All The Days of My Life (63 page)

“What a how-do-you-do, Molly,” she said. “And I've already had Shirley on the phone, in tears, this morning.”

“It's all right, Mum,” Molly said. “He's buying number 19. Your house'll be back in the family again. He'll live opposite me. Are you saying you can't be happy unless you're married?”

“That's the last thing I'd say,” her mother replied.

The new arrangement in Meakin Street worked well. Molly, officially sited at number 4, spent much of her time with Endell, across the street. George felt sufficiently mothered and sufficiently left alone to keep him happy. When Josephine was there she took on much of the task of caring for him. She recognized that different rules had to apply to poor George – he was almost incapable of looking after himself, required detailed instructions about how to cope with everyday life and was virtually helpless unless confronted with a mechanical problem. Almost incapable of finding his own socks, nevertheless he earned himself pocket money by fixing the neighbours' cars and motor bikes at low rates. Everything seemed simple, perhaps because Endell had the art of making things seem easy. When they went wrong he did not complain but worked out a way of making them come right the next time. He was not vain or fussy, and unencumbered by prejudices or set expectations. He worked hard, fell asleep anywhere, then got up and went on. Molly had accepted, as a fact of life, that in previous relationships she had to conform to a man's idea of what constituted a good woman. She had pandered to Johnnie Bridges' male gangster pride, she had attempted to live up to Nedermann's middle-European ideas of domesticity and she had been a silent naked Venus to Lord Clover while he poured out Cabinet secrets. She now found a relationship with a man which seemed to be without a rule book. She might rush back from work, feeling tired, to find herself cooking eggs and bacon for a minister of the government one day. On the next Joe would have made all the preparations for a dinner party that evening. The spare room at his house was almost continually occupied, sometimes by a refugee from Latin America, sometimes by a constituent on the run from a violent husband, sometimes by Josephine Flanders, or one of the many Endell relations, or an MP who had missed the train
back to his constituency on Friday night. The effect of living between two households and of the almost complete lack of privacy was offset by their continual conversation. Molly and Joe Endell talked all the time, interrupted each other, read things to each other, argued and agreed with each other. Molly, even at the hairdresser's on Saturday, often felt lonely for Joe, his shouting, chatting and general movement. She rushed home one day, hair still wet, and when she found him away, broke a couple of plates against the wall.

“What are you about?” demanded Joe, coming in.

“You weren't here,” said Molly. “And I came back with my hair all wet to find you.”

“I came to pick you up at the hairdresser's,” Joe told her. “When I found you weren't there I was alarmed. Can you come to this strategy meeting tonight?”

“The election's years off,” Molly objected.

“Not as long as you think,” Endell said. “Coming? Anything to eat?”

“Cold meat,” Molly said. “But Josephine sent George shopping and he's disappeared. She's gone off to find him. I'll make you a sandwich –I told Simon Tate I'd see him tonight. He's opened a restaurant in Chelsea. You could come on afterwards and we could have a meal.”

“Right,” Endell said, accepting the sandwich. “But I'd like you to have been there.”

“It gets on my nerves – you keep on and on about the voters and the unions and the movement – and all you ever mean is the men. Look at Jack – his wife walked out because she was so fed up with making sandwiches for men discussing their own rights.”

“There's equal pay –” Endell said.

“You know that's rubbish,” Molly told him. “What's the point without paid maternity leave and crèches? How could I have managed without Ivy? And she had to give up her job to take care of Josie. You'll never convince me the Labour Party isn't just as keen to ignore women as anybody else. It's just another men's club, that's all. You want to keep us dependent on you – makes you feel safer.”

“You want to have a baby,” Endell said.

“Thinking about it. Thinking it means giving up my job,” muttered Molly.

Once again Joe Endell made it easy. “I'm going to be a deputy parliamentary private secretary,” he said. “I won't be able to manage
without my own secretary. I might as well pay you as anybody else. That way the baby would fit in. Will you do it?”

“Which?” Molly asked. Then she said, “Yes.”

