Against the Light

by Marjorie Eccles

  Inskip bit his tongue. This was familiar ground but he wasn’t about to get into a religious discussion with Orla. He never won when he did, because in matters of faith she was entirely illogical, and he knew no counter-arguments anyway. Instead, feeling the rising of his temper at what he’d just heard, but sternly ordering himself to stay calm, he asked, ‘What does he look like, your lodger?’

  ‘What?’ She stared. ‘Oh the poor wee man’s nothing special, but he has lovely eyes when he takes his specs off. And lovely manners on him. He’s been well brought up, that’s for sure, though he needs somebody to look after him, some nice girl, I’m thinking. He tells me he’s been living in lodgings ever since his poor mother was taken.’

  ‘Nothing special, you say – but you’d recognize him again if you saw him?’

  ‘Well, wasn’t it only yesterday he sat where you are, eating his bacon and cabbage and saying how good it was? Of course I’d know him!’

  ‘What was his name again?’

  ‘Leonard. Lennie, he said to call him. Lennie Croxton.’ A growing uneasiness widened her eyes. ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes, Auntie. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but I’m afraid it’s possible your Lennie might have come to a sad end.’

  A good deed in a naughty world, the Dorcas in more ways than one shone amid the crumbling poverty that surrounded it, the tall tenements that excluded light and air, the foetid alleys and noisome courts. It occupied the ground floor of one of the many handsome old Spitalfields houses built originally by Huguenot silk merchants, most of them now fallen into sad disrepair. When Doctor Sam Weston had wished to set up his practice, he and his newly married wife, Hannah, with the aid of a small but timely legacy from her godmother, had bought the property and renovated and repaired as much of it as they could afford, although water still occasionally leaked through the roof into the attics above the upstairs rooms where they lived with their growing young family. And not the least of it was that the paintwork outside was flaking and badly in need of repainting, apart from a board which announced itself as Dorcas House, a free clinic for mothers and babies, and was kept clean and shining by Nurse Peg, as was the doctor’s brass nameplate. Inside, it was as welcoming and reassuring as fresh paint, clean, scrubbed floors throughout, light colours on the walls and a few cheerful pictures could make it.

  Alice, Sam, and his wife, Hannah, had all met when they were medical students. Hannah had been born into a well-to-do lifestyle, but she accepted with good grace the conditions and surroundings in which she now had to bring up her small twin boys, with another baby almost ready to be born, making it impossible for her to continue to work as a doctor. She took life philosophically and shared her husband’s dedication to the work being done at the clinic, though she sighed a little when he fell asleep over his supper after yet another day when he’d scarcely been off his feet. Unlike Hannah, he came from working-class stock, with no income except what he earned. It was only Hannah’s modest personal income which enabled him to maintain his family and his small practice, as well as the clinic. It certainly wasn’t a flow of rich patients able to pay the bills. As often as not in this desperately poverty-stricken district, they stayed unpaid. In that respect, Sam was just such another man as Alice’s father had been, almost a saint in his unstinting care for his patients. But sainthood didn’t pay the bills and their finances could only be stretched so far. Money was a constant worry.

  Today, when Alice arrived at the Dorcas, the waiting room was already full of wan-faced women and a great many children, some of them barefoot, even on a cold day like this, and at least one of whom, she noticed with resigned pity, had a bad case of rickets. Most of them showed signs of malnutrition. She hoped the suspicious flush on the face of one child wouldn’t turn out to be the first indication of measles or something worse, otherwise the clinic would very quickly have an epidemic on their hands and Heaven alone knew how they’d cope with that.

  Sam was surprised at her unexpected appearance, but pleased to see her. It meant he could be out on his rounds while she took care of those in the waiting room. The air around Sam Weston always seemed to crackle with energy and within ten minutes, he had shrugged on his coat and his stocky frame disappeared out of the door, seeming to leave a vacuum behind when he departed.

