Magnolia Square (21 page)

‘It might be Mr Giles,’ Doris said, her voice fraught with hope, ‘or Dr Roberts.’

‘“Knock, and it shall be opened unto you”
,’ Wilfred moved with intent towards the sitting-room door and the hallway beyond.

Pru moved like greased lightning, dodging in front of him, saving adroitly, ‘Let me go, Dad. I’ll see if whoever is there is fit for you to meet.’

Wilfred halted in his tracks. Pru was quite perceptive at time. Prophets of Jehovah couldn’t hob-nob with any Tom, Dick or Harry.

Praying that her mother was right about the possible identity of their visitor, Pru opened the door, but only a cautious couple of inches.

It wasn’t Mr Giles or Dr Roberts. It was Malcolm Lewis. ‘Hello,’ he grinned cheerily, his white shirt open at the throat, his hands laconically in his trouser pockets.
‘Are you coming out to join in the fun? Jack Robson has suggested going up town. The King and Queen are bound to be making an appearance on the balcony at Buckingham Palace
and—’

‘“Cast not your pearls before swine!”’
Though he couldn’t be seen, there was no mistaking Wilfred’s stentorian tones.

Malcolm blinked.

Pru flinched.

‘. . . and there’ll be singing and dancing until the early hours in Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square,’ Malcolm continued, refusing to let the interruption deflect him
from his purpose.

It had been Mavis who had suggested Pru might like to join them all on a jaunt up town. ‘Poor little devil gets little enough pleasure, ’avin’ old sourpuss for a dad,’
she had said, showing a great deal of leg as she had sat astride her absent husband’s motor bike. ‘Why don’t you go and ask ’er if she wants to come with us while I take
Emily for a victory spin over the ’Eath? You’re a scoutmaster and old man Sharkey isn’t likely to pitch into you the way ’e would if me or Carrie or Jack did the
asking.’

Without Mavis’s prompting, it would never have occurred to him to have asked Pru to go anywhere, no matter how big the group. He was twenty-seven and she was only sixteen or seventeen and,
in his eyes, little more than a child, but as he had strolled towards number ten he had been aware of a very pleasant sense of anticipation. There was a blunt straightforwardness about Pru that he
found both endearing and amusing, and, despite her curiously frumpish dress-sense, she was really quite pretty.

Mavis had roared past him on her husband’s motor bike, eighty-year-old Emily Helliwell on the pillion, her scrawny, chiffon-clad arms around Mavis’s waist as she clung on for dear
life. He had grinned and shaken his head in disbelief, reflecting that such a sight could only take place in Magnolia Square, which was why he liked the Square and its inhabitants so much. As he
had dropped the Sharkeys’ highly polished door knocker on to pristinely painted wood, he had been thinking of how he would like to live in the Square and, when he had heard Pru’s
footsteps walking, down the hallway to open the door, he had been looking forward to her surprise and pleasure when he announced the reason for his visit.

‘No,’ she said now to him tautly. ‘I’m not coming out. I don’t want to celebrate.’

He stared at her in disbelief. ‘But it’s the end of the war, Pru!
Everyone’s
celebrating. And everyone’s going up town. Jack Robson and his wife. Mavis and Carrie.
Kate and her husband. . .’

‘“Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more!”’

‘Well, I’m not,’ Pru said abruptly, and slammed the door in his face.

Malcolm stared at the reverberating wood in incredulity. What on earth had he said to her to have occasioned such a reaction? And who on earth had Wilfred Sharkey been in conversation with? He
shrugged, aware he would probably never have the answer to either question. Turning away from the door, he walked back down the path, towards the gate. If Pru didn’t want to join in the
celebration of the century, it was her loss, not his. All the same, it was a pity. He rather suspected that, when she was in a good mood, Pru would be exceedingly jolly company.

As he reached the gate a faint but unmistakable sound impinged on his consciousness. He paused, looking back towards the house, his eyebrows contracting in a deep frown. Someone in number ten
was crying. Someone female. Someone sixteen or seventeen years old.

