Suddenly, as if to console her, the vision of Allaun Towers, long and low, built of old red brick, weathered to russet, came into her head. She was a small child, standing in the drive on a summer afternoon, with the canopy of branches overhead making patches of brightness and darkness on the ground. She was looking towards the house, where a setting sun threw light over the roof tiles, turning them brilliant. The whole house glowed in the light. She recalled the sound of her feet on the drive, walking through the dapples made by the light, and the silence, the sound of the birds going to roost, the strangeness of coming from under the last trees at the edge of the drive, into the crescent of gravel in front of the house.
But that was yesterday, she told herself, as she sat on top of the bus. And this was now. She was supposed to be getting married after Christmas. And now she would have to sell the gold bracelet Lord Clover had given her and take some money to Ivy and tell her that she was about to marry Johnnie Bridges. She could imagine what Ivy would say. Which would be worse because she would have to tell Ivy that she could not have Josephine with her. Johnnie did not want her. He had offered to take in Josephine but so reluctantly that Molly knew it would never work. So Ivy would be faced with a daughter who was marrying a man she hated and a granddaughter she would have to continue to look after indefinitely.
Again, her mind switched to the stream, the fields and the dusty country paths in summer. And saw the clouded air and wet pavements of Oxford Street, the people struggling on the pavements to do their Christmas shopping, the lights and glitter of commercial Christmas. “Why does it have to be like this?” she thought to herself.
From the back of her mind somewhere a hard voice told her, “It doesn’t have to be like this.” She ignored the voice and went on feeling the same.
In the event it was a month after Christmas, and two days before the beginning of the trial of Steven Greene, when pneumonia solved Molly’s problem.
Molly had been ill for a week but her feeling of physical weakness had been masked by distress. She had tried to tackle Johnnie about working for Nedermann but he brushed off her arguments and said, all too truly, that she was living well on the proceeds of his work. But he had not liked the challenge or the criticism. He had become brusquer, less generous and less affectionate. And yet he was still eager to marry, although from the way he behaved Molly sometimes thought he disliked her. Because she was so uncertain she suggested they leave the wedding until April, when the weather would be better and they could have a honeymoon in Paris. “Be nice,” she had said to him eagerly, hoping to placate him. But she saw him begin to sulk at the delay. It was hardly a surprise when he started coming home late, saying he had been with friends. Perhaps if she had been feeling better she could have coped with this more cheerfully. As it was, she wept, felt ill and believed that her depression was causing the sensations of sickness. She began to realize this was not so one day in the flat. That night Johnnie did not come home at all and it was the following morning, as Molly was trying to telephone the doctor, that the doorbell rang. Molly put down the phone and crept along the wall to the door. She got it open to find Ivy there. As Ivy launched into recriminations, “Tracked you down at last!” she said. “No point in expecting a visit from you –” Mary fell. Ivy managed to catch her, dragged her inside and put her on her bed.
“Where’s Johnnie?” Molly moaned in delirium. Ivy phoned the doctor, who came and diagnosed pneumonia. Molly would have to go to hospital, he said. “Where’s Johnnie?” moaned Molly because women in these situations always call for the men in their lives and, the worse the villain, the more desperately they call, perhaps because he is almost never there. She had a temperature of 104°F and her left lung was very badly affected. “Where’s Johnnie?” she called as they put her in the ambulance. Ivy clambered in. “Fetch Johnnie,” she said. “All right, love,” said Ivy gently, “I’ll try to find him later.” She caught the ambulanceman’s eye. He shook his head sadly. Ivy sighed.
Three days later the trial of Steven Greene began. Mary was in hospital, still almost too weak to move. Johnnie Bridges had gone back to the flat at last and was just asking himself where Molly could be when the doorbell rang.
