Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘But first the bouquet!’ Pru Sharkey called out, much to her mother’s consternation and her father’s visible displeasure.

  ‘Throw it this way, luv,’ Nellie Miller shouted gamely. ‘I could do with anuvver ’usband, just as long as ’e’s an improvement on the last one!’

  Amid shouts of encouragement and laughter, Kate tossed her bouquet high and in Pru’s direction. With pink-cheeked eagerness Pru jumped high, catching it adroitly.

  There was a storm of cheers, and Daniel could be heard demanding cheekily, ‘So who’s the lucky man going to be, Pru?’

  ‘I don’t suppose she knows,’ Miriam said in an undertone to Hettie, ‘just as long as it ain’t the insurance man!’

  Kate’s fingers intertwined tightly with Leon’s. Their reception was going to take place in the church hall, and for every step of the way they would be bombarded with confetti and flower petals. It was a moment so perfect, so joyous, she felt as if her heart would burst.

  ‘Ready?’ Leon asked, his smile of happiness nearly splitting his face.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and then, as their friends and neighbours lined the church path, she looked over their milling heads and saw the car and the figure beside it.

  Her face froze. The car was a Bentley, and only one Bentley had ever nosed into Magnolia Square. When it had done so, four years ago, it had been because its owner wished to remove Matthew from her care. He had succeeded in doing so, but only temporarily. And now he was back, standing pugnaciously beside his chauffeured car, exuding wealth and power and menace.

  ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’ Leon asked, immediately sensing the change in her.

  ‘Nothing.’ She flashed him a brilliant smile, refusing to let Joss Harvey spoil the most magical day of her life. When he had done his damnedest to permanently remove Matthew from her care, Leon had been a prisoner of war, and it had been a battle she had had to fight alone. She was alone no longer, and any future battles would be battles they would fight together.

  She laughed up at her handsome, caring husband. ‘There’s nothing wrong at all, my darling,’ she said, her voice thick with joy and love. ‘Shall we make a run for it now? I think we’ve kept everyone waiting long enough, don’t you?’

  As they plunged into what, within seconds, was a maelstrom of confetti and flower petals, the silver-haired, bull-necked figure standing by the Bentley yanked open a rear door and barked an order at his uniformed chauffeur.

  Seconds later, when a laughing, breathless Kate snatched a glance at where it had been parked, there was no sign of it. She knew, however, that it would return. And she knew that when it did return, she and Leon would need all their strength in order to keep their family intact and inviolate.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Tell me what happened between you and Mr Harvey,’ Leon said grimly. ‘Tell me everything that went on between the two of you during the years I was away.’

  They were lying in the blissful comfort and privacy of their big, creaky double bed. It was an hour or so before dawn, and the curtains were pulled back, allowing moonlight to spill milkily into the room. From the next bedroom Carl Voigt’s snores could be heard faintly and rhythmically. In the room across the landing, Luke and Matthew were cosily tucked into the same downy bed, a nightlight offering comfort in case they should wake. In the room at the far end of the landing, Daisy was asleep, a battered teddy bear in her arms.

  Kate lay, her cheek resting against the naked warmth of Leon’s chest, as his arm circled round her. ‘Things came to a head between us the same week your ship was torpedoed and you were reported missing;’ she said, her voice husky with remembered grief and pain. ‘Matthew was still with his grandfather . . . yes, I know he’s really Matthew’s great-grandfather, but he’s still only in his late sixties and he’s so aggressive and forceful, I find it impossible to refer to him as a great-grandfather. Great-grandfathers should be feeble and as old as Father Time.’

  Despite his apprehension at whatever it was she was about to tell him, a smile tugged the corners of his mouth.

  ‘And?’ he prompted, his arm tightening lovingly around her. ‘What happened that week? Matthew was presumably still with Mr Harvey at his country home in Somerset?’

  Kate moved her head in a nod, her unbraided hair brushing silkily against his flesh. ‘Yes. Mr Harvey took him to Somerset, with a nursery nurse, during the first few weeks of the Blitz. I didn’t want him to go . . . he was only a few months old . . . but I knew he would be safe there, and I had Mr Harvey’s promise that the minute London was out of danger he would return Matthew to me.’

