Magnolia Square (38 page)

‘She doesn’t have to be on her own,’ Carl said, as sombre-faced as his friend. ‘If Miss Marshall is agreeable, I will accompany Christina and—’

Christina shook her head, the dark silky wings of her hair falling forward to frame her face. ‘No,’ she said quietly but with utter conviction. ‘That wouldn’t be fair,
Carl – not to you or to Ellen.’

‘Ellen is as appalled as we are,’ he said, speaking for Bob as well as himself, ‘at the thought of you travelling through Germany alone.’ His hands were clasped on the
table in front of him, and the knuckles whitened as he clasped them even tighter, saying, ‘It isn’t only the personal trauma you’re going to suffer at being back in Germany,
surrounded by a people that either supported Hitler’s Jewish policy or passively acquiesced to it, that’s worrying us, Christina. It’s the present situation that exists there.
Germany is a defeated country in a state of chaos. According to the Red Cross, the entire population is on the brink of starvation. The roads will be choked with hungry refugees, and in travelling
south from Cologne to Heidelberg you won’t be travelling through a British-occupied zone, but an American-occupied zone.’ Behind his spectacles, his grey-blue eyes were deeply troubled.
‘It will be far better if I travel with you and—’

‘No.’ The word was quietly spoken but was quite unequivocal. ‘This is something I must do alone. It’s something I
have
to do alone.’

There was a long, heavy silence. At last Bob Giles said, deeply unhappy, ‘The Red Cross have supplied me with names and contact numbers of officials operating in the French zone. If you
should be in need of urgent help they will do their best to provide it.’

‘And while you are away I’ll keep on pursuing the leads we have been given from New York,’ Carl said, taking off his spectacles and squeezing the bridge of his nose to relieve
the terrible tension that was building up over his eyes. ‘There is a Berger on the list of Jewish prisoners who survived Buchenwald. I think it’s unlikely your grandmother would have
been shunted all the way from Heidelberg to Buchenwald but, as anything is a possibility, I’ll write for whatever further information might be available.’

‘Thank you.’ Tears of gratitude glinted on the thick sweeps of Christina’s eyelashes. ‘I shall never know how to thank the two of you for all the help you’ve given
me. And when I come back from Germany I’ll have my mother and grandmother with me, I know I will.’

Neither man spoke. There was nothing they could say. All they could do was pray she returned safely, and that when she did so, her obsession would have been laid to rest.

‘She’s really going?’ Carrie asked Kate, wide-eyed.

Kate nodded, holding her shopping basket at a convenient angle so that Carrie could shoot potatoes into it straight from her weighing-scale scoop. ‘She leaves tomorrow. Dad isn’t
happy about it. He feels terribly responsible.’

‘Why?’ Wearing woollen gloves with the fingers cut off, Carrie expertly tipped the potatoes into the basket. ‘He wasn’t the one who got the Red Cross to lend a hand was
he? That Was Mr Giles.’

‘He doesn’t think Christina would ever have thought of returning to Heidelberg if he hadn’t helped and encouraged her to look for her mother and grandmother,’ Kate said,
keeping an eye on Matthew and Luke who, coated and scarved and gloved against the December cold, were hovering hopefully in front of the nearby bakery stall. ‘And he thought if she ever
did
return, she’d allow him to go with her.’

Carrie’s eyes widened even further. ‘Blimey!’ she said, blowing on her red raw fingers to warm them up a little. ‘Can you imagine what the gossips would have made of
that? Hettie would have a field day!’

‘She’s been having a field day ever since Ruth moved into the vicarage with a wedding ring on her finger,’ Kate said dryly. ‘According to Ruth, every time she so much as
passes the time of day with Hettie, Hettie pitches, in with a remark as to how the first Mrs Giles did things differently, the inference being that Constance also did things very much
better.’

‘It could be worse,’ Carrie said with a grin. ‘It could be Nellie who disapproves of her. Then she really
would
have a battle on her hands!’

‘And so you see, I had to come and put you in the picture,’ Ruby Miller, Nellie’s niece and the Emmersons’ solicitor, said several hours later as she
sat with Leon and Kate in their sitting-room. A coal fire was burning. The children were in bed. Hector was asleep on the hearth rug, his head resting on his paws. Ruby was seated in the
winged-back chair that had been Carl’s favourite chair for reading and nodding off in. Kate and Leon were seated side by side on a sofa, its shabbiness disguised by pristinely white, prettily
hand-embroidered antimacassars.

