All The Days of My Life (83 page)

Finally, I said, “What are all those funny looks about?” and he denied it, the way people do, and I asked Sid, who told us both to shut up because Ivy was ill upstairs and then Jack said, “I don't want to drag it all up while Ivy's not too good.”

“No need for a row,” I said. “If it's because you think I'm seeing too much of Pat – well, I've known her a long time and I can't switch loyalties every time you get married again.”

He just looked uncomfortable and said, “It isn't that at all.”

“It's the business,” Sid said. “That's what he's making all these faces about. And if you want my opinion, Jack” – not that any of the Waterhouses ever did want each other's opinions but they were sure to get them anyway – “if you want my opinion,” said Sid, “I think you shouldn't interfere. Molly's doing the best she can and she's got a boy to keep.”

“The old cry through the ages,” said Jack. “It's not an excuse for non-union labour. That's not what we've been fighting for all these years. It's employers like Molly who are eroding all the others struggled and fought for.”

And I told him I couldn't afford to use union labour. I told him the truth – if I did, I'd go out of business. It'd put a third on the price of the bikes and I'd lose sales. I said, “And moreover I can't afford the tax and insurance either. I can't afford to run proper canteens, observe full fire regulations and I can't afford proper rest breaks. That's why I use so many part-timers. They can eat and rest in their own time. On mine, they're working.”

“Sweated labour,” he said.

“They sweat in my time – they can have a bath in their own,” I told him. “I'm sorry, Jack, but it works. I use local labour – they don't have to come fifteen miles to work. They don't have to do a full day. They like it and I like it. You can call them blacklegs if you like. I call them people who want a job. It's better for the women too. They don't get so flogged out looking after their homes and families and doing a full day's work as well. If they can get it. They even mind each other's kids, some of them. While one's on shift she looks after the kids – then the other one takes over. The government isn't going to build nurseries for them and I can't afford it – so that works, too.”

“Meanwhile sister Shirley's fudging the books so it looks as if you've got a third of the workers you really have and you're greasing palms everywhere and fiddling the income tax,” he said.

“Shirley's been offered double her wages by two other companies,” I said. “She's in demand. What are you going to do – turn us in?”

He dodged that issue and said, “It's the principle I'm complaining about. You're part of a system that's keeping down negotiated wages. Your business is being run on the state – your workers are drawing benefits and not declaring them, you're not covering their contributions towards the National Health or the pension scheme. You're not paying fair tax. You're taking out but you're putting nothing back. If everyone were like you, we'd be put back a hundred years –”

“I'm keeping people in work,” I told him. “In a few years' time I'll be in the export market.”

“Nice for you,” he said. “But it doesn't do much for the rest of us.”

“I don't know about that,” I said. “I know it's embarrassing for you, in case they catch me and Shirley and you end up with two sisters on trial. But they won't catch us, not if I'm quick. All I've got to do is build up sufficiently and I can go straight. Live in a world where a bribe is called an honorarium and all that. In the meanwhile don't think I'm going to take on your great pork-fed trades unionists. I'm employing the working-class end of the working class – unemployed kids, women, pensioners – all the people your aristocratic unionists can't or won't help and protect. And what's more, I always shall, as much as I can. Why not? They're the likes of me.”

“Condescend to pay some tax?” asked Jack.

“Yes,” I said, “I'll club up with the rest of you for nuclear bases and a million a year for the Royal Family and fact-finding tours for civil servants and MPs –”

“The roads you walk on, the hospitals you're ill in, the schools you send your children to –”

“That's enough,” Sid said. “I'm tired.”

“I'm right though, aren't I, Dad?” Jack said.

“I daresay you are, Jack,” Sid told him. “Only I wonder if it's going to be any good being right, soon. Things are changing.”

“Some things never change,” Jack said.

“All right, Oliver Cromwell,” said Sid. He looked tired. We were all tired. Jack had just come through an election campaign. I was working long hours. And we all knew that Ivy was dying. In the end Jack and me didn't have the energy to go on with the quarrel.

