Magnolia Square (35 page)

With a lop-sided grin, he picked up his kit-bag. No matter that he hadn’t been home for anything other than short, and far too infrequent, leaves over the last six years, some things never
changed. Apart from the bomb-site where the Helliwells’ house had been, Magnolia Square hadn’t changed. The houses in the northern half of the Square, nearest to the Heath, were still
almost grandiosely Edwardian, the steps leading down from their front doors to their garden pathways, scrubbed and white-stoned. In the southern half of the Square – his half of the Square
– there was the same air of cosy ramshackle shabbiness. And Mavis hadn’t changed. She was still as fizzingly full of life as ever. He slid his free arm around her shoulders as they
walked up their cracked front path together, hoping fervently that some of her irrepressible zest for life would rub off on him and make him feel halfway to human again.

‘So where’s our Billy and Beryl?’ he asked half an hour later as he sat near the kitchen boiler, a pint mug of tea in his hands.

Mavis, who had stoically risen above the disappointment of finding herself not in bed, but at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes for chips, said cheerily, ‘Gawd knows. ’E comes
an’ goes when ’e likes. Beryl will be with Rose somewhere, or maybe with Daisy, the kiddie Kate took in. The three of them are always together.’ She began slicing the peeled
potatoes into chips. ‘Harriet Godfrey calls them
The Three Graces.
She says it’s the name of a painting by a bloke called Botticelli, and that it shows three lovely young women,
which is what she says our Beryl and Rose and Daisy are going to grow up to be.’ She chuckled throatily as she began patting the chips dry with a tea-towel. ‘Dad couldn’t get the
’ang of it all. “Who’s Botty-jelly when ’e’s at ’ome?” he kept asking Harriet. “An’ why don’t he jus’ paint a picture of our Beryl
and Rose and their friend an’ ’ave done with it?”’

Ted, who didn’t know who the painter bloke was either, said impatiently, ‘I fink I’ll go out and look for the kids. I was ’opin’ they’d be in the house when I
walked in. I’d sort of imagined how it would be – the two of ’em runnin’ to meet me and everyfink.’

Mavis plunged the chips into boiling fat and turned to face him, perceptively aware that he was suffering from a sense of anti-climax. ‘You’ve bin imagining it all for too
long,’ she said, aware that his home-coming wasn’t going to be without complications. ‘Things never are as you imagine they’re goin’ to be. The kids’ll be over
the moon to see you, but they’ve got used to you not bein’ ’ere. An’ they’re not little ’uns any more, like they were when you went away. Billy’s thirteen
and Beryl’s nine. They’re ’ardly ever in the ’ouse. Why should they be, when I’m workin’ on the buses every hour God sends?’

Ted put his mug of tea down a little unsteadily on the kitchen table. He should have stayed the night in the transit camp, as he and all the others returning home, fresh from overseas had been
advised to do. That way he would have arrived in Magnolia Square showered and spruce and rested. But he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of spending yet another night away from home, when
home was so blessedly near, and the result was that he felt dead on his knees.

‘Well, that’ll soon change now I’m ’ome,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I’ll get my old job back down at the docks an’ we’ll soon be back in the
old routine.’

Alarm flared through Mavis’s eyes. No matter how unexciting her job was in comparison to the danger of her war work, at least it put good money in her pocket and gave her independence and
got her out of the house. The ‘old routine’ hadn’t been that hot, if she remembered rightly. Cooking, cleaning, being pregnant . . .

‘’Ang on a minute, Ted,’ she said, deciding it would be best to tell him right from the beginning that things had changed on the home front and were never going to be quite the
same again, ‘I think you ought to know that—’

She was interrupted by the sound of the front door being flung back on its hinges.
‘Mum! Mum!’
Billy shouted, racing through the house to the kitchen, Beryl hard on his heels.
‘Are you in? Everyone in the Square is sayin’ Dad’s ’ome! Is it true? Is it . . .’

He rocketed into the kitchen and then stopped short, the blood draining from his face. ‘Dad!’ he said with a strangled sob. ‘Oh, Dad! You
are
’ome! You
are!’

‘Daddy!’ Beryl squealed, dashing past Billy, throwing herself into his arms.

