by Roland Moore
The red-haired lump next to the wiry man gave a jolly chortle. This would show this interloper!
The rest of their cards awaited. Connie wondered what hers held.
It was time. They turned a second card each. Connie got a seven while the wiry man got another king.
Disaster!
He already had a pair. A winning hand. And she had nothing.
Connie knew she would have to be lucky with her remaining three cards if she was going to beat him and not have to walk back to Helmstead. She breathed out, steadying herself. George gave her a small nod of encouragement and support. It wasn’t over yet. Connie was aware that the game was attracting the attention of the rest of the patrons in the pub. The couple had shuffled over to watch, the two labourers were leaning against the wall. Free entertainment. And the landlady was gazing with curiosity as she over-polished a glass behind the bar.
They turned their third cards. Connie got an eight. The wiry man got a ten.
He still had a pair. Connie still had nothing.
Nothing.
“Go on!” The red-haired man cheered.
They had two cards left to turn.
Connie wondered what Finch would do in a losing situation like this. She couldn’t help smile. He’d probably get his pig, Chamberlain, to rush in and knock over the table. Game void, sorry lads. Unfortunately, Connie didn’t have a large Tamworth pig that could conveniently save the day. No, she had to see this out to the bitter and unpleasant end.
The next cards flipped over. Connie got a nine. The wiry man got another ten.
No! He had two pairs now. That was a pretty strong hand in anyone’s book. And Connie still had nothing.
She looked at her four turned cards: a five, a seven, an eight and a nine. It was nearly a straight run of cards. But nearly wasn’t good enough. To win, she needed to get a six to make a straight of five, six, seven, eight and nine.
That was one thing. But also, to win, she had to pray that the wiry man didn’t turn over either another king or another ten. That would give him a full house – three of a kind and a pair.
If he got that, he’d win.
If Connie didn’t get her straight, then he’d win even without turning his last card.
Connie wished she could just disappear.
“Come on!” The red-haired man punched the air. The grey-haired man, smoking his cigarette, studied Connie. He wondered who she was. How had she come to this place? He knew he wouldn’t find out. Just as Connie would never know any of their names or their lives. They were all destined to be ships that passed in the night, for one brief moment of contact that would probably be forgotten in a dozen years.
George rubbed his mouth nervously.
Connie felt perspiration on her top lip. Her throat was dry.
The wiry man was enjoying her discomfort. Only one card would save her now. He motioned for her to turn.
Connie’s long fingers reached towards the table, towards her last card and she turned it over.
Henry perused the menu. He always loved coming to a Lyons’ Corner House, and he knew it would be the ideal thing to distract Margaret from her troubles. The young girl had looked at the cakes on offer, wanting to try everything on the menu. Vera had rarely made cakes. In the end, she whittled her choices down to either a flapjack or a Victoria sponge. Two elderly women, dressed very grandly for afternoon tea in the East End, smiled at Henry. To any outsiders, it looked like a young father out with his daughter. As the waiter came to take their order, Henry asked for a pot of tea and prompted Margaret to make her choice.
“It’s so hard,” she said, still agonising.
The waiter tutted. A busy Saturday afternoon meant he didn’t have time for children who couldn’t make up their minds.
Henry wasn’t having her treated like that! He took control.
“Well, if you can’t make up your mind, there’s only one thing for it,” he said. “You shall have both!”
Margaret squealed with delight. The waiter nodded obligingly, probably unimpressed with Henry’s parenting skills, and went away.
When their order arrived, Henry told Margaret about a game he liked to play. With strangers in church, he would try to guess their names, making up the most outlandish ones he could for them before he learnt their real names. Margaret thought that game sounded like fun. Henry demonstrated by glancing around the packed Corner House. His gaze fell on the two overdressed women.
“Tabitha Featherstone Harland,” he said in a low voice.
Margaret giggled. She had a go at christening the other lady: “Minerva Grape Bottle”.
“You’re good at this,” Henry laughed, conspiratorially. And soon they were working their way around the room, giving everyone a daft moniker. Margaret found this terrific fun and it was only when the tea and cakes arrived that they had to compose themselves and settle down.
“It’s fun giving people names, isn’t it?” Henry said, stirring his tea.
And then a flash of sadness washed over Margaret.
“Sawyer isn’t my real name,” she said. “That name was given to me too.”
“What is your real name?” Henry asked softly.
“Margaret Hawkins,” she said. It was a name she hadn’t been called for three years. A name she hadn’t said for three years. Michael and Vera had insisted that she take their surname while she was under their roof. “They took me in, so I had to do what they said.”
There was a moment’s awkward silence, but then Henry would have been surprised if he could have kept the atmosphere light throughout the whole afternoon tea. They both knew that Margaret faced an uncertain future. Neither of them knew where she would be staying tonight, which relative, if any, they could find. But Henry felt burdened with the additional guilt of thinking he should have gone with Connie. It wasn’t right that she was out there, in the East End, trying to find somewhere, while he was playing silly games in a Lyons’ Corner House and eating cake.
“Friston D Grumpington,” Margaret said, pointing to the waiter.
