Coronation Summer

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘That’ll save for another night,’ Jack said easily as they walked across to where Zac was towelling down, surrounded by a cluster of boy scouts.

  ‘’Ow do yer manage to ’it and not get ’it, when yer in the ring?’ one of them was asking.

  Zac tossed his towel to one side and began pulling on a pair of trousers over his training shorts. Showering facilities were meagre at the Embassy and he’d be in Queenie Tillet’s peeling, claw-footed bath in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. ‘You move your head after you punch,’ he said, showing no signs of impatience to be on his way. ‘If you’re down here Friday night I’ll give you a few tips on how to do it.’

  ‘Will yer?’ The youngster’s face glowed. Wait till he told the kids at school! His teachers could stick their sums and English compositions where the monkey stuck its nuts. He was going to be a boxer when he grew up. He was going to be a world champ!

  Jack observed the little interchange, bemused. If Zac Hemingway was going to be good with the kids who hung out at the gym it would definitely be to the club’s benefit. It was a bit of a turn-up for the books, though. When he’d been tipped off by a mate of his, a PT instructor at Parkhurst Prison, that a red-hot boxing prospect was due for release, he certainly hadn’t anticipated the jailbird in question being an asset where the club’s youngsters were concerned. But then he hadn’t anticipated Hemingway being so likeable and easy to get on with. He continued to watch Zac exchanging repartee with the admiring youngsters and Miriam and Hettie, both of whom were always over-generous with advice to anyone and everyone. Without knowing Zac’s history, it would be impossible to guess at it, and it would have been easy to come to the conclusion that, no matter how good he was in the gym, he didn’t have the innate meanness necessary for the professional ring. It would have been easy but, as he alone knew, very, very wrong.

  ‘Queenie ain’t much of a dab ’and in the kitchen,’ Miriam was saying as Zac shrugged his way into a short-sleeved vest. ‘If yer need somethin’ a bit more ’ot and fillin’ than she puts on the table, pop in to our ’ouse. I’ll soon knock up somethin’ to put ’airs on yer chest!’

  ‘Any hairs on my chest’d be so blond they’d look like fuzz on a baby’s bottom,’ Zac said with a good-humoured grin.

  Mavis was standing within earshot and though her eyes were on Jack, she heard Zac’s response to her mother and chuckled throatily. In her books, a man without a mat of sweaty chest hair was far preferable to one with – especially if his chest was as magnificently muscled as Zac Hemingway’s.

  ‘’Ave yer met me sister-in-law?’ Danny, who had darted ahead of Jack and Billy and was now at Zac’s side, asked him. ‘Any match yer ’ave with Mavis at the ringside and ’ollering in yer corner is as good as won.’

  Zac picked up his leather bomber jacket and, hooking it with his thumb, slung it over his shoulder. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, concealing his surprise.

  If Danny hadn’t told him, he’d never have guessed that the bottled-blonde now standing in front of him, her weight resting provocatively on one hip, a saucy gleam in her eyes, was Danny’s wife’s sister. Carrie Collins’s hair was as untidy as a gypsy’s and as smoke-dark. She also possessed a rosy-cheeked freshness that would have done credit to a country girl. There was nothing countrified about Mavis’s scarlet-painted lips and nails. Despite her age, which he judged to be nearer forty than thirty, she looked every inch a West End good-time girl.

  ‘Nice to meet you as well,’ Mavis said, putting on a show of flirtatiousness in front of Jack that she was far from feeling. As she put her hand in Zac Hemingway’s big paw she reflected wryly that at least she wasn’t having to try overly hard to be flirtatious. Zac Hemingway was the most gorgeous-looking man she’d ever set eyes on in her life. If it wasn’t that her heart was breaking for Jack, she’d have been well and truly smitten.

  ‘Come on you two, don’t make a meal of it,’ Danny said crudely, making an assumption that was far from correct. ‘I need to get these kids off ’ome and I want an early night fer once.’ In truth he wanted the club emptied so that he could have a proper discussion with Jack about Archie Duke. If Archie had swaggered into The 21 with his unwanted offer of protection he wouldn’t have felt quite so jumpy. Like Jack, he felt that Archie in Soho was one thing and that Archie in Magnolia Hill was quite another. ‘Not that an early night with my old woman is much of a pleasure,’ he added, playing it for a laugh as the kids in question began trooping towards the stairs. ‘She’s so big she doesn’t so much take ’er clothes off, as strike camp!’

