All The Days of My Life

by Hilary Bailey

  Arnie Rose, master of good timing, turned up after my second flaming appointment in Mrs Galton’s back bedroom. The syringe hadn’t worked. “You’re the sort that hangs on to them,” she remarked philosophically. I thought to myself, get out, you little bastard, and leave me alone. I was very fierce about that kid. I didn’t want it. I’d have jumped in the canal before I’d have had it.

  Anyway, there was Arnie, standing in the front room doorway, smoking a big cigar and saying “Well, well, well,” and there I was lying on the settee, staring at him in horror, and wearing an old candlewick dressing-gown.

  “I was going to suggest you and me going up West for a drink and a bit of dinner,” he said. “Just to show there’s no hard feelings about that other business.”

  “Nice of you, Arnie,” said Ivy, appearing behind him in the doorway, with a tea tray. “But as a matter of fact Mary’s not well.” Behind her Shirley peered round to crane at Arnie, with his gold watchchain and cigar. Something to tell the girls at school in the morning. Ivy sent her upstairs to do her homework and gave Arnie a cup of tea.

  “I can see she looks a bit peaky, Mrs W,” Arnie said. “What’s the doctor say?”

  Ivy broke all the rules which said that these things were women’s secrets and never revealed to men. Some men never even knew their wives were pregnant or had had an abortion even though every other woman in the street knew it. But Ivy just said, “There’s no doctor in this. Mrs Galton’s the doctor here.”

  I daresay Arnie had had some dealings with her in the past. He looked embarrassed, then incredulous. He said, “No –”

  “I could kill that Bridges,” Ivy said fiercely. “I won’t be at peace until he gets what’s coming to him.”

  Then I could see what she was up to when she told him.

  “You’ll be at peace soon enough, then, Ivy,” Arnie told her. “Quite a few of us have got scores to settle with him.” Then he looked at me and said, still embarrassed, “Well – I’d better be off and leave you to – er – here –” and he got his wallet out of his jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of fivers. “Take it, Ivy,” he said. “I’d like to help – plenty more where that comes from.”

  Ivy was shocked. There are rules about who pays for abortions – and Arnie was not the father of the child, nor a member of the family: What he was, or had been, was a man who had paid for plenty of abortions for the girls he ran. So this gesture, which included me among Arnie’s business girls, put Ivy right off. She refused and said Sid could look after me. So Arnie handed over a fiver before he left and said to get something for little Josie and this time Ivy took it.

  As the door clicked behind Arnie, she tucked the money behind the clock on the mantelpiece and said, “A nice thing – gangsters coming to call on you. I don’t know what people must think.”

  “They’ll feel all right if you tell them who paid for the doll’s pram,” I told her. I was leaning back feeling horrible and wondering when the pain would start. “They’ll all say, oh, well, for all his way of life, Arnie’s got a heart of gold when it comes to little kids. Kind to his old mother, too.”

  “I’d like to be a fly on the wall when they catch up with Johnnie,” Ivy said vindictively. But I was too depressed to see it like that. The pain had started now, and like all pain it was made worse by my feelings – here I lay on the settee while the man who had helped to make the baby I was getting rid of had let me down.

  It happened that night, with Ivy trying to comfort me and putting newspaper under me to absorb the blood. I won’t forget the look on her face when it was over – oh, Christ, the look on a woman’s face when she’s seen her daughter suffer the consequences of being a woman needs to be seen to be believed. Generations, thousands of years of them have looked like that, passed it on to their daughters, who pass it on to theirs. That face is full of pity but it tries to will a bitof courage into the girl. It says, that’s the way it is, but you don’t have to let it ruin you, girl.