Henry couldn’t help but laugh. Then they noticed Connie tapping on the window and beckoning them to come. The game was over. Margaret looked nervous. “Has she found one of my aunts?”
“Let’s go and find out.” Henry left some money and Margaret grabbed the rest of her flapjack to put in her pocket.
The last cards were waiting. Connie turned hers.
A six! She was overjoyed. She had a straight hand of five, six, seven, eight and nine.
At that moment, she was beating the wiry man’s hand of two pairs. But she knew that if he turned a king or a ten, he would get a full house and he’d still win. People exhaled nervously amid the cigarette smoke as the wiry man reached out his leathery fingers to turn his final card. As he turned the card, Connie looked at the queen. He’d turned a queen. He’d failed!
George erupted in an uncharacteristic holler.
“You only gone and done it, girl!” he shouted.
The wiry man shook his head in frustration. How could she have such luck?
As George helped to scoop up Connie’s winnings, she turned to take the congratulations from the rest of the patrons. The labourers suggested that she should get a round in. Connie thought why not. Her head woozy from the tension, she stood and took a handful of notes to the bar. This was like the old days.
“What you all having?” she shouted.
Then she turned to the suddenly-happy landlady to give her large order of pints and shorts. As the small woman busied herself behind the bar, pouring drinks, Connie idly glanced at the row of spirit bottles in the optics in front of the mirrored area at the back of the bar. It was a mirrored area, the same as she’d seen in a dozen pubs.
Her reflection stared back at her.
Connie stopped smiling.
Connie led the way, with Henry and Margaret following. Setting quite a pace, it was hard for Margaret to follow. She was finding it hard to eat the rest of her flapjack and keep up, her lungs not
giving her enough air for eating and walking. She parked the flapjack back in her pocket, deciding to have it later.
“Where are we going?” Margaret asked.
Connie seemed very tense, troubled, and unwilling to say much.
“I’ve found someone who can take you in,” she said, offering a warm smile. But her voice was cracking. Margaret wondered whether she was finding the prospect of saying goodbye a sad one. Like she was.
“Don’t worry. You can come and visit,” Margaret said, hoping it would cheer her up.
Connie bent down to her level. Her eyes were filled with tears. “Bless you, you sweet little girl, you.”
Henry put a comforting hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Let’s get it over with, eh?” he said softly. Margaret wondered why they were finding this so difficult. Why was Connie getting so upset?
Margaret caught up with Connie and put her hand in hers. They could have one last walk together, couldn’t they? Connie felt the warmth of the small hand in hers and she struggled not to cry. She had to be strong. She had to hope that Margaret would be allright.
They turned the corner onto a small side street and they found themselves staring at a three-storey building bookended by the rubble of shattered houses either side. The three-storey building was still standing. In fact, it was the only place that had survived, in a street that was just mountains of brick debris and buckled girders.
It was a pub. And above the ground-floor windows was its name.
The Grey Horse.
Margaret recognised this place, but was confused. This didn’t make sense, upending everything she had known and held onto these last three years. She looked to Connie for an explanation. The Grey Horse. But Connie was staring up at the building, transfixed, as though it was a miracle. Margaret looked back at the building. Her eyes must be deceiving her. She struggled to process what she was seeing: a place that shouldn’t exist. A place that was gone for ever. A place where her mum used to work.
Henry glanced at the street sign near the pub to confirm what he already knew. He prompted Margaret to look at the sign too. “It’s true,” he said, softly.
Talbot Street.
Although the rain had stopped, George Butler was keen to get moving before it started again. Why was Connie holding back, outside the pub? Water glistened on the street sign. Connie couldn’t take it in. She looked up at the pub name in disbelief, her mouth opening and closing as if to find the words. George Butler assumed that she was upset because the landlady hadn’t had a telephone for her to use to call her husband.
The Grey Horse.
“You’ll be home soon enough,” he said, trying to perk up her spirits.
Connie gave a half-smile that implied George couldn’t possibly understand what she was going through. She couldn’t begin to tell him the story about Margaret Sawyer and the train crash.
Instead, she did her best to snap out of it; ever the trouper, making the best out of a bad situation.
“We did good, didn’t we? You must be over the moon, George Butler.” She grinned.
And half an hour before, on that night, Connie was ordering the drinks from the excitable landlady. Connie stared idly at her reflection in the mirror beneath the optics. Etched across the glass in ornate lettering was the name of the pub. The Grey Horse. That was how Connie had realised she was in a place that shouldn’t exist.
Connie found herself gabbling to the landlady: “What street is this?”
“Talbot Street,” the landlady said, popping two pints on the bar, before busying herself with more pouring.
“The Grey Horse on Talbot – but wasn’t that hit in the Blitz? Demolished?”
“No, love. We survived every raid. And if you’d seen the wreckage all around us at the time, you’d think we had God’s hand over us.”
Had Vera made up the story about the building being hit in the Blitz just so she could lure Margaret away? It was all a lie. She’d gone to the school and told them that the pub had been hit, that Margaret’s mother was dead. And then another question bloomed in Connie’s mind, one which made hot tears well in her eyes and a rawness appear in her throat.
“Do you – is there a barmaid here called Ginny?”
