All The Days of My Life

by Hilary Bailey

  “Do you know Molly Allaun?” asked Floyd. “Molly – Herbert Precious.”

  Bert Precious was getting his breath back. “Phew,” he said, “I’m out of condition. Is it wet on the ground?”

  “Not very,” Floyd said.

  “Then – excuse me,” he said, and sat down. He looked up at her. “I think we met once, at Frames Club,” he told her.

  “Ah,” Molly said. “I met a lot of people then.”

  “I expect you did,” he said drily.

  She laughed and said, pointing upwards, “I know I’ll never rest until I’ve got to the top of that higher hill, there.”

  “Come on, then,” said Bert Precious, scrambling to his feet.

  “Count me out,” said Colin Floyd, sitting down.

  So together Molly and Bert scrambled over rocks and rough ground to the top of the windy hill. They found the two boys playing there.

  Bert looked at Frederick Allaun consideringly and said, “He looks rather like you.”

  Molly said, “I always think he looks like his father. Especially in the photographs when Joe was a boy.”

  She had not thought for some time about Fred’s parentage, or her own, or Joe’s. Now she did, and the notion made her grave. At the same time she saw Bert’s eyes appraising her son and herself. “Perhaps you and your husband were alike,” he said.

  “Perhaps,” Molly said, trying to throw off serious thoughts. But she said to herself – “Liker than we should have been.” “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, taking in the large view and the huge, blue sky above them. When she looked at Bert, who was standing at her side, she noticed he was looking at her, and not at the view. Meanwhile the two boys, who had been playing a complicated game of cowboys and Indians, Scots and English, were shooting each other and falling over. Suddenly, with a cry, Fred fell over the edge of the hill. Molly and Bert both ran forward. The boy lay a few feet below, laughing into their alarmed faces.

  “Ha, ha,” said Molly. “Very funny, I must say.”

  She turned to Bert but his face was still. She had learned the day before that his eldest child, a son, had died of a drug overdose two years before. She said suddenly, “Come on. We’d better go. It’s time for lunch.” They walked down the hill, with Colin Floyd. And Molly felt an internal stillness, as if there were a pause in time. She did not put it to herself that she was going to fall in love with this tall, long-faced man, whose features completely failed to conceal the movement of his thoughts and emotions. She did not tell herself this but part of her knew it was going to happen.

  They walked across the formal garden, past the pool and the low hedges surrounding geometrical flower beds. Looking at a tree shaped like a peacock Bert shook his head. “Funny notion,” he said, half to himself, “a French garden in Aberdeen.”

  They sat together at lunch, which was an informal meal with no placings. Jessica Monteith was not far off, next to Fred, who sat by his mother.

  As he and Jessica talked she discovered that he was short of money. He spoke of selling his house and moving to a cheaper one. She discovered that his two remaining children, a fifteen-year-old son and a thirteen-year-old daughter, lived with him and that a daily housekeeper was in charge. She had the impression of a sad life which he accepted, barely knowing how sad it was, for he was not self-conscious. It also began to dawn on her that Jessica Monteith had her eye on him.

  “The next time I’m in London, in a fortnight’s time,” she said, “I shall arrive on your step and sort you out, just as I did the last time.”

  “The last time you came the housekeeper resigned,” Bert protested. “I had to talk to her for an hour to persuade her to stay. I should be very pleased to see you, as indeed I always am, but I’d be equally pleased if you decided you didn’t want to count the sheets or look in the refrigerator. Your company is always welcome and quite enough in itself, Jessica. Don’t think me ungrateful.”

  “Honestly, Bert,” protested Jessica. “I don’t know how you manage at all. And with the children at day schools – As a woman who’s brought up a daughter, don’t you agree, Molly?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t bring her up. My mother did,” Molly said. “I don’t think I know enough about it.”

  “Well, you must all come and stay with us, Bert, en famille, very soon. We’ll be here for ages – what about Easter?” Jessica pressed.

  “Simon and Anne are going to Canada at Easter,” Bert said.

