All The Days of My Life (24 page)

“Doesn't work that way, duckie,” said the dark girl. She got up and
walked, swaying slightly, up to the bar. She spoke to the men who took almost no notice. Some smiled at her. She was angry when they ignored her and pulled at Johnnie's coat. He shrugged. The big man took her by the elbow and steered her across the room and out of the door. As she went she said, in Mary's direction, “He'll take you to Madame Renée's, in Tite Street. He's bought so many dresses there they give him a discount. Make hay while the sun shines, duckie.”

“Poor bitch,” said Susie compassionately. “Take no notice of her – she's drunk.” Mary, looking at Susie's face, pretty, blurry and kind, thought that she, Susie, was not altogether sober. But she said, “Did that girl, Jeanne, used to be a girlfriend of Johnnie's?”

“Long time ago,” Susie said tactfully. “He threw her over and she couldn't forgive him. But it's not just that with Jeanne. It's everything. She has no luck. She just hasn't got any luck at all.”

“What happened to her?” Mary asked.

“Oh – this and that. Women's problems,” Susie said vaguely. She put her hand over Mary's. “Look here,” she said. “Johnnie's kind and generous and a good sort and a nice looker. He doesn't hang around forever – but who does? He can show you a good time. On the other hand, you're only a young girl so don't get carried away. He's here today and gone tomorrow. Remember that. Don't start having too many dreams. Then you'll be all right.”

“I know all that,” Mary said, surprising herself.

“Good girl,” said Susie.

Nevertheless, Mary's eyes went towards the door. Then back across the room again to where the men were still laughing and joking. Then at the women in their attractive clothes. They were all young, or fairly young. They wore a lot of make-up. Her eyes went back to the door.

Then up came Johnnie. He chucked her under the chin and said, “Feeling neglected, pussy? Come on – we'll go and have some fun.”

“Why not?” said Susie. “You're only young once.” Staring uncertainly round the club, at the well dressed crowd, at the jovial men, the animated women, and then back at Johnnie, bending over her tenderly, Mary said, “That's right. Let's go.” And she stood up and went out with him.

“Back to your house?” suggested Johnnie in the car. And Mary said, “Yes.” He drove with his hand on her knee. He said, at the traffic lights at Marble Arch, “I don't want you to think I – Put it another way – did Jeanne say anything to you?”

“She's jealous,” Mary told him. “I could tell.”

“You don't want to believe too much of what they say,” he said.

“I don't,” said Mary, which was a lie. She believed what they said but did not care. She added, her voice shaking a little, “I love you, Johnnie.”

He squeezed her knee and said, “Christ – they've gone green,” started the car and drove off. The lights of the park, the gleam of the late summer trees as they drove up Bayswater Road, made her think she was dreaming. Back at Meakin Street she said, “Coming in?” He nodded and she opened the door. In the hall they fell into each other's arms. He carried her up the stairs saying, “You're a nice armful, I must say.” In the bedroom he had taken off her clothes resolutely, but somehow expecting a protest and, as she lay naked on the bed, watching him, he had taken off his own clothes and cast himself on top of her saying, “I can't wait – Mary – I can't,” and she, with all the certainty in the world, had put her arms around his naked back, said his name, felt his hard cock drive into her and felt such a great, triumphant joy at having him that she knew nothing but pleasure and happiness until the great waves of sensation swept her up at the end and she heard, faintly, through the sensations which took her, a voice, her own, crying out loudly.

“Oh, love,” said Johnnie Bridges, looking down at her and kissing her face.

She smiled up at him. “You frightened me there, for a minute,” he told her. “What a noise. Have the neighbours rushing in.”

“I nearly frightened myself,” she said.

“Never happened before?” he said, unsurprised.

“No,” she said.

“Funny how often that happens,” he said. “Well, then – I'm your first.”

“Seems like it,” she told him. “Oh, Johnnie, I love you so.”

“Oh, gel,” he said. “You're special. You're something really special.”

But the next day, after Johnnie had left to pick up some clothes from his mother's house, Ivy was banging on the door heavily. Mary opened it with her coat over her nightdress and there stood her mother, in a flowered apron, with the pram. “For two pins,” she declared instantly, “I'd have left this outside your door whether you were in or out, and just walked away.”

