All The Days of My Life (39 page)

“That's nice,” said Molly. “So much for black magic.”

He went on reading. The doorbell rang. A young man Molly recognized as a client of the club stood there, holding an envelope. “So sorry to disturb you,” he said. “I rushed round as soon as I could – Simon Tate said you were calling in a few markers. A woman let me in but I couldn't find anybody so she said I should come up here –”

Molly was amazed and grateful. She had begun to imagine that none of the defaulters would pay up without many phone calls and hints of blackmail. “Thanks,” she said, taking the envelope. “You're very prompt. Would you like to come in for a drink?”

He hesitated. “I'm with a friend,” he said.

“Bring them in,” she said expansively.

“This is very nice,” said the young man, whose name, she recalled, was John Christian. He called down, “Charlie – I've been invited in for a drink. Do you want to come?”

“I always want to come,” said a voice and Charlie Markham came round the bend in the stairs and up the steps two at a time.

Mary was horrified. Charlie Markham seldom came to the club now. When he did he tended to come up too close to her, to make dubious remarks and offend her. Because she worked there she had to endure him. Sometimes Simon Tate protected her. Sometimes she clenched her teeth and put up with it. Once, when he came too close and put his hand on her breast, she had hacked him in the shins and hissed, “Leave me alone, Charlie.”

He had winced and then recovered, saying, “Sorry, Moll. Just a joke – I'll be careful in future, especially as you're a special friend of Arnold Rose's.” He was always well informed. Now, it seemed too late to back out so she had to invite them in.

“Thought I might bump into you, Moll,” he said, sitting on the sofa with his glass. He was already rather drunk, she noticed. “Anyway,
poor old John got windy about coming here on his own. Thought he might be greeted by one of the Rose brothers' friends, I imagine.”

“Steady on, Charlie,” said the other. “I didn't think anything of the kind.”

“Well, I did,” said Charlie. “Their interest in the club isn't exactly a well kept secret. And I thought – well, help a friend to face it out and, who knows, perhaps the charming Molly will be there.”

“Any news from Allaun Towers?” demanded Molly, attempting to change the direction of his thoughts. But he just sat lolling in his chair, grinning at her.

“Remember our rencontre in the bushes, eh, Moll?” he said. “You and me and cousin Tom? A boy's dream came true.”

“I hope there's been more in your life since taking my knickers down in the bushes when I was four,” said Molly rudely. She surveyed him. “Though, now I look at you, maybe there hasn't.”

John Christian snorted, then said to Charlie, “Come on, Charlie. We'd better be going.”

“No need to rush, old man,” said Charlie. “What could be nicer than this snug spot. An old friend – and her friend –” he added, looking askance at Steven Greene. “I ask you, what could be more pleasant. I'm at a loose end, Moll,” he told her confidingly. “I left the army after a disagreement – just avoided being sent to Cyprus to be shot by some unsavoury gentleman of Mediterranean appearance. Now, here under a cowslip's bell I lie, wondering what to do with the remainder of my life. Any suggestions?”

“Long walk off a short pier,” Molly suggested agreeably.

“Cockney wit – so delightful,” he said to Greene. “No wonder you love having our Molly in your flat. No,” he said to Molly, “actually I think I'll be forced to enter the family business. I forget what it's all about but it's something to do with money so it can't be too bad.” He turned to Greene and said, “I hear you're the Queen of the Gypsies? Any chance of getting my fortune told while I'm here? No – on second thoughts I'd rather you didn't.”

Greene said coolly, “I think I know your fate already.”

“What do you mean by that, oh Queen of the Gypsies and Prince of Ponces?” Charlie said, getting to his feet.

Steven Greene also stood up and said, “I don't need to be clair-voyant to tell you that in the long term you'll go on bullying women and people weaker than yourself as much as you can – or that, in the short term, you'll be standing in South Molton Street in two minutes'
time, unless you happen to be on your back on the pavement.”

John Christian seized Charlie by the shoulders as he tried to pull towards Greene. He said, “I'm not letting him get away with that –”

“I don't want a row,” Greene said.

“Come along, Charlie,” said John, getting annoyed. Charlie got free of him and took a step towards Greene. “Don't be bloody stupid,” said his friend.

Charlie turned round and started for the door. “Perfectly right, John,” he said. “You're so right. Makes no sense at all standing and arguing with a pimp. That's rule I, after all: don't argue with tradesmen, no matter what they deal in.”

Molly slammed the door behind them and sat down angrily in a chair. “Horrible Charlie. Horrible Charlie,” she said.

Greene laughed. “Was it true about the bushes?” he asked.

“Oh – you're horrible yourself,” she said. “I suppose all men are horrible. Charlie gives me the creeps. He really does. He makes me go all gooseflesh.”

