All The Days of My Life (22 page)

“He's not her boyfriend,” said Sid. “She hasn't got a boyfriend.” Then he paused, looking uncertain. “Who was he, anyway?”

The young man in the smart suit, who had come to the bar to get his drinks, leaned over and said, “His name's Johnnie Bridges.”

“That Johnnie Bridges?” asked Ginger Hargreaves.

“The very one,” said the man, and went back to his wife.

“What about him?” asked Sid.

So the publican and his friend told him what they knew about Johnnie Bridges.

“I'll kill him if he hurts my Mary,” Sid told them.

Meanwhile Mary and Johnnie Bridges were walking hand in hand by the canal. As they strolled by the slow and turgid water
other couples passed them, whispering in the dusky light.

“This is nice,” said Mary.

“Come on,” he said, “I'll take you for a duck dinner.”

“To eat?” she asked.

“Well – I wasn't going to play with it,” he said. “You are a nice girl. What a stroke of luck, walking into that pub and finding you there.”

“Stroke of luck for me – you coming in,” she told him.

As they had walked from the pub she had said, “Do you really want to go for a walk by the canal?”

“Got to get to know you better,” he had told her gravely.

“It's a bit late,” she had said.

“Just late enough,” he said.

Now he stared at her, took her head between his hands and kissed her. She put her arms round his neck and kissed him back. He held her off, staring at her curiously, then they kissed again. Mary's knees weakened. She wanted this stranger as much as she had ever wanted anything in her life. She decided, moreover, that she would have him. She had the conviction of someone who knows for certain that something is her right. He said, “I'd better take you off for that duck. It wouldn't do for me to forget myself.”

So they turned back. Mary looked at him covertly as they walked. He was a tall, well-made man of about twenty-seven, dark-eyed and dark-haired. He carried himself lightly and had an air of physical alertness, as if he were ready for action at any second. He wore a very good, dark suit which looked as if it had been made for him, a very white shirt and a long, thin silk tie. He spoke like a Londoner but, now that they were alone together, she seemed to hear that he spoke more precisely than he had in the pub.

“You'll have to tell me something about yourself,” he said to her.

“You won't like what you hear,” Mary told him.

“Let me be the judge of that,” he said.

Opposite, across the water, was the high wall of the cemetery, overhung with trees and creepers. On their left, behind the wall they were nearest, lay the long open expanse of railway line and shunting yards. Above, along the whole length of the canal, was high, open sky, still visibly red on the horizon with the last tip of the setting sun.

“Pretty,” said Mary.

“Like a vision,” he said, looking up. “See the moon?”

There it was, a sickle moon, upright in the sky. Mary stared up, keeping her face, now, well away from the stranger's eyes. She did not
remember her body having felt properly alive since her pregnancy began eighteen months before, unless she counted the pains of labour when she had given birth to Josephine. Mostly, she had forgotten what it was like to feel completely well, completely at one with herself. Now she remembered. She had forgotten, too, what it was like to want a man to kiss her. Now she remembered that also. It was like being raised from the dead.

As they walked up the slope from the canal to the road they kissed again. She felt his warm lips, gentle at first, and then harder, she felt his arms about her and his body pressing hers and felt herself melting, disappearing, feeling nothing but the warmth of his lips and the strength of his body. He felt her breast and she heard herself moan.

“I've got to tell you –” she said, for she became conscious, suddenly, that this man knew nothing about her. What would he think when he found out she was the mother of a child, the widow of a hanged murderer? She feared that he would respond by making a joke, telling her this was no time for a chat, by grabbing her and trying to get what he wanted. In this she underestimated Johnnie Bridges' common sense or common caution. He drew back and said, “Might as well have something to eat while you're telling me. No point in facing it on an empty stomach.” Amazingly, he then stepped into the road, waved down a passing taxi and instructed her to get in. At that point she took a look at his suit and asked, once they were sitting in the taxi, “What do you do?”

