All The Days of My Life

by Hilary Bailey

  “I expect you were,” Sam said. “Only behind Ivy’s back. You know what she could be like when she was roused.”

  Molly ate a biscuit and said, “I wonder who my mum was? I suppose I could find out.”

  “The old woman said she was alive when they took her to hospital,” Sam said.

  Molly put the biscuit down. She stared at Sam. “Now you have shocked me,” she said. “She could still be alive.” She was silent for a moment. “Oh, my God,” she said finally.

  Sam Needham shook his head. “Don’t start digging about, Molly.” he told her. “Think of the damage you could do. If she’s alive she’ll have good reason not to try to find you. And – well, God, Molly – supposing she confirmed you and Joe were brother and sister. Think what that means for Fred.”

  “I’ve thought,” Molly said. “And I don’t care. Why should I? Why should I? It was all a mistake. It makes no difference. What hospital did they take the woman to?”

  “St Mary’s,” Sam said, “but I asked one of the members to see if you’d be allowed to see the records and the answer is no – there aren’t any records. They hit the annexe they were kept in with a doodlebug in 1944. The whole lot went up – records stretching back ten or twenty years. There’ll be no record of the woman’s admission or what happened to her. She must have died afterwards, somehow. Be reasonable, Molly – she would have looked for her children if she’d lived. Once the police had started checking they’d have found Joe first and then you.”

  “Poor woman – no husband, no relations – no name,” Molly said. “I wonder what it was all about?”

  “There’s one thing that will surprise you,” Sam said. “The old lady said that Lil reckoned Ivy was sent money right up to when you went to Framlingham. Notes – in an envelope. No message. She thought it must be for you. She used to get you food on the black market with it. She reckoned it helped you and made everybody else’s rations go further.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Molly, eating biscuits. Now she remembered the illicit eggs Ivy used to give her.

  “Apparently after that Ivy got suspicious and thought taking the money could lead to trouble. She got this suspicion – perhaps it came from crime, or she’d be asked to account for it one day. So when the payments started up again after the war she took to sending the envelopes back with “not known” written on the outside. But, you see, she was right when she assumed it was for you. Because the payments stopped when you went away and began again when you came back. Funny, isn’t it? It must have been some guilty father, maybe a married man, trying to salve his conscience. Or maybe just a charitable eccentric who’d heard how Ivy took you in.”

  “You know as well as I do, Sam,” Molly said, “that charitable eccentrics were in short supply round Meakin Street in those days. That street could’ve kept an army of them in charity, only funnily enough, all we ever got was the Salvation Army, when we were in luck. I reckon somebody involved knew what happened.” She paused. “I expect you’re right about the guilty dad. I suppose she didn’t say where the envelopes came from – the old lady?”

  Sam shook his head. “If there’d been anything special about them I daresay Ivy would’ve traced the sender. It wouldn’t be like her not to.”

  “Well,” Molly said. “It may stay as one of the great unsolved mysteries of all time. I’m certainly not going to start a hue and cry straight away. I’ll write it all down for Fred, when he’s older.”

  “Best thing,” said Sam. He stood up and put his cup on the table. “Thanks for the tea,” he said. “I’d better push off – we’re picking candidates for the council elections this evening.”

  “Thanks, Sam,” Molly said. “Keep your mouth shut about all this, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” he told her. He added, “I still miss Joe.”

  “So do I,” said Molly. “I’ve never found out how to replace him.”

  Well, thought Molly, as she sat there alone for a moment. I’ve no kith and no kin and I’ve changed my name so often now I don’t even know what that is. If Mary Waterhouse wasn’t even Mary Water-house, then Molly Flanders, Molly Endell and Molly Allaun seemed even less her names than they had been before. It’s enough to drive a woman mad, all this, she thought to herself, and went downstairs to dictate letters and examine the previous weeks’ accounts, already scrutinized and annotated by her accountants, Shirley and Ferdinand Wong.

  Later Richard Mayhew came in for supper. He had been at a rehearsal of his play at a theatre in Hammersmith. He was irritable and she was distracted. He told her about the botched rehearsal and then, as she said nothing, asked her, “Is something the matter?”

  Sniffing, she said, “I suddenly wanted a slice of Ivy’s bread pudding.”

