Sure and Certain Death

by Barbara Nadel

  She shuddered. Whether she was just putting that on for my benefit or not I didn’t know. I don’t know what I feel about those who claim to be able to contact the dead. I was and remain certain, however, that Cissy did hear her mother’s voice. Although whether it was indeed malevolent and whether in some way perhaps it made her do what she did, I don’t suppose anyone will ever discover.

  ‘’Course, if she was seeing your sister up Claybury it explains why she was late for Neville’s funeral,’ Mrs Darling said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. Well your Nancy was working that one, weren’t she.’ She drew her fur coat closer round her shoulders as we walked past the Abbey Arms. ‘When you come round to mine to organise the funeral with Esme, Cissy was there all the time. She must’ve realised then that she couldn’t be seen by both me and Esme and your Nancy at the funeral; would have given some of her lies away. I reckon Cissy had to have been waiting somewhere outside Esme’s until either the lot of you or your Nancy left. Only then could she come in. She couldn’t let people make connections to other parts of her life. Things tucked away in there she wouldn’t want anyone to know about.’

  ‘Like Mr Abrahams.’

  ‘Yes.’ She frowned. ‘As it was, she must’ve been under all sorts of strain.’

  ‘In what way?’

  We were outside the shop now. Mrs Darling looked with some disapproval at our dusty, blacked-out windows.

  ‘Well I remembered her from her Uncle Bob’s shop, as you know,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember her young man or her being with him when, as she has it, we tried to shame him into fighting. But just because I didn’t remember didn’t mean that no one else would.’

  ‘Her young man came from Custom House.’

  She shrugged. ‘We went down there, but I don’t remember who we talked to or what we done. There was a lot of men about, you know, Mr Hancock,’ she said. ‘And to our shame, us girls went and harassed many of them. I can say that we was young and young people will have their passions and what not. But I know it don’t go any way towards excusing it. We ruined lives.’

  ‘You had a hand in ruining Cissy’s, and of course her young man’s too.’

  ‘If we only done that then that’s enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not excusing what you did, Mrs Darling,’ I said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But I’m not condoning what Cissy did either.’

  We’d been standing outside the shop for a little while now. It became obvious that those inside had seen us when I saw one of the first-floor parlour windows open and Stella poke her head out.

  ‘Are you coming up, Frank?’ she said. ‘Nancy’s home. Isn’t that lovely?’

  I smiled. ‘Up in a minute,’ I said. ‘One extra for tea please, Stella.’

  ‘All right, Frank. Whatever you say.’ She closed the window as my face fell into a frown. Another disregarded spinster who wanted to be useful. Stella made me sad.

  ‘You know, Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘if all of these murders teach us anything, it’s that we overlook people at our peril. And I don’t just mean all the mad and wounded and just plain sad old soldiers who made it back from the First Lot. I mean the women who’ll never recover from that terrible carnage too. You know what Cissy said she feared the most when her mother died? Becoming a lonely spinster, a woman just tolerated by her family, a woman deemed sad or worthless or queer by our society. Outside of loving families these women are treated like dirt, Mrs Darling.’

  ‘Not by me, love,’ Mrs Darling said as she pushed on the shop door and began to go inside. ‘Believe what you like about what I do, but my circles give spinsters something, Mr Hancock. The dead don’t judge, remember. But then neither do I.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll go and visit Cissy in the condemned cell if they’ll let me.’

  ‘I think she may still want to kill you,’ I said.

  She smiled again. ‘I expect she does, God love her,’ she said. ‘But the guards won’t let her, and anyway, I ain’t afraid no more. I ain’t being watched any more now, am I?’

  ‘You and Linnit are free?’ I said with a smile.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘although Linnit says you’re still very troubled in your mind, Mr Hancock, and she knows you know!’

  I thought about telling Mrs Darling about the dream I’d had where I’d heard her spirit guide’s voice, but then I decided against it. After all, I didn’t want to actually get involved with spiritualism myself, did I?

  Cissy Hoskin made one attempt on her life before she even left Plaistow police station. Once in Holloway prison, according to Mrs Darling, she tried it twice in the first week. What she’ll be like at her trial I dare not imagine. Again according to Mrs Darling, Cissy’s mother talks to her all the time now, not always in the nicest of terms either.

