Magnolia Square Read online

  Hettie grunted agreement, grateful that she hadn’t any daughters who could run off marrying black sailors. She folded her arms across her matronly chest, saying in a voice that settled the matter, ‘What’s she going to wear though? She can’t very well wear white, can she? Not with two of her nippers in the front pew. Your Carrie looked lovely in her wedding dress when she married our Danny. Say what you like, you can’t beat a white wedding. Is that Doris Sharkey over there? Why has she got her hat pulled half over her face? She looks as if she’s attending a funeral, not a blooming wedding!’

  ‘You look beautiful, Liebling,’ Carl Voigt said to Kate, a lump in his throat. ‘Your mother would have been so proud of you!’

  Kate looked towards the mantel where a photograph of her mother had stood for sixteen years, ever since her untimely death. From the silver frame loving, laughing eyes met hers. Would her mother have been proud of her? She hoped so. She hoped so with all her heart. There had been times, when first Matthew had been born illegitimately and then Luke had followed him, that she had often wondered what her mother’s reaction to their births would have been. She stood silently for a few moments, the blue silk dress she had made with Carrie’s help falling sleekly to her ankles, her eyes moving from her mother’s photograph to the photograph standing next to it.

  Toby had been twenty-three when the photograph was taken. In a fleece-lined RAF flying jacket, he stood nonchalantly beside his Spitfire, a lock of Nordic-blond hair falling low across his forehead. Two weeks after the photograph was taken he had been killed, piloting his Spitfire over the Dunkirk beaches, engaging in battle with the Heinkels and Messerschmitts strafing the retreating British Army.

  She had loved Toby. In a way that Leon completely understood, she still did love him. But her love hadn’t been forged in maturity as her love for Leon was forged. She was bound to Leon with hoops of steel. Because of his mixed-blood parentage, Leon had always been a social misfit and, when they had first met in the dark, seemingly hopeless days of the war, she too, because of her father’s German nationality, had also been a misfit, reviled and ostracized, and unbearably lonely. Her tummy muscles tightened at the mere memory. People had long ago resumed normal, friendly relations with her, but for an unforgettable period of time she and Leon had faced a hostile world together, and it was an experience that had welded them together as no other experience could have done. She knew the indignities Leon often suffered on account of his racial difference, for she had suffered very similar indignities. She knew the stoicism and hurt that lay beneath his apparent indifference to those indignities for she, too, had erected a similar false front. And now, at last, they were going to be married.

  She turned away from the photographs and picked up her wedding bouquet of yellow Canary Bird roses. ‘I’m ready, Dad,’ she said, slipping her free arm through his. ‘I’ve never been more ready in all my life.’

  There were murmurs of appreciation from her friends as she stepped inside the church on her father’s arm, to the measured strains of ‘The Wedding March’. Her dress was blue, not white: a deep lavender blue that emphasized the blue of her wide-spaced, thick-lashed eyes. She was wearing a hat, not a veil. With a shallow crown and large picture brim, dyed to the exact same shade as her dress and decorated with a tiny posy of Canary Bird roses, it looked both stylish and seductive.

  Carrie, as matron-of-honour, was dressed in a simple blue floral summer dress, her bouquet a smaller version of Kate’s. Daisy, who was Kate’s only small bridesmaid, was dressed similarly in a dress that was blue and white and summery, though, where Carrie’s dress was prudently unadorned, Daisy’s was as flounced and ruffled as a princess’s. She wore a large white satin ribbon in her straight dark hair, and another white satin ribbon decorated her posy of Canary Bird bud roses.

  As Kate reached Leon’s side, and as the sound of Ruth Fairbairn’s organ playing faded away, Bob Giles looked at them both and smiled. It was the first wedding in Magnolia Square since the German surrender. Soon it would be followed by Charlie and Harriet’s wedding, and then by his own wedding to Ruth. Soon too, pray God, the war still being fought in the Far East and the islands of the Pacific would also come to an end. Life was again full of hope. And for the young couple standing before him it was full of deep, abiding joy.