“Do you want to come in, Mum?” asked Mary, knowing that she would.

“No, I don't. But I will anyway,” Ivy declared.

She dragged the pram in after her and said, “I don't know where you think you were last night. I was running to the neighbours at eleven o'clock at night when you didn't come back. From one I find out you're not at the pub working. And, of course it's Elizabeth Flanders who has to be the one to tell me she saw you get in a man's car at eight o'clock at night when she's coming back from some meeting at the church. Imagine what I felt! You'd better do some thinking, Mary – I've been awake all night worrying. What about the child?”

In the meanwhile she was looking in the parlour, then in the kitchen.

“Cup of tea, Mum?” asked Mary.

“Might as well,” said Ivy, satisfied that there was no man on the premises. Then she said, “There's nobody upstairs, is there?”

“No,” Mary told her.

“I don't want to be unreasonable,” Ivy told her. “And you'd better give the baby her egg. I haven't fed her any solids.”

In the kitchen, where Mary put on the kettle and the water for Josephine's egg, Ivy said, “I'd better warn you that Johnnie Bridges is a criminal. Where do you think he gets his money from? What do you think you're up to?”

“He asked me out. I went,” said Mary, feeling Johnnie's hands warm on her body. She trembled a little, even then, as she stood watching the kettle, with the morning light coming through the kitchen and her little daughter banging her spoon on the empty shelf in front of her high chair.

“Well, I hope you won't go again, that's all,” said Ivy. “Look, Mary – he's not just a fellow with an ordinary job who gets his hand on a bit of stuff that fell off the back of a lorry from time to time. Johnnie Bridges is a professional. He's tied up with Norman and Arnie Rose and you know what that means. You'd better get rid of him now, or you'll rue it later on. As for tricking me by leaving Josie with me and acting as if you were going to work down at the pub, all so you could go out with him – well, I don't believe it, Mary. I wouldn't have believed you could do a thing like that. I can see what's happening – you're starting to go down. You'd better pull yourself together straight away or I don't know what's going to happen next.”

“I'm seeing him again today. Will you look after Josephine?” Mary asked.

“Are you deaf?” demanded Ivy, putting the egg into the boiling water. “Haven't you been listening at all to what I've been saying? I'm telling you – give him up now, before it's too late. He'll wind up in jail, I'm telling you. Do I have to say it twice – if you think I'm going to look after your baby so you can get involved with Johnnie Bridges you've got another think coming.”

“Please, Mum,” said Mary, pleading. “Honestly – he's not bad. He wants to get out of thieving. That's true – he means it.”

Ivy's face sagged. She said in a defeated voice, “Mary – they all mean it. Sometimes. And then along comes another job, another chance to get rich quick. And they take it. I can understand what's going through your head. You're lonely, that's natural –”

“I'll ask Lil Messiter, then,” Mary interrupted. “She'll be glad of a few bob extra.”

“So that's it,” said Ivy, changing her tone. “You've got to have a feller at all costs. As long as he's got looks and a bit of money to flash about you don't ask any questions. You stupid little bitch. You'll wind up as a gangster's moll. First him, then somebody else – then God knows what – you'll be chucking yourself in the river in ten years' time and you'll be one of the lucky ones. They don't last long at that game, I can tell you, not them girls. They fetch up on the streets. Always. Only one way to go once you've started that game – down. You've seen them for yourself, hanging about on street corners and under arches in all weathers, looking for a pick-up. Worn out at thirty. He won't marry you, Bridges, and after that no decent man will look at you. Who'd want a gangster's leavings? And what about poor little Josephine?”

Mary, feeling the chill of the street corner blowing about her said, “I like him.”

“‘I like him,'” said Ivy, throwing back her head. “‘I like him.' Oh, my Christ. What am I hearing?”

Mary took the egg out of the boiling water with a spoon. She put it into an egg cup to cool.

“I should have known when you took this bloody place what you had in mind,” cried Ivy. “I should have put a stop to it.”

