Last Rights

by Barbara Nadel

  I looked at Velma, a little guiltily I must confess, and said, ‘What you need’s a nice cup of tea, isn’t it, love?’

  She didn’t smile, but her tears seemed to slow down after that.

  While I poured the water into the pot, Hannah said, ‘Dot had the coppers round about half past three. I expect that was why she—’

  ‘They come about my mum,’ Velma said. ‘She’s down the police station now, Mum is!’ And then she turned to me. ‘You know, don’t you, Mr Hancock?’

  I sat down opposite her and took one of her hands in mine. ‘Were you in the cemetery for your step-father’s funeral?’

  ‘Outside,’ the girl corrected. ‘Mum wanted me to go in but I wouldn’t, not for that pig.’

  ‘Your step-father?’

  ‘Yes. I hated him and I’m glad he’s dead! I couldn’t ever work out why Mum loved him, he done such bad things to her. Why have the coppers taken my mum away, Mr Hancock? Does it have anything to do with her mum and her sister Ruby?’

  I looked briefly at Hannah, who registered her surprise. ‘What do you know about that, Velma?’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t know nothing until Mum told me about it last night,’ the girl said. ‘Spent the night down Bethnal Green tube, we did. It was horrible. Me and Mum couldn’t sleep. Then she began telling me all about it. Mum said I should know in case my aunt, Ruby, got into the papers.’

  ‘Why does she think that your Aunt Ruby might get into the papers?’

  ‘Well, you was there,’ Velma said, ‘at that place in Spitalfields. Coppers think she done that old bloke in. Mum says they have to know about my granny too and about what she done, which was murder, so Mum said. Mum says the coppers’ll say her sister done it whether she did or not. Mum don’t trust coppers.’

  ‘Velma,’ I said, ‘what do you know about your grandmother?’

  And then the sirens went.

  I stood up as my speech went. ‘C-c-come on,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to c-c-come d-down our shelter.’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it down there,’ Velma said.

  I looked across at Hannah before I ran down the stairs. She knew I never went inside during a raid, but she followed me anyway.

  Out in the yard it was pitch dark and raining. I opened the door to the Anderson and stood to one side. I heard the Duchess greet Velma as an old friend when she went in.

  ‘What are you going to do, Mr H?’ Hannah said, as she stood underneath the pouring water from the sky.

  ‘I-I . . .’

  ‘Now you’ve got the girl talking . . .’

  ‘Er . . .’ I looked away from Hannah, into the shelter, my heart pounding at the sight of it. ‘V-Velma’s g-granny, this is v-very important…’

  ‘Then you’ll have to come down, won’t you?’ Hannah said.

  ‘Francis, are you going to come in this time?’ I heard the Duchess say.

  ‘Who’s that with you?’ Nan asked.

  ‘M-M-M-Miss J-Jacobs,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Never mind, there’s a raid on,’ I heard Aggie say. Then she came to the door of the shelter and ushered Hannah in. ‘Come on, love, come in. Frank, you coming in here with this lady or not?’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘That kid wants to tell you about her granny, Mr H,’ Hannah said, as she walked past me into the shelter. ‘So if it’s that important . . .’

  I swung myself through the door and pulled it closed behind me. Heart hammering, my breath coming short and shallow, I somehow staggered over to one of the bunks at the back of the shelter and sat down.

  Hannah’s a really bright woman. I often wish I could ask her to marry me. But there’s far too many ‘if’s – if she wasn’t Jewish, if I wasn’t like I am . . .

  She introduced herself to my family as a friend of Pearl and Velma Dooley. It was sort of true, after all. Not that Aggie was fooled – I saw her face and she was obviously amused. But, then, I knew she knew about Hannah – how I don’t know. Maybe she’d seen me leave her once, shaking hands on the doorstep of her boarding-house. But whatever Aggie did or didn’t know, she didn’t let on to the Duchess or Nan. No one spoke about Pearl either – not yet, at least.

