All The Days of My Life (68 page)

“I'll make some tea,” said Isabel Allaun to her daughter-in-law.

Tom sat down. Molly opened one of the long windows which led to the lawn. She stepped out, enjoying the brilliant sunshine, walked down through the tangled shrubbery and across to the lake. It was low,
now, and scummy. Dried-out reeds and long grass stood round the edges. Then she turned round and went back to the house. After the wedding, the long night of argument with Tom, and lonely reflection at Meakin Street, she was exhausted. She sighed as she crossed the lawn. It was the place she had loved best as a child but, now she came to it as an adult, everything seemed different. She wondered, again, whether she should have come here. And yet, neglected as it was, the house still had its big, high rooms, the air outside was still pure, birds still nested under the eaves. As she stepped back through the window Isabel Allaun came in with a tea tray. “Tom!” she said sharply.

He got up to take the tray, asking, “Where's Mrs Gates?”

Molly had been about to ask the same question. “She's been ill for a week,” Isabel said. “She had something like a slight stroke – the doctor wasn't sure. He wanted to move her to the cottage hospital but she didn't want to go. She's in her flat over the stables. Vera Harker's coming in twice a day to help.”

Molly said, “Oh – I'll go to see her straight away.”

“No tea?” enquired Isabel.

But Molly refused and anxiously took the path past the vegetable garden, which she saw had only a few straggling peas leaning on crooked sticks in it, and crossed the mossy flagstones into the stable block. It was surrounded by four walls. On one side stood the five stables and, above them, a hayloft and a set of small rooms where the groom and his wife must once have lived. The last horse had gone before Molly arrived as a child so that all she remembered of the rooms was bare boards and some tattered lithographs pinned to the wall of ladies with piled up hair and bare shoulders. What was Mrs Gates doing there now, she wondered, as she climbed the wooden steps up from the yard and pulled up the latch of the wooden door at the top. How ill was she and why wasn't she still living in the house?

She saw why as soon as she was inside. The small sitting room was panelled with the same dark wood she remembered from childhood but it had been restored, cleaned and freshly varnished. The paintwork in the little room was bright. The small fireplace was tidy and the brass fire irons shone. She smiled, recognizing that Mrs Gates had retreated from the deterioration at the big house and created a little snug for herself here. “Isn't it lovely?” she said to the elderly woman sitting in her chair with a rug over her knees.

“Mary,” said the old woman in a tired voice. “I've been waiting for you.”

“Well, I'm here now,” she said. “Want a cup of tea?”

“Vera's coming,” Mrs Gates told her. “Let her do it. You remember Vera – her brother Fred pushed you into a bramble bush once and she was the one who pulled you out.”

“Can't say I do remember,” Molly said, pulling up a chair and sitting down – Mrs Gates was speaking to the child she had been. She felt as if she had never left.

“You were scratched to smithereens,” Mrs Gates said.

“I daresay,” Molly replied. “But how are you, that's the question?” She studied the other woman carefully. Of course she knew that Mrs Gates would look older but she had not been prepared for her being so much thinner. She had always been a heavy woman, pinafore bursting round her bust and hips and legs like thick saplings. Now her face was thinner and more drawn. Her hands, on the blanket, looked frail and wasted. And she seemed very weary.

“I'm not so bad,” Mrs Gates replied, cheerfully enough. “I'm just tired. I need a little rest.”

“I'm not surprised,” Molly said. “That place is enough to wear anyone out. As soon as you're well enough I'll take you to London in the car. Ivy wants you to come and stay – she told me to tell you this time she wouldn't take no for an answer.”

“I don't know how they'd get on without me,” Mrs Gates said. “Still – as you're here –”

“That's just it,” agreed Molly. “I'm here. After all, you trained me up. Now you can profit by it. Anyway, my baby's coming down here soon. And I want you at the christening.” Yet she felt uneasy as she looked at the old woman and, as Mrs Gates looked back at her, knew that she, too, doubted how soon she would be better.

“My Josie's coming, too,” she said. “I bet you never thought I'd turn up here again, with all my offspring.”

