“Must be some funny genes somewhere,” Jack said.
“Speak for yourself,” said Molly. “I’ve got news for you. I’m not your sister. Added to that, you’re not my brother. They picked me off a bomb site and took me in.”
Jack looked at her, wondering if she were trying to make a joke. “Ivy told me just now,” she said.
“It’s a fantasy,” Jack said. His face fell. “Just a minute,” he said. “That’s right. I was staying with Auntie Win. They told me I had a new sister. When I came back there you were. I can remember you now – you were standing up sucking your thumb.”
“Didn’t you ask why I wasn’t a baby?” asked Molly.
“I might have done,” Jack told her. “They clouted me for my pains. I was only a small kid – I seem to remember saying ‘Why isn’t she a proper baby?’ and Sid belting me.” He looked vague. “I wonder if that really happened?” he asked himself, then said, as if she had accused him of something, “You know I’ve got no childhood memories, Moll. I went through half the Blitz and I can’t remember a thing. I can dimly remember being locked in the coal cellar by myself and thinking I’d never be let out. But, even then, Ivy swears she never did it to me so I don’t know if it really happened.” He said, “Do you want another cup of tea?”
When he went to get the tea Molly sat and stared at a couple in the corner. They spoke quietly to each other. The woman said something, angrily, to the man. Jack came back and put the tea on the table between them. “I must say, Molly,” he told her. “It’s a ridiculous story. I could be expected to forget but what about the others? Are you telling me they picked you up and brought you home and no one knew? What about the other people in the street? What happened to the baby Ivy was expecting? I still think she’s made the whole thing up. It’s dreadful – like dredging something out of her subconscious – frightening.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Molly told him. “I believe it-you don’t have to. You see,” she said, “it happened in a war. The men were away fighting. The women had jobs and kids and the whole place was being bombed to smithereens. And Ivy miscarried – she was off her head – that’s why they gave me to her, like you give a new doll to a sick child, so I daresay anyone who knew would shut up about it, for Ivy’s sake. You know what they were like in Meakin Street. The neighbours could be nasty but they had their limits, like never letting on anything to the landlord, or the police – maybe this was one of the things where they’d stick by you and what with that and the confusion I suppose a lot went by the board.” She thought for a moment and said, “I bet that was why Mum let Elizabeth Flanders treat her like that after Jim died. She was afraid Elizabeth would lose her head and make a scene, blaming me, and shout out in front of the neighbours that nobody knew where I came from.”
“I don’t know what to think,” her brother said. “I don’t know what scares me more – the way Ivy’s having delusions or the way you’re believing her.” He studied her closely, as if checking her for signs of instability.
“Doesn’t matter, Jack,” she said. Her attitude seemed to satisfy him that she was, indeed, not responding normally. He evidently decided that she was under too much strain for he patted her arm and said, “Do you want to come back with me to Pimlico – drive back to Kent in the morning?”
“It’s all right,” said Molly. “I’m fixed up in London for the night.”
He nodded and stood up. “I’ll go and see Mum, then,” he said.
Molly, who had no arrangements to spend the night in London but dreaded her sister-in-law’s sympathy, took a chance and telephoned Sam Needham, who offered her a bed.
And so Molly was in bed at 19 Meakin Street, where she had grown up, where she had lived with Joe Endell and conceived his child, when the telephone rang at three thirty and Sid told her Ivy was dead.
She had fallen asleep knowing that in all probability Joe had been her own brother. For if Ivy’s tale was true – and it was corroborated by what Peggy Jones had said, and by the papers Evelyn Endell had left her – then both she and Joe had been found in the burning house at the top of Meakin Street and although she could not assume that they had been brother and sister it was very likely. The thought, strangely enough, did not worry her. If she still felt she was the child of Sid and Ivy Waterhouse, no matter who her real parents were, then, by the same inner logic, she felt she was the sister of Jack and Shirley and not of Joe Endell. The rest was a technicality, a bit of the past which had no real meaning. The important thing had been her marriage to Joe, not the birth certificate which connected them. Thinking this she fell quite peacefully asleep until the telephone rang in the hall and woke instantly, knowing what she was going to hear.
