All The Days of My Life

by Hilary Bailey

  “We’re going away to get our proposals together now. There’ll be copies available when you arrive at work tomorrow. You can take all day to talk it over, with Shirley, Lee here, your shop stewards, husbands, wives – I don’t care. Turn the place into a public meeting if you need to – but let me have an answer by midday Tuesday.”

  And after this brief and serious address, she walked out of the silent canteen, wondering what thoughts were going through the heads of the men and women in overalls who sat there. She knew her timing was wrong. The scheme should have been started earlier. Jack would see it as a way of breaking a strike. And probably it was, thought Molly, but what other choice could she make? Together with Wayne, Shirley, Lee and the firm’s lawyers they roughed out the proposals. Then Molly, very tired, and Fred, who was very bored by now, got a car and drove back to Framlingham. They both slept most of the way, arriving at breakfast time, although no one was up.

  There was a scatter of garden catalogues and blueprints in the drawing room, so she deduced that the plan Richard and Isabel had concocted, to restore the old walled rose garden at the back of the house, was now being put into operation. Whether it was memory of the carefree weekend with Bert Precious or the thought of the anxieties connected with the decision about the Messiter factory in Liverpool, Molly felt a surge of resentment. As she left the bright catalogues and the plans for the beds and replanting of the garden and went into the kitchen she thought, “I need a wife here, not a couple of garden designers.” Gloomily, she cooked eggs and bacon and wished herself back at Meakin Street, remembering the way the mist had hung round the old gas street lamps when she had been a child, remembering Ivy in her apron on the pavement yelling at the children to come in out of the street and get their tea, remembering Joe Endell, who had started there with her their jolly mealtimes, with take-home curries, and documents all over the table, and a couple of friends laughing about the day in Parliament. She found her eyes filling unaccountably with tears – it was the prospect of some happiness with Bert Precious, it was for Joe Endell, it was the workload and the worries about the factory, it was her overdraft and the knowledge that she was going to have to pay for the roses, the garden walls, the construction of a pool. “It isn’t good enough,” she thought, as she cooked the breakfast.

  After she and Fred had eaten their eggs and bacon, in order to avoid the arrival of Richard and Isabel, who were getting up, and the housekeeper who would be coming in from the village shortly, Molly and Fred went out to look at the rose garden. It lay behind old brick walls. They forced through the archway, which was blocked with Brambles, and stood in the longish grass, for the path was overgrown and lost, and looked into the choked pond, in the middle of which was a broken statue. The roses, untended for years, dropped, grew along the ground, climbed the walls.

  “I like it how it is,” said Molly’s son. “It’s spooky and if they clear it all up we won’t be able to play properly here any more.”

  Molly nodded. She, too, was fond of the old garden, rioting untended roses in summer, brown and grey in winter. She liked it, she did not want it ordered, for people to stroll round and admire. The whole business felt like the last straw. She dealt, day by day, with mundane problems, like ferrying material to outworkers who were drawing the dole and could not take in consignments of fabrics without attracting the attention of malicious neighbours who might betray them to the DHSS; she dealt with gigantic problems, like how to set up worker management at a factory over two hundred and fifty miles away, with very few precedents to go on. It seemed to her that her revolutionary lover and her mother-in-law had nothing better to do than rearrange the flower beds. In spite of their different ideologies, both were trying to re-create the same dream. Here am I, she thought, tens of thousands in debt and everything pawned in the hopes of healthy trade over the next few years and they’re here talking about fountains and rose gardens. Even Fred’s got more sense than that. She sat down on a slightly rotting wooden bench and thought. There had been a message from Bert in the pile of letters and notes of telephone calls waiting for her when she got back. Yet now she was, somehow, not telephoning him at his house in London. She had not rung him while she had been in Liverpool. It was partly the sense of being under strain, as though she did not want him to see her workaday personality – the Molly Allaun waiting for negotiations in Liverpool to end and losing her temper about plans for a garden. But as she sat there, watching a starling tug at some old grass caught in the thorns at the foot of a sprawling briar rose, she seemed to feel mysteries and evasions surrounding the situation. She imagined, now, banalities involving a long-standing mistress, some peculiar upper-class connection with the secret service, even bouts of mental instability, schizophrenia, perhaps. None of these fantasies seemed to make any sense when she thought of the man who was supposed to be involved in them. On the other hand, she still felt there was something less than straightforward going on and, at present, she realized, she could not cope with any personal situation which was not clear as glass, outstanding as an elephant in Oxford Street. There had also been a message from her daughter, taken down by Isabel, on the heap. It had read, “Josephine has left her husband and gone to Peru – how sad. It sounds as if she may have number 2 lined up! Isabel.”

  Molly thought to herself, would Bert really fancy today’s Molly – harassed family woman, stressed businesswoman and hater of rose gardens?