  By this time, of course, I was speechless. There was nothing to hear then, save ordinary sounds like Nan pouring tea from a Thermos for people and Aggie’s pen scratching across paper – writing a letter to her little ’uns. No bombers, not yet. But I knew it wouldn’t be long. Germans and bombs, mud and limbs flying up in the air, yards not feet, then crashing down again, on top of houses and factories, children and old women and me. Burying me alive. How many times had I watched blokes sink into the mud of Flanders, folded into a tomb of muck, sinking into burial, alive and screaming. It was freezing down there in our Anderson, but the sweat was dripping off me. The Duchess, I knew, wanted to put out a hand to comfort me, but I also knew she understood what her action might do. Sometimes, when I’m like this, all it takes is a touch to make me scream.

  Then, as that familiar drone throbbed through my chest from the hundreds of planes above, just as I thought I would surely have a heart-attack, Hannah, sitting between me and Velma, began to speak. ‘You were going to tell us about your grandma, Velma,’ she said.

  The girl looked around at the Duchess and my sisters, her eyes full of fear.

  The Duchess, who has a knack of saying the right thing at the right time, said, ‘If you’d rather just speak to Mr Hancock and Miss Jacobs I promise you I won’t listen, my dear. I understand you have some trouble at the moment.’

  ‘Won’t be able to listen soon,’ Aggie put in. ‘Be bleedin’ deafened in a minute.’

  Nan shot her a disgusted look – Nan doesn’t like swearing – and then did what the Duchess says she always does, which is sit in a corner with her rosary. In the dark, squatting like that, she looked like one of those photographs you sometimes see of poor people in Delhi or Calcutta.

  ‘Well?’ Hannah stroked Velma’s dirty wet hair.

  ‘My gran was called Victorine Reynolds,’ Velma said. ‘Mum said the papers called her the Bloody French Maid – ’cause she was French originally, like.’

  I’ve never taken a great deal of interest in what newspapers print so neither the name nor the nickname rang any bells with me. But there was Reynolds and there was something distinctly foreign-sounding too. Victorine – I’d never heard the like before.

  The ground shook, and somewhere to the south there was the sound of first one and then about four explosions. The docks, getting it again. Inside my head something awful gibbered and jabbered like the ravings of the madmen those evil trenches had pushed out into the world.

  Velma took a deep breath before she continued. She was a brave little kid, determined not to show her fear. She put me to shame. ‘Victorine had this man,’ she said, ‘Neilson. He wasn’t Mum’s dad. I don’t know who he was. But he was like Kevin.’

  ‘What do you mean, love?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘He hit her.’

  A thud, somewhat closer now. Aggie, an unlit fag in her mouth, looked up from her letter. ‘Feels like over the Greengate way,’ she said, measuring the seriousness of the situation by pub name.

  Close. Getting closer. Then a massive explosion. My legs twitched, wanting to run. Stan Wheeler had been sitting when a German Mills bomb landed beside him. ‘Jesus!’ he’d said, just before he disappeared into nothing. ‘Jesus!’ I could hear it as sure as if he was still beside me. ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’

  ‘Then one night Mum and her sisters were out.’ Velma was speaking again and I made myself turn to look at her. ‘He went mad, this Neilson, bashing Mum’s mum up. She had to stop him so she stabbed him with her hatpin . . .’

  Aggie looked up at the word ‘hatpin’ then went back to her letter.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Hannah said, looking at me as she did so. ‘Right, then, weren’t you?’

  I nodded. So now she knew – that I’d found out the truth about how Kevin Dooley had d
ied and how the method of his death had led everyone’s thoughts to Pearl.

  ‘He died,’ Velma hadn’t been listening to us and was seemingly in almost a trance, ‘and my gran went to prison. Mum and her sisters went to an orphanage, or she and Ruby and Amber did. My gran had said they had to keep together, see. They’re all named after jewels, my mum and her sisters.’ Briefly she smiled. It’s amazing how kids can be when they find something they like. The world can be tearing itself apart but kids can still enjoy things like pretty names. ‘But the little sister, Opal, she was just a baby at the time so she went somewhere else. Mum don’t know. No one told her anything. They hung Victorine in the end and Mum didn’t know until it was over. Never said goodbye or nothing. Then Mum and her other sisters split up too. Mum says she’s always been afraid that someone’ll find out who she is and try to make up stories about her. So when she heard about Ruby she was scared.’ Velma looked down at her hands, her eyes heavy with sadness. ‘Do you think the police’ve got my mum ’cause they think she’s done a murder? Do they think she murdered Kevin?’

