All The Days of My Life

by Hilary Bailey

  Shirley had been studying physics and chemistry at Imperial College for six months when she met her husband, also a student. She had married at nineteen and given up the course. Her first child had been born a year later.

  Molly stepped over the very clean lino on the hall floor and went automatically into the kitchen. She sat down heavily at the small Formica table. Meanwhile Shirley put the kettle on. She sat down opposite Molly. She put the feeding bottle in the baby’s mouth. He sucked a couple of times and then spat the teat out.

  Molly felt uncomfortable in the sparse kitchen faced with her pale, blank-eyed sister. Her handbag, bulging with loot, lay on the kitchen table, next to the baby’s bottle.

  “Oh, God,” Shirley said. She got up and opened a tea caddy. She was scraping a few last spoonfuls from the tin when Molly said, “Why don’t you give me the baby?”

  Shirley turned and put the baby in her arms. He lay there looking up at her with red, rheumy eyes. There was a thump from upstairs. Hastily pouring boiling water into the teapot Shirley dashed out saying, “That’s Brian Junior. I’ll get him up before he wakes his dad.”

  Molly thought, in surprise, it’s only four in the morning. Shirley came down with a pale-faced three-year-old. He stared at her from watery blue eyes.

  “Would you like to go to sleep on the settee in the lounge?” Shirley asked persuasively. The baby, the boy, and, above all, Shirley, all looked exhausted. There were huge circles under Shirley’s blue eyes. Her pale brown hair was slightly dirty and pulled back in a bunch secured by a rubber band. Molly felt embarrassed about having come here in the middle of the night – not that the middle of the night here seemed to be any different from the middle of the day. She now realized that Shirley’s position, and state of mind, were much worse than hers. There was a lot she didn’t know – she reflected guiltily that she had hardly seen her sister since she got married. She did, however, remember the row at Meakin Street about the engagement.

  “You withhold your permission,” Molly had yelled at Sid. “She can’t marry until she’s twenty-one if you don’t agree. Make her finish her studies before she gets married. Then she’ll have something to fall back on if it doesn’t work out.”

  “She’s in love,” said Ivy. “And Brian’s a decent chap and he’ll be the one with the degree. And his parents have got grocers’ shops all over West London. They’re going to buy them a house as a wedding present.”

  “Oh, mum,” Molly said. “Look at me – if I’d had some qualifications I’d have gone a different way after Jim Flanders died. What’s the good of his qualifications to her?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ivy told her. “And I can’t fathom out why you come here and expect us to take your advice about our Shirley’s wedding.”

  “Shirley’s found herself a respectable bloke and she’s going to marry him,” Sid told her solidly.

  “Why can’t she get married and go on with her studies, then?” demanded Molly. “It’s been done.”

  “Well, we thought of that,” said Ivy, “but Brian’s parents didn’t fancy the idea. They thought it would be better if she settled down and became a proper wife to Brian – that way he can concentrate on his studies undisturbed. After all, it’s his qualifications which’ll keep the family.”

  “What the bloody hell is going to disturb his studies just because his wife’s studying, too?” cried Molly. “She’s not going to start banging and shouting, is she?”

  “Well, Brian’s parents thought it would be best if she concentrates on the house and he concentrates on the university.”

  “Oh,” said Molly, angrily stubbing out her cigarette. “It’s Brian’s parents this and Brian’s parents that – what’s the matter with you both? You’ve got as much right to say what happens to your daughter as they have to say what happens to their son. What are you doing – selling her to them as a servant for their Brian?”

  “What’s important is that she gets a husband and a home of her own,” Ivy told her. “A degree in science isn’t going to be much help when she’s got a family.”

  “Well – I don’t approve,” said Molly, standing up. “And if you think I’m coming to the wedding, I’m not. I wouldn’t mind betting our Shirley’s brighter than her Brian. That’s why the parents want her off the course before the race begins.”

  “You malicious bitch,” Ivy said.

  “Bet I’m right, then,” Molly said. “And if you look any more relieved about me not coming to the wedding I’ll come anyway, just to spoil it for you.”