  “Come alone then,” Jessica said promptly. “Otherwise you’ll be glooming about the house alone being bossed by that morbid woman you employ. Absolutely no good at all.”

  Bert Precious said, consideringly, “Thank you, Jessica. I’ll certainly think about it.” Then asked, “Donald! You think we can get a boat out and row to the island in the middle of the loch this afternoon?”

  “If Ian’ll let you,” his host said. “Whenever I want one it’s laid up for repairs or being repainted. But if you can get one, then do.”

  “I like rowing,” Bert said to Molly. “Do you feel like taking the boys for a row – you’ll let Willy come, won’t you, Jessica?”

  “I’ll come as well,” Jessica declared. “I hope you row well.”

  “No,” he said. “Wear a mackintosh and gumboots.”

  “I’ll bail,” said Molly.

  “You can swim, can’t you?” Jessica asked her. “If you can’t, it really isn’t safe.”

  Molly wondered if she was riding shotgun for her absent friend, Bert’s wife, or if, as she supposed, Jessica had a fancy for him herself. She said, “I can swim.”

  “I’ve got certificates,” Fred announced.

  “All’s well, then,” said Jessica.

  Molly had suspected Bert’s claim to be a poor rower was a gentlemanly stance but once they were in the boat she realized that he had spoken nothing but the truth. The water with which he spattered them was ice cold, straight down to the loch from the hills. The wind was chilly. She finally cried, “Blimey! I can’t stand this. These boys are drenched, Bert. Why don’t I row?”

  “Come and take an oar,” he suggested.

  Molly walked towards him across the lurching boat and sat down beside him. Sid, during their outings on the Serpentine and the occasional seaside holiday, had been a fussy oarsman, insisting on accuracy and correct strokes. They weaved across the loch until they arrived at the fir-fringed lochside. Fred jumped out in his gumboots to pull the boat in.

  Molly jumped out, saying, “Isn’t it nice?” Jessica, whose approach to the expedition was more temperate, said, “It’s a tiny island. You can walk to the other side in five minutes.”

  “I’m going to find Andy’s grave,” Willy cried out alarmingly. Fred ran after him into the trees.

  “Who’s Andy?” asked Bert.

  “An old dog Willy remembers. We always bury the dogs on the island,” she replied.

  “Better than Meakin Street, where I grew up,” Molly said. “People used to throw them in the canal.”

  The two boys came out of the woods and the grassy bank they stood on was full of the music of a tango.

  “Willy!” protested Jessica. “Did you bring your radio with you?”

  The boys were dancing in their gumboots. Bert Precious took Molly in his arms and they tangoed on the grass. He bent her over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. He straightened up and bowed and turned to Jessica. “Will you dance?” he asked.

  “My card is full but I can make space for you,” she answered.

  As they moved off in the dance Jessica shot her a black look. This jockeying for a position with Bert Precious was the same as the rivalries between the girls in the old drinking clubs she had gone to with Johnnie Bridges, thought Molly. But the women had been younger and the price of failure higher – back behind the counter of a shop or straight on to the streets.

  But as Jessica and Bert danced the music stopped, and the voice of the announcer took over. “So much for history, now for something closer –” The strange voice
sang, “This town is coming like a ghost town – can’t go on no more –”

  “Turn that off, Willy,” Jessica said impatiently. Molly, on the edge of the loch, was returned to the boarded up shops, the neglected look of much of her native city. She thought of the threatened haulage strike and said, “Can you walk right round the loch?”

  “If you don’t mind balancing,” Jessica told her.

  “I can balance,” Molly said, still thinking of the haulage strike. If the first consignment of Messiters for the American market missed the boat because they couldn’t get the machines to the docks the bikes would not be on the market for another two months. The lack of projected profits could mean no more credit from the bank. Materials could not be ordered – the factory could be almost at a standstill for eight weeks.

  And so they all set off to walk round the loch. Sometimes they were on broad strips of grass, sometimes edging over the roots of trees close to the water. Molly slipped and got her foot wet. She said, “It’s a shame it’s too cold for swimming.” To one side of them the clear water stretched away to the other side. On the other were thick pines, their needles littering the ground.

