All The Days of My Life (85 page)

“Of course I don't mind,” he said. He glanced at his watch, “I'd better be getting back.” He looked at her and said uneasily, “You're looking well. I hope you're happy.”

“I'm happy,” she said. “I can tell you are.”

They parted, he to go back to work and she to go down to Framlingham.

She remembered this as she mounted the polished stairs to the room on the first floor where her mother lay. She and Tom might have separated to go on different journeys, she thought, but there would be no more for Ivy, except the one which took her out of the world. Her mother lay flat in bed with her eyes closed. The nurse's five minutes would have tired her. As Molly sat down she asked, “Mary? Is Sid here yet?”

“No, Mum,” she said. “He'll be along in about fifteen minutes.”

“I thought it was nearly time,” Ivy said, in her weak voice.

There was something in her face which alarmed Molly. She said, “I'll ring up just to make sure he's on his way.”

“Don't disturb him,” she said faintly.

Molly went to telephone Sid. She said, “Haven't you left? Mum wants you.”

“I was on my way out,” he said. And immediately asked, “Is she worse?”

“I don't know – she keeps asking for you,” Molly told him.

“I'm on my way,” he said.

Molly went back to Ivy's room and sat down. “Sid's on his way,” she said.

Ivy sighed. “On his way,” she muttered. Then she said, “That thing I wanted to tell you –”

Molly said, “Yes.”

“Prop me up,” Ivy asked. The tired voice was urgent.

Molly very carefully drew her frail body up the bed. She could feel Ivy's sharp elbows and shoulder blades. She was secretly afraid that she might break one of her bones. Finally Ivy was propped up against two pillows, resting against a frame at the top of the bed. She shook her head in bewilderment at her own frailty. She turned her head towards Molly and said, “I'll say it straight out. You're not my daughter.”

“Mum?” said Molly. She stared at the wasted face. It must be a delusion brought on by the drugs she was being given, she thought. But what a horrible fantasy. She felt hurt that now, at the last moment, Ivy's brain had produced a dream, a nightmare, in which she rejected her.

Ivy nodded her head slightly from the pillow. “You think I'm losing my mind,” she said. “But it's true.”

Molly, not knowing what to think, drew a deep breath and answered, “If it is true it doesn't matter. You've been my mother – a good mother. That's what really matters.”

“I hope so,” Ivy said. “I've tried. But sometimes, with what's happened to you, I thought you could have had a better life somewhere else.”

“I'm all right. I'm fine,” said Molly in bewilderment. At that moment it did not really seem to matter whether Ivy had adopted her or not. The present was too important. Every moment took Ivy closer towards a mystery – Molly felt it now, hovering about her. She knew Sid had felt it, and Shirley. There was little room, here, for the past or the future. Time had stopped. She said, “Don't worry, Mum. I'm content with everything. Tell me what you like but don't tire yourself. Mothers are the people who bring you up – you were Josie's mother too, most of the time. You took her in when I was fit for nothing. You saved her.”

“She's a lovely girl,” Ivy said.

“Thanks to you,” her daughter said.

“I don't think you believe me, Mary,” her mother said, and it may have been the way in which she persistently called her by her old name, the name she had had as a child, which made Molly wonder if what she said was true. Ivy said, “Tom Totteridge found you in a bombed building and on the way down the street Sid met him. He had you on the cart. He just took you up in his arms and handed you down, a little girl, with golden curls, all filthy from the fire. There wasn't anybody about.”

Molly gazed at her mother in horror. “Sid brought you home to me. I'd lost my baby, on account of the bombing. A bomb landed nearby and blew me over. I got up and started to come home but I fell down in the street – a man had to carry me to hospital. The roads were all blocked. And then I nearly died and after that I think I went a bit mad. I kept on hitting Jackie, poor little mite, and in the end they had to take him away from me. He stayed with my sister. I wanted a girl, see, and
this baby would have been a girl. I was beside myself. I didn't know what I was doing. And they didn't have these drugs in those days. They couldn't do anything for you. Old Tom knew how I was. He found me in the street one day, crying, and brought me home. He saw Sid, that early morning when there was nobody about – I suppose he thought it'd help.” She paused, “After that I was all right. At first I thought you was mine, the little girl I wanted. Then I came round and I knew you weren't.” She was staring forward now, talking as if to herself. “But no one came forward to claim the other one. So I kept you.”

