All The Days of My Life (88 page)

Shirley, who had come into the flat at Meakin Street where the matter was being discussed, had shrugged off her fur coat and said, “If you've any sense you'll go public. Start the factory and sell shares. Otherwise you'll be raising loans everywhere.”

“Christ!” exclaimed Molly. “Now I've got the bureaucrats running a big factory, and the strikes on the shop floor and to crown all, a pack of shareholders to satisfy. You and that Chinaman must be secretly conspiring against me to make me bankrupt and put me in a mental home. It feels bad, Shirl, I'm telling you. It won't work. It's an idea that includes every fuck-up industrial system I ever heard of. Lazy managers, union trouble and a company owned by outsiders wanting fast dividends. Let's have a nice big board with plenty of lords and generals on it to finish the joke. Let's go one better – ask Charlie Markham if he's free to join. Then he can make a bundle on the side without giving a stuff what happens to the place.” She added, “What's more I've had the housekeeper at Framlingham on the phone again. She reckons she's been looking after Brian and Kevin solidly for ten days and she's wondering when you're going to make an appearance.”

“If you think this is any time to discuss who's putting the baked beans on the table,” Shirley said loudly, “then I don't. All I know is that the strain of working this lot out is telling on Ferdinand and me, who, by the way, doesn't like being called a Chinaman, especially by his sister-in-law, and I'm telling you neither of us can go on keeping you out of trouble for ever. Put at least some of the business on a decent footing or we're clearing out.”

“Clear out, then, you disloyal cow,” Molly yelled at her sister.

“I'm going – don't worry,” said Shirley and, picking up her coat, she left.

“Oh God,” Molly said to Wayne. She hit her head with her hand. “Oh God – I'm done for if Shirley goes. She and Wong are the only ones who can make sense of it all.”

“Trouble is, some of what you said is right.”

“Trouble is, I can't go back and I don't want to go forward,” Molly said.

“In that situation,” Wayne told her, “you have to think of something else.”

“Or you,” Molly pointed out. “If you're going to be managing the place you've got to tell me what you want.”

Wayne stared at her. “Give everybody a piece of the action,” he said. “Best way to pull the team together is to make it pay to work.”

Molly picked up the phone and dialled Shirley's number. No one was there. She said into the answering machine, “Wayne says we should think about a form of co-ownership, Shirl. Can you and me and Wong – and Wayne,” she said, glancing at him “meet to discuss this.”

Shirley rang next day and screamed, “It's never been tried – not properly. Start from stratch on an untried basis and the confusion'll be shocking. This isn't a solution – it's a cop-out –”

Molly's heart sank. There was some conversation in the background and Ferdinand Wong was on the line. “Get up there and talk it over with the union, Molly,” he said. Then Shirley was back, “I'm coming with you,” she said angrily, “to make sure you don't commit us to some stupid deal.”

And now, before the scheme had even begun, a transport strike threatened.

Worry, worry worry, she thought, cheerfully applying scent in the now elegant bedroom at Allaun Towers. All plus a sulking lover. Leaving him half-asleep in bed she went downstairs, and as she was drinking another cup of coffee, it crossed her mind that perhaps the situation between herself and Richard was not really his fault. Perhaps, over the months since she had met him, she had been too preoccupied with the business. He, the only child of devoted parents, was not used to taking second place to a bicycle factory. He might well be thinking of the actress, stage manager, script editor, who would understand his work, discuss it with him, perhaps marry him and make a home with him. She ran upstairs and kissed him, saying, “I'll ring you up when I get there.” Nevertheless it was a pleasure to get out of the house where she felt disapproved of and take the shuttle to Aberdeen with Fred. Molly was very excited, perhaps more so than her son, who had regularly had holidays abroad with his grandparents. A chauffeur met them at the airport and drove over roads, and finally on little more than lanes, to the imposing house where they were to stay.

“Highland cattle,” exclaimed Fred, looking on to a rugged field.

“Mr Monteith likes to keep some of them,” the chauffeur said. “I hear there are two calves expected. Maybe you'll be here when a calf is born.”

