All The Days of My Life (92 page)

And so the couple walked back to the house through pines, still holding hands as they passed under the stiff arms of the trees but each keeping their secrets. For it was Molly who knew that Joe Endell had been her brother and Herbert Precious who knew about their mother and father. And like all secrets, these began to cause restraints between them. Bert Precious began to think of his wife and children and Molly of her coming visit to Liverpool. Bert thought of his dead son and Molly of his absent wife. They went back into the house together, but slightly apart. That night it was again as if there were no secrets between them but it was fortunate that the next day they had to part, for whether Bert Precious spoke out or not, either way the relationship was doomed.

In the half-built canteen of the factory Molly looked at the two hundred and fifty faces in front of her, stood up and said, “I haven't got a lot to say – but I have to say this. I don't want to be the boss here for the sake of it. I've begged, borrowed and stolen to found this factory so that I can get a living from it. And you're here to get a living from it too, so we're in agreement over that. Now, I never started this because I wanted it to run the old way – I'd hold the whip hand over you, you'd fight me back and in the end I'd automate and get rid of the lot of you. So we have to think of another way to keep this place open. This is my proposal – I'm going to hand you fifty percent of the shares and, of course, you get a share of the profits accordingly. If there are any – and that's up to all of us. There'll be a proper set-out of all the terms and clauses for
everybody tomorrow. I'll need your answer to the proposition in twenty-four hours – because we have to get this strike out of the way and what you're going to have to do, if this transport strike goes on, is ride these bikes down to the docks to get them on the ship which'll be taking them to the States. You can do that, strike or no strike, because you own the bikes and if they don't get to the market the firm could go bust. If they do get there, in a year or two you'll be drawing dividends. But if you accept the proposal, bear this in mind – you'll have to pull your weight because once this bit of news gets out, my credit's shot. There isn't any bank in this country which won't be very cautious when they hear this is a firm half-owned by the workforce. I don't believe they'll extend any more credit. There's a huge loan out on this place and they've got to be paid back what's owed and you're the men and women who've got to do it. Along with the ideas for the new scheme you'll get a full balance sheet. My sister here, and her husband, the firm's accountants, will be here tomorrow to answer all the questions.” She added, “I meant to do this all along but I thought I'd better get the firm on an even keel first – but I'm beginning to see that as long as you can go along striking on me, because you don't understand what's going on, and I'm fuming away treating you like naughty kids – well, we may never get on an even keel in the first place.

“We're going away to get our proposals together now. There'll be copies available when you arrive at work tomorrow. You can take all day to talk it over, with Shirley, Lee here, your shop stewards, husbands, wives – I don't care. Turn the place into a public meeting if you need to – but let me have an answer by midday Tuesday.”

And after this brief and serious address, she walked out of the silent canteen, wondering what thoughts were going through the heads of the men and women in overalls who sat there. She knew her timing was wrong. The scheme should have been started earlier. Jack would see it as a way of breaking a strike. And probably it was, thought Molly, but what other choice could she make? Together with Wayne, Shirley, Lee and the firm's lawyers they roughed out the proposals. Then Molly, very tired, and Fred, who was very bored by now, got a car and drove back to Framlingham. They both slept most of the way, arriving at breakfast time, although no one was up.

There was a scatter of garden catalogues and blueprints in the drawing room, so she deduced that the plan Richard and Isabel had concocted, to restore the old walled rose garden at the back of the house, was now being put into operation. Whether it was memory of
the carefree weekend with Bert Precious or the thought of the anxieties connected with the decision about the Messiter factory in Liverpool, Molly felt a surge of resentment. As she left the bright catalogues and the plans for the beds and replanting of the garden and went into the kitchen she thought, “I need a wife here, not a couple of garden designers.” Gloomily, she cooked eggs and bacon and wished herself back at Meakin Street, remembering the way the mist had hung round the old gas street lamps when she had been a child, remembering Ivy in her apron on the pavement yelling at the children to come in out of the street and get their tea, remembering Joe Endell, who had started there with her their jolly mealtimes, with take-home curries, and documents all over the table, and a couple of friends laughing about the day in Parliament. She found her eyes filling unaccountably with tears – it was the prospect of some happiness with Bert Precious, it was for Joe Endell, it was the workload and the worries about the factory, it was her overdraft and the knowledge that she was going to have to pay for the roses, the garden walls, the construction of a pool. “It isn't good enough,” she thought, as she cooked the breakfast.