  Leon remained silent. It hadn’t only been servicemen like himself who had suffered during the war. It had been civilians, too, especially civilians living in bomb-blitzed towns such as Plymouth and Coventry and London.

  ‘What happened, sweetheart?’ he asked at last, tenderly. Whatever it was, he would make it up to her. From now on, as long as he had breath in his body, he would never let anyone or anything distress or harm her.

  She moved slightly against him, splaying a hand against the broad comfort of his chest. ‘Hitler began directing all his energies against Russia, and the bombing was over. Or at least it was over for a time. I told Mr Harvey I would be travelling down to Somerset to collect Matthew and to bring him home with me.’ She paused, reliving again the nightmarish moment when she had entered the nursery only to find it empty. ‘And he wasn’t there,’ she said simply. ‘Mr Harvey had spirited him away, and he vowed he would never return him to me.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ The words were uttered softly, so as not to wake the sleeping children, but with such fierce intensity that Kate felt a tingle ripple down her spine. If Leon had been home, Joss Harvey would have paid dear for his high-handed, unspeakable behaviour.

  ‘The next few days were a nightmare.’ Her voice was unsteady, and though her head was buried on his shoulder he knew there were tears glinting on her eyelashes. ‘I didn’t know if you were dead or alive. I didn’t know where Matthew was. And no-one would help me. Or at least no-one in authority would help me,’ she added hurriedly as he made a swift, angry movement of disbelief.

  From the next bedroom, her father’s snores reached a crescendo and then, as he turned over in sleep, subsided.

  ‘What did you do?’ Leon asked quietly, controlling his inner fury with difficulty. He had known, on his last leave at home with her, that Joss Harvey wanted to adopt Matthew. Why, then, hadn’t he realized how dangerous Joss Harvey could be? Why hadn’t he realized that a man like Joss Harvey was a man who would never take ‘no’ for an answer?

  ‘I went to the police. I went to a solicitor. Both were unhelpful. As far as they were concerned, Joss Harvey was respectability personified. And I, very obviously, wasn’t.’ Her gentle voice held a note of bitterness that, because it was so alien to her warm, compassionate nature, shocked him inexpressibly. ‘Not only was Matthew illegitimate, but I was expecting another baby outside of wedlock. In their eyes, if Joss Harvey had removed his great-grandson from my care, he had done so for good reasons.’

  He said gently, ‘And so what did you do when you received no joy from the police or the solicitor you had consulted?’

  ‘I realized that the most obvious thing was to capitalize on my friendship with Matthew’s nanny. I’d always got on well with Ruth Fairbairn and I knew that, thanks to Joss Harvey’s lies, she wouldn’t be aware that I no longer knew where she or Matthew were. So I put a message in the personal column of The Lady, which is a magazine all nannies read, and five days later Ruth was on the doorstep, Matthew in her arms.’

  ‘And now she’s about to marry the Vicar!’ Leon said, humour re-entering his voice again. ‘Which is a nice, happy ending.’

  Kate smiled to herself in the moonlit darkness. Ruth’s visit to Magnolia Square, with Matthew in her arms, had certainly had far-reaching and happy consequences for her. She had met Bob Giles when he was paying a parochial visit to the Jenningses, and the attraction b
etween the two of them had been instant and mutual.

  She kissed Leon’s dark, velvet-smooth flesh and said, ‘The happy ending came when Nellie Miller introduced me to her niece, Ruby. Ruby is a solicitor and she served Joss Harvey with so many writs, he must have thought he was drowning under them! Since then he’s left both Matthew and me very much alone.’

  ‘Until yesterday?’

  ‘Until yesterday,’ she agreed quietly and he felt her tremble in his arms.

  He raised himself up on his elbow and looked down at her. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of, sweetheart,’ he said fiercely. ‘Matthew is your child. Soon, when the adoption goes through, he’ll legally be my child as well. Joss Harvey is never going to take him from us. Not now. Not ever.’

  As he lowered his head to hers, she hoped with all her heart that his words would prove to be prophetic. But she wasn’t convinced. She knew Joss Harvey far better than Leon did. He had lost his son in the First World War and his grandson at Dunkirk. And he wanted his illegitimate great-grandson to take the place his son and his grandson would have filled. He wanted Matthew to be raised by him as his heir. And he was ruthless enough to let nothing stand in the way of that ambition.