  They sat down on the grass near the boat. The boys were among the trees. “Fred’s enjoying this so much,” Molly said to Jessica. “And so am I.”

  “It’s very nice for Willy,” Jessica said, “he gets rather lonely in the holidays.”

  “Good Lord,” said Bert Precious, as the rain began. “That was quick. I wonder – is it just a shower?”

  “Hardly any such thing here,” Jessica told him. “Once it starts it persists, usually.”

  “Better all jump in then,” Bert said. “I’ll get the boys.” Jessica and Molly stood in the drizzling rain until he came out of the woods with the two reluctant boys. They were protesting. “We were busy building a camp.”

  “Well, we don’t want to have to come and sit in it for two hours till the rain stops,” Molly said. “Hop in the boat.”

  Fred insisted on rowing them back, with Willy at the other oar. The rain poured down. Jessica put on a headscarf. Molly’s hair dripped down her neck. They lurched back to the other shore and set off, drenched, back to the house. Going through the garden Jessica said to Bert, “Do you remember we looked for Les Mémoires de Montespan when you were here last – it turned up in one of the guests’ bedrooms. Come to the library and I’ll show it to you.”

  Molly went upstairs and lay down on her immaculate green satin bedcover. He’s a married man, she said. Never mind if his wife’s in Canada pretending to look after her dead father – she’s doing that because their child died, and because a drug death always looks like a suicide, and when there’s a suicide people blame themselves, particularly the parents, if it’s a child. So if you butt in you’re interfering with a married man, a grieving wife, two guilty parents – so what sort of a shit does that make you? Plus, she said to herself, Bert Precious is a gentleman, a real one, maybe the last one left in England. He’s not Charlie Markham, or even old Monteith. He’ll respect his marriage vows as far as he’s able. Get mixed up with him and he’ll take it hard. And just because you haven’t had a holiday for years, she warned herself, don’t start acting like a secretary on a two-week break in Torremolinos – you’re too old for that lark. She told herself, too, that she had a bicycle factory to think of.

  She stood up, changed her damp skirt, combed her hair, put on fresh lipstick and went downstairs. She stood in the entrance to the billiard room, watching Jamieson and Colin Floyd play. The game was ending. “All I can say, James, is damn you,” remarked Floyd cheerfully, putting his cue on the table.

  Jamieson lifted his cue, spotting Molly in the doorway.

  “Fancy a game?” he said. “I’ll give you some points.”

  “I’ll take them,” said Molly, advancing.

  She was quite good, though not as good as he was. After a clever shot of hers he asked, “How did you learn all this?”

  “It’s true, what they say,” Molly told him. “It’s the sign of a misspent youth. I used to hang round a dubious snooker hall in the Edgware Road as a teenager. In winklepickers and a tight skirt,” she added, to make the picture clearer. “Mostly, the lads used to play and us girls would hang around giggling and trying to attract their attention. But sometimes my boyfriend would wheedle me in for a few games. A year like that,” she concluded, “and you were well away – some of those boys were dedicated, like saints.” And the one that got me in on the games was hanged by the neck until he was dead, she added to herself.

  “I see it all,” Jamieson said. “You were the girl I used to wish I knew while I was sitting in the taxi with my luggage on the way back to school.” He trickily potted six balls in succession. Molly said, “You’re almost as good as Lester O’Dowd at Arthur’s, Edgware Road, and that’s a compliment.”

  As she bent over the billiard table he asked, “Tell me – have you ever thought of using our engines in the Messiters?”

  Mary carefully potted her ball. At last, she thought, at last. She moved round the table for her next shot.

  “It’s crossed my mind,” she said. “More than once.” Her next shot went astray.

  “Good,” Jamieson said. “I’m moving in for the kill now. You can forget about Lester O’Dowd.”

  And at this point he began to win the game in dead earnest. At one point he put up his head and said, “We’ll talk about this business in detail later, if you agree. I have to think in terms of whether it’s worth retooling.”

