Coronation Summer

by Margaret Pemberton

  She waited patiently for the kettle to boil, aware that, even where circumstances were normal, not all boys followed automatically in their father’s footsteps. Young Billy Lomax, for instance, hadn’t become a docker like his dad, Ted. Instead, with Jack Robson’s help, he had set up in his teens as a scrap-metal merchant. As the kettle began to puff spurts of steam and she took it off the hob, she reflected that Billy’s enterprise had also been a first where the square was concerned. She brewed the tea, a slight frown puckering her brows. There was an awfully big difference between becoming a scrap-metal merchant and becoming a lawyer.

  ‘Is the law something Matthew is interested in?’ she asked curiously as she set the teapot on the kitchen table. ‘It isn’t something I’ve ever heard him mention.’

  Kate gave a slight shrug of her shoulders, her tears still staining her cheeks. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, not finding the subject relevant to the crucial subject of where Matthew could be. ‘He’s only twelve. I don’t suppose he knows what he wants to be yet. I s’ppose that was why the careers master was giving a talk. To give Matthew and the other boys some ideas.’

  Ruth sat down and poured fresh cups of tea. For a moment or two neither of them spoke. Kate was thinking about Leon, knowing that now another day had passed without news of Matthew, his anxiety, like hers, would be spiralling into panic. Ruth was thinking how odd it must be for Matthew, away at school for most of the year amongst boys who would probably live their entire lives without socially meeting a docker or a Thames lighterman, and then coming home in the school holidays and spending each day, all day, with Leon on the Thames as he ferried wood, or grain, or coal, or whatever other freight he happened to be handling.

  ‘I’ve always thought of Matthew as being happiest on the river,’ she said musingly. ‘I remember in the first months after the war, when Leon was back home and he and the older children were getting to know each other again, it was always Matthew, not Luke, who was his shadow whenever he went down to the river.’

  Despite the sick dread by now almost swamping her, Kate managed a shaky smile of reminiscence. ‘Yes, I remember too. He used to live in an old jersey he thought looked like a proper seaman’s jersey, and a pair of battered little wellingtons. Leon’s barge, then, was the Tansy and I’d send them both off in the morning with sandwiches and never see them again until dusk. I remember him once saying to me he thought Greenland Dock was just like Blackheath fair on a bank holiday!’

  ‘Well, I suppose it would be, to a small boy. All those barges and launches and tugs and ships.’ Ruth pushed the sleeves of her raspberry-coloured cardigan a little higher up her arms. It was part of one of her many twin-sets, all of which she wore with gently gored skirts of grey flannel or softly muted, heathery-flecked tweeds. Today’s skirt was all hazy mauves and purples and looked as if it had been hand-woven in a croft on the Outer Hebrides; not for the first time, Kate thought her friend would have been far more at home in a manse in a small Scottish village than she was in a vicarage in a boisterous south-east London square.

  Ruth, who had never been to Scotland in her life and would have been very surprised if she’d known the kind of impression she gave, said now, ‘A love of the Thames is something that gets into people’s blood, isn’t it? I can’t imagine Leon, for instance, happy working anywhere else but on the Thames.’

  ‘No.’ Kate’s shaky smile of happy reminiscence faded. Leon. He would be wondering where she was. She hadn’t told him, when he had left for work that morning, that she was going to go down to Somerset, to St Osyth’s. Daisy would have done so, of course, when he came home, or if not Daisy, then Carrie would have told him where she had gone. ‘I must go, Ruth.’ She rose to her feet, her fresh cup of tea untouched. ‘Leon doesn’t know where I’ve been and there may have been some news whilst I’ve been away.’

  If there had been, the vicarage would have been one of the first places to have heard about it, but Ruth didn’t say so. What she did say was, ‘I don’t think you’ve really been listening to what I’ve been trying to say, Kate. I’ve been thinking and thinking all day about why Matthew should run away, and I think the talk the careers master gave did have something to do with it.’

  Kate stared at her.

  Ruth pushed her chair away from the table, rising to her feet, her voice urgent. ‘Don’t you think it’s possible that a talk on careers, where it’s taken absolutely for granted that the only kind of careers to be contemplated are the professions – law or medicine or something equally prestigious – might have seriously distressed him if what he really wants to be is a Thames waterman, like Leon?’