  Life for Hancock’s goes on much as before although now Arthur has gone and Nancy has, to some extent, taken his place. She can’t really bear as well as a man. She admits that now she’s not so keen to mortify her flesh any more. We’ve another lad, Sidney, to do the bearing now. But Nancy does help out with the horses and the cleaning, and she is quite a desirable feature for some people at their loved ones’ funerals. Even in these tough times there are people who are affected by the sight of a sad-looking woman by a graveside. I suppose it goes back to the old days when mutes were popular at funerals. And my sister, it has to be said, is still sad. Her best friend is dead, a fact due directly to a dark secret Nan, Dolly and all the other White Feather girls once shared. I never tell her what Cissy told me about Dolly being jealous of her, though. I never would. What I do tell her and tell her, even though I know she doesn’t believe me, is that I’ve forgiven her. But then maybe at the very back of my mind I haven’t.

  One real mystery did however remain, and that concerned whether or nor I had really seen Fernanda Abrahams knocking on the door of the shop the night before Walter and I were attacked by Cissy. For several weeks after Cissy’s arrest I’d been expecting to maybe hear from Fernanda. After all, my name, as well as Cissy’s, had been in all the papers. Once criminals are caught, the censor goes out the window! But she didn’t come, and this seemed to confirm to me that she either didn’t care, which was very possible, or she’d put the whole thing out of her mind. Whatever the cause, I assumed that Fernanda hadn’t come to the shop that night except inside my head. But one bright morning towards the middle of March she proved me wrong.

  ‘Mr Hancock?’

  I’d just walked through the curtains and into the shop to speak to Doris when she came in. I recognised her immediately, even though her hair, or so it seemed, was slightly darker than it had been before.

  ‘Mrs Abrahams,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  She looked over at Doris and then back at me and said, ‘Mr Hancock, I need to talk to you. In private.’

  I took her upstairs to the parlour. The girls were out shopping and the Duchess was taking a nap, so we were likely to be left alone. Once she’d sat herself down and put her handbag on her lap, Fernanda Abrahams said, ‘I expect you’ve been wondering why I came here that night when you called down to me from the roof. There was a lot of bombing . . .’

  ‘I thought I dreamed you!’ I said. ‘Blimey, Mrs Abrahams, you’ve no idea how good it feels to know it wasn’t just all in my head!’

  ‘Oh.’ She leaned towards me. ‘Mr Hancock . . .’

  ‘Good heavens, I haven’t offered you a cup of tea!’ I started to get up. ‘God, what . . .’

  ‘Mr Hancock, I came that night to see Nancy!’ Fernanda Abrahams cut in. There was a desperation in her tone that made me stop and sit back down again. ‘I’d rowed with Ed and I flew out of the house, and by the time I got here it was dark!’

  ‘Why did you come to see Nancy?’ She’d been contemptuous, even hostile towards my sister last time she’d seen her.

  ‘Last time I saw Nancy, when we had that row with your other sister and . . . Nancy said something about my not wanting to know her
because she is everything I hate about myself. She meant her colour . . . what she . . . what she so obviously is and what I am so obviously not.’

  ‘Mrs Abrahams,’ I said, ‘like me and my sisters you are . . . well, you’re . . .’

  ‘I am more Indian than you, Mr Hancock,’ she said. ‘Both my parents are from India! Where this skin and this hair that I have come from I don’t know. My sisters were always jealous of me for it. My parents spoiled me because of it when I was tiny! From God knows how young, I lived my life as far as I could as a white person. I wanted that!’

  I’d wanted that once, but that had been many years before. You get used to being ‘the wog’ to some people. You put a smile on your face and you say nothing.

  ‘My old man wanted me to be white too. If he hadn’t, I would never have married him,’ she said. ‘That we’re white is important to Ed an’ all. Our daughter’s white. She’s a lovely girl.’

  This time there was no arrogance in her. Just sadness.

  ‘But you know, Mr Hancock, it was only when I come here and saw Nancy and all the rest of you again that it struck me that my daughter, Phillipa, only knows half her family. My parents disowned me when I went with Ed. His family didn’t want to know either, but some of his relatives do still speak to us. Phillipa has been brought up in their faith.’

