Coronation Summer

by Margaret Pemberton

  Two hours later, he knew he had a problem. The girls were all experienced where bar-work was concerned, and were all glamorously tarted up – too glamorously tarted up. When he concluded each interview by saying that the club was a straight, afternoon drinking and gambling club and that he didn’t want bar staff making arrangements with customers for after-hours sexual services, he was greeted by looks of incredulity.

  ‘No way, Mister,’ one after another of them said. ‘This is Soho and we’re either barmaids that are also hostesses, with everything hostessing means, or we ain’t barmaids at all. Sorry.’

  Jack had appreciated their frankness and began to wonder if he’d been a little hasty in dispensing with the services of the ex-RAF barman. He wanted a raffish atmosphere in The 21, but no blatant sleaze, and it was beginning to look as if such an ideal was going to be very difficult to achieve. Musingly, he locked up and walked down the stairs into Dean Street, turning left to call in at the nearby Jewish bakery in order to take home a little something for Christina’s mother. As he neared the entrance he heard a laugh coming from inside the shop that he’d have recognized anywhere.

  ‘So vy not bring your gran back here at tea-time on Coronation Day?’ elderly Edie Levy was asking Mavis as she served her with a dozen freshly baked bagels and a giant-sized cake. ‘So long it is since ve have seen her. Vy she never come up town no more? Vy she pretend she is old?’

  Mavis gave an infectious, deep-throated chuckle. ‘She ain’t pretending, Edie. Gran can give you fifteen years easily. She must be at least eighty-two!’

  ‘Eighty-three,’ Jack corrected as he stepped up beside her at the counter. ‘I happen to know because she’s the same age, and her birthday’s in the same month, as Christina’s gran, and it was Jacoba’s eighty-third birthday in April.’

  Mavis’s eyes danced. She always loved running into Jack unexpectedly, but running into him when they were far from Magnolia Square and its eagle-eyed busybodies was a real treat. ‘And what are you doing at lunchtime in the middle of Soho?’ she asked saucily. ‘You’ve not been visiting a strip club, ’ave you?’

  Jack grinned. ‘Not that I know of,’ he said, deciding there and then that though he intended keeping his ownership of The 21 a secret from the majority of his Magnolia Square neighbours, there would be something offensive about keeping it a secret from Mavis. ‘I’ve just been visiting a club I’m about to open.’

  Mavis picked up her bagful of bagels, her green cat eyes widening. ‘You mean a club you’ve bought?’ she asked, knowing that Jack never, but never, worked for anyone but himself.

  He nodded, saying to Edie, ‘An apple-strudel, Edie love,’ and then, to Mavis, ‘Do you fancy having a look at it? It’s only round the corner.’

  ‘Not ’alf!’ Mavis’s enthusiasm was unbounded. Fancy Jack buying into a little bit of naughty Soho! She wondered who else knew, and was pretty sure that, apart perhaps from Danny, no one did.

  ‘An unofficial ex-service club it used to be,’ said Edie, who had been selling Jewish speciality cakes via Mavis to her old friend Leah Singer ever since Leah had found the journey up town too much for her, and who had been serving them to Jack ever since Jack had married Christina, adding her two-penny-worth with easy familiarity. ‘Always it was full of middle-aged ex-servicemen, drinking pink gins and telling stories about their RAF and Army days.’

  ‘Blimey!’ Mavis pulled an expressive face. ‘It doesn’t sound as if it was too lively! I ’ope you’re going to put a bit of fizz into it, Jack.’

  ‘Oh, I think I’m going to be able to do that,’ Jack said nonchalantly, his mind already made up as to how this was to be achieved. He picked up his boxed cake. ‘Ta-ra for now, Edie. Be good.’

  ‘At my age, you tell me that?’ Edie made as if to throw something at him, cackling with laughter as she did so. It was good he would be doing business only a stone’s throw away. He was the kind of man who brought a bit of spice and sparkle to life.

  Mavis, who would have been in complete agreement with Edie’s opinion if she had known of it, tucked her hand into the crook of his arm.

  He looked across at her, flashing her a smile that had her heart doing cartwheels. ‘And now you know what I’m doing in Soho, what are you doing?’ he asked teasingly. ‘Not swinging the old handbag, I hope.’