Ivy did not rally after the second operation, which was followed by a second course of long radiation treatment. The family, beguiled by ambiguous statements from doctors, specialists and nursing staff, and confused by information and misinformation picked up from newspapers, radio and TV and other people, lived between hope and fear and all the hopes and fears were different – they hoped that Ivy would recover or that she would die swiftly and without pain. They feared a pathetic partial recovery, and a long drawn-out death. They feared that she knew she was dying. They feared that she did not know. In fact Ivy both knew and did not know just as children know and do not know that Father Christmas is really their own parents.

Fortunately, she felt no pain until the end. The effect of the illness was just to make her weaker and weaker and to introduce her, by degrees, to a world the family did not know. One day she would be tired and rambling, the next, in the grip of a strangeness no one understood. Then perhaps she would be her old self, ill but worrying about Sid, complaining about the repairs to the washing machine, taking tablets – Ivy Waterhouse, tired and ill, but her old self again. And those close to her went in, and out, of the world of the living with her.

Sid Waterhouse did what so many do in that situation – he became a hero. He ran the house and put up with Ivy's irritability at his incompetence. He resisted all efforts to appoint a housekeeper and only grudgingly accepted the council's home help. Sid was patient and thoughtful and he kept his fears and his grief to himself. During the final year of the illness Ivy was having radiation therapy and drugs together. She became thin, her hair fell out and then started to grow again. Sid's shoulders began to bow. His expression set in a curious way – he began to look patient and gentle, serious. Molly, watching him one day, remembered the face from childhood, when he would come in from work and sit down, tired, and help Shirley build her bricks into a big house, or help her re-dress the doll she had just stripped. Sometimes she would sit on his knee while he read her the comic strips in the
Daily Mirror
– Garth, Molly suddenly recalled, had been Shirley's favourite.

Ivy's illness affected Jack worst – or at least, it led him to behave worse. While Molly and Shirley went frequently to Beckenham, bringing things to take Ivy's fancy – special soaps, or flowers, or titbits for her to eat – and also tended to bring cooked foods so that Sid would
have less to do, Jack came less often, and never without his wife, Helena, who made Ivy feel uncomfortable. “She makes me feel common,” was how she put it to Shirley, who replied, “Well, Mum. You are, to her – we all are.” And Ivy said to this that they might be but it was wrong to make them feel it. But Shirley confided to Molly that she thought Helena had spent so long doing programmes on the unfortunate – the poor, people with crippling diseases, the parents of children in care – that she was treating her mother-in-law as if she were the subject of one of her programmes. “She's like a social worker,” Shirley reported. “She keeps on asking Ivy how she feels and I know she means Tell me how you feel about dying.' Of course Ivy just stares at her – she knows there's something wrong but she can't work out what it is.”

“It's all problems these days,” Molly said. “You know, everything in life turns itself into a problem – how to adjust to marriage, how to get over an abortion. Helena says Ivy's got to come to terms with death. So all the time she's there she's secretly trying to find out what progress she's made. No wonder Ivy feels uncomfortable.”

“I hope they let me die in peace,” Shirley said. “The whole time she's here she's looking like one of those relations who come round to spy out what they can get when the last breath leaves your body. Only she's getting it beforehand – information, a human problem. She's ghoulish. I wish Jack'd leave her behind when he comes.”

“He's too frightened to come by himself,” Molly said. “It's different for you and me – women can take these things.”

Josephine came in on her last words. She was now a tall, beautiful woman of twenty-eight. She lived in Kensington with an actor who was more out of work than in it and seemed to do very little when he was unemployed. Josephine herself was away a great deal. She had a job which involved collating and editing material on the third world for a Sunday newspaper. She was in touch with radical groups all over the world and Molly was always afraid that her bold daughter would end up in jail in Bolivia, South Africa or Thailand. All Ivy ever said was, “What did you expect? Did you expect her to settle down in the civil service – she's your daughter, after all.”

