‘What’s the matter, Mavis?’ she asked in alarm, fingers of terror squeezing her heart. ‘Is it Matthew? Have they found him . . .’
Mavis saved her from putting the unthinkable into words. ‘No, it ain’t Matthew, Carrie. It’s you!’
Carrie blinked. Mavis worrying about her was a rare old turn up for the books. Usually it was the other way around. All her life she had worried about Mavis – and most times with good cause!
‘Me? What about me?’ She looked from Mavis to Jack in bewilderment, aware that both of them were regarding her with very odd expressions in their eyes.
Mavis put a hand on the polished knob of the banister newel post, as if to steady herself. ‘I ran into Lettie Deakin this morning. She told me she saw you and Zac Hemingway up on the heath together last night, and that the two of you were up to no good. I told her she was a lying cow.’ She paused, her eyes holding Carrie’s while behind her Jack continued to prop the door open. ‘Then I ran into Zac bloody Hemingway,’ she continued when Carrie made no effort to speak. Couldn’t speak. ‘And guess what? He seems to think he was up on the heath with yer, kissing yer, as well!’
Still Carrie couldn’t speak. If Zac had told Mavis, who else had he told? Her head reeled. And why had he told anyone? Dear God, why?
Reading her mind, Jack shifted his weight against the door, his hands deep in his trouser pockets. ‘I reckon he told Mavis because she’s your sister,’ he said, trying to sound objective about it and not feeling at all objective. Christ Almighty! Carrie in a sneaky kiss and cuddle with Zac Hemingway! Carrie? Even though the truth of it was written all over her face, he could still scarcely believe it.
‘Zac bloody Hemingway seems to think you and he are at the start of something big,’ Mavis continued, her voice as taut as piano wire. ‘Though how the hell he can know in such double-quick time, beats me.’
It beat Jack as well. Zac was an ace boxer and quick as lightning in the ring, but, as he had said earlier to Mavis, it didn’t mean he had to be an equally fast worker out of it! ‘You still haven’t told Carrie there’s a chance Lettie’s also talked to Albert,’ he said now, focusing the conversation on what seemed to him to be the most immediately urgent aspect of the affair.
Carrie’s cry of anguished dismay brought Kate and Christina hurrying out of the kitchen. The only voice either of them had heard until then had been Mavis’s. Now, as Kate ran down the passage to where Carrie was standing in an attitude of utter horror, her hands pressed hard against her mouth, Christina came to an abrupt halt.
Jack was at the open front door, and it was obvious he hadn’t just arrived there, but that he had been there for as long as Mavis had been talking to Carrie; that he and Mavis had arrived together and were intending to leave together; that they had probably been together all day.
‘Has there been news of Matthew?’ Kate was demanding of Carrie and Mavis with fierce urgency.
Jolted by the shock of realizing that Carrie wasn’t in the house on her own, Jack’s hands were out of his pockets, his instantaneous reaction one of relief that the person visiting Carrie, and who could so easily have overheard Mavis, was Kate and not one of Magnolia Square’s gossips or, even worse, Hettie. In the same split second, with the alarm still evident in her eyes, he registered Christina’s presence. ‘Hello love,’ he said easily, hoping she, too, hadn’t overheard what Mavis had said to Carrie. It was bad enough that he and Mavis now knew about Carrie’s clinch with Zac, without Christina knowing about it as well.
‘Why are you here?’ Her voice cut across Mavis’s as Mavis hastily reassured Kate she had no bad news regarding Matthew. ‘You said you were going to be by the river all day with Leon and Danny.’ Christina knew she sounded like a shrew but she couldn’t help it. She had seen the alarm flash through his eyes and was certain it was because he hadn’t wanted her to know that he’d been spending time with Mavis.
‘I was, for most of the morning,’ he said, trying to keep his temper as she continued to make no move towards him, but to stare at him as challengingly as if he’d just done her a great hurt.
Still Christina didn’t move. If he’d been with Leon and Danny for only ‘most of the morning’, it meant he had probably been with Mavis ever since then, and it was now going on for six o’clock!
