Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  Kate gave a choked sob. If that happened, then Daisy might very well be taken away from them. Leon’s arm was comfortingly around her shoulder as she said in a voice so cracked and hoarse it was scarcely recognizable. ‘When is the hearing, Ruby?’

  Ruby hesitated. It was a hell of a date. ‘The twenty-fourth of December,’ she said reluctantly, knowing that if it didn’t go their way it was going to be a nightmare of a Christmas.

  ‘I don’t want a night out on the town,’ Ted Lomax said apologetically, sticking a poker into the base of the smouldering fire and lifting it, so that a draught of air fed it and it burst into flames. ‘I’ve been away from home for six years, Mavis. I want to stay in and enjoy my own fireside, not go roaming the West End.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be the West End,’ Mavis said, abandoning all hope of Piccadilly’s bright lights. ‘We could go down to the Social Club in Lewisham. There’ll be lots of your old mates down there.’

  He sat back in his armchair, a thin-faced man of thirty-four who felt fifty-four. ‘Not for me, love – not tonight. I just want to be at home. What about some toast? The fire’s going a treat now.’

  Mavis was about to suggest that they at least walk the few dozen yards down to The Swan, but then thought better of it. What would be the point, with Ted as sociable as a monk? ‘Toast it is then,’ she said, giving in with as much good grace as she could muster. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t as if his refusal to go out was a one-off. They hadn’t been out on the town together once since his return home.

  She mooched into the kitchen and took the lid off her enamel bread bin. She’d always joked about Ted being a fire and pipe man, but it was now so literally the truth that it wasn’t remotely funny any more. She lifted a loaf out of the bin and put it on the bread board. What did the future hold for the two of them if Ted wouldn’t even go out for a friendly drink on a Friday or a Saturday night? Ever since the war had ended she had been bored and now, with her husband safely home she was, God help her, more bored than ever. A feeling of shame washed over her. Ted had had a hard war. There had been no sunning himself in cosy little postings. He had been in the thick of the fighting almost continuously, and however unlikely-looking a hero he was, he was a hero and he had a medal to prove it.

  She looked at the slices of bread she had carved and realized she had carved far too many. With a shrug she returned two of them to the bread bin. If Billy didn’t have them with jam on in the morning for his breakfast she’d make a bread pudding out of them. Depression settled heavily on her shoulders. She wanted more to look forward to than the dubious joys of making bread puddings. She reached for the toasting-fork, remembering the Mormon-missionary-looking young man who had invited her out some time ago, and who now travelled on her bus route every chance he got. Is that what she wanted? The glamour and excitement of being taken out and wined and dined? Even before she had finished asking herself the question, she knew the answer. When it came to men, there was only one who could seriously tempt her off the straight and narrow, and he didn’t resemble a Mormon missionary. He resembled Clark Gable at his most masculine. She loaded a tray with the plate of bread, the toasting-fork, a butter-dish and a knife. What would happen when Jack came home? Would he and Christina sort out their differences? And if they didn’t?

  She stared at her reflection in the darkened glass of the kitchen window. If they didn’t, chances were it would have no effect on her own relationship with Jack. She had put the kibosh on that years ago, when she had so impetuously fallen for Ted and found herself pregnant. And her having fallen for Ted hadn’t ruined her life in any major way. They were far happier together than many couples she knew. Before he had enlisted he had always brought his pay packet home, putting it unopened on the kitchen table every Friday night. He was never violent in drink and never knocked her around. They had two grand kiddies and they had always been satisfyingly compatible in bed.

  She lifted the tray, walking through into the sitting-room with it, her habitual good humour reasserting itself. Where bed was concerned, nothing had changed, thank God. A grin touched the corners of her mouth. When they’d had their toast, she’d suggest an early night. If he wouldn’t go out, they could at least make the most of staying in!

  ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t feel like going swimming this evening,’ Leon said to Danny as they met at their regular Thursday night meeting place on the corner of the Square and Magnolia Hill. ‘I feel like something a lot more violent.’

  Danny tucked his rolled-up towel and his swimming trunks a little more securely beneath his arm. ‘Yer mean boxing?’ he said, his eyes lighting up. ‘We could nip over to the Enterprise north of the river. It’s a top-notch boxing club if yer fancy a proper work-out.’

