Last Rights (34 page)

A view obviously not shared by Pearl Dooley, who must have told Father Burton the truth about her sister Opal, I now realised.
It seemed Pearl hadn’t believed that any bad blood had come down from her mother. And maybe that was true but Victorine, in
pitting her man and her child against each other in the way that she had, hadn’t done either of them any favours. She hadn’t
deserved to hang for what her daughter had done but she was guilty in part, I felt, all the same.

‘Velma is a very nice girl,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing bad about her.’

‘Maybe not.’

I got out of the car as Doris came running out of the shop, shouting behind her, ‘It’s him, Mrs H! He’s here!’

Closely followed by Nan, Doris said, looking at me properly, ‘God help us, Mr H, you look like a bleedin’ Guy! Christ, what
a pong!’

‘I’ve had a bit of a night of it, one way or another, Doris,’ I said, and then I bent into the car to retrieve Sister Teresa
from the back seat.

‘You know, I think that Mum knew all along in a way,’ she said, as she took my hand and swung her feet out on to the pavement,
‘about Opal. She loved jewels, Mum. It’s why we’re all called after them. But Opals are unlucky, aren’t they?’

‘So it’s said.’

‘Well, it’s right, then, ain’t it? Bad jewels for bad blood,’ she said, and smiled again. ‘Bloody silly superstition. Ain’t
Christian, you know.’

I choked up a small and very dry laugh.

H
annah was, I’d recently discovered, a dab hand at putting on her makeup with only a candle and a fragment of mirror to judge
the effect by. I had to hold the mirror while she put it on, mind, but that didn’t in any way detract from my admiration for
her skill.

‘Can’t go out on a date looking like Gawd knows what, can I?’ she said, as she pinned her hair on to the top of her head in
a big yellow roll.

‘No,’ I said, as I watched her study her face critically in the mirror.

‘Hold it up!’ she said, as she moved the mirror and my hands several inches higher. ‘There, that’s better.’

It was two weeks now since the deaths of Opal Reynolds and Leonard Blatt. Of course, a lot of other people, some known some
unknown, had also died in that time, but it was those two who had had the most impact on me and mine. Except to pick up instructions,
I hadn’t been able to be indoors for the first week after it happened. I’d worked, of course, but if I wasn’t either
conducting a funeral or out the back with the deceased or the horses I was pounding the streets and what was left of the open
spaces of West Ham. Sometimes alone but sometimes with Ken, I walked and ran myself almost to a standstill that first week.
As Hannah said at the end of it when I went to her, desperate, in the middle of one long, strangely silent night, ‘It wasn’t
dying, it was burying alive that frightened you, wasn’t it? Like being back in the mud in Flanders.’

I’d hugged her almost to the point of crushing the poor girl. She knew, of course she did. Our age group does. She’d had a
brother out in Passchendaele. He’d loved her and written to her, in spite of their parents’ disapproval, mainly about the
mud, and then nothing. So they had no children left now, Hannah’s parents. That glum old couple she’d taken me to see that
night in Spitalfields. One really dead and the other as good as. How sad they’d let their beliefs kill their love. It’s so
rare in this world.

When she’d finished putting her face on, as she calls it, Hannah took the piece of mirror from me and said, ‘You know that
when I come out of Paddington that night after the all-clear and you weren’t there I was convinced you had to be dead.’

I started to say something wisecracky about how it would take more than bombs and girls with guns to kill me, when Hannah
put one of her fingers over my lips. ‘Because, see, I knew that you’d come back for me,’ she said.

‘Well, yes, love, you know I would.’

‘You’re the only one that ever has,’ she said, and then
she turned away very quickly. ‘Listen to me, soppy old cow.’

But I could see there were tears in her eyes and it caused me to have a few in mine too. Love isn’t a word I’d use either
about or to Hannah, it frightens her, but it is what I feel for her. I know what she is and what she does – why she’s in this
life too. Dumped by her boyfriend, rejected by her parents. Women don’t do too well alone, don’t do too well unless they’ve
got money, and, as she’d told me herself, Hannah didn’t think she deserved any better than the streets anyway. Poor girl.
I give her money, of course I do, but not very often, not now. She’d rather I take her out once in a while. Bad as me, really,
she is, out and about and happy to be so with the dead.

Hannah went over to the sink and picked up a little bottle of scent from beside one of the taps. ‘How’s Velma?’ she said,
as she dabbed a little behind each ear and on her wrists.

‘Happy now she’s got her mum back,’ I said. Pearl had finally been released from Holloway two days before, and she and Velma
had had a tearful reunion in our parlour. Now they knew who had killed Kevin Dooley, the police and Pearl’s new solicitor
had got her out. The new brief, a Mr Dobson, had also managed to persuade the coppers that Pearl’s defence about going to
Dot Harris for an abortion was a story she’d made up because she was frightened. No one believed this, including me, but with
no evidence that didn’t matter. Dot certainly wasn’t going to argue with it. But Pearl was out and that was the main thing.