  Kate continued to stare at her, this time in bewilderment. ‘But one of the reasons Matthew attends St Osyth’s is so that he can have more choice in life than Leon had—’

  ‘But what if Matthew doesn’t want more choice?’ Ruth’s gentle face was fierce. ‘He’ll know very well the hopes his Harvey aunts have for him, and he probably knows that you, too, have similar hopes. And what if those hopes are totally opposed to what he wants from life? What if what Matthew wants to be is a Thames waterman? What would his Harvey aunts say to that? I don’t suppose they’d like it very much, would they?’

  Kate sucked in her breath unsteadily. For the first time she was listening to a suggestion that made a glimmer of sense. Matthew’s aunt and great-aunt would most certainly not like the idea of him following in Leon’s footsteps! And Matthew would know that and . . .

  ‘Mrs Giles! Is Mum with you?’ The voice was Luke’s and it was coming from the direction of the vicarage’s ever-open front door.

  ‘She’s with me in the kitchen!’ Ruth shouted back, certain by the urgency in Luke’s voice that Matthew had been found.

  ‘Oh God!’ Kate stumbled towards the kitchen door and the hall beyond, feeling as if her heart had stopped beating. Had there been news? And if so, what news?

  Luke stood on the doorstep, his face flooded with relief at having tracked her down. ‘You’d better come home quick, Mum,’ he said, dashing her hopes in an instant. ‘Matthew’s aunts are at the house, and there’s bloomin’ ructions going on!’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘So what we goin’ to do ’bout Jack Robson, Archie?’ Ginger, Archie Duke’s chief henchman, asked him. Along with Archie’s other ‘boys’, he paid Archie dutiful attention.

  Archie was holding court in a corner of the Horse and Ferret in Deptford. It was his favourite pub. The landlord was in his pocket, the regular barmaid was obliging in more ways than one, and the regulars were all pleasingly deferential. He grinned, his fat rump centred firmly on a bar stool, his legs splayed in order to balance the weight of his beer belly, his massive hams straining beneath trousers hand-tailored in a loud, Prince of Wales check, his highly polished shoes shining like twin suns.

  ‘What we goin’ to do about ’im?’ he asked rhetorically, grinning. ‘I’ll tell you what we’re goin’ to do about ’im, old son.’ He stabbed the air with his cigar. ‘We’re goin’ to teach the cheeky bleeder a lesson he won’t forget in a hurry, that’s what we’re goin’ to do about him!’

  There were appreciative chuckles all round. No one Archie lit on as a prospective benefactor ever escaped scot-free if they refused to play ball, but there’d been a rather curious atmosphere when they accompanied Archie on his visit to Jack Robson’s boxing club, and some of the boys had wondered if Robson was going to score a first in the walking away scot-free department.

  ‘What we waitin’ for then?’ Pongo, a recent recruit to Archie’s inner circle asked glibly. ‘We’re all tooled up, let’s give him and his club a goin’ over now.’

  ‘He ain’t opened its doors yet, bird-brain,’ a powerfully built, much younger man said contemptuously. ‘We can’t frighten off the customers if there ain’t no customers to frighten, can we?’

  Pongo cast a swift look around the circle to try and read what his reaction to such contempt should be. Five pairs of interested eyes met his. Reading aright that ever
yone present would like to see him have a go with the big-shouldered big-mouth and that this could only mean it was unusual for anyone to do so, and with good reason, the recruit wisely kept his lips buttoned. Archie, who always enjoyed seeing someone bested, sniggered.

  Ginger, now he knew how Archie was going to play the Robson card, said with high satisfaction, ‘We’ll wait till Robson’s opening-night thrash and then we’ll give him and his punters a night to remember.’

  As the ‘boys’ – all of them, with the exception of the big-shouldered big-mouth, well into middle-age – savoured this prospect, the pub doors opened and a heftily built navvy strolled in.

  Like everyone else who had entered the Horse and Ferret that evening, he paused for a moment before approaching the bar and then, on registering Archie’s presence, walked over to Archie’s sacrosanct corner.