  ‘I fancy punching the hell out of something,’ Leon said grimly. ‘Preferably Mr Joss bloody Harvey.’

  ‘You imagine yer punch-bag is old man ’Arvey, I’ll imagine mine is my gaffer at the bloody biscuit factory,’ Danny said, who knew all about the spokes Joss Harvey was putting in the wheels of Leon’s application to adopt Matthew. ‘Did yer know I was once an Army boxin’ champion? Light-welterweight. There was no-one to touch me. If yer fancyin’ a work-out, Leon, yer’ve come to the right man!’

  ‘Christmas trees!’ Albert stared at Miriam in stupefaction. ‘Don’t yer think I’ve enough on my mind, Christina jaunting off to Germany in the mornin’ as if it was no more than a charabanc trip to Brighton, without yer wantin’ me to go out in the dark searching for bloomin’ Christmas trees!’

  ‘Yer don’t ’ave to search for ’em, I know exactly where they’re growin’,’ Miriam said, refusing to think about Christina’s imminent departure in case she broke down and never put herself back together again. ‘There’s two trim little conifers growing near the Ranger’s House on the ’Eath. If yer take a bucket and a spade yer can ’ave ’em back ’ere in two shakes of a donkey’s tail. We can ’ave one of ’em for ourselves and our Carrie can ’ave the other. Now, are yer goin’, or are you just goin’ to stand lookin’ stupid all night?’

  ‘Your dad’s going to come with me when I go to meet Miss Marshall in the morning,’ Christina said, sitting in Kate’s cheery kitchen, a mug of milky cocoa on the table in front of her. ‘It’s kind of you and Carrie to want to come with me as well, but I think the fewer people there are with me, the better Miss Marshall will like it.’

  ‘But you can’t just slip away as if you’re going on a . . . on a . . .’

  ‘Day trip to Brighton?’ Christina finished for her, a rare smile touching her mouth. ‘That’s what Albert says, but really it’s the best way. I don’t want a song and dance made out of my leaving. People like Miss Marshall don’t have hordes of friends seeing them off, do they?’

  Kate wrapped the last of the sandwiches she had been making in grease-proof paper and put them in Leon’s tommy-bag, ready for the morning. ‘People like Miss Marshall are members of a worldwide, official organization,’ she said, her voice a little unsteady. ‘You aren’t, Christina. How are you going to travel from Cologne to Heidelberg? Where are you going to stay when you get there? How are you going to get back to England?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Christina said truthfully. ‘But thanks to Mr Giles I have money and I’ll manage.’ Her eyes were fiercely resolute. ‘Germany is going to be full of people doing exactly what I shall be doing, Kate.’

  Kate regarded her with rising anxiety. If Christina did find her mother and grandmother, would they be allowed into England with her? Even if they were, the paperwork might take weeks, months even. Would Christina remain with them in Germany while their paperwork was being processed? And if there was no paperwork to process, if entry was refused, what would Christina do then? Would she feel unable to leave her mother and grandmother? Would she stay with them and never return to Magnolia Square ever again?

  Feeling nauseous and not knowing whether it was due to her escalating sense of foreboding where Christina’s return to Germany was concerned, or t
o her now confirmed pregnancy, she pulled a chair away from the table and sat down. There was something she had to ask Christina, and she was terribly afraid that she already knew what her answer was going to be.

  ‘Have you told Jack, Christina? Dad is under the impression that you’ve been keeping Jack informed all along as to what the two of you have been doing, but you haven’t been, have you?’

  Christina reached out for her mug of cocoa, her eyes avoiding Kate’s. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve tried, but it’s so difficult. We’ve had hardly any time on our own together, and in the time we have had . . .’ She lifted her shoulders in a helpless, hopeless gesture. ‘In the time we have had, Jack hasn’t made it easy for me to talk to him about such things. He doesn’t seem to have any idea of how I might be feeling. Not only about meine Mutter and Grossmutter but about other things also.’

  ‘Other things?’ Kate asked, her sense of foreboding soaring off the Richter scale, wondering how her father and Bob Giles were going to react when they knew; wondering what on earth was going to happen if Jack returned home whilst Christina was still in Germany. ‘What other things?’

