Magnolia Square (11 page)

‘It was Carrie who taught her,’ Christina said, pushing her chair away from the table and standing up. ‘Danny can’t swim. Is Leon going to teach him?’

Kate’s eyebrows shot high. ‘I didn’t realize he couldn’t swim!’ she said in astonishment. ‘I thought that by remaining in the shallow end and playing with
Matthew and Luke he was simply being unselfish.’

A smile touched Christina’s mouth. It was typical of Danny that he hadn’t admitted to an inability to swim. ‘Don’t let him know that I told you,’ she said, slipping
her shoulder-bag strap over her arm. ‘You know Danny. He’s got a lot of pride where things like that are concerned.’

‘Then he shouldn’t have.’ Kate poured milk for the children’s cocoa into a pan. ‘Leon would be only too happy to teach him. They could go on their own, without the
children. And maybe Danny could teach Leon something in return.’

Christina felt a rush of warmth towards both Kate and her father. It was typical of Kate to try and think of a way Leon could help Danny learn to swim without Danny feeling either foolish or
beholden. And Carl Voigt’s acceptance that her mother and grandmother could very well still be alive, and his commitment to uncovering whatever information he could, had taken an intolerable
burden from her shoulders. She no longer felt isolated and alone. Carl Voigt understood her grief and her guilt and her hope. She had someone now she could talk to, someone who understood the sense
of alienation that often overwhelmed her. Someone who, after over thirty years of living in Britain, had admitted he, too, often felt similarly alienated.

‘I must be going,’ she said to them both. ‘I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving the house, and if they discover I’m not in they’ll begin worrying.’

Kate turned the gas flame low beneath the pan of milk. ‘I’ll see you to the door,’ she said as thumps and bumps shaking the ceiling above them indicated that a pillow-fight,
not a story-telling session, was taking place.

At the front door, Christina paused for a moment. ‘Your father has promised to help me, Kate,’ she said confidingly. ‘He’s going to contact the Red Cross for
me.’

Kate slipped her arm through Christina’s and gave it an affectionate squeeze. ‘I knew he would. And you can tell Jack that Dad will be very, very painstaking and thorough.’

‘Jack?’ An odd expression flashed through Christina’s amethyst eyes.

Kate stared at her, oblivious of Charlie’s cheery wave as he took Queenie for a walk in the direction of the Heath. ‘You have written and told Jack you think your mother and
grandmother could still be alive, haven’t you?’ she asked, hardly able to believe her sudden suspicion that Christina had done no such thing. ‘He does know you’re going to
search for them, doesn’t he?’

Christina hesitated for a second. It was late evening now and in the deepening dusk her skin looked as pale as alabaster. ‘No,’ she said reluctantly. ‘No. I haven’t told
Jack. Not yet.’ And before Kate could make an astonished response she turned on her heel, running lightly down the shallow flight of broad stone steps that led to the front path and the
gate.

As she continued to hurry down to the bottom end of the Square, Kate stared after her, her eyes wide. What sort of a relationship did Christina and Jack have when Christina didn’t divulge
to him her fears and griefs and hopes?

‘Cooee!’ a familiar voice called out from the opposite direction. ‘What are you doin’, standin’ starin’ into space? Waitin’ for Christmas?’ Mavis
was obviously returning from the same kind of expedition Charlie had been embarking on, for her grandmother’s whippet was panting breathlessly at her heels.

‘I was just having a quiet think,’ she replied truthfully, not wanting to draw Mavis’s attention to Christina’s receding figure. She looked down at the panting dog.
‘Where on earth have you been walking Bonzo? He looks all in.’

‘Over to the village,’ Mavis replied, coming to a halt at Kate’s gateway, much to Bonzo’s vast relief. ‘’E’s my only excuse for gettin’ out of an
evenin’. If I go dahn The Swan, that little bleeder Billy lets on to my mum and then there’s all ’ell to pay. At least this way I can call in The Princess of Wales for ’alf
an hour or so without there bein’ a ruckus.’

