All The Days of My Life (97 page)

She heard Herbert Precious reply something and Shirley say, in a
hostile voice, “All right – I'm listening.” Then came more mumbling and Molly went to sleep again. She thought Shirley must be dosing her food with tranquillizers. She dreamed of Johnnie Bridges and woke up crying. “First love, I suppose,” she thought. She dozed and dreamed of Mrs Gates.

Later, Shirley brought Herbert Precious's flowers, and Fred in. “Are you feeling better, Mum?” he asked timidly. She had almost never been ill.

“Quite a lot,” she said and made Shirley promise she would do nothing if she would take him to a film before he went back to Framlingham. Before he left she scanned his face to see if it bore the marks of sickness or insanity – they said that children of incest were often sickly or mad.

Isabel stood in the doorway, saying, “Richard was so disappointed they won't let him see you.”

“Doctor's orders,” Molly said shortly.

“While I'm in town I'll put in an order for Christmas at Harrods,” Isabel said. “I'm assuming I'm in charge this Christmas.” Molly turned her head away.

“Do you think it would be a good idea to have a brace of wild ducks?” she said.

“Wild ducks,” Molly said.

“They might as well supply the tree.”

“I don't feel very well,” Molly said.

“Oh, my dear, I'm so sorry,” Isabel said. “I'll leave you to rest,” she said and left the room.

Seconds later Shirley put her head round the door, mouthing the words, “I couldn't stop her from coming up.” It was too much, though, and Molly felt her eyes filling with tears. Before they had found her she had been dry-eyed. Now she could not stop crying.

She heard Shirley, whom she knew to be growing threadbare, talking to her husband downstairs. “George is getting persistent. He wonders how long he is supposed to stay in Ramsgate – I don't know what to tell him.”

“Tell him to stay there,” Ferdinand Wong remarked. He came into the room where Molly lay, bringing roses. Molly looked at him suspiciously. He sat down and said, “I'm cooking a meal tonight – chicken, mushrooms, all sorts of good things. Then, I'm sure you'll agree it's right, I'll take Shirley home. She's very tired and you need to think.”

“I need a holiday,” Molly said.

“Yes,” he agreed calmly. “I don't think you can have one. Do you?”

She shook her head. “I don't know who I am,” she said.

“Does anyone?” he asked.

“Come to give me some oriental philosophy?” she said.

He said, “No – yes. Yes. Perhaps I have. I've come,” he said clearly, “to offer you any help I can give, knowing that when the moment comes you'll recover but not knowing when that moment will be. If it is now, then my help will be useful. If not, then you'll be angry.”

He seemed to expect nothing from her, not help, not strength and certainly no decisions. She became calmer immediately.

She asked, “Ferdinand – is Shirley putting tablets in my food or drink?”

“Not any more,” he told her calmly. She knew that he had persuaded her sister not to do it.

Then she said, “I was worn out when all this happened. And for all these years there's been more and more stuff about who I wasn't, who Joe was – then it all comes to a head when Bert Precious tells me his news. I've changed my name so often –” she was crying now. “How can you know who you are anyway, when you're Waterhouse, Flanders, Endell, Allaun – then your mother says you're not her and your father's child –”

“Herbert Precious offered to go with you to France to see your mother,” Wong told her quietly.

“Not with him,” she said, shaking her head.

“I think you're right,” he said.

Downstairs, Wong said to Shirley, “She has had no inner life since I've known her. Probably not for years. Your sister is naturally active and worldly but even she needs time to rest and contemplate for a little while. All human beings do.”

Shirley stared at her husband. He had been impatient and worried about the neglects and delays caused by Molly's shutting herself up at Meakin Street. He had, in fact, been creeping in late at night to listen to the phone messages, open the post and do his best to stall on issues demanding Molly's personal attention so that suppliers, and customers, did not find out what was happening and Wayne could go on running the factory. The tangles in the illicit businesses were becoming very great – the factory itself would be in a mess if Molly did not either get back to work or hand over full authority to someone else. Shirley found it strange that her husband was suddenly thinking about what afflicted Molly.

