All The Days of My Life (70 page)

“Molly?” came Vera Harker's voice behind her. She stood up. “I think she might be dead,” Molly heard herself saying.

“Go with Mrs Harker, Lady Allaun,” said the doctor.

In the other room, Vera Harker stooped down and took a bottle of brandy from the sideboard. Molly's teeth rattled against the glass as she drank. She sat down suddenly in a chair. “Do you think she's dead?” she asked the other woman.

“It might be a mercy,” Mrs Harker said. “I don't think she'd ever have got out of that bed again. She was an active woman. She wouldn't have wanted to end up bedridden.” She paused and said, “And she hasn't been alone.”

“It's peculiar, isn't it?” Molly said. “She told me a creepy story about how a gypsy foretold I'd be there when she died – years ago, during the war.”

“She told me that,” Vera Harker said. “Before you came.”

The doctor came into the room and said, “Lady Allaun –” and paused.

“She's dead?” Molly said.

He nodded. “I expect Sir Thomas will be making the arrangements?” he asked.

Molly found herself, even at that moment, wondering if Tom could, or would, ring the undertaker. But she said, “Of course.”

There was a silence. “You'd better go up to the house,” Vera Harker said.

She obviously knew the proper thing to do. Molly said, “Yes. We'll go up to the house.”

They went in through the open kitchen door to find Isabel peeling potatoes with determination but little expertise.

Molly said, “Isabel-”

At the same moment she had asked, “How's Mrs Gates-?” but broke off when she saw from the faces of the others that the news was serious.

“Isabel – I'm afraid she's dead,” Molly told her. She went to her mother-in-law and took her arm. “It was quite peaceful. I was there all the time.”

Isabel said, “Oh, my dear. If only I'd known how serious it was –”

“Is Tom in the house?” Molly asked.

“Poor Mrs Gates,” continued Isabel. “Her loyalty – she was above praise.”

“I think we'd better find Tom,” Molly insisted.

“He's gone to London,” Isabel said. “Surely he told you – really, he's so forgetful. And now, when we need him –”

“Never mind,” the doctor said. “It's a pity but he's not indispensable. I'm afraid I need to make out the death certificate –”

“I suppose we'd better go into the library,” Molly said. She turned to Vera Harker, “Do we need a nurse?”

“I think Mrs Twining would like to come. She was away on a visit but she should be back now,” Mrs Harker said. “I'll phone her.”

Molly said to the doctor, “Follow me.”

“You must sit down, Lady Allaun,” Mrs Harker said to Isabel, taking her arm. “Let me help you.” Molly felt grateful. When Joe had died she had made none of the arrangements. Now she was glad of the presence of Vera Harker, who knew what was appropriate and sensible.

The library was musty. The books were in bad condition. The doctor, looking at the fading spines said, “Are you interested in books, Lady Allaun?”

“I can't say I am,” Molly told him. “But I suppose we shall have to do something about all this.”

“Well – if you decide to get rid of any I'd like to look at them,” he told her. “I'm a bit of a collector. In fact, if you need any advice –”

“I'll remember,” Molly said, clearing a space on the dusty desk. He opened his bag and took out a form. “I'm putting the cause of death down as a coronary attack,” he said. “Her heart had been giving anxiety for several years.”

“I didn't know,” she said.

He looked at her shrewdly and completed the form. “There we are,” he said.

When he had gone Molly wandered into the kitchen where she found Vera Harker with the teapot in front of her. “I hope you don't mind,” she said. “I'm waiting for Elizabeth Twining.”

“Of course not,” Molly responded. “I'll help myself, if you don't mind.” Looking round the kitchen, and finding the ranks of old saucepans still gleaming, the flagstones on the floor impeccable, she uttered that old valedictory for the working-class woman, “She worked hard all her life.”

“All her life,” Vera Harker said. “They don't make them like that anymore.”