  “My designer guesses it is,” Molly told him. “That’s to say, my accountant made the guess, after talking to the designer … ”

  “Messiter?” Jamieson said, “I hear he’s not too well.”

  Molly, trying to produce a resistance to Jamieson’s game, thought hard. She did not know if George was well or not. He had spent two years almost exclusively working on a project he would say very little about. Wayne, down at Framlingham, was, with his wife, virtually George’s minder. George now lived with them because, as Wayne’s wife said, “He’s like a baby.” The profitless two years were explained by his friend as research likely to lead somewhere. But plainly the word was out that George Messiter had shot his bolt, was, perhaps, unbalanced.

  She straightened up and said frankly to Jamieson, “I don’t know. He’s a funny man. I have to let him go his own way but – I don’t know –”

  “You’ve got to watch these design Johnnies,” Jamieson said, “or they’ll have you believing reading the racing results is a creative pause. – well played!” he exclaimed, as Molly cannoned two balls into two separate pockets.

  “Don’t know how I did that,” she muttered, going for her next shot and then missing it. As she unbent she said, “I think that George is all right.”

  She wandered, later, in the formal gardens outside the house, while the two boys watched TV with Mrs Mooney. Bert, so far as she knew, was still in the library with Jessica. She pictured them with their heads together over the French book, shrugged, sat on a bench in a small box maze on the outermost edge of the garden, near where the moors began. Bert Precious came round the corner, sat down beside her and took her in his arms. He kissed her. Molly drew back. “You’ve been reading French books, haven’t you?” she said. “That’s right,” he said, and kissed her again. She stared into the very pale, long face, looked into his almond eyes and said, “Oh, Bert. Bert.”

  He said, “Corrie won’t come back to me, Molly. I’m very lonely. I want you,” and he stressed the you slightly. She put her arms round him. He murmured, “There’s an old country house tradition known as the rest before dinner –” They went, side by side, round the house to the kitchen entrance. The back stairs took them up to the corridor leading to Molly’s room. She said, “You’ve done this before.”

  “Only as a young man,” he told her. Later she leaned on one elbow, staring at the sleeping face on the pillow beneath her. It was tranquil. Indeed, his face was usually calm. It must have be
en the candour of his eyes which gave him the open, responsive look he bore. Then she got up, bathed quickly and quietly in the bathroom next door and put on her dinner dress. She slipped upstairs to have supper with the boys. Mrs Mooney, who was looking after them, was talking about her grandfather, the most famous poacher in the county. “But since what he did was wrong,” she said portentously, perhaps for the benefit of the two young members of the landlord class eating custard in front of her, “wrong and against the law, he finally went to prison. For six months.”

  “Can I take Fred off to see the blackbird’s nest?” Willy said. “Can we go nesting?”

  “It’s too dark,” Mrs Mooney said.

  “Let us just go out and look up at it in the tree – you can see it when the drawing room lights are on,” he said.

  “Straight down, and straight back,” Mrs Mooney said.

  “Nesting tomorrow?” said Willy.

  “That depends on your mothers,” Mrs Mooney said. The boys raced off.

  Molly had a cup of tea and said, “Poaching being a thing of the past round here, of course?”

  Mrs Mooney looked at her cautiously, then gave her jolly laugh. “What do you think?” she said. “There’s more than ever.”

  “Mr Monteith says they’re using my bikes to get them to the spot,” Molly said.

  “Aye,” Mrs Mooney said. “They’re handy, you see. They can go over rough country and down narrow lanes. Well – it’s hard enough to manage, these days. There’s no work out here, none in the town – people are getting poorer. We’re going back to the days my mother can remember, when folk saw little meat, just bacon sometimes and a rabbit or two for the pot.

  “But the problem now’s that the men from the towns are out poaching on a big scale. A whole sheep, twenty pheasants taken while they’re sleeping, with flashlights – it annoys the landlords and it makes the gamekeepers very angry – they’re that much more keen to catch anybody. And sometimes, when they do get someone, they’re none too gentle.”

  “Poaching here – mugging in the cities. It’s the same thing,” Molly said.