  Big Jumbo, Zac’s prospective sparring partner, tittered. It was an oddly unpleasant sound coming from such a gigantic mound of a man. Danny’s parents and his parents-in-law, well used to what they regarded as his harmless cracks at Carrie’s expense, merely grinned. Zac didn’t grin, though. He looked across at Danny with such an odd expression on his face that Mavis wondered if Danny had said or done something to rile him during his training workout. If he had, Jack wouldn’t be very pleased. Jack liked a happy ship. He said it made for an easy life.

  Later that night as he lay in bed, watching Carrie slip a sensible but very pretty sprigged cotton nightie over her head, Danny said bluntly, ‘We ’ad unwelcome visitors at the club ternight, pet.’ Unlike Jack, it was never Danny’s way to shield his other half from worries or unpleasantness. In Danny’s book, a worry shared was a worry halved.

  Carrie sat down on the edge of the high, brass-headed bed, her back towards him, and slipped off the slippers she had been wearing all evening. It had nearly killed her, but ever since he returned home she had fought the temptation to ask him how the evening had gone; especially how the evening had gone where Zac Hemingway was concerned.

  ‘Who?’ she asked, swinging her legs into bed and looking towards him. ‘Was Nellie there, being as disruptive as usual?’

  ‘Nah,’ Danny was contemptuously dismissive. What was Carrie thinking of, imagining he’d get his knickers in a twist over Nellie? ‘Nellie can’t get up the stairs to the gym any more,’ he added, wondering just how much he could safely tell Carrie. ‘She needs two strong men just to get ’er over ’er doorstep!’

  Carrie gave her feather pillow a shake and settled back against it. ‘Who, then?’ she asked with mild curiosity. ‘Wilfred Sharkey?’

  Wilfred Sharkey was a local religious maniac who made a nuisance of himself everywhere, especially outside the clock tower in Lewisham High Street.

  ‘Nah.’ Danny laced his hands behind his head. He wanted to tell Carrie about The 21 but he knew she’d immediately think of the kind of girls that would frequent it and that she’d go off the deep end. She might, God forbid, even tell Christina. ‘The visitors were Archie Duke and his boys,’ he said, deciding how much he could safely tell to shed some of his burden of worry. It meant fudging the details a little, but the basic problem remained the same. ‘He’s after protection money from Jack.’

  Carrie shot upright against her pillows so suddenly her hair tumbled forward all over her face. ‘Archie Duke? You’re joking, Danny! Dear God, please tell me you’re joking!’

  If Danny had had any doubts at all as to the potential ugliness of the situation, Carrie’s reaction dispelled them. Carrie didn’t worry over trifles. ‘I’m not joking, pet,’ he said unhappily. ‘He swaggered in this evening, four of his boys in tow, and put it to Jack straight. He wants protection money for the club.’

  ‘For the Embassy?’ Carrie stared at him in incredulity. ‘But the Embassy’s as much a youth club as it is a hard-nosed boxing gym! Why would a big fish like Archie Duke bother with a small-time boxing gym?’

  ‘Hey, ’ang on!’ Danny unlaced his hands, deeply aggrieved. ‘We ain’t that small-time! Especially not now we ’ave Zac Hemingway.’

  Carrie’s eyes opened even wider. ‘Is that why Archie paid the club a visit? Because he’s interested in Zac Hemingway?’

  ‘Nah, he don’t know nuffink about Zac. Zac was doing a workout when Archie came in and ’e
didn’t even wander over to take a decko at ’im. He just wants protection money fer the club, that’s all. And before you ask why he wants it, ’e wants it because ’e likes to be the big man with a finger in every pie – and because ’e’s a greedy git.’

  Carrie slid slowly down against her pillows. Archie Duke taking an interest in the Embassy Boxing Club. It didn’t bear thinking about – and nor did young Matthew’s disappearance. Of the two worries, her greatest anxiety was for Matthew. Jack would, somehow or other, solve the problem of Archie. But what would happen if Matthew didn’t soon return either home or to his school? He’d been missing for over twenty-four hours. Where on earth could he be? And how on earth was Kate managing to remain sane and calm?

