Magnolia Square (2 page)

Kate made a choking noise. Carrie said disbelievingly, ‘’Ow the hell could Bonzo try to copulate with Queenie? He’s only a whippet, for God’s sake!’

‘’E might be only a whippet, but ’e’s a game little bugger.’ Miriam heaved her bosoms up over the edge of the table so that she could reach the biscuit tin more
easily. ‘An’ ’owever much Christina ’ates knees-ups, you’d think she’d be the ’eart and soul of this one, wouldn’t yer? She is both German
and
Jewish after all. If she doesn’t want to celebrate the Nazis being thrashed into surrenderin’, wot will she ever want to bloomin’ celebrate?’

Neither Kate or Carrie attempted to answer her. Though they were each other’s best friend, Christina was their closest other friend and, despite being their close friend, she was an enigma
neither of them truly understood.

Miriam, aware that she had drawn a blank where Christina was concerned, blew on her tea to cool it, saying grudgingly, ‘It’s nice to ’ave five minutes’ peace and quiet
after all the ruckus that’s goin’ on outside. I told the Vicar the church bells nearly deafened me when ’e rang ’em when peace was declared and that ’e’d no need
to ring ’em again, but ’e said as ’ow as St Mark’s stood in the middle o’ the Square, it was only right St Mark’s bells should ring when the Square was
’avin’ its VE party.’

One of Carrie’s two tortoiseshell combs had come adrift and she pushed an unruly mass of near-black hair away from her face, re-anchoring it. ‘Your eldest daughter will be doing her
Billie Holiday impression by now,’ she said meaningfully as she did so, ‘and you did say she wanted all the audience she could get.’

‘Mebbe she does, but I’m comfy now.’ Miriam folded her beefy arms and rested them on the table. ‘There’s beer and shandy and lemonade runnin’ like rivers
outside, but there ain’t no decent tea, not since the Vicar’s lady-friend accidentally dropped a washing-up cloth into the urn.’

Carrie giggled. Her mother always knew just who had done what, when.

‘And Nellie Miller from number fifteen isn’t as ’appy as she could be,’ Miriam continued, getting into her stride. ‘She says it’s all right every bugger
that’s been fighting in Europe and the Middle East coming ’ome, but her nephew ’Arold is a prisoner of the Japs, and she doesn’t know when the ’ell ’e’ll
be on his way ’ome.’ She crunched into a ginger biscuit. ‘The Red Cross did tell ’er just after ’e was first captured that ’e was ’elping to build a
railway. It always seemed rum to me.’ She flicked ginger biscuit crumbs from her chest, adding in explanation, ‘’Arold was a milkman before he was conscripted, an’ apart
from going on an annual train ride to Margate, ’e knows nothin’ about railways, and certainly wouldn’t know ’ow to go about building one!’

Kate felt a pang of guilt. She’d been so ecstatic about Leon’s release as a POW, and his return home, that she’d forgotten Nellie Miller wouldn’t be similarly
celebrating. ‘Let’s go and have a word with her,’ she said to Carrie. ‘It can’t be very nice for her, everyone celebrating, when Harold’s still a POW.’

Carrie, well aware that, if they didn’t return to the street party, they’d have her mother with them for the duration, rose to her feet. ‘You have a word with her. I need to
make sure Danny’s still keeping an eye on Rose. He seems to think that now she’s started school she doesn’t need watching so much, but given half a chance she’ll be down by
the river with Billy and getting into goodness knows what kinds of trouble.’

‘Rose never gets into trouble,’ Miriam said, staunchly defending her favourite grandchild. She heaved herself reluctantly to her feet. ‘The trouble with you, Carrie, is that
yer like to keep tabs on everyone a little too much. It wouldn’t ’ave done Danny any ’arm to ’ave stayed in the Army an—’

‘Can you pass me that basket, Miriam, please,’ Kate interrupted hurriedly. ‘I expect all the party sandwiches are gone by now and I might as well begin gathering up all the
plates I loaned.’

With a full-scale shenanigans between Carrie and her mother avoided, Kate hurried them out of the house and into the flag-and-balloon-bedecked Square. Trestle tables graced the front of St
Mark’s. The church stood on a grassy island in the centre of the Square and both the island and the narrow road that encompassed it were thick with partying Magnolia Square residents.

A piano belonging to Carrie’s mother-in-law, Hettie Collins, had been trundled out on to the pavement. Carrie’s sister, Mavis Lomax, was seated on top of it, belting out a
rip-roaring version of ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’. Her peroxide-blonde hair piled high, Betty Grable fashion, her silk-clad, provocatively crossed legs showing an indecent amount of
stocking-top.