  ‘Course not, cheeky bugger.’ Mavis wasn’t at all put out at the suggestion that she might be doing a bit of street-walking. In Mavis’s eyes street-walkers were working girls, and though she’d never been a member of their ranks, she certainly wasn’t contemptuous of them. ‘I’m up here because it’s a lovely day and I’m bored,’ she said as they turned the corner into Dean Street, her dizzyingly high heels rat-tatting on the pavement. Her shoes were suede and the same cornflower blue as her costume. The lightweight cloth skirt was tight, with skittish side splits, and the nip-waisted jacket had a flounced peplum that drew much male attention to the lush curves of her hips and her effortlessly seductive wiggle. ‘I’m supposed to be doing an afternoon stint at the biscuit factory,’ she added as they came to a halt outside a doorway squeezed between the entrance to a strip club and a dubious-looking bookshop, ‘but they’re going to have to do without me.’

  With his free hand, Jack took a key from his trouser pocket and opened the door. ‘You’re wasted packing biscuits,’ he said truthfully, leading the way upstairs. ‘I thought you were barmaiding at The Anchor in Greenwich?’

  ‘I am, but that’s at weekends. Mid-week afternoons I’m at the biscuit factory.’

  There was resignation in Mavis’s voice. Not since the war, when she’d been a motor-cycle messenger with the ARP, had she had an occupation with any zip to it. For a while she’d been a bus conductress. For a little while longer she’d been a cinema usherette. Occasionally she stood in for Carrie at their dad’s market stall, and occasionally she helped Elisha and Lettie Deakin out at The Swan. The excitement factor, whatever she did, seemed to be nil, and there were times when she positively ached for the heady, adrenalin-packed days when she’d ridden Ted’s motorbike through streets either blacked-out, or bombed and burning.

  ‘Crikey!’ she said now as he crossed a relatively spacious landing and flung open a door. ‘What a smashing little spieler!’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Jack didn’t often give his feelings away, but there was no way he could keep the satisfaction from his voice. ‘I’m hoping to attract the boxing crowd. Jack Solomons has his office only a lick and a spit away and hopefully I’ll be having quite a few dealings with him.’

  Jack Solomons was the biggest, most successful boxing promoter in the country, and Mavis was duly impressed. ‘You mean dealings with him where Zac Hemingway is concerned?’ she asked, wandering over the red-carpeted floor in the direction of the mirror-backed bar.

  Jack nodded, leaning back against the door, watching her with deep affection. Even at forty years old, and with laughter lines crinkling the corners of her carefully made-up eyes, she was still quite a girl. He reckoned she always would be, for her sexual attraction stemmed as much from her bubbly effervescent zest for life as it did from her blowsy good looks.

  ‘How about it then?’ he asked as she ran scarlet-tipped nails along the polished surface of the bar.

  She sucked in her breath, the scarlet-tipped nails coming to an instant halt, and he cursed himself for being so foolish as to have worded his invitation in a way that could be interpreted sexually.

  ‘The club,’ he said lightly, easing himself away from the door. ‘How would you like to manage it for me? Five afternoons a week, no evenings.’

  She breathed out unsteadily, her disappointment that he was not, at long last, propositioning her, savage. Then realization as to what he was propositioning dawned. If she were to be managing it, it would be her club, near as dammit! And unless she was very much mistaken, Christina would never know about it – and their mutual sharing of one secret from Christina could, surely, very easily lead to others.

  ‘You’re
on, Jack love!’ Euphorically she rounded the bar. A job up in town among the bright lights, necessitating constant contact with the one man in the world she’d happily lie down and die for! Of course he was on. It was the best offer she’d had in a long, long while. Hell’s bells, it was the best offer she’d had ever!

  As she whirled towards him in happy delight, he broke out laughing, holding his arms wide in order to catch hold of her and swing her around. From now on The 21 would have all the zest and fizz it could possibly cope with, and all without the slightest hint of sleaze. ‘We’re going to make a great team, Mavis love,’ he said, still laughing as she nearly knocked him off his feet.

