Last Rights

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Oh, well, “we’ll meet again”, I suppose,’ she said, referring to what has for so many people become a favourite song.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘You owe me fags.’

  ‘Funny bugger!’

  When we parted, Aggie went right and I went left, towards Canning Town. I watched her go for as long as I could in the blackout and then I began my own journey across the rubble, occasionally pressing myself up against shop doorways crowded with sandbags as cars, their lights dimmed to almost nothing, sometimes mounted the pavement. In spite of, even because of the daylight raid, there were a lot of people about. Families clearing up damage to their homes where they could, boarding up broken windows, putting down sandbags. Some people were coming out of houses with furniture and kitchen things. People who might or might not have been looters – how was I to know? There was a warden and a copper talking on the corner of Star Lane and they weren’t doing anything so why should I?

  Even if I hadn’t known where Rathbone Street was, if I’d heard its reputation I would’ve known it when I got there. Even as early as this, before the mad pubs of Canning Town – the Bridge House, the Chandelier and the like – chuck out, some girls are out and about in the shop doorways. Not all their ‘trade’ goes to the pubs after all. Not the Lascars with skin like mine or the blacks from Casablanca who don’t take a drink because of their religion. There’s work to be had, for which I was mistaken by one poor lass in a darkened doorway. Just quickly she shone one of those torches they all have up at her face and said, ‘Evening, love.’

  Even by that little light, I could see she was nearer to seventeen than forty-seven.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck you, then!’ she said. Probably nearer fourteen than seventeen by the sound of her, poor kid. Her mouth already a karzy, probably in more ways than one. Several further incidents like this occurred until I eventually found Hannah. She wasn’t alone so I had to wait out of sight until she’d finished whatever she was doing. Luckily, once I’d heard her voice, I didn’t have to go any nearer and therefore see what he was making her do. But whoever he was he lifted his hat to her when he’d finished and he paid, which is more than a lot of them do.

  ‘What are you doing here, Mr H?’ Hannah said coldly, as she hastily rearranged her skirt.

  Trying not to look or even imagine in my head, I said, ‘Well, love, I’m on my way to Spitalfields to see about that Ruby . . .’

  ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to come with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what do you want with me?’ Hannah said. ‘Unless you want a bunk up.’

  ‘No!’ In case any over-enthusiastic punter should try to get between us I pulled Hannah into the doorway of a pawn shop. ‘I just need to know that we’re all right,’ I said. ‘I know I hurt you about your parents—’

  ‘Forget it,’ Hannah replied.

  ‘But I can’t,’ I said. ‘You even went to see them for me, which must have hurt you.’

  ‘I done it for that Pearl, not you!’ Hannah snapped. Her eyes darted over my shoulder at the furtive male figures shuffling awkwardly around the edges of the street. ‘A woman on her own like that . . .’ Hannah continued. ‘Look, are you going to Spitalfields or not, Mr H? Or do I have to lose money while I stand about chatting to you?’

  ‘Hannah!’

  I could see there were tears in her eyes, although whether they were tears of misery or fury I couldn’t tell.

  ‘If I don’t make the rent tonight Dot’ll have me out on me ear,’ she said. ‘So, if you don’t mind . . .’

  ‘I’ll pay your rent!’ I said wildly, and completely without thought about how. ‘Just go home, I . . .’ I couldn’t pretend any more. Suddenly the thought of my Hannah with some slobbering, dirty bloke, his guts full of booze, was just too much for me. ‘I’ll pay your rent, Hannah,’ I said. ‘I’ll look after you. I will!’

  Hannah sighed. She looked as if she were physically deflating. ‘I can’t and won’t let you do that, Mr H,’ she said. ‘You and me, we can’t never be more than what we are now . . .’

  ‘Look,’ I said, madly, I confess, ‘I can become a Jew. Ruby—’

  Hannah laughed. ‘But I’m not a Jew any more, Mr H, not really. Don’t you understand that? That ain’t the point. Or, rather, it is the point but not in any way I can see you’ll understand.’

  ‘Hannah . . .’

  ‘But if you want me to come out to Spitalfields with you now, you can pay me for my trouble and I’ll take the money for that.’

  I could hear men shuffling about behind me. I could even hear some brutish creature on the job with another girl further back down towards the Barking Road.

