All The Days of My Life (12 page)

Mrs Gates had taken it on herself one morning, when getting the day's orders from Lady Allaun, to introduce the subject of shell-shock. She began by saying that the lateness of the post was probably because the postmistress was having a difficult time with her old father, who had been in the trenches in World War I and had never been quite normal since. At this, Lady Allaun, who knew what was coming, had straightened her already straight back, looked her housekeeper firmly in the eye and said, “How lucky we are that no matter how dreadful this war has been for everyone, that, at least, is one thing we have been spared. There have been no shell-shock cases from this war.” Mrs Gates said no more but she knew Lady Allaun understood what she had been trying to tell her. She had been put firmly in her place. There
was nothing else she could do. Nevertheless, if it was not shell-shock, thought Mrs Gates, it was something very like it.

Towards the end of the war Sir Frederick had been sent to France just after the Normandy landings. He had fought his way through Germany, ending up in one of the first parties to enter the concentration camp at Belsen, or was it Auschwitz? Whichever it was, small wonder he was like he was, Mrs Gates thought. Maybe only the presence of little, rosy Mary Waterhouse was enough to drive out the memory of the walking skeletons in the concentration camp.

Still, the mystery of what had happened in the summerhouse remained. All Mrs Gates knew was that, just as she spotted the two familiar figures in the summerhouse and, the ache in her back somewhat relieved, was about to bend down again and pick more peas, she had seen Isabel Allaun running down the lawn with an expression of great rage on her face. Mrs Gates, half-hidden behind the hedge, had stood staring in astonishment. Then Lady Allaun had stopped short, about fifteen yards from the summerhouse door and shouted, “Frederick! Come out at once!” She must have been watching them from the drawing room window but what could she have seen, from such a distance, to make her behave in such an uncharacteristic way – like a street woman, Mrs Gates thought to herself. Had she seen something or had she imagined it? Had her husband been giving Mary a kiss or a cuddle or had he really, because that was the most likely explanation for Isabel Allaun's behaviour, actually been interfering with her, molesting her, putting his hand too high on her thigh, or under her little white knickers? That was a horrible thought and Mrs Gates did not believe it. Now she was admitting to the thoughts, Mrs Gates examined the situation candidly. She had seen such things before; she knew of things like this, and worse, much worse. But although Sir Frederick was not in his right mind and needed comfort – and pray God, he had not tried to find it in the child – she could not believe things had gone too far. Mrs Gates stole a look at Mary as she sat reading. She did not have the look of a child who had taken part in naughty games with a middle-aged man, but then, with girls in particular, you could seldom tell. Girls learned to conceal things like that from an early age, Mrs Gates knew that. Nevertheless, she was still sure nothing had been too wrong – until, that is, Isabel Allaun started shouting. What a scene for a lady to make. Then Mary had gone white as a sheet as Isabel stood on the grass, shouting, in a cracking voice, uncertain in its pitch, “Come out, Frederick, I tell
you.” And, to silence her terrifying voice, Sir Frederick had come out of the summerhouse, over the lawn all dappled with sun, saying something in a low voice, which Mrs Gates could not hear. But she could hear the bewilderment in his tone and he looked very bent, very old, twenty years older than he really was.

At that point Mrs Gates had pulled herself together, slipped out of the vegetable garden through a gap in the hedge, leaving the basket of peas on the ground, and, trying to look as if she had just come from the house, went to the summerhouse door, where Mary stood, dazed and rather frightened, and had said, using as normal a voice as possible, “Mary – I've been looking for you everywhere. You promised to go down to Twining's for the eggs.”

“Did I?” Mary answered, looking confused. “I must have forgotten.” In fact she had not – Mrs Gates had made the story up on the spur of the moment.

“You must,” she had told the child. “Will you go down now, before lunch? I must have them quickly.” At that, Mary had run off, with one startled glance at Sir Frederick and Lady Allaun, still talking, in low voices, on the grass, oblivious to the other two, while Mrs Gates had gone straight back to the house.

