Magnolia Square (13 page)

Jack made a choking sound and she said, perplexed, ‘Well, that’s what Grandad said, but I don’t understand it. Your dad doesn’t play a fiddle, does he? And Miss Godfrey
only plays the piano.’

When Jack could trust himself to speak he said hoarsely, ‘And when’s this wedding going to take place?’

Beryl shrugged her shoulders. ‘I dunno. I ’spect they’re waiting for you to come home.’ She flashed him a smile that almost split her elfin face in half. ‘And
you’re home now, aren’t you? Perhaps it will be this week!’

It was Billy who saved Jack from having to make any kind of a response. He had been languishing high up in a favourite tree in Magnolia Terrace, and the second he saw them he jackknifed upright,
nearly falling out of it.

‘Jack!
Jack!
’ he yelled, waving madly. ‘Have yer got any Commando knives with yer? ’Ave yer got any Jerry ’elmets?’

By the time Beryl and Jack reached the foot of the tree Billy, whooping like a dervish, had shinned down it.

‘Wotcher, mate,’ Jack said affectionately, rumpling Billy’s spiky mop of hair. ‘Who were you on the look-out for? A Luftwaffe pilot that doesn’t know
Germany’s surrendered yet?’

‘Nah,’ Billy said, not wanting his idol to think he was so daft, ‘but it ain’t ’alf borin’ not ’avin’ anything to look out for. Mum thinks
it’s boring too, ’specially as my gran’s kicking up a ruckus about ’er goin’ out at night. Gran says my dad’ll be ’ome soon,’ he added
confidentially, ‘and that as Mum will ’ave to start behavin’ ’erself then, she might as well start behaving ’erself now.’

Jack, well accustomed to the plain speaking that took place in the Jennings and Lomax households, merely grinned at the thought of Miriam trying to clip Mavis’s wings at this late stage of
the game. Inwardly he wasn’t grinning at all. He was trying to come to terms with Beryl’s shattering news.

Had his father really proposed marriage to Harriet Godfrey? Harriet Godfrey, a woman he and his friends had always referred to, when she had been their junior school headmistress, as a prissy
old trout? He’d known, of course, that the two of them had struck up an unlikely friendship. His father had never grasped the difficulties of reading and writing and, inexplicably, Harriet
Godfrey had one day taken it into her head to begin teaching him. Even more inexplicably, his father had happily allowed her to do so. From then on the two of them had been regularly seen together,
walking Queenie on the Heath or enjoying a drink at The Princess of Wales. And now, according to Beryl, they were going to get married.

As Billy grabbed the lids off two dustbins and began leading the way into Magnolia Square, clanking them together and shouting to the world at large, ‘Jack’s home! Jack’s
home!’ Jack wondered if there was any hope that Beryl had misheard or misunderstood. Children often did, after all. Or perhaps whoever had told her the news had been teasing her. Or had been
just trying to stir up trouble. Or . . .

‘Welcome home, Jack!’ Daniel Collins cried, pushing his bedroom window up and hanging half out of it, his braces dangling. ‘Has Beryl told you Leon Emmerson’s come
marching home as well? Smashing news, isn’t it?’

Other windows were also being opened. Doors were being thrown wide. Despite his consternation as to whether Beryl’s news was genuine or not, Jack couldn’t help being vastly amused by
the shouts of welcome being hurled at him from all sides. There had been a time, before the war, when he and his twin brother had been the local bad boys. Then Jerry had died, fighting the Fascists
in Spain, and everyone had immediately forgotten their previous opinion of him and had eulogized him instead. Now, it seemed, it was his turn to come in for a bit of the same treatment.

As Billy noisily led the way past the Voigts’ house, the door was tugged open and Kate burst out of the house, a dark-skinned, curly headed toddler at her heels, Hector charging in front
of her.

‘Jack! How wonderful!’ she cried, running down to her gate, her eyes shining, her long braid of flaxen hair swinging like a schoolgirl’s.