  “Oh, my God,” he said.

  But Molly was thinking that somewhere she could have brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, a whole tribe of them. The guilty father might still be alive somewhere. Not just my relations but Joe’s and Fred’s, she thought.

  He said, “Get Shirley to make you some – Ivy must have handed her secret recipe down to someone. Then you can eat it or put a lump in each pocket to weigh you down when you jump in the canal.” He was growing tired of her lack of energy.

  He’s gone off me, she thought, and I’m not surprised, because I think I’ve gone off him.

  He had telephoned her the day after Josephine’s reception and asked her if she would like to see his play, which was on at a theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, and have supper afterwards. Molly had gone, although she found the play literally incomprehensible. There seemed to be a large cast of people flinging themselves in and out of a drawing room in a country house in the thirties, making remarks about others she had never heard of.

  In the ladies’ room during the interval, she looked at the programme notes and read what his play was meant to be about. Embarrassedly, she rejoined Richard Mayhew and was obliged to tell him she really could not understand his play. “I’m very uneducated,” she said. “I don’t know who all these people are – the thinkers, I mean. But I can see the audience is enjoying it.”

  And he had smiled at her, turning his black-fringed blue eyes on her, and said, “I’m sorry – I’m afraid I’m writing for a rather small number of people.”

  In the star’s dressing room afterwards she had said, “Nice play, isn’t it?” and the old actor had turned his ruined, drunken face to her and said, “Absolute pretentious rubbish, my dear.” It was Christopher Wylie, she knew suddenly. She had not recognized him on stage, just as, she thought, he did not recognize her now.

  “What are you in it for, then?” she asked, very amused, her mind going back to the old days.

  “I’m keeping eight people,” he told her, accepting a thick wad of notes from his dresser. “Second favourite came in at twelve to one,” he said. At this moment in came Richard Mayhew, tall and slender, laughing. “If you ever get tired of him, my dear,” he said to Molly, “remember, there are compensations to making an old man happy.” Molly burst out laughing. She slapped him on the shoulder and said, “I’ll remember.”

  Eating supper after the play with Richard Mayhew, Molly asked, “It’s left-wing politics you’re interested in?” It was more politeness than anything else – she was still amused by the encounter with Christopher Wylie.

  “Roughly speaking,” he said.

  “Well, what I was wondering,” she said, “was how all those well-off people could come along and laugh and applaud. You see, where I come from there’s working class, and they’re Labour, like Jack, and there’s upper class, and they’re Conservatives. But these people dress Conservative and support Labour – don’t they realize it’s people like them who’ll get hit in the redistribution of property and higher taxes and all that?”

  “I don’t think I can answer that,” Richard Mayhew had told her. “But didn’t you meet a lot of people like that while your husband, Joe, was an MP?”

  “No,” said Molly. “
I didn’t.” She thought these were the kind of people Joe Endell had gone out of his way to avoid.

  But the affair had begun gloriously. Indeed, for a fortnight, in early summer, Molly had forgotten the firm, the long-delayed question of whether to move to Liverpool or not, and had basked in the joys of long nights in bed with Richard and long days in the sunshine, meeting his friends, going to plays, relishing the irresponsible sense of being in love, in someone else’s world. It was as she had gradually to resume her normal occupations, had met Fred from his camping holiday and taken him back to Framlingham, where Isabel had told her about the new window frames upstairs, which were beginning not to fit, had gone down to the warehouse in what had been Twining’s field and noticed that sixty frames had been stacked outside for too long, because a consignment intended for Leeds had somehow not been despatched – it had been as these realities had to be dealt with that she had felt the first twinges of doubt about the affair with Richard Mayhew. He was giving up his flat in London so that they could live together at Framlingham. She began to think of the wife and children he had in Hove and wondered who, and what, they were. She quelled her doubts and went ahead. Now finding herself uneasily playing the successful woman, proprietor of a country house where weekend parties were given for artistic people. Isabel enjoyed it and Richard revelled in it.

