“Herbert Precious offered to go with you to France to see your mother,” Wong told her quietly.
“Not with him,” she said, shaking her head.
“I think you’re right,” he said.
Downstairs, Wong said to Shirley, “She has had no inner life since I’ve known her. Probably not for years. Your sister is naturally active and worldly but even she needs time to rest and contemplate for a little while. All human beings do.”
Shirley stared at her husband. He had been impatient and worried about the neglects and delays caused by Molly’s shutting herself up at Meakin Street. He had, in fact, been creeping in late at night to listen to the phone messages, open the post and do his best to stall on issues demanding Molly’s personal attention so that suppliers, and customers, did not find out what was happening and Wayne could go on running the factory. The tangles in the illicit businesses were becoming very great – the factory itself would be in a mess if Molly did not either get back to work or hand over full authority to someone else. Shirley found it strange that her husband was suddenly thinking about what afflicted Molly.
“She’s always been a doer, not a thinker,” she pointed out. “I’m not cheered up if she’s in a state of contemplation. It’s not natural to her – it usually means there’s something wrong.”
“She needs to be as she is now,” he said.
“I don’t care what you say,” Shirley told him. “She’s never had any worries about her identity up to now. I think it’s all a load of clichés covering up a nervous breakdown. You know as well as I do we need a decision about when she’s going to pull herself together. It’s got to be soon. Apart from the day-to-day business there’s George stuck down in Ramsgate with his invention and Allaun Towers under siege conditions, Christmas coming on –”
“In the meanwhile,” Wong said, “you’re coming home.”
“What about Molly!” cried her sister.
“She’s better off alone,” Wong said.
Shirley looked at him. “There’s times,” she said, “when you act really Chinese.”
“Do as I say,” he said implacably.
After Shirley had gone, Molly turned to dreaming. Days drifted by as she sat in the little house, in the little street thinking of the past, which had now become strange for her because she realized her past was only partly private – that from her birth on she had been part of history. And sometimes she thought of nothing at all. She dragged about the house in her dressing-gown, scarcely eating, in a state halfway between sleeping and waking. One day she fell on the stairs and lay, with a bruised shoulder aching, crying, “Oh Joe, Joe. I wish you were here.” All that answered her was the hollow echo of her own voice. She called out “Ivy! Ivy!” Again there was no answer. She lay there on the stairs at Meakin Street, not bothering to rise. She said, “Joe,” again, in a doubtful tone. And still there was no one. The stairs were hard and the smell of the stair carpet began to offend her nostrils. She went upstairs and lay down, sobbing.
The next day she got up and went out. Jack Waterhouse was horrified when he met his sister in the hall at the House of Commons. She was pale, gaunt and untidy. He wondered if she had gone mad. “Don’t worry,” she said to him as he came towards her, looking very alarmed. “I’m all right. I just wanted to talk something over with you.”
They sat in a draughty office which belonged to three other MPs. Molly drank two cups of coffee and ate half a packet of biscuits. Spitting crumbs she outlined her idea. Jack, half appalled, wondered again if she was mad. He thought for a moment, then said, “It’s fair, I suppose. If anything in this business could ever be fair now. You’ll sign the renunciation, of course?”
“Sign?” said Molly. “Sign? Never. I’ll never give away my rights.”
“Christ, Molly – you’re mad,” Jack exclaimed. “Your rights? What are you talking about? The only rights you should want are the ordinary rights of a citizen in a democratic society.” He stared at her. “I thought you were talking about blackmail redeemed by the fact that it looked like rough justice –”
“I hate signing things,” said Molly. “When I have to sign anything I feel as if I’m signing in my own blood. Just think, Jack Waterhouse, your great-aunt Rosie, Sid’s favourite auntie, his mum’s twin sister, died of double pneumonia brought on by malnutrition in the winter of 1927. And because they couldn’t afford to call the doctor. Those days are coming back – rickets are back, people are getting ill because they’re out of work and they don’t get the right food to eat and they can’t afford warmth in their houses. Don’t talk to me about justice, rough or smooth. Don’t talk to me about blackmail or justice. The world we’ve living in is hard and getting harder.”
“All right, all right,” he said holding up his hands in surrender. “I can’t argue it.”
Until she decided to produce her Confessions Molly never made it generally known how she found the capital to start the Messiter Electric Car company (MEC). Ferdinand and Shirley Wong knew, of course, because it was they who calculated how much she would have received in Civil List payments, as a member of the royal family from the time of her birth to the year 1985. Sir Herbert Precious guessed where the money came from and no one minded his guessing but, equally, no one confirmed the guess as truth. Ferdinand Wong, becoming enthusiastic once the calculations were made, suggested charging interest on the money, but Molly rejected the idea. Several million pounds, she said, was all she needed to set up a new firm to exploit the electric motor on a modest scale. After that, she said, the business would have to earn its own living in the world just as, she supposed, they all would.
Her interview with the Queen at Buckingham Palace was less frosty than she had thought it might have been for Her Majesty was more than gracious. She was obviously realistic, and, Molly claimed later much later – to Herbert Precious, appeared relieved the matter was out in the open, pleased to make a donation to British industry and, Molly said, not entirely unamused by this original ending to fifty years of family shame and anxiety. What did not please her was Molly’s refusal to sign papers of renunciation but, as Molly also reported, she thought the Queen half expected her to refuse. At any rate, the meeting was as pleasant as it could be in the circumstances and the two negotiators parted on cordial terms. “You couldn’t,” as Molly said, “have asked for a nicer person, or cousin.”
