Coronation Summer

by Margaret Pemberton

  Snatching up a jacket that was lying over the back of a chair in the untidy room, he said in a voice which was only a fraction away from breaking completely, ‘I knew no good would come of her working in Jack’s bleedin’ club, but would she listen to me? Course she wouldn’t! She was so happy about it you’d have thought all her Christmases had arrived at once . . .’

  There came the sound of someone running anxiously down the stairs, and seconds later Billy, clad only in a pair of pyjama bottoms, burst into the room. At the unexpected sight of Bob Giles standing on the hearth-rug, he came to an abrupt halt, his eyes flying to his father’s. ‘What’s ’appened?’ he asked urgently. ‘Is it Mum? Is it our Beryl? Has there bin an accident?’

  ‘Your mum’s been hurt,’ Ted said tersely, striding past him out into the hallway. ‘I’m going to see her now. You stay here with our Beryl.’

  ‘Hurt?’ Billy ran after him into the hallway. ‘Hurt how? Dad? Dad!’

  His only answer was the front door slamming shut as Ted set off with swift strides towards Magnolia Terrace and the shortest possible route up to London Bridge and Guy’s.

  Billy spun round to face Bob Giles. ‘How ’as Mum bin ’urt?’ he demanded, looking suddenly very young and very vulnerable, his hair tousled instead of being combed into a quiff, his baggy pyjama bottoms a stark contrast to his day-time trousers.

  ‘I don’t have all the details yet, Billy,’ Bob said, mindful that he still had Carrie and Christina and Charlie to see and that Billy might not even know about The 21, much less his mother’s involvement with it, and that explanations would take time. ‘Your dad will be able to tell you how she is when he either rings the vicarage from the hospital, or gets back home.’ He moved resolutely towards the front door, glad that Beryl hadn’t woken up. Pacifying Beryl would have taken much, much longer. ‘And as Beryl is still asleep, don’t wake her,’ he added. ‘There’s no point, not yet.’ He opened the door, looking across the bottom corner of the square to number seventeen. The sitting-room light was on. Did that mean that Danny had already arrived home? Or was Carrie waiting up for him like Ted had been waiting up for Mavis?

  ‘Mum’s not going to . . . to die, is she, Vicar?’ Billy asked, his face chalkily white.

  Bob shook his head. Complete details he didn’t have, but he did know that people didn’t die from a dislocated shoulder, broken ribs and a ruined face. Though taking the last little item into the equation, they might very well want to. ‘No,’ he said, wondering how soon it would be before he, too, could reach Guy’s to see Mavis. ‘She isn’t going to die, Billy.’ He didn’t add, ‘But Jack very well might.’ Billy didn’t yet know about Jack and this wasn’t the moment to tell him.

  Heavy-heartedly he set off at a trot across the darkened square. Even if Danny hadn’t yet returned home, he wasn’t going to be able to spend much time with Carrie. He had to get down to Greenwich to see Christina, for if Jack’s condition deteriorated before Christina was informed of what had happened and was able to reach his bedside . . . He winced, unable to bring the thought to its conclusion. Christina would get there. Malcolm would whizz her up to St Thomas’s in his car in fifteen minutes or so. And Jack wasn’t going to die. Not yet. Not, God willing, for another forty or fifty years.

  When Carrie heard Bob Giles’s knock, she put the mug she was drinking from down so suddenly that tea slopped over its rim and on to her kitchen table. The knock was the knock of authority. A doctor’s knock, or a policeman’s. What it most certainly was not, was Danny’s knock. Not even if he had lost his door-key. Not even if he was paralytically drunk. Not that she thought he was out drinking. Ever since she had arrived home at just before midnight to find Rose in bed and not a sign of Danny, she was convinced he was trailing the streets, looking for her. How she felt about his reacting to her absence in this extreme manner, she didn’t quite know. A part of her was pleased. Danny always took her so much for granted that it was a miracle he’d even noticed she wasn’t home – though, of course, her not being there to cook his dinner would have helped bring her absence to his attention.

  Another part of her was intensely annoyed at his stupidity. Why, whatever time it had been when he went out looking for her, hadn’t he had the sense to realize that she would most certainly be home by now? And last but not least, she was in a fever of guilty apprehension. What was she going to tell him when he did come home? She couldn’t tell him that she’d been in Southend with Zac – not without revealing the nature of her relationship with Zac. Yet she couldn’t lie to Danny. She’d never lied to Danny.

