Magnolia Square (17 page)

The bomb-site was behind her now and she walked past the Robsons’ house, wondering if Christina would move in there now that Jack was home. Way ahead of her, Matthew and Hector bundled
through the gateway into the garden of number four. A smile touched her mouth. With a little luck, as well as laying a new strawberry bed, Leon and Luke would also have been picking strawberries,
and they would be able to have them for tea with milk and a little sugar. With her earlier anxiety now firmly under control, she walked past the Sharkeys, wondering how long it would be before the
church-owned, empty house next door to them would be occupied. As she did so, she looked towards the Sharkeys’ windows, half expecting to see Doris or Pru and giving them a cheery wave.

Her eyes widened, shock stabbing through her. Though there were hours to go yet before dusk, every curtain was tightly drawn, as if there had been a death.

‘We’ve picked stwabewwies for tea,’ Luke said, running to greet Kate with shining eyes. ‘An’ Daddy says we can have our tea in the back garden
an’ that he’ll take us to the park afterwards!’

‘
We’ve
had ice-creams in Chiesemans,’ Matthew began importantly in brotherly one-upmanship. ‘
We’ve
been in a big, big car . . . a
car
so
big.’ He held his arms as far apart as possible.

Leon stopped what he was doing, which was rinsing strawberries, and looked across at Kate in bemused curiosity. Matthew loved to exaggerate, as all kiddies did, but he never
told out and out fibs. ‘
Have
you been in a big car?’ he asked, trying to think, if she had, who on earth it could have belonged to. The only person they knew with a car was Dr
Roberts, and his little Morris couldn’t be called big, even by Matthew’s standards.

‘So big it had a horn like the Last Trump,’ she said wryly.

‘It was Great-Gra . . .’ Matthew began, about to tell his Daddy-Leon who the car had belonged to.

Kate clapped her hand over his mouth. ‘That’s quite enough chatter from you for the moment. Off you go into the garden and when you’ve found a nice place for us to have our
picnic tea, I want you to sit on it and count to a hundred.’

The request didn’t seem too unreasonable to Matthew. He was always counting to a hundred when he played Blindman’s Buff or Tag with Rose and Daisy. With Luke toddling at his heels,
he set off to find a picnic place, pretending he was doing so in the middle of a big, dangerous jungle.

‘Well, love?’ Leon asked, a frown beginning to crease his forehead. ‘Who did you run into while you were out shopping?’

Kate crossed the kitchen and slid her arms around his waist, resting her head on his broad and comforting chest. ‘Our own personal Demon-King,’ she said with a heavy heart.

His frown deepened as his arms closed round her. ‘Joss Harvey?’

She nodded. The whole relationship between herself and Joss Harvey was so convoluted and fraught with so many contradictions that, even to Leon, she didn’t truly know how best to explain
it.

‘And?’ he prompted. Though the word was said gently enough, she could sense his sudden inner tension.

She pressed the palms of her hands against his chest, looking up into his dark, handsome, caring face. ‘He said some ugly things, Leon – about you – about you not being a
suitable person to be his great-grandson’s adoptive father.’

A pulse began to throb at the corner of Leon’s strong jawline. He didn’t have to ask her what kind of things had been said, he already had a very good idea. Joss Harvey’s
insults would have had nothing to do with his ability to be a kind and loving father to Matthew, or to his ability to provide for him; they would have been racial slurs, the kind of slurs he had
suffered all his life.

Kate’s eyes held his steadily. ‘He said that we could settle the matter either in court or out of it, but that if we chose to go to court, he would make sure that his viewpoint was
splashed all across the local papers.’

From outside they could hear the voices of Matthew and Luke raised in argument as they disputed over the best place in the garden for their picnic tea. A lawn-mower was being trundled in a
nearby garden. Distantly, the sound of a long tug whistle carried up from the river.

‘His viewpoint being?’ Leon prompted tautly.

