Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you do,’ Mavis said, for all the world as if, when Billy and Beryl had been under-fives, she had been similarly conscientious. ‘Maybe I’ll see you in The Swan tonight. Cheery-bye for now.’

  ‘Cheery-bye,’ Kate said, wondering if a knees-up in The Swan really was on the cards. It certainly would have been in the days before Jack’s marriage to Christina. The Swan had always been Jack’s watering-hole. He’d never had any patience with pubs that veered on the pretentious. Christina, however, had never been known to enter any pub, not even the very respectable Princess of Wales.

  She turned into Magnolia Hill, her two-toned, Cuban-heeled shoes tapping out a smart rat-a-tat on the pavement as she began catching up with Matthew. Luke was with Leon, helping him make a new strawberry bed. Daisy was at school. Her father was visiting Ellen in Greenwich. As she drew abreast of Matthew and tucked his chubby little hand into hers, she wondered if she had enough points in her ration book to buy some dried fruit. She wanted to make a proper Christmas cake this year, not a poor replica made with carrots instead of currants and raisins, but storing up a suitable cache of dried fruit via the points system wasn’t easy.

  ‘Can we have honey sandwiches for tea?’ Matthew suddenly asked as he skipped along beside her, his thoughts, like hers, on food. ‘I like honey sandwiches and Daddy-Leon likes honey sandwiches and . . .’

  The Bentley’s engine was so quiet, Kate wasn’t even aware of its approach. Sleekly it purred to a halt at the kerbside, a few yards in front of them. She came to a far more abrupt halt, her heart racing, her throat so tight she thought she was going to choke.

  ‘What is it, Mummy?’ Matthew asked, looking up at her in perplexity. ‘Have you got a tummyache?’ The sun glinted on his thick shock of fair hair, burnishing it the colour of ripe barley. ‘Are you going to grow another baby in your tummy, like you grew Luke in your tummy? Are—’

  Hector bounded ahead and round the corner into Lewisham High Street. The Bentley’s uniformed chauffeur walked around the car, opening the nearside rear door. Joss Harvey stepped out, his thickening shoulders still impressively broad beneath his Savile Row tailored suit, his silver hair unhatted.

  Kate gripped Matthew’s hand so tightly he gave a yelp of pain. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t move and even if they would have done, there was nowhere to run to. After nearly four years of leaving her in peace, Joss Harvey was quite obviously all set to engage her in battle again. And this time he was doing so confident that he held every advantage.

  ‘You married him then?’ he said succinctly, walking towards her and halting a foot or so away.

  The force of his barely reined-in aggression was so intense, her every instinct screamed at her to fall back, to retreat as far and as fast as possible.

  Defiantly she held her ground. ‘I’m married, yes,’ she said tersely. As always, whenever she was in confrontation with him, she found it impossible to believe there had ever been any blood link between him and Matthew’s father. Toby had been good-humoured and good-natured. And tolerant – above all he had been tolerant. His upper middle-class upbringing and public school education ensured he would have been as staggered as anyone if he had known she would one day marry a half-caste seaman. But he would have trusted her judgement. And if he had ever met Leon, he would have liked him.

  ‘No Black Sambo is going to be stepfather to my great-grandson,’ Joss Harvey said bluntly, just as she had known he would. ‘We can settle this out of court, or in court. And if you choose to go to court, you’ll regret it. The case will be splashed all over the local newspapers, and you and your blackie husband will soon find out what the public thinks to marriages like yours. Especially when there’s a white child involved. A white child from a good background, with a great-grandfather well known and well respected and willing to provide a home and education for him.’

  Dimly Kate was aware that Hector was trotting back up Magnolia Hill towards them; that a group of workmen had stepped out of The Swan and were looking across at the Bentley with undisguised interest and envy; that Matthew was tugging impatiently on her hand, trying to gain her attention. Joss Harvey had said nothing she hadn’t already anticipated him saying, but her reaction was as intense as if she had been totally unprepared for it. Waves of sickness surged over her. This was the man Toby had admired, respected and loved: the man Toby would have wanted his son to grow up admiring, respecting, loving. And he was a man who referred to Leon with ugly racial epithets, a man she wanted her son to have nothing to do with at all.