  Alice’s first patient was that same flushed little boy she had noticed, brought in by his mother. Her quick, professional glance told her that the mother was not far away from having another little life to worry about, too. She wasn’t yet thirty, but looked fifty. The effort it must have cost to keep herself, the boy and her other children clean and decent was incalculable. Heavy-eyed and listless, the boy should have been in bed, but as Alice examined him she was thankful to find he appeared to be suffering nothing more than a heavy cold and a cough, one worrying enough to have caused his mother to bring him here. The clinic was usually a last resort. Many of the women so disliked seeking help from what they saw as a charity, they often left it too late.

  ‘Nothing seriously worrying, Mrs Cribbins, nothing more than the cough.’

  Nothing more than a cough, indeed! she thought as she wrote out a prescription for linctus. In the conditions in which this family lived, six of them in a two-roomed apartment in a house they shared with three other families, a cough like that could signal disaster – bronchitis, even tuberculosis. ‘Take him home and keep him warm and in bed. Hand this to Nurse Peg and she’ll get Mr Lubetkin to make up a bottle to ease his chest.’ Mrs Lambert, known to all as Nurse Peg, was a motherly, late-middle aged woman who had trained as a hospital nurse, brought up a family of four and now that they had flown the nest wanted to use her skills as a nurse again – though not in a hospital. She was bossy and would stand no nonsense, but she was also kind, and the patients respected her. Mr Lubetkin was an elderly Polish Jew who had been a pharmacist in his own country before being forced to flee from religious persecution there, and now worked in the little room at the back they used as a dispensary, rolling pills and making up countless bottles of medicine.

  Alice gave the little boy a striped humbug from the jar on her desk, smiling to see how his eyes brightened a little but noticing how sparrow-thin his arms were as he took it. ‘Promise to take the medicine, Ollie? It’s not nasty, in fact it tastes – really nice.’ She’d almost said it tasted of raspberries, but she doubted if he’d ever seen a raspberry, never mind tasted one. He needed milk, eggs and butter, and his mother would be able to give him none of these. She would have liked to have pressed money into her hand but Mrs Cribbins was proud, and even a few coins might have been seen as an insult. Instead, she stood up and fetched a small parcel of Lucy’s outgrown baby clothes she had brought in the previous day. ‘Maybe you or someone else will find these useful, Mrs Cribbins. My niece is seven months old now and these are too small for her. Amazing how quickly they grow, isn’t it?’

  This was something Mrs Cribbins understood. Baby clothes and other outgrown children’s garments were acceptable – everyone passed them on, once, twice, half-a-dozen times. As she fingered the quality of the long gowns, the lacy woollen matinee coats, tiny bootees, soft flannel vests, and little bonnets, and exclaimed at the hand embroidery, done by Violet, who was an exquisite needlewoman and had sewn a whole layette to relieve the boredom before Lucy’s birth, her sudden smile for a moment made her the young woman she once was. Such beautiful clothes might have to be sold rather than used for the new baby, but that didn’t matter.

  Patient after patient came in as the day wore on. At midday, Hannah came downstairs and invited her to share lunch. ‘I’ve made soup. Sam’s likely to forget he hasn’t eaten and won’t be home,’ she said with a wry smile, ‘but the terrible twins have had their lunch and I’ve put them down for a nap. I’d welcome a spot of adult conversation.’

  Alice could understand that. The two boys were engaging little imps of three who demanded all their mother’s attention. Friends since their medical student days, hal
f an hour with gentle Hannah was always welcome and she happily accepted the offer of soup and a chat.

  Late in the afternoon, the stream of patients gradually dwindled and at last, the waiting room was empty, allowing Alice to write up her records. She was tired, but nowhere near as tired as after one or other of the social events in her divided life. This, after all, was what she’d once dedicated her life to, nevertheless it shocked her to find herself suddenly aware that she felt more at home here than in her own home, at Manessa House.