  Mavis’s heels kicked the air gleefully. Of course they were going to make a great team. And not just a great business team. Not if she had her way! ‘Let’s open a bottle of bubbly, Jack love,’ she said breathlessly as he finally set her back down on her feet. ‘Let’s drink a toast to a bloomin’ wonderful future!’

  ‘Things don’t look too good I’m afraid,’ Matthew’s headmaster said sombrely to Kate. ‘None of the boys or the masters have been able to shed any light on the mystery as to why Matthew should have run away – that is, if he has run away.’

  Kate didn’t need to ask him to explain what he meant by his last remark. She’d arrived at St Osyth’s after first visiting the local police station and had already been told that Matthew’s disappearance was now being treated as a possible abduction. She said now, as she had said earlier to a kindly detective-sergeant, ‘But who would have abducted him? It isn’t as if Matthew is a small boy who would have gone off with a stranger if he’d been offered sweets. And anyway, he disappeared from school. It isn’t as if he disappeared during free time and was in the village, or in Taunton.’

  With his elbows resting on his desk, the headmaster steepled his fingers, pursing his lips as he did so. In many ways it would be much to his, and the school’s, advantage if Matthew Harvey had been abducted. It was, after all, far preferable for a pupil to be missing involuntarily, rather than voluntarily. Yet, as Matthew’s mother so rightly pointed out, Matthew would have had to break very strict school rules to be outside the school grounds at any time after his last lesson of the day and the time when his absence had first been noted. And with no track record of ever being unruly or disobedient, such behaviour on his part would only deepen the mystery, not clarify it, which, as far as the headmaster was concerned, brought him back to the one aspect of Matthew’s life which might be held accountable for his having run away. His bizarre domestic situation.

  He cleared his throat, wondering how best to broach such a delicate subject, wondering what Matthew’s father, who, as a former pupil, he remembered well, would have thought if he had known the day would come when his son would have a black man for a stepfather. ‘As no reason has been found within the school to account for Matthew’s disappearance,’ he began, feeling, oddly enough, as if he were conducting an interview with one of his upper-middle-class parents and not a working-class housewife with a very dubious home life, ‘and as there can be no reason to suspect an abduction such as kidnapping, perhaps it behoves us to look elsewhere for a motive for his disappearance.’

  Kate’s gentian-blue eyes steadily held his. Why didn’t the man use simple English? Did he think, perhaps, she wouldn’t know what the word ‘behove’ meant? If so, and if he were trying to emphasize what he obviously felt was the social and educational gap between them, he was failing badly. Her father had been a grammar-school teacher and she knew just as many little-used words as anyone else – and she certainly didn’t feel his, or anyone else’s, inferior.

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ she said, wondering if he was aware of something she was not. ‘Matthew would only have run away if he were unhappy—’

  ‘Which, as far as school was concerned, he was not.’ The interruption was made with such heavy emphasis that warning bells suddenly started clanging in Kate’s brain. What on earth was this pompous, unlikeable man suggesting? He leaned forward across his massive mahogany desk, resting his weight on clasped hands. ‘Is it possible, perhaps, that Matthew is unsettled in mind where your domestic arrangements are concerned, Mrs Emmerson? It is often difficult for a boy to come to terms with a parent’s—’ he had been about to say ‘remarriage’, and then, remembering that Matthew’s great-aunt, Miss Deborah Harvey, had bluntly informed him that Matthew’s mother had never been married to her nephew, he stopped himself in time, ‘changed circumstances,’ he finished a little inadequately.

  Kate rose to her feet, her fingers, with their almond-shaped, unpolished nails, tightening around the strap of her shoulder-bag. She knew exactly what was being insinuated, and her rage was so intense she could barely trust herself to speak. ‘Matthew’s domestic circumstances haven’t changed since he was adopted eight years ago when he was little more than a toddler,’ she said in a voice throbbing with such passion the headmaster could hardly believe it was coming from such a Nordically cool-looking woman. ‘Matthew’s father is his father. He isn’t his stepfather; he isn’t a so-called “uncle”; he isn’t a passing boyfriend of mine!’

  The headmaster rose to his feet to face her, reminding himself that only women of a regrettable type indulged in sexual congress with black men and that he needn’t feel as if he had behaved with loutish bad manners towards a lady.

