All the Days of Our Lives (42 page)

They sat at a sunny window table in the cafe, where they could see the street, and ordered cups of coffee.

‘Ah,’ Ruth said, after a few minutes. ‘There they are – bang on time, of course!’

Through the window Molly saw a slender, elegant young woman in a pastel green shirt-waister, wearing a white cardigan on top and white low-heeled sandals. Her dark-brown hair was still much as she had always worn it, cut into a neat collar-length bob and caught behind one ear. It was unmistakably Win Leighton. And in those seconds Molly took in that Win had, in a kind, subtle way, established a protective relationship with the dumpy, awkward-looking woman walking beside her, dressed in a belted suit of brown-and-tan tweed, which looked too heavy for the weather. Once more it wouldn’t have been possible to mistake Phoebe Morrison for anyone else – there was the black hair scraped up in a bun now, the solid, busty figure and the strong, determined face. Yet she looked smaller, as if, Molly sensed, she too had been diminished by civilian life.

They were all saying hello then. Molly was taken aback to be kissed on the cheek first by Win and then, as if following her example, by Phoebe Morrison. She caught the old smell of stale cigarettes as they were close together for a second.

‘Ruth, Molly – how absolutely wonderful to see you!’ Win gazed, beaming from one to the other of them, and Molly realized she was genuinely moved to be back with them again.

‘Hello,’ Molly said, nodding and smiling at them both shyly, realizing that she had no idea what to call Phoebe Morrison now. She couldn’t keep calling her ‘Ma’am’, could she?

Win did a very good job of making everyone feel comfortable and at ease, while they sat and drinks were brought. And Molly, who had Phoebe Morrison to her left at the little round table, saw her draw her cigarettes gratefully from her bag and light up.

‘For you?’ She held out the packet to Molly.

‘Thanks very much.’ She accepted a light as well, glad to have something to do with her hands.

‘So . . .’ Win beamed round the table, taking charge as she always had done. ‘We must catch up. Do let’s share what we’ve all be up to!’

Win seemed exactly the same, Molly thought, as during that first week in the ATS, when she had been self-appointed head of dorm and had taken charge of switching off the lights. She felt a warm gratitude towards her. Back then, when she had no idea how to fit in, Molly had resented this automatic public-school authority. Now, she just felt fond. She knew from experience about Win’s considerable good side.

As they sipped their drinks, Win and Ruth talked about university life and, having most in common, soon fell into conversation. Molly found herself being looked at closely from the left by Phoebe Morrison.

‘So,’ she puffed out smoke. ‘Did you say you’re working in
camps
?’

‘Yes, Miss, er . . . Morrison . . .’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, do call me Phoebe. We’re not in the army now.’

‘I’m at Butlin’s,’ Molly said, thinking it sounded silly. ‘Skegness at the moment – but I’ve been at Clacton. Before that I was in a boarding house.’

‘Ah yes, I think I’d heard that. Clacton – fancy that. Has it changed much?’

She asked her questions in a clipped way, seeming ill at ease.

‘Well, yes a bit. The beach is open – the hotels have all opened up as well . . . And the camps are very busy. There are lots of holidaymakers now.’

‘Ah yes. Well, no doubt you have a lot of fun and are kept busy.’

‘Busy enough,’ Molly agreed. She sipped some more of her cooling coffee. ‘You should come – have a holiday yourself.’

Phoebe Morrison gave a snort of laughter. ‘Ah well, perhaps!’

There was a pause, so Molly asked, ‘And where are you working, er . . . Phoebe?’

‘Oh, Civil Service: roads and transport. Very dull. Well, I say that – it has its moments of course. There is at least some purpose in it.’ Abruptly she asked, ‘What shall you do in the winter? Presumably the camps don’t stay open all the year?’ She pulled out another cigarette and lit up. Molly heard Win laugh at something Ruth had said.

‘I don’t know,’ Molly said. ‘I’ll just have to think of something.’

Win, who was looking at her now, leaned across the table. ‘Perhaps we should all come down in the summer and work at Butlin’s too? They take students, don’t they?’