  On the following day, as she waited at Framlingham for the call from Liverpool to tell her if the workforce was prepared to go ahead with the new scheme, she opened a short letter from Herbert Precious. There were, he said, things he felt he had to tell her. He could not put them in writing. Would she meet him very soon, so that they could talk? Molly, in a fit of impatience, wondering why any practical person could not either pick up the phone and discuss the matter, whatever it was or, if writing, not outline the problem, wrote a brief reply saying she had no time for mysteries, that she would always treasure the time they had spent together but she felt their chances of permanent happiness were very small. She stepped out in the brisk spring air, to put the letter into the postbox in the lane herself, feeling that she had been sensible. She regretted it later but argued to herself that it was only natural to feel regrets – it did not mean she had done the wrong thing.

  Nevertheless, she expected some response, even a short note from Bert saying that he regretted her decision. When none came, Molly shrugged and thought that she had always sensed mysteries in the affair, reflected that perhaps she had never understood him in the first place, then shed a tear and got on with her life. She could not know how much it had cost him to decide to reveal everything to her and how pleased he was to have a breathing space where he could, he imagined, organize matters so that his information caused as little trouble as possible. And only a day after her note arrived he had a telephone call from his wife saying that she was planning to return. The end result was that he solved his problem by the age-old human device of doing nothing and letting events decide for him.

  Whether Corrie Precious returned because of a change of heart, or because Jessica Monteith had lost no time in writing to her about his affair with Molly, or just to attend Prince Charles’s wedding, her husband did not know. Neither, he thought, did she. But, true to her nature, when she came back she not only took up the reins in the sense of seizing the keys to the linen cupboard and redecorating the attic, so to speak, but made a genuine effort to heal the breach in the marriage, started during years of matrimonial business and horribly widened by the death of their son. Her efforts calmed a tired and disillusioned husband, worried about an income badly affected by inflation and uncertain of what he wanted for the future. It was not for nothing, after all, that he was devoted to those two strong-minded women, his wife Corrie and his old passion, Molly Allaun. Nevertheless, a patch-ed-up marriage where the issues are not brought out into the open is not always wholly comfortable. It was fortunate that at this stage he was offered a job by his cousin, Mo
nsignor Paul Fitch, who told him that an archivist was needed in the vast, uncatalogued cellars of the Vatican. He was offered this post because he had, after all, a first-class degree in history, had written a thesis, much praised, on Rome’s dealings with the barbarian hordes of the eighth to tenth centuries, had considerable skill in Latin and, in large measure, because of his guaranteed discretion. He was also to act as a counter-weight to the ecclesiastical team working on the massive project. And so it was that Herbert Precious’s history of keeping his mouth shut and showing loyalty to his employers was partly responsible for getting a job more suited to his temperament than anything else he had so far done. Additional advantages were that it paid well and got him out of the country a great deal. This did not really suit Corrie, who was looking forward to the sale of the big house in Hyde Park Gate left to him by his father and going to a more modest place, where she could keep house on a smaller scale and enjoy a greater state of intimacy with her husband. Nevertheless, if Bert would be happier commuting to the Vatican and spending years in the dusty caves, examining the correspondence of Genghis Khan with the incumbent Pope or cataloguing the scandals of Alexander VI, then she would not complain. At the same time she had many hard thoughts about Molly Allaun, whose picture had recently been in all the papers, and on TV, riding in front of a column of Messiters to Liverpool docks, and waving cheerfully at the motorcycle policeman riding beside her. This provided much useful publicity for the firm, in Europe and the United States, but to Corrie it seemed unfair, as the chairman of this thriving company, showing a lot of still-shapely leg, rode her little scarlet bike through the streets, followed by a hundred other such machines.

  To Corrie’s mind, Molly looked too young and too successful, considering the life she had led. In fact Molly was putting a good face on a worrying financial situation, and a complicated industrial position, for the part-ownership of the factory by the workers was so far causing confusion while the details were sorted out. She was also having a fierce family quarrel with her brother Jack who said that the whole manoeuvre would only be interpreted in Britain and outside it as a bit of clever strike-breaking by a management hostile to the rights of workers. But Corrie knew none of this and, if she had, might not have been consoled by it.

  In the meanwhile, Molly was also worrying about the order book. Home demand held up, was, in fact, improving, but that alone would not keep the factory on its feet. She needed a much larger export business to make it profitable and an export business is not built overnight. A year after the opening she was still just paying the suppliers, the wages and the interest on the loan. She was surreptitiously feeding profits from the small businesses in London to the Messiter factory. And as they proceeded with the untested worker participation scheme she began to wish she had listened to Shirley and somehow suffered through the strike without putting the scheme forward at that time. “It’s not that it won’t prove itself in the long run,” Shirley said. “It just causes hiccups at the moment – and hiccups are what we don’t need.”

  “Sometimes,” Molly had replied, untruthfully, “I wake up in the middle of the night and wish I was back in the nick again.”

