All The Days of My Life (57 page)

He had delivered all this information in a fast, flat voice with a slight Yorkshire accent. Molly, in the daze of the rough-sleeper and rough-eater, lulled by the food and the heat in the cafe, barely took in what he said. But dimly she recognized in Endell's voice something which was not dulled, like the people she spoke to normally, nor full of masked impatience, like the officials with whom she had to deal.

“I've got a brother and sister, too,” she told him.

“Another cup of tea?” he suggested.

“I'll have coffee,” she surprised herself by saying. He went to the counter to get it and she became suspicious. Perhaps he was after her – some kind of pervert who picked up tatty women in the street. He could be a murderer. It was not unheard of for men to lure people on the tramp, men or women, to bits of waste ground and kill them. When he came back he carried two coffees. As he drank his he said, “That's better – I had one too many at the bar before I left. It's a hazard.”

“Easy to get separated from the kind of people you're meant to be talking about,” observed Molly.

“That's right,” Endell agreed. “And you – where are you going now? Any plans?”

“Me? I'm just staying out of trouble,” Molly replied. It was no use trying to explain. Her life had been too much for her and she could not even find the words to express this. She did not want to. She was done up and glad of it. She could not try any more. She felt a sort of rage against Endell because he could not understand. He might even be trying to draw her back into the world she had left.

He was trying. He looked at her closely. To evade his keen eyes and his friendly expression Molly stood up. “Thanks for the grub,” she said. He could still be a murderer, she thought. Better get out. She said to him airily, “I might be going down to Kent. I've got friends there who'll help me.”

He nodded at her gravely. After she had gone he sat on. The man in the apron, drying cups behind the bar, said humorously, “Girlfriend gone and left you, then? Better run after her – she could take up with some other bloke.”

Endell looked at him. “Ever seen her before?” he asked.

The man shook his head. “Not round here,” he told him and went back to his cups.

The months wore on. September was warm but in October the
pavements began to cool under Molly's feet. Sleeping rough became a matter of tossing under sacks and blankets in corners, sleep was thin and wakeful and her body was stiff in the cold dawns. Then it began to rain. She was obliged to sleep in shelters every night, which cost money. One morning a thought came into her head and she set off from the hostel, without thinking, for the House of Commons. By now it was November, dank and chill. When Endell arrived in the Central Lobby to see her he was shocked. She was in a worse condition than when he had last seen her. She wore old shoes and no stockings. Her face was not clean. Her legs were grimy. The hem of her old earth-coloured coat was coming down. There was a big scab on her hand. He sat beside her on a bench under the eye of a policeman. As she spoke, pouring out the words, he became more and more depressed.

“I need twenty pounds,” was what she said. “I can't go home like this. My mum would die if she saw me. I've got a little girl, well, she's a big girl now but I can't go on like this. It's getting colder and wetter. I want to change my life and look after my little girl. And I've got the means, see. I've got this valuable diamond at a bank in Brighton. Worth thousands. If I can only get it but I haven't got the fare. And they wouldn't believe it was mine, not looking like this. I have to have the fare and a decent coat and shoes. I can't go home. I've got nobody to turn to – will you help me?”

Endell, horrified by this whining scene, played out publicly in the visitors' hall at the House of Commons, regretted, as the honest citizen will, that he had ever extended the hand of friendship to this down-and-out. He told her firmly, “Look here. I'm not green – you can't expect me to hand over twenty pounds on the strength of a story like that.”

Realizing that she was in a public place, talking to a man who had some connection with the outside world, pulled Molly round. She said, “I'm not a liar. I'll ring up the bank and you can talk to them.” She took a deep breath. “And you'll find my family at 19 Meakin Street. That's in your constituency. I'm a constituent of yours and that's why I'm here. Name of Flanders, born Waterhouse. You check up – you'll find I'm telling the truth.”

