Ivy was horrified when Molly came back to visit her a week later. While Josephine was out, taking her new doll to show to a friend, she and her daughter sat in the kitchen, talking.
“Oh, God, Molly. I don’t know,” said Ivy. “You mean you’re standing in for his dead wife and baby? That’s why he wants you? Molly – it’s unnatural.”
“I know,” said her daughter.
“Here – give me one of your cigarettes,” said Ivy, who was supposed to be giving up smoking. She lit up and puffed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing’s ever straightforward where you’re concerned.” A thought suddenly struck her. “Here,” she said. “Where did you spend last night?”
“Orme Square, of course,” her daughter told her.
“Where, I asked,” Ivy said remorselessly.
“In the spare room,” Molly answered reluctantly.
Ivy puffed out more smoke and said, “I thought as much.” There was a silence. Then she said, “Well – it may work out, I suppose he’s better than Johnnie Bridges.”
“Josephine’s got ruffles on everything,” Molly said. “I’ll say that. If you could get ruffled shoes, she’d have them. There’s nothing Ferenc won’t do for us.”
Ivy looked at her. “There’s something he won’t do for you,” she told her daughter.
1958
The spring of 1958 seemed to Molly a long time in coming. For months after she moved in, the grass in Hyde Park, opposite the house, stayed coarse, dull and tussocky. The trees remained skeletons against a dull sky. She collected Josephine every day from the smart school in Knightsbridge she now attended and brought her home across the park. The little girl, in her green coat and hat, with a green and blue band on it, skipped ahead of her. Mary followed in her smart fur and high boots. Then she would let them both through the park gates, across the main road to the well appointed house in Orme Square. She would make a snack for Josephine and start to cook dinner. By watching the cook Nedermann, who was fussy about his food, had hired to come in on three evenings a week, she was beginning to learn how to cook. She found out how to use wine, garlic and spices in the food she prepared. Nedermann took her shopping. She began to select furniture, curtains, even her own clothing, with more taste than she was accustomed to employ. In the meantime, Josephine, another fast learner, was intoxicated by her new school, and the smart uniform which went with it. She took ballet lessons, talked in an upper-class voice and became what Molly privately described as a proper little madam. Ferenc Nedermann was delighted with the progress of his woman and child. Molly, keen to please, was happy he felt satisfied, but the knowledge that she was a symbol of security and regeneration for him, not a woman, made her feel impoverished. There were times when she would see a couple walking hand in hand in the park and think, “It doesn’t matter if they’re married to other people or she’s pregnant and doesn’t dare tell her parents or even if they’re going to get married, but he’ll knock her about. None of that matters because now, this minute, they’ve got what they’ve got – and I haven’t.” Nedermann gave her a bank account and put money in it for her. Molly took some out and hid it in the Post Office. As a precaution, without telling him, she kept up the rent on the house in Meakin Street.
One day she opened Nedermann’s safe in the study – she had not been Johnnie Bridges’ girlfriend for nothing. The amount of money in there startled her. There must have been three or four thousand pounds, all in dirty notes thrust into used envelopes or done up with rubber bands. There were also many documents which she did not stop to examine. What she, without knowing, was looking for was the clue to the mystery, a brown envelope on the bottom shelf – an old photograph of a woman of about her own age. The woman held a little girl by the hand. She wore a black coat with a fur collar. Her blonde hair was scraped up in a bun at the back of her head. Her long, unmade-up face bore an expression of kindness and patience. The child, also in a long coat, was thin and also blonde. She looked rather like her mother.
Molly stared at the photograph. She checked the back of the photograph and found an address in Prague. So this must be Mrs Nedermann and the child. Yet the woman was unlike Molly. She was small and slight, her legs looked a little bowed, her teeth protruded. She had a modest, even apologetic air. She was more like a woman from Meakin Street, thought Molly, a woman like Lil Messiter, who has come from a large family where there has never been enough to eat, a woman weakened by over-work during her growing years, the kind who is always tired, always slaving for others, and feels her only right to life is earned by service. The child in the photograph seemed to share the timidity and lack of strength. They wouldn’t have lasted long in a concentration camp, Molly thought.
