Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  Bob groaned and ran his hand through his hair yet again. He couldn’t get involved in a discussion with Emily at the present moment. He had to meet Jack off the train at Blackheath Station. He had to make quite sure that he was the one who broke the news to him about Christina. The thought of what would happen if Jack marched breezily down to number eighteen and was given the news by Miriam, made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

  ‘No, I’m coming out into the hall!’ he shouted back, adding hurriedly to Ruth, ‘I’m going to have to go straight out. Unless I get over to the station immediately, I’m going to miss him and then the situation will be even worse. Appease Emily for me. Make her a cup of tea. Give her a scone.’ He strode out into the hallway, saying as Emily rushed towards him, ‘I’m sorry, Emily. I can’t stop and talk. An emergency has cropped up. Ruth will make you some tea and I believe there are some scones—’

  ‘But Mr Giles, you must stop and talk to me,’ Emily protested, her thin-boned hands fluttering agitatedly. ‘Something terrible has happened! Christina has gone to Germany and Moshambo has just told me that her mother and her grandmother are—’

  The front door slammed behind him. Hettie’s eyes were the size of gob-stoppers. In all the long years she had known Bob Giles, she had never known him display such a common lack of courtesy. What on earth was the emergency? Was Wilf Sharkey making a prune of himself again down in Lewisham? And what did Emily mean saying Christina had gone to Germany? Surely she meant that Christina had come from Germany, which was a fact everyone had known for the last ten years.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said to Ruth, avid for a gossip that would answer both questions. ‘I’ve finished the flowers and I could do with a cup of tea myself. Now, what was it you were saying about Germany, Emily? You’re not beginning to ramble, are you? You do know the war’s over?’

  ‘That’s Jack Robson coming out of the station,’ Doris informed Cecily Lewis.

  They were in Cecily’s little Austin en route to her home in Blackheath Vale. A home that Cecily had insisted was, from now on, Doris’s home as well. The hastily packed shabby suitcase she had taken with her when she had gone to stay with her sister in Essex, lay snugly on the back seat. Cecily had suggested that they return to number ten for more of her possessions, but Doris hadn’t wanted to do so. Returning to number ten meant running the risk of confronting Wilfred, and she didn’t want to confront Wilfred ever again.

  ‘It’s strange seeing Jack in civvies,’ she said as Cecily slowed down to let a horse-drawn coal-cart turn left, and Jack began striding up Tranquil Vale towards the Heath. ‘He was in the Commandos. Wilfred said the Commandos deserved him. He didn‘t mean it as a compliment though,’ she added, in case Cecily should think Wilfred had ever had his reasonable, pleasant moments. ‘He thought Jack was wild as sin and that the Commandos were a bunch of hooligans.’

  Cecily lifted her eyes briefly from the road ahead and took note of the broad-shouldered young man striding athletically abreast of them on the pavement. He was certainly head-turningly handsome. There was something else about him as well. A careless, very attractive self-assurance. An amused smile touched Cecily’s mouth. Unless she was very much mistaken, Jack Robson possessed that almost insolent dare-devil quality her Jewish friends called chutzpah. It was no wonder Wilfred Sharkey hadn’t had a good word to say about him.

  ‘Wilfred never had anything nice to say about any of our neighbours,’ Doris continued, turning her wedding ring round and round on her finger. ‘He never had anything nice to say about anyone.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, Doris.’ Cecily returned her attention to the road in front of her. ‘You don’t have to live with him again. Not if you don’t want to.’

  Doris shuddered. She didn’t want to. Dr Roberts had visited her in Essex and tried to persuade her to return home, saying that over the last few weeks there had been a marked improvement in Wilfred’s condition, and that there were now times when he was completely rational. It had been no temptation to her at all. What Dr Roberts and Mr Giles didn’t seem to understand was that Wilfred was almost as bad when he was rational as he was when he was potty. She’d lived with him for years and she’d lived without him for weeks and she knew which she preferred.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said in answer to Cecily’s last remark, adding with a flare of vehemence that sent Cecily’s eyebrows flying into her hair, ‘I don’t want to live with the old sourpuss ever again!’

