Two Silver Crosses, page 8
‘They weren’t letters. They were just postcards.’
‘Did you write back?’
‘We couldn’t. We never had an address.’
‘Extraordinary,’ the old man said. ‘And now you want me to make a will to tempt them home. Is that it?’
‘I thought it would be an idea.’
‘It would halve your sons’ portion,’ Mr Holborn pointed out.
‘Yes,’ she agreed seriously. ‘It would. But if you were to do it, at least it would be fair, wouldn’t it? After all, they are Edward’s children. They ought to inherit.’
‘You’re a good woman, Agnes,’ Mr Holborn said affectionately, and he wondered yet again how she’d ever come to fall for such a pip squeak as Claud. ‘You’ve got a good heart. Better than mine, eh?’
But his joke fell flat. Now that she’d made her suggestion, she was anxious to keep news of it from Claud. ‘You could do it sort of privately,’ she worried. ‘Couldn’t you, Father? I mean there wouldn’t be any need to tell anyone else, would there?’
‘Leave it to me,’ her father said. ‘It’ll be our secret.’
Two days later he drew up his will. It was, as Horace Crabbit was happy to tell him, a masterpiece.
I leave and bequeath my estate, in toto, to my four grandchildren, my grandsons, George Norman Everdale and John Arthur Everdale of this address, and my granddaughters, Virginia Holborn and Emily Holborn, late of High Holborn, presently residing at a place unknown to me somewhere in France.
‘Cognisant of the fact that my grandsons are not yet of age and that it may take considerable time to trace the whereabouts of my granddaughters, I hereby give instructions that the search be continued for four years after my death and its initial institution, during which time the Company is to be administered in trust by my son-in-law, Claud James Everdale, and his wife, my daughter, Agnes Everdale, in conjunction with a board of management consisting of my works manager, Mr Jack Pennyfield, my chief engineer, Mr Roger Smith, the company secretary, Mr Thomas Reinhart, and Claud and Agnes Everdale, all with equal voting rights. During this time, neither the house, nor the company, nor any part of the estate is to be sold or altered in any way. If, at the end of four years, or by the majority of my younger grandson, whichever is the later, my granddaughters are not discovered, the estate is to pass, in toto, to my grandsons.
‘There’s only one thing I regret about this,’ the old man said.
‘And what’s that?’ Mr Crabbit asked, wiping his pen.
‘I shan’t be here to see Claud’s face when it’s read.’
‘Come back and haunt us just for the day,’ Mr Crabbit suggested.
‘If I can find out how it’s done, I will.’
‘Well, if anyone can find out how it’s done,’ Mr Crabbit chuckled, ‘you’ll be the man.’
So the will was signed and witnessed by Agnes Everdale and Horace Crabbit and the two men parted in high good humour, Mr Holborn to the afternoon rest he swore he didn’t need, and Mr Crabbit to Wolverhampton station and the journey back to town. He couldn’t wait to break his good news to Mr Hedgethorn.
Crabbit and Hedgethorn, Solicitors, had their offices in Little Medlar Yard, a small dark cul-de-sac leading north out of the Strand in London. Lined by the blackened façades of three Georgian terraces that had once been the townhouses of various up-and-coming merchantmen, it didn’t, at first sight, look impressive. Nowadays the houses were used in a more discreet fashion by several well-established solicitors, among whom Messrs Hedgethorn and Crabbit were two of the more prestigious. Their clients might be few in number, but they were mostly wealthy industrialists who had managed to hold their own during the depression, and, in addition to the trade they provided, the rash of bankruptcies that had spread through the City during the last few years had brought the firm a great deal of extra (and delicate) work. So much, in fact, that Mr Hedgethorn was planning to expand into a second storey and had let it be known that the firm was prepared to take on another articled clerk.
That afternoon, while Mr Crabbit was in Wolverhampton, he’d been interviewing the resulting candidates and now they were sitting in a row in the outer office waiting to be told their fate. Mr Crabbit walked right past them on his way into the inner sanctum.
‘Read that,’ he said, tossing the will on to the mound of paper on his colleague’s desk, ‘and tell me if you don’t think it’s the prettiest piece of business I’ve done in a long while.’
