“Get up and wave out the window,” instructed Ivy. As Molly hesitated she hissed, “Do it!” And Molly did. She waved the car off and then walked into the middle of the room.
“Sit down,” Ivy told her. “Have you got a drop of brandy in the house?”
“I’m all right,” Molly told her.
“You may be but I’m not,” said Ivy. She went into the kitchen and came back with the brandy and two glasses.
“I’ve got a shorthand test today,” said Molly.
Ivy swallowed her brandy. She was very shaken. “You know what he’s done, don’t you?” Ivy said in a panicky voice. “Why he’s got to disappear? It’s to do with that little boy. He and Norman must’ve arranged for him to be kidnapped – then the poor kid died of asthma on the floor of the barn where they put him. That’s why they’re looking for the Roses. Somebody told on them, at last.” Ivy was angry. “Think of that poor child’s fear. Dying like that. It’s time they were stopped. Perhaps now they’ll do something about them.”
“They’ll wriggle out of it,” predicted Molly.
Ivy drank some brandy. “It makes you realize,” she said. “Makes you see what they’re all about. You can’t have him here any more, Molly. He’s not fit company for a dog – and there’s Josephine – that little boy was ten years old. It’s frightening.”
“I was going down to Brighton today to get some money I left there,” Molly told her. “I was going to get away, with Josephine.”
“It’s not fair you should have to,” Ivy said. “But it seems the only way. Look at that big thug he went out with. You couldn’t get enough protection against that lot, not by police or anybody. Nobody’ll be safe till they’re inside. And look at you, you silly cow – you’ve not only picked him up and can’t drop him but you’re messing about with that Bridges too. It makes my blood run cold.”
“It was only the one night,” Molly told her. “He’s on the run, too. I had to take him in.”
“You horrify me,” said Ivy. She leaned back in her chair. “Molly – you horrify me. One’s a gangster and the other’s on the run – and he’s the one you sleep with. You’ve encouraged him, Molly. He won’t go away. He’ll hang about here until the police get him – probably in your bathroom. Then you’ll be an accomplice. You’d best leave Josie with me and get away for a few months. I don’t know how you managed to get mixed up with this mob in the first place.”
“Oh, God – Josephine,” Molly groaned in despair. “What sort of a mother am I?”
“No point in crying over spilt milk,” Ivy said. But she looked very old. Molly sighed and thought that she wasn’t much of a mother, or a daughter either.
Ivy’s next remark made matters worse. “You can’t even get to Brighton,” she said. “There’s a train strike.”
Molly felt even more trapped. Then she said, “Jack’s out on strike, too. He can take me in the car.”
“Not till the end of the week,” Ivy said. “He’s on a course.”
Molly looked at Arnie’s money, lying on the table. With it she could hire a car to take her to Brighton.
“I wouldn’t touch that,” Ivy told her.
“I don’t think I could,” Molly said. She knew if she attacked her savings she could still afford the car but also thought she should leave the money behind for Ivy. She decided, “I’ll wait till the strike ends or Jack can take me. Arnie’s not going to be back in a hurry. I’ve got a few days. And in the meanwhile,” she stated firmly, “I’m going to see if I can get to the college in time to take that shorthand test.”
“I’ll ring Jack from work and see if I can get him to do it quicker,” declared Ivy. The two women stood up and, shaken, left Meakin Street to go about their business.
Ivy came back in the evening to report that Jack could drive Molly to Brighton the day after next. It was too late. By then Molly was hopelessly trapped.
You can afford a bit of bad luck if your judgment’s been good. Likewise you can afford a bit of bad judgment if your luck’s in. What you can never afford is a bit of each – stupid decisions and then a calamity. Which is what happened. I’ve done all my if-onlys about it – did them in Holloway for a year where there wasn’t anything else to do. Blamed Johnnie, blamed myself, thought about it over and over again until I nearly sent myself mad. And the banging of the heavy doors and the jangling of the keys and the other women – well, all you can say is that I half-survived it. I don’t think anybody ever really gets over that.