  ‘There was a time when I was happy for Matthew to spend time with you,’ she said tautly as Hector skittered to a halt beside them. ‘You were the one who put an end to that situation. You abused my trust in the most dreadful way possible, and I’ve no intention of allowing you to do so again.’

  Hector, sensing hostility, had begun to growl low in his throat. With her free hand Kate took hold of his collar. She didn’t want him to bite Joss Harvey. If he did, Joss Harvey would inform the police and would insist on Hector being destroyed.

  ‘Mummy?’ Matthew was tugging on her hand in even greater urgency. ‘Mummy, who’s this man?’ He hadn’t understood anything that had been said but, like Hector, he sensed her distress and his eyes, so like Toby’s eyes, were troubled and perplexed.

  She didn’t answer him. Instead she gripped his hand even tighter and it was the man who was making her angry and upset who answered his question.

  ‘I’m your great-grandpa, young man,’ he said, bewildering Matthew even further, ‘and from now on we’re going to get to know each other very well. You’re going to visit my house, the house your father lived in when he was a little boy. It has a big garden. A garden as big as a park. And you’re going to go for rides in my motor car—’

  ‘Oh no he isn’t!’ Panic bubbled high in Kate’s throat, almost choking her. She had envisaged Joss Harvey using all kinds of brutal tactics in his attempt to gain guardianship of Matthew, but one thing she hadn’t anticipated was his attempting to seduce Matthew away from her. Or that Matthew would allow himself to be seduced.

  ‘In that motor car?’ he was now asking, his eyes like saucers. ‘With that Army man driving it?’

  ‘He isn’t an Army man,’ Joss Harvey replied, and to Kate’s even greater distress, his voice had lost its habitual harshness and held undeniable tenderness and even amusement. ‘He’s a chauffeur and his name is Hemmings.’

  ‘His name is Mr Hemmings!’ Kate hissed, incensed. It was bad enough Joss Harvey trying to bribe Matthew into his clutches without his teaching him upper middle-class high-handedness into the bargain.

  Joss Harvey ignored her. ‘Would you like to go for a ride now?’ he asked Matthew. ‘Would you like me to give you and your mummy a lift to wherever you’re going?’

  ‘We’re going to the market and it’s barely fifty yards away,’ Kate retorted furiously as Matthew’s little face lit up in happy anticipation, ‘and I wouldn’t accept the offer even if I had two broken legs!’ It was a crudity totally alien to her and she felt inner shock at having been goaded so far as to have sunk to it. No-one else seemed remotely concerned. Not even Matthew.

  ‘Please, Mummy!’ he begged, the outburst washing over his head as all the previous angry exchanges had done. ‘Please! I’ve never been in a motor car.’ He looked away from her and towards the powerful-looking figure who, incredibly, claimed he was his great-grandpa. ‘Does it go very fast?’ he asked. ‘Does it have a loud horn that makes people jump out of the way?’

  ‘It has a horn just like the horn on Mr Toad’s motor car,’ Joss Harvey said with a gruff geniality that sent fresh shock waves through Kate.

  It was all very well standing firm against him when he was being coarsely threatening and blatantly hostile, but it was a different matter when he was being caring and gentle with Matthew.

  Matthew was looking mystified, and Joss Harvey’s bushy silver eyebrows pulled together in a frown. ‘Hasn’t anyone read
Wind in the Willows to you, young man?’ he asked, concerned. ‘Your father used to love the characters in Wind in the Willows. Mr Toad and Ratty and Badger . . .’

  Kate fought a dizzy sense of disorientation. It was like being confronted with an affable Mr Hyde after tangling with an enraged Dr Jekyll. And it was no wonder that, if this was the only side of his grandfather Toby had ever seen, Toby had loved him. After all, with his parents dead, his grandfather had been Toby’s only family. And now Matthew was Joss Harvey’s only family. Watching the two of them together – Matthew looking up at Joss Harvey with shining trust on his face, Joss Harvey looking down at Matthew with hungry tenderness – Kate’s throat tightened. It was a devil of a situation, and always had been.