  The telephone ringing somewhere outside the room made her jump. Incoming telephone calls to the clinic were rare. Sam had felt it necessary to have it installed, but it was used only infrequently, when it was necessary to gain an urgent admission to one of the hospitals or for some other emergency. It was rarely, if ever, used as a method of summoning him. Few around here could afford to summon the doctor at all unless the need was desperate, and in any case almost none of them had access to a telephone or were familiar with its use. In an emergency, a boy would be sent running to the surgery, knocking the doctor up if it was night time.

  The ringing eventually ceased as Nurse Peg answered the call. Alice heard her speaking loudly – even she mistrusted the capabilities of the new-fangled gadget, quite rightly in most cases, since the inevitable crackling and hissing on the line often made carrying on a conversation a feat of endurance. A moment later she came in, her broad face pale and concerned. ‘That telephone call – it’s for you, Doctor. I’m afraid you’re needed at home.’

  Comforted by the tea, Orla had told Inskip everything she knew about her lodger, which in effect amounted to not much at all, and in the end, though she didn’t want to do it, she made no objections when he asked her, and went with him to identify the body of the dead man found in the taxicab.

  ‘Yes, that’s Lennie,’ she told them sadly. She bowed her head and said a prayer and when she opened her eyes she had tears in them. Inskip put his arms round her, then took her home again and made another pot of strong tea.

  ‘We’ll have to search his room,’ he said, wondering why he felt apologetic.

  ‘Go ahead, if you think it’ll be of any use. He was a gentleman, but he didn’t have much.’

  She was right. Lennie Croxton’s sole possession, apart from a few spare clothes, was a framed, rather faded snapshot of a pleasant-faced woman standing in a garden with two young children, a boy and a girl, an arm around each of them. His mother, his sister and himself? It would seem so. There was a resemblance. But his mother, according to Orla, was dead. The wedding ring on his watch chain had almost certainly belonged to her – and if that was his sister in the photograph, she could be married and living anywhere. Lennie had left nothing behind to indicate how it might be possible to get in touch with her. There were two other people in the snapshot but they wouldn’t be much use either, just a man and a woman, almost off the picture, evidently not meant to be in the photo at all but caught by the camera.

  Downstairs once more, he questioned Orla again about her lodger, but there was little more she could tell. She believed his guess about the photo was right – yes, his mother was dead and in fact she was almost certain the sister, too, had died at a young age. As to any other aspects of his life, his aunt was ignorant. Her lodger had spent most of his time in his room, except when he came down to share his dinner with her. What had they talked about, then, sitting there together in the kitchen?

  ‘Oh, this and that. He liked to hear about everything that was going on in the parish. And it fascinated him to hear about the old country, what we got up to as children, going potato picking in the field with the Da … and all that … before the Famine that forced us over here …’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Well, you know how all that was. The hardness of the times.’

  ‘There’s some that think they still are.’

  ‘That know they are,’ she corrected him. ‘And with good reason.’ For several minutes they spoke of the troubled land across the sea, then Orla sighed, stirred the piled fire, picked up the half-empty coal scuttle and shunted what was left in it into the grate. More flames roared up the chimney.

  Inskip wiped the sweat off his brow.

  Indeed he did know what Orla meant, he thought as he took the scuttle down to the coal-cellar and refilled it for her. He himself was only one remove from first generation Irish immigrants, refugees from the potato famine in which a million people had died. Like Orla, his parents had fled Ireland and settled with their four sons in London’s East End. After their mother, then their father died, all the boys, adults by then, had emigrated to the United States. Three of them were still there, leading successful lives in Boston. Only Inskip had returned – escaped, he liked to think – homesick for the warm life of the streets where he had grown up. He stayed, despite the letters from his older brothers which came extolling America, if you took the opportunities available and worked hard. They tried to seduce him back with stories of the money they were making, their spacious houses, central heating, motor cars and all the food you could eat. Inskip ignored the seductions. It was nothing to the vibrant, if squalid, life he was familiar with, its polyglot population from all over the place, its crumbling tenements, its teeming, noisy, and often hazardous street life, where people often lived on the edge of the law but mostly looked out for each other. And not the least reason he stayed here was because he felt alive by being kept on his toes with his work in the police, especially since he had become a detective at Scotland Yard.