He did not know who the men were who hit him. The punches, and later the kicks, as he lay on the hall floor, were delivered by three strange men, who circled him viciously. They did not speak to each other and the business was all over in four minutes. It was only as they were leaving, and he lay bleeding and moaning on the carpet, that one turned and said, “That’s a present from Jack Waterhouse. There’ll be another one if you go near his sister again.” It was only then that he realized he recognized the grim-faced man who had kicked him remorselessly as he lay on the floor. Even Ivy had not known that Jack and his two docker brothers-in-law were going to beat up Johnnie Bridges. She was not told about it afterwards, either. She heard the news from a cousin of Lil Messiter’s who worked as one of Nedermann’s builders. She was with Sid in the Marquis of Zetland one night when the man said, “Nasty business about Johnnie Bridges’ accident.”
She had replied automatically, “Don’t mention that man’s name to me –” when she broke off, recognizing the neutral tone of someone looking for a reaction and said quickly, “What accident? What’s happened to him?”
“Got beaten up by some fellers,” said Lil’s cousin. “Thought you’d have heard about it.”
He was asking if she knew who was responsible and Ivy, immediately suspecting the perpetrator was her son Jack, said, “No – no – I had no idea. Was he badly hurt?”
“It didn’t do him any good,” said the man.
“Here, Sid,” Ivy called to Sid, who was coming back from the bar with some drinks. “What’s all this about Johnnie Bridges? Have you heard anything about it?”
“I heard something about him getting his nose broken,” Sid remarked, putting the drinks down on the table. “Not surprising, I suppose. A man like that’s always got a lot of enemies.”
Ivy knew immediately that Sid had known about the attack on Johnnie and that Jack had been involved. She took a drink from her glass of gin and lime and said, “Been mixed up with all kinds of people, Johnnie Bridges.” And Lil’s cousin knew better than to say any more.
Molly’s hopes that Johnnie would come to see her in hospital gradually dwindled. It was Ferenc Nedermann who came to see her several times, bringing flowers, after she was over the worst of her illness. When she asked he said that Johnnie was away on business. Still hoping he would be back when she arrived home, she was brought from the hospital by Nedermann. Ivy opened the door and bustled her off to bed. There were roses in a vase in the room but, by now, she was too wise to imagine they had been bought by Johnnie. Ivy came in with a tray of tea and demanded efficiently, “Do you want to sit up?” Then she plumped up the pillows behind her daughter, poured out her tea and said, “You’d better thank Mr Nedermann, Molly. While you were in hospital he paid the rent. He said not to tell you but I said you’d want to know so you could pay it back.”
Molly, still weak and shocked by having had a serious illness, replied, “What? The rent? I don’t understand. Where’s Johnnie?”
“I’m sorry, love,” Ivy said. “I’m really sorry.” She looked pityingly at Molly.
“Well – what happened? Where is he?” asked Molly. Her head was spinning now. She thought she could not bear any more.
“He’s scarpered,” Ivy told her. “He’s done a bunk. I’m really sorry, love. His clothes aren’t here any more – I’ve looked. Jack and his wife’s brothers gave him a good drubbing before he went.”
“Oh, Mum,” moaned Molly. “Who asked them to interfere? I could kill Jack, I really could.”
“You could have died, Molly,” said her mother. “And all the time Johnnie was living with a woman in Shepherd’s Bush – some kind of a tart, calls herself a model. You’d been in that hospital a week and he never came near you. Jack found out what was going on and lost his temper. What Jack did mad
e no difference – but you knew what he was. You’d had plenty of experience of it before,” she added remorselessly. “Now – you drink your tea and thank Mr Nedermann when he comes in. He’s been really helpful.”
Molly, who had been preparing herself, although she did not realize it, for this moment, hauled herself up on her pillows and said, “My God – I’m penniless. What am I going to do now?”
Ivy sat down on the edge of the bed, looking approvingly at Molly. She said, “I’m relieved you’re thinking like that. What we thought was that you’d better move back into number 4. Permanently. You’ll have to take Josephine on yourself. You can get a little job. I can’t go on working and looking after her forever and, anyway, me and your dad are saving up to move to a nicer place – Beckenham, or Bromley, we were thinking. It’ll be easier for you now Josie’s going to school. And it’s time you took on some of your own responsibilities.”