‘I don’t quite understand.’ Leon’s dark rich voice was taut. His hand tightened on Kate’s and she knew that he was lying. He did understand. He understood all too
well. ‘Are you telling us that Joss Harvey has lodged an objection to my application to adopt Matthew on the grounds of my skin colour?’

Ruby nodded and flicked her cigarette stub into the roaring flames of the fire. With hair dyed a mat, dull black and lips and nails painted a scarlet that would have done credit to Mavis, she
looked as unlike a solicitor as it was possible to imagine. ‘’Fraid so,’ she said in her deceptively laconic manner. ‘And it’s an objection the judge might well be
sympathetic to, given Joss Harvey’s clout.’

‘But Leon is Matthew’s stepfather,’ Kate protested, a familiar feeling of sick dread beginning to churn deep in the pit of her stomach. ‘Nothing can alter that. And if
he’s Matthew’s stepfather, it’s only sensible that he should be his legal father as well!’

‘Where skin colour’s concerned, common sense doesn’t have a look-in,’ Ruby said, crossing nylon-clad legs. ‘Ask any black GI.’

‘What must we do?’ A pulse had begun to throb at the corner of Leon’s strong jawline. ‘Whatever it is . . . whatever it takes . . .’

‘Leave it to me,’ Ruby said succinctly, ‘that’s all you can do.’ She bit the corner of her lip. There was something else they had to be told, something that was
going to cause them added anxiety and heartache. Reluctantly, she said, ‘If the courts decide Joss Harvey’s objection is valid, then I think it’s safe to say he’ll
immediately slap in another custody application. And that isn’t all.’ Her eyes darkened with compassion for them. ‘Your joint application to adopt Daisy is also likely to be
refused. Sorry, my loves, but there it is.’

Kate’s face drained of blood. She’d lived with the fear that Joss Harvey would again seek to obtain custody of Matthew for a long time, but she had never, ever, considered that she
might lose Daisy. And that’s what would happen if they were judged unsuitable to be her adoptive parents. They would be judged to be unsuitable as foster parents as well, and Daisy would be
taken away from them.

‘Oh God!’ She pressed her free hand hard to her mouth. ‘Oh
dear
God!’

‘No-one’s going to break my family up!’
Leon’s rage was white hot. ‘No-one’s going to take our children away from us! Not Joss Harvey! Not the Council!
No-one!’

Ruby cleared her throat. ‘Where Matthew’s concerned, it’s not all doom and gloom,’ she said, taking another cigarette out of its packet. ‘Joss Harvey’s
attempted abduction of Matthew when he was a baby will go against him in a custody application. The fact that he is Matthew’s
great
-grandfather, not his grandfather, will also count
against him. Or it will by the time I’ve finished with him.’ She searched in her jacket pocket for her cigarette lighter. ‘And though he’s only as old as the average
grandfather, and fit as the proverbial bull, I’ll milk the age factor for all it’s worth.’ She paused for a moment, lighting her cigarette. A pulse was hammering at Leon’s
jaw-line. Kate’s now clenched knuckles were white. With a scarlet talon, Ruby removed a fleck of tobacco from her tongue and said, ‘However, although I might very well be able to stop
Joss Harvey from being allowed legal custody of Matthew, it doesn’t mean to say I’m going to be able to stop him preventing Leon from adopting Matthew. And if that happens . .
.’

Kate gave a choked sob. If that happened, then Daisy might very well be taken away from them. Leon’s arm was comfortingly around her shoulder as she said in a voice so cracked and hoarse
it was scarcely recognizable. ‘When is the hearing, Ruby?’

Ruby hesitated. It was a hell of a date. ‘The twenty-fourth of December,’ she said reluctantly, knowing that if it didn’t go their way it was going to be a nightmare of a
Christmas.

‘I don’t want a night out on the town,’ Ted Lomax said apologetically, sticking a poker into the base of the smouldering fire and lifting it, so that a
draught of air fed it and it burst into flames. ‘I’ve been away from home for six years, Mavis. I want to stay in and enjoy my own fireside, not go roaming the West End.’

‘It doesn’t have to be the West End,’ Mavis said, abandoning all hope of Piccadilly’s bright lights. ‘We could go down to the Social Club in Lewisham.
There’ll be lots of your old mates down there.’

He sat back in his armchair, a thin-faced man of thirty-four who felt fifty-four. ‘Not for me, love – not tonight. I just want to be at home. What about some toast? The fire’s
going a treat now.’

