“Mr Bridges,” supplied Johnnie.
“Yes, Mr Bridges,” agreed the old man. “Rent books are not always possible in premises like this. With the comings and goings and the defaultings – and if I supply them, the tenants lose them. So – we manage without them.”
“Of course, of course,” Johnnie said comprehendingly. “I can see your point of view. But obviously, with the property for sale, my associate Mr Nader would like to have some idea of what the place is bringing in.”
The woman appeared with coffee and a cake on a plate. As she served them Pilsutski said, “I wouldn’t be parting with this property, like I told Mr Nader, but the doctor told me, ‘Mr Pilsutski, the worry of that house is making your wife ill. The best thing you can do is sell it and go and live quietly somewhere in the country, or near the sea.’ A man’s wife, Mr Bridges, is more precious to him than any business – have some cake, miss,” he said to Molly. “It’s very good. Not like that,” he said to his wife, who was offering Molly the milk. “The lady hasn’t got three hands. Pour it in for her.” He said something sharply to her in a foreign language. She poured milk into Molly’s cup, took her own and went off to sit by the window.
“Yes,” Johnnie said sagely. “Property’s no joke these days. It’s all worry. Interference from this one and that. Worse if you live on the premises. That way you get all the tenants coming to you with their complaints.”
“That’s right,” said Pilsutski. “Every little blocked toilet, every little dispute between them – and there they are banging on the door. Day and night, night and day. You are supposed to look after them like babies in their cradles. It’s not worth it. Money is good but not as good as health.”
“You said it,” said Johnnie. “You just said it. I couldn’t agree with you more. Now – I’m afraid I have to ask you some personal questions. We haven’t got any rent books. I don’t suppose you keep receipts –”
“Well – I’m a busy man –” said Pilsutski.
“Very understandable,” said Johnnie. Molly was puzzled at first, then realized that without rent books or receipts no tenant could prove he had paid rent, or even that he was a tenant at all. This made eviction easy. She listened to the two men as they talked.
“So – ground floor,” said Johnnie. “Black family – man and a woman and plenty of children. Anybody else?”
“His brother – bus conductor,” Pilsutski said.
“How much for their room?” asked Johnnie.
“Seven pounds ten a week,” Pilsutski replied.
“Hm,” said Johnnie, noting it down. Molly absorbed the information. Sid and Ivy paid five pounds a week for the house in Meakin Street.
“The other doorway on the ground floor?” Johnnie was asking.
“Ah, that,” Pilsutski told him. “An old man. Controlled tenant. Now then – upstairs –”
“This old man,” interrupted Johnnie. “How much does he pay?”
Reluctantly, Pilsutski told him, “Ten shillings a week.”
Johnnie tutted. “Disgraceful, isn’t it. Another trial for the land-lord.”
“The landlord is paying them to live in his house,” Pilsutski said. Then, rage conquering discretion, he said, “Upstairs – more bloody control’ tenants. Two rooms, first floor, best rooms in the house – big rooms, big windows – old lady and her sister. Do you know what they pay? Two pounds a week. Two lousy pounds.”
“You could be getting twenty,” Johnnie said. “Or more. They got a bath?”
“Toilet,” responded Pilsutski. “Plenty of room for a bath. It could be a luxury flat. But, no – two pounds a week.”
“Ladies in good health?” enquired Johnnie.
“The sister’s sick at the moment,” he said. “But she’ll recover. You know old ladies. They –” Looking at Molly he changed his mind about what he was going to say and fell silent.
“Never mind. Never mind,” Johnnie said. “Perhaps things look better upstairs. How about the second floor? What’s that like?”
“At the front – three Irishmen – workers,” said Pilsutski. He shrugged. “Three – four – five – I don’t know. I ask no questions. Eight pounds a week, they pay. They give no trouble.”
“Get drunk and act a bit noisy sometimes, I expect,” Johnnie suggested.
Pilsutski looked at him cautiously, then saw the point, and nodded. “Terrible, sometimes,” he said. “Falling upstairs, shouting, banging doors. Sometimes fighting. You can hear them down here.”
