Coronation Summer

by Margaret Pemberton

  Carrie gasped in sheer, disbelieving incredulity. He was making love to her again! And this time he was doing so in public! In outraged indignation, she pushed herself violently away from him. This had to stop. It had to stop now. What if Danny walked into the pub? Lord Almighty, what if her mother walked in?

  ‘I’m going home!’ Her voice shook with passionate intensity. ‘I’m going home and I’m never going to be alone with you again, Zac! Not ever!’

  In other circumstances Zac would have pointed out that they weren’t alone now, not with Lettie listening in to them, glazed-eyed. Instead, aware of just how much was at stake, he said with a fierceness that sent shockwaves tingling down Lettie’s spine, ‘Just because something happens out of the blue, doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to happen! What’s happening between us is special, Carrie. You’re special! I’ve trusted my instincts all my life and I’m trusting them now. Don’t pretend this isn’t happening. Don’t—’

  The pub door slammed open.

  ‘Evening, all!’ Daniel Collins stepped across the threshold, beaming jovially. ‘Are you spreading the news about young Matthew, Carrie? It’s grand to know he’ll soon be home, isn’t it?’ He walked across to join them, slapping his folded evening paper down on the bar, saying to Lettie as he did every evening between six o’clock and seven o’clock, ‘A pint of light and bitter, Lettie, if you please.’

  Lettie could cheerfully have throttled him. In another few minutes Zac Hemingway would have been professing undying love to Carrie, and now he couldn’t do so! Compared to being a witness to that little scene, the news that Matthew Harvey had been found was very small beer – very small beer indeed!

  Carrie grasped at the news as if at a life-line. ‘Matthew’s been found?’ With her eyes holding his, she began to back away, moving on unsteady legs towards the door. She mustn’t think of all the things Zac had said to her, or the tone of voice he had said them in! ‘That’s wonderful news. Kate and Leon must be over the moon with relief.’ Even more importantly, she mustn’t give way to the all-consuming desire he had aroused in her – desire so intense that in the seconds before her father-in-law’s entrance, she’d been on the point of forgetting all about her vow to never, ever be alone again with him. ‘Who found him? And where?’

  The door was firm at her back now. Another minute – two at the most – and she’d be outside and hurrying home in order to make Danny his dinner, no longer the Carrie that a bruisingly fit, head-turningly handsome young man thought it reasonable to make public love to, but the Carrie rarely to be seen not wearing a street-trader’s pinny, the Carrie no one, not even her husband, ever looked at twice.

  ‘Don’t you know, pet?’ Daniel regarded her fondly. ‘I thought Danny must have told you and you’d come in here to spread the news.’ He leaned against the bar, waiting for Lettie to finish pulling the beer for his light and bitter, too uncomplicated a man to wonder what other reason Carrie could have for being in The Swan so early on in the evening, especially when Danny wasn’t with her. ‘Daisy and Billy tracked him down,’ he continued as Lettie finally placed a brimming pint glass within his reach. ‘They found him aboard the Tansy, Leon’s old barge. She’s out of commission now and berthed somewhere up Barking Creek. Leon hared off over there the minute he heard.’

  With her eyes still locked on Daniel’s, aware that Zac’s eyes hadn’t left her face even for a moment, Carrie managed a smile. ‘That’s smashing – and it’ll put that mealy mouthed old aunt of Matthew’s in her place. She seemed to think there was as much chance of finding Matthew by the Thames as finding him on the moon.’ She half-turned, her hand closing on the door handle. ‘’Bye,’ she said, wondering for how long Lettie would manage to keep her mouth shut, and what would happen when the effort became too much for her.

  ‘’Bye, pet.’ Daniel’s pint was snug in his callused hand. As the door banged shut, he said affably to Zac, glad of the opportunity to have a few friendly words with him, ‘How are you settling in?’ and then, not waiting for a reply, ‘I don’t expect you’ll be having any problems. We’re a friendly bunch in Magnolia Square, aren’t we, Lettie?’

  Lettie gave an hysterical snort. ‘Oh, aye, we’re a friendly bunch all right,’ she said when she could at last trust herself to speak. ‘In fact, Daniel, I think you’d be surprised if you knew just how very friendly to strangers some folks have been!’