  ‘Leon is sure he can handle Joss Harvey, but he hasn’t experienced Joss Harvey’s ruthlessness at first hand,’ Kate said to Carrie next morning, when she stopped by the Jennings’s market stall in Lewisham High Street to have a few words with her.

  Carrie expertly tipped half a stone of potatoes into a carrier bag the customer would be collecting when he came out of the nearby bookies and said, ‘The trouble with old man Harvey is that he doesn’t only have endless money for legal fees, he has a lifetime’s experience of besting people. Harvey’s is one of the biggest construction companies in the country, and it didn’t get that way without there being a lot of sharp practice at the helm.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ Kate said, not disguising her apprehension. Yesterday had been her wedding day, and she had refused to have it blighted by dwelling on thoughts of what Joss Harvey might or might not do in order to obtain custody of Matthew. Last night, in bed with Leon, she had felt that nothing on earth could harm her family. Now, in the garish brightness of day, she was not so sure. Joss Harvey was an astute businessman, and he had the power that came with wealth and influence.

  Seeing the anxiety in her friend’s eyes, Carrie tried to be reassuring. ‘Just because he came for a look-see yesterday doesn’t necessarily mean he’s out to cause trouble,’ she said, polishing apples to a rosy shine on her apron. ‘Though how he got to hear about your wedding beats me.’

  ‘It doesn’t beat me,’ Kate said darkly. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d known about Leon’s home-coming even before Leon knew of it!’

  Carrie chuckled and gave her attention to a prospective customer. ‘Three pahnds of carrots? Better take four, luv,’ she said in warm and friendly south-London fashion. ‘They’re fresh as a daisy which is more’n can be said for the tired-lookin’ carrots Black’eath greengrocers are tryin’ to off-load. An’ what about a couple of apples? They’re luvverly and juicy. Just the thing to keep the doctor away!’

  Carrots and apples were speedily tipped into a cane shopping basket. Customers were never in short supply at the Jennings’s market stall. Weights were always generous and produce was always fresh.

  ‘And anyhow,’ Carrie continued as another happy customer went on her way, ‘old man Harvey hasn’t given you any trouble for a long time now, has he? Why should he start again now?’

  Kate transferred her own shopping basket from one hand to the other. Her real fear as to why he should do so was one she hadn’t yet expressed, not even to Leon. She bit the corner of her lip – especially to Leon. She said unhappily, ‘When Mr Harvey first tried to take Matthew from me, he told me he was doing so because, as I was having a second illegitimate child, I wasn’t a fit person to rear his grandson’s child.’

  Carrie snorted. Kate had repeated that particular conversation to her at the time, and she had thought Joss Harvey was clutching at straws then; she thought he was clutching at straws now. What court would remove a child from its mother on those grounds? Especially when both children had been conceived during war-time and when the father of one of them had died a war hero?

  Kate steeled herself to tell Carrie the real crux of why she was so worried. Her hand tightened on the handle of her basket. By her side, Hector whimpered with impatience. ‘And he said that, as the father of my second child was black, no court in the land would consider him a suitable stepfather for his great-grandchild.’

  Carrie’s jaw dropped.

  ‘And so that’s why I’m so worried,’ Kate said, knowing she had every reason to worry. If she hadn’t, if the notion of a court declaring Leon unfit to be Matthew’s stepfather because of the colour of his skin had been ludicrous, then Carrie would have burst into derisive laughter.

  And Carrie wasn’t laughing. She was looking horrified. ‘But . . . but Leon is going to adopt Matthew, isn’t he?’ she said at last. ‘And if he does, then he’ll be Matthew’s legal father, won’t he? Not just his stepfather?’

  Another prospective customer was eyeing Carrie’s display of onions, and it was obvious that their conversation couldn’t continue for much longer.

  ‘But what if Leon applying to adopt Matthew is what Joss Harvey has been waiting for?’ Kate said, her face pale and strained. ‘When there was every chance that Leon might be dead, he couldn’t make an issue about his great-grandson being raised by Leon, but he can now. And I think he will do, Carrie, I think that’s why he came to Magnolia Square yesterday. He wanted to see for himself that we had married. And now that we are married, he’ll try to take Matthew away from us.’