Greene, lying back on the sofa, said, “Do you have to sound so common? I love you dearly but it's a great strain on me, having to listen to you. I sometimes think you do it deliberately.” He stood up and put on a record. Mary shouted furiously against a Chopin sonata, “Do you have to sound so queer? If you think I sound common I think you sound like a cream puff half the time, if you want to know. I expect you are. And what do you expect me to sound like or behave like? I'm not twenty and I'm the widow of a convicted murderer and I live in Meakin Street and I work at a club owned by gangsters. This isn't Buckingham Palace is it? I'm not the Queen? I'm like I am because of what I am, just like she is. And come to that, Steven Greene, who gave you the right to criticize me? I might come from a rough and ready home but my parents are honest and so am I. Can you say the same?” She stared at him, then said, “All right if I go to bed now, your high-and-mightyship?”

“Don't go, Moll,” he said, “I'm sorry. Stay a little while – after all, I nearly got in a fight with that hooligan on your behalf. He'd have murdered me, I can tell you that.”

“Bugger off, smarmychops,” said Molly, although she had to admit he was telling the truth. Nevertheless, “Common!” she thought, as she undressed and flung herself into bed in a rage. “Common!” What a cheek! What a sauce! Then a wave of depression and loneliness came over her. She was tired and jaded, bored and angry. She needed more
but did not know what she wanted. She thought of Johnnie with longing, in spite of what he had done. She thought of Charlie Mark-ham and shuddered. She had not had a holiday or an outing since Johnnie left. Now Steven Greene told her she was common. She was weeping with exhaustion and hopelessness when Steven Greene came into the room in his pyjamas, got into bed and put his arms round her. “You're a valuable girl, Molly,” he told her.

A lot of people assume that when you go to the bad, as it used to be called – nowadays I suppose they call it indulging in promiscuity – you do it out of lust and high spirits, in a sort of devil-may-care, pleasure-loving spirit. But most of the time it comes from despair, not knowing what to do with yourself, casting around for a solution, a future or a bit of reassurance. So I've never resented Greene for putting me within an inch of the streets, the Maltese ponce and the clap doctor. It was what I wanted, I suppose, at the time. Anyway, Steven wasn't what Charlie thought he was, not in any direct way. That's to say, he never made a penny at the game. Half the time he was out of pocket. He just brought people together – ignorant millionaires who wanted to buy posh paintings and the dealers who had them in the shops – young, fast aristocrats who wanted to meet a real-life gangster, and gangsters, like the Roses, who enjoyed the connection. The same kind wanted cannabis – Steven knew the black dealers. And half his deals were in information. He got it and he traded it to other people for more information. I'm not saying he didn't get ten percents from time to time, or a crate of champagne delivered at the door. He had to get those things, or how could he have lived? But mostly it was hand-to-mouth stuff and once I found out what was going on I could see the financial set-up was more like Meakin Street than anywhere else – ten bob borrowed till payday and “Excuse me, Mrs Waterhouse, mum says could you kindly lend us a cup of sugar.” Wendy Valentine never had the rent, which was only five pounds a week, and Carol always had ladders in her stockings so he was always pushing a note into her hand and telling her to go out and get new ones. The position was that among the people Steven brought together were us girls, and the people who wanted us girls – his posh friends and flowers of the gutters, like us. I swear I heard him on the phone using those very words – well, half these deals are in romance, aren't they? It's not what you're getting – it's what it means to you. Some crazy aristo must've
fallen in love with the kitchen maid at the age of ten – so yours truly becomes a flower of the gutter. In fact I was the only one of the three of us who was. Wendy and Carol were both the kind of girls who'd spent from ten to fifteen years old dreaming about film stars on some estate in Dagenham or Gravesend. Then the big world presents itself in the shape of some teddy boy who knocks them up outside the local Roxy dance hall – then there's the baby which has to be adopted because the parents can't stand the shame, then they drift to the big city and become amateur prostitutes, only with glamour. The punters are all in the Cabinet, or diplomats, or prime ministers' grandsons. I think that was what saved me from going too far in the game – I knew what was what and if I'd ever had any girlish dreams they'd been knocked out of me. Apart from anything else I was still getting back to Meakin Street to see Josephine over the weekends, though not as often as I should have done. But with what I knew, and a lot of Ivy's horrible sense of reality behind me, I couldn't go for the dream quite the way the other two did. I never even thought I'd get a lot of money out of it because I think both of them, Wendy and Carol, had the idea that in the end Prince Charming was going to come in with the diamonds and the big house with swimming pool in stockbroker Surrey. And I didn't have the real nightmare either: they both thought that if this didn't keep up they'd have to go to work in the only places their neighbourhoods had to offer a girl – somewhere like a boot factory or a bread factory, somewhere like that. The spectre of the white overall and the time-clock haunted them, the way it didn't me. But I think Steven was in on the dream too, half the time. His was a bit different, but it was all glamour – Steven Greene, friend and companion of the great and the man they could trust to get what they needed when they needed it. Also, god of love, though pretty tatty love, you must admit. A lot of the time he couldn't see one side of the deal was naughty girls and the other side was bent sods. They all were, one way or another, why would they have been looking for girls like us? So Steven helped them out, like he treated their old mums' backs and drew their beagles and found another doctor for Aunt Winifred, who'd come by a habit in Berlin in the '30s and got twitchy when the old quack died – yes, he helped but he wasn't their friend. He was a convenience. Poor bugger. They dropped him like a hot potato when he got into trouble – I'll bet the phones ran hot that day. I'll bet the smoke from stuff being burned in the fireplaces would have made a full grown horse faint dead away. I was just a pawn in the game – a silly, depressed girl working in a
hothouse atmosphere who'd had two men in her life so far. Jim Flanders, topped for murder. Johnnie Bridges, criminal. And in spite of all that – the hard work, the dodgy past – I suppose I still wanted some fun whatever sort it was. And it was fun, too, going to these parties and country house weekends in the summer, never knowing who you were going to meet or what was going to happen. I saw the world and how it worked – at the time it worked because everybody was a cousin of everybody else. And funnily enough, while I was living with Steven in that flat, he did broaden my mind. He wasn't stupid, whatever else he was. He made me read books. He talked to me. The world got a lot bigger. That's why I'll never hear a bad word said about Steven Greene. And also, as I've said, I was a bit mad. I couldn't have gone on just croupiering and helping Simon to run Frames, and then, if I had any time over, sitting up late chatting with Steven. I was too young and energetic – I wanted to get on the merry-go-round and I did, and stayed on it laughing till the music stopped.

