Last Rights (20 page)

‘All we can do is keep our fingers crossed,’ I said, as I put my hat back on.

‘And pray,’ Pia added. ‘The Blessed Virgin, she take care of us. Me and Tony, we don’t go down no shelter. If it’s meant to
be it’s meant to be.’

‘Yes . . .’

‘You know our youngest son, Gio – John – he join the Royal Navy. He don’t wait to be called up.’ Then, placing one hand nervously
on my arm, Tony said, ‘Mussolini is a bad man, Mr Hancock, a bad Italian. You know we like your people . . . Italians . . . we – we like your people a lot.’

I smiled. Whether Tony meant my people meaning Englishmen or whether he saw me as a Jew from what is recognised everywhere
as a Jewish part of London, I don’t know. But I accepted his words with good grace and then I went outside. Those loud, ’orrible
’erberts had gone so I stopped briefly in front of the doorway that led to the upstairs flats of number 125 and stared at
it for a moment or two. I’d found out what I wanted to know and it was getting still darker and cold.

As I walked along the street I kept an eye open for Tony’s tormentors, but they were nowhere to be seen. Probably gone home,
away from the ‘wops’, the evil servants of Mussolini. I know people say he’s as bad as
Hitler, but I find it hard to take him seriously when I see him on newsreels. He’s such a strutting, vain little man and vanity
is so often the subject of ridicule. Although not always. Pia hadn’t found much to laugh at in Opal Reynolds’s vanity. Ruby
had said she was spoiled and Pia had mentioned a certain unpleasantness of behaviour that neither of the old Italians had
wanted to pursue. But Victorine Reynolds had killed Neilson while trying to protect this apparently provoking child she’d
had by another man. Harold’s pride must have been in shreds. Men like him, like Kevin Dooley, they have to control their women
and children: it’s as essential to them as breathing. Any deviation, provocation, usually ends in violence.

Eager now to get back to the Duchess and the girls in case the Jerries made another appearance, I didn’t stop off in Spitalfields
to see if Ruby was all right. I’d do that once my family were settled in the Anderson, I thought. I’d already, by going to
see Tony, done a lot for Ruby that day.

All the way home on the bus I kept thinking about how little I’d been able to find out about what had led up to Kevin Dooley’s
death on that night of bombing, violence and fire. I was, it seemed to me, being sucked ever deeper into the world of Kevin’s
wife and her strange past at the same time as I was being deliberately excluded from Hannah’s peculiar origins. I was near
to her place now which was why my girl had suddenly popped into my mind. As my bus moved slowly through what remained of Canning
Town I imagined Hannah’s face and felt sad for what I’d said to her at Cherry Hazlitt’s funeral. Maybe I
shouldn’t have repeated what Doris had said. But I’d felt hurt that Hannah hadn’t told me herself, which now seemed both arrogant
and stupid.

W
hen I got home I tried to ring Mr Blatt to let him know I had Velma with me now, but the telephones were out again. I thought
I also ought to let him know about my strange encounter with the Reynolds ‘protector’ in Limehouse. He knew the family, after
all, and might have some idea about that. He might too, as Ken suggested when he popped round just after I got back from Paddington,
know where Opal was and who had adopted her. But in the meantime, I needed to see Ruby, if indeed my gruff-voiced geezer hadn’t
already ‘taken care’ of her. I shook when I thought about going back there, so much so, in fact, that the only way I could
get myself out of the shop was by promising myself I’d go and see Hannah first.

Because the Duchess, Nan and Velma had sensibly decided to get some sleep down the Anderson while they could, none of them
saw me leave the shop at just before nine. Aggie, however, was another matter. Like me, if for different reasons, she goes
out even if a raid might be on
the cards. Her face a mask of pink powder, red lipstick and some blue stuff round her eyes, with her jaunty hat and cigarette
in a holder, she looked not unlike some of the girls I’d seen earlier up in Paddington.

I held the shop door open for her as she left, eyeing her, as she eyed me, with suspicion.

‘Where you off to, Frank? No bombs flying about yet. What’s the hurry?’ she said, puffing smoke into my face as she passed.
I knew she wasn’t happy about my being involved, even just by taking care of Velma, in Kevin Dooley’s past and the questions
surrounding his violent death: she felt I wasn’t up to it. Both my sisters fear for me in their own ways.

‘Out,’ I said. ‘And you?’

‘Out too.’

