Coronation Summer

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Whoever gets in our way,’ Archie said easily, flashing Arnie a look of warning, ‘but there’s to be no going over the edge. Got it?’

  There was a tangible sigh of relief from three of Archie’s followers. Of the other two, Arnie merely began cracking his knuckles, and Pongo, Archie’s newest recruit, was left bewildered. What had the sudden awkward atmosphere been all about? He wasn’t thick – he always pulverized anyone who said he was – but sometimes he just couldn’t work out what was going on. ‘Yer’ve ’eard about the kid, then?’ he said, bringing the conversation round to something that, thanks to drinking sessions in Blackheath’s the Hare and Billet, he just happened to know something about. ‘The kid that’s a Harvey and heir to squillions of Harvey cash?’

  Archie’s piggy eyes narrowed. He hadn’t heard, and he didn’t like hearing from a minion. Where minions were concerned he did all the imparting of information, thank you very much.

  Pongo, happily regardless of this time-honoured tradition, said, ‘They thought he’d been found on his darky step-dad’s old barge. Some of his gear was there, and his dad and a young scrap-metal dealer bloke waited ages for him but he never showed. Then the coppers were called in and did a proper search and found the kid’s fingerprints everywhere, but no kid.’

  ‘’E’s been kidnapped for the cash ’e’ll come into,’ Jemmy said, beginning to clean his nails with a penknife. ‘It’s some-thin’ we should ’ave thought of doing. There’s pots of money in the ’Arvey family. The old gel ’as a mansion in Somerset and always rides around in the back of a bleedin’ Bentley.’

  ‘She ain’t doin’ so at the moment,’ Pongo said, eager to be helpful once again. ‘Her chauffeur had a heart attack in the garage in Shooters Hill Road. It caused a hell of a ruckus. A mate of mine who drinks in the Hare and Billet is a mechanic there and he told me.’

  ‘And what did the chauffeur have for breakfast then?’ Archie asked sarcastically. ‘Did your mate tell you that as well?’

  Pongo blinked. What did the chauffeur’s breakfast have to do with anything? ‘I don’t know about his breakfast,’ he said, hating it when people sniggered and he didn’t know what they were sniggering about, ‘but I do know the coppers don’t think the kid was kidnapped. Now they know he’s been on the barge, they think he ran away of his own vol . . . vol . . .’

  ‘Volition,’ Jemmy finished for him kindly, wiping his penknife clean and putting it back in his waistcoat pocket.

  ‘And now he ain’t there any longer, they think he must have thrown himself in the Thames.’

  ‘What, topped ’imself?’ Ginger asked incredulously. ‘A kid? What would ’e want to do a bleedin’ stupid thing like that for?’

  ‘I ’spect he did it fer the same reason he ran away,’ Pongo said with dogged logic, ‘and that’s not all!’

  Everyone waited with interest. Everyone but Archie. This latest recruit to his ranks was turning out to be a right little clever-clogs and was going to have to go.

  ‘Robson’s missus has left him and run off to her ma’s in Greenwich!’

  Archie eyed him balefully. ‘Robson’s missus is a German-Jewish bint who had all her family snuffed by Hitler. She doesn’t have a ma in Greenwich or anywhere else.’

  ‘I think she does, Archie,’ Jemmy said with pacifying mildness. ‘Like her daughter, she’s a classy bit of stuff, looks more French than German, and she married a widowed butcher with a shop down by the Cutty Sark.’

  Archie wasn’t remotely mollified. He glared at the hapless Pongo, wondering how best to be rid of him, saying for starters, ‘It’s your turn to buy a round and mine’s a Remy Martin. A double.’

  ‘So what’s the news, Dolly?’ Leah Singer asked, propped up in bed by half a dozen pillows, a quite unnecessary stone hot water bottle and Boots.

  Beryl shifted the complaining Pekinese to the bottom end of the bed and sat down in the place he had warmed. ‘I don’t really know where to start, Great-Gran,’ she said truthfully. ‘There’s ever so much trouble on over Matthew.’ She took a paper bag of mint imperials out of her cardigan pocket and proffered it to Leah, her voice wobbling as she added reluctantly, ‘They think he may be dead.’

  ‘Then they don’t think very good.’ Leah helped herself to a mint. ‘For why would a boy like Matthew do away with himself? It’s a tummel over nothing. Matthew will soon be home fine and dandy, just see if he ain’t.’

