All The Days of My Life (26 page)

“Yes, please,” said Johnnie, coming out of his doze. Mary was still wondering if his parents knew what he did and how Johnnie had come to be a crook from a background like this. The sons of homes like this became bank managers, or council officials, not safebreakers.

They ate their tea in the orderly and conventional room, with a rose-sprigged cretonne-covered sofa and chairs, and gate-legged tables in stained oak. A big gilt clock ticked on the mantelpiece. The teapot was silver. Mr Bridges talked about his garden – “Not much to be done at this time of the year but prepare for next year. And keep the vegetables coming for the family pot, of course. No excuses accepted in that direction, I can tell you.” Mary and Mrs Bridges talked about babies. “You have to let them have a few tumbles now and again,” said
Mrs Bridges. “You can't wrap them up in cotton wool.” Johnnie said little, except to argue about football with his father. “Say what you like,” said Mr Bridges, “these huge transfer fees are no good for the game.” And afterwards the men were set to mind the baby and make sure she got into no mischief while the two women took the trolley out in the kitchen to wash up. Mary stood beside Mrs Bridges with the tea cloth while she handed her the thin, bone china plates, one by one. Mary, who, thanks to Mrs Gates, had never broken a plate in her life, treated them with the proper care.

“I didn't know you were coming till yesterday,” the older woman said. “He sprung it on me out of the blue, by phone.”

“I didn't know I was coming till today,” said Mary. “In fact he never told me where we were going. It was a mystery tour.” She felt very embarrassed, a tall girl, the mistress of this woman's son, too young to have a fatherless baby. She put down another plate on the kitchen table and asked, “Where do you keep these?”

“Leave them there, dear. I'll put them away after,” said Mrs Bridges. Handing her a cup she said carefully, “You do know how he gets his living, don't you?”

Not knowing how to reply Mary said, “Well – er – he's told me one or two things –” and turned to put the cup on the table.

She put out her hand for another cup, which Mrs Bridges withheld. “He's a thief,” she said.

Mary said, “I know.” Mrs Bridges handed her the cup.

“What do your mum and dad think of that?” asked the other woman.

“Not much,” Mary said, with feeling. “'Specially my dad.”

Mrs Bridges sighed and said, “Well, I'm not surprised.”

Mary, thinking she'd better come out with it straight away, said, “Did Johnnie tell you what happened to my husband?”

“That's right,” agreed Mrs Bridges. “Young fool – with a baby on the way. Of course, I said at the time he shouldn't have been hanged. There was a lot of feeling about that. In my opinion they hung him as an example.”

Mary, at a loss for words, went on drying up the cups and saucers carefully.

“We don't take any of John's money,” said Mrs Bridges. “Not a penny – just Christmas and birthday presents so's to be normal, otherwise nothing. What started him off was the war, I suppose. His father, being an engineer, went straight into the airforce and after that
it was posting after posting. He was hardly ever here. John was twelve when his father went away – a bad age for a boy's dad to disappear. He was good at school, but he didn't take advantage of it. He got in with the wrong crowd. You know how it can be. I couldn't control him. There were lads coming round for him at half past one in the morning, and girls, not nice ones, I can tell you. By the time his father came back after the war he was a petty criminal. I couldn't bear it – I couldn't bear to admit it, even. But he was. Of course I thought his father would do what I hadn't been able to but – well, he couldn't. There was row after row. We turned him out of the house once, after the police found a lot of cases of watches here, under his bed. He got probation. First offence.” She paused, helplessly, looking at Mary as if she hoped to find support. Mary said, “But didn't you ought to have kept him with you, after he got caught and convicted –?”

“It was when he did it again,” she said.

Mary felt annoyed with Johnnie, for the first time. It seemed wrong that he should have upset this nice, quiet couple in the way he had. Mrs Bridges did not say so but it was obvious she must have had some plans for Johnnie – she and her husband must have hoped he'd become a doctor, or a lawyer, something like that.

“We had to accept it in the end,” Mrs Bridges told her, in a firmer voice. “We had to accept he was what he was. He came back that time but the next time we told him he had a home when he wanted one – whenever, whatever he wanted – but not for that. We couldn't let him use it as a base. We wouldn't have his mates round. We didn't want that kind of girl in our house – I hope I'm not shocking you,” she said suddenly. “You're not very old –”

“I've heard these things before,” Mary told her.

