the carpet into position and started passing the hammer back and forth while they tacked it down. Mary looked up from her hammering and said, “The trouble with me as far as you’re concerned, Jack, is that I don’t fit into any of the categories you’re learning at nightschool. I’m not a toiling proletarian, or a bourgeois or a capitalist, or any of that.”

  “I dunno,” said Jack. “At the moment I’d call you an unscrupulous entrepreneur.”