  ‘But you don’t want to go there, do you, Hannah?’ I said. ‘Not again.’

  Hannah reached up and put her hands round my neck, gently cradling my head in the cold, soft darkness. ‘I’m not a Jew, Mr H, because I don’t deserve to be one. I don’t deserve to be anything,’ she whispered. ‘This is all I do deserve after what I’ve done. I don’t deserve you . . .’

  ‘Hannah, I’ve done things myself,’ I began.

  But she put one finger on my lips and said, ‘Sssh. You’re a good, kind man. You care about people, even when they’re bastards, even when they’re dead.’

  Especially when they’re dead, I thought, because I know how they get that way. I’ve made people that way. Pushing German faces down into the depths of the suffocating Flanders mud, aiming my rifle at some poor kid wetting himself with fear and dishonour. Kevin Dooley, too, must have been terrified as he died. Everyone is – we don’t know what, if anything, comes after life, which is why the dying must be comforted by the living. I let Kevin down, me of all people. I let him die violently, disbelieved and alone.

  I put my hand into my pocket and took out some cash, which I gave to Hannah. ‘Come on,’ I said.

  We pushed our way out of Rathbone Street. Past drunks having sex with children watched by other drunks waiting for their turn. I thought about the youngster who’d offered it to me and how coarse and brutalised she had already become. There are so many ways to ruin a child – like this, by spoiling as Victorine Reynolds had done to her youngest . . . It’s a risk having children.

  Hannah and I took the bus over to Stepney. Slow, ghostly things they are now, blacked out, their lights dimmed to virtually nothing. We walked the rest of the way, past the Jewish soup kitchens, the Yiddisher theatres, the many, many synagogues. I told Hannah everything I’d discovered about the Reynolds family so far.

  ‘Gone.’ Hannah shrugged as she stepped out of the Princelet Street synagogue. ‘Left last night – well, early hours of the morning.’

  ‘But why?’ I said. ‘That raid lasted till almost dawn. Why would she leave in the middle of that?’

  All my fears about Ruby Reynolds were about to be confirmed. In fact, it was worse than I had imagined.

  ‘Maybe the bloke what threatened you come for her,’ Hannah said. ‘What time did that geezer approach you?’

  ‘Maybe ten or—’

  ‘Ruby Reynolds left here between one and two,’ Hannah said. ‘Rabbi says some young bloke knocked with a note for her.’

  ‘And they opened the door?’

  Hannah threw up her hands casually. ‘It’s them Commie boys, Mr H. All fired up on their new ideas. Always looking for new comrades. Raids don’t mean nothing to them. They come and go from their meetings, changing the world . . .’

  ‘So somebody knocked with a note for Ruby Reynolds.’

  ‘Yes. So she took it, she read it and then—’

  ‘Then she got up and left in the middle of a raid.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I leaned against the wall of the old Huguenot house and closed my eyes. Someone somewhere struck up a tune on a ukulele – something strange and foreign-sounding, not a bit like George Formby, thank Christ.

  ‘Did anyone know this bloke with the note?’ I said.

  ‘No, but Rabbi Nu
man told me Ruby said to him the note was from you.’

  ‘From me?’

  ‘That’s what she told him,’ Hannah said. ‘Them Commie boys wouldn’t have let her out unless they were sure whoever she was going to was kosher, and they know you. She’s a bit of a cause for them, you know, Mr H. She’s a fugitive from British injustice. Frummer or no frummer, they’ll help anyone on the run from the law.’

  ‘But I didn’t send her any note,’ I said. ‘I spent that night over in Limehouse.’

  Ruby, however, must have thought that the note was from me. That, or she had to have known the bearer of the missive once she got outside. But I had said to her that I would never ask her to leave the synagogue to do anything for me. And she’d done just that.

  ‘I think we should own up and tell the coppers Ruby’s missing. I’m scared for her,’ I said to Hannah, as a couple of the comrades came out of the synagogue. One of them was the ginger-haired lad who’d let me in to see Ruby.

  ‘You do that and we’ll smash your head in,’ he said, as he and his mate closed in around me.

  ‘We’re looking for her, all right,’ the other, far darker young bloke said, ‘now we know she ain’t with you.’

  Hannah said something in Yiddish and the boys backed away a little.

