Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  Doris sat on the edge of an easy chair in an agony of nervousness. Why had this intimidating woman called on her? Had Pru got into trouble? Why hadn’t Pru warned her Mrs Lewis was going to descend on her? What was she supposed to say to her? She’d never had the knack of conversation, never been able to chat blithely about anyone and anything as Leah and Miriam and Hettie and Nellie did. And if she couldn’t chat to the likes of Leah and Miriam and Hettie and Nellie, how was she supposed to chat to a woman whose white silk blouse and navy blue suit, worn with matching leather handbag and shoes, made her look like a lady mayoress?

  Cecily Lewis, well aware of Doris’s discomfiture, smiled disarmingly. ‘I’m so pleased about Malcolm’s friendship with Prudence,’ she said sincerely. ‘She’s such a lovely girl. So bright and cheerful and thoughtful.’

  Doris’s teaspoon clattered in her saucer. Pru’s friendship with Malcolm Lewis? What sort of friendship? Whatever sort it was, Wilfred wouldn’t like it. If the Emmersons weren’t keeping a close enough eye on Pru perhaps it was time she returned home to Magnolia Square. But if she returned home to Magnolia Square she would have to live with Wilfred again, and she didn’t want to live with Wilfred again.

  ‘Of course, I do appreciate how young Prudence is and that you are probably concerned about Malcolm’s intentions,’ Cecily continued, attempting to put Doris in the picture as painlessly as possible, ‘but he has assured me they are scrupulously honourable.’

  Malcolm hadn’t, in fact, used the word ‘honourable’. What he had said was that he wanted to marry Pru and that he intended giving her an engagement ring on her birthday, which was Christmas Day.

  ‘We’re going to have to wait until she’s twenty-one before we can get married, as her father certainly won’t give his permission,’ he had said pragmatically, ‘but it will give me time to add to my savings. I’d like to buy a house in Magnolia Square. And it will give Pru time to get a bottom drawer together.’

  ‘And she knows about . . . about your medical condition?’ she had asked, avoiding the ugly word as she always avoided it.

  ‘She knows I suffer from a mild form of epilepsy,’ he had said cheerfully, ‘and she knows my being an epileptic doesn’t mean I’m mentally retarded.’

  ‘But is the . . . is your medical condition the reason her father won’t give permission for an earlier wedding?’ she had asked unhappily.

  He had shaken his head. ‘It’s because Wilfred Sharkey is mad as a hatter,’ he had said, as if madness was of no consequence whatsoever. ‘He Bible-bashes down at Lewisham clock-tower. All hell and harlots. He’s as likely to give Pru permission to marry under-age as fly to the moon.’

  While she had been coming to terms with this little gem of information, he had added, ‘I thought you could help out where the problem of Wilfred is concerned. Pru’s mother is mortified by what she sees as the shame of having a barmy husband. I thought if you told her about how you had coped when Father was at his worst it would help her see she’s no need to feel ashamed. I also thought the two of you might get on rather well. It would be nice if you did. Especially as this house is so big and you’ll soon be all alone in it, and neither I nor Pru want Doris returning to number two to live.’

  ‘You mean you want me to invite Prudence’s mother to come and live with me?’ she had asked, in a daze.

  ‘Why not?’ He had shot her a cheeky grin, a grin that had been melting her heart and ensuring he got his own way with her ever since he had been a toddler. ‘Think how convenient it will be for me and Pru, having only one visit to make when the children want to see their grannies!’

  She said now to the fraughtly anxious woman sitting opposite her, ‘I do hope we can become friends, Mrs Sharkey. We have so much in common.’

  ‘We do?’ There was incredulity in Doris’s voice. How could she and this frighteningly self-assured, impeccably dressed woman have anything in common?

  ‘Why, yes.’ Cecily set her cup and saucer to one side and settled in for a confidence-sharing, friendship-forming chat. ‘Our husbands, for one thing. My dearly loved late husband was extremely eccentric. He believed the earth was flat, and felt it his duty to proclaim his belief to all and sundry.’

  Doris stared at her. Was this amazing woman saying to her what she thought she was saying to her? ‘Even in the street?’ she asked, leaning further forward on the edge of her seat.

  ‘Even in the street,’ Cecily affirmed. ‘It was highly embarrassing at times, especially as he was a Justice of the Peace.’