After she and Fred had eaten their eggs and bacon, in order to avoid the arrival of Richard and Isabel, who were getting up, and the housekeeper who would be coming in from the village shortly, Molly and Fred went out to look at the rose garden. It lay behind old brick walls. They forced through the archway, which was blocked with Brambles, and stood in the longish grass, for the path was overgrown and lost, and looked into the choked pond, in the middle of which was a broken statue. The roses, untended for years, dropped, grew along the ground, climbed the walls.

“I like it how it is,” said Molly's son. “It's spooky and if they clear it all up we won't be able to play properly here any more.”

Molly nodded. She, too, was fond of the old garden, rioting untended roses in summer, brown and grey in winter. She liked it, she did not want it ordered, for people to stroll round and admire. The whole business felt like the last straw. She dealt, day by day, with mundane problems, like ferrying material to outworkers who were drawing the dole and could not take in consignments of fabrics without attracting the attention of malicious neighbours who might betray them to the DHSS; she dealt with gigantic problems, like how to set up worker management at a factory over two hundred and fifty miles away, with very few precedents to go on. It seemed to her that her revolutionary lover and her mother-in-law had nothing better to do
than rearrange the flower beds. In spite of their different ideologies, both were trying to re-create the same dream. Here am I, she thought, tens of thousands in debt and everything pawned in the hopes of healthy trade over the next few years and they're here talking about fountains and rose gardens. Even Fred's got more sense than that. She sat down on a slightly rotting wooden bench and thought. There had been a message from Bert in the pile of letters and notes of telephone calls waiting for her when she got back. Yet now she was, somehow, not telephoning him at his house in London. She had not rung him while she had been in Liverpool. It was partly the sense of being under strain, as though she did not want him to see her workaday personality – the Molly Allaun waiting for negotiations in Liverpool to end and losing her temper about plans for a garden. But as she sat there, watching a starling tug at some old grass caught in the thorns at the foot of a sprawling briar rose, she seemed to feel mysteries and evasions surrounding the situation. She imagined, now, banalities involving a long-standing mistress, some peculiar upper-class connection with the secret service, even bouts of mental instability, schizophrenia, perhaps. None of these fantasies seemed to make any sense when she thought of the man who was supposed to be involved in them. On the other hand, she still felt there was something less than straightforward going on and, at present, she realized, she could not cope with any personal situation which was not clear as glass, outstanding as an elephant in Oxford Street. There had also been a message from her daughter, taken down by Isabel, on the heap. It had read, “Josephine has left her husband and gone to Peru – how sad. It sounds as if she may have number 2 lined up! Isabel.”

Molly thought to herself, would Bert really fancy today's Molly – harassed family woman, stressed businesswoman and hater of rose gardens?

On the following day, as she waited at Framlingham for the call from Liverpool to tell her if the workforce was prepared to go ahead with the new scheme, she opened a short letter from Herbert Precious. There were, he said, things he felt he had to tell her. He could not put them in writing. Would she meet him very soon, so that they could talk? Molly, in a fit of impatience, wondering why any practical person could not either pick up the phone and discuss the matter, whatever it was or, if writing, not outline the problem, wrote a brief reply saying she had no time for mysteries, that she would always treasure the time they had spent together but she felt their chances of permanent
happiness were very small. She stepped out in the brisk spring air, to put the letter into the postbox in the lane herself, feeling that she had been sensible. She regretted it later but argued to herself that it was only natural to feel regrets – it did not mean she had done the wrong thing.