“I can help,” he said. “I've done it before.”

“I don't think,” said the man, “that anyone but the vet and the head cowman will be let near the cow when she gives birth.”

But as they arrived in front of the house a boy rushed through the garden, crying to Fred, “Come quickly, Father says, and you can see the calf born.” Turning to Molly he remembered, “Father says will you excuse him. One of the cows is calving.”

“Right,” said Molly, and as the two boys raced away she made her
way up the steps. Donald Monteith's wife, Jessica, was in the hall when she arrived. Molly stared at the stags' heads mounted on the walls with incredulity.

“I'll show you to your room first,” Jessica Monteith said. She was a tall woman with pale red hair. As they went upstairs she said, “I take it Willy found your son.”

“They both dashed off,” Molly said. “Is Willy your son?”

“Yes,” Jessica said and as they reached a landing over which hung a large painting she walked a little way along a corridor and opened the door of Molly's room.

“We're in the drawing room. Do come down when you're ready,” she said. “Your son will be upstairs in the nurseries, in the room next to Willy's. I'm sure he'll enjoy himself – all the toys are there.”

After she had gone Molly stared upwards in amazement. The ceiling was painted all over, with men and women in eighteenth-century versions of Roman clothes. There were bulls and goats and swans. From the window she could see, beyond the garden, hills rising. And as she watched she saw two figures, her hostess's son and her own, running up through the grass. Halfway up they bent over, examining something. Molly combed her hair, washed her hands and put on fresh make-up. She left her hat on the bed and went downstairs. There were six people in the vast room, where logs burned in a huge grate. The walls were pale, a grand piano stood at the other end of the room. A great vase of pale lilies stood on a table. Windows on one side looked over the garden and out on to the hillside.

Donald Monteith, in tweeds, said, “It's not a beautiful house, architecturally, but we've lived here a long time and we come here whenever we can. Partly because I'm a sportsman when I get the chance.”

Molly, who knew he spent most of his time between the City of London and Miami, said, “Nice to have somewhere to go. What about the calf?”

“False alarm,” he said, looking disappointed.

There were two other couples in the room, the Floyds and the Jamiesons. Mary Floyd, small, dark and pretty, said, “You live in Kent, Lady Allaun?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “But I have to be in London a lot, too. The problem is that there are factories in both spots.”

“Quite schizophrenic,” said Mrs Floyd. Molly saw in her eyes that mixture of anger and pleading women frequently offered her. They felt
they had no reason to regret their lives, which were led around their homes and marriages, yet they wondered if they might be doing something else.

“Yes, it can be,” Molly said to her dryly, thinking of her £100,000 debt and the threatened transport strike which would put her out of action.

“You're such a busy woman –” Harold Jamieson said, coming up to her with an odd look on his face, half afraid, half challenging. She knew he was remembering that her life with men had been a shambles and that half her business operations were dubious if not actually illicit. Well, she thought, she couldn't deny it. She looked at him, in his London suit, caught a glimpse of Donald Monteith, in his tweeds, and suddenly recognized Arnold and Norman Rose, standing with their glasses in their hands, at the bar of a drinking club in London. She smiled rather broadly and said to Jamieson, “I just make money selling bikes and I offer jobs to a few people and luckily, so far, I've never had to fire anybody yet – or only for pinching.”

Jamieson, who had just closed a spares factory in Middlesborough and made 200 workers redundant, said “I pray you never have to. It's not a pleasant experience.”

“On either side,” Molly said.

“Let me get you another drink, Molly,” Jessica said. But glancing at the doorway, where a woman in a green overall stood, she said, “Oh – well, lunch is ready.”

She sat next to little Colin Floyd who said enthusiastically, “I've been wanting to meet you. I think this whole Messiter business has been a tour de force. I don't know how you've managed it.”

He was a handsome little man, chief shareholder and managing director of a thriving electronics firm. She said, “I'm not out of the wood yet. I'm pretty worried about this transport strike.”