  Doris’s jaw dropped open. A Justice of the Peace! And barmy! And she’d thought Wilfred was bad!

  ‘I soon learned to take it in my stride, though,’ Cecily continued amiably. ‘I told people, “I may be married to Frank, but I’m not joined to him at the hip. What he believes and does is his own affair. It’s no reflection on me.”’

  Doris continued to gape. Was it really as easy as that to deal with gossip-mongers and sniggerers? Even more amazing, this smartly dressed woman apparently knew of Wilfred’s cracked behaviour and yet still wanted to be friends with her! Not since she had been young and single had she had a friend, and she had never had a friend so wonderfully self-assured and capable.

  ‘Would you stay for another cup of tea?’ she asked, hope and excitement beginning to burgeon deep in her tummy. ‘And will you have a biscuit with it this time? They’re home-made. Home-made biscuits are always much nicer, aren’t they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind the recipe for these biscuits, Emily,’ Leah said as she enjoyed her elevenses in Emily and Esther’s cosy kitchen.

  Emily’s wrinkled face flushed with pride. Leah was Magnolia Square’s acknowledged queen as far as baking was concerned, and to be asked for a recipe by Leah was praise indeed. ‘It’s six ounces of self-raising flour to two ounces of porridge oats, three ounces of sugar and four ounces of margarine that’s been melted with a tablespoon and half of Tate & Lyle’s golden syrup,’ she said, knowing that she needn’t write it down, that as it was a recipe Leah would remember it for life after only one hearing. ‘The last thing to add is a half teaspoon of bicarb of soda that’s been scalded in a teaspoon of hot water.’

  ‘Well, that’s simple enough,’ Leah said, determining to make some that afternoon if her cache of sugar would run to it. ‘What are you doing for Christmas? Are you and Esther going to spend it with Nellie?’

  ‘With Nellie and Harold and Anna,’ Esther said from her wheelchair. ‘It will be Harold’s first Christmas at home in six years. Nellie’s expecting him any day now. He’s sailing from Colombo, in Ceylon, aboard the Empire Pride. And perhaps Jack will be home for Christmas as well,’ she added hopefully. ‘Do you know if Christina’s heard anything?’

  ‘If she has, she’s keeping it very close to her chest,’ Leah said darkly. ‘No-one gets anything out of her these days, not even me.’

  Emily laid down her knitting. ‘It can’t be easy for her at the moment,’ she said gently, ‘not with the papers all full of what is happening at Nuremberg. The evidence being given at those trials is terrible, truly terrible.’

  They were silent for a moment, thinking of the monsters standing trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. Goering and Hess and Ribbentrop and Fritz Sauckel, the slave labour overlord, and a score of others.

  At last Leah said emotionally, ‘Christina thinks her mother and grandmother could be still alive. That’s why she’s so quiet and strange these days. We’ve all told her it’s impossible, but she won’t listen to us. She just keeps saying they could be alive and that if they are, she’s going to find them.’

  Emily and Esther stared at her aghast, and then Emily said slowly, ‘Her grandmother was your childhood friend, wasn’t she, Leah? Do you have anything that belonged to her? Anything she had worn?’

  Leah’s eyes widened. ‘Moshambo?’ she asked. ‘Are you thinking your Moshambo might be able to contact them?’

  ‘I’m thinking it’s about time I tried to help dear Christina in the only
way I know,’ Emily said, much on her dignity as she always was when her spiritualist skills were being questioned. ‘Moshambo is wise and all-seeing and has never let me down yet, not even when the people seeking his help have not been true believers in him.’

  ‘Well, I ain’t a true believer,’ Leah said frankly, ‘but if he settles the question of whether Jacoba and Eva are alive or dead, I will be. Now, what would be of best use? A necklace of Jacoba’s I once swopped one of mine with her for, or a handkerchief?’

  ‘The necklace,’ Emily said, her aged face alight at the thought of renewing contact with her indomitable Indian spirit-guide. ‘Moshambo has a natural affinity with beads.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘It’s highly irregular, of course,’ Bob Giles was saying grave-faced to Christina and Carl.

  They were in Carl and Ellen’s tiny Greenwich kitchen, Coriolanus sprawled beneath the table they were seated around, Macbeth curled on a Windsor chair which Ellen had made comfy by means of a tie-on seat cushion, Hector hogging pride of place in front of a well-stoked wood-burning stove.