For a few seconds we stood on the pavement outside the shop, Aggie pinching her fag out with her fingers, lest the wardens
see her ‘light’, while I stood and rolled myself a smoke from my tobacco tin. Neither of us wanted the other to know where
we were going. Not that I was going to be up to no good. I wanted to see Hannah, talk to her rather than anything else. But
I knew if I mentioned this it wouldn’t look like that to others, especially not to Aggie. She’s not bad, my sister, but she
has had a rough time in the past with her useless husband and everything, so it’s natural she might want to have a good time
now. How much of a ‘good time’ she has I don’t know or want to know. She sends most of what she earns at Tate’s to her kids
out in Essex, so there’s not much for her to buy a drink or get some fags with. But somehow she does have
a drink a couple of times a week and she’s always good for a fag. She’s a pretty girl, with her white skin and her big dark
eyes, even if her bleached-up hair does look a bit hard to my way of thinking. Some blokes like that and they are, I think,
the sort of blokes only interested in one thing from women. The sort of blokes Aggie meets and thinks her brother might have
something in common with. I wish she’d never found out about me and Hannah.

‘Oh, well, “we’ll meet again”, I suppose,’ she said, referring to what has for so many people become a favourite song.

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘You owe me fags.’

‘Funny bugger!’

When we parted, Aggie went right and I went left, towards Canning Town. I watched her go for as long as I could in the blackout
and then I began my own journey across the rubble, occasionally pressing myself up against shop doorways crowded with sandbags
as cars, their lights dimmed to almost nothing, sometimes mounted the pavement. In spite of, even because of the daylight
raid, there were a lot of people about. Families clearing up damage to their homes where they could, boarding up broken windows,
putting down sandbags. Some people were coming out of houses with furniture and kitchen things. People who might or might
not have been looters – how was I to know? There was a warden and a copper talking on the corner of Star Lane and they weren’t
doing anything so why should I?

Even if I hadn’t known where Rathbone Street was, if I’d heard its reputation I would’ve known it when I got
there. Even as early as this, before the mad pubs of Canning Town – the Bridge House, the Chandelier and the like – chuck
out, some girls are out and about in the shop doorways. Not all their ‘trade’ goes to the pubs after all. Not the Lascars
with skin like mine or the blacks from Casablanca who don’t take a drink because of their religion. There’s work to be had,
for which I was mistaken by one poor lass in a darkened doorway. Just quickly she shone one of those torches they all have
up at her face and said, ‘Evening, love.’

Even by that little light, I could see she was nearer to seventeen than forty-seven.

‘No, thanks,’ I said.

‘Fuck you, then!’ she said. Probably nearer fourteen than seventeen by the sound of her, poor kid. Her mouth already a karzy,
probably in more ways than one. Several further incidents like this occurred until I eventually found Hannah. She wasn’t alone
so I had to wait out of sight until she’d finished whatever she was doing. Luckily, once I’d heard her voice, I didn’t have
to go any nearer and therefore see what he was making her do. But whoever he was he lifted his hat to her when he’d finished
and he paid, which is more than a lot of them do.

‘What are you doing here, Mr H?’ Hannah said coldly, as she hastily rearranged her skirt.

Trying not to look or even imagine in my head, I said, ‘Well, love, I’m on my way to Spitalfields to see about that Ruby .
. .’

‘I hope you’re not expecting me to come with you.’

‘No.’

‘Then what do you want with me?’ Hannah said. ‘Unless you want a bunk up.’

‘No!’ In case any over-enthusiastic punter should try to get between us I pulled Hannah into the doorway of a pawn shop. ‘I
just need to know that we’re all right,’ I said. ‘I know I hurt you about your parents—’

‘Forget it,’ Hannah replied.

‘But I can’t,’ I said. ‘You even went to see them for me, which must have hurt you.’

‘I done it for that Pearl, not you!’ Hannah snapped. Her eyes darted over my shoulder at the furtive male figures shuffling
awkwardly around the edges of the street. ‘A woman on her own like that . . .’ Hannah continued. ‘Look, are you going to Spitalfields
or not, Mr H? Or do I have to lose money while I stand about chatting to you?’

‘Hannah!’

I could see there were tears in her eyes, although whether they were tears of misery or fury I couldn’t tell.

‘If I don’t make the rent tonight Dot’ll have me out on me ear,’ she said. ‘So, if you don’t mind . . .’