  ‘How I feel at having married in an Anglican church,’ Christina said, her eyes at last meeting Kate’s. ‘How I feel at having turned my back on my religion and my culture.’

  It was so totally unexpected, so terrible in all it implied, that Kate sucked in her breath. ‘Oh my dear heaven,’ she whispered devoutly, ‘and you’ve been keeping all this from Jack? He has no idea of your feelings? None at all?’

  Christina shook her head. ‘He thinks of me as being a south-London girl,’ she said bleakly, ‘but I’m not, Kate. I’m a German Jew, and tomorrow I am going to return to Germany.’ Her face was set and pale, her eyes anguished. ‘I have to return. Not only to find my mother and grandmother, but to find the person I used to be. The person I want to be again.’

  ‘It’s all a bit deep for me, sweetheart,’ Leon said later that night as they lay in each other’s arms in the cosy comfort of their feather bed. ‘Are you trying to say that Christina feels as if she’s lost her identity? And that it’s living in England for so long that’s made her feel that way?’

  ‘That and other things,’ Kate said, too disturbed to be able to sleep. ‘And I think it’s mainly the other things that are so deeply troubling her. She feels she’s turned her back on her Jewishness by marrying Jack, especially by having married him in an Anglican church. The worst of it is, Jack has no idea she feels that way.’

  ‘Then perhaps someone should tell him,’ Leon said dryly. ‘He can’t help her come to terms with something he doesn’t know about, can he?’

  They lay silent for a little while, staring into the darkness, drawing comfort from their closeness.

  ‘Danny’s having a hard time of it as well,’ Leon said at last, his mouth close to the fragrant-smelling silkiness of her hair. ‘He hates his work down at the biscuit factory.’

  ‘I know,’ Kate said, remembering everything Carrie had told her, ‘but what else can he do? He’s never been apprenticed to anything, has he?’

  ‘No, more’s the pity.’ Leon thought of his own father and of how he had taken him, when he was fourteen, down to Waterman’s Hall in Billingsgate and had him indentured as an apprenticed lighterman. A smile touched his full-lipped mouth. He’d had to take oaths of loyalty to his sovereign and the company, promising ‘to learn his Art and to Dwell and Serve upon the said River Thames’. It had opened up a grand way of life to him and was an action he’d never regretted.

  ‘Danny’s a tough little boxer,’ he said musingly. ‘He loves the ring the way I love the river. We were over at the Enterprise tonight and the manager asked him if he’d like to earn himself a bit of extra cash by acting as a regular sparring partner for the big boys. If the Enterprise were this side of the river, I think he’d do it.’

  ‘What boxing clubs are there this side of the river?’ There was a speculative note in Kate’s voice. Boxing wasn’t a sport that had ever attracted her, but if it was something Danny felt passionate about, something that would restore his self-esteem . . .

  ‘There’s a whole wodge of them down the Elephant and Castle way,’ Leon said, pulling her even closer against him as she lay in the crook of his arm. ‘But the best clubs are the Enterprise and the Langham, and they’re both in the East End.’

  ‘And there isn’t a boxing club locally? In Blackheath or Lewisham or Greenwich?’

  ‘Not worth talking about. Nothing that would attract the big boys.’

  ‘Then perhaps there should be.’ Their own terrible problem of the impending adoption hearing was temporarily forgotten. Excitement and certainty gripped her. ‘And if it isn’t possible for Danny to own it, he could at least manage it!’

  Leon pushed himself sharply up on one elbow, looking down at her in the darkness, stunned by the brilliance of her idea. A local boxing club! It would be just the thing for kids like Billy. Malcolm Lewis would be interested in such an idea. He was always complaining of a lack of suitable activity for his scouts. The landlady of The Swan would definitely be interested. A local boxing club would put her pub on the map in a big way.

  ‘There’ll be a problem getting suitable financial backing . . .’ he said, trying to exercise a little common sense and caution.

  ‘No there wouldn’t.’ In the velvety darkness her eyes met his, her certainty absolute. ‘Jack will back it. Jack’s never had a problem finding money. And a boxing club will be just up his street.’

