All The Days of My Life (48 page)

It was partly the news about Johnnie which had depressed her. The knowledge that she had invested so much time and passion into a relationship with a man who later found it possible to take money from prostitutes – and Molly knew that meant treating them with a subtle mixture of brutality and faked love – was discouraging. It threw as much doubt on her as it did on Johnnie. He must have offered her the same bait that he later offered to his girls and she, like them, had taken it.

“It might help to get a job,” Simon suggested. “Perhaps things would look better if you had another interest.”

“Ferenc wouldn't let me get away with that,” Molly told him. “He thinks a woman's place is in the home. Anyway, I'm not that bored – I'm learning all these new dishes and so forth. It's no more monotonous than standing in that club night after night saying ‘
Faites vos jeux
,' and shoving bits of celluloid around with a rake.”

“Gets lonelier, though,” suggested Simon.

“That's a fact,” Molly agreed, but knew that half the loneliness she felt came from living with a man who did not love her.

“I don't know what to do,” she confessed. “Unless it's Meakin Street. Perhaps I'd be better off in the country. Once I'm back in Meakin Street I'll decide whether to see if that job at Allaun Towers is still open.”

“Tom Allaun's not improving,” Simon said. Molly looked at him sharply. His tone had been edgy and she guessed Tom had upset him badly.

“What's he done?” she asked.

Simon, about to tell her, changed his mind. “Just this and that,” he said.

After he had gone Molly was rather drunk. She sent a taxi to get
Josephine from school and sat her in front of the television. And by the time Nedermann came home, earlier than expected, she was seated in front of the open safe, crying, with the photograph of his wife and child back in her hand again. She looked up at him, startled, but without her usual fear of his criticisms. She knew, now, she was leaving. The reopening of the safe and the taking of the photograph were like a private farewell. But instead of bursting into exclamations and reproaches about the burgled safe and the exposed photograph Nedermann stood still just inside the door regarding her gravely. Then he said, in a low voice, “You understand – it was a long time ago. I asked you to come here, and Josephine. I wanted to get back the old days. But the longer you and Josephine have been here, the more different you seem. I am sorry – it was selfish. Stupid, also. An old dream.”

“We'll go,” she said, from the floor. “I plan to go. Tomorrow. We've both made a mistake. I shouldn't have opened your safe –”

“I always thought you might be able to do that.”

“Did you think I already had?” she asked.

“Perhaps,” he said. “It's an old safe. I guessed you might have learned –”

“You trusted me with all that money?” she asked.

“I didn't think you'd rob me,” he said, as if that were the least of his worries. “No – I didn't worry about the money,” he added sadly.

He took off his black overcoat and his gloves. He folded the coat neatly and put it over the back of a chair. He stood, a short, thickset, middle-aged man in an open doorway, and said, “I love you.” Even then there was something unnatural, Molly felt, about his declaration. It did not spring from him, as it might have done from a younger man. It was as if he stated a grave fact. Then he groped for a chair he could not see and fell into it, weeping. His shoulders heaved, he buried his head in his hands. Molly went to him, to comfort him.

That night they slept together for the first time. He was a tentative lover at first, shy, almost afraid of damaging her or letting himself go. As she lay beside him that night Molly felt little satisfaction. But there was something in his bulk and in the sad candour of his love for her which made her feel at once protective towards him and protected herself.

True to form, she was back at Ivy's a week later brandishing a large diamond ring and saying that she was getting married. She expected her family to be pleased that she was marrying a successful man and
providing a father and a good home for Josephine. They were not.

“Can I be a bridesmaid, Moll?” asked Shirley.

“Not with them spots,” her older sister remarked cruelly. Shirley rushed out of the room in tears. “It's in a registry office anyway,” Molly called up the stairs. The reply was an incoherent, angry shout.

“I hope you're more tactful than that when Josephine's fifteen,” Ivy remarked. “Honestly, Molly, I should think it over.”