“It's a terrible thing when a child, especially your only one, does that,” Mrs Bridges said. “My hair went completely grey in four years. This isn't my own colour,” she added. “He would have had a brother but he died before the war. Polio.”

“Oh, my God,” Mary said. “Oh – Mrs Bridges. Oh – that's terrible.”

“These things happen,” said Johnnie's mother. “Unfortunately.”

Mary put the drying-up cloth on the table beside the crockery and said, “Mrs Bridges – can I make you a cup of tea? You're all upset – no wonder.”

“Yes,” she said. “I could do with another cup.”

“Sit down, then,” said Mary. She put on the kettle.

Mrs Bridges sat down and produced a battered packet of Gold Flake from her pocket. She offered Mary one. Mary, who had learned to smoke to keep up with the other girls in the clubs, took it.

Mrs Bridges said, “You had to know.”

Mary, setting the teapot on the table, said, “I don't know whether I ought to say this, but he told me he was planning to go legitimate.”

“I hope to God he is,” she said, puffing out some smoke. “Because – because –” she burst out. “I've been worried to death. I think he did that Putney bank job. He didn't tell you –”

“They never do – they don't trust women,” Mary said. “But I thought something had happened. He turned up yesterday looking as if he'd been pulled through a hedge backwards. When was it – the bank robbery?”

“Wednesday night, Thursday morning,” said Mrs Bridges. “They must have hid out until they were sure the police had no leads – then he came to you. Anyway, I know it was him. I always know when he's in danger. I can't sleep – I get this instinct. I pray. Silly, isn't it – praying your son will get away with a crime. But he must have some money now. Best if he puts it in a business. Do you think that's what he has in mind?”

“I don't know, Mrs Bridges,” said Mary.

“You don't want him to go on thieving, do you?” demanded Johnnie's mother. Mary, as when she was expecting her baby, sensed the obligation of concerning herself selflessly with another person being placed upon her and felt the resentment of a horse tasting the bit.

She tried to answer truthfully by saying, “I'm not his wife, am I, Mrs Bridges? Stands to reason I wouldn't want anyone to go on thieving, not after what happened to my husband. But some people aren't made to work nine to five.” She paused, thinking this was a poor argument. All she meant was that she doubted if Johnnie Bridges would ever submit to it. And then added, “And he's got no training, either.” She paused again and said. “It's a hard choice, after you've had the best of everything and never got caught – either hard work and low pay, or going on like you are –”

“And ending up behind bars,” Mrs Bridges said bitterly. She was not finding in Mary quite the ally she desired. She wanted a woman who would dedicate herself to the reclamation, of her son.

“He could have done anything,” she said sadly. “He was clever at school.”

“That's why he's not been caught thieving,” Mary told her bluntly.
She had noticed that behind her lover's pretended insouciance lay a keen efficiency. She took another Gold Flake from the packet held out to her by Mrs Bridges and said, “Look – I don't know how to say this to you but in the first place I haven't got a lot of influence over him so I can't change his mind for you. And secondly, I don't like all this much, as you can guess, but I don't know I could ask him to go into a dead-end job and sweat his guts out for years and years, like my dad has.”

“All you young people think like that,” said Johnnie's mother. “It was the Labour government. You've got high ideas now. In my day you were glad of a job, any job, to keep body and soul together. I hope it keeps fine for you.”

The door opened and Johnnie said, “Oh – ladies' smoking party, eh? Aren't you coming back to join us?”

And there were Josephine's erratic steps behind him and her piping voice crying, “Don! Don!” He picked her up and handed her to Mary. “Here you are, love. And I think we'd better be going, Mum.”

As they left, Mary turned on the garden path and waved goodbye to Mr and Mrs Bridges, who were standing on the step. She knew they were both hoping that the formally perfect picture they saw before them – son, young woman and baby leaving after tea on Sunday – would somehow one day turn out to be as real as it looked.

On the way back he said, “What was Mum saying to you in the kitchen? Hoping you'd get me to go straight, was she?”

“That's right,” Mary said.

“And you told her you'd try?”

“No,” Mary said stoutly. “I told her I couldn't see why anyone should sweat their life out for the company for forty years and fetch up with a gold watch and a thank you from the managing director. Then the geezer goes home to his council house and the managing director pops off to his club as usual for another round of pink gins.”

