Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  Bob Giles looked down into her pale, pinched face, and his heart felt as if it were being squeezed within his breast. She was far too young to be bearing her present burdens. ‘Don’t worry about possible financial problems just now, Pru,’ he said quietly. ‘Leave that to me.’

  With Dr Roberts’s silence thundering in her ears, knowing she had guessed right about the imminent cessation of the sick notes, Pru opened the door. As she did so, Doris stepped into the hallway behind them.

  ‘Goodbye, Dr Roberts,’ she said waveringly, remembering her manners. ‘Goodbye, Vicar.’

  ‘Cooee there, Pru!’ a neighbour from Magnolia Terrace called out as she hurried home with a basket full of groceries. ‘Your dad’s just caused ever such a ruckus in Lewisham High Street! The Lady Mayoress was paying a visit to Chiesemans and he called her a whore and a harlot! Ever so entertaining it was. Best fun I’ve had in years!’

  Doris gave a low cry, like an animal in pain. Pru didn’t speak. Instead, tight-lipped and ashen-faced, she slammed the door behind her, pushing past Dr Roberts and Bob Giles, running, running, in the direction of Lewisham High Street.

  Kate was in the middle of doing her weekly wash when Doris disturbed her, knocking on the front door and stepping into the house, saying in a fraught voice, ‘Can you lend me sixpence for the gas meter, Kate? I’m out of change and Pru isn’t in and—’

  ‘Of course I can.’ Kate flashed her a sunny smile, putting down the wooden tongs she had been using to transfer steaming clothes from her copper to her dolly-tub. ‘Are you all set for the wedding tomorrow?’ With wet hands, she took a purse out of a kitchen drawer and unclasped it.

  ‘Wedding?’ Doris looked blank, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping.

  ‘Harriet and Charlie’s wedding,’ Kate said, finding a sixpence and handing it across. ‘Harriet hasn’t sent out individual invitations, but she’s hoping everyone in the Square will be there.’

  Doris clutched hold of the sixpence with childlike intensity. ‘Yes . . . no . . . I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Why don’t you stay and have a cup of tea?’ Kate continued, aware that Doris was distressed and hoping that over a cup of tea she might be able to offer her some comfort. ‘I’m just about to make one and—’

  ‘No!’ This time there was nothing indecisive in Doris’s voice. ‘No. I mustn’t. I can’t.’ Agitatedly she backed out of the kitchen, turning around in the passageway and almost running for the still-open front door.

  Kate stood for a moment, staring after her, wondering what to do for the best. Doris was an intensely private person. Unlike every other house in the Square, neighbours had never been encouraged to drop in at number ten. Forcing her own presence on Doris now might do more harm than good.

  ‘Mummmmy!’ Luke shouted plaintively from the back garden where he was digging a hole in the hope of reaching Australia. ‘Mummmmy! There’s a nasty wriggly thing and it’s fwightening me!’

  Kate dried her hands on a tea-towel and stepped out into the garden to rescue him. She would speak to Bob Giles about Doris. He would advise her on the right action to take. And she would speak to him today, just as soon as she had her weekly wash out on the line.

  ‘Come home, Dad,’ Pru was saying urgently, agonizingly aware of the small groups of people gathering on the pavements at either side of the road.

  ‘Get thee behind me Satan!’ her father roared at her. ‘I am a prophet of Jehovah bearing record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ!’

  A number twenty-one bus slowed down on its way past the clock-tower’s triangular-shaped traffic-island, and a group of youths standing on its platform cat-called derisively.

  ‘Take ’im ’ome, luv!’ a woman shouted, watching the show from outside the Midland Bank on the corner of Lewisham High Street and Lee High Road. ‘’E’ll be gettin’ ’imself in trouble with the police if he carries on much longer!’

  On the opposite corner, outside the entrance to Chiesemans department store, another well-intentioned bystander called out, ‘Let ’im alone, why don’t yer? ’E ain’t causin’ anyone any ’urt, is ’e?’

  Pru resisted the urge to shout back that he was causing his wife plenty of hurt. Instead she tugged yet again on his arm. ‘Come on, Dad. You’re not supposed to be down here today. It’s Friday today, not Saturday.’

  As often happened when she tried to confuse or divert him by such statements, she attracted and held his attention.