For Kate, he paused. There had been a time, long ago, when he had wondered if she might one day become his sister-in-law. Then news had come of Jerry’s death and he had never known if his
assumptions about their relationship had been correct or not. He kissed her warmly on the cheek, saying, ‘I’ve heard the news about Leon,’ adding teasingly, ‘I’m glad
to know he’s made an honest woman of you at last. Wasn’t before time though, was it?’

‘It certainly wasn’t,’ she agreed with full-throated laughter.

Luke tugged at her skirts. ‘Who that man, Mummy?’ he demanded, not liking the disconcerting familiarity between his mother and the big, dark-haired stranger.

‘He’s a friend and neighbour, sweetheart.’ She bent down and scooped him up in her arms so that he could say hello to Jack face to face. ‘And his name is Jack.’

As if to corroborate her words, there were cries of ‘Jack! Jack!’ and half a dozen of Billy’s mates came dashing up the street, eager to give their local hero a royal
welcome.

‘You’d best be on your way,’ Kate said to him as Luke put his thumb in his mouth and leaned his head against her shoulder, and Nellie Miller steamed into the Square from the
direction of Magnolia Terrace. ‘Nellie’s a one-man welcoming band. If she gets you in her clutches you won’t be reunited with Christina until Christmas!’

Well aware of the truth of her words Jack gave Nellie a cheery wave and then, a growing entourage of children and dogs at his heels, set off at a brisk pace towards the bottom end of the
Square.

Swiftly he strode past number six and number eight and then past the Sharkeys’ house. Net curtains twitched to one side but whether it was Wilfred Sharkey or his wife taking a
surreptitious look-see, he neither knew nor cared. His own house was next, but he didn’t even pause by its gate. Christina wouldn’t be there. She would be at the Jennings’s. Or
she would be if she wasn’t down the market, helping Albert out at his fruit and veg stall.

Excitement and anticipation knotted his stomach muscles into painful knots. ‘Please God,’ he prayed inwardly, ‘don’t let her be down the market. Let her be in the house.
Let the waiting be nearly at an end!’

With Billy still leading the way, and clanging his filched dustbin lids together as if they were giant cymbals, he strode past the overgrown bomb-site that had once been the Misses
Helliwells’ house. The roses of medieval France and Persia that Emily Helliwell had once so lovingly tended ran riot over the rubble. Uncaring of their beauty and scent, he turned the corner
on to the bottom end of the Square.

The Lomax’s front door was slammed back on its hinges so hard a slate fell off the roof.
‘Jack!’
Mavis shrieked, rocketing down her pot-holed pathway at suicidal speed.
‘For the love of God! What ’ave you got with you? A bloody brass band?’

Next door, at the Jennings’s, an upstairs window was shuttered open and Miriam leaned out, metal hair curlers bristling hedgehog-like all over her head. ‘Jack’s home!’
she shouted over her shoulder to the household at large. ‘Someone tell Christina to get to the front door sharpish!’

Leah was already at the door, Carrie was running down the stairs to join her. Danny, in the kitchen mending a pair of working boots on Albert’s last, put down his hammer and decided to
have a cigarette. In his opinion too much fuss had always been made over the fact that Jack Robson was a Commando. Being a Commando didn’t automatically make a man a hero.

Through the open window, he could see Christina pegging washing on the clothes-line. ‘Your old man’s ’ome,’ he shouted to her laconically. ‘And at this rate
you’re goin’ to be the last person in the Square to give ’im a welcome!’

Christina stared at him for a moment in disbelief then, as the sound of Billy’s clanging dustbin lids impinged on her consciousness, she dropped the towel she had been about to peg on the
line, running, running, running. Up the back garden path and into the house, through the kitchen, down the littered hallway to the open front door. And there he was, as devastatingly handsome as
ever, swinging a squealing Mavis round and round in his arms.

‘Nevertheless, I do feel Moshambo has let me down very badly,’ Emily Helliwell said to her wheelchair-bound sister and to Nellie Miller, who had called in on them
to tell them the news of Jack Robson’s homecoming. ‘If only he had communicated with me and told me when Jack was coming home, we could have organized a proper welcome party for
him.’

Moshambo was Emily’s spirit-guide, and both her sister and Nellie were well accustomed to hearing her speak of him as if he were a tangible presence.