“Upstairs, then,” Endell said. “And we'll discuss your duties – I'm keen to get started.”

They went upstairs. Later, as Molly put her clothes on she looked at Endell, whose tufty hair was rumpled, and told him, “I love you, Joe Endell, more than I've ever loved anyone in my life.”

He grinned and was asleep.

In his sitting room above the restaurant in Chelsea, Molly told Simon Tate, “I'm happier than I've ever been before.”

“So am I,” he replied. “Isn't it nice?”

“What is it?” she asked. “The restaurant? Clive?”

“Well – I love the restaurant and I love Clive – when I look back at good old Frames it feels like a nightmare. Chinless wonders losing their socks and those bricklike gambler's faces – all overshadowed by the Roses, like a couple of ogres. Hard to believe either of us could stand it.”

They were drinking brandy. “I suppose it had its good moments,” she said. “I mean, we had a few laughs – when we had to call all that money in at short notice and Ephraim Wetherby threatened to kill himself over the phone, so we could hear the shot – and those constant problems in the ladies' –”

“It was like Act III of a Lyceum drama in there some nights,” he recalled. “Suicides, gynaecological crises – yes, I daresay you're right. But I was young –”

“And afraid of the police,” Molly added. “It must have been like a shadow hanging over you all the time.”

“That's it,” he said. “It'll take years for that terror to wear off.”

“Remember Steven Greene?” she said.

“He was a real victim,” said Simon. “Let's drink to him – we can't do anything else for him.” And they chatted, like two people who had survived bad times, sometimes laughing and sometimes sad. “She went up North, I heard,” Molly said of Wendy Valentine. “I think they finished her. She'll find it hard to be normal again. Wherever she goes someone will find out who she is – anyway, that life's like being on drugs. It's hard to get off it – ordinary life seems so drab.”

“All that left a lot of wreckage about,” Simon agreed. Nevertheless,
talking about those old times chilled Molly. Simon had known her in the old, mad days, when shifts and changes took place rapidly. Now, wrapped in love and contentment, like someone in a thick fur coat, she could not bear to even remember that might change. They had seen hard times together, she and Simon, and he was a reminder of the fact that nothing, or practically nothing, lasts forever.

They all ate together at a corner table in the restaurant after most of the customers had gone home. As they left Simon kissed her and said, conventionally enough, “Look after yourself, Molly.” And, as he said it, her spine tingled with apprehension. She grabbed the keys from Endell on the pavement and said, without any explanation, “I'm going to drive, Joe.” Endell looked annoyed, for now that he had finally passed the test his abilities as a driver were one of the few things he prided himself upon. Nevertheless, he got in the passenger seat without protest and Molly drove home.

I was delighted when I learned of Molly's happiness with Joe Endell. It was a delight perhaps marred by a little left-over jealousy about her but considerably increased by what might seem a rather odd feeling –that she had, somehow, not let me down. It can't be said that her previous choices of partner reflected much credit on her. Yet here she was, thoroughly happy, with a genuinely decent man and carrying out her duties as the near-wife of an MP very seriously. It made me feel less of a fool for having tried to defend her and to persuade my father and the others to see her as a normal human being, as we were ourselves, not just as a tart and a shocking liability. Now, here she was, respectably connected with a member of the government, “almost one of us” (as one of us might have put it), and it seemed to prove to me that I was right to have thought about her as I had done. At all events, Joe Endell was an honest man about whom, even in his gossipy world, very little scandal ever spread. If anything he had a reputation for an unpolitical degree of candour and incorruptibility which his colleagues must secretly have felt to be unprofessional. However, it worked – or rather, he did. It was felt he might become deputy Minister of Education after the 1971 election – the Conservative party put a stop to that, obviously, by winning the election. Even so, he still held his seat with a loss of only fifty votes. He was sea-green, Endell, protected from calumny by his own innocence, which he maintained vigorously, and from failure by a gift for intelligent hard work. Even
his choice of a wife, which he seems to have made in a pub, after meeting the lady only three times – and on two of those occasions she was apparently a hopeless derelict – was one of the soundest decisions he ever made. No wonder I felt a little jealous. Endell had done what I might have done – asked Molly to marry me – but he had done it without qualms or doubt. And the result had been satisfactory. It made me feel cowardly, or unintelligent, or both. But I knew such feelings to be idiotic. I was perfectly happy myself in my private life. Before Endell and Molly married my wife had given birth to our second child. I was content – I suppose few people are immune to these small, wistful feelings on occasion.

