All The Days of My Life (30 page)

A silence fell around the table. Susie and Jimmy Carr glanced automatically towards the bar, where Johnnie was buying drinks. He pushed through the crowd, saw Arnie's hand on Molly's shoulder and remarked, setting three glasses down, “Hullo, Arnie. I hope you're not trying to sign her up for business. I've got exclusive rights.”

Arnie looked at him mildly and told him, “As if I'd dream of it, Johnnie. A beautiful girl like this – so much in love with you. But if it wasn't for you I'd be courting her with flowers, and that, my boy, is a fact.”

Johnnie ignored the challenge, and the threat. He said, “Take your hand off her shoulder, Arnie, and guess what's coming your way.” And he took an empty glass from Allan, who came up with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a fistful of glasses in the other.

Arnie Rose took his hand from Molly's shoulder and accepted the glass, which Allan filled. “And now,” he said to Johnnie, “I suggest we go upstairs and talk about our little bit of business.”

“Delighted,” said Johnnie. They weaved through the crush and went out.

Susie leaned over the table and said, “What's it all about?”

“Don't know,” Molly said. She felt depressed. If Johnnie was going straight why was he talking business again with Arnie Rose?

“You're lucky with Johnnie,” the girl said wistfully. “He thinks the sun shines out of your eyes – you can tell, the way he looks at you. Blimey, though,” she added in a lower voice, “it looks like Arnie's interested – he's a devil, you know, and he don't give up easy.” By now she was sitting next to Molly, talking into her ear.

“My mum used to know him as a kid,” Molly remarked.

“Don't say nothing about it,” Susie said. “He can't stand anybody saying things about him unless he told them first. Here,” she said, taking off a long glove, “see this – solid gold. Look at them stones – real rubies. A thousand quid if it's a penny, this.”

She took it off and handed it to Molly. Molly envied her. She wished Johnnie would give her something like that. But she thought that Susie was a bit like her sister Shirley, who was now twelve. She also showed
off her new trinkets – although Shirley's all came from Woolworth's – wanting you to ask who had given them to her, and acted, like Susie, all frightened about Arnie Rose, shivering and shuddering as if he was a ghost. What was Arnie Rose anyway, she asked herself? Nothing but a great big bully, always one jump ahead of the law and always looking over his shoulder in case a policeman came round the corner. But she exclaimed over the bracelet and listened to Susie's tale of how she had come by it.

Susie, glancing to the bar said, “Don't look now, but who's looking daggers? She still can't get over the loss of her Johnnie – silly cow.” It was true. The dark girl, Jeanne, over by the bar was staring at Molly. As Molly gazed she dropped her eyes. Molly stared round the club. The women, glamorously dressed, heavily jewelled and made up, were all glancing at each other. Before she could work out what was going on, Arnie Rose and Johnnie were back, smiling into each other's faces, both smoking big cigars and grasping arms when they talked to each other. This public display of bonhomie made Molly even more uneasy. How could Johnnie go straight with Arnie involved? Arnie reminded her of Charlie Markham, suddenly – the same broad smiles and still making her life a misery day after day with his punchings and pinchings and habit of leaping out at her unexpectedly. And she knew neither she nor Johnnie would be safe if Arnold Rose became unhappy with them. Temporarily she even disliked Johnnie for so enjoying Arnie's approval. But now Arnie was saying, “And I'm sure neither of you ladies will refuse another glass of fizz?” He waved at the barman, who came towards them. “And another,” said Johnnie, waving two five pound notes about.

So the corks went on popping, champagne bubbled over the edge of the glasses, the girls giggled and the men guffawed and the girls dabbed the corks from the champagne bottles behind their ears, scenting themselves with the drink. After that a party wanted to go on somewhere else but Molly persuaded Johnnie to take her home.

“He's rotten,” she told him that night in bed.

“Oh – he's a villain through and through,” Johnnie said complacently, sprawled across the bed with a cigarette in his hand. “There's no doubt about it. He's a real villain.” He was flattered by the attention Arnie Rose had paid him and the backslapping, the cigars.

“I said he was rotten,” said Molly. “He's evil, Johnnie. Bloody evil. You'd better remember that if you're going to get mixed up with him.”