“Very unpleasant for the old ladies,” Johnnie said.
“They complain,” said the landlord, “but what can I do?”
“Nothing,” Johnnie said.
“At the back there,” Pilsutski went on, “small room, very quiet man, very clean, works for the Council. Pays three pounds.”
Molly sat quietly, drinking her coffee, as the two men, leaning forward towards each other, went on with the inventory of tenants. Finally Johnnie, with a doubtful face, made a calculation and said, “Well, then. Something in the region of thirty pounds a week? Not a lot, really, is it Mr Pilsutski. Your main problem is these controlled tenants. Without them you’d be getting double.”
“Don’t I know it, Mr Bridges? Don’t I know it?” cried Pilsutski. “But there it is, that’s life, what can you do?”
“What indeed,” said Johnnie, standing up. “Now perhaps you’ll show me round.”
“With pleasure,” answered Pilsutski and led them up the stairs, back along the passageway and then, after a rapid knock on the door, into the room the black woman had entered. The room was full of beds and small children. A pot steamed on a double gas ring in the corner. The woman, holding a toddler up at the sink while she washed the child’s face, swung round when the party trooped in. “What you want now?” she asked Pilsutski sharply.
“Just taking a little look around, madam,” Johnnie said smoothly. “See if there’s anything we can do for you.”
Behind him Molly smelt the odour of the room where about eight people slept, lived and ate. It was a combination of children’s urine, stale cooking and sweat but it added up to more than all that, helped, she thought, by lack of ventilation and damp walls. It wasn’t the woman’s fault that things were like this. She suddenly remembered Ivy’s patches of weariness and despair, when she would come home from school and find no tea ready, the washing up not done and everything in a muddle, while Ivy sat at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking cups of tea and saying, “It’s no good. It’s heartbreaking. I can’t cope with any more.” And she thought for the first time that if Jim Flanders had been alive she herself might be stuck in the same two rooms in Meakin Street, with several children, and that her life might not be unlike the black woman’s. She now stood with her hands on her hips, looking hard at Johnnie and Pilsutski and saying, “This room is damp and the ceiling coming down in the baby’s carrycot. And if you,” she said turning to Johnnie, “are thinking about buying this rotten house I advise you now, go and look in that toilet in the hall – the pan coming away from the wall. It don’t flush. Then you go and ask that woman on the top floor how many pans and buckets she have to put out when the rain come flooding through his rotten, leaking roof. You going to do something for us?” she said to Johnnie. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“Thank you very much, madam,” Johnnie said smoothly, ignoring the hostility as if he were used to it. The toddler went over to an old carrycot on an iron-framed bed and poked the baby inside. The baby wailed. As they all went out the woman, going to the carrycot to comfort the baby, shot a look at Molly. It said, too plainly, that she, the black woman, despised her for her association with the other two – that she, a woman, should know better than to get mixed up with them. Molly, embarrassed, followed Johnnie and Pilsutski down the passageway.
“Poor old man,” confided Pilsutski as he hammered on another door. “Only one leg – the other one’s no good now.” He banged again shouting, “Mr Harris! Mr Harris! It’s Mr Pilsutski!”
“Got quite a temper – the lady back there,” Johnnie said.
“And the husband,” Pilsutski said. “You should hear them some nights, screaming and banging. And the children crying. Still,” he said philosophically, “it’s the way they live, isn’t it?”
“Really noisy, then?” enquired Johnnie.
“Oh – noisy. You couldn’t imagine.”
“Hm,” said Johnnie, sounding almost impressed, as if some special feature of the house like a new bathroom, or a recently papered ceiling, had been pointed out to him.
“Mr Harris! Mr Harris!” Pilsutski called, turning the handle of the door impatiently. “Locked – locked,” he said, turning to Johnnie. “The times I told him. ‘What if there’s a fire,’ I say. ‘There’ll be a tragedy one day – ’” He banged on the door again, saying, in a lowered voice, “My opinion is, he’s finished. He got a certain look. I can tell – I seen plenty in Poland, during the war.”
“Dear, dear,” said Johnnie. “Looks as if he’s gone out, though.”