“She's always been a doer, not a thinker,” she pointed out. “I'm not cheered up if she's in a state of contemplation. It's not natural to her – it usually means there's something wrong.”

“She needs to be as she is now,” he said.

“I don't care what you say,” Shirley told him. “She's never had any worries about her identity up to now. I think it's all a load of clichés covering up a nervous breakdown. You know as well as I do we need a decision about when she's going to pull herself together. It's got to be soon. Apart from the day-to-day business there's George stuck down in Ramsgate with his invention and Allaun Towers under siege conditions, Christmas coming on –”

“In the meanwhile,” Wong said, “you're coming home.”

“What about Molly!” cried her sister.

“She's better off alone,” Wong said.

Shirley looked at him. “There's times,” she said, “when you act really Chinese.”

“Do as I say,” he said implacably.

After Shirley had gone, Molly turned to dreaming. Days drifted by as she sat in the little house, in the little street thinking of the past, which had now become strange for her because she realized her past was only partly private – that from her birth on she had been part of history. And sometimes she thought of nothing at all. She dragged about the house in her dressing-gown, scarcely eating, in a state halfway between sleeping and waking. One day she fell on the stairs and lay, with a bruised shoulder aching, crying, “Oh Joe, Joe. I wish you were here.” All that answered her was the hollow echo of her own voice. She called out “Ivy! Ivy!” Again there was no answer. She lay there on the stairs at Meakin Street, not bothering to rise. She said, “Joe,” again, in a doubtful tone. And still there was no one. The stairs were hard and the smell of the stair carpet began to offend her nostrils. She went upstairs and lay down, sobbing.

The next day she got up and went out. Jack Waterhouse was horrified when he met his sister in the hall at the House of Commons. She was pale, gaunt and untidy. He wondered if she had gone mad. “Don't worry,” she said to him as he came towards her, looking very alarmed. “I'm all right. I just wanted to talk something over with you.”

They sat in a draughty office which belonged to three other MPs. Molly drank two cups of coffee and ate half a packet of biscuits. Spitting crumbs she outlined her idea. Jack, half appalled, wondered
again if she was mad. He thought for a moment, then said, “It's fair, I suppose. If anything in this business could ever be fair now. You'll sign the renunciation, of course?”

“Sign?” said Molly. “Sign? Never. I'll never give away my rights.”

“Christ, Molly – you're mad,” Jack exclaimed. “Your rights? What are you talking about? The only rights you should want are the ordinary rights of a citizen in a democratic society.” He stared at her. “I thought you were talking about blackmail redeemed by the fact that it looked like rough justice –”

“I hate signing things,” said Molly. “When I have to sign anything I feel as if I'm signing in my own blood. Just think, Jack Waterhouse, your great-aunt Rosie, Sid's favourite auntie, his mum's twin sister, died of double pneumonia brought on by malnutrition in the winter of 1927. And because they couldn't afford to call the doctor. Those days are coming back – rickets are back, people are getting ill because they're out of work and they don't get the right food to eat and they can't afford warmth in their houses. Don't talk to me about justice, rough or smooth. Don't talk to me about blackmail or justice. The world we've living in is hard and getting harder.”

“All right, all right,” he said holding up his hands in surrender. “I can't argue it.”

Until she decided to produce her
Confessions
Molly never made it generally known how she found the capital to start the Messiter Electric Car company (MEC). Ferdinand and Shirley Wong knew, of course, because it was they who calculated how much she would have received in Civil List payments, as a member of the royal family from the time of her birth to the year 1985. Sir Herbert Precious guessed where the money came from and no one minded his guessing but, equally, no one confirmed the guess as truth. Ferdinand Wong, becoming enthusiastic once the calculations were made, suggested charging interest on the money, but Molly rejected the idea. Several million pounds, she said, was all she needed to set up a new firm to exploit the electric motor on a modest scale. After that, she said, the business would have to earn its own living in the world just as, she supposed, they all would.

