All the Days of Our Lives (33 page)

She still hardly knew anyone in Clacton, other than shopkeepers, just by sight. The only other person who could just about be called a friend was a girl called Liza, a Londoner who worked as a chambermaid in one of the bigger hotels. Occasionally the two of them had time off together or met for a drink.

One such October day, Molly was due to meet Liza in the evening. All that gloomy day the sky seemed to be sitting on the tops of the houses. Molly went out to do some shopping and pulled her coat around her, looking at the cheerless streets. The holiday season was mostly over, very few guests arriving now, though Jane Lester had decided to keep Molly on more or less as a home help for herself. She supposed she was lucky to have a job really. Though Molly was glad to be relieved of her singing duties, she missed having other people passing through the house, where now the puritanical habits of the Lesters and their fellow evangelicals were unrelieved by anyone more joyful.

She dawdled over the shopping, even though it was cold, glad to be out and about. Thank goodness she could escape for a bit tonight! The afternoon passed, slow and dull.

When at last it was time to go, she sneaked down the stairs. It wasn’t that she wasn’t allowed out, but she didn’t want to have to explain to either of the Lesters where she was going. But as she reached the hall, Jane Lester appeared out of the back sitting room.

‘Oh, are you off out?’ she asked, suspiciously.

‘Yes,’ Molly said breezily. ‘I’m just meeting my friend Liza – we’ll have a cup of cocoa and a chat. I shan’t be late.’

Jane smiled, looking relieved. ‘Good. Well, you have a nice time, dear.’

Liza, a solid, black-haired girl, who had surprised Molly when they first met by telling her that she had been a Land Girl, was already waiting outside the pub when Molly arrived.

‘I didn’t think I wanted to go in without yer,’ she said, standing with her coat pulled tightly around her. ‘You know what it’s like – you only get a lot of old-fashioned looks!’

Molly laughed. ‘Oh, you don’t want to take any notice! Come on, love – let’s go and get settled in.’

As soon as the two of them walked in, a host of male eyes fixed on them. Molly, who had already drunk quite a bit before she came out, could feel herself acting up, giving pert looks and swinging her hips as she and Liza crossed the room with their drinks: whisky for Molly, half of mild for Liza. It was as if all her old habits, which she’d fought to drive out of herself in the later years in the army, were all coming back. They found a corner and sat chatting, but didn’t remain unpestered for long.

‘How’re your Holy Joes?’ Liza asked, offering Molly a cigarette. Both of them lit up. ‘Still singing all your hymns, are yer?’

‘Not when there’s no one staying,’ Molly said. ‘It’s all a bit quiet.’

‘Ours too. I’m lucky to have a job. Hey, you know what I’m gonna do? If it all dries up, I’ll go back up London, but come the spring I’ll be back. I like it down ’ere, out of the smoke, and I thought I’d go and get a job at the camp – at Butlin’s. They need tons of people there!’

Molly was about to reply when two lads approached them and squeezed in next to them, whether they were wanted or not. One was tall and thin with a cheeky expression, the other stockier with strong, dark brows.

‘’Ello, girls!’ the stocky one said. ‘All alone, are we?’

‘How d’yer mean, alone?’ Liza quipped. She was prickly towards men, or at least the pushy ones. ‘Can’t yer count, then? There’s two of us, so how can we be on our own?’

‘Ha bloody ha,’ the skinny one said. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked Molly.

‘I’m Molly,’ she said archly. ‘And that’s Liza.’

‘Well, I’m Brian,’ the skinny one said, mimicking her. ‘And that’s Roy.’

Molly could tell Roy was interested in her at once. Most blokes were.

‘’Nother drink, ladies?’ Brian asked, though there was a sarky tone in his voice.

‘Johnnie Walker for me, love,’ Molly said immediately.

‘Anything in it?’

‘Oh no, ta. As it comes.’ Molly could feel herself moving back into it, the pub talk, the men, the way she had always been with them – she knew she provoked men, led them on, so easily, unless she was determined not to.