‘I’m fine, Kate, really I am,’ Carrie was saying to Kate, sounding far from fine. ‘Mavis just had some news that was a bit of a shock, that’s all.’ She flashed Kate a pale imitation of her usual sunny grin. ‘It’s nothing for you to worry about, though. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is.’
With tremendous effort, Christina forced her thoughts away from Jack’s relationship with Mavis – a relationship she was growing more and more convinced was clandestine – too fond of Carrie not to be concerned about her. In all the years she’d known Carrie, she’d never seen her look so distracted.
‘What ought I to do?’ Carrie was now speaking to Mavis, and it was the first time anyone present had ever heard her ask that question of her elder sister.
‘Check whether Lettie’s said anythin’ to Albert,’ Mavis said bluntly. ‘And if she ’asn’t, make sure she bleedin’ well doesn’t!’
Aware that something was seriously amiss and that Carrie didn’t need visitors hanging around, Christina reluctantly moved away from the kitchen door, walking down the passageway towards the hall and Jack. As she reached the foot of the stairs where Carrie, Mavis and Kate were standing, she paused and, avoiding all eye contact with Mavis, said to Carrie, ‘Whatever’s happened, I hope things turn out all right, Carrie.’
Carrie was too choked up to speak. What if Christina knew why she was upset? What would she think of her then?
As Christina reached Jack’s side, he slid his arm around her waist, ignoring her stiff unresponsiveness. ‘We’re off then,’ he said to the others, and then, as he stepped out onto the pathway, he came to such a sudden halt, Christina stumbled against him. ‘Hell’s bleeding bloody bells!’
‘What is it?’
He didn’t answer her. Instead he spun on his heels and hurtled back into the house. In alarm and bewilderment, Christina looked up and down the square. There was nothing to see apart from Nibbo’s cat, stretched full out on the pavement as it enjoyed the early evening sun, and Hettie, imitation cherries bobbing on her black straw hat as she marched down the square towards number seventeen, obviously intent on having a few mother-in-law-like words with Carrie.
Chapter Twelve
Zac wasn’t in the habit of feeling sorry for people, but as he walked with Leon across the heath towards Magnolia Terrace, he felt sorry for Leon. Despite splitting up their original search party, so that after the abortive search of the ferry boats Danny and old Charlie had returned to Rotherhithe for a further search of the Greenland Dock area, Nibbo and Elisha had headed back to Deptford and he and Leon had covered the wharves in and around Greenwich, no sign of young Matthew had been found.
‘I just don’t understand it,’ Leon said for the thousandth time. ‘I know you don’t know Matthew, Zac, and so it might be hard for you to believe it, but Matthew isn’t a boy with any waywardness in him. For him to have run away like this . . . not letting anyone know where he is or if he’s all right or not . . .’ Leon ran a hand wearily over his kinky hair, ‘. . . it’s totally out of character, and it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all.’
Zac made a noise in his throat that could have meant anything, and that in this case meant he believed every word Leon was telling him. And he did. After a day in Leon’s company, if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that Leon would never fudge anything. If he said a thing, that thing would be God’s honest truth. He took a packet of ten Weights out of his hip pocket and offered one to Leon, before taking one out for himself. Such blatant integrity was something he’d never subscribed to himself. As far as he was concerned, he couldn’t see that it got anyone anywhere. It certainly hadn’t done so in Barnardo’s. He lit his cigarette and inhaled
deeply. Without a bit of fudging and ducking and diving, life in an orphanage would have been utterly impossible.
‘Daddy! Daddy!’
Even though the voice shouting from some distance behind them was female, and clearly not Matthew’s, both Leon and Zac spun round as if shot.
‘Matthew’s hiding out on the Tansy, Daddy!’ the very pretty girl running hard to try and catch them up, shouted out. ‘It was Billy’s idea to look there!’
‘Christ Almighty!’
It was a blasphemy Zac was sure Leon rarely gave vent to, and it was uttered as if he’d been pole-axed.
The girl was fleet-footedly closing the distance between them, calling out breathlessly as she did so, ‘Billy’s still aboard the Tansy waiting for Matthew to return to it! I didn’t want to come home without him but as time is getting on Billy said one of us should come and let you know so you wouldn’t be worrying any more . . .’
