Now it was autumn and, as she took Mrs Gates’s clothes from the drawers, she saw a cloud of leaves blowing past the window and wondered how hard it would be to face the long, dark winter in Framlingham.
Her money was running down also. “Get out,” she told herself, “cut your losses and get out of here.” Abandoning the piles of blouses and brown stockings she stood up and went into the other room. She opened the small bureau which stood in the corner of the room, in case there was information in there about a relative of whom no one knew, or some matter of business which would have to be tackled by the Allauns. There were letters there – some apparently from Mrs Gates’s husband, Andy, written while they were courting, some from her father, written from the front during the First World War. In an old envelope was a marriage certificate from Dover, dated 1927. A child’s death certificate, dated three years later. In the cupboard at the bottom there was a biscuit tin containing old photographs. Women with bustles and men in frock coats stared out, straightfaced, from the pictures. Unknown babies lay in long robes in women’s arms. Two bright girls in long white dresses and straw hats stood, arms entwined, on a beach. Apart from that there was little in the desk but some old bills, newspaper cuttings about the end of the war, an envelope containing a lock of fair hair. Molly wondered whose it was – perhaps, she thought, it might even be her own. She could not face throwing away the relics of someone’s life. She shut the desk and turned round as she heard voices on the stairs. Vera Harker came in with Elizabeth Twining. “Oh,” Molly said, “Mrs Twining. I’m so relieved to see you. I’ve been trying to sort everything out – I was hoping you’d be able to find a use for –” She gestured round her. “And the photographs – I don’t know who they are.”
The two women looked at her without pity. Their glances seemed to tell her that they had faced this situation before and dealt with the realities following death. Vera Harker softened. She said, “At least you tried.” They stood in the room, full of little piles of clothing. She pulled an envelope out of her basket. She said, “She wanted you to have this. The day before you came she made me get a form from the Post Office. She had some savings – she wanted half to go to Elizabeth and half to you. Said you’d need it – to make sure you spent it on yourself or the boy. ‘Make sure she keeps it for herself, for her and the child,’ she said.”
Molly was concerned. “Isn’t there anybody else – closer?”
“Five hundred and fourteen pounds in there,” Vera Harker told her. “You’d better count it in front of us. I didn’t fancy the responsibility but she was in a bad way – I couldn’t refuse.” Molly hesitated. “She wanted you to have it,” Elizabeth Twining said.
“But was she – did she know what she was doing?” Molly asked.
“Oh yes,” Vera Harker told her. “She said what was to happen to the clocks and her other bits and pieces. I told her not to be so morbid but it wasn’t any good. She was set on dying, that’s my opinion.”
Molly took the envelope and counted the money out. “Don’t you forget, Mary, she said it was for you,” Elizabeth Twining told her. And Molly, who was thinking of leaving Framlingham as soon as she could, felt guilty.
“I ought to do something with this,” she said, half to herself. Instead, she put it in the biscuit tin on top of the photographs and shut the tin in the cupboard.
“Go back and have a lie down,” advised Elizabeth Twining. “You look all in. Go on,” she said to Vera Harker. “Give it to her.”
What Vera Harker produced, a little shyly, from her basket was a comical scarecrow doll, about a foot long, dressed in patchwork rags, with hair made of real straw. Molly was touched, and very taken with the doll. It had an engaging, silly grin and eyeballs made of green buttons.
“Don’t thank me,” Vera Harker said. “I’m forever making them. There aren’t enough children in the village to give them to. The whole place is fed up with them.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Elizabeth said, “they’re famous for miles around. There’s all sorts – scarecrows and pretty ladies and funny old men, and dogs and cats. She ought to sell them, that’s what I tell her. Lou Gates used to say she should get herself a market stall at Hale Market-”
“Who’d buy those?” interrupted Vera Harker. “They’re only old scraps.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Molly said, impressed. “How did you invent it?”
“Just came to me as I went along,” the other woman told her. “Well all this praise and flattery’s cheered me up good and proper. Now you go along and Elizabeth and me’ll sort this lot out.”
And Molly departed, holding the scarecrow doll.
After giving the baby his bottle she went upstairs to put him in his cot, to find Tom lying on the bed in their bedroom.
“Aren’t you well?” she asked.
“I decided to take the afternoon off,” he told her. “It got tedious.”
Molly, feeling bitter about the time she had spent trying to look at Mrs Gates’s things without crying, said, “Well, life does, from time to time.”
“I don’t want you to leave, Molly,” he said. He must have been lying there, thinking about his life, she thought. It was odd that the silent Tom had spoken at last.
She said in reply, “I don’t know why you want me to stay. You don’t really like me, or so it seems. There’s nothing between us – not even as much as there was when we were living at Meakin Street.”
He looked at her pitifully. “I’m not used to being a husband,” he told her. “I don’t think I’m very good at it. I’d like you to stay.” He burst out, “I can’t take a winter here, with Mother.”