Later, she became indignant, after she had put the picture back in the envelope and shut the safe. She was sitting in the living room, with its pink-shaded lamps and the large chintz-covered sofas and chairs from Heal’s, when her pity ceased and her rage grew. It was the rage of the rejected, the anger of a sexually frustrated woman. She had embraced Nedermann, she had even crept into the large room where he slept alone and been told, wearily, that he was tired. She had tried to talk about the situation.
He had only said, “Molly – Molly. I want you as you are. I want nothing more. I want nothing from you.” She had not been able to make him understand that she wanted him to make love to her. Somewhere he had learned that sex was a burden for women and bought from those who were selling the favour for money. Molly, in her indignation, began to think that perhaps he had not acquired that thought during hard times as a penniless emigré in Britain, but from the life he had led with poor, crushed Mrs Nedermann.
She found she was drumming her feet angrily on the dark pink carpet under her feet. She had spent two months in this house, she thought, learning how to be a posh man’s wife, not knowing the woman she was impersonating had never existed. Czech or English, Molly knew an old coat, an undernourished face and the humble expression of the poor when she saw them. Nedermann, she decided, in one flash of intuition, had been making her be, not the wife, probably dead, whom he had once had. She was trying to be the wife he wished he had had – the bloody sod, she said to herself. Never mind Josephine’s ruffles, we’re leaving tomorrow. I’ll have it out with him tonight.
It was at this point that the doorbell rang. Simon Tate stood on the step. “Moll,” he said. “Just passing. I thought I’d call on the offchance – is it inconvenient?”
Molly was very pleased to see Simon’s long, thin figure, his pale face and beaky nose.
“Come in,” she said. “Don’t stand in the cold.”
“Phew,” he said, after she had taken his coat and led him into the living-room. “Very nice.” Then, approaching a picture which hung on the wall he said, in an impressed tone, “Very nice. Where did this come from?”
“Ferenc took it in settlement of a debt,” Molly explained. The picture was a small portrait of a woman of the eighteenth century. She stood in parkland, with a dog at her feet.
“Not bad,” said Simon Tate. “Not bad at all. Well, Moll,” he said, swinging round. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”
Molly, knowing that Ferenc, who mistrusted alcohol and its effects, would disapprove of this afternoon drinking, said gleefully, “Right you are. How’s tricks? What’s happening at the Club?”
“Same as usual,” he said. “Fortunes made and lost – no soap in the ladies’ – gentlemanly disputes on the pavement. I see you fell on your feet again, Moll.”
“Courted at the funeral – I might have known the rest would be the same,” Molly said disconsolately.
Simon regarded her sulky face and said, “Moll – aren’t you rather looking a gift horse in the teeth?”
“Long story,” was all Molly said. Trying to be cheerful, she asked Simon for more news of the Club and, finally, unable to help herself, demanded if there was any word of Johnnie Bridges. Simon, looking as if he had hoped she wouldn’t ask, said, “Sorry, Moll. He’s on remand.
I think it’s going to be all up with handsome Johnnie for about a year. Just as well, perhaps. You wouldn’t want him coming round here making approaches to you now you’re so well set up.” What he meant was that he knew she might succumb to Johnnie again, if only from boredom.
“What’s he done?” asked Molly. “Another robbery?”
Simon hesitated. “Sorry again, Moll. Poncing. He was really doing what Steven Greene was supposed to have done. He was running a few girls in the West End – Marylebone.” He paused. “From what I hear he wasn’t a bad thief but I suppose that’s an easier life than thieving if you’re what’s known as a bit of a ladies’ man.”
Molly was shocked. But she said resolutely, “He never did really like women. Just pretended to. No man who liked women could treat them like that.”
Simon, pouring two gin and tonics and handing one to her, said: “We’ve been friends for a long time, Molly – you don’t look happy. What’s the trouble?”
“Nothing,” Molly said. “They won’t be too nice to Johnnie in jail.”
“No,” agreed Simon.
“Have you seen Bassie at all?” she enquired.