‘It ain’t old Moshambo’s fault,’ Nellie said fairly. ‘Jack’s only ’ome on leave after all.’

Though they were in the living-room, she was sitting on a straight-backed kitchen chair as it was the only type of chair she could rise from without the help of three strong men.

Esther Helliwell’s wheelchair was stationed near the window. From this viewpoint she could watch all her neighbours’ comings and goings and also see the bomb-site of what had once
been the home she and Emily shared. The church, unfortunately, obliterated her view of the opposite top end of the Square, but its Christmas-card prettiness and its magnolia tree were ample
compensations.

She dragged her eyes away from the sight of Doris Sharkey scurrying home from the direction of Lewisham as if her life depended on it, saying helpfully, ‘Perhaps you could communicate with
Moshambo and ask him when dear Jack will be demobbed?’

‘An’ if you do communicate with ’im, ask ’im when my Arthur’s goin’ to be released by the Japs,’ Nellie said, not wanting her nephew’s plight to
be forgotten in the euphoria of Jack Robson’s home-coming.

Emily’s liver-spotted hands fiddled a little nervously with one of the several bead necklaces draped around her neck. It was all right Esther and Nellie suggesting she communicate with
Moshambo, but it wasn’t as easy as they seemed to think. Moshambo was an American-Indian spirit-guide and didn’t take kindly to being summoned as if he were a civil servant at the
Public Information Bureau.

‘We could ring the Public Information Bureau,’ Daniel was saying to his fellow deputy churchwarden as they met with Bob Giles for their weekly meeting.

‘To find out if, and when, local authorities are going to be given the power to requisition empty houses?’ Wilfred Sharkey asked deridingly.

Daniel was unabashed. As far as he was concerned, a public information service was empowered to give the public information. And he wanted to know what was going to happen to number seventeen
now the Binns family were moving out of it. He wanted to know, because Carrie and Danny were anxious to move into it.

‘I’ll speak to Housing and find out what I can,’ Bob Giles said, uncomfortably aware that if he hadn’t agreed to number eight, a church property, being set aside to
accommodate a Polish displaced person, the young Collinses could have moved in there and enjoyed a peppercorn rent. ‘And now I’d like to ask your opinion on something I intend doing,
but which might be a little controversial,’ he said, changing the subject.

His two churchwardens, arraigned at the far side of his desk, waited, Daniel trustingly, Wilfred suspiciously. Bob Giles gave himself an extra minute’s grace by tamping tobacco into the
bowl of his pipe. At last, after lighting it, and sucking it into life, he said, ‘Monday’s news, about the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was terrible enough, but today’s news, that
a second A-bomb has been dropped on Nagasaki, is terrible, truly terrible.’

Daniel bit the corner of his lip. It
was
terrible, there was no doubt about that, but it was also bound to result in the Japs surrendering and so, as he saw it, out of a terrible event
would come a mercy. Wilfred Sharkey’s thin mouth tightened until it virtually disappeared. If the Vicar was going to suggest what he thought he was going to suggest . . .

‘I intend offering prayers at tonight’s evening service for the victims,’ Bob Giles continued, fulfilling Wilfred’s expectations. ‘I shall also, of course, be
offering prayers for the safe return of men still being held prisoner in the Far East and—’

‘I protest!’ Wilfred’s nostrils were pinched and white. ‘The Japanese are in league with the devil. The rain of ruin now descending on their cities is just and righteous
punishment! The—’

‘Hey, steady on, old chap,’ Daniel said in consternation as Wilfred’s limbs began to jerk like a marionette’s. ‘There’s no need to take on so, you’ll
make yourself ill.’

Wilfred took no heed of him. He’d had a headache all day and now his head felt as if it were in a vice. The Vicar didn’t understand about the Japanese. He didn’t understand how
all evil was pre-ordained. He didn’t understand the cleansing power of fire and blood. ‘“And I saw the seven angels which stood before God,”’ he declaimed suddenly,
falling back on to the sturdy rock of
Revelations,
‘“and to them were given seven trumpets and the first angel sounded and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood . .
.”’