All The Days of My Life (56 page)

All Molly had said was that she would decide what to do when she left prison. She was now very dazed all the time but had enough rudimentary cunning left to write to Sid and Ivy giving her release date as the 18th, instead of the 13th. She thought that this deliberate mistake would escape any censor's eye and, indeed, it did. When Sid and Ivy came to meet her, she was gone – well, it was freedom she wanted, wasn't it? Freedom. She says the word aloud into the empty space of the warehouse. Down below, there is a loud, mad, laugh.

So it goes on. Molly does the drift, sleeping sometimes in hostels, with the restless, rootless women tossing and turning all round her, and sometimes in derelict houses and sometimes, on fine nights, on patches of waste ground. She gets money from the Social Security (someone has given her a birth certificate in the name of Maria Lane, from Birmingham). She eats eggs and chips in cafes or sandwiches and coffee from snack bars and stalls. Her appearance deteriorates because she can only bathe or wash her hair at the public baths, because her shoes are worn with walking and her clothes have become dirty and damaged by sleeping rough. She hooks up with a couple of mates, a young girl in an Indian dress, who wears no shoes, and an older man who this girl says is her father, although it seems unlikely, for he wears a shiny suit and speaks with a strong Irish accent. They wander together, drinking and taking pills when they can lay hands on them, planning their daily journeys, telling each other long contradictory tales about who they are, have been and will be. Lines of weariness carve themselves on Molly's face. She loses the bottom of a front tooth when a boy throws half a brick at the group while they are sitting round their fire on a patch of waste ground near Commercial Road.

In this way she drifts through the summer of 1966, awake at night, awake at dawn camped on rough grass behind a wall, sleeping on benches and on the ground, restless, nightmare-ridden in sleep, half-awake during the day, hearing her companions talking to each other: “Give us a puff of your fag, then,” “the ugly bugger,” “get the train to Aberdeen.” “Look at him over there, will you, what does he think he is?”

At this point my father said, “We tried to get her a decent job. Do nothing – she's on her own now.” I was unhappy about this – I'm unhappier now that I know the facts were even worse than I supposed. I was the person who had to explain how Mary had refused the job, and disappeared. There was considerable consternation. She had, to be frank, been more or less forgotten. The knowledge that she had vanished brought her back to mind. In short, I had been continuing in my duties like some conscientious functionary of a failing empire, who continues to mark the rolls in some distant, barbaric outpost with no idea that events at the centre are causing his efforts to be ignored. No attention was being paid to my continuing labours, which had been organized at a time when they seemed important. Time had dulled all interest in them – indeed, after a brief flurry of concern at her disappearance, it was agreed to let the matter drop and I was left with the sad feeling of someone who finds the work of many years discounted. At that point, keeping an eye on Molly was no longer my responsibility. Yet it remained a minor obsession. I was fascinated. I was, at this time, sorry for Molly, although impatient with her. And there was perhaps, even then, more to it than that. At all events, I still wanted to follow what was happening to her as much as I could but, obviously, at this stage there was no trace of her. Obviously she had something like a nervous breakdown in Holloway. After all, in the space of a few months she had seen her protector, Nedermann, die, had tried to reconstruct her life in spite of being pursued and terrified by one of London's worst gang bosses. She had almost succeeded until the unexpected arrest, trial and imprisonment. No wonder these blows and struggles, followed by the shock of prison, had exhausted her. On her release, she must have wanted to escape everything she knew. The danger was that the dreadful life would drag her down and make permanent the separation from a normal existence she was trying to achieve. She might have gone further and further down until she died perhaps, of self-neglect. The prognosis for her was good – she was young, strong and basically intelligent. Yet even these things are not always enough to save a man or woman. Bad luck and wrong circumstances can destroy the strongest of us.

Molly sat at a long table in a big, institutional room, green-painted to knee height, and dull white above that. She was eating her bowl of soup in the company of tramps, vagabonds, unemployed labourers
looking for work, and a couple of blank-eyed hippies in jeans and bright shirts.