  He took the scuttle back, washed his hands at the stone sink and tried to prise out more information about Lennie Croxton from Orla, but it was evident that in their conversations over their meals together it was she who’d done the talking and Croxton the listening, giving nothing of himself away.

  ‘Did he have a job, a profession?’

  ‘I don’t know, but he never failed to pay his rent. I had the impression he was a clerk somewhere but you can’t force a person if they don’t want to talk about themselves,’ she said sadly. ‘I suppose he might have had some private means … this wasn’t the life he’d been born to, that’s for sure. I told you, he was a gentleman, he didn’t give himself airs but he was educated and used to better things.’

  He thought she must have had a hard time repressing her curiosity, not having anything to satisfy her or to pass on to her church cronies, who enjoyed nothing better than gossip – what they called the craik. ‘What were his interests, his friends?’

  ‘I don’t know of any friends.’ She was beginning to look distressed. ‘Listen, he was just a quiet young man that never harmed a living soul.’

  She was trying to convince herself that her nice young lodger couldn’t have been implicated in anything sleazy, that neither his reticence, nor his apparent lack of friends or acquaintances, his unexplained absence and his having no visible means of support, had anything to do with his grisly end. As for the uncharacteristic rapport he’d struck up with O’Rourke … Inskip just didn’t believe that.

  ‘Where was O’Rourke staying?’ he asked his aunt.

  She gave him a steady look. Despite what she wanted to believe, the implications of what had passed hadn’t really escaped her. ‘He didn’t say. It was a surprise to me to see him back at all. I expect he still has friends here, though.’

  ‘I’m sure he has,’ said Inskip, thinking of the sort of friends they would be, and that he knew where to find them, though he wouldn’t bet much on the chances of O’Rourke being with any of them now. With his capacity for dodging trouble and disappearing like smoke, he was very likely out of the country already, maybe back in Ireland, or even further away, in any case holing up somewhere where he couldn’t be found. Everything pointed to him as the killer who had got into the cab with Lennie Croxton and cut his throat, and hopefully the cabbie would have no difficulty in identifying him as the ‘big fella’ who’d been his second passenger … if he could be found. But why had the mild-mannered Lennie Croxton his aunt knew been associating at all with
a rogue like O’Rourke? And what the hell was O’Rourke up to?

  ‘So they knew one another, O’Rourke and your Lennie?’ he said, in spite of not believing at all in such an unlikely friendship.

  She shook her head, ‘They’d never met, until Danny came to see me. I think they just took a liking to each other, you know, the way it happens sometimes.’ But she didn’t look too certain.

  Neither was Inskip putting much store by that, though he knew what she meant. People did initially take to the man. O’Rourke, when he wanted to, could charm birds off trees, use his silver tongue to convince anyone of anything … look at Cathleen. Even perhaps to persuading a young chap of mild disposition and irreproachable habits whom he’d only just met to go out carousing with him? Inskip’s natural cynicism, plus his police training, took over and told him no. Things had been going on beneath the surface that indicated at least one of those things he’d just heard about Croxton might not be true … His mysterious absence over the last month, for instance, indicated he’d been leading a secret life. At the very least his behaviour had been such as to excite suspicion, but he didn’t disillusion Orla further.

  ‘If you hear anything about where that O’Rourke is, you just let me know, Auntie,’ he said as he got up to leave.

  ‘I will. It’s not right that such a decent young fellow should have been killed like that. I’ll ask around,’ she promised. ‘Someone will know.’ He nodded his thanks. The Catholic community round here was tightly integrated, and not much would escape the old gossips at St Bede’s – not forgetting Father Finucane himself. A visit to him might in fact be profitable. Daniel O’Rourke hadn’t left a lot behind him in the way of sympathy when he’d scarpered like the lily-livered coward he was, leaving behind the wreckage he’d caused to a young woman’s life.