Last Rights

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘’Cause you see, Frank,’ Nan butted in, ‘your idea about me taking that young Velma down Southend is stupid. The bleedin’ Germans are killing us! You know that redhead woman down Balaam Street, the young one with the baby? Mrs Woods. Well, some German in his aeroplane tried to kill her and the baby last night. Come screaming down Balaam Street as she was on her way back from her mum’s. Firing his guns at her he was, at her and the baby! God help us, Frank, what sort of a world—’ And then, worn out by the great rush of words she’d just spilled out at me, she broke down into tears.

  I went over to her and put my arm round her shoulders. Nan, who isn’t one normally for any sort of affection, buried her head in the collar of my jacket.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to go to Southend. I’ll – I’ll think of something . . .’ After all, in view of my experiences in Limehouse I needed now, probably more than before, to locate Amber Reynolds.

  ‘I thought that maybe me and Velma could phone the Nazareth sisters,’ Nan said, ‘but then when Mother said that the telephone was out . . .’ She put one hand over her mouth as she began to sob once again. Nan is proper no-nonsense, carry-on-and-get-the-job-done normally, but even she has her breaking point and it sounded like the story of the young mum and her baby had just about done her in.

  ‘I’ll take Velma to the bank,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Mr Deeks won’t mind if we use his telephone. We’ll make do. Velma doesn’t have to go to Southend. We’ll keep her safe here, eh?’

  Nevertheless, I had to find Amber with or without Velma’s help and then I had somehow to find the time to get back to Princelet Street to see Ruby. Provided, that was, my gruff-voiced geezer hadn’t ‘taken care’ of her already – whatever that meant.

  I had to keep working around all of this too, so once I’d settled Nan down and made sure that the Duchess was all right, I took Velma to the bank and asked to use the telephone.

  My plan was to get through to one of the nuns in charge, then hand the telephone to Velma. Asking for information about one of their old pupils had to be better coming from a relative. But somewhere along the line, the girl lost her nerve and I found myself talking, on a very crackly line so I had to shout, to a nun called Sister Joseph. I couldn’t work out what she was in the orphanage except that she wasn’t the Sister Superior or whatever they call the top-dog nun.

  I introduced myself, said where I was from and then I said I was looking for a girl who’d once lived at Nazareth House on behalf of her sister who’d also been in the orphanage. I told Sister Joseph the approximate dates of Amber’s residence, and she said that although it was quite a while ago now, she’d do what she could to help me.

  ‘We try to keep in touch with children we’ve helped after they’ve left,’ she said. ‘What was the girl’s name?’

  ‘Amber Reynolds,’ I said. ‘Her sisters, Pearl and Ruby, were also with you for a time.’

  Even through the crackling on the line, I was aware of the silence blaring away at me from the other end.

  ‘Pearl needs to speak to Amber. She just wants to know that she’s all right, which is why we need to find her,’ I added. And then, fearing that perhaps Sister Joseph might think I was some nosy reporter digging about for information on the children of a murderess, I said, ‘I’ve got Pearl’s daughter Velma here, if you want to talk to her.’

  ‘No. That won’t be necessary.’

  It was said coldly and with a finality I didn’t much like.

  ‘Sister Joseph—’

  ‘Mr Hancock, I don’t think we will be able to help you.’

  ‘Yes, but you said—’

  ‘I said that we try to keep in touch with those children we have helped,’ she said. ‘But sometimes we fail, as in this case.’

  ‘Yes, but you must have some sort of idea—’

  ‘The Reynolds girls were very troubled children, Mr Hancock. I assume you know about their mother and the “unpleasantness”. When they left Nazareth House they went their own separate ways and wished for no further contact with this institution.’

  Normally, I thought, places like orphanages had to pass the kiddies on to someone else, an employer or a landlord or someone, when they grew up. But maybe that only applied to ‘good’ children, kids who didn’t have a murderess for a mother. I’ve been at odds with the Duchess and Nan over the Church for years, about how the priests and what-not only have an interest in people who live the good Catholic life and to hell with murderers, prostitutes, madmen and the like. This conversation I was having with Sister Joseph only served to confirm my beliefs.