Endell reflected that it was this trick of turning from the mendicant to the sane and, indeed, quick-thinking person which baffled him. Deciding quickly to trust her a little he told her, “All right. There's no point in ringing the bank. They wouldn't give me information over the telephone. But if your family are constituents of mine I'll try to help
you. If I give you some paper and a stamp will you write to the bank to get confirmation of your story? Get it sent here, care of me. And I'll check –”

“Oh – just give me the money,” said Molly impatiently. Her life had conditioned her to getting small items quickly, or not at all. “Just give it to me and I swear, as God's my witness, I'll never trouble you again.”

“It's a funny story,” Endell said doggedly. “You know that as well as I do. I must look into it and I will. Now – let me give you a few bob for paper and a stamp –”

Molly began to cry, whining, “I don't know what I'm going to do – I don't know which way to turn.”

Endell, spotting the falsity, said, “Shut up. Don't let yourself down like this. Take this money, write off and come back next week.”

Molly, suddenly bitter as the grave, stood up, ignoring the money he held out, and left the House of Commons.

It was this gesture which made Endell begin to believe she might be telling the truth. But when he looked in the electoral register there was no Waterhouse and no Flanders. “You nearly got taken there,” he said to himself.

Molly went on the tramp in November, when most dossers were coming back to the city for the warmth and the extra facilities. She walked straight out of the House of Commons and headed, furiously, over the nearest bridge. She crossed the Thames and started walking south, towards the coast.

She walked doggedly through South London on that rainy morning, still clutching her two carrier bags. She walked through the affluent suburbs with their long lawns and large, neat houses. By afternoon, as the dark was coming down, she was on a long road, under trees with ferny common land on either side. She might have picked up a lift from one of the cars or lorries which swept past her on the road but a kind of obstinacy made her trudge on without stopping. She slept, when she felt she would drop down if she walked any further, beside a tractor in a farm building. She got up at dawn, when she heard a cock crow in the farmyard, and walked on. Later in the morning she bought some rolls in a small bakery in a little place she passed through. She spent the next night in a large park on the outskirts of Brighton. It rained. She was sitting, damp and filthy, on the steps of the bank in Brighton when it opened in the morning. The cashier, reluctantly, called the manager
when she explained what she wanted. The manager was calm. She had only the papers they had given her when she left prison to prove her identity. Nevertheless he listened to her story, took several specimens of her signature and asked her to come back later in the day.

Molly sat on the beach, looking at the cold waves and recalling that it was two years since she had last been here. That was when she had deposited the ring. That was before the combination of Arnie Rose and Johnnie Bridges had got her sent to prison. She ought to have been worried about not getting the ring back but she was not.

“Everything seems in order,” the manager told her, when she went back to the bank in the afternoon. “In any case,” he remarked, giving her the documents to sign, “I recognized you. I never forget a face.”

Molly said, “I don't look the same now.”

“No,” he said, “but I never forget a face.”

“Congratulations,” Mary replied and, seizing her ring, rushed off to find a jeweller who would buy the ring. After a call to the bank manager he offered her three thousand pounds. She took some in cash and the rest as a cheque. Along the front she threw her bags into the gutter. She raced on. Then she turned back and gazed at the newspapers, old clothing, scarves and the battered hairbrush which lay by the kerb in a heap. She bought some jeans, a sweater and a coat, some soap, shampoo and a toothbrush and managed, with some difficulty and by paying in advance, to book herself into a hotel. Next day she returned to Meakin Street, to find Sid, Ivy and Josephine.

Back at the House of Commons, in his office, Joe Endell was getting a surprise.

“Waterhouse,” said Sam Needham, his agent. “Course I know them. Sid Waterhouse was a paid-up member for twenty years. His son's a big union man down in dockland. He's a councillor – chairman of the housing committee – Poplar, I think. I don't know why the Waterhouses aren't on the register. They must have moved out.” He pulled down an old copy of the electoral register from a shelf, as he spoke. “One of the daughters was a naughty girl – ah – that's right – Mary.” He turned over a page. “There you are – three years back – and – Sid and Ivy Waterhouse, no 19 and – no 4 – Flanders, Mrs Mary. Oh, blimey, that's it, of course. Mary Flanders. Her husband was hanged for murder. Did in a nightwatchman during a factory robbery. He was only a kid. No criminal record but the judge decided to make an
example of him. And this girl, his wife, was Sid and Ivy's daughter. It's all coming back to me now. She had a kid just after her husband got topped. After that, she got into trouble.”