Reluctantly, not wanting to hurt him yet knowing that he had to know just what depths Joss Harvey would sink to if he was ever to understand the agreement she and he had reached, she said,
‘That Matthew is his flesh and blood. That he is a white child whose father came from a middle-class background and that he, Joss Harvey, a wealthy pillar of the local community, is far more
suited to have custody of Matthew than . . . than—’

‘Than a Black Sambo seaman,’ Leon finished bitterly.

‘I’m sorry, love,’ she said, hating Joss Harvey’s ignorance with all her heart, ‘but you were the one who warned me of the kinds of things that some people would
say and—’

‘And was this said to you before you got in the car with him, or afterwards?’ There was an edge to his voice she had never heard before, an edge that warned her that for the first
time in their entire relationship they were on the verge of gravely misunderstanding each other.

‘It was before I got in the car,’ she said quietly, ‘and I got in the car because I knew that unless I reached some sort of an accommodation with him, he would begin a long,
vicious fight with us for guardianship of Matthew.’ Her voice broke slightly and she could feel tears beginning to burn the backs of her eyes. ‘And that one of his ways of doing so
would be to bring to everyone’s attention the fact that you and Matthew are racially different. At the moment, no-one thinks it at all odd that you should become his legal father, and I
don’t want them to start thinking differently. I don’t want us to have to go through all the hideousness that would bring in its wake, or to have the children go through it . .
.’

Her voice cracked completely and his arms tightened around her. ‘I don’t want that either, sweetheart,’ he said thickly, pulling her close again, his lips brushing her hair.
‘And so what “accommodation” did you and he come to?’

She took a deep, steadying breath. ‘That he could begin building up a relationship with Matthew. That he could take Matthew out once a week—’

‘And you’d trust him? After all that happened when Matthew was a baby, you’d trust him?’

Once again she looked into his dearly loved face, her eyes holding his. ‘We have to, Leon. Only this way will your adoption application go through unopposed.’

Anger and frustration chased across his face. None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for his skin colour, and yet he was as British as Joss Harvey! He had been
born
in
Britain. His mother could probably have traced her Kentish ancestry further back than Joss Harvey could trace his.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said urgently, needing to love her; needing to reassure himself that none of the difficulties they were going to meet as a married couple would ever take
her away from him.

Her own need for comfort was just as great as his. It flamed through her eyes as she said despairingly, ‘We can’t – the children. . .’

‘The children can picnic on their own,’ he said, releasing his hold of her and picking up the bowl of strawberries. ‘You go up to our bedroom. I’ll be with you just as
soon as I’ve taken these out to Matthew and Luke.’

‘Hey up, there! Let the dog see the rabbit,’ Daniel Collins said genially that evening as he tried to reach the bar through the crush. ‘A pint of mild,
barman, when you have a mo. Goodness, gracious me, if it’s going to be like this in here every night now Jack Robson’s home, I’ll have to start drinking in Blackheath!’

The elderly barman grinned. ‘If all Jack’s mates keep coming here to drink once Jack’s home for good, your custom won’t even be missed,’ he said affably, pushing a
frothing pint across the bar-top in Daniel’s direction. ‘Try not to spin it out till the end of the night. If I had to rely on your custom, my right hand would think my right arm was
broke.’

It was well known that Daniel was practically a teetotaller, and there were gusts of laughter from the throng hemming him in. Daniel was happily uncaring. He’d only come down the pub in
order to welcome Jack back. He looked around, trying to find a quiet place to sit.

‘Yer won’t find one!’ Miriam called out from the table she was sitting at with her mother and Christina. ‘All Jack’s mates from Lewisham and Catford ’ave come
to see ’im.’ She moved over a little on the shabby banquette that served as seating on the wall side of the table, to make room for him, saying, ‘An’ ’e’s got a
lot of mates, ’e always did ’ave.’

‘It’s nice to see Jack home,’ Daniel agreed wholeheartedly, ‘but dear, oh dear, his mates make it as crowded as the Yanks did last summer. A pub should be where a man can
come for a bit of peace and quiet and a game of cribbage, not somewhere he can’t hear himself talk.’