In fact they lived their curious domestic life together for about seven years. They must have married just before, or just after, Molly conceived their child. By that time their union was fairly well known. Inside the constituency Molly's past misdemeanours were put down to youthful folly, prompted by the terrible death of her first husband. Perhaps her past even helped a little – people felt she was human, and could sympathize with a good many of their problems. She got away with it, in fact, because she was obviously ingenuous. She was energetic. She was enthusiastic. She was attractive and happy and kind. So, inside the constituency the marriage was mostly greeted favourably and outside it attracted only a few comments.

During the years she spent with Endell Molly was very obviously happy and one might have been forgiven for thinking that, for once in her life, happiness could last.

Joe Endell sat contentedly by an open fire in Meakin Street with his feet on the fender. Some Yorkshire instinct had led him to have the fireplace opened up and the chimney swept in the autumn, saying, “Hard times a-coming, Molly dear. You'll thank me later, I'm sure.” By the light of a battery-operated lamp he chortled, wrote a speech and predicted the downfall of the government. “Lucky you're having the baby in June. At worst there'll be enough daylight to have it by. At best it'll be born the child of a Deputy Minister of the Crown.”

“As long as it's all right,” Molly replied. “I don't care.” She felt better during this pregnancy, in her thirty-seventh year, than she had as Jim Flanders' reluctant, teenage bride. “But I must say, Joe,” she said, looking up from her typewriter, “that I think you could try to trace your parents. It might be nice, now.”

“It might not,” said Joe Endell.

“Afraid you'll find out your dad was hanged for murder?” enquired Molly. “Or your mother was a tart? Don't worry. None of that's harmed Josie. No – honestly – aren't you ever curious?”

“No,” Endell said shortly.

Molly, still typing, said, “Seriously, Joe, do you think all this gloating about Heath's disaster with the unions is a good idea? It's a bit boring.”

Endell nodded. “Get that draft plan from upstairs,” he said. “I'll use that, then concentrate on a rational future. Oh – well,” he said, looking at her slightly tired face. “I'll get it. You sit there and take your bit into the future.”

Molly sat in the dark room, which was lit only by the fire and the two low-powered lamps. She had raised the matter of trying to trace Joe's real parents before but he had always resisted. He told her that only the present and the future mattered to him. He had said, rightly,
she thought, that his real parents were the mother and father who had reared him. Nevertheless, Molly imagined she detected, in his firm tones, some leftover traces from the doubts of childhood and adolescence. She spoke about this to Evelyn Endell, Joe's mother. “I know,” Evelyn had said. “He doesn't want to think about it – I suggested it once before and he told me to leave the matter alone. Quite bluntly, really, for Joe. I wanted to do it anyway, years ago, but Fred felt it would be unwise. He said that he'd come in contact with a case once, in his own practice, where the patients had suddenly found out, by accident, that the real mother of their adopted daughter had been a prostitute. They'd virtually locked the girl up from the age of eleven. To conquer the bad blood, you see. And his idea was that if we found anything bad about Joe's parents we might be the same – not so extreme, if you see what I mean, but that it might colour our attitudes when he became difficult in adolescence, or at a time of crisis. I thought Fred might be right, so I let the idea drop.”

They were sitting on the Endells' very green lawn, outside the house on the Lancashire coast. At the bottom of the garden there was a drop, then a long beach and then the sea began. Molly said, “I still think it's a bit peculiar. It was the one thing he never told me about himself. You had to tell me in the end. He never talks about it – and he hasn't got any memories before he came to live here. He was about five, you say. He must remember something – children do.”