  Beryl’s shiningly plain face remained deeply troubled. She hoped her great-gran was right, she really did, but the police didn’t seem to think it was only a tummel. The police had told Kate and Leon to prepare themselves for the worst.

  ‘And so what else is happening?’ Leah sucked on her mint imperial. ‘There’s other trouble, ain’t there? Just because I can’t go downstairs no more don’t mean I’m blind and deaf! There’s been a ruckus at the Robsons’ and no one can tell me there ain’t. They only live three doors away and I ain’t stupid, nu. I know the difference between an ordinary set-to and a nasty set-to.’

  Beryl’s eyes had grown so round they resembled a marmoset’s. Had her great-gran actually heard what had taken place at the Robson’s? If so, she was the one who should be doing the gossiping; no one else knew anything other than that Christina had run from the house in tears and that she had a small suitcase with her.

  ‘There was a row, Great-Gran. There must have been. Christina’s gone to her mother’s. Jack isn’t saying anything, and he looks terrible.’

  Leah’s rheumy eyes glinted. She might be in her dotage, but she knew one thing and that was that Jack Robson had never looked truly terrible in his life. How could he, a man with all his chutzpah and devilry? ‘For why hasn’t he gone down to Eva’s and brought her back home?’ she asked, practically. ‘It don’t sound like Jack not to have done so. And where is Eva going to sleep her in that little house in Greenwich?’

  Beryl’s smooth forehead puckered in consternation. This was a problem no one else had thought of. Just as her gran had always had Great-Gran live with her, so Christina’s mother had her aged mother living with her – and that meant that in a tiny Georgian terraced house there was no room for unexpected visitors.

  ‘Perhaps she’ll share a bed with Jacoba,’ she said doubtfully, not truly being able to imagine such a possibility.

  Leah snorted. Christina’s grandmother, Jacoba Berger, was her own age and an old, old friend. Jacoba wouldn’t want to be sharing a bed. Jacoba thought the world of her grandson-in-law and she’d want to know why Christina had been fool enough to have left him. And that Christina had been a fool, Leah wasn’t in any doubt. A man like Jack Robson wasn’t the kind of man it was wise to leave. There were too many other women eager to warm his bed. Her own grand-daughter, for one. She rolled her mint imperial round on her tongue and eyed Beryl thoughtfully. Was Beryl aware of the undercurrents beneath her mother’s relationship with Jack? She was so endearingly naive that Leah doubted it. Mavis and Jack’s friendship was of such a long duration it no longer excited comment, and there was no reason why Beryl should suspect that there was more to it than met the eye. She, Leah, wasn’t endearingly naive, though. She’d been around a long, long time and she could read her eldest grandchild like a book. Mavis was in love with Jack. She’d always been in love with Jack.

  Deciding it was a subject best left alone, she gave Boots a prod to stop him snoring, and said, ‘And your gran and grandpa – what have they been barneying about?’

  ‘Tomatoes,’ Beryl said, relieved that this time she did at least have a proper answer to her great-gran’s question. ‘Grandpa caught Gran trying to palm off frying tomatoes as salad tomatoes. Gran says that when she’s on the stall by herself she’ll do as she bloomin’ well likes, and Grandpa says that she’ll do so over his dead body. They’ve been at it for days.’

  Leah sniffed, her sympathies, for once, with her daughter. If Miriam could get good prices for poor tomatoes why for shouldn’t she do so? ‘And Hettie?’ she asked, determined not to let Bery
l go until she’d had her curiosity satisfied about everyone. ‘I saw her stomping down to Carrie’s in a high old temper the other day, when I was on my commode. Has my nebbish of a grandson-in-law been complaining Aunt Carrie doesn’t feed him properly?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything to do with Uncle Danny.’ Beryl couldn’t remember a time when there had been so many squabbles taking place in the square at the same time – squabbles her great-gran seemed to know an indecent lot about. ‘She took high umbrage because she’d left a line of washing out when she went down to the shops and, when there was a flash thunderstorm, Carrie didn’t take it in for her.’