  ‘And you’ve been with her nearly all day? Because she was upset? And you can’t tell me what it was she was upset about?’ Still wearing the burgundy silk shirt and white linen skirt she’d worn whilst searching for Matthew, Christina stared at Jack across the width of their immaculately made bed, rigid with hurt and a whole host of other, far more complex and dark emotions.

  Jack ran a hand through his thick shock of unruly dark hair. This kind of scene was becoming increasingly frequent – and tedious. There was no way he could tell Tina why Mavis had been so upset and, even if he could, he could see no reason why he should do so. He had come up to the bedroom for a clean shirt before going over to the gym and she had followed him upstairs, intent, so it seemed to him, on a quite unnecessary quarrel. ‘Let’s give it a rest, shall we?’ he said with barely concealed impatience. ‘I have to get over to the club to let Zac know I’ve arranged a fight for him and—’

  ‘That’s all that’s important to you, isn’t it?’ Her usually soft voice held a hard edge of bitterness. ‘The boxing club and the fight game and the money that can be made from it.’ She thought of the way things should have been; of summer evenings spent together in the garden as their children laughed and shrieked and played on swings or in a paddling pool, her resentment so intense it felt as if it were eating her alive.

  Jack heard the resentment and completely misconstrued it. Christina had class. Class that was inbred, not merely assumed. Class he had always been proud of and that had never threatened to become a divisive issue between them – until now.

  ‘And how would you prefer I earn the money that keeps a roof over our heads?’ he demanded, his voice a whiplash of barely controlled fury, ‘By being a test-pilot or a brain surgeon or a university professor? I’m a south-east Londoner, for Christ’s sake, not a middle-class, public-school-educated toff!’

  It was the first time he had ever spoken to her in such a way and he made not the slightest apology for it. He’d put up with her stand-offishness where the club was concerned for long enough. ‘Perhaps if you came down to the club some time . . . took an interest in it . . . you might look at it a little differently!’

  The white counterpane-covered bed divided them like a battleground. Christina could feel her knees wanting to buckle against it. The club! She hated the club! It smelled of hot liniment and dirty socks and sweaty jock-straps. On the rare occasions she visited it, she felt glaringly out of place. Unlike Carrie, who worked amongst the colourful language and earthly repartee of a street market, she couldn’t shrug off the coarse jokiness that most of Jack’s boxers indulged in. Mavis, of course, did so with ease. If Mavis was told a risqué joke she was quite capable not only of laughing at it with full-throated enjoyment, but of capping it with a joke of her own. Was that what Jack wanted? A woman who had never shown the slightest interest in home life and who certainly wasn’t a caring mother in any conventional sense of the word? Perhaps his real reason for not wanting to adopt children was that, like Mavis, he felt that children were a hindrance when he enjoyed late-night clubs and bright lights so much.

  She pushed a long smooth wave of satin-black hair away from her face, saying tautly, ‘I don’t want to visit the club! I don’t want to watch brainless, beefy men training to hammer other equally brainless, beefy men senseless! I don’t want—’

  ‘Me. Is that what you’re trying to say?’ His voice was a hard, raw rasp. Thin white lines edged his mouth and a pulse had begun to throb at his jaw-line. ‘You don’t want me any more? Is that why you’ve been giving me the cold shoulder in bed for so long, Tina? Is that why you keep trying to
make an issue over my friendship with Mavis? Because you want an excuse to cut and run?’

  She gasped, aware that they had crossed a hitherto uncrossed line; that where their personal relationship was concerned they were in strange, never-before visited country. ‘Is that what you would like me to do?’ Without the hard edge of the bed against her legs she would have fallen. ‘Would my cutting and running make everything easier for you? For you and Mavis?’

  Something snapped within Jack. He was sick to death of having his words twisted; of bending over backwards trying to understand her moodiness; of being considerate, and damn-near celibate! With panther-like speed he rounded the bed, seizing hold of her shoulders, intent on shaking sense into her. Her response was to freeze into icy rigidity and it was a response that tipped him over the edge. Instead of shaking her, he dragged her down onto the bed, the burgundy silk tearing beneath his fingers as she tried frantically to twist away from him and he imprisoned her beneath him.

  ‘Jack, no! Please! No!’

  He silenced her with his mouth, pinioning her wrists in an iron hold high above her head as, with his other hand, he pushed her skirt high.