“He’s living with a writer in Morocco,” Simon told her. “Come on, Molly – all I see here is a bored housewife. Tell the truth – what’s wrong?”
“I’ll have to get out, that’s what’s wrong,” Molly suddenly declared. “I’m pining to get back to Meakin Street, horrible as it is. This place is a nightmare. He doesn’t – take any interest in me. I’m a hostess and a furniture polisher. I’m just here to impersonate his dead wife, that’s all, and Josephine’s being given the sun and the moon and the stars as well because he wants his dead daughter back. So I’m like a ghost – and it’s worse –” Then she told him about her robbery of the safe and the photograph of the woman she was replacing. “We weren’t even the same kind of woman – never could have been. I feel rotten because I know while they were starving to death in concentration camps I was eating currant cake in the country – but I can’t stand it any longer.”
Simon referred to what she had not directly told him. “You must be using the wrong scent, or something,” he said. “If you had a more normal life none of this would matter. You don’t love him of course, that’s a hindrance. You loved weak Johnnie Bridges. You’d better be careful of that tendency. That sort’ll always drag you down. The Queen of England couldn’t afford them.”
Molly put her head in her hands. “I feel a fool,” she said. “It looked all right at the time. I’m fond of Ferenc. I don’t like how he makes his living but I am fond of him, whatever you think. But while it’s like this I can’t go on. Now I’ll have to drag back to Meakin Street after two months. My poor mum and dad – how can they explain me away? Supposing it was Josephine doing all this? I’d send her for mental treatment.”
It was partly the news about Johnnie which had depressed her. The knowledge that she had invested so much time and passion into a relationship with a man who later found it possible to take money from prostitutes – and Molly knew that meant treating them with a subtle mixture of brutality and faked love – was discouraging. It threw as much doubt on her as it did on Johnnie. He must have offered her the same bait that he later offered to his girls and she, like them, had taken it.
“It might help to get a job,” Simon suggested. “Perhaps things would look better if you had another interest.”
“Ferenc wouldn’t let me get away with that,” Molly told him. “He thinks a woman’s place is in the home. Anyway, I’m not that bored – I’m learning all these new dishes and so forth. It’s no more monotonous than standing in that club night after night saying ‘Faites vos jeux,’ and shoving bits of celluloid around with a rake.”
“Gets lonelier, though,” suggested Simon.
“That’s a fact,” Molly agreed, but knew that half the loneliness she felt came from living with a man who did not love her.
“I don’t know what to do,” she confessed. “Unless it’s Meakin Street. Perhaps I’d be better off in the country. Once I’m back in Meakin Street I’ll decide whether to see if that job at Allaun Towers is still open.”
“Tom Allaun’s not improving,” Simon said. Molly looked at him sharply. His tone had been edgy and she guessed Tom had upset him badly.
“What’s he done?” she asked.
Simon, about to tell her, changed his mind. “Just this and that,” he said.
After he had gone Molly was rather drunk. She sent a taxi to get Josephine from school and sat her in front of the television. And by the time Nedermann came home, earlier than expected, she was seated in front of the open safe, crying, with the photograph of his wife and child back in her hand again. She looked up at him, startled, but without her usual fear of his criticisms. She knew, now, she was leaving. The reopening of the safe and the taking of the photograph were like a private farewell. But instead of bursting into exclamations and reproaches about the burgled safe and the exposed photograph Nedermann stood still just inside the door regarding her gravely. Then he said, in a low voice, “You understand – it was a long time ago. I asked you to come here, and Josephine. I wanted to get back the old days. But the longer you and Josephine have been here, the more different you seem. I am sorry – it was selfish. Stupid, also. An old dream.”
“We’ll go,” she said, from the floor. “I plan to go. Tomorrow. We’ve both made a mistake. I shouldn’t have opened your safe –”
“I always thought you might be able to do that.”
“Did you think I already had?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” he said. “It’s an old safe. I guessed you might have learned –”
“You trusted me with all that money?” she asked.
“I didn’t think you’d rob me,” he said, as if that were the least of his worries. “No – I didn’t worry about the money,” he added sadly.