Kate was quite accustomed to Mavis’s colourful way of referring to her eldest child, and didn’t even blink. What did make her blink, however, was the realization that Mavis took even
the briefest notice of Miriam’s disapproval. For a moment she thought Mavis was teasing her and then Mavis said wearily, ‘What trouble Mum thinks I can get up to ’avin’ a
drink in The Swan I can’t imagine, but she’s got it fixed in ’er ’ead that Ted will go ’aywire when ’e comes ’ome if ’e thinks I’ve been what
she calls gallivantin’.’ She gave an unladylike snort of derision. ‘As if anyone could gallivant in The Swan! Lord, but life’s borin’ now there’s no more
air-raids or rocket attacks! I don’t ’alf miss the excitement, don’t you?’ And with a grin and a friendly wink she continued on her way, her teeteringly high heels tapping
out ringingly on the pavement, her leopard-printed cotton skirt and scarlet chiffon blouse garishly exotic in the blue-spangled dusk.

Kate stepped back into her hallway and shut her front door. All through the height of the Blitz Mavis had been in the ATS, riding Ted’s motor bike on life and death errands through
shattered and blazing streets. She was now working as a bus conductress, and it was no wonder she found the peace boring. And Jack Robson, who had served in the Commandos all through the war, would
no doubt find it boring also.

‘Why are you looking so worried, sweetheart?’ Leon asked a few minutes later when she put a tray bearing mugs of milky cocoa and Marmite sandwiches down on Matthew and Luke’s
bedside table, and then sat down next to him and Daisy on the edge of the bed. ‘Has Christina got problems?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said unhappily, slipping her hand into his, ‘and I rather think that in the near future she’s going to have even more.’

‘You’re just in time for a cup of char,’ Miriam called out from the kitchen as Christina stepped inside the cluttered hall. ‘I’m just
puttin’ the kettle on.’

‘You needn’t make a cup for me,’ Christina called back, negotiating a lawn-mower that for some inexplicable reason had been left in the hallway, and wondering for the umpteenth
time why it was the British couldn’t survive so much as an hour without a cup of hot, strong, tea. ‘I’ve already had two cups at the Voigts’.’

‘Then you were bloomin’ quick about it,’ Albert retorted cheerily from the depths of his armchair, ‘Carrie’s only bin back ten minutes and she an’ Kate
an’ Danny an’ the kids all came ’ome from the swimmin’ baths together.’

Christina walked into a sitting-room almost as cluttered as the hallway. Albert was reading the paper, the sleeves of his collarless shirt rolled high. Danny was trying to tune the wireless into
some light music, his coppery-red hair still wet from the duckings he had received at the swimming baths. Leah was finishing off Miriam’s pile of darning.

‘Did the children enjoy themselves?’ she asked, not wanting to disclose that it had been Kate’s father she had been talking to and drinking tea with, not Kate.

‘They nearly bloomin’ drowned me,’ Danny said, successfully tuning the wireless into some dance music. ‘That little Daisy swims like a fish.’

‘And so does our Rose,’ Albert chipped in, not wanting his granddaughter to be put in the shade by her friend. ‘Pru Sharkey used to be like greased lightnin’ in the
water,’ he added, dropping his newspaper to the floor where Bonzo immediately sat on it. ‘I remember her mother tellin’ me ’ow she won medal after medal when she was at
school.’

Everyone looked at him in astonishment. ‘Pru Sharkey?’ Danny said, perched on the arm of a battered sofa and swinging his foot up and down to the strains of Reginald King and his
orchestra. ‘I wouldn’t ’ave thought Pru would ’ave been
allowed
to go swimmin’. I would ’ave thought old man Sharkey would ’ave ’it the roof
at the thought of ’er in a swimmin’ costume.’

Miriam came into the room, a pint pot of tea in one hand for Albert, a mug of tea in the other for her mother. ‘’E did,’ she said expressively, handing Albert his tea.
‘An’ if it wasn’t for the ’eadmaster, the poor little mare would ’ave ’ad to give it up.’

Even Christina was intrigued. Wilfred Sharkey saw himself as an authority figure who bowed to no-one except, very reluctantly, Bob Giles. ‘What did the headmaster do?’ she asked
moving a half-knitted pullover to one side in order to sit down on the littered sofa.