‘Er – yes,’ Molly said. She thought about some of the behaviour of the other staff, the fights and rivalries, the state of some of the kitchens. ‘I’m not sure you’d like it really, Win.’

Win laughed. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

They sat talking for an hour or so, before Win said they would really have to be going. Molly was relieved. She had found it hard going with Phoebe Morrison, despite being very pleased to see her. All in all, the meeting had made her feel sad. Phoebe’s crustiness seemed to stand out more now than it had in the army, where it merged with her commanding role. And apart from her work, she had very little to talk about.

Molly sensed in her an aching loneliness, akin to that she felt herself. Of course, it was not the done thing to miss the war. Everyone had to be glad it was over, overjoyed to be getting on with their lives – getting married, having families, building a life. But what if you were not destined for any of those things? She could see that Phoebe missed the army with the same endless ache as she did herself, knowing, as she felt it all slipping away, that it had been the best time of her life, and that it was over now. And that somehow you had to go on.

As they were all getting up to leave, though, Phoebe surprised her by slipping her a piece of paper.

‘My address. I don’t suppose you have a fixed address – but do drop me a line if you think of it, will you?’ There was a hesitant smile on her face.

‘D’you really want me to?’ Molly spoke lightly, jokingly, to cover the fact that she was so touched by the request. She could see that Phoebe Morrison had not found it easy to ask. ‘Course I will – I’ll send you a card now and then, let you know where I’ve got to next!’

‘Do,’ Phoebe said briskly, turning away. ‘I’d like that.’

All that winter she had kept running. That was how it felt now. Keep moving: don’t settle to anything for too long. That was the way to keep life feeling like an adventure, like being on the road – a place where no one could expect or demand too much of her or get to know her too well.

At first she had been with Liza.

‘You can come back to Mum’s with me,’ she said, as Molly wondered what to do at the end of their first camp summer. The season ended in September. ‘See what we can find.’

After a few nights sleeping downstairs on a lumpy couch at Liza’s house in Plaistow, where her thin, harassed mother was bringing up eight other children, Molly moved out to be a paying guest in another house. Liza’s mother also put in a word for her at Tate & Lyle, where she worked, and Molly got a job packing sugar. It was all right for a bit and helped her get on her feet. But she didn’t like factory work and some of the women got on her nerves, forever taking the rise out of her accent (‘Ow! Yow from Birmigum, boy any chance?’). Liza, back in London now, where she had other friends, began to treat her in a very offhand way. Molly knew when she wasn’t wanted and moved on.

In her bag she had a scrap of paper with the address on it of one of the guests at Clacton, a married man who had taken a blatant fancy to her. But he had also offered her a job in a cinema in South London. Molly had been surprised. He was a big, beefy, red-faced man who looked more like a butcher.

‘You’re just the sort of girl I could do with,’ he’d said, ogling her shamelessly, even in front of his wife, while tucking into his roast chicken. ‘You’d bring in the crowds all right – wouldn’t she, Rene?’

Rene looked mildly across the table. ‘I s’pect she would, Bert, yes.’

‘You’ll want somewhere to go – yer can’t stick here all the year round.’ He had insisted on writing the address down and Molly took it, with no thought of doing anything about it – until now.

‘Albert Carter,’ the paper said, ‘Gaumont Cinema’, followed by a scrawled address. She had to ask someone to decipher it for her.

‘Oh, I get it – that’s down Walworth way,’ the man told her. ‘Bit of a way from ’ere, love.’

She had thought Bert Carter might have forgotten about her by now, that he used his chat-up line wherever he went, handing out his address, but he had seemed very pleased to see her. She arrived at the Gaumont, a dark old fleapit of a place, and, heart sinking, asked the girl in the ticket kiosk for him by name.

The girl looked her up and down with a snide, knowing glance and said pertly. ‘Who shall I say it is?’

‘Molly Fox,’ Molly said, trying to sound dignified.

Anyway, if he doesn’t remember or he’s rude, he can stuff it, she thought.