‘So what about the Dooleys?’ Hannah asked, as the smell of Californian Poppy began to get inside my nostrils. ‘Pearl back
there, is she?’

‘She’s been,’ I said. I’d taken her over to Canning Town and seen for myself how hard it had been for Vi Dooley and her son
Johnny to admit they’d been wrong about her. ‘Picked up the rest of the kids.’

‘What, and took them back to yours?’ Hannah’s eyes widened with surprise.

I laughed. All those kids in our place! ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sister Teresa took her and all of them down to Southend with her.’

‘To the convent?’

‘To start with, yes,’ I said. ‘Pearl’ll have to work and then who knows?’

If Sister Teresa carries on doing what she’s doing I’ll be very surprised. By her own admission, and just like Pearl, in her
way she had hidden in the first safe place she could find. For Pearl that was marriage, any marriage, and children. For Amber
it was the veil, doing penance for a crime that wasn’t even hers. Thinking back on it, which I’ve done almost all of the time
these past couple of weeks, I reckon it was only ever Ruby who had found any peace in her life. Had Opal not ruined it, she
would have been happy among the Jews with Shlomo as her husband. Gerald would’ve got used to it eventually, and Ruby would’ve
been a contented congregant at the Great Synagogue on Brick Lane with all the other frummers. Fred Bryant says she’ll almost
certainly hang for the murder of her sister and Blatt, and you don’t have to be a
copper to realise that’s on the cards. But when I’m called to give evidence I will do my best to try to give the court some
idea of the strain and grief she was suffering, of the cruelty that had been done to her. However, as Sister Teresa said to
me the night after it had happened, ‘Ruby ain’t going to try to get out of it, Mr Hancock. She did what she thought was right.
She’s prepared, as she said, to hang for it.’

But it still isn’t a comfortable thought, so for a moment I frowned.

Hannah, seeing this look flash across my face, said, ‘I hope you’re not going to have a face like that on all through the
picture.’

‘No.’ Then I smiled. ‘How can I with Deanna Durbin up on the screen and you on my arm?’

Hannah shook her head in mock irritation. ‘Come on, then,’ she said, as she went over to the door and opened it. ‘Let’s get
out of here before the Jerries turn up.’

I stood up and followed her out into the hall.

W
hen someone you know dies the world changes, or so some people say. In many ways, however, it remains the same and I don’t
know which is more hurtful: the change or the endless sameness of it all.

I’m standing here now, back in the graveyard where the bare-knuckle fight took place, next to where Kevin Dooley died, where
I was nearly buried in the monument that the woman I’m looking at now is leaning against. I know she’s scared, of the bombs
crashing to the ground all over the manor as well as of me because, as happens sometimes, I can’t help laughing. Sometimes
in the trenches I’d laugh for hours without a break.

But I know it’s a measure of her desperation that she’s followed me up here. ‘Johnny’s chucked us out,’ she said, as she grabbed
hold of my sleeve that first time over by the gate. ‘You helped Pearl. Help me. I’ll do anything you want.’

And then, poor cow, she’d opened her blouse and shown herself to me. She’s a well-built woman, Martine
Dooley, and I can easily appreciate what a man might see in her. But not me. I can’t take to a woman whose face shows open
disgust every time she looks at you. I started to stutter I wasn’t interested and then she began to laugh, which is why I’m
howling myself now.

So she, Martine, is silent and I am behaving like a madman. It’s nearly winter now and the Nazis have all but blasted us back
to the start of creation here in West Ham. Everyone has lost someone, many of whom I’ve buried. The business goes from strength
to strength.

Here I sit, Francis Hancock – undertaker, wog – out of his tiny mind, looking at that still broken monument that Opal Reynolds
put me into.

Wishing, madly, I could climb inside one last and final time.

19 Princelet Street –
Europe’s First Museum
of Immigration and Diversity

Although the characters in this book are fictional, most of the locations are real and many of them are still in existence.
Sadly, not all of these old buildings are in the best of condition. The building referred to in this book as the ‘Princelet
Synagogue’ is one of them. Originally the home of a Huguenot silk merchant, 19 Princelet Street is a magical place which possesses
a beautiful Victorian East European Synagogue built over its rear garden.

The Spitalfields Centre charity is working to preserve this building and give it new life as a place of education and a museum
of immigration. It will be a celebration of the rich diversity that exists amongst the people who have settled into the area
and of the tradition of giving refuge that Britain can so rightly be proud of.

This delicate, vulnerable and evocative building is close to my heart both as a place and as a symbol of cross-cultural tolerance
and understanding. However, in order to properly preserve this international site of conscience, a Grade II* Listed building
of national importance as a permanent exploration of issues of immigration, exile and identity, the charity needs money. If
you would like to help save the house and make the museum a reality, then please send your contribution to The Spitalfields
Centre, 19 Princelet St, London, E1 6QH. The Spitalfields Centre
is a registered charity number 287279,
www.19princeletstreet.org.uk
.

Thank you.

Barbara Nadel.