And Molly thought that she might as well stay a little longer. She did not want to remake her life again, after this botched attempt. She said, “I’ll stay. Maybe not for ever. But I’ll stay. But we might both feel easier if I slept alone. I don’t sleep well when you’re here – and I worry about Fred disturbing you. I’ll move back into my old room, on the corner of the house. I always loved it.” But Tom was afraid of his mother’s questions. “Just say the baby disturbs you all night long and you’re going mad,” Molly said. “She’ll accept that. She doesn’t want to ask too many questions.”
“Sometimes I think I’m going mad,” he said.
“This is all impossible,” Molly said, sitting beside him. “I’ve seen and been in some rotten situations but this seems one of the worst. There’s a lock on it – and no key. You should get rid of this place – it’s dragged you down, over the years. You should just walk away and leave it to rot.”
“It’s Mother,” he said.
“You’d have to be firm,” Molly said. She gazed out of the window. “It’s criminal – cutting down the oaks.”
“I know,” Tom said.
“Anyway, I just made up my mind. I’ll try to make a bit of money for Christmas.”
“How?” asked Tom, alarmed.
“I’m going to work with Vera Harker,” she said. “I can’t leave Fred but I can do that.”
That evening she went to see Vera and looked at all the toys – the knitted harlequin, the fat red velveteen man with yellow hair and surprised button blue eyes, the terrier dog, the squashy black and white cat, the pretty ladies in their full skirts, petticoats and little removable shoes. She persuaded Vera and her mother to let her borrow the toys to take to London next day. “I’ll try to get some orders,” she said. “It could mean a nice little sum for all of us before Christmas.”
The two women were cautious. Harker, who worked for a market gardener, put down his paper and said, “Good luck to you. I’ve told her time and again those were too good to give away.”
“If I get too many orders would anybody else help?” Molly asked Vera.
“You’ll be lucky to get one” Vera said. This was her right as the creator of the toys.
“There won’t be a woman here who won’t help, just before Christmas,” Vera’s mother said. “It’s a slack time for work.”
And so, next day Molly put all the toys in the back of the car with the baby and got a large order from a large, smart toyshop. She returned to Framlingham with material, thread and buttons and told the women, “They cost three pounds to make and they’re giving us seven – that’s an average price – and they want a hundred in all. That’s for Christmas, so we have to do them in six weeks. But I want them in two lots because if they sell them out before Christmas they might take more. And even if they don’t, someone else may. I’m taking a pound on each and the rest of the profit goes to the woman who makes the toy. Can you get about eight or nine other women to help?”
She was using Mrs Gates’s legacy as stake money. The women did not hesitate. As autumn wore on Molly was touring the village every day, checking on progress and submitting the other women’s toys to Vera for approval. “I can’t sew,” she explained apologetically. “But it looks as if I can sell.”
A fortnight later she was back at the shop with her consignment. The department manager was reluctant to display and sell them early. “We could use up space and spoil their freshness,” he said. Molly, desperate, went to three stores. The last one gave her an order for a hundred and fifty toys, but only if they were half the size. Molly, knowing that the cost of the materials would be higher in proportion, nevertheless agreed. Vera, slightly horrified by having the challenge thrust on her at short notice, worked out patterns and prototypes. Molly, who knew that Vera’s creative pleasure was diminishing as trade increased, said, “Leave the others to make them, Vera. You sit and think about another one. Have you thought of a footballer – then people can buy one for quite a big boy without thinking they’re turning him into a cissie. You know what people are like – they won’t get anything cuddly for the boys after they’re about three. But they still want something to take to bed with them at night.” Vera’s stocky footballer was, if anything, outclassed by her gangling cricketer in cap and long scarf.
“You’re a genius, Vera,” she told her. “They’re witty – these. It must all be locked up inside you.”
“I’ve always been a quiet sort of a woman,” Vera said. “My dad and mum brought us up to be quiet, on account of us being nine, all in one small cottage. She used to look at you, did Mum, and say if Lady Allaun wanted to take in a child she could have looked closer to home. Quite bitter, she was, when you came round calling for me in your little white socks and starched dress. I suppose a lot gets locked up in you when the family’s big and the money’s short.”
Throughout October Molly added up the bills for the materials used, and badgered the women through a flu epidemic which hit nearly all of them or their families. They were grateful to her but she knew few of them liked her. To them she was a fast-talking cockney, using their labour to make money, someone who, in spite of having been an evacuee and having a dubious past, had managed to manoeuvre her way into becoming Lady Allaun.
“The old gypsy said she was to marry three times,” reported tall, thin, Clarisse Smith to plump Vera Harker, when she brought round ten knitted harlequins and columbines, “now that’s true enough, isn’t it. But the child – unnatural fruit – and the marriages no true marriages – what sort of a thing is that, said to a child of six? Must be something in it.”
“Means rubbish, I should say,” retorted Vera, examining columbine’s hat and picking at a loose stitch. “Whoever listens to gypsies? Only if you want an upset and something to worry you.”
