‘No, Zac!’ Her voice was a croak. If she’d felt herself to be another person ever since she’d met him, she now felt herself disorientated almost to the point of disembodiment! Who was this woman contemplating, even for the briefest of seconds, leaving hearth and home, husband and child, friends and family – everything that was familiar, everything that made up the substance of her life – for a man she barely knew? It couldn’t be her, Carrie Collins. It couldn’t be. It was. As, with her arms still pinioned behind her, his mouth came down hot and sweet on hers, all she could think of was how dizzyingly wonderful it would be to be with him always: to be with him in a clean, quiet country of blue mountains and rushing rivers.
He lifted his head from hers and dazedly she opened her eyes, looking above his broad shoulders to the faded, familiar flower pattern of her hall wallpaper; the plaster head of an Alsatian dog that hung on the wall opposite the newel post and that Rose had brought back after a school day-trip to Margate; the worn stair carpet that had been nearly new when Danny filched it and, bringing it home while she was at the cinema with Kate, had laid straight away as a surprise for her.
‘No,’ she said again, her voice strangled. ‘I can’t, Zac. It’s not possible. It’s utterly impossible—’
There came the rat-a-tat-tat of Cuban-heeled shoes as someone slowed down at her gateway and then, seconds later, turned in at it.
Jerking free of Zac so suddenly that she stumbled, Carrie looked towards the open doorway and elderly Harriet Robson.
‘I’m sorry, Carrie. I’ll come back later,’ Harriet said with stilted awkwardness, unsure of what it was she had seen.
‘It’s all right, Harriet! Don’t go!’ Circumnavigating Zac, Carrie stepped hastily towards her. ‘I had something in my eye, but Zac’s got it out. What was it you wanted?’
Ashamed of the suspicion that had, for a moment, crossed her mind, Harriet said hesitantly, ‘I was wondering if Danny was home and if he could give Charlie a hand putting up the square’s Coronation Day flags and bunting. I know Leon is at home, but I don’t like to ask him – not under the circumstances.’ She tucked a straying strand of silver hair back into her bun. ‘To tell the truth, Carrie, I’m not sure we should be putting up decorations, not when Matthew is still missing and Mavis and Jack are lying in hospital. Charlie doesn’t agree with me. He says both Mavis and Jack would want whatever show was going on, to still go on, and that Coronation Day might just be the attraction to bring young Matthew home, and that if he does come home on Coronation Day, it would be a sorry state of affairs if there were no flags or bunting up.’
Carrie struggled to think straight. With Zac still only mere inches away from her, the task wasn’t easy. ‘Danny isn’t in, Harriet,’ she said, trying to come to grips with the fact that the coronation was nearly upon them and that, as yet, she’d hardly given it a thought. ‘He’s gone up to St Thomas’s to visit Jack.’
‘Then I wonder, Mr Hemingway, if you might be able to give my husband a hand?’ Harriet said queryingly to Zac. ‘Mr Nibbs is already helping him, but he hasn’t a head for heights and the bunting needs to be strung from the top of one lamppost to the top of another.’
Zac, mindful that the evening before a fight was too late for a heavy training session to make much of a difference to the outcome, shrugged away Danny’s advice to get immediately down to the gym, saying with easy good humour, ‘I’m at your disposal. Lead the way and I’ll have Magnolia Square a sea of red, white and blue in no time at all.’
Harriet beamed. She still thought him a rather disconcerting young man, but at least he was obliging. As she led the way back down Carrie’s front path, the obliging Mr Hemingway looked back towards Carrie, and winked. Scarlet-faced, Carrie whipped the door shut and then leaned exhaustedly against it. What on earth was happening to her nice, ordered, safe world?
Mavis was in hospital with her face cut to ribbons, though Zac was going to give royal punishment to the bastard responsible. Zac was also leaving the country immediately after the fight and, though not obviously certifiably insane, must be, seeing as he expected her to go with him! As if that weren’t enough, she was certain she was pregnant – and Zac didn’t know and neither did Danny. There was, as well, the little fact of her doctor, years ago, telling her she should never risk a pregnancy again.