Leon tossed aside the cigarette Zac had given him and broke into a sprint. Zac watched in bemusement as the two of them raced over the rough grass towards each other. The girl was obviously the adopted, eldest Emmerson child, though if the pleasing jiggle of her school-blouse-covered breasts were anything to go by, she was no longer a child in the real sense of the word. She raced into Leon’s arms, hugging him tight, her eyes shining, her face radiant.
‘There are newspapers in the Tansy’s cabin, Daddy! And all of them are only a few days old! And there are empty food tins and fresh wood-kindling!’
Zac grinned, glad the missing kid had been found, vastly amused at the sight of Leon with his eldest daughter. It seemed to him that ‘Daddy’ was a babyish expression, coming from a girl on the verge of womanhood, but that it was also a rather endearing one.
‘But have you seen Matthew?’ Leon was asking her urgently.
Zac didn’t wait to hear her reply. He’d given his entire day up in searching for the Emmerson kid, and he had other things to attend to now. An evening of hard training in preparation for the fight Jack had arranged for him and the little problem of Lettie Deakin and whether she’d dropped him and Carrie right in it by not only telling Mavis she’d seen them kissing, but by telling Carrie’s father-in-law also. And then there was Carrie herself. He wasn’t going to allow what had happened between them to be a one-off, never-to-be-repeated event. He’d waited a long time to find a woman who aroused in him the deep, complex emotions Carrie aroused in him, and now he’d found her, he wasn’t going to lose her.
With long, easy strides he turned into Magnolia Terrace. Perhaps the first thing he should do was to have a word with Lettie. If she hadn’t blabbed to Albert Collins, it meant he still had Danny as his trainer. And if she had? If she had, he would simply ask Leon to stand in as his trainer – and he’d do his damnedest to get Carrie to move in with him!
‘Course I didn’t say owt to your pa-in-law!’ Lettie was saying indignantly with Yorkshire bluntness. ‘What the heck do you take me for? I only gave Mavis the impression I might do, because she’d been so bloody high-handed with me and got me so bloody riled!’
Carrie could never remember feeling so relieved over anything, not even the end of food rationing. The tizzy she’d been in had, however, made one thing perfectly clear to her. Whatever her chaotic, tumultuous feelings where Zac was concerned, they couldn’t be indulged in. She wasn’t cut out to be a faithless wife. It was too wearing on the nerves.
Lettie put the glass she’d been polishing on the bar top and picked up another from out of the sink. ‘What I will say though is this. If you’re going to play away from home, Carrie, play a bit bloody further than the heath! The world and his brother are up there at night, walking their dogs. You’d get as much bloody privacy canoodling at Lewisham clock tower!’
Carrie refrained from making any comment. Grateful as she was that Lettie hadn’t broadcast her juicy tit-bit of scandal any further than Mavis, she wasn’t about to make her a confidante. With a return of her natural cheery smile, she turned to go. There had been no customers in The Swan when she had entered it, and there were still no customers, even though it was getting on for six o’clock. Presumably all the regulars were, like Danny, giving Leon a hand in searching for Matthew. As she neared the door, her thoughts turned to Rose. Where on earth was she? She should have been home from school an age ago. Had she, perhaps, met up with Daisy, and were they doing a bit of searching of their own?
She was just about to reach out for the door handle when the door swung abruptly open. This time her cry of shock brought no one running to her side. Lettie Deakin merely put down the glass she had been polishing and settled her generous weight comfortably against the bar in order to enjoy what was obviously going to be a very interesting free show.
‘Do you always pop into the pub on your own for an early evening tipple?’ Zac asked teasingly, his eyes, as they met Carrie’s, flushed with the heat of another, far more disturbing emotion.
‘No. Of course not.’ Her voice was a croak. Her knees were jelly. Her heart was hammering wildly somewhere up in her throat. With a tremendous effort, she remembered that she was going to have nothing further to do with him and that she was deeply outraged and furiously angry with him. ‘I came to have a word with Lettie and, according to Mavis, you know very well why!’