With a glance at Vera Harker’s mother, who was quietly sewing on a footballer’s scarf in her chair by the fire, Clarisse said, “Well, some of it came true, didn’t it?”
“Said she’d make her fortune, too,” remarked the old lady. “If I remember right. So let’s believe that and get on with the work.”
“Unnatural fruit, though – makes your blood run cold,” said Clarisse.
“Well, the boy looks natural enough,” Vera said. “Mum’s right – let’s get on with it. I’ll soon have enough to pay for my freezer.”
“I don’t know about the marriage, though,” her mother remarked treacherously. “You want your blood to run cold, take a look in her husband’s eyes. I’m glad none of mine ever took up with him, that’s all, title or no title.”
Vera said, “I don’t remember him ever come round courting me. He ever come knocking on your door, Clarisse?”
By Christmas Molly had made a hundred and fifty pounds, which took them through a quiet Christmas Day and paid some bills. By then she was too busy working out a plan to keep trade going after the Christmas boom to think very much about the sombre quality of the Christmas cheer or remember very much that this was her first Christmas without Joe. She just exhausted herself with calculations about the toy trade, with cooking and putting up decorations and caring for the child. She had decided, without realizing it, to look for no more happiness. For the time being, at any rate, she had to concentrate on survival.
The months after Christmas were grim. The income from the Allaun’s unbreakable trust fund did little more than keep up the interest payments on the heavy mortgages. The farms, even the better pictures in the house and some of the silver, had been sold off years before. Tom’s income was small because in effect he was more legal clerk than solicitor. Molly’s earnings were soon gone and soon she was attacking the dwindling sum which had been Joe Endell’s life insurance. The Twinings were kind and tactful – Elizabeth brought eggs from the hens, a few apples she had been clearing out of the loft, unwanted vegetables from the garden, always making the point that if Molly did not accept the gifts they would be thrown away. Her husband sent his grandson over to do heavy digging in the vegetable garden and give Molly tips on what would and would not grow. The boy, Rob, was more sceptical.
“I might get some hens,” she told the boy one day.
He looked at her shrewdly. “I should concentrate on business,” he said.
In the meantime, Molly, saying nothing to the Allauns, wrote to Sam Needham and asked him if he could recommend a tenant for Meakin Street. He, about to marry, suggested himself. Molly wrote back and offered him the house – she knew that Tom and Isabel very much wanted her to sell her house to finance Allaun Towers. She had noticed that Isabel had hung on to her rings, the last items of any real value in the house, and did not propose to sell her own house to mend the roof at Framlingham, while Isabel’s hands still flashed with their old sparkle. These rings were plainly vital to Isabel’s conception of herself as a well-off country gentlewoman, as were the trips up to Town, as she described them. There she visited old friends, to whom she was able to misrepresent her situation. “My daughter-in-law is a keen gardener,” for example, would bring to mind the vision of a lady in a straw hat cutting roses but not Molly’s mud-stricken battles with the kitchen garden in a high wind, while Fred lay rawly in his pram in a thick hat and mittens, his nose running. The friends, no doubt, retaliated by shining a glamorous light over their own affairs. But although these outings revived Isabel, Molly, furious and intolerant, could not bear her evening remarks: “I had such a nice time I forgot I had a train to catch and had to take a taxi to the station.” “We went to a matinée – it was quite like the old days.”
After these conversations Molly would lie in her room fuming with rage and trying to do the impossible calculations for a household where no one was quite candid about income and expenditure, money came from different sources into different hands and no one person was responsible for what was spent. Meanwhile Vera Harker, Clarisse and the others had tasted blood.
They were keen to keep the toy business going and continue to earn as they had before Christmas. But Molly knew the shop and the store she had dealt with were reluctant to offer more orders until the spring and her efforts to find other customers had been unsuccessful, except for one order, for fifty toys. She had to decide whether it was worth carrying on and hoping for better times, as the year progressed. March was cold and blustery. The orders had still not arrived, if they ever would. She had the idea Tom and h
is job were about to part company. The house had been freezing for six months except for small areas around the sitting room fire and kitchen stove and both Molly and the child had severe colds. She was lying in bed, slightly feverish, listening to the unfriendly wind howling round the corner of the house and huddling the baby under the bed covers to keep them both warm, when Charlie Markham walked in wearing country tweeds.
“Ho,” he said, startled and deterred by the sight of Molly, red-nosed in a grey sweater, flat on her back in bed beside the large, snuffling baby. “Well, well. Isabel said you were ill when she let me in – I thought I’d just slip over and make my New Year visit to the family.”
“Come here ratting every March, do you, Charlie?” Molly said, annoyed at being caught looking so demoralized by a smartly dressed Charlie Markham. “You’re in luck. There’s one creeping into the kitchen at night.”
“Don’t take on, Molly,” remarked Charlie. “I’m a visitor – and you can’t see many of those. I’ve brought a bottle of Gordon’s from Simon Tate. And I did a sweep at Fortnum’s before I set off. And Simon’s sent his christening present for little Fred, here.”
All The Days of My Life Page 56