What happened is that Johnnie came back. He came at one in the morning and climbed in through the bedroom window, at the back. I had an argument with him then. It went on for hours. He got quite nasty at one point and acted as if he was going to hit me. I couldn’t do anything, even if he had, because Josephine was in the house. There he is, dragging me out of bed, calling me a bitch and I couldn’t do anything. Anyway, the upshot was that he spent the night on the sofa downstairs. Anyway, he’d refused to go, which meant the only way I could get rid of him that night was to call the police, which I wish – wished over and over again – I’d done. But somehow I didn’t want to shop him. So I told him he could sleep downstairs, that if I saw him any more I would tell the police and then I went to sleep, thinking that even if the police arrived that minute I could just about make out he must have got in without me knowing about it. I went to sleep hating him and in the morning he was gone. And I worked out that Josie could go to Ivy’s after school, I could dash down to Brighton for the ring – then I’d have the money to go up North for a few months, get a job, send money back to Ivy, write to Arnie saying I was still grieving for Ferenc and had gone away to find my fate or some such rubbish – and then I’d be back, none the worse for wear, in the spring when things had quietened down.
The whole country was buzzing. There were plenty of jobs, quite a lot of fun. I really thought, then, I could get back to London, get a decent job and – and I wind up in Holloway.
I’ve had some bad moments in my life but one of the worst was when I came back from the college about five in the afternoon and found the house full of policemen. There must have been ten of them, uniformed men and plain-clothes men as well. And Josie’s there, in her school uniform, looking as if she’s going to faint.
I knew there was something wrong when I came up Meakin Street. They were all out there, round the door – Lil and George, the woman from the corner shop, old man Fainlight. There were a couple of people there I didn’t even know.
The other if-only was always about why I didn’t turn round at the bottom of the street and run – but how did I know it wasn’t an accident? It could have been a gas explosion or a murder, for all I knew. It could have been to do with Josie. And by the time I’d got close enough to ask, the coppers were close enough to find me. “Mrs Flanders?” says an inspector pushing his way down the hall.
“You all right, Josie?” is all I said. The poor kid just nodded at me dumbly. She’d only gone back to get a few books after school and then she opened the door and there they all were. Apparently they pushed past her and she didn’t know what was happening. Then there’s Ivy and Sid, who’d noticed the crowd at the house. “What’s going on?” Sid asks the inspector. He turns to me and asks the same thing. I couldn’t answer. Then another policeman, in uniform, edges down the hall and whispers in the inspector’s ear. And he looks at me and calls me by name and charges me on the spot, in front of my mother and father and daughter, not to mention half the street. Harbouring a fugitive and receiving stolen goods, those were the charges. The first I couldn’t deny and the second staggered me. I’m standing there startled when he hits me again. “Have you got a firearms licence?”
I just stood there. I don’t know what I said. The next thing I know I’m in the car on my way to the police station.
The long and short of it is that I got eighteen months. It would have been more but I had no previous criminal record and they reckoned like they usually do, I’d been deceived by a man – and this time that
was all too true.
I found out later that Arnie might have left the country but he’d put a man to spy on me. This man must have seen Johnnie either going in or out. He’d phoned Arnie in Spain and Arnie had lost his temper and shopped me. I’m glad it wasn’t worse – he could have taken his spite out on my family. But that’s small consolation when you’re in a cell six feet by eight with two other women.
In all those smells and out of sight of day and pushed around and bullied all the time – and the feet on the corridors, and the clanging of the doors and the rattling of the keys – oh God, it’s horrible, wicked, a prison.
Needless to say Arnie made sure they got Johnnie, too. At least he owned up that it was his stolen goods and his gun he’d put under a floorboard in the front room while he was meant to be sleeping there. He got seven years, for doing the robberies and having the gun. And he had a record, too.
I only did fourteen months in the end but it finished me. When I came out I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t even know who I was.