‘I’ll pay your rent!’ I said wildly, and completely without thought about how. ‘Just go home, I . . .’ I couldn’t pretend
any more. Suddenly the thought of my Hannah with some slobbering, dirty bloke, his guts full of booze, was just too much for
me. ‘I’ll pay your rent, Hannah,’ I said. ‘I’ll look after you. I will!’

Hannah sighed. She looked as if she were physically deflating. ‘I can’t and won’t let you do that, Mr H,’ she said. ‘You and
me, we can’t never be more than what we are now . . .’

‘Look,’ I said, madly, I confess, ‘I can become a Jew. Ruby—’

Hannah laughed. ‘But I’m not a Jew any more, Mr H, not really. Don’t you understand that? That ain’t the point. Or, rather,
it is the point but not in any way I can see you’ll understand.’

‘Hannah . . .’

‘But if you want me to come out to Spitalfields with you now, you can pay me for my trouble and I’ll take the money for that.’

I could hear men shuffling about behind me. I could even hear some brutish creature on the job with another girl further back
down towards the Barking Road.

‘But you don’t want to go there, do you, Hannah?’ I said. ‘Not again.’

Hannah reached up and put her hands round my neck, gently cradling my head in the cold, soft darkness. ‘I’m not a Jew, Mr
H, because I don’t deserve to be one. I don’t deserve to be anything,’ she whispered. ‘This is all I do deserve after what
I’ve done. I don’t deserve you . . .’

‘Hannah, I’ve done things myself,’ I began.

But she put one finger on my lips and said, ‘Sssh. You’re a good, kind man. You care about people, even when they’re bastards,
even when they’re dead.’

Especially when they’re dead, I thought, because I know how they get that way. I’ve made people that way. Pushing German faces
down into the depths of the suffocating Flanders mud, aiming my rifle at some poor kid wetting himself with fear and dishonour.
Kevin Dooley, too, must have been terrified as he died.
Everyone is – we don’t know what, if anything, comes after life, which is why the dying must be comforted by the living. I
let Kevin down, me of all people. I let him die violently, disbelieved and alone.

I put my hand into my pocket and took out some cash, which I gave to Hannah. ‘Come on,’ I said.

We pushed our way out of Rathbone Street. Past drunks having sex with children watched by other drunks waiting for their turn.
I thought about the youngster who’d offered it to me and how coarse and brutalised she had already become. There are so many
ways to ruin a child – like this, by spoiling as Victorine Reynolds had done to her youngest . . . It’s a risk having children.

Hannah and I took the bus over to Stepney. Slow, ghostly things they are now, blacked out, their lights dimmed to virtually
nothing. We walked the rest of the way, past the Jewish soup kitchens, the Yiddisher theatres, the many, many synagogues.
I told Hannah everything I’d discovered about the Reynolds family so far.

‘Gone.’ Hannah shrugged as she stepped out of the Princelet Street synagogue. ‘Left last night – well, early hours of the
morning.’

‘But why?’ I said. ‘That raid lasted till almost dawn. Why would she leave in the middle of that?’

All my fears about Ruby Reynolds were about to be confirmed. In fact, it was worse than I had imagined.

‘Maybe the bloke what threatened you come for her,’ Hannah said. ‘What time did that geezer approach you?’

‘Maybe ten or—’

‘Ruby Reynolds left here between one and two,’ Hannah said. ‘Rabbi says some young bloke knocked with a note for her.’

‘And they opened the door?’

Hannah threw up her hands casually. ‘It’s them Commie boys, Mr H. All fired up on their new ideas. Always looking for new
comrades. Raids don’t mean nothing to them. They come and go from their meetings, changing the world . . .’

‘So somebody knocked with a note for Ruby Reynolds.’

‘Yes. So she took it, she read it and then—’

‘Then she got up and left in the middle of a raid.’

‘Yes.’

I leaned against the wall of the old Huguenot house and closed my eyes. Someone somewhere struck up a tune on a ukulele –
something strange and foreign-sounding, not a bit like George Formby, thank Christ.

‘Did anyone know this bloke with the note?’ I said.

‘No, but Rabbi Numan told me Ruby said to him the note was from you.’

‘From me?’

‘That’s what she told him,’ Hannah said. ‘Them Commie boys wouldn’t have let her out unless they were sure whoever she was
going to was kosher, and they know you. She’s a bit of a cause for them, you know, Mr H. She’s a fugitive from British injustice.
Frummer or no frummer, they’ll help anyone on the run from the law.’