Two men entered the silent room, with two others behind them. In front came the vicar of St Botolph's, whose mission this was. Beside him stood a stocky man of medium height, wearing a black suit and a red tie. His stance implied energy. His bright, blue eyes went round the room quickly, taking in what was to be seen.

Molly, sitting between an old lady with bird's-nest grey hair and no teeth and a young boy who had evidently been thrown out by his parents, took no notice of the party, which was in charge of investigating the extent to which private charities supporting the poor should be subsidized from public funds. Very few of the eaters looked up from their plates, in fact. Some two months earlier a man had been thrown down the stairs of a doss house nearby and kicked to death. The coroner had called it murder. The culprits were either the inmates of the hostel or the staff in charge. Witnesses had scattered fast after the event but the dead man had, it turned out, not been so detached from society as many others – two brothers, one a bank manager, and two sisters, both married to policemen, were keeping the subject of their brother's death on the boil. In consequence the arrival of the vicar and three men in suits was taken to mean further investigation and no one in the room wanted to be involved.

So even when Molly noticed the group in the doorway she pretended to take no notice. She went on eating her bread, which was hard, and ignoring the pain when she bit down on her damaged front tooth.

The man in the black suit and the red tie habitually moved fast. He was at Molly's side very quickly, holding out a large hand and saying, “Hullo. I'm Joe Endell. Who are you?” Molly paused before she realized she was meant to take the outstretched hand. Formal introductions had not been part of her experience for a long time.

“Mary Flanders,” she said, taking the hand.

“Are you here often?” he asked.

Molly looked into the bright, blue eyes and told him, “Quite often. The floor's not too good but the band's terrific.”

Joe Endell's eyes glittered a little but, short of time and spotting someone who could respond quickly, he merely asked in an undertone, “Have they done it up recently?”

“Cleaned it up a bit – changed the knives and forks,” Molly told him in a low voice. In a few seconds she seemed to have left the daze of poverty, fatigue and depression she had been walking through for
months. It could have been a spontaneous remission. It could have been the lively glint in Endell's eyes. And so, resuming, more loudly, her mendicant's whine, she said to him, “It's lovely here. One of the best cribs in London.” Then, on a lower register, “There's a funny room upstairs where they put blokes who get out of control. I don't think the vicar knows too much – back room, third floor.”

She startled herself by her own responses. Fighting them off she looked down at her plate again.

“Thank you very much for talking to me,” Endell told her. He moved away to talk to some of the others while she picked up her hard bread, stood up and walked out. She ate it under a big tree in Hyde Park, later, and then fell asleep. In the meanwhile Endell was persecuting the staff at the mission mercilessly, looking into every room and asking questions, while his assistants chafed to get away, thinking they had seen all they needed. On the third floor, since he had seen every room, every lavatory and every bathroom, he could not be refused permission to see inside the small room at the back. The vicar was surprised to find the door locked and the key apparently missing.

“Must be somebody here who can pick a lock,” Endell suggested boldly.

At this point a key was hastily produced and the door opened. The party gazed at concrete walls, mysteriously stained, a tiled floor, a mattressless bed. They smelled disinfectant and vomit. Under that, the scent no one can plainly smell but all can detect – fear. The vicar turned to a subordinate to ask a question. Endell made a note in his pocket-book and said, “What's this room for?”

“I shall be finding out,” the vicar said firmly.

“I shall be interested to know,” said Endell. Endell's companions, now seeing the point of the exhaustive survey of the mission, indicated agreement. Then the party broke up, the barrister to return to his chambers and the civil servant to his ministry, Endell himself to stroll on foot, back to the House of Commons. As he walked beside the river the picture of Molly's frowsled blonde hair, her wide pale mouth, with the chipped tooth, and her weary blue eyes came back to him. “The band's terrific,” he said to himself with a grin. He realized that what made her memorable was the way she had spoken to him as an equal. In places such as that, as in many other places, a man such as himself would seldom be spoken to informally. Nor, because of that constraint, would he hear about the little rooms of various kinds on various third floors throughout the country. The people elected you as
their representative, thought Joseph Endell, MP, walking through the gloomy high halls of the House of Commons, and then, half the time, they respected you too much to tell you anything they thought unsuitable for you to hear. If the saucy young vagrant had not spoken up, he and the others would never have discovered that sinister room at the mission where the staff must treat awkward customers in any way they saw fit.