  ‘Dearly beloved,’ he said, lifting his eyes from their radiant faces, looking out over his abnormally large congregation, ‘we are gathered together here in the sight of God, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony . . .’

  Ellen Pierce clasped her net-gloved hands tightly together. Kate looked beautiful. With her long, heavy braid of wheat-gold hair coiled into an elegant knot in the nape of her neck, she looked more than beautiful. She looked regal. A spasm almost of pain flared through Ellen’s eyes. Kate’s looks hadn’t been inherited from Carl who, with his thinning hair and rimless spectacles, was pleasingly intellectual-looking but far from handsome, but from her mother. Was that why Carl had still not asked her to marry him? Because he couldn’t bear the thought of settling, in middle age, for a plain, socially awkward woman, when he had once been married to a woman who, if her photograph was anything to go by, had looked like a happy Greta Garbo?

  ‘Thirdly,’ Bob Giles was saying, ‘it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. Therefore if any man can show any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.’

  There was a silence in which a pin could have been heard dropping. It was broken by Wilfred Sharkey clearing his throat in what was interpreted, by many people, to be a disapproving manner. Ellen was oblivious of Wilfred’s contribution to the proceedings. ‘Mutual society, help, and comfort.’ The words rang in her head. That was what she wanted to share with Carl. He had been on his own for a long time and he wasn’t a gregarious man. If he had been, she would never have had the temerity to offer him her friendship in the first place.

  ‘I require and charge you both,’ Bob Giles was now saying solemnly to both Kate and Leon, ‘as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it . . .’

  Of course, offering Carl friendship way back in early 1940 had been an easy thing to do. Kate had been a secretary at Harvey’s Builders where she, Ellen, was Personnel Manageress. When Kate had disclosed to her that her father had been interned, she had shyly begun a correspondence with him to help him combat the loneliness and boredom she was sure he was experiencing. There had been many times since his release from internment when she had wondered if their pen-pal friendship hadn’t been easier, and more rewarding, than the personal relationship which had succeeded it.

  ‘Wilt thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife,’ Bob Giles was now saying to Leon, ‘to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?’

  Christina sat in one of the left-hand pews. It was the first time she had listened to the words of the Anglican wedding service since they had been spoken at her own wedding. After the ceremony, and the obligatory reception held in the church hall, she and Jack had driven into Kent. Their wedding night had been spent in a small, lattice-windowed room above the White Bear Inn, in Brasted. That was all the time they had had together. The next morning he had returned to his unit and he had had no leave since. And at the end of the month, according to Mavis, he was going to be home again. Soon he would be coming home for good, and their married life together could truly start.

  Leon had made his response in his distinctive, honey-dark voice. It was now Kate’s turn to make hers.

  ‘I w
ill,’ she said quietly, and without the least sign of nervousness.

  Christina twisted her wedding ring round and round on her finger. Why hadn’t Jack written to her with such important news? Had he, perhaps, done so, and had the letter gone astray in the mail, as Carrie insisted so many of Danny’s letters had done? And even if he had written to her with the news, why had he written to Mavis at all? Mavis was a married woman, for goodness sake. Jealousy flared through her. Was he still continuing his gossip-arousing relationship with Mavis because of what had happened, or rather what had not happened, on their wedding night?

  She felt sick with apprehension and regret. Why hadn’t Jack been more understanding? Why hadn’t he realized how traumatic the day had been for her, marrying in an Anglican church? Marrying without one member of her family being there as a witness. Marrying with her heart and mind full of thoughts of her dead and missing loved ones.

  ‘Forasmuch as Katherine and Leon have consented together in holy wedlock,’ Bob Giles was saying sonorously, ‘and have witnessed the same before God and this company, and thereto have given and pledged their troth either to other, and have declared the same by giving and receiving of a Ring, and by joining of hands; I pronounce that they be Man and Wife together, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

  Christina became aware that an elderly neighbour, Emily Helliwell, was watching the way she was twisting her wedding ring round and round. Quickly she dropped her hands to her sides. Emily was Magnolia Square’s local palm-reader and clairvoyant, and Christina knew that it wouldn’t take much to alert her to the fact that things between her and Jack weren’t quite as they should be.