‘Why for do you want peace and quiet when you go out?’ Leah asked. ‘Peace and quiet you can get at home.’

‘Not in our ’ouse, you can’t!’ Albert boomed, squeezing through the crush and setting Miriam’s and Leah’s drinks down on the table. ‘In our ’ouse
peace and quiet is as rare as bananas. Talking of which, I’ve been told we’ll soon be seein’ a banana boat cruisin’ up the Thames again. Now, that’ll be a grand sight,
won’t it?’

‘It will be if we all get the chance of some and there’s not too much black-marketeering,’ Daniel said cautiously.

Nellie Miller was seated three tables away, but she had ears like the proverbial elephant. ‘Black-marketeering?’ she thundered in a voice that could have been heard in Greenwich.
‘If there’s any black-marketeering about, count me in! My last little windfall was parachute silk. It made wonderful knickers.’ She twanged an elasticised ruche just above a
mammoth-sized knee. ‘I’m safe as ’ouses in these, an’ if I should fall from a great ’eight I’ll ’ave an easy landin’!’

‘The poor bugger you fall on won’t!’ some wag rejoined, and the pub rocked with ribald laughter.

‘Hey, Nellie!’ Danny Collins pitched in from his favourite spot near the end of the bar. ‘Is it true you don’t get undressed any more, you just strike camp?’

As the laughter reached deafening proportions, Christina smiled so that she wouldn’t look as if she were being a killjoy, and tried to catch Jack’s eye. He had gone to the bar ten
minutes ago to buy a round for all the mates who had heard he was home and had popped in to The Swan to see him. From where she was sitting she could see him easily, tall and broad-shouldered and
the centre of attention.

Her stomach muscles tightened in a mixture of desire and love and apprehension. This was the way it always was with Jack, and she had the common sense to know that it was the way it always would
be. People gravitated to him like moths to a flame, attracted by a magnetism impossible to analyse. He had been the leader of every gang he had ever been a member of. Leadership was his style, but
only a very particular kind of leadership: a leadership with a hint of lawlessness about it. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Her father would not have approved of Jack. Nor would her
mother. They had been very middle-class, very respectable, very law-abiding. And her middle-class, respectable, law-abiding father had been shot in the street and her very correct, very
conventional mother had been forced to scramble at rifle-point into a truck no better than a meat truck en route to a slaughterhouse.

Fresh laughter was rocking the room. Was it something else Nellie had said? Something Charlie had said? She didn’t know. She was impaled again on the pain of her past, a past no-one else
in The Swan had shared or could even begin to understand.

‘Come on, pet. Drink up your lemonade and ’ave another,’ Albert was saying to her as he rose from the table to get another round in. ‘Why don’t you have some whisky
in it this time?’

‘You don’t know why the Socialists won the election?’ Malcolm Lewis was saying to the barman. ‘I’ll tell you why! It’s because this country has just fought a
war, and if we’d lost, all the landowners in Great Britain would have lost all their land. It would have gone to Germany. Now here you’ve got millions of young men coming home out of
the forces . . .’

‘I’ve nothing against cats,’ a mate of Jack’s was saying to a gullible Miss Helliwell, ‘but when I’ve eaten one of ’em I’ve ’ad
enough.’

‘. . . they’ll all be getting married and wanting homes,’ Malcolm Lewis was continuing heatedly, ‘and when they get a house, that house will be costing them extra money
because somewhere along the line someone had to pay for the land it’s built on. Now that land is land that British men have fought and died for and it’s land that should now be theirs
by right . . .’

‘Stop screaming, Emily, for the Lord’s sake,’ Nellie was saying to a distraught Miss Helliwell. ‘’E was only kiddin’ yer about the cat. No-one eats cats in
Britain, they don’t even make muffs out of ’em!’

‘Do you think the Vicar knows young Malcolm Lewis’s politics?’ Daniel asked the table at large, a troubled frown creasing his brows. ‘Because they seem a bit on the Red
side for a scoutmaster—’