He took off his black overcoat and his gloves. He folded the coat neatly and put it over the back of a chair. He stood, a short, thickset, middle-aged man in an open doorway, and said, “I love you.” Even then there was something unnatural, Molly felt, about his declaration. It did not spring from him, as it might have done from a younger man. It was as if he stated a grave fact. Then he groped for a chair he could not see and fell into it, weeping. His shoulders heaved, he buried his head in his hands. Molly went to him, to comfort him.
That night they slept together for the first time. He was a tentative lover at first, shy, almost afraid of damaging her or letting himself go. As she lay beside him that night Molly felt little satisfaction. But there was something in his bulk and in the sad candour of his love for her which made her feel at once protective towards him and protected herself.
True to form, she was back at Ivy’s a week later brandishing a large diamond ring and saying that she was getting married. She expected her family to be pleased that she was marrying a successful man and providing a father and a good home for Josephine. They were not.
“Can I be a bridesmaid, Moll?” asked Shirley.
“Not with them spots,” her older sister remarked cruelly. Shirley rushed out of the room in tears. “It’s in a registry office anyway,” Molly called up the stairs. The reply was an incoherent, angry shout.
“I hope you’re more tactful than that when Josephine’s fifteen,” Ivy remarked. “Honestly, Molly, I should think it over.”
“Don’t do it, Molly,” said Sid, who had been on an early shift and was sitting in his uniform having a cup of tea. “Live with him a bit longer until you’ve made up your mind. It’s not the same for you as it was for us. We had to get married to get a bit of privacy –”
“We had to get married, full stop,” Ivy broke in. “But your dad’s right. You can take time to consider – you’ve got Josie to think of, now.”
“Marriage is no joke,” said Sid. “Next thing – you’ll have another kid. Then you’re committed.”
“No chance of that,” Molly told him, although she suspected that N
edermann badly wanted a child by her. “Anyway, I can’t think what you’re all on about. You acted up enough when I took up with Johnnie without marrying him. Now you’re telling me not to get married. It’d be nice if people round here made up their minds.”
“Circumstances alter cases,” Sid told her gravely.
“What alters what?” Molly asked. “You must all be barmy. I’m better off doing what I want and not listening to you.”
“When did you ever do anything else?” demanded Shirley, coming back into the room.
“You can mind your own business, too,” said Molly. “When I want the opinion of a spotty teenager I’ll ask for it.”
“Sorry I spoke,” said Shirley. “I ought to know better than to say anything in this house.” She went off again, banging the door.
“It’s these O Levels,” explained Ivy. “She’s working ever so hard at her books. They reckon she’s got real brains.”
“Might make up for her horrible nature,” Molly said sharply. she was still annoyed by the reception of her news. She added, “Still – you can all relax for a bit. We can’t get married until Ferenc’s proved officially that his wife’s dead. He heard she was from somebody but that’s not good enough for the authorities. He’s got to get the proper documents.”
“Be a pity if she turns up suddenly,” Sid remarked.
Molly stared at him with dislike and, about to marry a wealthy man unacceptable in her own home, swept off in a taxi with the diamond ring glittering on her finger.
In the event, proving Mrs Nedermann’s death was a lengthy and painful business. It meant getting a marriage record which might or might not now exist from a bureaucratic and unsympathetic government. It meant checking the death rolls and lists of survivors of the camp in Poland where Mrs Nedermann and the child had been sent. The applications, the replies, the agents’ reports cast a pall over their days. Nedermann was obliged to relive the anguish of the post-war years, after others had told him the details of his wife’s death of pneumonia in the winter of 1942 and of the death from gangrene, not long after, of his daughter. Molly privately thought that life would have been simpler if he just forgot about proving himself a widower and declared that he was single. But Nedermann, a former refugee, who had lived on sufferance in Britain for many years before achieving nationality, had a terror of infringing regulations. He believed that if he stated he was single at the registrar’s a jealous or vindictive compatriot might denounce him, jeopardizing not only the marriage but his status as a citizen.
All The Days of My Life Page 37