  ‘Friday?’ he frowned. ‘What’s wrong with Fridays?’

  Pru desperately tried to think of what could be so wrong that it would persuade him to return home. Before she could do so, a young man leaning out of one of the Midland Bank’s upper windows, cried out in sudden recognition, ‘Hey! That’s Wilfred Sharkey! He’s a churchwarden at St Mark’s! What’s happening to St Mark’s then? Is it going all Evangelical?’

  Something very like hysteria began to bubble up in Pru’s throat. Now a connection had been made between the clock-tower’s Bible-basher and St Mark’s, the situation could only get worse.

  ‘What’s wrong with Fridays?’ her father demanded again, oblivious of the interest he was arousing. ‘The time is at hand to read and listen to the words of the prophets. He that hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith! And the Spirit saith repent, for the end of the world is nigh!’

  ‘If he’s a churchwarden someone should write to the papers about him,’ a smartly dressed woman announced to those standing nearby her. ‘He’s an affront to public order!’

  Pru’s self-control snapped. ‘Shut up!’ she shouted, still holding tightly on to her father’s arm. ‘Shut up, you silly woman! Why don’t you go home and mind your own business instead of making things worse?’

  There were ‘tut-tutts’ from many of the bystanders, but whether their sympathy was directed at herself or the woman on the pavement, was unclear.

  Pru tugged violently on her father’s arm. ‘Come on, Dad,’ she said again, her voice cracking. ‘Please don’t do this! Please come home!’ As her father remained obdurately unresponsive, she became aware of a slim-hipped figure sprinting towards them from the direction of the number twenty-one bus stop. ‘Oh no!’ she whispered, her cheeks flooding scarlet with mortification. ‘Oh no!’

  Malcolm Lewis dodged a number thirty-six bus on its way to Catford, avoided a cyclist and breathlessly made the comparatively safe haven of the clock-tower’s tiny island. ‘What on earth’s going on?’ he demanded, concerned. ‘I saw you both from the top of the number twenty-one. Is your father ill?’ He turned towards Wilfred. ‘Are you ill, Mr Sharkey? Are you not feeling quite yourself?’

  Wilfred glared at him, still troubled by Pru’s insistence that if it were Friday he shouldn’t be in Lewisham High Street. ‘Of course I’m not ill!’ he said querulously, wondering if he should be in Woolwich or Greenwich instead. ‘I’m full of the spirit of the Lord and the gift of prophecy!’

  ‘Then if that’s the case, you’re not likely to come to any harm,’ Malcolm said, much to the prophet’s satisfaction. He turned towards Pru, now knowing why her neighbours had been seeing so little of her, and why the Sharkeys’ front-room curtains were almost permanently drawn. ‘Let me take you home,’ he said compassionately. ‘You can’t protect your father from the kind of attention he’s attracting, all your presence is doing is making the situation worse.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ Pru was on the brink of hysteria. ‘It isn’t your dad who’s making a public spectacle of himself, is it? It isn’t your dad who’s about to get himself arrested and whose name will be in all the papers!’

  ‘Not today it isn’t, no,’ Malcolm agreed matter-of-factly. ‘But my father was a flat-earther, and he’s spent a very large part of his life haranguing anyone and everyone about his belief, just as your dad is haranguing people now.’

  Pru stared at him. ‘In the street?’ she asked, the hysteria she was about to give vent to held in precarious check. ‘He marched up and down in the str
eet? Just like Dad’s doing?’

  ‘Speakers’ Corner was my father’s favourite spot,’ Malcolm said, taking her gently by the arm and leading her a few feet away from where the prophet of God was adjusting his placards. ‘So you see, I do know how you’re feeling. I also know the best way of handling such a situation, and it isn’t by having public confrontations. At the present moment, the most sensible thing you can do is to let me take you home and leave your father to come home under his own steam and in his own good time.’

  Pru’s eyes held his, her hysteria beginning to ebb. ‘What’s a flat-earther?’ she asked, as she unresistingly allowed him to lead her off the clock-tower’s traffic-island and into the busy main road. ‘Is it a kind of Jehovah’s Witness?’

  Despite the awfulness of the situation a glimmer of a smile tugged at Malcolm’s mouth. ‘No,’ he said, as he guided her through the traffic. ‘It’s someone who believes that the earth is flat, and that it’s possible to topple over the edge of it.’