“She does it all for arguments,” Molly protested. “Like exposing multi-nationals or women's rights – I never had a principle in my life. Wouldn't know one if it jumped up and bit me.”

“Now you know what it's like,” Ivy said in a satisfied voice. “Sitting in bed at night and wondering what your daughter's up to now. Mind
you,” she added, “I don't like the sound of the fellow she's living with. He's doing nothing while she's racing round these famines and wars.”

“I hope Fred goes into a bank,” replied Molly.

In April, Josephine's wedding to James Kingsbury took place. Molly gave a party at Allaun Towers where, over the years, a precarious prosperity had been built up from the old ruins, though there was never a moment when Molly felt easy about the future. Nevertheless, as a hundred and twenty guests filled the drawing room, the dining room or walked outside, where a marquee had been erected on the lawn, the situation looked respectable enough. The day was bright. Waiters on the lawn carried trays of champagne. Everyone came – actors and journalists, friends of the bride and groom, the men and women from the Framlingham factories and Evelyn and Frederick Endell, who had always been fond of their step-grandchild. Simon Tate came, accompanied by Arnold Rose – “He insisted, Molly,” Simon told her unhappily. Jack's first wife, Pat, came with her two adopted children and a sober-looking official from the Docker's Union. Jack and Helena came with Jasper in a carrycot. There was a political argument at the back of the marquee between the two men in which Pat's husband-to-be accused Jack of going soft on the real issues. Molly saw Jack's face, which reflected apprehension about whether personal and political issues might get confused and lead to a fight, so she brought up Arnie Rose to talk to them. The atmosphere did not lighten for Arnie himself looked apprehensive. “Opinion in the police is beginning to turn against them now,” Simon said to her. “The Rose brothers are done for.”

“I hope no one's going to get arrested here today,” Molly said. Beside her Richard Mayhew, who had been best man at the wedding, looked amused and said, “It'd add some drama to the proceedings.” Molly looked at him. He was six or seven years younger than she was. She had not met him until James Kingsbury, Josephine's husband,
introduced them just before the wedding. He was tall and had dark hair, a lock of which fell into very blue eyes, and Molly, who had not been in love for years, thought he looked more like a film star than a playwright and TV scriptwriter, which he was.

She smiled at him and said, “I'm praying nothing will happen – would you like another drink?”

“Not for the moment,” he said.

“I think I'd better just pop in and see how my mother is,” Molly said.

He came with her and they all sat by the drawing room sofa, where Ivy had been since early in the party.

“Lovely do,” Ivy said to Isabel. There were groups all over the room, chatting. “Mind you, I thought Josie's face was a bit set during the wedding.”

“Nerves, I expect,” said Richard Mayhew. “I've been terrified, both times.”

“I don't know,” Ivy said. “Everybody gets married so much, these days.”

Molly, who knew her daughter would not stay with her husband, said, “Oh, well – things have just changed, Mum.”

“The men aren't what they once were,” Isabel said. She was very grand in her navy silk suit. The rings still flashed on her fingers. She added, in an undertone, “I can't say the bridegroom looks much of a protector.”

“She'll be looking after him,” Ivy muttered back.

“All right until she has a child,” Isabel Allaun said.

“If,” Ivy said darkly.

“How are you, sweetheart?” came Charlie Markham's voice behind Molly. He ruffled her hair.

“Charlie!” exclaimed Molly.

“Tom invited me,” he explained. “I thought – ‘Good Heavens, Charlie. Surely you don't believe Molly's the sort to hold a grudge?'”

“I'm not too sure,” Molly replied truthfully. “Still, now you're here, what about a drink?”

“I knew you'd forgiven me, really,” Charlie said.

“Come over here,” she said. “There's a buffet. Mum – Isabel – do you want anything?”

“I'll look after Ivy, dear,” Isabel said kindly.