As they hugged and kissed and laughed, Billy remained immobile in the doorway. His dad was home! Not just for a leave, but home for good. It was wonderful and stupendous – and it was too
much to take in. In a way he didn’t understand, he felt suddenly frightened.

Over the top of Beryl’s fair hair, his dad’s eyes met his. ‘I’ve missed yer, son,’ Ted said simply, letting go of Beryl, aware of Billy’s momentary emotional
confusion.

Billy gave a choked gasp and then he was running, running, running, tears streaming down his face as he threw himself into his dad’s outstretched arms.

Mavis felt tears sting her eyes. What she had been about to say to Ted could wait till later. All that mattered for the moment was that his long dreamed-of homecoming was, at last, coming
true.

‘Where are we going today, Grandad?’ Matthew asked, wriggling in happy anticipation on the Bentley’s delicious-smelling, leather-covered rear seat.

Joss Harvey patted his great-grandson’s hand and smiled down benevolently at him. He liked the fact that Matthew called him ‘Grandad’ and not ‘Great-Grandad’. To
have been called ‘Great-Grandad’ would have made him feel as old as Methuselah. ‘It’s too foggy a day for parks or zoos,’ he said, glad to see that Matthew’s
mother had had the sense to wrap him up warmly against the nasty November weather. ‘Instead, we’re going to have a very special tea out. Tea at the Ritz. I used to take your daddy there
on his first day home from school every half term. They do the biggest cream cakes in the world at the Ritz.’

Matthew beamed up at him happily. He loved his days out with his grandad. They were special days. Days full of treats and surprises. ‘And toasted teacakes?’ he asked eagerly.
‘When Mummy takes me to Chiesemans we always have toasted teacakes.’

‘I’m not sure about the toasted teacakes,’ Joss replied as the Bentley purred down the Old Kent Road. ‘Would smoked salmon and cucumber sandwiches do instead?’

Matthew wasn’t sure what smoked salmon was. It sounded funny. His daddy smoked when he was doing the gardening or was working on the river, but he didn’t smoke in the house.
‘Gaspers’, he called them. He rolled each one himself, his chocolate-dark fingers moving so fast and so neatly that Matthew never tired of watching. Then he would tuck the gasper behind
his ear, where it nestled against hair so wirily tight and curly that it tickled Matthew’s palms whenever he touched it, making him giggle.

The gasper was in readiness for when he took his ‘toke’. Matthew liked tokes. They were the times when his daddy stopped working for ten minutes or so and made a mug of tea. He
didn’t make it like Mummy made it, in a teapot. Instead, he shook the tea-leaves into a big pint mug, dowsed them with boiling water, then spooned in condensed milk and a shake of sugar.
‘And the next bit,’ he had said the first time Matthew had ever watched him, ‘is the secret bit. The bit that makes a
proper
mug of tea.’ Wide-eyed, Matthew had
watched him as he had put the mug back on the stove. ‘Just to re-heat it,’ his daddy had said. ‘We don’t want to stew it, we just want to bring out the richness.’

And Daddy’s mugs of tea
were
rich. They would sit side by side on the back step, their hands around the steaming mugs of treacly, deep brown liquid, companionably surveying whatever
work they had just completed, a newly planted bed of spring cabbages or newly seeded bed of broad beans or winter lettuce. And a toke didn’t only mean tea and a cigarette. It meant fried egg
or bacon in buttered bread so thickly sliced his mummy laughingly called them ‘doorsteps’.

The Bentley purred around the Elephant and Castle and headed for Westminster Bridge. A group of children seated on the kerb playing ‘Five stones’ gazed after it open-mouthed,
wondering if it belonged to the King or the Queen or the Prime Minister.

‘The Ritz is near to a very good bookshop,’ Joss said, Matthew’s woollen-gloved hand still tucked in his. ‘We’ll call in at Hatchard’s and see if we can buy
you a really nice copy of
Wind in the Willows.
And then we’ll pay a visit to Hamleys.’

‘What’s Hamleys?’ Matthew asked, knowing it would be something nice; knowing it would be somewhere no-one else he knew had ever been.