  “Not much to look forward to,” Sid remarked gloomily. “They’re Baptists. Teetotallers.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Molly said. “You should stop this lot straight away. She’ll only be unhappy.”

  Sid looked at Ivy, who looked implacably back at him. Ivy said, “We’ve already seen what happens when daughters go their own way.”

  Molly, offended, shouted, “She is going her own way. If you want to start being strict parents, tell her she’s got to wait to get married.” She walked out, still shouting, “She’ll be unhappy, I’m telling you.”

  She asked Shirley round to Orme Square next day but Shirley, over the phone said, “I can’t come, Molly. Brian wouldn’t like it. Anyway, we’re going to a Christian Union meeting.” Shirley, on arrival at Imperial College, had become a Christian. This was where she had met Brian. Molly, guessing that Christian fervour and romantic love had got confused in her sister’s heart, said, “All right, Shirl. But don’t forget that I’m praying now you use your brains and put off the wedding till you’ve got your degree. Do you think God wants you to sacrifice yourself for Brian?”

  “You don’t understand, Molly,” came Shirley’s quiet and convinced voice. “It’s not a sacrifice – and if it is, I make it willingly.”

  And now, she reflected, as weary Shirley put her boy to bed on the sofa, it seemed too late.

  They drank a cup of tea and Molly said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have come here, Shirl. What I wanted was a few days to hide out, pull myself together and work out who’s doing what to who.”

  “You know I’d like to help you, Molly,” said Shirley. “But it’s Brian – the disturbance.”

  Molly thought of stringy Brian, with his thatch of ginger hair and discontented expression. She had been right about the relative abilities of her sister and brother-in-law. Brian had dropped out of the honours degree course after his first year and had not even completed the general degree at another college. It had been said that his father was getting older and needed his son’s help in the business but Molly believed he had backed out rather than fail his examinations. Now she said, “I’ll push off, then. No point in causing problems in other people’s homes.”

  “Where will you go – mum and dad’s?” enquired Shirley.

  “Don’t be daft,” Molly said. “I’ve kept the rent up at number 4 Meakin Street. If I wanted to go to Meakin Street I’ve got my own place to go to. Josephine’s there now.”

  Shirley’s eyes glinted. “What’s up?” she said, with a mixture of her new timidity and a little of the old Waterhouse interest in life’s events, however sad and sorry they might be. Molly got a sudden mental image of Brian, Brian’s parents and Brian’s parents’ friends all sitting stiffly behind net curtains avoiding trouble and evading joy.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Molly said. “I just want to stay clear of Meakin Street for a bit. I’ll go to a hotel.”

  Shirley nodded. “Would you like another cup of tea?” she asked.

  Molly said, “Look – the baby’s asleep. Why don’t you creep up and put him back in his cot.”

  “He’ll only wake up again and disturb Brian –”

  “I don’t see it,” interrupted Molly. “Does this happen often? Do you spend many nights creeping the kids up and downstairs so Brian doesn’t wake? How do you get any sleep?”

  “They don’t always do it,” Shirley said. “But it’s not too bad when they do. I can either doze o
ff on the settee with Brian Junior or else I get on with the books. They’re always behind. It gives me a chance to catch up.”

  “Books? What books?” demanded Molly.

  “I do the firm’s books,” Shirley explained. “The accountant was making a mess of it so I took it over about a year ago. But you have to keep it up or it gets on top of you.”

  “Oh,” said Molly. She took out a packet of cigarettes. “Want one?” she asked. Shirley, who looked frightened, said, “All right – but don’t tell Brian.”

  “Shirley, my gel,” Molly told her sister. “When he gets up I won’t even be here. I’m just waiting for the tube station to open.”

  “I’m sorry, Moll,” Shirley said.

  “Nothing whatever to be sorry about,” Molly told her. “What can you do when your sister who’s a moral degenerate through no fault of your own turns up in a taxi in the middle of the night. Obviously on the run.” She grinned, reached across the table and patted Shirley’s arm. “I’m going to Brighton,” she said. “But you can do me one favour. Give Ivy a ring tomorrow when you’re out shopping. Say I’m all right and I’ll get in touch in a couple of days.” She paused. “You’d better tell her Ferenc’s dead, too.”