Sid sounded quite calm. He said only, “She’s gone, Molly.”
“Oh, Dad. Dad,” she said.
“It was quite peaceful,” he said. “She came out of the coma she was in and she knew what was happening – I think she did. She sent you all her love and she said goodbye –”
Molly stared at the telephone, the digital phone book which lay beside it, the pair of gloves on top.
“It’s not fair, Dad,” she said. It was still hard to realize Ivy was really dead. You won’t see her any more, she told herself. It’s all wiped out now, the body and the whole person. She said, “Shall I come? Do you want to come here?”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m going home to sleep for a few hours. When I’ve phoned Jack.”
“I’ll come over early in the morning,” said Molly.
“I’m glad it’s happened now,” he told her. “She was worn out. The fight had gone on too long. It had to happen. I’m glad, for her sake, it’s over. It’s not a shock – I faced it already, over and over, in my mind.”
“She’s released, now,” Molly said. “I’ll see you in the morning, Dad.”
Now she sat down in the sitting room and breathed heavily in and out, as if she herself had been threatened with death. And she felt empty. She could not even cry.
They took Ivy back to the West London Cemetery for the burial. It was a cold November day. There was not a leaf on the trees as they drove through mean, drizzling streets. Richard Mayhew sat in the car with Molly and put his arm round her. Fred sat opposite her, very close to Josephine.
Miles and miles of tombstones surrounded them as Ivy’s coffin was lowered into the grave. They all walked away, knowing they were abandoning her, alone in the ground.
Halfway down the path Molly caught up with Sam Needham and his wife. “Thank you for coming,” she said.
“We suddenly thought we wanted to,” he said. “She was a good woman, your mother. It wasn’t easy to bring up children in Meakin Street.”
“That’s the point,” Molly said on impulse. “She did that but before she died she told me I wasn’t her daughter. She said an old man found me in a bombed building and took me to her and Sid.”
He paused and said, “I heard a story like that from an old lady once – but I thought it was about Joe –” His voice trailed off. He stared at her. A sharp wind hit them, bringing tears to Molly’s eyes.
“That’s the trouble,” she said, “I think there might have been two of us.”
Sam took this in. His face altered. “Oh, Christ Almighty,” he said. Then he looked at his wife, who seemed not to be listening. In a low voice he said to Molly, “Better keep quiet about this. I’ll make enquiries but are you sure you want to –”
“Yes,” Molly said firmly. “I’ve got a feeling – it was like Ivy’s last message to me. She wants me to find out what there is to know.”
“All right,” he said quietly. “There might be a couple of people who know something.” And, as Jack and Helena came up with Richard Mayhew he said to Jack, “Hope you didn’t mind us coming on impulse, Jack. Your mum will be missed.”
“We’re going off to get something to eat now,” Jack told him. “Will you come?”
It did not help that the ceremony had been so small, for later Molly woke u
p in bed at Framlingham and wept, thinking that they had shunted Ivy away quickly and left her behind. In the end she got out of bed, rather than wake Richard, who lay peacefully asleep with his rather long, dark hair spread out on the pillow. She felt very far away from him. He was six years younger than she was but, she could not help thinking, fifteen years younger than her in experience. It was funny, she thought, that he was meant to be a playwright and ought to understand things – yet someone much younger like Josephine or Wayne seemed to have more grasp of real life. How could he understand about Ivy, she wondered, going downstairs in the darkness? He had spent his life at schools, universities, and then mixing with the people he had met in those places. He couldn’t understand Ivy, who had had almost no education, who had spent her life dealing with circumstances beyond her control, whose only epitaph at the end seemed to be that she had clung on, reared her children, looked after Sid and caused no tragedy or disgrace to herself or the family. Yet, poor and encumbered, she had taken in another woman’s child, scraped up money for food, smacked her, cleaned up, shouted, worried and loved. And she, the greatest complainer of them all, had never complained about that, or felt hard done by nor, even when Molly’s life was at its worst, had she allowed herself to declare that Molly’s behaviour was not her responsibility, since the girl must have bad blood in her. And after Molly came her daughter – Ivy had spent years of her life providing cough mixture, clean clothes and meals for a girl who was not her child, and her daughter, who was not her granddaughter. She had been good, Ivy, her daughter decided. She had no halo, her expression was rarely placid or saintly but she must have been good, or why should she have done what she did? Richard didn’t seem to see things that way, thought Molly, and as the wind roared round Allaun Towers, she sat and wept for her mother.