“Don't do it, Molly,” said Sid, who had been on an early shift and was sitting in his uniform having a cup of tea. “Live with him a bit longer until you've made up your mind. It's not the same for you as it was for us. We had to get married to get a bit of privacy –”

“We had to get married, full stop,” Ivy broke in. “But your dad's right. You can take time to consider – you've got Josie to think of, now.”

“Marriage is no joke,” said Sid. “Next thing – you'll have another kid. Then you're committed.”

“No chance of that,” Molly told him, although she suspected that Nedermann badly wanted a child by her. “Anyway, I can't think what you're all on about. You acted up enough when I took up with Johnnie without marrying him. Now you're telling me not to get married. It'd be nice if people round here made up their minds.”

“Circumstances alter cases,” Sid told her gravely.

“What alters what?” Molly asked. “You must all be barmy. I'm better off doing what I want and not listening to you.”

“When did you ever do anything else?” demanded Shirley, coming back into the room.

“You can mind your own business, too,” said Molly. “When I want the opinion of a spotty teenager I'll ask for it.”

“Sorry I spoke,” said Shirley. “I ought to know better than to say anything in this house.” She went off again, banging the door.

“It's these O Levels,” explained Ivy. “She's working ever so hard at her books. They reckon she's got real brains.”

“Might make up for her horrible nature,” Molly said sharply. she was still annoyed by the reception of her news. She added, “Still – you can all relax for a bit. We can't get married until Ferenc's proved officially that his wife's dead. He heard she was from somebody but that's not good enough for the authorities. He's got to get the proper documents.”

“Be a pity if she turns up suddenly,” Sid remarked.

Molly stared at him with dislike and, about to marry a wealthy man unacceptable in her own home, swept off in a taxi with the diamond ring glittering on her finger.

In the event, proving Mrs Nedermann's death was a lengthy and painful business. It meant getting a marriage record which might or might not now exist from a bureaucratic and unsympathetic government. It meant checking the death rolls and lists of survivors of the camp in Poland where Mrs Nedermann and the child had been sent. The applications, the replies, the agents' reports cast a pall over their days. Nedermann was obliged to relive the anguish of the post-war years, after others had told him the details of his wife's death of pneumonia in the winter of 1942 and of the death from gangrene, not long after, of his daughter. Molly privately thought that life would have been simpler if he just forgot about proving himself a widower and declared that he was single. But Nedermann, a former refugee, who had lived on sufferance in Britain for many years before achieving nationality, had a terror of infringing regulations. He believed that if he stated he was single at the registrar's a jealous or vindictive compatriot might denounce him, jeopardizing not only the marriage but his status as a citizen.

A year passed before official proof of Nedermann's wife's death arrived.

The photographs of the old documents, with their crumples and their bent-back corners dark on the page, lay between them on the table one morning seeming, somehow, like the proof of their own crime. There was something accusatory about the old typewritten Gothic script, the alterations in a spikey foreign hand, the sheet of paper recording the deaths of thirty-seven people.

Nedermann stood up and picked up the evidence. He left the room silently. A few seconds later Molly heard the door of the safe close. And that evening he handed her the deeds of two houses, numbers 11 and 13 Baldry Place, in Notting Dale. She took the deeds, wondering if she could do something to rescue the houses and their tenants from decay. As she did so, Nedermann remarked gloomily, “Take care of them. My affairs are becoming complicated. It will be all right but these houses are for you, in case anything goes wrong.”

Nedermann now owned more than fifty houses in London, half a bingo hall in Leeds (given in payment of a debt) and half a row of back-to-backs in Middlesborough, a swap as part of a deal involving three houses in Edgware. In London most of his houses were Victorian
slums, some having been slums since they were built and others having been formerly substantial, now decayed. He had been buying up these properties since the end of World War II, and the post-war shortage of housing and the waves of immigrants coming into Britain in the 1950s had made them highly profitable. Indeed, as he told Molly, the profits on his smart block of flats in Mayfair, inhabited by colonels' widows, rising young barristers and single girls whose well-to-do parents paid the rent, were no more than those he drew from his collapsing houses in Notting Hill, Kilburn and Shepherd's Bush. In these buildings, with their unsafe staircases, leaking roofs and poor sanitation, tenants lived crowded together, afraid to complain about the condition of the houses in case they were turned out.