  She had begun the new factory in Liverpool only six months before and found the strain of constant entertaining tiring. Now she was relieved to be leaving for a weekend in Scotland, saying cheerfully as she skewered her hat on with a hatpin she had found in a cardboard box in Ivy’s dressing table, “There’s no doubt about it – I’m like Lazarus, rising from the dead, time and time again.” She cocked her head on one side, gave herself a charming smile of encouragement and said wonderingly, “How do you do it, Lady Allaun? So beautiful, and so carefree, while all the time you’ve got a new factory in Liverpool about to be halted because of a strike and you’re only a hundred thousand pounds in hock and if you don’t sort it all out they’ll soon be selling you up lock, stock and barrel.”

  “I don’t know how you can face going to this place in Aberdeen,” he said to her now.

  “Be a nice outing for Fred,” she said, ignoring his sulky tone.

  “Well, I hope you enjoy the company of those who are bringing the country to ruin,” he said.

  “I’m getting used to left-wing denunciation,” responded Molly. “It’s water off a duck’s back, now.”

  Looking at his handsome, gloomy face on the pillow she reflected that a smile from the face of a face-grinder of the poor might be cheering after the sad, puritanical expressions of Richard and her brother, Jack.

  “Anyway,” she told Richard, “there’s a man there who might give me cut-rate on the new model bike engines if I put in a big enough order. So I suppose I’m going there partly for trade, as well as pleasure. That must make me a double villain. Still, that’s nothing new.”

  “You’re still keeping on those bucket-shops. Still employing blackleg labour – I don’t believe it,” her brother Jack had told her, only a few days before. “Even now you’ve opened the new factory you’re still expanding these places.”

  “Look at the date on your calender,” Molly said sourly, “October 1982. There’s three million and over out of work. What’s your answer? One thing’s certain – your job’s safe. When they start laying off MPs, amalgamating constituencies and so forth, come and call me a sweatshop owner.”

  “I suppose you’re the Victorian dream the government has in its heart,” Jack said.

  “I hate politicians’ dreams,” Molly said. “I never have any myself.”

  “You’re just a rudimentary economic organism,” her brother said. “You adapt and survive.”

  “Like a rat, you mean,” said Molly.

  They were walking by the lake in the late sunshine. Saplings, surrounded by protective mesh fences, grew opposite.

  “I’m a liar,” Molly said. “This place was my dream – once.”

  Jack nodded. Fred, very blonde and ruddy in the face, came running up. “Richard just arrived,” he said. “I’m going down to the village to play football.”

  “I hope he’s in a good mood,” Molly said, as they walked back to the house. “Don’t start a political argument, will you?”

  “All right,” Jack agreed. “I suppose it’s his artistic temperament which makes him so stroppy.”

  “Yes, and your political temperament,” she said.

  Now she went downstairs to make some coffee. Fred was in the kitchen, eating cornflakes. He was washed, dressed and packed. He was looking forward to the flight to Aberdeen. So was Molly, but felt gloomy about Richard. The affair had now lasted nine months. On their first night together she believed he was bringing back the body Johnnie Bridges had found, and lost. It was not the body which had been with Joe Endell, where sex had been confused in her mind with Joe himself, with their life, with the vibrant optimism and love he exuded. She had slept with Joe for twenty, thirty, a hundred reasons – to be close to him, to express love for him, to talk to him in another way. Their bed had been like a private club for them, in a world where otherwise there was little privacy. But with Richard, as with Johnnie, sexual feeling did not lead to any real ease between them. At first she had not understood this – but this morning, as she made the coffee, carried it up to the bedroom and sat beside the bed, still in her hat, drinking it with him, she understood clearly that they would never go any further together. He could give no more now, only take from her.

  She sat under her hat, feeling glad to be going away, on her way to Scotland thinking about the new factory.

  Before she opened it, George had been alarmed. “I’m not going up there,” he had said. “They’re savages.”

  Wayne, no keener than George on transplanting himself, had been more philosophical. “He thinks civilization stops north of Watford,” he said. “So do you, really, Molly. But they brought us from Africa to the West Indies to cut cane and from the West Indies to London to work on the buses, so I guess we’re easily moved.”