Two small grey-haired old ladies, arm in arm, helped each other up the hill to the chapel of the abbey of Poulaye-sur-Bois. One of them, smelling woodsmoke on the chill, early air, suddenly remembered a still-smoking house, the back a pile of broken, blackened bricks in the yard, the parlour full of sodden, black furniture, the staircase collapsed, remembered being lifted from the iron bedstead upstairs under a shattered roof, open to the blue, calm sky. The old woman breathed the clear air of France, took in the acridity of smoke, remembered the foul stink of a burning slum and the terror of war.
Molly, still hesitating about opening the big factory up North, was looking up at the London sky through the holes in another roof and said, “Cost too much to repair, Mr Donelly, with labour costs the way they are. And it’d take someone with bigger resources than me to put this neighbourhood on its feet. Look at it.”
From the upper window of the ruined factory, where once they had made parts for mangles, vacuum cleaners, railway trolleys and lifts, they could see, opposite, small terraced houses, backed by the giant skyscrapers of the council estate behind. Five of the houses opposite were shops. Only two of the big windows of the lower storeys were lighted on this dark, November afternoon. In one there were displays of disposable nappies and cameras. In the other, displays of bottles of wine and spirits. The off-licence window was covered by heavy wire mesh. There was no one in the street.
She said, “Sorry – but who could tackle it? No shops, council flats full of hooligans and vandals – would you want to live here if you had kids or you were old? You’d be locking yourself in here at six at night and never opening the front door. And if you had premises here you’d have constant trouble and you couldn’t leave your car in the street. You’d spend a fortune in guard dogs.”
Donnelly, a short man in a striped shirt, said in his upper-class voice, “You’ve done it in other places, Lady Allaun.”
“Yes,” she said. “But what happened here was a disaster. Two thousand jobs lost by the tyre factory shutting – everything else goes with it. I can’t reclaim the area by opening up on a small scale.”
A woman came along with a child in a pushchair. She turned into the chemist’s. “The woman’s frightened, you see,” she said. She sighed, “This neighbourhood’s too big to fight. It needs GEC or a big power station opening up –”
He said, “I don’t think this situation is permanent.”
As she stood beside him in the window she felt tired. The country seemed to be lying under a dark cloud of inertia, as it had once lain under the dark cloud of its own factory smoke. Sometimes she felt the despair pulling her down with it. The presence of thoughtless optimists like Donnelly did not help.
She said simply, “There’s a lot of misery about,” and turned to walk out.
Donnelly came behind. She could feel his admiring regard on her back. She was collecting, she knew, more admiration these days, as one of the few expanding industrialists, than she had as Mary Water-house, murderer’s widow, Mary Flanders, gangster’s moll – the world, she thought, forgot quickly when it wanted to.
As they got in the car she said, “I’m sorry to have wasted your time – I had a feeling it might be like this. I had to see for myself.”
“ ‘Not at all, Lady Allaun,” Donnelly said politely.
“Could you drop me off at the end of Meakin Street?” she asked.