Nellie Miller, whose enormous bulk would have made two of the ample Miriam, was sitting in the front of Mavis’s appreciative audience, wedged in an armchair that had been specially wheeled
out of the vicarage for her. In one hand she held a piece of string which was attached to a buoyantly floating red balloon. In the other was a slab of home-made mint and currant pasty. Ignoring the
discomfort to her elephantine legs, she was tapping a foot up and down in time to Hettie’s exuberant piano playing.

With not much more than crumbs and an occasional cake left on the crêpe-paper-covered trestle tables, children were no longer seated at them but running and shrieking everywhere. There was
no sign of Rose, however, or Danny.

‘If he’s sloped off for a quiet game of billiards and taken Rose with him I’ll blooming kill him!’ Carrie said, fending off a big black Labrador that had bounded up to
greet them.

The Labrador was Kate’s and she said admonishingly as he threatened to knock both her and Carrie off their feet, ‘Down, Hector! Down!’

Hector obediently sat and as he did so Kate caught sight of Leon. He was talking to Daniel Collins, Carrie’s father-in-law. Their little son, Luke, was laughingly straddling his broad
shoulders and clutching on to his tight, crinkly hair. Matthew was clinging to one of his hands and chattering away to him ten to the dozen, while Daisy was holding tightly on to his other hand.
Kate felt her heart turn over in her chest. God, but she loved him! For nearly three years he had been a prisoner of the Germans, transported to a prison camp deep in captured Russian territory
after his ship had been torpedoed and sunk in Arctic waters. Unlike Nellie where Harold was concerned, she had never had any communication from either the War Office or the Red Cross, informing her
that he was alive and a POW. All she had had was deep, sure, unswerving inner certainty. And what if she had been wrong? The very thought made her dizzy with horror. How would she have been able to
face life if Leon had not returned to her? How would she have been able to wake and face each new day without Leon’s cheery good humour; his compassion and tolerance; his tender, passionate
love-making?

As if sensing the intensity of her thoughts, Leon turned his head slightly, looking directly towards her, his gold-flecked, amber-brown eyes meeting hers, his vivid, loving smile splitting his
chocolate-dark face. She knew that people would be eyeing them with covert, prurient curiosity, because people always did. ‘Nice’ girls didn’t consort with black sailors, and they
certainly didn’t have babies with them. Radiantly she smiled back at him, her eyes ablaze with love. Soon the street party would be over; soon the children would be bathed and in bed; soon
they would be alone together and in each other’s arms, loving each other as they had burned to do all through the long, lonely years of their separation.

‘So who’s going to be married first?’ Nellie Miller called out to her. ‘You an’ Leon or the Vicar an’ his lady-friend?’

With agonizing reluctance Kate broke eye contact with the man she loved with all her heart. ‘Me and Leon,’ she said without a second’s hesitation.

Nellie grinned, displaying a mouthful of appallingly crooked and broken teeth. ‘I’m glad to ’ear it. It’s about time at least one of your whipper-snappers was made
legit.’

Kate crossed over to Nellie’s shabby armchair and perched on the arm. ‘They’re both going to be legitimized,’ she said as Hettie began playing a conga, and the throng
around them exuberantly pushed and pulled themselves into a long conga line. ‘The minute we’re married, Leon’s going to adopt Matthew and we’re both going to apply to adopt
Daisy. With a little luck, by the end of the year we’ll be an ordinary family.’

Nellie looked across to where Leon was again talking to Daniel Collins, the children swarming around him like a band of boisterous monkeys. Daisy’s hair was dark and straight and fine, her
blue eyes and magnolia-pale skin indicating she had more than a little Irishness in her blood. Luke was as dark-skinned as his father and, though his mop of curls wasn’t yet as tight and wiry
as Leon’s, it would be when he was older. As for Matthew . . . Toby Harvey had been fair-haired and, as Kate’s hair was the colour of ripe wheat, Matthew’s colouring was as Nordic
as a little Viking’s.

Nellie chuckled. Whatever else the about-to-be-formed Emmerson family might be, it was certainly never going to be ordinary! ‘An’ who’s going to be matron-of-honour?’ she
asked as the conga line noisily encircled her chair. ‘Yer can’t have both Carrie
an
’ Christina.’

‘Why not?’

Nellie clicked her tongue. ‘Because though you can ’ave as many bridesmaids as yer want, you’re only supposed to ’ave one married friend as a matron-of-honour. So
who’s it going to be? Carrie or Christina?’