  Chapter Four

  ‘I shall lose my mind with worry if there isn’t news of him soon,’ Kate said to Leon.

  Even though it was well after midnight, neither of them were in their night-clothes. How could they possibly go to bed and sleep when they didn’t know where Matthew was? What if the police called to say Matthew had been found and wanted them to travel to a distant police station to collect him?

  ‘I’ll make another cup of cocoa, love.’ Leon’s dark, attractive face was taut with anxiety. Where the devil had Matthew got to? It wasn’t the fact that Matthew had run away from school that worried him so much as the fact that there’d been no word from him since he’d done so. After all, he would only have run away in order to go home. He was only twelve years old. Where else could he possibly run to? He pondered the problem in the kitchen and then, when he returned to the sitting-room with two steaming mugs of milky cocoa, said tentatively, ‘You don’t think he’ll have gone to one of his Harvey aunts, do you?’

  Kate sucked in her breath. It was a thought that hadn’t occurred to her. Matthew’s visits to his Harvey relations were more in the way of duty visits than pleasant trips, and yet . . . it was a possibility. Hope flared in her eyes and then almost immediately died. ‘If he’d turned up on either of their doorsteps they’d have contacted us.’ She saw Leon’s generously shaped mouth tighten. Both Matthew’s aunt and his great-aunt would have been carried kicking and screaming into hell before voluntarily contacting Leon. ‘Or if they didn’t contact us,’ she added, well aware of his thoughts, ‘they would have contacted the school.’

  Their eyes held, other thoughts occurring to them, thoughts neither of them wanted to put into words. Both of Matthew’s Harvey aunts kept in regular contact with St Osyth’s. It was, after all, the school Matthew’s father had gone to, and his father before him, and his aunt and great-aunt had been attending speech days and sports days there for many, many years. They were on exceedingly comfortable terms with Matthew’s headmaster, which was more than could be said for their own relationship with him.

  From the very first time he met them he was obviously uncomfortable and patronizing. When discussing one of Matthew’s early school reports he even went so far as to ask Leon if he was able to read it adequately or if he would like it to be read to him. Even now, years later, the mere memory filled Kate with bitter, burning anger. Leon handled the incident with a quiet dignity that had, in Kate’s eyes, put St Osyth’s headmaster to shame. It made no difference to their future relations with him, however. Despite the surface courtesy with which he treated them, they both knew how he felt about them: they didn’t personally pay Matthew’s school fees and so no respect needed to be accorded to them on that score. Kate was a white woman in a mixed-race marriage, and so obviously a woman with little self-respect. As a black seaman who had been allowed to adopt his wife’s illegitimate child, a child whose natural father’s family were white and upper-middle-class, Leon was obviously a man with ideas far above his station.

  As a consequence of his prejudiced views, the headmaster far preferred discussing Matthew’s scholastic progress and welfare with Matthew’s aunts rather than with them. Unsaid, but implicit, was his regret that Matthew’s aunts were not Matthew’s legal guardians, thereby saving him a great deal of social embarrassment.

  ‘Perhaps one of them has,’ Leon said slowly. ‘Perhaps Matthew is with one of his aunts and the school have been informed and are taking the line that it’s up to the aunt in question to contact us and to tell us so, not them. And perhaps Matthew thinks his aunt has contacted us. That would explain a lot, love, wouldn’t it?’

  Kate nodded, her eyes flying to the clock on the mantelpiece. It was twenty to one.

  ‘We can’t phone at this time in the morning,’ he said gently, reading her thoughts. ‘We’re going to have to be patient for another six or seven hours, and we might as well try and get a little shut-eye whilst we’re doing so.’

  Reluctantly she nodded agreement, her arm sliding around his waist as his arm circled her shoulders. Bed, a few hours sleep and then a telephone call that would, hopefully, put an end to the worst of their anxieties. ‘I feel a hundred,’ she said wryly as, her head resting against his shoulder, she allowed him to lead her to the bottom of the stairs.

  He looked down at her, his brandy-dark eyes full of love. ‘You don’t look a day over twenty-five,’ he said truthfully and then, aware of just how bone-deep her weariness was, he lifted her into his arms, carrying her up the stairs as he had on the day they married.