But Bert Carter soon appeared, in his shirtsleeves, red-faced as if he had been hurrying, and seemed delighted to see her. A job? Of course! Hadn’t he promised? Within a day Molly was installed as an usherette at the Gaumont and had a room in the house of a Mrs Willetts a few streets away.

The work was all right, and she liked to see parts of the pictures as she stood waiting. But she waited to see what the catch was. Sure enough, it was the obvious one. Bert Carter’s line of suggestive remarks – ‘You’re looking very lush-civious today, my dear . . .’ – and attempts to grope her in dark corners whenever he got the chance were no more than she expected. But, as Mavis, the rather superior girl who worked at the front, told her world wearily, ‘Oh, you don’t want to take too much notice – ’e’s all mouth, that one. Some of ’em like the girly papers for a bit of an eyeful; ’e just likes to ’ave it walking around, that’s all. It don’t amount to anything.’

Molly fended him off and made friends with the other usherettes, all of whom were pretty, buxom girls, and comparing notes, they realized they had all been employed for the same reason. As Lily, one of them, said with a cackle one day, ‘We’re just ’ere to ’elp ’im keep ’is right hand busy!’

It was all right until Christmas. Christmas Eve was hectic, but Molly could feel it building up: the sense of dread of the next lonely day. Why had she come back to London of all places? She’d burned her boats with Liza, so there was no invitation there. That evening, on the way home, she broke all her rules and bought a bottle of Scotch.

‘I can’t get through tomorrow without you,’ she whispered to the bottle, tucking it under her arm in the foggy, dimly lit street. As she stood there, she had a moment of complete giddy panic: a vision of herself, all alone on the vast, spinning world. She had to right herself against the front of a shop.

Her landlady, a reclusive woman, didn’t seem to be celebrating Christmas either. Molly spent the day alone in her room, sinking lower and lower. For lunch she heated a tin of soup and ate a ham sandwich. Too late she realized she should have done something about it, gone to Birmingham and asked Em if she could be with them. But the thought of Birmingham – and of being anywhere near her mother – oppressed her.

She thought of past Christmases, army Christmases with all the laughter and entertainments. Faces flashed before her mind, especially from that final Christmas, in Belgium. They knew it was all coming to an end, and that had that lightened the pressure on everything. She remembered a group of them singing round an old piano in a school hall; Cath’s face, pink and joyful, knowing that soon she might be with her beloved Derck; the pianist, a plump girl called Susan, so close to being helpless with laughter that she struggled to play; and in the background – as usual – Phoebe Morrison, singing, her face alight as she watched everyone with an almost maternal air. She had looked happy. Molly thought of the dulled, almost bitter woman she had seen in London, the gruff cards she had received with sardonic references to ‘keeping on keeping on’.

It was that scene among many memories that floated through her mind as sat on her bed and stared at the bottle. Johnnie Walker. It was the same spirit that her brother Bert had plied her with that night during the war when she went to the house, until she was almost too drunk to know what was happening. She saw his bony face in her mind, then her mother’s bloated one. She thought of the men whom she might have ended up with, had things been different, had
she
been different – Tony, and Len. All the sadness and regrets of her life, which she usually tried to run away from, welled up in her today and she couldn’t seem to stop them. Look at me! I might as well go and walk the roads like a proper tramp – I’m living like one anyway. Tears came, sharply, making her sob. The rest of the day was a haze. She slept for most of it. On Boxing Day she woke feeling terrible and her first thought was:
I’ve got to get out of here
.

She left the Gaumont and her lodgings and got a job as a school cook. Her landlady, in a little terraced house, was a Marion Letts, a petite, dark-haired woman in her thirties whose husband had deserted her, leaving her with two young sons, Jimmy and Alan. Though harassed, she was keen to have a bit of company, and the boys, who were six and eight, liked having Molly in the house, especially as it was also at their school that she worked. Together they struggled through that bitterly cold winter, knitting balaclavas for the boys while pipes burst in the school where Molly worked, and spent every evening sitting on top of the fire, in all the clothes they could find, smoking all the cigarettes they could get hold of, to keep warm.