After that there were high words in the drawing room. Voices could be heard right along the passageway and through the kitchen door, behind which Mrs Gates tried to get on with preparing the lunch. Not that there was any lunch. Sir Frederick took to his bed with a bottle of whisky after the row. Isabel Allaun said that she was going out to see some neighbours. Which, Mrs Gates worked out, must have been when she took the letter asking the Waterhouses to collect Mary down to the post office. So she and Mary ate their chops together in the kitchen. And that was the end of any talk of adoption and the reason why they were sitting together in this stuffy train, now nearly in London, judging by the parade of shabby houses and the gaps in the streets, like mouths with many teeth missing.

Mrs Gates sighed. It was this dreadful war which was to blame. Without the war Mary would never have come to the Towers. Sir Frederick would have been the same bluff, selfish fellow he had once been. Isabel Allaun would have been the same snobbish, not unkind, country lady, with her bridge and her shopping trips. And now Mary had to go back to what was most likely a slum. Probably her father drank, thought Mrs Gates, and there seemed no doubt that her mother was a slut and a slummock, if you considered the state of the child's
clothes when she had arrived. You didn't have to be dirty, even if you were poor, thought Mrs Gates self-righteously. But all this resentment against the unknown Waterhouses now, as the train got closer and closer to Victoria, had little power to console. If only, she thought miserably, that scene outside the summerhouse had never happened. What could it have been that Lady Allaun saw? And what did that child, reading her book so calmly, really know?

It was very hot that day and the air was sweet with the flowers – I don't suppose I'd have remembered anything if it hadn't been for the sequel – Isabel going mad like that, on the lawn, with her body all straight and stiff and her blonde hair coming down out of the big, soft bun she used to put it in and her eyes all hot. She usually had those pale, cold blue eyes, Ice Maiden eyes, but this time they were blazing. But another bit of me wasn't that surprised. I knew Sir Frederick wasn't the way he should have been. Even a child, or perhaps specially a child, could spot it. I'd seen him before, remember, when he came back home on leave and then he was like Father Christmas, big and ruddy only with a little toothbrush moustache instead of a beard. After his first leave he always brought me back a present. He was always coming into the room, shouting something and picking me up and swinging me round. Those times, too, he'd try to do something about the work that needed doing because there hadn't been enough staff for years. So he'd take me with him to mend the catch on the gate to stop Twining's cows from getting into the grounds, or shoot all the rabbits which had been multiplying cheerfully for years while no one did anything about it. Those times Tom would go too, and be allowed to fire at a pigeon or so. Anyway, the last time he came, after he was released by the army, you could tell he wasn't the same. He wore the same old grey cardigan all the time. He shuffled. He'd sit in a chair in the library for hours on end, staring into space. Mrs Gates called it shell-shock when she was talking to her friends. Really, it was depression – there was less help for it then. “Mad,” he sometimes whispered to himself when he thought there wasn't anyone there. “I'm mad.” I walked into the library one day with a butterfly – a Red Admiral – in my hands to show him. He shuffled into the top drawer, which was open just as I came in. I pretended I didn't know what it was but I did – throughout the years, sneaking around the house opening drawers and cupboards while nobody was about, I'd been fascinated by the revolver in the top
drawer of the desk. It wasn't loaded, of course. I'd tried it. But I think it was that day. I think he was going to shoot himself. Better if he had really. From what I heard years later he never really recovered. The experience made Isabel worse. She was never a big-hearted woman but she must have been a lot nicer in the days when she had the life she wanted.