‘Another half for me, ta,’ Liza said, a bit more friendly now.

The lads settled down with them and they had one drink after another, the men paying. They each told Molly and Liza what they did for a job, but Molly had soon forgotten. She was very well oiled, and everything was distant and mellow and she didn’t care about anything. She heard herself laughing at their jokes, telling them where she worked, doing an unkind imitation of Bernard Lester’s singing, which made them all laugh. She told them she’d been in the army. Roy, the dark one, said he had been too. Molly decided she liked him best of the two. Someone started up singing and they joined in. The evening passed in a haze.

‘I’m off now, Moll,’ Liza said at some point.

‘I’ll see yer back,’ Brian said, getting up, and soon Molly realized they had gone and that Roy was sitting closer and had his hand on her thigh. She thought about telling him to get it off, but somehow the words wouldn’t come to her. What the hell did it matter anyway? She was warm and contented and it was nice to have someone near.

‘God, it’s been a long time,’ she murmured.

‘Whatcha saying?’ Roy asked, leaning down to her.

‘Oh – nothing!’ She looked up and laughed, suddenly. ‘Let’s have another drink. I’ll get this one in.’

When she got up, she was taken aback by how odd her legs felt. They weren’t hers – someone had stolen them. She only just managed to get back to the table without spilling the drinks.

‘Dunno how much I’ve had,’ she giggled, falling back into her seat again.

‘Quite a bit, by the look of yer,’ Roy said.

‘What’s your name again?’ Molly said. And she started laughing and couldn’t stop.

There was rain falling on her face. Molly lay letting the drops fall and slide, trickling down her cheeks. Gradually, as she came to, she noticed that she was cold to the bone, that she was lying somewhere very hard and uncomfortable, that her head was reeling even though she was lying still and that she was half undressed.

She groaned softly, managing to push herself upright. It was neither light nor dark and she had no idea of the time or where she was. She was wet through, shivering. Somewhere in front of her she heard waves breaking gently; she felt the wet sand with her hand and cursed repeatedly. How had she got there? Those lads – had she come with them? What had happened? But it was obvious. She was no longer wearing knickers, and her stockings had been torn away from her suspenders. She only had one shoe on: the left one. As she sat there her teeth began to chatter unstoppably.

Groping around with her hands she found her knickers, one of the stockings and her other shoe. Her underclothes were so soaked that she didn’t bother putting them on, but she put her shoe on and stood up, shakily. As soon as she tried to walk, her heels clagged in the sand, so she stooped with a whimper at the pain in her head and took them off again, turning to walk away from the sound of the sea. It was just growing light, the early east-coast dawn, so that she could make out the outlines of things, the top of the beach, the pier stretching away behind her. She stood and got her bearings for a moment. A lone gull cried overhead. She would walk back along the beach.

Shivering and feeling ill, she scuffed her way along the sand, carrying her shoes, her knickers stuffed into one, the stocking in the other. Things gradually became clearer as the sun came up, casting a pale morning light that knifed into her eyes, making her screw them up. Only one person was about, a man with a dog, coming back up from the sea, who avoided looking directly at Molly, then disappeared up to the promenade.

How must I look? she thought, washed with shame. She felt sticky between her legs, her clothes were soaked and dishevelled and her hair was full of sand. After a while she realized she was near the place where there were public toilets. She needed to go, and also maybe she could have a bit of clean-up before going back to the Laurels? She’d have to sneak in without them hearing.

Climbing up off the beach, she stepped inside the even colder atmosphere of the toilets. It was quite dark inside and, as she stepped towards the basins, someone loomed towards her, a tall, dark figure that she recognized with a horrible shock. The big-boned face, hair pulled messily to the side, the slouching walk, the drunken, sullen expression . . .

‘Mom!’ she gasped. What the hell was Iris doing here, lurking in a public convenience, waiting to jump on her, give her one of her beatings?

Heart thumping with shock, she moved closer to the mirror, reached out and, with a small intake of breath, touched its cold surface.

‘Oh! Oh God!’