“Good job, too,” Molly said, spoiling the tribute. In fact, she thought in grief and rage, this place had gobbled Mrs Gates up. No husband, child dead – and the Allauns. She had washed the ugly chandelier in the sitting room, piece by clinking piece, she had scrubbed the kitchen flags on her hands and knees, laundered the heavy sheets and pegged them out on the line. She had ironed, washed and cooked but nothing was her own, only the little pink porcelain lady, the clocks and the bed she slept in. And what of the children she had tended – Tom, weak, absent when she died, Charlie, bluff and brutal, and she, who had stepped so often and so heedlessly into the street without looking that her life had come to resemble one huge traffic accident? Had all that been worthwhile? All that work?

“She saw it as duty and self-respect,” Mrs Harker continued.

Molly said bitterly, looking at the scrubbed surface of the big pine kitchen table, “They should put this up as her tombstone.” And thought to herself, “I can beat this house. I'll do it for her sake, to prevent all her work from going to waste.” And she stared fiercely at Vera Harker, who, already disconcerted by the turn the conversation had taken, dropped her eyes, wondering what new follies were about
to begin at Allaun Towers under the aegis of this new and inappropriate mistress.

But there is a point, after a death, when people feel a kind of energy, a determination to get back at death and make it concede that its victory over life is, after all, only a draw. As the months wore on at Allaun Towers and summer gave way to autumn Molly, if she looked back at that moment of resolution at all, felt only slightly ashamed and embarrassed. Nevertheless, as events later proved, the moment had not been completely meaningless.

There was a sudden flurry of interest in the fate of Mary Waterhouse around the time of her marriage. Those who needed to know what was happening to her had their own family problems and this for some reason seemed to focus attention on her. There was only moderate enthusiasm for her marriage to Joe Endell because although it settled her it did put her into the hands of a notable radical, and a man living in areas where he might hear gossip – a dangerous combination. When he died it was rather a relief but, of course, it meant she was on the loose again. Then came the marriage to Tom Allaun and it was felt that all concerned could breath normally again. A decent future for Molly and the child lay ahead. And although no one stated it, one of the greatest advantages of her new position was that it would keep her away from London. No more prison sentences, vagrancy or taking up with shady characters. It is embedded deeply in the English psyche – this notion that life in the country is purer and more wholesome than life in the town. The country is like a kind of lay monastery to which people go to redeem themselves and avoid the temptations of the world.

It was my wife, Corrie, who poured cold water on these illusions. She pointed out that bringing Molly's son up as a landless peer might be worse than letting him grow up in the city and learn an honest job. And she added that, from what she knew of her, anyone who imagined that Molly Allaun was going to spend the rest of her life living quietly in the country as a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances, married to a gentleman of no capacities and uncertain sexual orientation, must be stark, staring mad. I told her that Molly was now a woman of thirty-eight, not a girl of twenty. She had presumably seen enough trouble to make her want no more. And, in addition, she had a young child to bring up.

Corrie said, “You underestimate women, Bert. You always have. They're capable of anything, you know – anything. It's a crippling disadvantage men have got – not realizing that women are exactly like themselves – just as likely to be heroines or bank robbers, saints or hypocrites. You'll all have to wake up one day. But if you want that woman to keep quiet the first thing to do is to get her some money. If she's too poor she'll get desperate. And you know what she's like when she's desperate. She's been in a thousand situations where her most proper response would have been to have shouted ‘Alas, cruel world,' and jumped off a bridge. Instead she thinks of something – she's like a dreadful child left alone in a room for one minute – the kind who can always think of something to do like opening the bird-cage or cutting off all their own hair. Your job is to stop Molly Allaun from having any ideas at all. Can't something financial be arranged?”

“I don't see how,” I said. “And I don't think they'd do it.”

“These things were better organized in the old days,” Corrie remarked. “There were pensions and grants. You might have to put up with spies in your household or even the slight prospect of an accident, but that wasn't too big a price to pay for all the rest. Poor Molly,” she added, severely, “has only had the spies.”