  ‘I don’t know, love,’ Hannah said gently, as she stroked Velma’s hair.

  I said nothing. With a raid in full swing, with the dust from explosions maybe miles away creeping into the shelter, I wouldn’t have been able to put a sentence together anyway.

  ‘So why did you come to, er, to my place when your mum had gone?’ Hannah said, carefully avoiding owning up to where she lived in front of my family.

  ‘I wanted to see Mr Hancock,’ Velma said.

  ‘Why didn’t you just come here?’

  ‘Because I saw him go across to the police car when the coppers took her away,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really know what had happened. I come to see you, Miss, because you’re his friend. Mum said you was all Jews . . .’

  ‘Jews!’ Nan nearly dropped her rosary. ‘We ain’t no Jews!’

  ‘Oh, but my mum—’

  ‘Well, your mum thought wrong,’ Nan said. ‘We’re Christian us, English. Are you stupid or something?’

  Given that all of us, except Aggie, were a damn sight darker than Hannah, Pearl’s assumption hadn’t been so daft. But no one said anything to Nan about this.

  ‘No, it’s only me who’s Jewish,’ Hannah said to Velma. Then she changed the subject. ‘So you must’ve remembered where I live from when Mr Hancock brought you over. Did you ask my landlady if you could see me?’

  ‘I never got the chance,’ Velma replied. ‘She went barmy when she see me. She said the coppers had already been round about my mother and she didn’t want no more trouble. If you hadn’t come down, Miss, I don’t know what I’d’ve done.’

  ‘Do you know what the coppers were asking about your mum, Velma?’

  There was a huge explosion, really close this time. As the dust and muck shot into the shelter we all ducked down and closed our eyes. There was that smell too, the one I can’t easily describe, but it’s the smell you get when bricks burn. It’s disgusting.

  ‘Christ!’ I heard Aggie yell.

  Nan, in contrast, clung to her beads. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the time of our death. Holy Mary . . .’

  Up above, the roar of the bombers’ engines. Directly overhead. For seconds that could have been minutes, we held our breath. Somehow I stifled the urge to scream, but I felt my face go white and it wasn’t until Hannah spoke again that I came back to the world once more.

  ‘Velma?’

  The girl shrugged, half a ton of grey dust from her shoulders falling on to the floor as she moved. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was about what Mum done the night Kevin died.’

  Velma put her head down as if in shame. In spite of the way that I felt and everything that was going on I was interested in this so I moved a bit closer the better to hear.

  ‘What did your mum do that night, Velma?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘She went to see Mrs Harris,’ Velma said. ‘I went with her. Me and Mum saw you that night, Miss,’ she smiled, ‘but you never saw us so Mum said not to say nothing.’

  Aggie, now given up on her letter, looked at me and frowned. She’d perked up at the mention of Mrs Harris all right.

  ‘Why was your mum at Mrs Harris’s, Velma?’ Hannah asked.

  Again the head went down and this time I had to get still closer to hear what she was mumbling.

  ‘Mum was ill,’ she whispered. ‘Mum said Mrs Harris can sometimes make people better. And she’s cheaper than a doctor, Mum says. She was in her room for a long time. When she come out her face was white and there was . . . blood, on her, like her slip and that . . . She said I wasn’t to tell no one about what she done, but because you know Mrs Harris, Miss . . . you and Mr Hancock, you won’t tell no one else, will you?’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Who d’you think you are? Sherlock Holmes?’

  ‘If I’m being told the truth Pearl Dooley couldn’t have killed her husband,’ I said, and then, lowering my voice to a whisper, ‘She was having an abortion at the time. At Dot Harris’s. Her daughter told me about it last night.’

  Talking about such things, even round the back of the police station with no one else about, you have to be careful. Not that the coppers don’t know it goes on. They know all right, and who does it. But I sometimes think that a lot of people consider talking about things almost worse than doing them. So much in life is about how things look to others. Like those women who gave out white feathers to blokes they saw out of uniform during the Great War. I got one once, when I was home on leave. Made me cry myself to sleep it did. I should have rammed it down her stupid throat with my bayonet.

  ‘Look,’ Fred Bryant glanced quickly over his shoulder and then came and stood very close to me, ‘I know all about the so-called abortion.’ He mouthed rather than spoke the last, forbidden, word. ‘Pearl Dooley come out with that straight away. But Dot Harris says she never done it.’