Molly's head spun. The other one. Oh, God – the other one, she thought. And remembered what Peggy Jones had said in the Kilburn pub. “It was the girl who'd been screaming and crying… he was lying on top of her but her face was free … the bed on fire and their dead mother lying on it … he asked the boy who he was but he couldn't speak.” She murmured Peggy's words, “Let's hope they never knew how bad it was.” Ivy, very tired, asked, “Who?”

“The children,” Molly answered, scarcely knowing what she was saying. She knew she must respond to her mother's story without telling her the whole truth. How could Ivy ever forgive herself for what happened later? And yet she could not think what to say, how to act. Ivy had told her the secret she had kept for so many years – now she must keep the secret beyond the secret. The atmosphere in the room was heavy now, full of death. Molly herself struggled to get some air into her own lungs. Finally she said, quietly, “Thanks for telling me, Mum. But, like I say, I'm still your child. The past is still the same –” and then, trying not to cry, she said, “It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. What difference does it make?” And added, “You saved me from the orphanage – it was the same as the way you saved Josie –”

She knew she was tiring Ivy, who lay leaning against the pillows, after her confession, as if she were completely exhausted, her eyes open and unblinking. Molly felt the contrast between her own human vitality and her mother's body, from which the spark of life had almost gone. And Ivy lay back, drugged and dying, seeing Lil Messiter walking up Meakin Street towards her. It was a sunny day and Lil was wearing a cotton dress with flowers on it. “Hullo, Lil,” said Ivy. Molly leaned forward in her chair to catch the mumbled words but she could hear nothing. Lil smiled at Ivy. “Hullo, Lil,” she said again.

The door opened. Molly turned at the sound and put her finger to her lips. Then she shook her head, sadly. And she mouthed at him, “She told me – about you getting me off Tom Totteridge's cart.” She
smiled. “Nice bargain off a rag-and-bone man. Tell her when she wakes up – it doesn't matter.” She stood up and kissed him and left the room quietly. But Sid was behind her in the corridor, “I told her,” he said. “Told her time and again you should know. She was like a madwoman on the subject – a madwoman, I'm telling you. Like she was with the Flanders' when Jim died. That was when it all came back to her – You should have known before.”

“Doesn't make any difference, does it, Dad?” Molly said. “Children are who you bring up, that's right, isn't it? Doesn't matter where you get them from – it's who you bring up.”

He nodded at her and said, “I'd better get back inside.”

Molly walked swiftly down the corridor. She saw the nurse who had attended to her mother earlier.

Molly said, “She's looking very weak. Can you tell me anything?”

“She's happy,” said the nurse. “That's the chief thing.”

Molly asked her directly, “How long will it be?”

“You can never tell,” said the nurse in her professional voice. “The main thing is that she's happy and comfortable –” But there must have been something in Molly's expression which commanded a less brisk approach. She broke off and said, “Not long now.”

“Is it days?” asked Molly.

She hesitated. “I don't think it will be days,” she told her.

“Thanks,” Molly said.

She met her brother Jack coming through the swing doors into the reception area. He looked at her in fear as if she might be bringing the news of Ivy's death.

“Hullo, Jack,” she said. “I thought you weren't coming till tomorrow.”

“I had an impulse,” he said. “I came straight on from a meeting. How is she?”

“Pretty bad,” Molly told him. “I talked to the nurse – she said it would be soon. Not even a few days, she said.”

Jack sighed. “I must have known it,” he said. “Are you going to ring Shirley?”

“No point yet,” said his sister. “Do you want to come and have a cup of tea? Sid's up there and she's half asleep.”

They sat in two chairs and drank their cups of tea. Jack looked hopeless. Molly said, “She's in no pain.”

“Going though, isn't she?” Jack said. He burst out, “What did she
do to us? We're a restless lot, aren't we? You've been married too many times and now you're making bikes. I'm in the House of Commons waiting for the revolution – even Shirl's married to a Chinese, now, and she was the quiet one. Why aren't we living quietly in nice semis with steady jobs?”