Meanwhile Molly, beneath her tree, dreamed of Endell buying eggs in the corner shop in Meakin Street. Then her dreams took on the confusion of the homeless, rootless, lost.

A week later, Joe Endell left the House of Commons at midnight. As he walked along by the river in the intense, late heat which follows a hot, close day in the town he saw a woman sitting at the base of one of the pineapple-topped columns of Lambeth Bridge. She looked, in fact, as if she had been standing against it until she had suddenly slid to the ground. Nice to be in the country, Molly was thinking, as she sat on the pavement. Perhaps, she dreams, she will go to Framlingham and talk to Mrs Gates. In fact she was really heading towards a quiet, cool bed in the vetch and long grass of an old graveyard in the City of London.

As she rose to her feet she came nose to nose with Joe Endell. “Oh,” he said, and, a true politician, remembered her name, “Mary Flanders.”

Molly was kicking herself for having given him her real name. She said muzzily, “Can't remember yours – what is it?”

“Endell,” he told her. On impulse he said, “Can I buy you a meal somewhere?” He told his agent, Sam Needham, later, that he wanted to ask her more about the workings of the hostels, soup kitchens, shelters, even the social services as they might be seen by a homeless person. This was the point at which Sam started to laugh.

However, Endell indeed began to question her as they walked up wide, empty Victoria Street under a full moon.

“How long have you been living rough?”

“Since the spring,” Molly told him.

“This spring?” said Endell, thinking that she had not yet been reduced by trying to live rough through the winter.

“That's right,” said Molly. “What do you do?”

“I'm an MP,” Endell told her.

“Oh,” said Molly. “Where for?”

“Kilburn West,” said Endell.

Molly hesitated. The constituency he named included Meakin
Street. She did not want to think about Sid or Ivy or her daughter and she knew that if she told Endell she knew the area he might start trying to arrange something for her. She was probably a responsibility of his. In fact, he probably knew her brother Jack. Endell noticed the silence and filled it. He told her, “I'm Labour. I do some journalism, too. I'm from Yorkshire.”

“Labour got in, didn't they?” Molly asked vaguely.

“That's right,” Endell said. “This'll do, won't it?” He led her into a small cafe down a side street. They sat down at a Formica table.

“This is nice of you,” Molly said. “Why?”

“You did me a good turn,” he told her. “If you hadn't tipped me off about that little room at the mission I wouldn't have believed it. There were clues in the reports I was reading but I needed to see the real thing. It was pretty horrible.”

“Sausage, tomato and chips,” said Molly to the man who came up in a stained white apron. “And I'll have a cup of tea.”

At a nearby table some lads were lounging, making a noise. Then one of them got up and put some money in a jukebox. The sound of the Rolling Stones beat into the hot atmosphere.

“We'll be watching for that sort of thing in future,” Endell told her.

“Good,” Molly replied. Through the blur she was conscious of a man sitting opposite her who did not want anything. In the life she was leading nearly everyone wanted something – little evanescent desires, for a cigarette, or a few bob or a pair of shoes, flowed like a current between one and another. And here was someone who was not wondering if she had any money or pills, or a few cigarettes, on her. She took it for granted that he would not want from her what men want from women. She was tired and dirty. She was wearing plimsolls and an old coat. She wore a brown beret over her hair and, as a final touch, she lacked half a front tooth. She was well disguised. She had given up being a woman, perhaps because it had given her too much trouble and pain.

Endell, naturally polite, did not question her about how she came to her present situation but, as they ate, told her about himself. “I'm lucky – they couldn't give me a constituency up North but I was selected for the one in London. There's no travelling so I can spend more time there – in fact, I live there. I've got a lot to learn about the constituency and the people. I couldn't manage without the agent there. He's local and he knows everything and everybody. My parents still live up North, though. My father's a doctor and my mother's a
teacher. I've got a brother and sister, too. Have you any brothers and sisters?”