Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  A surge of pride eased her apprehension. And home-and-hearth Ted Lomax had won himself a medal for saving the life of a comrade under heavy fire. He was a hero, was her Ted. And he deserved a hero’s welcome from his wife, not a welcome marred by doubt as to what the future held for them both or, even worse, tarnished because her thoughts weren’t centred on him alone.

  She saw Harriet and Charlie some distance away, Queenie running in wide circles around them. They were walking away from her and she didn’t call out to attract their attention. Instead she continued to ponder the mystery of just why she and Jack had ended up as only friends and not as husband and wife. They’d been inseparable as kids. As they had grown older and Jack had started breaking hearts the length and breadth of south-east London, it was always her he’d returned to, saying she was his best girl and his best mate. And then she’d met Ted and was intrigued by his quiet manner and, next thing she knew, she was pregnant with Billy. ‘Which just goes to prove that the quiet ones are the worst,’ her mother had said darkly on being told the news. Her father, too, had been remarkably philosophical. ‘Me and yer mother ’ad to get married a bit sharpish,’ he had said, standing with his legs apart, the better to balance his beer belly, ‘an’ we’ve bin ’appy enough.’ Mavis smiled to herself fondly at the memory. Dear Dad – all he asked of life was a hot meal on the table at the end of each day and the luxury of a steamingly deep bath on a Friday night.

  She stepped off the Heath, crossing the road that flanked it, her smile fading. It had been Jack’s reaction, though, not her parents’ reaction, that had been crucial to her. And Jack’s reaction had been appallingly indifferent. ‘He seems like a good bloke,’ he had said to her when she had told him the news. ‘And he’s a docker. Dockers always bring home a decent pay packet. You’ll be all right there, Mavis, just as long as you don’t give him the run-around.’

  Even now, after all these years, she didn’t know whether or not he had been covering up a hurt and disappointment as deep and monstrous as her own.

  She turned into Magnolia Terrace, aware that even if he had been, the arrival of Christina Frank would have swiftly put paid to it. Her jaw tightened. Hitler had a lot of sins to answer for, and in her opinion, one of them was in being responsible for Christina fleeing Germany and seeking refuge with the Jenningses. Within days of moving in there, and without even trying, she had caught Jack’s attention and he had fallen for her hook, line and sinker.

  Was he still quite so besotted? Musingly she rounded the corner into the Square. He certainly hadn’t been a hundred per cent happy on his last leave home. ‘I can’t work it out,’ he had said to her time and time again. ‘Something’s wrong between me and Christina, but I’m damned if I know what it is. And if I don’t know what it is, how the hell can I put it right?’

  She had had no answer for him. Christina was a mystery there was no unravelling. Why, for instance, was she the only person in Magnolia Square not to have befriended Anna Radcynska? It didn’t make sense. Anna had suffered the torments of hell at the hands of the Nazis, just as Christina’s family apparently had, yet to the best of her knowledge Christina had never troubled to call on Anna to introduce herself. It was almost as if she didn’t want anyone remembering what her past had been; as if she had blanked from her mind all memory of the family she had lost.

  A faint sprinkling of rain dampened her face and she quickened her step. In Harriet’s carefully tended garden, late flowering Michaelmas daisies jostled with the bronze pom-pom heads of chrysanthemums. In Anna’s garden, a freshly planted japonica indicated that the surrounding nettles and weeds would soon be a thing of the past. She wondered who had planted it for Anna. Carrie, probably. Or Kate. The sky, which had been a hard pale blue when she was crossing the Heath, was now purpling to dusk. She looked down the Square, wondering if Billy and Beryl had let themselves into the house and had made themselves some drip and bread or jam and bread for their tea. If they hadn’t, she’d get the chip pan out. She grinned to herself, recovering a bit of her old bounce. Egg and chips, a mug of tea, and Variety Band-box on the wireless. It wasn’t exactly the way she would have chosen to spend the evening, but it had its compensations. She’d be able to go to bed early for one thing, and as her clocking-on time in the morning was six-thirty, an early night wasn’t to be sneezed at.

  As she walked past the Sharkeys’, she saw that someone was seated on her garden wall. Someone masculine and uniformed and very, very tired-looking. She stopped dead in her tracks, terrified that her eyes were playing tricks on her. It couldn’t be Ted. It couldn’t. There would have been a telegram telling her when to expect him. A phone call via Mr Giles. The seated figure was probably an irate householder waiting to complain to her about Billy’s apple scrumping or bicycle-chain filching. The man raised his head, looked directly at her, and rose to his feet.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she whispered, and then, forgetting all her ambivalent feelings of a few moments ago, she began running towards him, shouting joyfully, ‘Ted! Ted! Why didn’t you let me know you’d be ’ome tonight? All I’ve got for yer tea is egg and chips!’