  ‘Kate! Kate! Are you in?’ Emily stepped inside Kate’s spick and span hallway. ‘Mr Giles won’t listen to me and . . .’ There were voices coming from the kitchen. A peeved, childish voice and a patient, adult voice.

  ‘I can’t explain why, Matthew,’ Kate was saying. ‘You’ll just have to believe me when I say I don’t know when Great-Grandad will be coming to take you out again, but that I do know it won’t be until after Christmas.’

  ‘But what will happen to my Christmas presents?’ Matthew’s voice was high and indignant and dangerously wobbly. ‘Great-Grandad said he’d take me to Harrods to see Santa Claus in his grotto! Harrods is bigger and better than Chiesemans! Harrods is—’

  ‘I must talk to you, Kate!’ Emily announced, tottering arthritically into the kitchen, her scarves swinging around her like the ribbons of a maypole. ‘It’s so very, very important . . .’

  ‘You don’t like Great-Grandad, do you?’ Tears were streaming down Matthew’s face. ‘That’s why you never come with me when I go and visit him, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that, darling,’ Kate said, wondering how she could possibly explain to him.

  ‘Matthew can’t continue visiting his great-grandfather,’ Ruby had said categorically. ‘Joss Harvey’s desire to see Matthew is the only real weapon we have. If he realizes that, if his objection to the adoption fails, you may never allow him to see Matthew again, he may think twice about going ahead with it.’

  ‘And what else are we doing to encourage him to think twice about going ahead with it?’ Leon had demanded in tortured frustration. ‘Why won’t you let me speak to him? How much worse could it make things?’

  ‘It could make things a lot worse,’ Ruby had said dryly.

  But Leon hadn’t believed her, and that morning, before leaving for the river, he had said, ‘I have to talk to Joss Harvey, Kate! I can’t just stand by doing nothing!’

  ‘Great-Grandad doesn’t understand how happy we are with your new daddy,’ she said now, struggling for words that wouldn’t confuse Matthew more than ever, worried sick as to what might be happening even at that very moment between Leon and Joss Harvey, ‘and so he doesn’t want your new daddy to adopt you . . .’

  ‘. . . and as you know, Kate, Moshambo is never wrong,’ Emily was saying, swinging an emerald green scarf with scarlet fringing out of the way of an interested Hector. ‘If only I had known what poor dear Christina intended—’

  ‘You’re lying! You’re lying!’ Matthew twisted away from Kate, charging for the door.

  ‘And now Mr Giles has gone to meet Jack at Blackheath Station and . . .’

  Kate was halfway across the kitchen after Matthew. She halted in her tracks, spinning round. ‘Jack’s on his way home? He’s on his way home now?’

  Emily nodded, displacing an orange and yellow hand-crocheted creation more the size of a shawl than a scarf. ‘That is what Ruth says, but as Mr Giles told me he was going to deal with an emergency, I don’t quite understand . . .’

  Kate did. She understood all too well. ‘Oh my good Lord!’ she said, wondering why everything always happened at once. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Emily. I need to make things right with Matthew and then I must have a word with Jack. There are things he has to be told. Things I don’t think even Mr Giles knows about.’

  She whirled out of the room, leaving Emily saying plaintively to thin air, ‘But it’s my news that is the emergency! Someone has to do something! Someone has to do something quickly!’

  J
ack knew something was wrong the instant he saw a grim-faced Bob Giles striding purposefully across the Heath to meet him. His heart kicked violently. Christina! Something had happened to Christina! He dropped the clumsy cardboard suitcase the government had given him when it had kitted him out in civvies, and sprinted across the frost-white turf.

  ‘What is it?’ he shouted as the gap between them narrowed. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘No-one’s ill, no-one’s hurt!’ Bob called back, aware that he was not conducting matters in a very dignified way. He slowed to a halt, bending over and resting his hands on his knees, panting for breath. Now that the moment had come, what on earth was he going to say?

  ‘Why’ve you come to meet me?’ Jack demanded as he came breathlessly to a halt a few feet in front of him. ‘You are on the Heath to meet me, aren’t you?’

  Bob nodded. ‘I thought it best . . . my responsibility . . .’

  The word responsibility, coming from a man wearing a dog-collar, drained the blood from Jack’s face.

  ‘Christina?’ he demanded savagely. ‘What’s happened? Where is she?’