If only she could go to Kate and have a no-nonsense heart-to-heart and receive a bit of straight advice, but how could she? Kate had more than enough on her mind worrying about Matthew. The last thing her best friend needed right now was to be burdened with more problems. ‘You’re going to have to soft it all out for yourself, Carrie girl,’ she said grimly as, with immense effort, she heaved herself away from the door. ‘And what you need before you start, is a cup of tea. Several cups of tea!’
*
‘The tea in here is like dishwater,’ Jack said the minute Danny sat down beside his bed.
‘Never mind yer tea!’ Danny retorted, still breathless from his hurried journey. ‘Yer goin’ to choke on it anyway when yer ’ear what I ’ave to tell yer!’
‘You mean I’ve put Archie Duke into a neck-collar and brace and all for nothing?’ Jack was saying in incredulity five minutes later.
Danny nodded, anxiously aware that, as it was now five minutes into evening visiting time, Christina would soon be arriving and that when she did, there’d be no further conversation with Jack about Archie and Arnie. ‘And the bastard yer should ’ave bin ’ammering to ’ell is walkin’ around with a grin on ’is face.’
Jack’s hands clenched until the knuckles showed white. ‘He won’t be when Zac’s finished with him,’ he said fiercely. ‘My God, what wouldn’t I give to be at the ringside tomorrow night!’
‘I ’spect Mavis will feel the same, when I tell her.’
Mavis. At the thought of Mavis, and of what had been done to her, both men were silent for a moment and then Jack said, ‘I want you to talk to Mavis for me, Danny. I want you to tell her that, if she wants it, The 21 is hers – and make sure she knows about tomorrow night’s fight. When the bastard who ruined her face is being beaten to a pulp, I want her to know he’s being beaten to a pulp. Understand?’
Danny understood perfectly. Before he could say so, however, the expression on Jack’s face changed and Danny knew, even though he was seated with his back towards the ward doors, that Christina had arrived. Marvelling that a bloke as tough as Jack could be so soppy about a woman – especially a woman he was married to – Danny rose to his feet and turned to greet her.
Wearing beige linen slacks, a cream shirt, sandals, and a white silk blazer, her shoulder-length hair held away from her face by ivory combs, she looked exquisite. Tall and delicate and, Danny supposed, elegant and sexy. She didn’t look sexy to him, though. She looked as remote and as untouchable as the moon.
‘’Lo, Christina,’ he said affably, wondering just what the situation was going to be between her and Mavis, when Mavis got out of hospital. ‘Jack tells me you’re regularly lookin’ after someone’s nipper for ’em. Keepin’ yer busy, is it?’
‘Yes.’ With an acknowledging smile, the smile that Jack always referred to as her Mona Lisa smile, Christina sat down in the chair he had just vacated.
Danny stared at her. There was a glow about her he’d never seen before. A glow that didn’t make sense when you considered that Jack was laid up with a knife wound in his chest. He shrugged. Christina had always taken a lot of fathoming. Maybe the new spring in her step was because Jack had decided to off-load The 21. Remembering that he was going over to Guy’s to ask Mavis how she felt about taking The 21 on, he said a speedy goodbye. He didn’t want to find, by the time he got to Guy’s, that visiting was over.
‘Even if visiting had been over, the Ward Sister would still have you let in to see me,’ Mavis said, her dislocated shoulder back in its socket, her broken ribs strapped, the only thing familiar about her swollen and heavily stitched face the defiant light in her cat-green eyes. ‘She and me are mates. She
’s going to come down to The 21 when we open.’
Danny pulled a chair up to the side of her bed and sat down, grateful that, for the moment at least, Ted wasn’t around. ‘Jack’s plans ’ave changed where The 21 is concerned,’ he said bluntly, seeing no sense in argey-bargeying around. ‘’E wants to off-load the ownership. ’E ’asn’t said so, but I reckon ’e’s tryin’ to keep Christina ’appy.’
Mavis gasped, her eyes shooting wide.
‘’E wants to know if you’ll take it on,’ Danny added speedily before there should be any misunderstanding. ‘’E says it’s yours if yer want it.’
Still Mavis didn’t speak. At the thought of Jack ‘keeping Christina happy’, she couldn’t speak.
Mistaking the reason for her shocked silence, Danny said, ‘’Course, if yer don’t think yer goin’ to want to be out an’ about in future, owin’ to yer face an’ everythin’—’
Mavis uttered a word that made even Danny flinch.