“Out? Out?” said Pilsutski. “He can’t go nowhere – sh – I can hear him coming.”
There was a shuffling, scraping sound from inside the room. The door opened slowly. A very old man, his face grey and his eyes red-rimmed, looked round. He was leaning on a crutch.
“What do you want?” he gasped.
“Looking round, looking round, Mr Harris,” said Pilsutski.
“Third time this week,” said Harris, turning on his crutch so that they could follow him in. The others moved behind him slowly. As he advanced into the room Molly, from behind the others, could hear his breath wheezing in and out of his lungs. There was a tumbled bed, with grey blankets, a table, on which stood a loaf of bread on a breadboard, and a block of margarine, a pot of jam, a packet of tea, a milk bottle, half full. The floor was covered with old linoleum, red and cracked. An old armchair with wooden arms stood beside a small, hissing gas fire. Mr Harris faced Pilsutski and Johnnie, hanging from his crutches. He had no left leg. The other ended in a carpet slipper. He wheezed, waiting for them to speak.
Molly could bear it no longer. She said, “I’ll wait in the car, Johnnie.” He did not hear her.
“Nice size of room,” he said to Pilsutski.
“Give me the keys,” she said more loudly, but all he said was, “Make a nice double bed-sit.”
Molly turned and left the house quickly. She banged the door behind her and stood on the steps breathing in the relatively fresh air. The tall houses opposite her, with their cracked and broken plaster mouldings, broken window ledges and fallen railings, had almost all the same air as the house she had left. Here and there was a tended garden, fresh paint, neatly curtained windows, but on the whole all the houses were as derelict as this one. Ten children were swarming over abandoned cars in a turning opposite her. She ran down the steps quickly determined not to wait for Johnnie. She’d get a cab, or a bus, she thought. But behind her she heard the sound of a window being pushed up. “Hey – lady,” called the black woman. She had managed to shove up the window of her room and was calling down the steps. Molly reluctantly climbed up and heard her say, “What happening? Is your man buying this place?”
“Thinking about it,” said Molly. Behind the woman a girl of about four was grinning through the open window at her.
“Who he, then?” asked the woman.
“None of your business, is it?” Molly told her. The little girl poked out her tongue.
“Why not?” the woman said. “We got to live here. The landlord is our business. I have four children. I should know what’s going on here.”
Molly hesitated. She said, “He works for a man called Ferenc Nedermann –”
“Oh God, oh Lord,” the woman cried out. “Nedermann – he the worst, the wickedest landlord in this place. He push us in the street. Pilsutski, he bad, but Nedermann make him look like an angel. Look,” she said fiercely to Molly, “you get that man of yours to leave us alone. This house is rubbish anyway. Rubbish,” she repeated. “If Nedermann gets his hands on this place – oh, my God, we finished.”
Behind her the little girl was looking round her mother’s head to study the expression on her face.
“Finished?” Molly asked numbly.
“Out in the street, I’m telling you,” the woman said emphatically, trying to make Molly understand. “And that poor old man with one leg – the old ladies – don’t you understand? He raise the rents on the ordinary tenants and he get rid of the controlled ones, like the one-leg man. He do anything – frighten them with big dogs, send men with guns, put men in the house to terrify them. Anything so they leave and he can have the place and charge more rent.”
Molly stood there, staring into the big, black face of the woman. Behind her the little girl had unconsciously taken on the same earnest, energetic expression.
“Nice girl like you can do a lot,” the woman said encouragingly. “Tell him to say the place in worse condition than it is and all the tenants are controlled – that way Nedermann will go and get another house. All you have to do is make your man say the house is no good.” An idea struck her. “He can say, too, there a lawyer living on the first floor. That way Nedermann think he get too much trouble whatever he do.”
“I can’t do it,” said Molly. “Johnnie won’t take any notice of me.”
A child began to cry in the room. “Then you got trouble, too,” said the woman and banged the window down. She lifted the girl from the chair she was standing on and turned away. Molly saw her walk into the middle of the room and bend over an invisible child. Molly walked blindly down the steps and up the street. The pavements were uneven and sprinkled with broken glass.