“A little bit of this and a little bit of that,” he said. So she knew he was a gangster. This did not worry her. In fact it cheered her up. Her revelations would be less shocking to him if he was on the wrong side of the law himself. Unless he thought she was unlucky, would bring bad luck to him – men like that were superstitious. He kissed her ears and said, “Don't worry – it may never happen.”

When she saw the restaurant, a smart place in Old Compton Street, she said, “I can't go in there – like this.”

“Pretend you're Cinderella and the clock struck,” he told her, pulling off the rubber band and hair ribbon, which were already falling off by then. So they walked in, got a table, got a menu and Mary Flanders thought again, “He's got to be a gangster or something. Else where is the money coming from?”

“All right,” he said, after ordering them two pink gins, “let's have the confession. I'll guess – your father's a police marksman and he's going to shoot anybody who messes around with you and you're on
the game, you're pregnant, you've got the clap and you're a typhoid carrier. All that wouldn't matter only you're also a bloke who likes wearing ladies' dresses. I've met 'em all. I don't think you can surprise me. Thing is I've taken a fancy to you.”

Mary took a drink from her glass of gin, then another, hoping it would bring her courage.

“I can surprise you,” she told him. “I'm sixteen years old and I'm a murderer's widow. He was hung last December. And,” she added, “I've had his baby.”

“Ah,” he said, considering. “Jim Flanders.”

There was a silence. He did not meet her eyes. She stared at his soft profile and her new feeling of life began to drain from her. She sensed the old numbness. Then a feeling of grief too sharp to be borne. He would go away, this man she so desperately wanted. She would be left as she was before, no more than a frozen bird on a twig or like flowers left in a vase without water.

He turned back to her and said, quite naturally, “Have you had a boyfriend since your husband died?”

“No,” she replied, startled at the question.

“Well, then,” he said, “your only problem is deciding what to eat. Mine's trying to get that poncey waiter over here to take the order.” His knee touched hers under the table. He squeezed one of her knees between his own. “What do you want to eat?”

Mary, who had seen the word on the menu and remembered the taste from Framlingham, asked, “Can I have pheasant?”

“Not going to be cheap to take about, are you?” said Johnnie Bridges.

Mary bit the bottom lip of her angel's mouth and giggled.

It must have been in 1955, when I still knew nothing about Mary other than her name, when I picked up a photograph I found lying incongruously among the papers on my father's desk. The picture showed a group of people, three men and two women, at a table crowded with bottles in what was evidently a night club. Or it might have been somewhere like the Dorchester – I don't know. All the faces of these people, elaborately dressed in evening clothes, were turned to the camera. The men all looked as if they might have been a little drunk. Two of them were heavy-set, rather stupid-looking, tough and evidently not much soothed by the effects of the dinner, the drinks and
the band, which I imagined somehow as playing hit songs from
Call Me Madam
or some such show. Between the two of them was a dark girl, smiling into the camera, an all-teeth smile you felt she must have learned from Hollywood films. She had tight curls, a very low-cut dress and a lot of make-up. She wore long, dangling earrings. She was the type that, in those days, I'm afraid, I would have called a “floosie” or a “tart”. Both the heavy men had an arm round her shoulders as she, oblivious of them, gave the club or hotel photographer her professional smile. And next to one of the men was a very fair girl, looking at a handsome chap. He was also staring into the camera and smiling. His hand was over hers on the tabletop. She wore a low-cut gown, like the other girl, and the same dangling earrings. Her hair curled round the same over-made-up face. Why she looked less shop-worn than anyone else in the group I do not know. Perhaps it was her youth – she can have been only eighteen or nineteen at the time. It may have been her loving look at the handsome man beside her or simply that, gazing up at him, her face bore one of the charming half-innocent smiles you can see on the faces of men and women in some of the paintings of Fragonard. At any rate, she was a beauty, and that was chiefly what caught my young man's eye. As for the others, the two tough men were too tough for me, the dark girl too hard and the handsome, reckless-looking man at whom the girl gazed was a type I recognized from school – the big, already-a-man fifth former, he of the sexual exploits in the holidays, the well hit 87 runs against Stoneyhurst and the sharp, cribbing eye in the examination room. In any case, I was jealous of him for having the attention of the girl. When my father came into the room I was still looking at the photograph. Something made me feel guilty when he saw me with it. I dropped it on the desk and said, “Funny picture – anyone you know?”