Anyway, there it was. Frederick Allaun was a wreck – and I was his only consolation. All I meant was a bit of life for him, I think, something to take away the taste of all those deaths. I knew there was something not quite right about it, mind you, there was the funny way his hands were always on me as if it was an accident, but it wasn't. They were big hands, always cold. I did know it wasn't the normal relationship of a child with an adult. I knew he needed me and that made me a bit uneasy, and I knew I felt sorry for him, which made me uneasy as well because, after all, children don't like to feel sorry for adults. It seems wrong to them. But I liked him. I suppose a lot of people would say I was a girl who'd been without a father for a long time. Maybe that was it, maybe it wasn't. But Frederick Allaun never went over the line, whatever it is. Well, it's the difference between big, cold hands on your body and big, cold hands right up between your legs, or worse. In a way we both knew this touching and feeling wasn't right – sometimes I'd make an excuse and shift away from him. Sometimes he'd drop his hands, which might have been round my waist, as if he'd been scalded. So I don't know what Isabel saw in the summerhouse – couldn't have been more than a peck on the cheek or something but whatever it was she couldn't bear it. She never forgave me, I don't think, not for forty years, but she was like that anyway and her own problems must have been terrible, for her to let it all out like that. Cold scenes and silences were more her style, deathly chills she could create, and rooms turning to refrigerators on the spot. But she must have been really upset to stand yelling like that. After that she'd have been so fed up with herself she would have had to get rid of me anyway – probably a hollow victory, because maybe if I'd stayed around Sir Frederick might have got back to normal.

Anyway, there it was – I got the chuck from Allaun Towers. Looking back I realise that Isabel would have manoeuvred it probably anyway. She didn't want me around taking Sir Frederick's attention away from Tom – not that he got it even after I'd gone, but she wasn't to know that. And I daresay she saw me growing up into a pretty girl and then it would have been “Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who is the
fairest one of all,” with her cast as the wicked stepmother. Poor old Isabel. She must have had very little happiness in her miserable bloody life. She would have done better, when she'd first polished me off, and after that Sir Fred, to have gone and got another bloke. It might have prevented Tom's ruin. Probably couldn't find anyone good enough for her.

Anyway, there I was, catapulted out of the Towers and back to Victoria before I could draw breath – my God, Ivy was a shock to me first go off, and no mistake.

Imagine it – there's me, little miss primknickers, standing on the station, which is full of smoke and absolutely filthy and horrible-smelling to a child who'd spent years in the country. It's crammed with worn-out looking people with grey faces, and soldiers and sailors, and there, suddenly, was this bleached-haired, over-made-up woman of thirty-four standing at the barrier waiting for me with a grubby little girl – or so she seemed to my countrified, upper-class eyes – and the girl's holding out a bar of chocolate to me and in a flash I'm in the arms of this woman, her bright red lips are all over my face, she smells of fags, and all in the middle of this noisy, smelly station. And it was my mother – it took my breath away. There we stood, me in the clutch of this woman, and the people pushing round us and the trains banging and snorting and belching out smoke and this common little girl, my sister, Shirley, is saying over and over again, “Here – Mary – d'you wanna bar o' choclit. Look – I brought you this bar o' choclit.” It was like a horror story. Years later, when I was living in South Moulton Street with Steven Greene he put me on to reading Greek myths. One night, late, he read me out the story of Persephone, the girl who was rescued from the underworld by her mother, sort of taken back into the light and fields and so forth. I was thinking all the time, while he was reading, “My God – I remember that. Only it was my mum who took me into the underworld.” I could see that station then, as clearly as I saw it when I turned up in London as a child. I can still see it now.

Of course, looking back, I realize how bloody awful it would have been to have become little Mary Allaun, and grown up in that dodgy atmosphere at the Towers. Mrs Gates wouldn't have been the be all and end all for very long. In no time I'd have been exposed to the whole lot – Isabel and her jealousy and snobberies, Tom Allaun and, worse still, Charlie Markham and then there'd have been poor old Sir Frederick… I was a lot better off with Sid and Ivy, in the long run, but
I wasn't half staggered at the time, I can tell you. Probably the first of a long series of shocks, I suppose.

Inside the cafeteria tea urns hissed on the counter, behind which a tired woman in an overall dealt out tea and rock buns, snapping at people who asked if there were any biscuits or cheese sandwiches. People sat close-packed at small tables.

“I hope you'll let Mary come and visit us in the holidays,” Mrs Gates said, looking Ivy Waterhouse firmly in the heavily mascaraed eye. Then she looked sharply at a couple of drunk soldiers who had jogged the table as they went unsteadily towards the door.

“If she can,” said Ivy in a neutral tone.