Nevertheless, she expected some response, even a short note from Bert saying that he regretted her decision. When none came, Molly shrugged and thought that she had always sensed mysteries in the affair, reflected that perhaps she had never understood him in the first place, then shed a tear and got on with her life. She could not know how much it had cost him to decide to reveal everything to her and how pleased he was to have a breathing space where he could, he imagined, organize matters so that his information caused as little trouble as possible. And only a day after her note arrived he had a telephone call from his wife saying that she was planning to return. The end result was that he solved his problem by the age-old human device of doing nothing and letting events decide for him.

Whether Corrie Precious returned because of a change of heart, or because Jessica Monteith had lost no time in writing to her about his affair with Molly, or just to attend Prince Charles's wedding, her husband did not know. Neither, he thought, did she. But, true to her nature, when she came back she not only took up the reins in the sense of seizing the keys to the linen cupboard and redecorating the attic, so to speak, but made a genuine effort to heal the breach in the marriage, started during years of matrimonial business and horribly widened by the death of their son. Her efforts calmed a tired and disillusioned husband, worried about an income badly affected by inflation and uncertain of what he wanted for the future. It was not for nothing, after all, that he was devoted to those two strong-minded women, his wife Corrie and his old passion, Molly Allaun. Nevertheless, a patch-ed-up marriage where the issues are not brought out into the open is not always wholly comfortable. It was fortunate that at this stage he was offered a job by his cousin, Monsignor Paul Fitch, who told him that an archivist was needed in the vast, uncatalogued cellars of the Vatican. He was offered this post because he had, after all, a first-class degree in history, had written a thesis, much praised, on Rome's dealings with the barbarian hordes of the eighth to tenth centuries, had considerable skill in Latin and, in large measure, because of his
guaranteed discretion. He was also to act as a counter-weight to the ecclesiastical team working on the massive project. And so it was that Herbert Precious's history of keeping his mouth shut and showing loyalty to his employers was partly responsible for getting a job more suited to his temperament than anything else he had so far done. Additional advantages were that it paid well and got him out of the country a great deal. This did not really suit Corrie, who was looking forward to the sale of the big house in Hyde Park Gate left to him by his father and going to a more modest place, where she could keep house on a smaller scale and enjoy a greater state of intimacy with her husband. Nevertheless, if Bert would be happier commuting to the Vatican and spending years in the dusty caves, examining the correspondence of Genghis Khan with the incumbent Pope or cataloguing the scandals of Alexander VI, then she would not complain. At the same time she had many hard thoughts about Molly Allaun, whose picture had recently been in all the papers, and on TV, riding in front of a column of Messiters to Liverpool docks, and waving cheerfully at the motorcycle policeman riding beside her. This provided much useful publicity for the firm, in Europe and the United States, but to Corrie it seemed unfair, as the chairman of this thriving company, showing a lot of still-shapely leg, rode her little scarlet bike through the streets, followed by a hundred other such machines.

To Corrie's mind, Molly looked too young and too successful, considering the life she had led. In fact Molly was putting a good face on a worrying financial situation, and a complicated industrial position, for the part-ownership of the factory by the workers was so far causing confusion while the details were sorted out. She was also having a fierce family quarrel with her brother Jack who said that the whole manoeuvre would only be interpreted in Britain and outside it as a bit of clever strike-breaking by a management hostile to the rights of workers. But Corrie knew none of this and, if she had, might not have been consoled by it.

In the meanwhile, Molly was also worrying about the order book. Home demand held up, was, in fact, improving, but that alone would not keep the factory on its feet. She needed a much larger export business to make it profitable and an export business is not built overnight. A year after the opening she was still just paying the suppliers, the wages and the interest on the loan. She was surreptitiously feeding profits from the small businesses in London to the Messiter factory. And as they proceeded with the untested worker
participation scheme she began to wish she had listened to Shirley and somehow suffered through the strike without putting the scheme forward at that time. “It's not that it won't prove itself in the long run,” Shirley said. “It just causes hiccups at the moment – and hiccups are what we don't need.”