  ‘Red Cross officials are not travel couriers,’ Bob continued, his eyes holding Christina’s, ‘but under the circumstances—’

  ‘The circumstances being your willingness to co-operate with them when a home was needed for Anna?’ Carl interrupted queryingly, wondering just how Bob had managed to pull such powerful strings.

  ‘Partly,’ Bob admitted, well aware that if he hadn’t put himself, and the Parish, at the disposal of the Red Cross over the question of housing a displaced person, he would have had no contacts to approach over the problem of how best to help Christina enter Germany. ‘Miss Marshall, a Red Cross official, leaves for Berlin on the seventh of December,’ he continued, hoping fervently that neither he nor Carl would live to regret the plans now being made. ‘You’ll be able to travel with her as far as Cologne, Christina. After that you will be on your own.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to be on her own,’ Carl said, as sombre-faced as his friend. ‘If Miss Marshall is agreeable, I will accompany Christina and—’

  Christina shook her head, the dark silky wings of her hair falling forward to frame her face. ‘No,’ she said quietly but with utter conviction. ‘That wouldn’t be fair, Carl – not to you or to Ellen.’

  ‘Ellen is as appalled as we are,’ he said, speaking for Bob as well as himself, ‘at the thought of you travelling through Germany alone.’ His hands were clasped on the table in front of him, and the knuckles whitened as he clasped them even tighter, saying, ‘It isn’t only the personal trauma you’re going to suffer at being back in Germany, surrounded by a people that either supported Hitler’s Jewish policy or passively acquiesced to it, that’s worrying us, Christina. It’s the present situation that exists there. Germany is a defeated country in a state of chaos. According to the Red Cross, the entire population is on the brink of starvation. The roads will be choked with hungry refugees, and in travelling south from Cologne to Heidelberg you won’t be travelling through a British-occupied zone, but an American-occupied zone.’ Behind his spectacles, his grey-blue eyes were deeply troubled. ‘It will be far better if I travel with you and—’

  ‘No.’ The word was quietly spoken but was quite unequivocal. ‘This is something I must do alone. It’s something I have to do alone.’

  There was a long, heavy silence. At last Bob Giles said, deeply unhappy, ‘The Red Cross have supplied me with names and contact numbers of officials operating in the French zone. If you should be in need of urgent help they will do their best to provide it.’

  ‘And while you are away I’ll keep on pursuing the leads we have been given from New York,’ Carl said, taking off his spectacles and squeezing the bridge of his nose to relieve the terrible tension that was building up over his eyes. ‘There is a Berger on the list of Jewish prisoners who survived Buchenwald. I think it’s unlikely your grandmother would have been shunted all the way from Heidelberg to Buchenwald but, as anything is a possibility, I’ll write for whatever further information might be available.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Tears of gratitude glinted on the thick sweeps of Christina’s eyelashes. ‘I shall never know how to thank the two of you for all the help you’ve given me. And when I come back from Germany I’ll have my mother and grandmother with me, I know I will.’

  Neither man spoke. There was nothing they could say. All they could do was pray she returned safely, and that when she did so, her obsession would have been laid to rest.

  ‘She’s really going?’ Carrie asked Kate, wide-eyed.

  Kate nodded, holding her shopping basket at a convenient angle so that Carrie could shoot potatoes into it straight from her weighing-scale scoop. ‘She leaves tomorrow. Dad isn’t happy about it. He feels terribly responsible.’

  ‘Why?’ Wearing woollen gloves with the fingers cut off, Carrie expertly tipped the potatoes into the basket. ‘He wasn’t the one who got the Red Cross to lend a hand was he? That Was Mr Giles.’

  ‘He doesn’t think Christina would ever have thought of returning to Heidelberg if he hadn’t helped and encouraged her to look for her mother and grandmother,’ Kate said, keeping an eye on Matthew and Luke who, coated and scarved and gloved against the December cold, were hovering hopefully in front of the nearby bakery stall. ‘And he thought if she ever did return, she’d allow him to go with her.’

  Carrie’s eyes widened even further. ‘Blimey!’ she said, blowing on her red raw fingers to warm them up a little. ‘Can you imagine what the gossips would have made of that? Hettie would have a field day!’