  Of course Johnnie had rejected me when I needed help, but, of course, he turned up when I was all right. Some people are like that – the exact opposite of the person who’s always there when you need them. They’re the sort that are never there when you just fell off the bus and always around if you won the pools. He ducks in, looking all round like a kid who’s been nicking sweets from Woolworth’s, and sits down to talk about marriage and love and a better life when he’s got things straight with the Roses. I said, “Go away and leave me alone, Johnnie,” because Ivy was in the room but, do you know, if Ivy hadn’t been in the room I’d have fallen on his neck, just as usual, and agreed to anything he said. Like I said, I’m sure half of it’s like a relationship between a torturer and the person he’s torturing. It’s that, and of course that you always hope to wipe out the past and set the record straight and have everything back the way it was before. But Ivy wasn’t having anything to do with Johnnie and she told him now he’d seen I was all right he could go. He didn’t hang about arguing when she pointed out Josie’s fiver still on the mantelpiece and told him who it came from and wasn’t Arnie kind to drop in and see how I was keeping. Johnnie flashed out the door like greased lightning. Even I had to see the funny side – Ivy and me laughed so much I had to tell her to stop me. I thought I’d do myself a mischief, the state I was in.

  1955

  It was in February, as Molly stood in the park pushing her daughter on the swing, that a thickset man of medium height came up to her and asked, very politely, “Mrs Flanders?” She looked into an ivory face, with very black, slightly slanted eyes and said, after a hesitation, “That’s right. Who are you?” His eyes then turned to the swing, where little Josie was bending herself to and fro to try and keep it in motion, now that Molly had stopped pushing, and he said, almost absent-mindedly, “My name is Ferenc Nedermann.” In his thick black overcoat, middle-aged and rather shy, he did not give the impression of being the notorious slum landlord he really was. She said, “How can I help you, Mr Nedermann?”

  “I wondered,” he said, in his slightly accented English, “if you would be able to tell me where Johnnie Bridges is?”

  She shook her head and told him, “No. I wouldn’t know where to find him. I haven’t seen him since before Christmas.”

  “You haven’t got any idea where he might be?” he said. “At the moment the matter is desperate. He’s borrowed money from me and I now need it badly.”

  “Oh, God,” said Molly. She felt sick, tired and depressed suddenly. She never wanted to hear of Johnnie or his complications again. She had still not recovered from his refusal to help her. Meanwhile Nedermann went on staring at Josie, who was now turning her head of brown curls towards Molly and crying out, “Push, Mum. Push.”

  Nedermann, after a pause, said, “It was five thousand pounds. He swore he had a way of paying me back by the middle of last month. At another time I would not mind the delay. But at the moment I need to call on every penny I have.”

  “Five thousand,” Molly said. “He told me it was two.”

  “To pay off the Roses,” Nedermann agreed. “Then he borrowed a further three.”

  “Why did you lend him so much?” said Molly. “A man who’d already cheated the Roses. What made you think you’d do any better?”

  Nedermann shrugged, then moved forward to push the swing – a little push, so that Josephine would not fall off. He turned his head to look at Molly. “He did me a small favour,” he said. “And his plans for getting the money to return to me seemed sound.”

  “You mean you lent him the money to go out and do a job,” Molly said bitterly. “And then it failed and he disappeared. That’s the story, isn’t it?”

  “More or less,” agreed Nedermann. “People told me Johnnie Bridges never failed.”

  “That used to be true,” she agreed. “Have you tried the police stations?”

  “He’s not in the hands of the law,” Nedermann told her. He gave Josephine a large push, to keep her swinging, and stepped back to lo
ok at Molly. “You’ve no idea where he is – not a clue?”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

  Josephine then fell off the swing and began to cry. Molly ran to get her, picked her up and returned to Nedermann, who said instantly, “Is she hurt?”

  “Just a graze,” Molly told him and then said bluntly, “Mr Nedermann – I don’t want anything more to do with Johnnie or the Rose brothers. And I can’t help you.” She thought that she wanted no more to do with him either, although she felt sorry for him. He seemed a lonely man. He had been cheated by Johnnie. She had heard of his evictions, his West Indians crammed together, whole families to a room, paying inflated rents and unable to complain because they might not be able to find anywhere else to live. She had heard of his houses run as brothels, the fires caused by faulty wiring, the damp, his practice of doing what they called “putting the schwartzes in” – letting flats in houses to West Indians, who would have noisy parties all night long and wear down the old people who lived there so much that they left. She knew all this but still she thought he was a sad and rather pathetic man.