“I know all that,” said Johnnie. “But he's made me a very fair offer
and I'm thinking it over. We sorted out a few details tonight.”

“What offer?” said Molly. “Smashed kneecaps?”

“Now then, lovely,” he said, kissing her. “None of your business, is it? Your business is something else. I can deal with Arnie – you got to deal with me, see. Here – aren't you lovely? Say, ‘I'm lovely.'”

“You're lovely,” said Molly, as his warm weight came down on her.

But as it happened the deal between the Rose brothers and Johnnie became her business. She was part of the deal. Johnnie at first did not agree, but when it looked as if Arnie would back out he had to let Molly work there. And so it was that when Frames, the gambling club, opened for the first time and soft-faced debutantes, hiding schoolgirl faces under the heavy paint and hauteur of top models, and their almost-as-young escorts, and men with the small mouths and distanced looks of gamblers, and minor aristocrats, film stars and starlets and MPs, company directors, jockeys, owners and crooks, even a princess, mingled in the high rooms on the opening night, drinking free champagne and having their pictures taken, it was Molly, in cream satin, with her hair on top of her head, who acted as hostess. She concealed her high good humour and satisfaction for the occasion and tried to speak and act like a younger version of Isabel Allaun. Even the Roses were impressed. “I don't believe it, Molly,” exclaimed Norman through his cigar. “Arnie told me you were good, had a bit of class, as you might put it but – you look like the real thing. What do you say, Simon? Like your own sister, ain't she?”

Simon Tate, who had been at Oxford and had been taken on as manager, remarked gallantly, “I haven't a sister, but if I had, I'm sure Molly would make her look as if she ran a whelk stall down Petticoat Lane.”

“Think I'm overdoing it, then?” Molly asked him.

“Not a scrap,” he told her. “You're fine. The boyfriend's a bit flashy, though. I'll have a word with him.”

Molly flushed at hearing Johnnie criticized. “I'm here to see to these things,” he told her. The Roses, no fools, had hired him to advise on who was good for what money and do what the Roses described as keeping up the tone – keeping out the riff-raff.

“I don't want to come in here one night and find anybody like me on the premises,” Norman Rose had told him genially. “If I do, I'll sack you.”

Simon was energetic. The night after the opening he was at the club at nine, saying to Molly, “You must get rid of the woman you've got
running the ladies' room as Soon as she comes in. Get somebody else – she's got to be something like a trained nurse or a retired housekeeper. She has to look extremely respectable and be quite unshockable. She must be able to produce anything from an aspirin to French scent, not excluding a calming brandy or gin. She must have a list of telephone numbers including doctors, solicitors and the House of Lords. We must look after the ladies or the place will turn into a snooker hall.”

“How am I supposed to find her?” moaned Molly. “And it's not my job.”

“You'd better ring some smart employment agencies,” he told her. “And if you think your job at this club is going to begin and end with standing about in a low-cut dress doing an impression of the Honourable Miss Tinyfeet then think again. You're the only person here, other than me, who can cope. What are they paying you?”

“Fifteen pounds a week,” muttered Molly.

“Get cracking, then,” he advised, “and then ask them for twenty when you get established as Madame.”

This advice did not seem real to Molly, any more than anything else at Frames seemed real. Night after night the clients came into Frames, to see and be seen or to gamble. The hard core of gamblers slightly bewildered her.

“It's the excitement that gets them,” Arnie Rose said to her one night as they stood at the small, hidden window in the office upstairs, gazing down at the tables. A young merchant banker stood watching the dice roll across the green baize. His face was quite expressionless, though very pale. The dice halted. He spoke to the croupier and walked away.

“That's him done for,” remarked Arnie. “We've got markers off him for a quarter of everything his dad owns. It's the excitement, see. People'll do anything to get it. Drink, drugs, dirty women, trying to break land-sea records, exploring up the Amazon. You show me a bored man and I'll show you a mark, a punter, a sucker.”

Again, the reality of the banker's actions did not really strike her. That sort of thing happened at Frames. It meant nothing to her.

“Fancy a gin?” asked Arnie, turning away from the window.