  Right from the beginning, when Toby had been killed and she had known she was carrying his child, she had tried to ensure that the day would come when a loving relationship would exist between Joss Harvey and his great-grandchild. She had done so because she had believed it was what Toby would have wanted, and because she felt it was morally right that, despite Matthew’s illegitimacy, the two of them should have the opportunity to forge loving links with each other. And Joss Harvey had scuppered her every attempt. He had abused her for her German paternity with the same ugly crudity he had employed over Leon. When Matthew, as a small baby, had been evacuated to his country home for the duration of the Blitz, he had refused to hand him back to her and had sent Matthew and his nanny into hiding.

  Kate’s jaw clenched, old anger flooding through her. It had been a ploy that had failed, for the nanny in question had been Ruth Fairbairn, and Ruth had returned Matthew to her. After that, instead of trying to encourage contact between Joss Harvey and Matthew, she had done her utmost to ensure there was no contact whatsoever. And there hadn’t been – until now.

  ‘Mole is a very fine chap,’ Joss Harvey was saying to an entranced Matthew. ‘But he’s timid. Mr Toad, however, is far from timid. Mr Toad is a noisy, swashbuckling fellow who lives in a very grand house called Toad Hall and . . .’

  Hector had long since given up growling and, sensing that the halt to his walk was going to be a long one, was now lying flat on the pavement, his head resting morosely on his paws. On the far side of the road the workmen, having gazed their fill at the Bentley, were noisily dispersing in the direction of Lewisham High Street. Kate wished fiercely that she and Matthew were hurrying in their wake, her decision about what line to take with Joss Harvey now safely reached. What was she to do? Unless she deflected him, he would most certainly begin a legal fight for guardianship of Matthew, and the fight would be long and ugly. He would accuse her of being an unfit mother and was unscrupulous enough to both fabricate evidence and bribe so-called witnesses. And he would make as much mileage as possible out of Leon’s and Matthew’s racial differences.

  The very thought of the ways in which he might do so filled her with sick apprehension. Whatever the outcome, it would almost certainly put an end to Leon’s hopes of adopting Matthew, and it might also put an end to their neighbours’ easy acceptance of their mixed marriage. The nerves in her stomach tightened into knots. She had had too much experience of the way latent prejudices could be whipped into life to ever be complacent about acceptance and tolerance. Before the war, her father had lived for twenty years in Magnolia Square without his German nationality ever being an issue and then, when war broke out, he had found himself ostracized and vilified and spat upon.

  ‘. . . and so Toad bought himself a large and very expensive motor car. . .’

  ‘Like your motor car, Great-Grandpa?’

  Listening and watching, Kate found it almost impossible to believe that, until a few minutes ago, Matthew hadn’t even known he had a great-grandfather and that, as a baby, he had spent months in his care. With an ease that both deeply disturbed her and yet left her reluctantly admiring him, Joss Harvey had forged the kind of rapport with Matthew she had once fervently hoped for. Was it a rapport that, with forbearance on her part, could be maintained? A rapport which Joss Harvey could be made to realize would be lost if he embarked on an ugly legal fight?

  She thought of the alternative, and of what she and Leon might lose, and cleared her throat. ‘I take back what I said earlier,’ she said crisply. ‘I will accept a lift to the market. But only on the understanding that we have a civilized discussion together. A discussion with no name-calling, no threats, and no attempts at blackmail.’

  Joss Harvey’s pugnacious jaw tightened for a moment and then he said tersely, ‘Get in the car. And if we have to take that apology for a dog with us, make sure it stays on the car floor and doesn’t clamber on to the seats.’

  Praying to God her decision was not one she would live to regret, Kate roused Hector from his torpor and walked towards the Bentley. As she did so her heart began to beat in swift, erratic strokes. In front of her Matthew and Joss Harvey were walking companionably together, Matthew’s chubby hand tucked trustingly in Joss Harvey’s large, powerful paw.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘What sort of home-coming is this, for Christ’s sake?’ Jack Robson was demanding in angry and disappointed frustration, dark hair tumbling low over his brow. ‘I got more of a welcome from the dog!’