Mr Hedgethorn was impressed. ‘There’s a deal of work in it,’ he said, when he’d read it. ‘Yes indeed. It’s most satisfactory. Are we to institute the search instanta?’
‘We can make an unofficial start as soon as we are given an address,’ Mr Crabbit told him. ‘The old boy’s waiting for somebody to write. Officially, of course, it doesn’t begin until his death. Either way we shall have plenty to keep us occupied.’
‘Excellent,’ Mr Hedgethorn said, patting the will. He always patted papers when he was pleased with the contents. But then he frowned. ‘Now what are we to do about our new clerk?’
Mr Crabbit was lighting a cigar. ‘Haven’t you chosen one?’ he asked, his bushy eyebrows twitching against smoke and incredulity. ‘I thought the interviews were this afternoon.’
‘They were,’ Mr Hedgethorn said. ‘In point of fact they still are. They’re waiting in the inner office.’
‘So they are,’ Mr Crabbit remembered. ‘I passed them on my way in. Well then, high time you made your mind up.’
‘It’s all very well for you to take that tone,’ Mr Hedgethorn complained. ‘I’ve whittled it down to two but it’s a very difficult choice. Mr Bond has all the right credentials, eighteen, good school, family backing, that sort of thing, and of course he’s available now, but Mr Commoner has the sharper mind. There’s no gainsaying that. Grammar school, of course, and only sixteen, but they expect excellent results of him in the Lower School examinations. I can’t help feeling we’d be missing an opportunity if we passed him over.’
The two men surveyed the waiting candidates in the deserted room through the frosted glass of the inner office, six young men in their best suits sitting on a row of chairs against the wall looking ill-at-ease. The gaslight had been lit, but Mr Grossman and old Mr Thomas had long since gone home and the office had been tidied for the night, all files put away, out-trays empty, covers over the typewriters.
‘Poor kids,’ Mr Crabbit said. ‘Put ’em out of their misery. Which one’s Mr Bond?’
‘The dark one at the end. The one with the good suit.’
‘Ah yes. And Mr Commoner?’
‘The fair boy next to him.’
‘He’s tall enough!’
And he certainly was. For even though he was only just sixteen, Charlie Commoner was over six feet in his grey socks, his cheap business suit and his uncomfortable paper collar, skinny and pale, like a young plant deprived of sunlight. His hair was so very fair that the highlights in it shone like white water, and his skin had the translucent pallor of bone china. He looked industrious and had a text book on his lap which he was studying with an air of intense concentration that Mr Hedgethorn found pleasing.
‘It’s such a difficult decision,’ he said. ‘I don’t know which of the two to choose.’
‘Then take them both,’ Mr Crabbit advised. His success at High Holborn had put him into an extravagant mood.
‘Would we have the work to warrant it?’ Mr Hedgethorn worried.
Mr Crabbit patted Mr Holborn’s last will and testament. ‘Yes,’ he said.
He might not have made quite such a rapid decision had he known that Charlie Commoner wasn’t actually studying anything at all. His eyes were simply resting on the book in front of him. Inside his head he was happily and heroically occupied in one of his daydreams.
He was much given to daydreams, which were usually the kind of thing he saw at the pictures every Saturday night. At that moment he was rescuing a damsel in distress. She was locked up in a dreadful dungeon somewhere in deepest Africa where he had been sent by her distraught father, with the passionate plea, ‘Find my daughter! Bring her back to me safe and well.’
‘Trust me!’ he cried, buckling on his trusty sword. The villains leapt at him, rapiers at the ready, snarling and showing their teeth like Basil Rathbone, and one hand nonchalantly on his hip à la Douglas Fairbanks he parried their attacks. The damsel watched from the gallery, her blue eyes wide with alarm and her long blonde plaits swaying across her pretty tip-tilted breasts. (All his heroines had long blonde hair and pretty tip-tilted breasts.)
‘Never fear!’ he called to her, smiling encouragement.
And the damsel called back…
‘Ah — um — gentlemen. Thank you for attending this interview this afternoon. Mr Crabbit and I will be conferring together, and I will let you know the result of our deliberations in due course. Thank you very much.’
