Magnolia Square (45 page)

His arm tightened around Mavis’s waist. ‘I don’t want to lose yer, luv,’ he said fiercely. ‘This next year’s goin’ to be different, I promise. If yer
want takin’ out on the razzle, that’s fine, jus’ as long as it’s me wot’s doin’ the takin’. I want us to be ’appy together, Mavis, jus’ like we
used to be.’

Mavis looked into his eyes, as aware as he of Jack’s so-near presence. Around them, for Malcolm’s benefit, the room had erupted into a noisy chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly
Good Fellow!’ It was a long moment. She felt as if she would one day look back on it as being one of the longest moments of her life. Was she to go on with her marriage to Ted or, like
thousands upon thousands of other women who had, through the war years, discovered a freedom they had never known before, to abandon her marriage and seek a divorce?

And if she abandoned her marriage? She didn’t have to turn her head and look towards Jack to know that Jack would never be waiting for her, not in the way she wanted him to be. A wry,
realistic smile touched her scarlet-lipped mouth. And if Jack wasn’t going to be waiting for her, there was no sense at all in throwing away a good man like Ted Lomax.

‘We will be, Ted,’ she said, standing on tiptoe in her high, wedge-heeled shoes in order to seal her decision with a wifely Christmassy kiss.

He held back from her a little, his eyes holding hers. ‘There’s one other thing, luv. Something I’d like you to agree to.’

Mavis suppressed a sigh. Why was it men were only prepared to go out of their way when they wanted something back in return? ‘All right,’ she said equably, ‘if you’re
prepared to start taking me out on the razzle, I suppose I can’t say “no” to whatever it is you want me to agree to.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

It wasn’t often a grin split Ted’s narrow, serious face, but he grinned now. ‘I want us to ’ave another baby.’

All around them their family and friends had embarked on a string of favourite carols. As hallelujahs filled the air, Mavis said a swear-word even Ted was barely on familiar terms with. Then
glorious throaty laughter spluttered out as she clasped her hands behind his neck, saying, ‘All right, Ted Lomax. But see to it yer bring plenty of parachute silk ’ome! If I’m
goin’ to be wearing maternity tops again, I want to be able to look like Rita ’Ayworth in ’em!’

‘Merry Christmas,
Liebling
,’ Carl Voigt said tenderly as he kissed Kate on the cheek. ‘This is a good Christmas. A Christmas we’ve waited a long time
for.’

Kate twined her fingers through his, squeezing his hand tight, knowing all the things he was remembering – the Christmases he had spent during the war in an internment camp; the
Christmases she had spent alone, and lonely, when anti-German feeling against anyone of German descent had been at its height. Then, after Leon had come into her life, the terrible Christmases when
he had been held a prisoner in German-occupied Russia, and she hadn’t even known if he were still alive.

She looked around the room, at the throng of friends and neighbours spilling out into the hallway and the kitchen, knowing very well why her German-born father thought the Christmas they were
now celebrating was so special. It was because Magnolia Square had chosen to have its collective Christmas Eve party in their family house, eradicating utterly and for ever that almost unbearably
painful time when he had been excluded from such community gatherings.

There were other reasons, too, why this Christmas was so special, and not all of them were to do with it being the first peace-time Christmas in six long, traumatic years.

‘Leon has something to tell you, Dad,’ she said, her eyes shining with a happiness so deep she felt as if it had seeped into her very bones.

Carl looked towards his handsome, muscular, caring and kind black son-in-law. ‘The adoption?’ he asked, hardly daring to say the words in case he was jumping the gun; in case they
hadn’t yet heard.

Leon slid his arm around Kate’s waist, holding her as close as his injured rib cage allowed. ‘Yes,’ he said, his relief and joy almost too deep for expression. ‘It was
granted this morning. Joss Harvey didn’t contest it.’

‘He said that after being a witness to Leon’s bravery he had had second thoughts,’ Kate said, well aware that Leon would never speak of the reason. ‘There’ll be no
problem now about our adopting Daisy. We’re almost completely legal at last, Dad! We’re a family no-one and nothing can separate!’

‘Are we going to ’ave carols first? Or charades? Or a knees-up?’ they could hear Nellie demanding. ‘An’ if we’re goin’ to ’ave carols, can we
start off with “Silent Night”?’

‘What? With all this rabble?’ Daniel retorted equably. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing!’

It was when they were on the final chorus of ‘Silent Night’, Hettie at the piano, everyone crowding around her, that there came the sound of someone knocking on the front door.