  Christina stood facing him across the narrow width of her pristinely made single bed. Why, why, why had she not been able to control her crushing jealousy when she had seen him whirling Mavis around in his arms? Why, instead of running joyfully to greet him, had she allowed the presence of so many onlookers to freeze her into immobility? Why had she allowed anything to mar such a long-awaited, precious moment?

  A sea of conflicting emotions churned inside her and she could give expression to none of them. Instead of doing what she longed to do, rounding the bed, hugging him tight, explaining that she found it hard to display private feelings in front of an audience, she heard herself saying stiffly, ‘I’m sorry, Jack. I am glad to see you. Truly I am.’

  There was a brief moment when she feared it wasn’t going to be enough and that he was going to turn on his heel and leave the room. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. They had spent only one night together since their wedding and that, too, had been ruined because of her inability to reveal to him her troubled thoughts and feelings. Ever since then he had been fighting in Europe, undergoing God only knew what kind of horrors, and he had come marching home in happy anticipation of a south-east London welcome from his wife. And, as she well knew, a south-east London welcome was anything but restrained. How could it be, when the women were breezy and boisterous and the men were as unlike archetypal Englishmen, all repression and stiff upper lip, as it was possible to imagine? Jack would have been expecting her to run joyously to greet him, no matter how many onlookers there were. And she hadn’t done so. Instead she had stood in the Jennings’s doorway, to all outward appearances as unmoved and unemotional as Hans Andersen’s Ice Queen.

  Silence spun out between them, so taut it was almost a physical presence. A pulse had begun to beat at the corner of his jaw. None of the scenarios he had envisaged on his long journey home had included being greeted by his wife as if they were casual acquaintances and nothing more. His savage disappointment was exacerbated by hurt pride. Half the Square had been a witness to Christina’s coolness and restraint, and he knew the kind of gossip that would soon be going the rounds in The Swan. The question was, did he care? The instant the question entered his head he shrugged it impatiently away. Of course he didn’t care. He’d never given a damn what people said or thought about him and he certainly wasn’t about to start now. What the hell did it matter if she hadn’t given him the kind of public welcome Mavis had so enthusiastically given him? Christina wasn’t Mavis. She was quieter, classier, far more reserved.

  A smile crooked the corner of his well-shaped mouth, his anger ebbing as speedily as it had erupted. It was Christina’s reserve that had first intrigued and attracted him and, if one of the consequences of it was behaviour that would have their neighbours gossiping to king
dom come, so what? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was what took place in private between them, not what took place in public.

  He said in a voice raw with emotion, ‘I’m sorry for reacting like a kid.’ It was the first apology he had ever made, but it was worth it to see the misery lift from her eyes.

  Her relief that he wasn’t going to walk away from her, out of the room, was so intense her knees buckled slightly against the edge of the bed. ‘And I’m sorry for being so . . . so unsouth-London.’

  Through the open window came the sound of an approaching horse and cart and the unmistakable street cry of a rag-and-bone man. Three gardens away, Queenie began barking, outraged by the intrusion. Nellie Miller shouted out that she had an old wash-tub she wouldn’t mind a few coppers for. Billy, hopeful of earning one of them as a middleman, eagerly announced his willingness to dig it out of her scullery and bowl it up on to the back of the cart.

  Oblivious of the intruding noise, Jack’s eyes held Christina’s, the heat in them hot and urgent. ‘I love you,’ he said, and she knew that in another second he would have rounded the bed and she would be in his arms. And then they would make love. With the hurly-burly taking place in the Square infiltrating the room; with Leah and Miriam and Carrie and Danny in the house; with Rose possibly in the house also; and Bonzo; and God only knew how many nosey visiting neighbours.

  Panic beat its way up into her throat. Desperately as she loved him, how could she possibly respond uninhibitedly to him with half the Square within earshot? And if they didn’t make love now, in the crowded bedroom she shared with Rose, where could they make love? Charlie would be in situ at number twelve, and certainly wouldn’t have the sensitivity to remove himself from the house. They didn’t possess the kind of money that would make booking into a hotel a feasible option, and even if they did and she made such a suggestion, Jack would be mystified by it. For working-class south-Londoners, hotels were for special, one-off occasions, such as wedding nights, and then only for the fortunate few. She knew that Carrie had never set foot in a hotel and she doubted if Kate had either.