  “I must go now,” she said hastily, “and give my little girl her tea.”

  She let herself thankfully into the little house. But the brief meeting with Nedermann had brought a whole crush of memories back to her mind. She ironed Sid and Jack’s shirts and Shirley’s school blouses. She put a chicken in the oven. And remembered walking with Johnnie along the canal, and the clubs and Frames and, reaching further back, had a vision of Allaun Towers at Christmas – the long, old building, the old rust-red bricks, the lawn, the bare trees, the big fire at the back of the house – and then, Johnnie again, bending over her as she lay in bed, smiling at him. She felt his body, which she had tried hard to forget. She stood at the sink with a potato in one hand and a knife in the other. Tears of misery and boredom began to drip from her face.

  Josephine said, “I lost golly,” four times. But Molly did not hear her until at last she looked down into the child’s face and said, “What am I going to do?” and burst into tears herself.

  “I lost golly. Find golly,” demanded her daughter. Molly sat and cried. When Shirley came in from school Molly went upstairs, saying she was unwell, and sat there by herself as the noise of the others coming in began. Nineteen Meakin Street was now badly overcrowded. Although Jack was living with a family near the docks, where he worked, there was not room for Josephine’s cot in the bedroom, so she slept in Shirley’s bed and Molly in the other, while Shirley had taken up Jack’s old position on the front room settee. At weekends, especially if Jack was there with his girlfriend, there was no room in the house at all. Ivy, who had got back her old job in the breadshop, was tiring under the strain. Molly, still living on what the family had saved from her wages and tips, knew that she would have to leave. It would mean getting a job which paid her enough to cover the rent and the cost of a minder for Josephine. That might be difficult, but would not be impossible to manage. The worst thing was her sudden craving for some movement, some excitement, a bit of life. She saw nothing ahead but a Council flat, if she could get one, and a job in a shop or perhaps an office. She did not know what she wanted but she did not want that. She was nineteen and a half. She had a small child to look after and few choices. She went downstairs and sat in the front room while the family had their supper.

  Simon Tate walked down Meakin Street that evening, finding it narrow and depressing. A thin and malignant dog barked at him through mist laden with drizzle. A woman walked past, heavy-legged and bowed down with shopping. He knocked on the door of number 19. It was opened by a tired woman in her late thirties, with coarsely dyed blonde hair tied back and held with a black velvet bow at the nape of her neck. She looked at him with the alert, slightly sceptical expression which he recognized as Molly Flanders’. Behind her a pretty two-year-old with round, brown eyes and curly hair stood clutching a grubby doll.

  “I’m a friend of Molly’s,” he said, “from Frames. I brought these.” He presented the bunch of roses he had in his hand. The woman looked at him and said, “Come in, then. She’s in the front room.”

  In the small parlour Molly sat with her feet on a stool, smoking and watching TV. She looked up apathetically and then her expression brightened. “Simon!” she cried.

  “Here you are, Molly,” said Simon. “Hope you’re feeling a lot better.”

  “Excuse me,” said Ivy, now satisfied that the visitor was welcome, “we’re just eating our tea. Fancy a cup of tea, later?”

  “Thank you,” said Simon. “I’m just back from Kenya – thought I’d look in.”

  Simon sat down and said, “That’s what it’s all about. I’ve come with a proposition from the Roses. They called me back – found out where I was from the man I used to share the flat with. They’ve offered me extra wages and they want you back too. They’ve been trying to run the place with other staff but it hasn’t worked out. I’m here to say, how about it?”

  “All right for you,” said Molly. “They want you because you do your job well. But my worry is that Arnie Rose wants me for other reasons. I mean, I could do with the work but I don’t want it on condition I take on Arnie Rose.”

  “Well, it was Norman who asked me to ask you,” he said. “He told me you were attractive, confident and efficient and honest, and you knew the job. Arnie didn’t come into it, as far as I know. You’d get more money.”