  Bob Giles’s knock sent all her assumptions and mixed feelings flying. For the first time it occurred to her that the reason Danny was not home wasn’t that he was out looking for her, but that he had fallen under a car or a bus – or even into the Thames. She sprinted to the door, yanking it open with such fierce force that Bob Giles took a hasty step backwards before she should fall on top of him.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Carrie stared, appalled, at the almost luminous whiteness of his dog-collar. ‘There has been an accident! I should have known Danny wouldn’t get himself in such a state looking for me! He’s been hurt, hasn’t he? Where is he, Mr Giles? How did it happen? When—’

  Bob raised a hand in order to silence her frantic flow of questions, bewildered as to why, at nearly half-three in the morning, she should think Danny was out looking for her. ‘Danny’s on his way home, Carrie,’ he said in hasty reassurance. ‘He telephoned the vicarage fifteen minutes or so ago. He and Jack met with trouble, and though Danny hasn’t been seriously hurt, Jack has. I need to get down to Greenwich to break the news to Christina as soon as possible.’ Before he could do so, though, he had to tell her about Mavis. ‘There’s something else, Carrie,’ he said unwillingly. ‘If I could just step inside for a minute . . .’

  Icy fingers squeezed Carrie’s heart. Had Bob Giles merely been preparing her for something far, far worse when he had said that Jack was seriously hurt? Was he now going to tell her that Jack was dead? And if he was, how on earth would Mavis cope with such news? Now that she knew what it was like to be helplessly, hopelessly, head-over-heels in love with a man not her husband, she felt a sympathy for Mavis’s feelings for Jack that she had never felt before.

  ‘It’s Mavis, Carrie,’ he said gently as she stepped back into the hallway and he crossed the threshold. ‘She was by herself in a club Jack is opening in Soho, and some thugs broke in to smash it up and . . . and Mavis got hurt in the process.’ Time enough for the hideous details later, he thought, when the first shock was over. ‘She’s been taken to Guy’s and they’re keeping her in. From what I could gather from Danny, she’s likely to be there a few days.’

  Carrie gave a choked cry, her pupils dilating so that her eyes appeared to be ink-black, not sea-green. Mavis hurt and in hospital, Jack hurt and in hospital and her Danny also hurt, though not as badly! How on earth had it all happened, and how was she to get up to Guy’s to see Mavis if Danny was on his way home? She’d have to see Danny first. And she’d have to tell her mam and dad. And Ted, Ted would have to know.

  ‘I’ve already told Ted,’ Bob said, reading her chaotically whirling thoughts. ‘And he’s on his way to the hospital now. There’s nothing you can do for the moment, Carrie, except wait for Danny to get in.’

  She looked so dazed and distressed that he didn’t like to leave her, but he had no option. Charlie still had to be told what had happened and, even more importantly, so did Christina. ‘I have to be on my way,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I’ve still to speak to Christina. And Charlie.’

  ‘Yes . . . yes, of course.’ Bob Giles said that Jack had been seriously hurt. How seriously? And what was the club he had mentioned and why had Mavis been in it on her own? And if she had been in it on her own, where had her Danny and Jack been when they had been hurt?

  ‘How—’ she began as he turned to go, and got no further.

  ‘I got your message, Vicar!’ Malcolm Lewis was saying when he rounded the co
rner of her gate at a run. ‘What do you want me to do first? Take Ted up to Guy’s or give you a lift down to Greenwich?’

  Bob strode to meet him, his relief vast. ‘Ted’s already on his way to Guy’s. Would you go down to Christina’s mother’s for me, while I go across to Charlie’s? She needs to be told that Jack’s been taken to St Thomas’s, and by the time you’ve done that, and she’s dressed and is ready to leave, I’ll have joined you.’

  Even as they were talking, they were walking swiftly back down the pathway. ‘A knifing,’ Carrie heard Bob Giles say in answer to a question of Malcolm’s, and then they were separating, Malcolm hurriedly wrenching his car door open, Bob Giles setting off at a swift lick up the square towards the house Charlie lived in, in the top right-hand corner, conveniently adjacent to the vicarage.