She found there were tears in her eyes. So that was Johnnie’s wonderful new, honest job. It was from this work that he came home in his hand-made suits, his impeccable shirts and the shoes he had made for him by a cobbler in Covent Garden. It was after treading through the wreckage in these houses, buying slums for Nedermann, threatening and evicting the tenants, that he returned looking so prosperous and respectable. This job was his idea of going straight. “But it’s worse – far worse – than safe-breaking,” she thought, realizing she had thought the same about his frauds at Frames.
On a corner she opened the expensive crocodile handbag Johnnie had given her. She found her purse and realized she had not got enough for a taxi, just her bus fare back to the West End. At the same time she remembered that he had not given her any money for weeks. Standing at the bus stop she looked for her post office savings book and realized how little money she had left. It was just as well Steven Greene had refused the money she had offered him. If he had accepted she would have had to sell one of her last two remaining pieces of jewellery. Apart from that she had five pounds. She had unthinkingly bought food and drink for herself and Johnnie, paid the rent on the flat from time to time and now she was broke. Other, worse, thoughts came to her as she stood waiting for the bus. The black woman had seen what was happening to her. She had looked past the expensively piled-up hair, like a golden beehive, and the fur coat and the expensive bag and shoes. She had seen a woman who had no power to persuade her lover not to buy the house – not to do anything. Why not? Because, Molly supposed, he did not love her. Or, if he did, and she supposed in some ways he did, then it was not the love of people who share their lives and pay real attention to each other’s thoughts and feelings. Not like Sid and Ivy, for example. She had her hair done and drank champagne and went to clubs but she was disregarded when it came to anything important – must be, or she would have had some idea, by now, about the sort of work Johnnie did. She was Johnnie’s ornament, the focus for his romantic feelings, his lover. But she was worse off than Ivy, who had her say, often loudly, about everything involving Sid or herself.
Behind her she thought she heard one of two middle-aged women, with shopping bags, mutter, “Bit of brass.” Molly, pretending not to hear, thought to herself, “That’s about right. That’s about the truth.�
� Self-protective resentment arose. She thought that if she’d been rich she wouldn’t be discussed behind her back at bus stops by worn-out old bags. But a fur coat on a girl like her was still the price of surrendered virtue. Decent women had children and worries and bad girls had fur coats, that was the rule, as it always had been.
Once inside the bus, which smelt of cold, and damp, and stale cigarette smoke, Molly lit a cigarette and brooded. She told herself that you couldn’t have everything. Did she want to be tied to a sink, a husband who might turn out to be rotten, a gang of children, all her life? So that, with any luck, when she got to nearly forty she’d be able to go out and get a job in a breadshop, like Ivy, and get herself a few new clothes and start saving up for a spin drier? Johnnie was handsome and sexy and generous. She had a posh flat – what more could anyone ask? Then she remembered what he had done when she was pregnant, remembered how she had covered up his thefts at the club, remembered his girlfriend Amanda. And now, she thought, he was living on the profits made out of slums. It seemed worse, she thought, because he was really only an employee. He was like Nedermann’s overseer on a slave plantation – he went about evicting and bullying because someone else was paying him to do it. She decided that Johnnie didn’t really understand what he was doing. But it was with a shock that she realized Johnnie had never really been poor, as the Roses had, or Ivy, who could remember being given rice puddings made with water to eat, or Sid, who could recall a winter when he and his brothers had gone to school without shoes on their feet. Even she and Jack and Shirley had seen a few plates of chips in front of them without an accompanying fried egg or sausage. She didn’t think Johnnie’s mother had ever given him a plate of chips for tea or that he had ever shivered through nights when there not only weren’t enough blankets for the beds, but not enough overcoats and jackets to pile on them either. Had Johnnie’s mother ever sat in the house with her children telling them to shut up about food until their father came home with the wages and she could dash to the fish and chip shop and buy them some supper? She doubted it. And perhaps that was why he didn’t worry about those broken-down houses, or the coughing babies and old ladies dragging themselves up and down damaged staircases.
All The Days of My Life Page 34