  As they stepped up on to the pavement outside Chiesemans, Pru said incredulously, ‘He couldn’t possibly have believed that! Not when ships sail right round the world!’

  Malcolm looked down at her. Her hand was still where he had tucked it, in the crook of his arm. He rather hoped she would keep it there. It felt as if it belonged there.

  Behind them, on the clock-tower’s traffic-island, Wilfred’s voice rose stentorously. ‘Repent! For the end is nigh! The world will be destroyed with fire and brimstone!’

  Neither of them turned their heads.

  ‘That’s exactly what my father believed,’ Malcolm said, wondering what was on at the local flicks that evening; wondering if Pru would go with him to see whatever was showing. ‘He thought ships were simply going round and round on a flat surface.’

  They rounded the corner on which Chiesemans stood, continuing down the bottom end of the High Street into Lewisham Road, heading towards the turn-off for Magnolia Hill.

  ‘Did he believe in dragons as well?’ Pru asked, no longer acutely aware of their nine-year age difference, and no longer painfully self-conscious in his company. ‘On maps that were made when everyone thought the earth was flat there are drawings of monsters in the corners, warning that “Here be dragons!”’

  ‘I never thought to ask him,’ Malcolm said, happily aware that Pru was going to keep her hand tucked in the crook of his arm, ‘but he probably did. Would you like to go to the flicks tonight? I don’t know what’s on, but if there isn’t anything worth seeing on in Lewisham, we can always go to Greenwich.’

  Kate carried a basket of wet laundry out into her back garden and began pegging it on the line. It was a sunny day with a refreshing breeze, and everything would be dry by tea-time.

  ‘Can I peg out?’ Luke asked toddling over to her, as grimy as a coal-miner from his digging activities.

  ‘Not on this clothes-line, it’s too high for you, and not with hands that colour you can’t!’ Kate said, dropping the shirt she had been holding back into the basket and scooping him up, tucking him under her arm.

  Her long braid had fallen forward over her shoulder when she had bent down towards him and she flicked it back with her free hand, saying in mock severity, ‘A soapy flannel on your hands and face is what you need, young man. And stop wriggling. You’re worse than that worm you were frightened of!’

  He shrieked and giggled as she carried him into the kitchen and sat him on the draining-board, next to the sink.

  ‘There’s enough dirt under your fingernails to grow potatoes in,’ she said, making him giggle harder than ever. She turned on the tap and reached for the flannel. Then a distant scream froze her into immobility.

  It was followed by another scream. And another. They weren’t the screams of children at play, or even adult screams of pretend terror. They were terrified. Horror-riven. Desperate. And they ran one into another, on and on.

  She whipped a startled Luke off the sink-top. ‘Stay here! Don’t leave the house! Do you understand?’

  Uncertain and alarmed, he nodded, putting his thumb in his mouth for comfort as she raced out of the house and into the Square.

  Bob Giles was running down the vicarage’s short front path in his shirt-sleeves. Leah was running up from the bottom end of the Square, moving at a speed Kate could scarcely believe. Charlie was charging out of his garden gate. Emily Helliwell was hurrying across from the far side of the Square. All were making a bee-line for the open front door of number ten. Charlie reached the Sharkeys’ gate first, Kate hard on his heels.

  ‘Run for the vicar!’ Malcolm Lewis could be heard shouting from inside the house. ‘Tell him to ring for an ambulance!’

  ‘Ring for an ambulance!’ Charlie shouted over his shoulder to Bob Giles, who was fast approaching the Sharkeys’ gate.

  ‘Ruth’s already ringing for one!’ Bob panted, racing into the house in Charlie and Kate’s wake.

  The smell of gas was overpowering. They ran down the long hallway leading to the kitchen, bursting into it, seeing instantly the open oven door, the cushion Doris had placed inside it for her head, the heavy ornamental tablecloth she had draped over the oven and her shoulders so that no fumes would escape. Malcolm Lewis had carried Doris’s comatose body out into the back garden and, as Pru continued to scream, was trying to revive her, pressing down hard on her shoulder-blades, lifting her chest free of the ground by her shoulders in order to draw air into her lungs, pressing down again, lifting, pressing down, lifting.

  ‘Is all the gas turned off?’ Bob Giles demanded urgently, dropping down on his knees beside Doris, feeling for her pulse.