Once again, his grandad’s pigskin-gloved hand patted his. ‘Hamleys is an Aladdin’s Cave,’ he said, his gruff voice gentle with love. ‘Hamleys was your daddy’s
favourite place in all the world.’

Matthew liked it when his grandad talked to him of his other daddy, the daddy who had died before he had been born. His mummy kept a silver-framed photograph of him on the mantel-piece, and his
new daddy said that his other daddy had been very brave and had died a war hero at a place called Dunkirk.

‘Did you and my first daddy ever have tokes together, Grandad?’ he asked as the Bentley slid to a halt outside the gracious splendour of the Ritz Hotel, Piccadilly.

‘Tokes?’ As Hemmings stepped out of the car to open the rear door for them, Joss stared down at Matthew, his brows beetling together in a slight frown. ‘What is a toke,
Matthew?’

‘It’s when you smoke a gasper,’ Matthew said patiently, climbing out of the Bentley in Joss’s wake, ‘and drink tea that’s been brewed in the mug and reheated
on the stove.’

Hemmings began to cough in a strangled manner. Joss was impervious. He had no intention of shutting Matthew up. He needed to pass on to Cyril Habgood as many details as possible about the
undesirable, working-class aspect of Matthew’s home life in order that Cyril could build up a watertight argument as to why Emmerson’s application to adopt Matthew should be
refused.

‘And you have egg and bacon doorsteps with it,’ Matthew continued blithely, skipping along at Joss’s side as they crossed the pavement, and a commissionaire in a uniform even
grander than Hemmings’s uniform, held a door wide open for them. ‘Doorsteps are when the bread is cut so thick you can—’

‘Good afternoon, Mr Harvey,’ the commissionaire said, touching his cap and wondering if he had heard aright.

Joss strode past him, grim-faced. Tokes indeed! Tea brewed in the mug! Doorstep sandwiches! The sooner Matthew was living with him and acquainted with wafer-thin smoked salmon sandwiches, Earl
Grey and the Queen’s English, the better!

‘Maffew’s home! Maffew’s home!’ Luke cried, scrambling down from his look-out post on the settee in front of the living-room window and running through
into the kitchen to tell everyone.

Kate was in the middle of washing up the supper things. Leon was seated at the table, enjoying a mug of tea as he read the evening paper. Pru and Daisy were at the opposite end of the table,
sticking pressed flowers into a scrapbook.

‘And not before time,’ Kate said dryly, reaching for a tea-towel and eyeing the clock.

There was a loud, sharp knock at the door and Leon’s eyebrows rose, his eyes meeting Kate’s. It was an adult knock. Was Joss Harvey at last paying them a personal call? He pushed his
chair away from the table. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘If Mr Harvey wants a word with anyone, he can have it with me.’

Pru prised a speedwell from blotting paper with a pair of tweezers, unaware of the tension the knock had aroused. As far as she was concerned, Matthew was simply returning from a nice day out
with his great-grandad. Daisy, aware that Matthew’s days out with his great-grandad weren’t like normal outings with grandads, put down the scissors she had been about to cut a piece of
sticky paper with, and looked from Kate to Leon. She didn’t know
why
Matthew going out with his great-grandad was different to his going out with the grandad who had once lived with
them and who now lived in Greenwich, but she knew it was. When Matthew was out with Great-Grandad Harvey, her mummy never laughed and teased quite as much as she usually did. And she always kept
looking at the clock, impatient for it to be the time when Matthew would return, almost as if she were afraid that he
wouldn’t
return.

She sat very quietly, her eyes on the open kitchen door and the corridor beyond that led through the house to the front door. She saw Leon open the door and Matthew charge into the hall, his
cheeks flushed with excitement, a brown paper parcel clasped in his arms. Luke rushed to meet him, noisily demanding to know what the present was. Daisy wasn’t interested in his reply. Her
eyes were on the man at the door. It wasn’t Great-Grandad Harvey. It was the man who drove his big motor car for him. He was carrying a box, a box so enormous his face could scarcely be seen
peeping over the top of it.

‘I can’t help it if you think it inappropriate, mate,’ she heard him saying to Leon. ‘My job is simply to deliver it.’ Awkwardly he thrust the box, which looked to
be very heavy, at Leon and turned on his heel, striding back to the motor car.