  ‘Look, Sister,’ I said, ‘I need to get in touch with Amber Reynolds. It’s important. Her sister Pearl is in trouble and she needs to know that Amber is all right.’

  ‘As I’ve told you before, Mr Hancock,’ she interrupted, ‘there’s no record of where Amber Reynolds went from here. The girl just upped and disappeared.’

  Then she put the telephone down on me and I had to stop myself saying a very bad word in front of Velma.

  I was supposed to work that afternoon, but we had a daylight raid so I ran, walked and then, once the raid was over, got on a bus up to Paddington.

  Whatever might or might not have happened to Ruby Reynolds, I had promised her I’d have a go at locating that Phyllis Neilson, which was what I turned my mind to now. If I say I’m going to do a thing then I generally do it. I was also, I have to admit, intrigued now by the Reynoldses’ past. I wanted to see where it had all started all those years ago with their mother. I’d far from forgotten about poor old Kevin Dooley: it was just that other mysteries had now joined his demise in my head.

  Paddington and that area just north of Hyde Park hasn’t taken the bashing we’ve had – nowhere has had as much punishment as the East End. But they’ve had their share. The people look worn out, like ours, and there’s damage to be seen, here and there though, rather than in great swathes of destruction, but it’s there.

  Praed Street is where Paddington station is, and was, I should imagine, quite a grand thoroughfare at one time. They built big and impressive back in the Victorian age, and although the handsome four-storey buildings on the south side of the street are now mainly given over to shops, cafés and cheap flats, it’s still easy to see how they might once have been considered smart. There’s even what I’d call an air of faded gentility about the place – as if it’s been something, now isn’t, but can’t quite understand why. Maybe it’s to do with the superior attitude of the girls on the game in these parts – there are lots of them in Paddington and, dressed up like bandboxes, they’re pretty obvious. Or maybe it’s the mixture of classes round the station. Out in our manor, people are mostly working class. Even Mum’s priest comes from a docks family originally. But in Paddington you can see clerks and surgeons, sailors and lords all briefly rubbing shoulders as they head either into or out of our great city. There are also the Italians in Paddington too – flat-nosed, slick-haired geezers who run boxing gyms, and little old blokes, like Tony of Tony’s Café, which was on the ground floor of 125 Praed Street where the Reynolds girls grew up and where Harold Neilson met his bloody end.

  Although difficult at first – he would keep trying discreetly to cross himself every time he looked at the veil on my top hat – Tony eventually warmed to me. Maybe it was the five cups of tea I drank in his almost empty café, or maybe it was because I introduced myself as a friend of someone whom Tony called ‘Little’ Ruby. Then again, perhaps he was just scared. Ever since March when Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, Italian people and their businesses have taken a lot of abuse in London. In some cases they’ve even been attacked. Someone with no accent, like me, could have been anyone – a copper, a spy, you name it.

  ‘Used to knock Little Ruby about, that beast Neilson,’ Tony said, through and around the stub of an old cigar. ‘We live in the flat behind the café, Vicky Reynolds and her girls in the one above that, one hundred and twenty-five B.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Som
etimes my Pia and our boys, we hear what was going on. But I say to them, that’s their business. It wasn’t for us to interfere.’

  ‘No.’

  Tony leaned forward so that his thin brown cheeks nearly touched mine. ‘Of course, you know and we knew what Vicky Reynolds was,’ he said. ‘But that never made no difference and that were no excuse for Harold and what he done.’

  Suddenly he smiled, revealing just one top row of straight brown teeth. ‘So if you a friend of Ruby, Mr Hancock, what you want here and why she don’t come to see us herself?’

  Tony obviously hadn’t heard what had happened in Spitalfields and so, safe in the knowledge that there had obviously been little love lost between himself and Neilson, I told him about Ruby, Shlomo Kaplan and what the police suspected. What I left out was where Ruby was and what exactly I was doing.

  The old Italian scoffed at the idea of murder. ‘Nah! Not Ruby! She wouldn’t hurt nobody. You know her, Mr Hancock.’ And then, turning on me quickly, he said, ‘Where did you say you know Ruby from?’