Ellen Pierce plumped and rearranged the cushions on her sofa, hurriedly removed a small dog-basket from the side of the hearth and re-located it in a discreet position in the
corner of the kitchen, checked her appearance in the mirror hanging over the fireplace, and then plumped and rearranged the sofa cushions yet again. Why did she get so agitated when Carl was about
to visit her? Why couldn’t she simply relax and enjoy his company and cease fretting about whether the house was suitably tidy and whether or not the dogs were going to be annoying and if he
was ever going to ask her to marry him? She knew Harriet didn’t behave in a similar manner where Charlie was concerned, but then Harriet was the most sensible woman imaginable and Charlie had
already asked her to marry him and, in any case, Charlie wasn’t a complicated personality in the way Carl was complicated.

‘Down, Hotspur,’ she said, flustered, as a Welsh Terrier jumped up at her, eager to gain her attention. ‘Your basket is in the kitchen for the rest of today. And
please
don’t jump on the sofa! I’m sure Carl doesn’t like it when you jump on the sofa. And where are Macbeth and Coriolanus? Are they sulking because I’ve taken their baskets
upstairs?’

Hotspur yapped in an excited frenzy, certain he was about to be taken for a walk. Ellen did her best to ignore him. Was it because of her dogs that Carl still hadn’t suggested they
formally spend the rest of their lives together? She knew that, before Kate had given a home to Hector, the Voigts had never owned a dog. And though Carl had never said a single word to indicate he
wasn’t happy at Hector’s presence in his home, she couldn’t really
tell
whether he was unhappy about it or not.

It was never possible to tell
what
Carl was thinking. He was such a quiet, introspective,
complex
man that his private thoughts were a complete mystery to her. And that was the
source of all her anxiety. How could she relax and be happy in their relationship when she didn’t know how Carl viewed that relationship? Though he was affectionate towards her, they
weren’t lovers in the accepted sense of the word. They had never gone to bed together. But then, they weren’t married, and Carl was a very moral man. She couldn’t imagine him even
considering going to bed with someone to whom he wasn’t married. And it wasn’t as if she were an experienced sex-siren! She was a forty-year-old virgin, for goodness sake!

A large, ungainly mongrel lolloped into the room and clambered on to the sofa. Ellen was too distracted by the route her thoughts had taken to even notice. Was her unwanted virginity one of the
reasons their relationship never achieved real mental and emotional intimacy? Or was it because he couldn’t imagine being married to a woman who, though capable of holding down a responsible
position at Harvey’s, was not his intellectual equal? A woman who very foolishly shared her small Greenwich terraced house with three bombed-out dogs?

As Coriolanus nuzzled contentedly deeper into the cushions on the sofa, she looked despairingly into the mirror. She’d had her mouse-brown hair permed shortly after VE Day, and now VJ Day
had come and gone and the perm still hadn’t settled down! She’d been a fool, of course, to have ever had it cut. At one time she had worn it in a sensible bun, as Harriet wore her hair.
Only her bun had never looked as elegant as Harriet’s, and she had thought that a cut and perm might make her look a little more fashionable. It didn’t, of course. She looked the same
as always. A middle-aged Plain Jane.

There came the sound of his familiar knock on the door and her heart jarred against her ribs. He was here! They would spend the rest of the day together and she knew that she was lucky, lucky,
lucky! If he wanted, Carl could have his pick of middle-aged, unmarried lady companions, yet he continued to seek only her company and she was deeply, unspeakably grateful. If only she could be
sure he would
continue
to seek only her companionship, she would be the happiest woman in the world. She hurried to open the door to him, wondering if she had put enough lipstick on, or too
much; wondering if he would be impressed by the sponge cake she had made for their tea, or if he would think it a poor thing compared to the sponge cakes his late wife had no doubt once made for
him; wondering if she should chatter on about the celebrations of VJ Day, or if he would like a little peace and quiet now that the boisterous celebrations were over.

