The Londoners (57 page)

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?

Leon Emmerson might have walked jauntily into the Square after an absence of information indicating he hadn’t drowned over three years ago, but German-born Jews, Jacoba Berger and Eva
Frank, dragged from their Heidelberg home and incarcerated in a concentration camp even before the war had begun, weren’t likely to be so lucky.

Distantly, on the light summer breeze, came the sound of piano playing and discordant but exuberant singing. Magnolia Square’s street party was still going at full throttle. In a nearby
shrub, two sparrows wrangled noisily. A butterfly alighted briefly on one of the shaking leaves and then flew off, the sun glinting on the scarlet markings of its wings. Christina’s fingers
dug deeper into the flesh of her arms. Ever since she had escaped from Germany, she had schooled herself to accept that her mother and grandmother were dead. Why now, after all this time, had doubt
begun to return? Certainly the news reports of the last few weeks had given no cause for hope. The first Allied troops into the camps had found horrors beyond imagining, and the estimate of the
number of Jews who had died in them now ran into the millions. To entertain any hope that two women who had been imprisoned as long ago as 1936 could have survived was not only vain, it was
ridiculous.

Or was it?

The sparrows flew off, still wrangling. A bee began to circle the bush, looking for flowers and pollen. Slowly, as she stood there, the hope she had suppressed for so many years began to take
fierce hold. All over Europe displaced people would be struggling to make their way back to their homes. All over Europe, reunions similar to Leon and Kate’s would be taking place. What if
her mother and grandmother hadn’t died in the concentration camp they had been taken to? What if, by some miracle, they, like Leon, had survived?

‘Hello there!’ a middle-aged woman she knew only by sight called out to her cheerily, a mongrel skittering at her heels. ‘I’ve just been told your vicar’s thinking
of marrying again. Lovely woman Bob Giles’s first wife was. I remember the day she was killed. The first air raid of the war, it was. Such a shame, and her only a young woman too. Still,
it’s nice he’s found happiness again.’

With great effort Christina dragged her thoughts away from a ravaged Europe and the thousands upon thousands of displaced persons trailing the rutted road, their pathetically few belongings
piled high in old prams and handcarts. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, smiling politely. ‘It is.’

The woman would have liked to stay for a longer chat, but there was something about Christina Robson that was definitely not encouraging. She was polite enough, of course, but she wasn’t a
friendly, jolly south-London girl, like her friends Kate Voigt and Carrie Collins. She was too reserved. Too deep. Which all came of her being a foreigner of course, and Jewish into the
bargain.

‘Toodle-oo,’ she said amiably, making allowances for what the poor girl couldn’t help, adding as an afterthought, ‘your hubby will be demobbed soon I expect, or he will
be if he doesn’t decide to make a career of commandoing. I’ve seen newsreels of Commando attacks. The Commandos were all guyed up in balaclava helmets with muck on the bits that show so
they’d merge into the background, and they were bristling with knives and pistols. Should suit your Jack a treat. He always was on the wild side.’

Christina made no comment. She didn’t want to think about Jack yet for a bit. Thinking about Jack was too unsettling, too intimidating. She would think about her mother and grandmother
instead. She would think of ways she could try to discover what had happened to them, if they were alive or dead and, if they were dead, where they had died, and how. And if they were alive? Her
throat was so tight she could hardly breathe. If they were alive she would find them. She would find them if it was the very last thing she ever did.

Kate sidestepped a running toddler and joined Leon as he continued to chat with Carrie and Danny and Danny’s dad, Daniel.

‘. . . that kid should’ve bin a requisitions officer,’ Danny was saying, quite obviously referring to Billy and his private ammunition dump. ‘’E’s got a
natural-born talent for scroungin’.’

Kate slid her arm around Leon’s waist. The street party seemed to be going on for ever. When on earth would it come to an end? When would they be able to escape and have some privacy?

His hand cupped her far shoulder as he hugged her close, his thoughts exactly the same as hers. As she leant her head against his shoulder, he looked down at her in utter love, his throat
tightening in emotion. Christ, but she was beautiful! No woman he had ever seen had hair of such a rich, glorious gold colour. Or hair so long and lustrous. And she had waited for him. For over
three years she hadn’t known whether he was dead or alive, but she had given birth to his son and had waited faithfully in fierce hope.

‘I love you,’ he whispered in her ear as their son continued to ride high on his shoulders, and Daisy and Matthew engaged in a giggling game of tag with Rose. ‘When the devil
can we escape and be alone together?’

Before she could make a response, Daniel Collins said genially to her, ‘Have you heard that you and the Vicar aren’t the only ones having weddings this month? Charlie Robson has just
announced he’s going to marry your next-door neighbour. Funny old couple they’ll make, her a retired headmistress and a spinster and him a widower with a criminal past, barely able to
read and write.’

‘They’ve been friends for a long time,’ Carrie said, wondering what Christina would think of her father-in-law’s rather surprising wedding plans.

Danny ran a hand through his spiky, mahogany-red hair in baffled bemusement. ‘Wasn’t ’Arriet Godfrey Jack’s old ’eadmistress? And didn’t she once say Jack was
more suited to a Borstal than ’er junior school? I wonder what ’e’s goin’ to think when ’e comes ’ome and finds she’s about to become ’is
stepmother!’

They all roared with laughter, not noticing Mavis’s approach. ‘Is it a private joke or can anyone join in?’ she asked, strolling up to them on perilously high, peep-toed,
wedge-heeled sandals, her toenails a vivid scarlet beneath her sheer silk stockings.

Carrie sighed, her laughter subsiding. Her older sister was a constant source of irritation to her. Where, in these days of deprivation, had the silk stockings come from, for instance? Wherever
it was, the supply would have to stop when Ted was demobbed. He’d been upset enough about her long-standing flirtatious relationship with Jack Robson, and he knew Jack well. He certainly
wouldn’t countenance a similarly dubious relationship with a stranger, and the stockings must have come from a stranger because Jack hadn’t swaggered into Magnolia Square on leave since
the weekend he’d been home and married Christina.