Magnolia Square (24 page)

From the attic room above them came the reverberation of footsteps and the muffled sound of childish voices. Soon Rose would be on her way downstairs to the kitchen and breakfast. There were
already familiar sounds emanating from that direction. The rattle of a frying pan being slapped on top of the stove. Water filling a kettle. Cutlery being clattered. It would be Carrie who was up
and doing, for there had been no movement from Leah’s bedroom. Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, was a day when Leah often stayed in bed for an extra half hour or so, and on both Saturday and
Sunday mornings Danny
always
stayed in bed for as long as Carrie’s patience would allow.

‘What is it then?’ he asked again, beginning to wish he hadn’t stubbed his cigarette out. Whatever the problem troubling her, it was obvious it wasn’t going to be aired
and over with quickly.

She said at last, her voice resolute, her dark-lashed eyes holding his, ‘Ever since the war with Germany came to an end, I’ve been thinking more and more about
meine Mutti
and
Grossmutter
. . .’

He felt the tension in his stomach relax. Christ! Was that all this was about? Was it nothing to do with their personal relationship at all? He sat up, his strong back muscles rippling.

‘That’s only to be expected, love,’ he said understandingly, covering her clasped hands with one of his. ‘But that nightmare’s over now. You need never, ever, give
the bastard Germans or Germany another thought.’ He grinned, his teeth dazzlingly white against a skin that had been weathered by fighting in Italy as well as Greece. ‘You’re a
south-east London girl now. And south-east London girls don’t brood. It isn’t in their nature.’

He had meant to jolly her out of her sombre mood but instead of returning his smile her eyes darkened. ‘I’m not a south-east London girl,’ she said tautly, ‘I don’t
have a south-east London girl’s history or temperament. I’m a German – a German Jew.’

If she’d said she was a creature from another planet, he couldn’t have been more pole-axed. How on earth, after all that the Germans had done to her family, could she possibly think
of herself as being German?
He
certainly didn’t think of her as being so. He ran his free hand through his thick shock of hair. Christ Almighty! He’d just spent six years
fighting the bastards. He certainly didn’t think of himself as being married to one of them. And if Christina thought he was labouring under such a misapprehension, it was no wonder she was
troubled!

He slid an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close against him, saying reassuringly, ‘You’re wrong about your not being a south-east London girl, sweetheart. This is your home
now. It’s been your home for nearly ten years, and it’s going to be your home for life. We need neither of us ever speak about what you suffered before you came here. It’s in the
past and the past is dead and buried.’

She tried to shake her head but he was holding her too close against him. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, an edge of panic entering her voice. ‘The past isn’t
dead and buried for me, Jack. It isn’t dead and buried for
any
Jew that has survived . . .’

Rose’s footsteps hurried past their bedroom door. A smell of fish was beginning to permeate the house – kippers, perhaps, or maybe smoked haddock.

‘It is for Jews who married in an Anglican church,’ he said wryly, interrupting her and trying to get her to see things in perspective. Hell, her Jewishness had never been an issue
between them. If it wasn’t that it had been the cause of her having to flee Germany, he would no more have thought of her as Jewish as he thought of her as German!

‘Nationality and religion are never going to be an issue for us, sweetheart. No-one in Magnolia Square thinks of you as being German, and, despite the reason for you having come here in
the first place, I doubt if many people think of you as being Jewish, just as no-one thinks of Miriam as being Jewish, or of Carrie having Jewish blood. You’re a south-east Londoner now, just
like the rest of us, and—’

Rose burst into the room, fizzing with energy. ‘We’re having kippers for breakfast!’ she announced, her eyes sparkling in happy anticipation. ‘Mum’s serving them up
now, so you’d better hurry!’

‘Don’t go waking Jack and Christina, Rosie!’ Carrie shouted up from the bottom of the stairs. ‘I can keep their breakfast warm for them!’

‘Too late came the cry,’ Jack said dryly, ensuring that the sheet was covering him to the waist. ‘Off you go, young Rose. Tell your mum we’re on our way.’