  “The other problem is, who would look after Josephine?” Molly told him.

  “What about your mother –” Simon suggested.

  “She’s got a responsible job managing a breadshop. And she likes it,” Molly said. “Why should she have to give it up?”

  “Up the ante on the Roses. They’ve offered you twenty a week,” Simon responded. “Say you’ll do it for twenty-five. With your tips you could afford to make it worth your mother’s while.”

  “Why shouldn’t she have a life of her own?” Mary said impatiently.

  “Who?” demanded Ivy, coming into the room.

  “You, if you want to know,” her daughter told her.

  “I thought I had one,” said Ivy. “Too much of it, most of the time.”

  Simon looked at Ivy and decided that she was the sort of woman who made up her own mind. So he put the matter to her. And Ivy said that she would take Josephine over during the week, that she would book her in to a state nursery in the mornings and take her to work with her in the afternoons. She added that Mary had to collect Josephine every Friday night and return her at a decent hour on Sundays. She added that all this was subject to Sid’s approval but it seemed to Simon this was only a nod to convention.

  “Done, then,” said Simon, standing up. “It’ll be good to have you back. But do you think you’re fit enough?”

  “Fit for anything,” declared Molly. “But is the flat still going? I’ve got to find somewhere to live. No point in you having the weekend off without Josephine, Mum, if I come here with her. And she won’t know what’s going on.”

  “Flat’s gone,” Simon said laconically. “Arnie let it to a bloke called Greene. He’s a slightly dubious doctor – unqualified, specializes in looking after society gentlemen and ladies’ bad backs – and other things, too. He also draws their pets – dogs and horses and the like. He’s the kind of versatile chap they used to keep about the courts of Europe in the old days – could be relied on to produce a love philtre, play a few relaxing songs on the guitar when the king felt out of sorts, and generally help out on any and every occasion.” Mary thought there might be more to Greene’s talents than he was prepared to say in front of Ivy, but at that moment she was more concerned with her own predicament.

  “I’ll have to go to an agency and find a flat,” she said despondently.

  “I think Sid told me the Tomkinsons were moving out of number 4, where you used to live,” Ivy said. “He works at the garage but they’ve got the deposit for a house, now.”

  “Oh,
Christ, Mum,” Molly said. “Not there. I can’t go there.” In that house she had weathered out the time after Jim Flanders was hanged. In that house her romance with Johnnie Bridges had begun.

  “The rent’s low, if the landlord’ll let you have it. If you go to an agency you’ll get some tiny rathole for twenty guineas a week – and it won’t disturb Josie so much –”

  Molly groaned. “Have a word with him, then,” she told her mother. “Tell him I’ll pay half the price of having a bathroom installed if he’ll pay the other half. That’ll convince the mean sod. I can’t be running up here for a bath all the time like I used to and Josie’s too big to bathe in the sink any more. All right, Tate,” she said, rounding on him. “Now you can go home with a Balkan Sobranie drooping out of your mouth after a nice evening witnessing the problems of the poor.”

  “I was admiring your velocity,” remarked Simon. “Goodbye, Mrs Waterhouse. Goodbye, Molly. Monday night at eight?”

  And he was gone. “Nice man,” Ivy said. “That’s the sort you should be setting your cap at from now on, Mary.”

  “Thanks a lot, mum,” said her daughter drily.

  The next day Molly put on her old fur coat, mittens and a woolly hat and took a heavily bundled up Josephine out to the scruffy little park.

  The sky overhead was livid and dark as they arrived. “It might snow,” she told Josephine, who jumped up and down, crying “Snow! Snow!” Molly looked down at her. She was a tartar, and no mistake, she thought. Half the time she clung wordlessly to Ivy’s skirts, or sheltered behind Sid. Seconds later she’d be rattling away, nineteen to the dozen, getting hold of a neglected can of paint and painting the back of the house red, sternly counting the milk bottles in front of the milkman, as if checking the delivery, rushing and tearing everywhere. There were times when Mary looked into the bright, huge brown eyes and feared for a child of such emphatic character.