It began on my own initiative when I took on a date with Charlie Markham and I won't say Steven encouraged me. When I set out in my high heels and spotted nylons and the little black dress with the cleavage he told me, “I hope you know what you're doing.” But I was on course for ruining myself. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some masochism lurking somewhere – that's what the likes of Johnnie Bridges do to you. You lose all proper sense of yourself. You'll go for anything that might make you feel real for a minute. All I said was, “What do you mean?” And he said, “I don't know but I should be careful.” The word careful meant nothing to me in those days, so I went out to dinner with Charlie and then back to his flat, which was all cut-glass and crossed swords over the mantelpiece until you got to the bedroom, which was meant to be seductive but was really dark and gloomy, with dark red walls and black paint and mirrors on the ceiling and a huge fourposter with dark posts and red velvet hangings. It was more like a torture chamber, really, like the spare room at Death Abbey, the one with the flickering candles and the ghost – the mad monk, which was Charlie, who was what they sometimes call inventive. How I got through that night with my nerves, let alone my skin, in one piece I'll never know. I seem to remember falling back on my cheerful cockney sparrer act, giggling when I could and giving uninhibited working-class-style screams when I couldn't help it, especially when he got the cane out. I should have left but I thought, well, I came up here in the first place and, anyway, I thought at any moment he'd
stop. Course, the truth was he couldn't get it up without feeling he was hurting and scaring me and the more I fought back, trying to make the best of it, the longer it was all going to take. So I spent the night running round the room. Finally I'm lying there wearing a lot of costume jewellery and a mask, letting him beat me on the bum with a pillow on it (the pillow was my idea) and screaming and begging him to stop only half-acting and I think after that he actually managed it. I was so pulled and pushed about by then I couldn't remember what happened, though I remember feeling nostalgic about Johnnie and thinking about him just lying there with me and making love like a normal, loving person. I got away about six and straight into a taxi. Steven was up when I got in – he'd obviously been out all night himself. He was a bit drunk – he roared when he saw my face and then laughed his head off when I told him what had happened. He managed to make me a cup of coffee while he fell about the kitchen. What he was laughing at was my outrage, as well as what happened. “He's been thinking about you ever since he first frightened you in the shrubbery,” he said. “He muttered something like that,” I said. I was amazed. “A lot of people are like that,” he told me. “Somewhere along the line their bodies and their imaginations get into a fatal knot.” I moaned. Believe it or not during the morning round comes a great big bunch of roses, signed “Love, Charlie” and after that a phone call. Charlie, asking me out again. I couldn't believe it. After a night of love like that, more like interrogation by the Gestapo, I couldn't think of anything more horrible. I laughed and said no. After that his voice went a bit funny. I'd made an enemy and the day came when I regretted it. Not that it made much difference in the long run.