  ‘Well, she would. But Velma, Pearl’s daughter, she can identify Dot.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. So can a lot of people,’ Fred said. ‘Anyway, Dot don’t deny knowing Pearl Dooley. Said she come to her for a you-know-what last year. But told her she was out of that business now. Dot ain’t seen her since, and certainly not on the night that Kevin Dooley died.’

  ‘Velma says her mother was in a bad way after the abortion. Someone must have noticed!’

  ‘Vi Dooley says Pearl was out with Velma the night Kevin died and when she come back in she was perfectly all right. All the family were at home with the exception of Kevin, Pearl and Velma, so Vi says. So Pearl could’ve just as easy been with her husband as she could’ve been at Dot’s.’

  ‘Velma says her mother had blood on her clothes.’

  Fred shook his head. ‘Well, she’s on her own with that.’

  ‘You should get a doctor to examine Pearl,’ I said.

  ‘And what would that prove?’ Fred replied. ‘Doctor can’t tell when she had, you know, it done even if he does find something. She could’ve had it the morning or the night before or even the next day. Can’t prove she had it done that night or that Dot Harris done it, not unless someone turns up what saw her at Rathbone Street. But we’ve had no luck with that so far.’

  ‘So you going to charge her?’

  ‘You said yourself Dooley talked about a woman stabbing him,’ the policeman said, ‘and, anyway, you know what his wife’s background is. Ain’t no such thing as a coincidence, I don’t think, and,’ Fred lowered his voice, ‘Pearl had made threats against her husband, during arguments.’ And then as he started walking back to the station he called back, ‘Go home, Mr H, there’s nothing you can do about it now.’

  I relit what was left of my fag and started to walk. Although I knew in my heart that I’d done the right thing with regard to Kevin Dooley, I couldn’t help feeling guilty. I couldn’t be certain, of course, that Pearl was innocent, but to use an abortion as an alibi seemed strange to me. If it were legal, I could understand it, but it isn’t. Why u
se one crime, of a type almost as serious as murder, to cover up for another? Besides, Pearl must have known Dot Harris would never back her up. Also, Pearl had loved her thug of a husband for some reason. He beat her, gave her kids she couldn’t support, some she maybe did want rid of, and yet she, like so many of the poor women around here, still cared. And then there was Velma. Again, it was me who had brought her in to the police. But only because I thought that what she had to say was important. She was in there with them now and, although Fred had told me to go home, I’d decided to wait for her as long as I could. I just hoped the coppers didn’t take it into their heads to keep her in too.

  Coming up from the Anderson that morning I’d met Ken passing the back gate. Ken’s straight as a die so when I told him about what Velma had said about Pearl he gave me his honest opinion.

  ‘Well, you’ve got to try and help her if you think there’s a chance she might be innocent,’ he’d said. ‘Mind you, with her background, it sounds to me as if the coppers have got her in the nick and hung already.’

  I said something about not believing anything about murder being in the blood and Ken replied, ‘I dunno, pal. Sometimes I wonder. After all, them as are fighting now are the kids of them in the first lot, ain’t they?’

  ‘Some,’ I said.

  ‘You’d think that what we saw would’ve taught them something, wouldn’t you? But they keep on sending their kids for King and country. Maybe it is in the blood, mate. Who knows?’ He looked down sadly at his boots and said, ‘But there’s also the truth – important to old soldiers like us, H, even if them in authority, right or wrong, always get to do what they want.’

  He was right there. I only had to think about the so-called deserters we’d been ordered to shoot to know that. Men go mad and then they lose their way, wander right off sometimes. There are reasons for desertion, good reasons, but in the eyes of military law they’re in the wrong, and no matter what they’ve been through, those in power demand only one punishment for such a crime: death at the hands of their fellows. Reasons, the truth itself, rarely mattered. Some of the officers used to call it ‘making an example’ of a bloke. It was incidents like this that had helped to form Albert Cox’s rather ‘Commie’ style of opinions. And I do agree with him in lots of ways. It’s simply that, for me, unjust death need not be political. For me it’s about truth and justice for the dead. Looking after them is what my life is all about. Without them I am nothing.