  ‘Course yer not forcin’ yerself on me,’ Nellie said stoutly to Deborah Harvey. ‘I invited yer in for a cuppa, didn’t I? It ain’t your fault your chauffeur chappie bunked off without so much as a by-yer-leave.’

  Despite having now been several hours in Nellie’s company, Deborah still had difficulty translating her speech into plain English. The meaning of ‘bunked off’ was, however, clear even to her. Where, though, had Adams ‘bunked off’ to?

  ‘We’d better ’ave another cuppa,’ Nellie said practically, heaving herself out of her chair.

  Deborah shuddered. She needed the reviving effects of tea, but Nellie’s tea was like no tea she had ever come across before. ‘’Ow do yer take it?’ Nellie had asked when they’d first entered the house. ‘With milk an’ sugar?’ ‘Just a slice of lemon, if you please,’ she had replied, too grateful at having been saved from passing-out in the street to be her usual, autocratic and stand-offish self.

  ‘Lemon? Lemon?’ Nellie’s eyebrows had shot nearly up into her hair-net. ‘It’s a cup of tea I’m offerin’ yer, Blossom, not a bleedin’ gin and tonic!’

  Deborah didn’t know which had rendered her most speechless, the prospect of a cup of tea without lemon, or being called Blossom. Both shocks paled into insignificance, however, compared to the shock of discovering that the milk she had asked for, as a substitute for lemon, was not milk as she knew it but a sickly sweet substance which came from a tin.

  ‘Gettin’ used to the condensed milk now, are yer?’ Nellie asked, pausing to get her breath back after the exertion of hauling herself to her feet. ‘By the time we’ve had this cuppa, young Luke will be calling by an’ ’e’ll be able to tell us if ’is mam and dad are ’ome yet.’

  Deborah stiffened, not having the slightest desire of finding herself in the company of one of Matthew’s rude and objectionable mixed-race siblings. The prospect was so distasteful that it put all thoughts of the hideousness of condensed milk completely out of her mind.

  ‘There wouldn’t ’ave been much laughter an’ companionship for Matthew if Leon ’adn’t got together with Kate,’ she said sagely, deciding it was time her guest was told a few home truths. ‘’E’d ’ave just been an only kid with no real family life at all. As it is, ’e’s part of a big, boisterous, loving family. I used to watch ’im when ’e was a little nipper. Always with Leon ’e was, riding on ’is shoulders or trotting along, ’olding ’is ’and. Leon never told ’im to run off or to make ’imself scarce and then, when Leon’s own nipper came along, ’e never made ’im a favourite. In fact, ’e always used to seem to be spending more time with Matthew than with Luke, seeing as ’ow it was Matthew who was mad about the river an’ always wanting to be aboard a barge.’

  Deborah made no response whatsoever. Seated as rigidly upright as it was possible for anyone to sit on one of Nellie’s sagging-bottomed armchairs, her purple toque still slightly askew, she remained as impassive as a stone statue.

  Nellie shrugged her shoulders, sending rolls of fat quivering and wobbling like a seismic eruption. Not being born yesterday, she could guess the reason for Deborah Harvey’s hostility where the Emmersons were concerned, but she couldn’t understand it. What did it matter what colour Leon and his kids were? They could be sky-blue or pink with yellow polka-dots for all she cared. What mattered was the kind of people they were – and Leon and his kids were the very best kind, by crikey they were! She continued on her ponderous way into the kitchen, leaving Deborah to face some very unpalatable facts.

  The Emmersons hadn’t, as she had thought, been feeding her a cock-and-bull story when they told her that Matthew loved to spend time down by the river. It was true. Yet Matthew had never once mentioned the river when he had been with her, at Tumblers. And she was quite sure he had never done so when in Kensington, with Genevre. Did that mean that she and Genevre didn’t know Matthew as they had always believed they knew him? It was an appalling thought; almost as appalling as the prospect of Matthew not feeling a misfit in a mixed-race, working-class family!

  Through a window prudently bereft of nets, she saw the tousle-haired, dusky-skinned figure of the elder Emmerson boy turn in at Nellie’s gate at a run. Her lips tightened into such a thin line they almost disappeared. She wouldn’t answer the door to him when he knocked and, with luck, Nellie might not hear him. The satisfaction she was looking forward to, that of seeing him having to go back from wherever it was he had come from, was denied her.