‘Then it will have to be Carrie. After all, we’ve been best friends ever since we were toddlers. I’ve only known Christina since she came here as a refugee.’

As the conga line danced its way down to the bottom end of the Square, she saw that Carrie had run Danny and Rose to earth, for they were walking hand in hand, with Rose skipping along in front
of them, to where Leon and Danny’s father were still deep in conversation.

‘It’s ’ard to think of ’er as a refugee, ain’t it?’ Nellie said ruminatively. ‘I mean, it’s not as if she speaks like a foreigner, is it?
There’s Ukrainians and Poles down in Woolwich can’t speak a word of the King’s English, poor bleeders. Gawd knows ’ow they manage, I don’t. Christina speaks it like a
nob.’

‘Her gran was English,’ Kate said, remembering that her intention had been to sympathize with Nellie about her nephew’s continuing imprisonment by the Japanese, and that she
hadn’t yet done so. ‘She was born and brought up in Bermondsey and went to school with Carrie’s gran. That’s why, when Christina came to England, she moved in with
Carrie’s family.’

‘Well, she’s English enough now she’s married Charlie Robson’s son,’ Nellie said, who didn’t much understand why Christina’s Bermondsey-born grandmother
should have wanted to go off and marry a Hun, even if it had been before the First World War when she’d done so. ‘Though it might be some time before Jack’s demobbed. Fighting in
Greece last time anyone ’eard, wasn’t ’e? Commandos don’t ’alf get about. ’E’ll find Civvie Street pretty boring after rampaging all over Greece with
knives stuck down his boots, and grenades ’angin’ from his belt.’

‘I came to sympathize with you about your nephew,’ Kate said, eager to accomplish her mission so that she could join Leon. ‘It can’t be much fun, everyone celebrating the
end of the war in Europe, when he’s still being held by the Japanese.’

‘No, it ain’t,’ Nellie said frankly as Hector slumped at her swollen feet, patiently waiting for Kate to make a move. ‘But the Yanks’ll soon ’ave the Japs on
the run and old ’Irohito’ll get his just desserts just like old ’Itler did. An’ when we ’ave a Victory over Japan party, I’ll be conga-ing with the best of
’em, bad feet or no bad feet. I can’t understand why Christina ain’t ’ere, you’d think she’d be dancin’ ’er ’eart out, wouldn’t
yer?’

Christina Robson had never felt less like dancing in her life. She stood on the far, north-west corner of the Heath, looking out over a superb view of Greenwich and the River
Thames and, a little more distantly, the City and the glittering dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. London. It was the city that had given her refuge, and for that reason alone she would be
grateful to it for as long as she lived. But she wasn’t merely grateful to it, she loved it. She loved its tree-shaded squares, its unexpected patches of green, its noise and its bustle and
its friendliness. It had become her home, and she wanted no other. Why, then, did she continue to feel so dispossessed? Why did she feel as if she were never, ever, going to become a Londoner
herself? She was, after all, married to a south-Londoner. All her friends were south-Londoners. All her neighbours. Surely, by now, she should feel she was a south-Londoner by adoption?

Despite the heat of the sun, she hugged her arms. She certainly hadn’t done so when Magnolia Square’s street party had been at its height. She had felt like the biblical Ruth amid
the alien corn. Everyone else, with the exception of Nellie Miller, had been celebrating reunions or pending reunions. Though a general demob was still weeks, and possibly months, away, brothers
and fathers, boy-friends and husbands, would soon be returning home
en masse.
Danny Collins, who had been a prisoner of the Italians, and Leon Emmerson, who had been freed by the Russians
from a German prison camp, were both already home.

Had it been the realization of all those reunions that had brought the past hurtling back to engulf her so cruelly? Or had it been the talk of weddings? The Vicar’s wedding to his rather
surprisingly young, but extremely pleasant, lady-friend. Leon and Kate’s imminent wedding. Both weddings would take place in St Mark’s, as had her own wedding to Jack – and St
Mark’s was an Anglican church, and she was Jewish.

While her friends and neighbours had gossiped around her, she had stood with her back to one of the magnolia trees the Square had been named after, staring up at St Mark’s glittering
spire, wondering what her father would have said, what her mother and grandmother would say – and it had been then, as, for the first time in ten years, she thought of her mother and
grandmother in the present tense, that mental and emotional pain had sliced cripplingly through her. How could she possibly have thought of them as if they were still alive? How, after all that had
happened in her homeland over the last decade, could she subconsciously have thought of them in the present tense, betraying vain hope that they had survived, that a reunion was still a
possibility?