Looking into Mrs Gates's eyes she realized she was taking the jovial tone of someone visiting a sick person who assumes that the patient has, due to their illness, become an idiot.

Mrs Gates said, “I knew you'd come. Though I never thought it would be because you'd married Tom.”

Molly noticed that she did not congratulate her and was relieved. “Sitting here,” Mrs Gates said, “the past seems as plain to me as yesterday – maybe plainer. That's how I knew, you see – the gypsy. She told you such things – and they've come true, some of them. My goodness, though,” she said, staring from the window as if she could
see the house, which she could not, for the windows faced out, over the lake towards the trees and the tip of the church spire. “My goodness, though, this place has gone down. All cracked and broken, all collapsing.” She closed her eyes, then, and seemed to doze.

Molly sat there a little longer, listening to the ticking of the wooden clock she had so admired as a child, studying the toby jug, the plaster cat and the little statue of the pink and white lady in the old-fashioned dress which stood on this mantelpiece as they had stood on Mrs Gates's old mantelpiece in her attic back at the house. She gazed again at Mrs Gates's peaceful, lined face. Then she stood up and tiptoed across the carpet and down the narrow wooden stairs to the yard.

There she met a plump woman of about her own age. She had a wicker basket in her hand. “Lady Allaun?” asked the woman. For a moment Molly wondered where Isabel was. Then remembered she was Lady Allaun. She nodded, studying the other woman's features to see if she recognized a face from childhood. She did not.

She asked, “Did we go to school together?”

The woman said, “I wouldn't have recognized you and I don't suppose you recognize me.”

“Can't say that I do,” Molly said. Glancing up at Mrs Gates's window she added, “She's asleep now. I haven't really had time to find out what's the matter with her. She looks very ill to me – worse than they said.”

“That's right,” said the woman, Vera Harker. “The doctor wanted her to go to hospital. She's been waiting for you.” Molly was startled.

“I hope I can do some good,” she said. “I've been wondering if she should be alone at night.”

“I'll stay,” Vera Harker said promptly. “I've got my nightie in this basket.”

Molly looked at her, wanting to ask how ill she thought Mrs Gates was. Vera Harker looked back. Molly did not ask the question but her heart sank.

Mrs Harker went up to the house to telephone her family and tell them she was staying. Molly sat on the wooden mounting block, and looked through the stable entrance to the vegetable garden and the corner of the house. The bricks of the vegetable garden wall and the house were reddening as the sun went down. Now she remembered Vera Harker. They always taunted her by saying her granny was a gypsy. She denied it but all the children knew it was true. She and Vera
used to tag along after the big boys when they went out scrumping apples from the neighbouring orchards. We got chased by a big black dog, once, she thought, as she wandered back to the house. She was not looking forward to going inside again. At least I'm here for Mrs Gates, in case she dies, she told herself. This was the first time she had actually admitted the possibility of Mrs Gates's death but it had been there all the time – and she had read it in Vera Harker's eyes.

She did not go directly into the sitting room but, as if she were a child again, wandered through the house. As a child, she enjoyed the sweep of the big staircase and the huge, sparsely furnished rooms. As an adult, she observed the deterioration. It was not evident at first, for plainly Mrs Gates had cleaned everything that could be cleaned and mended everything that could be mended. But half the lights were out of action, one lavatory would not flush and five or six other minor defects made the mended tears in the faded curtains and the rows of shining pans in the kitchen look like a full-hearted effort to check continual decay. She wondered why Tom had not tried to do some repairs and then, knowing she did not want to be detected on the prowl by Isabel, went downstairs. She found them looking through an old photograph album. “I thought you'd like to see it,” said her mother-in-law. “Such a pity there was hardly any film when you were here in the war. Look, Tom – there you are stepping on the Bishop's foot at Charlie's sister's christening.” Molly, who had just seen wet walls and leaking cisterns, conquered a surge of irritation at this nostalgic search through the family albums. She went over to look through the pictures. It only made her more despondent. Allaun Towers was too expensive. The sale of the house in Meakin Street would not produce enough money to restore it and even then there would be nothing on which to keep it up. Once there had been a gardener who kept the lawn on which they picnicked in these snapshots, there had been servants to tend the rooms in which the people here were photographed in evening dress, drinking cocktails. Now both money and help were lacking.