  ‘’Lo, Mr Duke,’ he said, coming to a halt a deferential couple of feet away. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘A brandy-chaser,’ Archie said, not recognizing the navvy even by sight, and not caring. It was enough that the navvy had recognized him and, like everyone else who stepped through the pub doors, had immediately acknowledged his presence in a suitable manner. Everyone kowtowed to Archie. It was the way he liked it. It was what being a hard man and a grafter was all about.

  ‘I thought word was out Robson was going to be putting up against us in a dog-fight,’ a rather thoughtful-looking, long-time crony of Archie’s ventured. ‘Won’t blitzing his club put the kibosh on such a fixture?’

  ‘A dog-fight? What’s a dog-fight?’ Pongo asked his nearest neighbour out of the corner of his mouth.

  His neighbour wiped a foaming line of best bitter from his upper lip and, as the question that had been put to the group but that everyone knew had really been put to Archie alone, remained unanswered, said, ‘It’s an illegit boxing-match, stupid. Don’t yer know nuffink? Arnie fights reg’lar for Archie in ’em. Yer can put a packet on ’im every time, an’ even if it isn’t a carve-up you’ll still be quids in.’

  Arnie was the big-shouldered big-mouth, and Pongo was grateful he’d had the sense not to tangle with him. He opened his mouth to ask what a carve-up was and then thought better of it. It didn’t do to look too stupid, and, anyway, what else could it be but a fight that was fixed?

  Archie was looking seriously nonplussed and, in order to help him out, Ginger said scornfully, ‘Robson couldn’t put anyone up against Arnie! The boxers at ’is club are all kids. Yer saw ’em for yerself the other night. Nippers, most of ’em. Even Jack Solomons wouldn’t pull a crowd billing one of them in a fight!’

  ‘The bloke knocking ’ell out o’ the speed-ball wasn’t a nipper,’ Pongo said, glad of the opportunity of making a statement no-one could argue with. ‘’E looked like a bloke who knew ’is business.’

  No one responded. Unlike Pongo, they hadn’t taken any notice of the bloke working out. They’d been too intent on giving Archie the kind of swaggering Mafiosi back-up he expected on such occasions. It was the boxer amongst them who set the record straight. ‘No bloke who knew his business would be working out in front of an audience of kids and old dears,’ he said with reasoned scorn. ‘In a proper ring he’d be down in less time than it takes to boil an egg.’

  Archie’s familiar snigger reassured everyone that a gaffe hadn’t been made. If Jack Robson was going to be daft enough to put one of his fighters up against Arnie in a dog-fight, then doing over his spieler was going to be neither here nor there. The silly bugger was simply going to lose out every which way there was.

  ‘Where the ’ell’s the barmaid with your brandy-chaser, Archie?’ Ginger asked solicitously. ‘Don’t she know you’re not a man to be kept waiting? Some people just don’t know when they should spring to it, do they?’

  ‘Spring to it? Spring to it? How dare you walk in our house like the Wicked Witch of the North and speak to my little sister like that?’ Daisy stormed at Deborah Harvey. ‘If you want a cup of tea, you can jolly well wait until one is offered to you!’

  ‘Why is she saying Matthew’s runned away?’ Jilly was demanding, tugging hard on Daisy’s hand. ‘Why is she here? Why is Daddy putting Johnny to bed when we haven’t had our supper yet? Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘Do you think I should take Jilly home with me whilst Leon sorts this little lot out?’ Carrie, who had deposited Johnny home only five minutes earlier, was yelling to Billy above the din.

  Billy, in the house ostensibly to see if there was any news about Matthew, but really in order to see Daisy, lifted his shoulders in a helpless gesture. He was damned if he knew what anyone should do. He’d never known Daisy lose her temper in such a way before. Hell’s bells! He never knew she had such a temper before!

  ‘Want to stay up, Daddy!’ Johnny was yelling from somewhere at the top of the stairs. ‘Want to see the nasty witch lady!’

  Kate raced up her front path, Luke at her heels.

  ‘Trouble, dear?’ Lettie Deakin, who was always in the offing when least wanted, asked with animated interest as she drew near the gate, her little dog skittering around her feet.

  Neither Kate nor Luke looked over their shoulders to reply.

