All The Days of My Life (47 page)

“Come on,” Nedermann said. “We'll go for the child.”

Some might say – some did – why go off like that, with a man you didn't love? It must've been money. Though I've seen a lot of women do a lot of things like that for money, and a few men, too. Sometimes they can stick a coat of whitewash over it – a wedding, or an attack of true love covers the situation nicely. But there's often money at the back of it though the people involved don't say so, sometimes don't even admit it to themselves. When I told Josephine about it, when she was older she said practically no working-class girl of my times had the idea she could look after herself. No wonder, she said, what with the faulty contraception and rotten jobs – I'd lost my only chance when I never bothered with my education. Not like Shirley. Of course the other difference between Shirley and me is that I was the good-looker. Shirley was a pretty girl but I couldn't sit down on a bus without one of the men starting to get into conversation, asking me out or whatever. It wasn't too easy to tread the boring straight and narrow when fellows kept on offering tempting alternatives. Like Nedermann. He offered me a good life, protection for me and the child – and love. Love – it was more like devotion. I could tell it though I didn't really know the reasons for it. That came out later. But Josephine says she's never forgotten that day when she watched her dolls' pram, all piled high with her toys, being hoisted into a Rolls Royce by a man in a peaked cap. She was only five and I had to stand beside her telling her over and over again that we were going in the car, too. She had this suspicion the car might start up suddenly and drive away with the pram and all her toys. She was in her best red velvet dress and patent leather shoes. She wouldn't put her coat on because it hid her dress. She had all these brown curls flying about and her great big brown eyes were open wide with all the excitement. Ivy was standing there looking doubtful and
holding Josephine's coat. Ferenc had impressed her. I knew that. It was because he was older, and looked respectable and, probably, she could sense that he would love Josephine. I can still remember how she took a flying leap into the car that day and began to wave out of the window like the Queen. Ivy was stuck between approving and disapproving, and crying a bit now Josephine was really going. She didn't know what to do with herself. She handed Josie's little case in and said, “Come back soon, Josie.” Josie didn't give a flicker of emotion. She just said, “I'm going to live in a big house. I'll have flounces round my dressing-table.” She was obsessed with frills and flounces at the time, Josephine. I was so embarrassed that she hadn't said goodbye properly to Ivy that I hit her as soon as we moved off. I must have said something nasty to her, as well. I'll never forget the look on Ferenc's face when he saw Josephine start to sniffle. I might as well have hit him. That was what it was all about, of course.

Ivy was horrified when Molly came back to visit her a week later. While Josephine was out, taking her new doll to show to a friend, she and her daughter sat in the kitchen, talking.

“Oh, God, Molly. I don't know,” said Ivy. “You mean you're standing in for his dead wife and baby? That's why he wants you? Molly – it's unnatural.”

“I know,” said her daughter.

“Here – give me one of your cigarettes,” said Ivy, who was supposed to be giving up smoking. She lit up and puffed. “I don't know,” she said. “Nothing's ever straightforward where you're concerned.” A thought suddenly struck her. “Here,” she said. “Where did you spend last night?”

“Orme Square, of course,” her daughter told her.

“
Where,
I asked,” Ivy said remorselessly.

“In the spare room,” Molly answered reluctantly.

Ivy puffed out more smoke and said, “I thought as much.” There was a silence. Then she said, “Well – it may work out, I suppose he's better than Johnnie Bridges.”

“Josephine's got ruffles on everything,” Molly said. “I'll say that. If you could get ruffled shoes, she'd have them. There's nothing Ferenc won't do for us.”

Ivy looked at her. “There's something he won't do for you,” she told her daughter.