“I've had enough of this, Mum,” Mary shouted back. “You've got no rights over me. I'm a widow – remember. I'm a gangster's widow already. You can't come here as if I'm a little girl from a convent school who ran away with a big, bad man. And I'll see who I like when I like and it hasn't got anything to do with you.”

Ivy looked her straight in the eye and said, “I'm leaving – and don't come to me for any help when you're in trouble because you won't get it.”

Josephine began to cry as her grandmother slammed the kitchen door behind her. Mary stood still for a moment, partly sobered. This was the first time Ivy had ever threatened to withdraw her support. Then she set her mouth and cracked the top of Josephine's breakfast egg.

It was a long, Indian summer for her. It seemed that the dark green trees would never turn brown, the air would remain perpetually full of golden light, as if the year would stay pitched between the end of summer and the start of autumn for ever and ever. She and Johnnie took Josephine to the seaside and dipped her toes in the waves. She screamed with delight and struggled to get from Mary's arms. They shopped extravagantly, ate, went dancing and made love for long, warm nights in Mary's big bed at Meakin Street.

Meanwhile Johnnie maintained a home of some kind elsewhere. Mary was mildly curious about this unknown address, half-suspecting him of having a wife tucked away somewhere. How, otherwise, were his shirts always so immaculate, starched to exactly the right degree? How were his suits so beautifully pressed and his shoes so well-polished? Sometimes she saw a West End flat, filled with expensive furniture, presided over by a blonde mistress smelling strongly of scent – but it was hard to imagine this figure toiling over a washtub. Sometimes she saw a passive wife in the suburbs – but he did not give the impression of having that sort of domesticity in his life. And none of this vastly worried her. She was in a dream – what mattered was not where he might sometimes hang his hat or pick up his laundry but whether he loved her, and whether she loved him. And she knew she was so happy that nothing could be really wrong. She was content to see him disappear for a few days and then reappear.

But Meakin Street, and especially the women, hated her. She, sad widow of their unjustly hanged Jim Flanders, was now flashing about in a white car with a fancy man. She dragged them down with her carryings-on. Yet she looked so bonny and happy that they could not help comparing their own position with hers. Mary was not paying the price of sin. It looked as if she were getting rewarded for it. Their hard eyes followed her as she wheeled her pram along the street. They
whispered, their arms crossed on their breasts. “Tart – disgusting, isn't it? Should've been her what got hung.”

Strangely enough, Ivy's attitude weakened. She could see her daughter was happy. She heard her grandchild shouting excitedly when Johnnie appeared in the doorway with an oversized teddy bear in his arms. She found the notorious gangster one day in his shirtsleeves in the kitchen, unstopping the sink.

“He's good to you, I will say that,” she said grudgingly to Mary, when her daughter showed her a new coat. In the end it was Sid who maintained his hostility to Johnnie. He told Mary bluntly that he did not want to meet Johnnie and that if he did come across him by chance he would say what he thought about him to his face.

“You're carried away, Ivy,” he said to his wife one evening, as they were having a cup of tea before going to bed. “Of course she's happy now. What about later? This is the honeymoon but it won't go on. What happens after? Suppose she has a kid – what then? That sort doesn't hang about for long, even if they get the chance, which half the time they can't. They're in prison. Then our Mary's left there, pale and peaky, maybe with another kid, or one on the way, waiting for him to come out. You're not minding Josephine no more while Mary gads about with him.” Ivy had weakened over the question of minding the child after her first declarations.

“Oh come on, Sid,” Ivy expostulated. “What's she supposed to do – a widow of seventeen with a baby. She's got to go out sometimes.”

“Not with him,” Sid told her. “Let her look after her kid. It'll bring her to her senses. Let her live quiet and get a little job and wait for a decent feller to turn up – that'll do her more good than turning herself into a gangster's moll before our eyes. She's got to learn. If she doesn't do it now she'll do it the hard way later.” He put his cup into the saucer with a bang. “This is for your sake and mine as well as hers,” he said. “Because if it goes on, it's us who'll have to pick up the pieces. Say she has another kid and he gets caught – who'll have to support the three of them while he's inside? Us – that's who.”