  A grin cracked his tired face as he rose to his feet to meet her. ‘So what’s new, Mavis love? The last time you cooked a decent tea, ’Itler was just a strugglin’ painter and decorator an’ the Duke of Windsor was the Prince of Wales an’ in short trousers!’

  With a shout of laughter she hurtled into his arms, hugging him with all the strength she had. At last, nearly unsteady on his feet with tiredness, he held her away from him a little in order that he could kiss her. His had been a long war and a hard war. He’d fought what had seemed to be the length and breadth of Europe, and he never wanted to see Europe again. England would do for him, thank you very much. Home – that was all he wanted. And rest. Above all, he wanted rest.

  ‘Let’s stop givin’ the Square a public display,’ he said, raising his head from hers. ‘Yer might ’ave only eggs an’ chips fer tea, Mavis, but I’m ready for ’em. I ’aven’t eaten fer so long, me stomach finks me froat’s bin cut.’

  Mavis blinked up at him. His kiss, for a reunion kiss, had left an awful lot to be desired. Her disappointment vanished as she saw the utter exhaustion in his face. ‘What you need, Ted Lomax,’ she said perceptively, ‘is a scalding ’ot pint of tea with lashings of condensed milk in it. Come on, I’ll put the kettle on and yer can get out of uniform. Yer can get out of it and never put the blinkin’ thing on ever again!’

  With a lop-sided grin, he picked up his kit-bag. No matter that he hadn’t been home for anything other than short, and far too infrequent, leaves over the last six years, some things never changed. Apart from the bomb-site where the Helliwells’ house had been, Magnolia Square hadn’t changed. The houses in the northern half of the Square, nearest to the Heath, were still almost grandiosely Edwardian, the steps leading down from their front doors to their garden pathways, scrubbed and white-stoned. In the southern half of the Square – his half of the Square – there was the same air of cosy ramshackle shabbiness. And Mavis hadn’t changed. She was still as fizzingly full of life as ever. He slid his free arm around her shoulders as they walked up their cracked front path together, hoping fervently that some of her irrepressible zest for life would rub off on him and make him feel halfway to human again.

  ‘So where’s our Billy and Beryl?’ he asked half an hour later as he sat near the kitchen boiler, a pint mug of tea in his hands.

  Mavis, who had stoically risen above the disappointment of finding herself not in bed, but at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes for chips, said cheerily, ‘Gawd knows. ’E comes an’ goes when ’e likes. Beryl will be with Rose somewhere, or maybe with Daisy, the kiddie Kate took in. The three of them are always together.’ She began slicing the peeled potatoes into chips. ‘Harriet Godfrey calls them The Three Graces. She says it’s the name of a painting by a bloke called Botticelli, and that it shows three lovely young women, which is what she says our Beryl and Rose and Daisy are going to grow up to
be.’ She chuckled throatily as she began patting the chips dry with a tea-towel. ‘Dad couldn’t get the ’ang of it all. “Who’s Botty-jelly when ’e’s at ’ome?” he kept asking Harriet. “An’ why don’t he jus’ paint a picture of our Beryl and Rose and their friend an’ ’ave done with it?”’

  Ted, who didn’t know who the painter bloke was either, said impatiently, ‘I fink I’ll go out and look for the kids. I was ’opin’ they’d be in the house when I walked in. I’d sort of imagined how it would be – the two of ’em runnin’ to meet me and everyfink.’

  Mavis plunged the chips into boiling fat and turned to face him, perceptively aware that he was suffering from a sense of anti-climax. ‘You’ve bin imagining it all for too long,’ she said, aware that his home-coming wasn’t going to be without complications. ‘Things never are as you imagine they’re goin’ to be. The kids’ll be over the moon to see you, but they’ve got used to you not bein’ ’ere. An’ they’re not little ’uns any more, like they were when you went away. Billy’s thirteen and Beryl’s nine. They’re ’ardly ever in the ’ouse. Why should they be, when I’m workin’ on the buses every hour God sends?’