“Aren't we all?” he told her. “It's easier for the Monteiths of this world. They have big interests abroad which cushion them. I'm a British businessman working exclusively in Britain. I have to deal with the many vagaries of British life. Still, cheer up, the strike may not happen.”

“I've decided that if it does,” Molly said in an undertone, “I'm getting the workforce to ride the buggers to the docks. They'll call me a strike-breaker, it'll embarrass my brother Jack no end – he's an MP – but my idea is that it's like the old notice in the pub. ‘We have agreed with the bank that we will not cash cheques if they will not sell
beer.' See, if the unions don't interfere with me I won't interfere with them. The problem is, will the workers do it?”

“That's always the problem here, it seems to me,” said Caroline Jamieson feelingly. “No wonder money's flooding out of the country. Are you interested in opera?” she asked Molly.

“Not much, I'm afraid,” Molly said. “I've seen a lot of plays recently.” For a little while they discussed the plays running in the West End until Monteith boomed across the table, “More wine for the Boadicea of British industry,” and Molly said, “The trouble is, Boadicea got beaten.”

“Well, my dear, I'm sure that won't happen to you,” he said.

Colin Floyd turned to Monteith and said, “You know I've got a craving for a round of golf. I don't suppose there's a course near here.”

“Straight in the car after lunch,” Monteith said instantly. “What a remarkable thing – I was thinking along those lines myself.” He pushed his glass back. “That's enough of that then. Did you bring your clubs?” he asked Floyd.

“Well, it just so happens that I did,” Floyd told him.

“Good man,” said his host. “Just the thing to put the ulcers on the run. Jamieson?”

“Try to leave me behind,” said the red-faced man. And bang goes my chance of cornering you in the library or attacking you in the conservatory, thought Molly Allaun. Well, I'll nobble you yet.

So that afternoon Molly splashed and swam with the two boys in the water under the green dome of the swimming pool. Then Willy took her on a tour of the farm with its clean hay-filled byres, containing clean, fluffy cattle, and its neatly painted chicken huts outside which fat hens scratched in well swept runs. It looked almost like a farm set up for city children to visit on educational trips. Fred talked knowledgably with the farm manager and, carrying home two eggs from the hens, they all went back, the boys discussing their trips to Disneyland as they walked through the darkening formal garden, where chill misty air hung over the clipped bushes and trees, which had been trimmed into the shapes of birds and crowns. Over supper upstairs in the attic rooms Fred decided that he would stay for a week or two. “Gavin will be needing help with the pheasant chicks,” Willy said importantly.

“You haven't been invited and you have to go to school,” Molly said. “And I'm afraid I can't spare the time to stay here with you.”

There were ten more guests for dinner. They all sat round a big table in candlelight. Next to Molly was Colin Floyd. On her other side she had a neighbour of the Monteiths, Sir Graham Keyes. Molly, by now getting the shrewd impression that none of this dream of loch and glen was without commercial underpinnings of skyscraper and Concorde to New York, was not surprised to find the industrialist buried beneath the laird. “What am I doing here?” she thought in amazement, sitting in the light of candles in old silver sconces, with portraits of the Monteiths, one dating from the seventeenth century, on the walls around her. Glancing about her at the women's jewels, winking in the candlelight, and the solid faces of the men, she felt almost frightened, noticing that here all was not as it seemed, catching, occasionally, the gamblers' expressions, watchful eyes in seemingly relaxed faces. And the room filled suddenly, in her mind's eye, with the figures of the unemployed and hopeless, in their anoraks, faded overcoats, cheap shoes and old sneakers. They leaned against the walls of the room and against the old paintings. They were pale. I must be mad, she thought, hauling her attention back to Graham Keyes. He said, “There's only one flaw to my land – the moor's just enough tracks for cycles and it's just steep enough to make bicycling difficult unless you've legs like a marathon runner. So do you know what they do?”

Molly laughed and said, “They get little power-driven cycles –”

“Which scare the pheasants all over the place,” he said. “I tried to ban them but, do you know, my gamekeeper caught two poachers the other day and that's what they were using – quick and easily manoeuvred in the lanes, you see.”