All The Days of My Life by Hilary Bailey

Author:Hilary Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

I wasn’t happy, not really happy, with Ferenc but I was content, which is something to be grateful for, I suppose. I wasn’t flogging Lord This or sucking off Sir That. I wasn’t selling aspirins in Boots and trying to make ends meet for me and Josephine. And Josephine got her education off to a good start at school. The private school was better than Wattenblath Elementary School, or whatever they were calling it by that time. And I liked Nedermann and I was sorry for him, though I can’t say I loved him, whatever that might mean. The truth is he was so repressive I felt irritable with him half the time. He had these high domestic standards and he banned practically everybody I knew from the house. He had to put up with Ivy because she was my mother, after all, but when he came home after she’d gone he used to prowl about the room, saying her cigarette smoke was too strong and opening up the windows and fussing about like an old hen. I couldn’t really complain too much – after all, he was paying for everything, including Josephine’s ballet lessons and the posh school and the uniform and all that. Still, I suppose I wouldn’t have stayed if I hadn’t been fond of him – I often used to think of life in Meakin Street, even if it was a bit rough and ready, it would have been a damn sight easier and more fun than living with Ferenc Nedermann. And it wasn’t too easy to forget how he got those funds – he had us, Josephine and me, as captives and he had those poor bloody tenants of his in the same state. He was a natural jailer, that was the truth. He got his security from knowing he had everybody under his thumb. There were times when, seeing him carrying on like the Mayor of Scarborough, all watch-chain and haemorrhoids, I felt just like screaming out loud. But there you are, he was kind, he needed me – I couldn’t see for crying when he died. They shuffled him off to his grave in the end. He would have died of horror if he could have seen his own funeral. It preyed on my mind for years and in the end, when I had the money, I got everybody together that had known him and I had a great big ceremony, in the cemetery where he was buried, with a proper address by a rabbi and, afterwards, a big party. Then I had a huge, marble tombstone put up for him. Well, I thought it was the least I could do for the poor old bugger.

Anyway, things went from bad to worse. I was lucky in a way not to be married to him. Because if I had, when the crash came he’d have tied me up in the firm as a nominal director of all these banana republic companies he had, I’d

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