  There was some justice in the charge that Molly resisted the idea of leaving the South of England. But she said, “Thank God someone’ll go. There’s no point in bothering if I have to employ some gin-drinking overcharging manager, or a bright, ambitious lad full of ideas about how things have always been done, plus a pack of shop stewards who’ll make sure even that doesn’t happen. Give me all that, and we’ll be out of business in three months. It makes my heart sink, all of it. I’m not sure I’m up to being the manager of a large British company. I don’t think I’ve got the guts.”

  Shirley, who had come into the flat at Meakin Street where the matter was being discussed, had shrugged off her fur coat and said, “If you’ve any sense you’ll go public. Start the factory and sell shares. Otherwise you’ll be raising loans everywhere.”

  “Christ!” exclaimed Molly. “Now I’ve got the bureaucrats running a big factory, and the strikes on the shop floor and to crown all, a pack of shareholders to satisfy. You and that Chinaman must be secretly conspiring against me to make me bankrupt and put me in a mental home. It feels bad, Shirl, I’m telling you. It won’t work. It’s an idea that includes every fuck-up industrial system I ever heard of. Lazy managers, union trouble and a company owned by outsiders wanting fast dividends. Let’s have a nice big board with plenty of lords and generals on it to finish the joke. Let’s go one better – ask Charlie Markham if he’s free to join. Then he can make a bundle on the side without giving a stuff what happens to the place.” She added, “What’s more I’ve had the housekeeper at Framlingham on the phone again. She reckons she’s been looking after Brian and Kevin solidly for ten days and she’s wondering when you’re going to make an appearance.”

  “If you think this is any time to discuss who’s putting the baked beans on the table,” Shirley said loudly, “then I don’t. All I know is that the strain of working this lot out is telling on Ferdinand and me,
who, by the way, doesn’t like being called a Chinaman, especially by his sister-in-law, and I’m telling you neither of us can go on keeping you out of trouble for ever. Put at least some of the business on a decent footing or we’re clearing out.”

  “Clear out, then, you disloyal cow,” Molly yelled at her sister.

  “I’m going – don’t worry,” said Shirley and, picking up her coat, she left.

  “Oh God,” Molly said to Wayne. She hit her head with her hand. “Oh God – I’m done for if Shirley goes. She and Wong are the only ones who can make sense of it all.”

  “Trouble is, some of what you said is right.”

  “Trouble is, I can’t go back and I don’t want to go forward,” Molly said.

  “In that situation,” Wayne told her, “you have to think of something else.”

  “Or you,” Molly pointed out. “If you’re going to be managing the place you’ve got to tell me what you want.”

  Wayne stared at her. “Give everybody a piece of the action,” he said. “Best way to pull the team together is to make it pay to work.”

  Molly picked up the phone and dialled Shirley’s number. No one was there. She said into the answering machine, “Wayne says we should think about a form of co-ownership, Shirl. Can you and me and Wong – and Wayne,” she said, glancing at him “meet to discuss this.”

  Shirley rang next day and screamed, “It’s never been tried – not properly. Start from stratch on an untried basis and the confusion’ll be shocking. This isn’t a solution – it’s a cop-out –”

  Molly’s heart sank. There was some conversation in the background and Ferdinand Wong was on the line. “Get up there and talk it over with the union, Molly,” he said. Then Shirley was back, “I’m coming with you,” she said angrily, “to make sure you don’t commit us to some stupid deal.”

  And now, before the scheme had even begun, a transport strike threatened.

  Worry, worry worry, she thought, cheerfully applying scent in the now elegant bedroom at Allaun Towers. All plus a sulking lover. Leaving him half-asleep in bed she went downstairs, and as she was drinking another cup of coffee, it crossed her mind that perhaps the situation between herself and Richard was not really his fault. Perhaps, over the months since she had met him, she had been too preoccupied with the business. He, the only child of devoted parents, was not used to taking second place to a bicycle factory. He might well be thinking of the actress, stage manager, script editor, who would understand his work, discuss it with him, perhaps marry him and make a home with him. She ran upstairs and kissed him, saying, “I’ll ring you up when I get there.” Nevertheless it was a pleasure to get out of the house where she felt disapproved of and take the shuttle to Aberdeen with Fred. Molly was very excited, perhaps more so than her son, who had regularly had holidays abroad with his grandparents. A chauffeur met them at the airport and drove over roads, and finally on little more than lanes, to the imposing house where they were to stay.