It took Mr Commoner quite an effort of will to drag himself away from the delights of the rescue. He closed his book, nodded politely at Mr Hedgethorn and stood up, stretching himself to his full height.
Looking up at him Mr Hedgethorn was surprised to see what fine eyes the young man had. Large and almond-shaped, and a rich, dark, warm speckled grey that reminded the solicitor of sealskin, they were fringed by thick lashes and arched over by sleek eyebrows. He would have called them passionate eyes, if the words hadn’t been totally inappropriate for an articled clerk. They were really rather disquieting. And as the young man went on looking straight at him, holding his gaze quite steadily, he realised that the most disquieting thing about those eyes was that they seemed to be smiling, even though the rest of the young man’s face was politely composed. But no, that couldn’t be right. No applicant would ever smile at a senior solicitor and certainly not when he’d just been interviewed. Some trick of the light, doubtless.
‘That will be all,’ he said. And watched with relief as they all trooped through the door.
‘What a sell!’ Jack Bond said, as he and Charlie walked out into Medlar Yard. ‘They might have told us.’
‘Perhaps they haven’t made up their minds,’ Charlie said.
‘’Course they have,’ Jack said, adjusting his hat. ‘They just like to keep you waiting that’s all. It’s the way they go on.’
And he was right. The decision had been made as they were both to hear three days later. And, as is so often the case with important decisions, it was to provoke a second. But as this one was worried about in a terraced house in Abbeville Road in Clapham, neither of the two solicitors were ever to hear anything about it. It was a far-reaching decision all the same.
Chapter 6
Charlie Commoner was an only child. Born just after Christmas in 1916, while his father was away in France fighting in the trenches, he had spent the first two years of his life alone with his mother in a two-roomed flat over a greengrocer’s shop in the Balham High Road.
His father had been a carpenter before he volunteered for the army, and so when he came back to Civvy Street he was convinced there would be plenty of work for him building all those ‘homes fit for heroes’ that the government had promised. But as the Commoner family discovered along with everyone else, promises are one thing, bricks and mortar another. Work in the building trade was hard to come by in the post-war years and, as their income fluctuated, the family became used to moving from flat to flat.
During the last three years trade had picked up enough for them to rent a whole house in Abbeville Road in Clapham. There among the plane trees and the privet hedges and the long stolid rows of Victorian terraces, they’d never been so comfortable nor so happy. In many ways it was more like living in a village than a London suburb for there were more than twenty shops in the road and the church of the Holy Spirit, where they worshipped every Sunday, was just round the corner in Narbonne Road. Charlie’s school was within walking distance, and it was a mere stone’s throw to the Windmill pub, the two ponds and the almost rural space of Clapham Common. A first-rate place, all three of them agreed.
Charlie had worked hard at school. He might be a dreamer, especially after a Saturday night at the pictures, but he was well aware that his fantasy world was froth and that the really important and difficult thing in life was to get himself apprenticed to a dependable trade. So, when Mr Hedgethorn’s letter arrived with its good news, the thrill of being accepted was so intense that he spent the rest of breakfast time leaping around the kitchen, alternately crowing like a cockerel and rapturously hugging his mother.
‘Now you’ll see something, Mum,’ he triumphed. ‘Now you’ll really see something. Articled clerk! Imagine it! You an’ Dad’ll never need to worry about money again. Once I’m qualified, we shall be real swells. My eye, there’ll be some changes then!’
‘Never mind changes,’ his mother laughed, extricating herself from his third bear-hug. ‘You’ll be late for school if you go on.’
He glanced at the clock on the wall, saw how late it was and whooped off into the narrow hall, gathering raincoat and satchel on his way.
‘See you, Mum!’ he called, and was gone in a flurry of flapping coat and leaping excitement.
Left on her own in a silenced kitchen, Ruby Commoner picked up the letter from the table where Charlie had tossed it and read it through quietly, her face furrowed with anxiety.
Even though he’d won a scholarship to Henry Thornton and had a grant to cover the cost of his uniform, keeping Charlie on at school until he was sixteen had been a struggle. With this letter, wonderful though it was, they were going to have to face the last and most difficult challenge of all, because now there were fees to pay.