The spring of 1958 seemed to Molly a long time in coming. For months after she moved in, the grass in Hyde Park, opposite the house, stayed coarse, dull and tussocky. The trees remained skeletons against a dull sky. She collected Josephine every day from the smart school in Knightsbridge she now attended and brought her home across the park. The little girl, in her green coat and hat, with a green and blue band on it, skipped ahead of her. Mary followed in her smart fur and high boots. Then she would let them both through the park gates, across the main road to the well appointed house in Orme Square. She would make a snack for Josephine and start to cook dinner. By watching the cook Nedermann, who was fussy about his food, had hired to come in on three evenings a week, she was beginning to learn how to cook. She found out how to use wine, garlic and spices in the food she prepared. Nedermann took her shopping. She began to select furniture, curtains, even her own clothing, with more taste than she was accustomed to employ. In the meantime, Josephine, another fast learner, was intoxicated by her new school, and the smart uniform which went with it. She took ballet lessons, talked in an upper-class voice and became what Molly privately described as a proper little madam. Ferenc Nedermann was delighted with the progress of his woman and child. Molly, keen to please, was happy he felt satisfied, but the knowledge that she was a symbol of security and regeneration for him, not a woman, made her feel impoverished. There were times when she would see a couple walking hand in hand in the park and think, “It doesn't matter if they're married to other people or she's pregnant and doesn't dare tell her parents or even if they're going to get married, but he'll knock her about. None of that matters because now, this minute, they've got what they've got – and I haven't.” Nedermann
gave her a bank account and put money in it for her. Molly took some out and hid it in the Post Office. As a precaution, without telling him, she kept up the rent on the house in Meakin Street.

One day she opened Nedermann's safe in the study – she had not been Johnnie Bridges' girlfriend for nothing. The amount of money in there startled her. There must have been three or four thousand pounds, all in dirty notes thrust into used envelopes or done up with rubber bands. There were also many documents which she did not stop to examine. What she, without knowing, was looking for was the clue to the mystery, a brown envelope on the bottom shelf – an old photograph of a woman of about her own age. The woman held a little girl by the hand. She wore a black coat with a fur collar. Her blonde hair was scraped up in a bun at the back of her head. Her long, unmade-up face bore an expression of kindness and patience. The child, also in a long coat, was thin and also blonde. She looked rather like her mother.

Molly stared at the photograph. She checked the back of the photograph and found an address in Prague. So this must be Mrs Nedermann and the child. Yet the woman was unlike Molly. She was small and slight, her legs looked a little bowed, her teeth protruded. She had a modest, even apologetic air. She was more like a woman from Meakin Street, thought Molly, a woman like Lil Messiter, who has come from a large family where there has never been enough to eat, a woman weakened by over-work during her growing years, the kind who is always tired, always slaving for others, and feels her only right to life is earned by service. The child in the photograph seemed to share the timidity and lack of strength. They wouldn't have lasted long in a concentration camp, Molly thought.

Later, she became indignant, after she had put the picture back in the envelope and shut the safe. She was sitting in the living room, with its pink-shaded lamps and the large chintz-covered sofas and chairs from Heal's, when her pity ceased and her rage grew. It was the rage of the rejected, the anger of a sexually frustrated woman. She had embraced Nedermann, she had even crept into the large room where he slept alone and been told, wearily, that he was tired. She had tried to talk about the situation.

He had only said, “Molly – Molly. I want you as you are. I want nothing more. I want nothing from you.” She had not been able to make him understand that she wanted him to make love to her. Somewhere he had learned that sex was a burden for women and
bought from those who were selling the favour for money. Molly, in her indignation, began to think that perhaps he had not acquired that thought during hard times as a penniless emigré in Britain, but from the life he had led with poor, crushed Mrs Nedermann.

She found she was drumming her feet angrily on the dark pink carpet under her feet. She had spent two months in this house, she thought, learning how to be a posh man's wife, not knowing the woman she was impersonating had never existed. Czech or English, Molly knew an old coat, an undernourished face and the humble expression of the poor when she saw them. Nedermann, she decided, in one flash of intuition, had been making her be, not the wife, probably dead, whom he had once had. She was trying to be the wife he wished he had had – the bloody sod, she said to herself. Never mind Josephine's ruffles, we're leaving tomorrow. I'll have it out with him tonight.