  *

  ‘A knifing!’ Mr Nibbs said, horrified, as Daniel Collins broke the news to him the next morning. ‘And your Danny with a cracked jaw and fifteen stitches in a cut over his eye? Dear, oh dear, what is the world coming to?’

  They were standing on the pavement outside Nibbo’s front gate, the carefully trimmed privets which flanked it such a solid mass of yellow that they resembled shields of dazzling brass. Daniel dragged his eyes away from their brightness. Today wasn’t a day to be admiring the beauties of nature – not with Mavis lying with her face a mass of stitches and with the police coming down heavy-handedly on Jack and Danny for taking retribution for her injuries into their own hands.

  ‘But why are the police going to prosecute Danny and Jack when it was Archie Duke’s mob who beat up Mavis?’ the bewildered Harriet Robson was asking Kate. ‘It just doesn’t make sense. Are Archie and his mobsters to be prosecuted as well? Can we perhaps give good character statements on Danny’s and Jack’s behalf?’

  ‘I dunno why Archie Dook should be in the same ward as my Jack,’ Charlie said in deep perplexity to Elisha Deakin, his collarless shirt of thick, striped flannel open at the throat, a pair of braces straining over his beer belly. ‘It don’t ’alf make visitin’ awkward!’

  ‘And you say Jack tried to break Archie Duke’s neck?’ Ellen Voigt, Kate’s stepmother, asked Malcolm Lewis’s mother, goggle-eyed. ‘And that he would have done so if it hadn’t been for one of Archie Duke’s men knifing him in the chest?’

  ‘It’s a good job all Archie’s boys weren’t still with ’im when Jack caught up with ’im, or Jack would probably be dead,’ Danny said flatly to Leon. ‘As it was, I thought ’e was goin’ to bleed to bloody death before I got ’im to the bloody ’ospital.’

  ‘Christina is vith Jack now,’ Christina’s mother said to Ruth Giles. ‘It vas so kind of the vicar to go up to the hospital vith her. I hope that now she and Jack will reconcile their differences, but who can say that they vill do so ven no one knows vat their differences are? It is all such a vorry, Mrs Giles. Such a very great vorry.’

  Carrie, too, was worried, though not about explaining away yesterday’s absence to Danny. With all Danny now had on his mind, she could have been in Timbuctoo with Clark Gable yesterday, not merely Southend with Zac. And her worry wasn’t solely about Mavis, though as the doctors said, Mavis’s facial scars were likely to be severe, and she was worried about Mavis. Nearly out of her mind with worry.

  She stared at her reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror, another worry dominating her thoughts. How many hours ago had it been since she and Zac had made ecstatic love among the sand dunes? Eighteen? Twenty? Whatever the number, her just having been sick couldn’t possibly have any connection to it.

  Could it?

  When she’d fallen pregnant with Rose and with the baby she had later miscarried, she had suffered with morning sickness before even missing her first period. It had been quite a joke between her and Doctor Roberts. But she couldn’t, surely, be suffering with morning sickness after eighteen hours! ‘You’ve been sick because you’re in such a state of nerves worrying over Mavis,’ she said aloud to herself, firmly. Her reflected eyes looked back at her, unconvinced. What if worry over Mavis wasn’t the reason for her being sick and feeling so familiarly nauseous? What if she were pregnant? Pregnant with Zac’s baby? What then, dear Lord? What then?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dressed in a white silk shirt, black trousers, black ballerina pumps and with a yellow cashmere cardigan around her shoulders, Christina sat by Jack’s bed, her eyes dark-shadowed by sleeplessness and stress. She had been home briefly since her first vigil at the hospital, for in her shocked response to Bob Giles’s news, she hadn’t thought to pack a bag with Jack’s pyjamas or toilet things, and arrived at St Thomas’s, just after four in the morning, completely empty-handed. Now, however, a small bag with everything he might need was stowed in his bedside locker, and Jack was propped up against pillows, looking like death.

  ‘Your husband has had a lucky escape,’ the surgeon said to her when, several hours previously, Jack was wheeled back into the ward after emergency surgery. ‘Another half inch to the left, and the knife wound would have been fatal. The police are waiting to speak to him, but I’ve told them he’s not yet fit to be questioned.’