“Gangsters,” he said shortly.

“What have you got it for?” I asked.

“Part of the job,” he said rather irritably. “Part of the job.”

My eyes went back to the pretty girl. “This one's got a nice smile,” I said, pointing at it.

He leaned over my shoulder and looked. “Not in the next one,” he told me. He lifted that photograph up to reveal another. This had evidently been taken just before or after the first. Here, the photographer had managed to command the attention of the whole group. The two toughs stared into the camera, smiling grimly. The two girls had widened their eyes and smiled to show their teeth. Only the
handsome man on the right looked the same, smiling evenly, calmly, knowingly. In the meanwhile an intruder, a bearded man in a striped shirt, had slipped his arm round the blonde girl and was saying something. Whatever sly remark he made – and I had the idea it was sly – was making her laugh more widely, with her head tilted back in approved Hollywood style, like a picture of a film star outside a Gaumont.

“Mm,” I said. “She doesn't look so nice in that one.”

“I'm glad you think so,” he said.

“Are they Scotland Yard photographs?” I asked.

But the whole subject obviously depressed him. He sighed and said, “Never mind.” He crossed to the window and looked out over the square. “I wonder,” he said, as much to himself as to me, “how you would have turned out if you had had no advantages? If you'd been born in a cottage on one of the farms on the estate, for example. Ever thought about that?”

Naturally, I had not. Indeed, at nineteen the idea that you have “turned out” to be anything is alien and strangely annoying. I took my own life seriously, of course, but I took my condition for granted.

“I suppose I'd have dug ditches in that case,” I told my father, “or driven a tractor or something. There's not much alternative for anyone from a cottage, is there? I suppose you just do what your father did before you – country people are very conservative, after all, aren't they? And you did what your father did and presumably I may do it one day – unless,” I blithered on, “the bolshies get back in again. Then we may get a stronger dose of revolution than we had the last time in which case, I suppose, they'll hang the Royal Family and shoot the House of Lords and I'll be directed to go down the nearest coal mine.”

I thought these last remarks to be rather suave and funny but soon observed that my father did not. He responded by squashing me – “Yes, well, try thinking a little bit from time to time – I assure you it won't hurt your health.”

I said, “Oh, come on, Father. You know what I meant.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I know what you meant. But it won't do, dear boy. It won't do.” Then he sighed and told me, “I'm turning into an old curmudgeon – you and I must have a serious talk before you go back to the University –” and at that point the telephone mercifully rang, cutting off his rather confusing remarks. As he answered it I made an embarrassed escape.

We never had the promised serious conversation – at least, when we did, it was eighteen months later, and I had taken my degree. The
photograph was one of the things he explained to me on that summer evening when the starlings swooped over the big London garden and the course of my life was planned for me, exactly like, when you come to think of it, the life of a boy born in a labourer's cottage who grows up to be a tractor-driver or a cowman on the same estate…

Johnnie and his mates had planned this big bank raid. They did it and got away with it and that was when I said I couldn't stand any more of it, the worry and the pain and so forth, I said that he had to get out or else – the upshot was that the next day he went to see the Rose brothers and they agreed to go in with him. So they started this gaming club, Frames, in South Molton Street. Johnnie owned a third of it and the Roses the other two-thirds. Johnnie was going to manage it, and get wages for doing that as well as a third part of the profits. And I said I'd act as a hostess, doing some croupiering when needed. I wound up doing all that, and the housekeeping, too, but that's another story.