Her interview with the Queen at Buckingham Palace was less frosty than she had thought it might have been for Her Majesty was more than gracious. She was obviously realistic, and, Molly claimed later
much later – to Herbert Precious, appeared relieved the matter was out in the open, pleased to make a donation to British industry and, Molly said, not entirely unamused by this original ending to fifty years of family shame and anxiety. What did not please her was Molly's refusal to sign papers of renunciation but, as Molly also reported, she thought the Queen half expected her to refuse. At any rate, the meeting was as pleasant as it could be in the circumstances and the two negotiators parted on cordial terms. “You couldn't,” as Molly said, “have asked for a nicer person, or cousin.”

And so it happened. Starting with the manufacture of electric cycles the Messiter company gradually expanded into fuelless cars and, later, other vehicles. By 1990 one car in ten bought in Britain, and one in a hundred elsewhere, was a Messiter. Gradually other companies followed suit. Throughout the bleakness of the late '80s and early '90s the Messiter company survived, pursuing a policy of worker management and profit-sharing which appeared to operate smoothly. Indeed, when the ferocity of governments in the early years of the company was over, and the wobbling of the governments which succeeded them ended, the industrial example of the Messiter company appeared very much in keeping with the new times. So, indeed, did the product. Neither the management nor the vehicles were exciting, tension-producing, aggressive, glamorous, noisy or smelly. In this manner the company survived eight years of economic swings, mounting social violence and repression and the strains of a deeply divided society at home without losing either its viability or, too often, its conscience. The proprietor, Molly, née Waterhouse, later Flanders and Endell, finally Allaun, although mysteriously unhonoured by the Queen's Award for Industry or any other kind of official recognition, earned herself at least a footnote, and perhaps more, in the industrial history of Great Britain.

For the rest, events went on as they might have been expected to. Isabel Allaun lived to be ninety years old, desolated, at first, when Molly's lover Richard Mayhew left Framlingham for good but much consoled when her son Tom and his lover came back to live in a cottage in the village, although she was never able to acknowledge the real relationship between them. Shirley and Ferdinand Wong stayed on as directors of MEC – Shirley had twin daughters and the family ended as a large one, containing the couple, their children and his old parents, whom he was able to bring over from Hong Kong before the British lease on the island ran out. Josephine, twice divorced, married an
amiable garage proprietor called Joe Marks and was happy, working for Amnesty and leaving for Bogota, Thailand or Prague when her husband's large previous family of children threatened to descend. Jack Waterhouse, who lost his seat in Parliament, took a job at the research department of Transport House and returned to his first wife, Pat, who left her husband for him. Sid Waterhouse died, peacefully, one summer day, between the runner beans and the lettuces in his garden at Ramsgate. And Molly's son, Fred, told of his unnatural birth when he was eighteen and about to leave for a kibbutz in Israel for a year, refused to believe it, left the country and then phoned from Jerusalem to say that he did believe it and that, having seen at close quarters how time and chance had dealt with the Jews, he thought that royal birth and incest made no difference at all. Molly failed to see the reasoning but was relieved that her confidence in her son's natural good sense and healthy ego had been justified. Fred came back minus two fingers on his left hand, which he lost on the Lebanese border. “Not fit now,” he said, “to wave out of the window of a state coach.”

As the last tape ends Sir Herbert sits in the silence of his ivory and blue sitting room in London.

Molly's last words linger in the room. “I suppose the proper ending to my story's really me finding my real mother at last and with her finding me and seeing Fred and knowing when she died she'd leave something behind. Yes – that's the real end, I suppose – Life goes on – that'd be the moral of it all.”

“Oh, my God,” the infuriated Sir Herbert exclaims into his empty room. The final addition of this piece of homespun philosophy, delivered in Molly's ever-lively tones, is more than he can stomach, after all the unnecessary and embarrassing revelations she has insisted on making. It's just about the last straw, he thinks – absolutely the last. And what's to be done about it all? There's enough material buried in Molly's story for a hundred TV, magazine and newspaper investigations – enough to topple a government, a company, even the monarchy itself, once the threads start to be pulled out, once the unravellings begin!