Twenty minutes later Mr Douglas stood with his arms crossed, resolutely unmoved by her tears as she packed her clothes into her suitcase. She found his manner even more distressing because he’d always been so nice to her before; they’d often shared a little light-hearted banter at the staff door. She couldn’t believe that he would turn against her like this.
What was she to do? She couldn’t go home, not when she’d told her father she’d never come back while he was alive. She couldn’t land herself on George and his family at Christmas either, not without being invited, and they weren’t even on the telephone so she couldn’t try sounding them out. And even if she had a fairy godmother living in the village, one who would welcome her with open arms and no strings attached, Molly would have to admit that she’d lost her job. The reason would soon come out and, before she could even say ‘dismissed’, it would be right round the village. No one would believe that she hadn’t done something bad.
Once she’d got everything into her suitcase, she looked pleadingly at Mr Douglas. ‘Please may I leave a note for Dilys?’ she asked.
‘Certainly not,’ he said gruffly. ‘The management doesn’t hold with thieves fraternizing with employees. Pick up that case and get going.’
‘Dilys will be upset if I’m gone without her knowing why,’ she pleaded.
‘She will know why. All the staff will be told. It encourages them to stay honest.’
Molly put her hands over her face in despair to imagine all the girls she’d come to know and like thinking she was a thief. How could this have happened? She had never done anything wrong.
Yet from deep inside her indignation rose up. ‘What about innocent until proved guilty?’ she snapped at the security man. ‘If Miss Stow or Mr Hardcraft had really seen me slipping something to someone, as they claim they did, why didn’t they stop that person?’ Her voice rose in her anger and she moved closer to the man to drive her point home.
‘I haven’t even heard a description of this person! Not even whether it was a man or a woman. But then they couldn’t describe them, or stop them, because they just don’t exist. It’s all fantasy, malicious at that. If they could do this to me, they’re probably robbing the store blind between them. Have you thought of that?’
If her words meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. His face was as cold and hard as granite. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said and, putting his hand in the small of her back, he nudged her towards the door.
She took one last look at the room she’d been so happy in. Dilys’s somewhat bedraggled poster of Gone with the Wind, and the photograph of Frank Sinatra she used to kiss goodnight. The paper chains they’d made together, looped right round the room, the two bulging felt stockings hanging from the knobs on the wardrobe.
So many stories from the past traded in this room; a few tears, but far more laughter. Now Dilys would be alone for Christmas, thinking her best friend was a thief.
Mr Douglas shut the front door of Warwickshire House the second she was over the threshold and, as the cold wind hit Molly’s face, the enormity of her situation hit her, too. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve; she was jobless and homeless. What’s more, it would be difficult to get another job after Christmas without a reference from Bourne & Hollingsworth.
Part of her wanted to hang around and see Dilys to tell her what had happened. But all the staff came back together in big groups, and if they’d already been told what she was supposed to have done, they would probably be as nasty as Mr Douglas had been. Dilys might even believe it was true. After all, she’d been the one warning her that something was afoot.
Molly made her way towards Euston, rather than going the other way, which might mean running into someone from the store. Her suitcase was much heavier than when she had first came to London, because she’d bought new clothes and shoes. The weight of it and the need to sit down and think about what she was going to do made her go into a café and order a cup of tea.
Once she had her tea and an iced bun, she counted her money, including the wages she’d been given today. They’d paid her for two weeks, as she’d worked a week in hand when she had first arrived in London, and along with what she already had in her purse, she had three pounds, four shillings and sixpence. But that was all: no savings, nothing more.
If Miss Grady at the Braemar would give her a room, she had enough money for roughly five nights. Maybe she could get a job in one of the restaurants around Paddington?
But what if she couldn’t? Once her money ran out, she’d be destitute, like the men who slept on the park benches down on the Embankment.
A little later, she telephoned the Braemar from a telephone box, and Miss Grady answered.
‘I’m very sorry, Miss Heywood,’ she replied to Molly’s request for a room, ‘I’m full to bursting. So many people come to London at Christmas to see relatives, it’s often my busiest time of the year. But aren’t you going home?’
There was something guarded in Miss Grady’s voice, as if she suspected Molly was in difficulties and didn’t want to hear about it for fear of being expected to help. So Molly just said she’d left her job and was going on to a new one in the New Year. Even as she said it, she wondered how many more lies she was going to be forced to tell in the coming days.
Miss Grady didn’t suggest another hotel, and Molly was so demoralized that she didn’t ask.
The streets around Euston were becoming empty now that people had left their offices and all the shops had closed. She tried two guest houses close to the station, but they were full up, like the Braemar, but with even less friendly owners, who both said they couldn’t recommend anywhere else.
She walked back down Tottenham Court Road, because it felt safer to be amongst people.
Since her first day of working in London she had completely lost her fear of the big city, but that fear came back now. Suddenly, everyone looked tight-lipped, cold-eyed, elbowing their way aggressively through the crowds. Her case was heavy, she was cold and hungry and she was fighting back tears.
As she reached the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, she looked right and saw that Oxford Street was still packed with people who had come into town to see the Christmas lights. They didn’t have that mean and aggressive look she’d observed around Euston, but somehow their happiness and delight made her plight seem even more desperate.
Married couples arm in arm, a serenity in their expressions that said they expected this Christmas would be the best since before the war, because so many foodstuffs, including sweets, had come off ration. Sweethearts, hand in hand, looking at each other with tender smiles; old people huddled together for warmth, perhaps afraid this would be the last time they’d see the lights. And there were so many families, some of their children sagging with weariness on their father’s shoulders, others jumping up and down with the excitement of being out so late, but all gazing up at the lights with awe.
She remembered, when she and Emily were little, how excited they used to get as Christmas approached, making paper chains, sewing needle cases or making calendars for Christmas presents. If her parents had brought them to London to see the lights they would have been delirious with joy.
That same kind of joy was everywhere she looked, and it was unbearable when she didn’t even have a bed to sleep in. Unable to stand another moment of it, she turned off Oxford Street towards Soho.
When she had first got here, people had delighted in telling her lurid tales about Soho. It was supposed to be a dangerous haunt of prostitutes and gangsters. But from what Molly had read in newspapers and travel guides, it also had the best night clubs and restaurants in London. She and Dilys had loved walking through it and, though they certainly sensed an element of menace in some parts, perhaps because of the neglected old buildings and unsavoury smells, their overall impression was that Soho was just a melting pot of people from all walks of life and of many different nationalities. They had observed elegant, aristocratic women in evening dress with their equally elegant male escorts sharing the grubby pavements with vagrants, snotty-nosed urchins and the kind of rough-looking women in aprons and scarves, fastened turban-style, that her mother had always called ‘fishwives’. If there were prostitutes working here, then they weren’t out on the streets wearing the kind of tight skirts and clingy sweaters Molly imagined such women wore. Dilys had always joked that maybe streetwalkers were like vampires, and they had to wait for the midnight hour to come out.