  ‘Four onions, six pahnds of carrots, a bunch of greens and three apples,’ Carrie’s customer said, snapping her carrier bag open in front of Carrie’s weighing scales. ‘And pardon me for saying so, but yer’d take much more custom if yer didn’t gab so much to yer friend. Are those radishes yer ’iding be’ind the carrots? Because if they are I’ll ’ave two bunches.’

  Kate raised a hand to Carrie to signify she was going to be on her way. Staying any longer was pointless. Lewisham High Street was no place to be discussing her very real fears about Joss Harvey’s designs on Matthew.

  Carrie tipped carrots on to the scales and watched her go, heavy-hearted. It had only been Kate’s wedding day yesterday, for goodness sake. In an ideal world she would have been enjoying a honeymoon now, not trailing down to Lewisham High Street to confide her worries about Joss Harvey.

  ‘And I’d cheer up a bit if I was you,’ her customer said to her tartly. ‘The war in Europe’s been won an’ the world’s a sunnier place, or ’adn’t you noticed?’

  Carrie grinned, knowing that her customer was right and knowing that if she didn’t at least look cheerful she’d scare further custom away. ‘I ’ad, as a matter of fact,’ she said breezily. ‘And when the war in the Far East is won as well, you can ’ave a basket of apples for free.’

  ‘Bloody Japs,’ her father said later that day at supper-time. ‘Why can’t Hirohito throw the towel in?’ He rattled his evening paper in irritation. ‘It says here they lost over a thousand men when the Yanks finally took Okinawa. And still it goes on: Yanks dying, Japs dying, prisoners of war dying.’

  Miriam sniffed as she sat in a sagging-bottomed easy chair, darning a pile of socks. She didn’t mind Albert being heart-sore over the Yanks who were dying out in the Pacific, but she didn’t given a tinker’s curse about the bloody Japanese. Leah didn’t very much care about them either. Her thoughts were centred on Christina, not the ongoing war in the Far East.

  Albert, uncaring of his audience’s lack of interest, mounted another hobby-horse. ‘And look at this,’ he said, stabbing at the newsprint with his thumb. ‘It says here the Tories stand no chance in the comin’ election. It says the new Prime Minister’s goin’ to be Clement Attlee, not Winston Churchill. And after
all that Winnie’s done for us. Keepin’ our spirits up durin’ our darkest hours. It’s a damned disgrace!’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t take on so, Albert,’ Miriam said, tossing a darned sock on to a pile of similarly darned socks and reaching for an undarned one. ‘People want a change, that’s all. And you can’t blame ’em. Not after all they’ve been through.’ She stuffed a darning-tree into the heel of one of his socks and stretched the thinning wool over the top of it. ‘I’m goin’ to be votin’ Labour,’ she said, vigorously attacking the thinning area with her needle, ‘and I ’spect everyone else in Magnolia Square will be voting the same way, ’cept for ’Arriet Godfrey of course. ’Arriet will be voting Tory. She’ll be votin’ Tory till the Second Coming!’

  Leah fidgeted uneasily in her fireside chair. It was all very well nattering on about the Japanese and the coming general election, but what about problems a little nearer to home? What about Christina’s increasing preoccupation? Instead of being happy as a lark at the prospect of soon being reunited with Jack, she was becoming more withdrawn with every day that passed. And Albert and Miriam didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Where’s Christina?’ she asked before Albert could give vent to yet another of the bees in his bonnet. ‘Why for do we hardly see her these days?’

  ‘She’ll be in her room, writing to Jack,’ Albert said easily, turning over a page to see what else was wrong with the world.

  ‘No, she isn’t!’ Miriam broke off her woollen darning thread with her teeth. ‘She’s gorn up to Kate’s. Our Carrie says Kate’s worryin’ about old man ’Arvey ’avin’ turned up at ’er weddin’. I ’spect Christina’s trying to cheer’er up a bit.’

  Christina wasn’t even aware of Kate’s anxieties. Carrie had told her that Kate and Leon were taking Daisy, Matthew and Luke swimming that evening and that she, Danny, Rose and Elizabeth were going to go with them. It meant that, with a little luck, Carl Voigt would be at home on his own.