Molly looked at her mother and nodded, wearily. She would have to do what Ivy suggested. Ivy had mothered her child because she had been too young to mother Josephine herself. Ivy had given her a good run. And now Ivy was tired of it. And she, Molly, was broke and had to do something.
“You might as well stop here,” her mother told her. “You’re all paid up until the end of the month and the landlord’s putting in a bathroom. He’ll be finished in a fortnight.”
“Make a change from bathing in the sink,” Molly said gloomily.
“It seems hard at the moment,” Ivy said. “But it’s swings and roundabouts, isn’t it? You have to take the rough with the smooth.”
Molly shut her eyes and nodded. She thought resentfully that all her life Ivy had been dedicated to proving that there was no way but hers – husband, children, Meakin Street and poverty. Here she lay, weak, abandoned and broke, the daughter who had tried to escape and failed. She had lost. Ivy had won. A few angry tears crept down her cheeks.
Nedermann knocked at the door and came in. Seeing the tears he said, “Come on, Molly. None of this. So the future looks bleak – it sometimes does. At these times we need courage.”
Molly tried not to show how angry she was about all these pieces of philosophy. Instead she sniffed and said, with as much gratitude as she could muster, “I hear you paid the rent. It was very kind of you – I’ll pay you back, of course.” And bang goes Sir Christopher Wylie’s Victorian ring, she thought, hoping that the stones in it were rubies and not garnets.
“You don’t need to,” Nedermann told her. “I took the money from Johnnie’s wages when I fired him last week.”
Molly stared at him. “His old tricks,” Nedermann explained. “I knew it was happening but he had sorted out a lot of problems – income tax, trouble with councils. He even straightened out some of the accounts. I had to thank him for that. So I let it go on. Maybe when the right time came I would have warned him and kept him on. But then he got careless about coming to do his work –” He looked round questioningly at Ivy, who said, “She knows all about it.”
“Well, then,” Nedermann said, “I’m sorry but you know the reason – the woman was paying – Johnnie relaxed. Next thing – Johnnie’s here on Wednesday but where is he on Thursday? I can’t stand that. Also – he got a little greedy. A few hundreds – yes. But thousands of pounds and always increasing – I can’t do the sums but I can feel the blood leaving my body like any man can. A coloured woman came to me and told me that Johnnie was all set to get me to pay £6,500 for a house worth £4,000 and then split the difference with the owner. That way they would both make over a thousand pounds from me.”
“Was that Pilsutski’s house?” asked Molly.
“That’s right,” Nedermann said. “What do you know about this?” For a moment she knew he suspected she was involved in the fraud.
“I went there with Johnnie one day. I met the woman,” Molly said. “Did you reward her?”
“I gave her a bigger flat in the house,” Nedermann said. “Two rooms – own toilet on the landing – the same rent. That’s my policy – I can be generous to people who are loyal. The rest – let them run for a little while, then –” He made a chopping gesture with one of his big, stubby hands. Mary hoped that the black woman’s reward had not been the flat of the two old sisters. “The trouble with Johnnie is,” Nedermann went on, “that he betrayed me for so little. I paid him well. If he had been honest I would have given him more than he could ever have taken. They’re all the same, these soft boys. But,” he said, looking at Molly’s face, “you’re tired – and I think you still have a little weakness for him – yes? You should be careful of that. He has hurt you twice – how many times? – now? Once is an accident – twice, it looks like masochism.” Molly did not recognize his heavy foreign pronunciation of the word, which she had seldom heard anyway. She said fiercely, “I hate his guts, now.”
“Be careful of that, too,” he said.
After he had gone Ivy cooked some lunch for Molly. She told her where everything was and added that the woman in the flat across the hall would help her if she needed it. As she left she said, “I don’t like leaving you but you can’t live at number 4, with half the walls out, and there isn’t much room with Sid and me. I think you’re better off here. It’s quieter. I’ll be back tomorrow.” And she put her coat on and left. “Shall I get you a paper and drop it in?” she called from the hall.
“No, thanks, mum,” called Molly, wondering why her mother thought she would want a newspaper.