  At the same time her daughter was covering the riots in Los Angeles and her new future son-in-law was, as she reported to her sister furiously, “just sitting on his bum all day in Hammersmith, calling meetings to discuss the future of the community.”

  “Well he’s – er – a community worker, isn’t he?” Shirley had replied, looking at her sister wryly. Molly, seeing the point, had burst into laughter. “I think you’re right,” she said. “Josie’s got another one – I ought to get him down to Framlingham so he can join the famous Framlingham Rose Garden and Pension Scheme.”

  “Thank God I’m married to a Chinaman,” was her sister’s comment.

  Molly often thought weakly that she should end her relationship with Richard Mayhew but like many a tired tycoon, she could not face disturbance. She was paying for stability and supposed vaguely that as long as Richard and Fred were happy laying bricks and digging in peat she should be grateful. Philosophically, she endured a life of mingled business anxieties and domestic impatience, telling herself that things would somehow change. They always did.

  1985

  “What are you doing down South, Wayne?” Molly shouted. “You’re supposed to be up North. I thought we had a complete smash-up on the front frame side? Have you sorted it out?”

  “Never mind that,” he said grimly. “Get yourself down here.”

  “What’s happened?” she cried.

  In the Meakin Street office her assistant stared at her.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Wayne told her. “It’s something George did. I don’t even want to talk about it now.”

  “What? On the phone?” she said, recognizing the voice of someone who thinks others may be listening in. “Is it an emergency?”

  “Not the sort you mean,” he said. “Why don’t you get down here?”

  “OK,” she said. “I’m coming. What happened about that front frame assembly?”

  “Kennedy’s in charge,” Wayne said dourly. “He wants to participate.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said.

  Somehow she expected signs, when she arrived, that there was a crisis afoot. Instead the house was the same, shrouded now in mist which stood a foot high on the ground as she pulled up outside. Putting her head in the drawing room door she found Isabel by the fire.

  “They’re out in the stables,” she said. “They’re extremely excited about something. Fred refused to go to school this morning.”

  Molly ran down the corridor to the kitchen. As she passed the long, large mirror in the hall she saw, in the old frame, a middle-aged woman, pale hair flying, and remembered her image as a little girl, caught in the same mirror, running to the kitchen. She ran through the mist to the old stable entrance and into the room where George worked. The walls were banked with instruments and there was a long Formica and enamel workbench in the centre. George, in a baggy old brown suit, his long legs extended under the bench, was asleep. Beside his head, on the shiny surface of the workbench, was a round, glittering object, the size of a football, with a flattened top.

  Wayne stood beside him, holding a mug of tea. He said, “I turned round to make him a cuppa and the next thing I knew he was like that. He’s been up for the best part of a week.”

  Molly studied the silver globe on the workbench and said, “That’s it, is it? It works?”

  Wayne nodded. Fred came in and paused in the entrance, seeing George asleep. Molly thought, if it works we’ll all be rich. We can employ thousands of people. We can dictate our terms. She looked at Wayne, who read her eyes. He nodded. “He’s cracked it,” he said. “I knew he would.”

  She was almost too nervous to ask Wayne to hook up the new engine for a demonstration. It had been years, now, since George had told her that he was working on a scheme to power the Messiters electrically. Even Molly knew that to do this would mean a battery about half the size of the bike itself, but he told her he would not be thinking of using batteries, but, instead, energy stored by a flywheel working inside the new engine. There were, he said, three problems, the first concerned having a material for the flywheel resilient enough to stand the friction it created for itself in motion, and the second involved safety – if the flywheel broke loose while the bike was moving it would burst through the casing and then anything else in its way with the velocity of a bullet. The third was simply to achieve enough power and conduct it, without increasing the weight of the Messiter. In progress reports she learned over the years that George had decided on laminated steel, that he had solved the problem of energy storage, that he had decided that, to reduce wear and tear on the flywheel, he was mounting it in a cylinder, in a vacuum. As time went on he had worked out the best remodelling of the Messiter to allow the new engine to function properly – the chief problem was now how to ensure that if the drum containing the flywheel broke open and t
he flywheel came off its mounting, the result would not be a dangerous projectile. A too-heavy casing would be safe but would make the machine heavy. One which was too light might be dangerous. As all this had gone on Molly had sometimes followed it with scepticism; sometimes she had forgotten about it completely. She had admired the way George had solved problem after problem but she was not sure that ultimately he could produce independent electrical power for the bikes. Now, it seemed, he had. She looked down at the tousled head, asleep beside the new power source and said, “Did he solve the safety problem?”

  “He’s using two casings,” Wayne said. “The interior one is resin-impregnated glass fibre and the exterior’s laminated steel. It’s impossible for both cases to crack right open in normal circumstances – even a bullet wouldn’t produce cracking. Only a bomb’d smash it and if that happened you wouldn’t bother about a flywheel screaming past your ear.