“That's my girl,” said Johnnie.

“I said I didn't want to see you in jail, either,” remarked Mary.

“You'll never see that,” he told her.

“No, that's right,” she said. She loved him.

I suppose if you study what all this meant, what I was saying wasn't what your average working-class girl would have told the man she loved. The usual would have been, “Unless you go straight I'll never
see you again.” I couldn't do that. I knew I loved Johnnie so much I couldn't part with him, no matter what he did. I suppose if I found out he'd been torturing little children or beating up old ladies I would have had to get rid of him. But if he'd been that sort I doubt if I'd have taken to him in the first place. As it was, at that time, he was a crook, but not a brutal one. It was a mixture of greed, which he had a lot of, and high spirits and the challenge of it all – but the truth is that I took him on the way he was and that's the point I became what Ivy feared I would – a gangster's moll. In fact Johnnie always called me Molly and in the end everybody did. Even Sid and Ivy got round to it. By that time I think I didn't seem to anybody like a Mary any more. That's a plain old name. Your average Mary in those days was a quiet girl who didn't get up to any tricks. So I suppose the name Molly fitted me better.

But Mary, or Molly as we might as well call her now, had the secret hope that Johnnie's vague remarks about going straight might mean something. She knew he must have a good sum, from £5,000 to £10,000, tucked away. Even if it was as low as £5,000 he could buy a small business, say a newsagent or little cafe. If it was more he could do better. But during the following few weeks her hopes were dashed. The money went out like water – a few hundred lost in a poker game here, a new fur coat for Molly there. She took the coat because she knew if she did not the bookies would get the money anyway. “I can always sell it,” she told herself. Meanwhile, they still had a good time at the races, round the clubs. They had champagne at all hours – and sex, too. There was no time when Mary did not desire the hardness of Johnnie's body, his cock plunging so deeply inside her that she felt completely taken over by it. Susie, at the club, looked at her through the smoke one night and said, “It don't last, you know, Moll. Don't expect it to last.” Molly knew it would. She knew that the love, desire, romance, fulfilment she and Johnnie gave each other would never fail in their magic.

As autumn wore on and became winter she began to realize the implications of the life she had entered with Johnnie. In early November a few of the friends she had met with him – cheerful, open-handed, friendly men, she thought them – began to call at Meakin Street. They tended to stay late. Sometimes Molly went to bed before they left. She had, after all, to get up early and look after the child. Gradually she realized that the men, Jimmy Carr, Allan Lane and Fred Jones, were in
the house for a reason. They were trying to get Johnnie out on another job. By mid-November he was interested and by the end of the month committed. Molly began to find it hard to sleep, as she lay there, hearing the men's voices downstairs, knowing that in probability once she had gone upstairs they had laid out their plans and their streetmaps on the table she had proudly polished. They would be eating the sandwiches she had prepared and left on a plate in the kitchen for them. In the morning there would be crumbs, empty glasses, ashtrays overflowing with stubs – she, Molly, was servicing this operation, which might deprive her of her lover. But she would never be allowed to know what was going on.

She found out. On her side was the fact that Johnnie loved her, and so was incautious in his talk, that she looked over the streetmap one morning and found the faint markings they had made on it and, above all, that none of them expected her to want to know. Of the four men involved, Allan Lane was the driver and Fred Jones the looker. Jimmy Carr had fallen in love with the secretary of a solicitor who had an office next door to a small bank in West Ealing. One evening, weary of the efforts to get her to sleep with him before her parents came back from the cinema – the assault had gone on for three months as she explained she wished to be a virgin when she married and he evaded making a proposal – he got fed up and took an impression of the keys of the office, which she had in her handbag in the hall. By the time she came to see him, ready to yield herself up to him, he had lost interest and was working on the plan to rob the bank. On Christmas Day, when the takings from the shops in the area were in the vaults, he and Johnnie would let themselves in through the solicitor's door, blow a hole in the wall on the ground floor, get into the bank, get down into the vaults and break open the safes. Fred Jones had taken a room above the chemist's opposite the bank. From there he could look out and signal the arrival of the police, if they came. The one real danger was that the noise of the explosion when the wall was dynamited would bring them along.