  ‘She’s been having a field day ever since Ruth moved into the vicarage with a wedding ring on her finger,’ Kate said dryly. ‘According to Ruth, every time she so much as passes the time of day with Hettie, Hettie pitches, in with a remark as to how the first Mrs Giles did things differently, the inference being that Constance also did things very much better.’

  ‘It could be worse,’ Carrie said with a grin. ‘It could be Nellie who disapproves of her. Then she really would have a battle on her hands!’

  ‘And so you see, I had to come and put you in the picture,’ Ruby Miller, Nellie’s niece and the Emmersons’ solicitor, said several hours later as she sat with Leon and Kate in their sitting-room. A coal fire was burning. The children were in bed. Hector was asleep on the hearth rug, his head resting on his paws. Ruby was seated in the winged-back chair that had been Carl’s favourite chair for reading and nodding off in. Kate and Leon were seated side by side on a sofa, its shabbiness disguised by pristinely white, prettily hand-embroidered antimacassars.

  ‘I don’t quite understand.’ Leon’s dark rich voice was taut. His hand tightened on Kate’s and she knew that he was lying. He did understand. He understood all too well. ‘Are you telling us that Joss Harvey has lodged an objection to my application to adopt Matthew on the grounds of my skin colour?’

  Ruby nodded and flicked her cigarette stub into the roaring flames of the fire. With hair dyed a mat, dull black and lips and nails painted a scarlet that would have done credit to Mavis, she looked as unlike a solicitor as it was possible to imagine. ‘’Fraid so,’ she said in her deceptively laconic manner. ‘And it’s an objection the judge might well be sympathetic to, given Joss Harvey’s clout.’

  ‘But Leon is Matthew’s stepfather,’ Kate protested, a familiar feeling of sick dread beginning to churn deep in the pit of her stomach. ‘Nothing can alter that. And if he’s Matthew’s stepfather, it’s only sensible that he should be his legal father as well!’

  ‘Where skin colour’s concerned, common sense doesn’t have a look-in,’ Ruby said, crossing nylon-clad legs. ‘Ask any black GI.’

  ‘What must we do?’ A pulse had begun to throb at the corner of Leon’s strong jawline. ‘Whatever it is . . . whatever it takes . . .’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Ruby said succinctly, ‘that’s all you can do.’ She bit the corner of her lip. There was something else they had to be told, something that was
going to cause them added anxiety and heartache. Reluctantly, she said, ‘If the courts decide Joss Harvey’s objection is valid, then I think it’s safe to say he’ll immediately slap in another custody application. And that isn’t all.’ Her eyes darkened with compassion for them. ‘Your joint application to adopt Daisy is also likely to be refused. Sorry, my loves, but there it is.’

  Kate’s face drained of blood. She’d lived with the fear that Joss Harvey would again seek to obtain custody of Matthew for a long time, but she had never, ever, considered that she might lose Daisy. And that’s what would happen if they were judged unsuitable to be her adoptive parents. They would be judged to be unsuitable as foster parents as well, and Daisy would be taken away from them.

  ‘Oh God!’ She pressed her free hand hard to her mouth. ‘Oh dear God!’

  ‘No-one’s going to break my family up!’ Leon’s rage was white hot. ‘No-one’s going to take our children away from us! Not Joss Harvey! Not the Council! No-one!’

  Ruby cleared her throat. ‘Where Matthew’s concerned, it’s not all doom and gloom,’ she said, taking another cigarette out of its packet. ‘Joss Harvey’s attempted abduction of Matthew when he was a baby will go against him in a custody application. The fact that he is Matthew’s great-grandfather, not his grandfather, will also count against him. Or it will by the time I’ve finished with him.’ She searched in her jacket pocket for her cigarette lighter. ‘And though he’s only as old as the average grandfather, and fit as the proverbial bull, I’ll milk the age factor for all it’s worth.’ She paused for a moment, lighting her cigarette. A pulse was hammering at Leon’s jaw-line. Kate’s now clenched knuckles were white. With a scarlet talon, Ruby removed a fleck of tobacco from her tongue and said, ‘However, although I might very well be able to stop Joss Harvey from being allowed legal custody of Matthew, it doesn’t mean to say I’m going to be able to stop him preventing Leon from adopting Matthew. And if that happens . . .’