Her reflection stared back at her in horror. The darkness had stolen the blonde colouring from her hair so that it looked darker, like Iris’s. And the puffy drunkard’s face: her mother’s face looking back at her, full of disgust at what she saw.

‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t go on like this.’

Molly leaned queasily against the basin in front of the mirror, put her hands over her face and began to sob from the depths of herself.

‘Come on, Nanna, open the door!’

Robbie rapped his knuckles impatiently on the door of number eighteen.

‘Get back under here,’ Em said, leaning over him with the umbrella. ‘You’ll get soaked else.’

Even now, after a month of living with her mother-in-law, there was a lump in her throat as she stood on her mother’s doorstep. Cynthia looked after Robbie in the daytime most days, and for the first few days of her own and Norm’s move to Saltley, Em had cried when she had had to come back as a visitor.

‘Back again!’ Cynthia said, opening the door, for Robbie to push inside. She was already dressed and ready for them.

‘I’m wet, Nanna!’

‘Well, you should’ve stayed under the umbrella,’ Em grumbled, putting it down and shaking the drops off outside the door.

Breakfast was still on the table, and Joyce and Violet were both on their way out to work. ‘Bye!’ they yelled, hurrying out into the wet.

‘D’you want any more to eat, Robbie?’ Cynthia asked. ‘Not that I’ve got much.’

Robbie, who was on the floor, getting his marbles out of his pocket, shook his head emphatically.

‘Don’t get those out in here!’ Em said. ‘Nanna’ll fall over them and hurt herself. I’ve told you – only outside.’

‘Has Granddad finished the moke yet?’ Robbie asked, scrambling up off the floor. A moke was a little car made of pram wheels and leftover bits of wood, to sit in and push along with your feet – unless your mates would push you. Bob was in the middle of making one for him.

‘You know, Norm calls them goeys,’ Em said.

‘Does ’e?’ Cynthia said absently, clearing things from the table. ‘You can go and look at it, Robbie – he did a bit more last night. It’s in the privy, but don’t go getting wet!’

‘I wanna take it out!’ Robbie squeaked excitedly.

‘Well, what you want and what you’ll get’re two different things,’ Cynthia told him tartly. ‘Now be quick, and don’t get wet. You got time for a cuppa?’ she asked Em as Robbie scurried out to the back.

‘Not really, but he won’t mind if I’m a bit late.’ Em sat down wearily. Her mother seemed in better nick than she did herself these days. All the inconveniences that during the war were a heroic sacrifice were now just a tiresome nuisance.

‘All right?’ Cynthia looked at her and handed her a cup of stewed tea.

‘I’ll survive,’ Em said, stirring sugar. ‘
He
’s getting to be a handful, though.’

Over the time she had been living with the Stapletons, Robbie had been a constant worry. At first he had refused to settle there, suffering from the separation from his grandparents and aunties and from the only home he had ever known. He took against Norm and his mom and dad, and screamed for ages when Em tried to put him to bed. It was only Edna Stapleton’s kind firmness – which Em had found almost unbearable, even when she knew her mother-in-law was right – that had got him to begin settling in.

‘Don’t just give in to him every time,’ Edna told her. ‘I know it sounds bad and that, but if you just give in and go up to him every time, he’ll have you wrapped round his little finger. You have to be firm. He’ll get used to it soon enough.’

It had taken weeks, and a heavy toll on Em’s nerves. Sometimes she felt that Norm and the other Stapletons were ganging up on her, coming between her and Robbie. But at the same time she could see that if Robbie didn’t settle and carried on demanding so much of her, it would drive a wedge between her and her newly returned husband. Even now, at times she felt torn in half.

‘He’s got in with a lot of boys in the road,’ Em said.

‘That’s good, isn’t it? Have him make some friends.’

‘They’re older, though. But they’re not old enough to know to look out for him. He loves it – thinks it’s all a big adventure.’

Robbie was not yet five, and a lot of the other boys were eight and nine. Sometimes it felt as if Robbie wanted to be a baby at night, but far too grown-up in the daytime.