  ‘Almighty God,’ began Bob Giles, embarking on his final blessing of the happy couple, ‘who at the beginning did create our first parents, Adam and Eve, and did sanctify and join them together in marriage; Pour upon you the riches of His grace . . .’

  As she stood behind Kate at the altar, tears stung Carrie’s eyes. She, more than anyone else in the church, knew just how much Kate deserved her present happiness. There had been the anguish she had suffered when, at the outbreak of war, her father had been interned. Then there had been Toby Harvey’s death at Dunkirk. And lastly, but by no means least, there had been the traumatic years after Leon had been reported missing and she had not known if he had been taken prisoner, or if he had died.

  ‘. . . sanctify and bless you, that ye may please Him both in body and soul, and live together in holy love unto your lives’ end. Amen.’

  And now Kate and Leon were married. And unlike most newly married couples, they already had a family of three children. With every fibre of her being, Carrie wished them well. She had been married long enough herself to know that marriage wasn’t the fairy tale they had believed it to be when they were schoolgirls. When a house had to be shared with parents, and care had to be taken that neither love-making nor arguments were overheard, it was hard work. And it was even harder work when a man accustomed to wielding authority as a sergeant had to acclimatize himself to being just another factory employee.

  Lines of tension etched her mouth. Ever since Danny had been eighteen, he had been a professional soldier. Or he had been until the last few months when, liberated in poor health from his Italian prison camp, he had been given the opportunity of opting for a Sick Discharge. He hadn’t wanted to take it. He had wanted to return to non-active service – and she had persuaded him otherwise.

  Ruth Fairbairn began to play the organ again. The hymn was ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, chosen by Kate because it was her children’s favourite. Carrie sang the familiar words, her thoughts far away from them. Though she hadn’t admitted it to anyone yet, not even Kate, she knew now that she had made a grave mistake. Danny had been happy in the Army. He had known respect and responsibility, and was Sergeant Collins, sir. In Civvie Street, working at the biscuit factory, he was just another debilitated returnee with no authority whatsoever. And he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy at all.

  With a heavy heart, she wondered just how long it would be before he began laying the blame at her door, and what on earth the two of them would do when he did so.

  ‘Doesn’t Kate look elegant!’ Harriet Godfrey said to Nellie Miller as, the hymn having come to an end, the bride and groom began to walk back down the aisle to joyful organ music.

  ‘She looks the bee’s knees,’ Nellie said, hoisting herself to her feet with difficulty. The pew seat was very narrow, and as her posterior was very large, the last twenty minutes or so had been exceedingly uncomfortable. ‘I wonder who Kate is going to throw ’er bouquet to?’ she said as they filed out of the pew and into the aisle in the wake of Kate and Leon.

  ‘Prudence Sharkey is young and single,’ Harriet said musingly. ‘Perhaps she’ll throw it to Prudence.’

  Nellie made a disparaging noise that turned several heads. Harriet lifted her eyebrows slightly. Nellie was unrepentant. ‘Don’t go givin’ me none of your ’ead-mistressy looks, ’Arriet,’ she said, looking across to where Wilfred Sharkey was saying something to his wife, a frown pulling his eyebrows together. ‘With Wilfred for a father, that young lady stands no chance of becoming a bride.’

  It was Harriet’s turn to frown slightly. She prided herself on being an excellent judge of character and had always regarded Wilfred Sharkey as being a pillar of Magnolia Square’s little community. ‘I don’t quite understand,’ she said as they stepped out of the church into the blazing summer sunshine. ‘Wilfred’s manner can be a little severe, but—’

  ‘Severe?’ Nellie looked as if she were going to explode. ‘’E’s more than severe, ’Arriet, ’e’s a proper misery, and ’e makes ’is family’s life a misery too. There’s no popping into The Swan for a drink and a bit of a knees-up for Doris. Oh dear me, no. Wilfred don’t approve of drink and ’e don’t approve of a good time either. Poor Prudence isn’t allowed any boyfriends. The only thing in pants allowed over Wilfred’s doorstep is the insurance man, and ’e must be eighty if ’e’s a day!’