  Luke didn’t bother to knock. There was no need. Nellie’s front door was open as usual, and he simply sprinted straight in, coming almost instantly to an abrupt halt. ‘Blimey!’ Panting for breath, he stared at her as if she was a Martian just landed from Mars. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Deborah waited in icy silence for Nellie to lumber into the room and to come to her aid. She didn’t do so, and there was nothing for it but for her to answer his question herself.

  ‘I am here, you ill-mannered young man, because . . .’ she paused – she couldn’t possibly admit to the indignity of having been taken ill in the square – ‘because—’

  ‘She ’ad a funny turn after her chauffeur chappie buggered off and didn’t come back fer ’er,’ Nellie said, manoeuvring her bulk, and a tray, into the room with difficulty, and wondering why doorways weren’t as wide as they’d once been. ‘Is your mam and dad ’ome, an’ if they are, ’as there been news of Matthew?’

  Luke’s grin nearly split his face in two. ‘He’s been found!’ He took the tray out of her hands and set it down on the nearest available surface, slopping tea as he did so. ‘Daisy and Billy found him aboard the Tansy, and Dad’s gone to get him!’

  ‘Well, ain’t that just wonderful news?’ If it were physically possible for her to have done so, Nellie would have danced a jig. ‘Don’t that just beat the band?’

  Deborah’s relief was so total it betrayed her utterly. With a shuddering gasp she covered her face with her hands, and, to Luke’s and Nellie’s stupefaction, began to weep, the tears seeping heedlessly between her gnarled, be-ringed fingers.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘So the fight’s definitely been fixed, Archie?’ Ginger asked Archie as he and the rest of the ‘boys’ clustered respectfully around him in the Horse and Ferret. ‘And Jack Robson doesn’t know his bloke’s opponent is going to be Arnie?’

  ‘He hasn’t a clue,’ Archie said in high satisfaction, cigar smoke wreathing his head. ‘Not a bleedin’ inkling.’

  There were chuckles of laughter all round. As Jack Robson was under threat either to pay protection to Archie or face unpleasant consequences, it was obvious he wouldn’t have agreed to the match if he’d known who his fighter was being set against. The mediator who arranged the fight had, however, seen that Archie’s name wasn’t even mentioned and, as they all knew how superior Arnie was to any fighter Jack
Robson might have, they were all looking forward to betting heavily on the outcome and making themselves a nice little packet.

  ‘An’ when are we goin’ to do his Soho spieler over fer ’im?’ Archie’s bottle-scarred mobster asked impatiently. ‘We ain’t seen any fun and games for ages, an’ we’re lookin’ forward to it.’

  ‘Saturday night,’ Archie said, shifting his fat rump a little more comfortably on his bar stool. ‘That’s when he’s opening and that’s when we’ll let him know what happens to people who are given the opportunity of contributing to our business funds and don’t take it.’

  There were more chuckles. Archie had a wonderful way of putting things. Sometimes he spoke just like a nob.

  Jemmy, Archie’s longer-serving crony, and a man credited by the others as being something of a thinker, said musingly, ‘Do yer reckon Robson will be there when we hit it, or do yer reckon it’ll be only bar staff and croupiers and the blowsy piece who’s runnin’ it fer ’im, that’ll be there?’

  ‘Robson’s bound to be there,’ Ginger said, saving his boss the indignity of having to state the obvious. ‘That’s what’s goin’ to make everythin’ so much more fun.’

  ‘But if he ain’t,’ Jemmy persisted, leaning forward a little to stress the point of what he was about to say, ‘if he ain’t, who is it who’s goin’ to get hurt? The punters or the staff?’

  There was an awkward silence. By ‘staff’ they knew that Jemmy wasn’t referring to bar staff or croupiers but to the blowsy bit of goods who was apparently going to be running things for Robson – and that he was doing so with good reason. Their ace boxing-bet, Arnie, didn’t like women, or not unless he was hurting them. It was a kink that had caused them a bit of trouble in the past. Slapping a bit of skirt around was one thing, doing her the kind of injury that could risk a murder charge was quite another, especially when it was a charge they might all be dragged in on.