  Malcolm nodded, still pressing down and lifting, pressing down and lifting. ‘Yes . . . but all the windows in the house need opening, and for the love of God tell no-one to strike a match!’

  ‘Charlie’s seeing to the windows,’ Kate said as Pru’s screams subsided into terrified sobs.

  ‘Our Father which art in Heaven,’ Emily Helliwell was saying quietly, standing several yards away so that she wouldn’t impede the resuscitation attempts of Bob Giles and Malcolm Lewis, ‘Hallowed be thy Name . . .’

  ‘It’s Dad’s fault! It’s all Dad’s fault!’ Pru sobbed, hugging her arms, rocking herself to and fro. ‘And now Mum’s killed herself and I’ll never be able to forgive him! Never!’

  There was a hoarse, wheezing sound as Malcolm Lewis lifted Doris’s shoulders clear off the ground yet again.

  ‘She’s alive, my life!’ Leah’s voice was fervent. If Doris had succeeded in killing herself, it would have been a terrible thing; a criminal action.

  ‘Don’t stop what you’re doing till she regains consciousness or the ambulance-men arrive,’ Bob Giles said tautly to Malcolm, his fingers still on Doris’s frighteningly weak pulse beat.

  Malcolm nodded, beads of sweat standing out on his brow, his face fierce with concentration.

  ‘I fink I’ll just remove that cushion and ’eavy tablecloth from the oven, Vicar,’ Charlie said ruminatively from behind them. ‘We don’t want the ambulance-men gettin’ any funny ideas about wot ’appened, do we? They might go reportin’ it to the police.’

  After only the slightest of pauses, Bob Giles said, ‘No, Charlie. We don’t. I rather think Doris left the gas on by accident when she made her lunch-time cup of tea, and then fell asleep and was overcome by the fumes. Make sure the oven door’s closed, there’s a good chap.’

  Doris gave another, barely audible, rasping sound of life.

  Pru’s knees buckled and she sank down on them, saying through her tears, ‘Come on, Mum! Please come back to me! Please!’

  Miss Helliwell said in a voice rendered quavery by shock, ‘I can hear an ambulance bell ringing, Vicar. It’s going to be all right, I know it is. If Doris had been going to die, Moshambo would have told me.’

  Seconds later, they could hear Charlie shouting informatively to the ambulance-men as they ran into the house, ‘The lady’s out the back! She’s ’ad a bit of a nasty accident wit
h ’er gas!’

  ‘And then what happened, sweetheart?’ Leon asked, concerned. He was sitting at the kitchen table and she was forking a generous wedge of toad-in-the-hole from a baking tin, on to his dinner plate.

  ‘One of the ambulance-men confirmed she was alive and praised Malcolm Lewis for the way he had acted.’ She handed him the plate, her face pale with distress. ‘Then they rolled her on to a stretcher and put her in the ambulance and took her to Lewisham Hospital.’

  ‘And Pru went with her?’

  She nodded, making no attempt to put anything on her own plate. ‘Malcolm Lewis went as well,’ she said, her voice unsteady. ‘I think he and Pru must be very fond of each other. He had his arm around her shoulders and she was leaning against him as if he was all the comfort she needed.’

  Leon made no move to pick up his knife and fork. He knew his Kate, and he knew there was something else distressing her, something she hadn’t told him yet. ‘What is it, love?’ he asked gently. ‘What are you fretting about?’

  Her eyes held his, the expression in them agonized. ‘That it was partly my fault,’ she said hoarsely.

  He stared at her in utter bewilderment, ‘But how on earth . . .’ he began, his dinner forgotten.

  ‘I was the one who lent her the money for the gas!’ Tears began streaming down her face. ‘Oh, Leon! I didn’t know what she was going to do when she asked me for it, but I did know she was troubled, and I didn’t do anything about it. I simply went on with my laundry! And all the time she was . . . she was . . .’

  He was out of his chair, his arms around her, drawing her to her feet, holding her close against him. ‘How could you possibly know what was going to happen?’ he said, his voice full of loving reason. ‘If you hadn’t lent her the money, she would only have borrowed it off someone else. Leah, perhaps. Or Nellie.’

  ‘But I feel so guilty!’ Her words were muffled against the comforting warmth and strength of his chest. ‘I feel so responsible!’