  “Oh – oh dear,” said Shirley. “How did that happen?”

  “Another day,” Molly said.

  “I’m worried – why can’t you go home? Are you in real trouble?”

  “Not really,” Molly said. “Take my word for it.” She looked at her sister’s anxious face and added, “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Shirley’s face was still anxious. Molly realized sickly that her sister was more worried about a scandal than she was about her. She said, “Don’t worry – it won’t get in the papers.” Then she hesitated and said, “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “I hope not,” Shirley said. Then she looked ashamed of herself.

  “Might be something happening down at the tube station now,” observed Molly.

  “It’s still dark,” Shirley said.

  Molly stood up carefully and handed the baby to her sister. Walking to the tube station along tidy suburban streets in the first light she wondered which of them, the two Waterhouse sisters, was the more wretched on this cold November dawn of 1964.

  Once in Brighton she booked into a small hotel on the front and put the jewellery in a safe deposit at a bank. Obeying an instinct she kept back a ring containing a large diamond and left it at a different bank. She walked back to the hotel along the misty road beside the sea. Cold waves lashed the pebbles on the beach below. She wondered if she should have come here. The trouble was that for her, as for many Londoners, the rest of the country barely existed. For them, there was only London and the few towns on the South Coast where they took their holidays. And of these towns, Brighton was the one most like home, almost an extension of the city. At this time of year, though, with the arcades half-shut and the weather gloomy, it depressed Molly. Over the next few days she slept, and had uneasy dreams about Nedermann. She woke sometimes from a seemingly dreamless sleep with a terrible sense of loss. She walked along the gloomy promenade, watching the big grey waves coming in and thought, I didn’t love him enough. He wasn’t happy enough.

  As the gulls flew and cried over her head, she stood on the beach and thought, “I’d better ring Sid and Ivy.” She did not want to. This miserable limbo was beginning to suit her. The shock of Nedermann’s death and her own flight had drained her. However, she phoned Ivy who told her that Sid’s friend in the police had discovered they were not interested in seeing her. On the other hand, she said, Arnie and Norman had sent round a tough-looking man to ask if she or Sid knew where Molly was. She thought he had believed her when she told him they did not know.

  “I suppose I’ll have to meet them sooner or later,” Molly said. She was frightened now.

  “I wouldn’t,” Ivy advised. “I wouldn’t go looking for trouble.”

  “I can’t go on hiding forever,” Molly pointed out. “And then there’s Josephine.”

  “Sid’s friend, the copper, he says you should go to the police and tell them everything. You could get police protection,” Ivy said.

  “Question is – will the police be more on my side than the Roses’? A lot of them are getting paid off.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Ivy said. “Oh, God, Molly. I don’t know what you’re going to do. And I don’t know what can have persuaded you to go to Shirley’s. You might have known there’d be no comfort there.”

  “Nobody told me what it was like, Mum,” Molly said drily. “What’s happened – the glamour of the Baptist grocers wearing off a bit?”

  Ivy was plainly too unhappy about the situation to defend herself. She just groaned and then said, unwilling to admit that Molly had been right about the marriage, “I’d like the day to dawn when I’m not worried about both my daughters.” She added, with more decision in her voice, “Your best bet is still to come back and go to the police. Sid’ll come down with you to the station and back you up.”

  “I don’t want to involve him,” said Molly and went back to the hotel feeling depressed and frightened. She realized that if she wanted to avoid the Roses she would have to leave Brighton. She could not make up her mind whether to seek them out and face them or keep on running away. And if she kept on running where could she go? And how long would she have to stay away? Even Framlingham was not safe. She might have to go further – she might have to get Simon Tate to give her the name of someone to go to in Kenya – just to get away from the Roses?