  Bob sucked in a deep, steadying breath. Jack had been a Commando for six years. He wasn’t a child. It would be far better to come out with the news bluntly and to save the explanations for later.

  ‘At the moment she’s probably in France,’ he said, the words so improbable and melodramatic he felt like a second-rate actor in a third-rate farce. ‘She’s travelling with a Red Cross official, and she’s on her way to Heidelberg to look for her mother and her grandmother.’

  Jack’s first reaction was that Bob Giles was keeping Wilfred Sharkey company and had lost his marbles. ‘And I’m the King of Siam,’ he said, wondering whether he should bother trudging back for his suitcase or, as he would certainly never wear anything that was in it, leave it for a lucky scrounger to find.

  Bob shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, his breath puffing white in the frosty air. ‘I’m not joking, Jack, and I’ve not taken leave of my senses. Over the last few months Christina has become convinced that her mother and grandmother are alive. Carl Voigt has written on her behalf to scores of refugee and displaced persons’ organizations, in the hope that the names of her mother and grandmother are on their lists of those who survived the camps, so far without any luck. Christina believes that, just as she’s looking for them, her mother and grandmother will be looking for her and that they will be doing so in Heidelberg, their home town.’

  ‘Jesus God!’ Jack was uncaring of Bob Giles’s dog-collar. He was uncaring of everything other than one stark fact. Christina had left him. And he knew she hadn’t done so for the reasons Bob Giles had given him. How could she have? In all the years he had known her she had never once talked of her mother and grandmother as if they were still alive. If she’d begun voicing that belief now, it had only been in order to give her disappearance an air of respectability. His jaw clenched so tightly that the tendons in his neck stood out in ugly bunches. He knew why she’d left. She’d left because their marriage was in difficulties. He’d sensed it every hour of his last leave home. He’d known something was wrong!

  He didn’t want to hear another word. He couldn’t bear to hear another word. Devastated beyond speech, he swung abruptly away from Bob, heading blindly out across the Heath. Something had always been wrong between himself and Christina. Something he’d never been able to put his finger on. Something he’d never understood. For the first time since he’d been a very small boy, sobs rose up in his throat. What in God’s name was he going to do? How could he exist without her? He couldn’t bear such pain. He couldn’t live with it.

  Bob stared after him, utterly appalled. Whatever reaction he had expected, it hadn’t been pole-axing grief. Had he explained things badly? Had Jack somehow misunderstood him? He groaned, running his fingers wearily through his hair. He couldn’t possibly catch Jack up. He was a middle-aged man, not a super-fit Commando. The only thing he could do was to return to the vicarage and wait for Jack to seek him out when he had recovered from his initial, obviously devastating, shock. With creaking knee joints, he turned once more in the direction of Magnolia Square, devoutly hoping there would be no more crises, at least for a little while.

  ‘I’m not waylaying you!’ Leon was protesting fiercely, if not altogether truthfully. He was facing Joss Harvey on the steps of a gentlemen’s club in Pall Mall and was excruciatingly aware of the attention his dark skin was attracting. It was always the same whenever he stepped a hair’s breadth out of the locations and situations a black working-class man might be expected to inhabit. In places close to the river, places such as Bermondsey and Deptford and Greenwich, which were accustomed to the sight of foreign seamen, he attracted very little attention. In Lewisham and Blackheath, heads turned. Outside a Pall Mall club people’s heads didn’t just turn. People stood and stared.

  ‘God damn you for your impudence!’ Joss was shouting, frothing at the mouth with rage. ‘How can you ever be my great-grandson’s legal father? My grandson was a fighter pilot! A man who fought and died for his country! And his son isn’t going to be adopted and brought up by a darkie!’ His habitually high colour had deepened to puce, and in sinking despair Leon knew he was never, not in a million years, going to be able to hold a rational conversation with him. By seeking him out and speaking to him in person he had made things worse, not better, just as Ruby had predicted he would do. He had let Kate down and he had let Matthew down.

  Sick at heart, he turned away. As he did so, a uniformed doorman, vastly relieved that it now seemed unlikely he would have to tangle with him, approached Joss, saying belatedly. ‘Do you need assistance, sir?’