With one hand, he shut the door behind him, with the other he took hold of her arm. There was ownership in his fingers, complete possession. ‘Then we’re both here for the same reason,’ he said, sensing immediately she had convinced herself that the previous evening had been, on her part, a shameful, never-to-be-repeated, aberration. ‘And as you’ve obviously already spoken to Mavis, you’ll know that I didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know.’
It was on the tip of Carrie’s tongue to retort that he most certainly had done! Then she remembered just what it was he had told Mavis and bit the words back, aware she could hardly fling at him that he’d said he believed he and she were at the start of something big!
‘And was Mavis right in believing Lettie had told Albert?’ he asked, looking across to where Lettie was openly and avidly listening in to everything.
‘Course I didn’t,’ Lettie wasn’t remotely abashed at being caught so openly ear-wigging. ‘It’s no use running a pub and not knowing when to keep your trap shut about who’s playing around with who.’
Carrie tried to shake herself free of Zac’s hold. She was wearing the same scarlet cotton dress she’d been wearing when she had met him down the market and young Johnny was with her, the sweetheart neckline revealing the full, voluptuous curves of her breasts. ‘I hope you’re not including me in that last remark, Lettie!’ she said explosively, the gold locket on her necklace dancing down into her cleavage, ‘because contrary to what you might think, I’m not playing around with anyone!’
Lettie pursed her lips. ‘Well if you’re not, dear, you’re making a damn good imitation of it,’ she said as, far from allowing her to shake him off, Zac began steering Carrie back towards the bar.
‘A tomato juice and a gin and tonic,’ he said, pulling a ten-shilling note out of his back jeans pocket with his free hand.
‘I don’t want a tomato juice!’ There was an edge of hysteria in Carrie’s voice. It was as if Lettie’s seeming acceptance that she was having an affair with Zac meant that she really was having an affair with him!
‘I’m not buying you one.’ Despite the flare of panic he’d felt when he realized she intended trying to end things before they’d even really started, there was amusement again in his voice. ‘The tomato juice is for me. I’m in training, remember?’
With a sharp, determined effort, Carrie wrenched her arm free of his hold. She didn’t particularly want to have an audience to what she was now about to say, but she didn’t seem to have any option. ‘I can’t drink with you here, Zac, or anywhere else.’ Considering that her whole body was again responding to him in the most flagrant, indecent way imaginable, her voice was commendably level and firm. With an effort she avoide
d looking him in the eyes and with an even greater effort didn’t allow her glance to fall on her arm where he had taken hold of her and where she knew she would see the imprint of his fingers. She had to spell out how things stood between them and leave. She hadn’t to marvel at how scorched her skin felt where he had touched her, or to dwell on the mystery as to why, having had time to come to her senses, she still wanted nothing more than to catapult into his arms as if they were the one place she belonged. Bewilderment twisted in a knot deep in the pit of her stomach. It was as if she had become a stranger to herself. As if the old Carrie Collins no longer existed and a new Carrie Collins, frighteningly capable of anything, had taken her place.
Zac gazed at her averted face, his mouth tightening. He’d known this little scene was going to come but hadn’t anticipated it taking place in front of Lettie. Lettie, however, already knew there was something going on between him and Carrie, and he certainly wasn’t going to let Carrie say her little pre-arranged piece and then hurry home to make Danny’s dinner! With a lean strong hand he encircled her wrist, holding her fast.
Lettie’s eyes glazed. She’d witnessed some interesting scenes in her time, but this one took the biscuit.
‘Let me go!’ Carrie’s voice was no longer steady. She could do what she had determined to do – draw a line under the whole incredible episode – but not if he had hold of her; not when he was so near she could smell the male scent of him; not when she could see the heat in his eyes, smoking them the colour of quartz.
‘There’s something you have to understand, Carrie.’ His voice was low and urgent – so low that Lettie, to her chagrin, was having difficulty in hearing. ‘I wasn’t just fooling around, last night.’ He’d drawn her close, his mouth against the untidy tumble of her hair. ‘I’ve fallen for you hook, line and sinker, Carrie Collins. I’ve fallen for you in a way I’ve never fallen for a woman before.’
Coronation Summer Page 17