She lay back on her pillows unhappily. Back to Meakin Street – again, she thought. It was like a nightmare – every time you thought you’d escaped, there you were, back again. But if Ivy was handing back Josephine she had no choice. She’d have to live narrowly and get an ordinary badly paid job with short hours, and bring up her child. Without Johnnie. It should have been a relief that he’d gone but, somehow, it wasn’t. You’re like some stupid tart, she told herself, pining after some pimp who mistreats her and lives off her money. Not only that, but he’d wanted to marry her and she’d hesitated – probably just as well he’s gone, she thought. Probably just as well you have to get back to Meakin Street. Like a butterfly when the summer’s over. And with that thought she went to sleep. She heard a high clear voice singing in what she now knew was French. She heard birds singing. There was an old, grey stone building and, somewhere, a clump of willows with grey branches hanging down, like long hair.
The phone rang in the other room and she got up and went to it. She thought it was Johnnie. It was not. It was Wendy Valentine.
“He’s dead, you bitch. He’s dead,” she cried, through her sobs. “Why didn’t you help him like you said?”
“What? Wendy?” Molly said in confusion. “Wendy – who’s dead?”
“You’re a cold bitch, aren’t you, Molly Flanders,” Wendy said. “When it comes down to it you aren’t there, are you. Now he’s dead – poor Steven – poor Steve.” Her voice broke again.
“Oh my God,” Molly cried. “What’s been happening! Are you sure he’s dead? I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it. There wasn’t anything wrong with him.”
“Didn’t have to be, did there,” Wendy shouted. “He killed himself, that’s what he did. Killed himself.” There was a long silence. Wendy, horrified at the meaning of the words, just cried. Molly stood on the carpet in the living room, holding the phone. It must be true. Wendy must be telling her the truth. Then Wendy said, more calmly, “I just want you to know I’ll never forget this, Molly – never. You said all these things about turning up in court to speak for him and you never did, did you? And when I ring the flat, over and over again, there isn’t anybody there, is there? Left town, hadn’t you? Not getting involved. Who paid you, that’s what I’d like to know? And I hope you spend the rest of your life wondering if it was worth it.”
“You’ll have to tell me, Wendy,” Molly said desperately. “You’ll have to tell me. I’ve been in hospital. Wendy, I don’t know –” Her voice broke and she said, in a low voice, “I can’t
– if only I’d known –”
But Wendy was too full of rage and pain to listen. “‘I’ve been in hospital, Wendy. If only I’d known, Wendy,’” she mimicked. “You just shut your trap now, Molly Flanders. You’ve got nothing to say any more. But if I ever see you again I’ll see you don’t forget it. That’s a promise, Molly. You just wait.” And the phone went down.
Molly rang Frames and asked if Arnie Rose was there. She still did not quite believe what Wendy had said. She might be hysterical, mad, on drugs – anything. Arnie Rose came on the line, sounding friendly. It seemed he had decided to overlook his grudge about the night when he had caught her with Johnnie and thrown her out of the club. “Hallo, Molly,” he said expansively. “Heard you hadn’t been well. Glad to see you’re back in action again.”
“It’s Steven,” Molly burst out. “Wendy Valentine rang up and said he was dead. She blamed me.”
“Stupid cow,” Arnie said. “What could you have had to do with it?” All Molly knew was that his words confirmed that Steven was dead. She said, “He is dead, then? What happened?”
“Topped himself in his cell,” Arnie told her. “Nasty tragedy. He didn’t have to do that. He’ll be a bad loss. Shocking thing, though, isn’t it?”
“Why?” Molly half-cried. “Why did he do it?”
“He was started on a two-year sentence for poncing, wasn’t he?” Arnie said. “He couldn’t face the thought of it, a man like him. So while he was still in Brixton, waiting for transfer, he hung himself. I’m sorry, Moll. I know you were fond of him. We all were. But I still think it was a stupid thing to do. Two years, with remission – he’d have been out in eighteen months. Not as if it was fifteen or twenty years, is it? I mean, if a man’s faced with that you can understand him doing something desperate.”
All The Days of My Life Page 35