Mavis was about to suggest that they at least walk the few dozen yards down to The Swan, but then thought better of it. What would be the point, with Ted as sociable as a monk? ‘Toast it
is then,’ she said, giving in with as much good grace as she could muster. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t as if his refusal to go out was a one-off. They hadn’t been out on the
town together once since his return home.

She mooched into the kitchen and took the lid off her enamel bread bin. She’d always joked about Ted being a fire and pipe man, but it was now so literally the truth that it wasn’t
remotely funny any more. She lifted a loaf out of the bin and put it on the bread board. What did the future hold for the two of them if Ted wouldn’t even go out for a friendly drink on a
Friday or a Saturday night? Ever since the war had ended she had been bored and now, with her husband safely home she was, God help her, more bored than ever. A feeling of shame washed over her.
Ted had had a hard war. There had been no sunning himself in cosy little postings. He had been in the thick of the fighting almost continuously, and however unlikely-looking a hero he was, he
was
a hero and he had a medal to prove it.

She looked at the slices of bread she had carved and realized she had carved far too many. With a shrug she returned two of them to the bread bin. If Billy didn’t have them with jam on in
the morning for his breakfast she’d make a bread pudding out of them. Depression settled heavily on her shoulders. She wanted more to look forward to than the dubious joys of making bread
puddings. She reached for the toasting-fork, remembering the Mormon-missionary-looking young man who had invited her out some time ago, and who now travelled on her bus route every chance he got.
Is that what she wanted? The glamour and excitement of being taken out and wined and dined? Even before she had finished asking herself the question, she knew the answer. When it came to men, there
was only one who could seriously tempt her off the straight and narrow, and he didn’t resemble a Mormon missionary. He resembled Clark Gable at his most masculine. She loaded a tray with the
plate of bread, the toasting-fork, a butter-dish and a knife. What would happen when Jack came home? Would he and Christina sort out their differences? And if they didn’t?

She stared at her reflection in the darkened glass of the kitchen window. If they didn’t, chances were it would have no effect on her own relationship with Jack. She had put the kibosh on
that years ago, when she had so impetuously fallen for Ted and found herself pregnant. And her having fallen for Ted hadn’t ruined her life in any major way. They were far happier together
than many couples she knew. Before he had enlisted he had always brought his pay packet home, putting it unopened on the kitchen table every Friday night. He was never violent in drink and never
knocked her around. They had two grand kiddies and they had always been satisfyingly compatible in bed.

She lifted the tray, walking through into the sitting-room with it, her habitual good humour reasserting itself. Where bed was concerned, nothing had changed, thank God. A grin touched the
corners of her mouth. When they’d had their toast, she’d suggest an early night. If he wouldn’t go out, they could at least make the most of staying in!

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t feel like going swimming this evening,’ Leon said to Danny as they met at their regular Thursday night meeting place on the
corner of the Square and Magnolia Hill. ‘I feel like something a lot more violent.’

Danny tucked his rolled-up towel and his swimming trunks a little more securely beneath his arm. ‘Yer mean boxing?’ he said, his eyes lighting up. ‘We could nip over to the
Enterprise north of the river. It’s a top-notch boxing club if yer fancy a proper work-out.’

‘I fancy punching the hell out of something,’ Leon said grimly. ‘Preferably Mr Joss bloody Harvey.’

‘You imagine yer punch-bag is old man ’Arvey, I’ll imagine mine is my gaffer at the bloody biscuit factory,’ Danny said, who knew all about the spokes Joss Harvey was
putting in the wheels of Leon’s application to adopt Matthew. ‘Did yer know I was once an Army boxin’ champion? Light-welterweight. There was no-one to touch me. If yer
fancyin’ a work-out, Leon, yer’ve come to the right man!’

‘Christmas trees!’ Albert stared at Miriam in stupefaction. ‘Don’t yer think I’ve enough on my mind, Christina jaunting off to Germany in the
mornin’ as if it was no more than a charabanc trip to Brighton, without yer wantin’ me to go out in the dark searching for bloomin’ Christmas trees!’

‘Yer don’t ’ave to search for ’em, I know exactly where they’re growin’,’ Miriam said, refusing to think about Christina’s imminent departure in
case she broke down and never put herself back together again. ‘There’s two trim little conifers growing near the Ranger’s House on the ’Eath. If yer take a bucket and a
spade yer can ’ave ’em back ’ere in two shakes of a donkey’s tail. We can ’ave one of ’em for ourselves and our Carrie can ’ave the other. Now, are yer
goin’, or are you just goin’ to stand lookin’ stupid all night?’