  Ted put his mug of tea down a little unsteadily on the kitchen table. He should have stayed the night in the transit camp, as he and all the others returning home, fresh from overseas had been advised to do. That way he would have arrived in Magnolia Square showered and spruce and rested. But he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of spending yet another night away from home, when home was so blessedly near, and the result was that he felt dead on his knees.

  ‘Well, that’ll soon change now I’m ’ome,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I’ll get my old job back down at the docks an’ we’ll soon be back in the old routine.’

  Alarm flared through Mavis’s eyes. No matter how unexciting her job was in comparison to the danger of her war work, at least it put good money in her pocket and gave her independence and got her out of the house. The ‘old routine’ hadn’t been that hot, if she remembered rightly. Cooking, cleaning, being pregnant . . .

  ‘’Ang on a minute, Ted,’ she said, deciding it would be best to tell him right from the beginning that things had changed on the home front and were never going to be quite the same again, ‘I think you ought to know that—’

  She was interrupted by the sound of the front door being flung back on its hinges. ‘Mum! Mum!’ Billy shouted, racing through the house to the kitchen, Beryl hard on his heels. ‘Are you in? Everyone in the Square is sayin’ Dad’s ’ome! Is it true? Is it . . .’

  He rocketed into the kitchen and then stopped short, the blood draining from his face. ‘Dad!’ he said with a strangled sob. ‘Oh, Dad! You are ’ome! You are!’

  ‘Daddy!’ Beryl squealed, dashing past Billy, throwing herself into his arms.

  As they hugged and kissed and laughed, Billy remained immobile in the doorway. His dad was home! Not just for a leave, but home for good. It was wonderful and stupendous – and it was too much to take in. In a way he didn’t understand, he felt suddenly frightened.

  Over the top of Beryl’s fair hair, his dad’s eyes met his. ‘I’ve missed yer, son,’ Ted said simply, letting go of Beryl, aware of Billy’s momentary emotional confusion.

  Billy gave a choked gasp and then he was running, running, running, tears streaming down his face as he threw himself into his dad’s outstretched arms.

  Mavis felt tears sting her eyes. What she had been about to say to Ted could wait till later. All that mattered for the moment was that his long dreamed-of homecoming was, at last, coming true.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Where are we going today, Grandad?’ Matthew asked, wriggling in happy anticipation on the Bentley’s delicious-smelling, leather-covered rear seat.

  Joss Harvey patted his great-grandson’s hand and smiled down benevolently at him. He liked the fact that Matthew called him ‘Grandad’ and not ‘Great-Grandad’. To have been called ‘Great-Grandad’ would have made him feel as old as Methuselah. ‘It’s too foggy a day for parks or zoos,’ he said, glad to see that Matthew’s mother had had the sense to wrap him up warmly against the nasty November weather. ‘Instead, we’re going to have a very special tea out. Tea at the Ritz. I used to take your daddy there on his first day home from school every half term. They do the biggest cream cakes in the world at the Ritz.’

  Matthew beamed up at him happily. He loved his days out with his grandad. They were special days. Days full of treats and surprises. ‘And toasted teacakes?’ he asked eagerly. ‘When Mummy takes me to Chiesemans we always have toasted teacakes.’

  ‘I’m not sure about the toasted teacakes,’ Joss replied as the Bentley purred down the Old Kent Road. ‘Would smoked salmon and cucumber sandwiches do instead?’

  Matthew wasn’t sure what smoked salmon was. It sounded funny. His daddy smoked when he was doing the gardening or was working on the river, but he didn’t smoke in the house. ‘Gaspers’, he called them. He rolled each one himself, his chocolate-dark fingers moving so fast and so neatly that Matthew never tired of watching. Then he would tuck the gasper behind his ear, where it nestled against hair so wirily tight and curly that it tickled Matthew’s palms whenever he touched it, making him giggle.

  The gasper was in readiness for when he took his ‘toke’. Matthew liked tokes. They were the times when his daddy stopped working for ten minutes or so and made a mug of tea. He didn’t make it like Mummy made it, in a teapot. Instead, he shook the tea-leaves into a big pint mug, dowsed them with boiling water, then spooned in condensed milk and a shake of sugar. ‘And the next bit,’ he had said the first time Matthew had ever watched him, ‘is the secret bit. The bit that makes a proper mug of tea.’ Wide-eyed, Matthew had watched him as he had put the mug back on the stove. ‘Just to re-heat it,’ his daddy had said. ‘We don’t want to stew it, we just want to bring out the richness.’