  ‘Come on, ladies,’ Albert Jennings exhorted, a box of pre-war confetti at the ready. ‘Stop the chatter and pay the bride and groom some attention.’

  Harriet, aware it was a miracle they hadn’t been overheard, was only too happy to do as he suggested. As an ex-headmistress, she felt obliged to set a certain standard of behaviour, and gossiping at a wedding about a fellow wedding guest and neighbour was not the way to do it.

  ‘I want the bride and groom on their own for the first photograph,’ Daniel was saying authoritatively, a box Brownie camera hung importantly around his neck. ‘In front of the church porch will be lovely, if the children can be lifted out of the way.’

  Carrie scooped up a bewildered Luke and removed him from the field of Daniel’s vision. Charlie ambled forward and lifted a protesting Matthew high into his arms.

  ‘Only one photograph without the children,’ Kate said to her photographer, radiant with happiness and not wanting that happiness to be flawed by her children’s displeasure at being removed so unceremoniously from her side.

  ‘I must have a little room,’ Daniel protested as he was jostled by the happy couple’s friends and neighbours. ‘Will someone get that dog out of the way, please?’

  ‘Oh, do get a move on, Daniel!’ Miriam Jennings called out in exasperation. ‘You’re takin’ a wedding photograph, not paintin’ the bloomin’ Sistine Chapel!’

  Daniel took the photograph. Charlie swung Matthew down to the ground, and Carrie released her hold on Luke. With Matthew grasping tight hold of Leon’s hand, Luke holding on to Kate’s, Daisy in front of them and Carrie to one side of them, another photograph was laboriously taken. Then Daniel wanted to take a photograph of Kate and her father. And then one of Kate and Carrie and Daisy.

  ‘Hey up,’ Charlie said in a whispered aside to Harriet, his eyes not on the happy couple but on the exceedingly flash car he had just spied parked at the top end of the Square, and on the elderly, bulldog-jaw
ed, expensively suited figure standing beside it, ‘but I fink Kate’s got trouble, ’Arriet.’

  Harriet turned her head, saw what he had seen, and sucked her breath in sharply.

  ‘Do you fink I should ’ave a word with ’im?’ Charlie asked, deeply troubled. ‘Do you fink I should tell ’im it will spoil ’er day if she sees him standin’ there, watchin’?’

  Harriet immediately laid a restraining hand on his arm. ‘No, Charlie. It would only make matters worse. With a little luck, he’ll have gone by the time Daniel has finished taking photographs.’

  Charlie looked towards the menacing figure of old Joss Harvey, of Harvey Construction Ltd, the man who was little Matthew’s paternal great-grandfather, and hoped she was right. And if she wasn’t? What could he, or anyone else, do about it? Old man Harvey was little Matthew’s great-grandfather. He had as much right taking a look at Matthew’s mother on her wedding day, as anyone else. But Kate wouldn’t want him there. Not after all the trouble he had caused her. Not after he had tried to take Matthew away from her.

  ‘For the Lord’s sake, Daniel, ’ave done with the photos and let’s throw the confetti!’ Miriam called out, voicing her own, and everyone else’s, impatience.

  With difficulty, Charlie and Harriet returned their attention to the bride and groom. Carrie’s daughter, Rose, presented Kate with a lucky horseshoe. Billy Lomax attempted to present her with a handful of coal so sooty that his hands and face were already as streaked as a miner’s, and he was only prevented from doing so by being speedily hauled away by his grandmother.

  ‘Yer stupid little bugger!’ Miriam said irately as his cargo scattered far and wide. ‘Yer supposed to give the bride a small piece of coal for luck, not half drown ’er in a ton of nutty slack!’

  At last, to everyone’s satisfaction, the bride and groom prepared to make a run for it through a traditional shower of confetti.