  Leah raised gnarled hands in an age-old gesture of despair. Hettie Collins was a woman never happy unless complaining about something – and a woman with less to complain about never breathed. Hadn’t she got a pearl of a husband in Daniel? Hadn’t she a daughter-in-law in a million in Carrie? Wasn’t Rose the brightest, bonniest grand-daughter imaginable?

  Before she could begin a litany of all Hettie’s blessings, Beryl offered her another mint imperial. She didn’t want to talk to her great-gran about Hettie. She wanted to talk to her about Zac. ‘Have you spoken to Aunt Carrie about Zac, Great-Gran?’ she asked hopefully. ‘Has she told you how nice he is? How he’s nice to everyone, even the small boy scouts who plague him for tips on how to box?’

  Leah was grateful for her second mint imperial. It meant she could pretend to be having a problem with it while it gave her time to think how best to answer. She had spoken to Carrie about Zac Hemingway. As Beryl had taken such a shine to him she wanted to know what kind of a young man he was. That a simple question could have aroused such an extraordinary reaction, Leah still couldn’t quite believe. And she still didn’t know what to make of it. ‘Yes, he’s quite nice,’ Carrie had said, rummaging in her handbag with such intensity anyone would think she’d mislaid the crown jewels. ‘No, he isn’t at all a suitable young man for Beryl.’ She thought he wasn’t going to be staying in Magnolia Square for long. She thought he was too old for Beryl.

  ‘For how can he be too old for her?’ she had asked, mystified. ‘He’s only in his mid-twenties, nu!’

  Carrie’s head had remained bent as she had tossed first one item out of her handbag onto the bed, and then another. ‘He’s quite possibly older than he looks,’ she had said, her hair cascading all over her face so that Leah had had difficulty in hearing her. Distractedly she had begun gathering up all her scattered possessions, stuffing them back from where she had taken them. He wasn’t Beryl’s type. She didn’t want Beryl to be hurt. Boxers were a decidedly dodgy breed. She had to go home and get Danny’s dinner on. And then she’d gone, clattering down the stairs as if, unless she got on with Danny’s dinner that very instant, she’d be facing a firing squad! It had all been very odd. Too odd for Leah to fathom.

  ‘Your grandpa tells me Zac Hemingway is very patient with the youngsters,’ she said, answering Beryl’s question as obliquely as possible. ‘And he says he’s a versatile fighter and that he can knock an opponent out with either hand.’

  This wasn’t quite the response Beryl was after, but it was better than nothing. At least her great-gran no longer seemed to disapprove of Zac’s profession, and at least she was talking to her about him. She certainly hadn’t been able to get her mother or her aunt to talk about him. Carrie had clammed up as tight as an oyster when she had asked her if she thought she stood a chance with him. As for her mother . . . Her mother seemed to have taken a quite inexplicable dislike to him, and for someone as easy-going and exuberantly friendly as Mavis, it was very odd behaviour indeed.

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with everyone at the moment, Great-Gran,’ she said, mystified. ‘Everyone seems to be acting really oddly. I can understand why the Emmersons are on edge, but Mum and Aunt Carrie are nearly as bad. It’s as if they’ve all got a ’flu bug or something.’

  Leah screwed her lips as if she’d just sucked a lemon. Whatever was going on in the square, and that something over and above young Matthew’s disappearance was going on she’d sensed for some time, it wasn’t a ’flu bug. She scratched the top of Boots’s head. So what was it? If Beryl didn’t know and neither Mavis nor Carrie were prepared to tell her, she’d have to find out some other way. From Nellie, perhaps. Or Lettie. Lettie always knew everything that was going on. She’d get Albert to ask Lettie to visit her, then she’d know why Mavis and Carrie were both acting as if they were seriously out of sorts.

  ‘But whatever it is, it ain’t ’flu, Dolly,’ she said to Beryl who was now on her feet and about to go back to work. ‘Though it says in the paper these new immigrants will soon be suffering from it.’ She patted the newspaper laying on the bed where a banner headline proclaimed, Immigration increases from West Indies. ‘It says two hundred and fifty Jamaicans were piped ashore yesterday morning by a ship’s band when they landed at Plymouth, and that, even though it was a glorious warm day, they all complained that the weather was cold!’