  And Daddy’s mugs of tea were rich. They would sit side by side on the back step, their hands around the steaming mugs of treacly, deep brown liquid, companionably surveying whatever work they had just completed, a newly planted bed of spring cabbages or newly seeded bed of broad beans or winter lettuce. And a toke didn’t only mean tea and a cigarette. It meant fried egg or bacon in buttered bread so thickly sliced his mummy laughingly called them ‘doorsteps’.

  The Bentley purred around the Elephant and Castle and headed for Westminster Bridge. A group of children seated on the kerb playing ‘Five stones’ gazed after it open-mouthed, wondering if it belonged to the King or the Queen or the Prime Minister.

  ‘The Ritz is near to a very good bookshop,’ Joss said, Matthew’s woollen-gloved hand still tucked in his. ‘We’ll call in at Hatchard’s and see if we can buy you a really nice copy of Wind in the Willows. And then we’ll pay a visit to Hamleys.’

  ‘What’s Hamleys?’ Matthew asked, knowing it would be something nice; knowing it would be somewhere no-one else he knew had ever been.

  Once again, his grandad’s pigskin-gloved hand patted his. ‘Hamleys is an Aladdin’s Cave,’ he said, his gruff voice gentle with love. ‘Hamleys was your daddy’s favourite place in all the world.’

  Matthew liked it when his grandad talked to him of his other daddy, the daddy who had died before he had been born. His mummy kept a silver-framed photograph of him on the mantel-piece, and his new daddy said that his other daddy had been very brave and had died a war hero at a place called Dunkirk.

  ‘Did you and my first daddy ever have tokes together, Grandad?’ he asked as the Bentley slid to a halt outside the gracious splendour of the Ritz Hotel, Piccadilly.

  ‘Tokes?’ As Hemmings stepped out of the car to open the rear door for them, Joss stared down at Matthew, his brows beetling together in a slight frown. ‘What is a toke, Matthew?’

  ‘It’s when you smoke a gasper,’ Matthew said patiently, climbing out of the Bentley in Joss’s wake, ‘and drink tea that’s been brewed in the mug and reheated on the stove.’

  Hemmings began t
o cough in a strangled manner. Joss was impervious. He had no intention of shutting Matthew up. He needed to pass on to Cyril Habgood as many details as possible about the undesirable, working-class aspect of Matthew’s home life in order that Cyril could build up a watertight argument as to why Emmerson’s application to adopt Matthew should be refused.

  ‘And you have egg and bacon doorsteps with it,’ Matthew continued blithely, skipping along at Joss’s side as they crossed the pavement, and a commissionaire in a uniform even grander than Hemmings’s uniform, held a door wide open for them. ‘Doorsteps are when the bread is cut so thick you can—’

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Harvey,’ the commissionaire said, touching his cap and wondering if he had heard aright.

  Joss strode past him, grim-faced. Tokes indeed! Tea brewed in the mug! Doorstep sandwiches! The sooner Matthew was living with him and acquainted with wafer-thin smoked salmon sandwiches, Earl Grey and the Queen’s English, the better!

  ‘Maffew’s home! Maffew’s home!’ Luke cried, scrambling down from his look-out post on the settee in front of the living-room window and running through into the kitchen to tell everyone.

  Kate was in the middle of washing up the supper things. Leon was seated at the table, enjoying a mug of tea as he read the evening paper. Pru and Daisy were at the opposite end of the table, sticking pressed flowers into a scrapbook.

  ‘And not before time,’ Kate said dryly, reaching for a tea-towel and eyeing the clock.

  There was a loud, sharp knock at the door and Leon’s eyebrows rose, his eyes meeting Kate’s. It was an adult knock. Was Joss Harvey at last paying them a personal call? He pushed his chair away from the table. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘If Mr Harvey wants a word with anyone, he can have it with me.’

  Pru prised a speedwell from blotting paper with a pair of tweezers, unaware of the tension the knock had aroused. As far as she was concerned, Matthew was simply returning from a nice day out with his great-grandad. Daisy, aware that Matthew’s days out with his great-grandad weren’t like normal outings with grandads, put down the scissors she had been about to cut a piece of sticky paper with, and looked from Kate to Leon. She didn’t know why Matthew going out with his great-grandad was different to his going out with the grandad who had once lived with them and who now lived in Greenwich, but she knew it was. When Matthew was out with Great-Grandad Harvey, her mummy never laughed and teased quite as much as she usually did. And she always kept looking at the clock, impatient for it to be the time when Matthew would return, almost as if she were afraid that he wouldn’t return.