“All right,” said Molly. “But I'd better be getting down there soon,” she said.

“Good girl,” he told her. He handed her the glass and asked, “What are you after, then?”

“After?” she asked.

“Yes – I mean to say, everybody's after something, aren't they? Stands to reason. Take your average bank clerk – he's after security, isn't he? Ask him to rob his bank and he won't. He'd rather have his pension. But you tell him his pension's threatened and he'll do anything. Anything at all,” Arnie repeated. He looked hard at Molly. “Nobody's honest,” he said, “not when it comes down to it. So there's money, power, safety, excitement – what do you want? What would you do anything – anything at all – for?”

“It's a bit depressing to think like that,” Molly told him.

“'Course – you're a woman,” he said. “You're not supposed to think.” She realized now that he was a bit drunk and became afraid. He stood swaying and peering at her intently. He came closer and put his arm round her. “Maybe with you it's kids and security. You've had a rough time, poor little Molly.”

“I'd better get down there, Arnie,” she told him. “Celey's looking at her watch. I told her I'd take over on the baccarat.”

“Good old Little Molly – always on the go,” said Arnie Rose. As she left he said, “Think about what I just said, though, gel. It's kosher – everybody's after something. Even you.”

Going fast downstairs on her spikey heels Molly thought, Phew. What was all that about? But the conversation had upset her. Perhaps it was true that everyone wanted something. Certainly, in Frames you saw how much it was possible to want something as silly as a couple of bits of pasteboard with the right pictures or numbers on them. But her real uneasiness was about Johnnie, who was out on unexplained business so much, who seemed not to love her as much as she loved him. And threatened love will take any conversation, any portent, any remark overheard in the street and try to make it a clue to the mystery. Fixing on her smile, she went to the baccarat table, greeted the people she knew and took up the cards.

Not long after, Simon Tate arrived and took over the table. He muttered, “Get up to the ladies' room – fast.”

In the pink, scented atmosphere she found a woman of thirty in an expensive scarlet dress stretched out on the couch under the mirrors.

“Oh, Christ,” Molly said, looking at the pale face. “What's the matter here? Just a minute – she's Alexander Fraser's wife, isn't she? Oh, God, what's the matter with her?”

“Not married,” said the other woman, Mrs Brown, plump and middle-aged in her pink uniform. “She's married to Perry Elmond, Lord Antony's son.”

She lowered her voice, “I think Mr Fraser ditched her tonight. She's been taking pills to calm her down – probably phenobarbitone.”

“We should get an ambulance,” said Molly.

“No scandal,” Mrs Brown said firmly. “Get Mr Fraser.”

Molly had seen the woman earlier, leaning over Fraser's shoulder, trying to attract him. She said, “I don't know where he is. He dropped a packet tonight and left. What about her husband – or her mum?” She was desperate.

“Her mother never leaves Scotland,” said the woman. “We'll get her into the Sloane Clinic. You stay here and I'll phone them from the office.”

“Well, hurry up,” said Molly. “Because if there's any delay I'm getting a hospital ambulance.”

“She's not too bad. I've seen worse,” said the woman.

Molly sat by the woman, whose face was pale and sweating. She moaned and said, “Beattie. Beattie, come here.”

Her sister? A dog she had owned in childhood? A nanny? Molly bathed her face, wondered if she ought not to be walking her up and down as you saw people do in films. She prayed she would not die and that no one would try to come into the ladies' room. Frames needed no high-class scandals for the Sunday papers Sid enjoyed after his dinner.

The woman came back into the room and said, “Here – help me carry her down to the front door. Try to smile a bit and make it look as if she's drunk.”

And so the two women, with the semi-conscious one between them, half-dragged her rapidly down the stairs. Molly smiled a little in a well-we're-all-human-aren't-we way at anyone who looked anxious or curious. They held her between them on the pavement while they waited for the car from the clinic.

“She had everything,” muttered Mrs Brown.

“People always want more, don't they?” Molly said. “If they didn't we'd be out of business, for a start.” They bundled the sagging woman into the car and went back inside. “Someone should be told,” said Molly. “I wonder who?”