  ‘Dad had to let Miss Harvey in!’ Luke panted as Lettie came to an interested halt at the bottom of their path and Kate took the shallow flight of steps leading to their front door, two at a time. ‘He couldn’t leave her out on the doorstep, could he?’

  Kate didn’t know what Leon could have done. What she did know, though, was that in another five minutes half the square would be privy to what was going on. Elderly Harriet Robson, who lived next door at number two, was already shuttering up a bedroom window to see what all the kerfuffle was about, and Mr Nibbs, who lived on the other side of her, was standing on his top step, pretending to be enjoying the evening air as he listened avidly to the shouts and counter-shouts.

  ‘How dare you speak to me like that, you ill-bred young woman!’ Deborah Harvey thundered at Daisy.

  ‘Want Mummy!’ Jilly hollered tearfully to anyone who would listen.

  ‘Want downstairs!’ Johnny shouted, pummelling Leon’s shoulders in frustrated rage as Leon hastily deposited him in his bedroom.

  ‘Don’t you dare call Daisy ill-bred!’ Carrie erupted, facing Miss Deborah Harvey, her hands on her hips, her eyes flashing fire. ‘You’re the one who’s out of order, accusing Leon of being responsible for Matthew having run away, and talking to Daisy as if she’s a skivvy!’

  ‘If, before, I had had the slightest doubt as to the regrettable quality of my great-nephew’s home life, I have so no longer!’ eighty-year-old Deborah Harvey fumed, so resplendent in funereal purple and a matching, be-feathered toque hat, that Jilly believed Queen Mary was throwing a fit of fury in their kitchen. ‘Never have I been in such a disorganized, ill-mannered, uncouth household!’

  Leon’s footsteps thudded at a run down the stairs. Kate, her agonized eyes meeting his, sprinted into the hallway.

  ‘There’s only one of them here!’ Leon said breathlessly to her unspoken question as, together, they hared down the hall towards the kitchen. ‘The older one. The first thing she said was that she doesn’t like Blacks, Irish or Roman Catholics, and that nothing but concern for Matthew’s welfare would have persuaded her to step foot across the threshold.’

  ‘She left out Germans and Jews,’ Kate said bitterly, reaching the kitchen first and making a head-turning entrance.

  ‘Mummy!’ Jilly ran towards her, throwing her arms thankfully around her waist.

  ‘Thank God you’re here, Kate!’ Carrie said in vast relief.

  ‘This nasty, nasty woman says everything is Daddy’s fault and that he should never have been allowed to adopt Matthew!’ Daisy blazed, determined that her mother should know exactly how out-of-order Matthew’s great-aunt had been.

  ‘That’s enough, Daisy.’ Kate’s pleasantly modulated voice didn’t rise by so much as a decibel, but the room was instantly brought to order. ‘Would you put the kett
le on now, love, and make us all a cup of tea? Jilly . . .’ gently she unwound Jilly’s arms from around her waist, ‘. . . would you go upstairs and read a story to Johnny for me, pet?’

  Daisy and Jilly both reluctantly did as they were asked, and Kate finally addressed her attention to Matthew’s great-aunt. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t in when you arrived,’ she said civilly. ‘Would you sit down and have a cup of tea? Then perhaps we can pool our thoughts as to why Matthew might have run away.’

  Deborah Harvey breathed in hard through rocking-horse nostrils. ‘The reason for my great-nephew having run away is blatant, Mrs Emmerson,’ she said icily, tugging a net glove more tightly over the back of an arthritic hand by its frilled cuff. ‘My nephew’s child should never have been adopted by a . . . a . . .’

  For an appalled moment Carrie thought Deborah Harvey was going to say ‘nigger’.

  ‘By a man of colour,’ Deborah Harvey said with more restraint than she usually showed when referring to Matthew’s adoptive father. Steadfastly refusing to even look in Leon’s direction, she continued fiercely, ‘Such an arrangement is a deliberate flouting of nature and has never been in my great-nephew’s best interests.’

  Kate sucked in her breath, the skin tight across her cheekbones.

  Leon said, ‘Let me deal with this, love,’ in a voice so quiet, Carrie’s scalp prickled.

  Billy cleared his throat, thinking it high time he took his leave. ‘I fink I’d best be off . . .’ he began, trying to catch Daisy’s eye, hoping she would leave the house with him.