“Well,” said Molly. “It's partly Ivy but it's partly that we were the revolution – we were post-war kids. We had all this free orange juice and opportunities. Not that Ivy didn't stir us up – it must have been all that yelling and screaming.”

“Must be some funny genes somewhere,” Jack said.

“Speak for yourself,” said Molly. “I've got news for you. I'm not your sister. Added to that, you're not my brother. They picked me off a bomb site and took me in.”

Jack looked at her, wondering if she were trying to make a joke. “Ivy told me just now,” she said.

“It's a fantasy,” Jack said. His face fell. “Just a minute,” he said. “That's right. I was staying with Auntie Win. They told me I had a new sister. When I came back there you were. I can remember you now – you were standing up sucking your thumb.”

“Didn't you ask why I wasn't a baby?” asked Molly.

“I might have done,” Jack told her. “They clouted me for my pains. I was only a small kid – I seem to remember saying ‘Why isn't she a proper baby?' and Sid belting me.” He looked vague. “I wonder if that really happened?” he asked himself, then said, as if she had accused him of something, “You know I've got no childhood memories, Moll. I went through half the Blitz and I can't remember a thing. I can dimly remember being locked in the coal cellar by myself and thinking I'd never be let out. But, even then, Ivy swears she never did it to me so I don't know if it really happened.” He said, “Do you want another cup of tea?”

When he went to get the tea Molly sat and stared at a couple in the corner. They spoke quietly to each other. The woman said something, angrily, to the man. Jack came back and put the tea on the table between them. “I must say, Molly,” he told her. “It's a ridiculous story. I could be expected to forget but what about the others? Are you telling me they picked you up and brought you home and no one knew? What about the other people in the street? What happened to the baby Ivy was expecting? I still think she's made the whole thing up. It's dreadful – like dredging something out of her subconscious – frightening.”

“It doesn't matter anyway,” Molly told him. “I believe it-you don't have to. You see,” she said, “it happened in a war. The men were away fighting. The women had jobs and kids and the whole place was being bombed to smithereens. And Ivy miscarried – she was off her head – that's why they gave me to her, like you give a new doll to a sick child, so I daresay anyone who knew would shut up about it, for Ivy's sake. You know what they were like in Meakin Street. The neighbours could be nasty but they had their limits, like never letting on anything to the landlord, or the police – maybe this was one of the things where they'd stick by you and what with that and the confusion I suppose a lot went by the board.” She thought for a moment and said, “I bet that was why Mum let Elizabeth Flanders treat her like that after Jim died. She was afraid Elizabeth would lose her head and make a scene, blaming me, and shout out in front of the neighbours that nobody knew where I came from.”

“I don't know what to think,” her brother said. “I don't know what scares me more – the way Ivy's having delusions or the way you're believing her.” He studied her closely, as if checking her for signs of instability.

“Doesn't matter, Jack,” she said. Her attitude seemed to satisfy him that she was, indeed, not responding normally. He evidently decided that she was under too much strain for he patted her arm and said, “Do you want to come back with me to Pimlico – drive back to Kent in the morning?”

“It's all right,” said Molly. “I'm fixed up in London for the night.”

He nodded and stood up. “I'll go and see Mum, then,” he said.

Molly, who had no arrangements to spend the night in London but dreaded her sister-in-law's sympathy, took a chance and telephoned Sam Needham, who offered her a bed.

And so Molly was in bed at 19 Meakin Street, where she had grown up, where she had lived with Joe Endell and conceived his child, when the telephone rang at three thirty and Sid told her Ivy was dead.

She had fallen asleep knowing that in all probability Joe had been her own brother. For if Ivy's tale was true – and it was corroborated by what Peggy Jones had said, and by the papers Evelyn Endell had left her – then both she and Joe had been found in the burning house at the top of Meakin Street and although she could not assume that they had been brother and sister it was very likely. The thought, strangely enough, did not worry her. If she still felt she was the child of Sid and Ivy Waterhouse, no matter who her real parents were, then, by the
same inner logic, she felt she was the sister of Jack and Shirley and not of Joe Endell. The rest was a technicality, a bit of the past which had no real meaning. The important thing had been her marriage to Joe, not the birth certificate which connected them. Thinking this she fell quite peacefully asleep until the telephone rang in the hall and woke instantly, knowing what she was going to hear.