  Four doors away, at number twelve, Jack Robson sat gently down on the edge of the big double bed he shared with Christina and eased off his shoes. What an evening! He’d anticipated a confrontation with Archie Duke somewhere down the line, but he hadn’t thought it would come quite so soon and he certainly hadn’t anticipated being confronted on his home turf.

  ‘Is that you, darling?’ Christina murmured sleepily, turning over beneath broderie-anglaise-edged sheets and stretching a hand out towards him.

  Jack felt his throat tighten with emotion. Christ! He loved Christina so much there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. He remembered the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the world and familiar, bitter frustration swamped him. A baby. It wasn’t much to ask for, was it? Other couples had babies at the drop of a hat, whether they wanted them or not. But he and Christina didn’t, and they didn’t know why.

  ‘Be patient,’ Doctor Roberts had said to them before he retired. ‘You’re both young and fit. A baby will come along eventually, in its own good time.’

  ‘Try to stop worrying about it,’ Doctor Roberts’s young successor said, when five years had gone by and there was still no sign of the longed-for baby. ‘Worry only makes conception more difficult.’

  That was three years ago. Nowadays the subject was one they could hardly bring themselves to talk about. Christina was thirty-five. Where babies were concerned, time was ticking by.

  He said to her now, ‘’Course it’s me. Who did you think it was? The milkman?’

  She smiled in the darkness and opened her eyes. ‘You’re late,’ she said accusingly in the soft, gentle voice that even after eight years of marriage still sent tingles of pleasure down his spine. ‘Have you been having a drink with Danny?’

  When they first met she had spoken with a slight German accent; now not even a trace of it remained and people ascribed her elusive air of ‘foreignness’ to the fact that she was Jewish.

  ‘No.’ He didn’t tell her that Danny had hopped off home at an unusually early hour. Instead, undressing swiftly, he said, ‘I’ve just been pottering about, tidying up some odds and ends of paperwork.’ He pulled on a pair of striped cotton pyjama trousers. He never wore a pyjama jacket with them. He always slept bare-chested, even in the depths of winter. ‘Zac Hemingway showed up tonight. Danny is as impressed with him as I am.’

  She made a small sound which could have meant anything and which he took as meaning that she was pleased for him about Hemingway, and closed her eyes again.

  He slid into bed beside her, the feather mattress sinking comfily beneath his weight. ‘Don’t go back to sleep, sweetheart,’ he said huskily, sliding an arm around her, the silky softness of her hair as it brushed his nak
ed flesh increasing his already fierce state of arousal.

  There was no response from her and, curbing the urgency of his desire with long-practiced patience, he cupped a full, firm breast in a powerful, careful hand.

  ‘I’m tired, darling,’ she murmured as his thumb gently brushed her nipple. Her voice was blurred, as if she was already drifting back into a heavy sleep.

  As she moved slightly, turning away from him, a pulse began to pound in the corner of his jaw. He didn’t for one minute believe she was almost asleep. She was feigning it, as she often feigned it. Feigning it because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

  The temptation to persist, to simply overcome her disinclination with loving force, nearly overpowered him. For some women such an approach would both be expected and excitingly welcome, but he knew that Christina wasn’t one of their number. Christina wasn’t remotely like any other woman he had ever known – and in his time he had known a good many. There was an air of frailty about her he found profoundly sexually disturbing; a delicacy and a lady-like refinement he had never been able to bring himself to wilfully violate.

  With his hand still cupping her breast, he nuzzled the nape of her neck, his lips hot against the extravagant satin of her hair. ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ he whispered persuasively, ‘you can’t be that tired. And I want you. I want to make love to you.’

  She covered his hand with hers, making a slight, negating movement with her head, still not speaking. In the darkness her engagement ring gleamed. It was a ring that had been bought during the war – a ring that couldn’t possibly have been bought out of army pay. Set in gold, a circlet of tiny diamonds edged with pale mauve amethysts.

  She hadn’t been overawed by it, like a local-born girl would most likely have been, nor did she query how he could possibly have afforded it, like a local girl would most sensibly have done. But then, Christina wasn’t a local girl. Her upbringing had been far different to Kate’s and Carrie’s and Mavis’s, or any of their friends. Her German-Jewish parents had been middle-class professional people and, by Magnolia Square standards, affluent. They would have expected such an engagement ring for their daughter.