Nedermann himself operated from a couple of ramshackle offices in Bayswater, with a staff of about ten men, ranging from bright young men in smart suits to thugs whose heavy bodies and battered faces indicated to the tenants what they could expect if they made a fuss. They collected their rents accompanied by Alsatian dogs. They were not above showing Nedermann's tenants a glimpse of a revolver if they proved awkward in their complaints or slow with the rent. And yet, like many tyrants, Nedermann was capable of acts of kindness. He had the child of one of his tenants driven in his own car regularly to and from a hospital for treatment. He could give a flat at rock-bottom prices to a homeless stranger he took a liking to. But when Molly complained about the rats in the basement of one of his houses he only said, “What can I do about it? The people who live there – they should kill the rats. Am I ratkiller? No, I'm a businessman. I run my business. I work hard so I don't end up like some of the human vermin living in my property. If they worked like I do they would be living next door to me in Orme Square. Instead they sit and whine about the rats. They are weak. Let them kill their own rats or move out – it's their choice.” Molly found all this chilling, but she said nothing. She was having a hard time keeping up with Nedermann's demands on her. She had to be the perfect cook, hostess and mother – three roles in which she had not had much experience – as well as a bright, well-dressed and gay companion when they were at parties and clubs together. But while he wanted her to cause envy in other men he became furious if she drank too much or flirted more than he thought right. On one occasion, at a party at the house of a Member of Parliament, he had told her firmly that they were leaving and, when she hesitated, had dragged her out of the room by her wrist. He had forced her into the car and, slamming
the window which separated them from the burly chauffeur, who also acted as a rent-collector, he shouted, “Can't you control yourself? Do you think I can take you to decent places with decent people when you behave like a whore off the streets?” Molly, who had been flirting with a racing driver and given him a little kiss, shouted back, “At least he was paying me some attention. What am I supposed to do? Stand around all evening while you talk about the Leasehold Reform Bill? I keep house all day long and in the evenings I dress up and stand beside you while you talk business. You talk business, you think business – I bet you even dream business. What do you want?”

“A little love – a little loyalty,” he replied shortly.

“Like him,” she said, nodding at the figure in the driver's seat. “Someone who says yes sir, no sir, three bags full because you're paying him to do it.”

“I don't know what you mean with your three bags full,” Nedermann said. “I know a woman who has everything she wants should support her husband and not act like a street woman.”

“I'm not married to you yet,” she reminded him. Underneath his frenzy she could sense the chronic anxiety of the refugee who arrives with nothing but the knowledge of how terrible life can be. It was the fear of being hauled back into the world of deportation, exile and poverty which drove Nedermann. This was also the source of his callous attitude to his tenants – he had suffered once as they did now, he reasoned. If they didn't like it they should do what he had done – escape.

Molly sighed. “I'm like a horse,” she complained. “No wonder I feel like a bit of fun from time to time. How many are coming tomorrow?”

“Ten,” he told her.

“Oh, Christ,” Molly said. “What did you do before you had me? Why can't you get a caterer in? You need six women, not one.”

“A woman should look after her man,” he told her. “Only the lazy ones complain.”

Molly had been bred in the old tradition of women who stand in the street in curlers and slippers, grumbling to each other about their demanding husbands and disorderly children as if these chains were all that prevented them from following their true vocations as film stars or the matrons of London teaching hospitals. She said sourly, “So only the lazy ones complain, eh? What do the good ones do – die at the age of thirty-two with grateful smiles on their faces?”