  ‘You’re speaking from a position of complete ignorance!’ Kate blazed, wishing she were a man and that she could deflate his insufferable smugness with a smart punch to his jaw. ‘If Matthew is unsettled, the very first person he would turn to would be his father!’ She could feel tears of anger and utter frustration pricking her eyelids and blinked them back furiously, not wanting them to be mistaken for tears of weakness. Why were some people so crassly prejudiced? Why couldn’t they judge Leon by the kind of man he was, and not by his skin colour? And why, why, why couldn’t they understand that Leon and Matthew’s relationship was as close as that of any other loving father and son?

  ‘Matthew’s father has never let him down, never!’ She was trembling with the force of her anger. ‘Whatever the reason for his disappearance, it isn’t because of unhappiness at home, and the sooner you and the police get that into your heads, the better! And now that that’s understood, I’d like to speak to Matthew’s classmates.’

  ‘The police have already carried out that task.’ The headmaster’s voice was glacial. He wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to with such lack of deference and, especially coming from such a source, he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one little bit. He hooked his thumbs into the folds of his gown, thrusting out his chest as he did so.

  Kate was unimpressed. She wasn’t leaving the school until she had spoken to Matthew’s classmates, and that was that. ‘I’m aware the police have interviewed several boys,’ she said, her anger now fully under control, her voice clipped and curt, ‘and now I would like to speak with them. So if you please . . .’

  The headmaster didn’t please, but knew he couldn’t possibly say so. With no other option, he walked from around his desk, fuming at how well-spoken she was. A south-east London working-class woman, who had had at least one child out of wedlock and who bedded with a black man, had no business speaking in a voice that would have been happily at home at a polite dinner or garden party. It was too unnerving, too deeply unsettling. Severely discomposed, he swept off in the direction of class one alpha, taking savage delight in the fact that Mrs Emmerson had to keep breaking into a run to keep up with him.

  ‘And so what did Matthew’s friends say?’ Ruth Giles asked Kate, several hours later. They were seated at a large pine table in the vicarage kitchen. Kate hadn’t yet collected Johnny from Carrie’s, or gone home, even though she knew Daisy, Luke and Jilly would all be home from school by now, and that Leon would most probably be home from work.

  ‘They said nothing more or less than they said when the police talked to them.’ The skin seemed to be stretched tight over her cheekbones, and there were
blue shadows of weariness and desperate tension beneath her eyes. ‘The last lesson on the day he disappeared was given in what was normally a free period, and was more of a talk and discussion than a lesson proper.’

  ‘About careers?’ Ruth prompted, who knew a talk on careers had been given to Matthew’s class because Leon had told her and Bob so, the previous morning.

  Kate nodded, pressing her fingers against her temples. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary was said.’ Her voice was thick with fatigue from sleeplessness, her head hurting as she tried to make sense of it all, tried to think what could have happened to Matthew; where he could possibly be. ‘The careers master discussed some professions he thought the boys should be thinking about. Apparently a lot of St Osyth boys become lawyers and barristers, and most of the period was given over to a discussion as to which subjects they should be concentrating on if they wanted to follow school tradition.’ Her voice cracked, breaking completely. ‘Where on earth can he be, Ruth?’ Tears streamed down her face. ‘If he had run away he would have run home. I know he would have run home!’

  Ruth rose from the table and crossed the kitchen, lifting her kettle from the hob. Kate was crying properly now, and she had no intention of trying to stop her. Not for a little while, anyway. Knowing Kate as she did, she knew that at home Kate would have fought back her tears so as not to alarm and bewilder Johnny and Jilly, who were still in happy ignorance as to Matthew’s disappearance. A cry now, when such considerations didn’t have to be taken into account, would do her the world of good. She filled the kettle at the sink and then placed it back on the hob. The law as a profession. If that was what Matthew eventually decided on, it would certainly be a first where Magnolia Square was concerned. Most local boys either worked in one of the area’s many street markets or got themselves jobs in the docks or on the river. Leon Emmerson was a Thames waterman, for instance, and in normal circumstances it would have been customary for Matthew to follow in his footsteps and to embark on a formal apprenticeship so that one day he, too, would be judged fit to navigate a barge under oars anywhere on the Thames’s seventy miles of tributaries, creeks and waterways.