Meanwhile, Isabel pointed out there was nothing to eat in the house because of Mrs Gates's illness. Molly made omelettes and she and Tom spent the night in the large bed in which his parents had once slept. Since Isabel had made a point of the efforts she had made to remove her effects from the room – “It's more suitable for you,” she had said, “now there are two of you” – there was no question of not using the
room. Molly and Tom undressed embarrassedly, Tom taking off his clothes and putting on his pyjamas in the dressing room which led from the main bedroom. They got into bed. Molly instantly declared herself to be exhausted. Tom agreed that he was, too. Having, so she thought, declared that she was not expecting him to make love to her, Molly thought that at least they might talk. There seemed to be much to discuss. She was hoping he might give her some idea of what his plans for the future were – instead he went straight to sleep. She remembered that even while they had been at Meakin Street he had been preoccupied with getting a night's undisturbed rest. Now she realized that what she had seen as the small change of conversation – “I must get some sleep,” “I had nightmares all night long” – was, to him, the discussion of a crucial affair. In consequence Molly lay awake, worrying about Mrs Gates and wondering what to do about the house, the money and herself and her child. Had she really heard Joe's voice telling her to bring the child to Framlingham? Would the real Joe have advised her to stay, or go back to London as fast as possible?

She got up early next morning. The sun was shining and she strolled in the garden, sat drinking her tea on the still-dewy lawn, then leaned, half-dozing, against the apple tree in the kitchen garden. Scarlet pimpernels grew all over the parched earth. She reflected dreamily that Tom or Isabel could at least have grown some vegetables. But for the row of declining peas there was no sign of cultivation of the humped rows of earth where plants had once grown. She even remembered where Benson used to put the potatoes, remembered dropping the old, wrinkled seed potatoes into the trench and helping him to cover them over. She shut her eyes, recalling the long days of childhood, when time stopped, her small bed under the eaves, being woken at dawn by the wagtails nesting there in the guttering below the roof, the taste of an apple picked from the branch you were sitting on and the lane to school in autumn, when the hedgerows were going gold and brown and the air was thin and misty –

“Lady Allaun,” came a voice from behind the garden wall. She glanced up and saw Vera Harker, and caught a curious glance. Vera saw no bride, just a tired woman in her thirties sitting under a tree in the early morning.

“You'd better call me Mary again,” she said. “Or better than that-Molly. That's what they call me in London. No point in standing on ceremony. I remembered suddenly when we had to run away from Mr Crewe's
dog. How's Mrs Gates this morning?”

“I don't like to leave her alone too long,” Vera Harker said. “But I've got to go and get the children off to school.”

“I'll go,” Molly said. “Will you get something for her lunch in the village? I'll give you the money when you get back.” A thought crossed her mind. “Who's paying you for all this?” she asked.

Mrs Harker looked embarrassed and said, “Lady Allaun said she'd give me a sum – I don't like to charge at all, you understand –”

“We'd better talk about it when you come back,” Molly told her. At some point she or Tom would have to reveal to Isabel that Molly had not come to Allaun Towers with a vast fortune. For all she knew Vera Harker's wages were guaranteed by this imaginary sum of money. She said, “Do you think you could come back at about twelve?” Then she hurried off to see Mrs Gates.

“The doctor'll be along later,” called Mrs Harker.

Molly climbed the wooden stairs into the flat above the stables. Mrs Gates lay in the bedroom in her big bed with the carved wooden headboard. Her face was grey above snow-white sheets. She was asleep, or so Molly thought. By the side of the bed was a photograph in a silver frame, of Tom and Charlie, with herself standing in front on a summer day, on the lawn in front of the house. Even if Tom looked a little sulky they were all healthy; bare-legged, bright-eyed – Charlie was holding his treasured cricket bat. The other photograph, in another silver frame, showed a tall man, in an old-fashioned suit and a plump, smiling woman in a floral dress who held a baby in long, white clothes. Mrs Gates, thought Molly, and the absconding Mr Gates, and the baby which died.