  ‘Do I look as if I need assistance?’ Joss snapped, regarding Leon’s retreating back in satisfaction. ‘Of course I don’t need assistance! Where’s my chauffeur? Where’s my damn car?’

  His car was parked, unattended, a mere half-dozen yards away. Hemmings, who had slipped across the road to a tobacconist’s for a packet of Craven ‘A’, was standing on the far pavement, unable to sprint back to his post because of a surge of densely heavy traffic. A double-decker bus slowed prior to negotiating the corner with St James’s Street. Hemmings took advantage of its decreasing speed, leaping out in front of it in order to try and get back to the Bentley before he was fired from his job. As he did so, a lorry on the bus’s blind side, carrying heavy building machinery, surged forward. There was a screeching of brakes as metal impacted on flesh. Amid screams and shouts, the lorry’s heavy load broke free of its moorings, crashing into the road.

  Leon saw Hemmings’s cap roll free of the settling machinery, but Hemmings didn’t roll free with it. What looked to be a giant winch lay solidly across his back.

  ‘He’s being crushed! He’s being crushed!’ bystanders shouted hysterically as the driver and the conductress of the bus raced to the scene. ‘Call for an ambulance, someone! Call for the fire brigade!’

  Leon was running too. The winch had to be lifted, and it had to be lifted now – immediately. It was no use waiting for the fire brigade. By the time the fire brigade arrived, Hemmings would be dead. That is, he would be dead if he weren’t dead already.

  ‘He’s alive!’ It was Mavis, straight off the bus, wriggling forward on her belly beneath the arm of the winch, she had managed to stretch out far enough to be able to feel Hemmings’s pulse.

  ‘He won’t be alive for much longer if you don’t get that winch off him!’ someone shouted. ‘And it’ll have to be prised up and off him, it can’t be lifted off, not without a crane!’

  Leon was on his knees beside Mavis. ‘You get out,’ he said to her tersely, ‘I’m going to try and prise the weight up long enough for him to be dragged free.’

  ‘An’ ’ow the ’ell are you goin’ to then get out from under?’ Mavis asked, wriggling back out of the shadow of the winch, her face chalk-white. ‘Do ’ave a bit o’ sense, Leon. The fire brigade will be ’ere in a tick and—’

  ‘Get him out! Get hi
m out! What’s everyone standing around for? Why isn’t anyone doing anything?’

  At the sound of the harsh, authoritative voice Leon’s head spun round.

  ‘’E can’t be got out,’ a spectator from the pavement informed Joss Harvey helpfully. ‘Anyone tryin’ to get ’im out will be crushed as well.’

  ‘Someone’s rung for the fire brigade,’ someone else proffered, ‘but I don’t think he’ll last. He’s bleeding from his mouth. He must be hurt horrid bad inside.’

  The winch creaked, seeming to settle even heavier, and there were fresh screams from the women standing on the pavement.

  Leon began to scramble out of his jacket. ‘The fire brigade will get me out,’ he said in answer to Mavis’s question. ‘If this chap stays under that weight any longer, injured as he is, he’s going to be dead by the time they get here. I won’t be.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bank on it, mate,’ Burt, Mavis’s driver said pessimistically. ‘Still, if you think you can hold it off him, I’ll drag him out. I’ve had plenty of practice. I was an ARP warden during the war.’

  As Leon lay flat on his back on the ground, preparing to ease himself under the winch beside the unconscious Hemmings, Joss Harvey dropped to one knee beside him, his camel-coat trailing in the dust of the road.

  ‘It’ll take more than one man,’ he said tersely. ‘I’ve still got a lot of power in my arms. Let me try and lift from the other side at the same time.’

  Leon blinked, wondering if he was hallucinating. Joss Harvey was a great-grandfather, for the Lord’s sake! And even if he wasn’t, he was far too heavily built to squeeze into the narrow gap between the monstrous weight of the winch and the road.

  ‘You couldn’t do it,’ he said tersely. ‘What you can do is give a hand hauling Mr Hemmings out when I give the word.’

  Before Joss Harvey could protest, or make any more ridiculous suggestions, he carefully manoeuvred himself into a position where he could get the flat of his hands beneath the underside of the winch. And then he pushed with all his might and main. And kept on pushing.