  She fell asleep, with the sound of the sea in her ears, dreaming, uneasily, of the Roses pursuing her, of Ferenc Nedermann’s ghost. She was trapped in one of his terrible houses. There were patches on the walls which grew and expanded, the windows were broken, she ran across rotting floorboards – She awoke, saying aloud, “He wasn’t happy enough.”

  And, “Who wasn’t happy enough, Molly?” asked a familiar voice.

  She sat upright, terrified. Arnie Rose was sitting in a chair by the window, looking at her mildly. Molly’s heart thudded.

  “Who let you in?” she cried.

  “Lady downstairs,” he told her. “I said you were my wife – we’d had a little matrimonial disagreement. She seemed happy to help.”

  “You paid her,” said Molly. “What do you want, Arnie?”

  “You know what I want, Moll,” he remarked peaceably. “Nedermann robbed my family. You robbed Nedermann – had to be you, didn’t it? All I want now is what rightly belongs to us. You know I can’t let you off the hook. It’s discipline. You know,” he said in a different tone, “you aren’t half a restless sleeper. Tossing and turning all the time. You need a bloke in that bed to quiet you down.”

  He was not as frightening as she had thought he would be. She said, “Arnie – I’ve got nothing –”

  “Come on, Molly. You done the safe. You forgot to close it after you. And there has to be a lot of jewellery. I’m not one to take away a lady’s ornaments but, like I say, it’s got to happen.”

  “I only took what Ferenc would have left me if he’d made a will,” claimed Molly.

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been his to leave, would it, my dear?” Arnie replied.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “Found your sister, Shirley, in some Baptist Chapel singing hymns in a little beret. She looks shocking these days, Moll. She used to be nice-looker. It must be the hymns and that ginger streak of misery she’s married to. Anyway, she didn’t want an argument in front of the neighbours –”

  “Oh – Shirley,” Moll moaned in despair. “Oh – Shirley.”

  “She didn’t enjoy it,” Arnie told her. “In fact, do you know, she’s the sort you could tear the fingernails off of – if you weren’t a gentleman, I mean, and she wouldn’t say a dicky bird. Swear to you, Moll, she’d lay down her life for you – only thing she couldn’t stand was getting into trouble from that po-faced lot down the chapel. Take my word for it. Th
at’s true. But you see,” he said in the same reasonable tone, “none of this is getting us any further forward in the little matter we have under consideration. The situation is – I won’t mince words – that I have to know what you took out that house in Orme Square and make a deduction. So first you have to tell me where it all is. I give you to the count of five – then I have to turn the place over. Then if it’s not here I have to ask where it is. And if you don’t want to tell me I have to go on asking – know what I mean?”

  Already Molly saw a look in his eye which meant that, now he had begun to think of how he would get the information from her, he was beginning to relish the idea. His talk of Shirley’s fingernails had frightened her too.

  She said, “All right, Arnie. There’s £200 in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers. It’s all I got. And out of that I’ll have to pay the hotel. There’s some jewellery at the Midland Bank – not a lot. I gave half of it back to Ferenc when the business started going bad.” She looked him in the eye and tried to make him believe her. She had not mentioned the diamond ring or the deposit at the other bank. Arnie glanced at her rapidly, decided she was telling the truth and said, “OK, Moll. I believe you. On the other hand, if I ever hear anything that makes me think you haven’t been telling me the truth –”

  “All right, Arnie,” Molly said briskly, getting out of bed. “We’ll go to the bank and get the jewellery. Now get out so I can get dressed.”

  “Sure you don’t want me to stay?” he said, as he looked her over.

  “Not with poor Ferenc hardly cold,” Molly told him. “Have a bit of respect.”

  “Oh – come on, Moll,” he said and Molly smiled the smile she had offered Lord Clover and Sir Christopher Wylie – and submitted to Arnold Rose. He was a slow and slightly brutal lover, a smacker, a hair-puller, a neck-biter. Molly’s only surprise was that he was not worse. There was, in any case, no point in worrying about it. The Roses always got their price. “You’re a lovely girl, Moll,” he told her afterwards. “Never seen a finer and this just proves it more. I hope we’re going to see a lot more of each other.”