She and Stan had talked it over and over, naturally, ever since they agreed with the teachers that Charlie ought to train for a solicitor and decided to let him stay on. Talking was one thing, now the moment of decision had come and that was quite another.
Still, Ruby thought to herself, as she started to clear the breakfast things. Look on the bright side, Rube. It’s no good getting down. They’ve offered him the chance. That’s what really matters. We shall manage somehow or other. My Stan’ll sort it out.
Stanley Commoner was a sensible man, the type that could be depended upon to sort out most difficulties without making a fuss. Ten stone in weight and five-and-a-half feet tall in his grey cloth cap, he was broad of shoulder, brow and opinion; a thick-set sturdy individual with close-cropped gingery hair, kindly blue eyes, a broken nose and a brindled moustache as bristly as a brush. On first acquaintance he seemed a slow man, for he took his time before venturing an opinion and spoke and worked with extreme care, but those who knew him well valued him for his dependability and were prepared to wait for his advice, knowing it would be sound when it came.
‘Well,’ he said that Friday evening, when Charlie and his friends had gone roaring off to the pictures and he and Ruby were on their own together, ‘one thing’s certain. We can’t let him down now, Rube. Not when we’ve come so far, and he’s done so well.’
‘I suppose we could move somewhere cheaper, if it come to it,’ Ruby said. ‘I don’t want to though, Stan, an’ that’s a fact, what with all the decorating you’ve done an’ the garden an’ everything. I’ve just got those flower beds lovely. It’d be a pity to leave it all for someone else to get the benefit. It’s the best house we’ve ever had.’
‘I done some sums,’ her husband said, producing a battered notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Seems to me we got two options. We could move somewhere cheaper up the old town or…’
‘Or?’
‘We could take in a lodger.’
‘Meaning Grandpa or Aunty Grace?’
‘Not Aunty Grace,’ Stan said, making a wry grimace. ‘We’re not that desperate.’
‘Poor old Grace. She is awful.’
‘But Grandpa’s all right.’ Stan prompted.
‘Yes,’ Ruby said, but she was acknowledging his words, not accepting necessity. At least, not yet. Grandpa Jones was all right. Most of the time. And ever since Gran died, they’d known they would have to take him in sooner or later. Of course he would help with the rent; he’d always promised that. But all the same it would be hard, sharing their home after all these years alone together, her and Stan and Charlie.
It took her time to think about it and Stan sat silent and watched her as she thought, that round face of hers brooding and serious and those fine grey eyes hidden in the shadow of the gaslight. And it seemed to him that he had never seen her looking so warm and rounded and accommodating, not ever, and he wished it wasn’t necessary to ask her to accommodate quite so much.
‘It’ll ’ave to be your decision, old gel,’ he said, ‘seeing as you’ll bear the brunt a’ the work.’
His concern made her decision possible. ‘I daresay we shall manage,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘After all we can’t let our Charlie down, can we? Not now, not when all’s said and done. An’ we’ve got the room.’
So the necessary burden was accepted. The next day Charlie wrote a much-displayed letter to accept Mr Hedgethorn’s offer and his father composed a very private one to agree to the payment of the necessary fees. Now it was simply a matter of studying hard for the School Certificate and waiting for August eighth, the day after Bank Holiday Monday, when he would embark on his chosen career.
‘I’ll get Dad to find me a job on the buildings as soon as the exams are over,’ he promised his mother. ‘You’ve kept me quite long enough. Time I brought in a bit of money for a change.’
He started work at eight o’clock on the morning after he’d taken his final examination and cycled off with his father to a building site at Streatham, returning late that evening in cheerful triumph, full of jokes and stories to entertain his mother. He had grazes on his hands, a bruise on his forehead, two pints in his belly and an enormous appetite.
Ten days later, Grandpa Jones took up residence with his youngest daughter and his son-in-law. Although the old man put himself out to be as helpful as he could, diligently filling coal scuttles, chopping firewood and mending all the boots and shoes, there was no doubt that his arrival had changed the atmosphere. The trouble was that he dominated every mealtime with interminable tales of the good old days when he won every school prize that was going and passed more examinations than anyone had ever thought possible. Apparently, he was ‘the best looker’ in the street.