‘Good,’ said Rose, who had had no intention of eating breakfast with no-one for company. ‘’Cos kippers aren’t very nice warmed up, are they? An’ you should
’ave told Dad you didn’t ’ave any pyjamas. ’E’d ’ave lent you a pair of ’is. Mum says if you don’t wear pyjamas in bed you get chills on your
chest.’

Jack cracked with laughter. ‘I don’t have chills on
my
chest, young Rose! When my luck’s in I have something far more interesting! Now scarper so’s we can get
dressed.’

As he threw a pillow in the general direction of her unruly curls, she dodged adroitly, running out of the room, shouting down to her mother, ‘Jack and Christina don’t want to stay
in bed! They’re getting up and going to have their kippers now!’

Jack swung his legs from the bed, still laughing. Rose was a little minx and no mistake. A chill on his chest indeed! And him a Commando! He reached for his trousers, grateful for the way she
had burst in on them. If she hadn’t, Christina’s conversation would no doubt have turned to the subject of concentration camps, and he had determined never to allow her to brood on such
horrors. The war was over and they need never think of it again. What mattered now was the future. The minute he was back in Civvie Street he was going to set about making a tidy fortune, and if he
had to cut a few corners and skirt the law in order to do so, what did it matter? Risk-taking had always been second nature to him, and six years in the Commandos had turned it into a way of life,
a way of life he thrived on. He wanted to be able to give Christina, and the kids they would have together, lots of creature comforts.

He grinned across at her, buckling the leather belt sitting low on his waist. ‘In a year or so, perhaps even less, we’ll have a little madam of our own, just like young Rose. Perhaps
we could give her a name just as pretty. Holly or Poppy or Primrose.’

She was fastening her skirt, her head turned away from him. ‘Don’t you think it would be a flower name too many?’ she said, struggling to keep the despair she felt from showing
in her voice. ‘There’s already a Daisy in the Square. And besides,’ a new note had entered her voice, one he had never heard before, ‘I would like any daughter I have to be
named after my mother and grandmother.’

He was standing by the door, waiting for her, his naked chest broad and bronzed. ‘That’s fine by me,’ he said easily, ‘remind me what your ma and grandma were
called?’

Her hands shook as she fastened the buttons on her blouse. ‘My mother’s name is Eva and my grandmother’s name is Jacoba.’ He’d forgotten their names! How could he
have forgotten their names? And how could he be so insensitive not to notice that where he had used the past tense in talking about her mother and grandmother, she had used the present tense?

‘You’d better go down to the kitchen or your kippers will be cold,’ she said, knowing that unless she had a little time to herself she would break down completely.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute, when I’ve put my stockings on.’

When he had left the room she sank down on to the edge of the bed, her stockings in her hands. How was it possible to love someone so much, and to communicate with them so badly? How could she
and Jack ever enjoy the kind of relationship Kate and Leon, and Carrie and Danny, enjoyed together, when her hopes and fears were a closed book to him?

‘Your kippers are going cold, Christina!’ It was Rose, intending to be helpful.

With an aching heart, she began to put on her stockings, knowing that if she didn’t speedily put in an appearance at the breakfast table Rose, or perhaps even Jack, would be coming
upstairs to see what it was that was delaying her.

The cotton skirt she was wearing was toffee-coloured, her blouse pale buttermilk. She cinched her waist with a cream belt and slipped her stockinged feet into cream-coloured, wedge-heeled
sandals. In an hour or two, when Jack had left for the station, she would go up to the Voigts and see if Carl had any further news for her. There might be letters she could write, a fresh line of
enquiry to follow.

As she entered the kitchen, Carrie gave her a strained smile. She was beginning to suffer from morning sickness, and kippers were the last thing she had wanted to cook. They were, however,
Jack’s favourite breakfast and, as this was the last breakfast of his leave, she had made a special effort. She bit into a piece of dry toast. Christina was looking under the weather as well,
though that would be because of Jack’s approaching departure. She sighed. Christina certainly had nothing else to be despondent about. In another few months Jack would be home for good, and
they would be setting up home in number twelve. If only she and Danny could look forward to setting up home in a house of their own, she wouldn’t let anything get her down, not even morning
sickness.