They needed a West End office, Shirley had said. No business could run from Framlingham, where the telephone connections were unreliable and clients had either to be met in London, or drag themselves to Kent in order to do business on a personal level. Molly responded sharply that she had seen enough West End offices at God knew how many thousands of pounds a year per square foot, crammed with men in suits exerting executive privileges and typists tending potted plants. She added that such a building could ruin any business. So they had turned the ground floor at Meakin Street, with an extension at the back, into a small but efficient set of offices and retained the upstairs as a small flat. Shirley and her new husband, Ferdinand Wong, lived a few miles away. Wayne, who had married a local girl, lived very smartly in a purpose-built house just outside Framlingham. Any racist feeling there might have been once about the marriage had been subdued in the face of Wayne’s income and position as manager at Framlingham and was probably now forgotten. His children went to the village nursery because, as Molly had told him, “When we came here, with no nighties or knickers and our heads full of nits, we were as black as you as far as the locals were concerned. But it all blew over for us, just like it will for your kids.” Because of the other black workers who had married and moved to Framlingham, sociologists from Sussex University had come down to study racial tension in the village, and gone back concluding that villages were different from cities since the worst incident reported had been the attack by one of the black workers’ wives on the manager of the small supermarket, who was a Bengali.
Molly, who had insisted on being dropped outside the Marquis of Zetland, walked slowly up Meakin Street towards the house. She had seen Donnelly’s respectful appreciation, even as she got out. She was in her middle forties now, unlined, tall and strong. She wore a blue suit with a wide skirt, boots and a knitted pink hat like a beret. And, as she walked to the house through the afternoon gloom, thinking “It’ll have to be Liverpool,” she saw Johnnie Bridges waiting for her in the rain, outside the front door, heard him saying, “Moll.” That night she had been the barmaid at the Marquis of Zetland. Now, with the computers inside, waiting for her, she felt the whole weight of Allaun Towers, the businesses, the family responsibilities, pressing down on her. “You chose it,” she told herself.
Inside she said to the man behind the desk. “Anything up?”
“Nothing much,” he said. “Only there’s a man called Sam Needham waiting upstairs. Said he was an old friend. The Liverpool people want to talk to you urgently.”
“I’ll see Sam first,” she said, and ran upstairs.
“Sam!” she said, going into the sitting room, which overlooked Meakin Street. “Is that a cup of tea?”
“Freshly brewed,” he told her.
“Wonderful to see you,” she said. “What do you think
of the office?”
“They should have you at Transport House,” he said. “I see brother Jack’s shadow Minister of Defence.”
“Don’t talk to me about that lot,” Molly said. “They’re forever standing in the way of good, dodgy businessmen and women and then whining about industrial collapse.” She handed Sam a cup of tea.
“We’ll never agree on that,” Sam told her. “All you are is a capitalist. I don’t deny you do your best but if you don’t conform to the regulations no one else will. There’s a fine line between benevolent capitalism and exploitation. Anyway, I came here to give you a shock.”
“Impossible,” declared Molly, sitting down. “But you can try.”
“It’s about the kids in that bombing,” he said. “I talked to an old lady in the council home – she heard a story from Lil Messiter when she was drunk. Lil was, I mean. And what she heard was that the old rag-and-bone man did meet Sid in the street and give him a little girl. And there was another child, a boy, which he took round to the orphanage.”
Molly, opening a packet of biscuits, said, “The people who lived in the street must have known this, some of them. Why didn’t I ever find out?”
“Search me,” Sam Needham said, taking a biscuit. “I suppose there was a lot going on in people’s lives, then. And you got evacuated not all that time after, so when you and Jackie came back everyone forgot you weren’t brother and sister. After all, there were men coming back from the war, there’d been bombing and moves and evacuations –”
“Yes, and after that, everything was gone over with a toothcomb,” Molly said. “Whose baby was born ten months after the old man went away on active service – who’d acquired a pair of vases from somewhere they shouldn’t – it went down to the last tin of black market corned beef and who’d been spotted in a pub up West with a GI. So why wasn’t I included?”
All The Days of My Life Page 67