‘Hey, steady on, pet,’ he said defensively, ‘I only thought that as—’
‘I know bloomin’ well what you thought!’ Mavis was as spitting mad as her condition allowed. ‘You thought the same as Ted! That now I’ve had broken glass pitched in my face, I’m suddenly going to begin living like a bloomin’ nun! Well you’ve both thought wrong! When I get some pancake make-up on the top of this little lot, I’ll be as good as new!’
Danny was glad to hear it. ‘And the club . . . ?’ he ventured, knowing that if she did accept Jack’s offer it would cause bloody ructions between her and Ted. ‘I doubt if Archie Duke will ever give you trouble again, but—’
‘No one will ever give me trouble again!’ Mavis fumed, her eyes flashing fire. ‘As for the bastard who put me in here . . .’
Danny’s grin, thanks to his stitches, was macabre. ‘Don’t you worry abaht ’im, pet,’ he said, and told her how that little matter was going to be taken care of.
Later, when he had gone, Mavis laid back against her pillows, her eyes bleak. So . . . Jack wanted out of The 21, did he? They wouldn’t, after all, be working together and seeing each other every day. That little dream was over, as was the blissful interlude of the two of them being lovers as well as friends. Tears pricked her eyes and she blinked them fiercely away. Tears falling on the raw cuts on her face would make them hurt more than ever, and, besides, tears where Jack was concerned would be an admission of defeat.
‘And I’m not defeated yet!’ she said aloud, noticing that her scarlet nail varnish had been removed for her operation and that her nails were in dire need of a little jazzing up. ‘Christina may have won this particular match but she hasn’t won the game. Not yet. Not by a bleedin’ long chalk!’
Daisy was seated on the low wall that fronted number four’s garden. Still in school uniform, a bulging satchel of books at her feet, she was gazing miserably across the square to where Billy and one of Queenie Tillet’s lodgers were talking together on Queenie’s doorstep. The lodger was young and female and startlingly exotic. At least Daisy thought that was the word for her. How else could a get-up of a tightly belted trench-coat, black fishnet tights and teeteringly high, red-sequinned ankle-strapped shoes, be described? She was probably a dancer, Daisy thought, acutely aware of the childishness of the ankle socks and lace-up shoes that were an obligatory part of Blackheath High uniform. Queenie took in a lot of dancers as lodgers. Artistes, she called them. Rumour had it that some of them were strippers, an accusation that Queenie, mindful of the importance of being seen to be respectable, always vehemently denied. Circus folk sometimes stayed with her, though, and Queenie never made any attempt to hide the nature of their work. ‘I’ve got an elephant-trainer with me this week,’ she would say proudly to Hettie or Miriam or Nellie. ‘His caravan is full to the gunnels with visiting family and so he’s bed-and-breakfasting with me for a few days.’ Sometimes it wasn’t an elephant-trainer. Sometimes it was a circus strong-man or a clown or a trapeze artist.
With a hurting heart, Daisy wondered if perhaps the girl talking to Billy wasn’t a dancer, but was from a circus. As a youngster, Billy had been fascinated by the circuses that visited the heath and, when they moved on to their next pitch, regularly ran away from home to go with them. Whoever the girl was, it was obvious Billy wasn’t going to call her over so that the two of them could be introduced. Though he would have had to be blind not to see her, he hadn’t acknowledged her presence in any way whatsoever.
The girl on Queenie’s doorstep threw back her head, laughing, her hands plunged deep in the pockets of her trench-coat. Even from a distance Daisy could see that extravagant flicks of black eyeliner had been applied to the outer corners of her eyes to give her a doe-eyed look, and that her eyebrows were high and arched, her lips a bright pink.
Despairingly, Daisy knew there was no way she could compete with such glamour. She’d lost Billy and all over a stupid misunderstanding that, because he was no longer speaking to her, she couldn’t even begin to put right. As the girl laughed again and Billy began walking her down Queenie’s path towards his parked lorry, she reached down for her schoolbag, tears scalding her eyes, her misery total.
Carrie was seated at her kitchen table, alone, her hands hugging a mug of tea. It could have been her fourth mug of tea, or her fifth or sixth. She didn’t know, for she’d long since lost count. The sun was beginning to set and the light spilling through the window was a deep copper-gold. Very faintly she could hear the whirr of a lawnmower being trundled up and down and the sound of someone calling in a playing child. No doubt if she were seated at the same table ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, the sounds drifting in through the half-open window would be very similar. She wouldn’t know about them, though. Not if she were in New Zealand.