It was at this point that the doorbell rang. Simon Tate stood on the step. “Moll,” he said. “Just passing. I thought I'd call on the offchance – is it inconvenient?”

Molly was very pleased to see Simon's long, thin figure, his pale face and beaky nose.

“Come in,” she said. “Don't stand in the cold.”

“Phew,” he said, after she had taken his coat and led him into the living-room. “Very nice.” Then, approaching a picture which hung on the wall he said, in an impressed tone, “
Very
nice. Where did this come from?”

“Ferenc took it in settlement of a debt,” Molly explained. The picture was a small portrait of a woman of the eighteenth century. She stood in parkland, with a dog at her feet.

“Not bad,” said Simon Tate. “Not bad at all. Well, Moll,” he said, swinging round. “Aren't you going to offer me a drink?”

Molly, knowing that Ferenc, who mistrusted alcohol and its effects, would disapprove of this afternoon drinking, said gleefully, “Right you are. How's tricks? What's happening at the Club?”

“Same as usual,” he said. “Fortunes made and lost – no soap in the ladies' – gentlemanly disputes on the pavement. I see you fell on your feet again, Moll.”

“Courted at the funeral – I might have known the rest would be the same,” Molly said disconsolately.

Simon regarded her sulky face and said, “Moll – aren't you rather looking a gift horse in the teeth?”

“Long story,” was all Molly said. Trying to be cheerful, she asked Simon for more news of the Club and, finally, unable to help herself, demanded if there was any word of Johnnie Bridges. Simon, looking as if he had hoped she wouldn't ask, said, “Sorry, Moll. He's on remand. I think it's going to be all up with handsome Johnnie for about a year. Just as well, perhaps. You wouldn't want him coming round here making approaches to you now you're so well set up.” What he meant was that he knew she might succumb to Johnnie again, if only from boredom.

“What's he done?” asked Molly. “Another robbery?”

Simon hesitated. “Sorry again, Moll. Poncing. He was really doing what Steven Greene was supposed to have done. He was running a few girls in the West End – Marylebone.” He paused. “From what I hear he wasn't a bad thief but I suppose that's an easier life than thieving if you're what's known as a bit of a ladies' man.”

Molly was shocked. But she said resolutely, “He never did really like women. Just pretended to. No man who
liked
women could treat them like that.”

Simon, pouring two gin and tonics and handing one to her, said: “We've been friends for a long time, Molly – you don't look happy. What's the trouble?”

“Nothing,” Molly said. “They won't be too nice to Johnnie in jail.”

“No,” agreed Simon.

“Have you seen Bassie at all?” she enquired.

“He's living with a writer in Morocco,” Simon told her. “Come on, Molly – all I see here is a bored housewife. Tell the truth – what's wrong?”

“I'll have to get out, that's what's wrong,” Molly suddenly declared. “I'm pining to get back to Meakin Street, horrible as it is. This place is a nightmare. He doesn't – take any interest in me. I'm a hostess and a furniture polisher. I'm just here to impersonate his dead wife, that's all, and Josephine's being given the sun and the moon and the stars as well because he wants his dead daughter back. So I'm like a ghost – and it's worse –” Then she told him about her robbery of the safe and the photograph of the woman she was replacing. “We weren't even the same kind of woman – never could have been. I feel rotten because I know while they were starving to death in concentration camps I was eating currant cake in the country – but I can't stand it any longer.”

Simon referred to what she had not directly told him. “You must be using the wrong scent, or something,” he said. “If you had a more
normal life none of this would matter. You don't love him of course, that's a hindrance. You loved weak Johnnie Bridges. You'd better be careful of that tendency. That sort'll always drag you down. The Queen of England couldn't afford them.”

Molly put her head in her hands. “I feel a fool,” she said. “It looked all right at the time. I'm fond of Ferenc. I don't like how he makes his living but I am fond of him, whatever you think. But while it's like this I can't go on. Now I'll have to drag back to Meakin Street after two months. My poor mum and dad – how can they explain me away? Supposing it was Josephine doing all this? I'd send her for mental treatment.”