‘’E told Wilfred he was out of order,’ Miriam said, handing the mug of tea to Leah and plumping herself down next to Christina. ‘’E said Pru’s athletic
ability was a God-given talent an’ that it would be a sin if she wasn’t allowed to express it, an’ that if Wilfred was ’alf the Christian he professed to be ’e’d
encourage ’er, not put obstacles in ’er path. An’ then he said that if Wilfred persisted in refusin’ to allow ’er to swim, ’e’d tell the Vicar.’

Danny laughed so hard he nearly fell off the arm of the sofa. Albert chuckled into his pint of tea. Leah said in high admiration, ‘That headmaster was a clever man,
bubbeleh.
He
knew Wilfred’s Achilles’ heel, all right.’

‘I don’t know about Wilfred’s Achilles’ ’eel,’ Miriam said, eyeing the large pile of finished darning. ‘I think Albert must ’ave dodgy ’eels
the way ’e goes through ’is socks!’

That night, in bed in the room she shared with Rose, Christina lay awake for a long time. It was always the same whenever she stepped over the threshold of the house that had
become her home. There would be good-natured bantering. Endless mugs of tea. Lots of gossip and laughter. And when Jack was demobbed she would be packing her bags and moving out, leaving all the
noise and clutter and camaraderie behind her in order to build a home of her own.

She lay on her back, her hands clasped behind her head. Where would that home be? Would it be at number twelve, with Charlie? She liked her father-in-law. Despite his dubious criminal past, it
was impossible not to like him. But Charlie was engaged to Harriet Godfrey and she couldn’t envisage herself sharing a home with Harriet and she certainly couldn’t envisage Jack doing
so.

In the darkness Rose stirred, murmuring in her sleep. She looked across at her lovingly. She had already been living at number eighteen when Rose had been born, and she would miss Rose and Rose
would miss her. But she would have Jack. Her stomach muscles tightened in a fierce, chaotic tumble of emotions. Why had he still not written to her with news of when he hoped to be home? Was it
because, with the war still continuing in the Far East, home leave for Commando units was still not on the cards? And did that mean that Mavis had been imaginatively inventive when she had said
Jack had written to her with the news that he hoped to be home soon? Or had she simply mistaken whatever it was he had written to her?

She turned over on her side, trying to control the surge of jealousy that threatened to bring her almost to tears. Why, when she loved Jack so much, did she find it so difficult to confide in
him? Why hadn’t she told him of the guilt and grief that still wracked her where her family were concerned? Was it because she instinctively felt that a man who lived for the moment, as Jack
so spectacularly did, wouldn’t understand? That he would think her inability to free herself from the tragedies of her past was morbid and pointless?

She dug her fingers into the soft down of her pillow. ‘Come home soon, Jack!’ she whispered fiercely, tears scalding her cheeks. ‘Come home soon and let everything be all right
between us!’

Pru Sharkey sat miserably in the bus-shelter at the corner of the Heath. It was August now, and London was suffering one of its periodic summer thunderstorms. In the distance,
lightning flashed over Blackheath Village, searingly illuminating All Saints’ Church. A little nearer, the donkey-man had donned a capacious mackintosh and sou’wester and had thrown
groundsheets over his animals to keep the worst of the rain off them while he stoically waited for the storm to rumble away.

The donkeys looked exceedingly despondent and Pru sympathized with them. She, too, felt despondent. She had felt despondent for so long she had forgotten what it was like to feel anything else.
She looked down at her sensibly shod feet. Brown, low-heeled, thick-soled shoes with a sturdy strap across the ankle. They were unfashionable shoes – old women’s shoes – shoes
that looked like boat-barges.

‘They’re serviceable,’ her father had said as he towered over her in Jem Porritt’s linoleum-floored Repair and Shoe Shop. It had been an adjective impossible to disagree
with.

Rain drummed down on the roof of the bus-shelter, and Pru sighed heavily. She was nineteen years old. No-one else she knew of her age had to suffer being taken for a new pair of shoes by their
father, especially when the money for the shoes was being paid for out of her own hard-earned money. She sighed again. And she hadn’t wanted to shop for shoes in Mr Porritt’s
musty-smelling shop. She had wanted to shop for them in Lewisham or Catford, and to do so in a shoe shop that sold stylish shoes, not just old women’s shoes and working boots and
slippers.