“Oh, my God,” said Endell. “I turned her away. I'd better try and find her.”

“Don't do it,” Sam Needham said firmly. “And don't reproach yourself. You can't go handing out money to every tramp who comes asking for it. Mind you, she was a lovely kid. I can remember her round the polling station with Sid when she was about ten or eleven. She was like an angel. I bet she's changed now.”

“She has,” said Endell.

“Better take that wistful look off your face, Joe Endell,” warned Needham. “She's the sort that means trouble. I mean – what happened after her husband died was she took up with God knows who. I think she was working in a club. It had something to do with Norman and Arnie Rose, I do know that. And Ivy had to look after the little girl she had. And finally she fetched up with that property racketeer, Nedermann, you know – the one who was rack-renting half your constituency, the one at the back of half your housing cases, even though he's been dead for two years. That lady you're so sorry for lived high, wide and handsome on the profits of his slums and his brothels. That's where the famous jewellery comes from. Don't you bother with her – save your sympathy for those that need it more.”

Endell grinned, “All right, Sam.”

“I reckon,” said Sam, “that little bleeder can still turn the trick, even covered in flea bites and carrying all her worldly wealth in an old carrier bag.”

“Sam – I was sorry for her,” Endell said.

“I hope that's all you were,” Sam told him. “You should get married and suffer like the rest of us.”

“I've been married,” Endell said. “Now – perhaps we can get back to the sewers in Treadwell Street.”

Nevertheless, dining with his girlfriend, Harriet Summers, he could not help mentioning the matter of Molly's appeal to him for help and how he had not been able to prevent her from leaving without it. “She's muddled and despairing,” he said. “She doesn't know what she's doing. She might have been on the point of restoring herself – I might have been the man who prevented that.”

Harriet, like Sam Needham, told him that he had no need to worry. She added sharply that a woman like Molly Flanders always knew
how to look after herself. But, like Sam, she felt an undercurrent of suspicion about Endell's attitude to Molly. The next day, at the
Daily Mirror,
where she worked, she set to work on the files. The information she obtained, together with the memories of the reporters in the newsroom, and in the pub at lunchtime, made up a useful profile of Molly Flanders. She told no one why she was looking in case an enterprising feature writer decided that this gangland heroine turned down-and-out might make a useful piece of copy for the paper. And, being no fool, she did not tell Endell. She just went on burrowing away.

In the meanwhile Molly, who had found a dentist in Brighton prepared to replace the broken end of her tooth at short notice, was on her way, cleaned up and respectable, back to Meakin Street.

In the afternoon she knocked on the door of number 19. She was already disconcerted when the door opened. The brass knocker in the shape of a fish did not look like Sid and Ivy's doing. Nor did the brown paint on the front door. Nor did the ivy-trailing window boxes on the ledges outside the front window. Meakin Street was going up in the world. But where were Sid, Ivy and Josephine?

The woman who opened the door was wearing jeans and carried a small baby. Behind her, in the passageway, stood a red tricycle. The woman looked at Molly cautiously. She must still have carried some smell of the streets. She said, “Waterhouse? – Of course. Mrs Water-house left an address. She was very insistent – now – where did I put it? Wait there.”

Molly waited. She came back with an address book and read out, “20 Abbot's Close, Beckenham.”

“Thanks,” said Molly and walked back down Meakin Street through the rain. She grinned. Ivy had got her wish at last. The Waterhouses of narrow, poor Meakin Street had become the Water-houses of suburbia. Then she saw two large, black cars stopping outside number 4, the house which had once been hers. People got out and started to go inside. A tall boy in a black suit stood by the car, staring at the house. Molly ran across the street shouting, “George! Georgie!” The boy, a gangling teenager, with pale brown hair and a long, pale face, stared at her. He looked very drawn.