  She had flinched at the word ‘knife’ and, because she was an extremely beautiful woman and he was a man with a very healthy libido, he felt a pang of pity for her. She didn’t look the sort of woman who could expect her husband to be half-killed in a sordid gangland knife fight. A fight that had been, if the information he had received was correct, over a woman other than herself. Mindful that the other person injured in the fight was lying behind screens only half a dozen beds away, he made a mental note to have Mr Duke removed to another ward at the first opportunity. He didn’t want a fracas on the ward and, if Mr Robson and Mr Duke were too ill to cause one themselves, their respective visitors would not be. ‘If you want to stay close by until your husband comes round from the anaesthetic, you can do so in the visitors’ waiting-room,’ he said, mystified as to why such a classy-looking woman should have married a Soho gambling-club villain. ‘Visitors aren’t allowed on the ward outside visiting hours, not even for cases such as your husband’s.’

  She thanked him, grateful that, as Malcolm Lewis had taken Bob Giles the short distance from St Thomas’s to Guy’s in order that he could check on Mavis’s condition, she was at last on her own. She had plenty to think about, not least her reaction when, all the time Jack had been in the operating theatre, she was convinced he was going to die. She knew then that she didn’t want to live her life without him – and that if he was in love with Mavis and a way of life that revolved around Soho and sleaze, that might very well be the future she was facing. She began to cry then, tears sliding down her face and dropping onto her hands. How had everything gone so very, very wrong between them? What other aspects of Jack’s life, aspects such as the club Mavis had been involved in with him, did she know absolutely nothing about?

  Later, for a few precious moments, she was allowed to sit by his bedside and, barely conscious, he reached for her hand, mumbling thickly, ‘Tina? Is that you, love? Glad it’s you, Teen. Ver glad . . .’ His voice had tailed away as he slid again into unconsciousness, and the Ward Sister asked her to return to the waiting-room where, in lonely privacy, she wept even harder and longer.

  Only when a deeply anxious Charlie arrived at the hospital did she leave it, returning not to Greenwich, but to Magnolia Square where, within seconds, it became obvious to her that word of what had happened was rife, and had been for hours. ‘Jack’s going to be all right,’ she said time and time again as people asked after him and, trying to hide prurient curiosity, asked also after Mavis. ‘The wound isn’t as critical as they first feared. I don’t know anything about Mavis’s condition other than that she was badly hurt. Mr Giles is at the hospital with her. He’s the one who will have news.’

  With intense relief, knowing very well that her enquirers and well-wishers were all wondering if there was, after all, some truth in the old rumours about the nature of Jack and Mavis’s relationship
, she closed her front door against everyone. Mavis. She still hadn’t allowed herself to think too much about Mavis. She daren’t think too much about Mavis and what had happened to her. The subject was too emotionally charged, too bound up with the fact that if it hadn’t been for his reaction to Mavis’s injuries, Jack would not have come so close to losing his life.

  Instead of dwelling on thoughts she was unable to cope with, Christina scooped up Jack’s razor and shaving brush from the bathroom shelf and plucked his toothbrush and toothpaste from the drinking glass on the wash-basin, tipping them into a toilet-bag. Then she stuffed the toilet-bag and two pairs of pyjamas into a capacious carry-all and hurried from the house, this time being waylaid only by Lettie and by Nellie.

  Despite her fraught anxiety to get back to St Thomas’s as swiftly as possible, she didn’t catch a bus that would take her directly there, but cut across the heath, hurrying down Croom’s Hill into Greenwich. It was a detour that would add fifteen minutes or so to her overall journey but, as she had reached an agreement with Madge Dracup that she would look after Judith every day, and, as her commitment to Judith was now total, it was an inconvenience she undertook gladly.

  ‘Why can’t I come in the hospital with you?’ Judith asked her on the bus ride up to London Bridge. ‘I’d be ever so good. I wouldn’t make a squeak.’

  For the first time that morning a shadow of a smile had touched Christina’s mouth. She loved the feel of Judith’s small hand in hers; of the trust in her eyes, eyes that were nearly the same astonishing amethyst colour as her own. ‘Because children aren’t allowed in the hospital,’ she said truthfully. ‘Not as visitors. You’ll be able to wait for me in the gardens, though, and there’ll be other children there. I won’t be very long. The hospital doesn’t allow even grown-up visitors to stay with patients for long.’