  ‘Well, I suppose it seemed cold to them,’ Beryl said, unclipping the pink plastic hairslide that had slid low in her slippery, poker-straight hair. ‘It must be very hot in the West Indies, mustn’t it?’ She pushed her hair away from her face and re-clipped it, looking down at the accompanying photograph of black, hopeful, smiling faces. ‘It must be very strange for them, coming from islands of sun and sea to live in London, in places like Lewisham and Deptford.’

  ‘They’ll do what Jewish people have always done, nu. They’ll adapt,’ Leah said, not envying them the task. ‘And now that the government is encouraging so many of them to come here to work on the buses and in the hospitals, think of the difference it will make to the Emmersons. With more black faces on the streets, Leon won’t get stared at and pointed at so much.’

  At such a happy prospect, Beryl beamed, temporarily forgetting how troubled she had been feeling. Leon never talked about the way some people reacted to his skin colour, but she knew there had been nasty incidents. Once, when he went with her Uncle Danny into the Dartmouth Arms in nearby Forest Hill, the landlord had refused to serve him, or allow him to be served, and another time, when he was with Billy at a football match and Billy had been only a youngster, a gang of hooligans had turned on him, kicking and punching him and yelling that he should get back to where he had come from.

  ‘’E comes from Chatham!’ Billy had sobbed and shouted, all to no avail. As he said later, when telling her what had happened, ‘They didn’t care where Leon ’ad come from, Beryl. They only cared that ’e was black.’

  ‘Maybe this news about the immigrants will cheer Leon up a bit,’ she said now with typical naive optimism. ‘I’ll tell him about it when I next see him. It’s awful seeing him look so worried. Mum says he’s aged ten years this last couple of weeks.’

  If Leon had known of Mavis’s opinions, he would have disagreed with it. He didn’t feel as if he had aged ten years. He felt as if he had aged twenty. Somehow his brief conviction that Matthew was aboard the Tansy and would soon be home again had, when it proved false, made everything even worse than it had been before. Before the search of the Tansy, when he found a sweater he identified as being Matthew’s, and the police found Matthew’s fingerprints and, apart from prints left by himself, Daisy and Billy, Matthew’s prints and Matthew’s alone, it was possible to believe that Matthew had, perhaps, been abducted. But no longer. No strange abductor would have known of the Tansy’s existence. Matthew had hidden out on her voluntarily and alone, and then, in a lonely area of the creek, had vanished.

  The police questioned both himself and Kate with rigorous thoroughness. They didn’t say so, but he knew he had been under suspicion. After all, he had known of the Tansy’s existence, and hadn’t made the suggestion to search her. He knew the police were wondering if, perhaps, he had taken Matthew to the Tansy, murdered him and dropped his body into the Thames. Perhaps, if he hadn’t had consistent alibis for the period over which Matthew disappeared from school, they would have voiced th
eir suspicions and charged him – though whether they could have charged him with murder, when there was no body, he didn’t know. He did know, though, that the very thought that anyone could believe him guilty of harming Matthew filled him with a revulsion crucifying in its intensity. He loved Matthew. He loved all his children, but Matthew was special.

  When Kate went into labour with Matthew it was during the war and he was a sailor on sick-leave, lodging with her and already, though she hadn’t known it, in love with her. In the aftermath of a bombing raid, no doctor or midwife was able to get to Magnolia Square in time to assist with Matthew’s birth. He had acted as Kate’s midwife. Single-handedly he brought Matthew into the world, and the experience was one that had forged an unbreakable bond, not only between himself and Kate, but between himself and Matthew also.

  And now Matthew was missing and the words ‘juvenile suicide’ and ‘drowned’ were being bandied about by the police with greater and greater frequency. He didn’t believe Matthew had drowned himself, though. And, despite all her tears, neither did Kate. But if Matthew had been aboard the Tansy and was so no longer, and he hadn’t drowned, where was he? It was a puzzle that tormented him day and night and he was far too obsessed with it to be even remotely cheered by Beryl’s kindly meant remarks about black immigration.

  Later, though, exhausted after another long and abortive day spent searching for Matthew, this time down around the marshes of Erith, he gave the subject a little more thought. The large-scale black immigration now taking place would, surely, be all to the good where racial ignorance was concerned. The people who, at the moment, reacted so violently when faced with the sight of a dark skin weren’t likely to continue doing so when dark skins were no longer a rare oddity but became a common sight. There’d even been a slight change in Deborah Harvey’s attitude of late, though that was due to Luke.