“Why do you ask?” The landlady’s voice carried a note of suspicion, but her eyes had already registered the name.
But before Connie could say more, George came over, gave her a big hug and whisked her back to the table. The patrons converged on the bar and took their drinks, toasting Connie in the process. By the time they had finished, Connie had thought twice about telling the landlady what she knew about Margaret. The danger was that if Ginny knew her daughter was alive, then she might travel to Helmstead and confront Michael and Vera Sawyer at Jessop’s Cottage.
And that could end badly.
Connie planned to tell Margaret when she got back to Helmstead.
But when Henry had vanished, all thoughts of Margaret went out of her head.
And now, outside the pub that shouldn’t exist, Connie and Henry turned to Margaret.
“But my mum – when the pub was bombed,” Margaret said in bewilderment.
“It was never bombed,” Connie said. “Vera lied to the school. She did it so she could take you away. I’m so sorry.”
“She lied?”
“But it’s going to be all right,” Connie said. “Before we came to London, I spoke to Henry about what to do.”
“We decided that we should meet Ginny – your mother – first. Just to see how she was before raising your hopes,” Henry continued.
“Just in case she’d got married again or had got other children. Perhaps you coming back would be difficult. So we made up the story about trying to find a relative just in case it didn’t work out. Didn’t want you being upset all over again. Henry was dead against me lying to you. But I just wanted to protect you.” Connie could see that Margaret was still struggling to take this in. “But we were hoping with all our hearts we could find your mother.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Margaret said.
“I came to the pub to find your mum. And when it was all right, then I came to the tea shop to collect you both.”
But Margaret wasn’t listening to the explanation.
She had seen a ghost.
Her mother had emerged from the pub. A blonde woman with the same round face as Margaret. The same kind eyes. Eyes that were currently filled with tears. She hadn’t been able to settle since Connie Carter came in an hour ago. Connie, the woman full of impossible promises. A woman who told her she knew where her daughter was and promised she would bring her to meet her. Ginny hadn’t believed that Connie would return, but Connie had promised that she would.
Just wait here, I’ll be back.
Connie had wanted to break the news to Margaret first, on the way over to the pub. But in the end, she couldn’t do it, when she realised she wouldn’t be able to get the words out. Finding a lost mother was all too raw for Connie Carter. So instead, she got Margaret to Talbot Street as quickly as she could. And throughout the walk, she imagined the glorious surprise that Margaret would have when she saw her mum. Henry had glanced at his wife, wondering when she was going to tell Margaret what was happening. But for Connie, keeping one last secret seemed the best idea in the world. The best surprise present that Margaret could ever have.
Ginny Hawkins put her hands to her mouth, unable to stop the tears welling in her eyes and pouring down her cheeks.
“I thought you were gone forever,” Ginny gasped.
Margaret ran to her and they hugged so tightly that the air was forced from their lungs. Ginny had so many questions, so much to say. She wanted to tell Margaret that it was a stupid extra shift at the pub that had meant she’d been late coming to the school that fateful day. She wanted to say how she’d looked for her endlessly afterwards, about how she had got the police involved. She wanted to tell her how the search petered out with the mass evacuation of children and the displacement of hu
ndreds of people from bombed-out homes. Suddenly it was impossible to find anyone. She wanted to say that she never gave up hope.
She wanted to say all these things and more.
But now she couldn’t even speak. Instead she let out a primal howl of blissful emotion. Connie hugged them both, smelling the mix of carbolic soap and cigarette smoke in Ginny’s hair.
“Mum!” Margaret wailed.
“My darling, oh my darling,” Ginny said, finding some words again, holding her tight.
“Why didn’t you come for me?” Margaret said, through her sobs.
Ginny stroked the back of her head. “I didn’t know where you was. But I never stopped thinking about you, darling. Never stopped hoping.”
“I always hoped too. Hoped I’d see you coming up the path.”
“You’re back now. Oh dear Lord, you’re back.”
“Oh, Mum!”
They hugged, letting time stand still in a moment that both of them hoped would never end. And as Connie watched mother and daughter, she guessed it was one of the images that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Connie had moved back to allow them their reunion. Their homecoming. Henry placed an arm around her shoulders, his thumb stroking her skin for comfort. Connie was trying not to cry at the scene in front of them.
That evening, Connie and Henry said their goodbyes and left Ginny’s modest house. Before Margaret fell asleep in the bed she hadn’t used for three years, she unpacked her suitcase. She got out her teddy bear and her few clothes. And she got out the newspaper cutting of her with Connie Carter. She stuck it above her bed. Her mum said they would always keep it. Margaret and Ginny would have their new life together, thanks to the train crash and Connie Carter.
Connie and Henry walked towards the nearest underground station as night began to fall and the ARP wardens started their patrols. They were woozy with both the emotion of the day and the vodka they’d had to celebrate Margaret’s return at Ginny’s house. Finally, Connie felt the moment had come. It was time. She couldn’t wait any longer to know what would happen to her and Henry.
“I can stay here, in London, Henry,” she said. “If that’s what you want.” There, it was out in the open. A brusque and unsentimental ultimatum designed to force a response, to open a conversation about what happened next.