‘Now who can that be?’ Albert said as Hettie continued to play. ‘We’re all ’ere, ain’t we?’

‘Emily and the Vicar ain’t ’ere!’ Nellie proffered, waving her sprig of mistletoe in time to the music.

Ruth, who had been standing next to Esther’s wheelchair, rushed for the door as though she had wings on her heels.

‘Blimey,’ Albert said as everyone else continued to sing, ‘I wish Miriam still moved that fast when I knocked on the door!’

On the far side of the piano, Leon and Kate, Christina and Jack, Pru and Malcolm, all swayed to the music as they sang. Or at least, Leon swayed as much as his injuries allowed him to sway, and
Christina merely leaned against Jack, looking almost as if she were being physically supported by him, her lips barely moving, her thoughts far, far away, in another time and another place. Mavis
and Ted, Carrie and Danny, Miriam and Albert and Leah, were all pressed in around the back of Hettie. Doris and Cecily were by the window, cupping a glass of sherry each. Charlie and Harriet were
standing to one side of the fireplace, Carl and Ellen at the other side of it. Daniel was seated in one of the easy chairs, Luke on one knee, Matthew on the other. Nellie was seated in state in the
other easy chair. Billy and Beryl and Rose and Daisy were all sitting cross-legged on the floor, singing lustily, Billy cramming a mince pie into his mouth as he did so.

Bob Giles entered the room, Ruth at his side, and there was something so charged about the two of them, such a powerful emotion barely contained, that Hettie’s hands faltered on the piano
keys and everyone fell silent.

‘What on earth is it, Vicar?’ Nellie asked, never one to be dumbfounded for long. ‘Yer look as though you’ve just been witness to the Second Coming!’

‘I feel as if I have, Nellie,’ Bob said unsteadily, his eyes fixed on Christina, his entire attention focused on her. ‘Christina, my dear,’ he said as if there were only
the two of them in the room, ‘I’ve brought another two guests to the party. Two guests you’ve been looking and looking for . . .’

In the crowded, fire and gas-lit room a pin could have been heard dropping. Very slowly, with not a vestige of blood in her face, Christina moved away from Jack’s supporting arm, walked
from behind the piano, crossed the room towards him.

‘He can’t mean what I think he means!’ Leah whispered to Miriam, pressing a shaking hand to her mouth. ‘Ai-yi! He can’t mean it! It isn’t possible!’

The door behind him, leading into the paper-chain-decorated hallway, was still open. Kate could glimpse Emily, her many scarves reaching almost to her ankles. There were two other people in the
hall, standing just out of view of the door. She could glimpse a booted foot, see the wing of a coat hem.

‘It wasn’t possible to warn you, my dear,’ Bob Giles was saying as Christina approached him almost like a sleep-walker. ‘We weren’t sure, you see. It was impossible
to be sure . . .’

Emily moved arthritically forward into the room. Two women, one heavily middle-aged and one looking older than Time itself, moved, dazed and bewildered, into view behind her. Christina sucked in
her breath and then gave a broken, animal-like cry that sent every scalp in the room prickling and tingling. The very old woman, her face yellowed and wrinkled, didn’t move. Instead, stooped
and frail, she looked round at the sea of faces, and at Christina, uncomprehendingly. The other woman gasped and stumbled forward, her arms outstretched like those of a long-drowning woman about,
at last, to be saved.

‘Mutti!’
Christina took one step towards her – two – was in her mother’s arms; was clinging to her so tightly, it seemed that nothing on this earth would
ever separate them again. ‘Oh,
Mutti! Mutti! Mutti!’

Leah was on her feet, moving towards Jacoba with all the speed of a young girl. ‘Jacoba, my life! Why for don’t you say something? Why for do you look as if you don’t know
me?’ She was hugging and hugging her, Jacoba whom she had promised to be kind to long, long ago, when her father had been killed by the nasty Boers, Jacoba who had been her friend for so, so
long.

‘I don’t think she remembers you, Leah,’ Ruth said gently. ‘She remembers very little . . .’

‘Meine Tochter!’
Eva Frank was murmuring, rocking Christina in her arms.
‘Ach, meine schöne, schöne Tochter!’

‘Blimey,’ Albert was saying, his eyes over-bright. ‘This is a right old Christmas and no mistake.’

‘But how . . .? Where . . .?’ Harriet was saying bewilderedly.