Carl, happily ignorant of being the cause of such tormented indecision, was wondering if the suggestion he intended putting to Ellen that afternoon was, perhaps, offensively cavalier. Her house
wasn’t very big. Not when Hotspur, Macbeth and Coriolanus were taken into account. And even if her home was twice the size, it still wouldn’t alter the fact that it was a man’s
responsibility to provide a marital home for his wife. Moving into a woman’s home was, after all, little different from living off her money.

As he heard Ellen’s dearly familiar footsteps hurrying towards the door, he knew it was a problem he had to face up to. Though his own home was a spacious, Edwardian family house, it
wasn’t spacious enough to accommodate another three dogs. Or at least not to do so in comfort. And besides, much as he loved his daughter and her children, he didn’t have a temperament
suited to boisterous family life. He liked to read and listen to music, and he liked to do so in peace and quiet. Ellen, too, was accustomed to living quietly, or as quietly as her dogs allowed. To
start off their married life sharing number four Magnolia Square with Kate and Leon and the children, would be a sure-fire recipe for disaster. And as he had no capital with which to buy a second
house, the only other alternative was for him to move in with Ellen.

The door opened and Hotspur shot past him like a bullet from a gun.

‘Hotspur! Hotspur!’ Ellen shouted ineffectually, having no choice but to hurry straight past Carl in an attempt to call Hotspur to heel before he should reach the main road.

Hotspur, dimly aware that things were not quite as they should be, had the sense to come to a halt when he reached the street comer.

‘Naughty,
naughty
dog!’ Ellen chastised, gulping for air, realizing too late that she didn’t have a dog lead with her.

Twenty yards away, Carl was still standing at the doorway, waiting patiently for her return.

Hotspur was not the best trained of dogs. Ellen knew that if she once let go of his collar, he would immediately dart off in the wrong direction in the happy expectation of again being chased.
Resignedly she hooked a finger under his collar and, stooping lop-sidedly like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, awkwardly began to drag him back to the house.

Carl continued to wait for them patiently. Who but Ellen would nearly break her back in dragging a recalcitrant Welsh Terrier home? If necessary, he knew she would be quite capable of laying
down her life for one of her dogs; or for anyone she loved. The sensation of warmth he always felt when in her company eased through him. Loyal and loving, totally incapable of a harsh thought or
word, she had brought romantic companionship back into his life at a time when he had been bereft of companionship of any sort. As memories of the internment camp he had been imprisoned in during
the war flooded into his mind, he thrust them firmly back. Those days were over, just as the war was now over. The neighbours he had lived amongst for over twenty years and who, when war had broken
out, had ostracized him because of his nationality, had long since sheepishly befriended him again. One memory he would never try to suppress, however, was the memory of how a middle-aged lady he
had never even met had, when she had heard of his internment, shyly begun a pen-pal relationship with him in order to ease his loneliness and isolation. It had been an act of Christian charity, and
utterly typical of her. His heart swelled with love. Dear Ellen. Sometimes he wondered if she had even the remotest idea of how much her letters had meant to him, how they had renewed his faith in
human nature.

‘Hotspur’s not usually such a naughty dog,’ she said now, dragging Hotspur off the pavement and on to her short garden path, still bending at an almost impossible angle as she
did so. ‘It’s just that he does so love a walk.’

Carl closed the garden gate so that Hotspur shouldn’t make yet another bid for freedom. ‘We’ll take all three dogs to the park, if you like,’ he said amenably, ‘but
first I want to have a chat with you, Ellen. I’m afraid it’s all a little difficult and I shall quite understand if you think my suggestion unacceptable . . .’

Ellen released her hold of Hotspur and, not without a little difficulty, straightened her spine, fear flooding through her. What on earth could he be about to suggest that might be unacceptable
to her? Was he going to suggest they didn’t see each other quite so often? Was he about to try to end their relationship? She led the way into her tiny, linoleum-floored hallway. Macbeth, her
aged Scottie, barked in greeting. In the sitting-room Coriolanus raised his head from the cushions and, on hearing more than one set of footsteps, prudently abandoned the sofa and did his best to
make himself comfortable on the floor.