It’s the noise I can remember. The clanging, the footsteps, the echoes, the way the women sometimes, for no reason at all, would begin to shriek and break things. So did I. It was like a madhouse. I was mad some of the time. I used to dream brilliantly coloured dreams, hearing a woman singing, in French, then breaking off into a long, terrible scream. There were days when that song would go through my head, every day, all day. I thought I was haunted. I told one of the women, a French whore by the name of Madeleine. She said, hum it, so I did. And she joined in. She sang me some of the words but she couldn’t remember very many – it was about love escaping like the wind and cornfields, sentimental stuff like that. She told me it was an old song that had been popular round the clubs in her mother’s day. I was surprised to find that it was a real song and wondered how I knew it but, the funny thing was, as she remembered more and more of the tune and the words I felt worse and worse and in the end I had to tell her to stop singing. I was getting desperate and you can’t afford to get like that – not in there. Madeleine was kind – some were, in there, and she stopped and gave me a cigarette – but after she’d gone, I could remember more of the song, myself.
In the end the noise, the confinement, the pressure of the other women, prisoners and guards, was gone. I got out. But I couldn’t go home.
1966
Molly Flanders, née Waterhouse, now nearing thirty years old, sits on a bench under trees on the Embankment at two in the morning.
Behind her, on the other side of the road, stand the big buildings of the lawyers and their small, carefully tended lawns. The pavements in front of her are wet. It is quiet, apart from the sound of an odd car passing and the distant banging of a train going over a bridge. She can even hear the sound of the water lapping at the Embankment wall opposite her. It is spring and the water is high.
She is wearing an old brown skirt, brown shoes, and a large grey jacket. Beside her is a plastic carrier bag containing her flannel and toothbrush, a nightdress, some underclothes and a sweater. There is a chilly wind but the air is fresh. Her eyes, as she sits there, have a vague look. She is not in the real world. Mary Waterhouse, like the crisp packet slopping against the embankment wall or the twigs going down in the currents of the river, she is drifting…
In May she is sitting in the same clothes, this time on the stairs of a burned-out warehouse lower down the river, near the docks. Through the open door she can see an expanse of concrete and an abandoned car.
The man sitting beside her offers her a drink from a bottle of red wine. She puts it to her lips. He is decently dressed in green corduroys and a navy blue pea jacket. Unlike the couple crouching in a far, dark corner of the warehouse he is not a derelict. The others, in their huge, ragged overcoats and broken shoes, are sharing a drink from a long, dark bottle. From the stairs Molly and her companion can only see their huddled figures. One of them has a bad cough. But this pair, Molly and her companion, are different, many stages behind the other two. Molly herself looks no more apathetic, no dirtier, than she did a month ago. Her plastic bag is still the same size – she has not taken to collecting stray, talismanic items, or things which might be useful another day. She is still outwardly respectable. If the police approach her she can still say that she is on her way somewhere, and be believed. There will be no more prison for Molly Waterhouse. Or not yet. But below them as they sit on the stairs, they can hear the coughs, the scuffles and the mutters of the others, holed up in the warehouse like rats. Below is a thousand square feet of empty space. Light from the full-length windows falls on the shapes of the tramps, sitting alone or in groups with their bottles, their bundles, their blankets and their old suitcases tied up with string. Occasionally noisy, meaningless quarrels break out. The rows soon die away and one is left shouting an incoherent phrase – “It was my sister that did it. My sister, I tell you, my sister.”
“You always say that. That’s what you always say.”
“I think,” says the man in the pea jacket to Molly, “I think I’ll just step over to Kilburn to see if a friend of mine’s in. D’you want to come? He’s got a flat.”
Molly shakes her head. She knows the likely outcome of the trip – they will end up in the wrong neighbourhood, or the wrong street, looking for an address which never existed or has been forgotten. Or the friend will have left many years ago. The whole warehouse is full of such dreams – of useful friends and welcoming relatives. Dreams repair ruined childhoods and reclaim ruined pasts. Reality has got lost, or is too hard to face.
The man in the pea jacket gets up and sets off on the long tramp to Kilburn, leaving Molly alone on the stairs. Her memory of how she came to be here is not very clear due to slight malnutrition and permanent fatigue. She seldom sleeps for very long in the same place. After she left Holloway with her brown paper parcel of clothing under her arm Ivy and Sid had expected her to go back to Meakin Street, where they had kept her house on, although it meant forgetting about their savings for the new house they wanted. They said a job as a clerk in the Civil Service had been fixed up for her – someone, they told her, had asked mysteriously not just for any discharged prisoner but specifically for her. The job had been in a museum. But they told her, as she stared at her parents’ faces on visiting day, if she did not want to take the job in the museum, then Lady Allaun had written saying that she would like Molly to come down to Framlingham to help Mrs Gates, who was too old to manage without assistance.