  I knew. ‘Mrs Abrahams,’ I said, ‘Nancy isn’t here at the moment . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I just have to talk to someone, to . . .’ She gulped. ‘Look, my daughter don’t know my family, they don’t know her. My daughter, Mr Hancock, don’t even know what my family are. She’s a nice Jewish girl, she is! A nice Jewish girl from Clapham!’ Her eyes bulged with tears as the words caught painfully in her throat. ‘I always kept away from your sister when we was in the White Feather girls. Some of the others would whisper about her behind her back, about her being brown . . . I didn’t want them to do that to me! Although I expect some of them did. They all knew – I think they did. But only Marie really got through to me, you know. Margaret never! She was a nice person, Marie, kind. I trusted her.’

  ‘Marie was good to you?’

  ‘She helped me! She introduced me to Ed and so she helped me, indirectly like, to be a white lady in Clapham! And, and . . .’ She began to cry. I let her weep for quite some time before I spoke again.

  ‘So what happened to change that when you came here?’ I said. As I recalled them, both her appearances in my home had been fraught and far from pleasant.

  She looked at me over the top of her handkerchief and said, ‘I saw that you didn’t care. You, all of you, just get on . . .’

  ‘We don’t really have much of a choice . . .’

  ‘Yes, but what you are don’t matter! You all love each other, you help each other. Your sister Aggie is as white as I am, although,’ she smiled through her tears now, ‘her hair’s probably a damn sight lighter than mine at the moment! Can’t get hold of the peroxide.’ She put her head down a little. ‘Maybe not sure that I want to . . .’

  ‘Mrs Abrahams . . .’

  ‘I came that night to apologise to all of you,’ she said. ‘Also I wanted to tell Nancy that she was so kind to do what she did to warn me. She never liked me, Mr Hancock. I know that. And to be fair, I wasn’t likeable. I wasn’t nice to your sister when we were young, and yet in spite of that she still put herself out to help me when Ed and me saw her up Claybury.’

  ‘But Mrs Abrahams,’ I said, ‘when you came here after you’d met up with Nancy at Claybury you were furious at us for bringing up the White Feather subject in front of your husband because it made him angry.’

  ‘It did! But what he was also angry about was being here with you!’ she said. ‘I know he hid it well; he’s a polite man, my husband. But being so close to Canning Town with people your colour . . . Ed’s never got over the way most of his family disowned him. He blames the colour my skin should be, do you understand? He blames my skin for taking him away from his family, for making our Phillipa something she isn’t, just like me!’

  This time her tears stopped her from saying any more. I didn’t feel able to comfort her, either with my voice or with a friendly arm around her shoulders. I let her weep until she was spent. I said very little when she finally did rise to go. But she did.

  ‘Mr Hancock,’ she said, ‘that night I come here in the raid, I was running away. As I said, I had a row with Ed and . . . Suddenly I didn’t want the white life any more! I wanted to be who I am . . . But then I saw you up there on the roof, your brown face and your strange black clothes, and I, I couldn’t.’ She sniffed. ‘I saw you as different. I couldn’t belong to people like you – God forgive me!’

  I wasn’t upset by what she said. I knew what she meant. ‘Mrs Abrahams,’ I said, ‘you’ve lived most of your life as a white lady. You can’t just stop doing that now.’

  ‘Yes, but my daughter . . .’

  ‘Your daughter is a white girl,’ I said. ‘You made that choice, Mrs Abrahams. A very long time ago.’

  Suddenly she looked crushed. If she’d come wanting me to take her in to some kind of Anglo-Indian community, help her find her parents maybe and talk to her daughter, she was now very disappointed. But then maybe she hadn’t just come to see if I or my sister would do that. Maybe she’d come to have us confirm some things to her too. I said, ‘You know, your husband must love you very much. He gave up most of his family for you.’

  She looked at me, her eyes glazed with tears.

  ‘I will tell Nancy that you came and that you thanked her for what she did,’ I said.

  And then she left. But just before that, she pulled my head down towards her face and she kissed me on the cheek. It was, she said, just for a moment like kissing her father’s face once again.

  That night there was a raid and so I went out running. My feet pounding down on the pavements that threatened to melt underneath me, I thought about Cissy Hoskin and how her life had been taken away from her by a few silly girls. We all do what we think is best at the time, and yet so often we make mistakes! Nancy and, I imagined, the other remaining White Feather girls were trapped to some extent in their guilt; Fernanda Abrahams was trapped inside a skin she felt she was no longer comfortable with. And Cissy? Cissy Hoskin’s trial will begin next month, it appears. After it she will be sent to the condemned cell and then there will be silence. In a way, I do believe it is probably what she wants.