‘Moshambo,’ Emily said proudly, looking like a diminutive and ancient pixie in her layers of variegated wool. ‘Moshambo told me they were both alive and then, when I asked
where, he said to look for them by the Thames.’

‘Grossmutter?’
Still in her mother’s arms, Christina was looking towards her blank-eyed, unresponsive grand-mother. ‘
Grossmutter
, it’s me,
Christina!’

‘The
Thames
?’ Carl Voigt said disbelievingly, ‘
Ach, Du lieber Himmel
! How, in the name of God . . .’

‘They’ve been in London ever since 1938,’ Bob Giles said, causing everyone to gape at him like stranded fish.

‘She doesn’t remember you,
Liebling
,’ Eva Frank was saying to her daughter, her precious daughter, her daughter who had, by a miracle she still didn’t comprehend,
been restored to her. ‘That was why I couldn’t find you! Only she knew her old friend’s address. Only she knew where in London her old friend lived!’

‘And her mother’s been searching for Christina all these years?’ Hettie asked, her voice cracking with emotion at the very thought.

‘How did they get out of Germany?’ Carl was asking Bob.

‘Who are those old ladies?’ Daisy was asking Kate inquisitively. ‘Are they displaced persons, like Anna? Will we have to find clothes for them, like we did for Anna?’

‘Oma?’
It was the name Christina had used for her grandmother when she had been a small child. ‘
Oma
? It’s me, Christina. We’ve found each other at
last,
Oma.
’ Tenderly she touched her grandmother’s face. ‘Please know who I am,
Oma.
Please. Please!’

The tiny wizened figure looked blankly from Christina to Leah and back again. A slight frown puckered the wrinkled brow. ‘Christina?’ she said at last in a quavering, puzzled voice.
‘Christina and Leah?’

Christina took both her grandmother’s hands in hers, willing her to understand. ‘Yes,
Oma.
Leah lives in Magnolia Square. Do you remember? And I now live in Magnolia Square,
too.’

Very slowly Jacoba looked around the room. There were so many faces, so many staring, incredulous faces. The residents of Magnolia Square, even the children, held their breaths.

‘Everyone here is a friend,
Oma
,’ Christina’s voice was breaking with emotion. ‘They are all Leah’s family and friends. All my friends.’

‘It’s true, Jacoba.’ Leah’s face was awash with tears. ‘My Miriam is here, and her
goy
husband Albert. And little Carrie is here, only she ain’t little
any longer,
nu.
When she was little, I used to tell her all about you and me and how we met. Do you remember the schoolroom,
bubbeleh
? Those slates we had to write on, and the smell
of chalk and the teacher saying how your pa had died at Majuba and how I was to be kind to you?’

Something stirred in the depths of Jacoba’s eyes. Though she was still looking at Leah, her hands tightened on Christina’s. ‘And you
were
kind to me,’ she said to
Leah, nodding her head. ‘Always kind.’ She turned to look at Christina, partial understanding dawning at last. ‘And you’re here,
bubbeleh
?’ Tears began to
trickle down her withered cheeks. ‘Ai-yi! After all this time, my darling, my dove, at last you’re here!’

‘No,
Oma
,’ Christina said, hardly able to speak for her own tears, ‘
you
are here. It’s
you
have come to
me
!’

‘Why is everyone crying, Mr Collins?’ Matthew, still on one of Daniel’s knees, asked in fascination.

‘How did they get out of Germany?’ Carl was asking Bob Giles yet again.

‘Jacoba has a British passport,’ Bob said, knowing exactly how incredulous Carl was feeling. ‘They were only imprisoned for a matter of weeks. It was nineteen thirty-six,
remember? At that time, Hitler’s extermination policy wasn’t running at full throttle.’

‘And when we couldn’t find you,
Liebling
, we knew you had managed to escape, and we knew where you would try and make for,’ Eva was saying to Christina. ‘But by
the time we reached England,
Bubbeleh
’s memory was failing. She couldn’t remember her old friend’s married name or her address. She only knew it was near Bermondsey, where
she and Leah had lived as children. That it was near the Thames.’

Daniel raised his eyes to heaven. Near to Bermondsey, for goodness sake! So it was, in a way, but then so were a thousand streets and terraces and squares.

‘I want you to meet my husband,’ Christina was saying to her mother and grandmother, her dark beauty ablaze with the joy singing through her veins. Lovingly she led them each by the
hand to where Jack was still standing by the piano. ‘He isn’t Jewish
Mutti
, but he’s a
chawchem
all the same.’