All Molly had said was that she would decide what to do when she left prison. She was now very dazed all the time but had enough rudimentary cunning left to write to Sid and Ivy giving her release date as the 18th, instead of the 13th. She thought that this deliberate mistake would escape any censor’s eye and, indeed, it did. When Sid and Ivy came to meet her, she was gone – well, it was freedom she wanted, wasn’t it? Freedom. She says the word aloud into the empty space of the warehouse. Down below, there is a loud, mad, laugh.
So it goes on. Molly does the drift, sleeping sometimes in hostels, with the restless, rootless women tossing and turning all round her, and sometimes in derelict houses and sometimes, on fine nights, on patches of waste ground. She gets money from the Social Security (someone has given her a birth certificate in the name of Maria Lane, from Birmingham). She eats eggs and chips in cafes or sandwiches and coffee from snack bars and stalls. Her appearance deteriorates because she can only bathe or wash her hair at the public baths, because her shoes are worn with walking and her clothes have become dirty and damaged by sleeping rough. She hooks up with a couple of mates, a young girl in an Indian dress, who wears no shoes, and an older man who this girl says is her father, although it seems unlikely, for he wears a shiny suit and speaks with a strong Irish accent. They wander together, drinking and taking pills when they can lay hands on them, planning their daily journeys, telling each other long contradictory tales about who they are, have been and will be. Lines of weariness carve themselves on Molly’s face. She loses the bottom
of a front tooth when a boy throws half a brick at the group while they are sitting round their fire on a patch of waste ground near Commercial Road.
In this way she drifts through the summer of 1966, awake at night, awake at dawn camped on rough grass behind a wall, sleeping on benches and on the ground, restless, nightmare-ridden in sleep, half-awake during the day, hearing her companions talking to each other: “Give us a puff of your fag, then,” “the ugly bugger,” “get the train to Aberdeen.” “Look at him over there, will you, what does he think he is?”
At this point my father said, “We tried to get her a decent job. Do nothing – she’s on her own now.” I was unhappy about this – I’m unhappier now that I know the facts were even worse than I supposed. I was the person who had to explain how Mary had refused the job, and disappeared. There was considerable consternation. She had, to be frank, been more or less forgotten. The knowledge that she had vanished brought her back to mind. In short, I had been continuing in my duties like some conscientious functionary of a failing empire, who continues to mark the rolls in some distant, barbaric outpost with no idea that events at the centre are causing his efforts to be ignored. No attention was being paid to my continuing labours, which had been organized at a time when they seemed important. Time had dulled all interest in them – indeed, after a brief flurry of concern at her disappearance, it was agreed to let the matter drop and I was left with the sad feeling of someone who finds the work of many years discounted. At that point, keeping an eye on Molly was no longer my responsibility. Yet it remained a minor obsession. I was fascinated. I was, at this time, sorry for Molly, although impatient with her. And there was perhaps, even then, more to it than that. At all events, I still wanted to follow what was happening to her as much as I could but, obviously, at this stage there was no trace of her. Obviously she had something like a nervous breakdown in Holloway. After all, in the space of a few months she had seen her protector, Nedermann, die, had tried to reconstruct her life in spite of being pursued and terrified by one of London’s worst gang bosses. She had almost succeeded until the unexpected arrest, trial and imprisonment. No wonder these blows and struggles, followed by the shock of prison, had exhausted her. On her release, she must have wanted to escape everything she knew. The danger was that the dreadful life would drag her down and make permanent the separation from a normal existence she was trying to achieve. She might have gone further and further down until she died perhaps, of self-neglect. The prognosis for her was good – she was young, strong and basically intelligent. Yet even these things are not always enough to save a man or woman. Bad luck and wrong circumstances can destroy the strongest of us.
All The Days of My Life Page 43