She looked up at the kitchen clock. It was nearly half past nine, and Danny was still in bed. With a surge of rare irritation, she pushed her chair away from the table, carrying her plate over
to the sink, saying to a startled Rose, ‘Will you tell your dad that if he doesn’t show his face within the next five minutes I won’t be serving him his kipper on a plate,
I’ll be slapping him around the face with it!’

‘It’s time you got yourself a steady girl-friend,’ Mavis said to Malcolm Lewis.

It was a week after Jack had returned to his unit, and she was leaning against Ted’s motor bike, clad in the serviceable slacks and jacket of her bus-conductress’s uniform, her
blonde hair scooped into a scarlet headscarf, the ends fastened in a knot on top of her head.

Malcolm grinned. ‘If you’re offering, I might,’ he said, knowing he stood no chance at all and not too seriously upset by the fact. He was a scoutmaster and an active
Christian, and adultery wasn’t on his agenda. If Mavis had been single though . . . His grin deepened as he thought of what his mother’s reaction would be if he brought a sex-siren like
Mavis home as a girl-friend. Common. Tarty. Fly-by-night. Those would be the kind of words his mother would use to describe Mavis.

Even now, dressed in a far from glamorous clippie’s uniform, Mavis still exuded earthy glamour, impossibly blonde curls escaping from her confining headscarf, tumbling
à la
Betty Grable over her forehead, her lips and fingernails painted the same searing scarlet as her turban. ‘Don’t be so cheeky,’ she said, without the least trace of censure in her
voice. ‘I’m a respectable married woman, Malcolm Lewis, and well you know it.’

Malcolm eyed her in genuine perplexity. Was she? She certainly wasn’t if the rumours about her relationship with Jack Robson were anything to go by. Their chat was being conducted on the
kerb of the pavement, outside number sixteen. Next door, on the bomb-site, Emily Helliwell’s giant-sized cat had returned to his erstwhile home and was stalking some poor unsuspecting
creature through thick undergrowth. On the corner across from number sixteen, Nellie Miller was seated in state on a dining chair placed full-square in her open doorway. From this admirable
vantage-point, she was keeping tabs on her neighbours’ comings and goings, and was taking enjoyable interest in Mavis’s and Malcolm’s
tête-á-tête.

Well aware of Nellie’s affable scrutiny, Malcolm said, changing the subject slightly, ‘When will your husband be demobbed? Have you heard from him?’

Mavis’s thoughts, too, had flicked to Ted. It was all very well harmlessly flirting with Malcolm and teasing him as to whether or not she was all that she should be, but when Ted came home
she would no longer be able to flirt with anyone, harmlessly or otherwise. ‘I had a telephone message from him via Mr Giles. He said he’d definitely be demobbed by Christmas, and with
luck he’d be home for our wedding anniversary in October.’

Any telephone message for Magnolia Square residents came via the vicarage as no-one else in the Square possessed the luxury of a telephone. It meant messages by phone could be delivered but that
conversations between message-giver and eventual message-receiver rarely took place. Mavis wished she’d been able to have a few words with Ted. They’d been separated for so long that
the unthinkable was happening to her; she was growing nervous at the thought of a reunion that wouldn’t only be for the length of a leave, but would be for good.

‘That’ll be nice for you,’ Malcolm said, vaguely surprised that the Lomaxes gave thought to such conventional niceties as wedding anniversaries. ‘I expect that will mean
another good old celebratory knees-up in The Swan.’

‘It might not,’ Mavis said, seeing no reason why Malcolm should live in happy anticipation of an event unlikely to take place. ‘Ted isn’t Jack. He’s a quiet bloke,
and I doubt if he’ll want a rowdy get-together.’