We were sitting alone, over tea, in our house in the country. The fire had been lit. The winds of early autumn were hissing through the trees outside. I was annoyed by Corrie's last remark. She had never overtly criticized my involvement with Molly Waterhouse. I think many of the charges she might have made about my part in the affair were bitten back because of her slight resentment of the ancient hold Molly had on my affections. Wise women do not even discuss these things. But this time, it seemed, her pity for the woman had overcome both a tiny jealousy and her feeling that it was not quite right for her to interfere. Corrie was indignant and her indignation stung me – all the more so, I suppose, because I was sensitive about the whole business.

“I did my duty,” I said, in my own defence. “I did what they asked.”

“Only obeying orders,” she said. “I'm sorry, Bert. I can't stand being associated with this situation – where people pry and spy and worry about the consequences, but never do anything to help. It seems so wrong.”

“I know,” I said. “I'm not sure what the alternative was, though.”

“Have you got the file still – the one upstairs?” she demanded suddenly. I was alarmed. It even seemed possible she was contemplating action.

“Of course not,” I told her. “That file was not mine to take.”

“But you took it, Bert, and copied every page,” she pointed out. “I found it all in a blue file in the attic when I was getting out the old christening dress for Laura's child.”

“Well, yes,” I admitted, “I did copy it. I took it with me when I left.” For I had, a few years before, taken over my father-in-law's firm after his death. And I must admit I was relieved to be able to go without fuss.

“You were angry,” she told me. “But why are you pretending you haven't got the papers – do you think even I can't be trusted?”

“It's partly just a conditioned reaction,” I told her. “I inherited the secret from my father. I've kept it so long –”

“Then why did you copy the papers?” she asked. “I suppose you realize that if we were burgled they could end up on a dump, in a field – it's almost asking for trouble –”

“I didn't think of that,” I said.

She leaned back in her chair and said, “Bert – I believe your attitude is ambiguous. On the one hand you can't even tell me, your wife, that you have the copies. On the other hand, you deliberately make another copy and leave it in a very unsecret secret place. An attic, for heaven's sake, where any curious person, any burglar, looks first.” And she added cruelly, “It's like some horrible case history where a man is trying to conceal and reveal his trauma to an analyst. In any case,” she went on, having crippled me with the observation in which I felt there was some justice, “I'd like to read the papers.”

“I can't do that,” I protested.

“They're in my attic. You put them there. I could have read them at any time during the last few years,” she pointed out.

I could not deny this. In a way I could not refuse to let her read the documents. And yet it disconcerted me to think of my wife, the mother of my three children, rummaging in the attic for my records, my memories of Mary Waterhouse, my past. It was almost as if she had coolly announced that she wanted to read my old love letters from another woman. And yet I realized that Corrie was a tactful and sensible woman, perfectly aware of my old tender feelings – the feelings which had begun when I was a silly young man, virtually an adolescent boy. And I knew she would not mock me about them. It seems strange, I imagine, for a grown man to make such a fuss about a pile of old documents. But, remember, the secrets considered important by one generation seem absurd to the next, which, in turn, is keeping secret the kind of information quite openly presented by the
previous generation. And remember, too, the story those papers hid. I was putting highly confidential information which, strictly speaking, I should not have had available, into my wife's hands. To be candid, at that moment I thought what a fool I'd been to copy the papers and store them.

Just how considerable the secret was I don't think even I realized, as she sat down and said comfortably, “There's a couple of hours till dinner time – and it's a casserole, already in the oven.” She opened the cardboard cover of the file and began to read. Only minutes later she said, “Good Lord – I didn't realize it gave chapter and verse to this extent.”

I had been looking into the fire and feeling slightly gloomy, like a child standing by while his father reads his school report. I reassessed the whole affair in my mind. There is something about the sudden production of old documents – letters, invitations, photographs – which does not always tend to pleasant nostalgia. Sometimes they can induce feelings of self-reproach – “To think I never saw him again before he died” – or just self-contempt – “What a fool I was.” And in nine cases out of ten it's impossible to do anything about it – the past is gone, and that's that. In this particular case the fact that half the revelations were not mine at all, but belonged to the main actors in the affair, seemed to make it worse, rather than better. So when Corrie remarked on how specific all the information was, I just agreed sourly. “Oh yes,” I said, “there isn't anything there which wouldn't stand up in court.”