But she wouldn’t be in New Zealand. She couldn’t be.
She looked around the cheerfully cluttered room. There were pots of mint on the window-sill; gaily coloured rag-rugs on the red-tiled floor. That it was even possible that after tomorrow night she might never sit at the dearly familiar table ever again, was nearly beyond her imagination. That it was even likely was so dumbfounding as to seem like science fiction. And yet what would happen to her if she didn’t leave the country with Zac? She’d lose her home, anyway, for there was no way she could pass the baby off as Danny’s. She simply wasn’t capable of a deceit so terrible and so prolonged. As she wondered if her mother would be likely to take her and the baby in, hysteria bubbled in her throat. Living two doors away, at her mother’s, would be little different to her remaining at home! And then there were Rose’s feelings to consider – not to mention Danny’s.
Fear engulfed her. She’d never had to make a decision like this before; a decision on which her entire future, and the future of those she loved, depended. If she went with Zac – and oh, there was a part of her, the part of her that had only come alive since she had known him, that yearned to go with him – then Rose would be devastated. She would be more than devastated. She would be heartbroken. For that reason alone, she couldn’t possibly go to New Zealand. She stared down into her now cold tea. Rose was fourteen. In another five years it might very well be Rose who would be wanting to start a new life in Australia or Canada – or New Zealand. All it took for an assisted passage was ten pounds.
If Rose emigrated, she would be separated from her anyway. The difference would be, though, that she, Carrie, wouldn’t be with Zac. Instead she would be working on the fruit and veg stall in Lewisham High Street; going to the cinema in Catford for an occasional treat; having a drink now and then in The Swan. And the man who made her laugh and made her feel desirable and made her feel alive, the man whose baby she was in all probability carrying, would be thousands and thousands of miles away, out of her life forever.
In anguish she pushed the mug of cold tea away. It was nearly dark now and Danny would be home at any moment. With Zac leaving the country tomorrow night, it wasn’t possible for her to keep things secret from him any longer. She had to tell him that she was
in love with another man, and she had to tell him that she thought she was pregnant. The very thought had beads of sweat standing out on her forehead. His pride was going to be terribly, terribly hurt, and she didn’t want to hurt Danny. She didn’t want to hurt him in any way whatsoever. She loved him. She’d loved him all her life. She wasn’t in love with him, though, not the way she was in love with Zac. She’d never been in love with him that way.
There came the sound of the front door being opened and she covered her face with her hands. ‘Oh dear God,’ she whispered devoutly, knowing she was about to live through the worst few moments she had ever lived through. ‘Oh Christ! Oh hell!’
Chapter Twenty
‘What the bleedin’ ’ell are yer doin’ sittin’ at the table starin’ into space?’ Danny asked, stopping short in shock the instant he entered the kitchen. ‘Why isn’t the oven on? Where’s my grub?’
He looked around, bewildered, to see if there was a plate being kept warm somewhere. There was nothing. Not even a dish of something cooked and waiting to be re-heated. Not even a jar of pickles signifying cold meat under the larder net. ‘Bleedin’ ’ell, Carrie!’ he exploded, running a hand through his already spiky hair. ‘Don’t yer know I need to be in and out in a couple of jiffs? Zac’ll be dahn the gym waitin’ fer me to put ’im through a workout. Ternight’s the only real time we’ve got before ’e takes this Arnie geezer on!’
‘I need to talk to you, Danny.’ Carrie’s heart was beating like a sledgehammer. She felt sick again, but she couldn’t be sick just yet. She had to get the words that had to be said out and over with. Crazily it occurred to her that, apart from knowing his pride would be devastated, she didn’t have a clue what his reaction was going to be. She drew in a ragged breath.
‘Danny, I—’
‘An’ I come back from seein’ Jack an’ there’s nothin’ on the bleedin’ table!’ Danny continued, annoyance turning into real anger. ‘Christ Almighty, Carrie! It ain’t as if you’ve bin knocking yourself out with work this last few days, is it? Yer dad still doesn’t know where yer scarpered off to when yer left the stall the other day, and come to that, neither do I—’
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