And so it happened. Starting with the manufacture of electric cycles the Messiter company gradually expanded into fuelless cars and, later, other vehicles. By 1990 one car in ten bought in Britain, and one in a hundred elsewhere, was a Messiter. Gradually other companies followed suit. Throughout the bleakness of the late ’80s and early ’90s the Messiter company survived, pursuing a policy of worker management and profit-sharing which appeared to operate smoothly. Indeed, when the ferocity of governments in the early years of the company was over, and the wobbling of the governments which succeeded them ended, the industrial example of the Messiter company appeared very much in keeping with the new times. So, indeed, did the product. Neither the management nor the vehicles were exciting, tension-producing, aggressive, glamorous, noisy or smelly. In this manner the company survived eight years of economic swings, mounting social violence and repression and the strains of a deeply divided society at home without losing either its viability or, too often, its conscience. The proprietor, Molly, née Waterhouse, later Flanders and Endell, finally Allaun, although mysteriously unhonoured by the Queen’s Award for Industry or any other kind of official recognition, earned herself at least a footnote, and perhaps more, in the industrial history of Great Britain.
For the rest, events went on as they might have been expected to. Isabel Allaun lived to be ninety years old, desolated, at first, when Molly’s lover Richard Mayhew left Framlingham for good but much consoled when her son Tom and his lover came back to live in a cottage in the village, although she was never able to acknowledge the real relationship between them. Shirley and Ferdinand Wong stayed on as directors of MEC �
�� Shirley had twin daughters and the family ended as a large one, containing the couple, their children and his old parents, whom he was able to bring over from Hong Kong before the British lease on the island ran out. Josephine, twice divorced, married an amiable garage proprietor called Joe Marks and was happy, working for Amnesty and leaving for Bogota, Thailand or Prague when her husband’s large previous family of children threatened to descend. Jack Waterhouse, who lost his seat in Parliament, took a job at the research department of Transport House and returned to his first wife, Pat, who left her husband for him. Sid Waterhouse died, peacefully, one summer day, between the runner beans and the lettuces in his garden at Ramsgate. And Molly’s son, Fred, told of his unnatural birth when he was eighteen and about to leave for a kibbutz in Israel for a year, refused to believe it, left the country and then phoned from Jerusalem to say that he did believe it and that, having seen at close quarters how time and chance had dealt with the Jews, he thought that royal birth and incest made no difference at all. Molly failed to see the reasoning but was relieved that her confidence in her son’s natural good sense and healthy ego had been justified. Fred came back minus two fingers on his left hand, which he lost on the Lebanese border. “Not fit now,” he said, “to wave out of the window of a state coach.”
1996
As the last tape ends Sir Herbert sits in the silence of his ivory and blue sitting room in London.
Molly’s last words linger in the room. “I suppose the proper ending to my story’s really me finding my real mother at last and with her finding me and seeing Fred and knowing when she died she’d leave something behind. Yes – that’s the real end, I suppose – Life goes on – that’d be the moral of it all.”
“Oh, my God,” the infuriated Sir Herbert exclaims into his empty room. The final addition of this piece of homespun philosophy, delivered in Molly’s ever-lively tones, is more than he can stomach, after all the unnecessary and embarrassing revelations she has insisted on making. It’s just about the last straw, he thinks – absolutely the last. And what’s to be done about it all? There’s enough material buried in Molly’s story for a hundred TV, magazine and newspaper investigations – enough to topple a government, a company, even the monarchy itself, once the threads start to be pulled out, once the unravellings begin!
He stares blindly, tiredly, desperately at his large black and white cat, which is tapping indignantly at the window, waiting to be let in. Behind the cat stretched the garden, sunny in the afternoon light. He gazes at the great chestnut tree, standing very still in the middle of the lawn. The solid mass of leaves are still dark green but interspersed among them, and visible at the ends of the branches, some are yellowing, preparing to drop. He glances across the room at the big grandfather clock in its blue alcove, sees that it is four o’clock, sighs, gets up and opens the window. In springs the cat and begins to rub round his legs. “If only Joe Endell had lived,” he sighs in a sudden access of pity for Molly, and, behind it, lies the thought that if Endell had lived, perhaps the problem of Molly’s memoirs would never have arisen.
The telephone rings loudly in the quiet room. It is, most likely, thinks Sir Herbert, either his sovereign ringing to enquire about Molly’s story, or Molly herself asking for an opinion. Showing a good turn of speed for a man of his age, Sir Herbert is swiftly away from the telephone, the cat and the room, and out in the hall collecting his coat and then in the street hailing a taxi.
As he leans back in the seat he enjoys driving through the noisy, tatty, brightly-coloured, jibber-jabbering streets of London, on to the peace of the gentlemen’s club to which he belongs.
Perhaps it is rightly in France where we should leave Molly, as she and her son walk across the flagstones of the courtyard to the big grey house, ring the heavy doorbell and see before them in the doorway the bent figure of the old maid who has been her mother’s constant companion during so many years of exile.
Or perhaps we should leave her as she and the tall boy walk down the drive and turn to wave back at the two small, grey figures who stand there, light, bent and frail as if, like leaves ready to blow away, they are only insecurely placed on the heavy flagstones where they stand. Behind them looms the house, all wreathed in mist, a complicated, massive pattern of stone crenellations, buttresses and bays. One of the figures, her mother’s, slowly lifts her arm, then links it to the supporting arm of the old servant. Both women turn and begin to walk slowly up the steps of the house, while Molly and Fred continue down the drive, past the misty trees and lawns on either side of them. They go through the gates to the car which will take them to the airport.
The author wishes to thank the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the British taxpayers, who gave her a grant of £3,000 in 1980 to help her write this book.
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
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