  Leon stared down at her, his admiration knowing no bounds. He didn’t know Jack very well, but from everything he’d heard about him, he knew she was spot on. ‘And if there’s a problem finding suitable premises, we can use the back rooms at The Swan,’ he said, as utterly sure of co-operation from that quarter as she was of Jack’s. A grin split his face. ‘Hell, Kate! We may not have solved our own problems, and we can’t solve Christina’s, but I think we’ve solved Danny’s!’

  Her arms slid up and around his neck. ‘Then let’s celebrate,’ she said with husky seductiveness. ‘I love you, Mr Emmerson. I love you with all my heart.’

  There was adoration in his eyes and in his voice as he eased his weight on to her willing, supple body. ‘And I love you, Mrs Emmerson.’ His mouth was the merest fraction from hers.

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Forever.’

  ‘I must see Christina!’ Emily Helliwell announced agitatedly as she stood on the threshold of number eighteen, a riot of variously coloured wool scarves around her throat, her coat so hastily buttoned not one of the buttons was in the right buttonhole.

  ‘Lord ’elp you, Emily, ’ow can you?’ Miriam’s eyes were red from weeping. ‘She left this morning and the Lord only knows when she’s going to return!’

  ‘Left?’ Emily blinked. ‘Left for where? It’s most important that I see her, Miriam. I have a message for her from Moshambo. He says that her mother and grandmother are—’

  ‘Germany!’ Miriam wailed, a fresh flood of tears streaming down her face. ‘She’s only gorn back to bloody Germany! I told Albert ’e wasn’t to let ’er go! Wot if she never comes back, Emily? Wot then?’

  ‘Germany?’ Emily’s voice was little more than a croak. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. Oh, but that’s terrible news. That’s the worst news I’ve heard since Moshambo told me what a mistake Mr Churchill was making in 1942, when he ordered the raid on Dieppe!’

  ‘It ain’t the worst news I’ve ever ’eard,’ Miriam said, one hand pressed to her heart, her apronned bosom heaving. ‘The worst news I’ve ever ’eard was five minutes ago when Mr Giles came and told me ’e’d ’ad a telephone call from Jack! ’E said that Jack was at Charing Cross station, Emily! That ’e’s goin’ to be ’ome in ’alf an hour! Wot’s goin’ to ’appen then, that’s wot I want to know? Who’s goin’ to tell ’im ’is wife is on ’er way to Germany? The bloody Dieppe raid won’t be a patch on this hoo-ha, Emily! It’s goin’ to be like the bloody Blitz all over again!’
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  Chapter Twenty

  ‘How was I to know she hadn’t told Jack?’ Bob Giles was saying in horror-struck tones to Ruth. ‘Such a thing never even occurred to me!’ He ran his fingers through his still thick hair. ‘Carl can’t know either. And as Carl is tucked away down in Greenwich, I’m the one who is going to have to break the news to Jack.’

  Ruth regarded him gravely. Like Kate, she had long doubted whether the encouragement he and Carl had been giving Christina was wise. And she certainly hadn’t thought helping Christina to return to Germany was wise. It had been the act of a couple of middle-aged, naïve romantics. ‘Perhaps it isn’t too late for him to catch up with her?’ she suggested without too much hope.

  ‘It’s far too late.’ Bob’s dishevelled hair stuck out around his head like an untidy halo. ‘She and Miss Marshall and the Red Cross supplies will be halfway across the Channel by now, and how could he get travel permits?’ For the first time, he realized the enormity of his and Carl’s action. What on earth had they been thinking of? More to the point, what had he been thinking of? He was a clergyman, for goodness sake! He was supposed to be a man of wisdom and sense.

  They were in the kitchen. Ruth had been in the middle of making scones and she dusted the flour off her hands, saying, ‘Christina was so determined to return to Germany that she would have found a way of getting there with or without help from you and Carl. At least by arranging she travel out with a Red Cross official, you’ve guaranteed she’ll arrive there safely.’ She stepped towards him and kissed him lovingly on his cheek. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, darling. Jack can’t blame you for Christina’s obsession. He’s just going to have to try and understand it . . .’

  ‘Emily wants a word with you, Vicar!’ Hettie shouted from the hallway where she was arranging sprigs of winter jasmine in a vase on the hall table. ‘Shall I send her through?’