  I hadn’t mentioned exactly where I’d come from so I said I was a neighbour from Spitalfields. I could, after all, easily be Jewish on first sight and this explanation seemed to satisfy Tony. But then, in my experience, people outside the East End, whatever their origins, are never as close as those of us who live in the old Thames-side villages. Maybe we’re a bit too close sometimes. Keeping together and close can sometimes lead to ignoring obvious truths, not doing proper justice to those who’ve died among us – like Kevin Dooley, maybe.

  Tony and I chatted and as we did I tried to work out how I might broach the subject of Harold Neilson’s sister, Phyllis.

  ‘Oh, they were lovely girls,’ Tony said enthusiastically. ‘Ruby – that quiet one, Amber, pretty little Pearl—’

  ‘The tiny one was a madam.’ I looked up into the big dark eyes of Tony’s heavy-limbed missus. ‘Very pretty but a madam.’

  ‘Pia . . .’

  ‘She was spoiled,’ Pia’s accent was much stronger than Tony’s. ‘My ’usband ’e remembers nothing,’ she said to me. ‘’Arold was very jealous of that little one.’

  ‘Opal?’

  ‘Yes. Vicky spoiled the child. When she ’ad ’er so all the trouble with ’arold and then that sister of his coming around causing trouble upstairs, that all begun. Opal, she would show off what ’er mum would buy her, send ’arold crazy – his sister Phyllis screaming about Vicky wasting all ’arold’s money on the child. Vicky made all the money as far as I could see. But she would laugh, that child, at the man’s jealousy.’ Pia sighed heavily. ‘In the court Vicky said she killed ’arold because he try to ’urt Opal. But that child pushed him, you know.’

  ‘Pia!’

  ‘Neilson and his sister were evil people, God rest their souls,’ she crossed herself quickly, ‘but that child made you mad. I looked after her – once. You remember, Tony?’

  ‘Well, yes . . .’ Tony put his head down in his shoulders and said, ‘But Mr Hancock don’t need to know nothing about that, Pia. He’s a friend of Ruby.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, well, she always a nice girl. Decent.’ Pia’s big face broke into a smile, and then she left to serve the only other customer they’d had in all the time I’d been there. What, I wondered, had little Opal done that had been so nasty?

  However, now that I knew Phyllis Neilson was dead, and now that it was starting to get dark outside, I could have gone home but I asked Tony for another cuppa instead. A couple of rough-looking lads were hanging about outside, making comments about ‘wops’. Tony seemed a decent sort – not all Italians can be like Mussolini after all – and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of leaving him and Pia alone with them lurking.

  ‘Phyllis, she had the TB,’ Tony volunteered, as he put my cup down in front of me. ‘It was only a question of time. Maybe ten years she’s been dead now.’

  No danger to Ruby or anyone else from her, then. Whoever the sinister bloke who had told me he was ‘taking care’ of the Reynolds girls was, it was unlikely he had anything to do with a woman ten years dead. And there wasn’t any reason, as far as I could tell, to disbelieve Tony and his wife. They had, after all, been quite explicit about the family who had once lived above them.

  ‘’Cause nobody wouldn’t live in Vicky’s flat for years,’ the Italian continued, as he sat down opposite me again and relit his cigar. ‘Not that the old landlord cared. Let the place go to ruin. But Mr Hubbard and Mr Green, they’re the new owners, they ain’t like that. Got some nice people here since they come. People with a bit of class.’

  There was a nice middle-aged book-keeper on the top floor and a ‘very smart’ lady, some relative of the landlords, in the Reynoldses’ old flat. As well as making the flats a bit better to attract a ‘nicer’ class of tenant, the new landlords had also done some repair work on Tony and Pia’s flat. But they’d probably bought the properties so cheap they could afford to keep the tenants happy. In some parts of this city landlords are almost giving places away now, something of which Tony also was aware.

  ‘But if we get bombed by the Germans, what Mr Hubbard and Mr Green done won’t be worth nothing, will it?’ he said, as he led me to the door while his wife pulled down the blackout curtains.

  ‘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 r
epeated what Doris had said. But I’d felt hurt that Hannah hadn’t told me herself, which now seemed both arrogant and stupid.

  Chapter Twelve

  When 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.