  ‘The bloke who came for her said he was your lad,’ the ginger youngster said to me.

  ‘What was he like?’ I asked.

  ‘Small, dark, black suit . . .’

  An undertaker’s lad. Yes. But not mine. Arthur is six foot tall and has hair the same colour as Jean Harlow’s was. This other little lad was someone else, if someone else who knew me. I wondered if his voice had been unusually coarse and rasping for his age or whether the voice I’d heard in Limehouse had been that of someone who was using this lad. But the comrades couldn’t remember anything about his voice.

  But why had whoever had drawn Ruby out done so? How had he or they known where she was? If they’d been coppers they’d have been all over the synagogue by now, them not liking the Commies too much these days, so it obviously wasn’t them. Someone bubbling up from Ruby and her sisters’ past, someone not Phyllis Neilson?

  The two comrades moved off then without further threats to me.

  ‘I promised them I’d keep you away from the coppers,’ Hannah said, as we watched them pass into the thickness of the blackout.

  ‘But someone could be holding her, hurting her,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ Hannah said. ‘But if you cross the Commies they’ll hurt you, so put it from your mind, Mr H.’

  When I’d first met her, Ruby had been a frightened woman, suspicious of just about everyone except those closest to her. I’d told her I wouldn’t ask her to leave that synagogue. She had to have either known my so-called ‘boy’ very well or something in that note must have had a real effect on her. There was also, personally, something else. Someone, be it the gruff-voiced geezer in Limehouse or not, knew who I was, what I did and about my involvement with Ruby. For what purpose?

  But whatever the reason, Ruby was now missing and not even Bessie Stern, whom Hannah and I went to see afterwards, had any idea where she might be.

  ‘She changed her name to House,’ the old matchmaker said, as she gave me a cup of tea and took a fag, if rather sniffily, from Hannah. ‘I knew who she was. I recognised the name Reynolds, remembered all them poor little orphaned girls. But I told her I’d keep her secret and I was true to that until I asked the Commie rabbi to take care of her and then I told you. She never killed Shlomo, I don’t care what anyone says.’

  ‘Why did you contact me?’ I said.

  Bessie Stern shrugged. ‘Because Ruby told me to. She thought that if you was with her sister and her girl you had to be all right. I thought the sister might come back and see me herself at some point, to be honest with you. I’d’ve told her everything. But she had her own troubles too. Whatever, you had to be better than the police – no one can trust them now. They’ll do anything to make their lives easy, the poor bastards. Who can blame them in such times?’ She shrugged again. ‘And then this lawyer came to help her sister. Ruby said he couldn’t be trusted either. What can a person do? Poor Ruby is afraid she’ll hang like her mother. She’s afraid that someone wants her to hang like her mother. And now this with her sister . . .’

  ‘You’ve no idea who she might have gone off with last night?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head, tutting as she did so. ‘You know, she was well hidden in that synagogue. I don’t hold with Commies myself. We,’ she looked pointedly at Hannah as she spoke, ‘don’t have no politics, our kind. Our rabbi don’t hold with breaking the law. But I knew that Rabbi Numan and his people would look after her. The Commies all closed in around her, as they do. You know she said her father was Jewish? He told her mother what town he come from back in his own country. It was Riga. A lot of people come from Riga. Course, Ruby never knew him, but coming down here made her feel sort of close, I think, to Yiddisher people . . . And then there was Shlomo . . .’

  ‘Mrs Stern,’ I said, ‘do you think that his son . . .’

  ‘Gerald never approved,’ she said. ‘He even put some very bad rumour around about his father. But he’d never have done nothing mad, not nothing that might’ve got him into trouble.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because he’s already got the business from his father,’ Bessie said. ‘And as for the house and all the rest of it, well, the house is Gerald’s now too, so it would’ve only been old Shlomo’s cash and none of that had been taken. Maybe he found out about Ruby’s past and killed his father . . . No.’ Bessie Stern shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t’ve needed to kill Shlomo. He was a naturally suspicious old bastard. If anyone had told him about Ruby’s mother he would’ve thrown her into the street. Much as he loved her he would have done so. He could never have brought himself to trust her. Silly old fool, he believed in bad blood, like a lot of the old ones. I only knew about Ruby’s past because, as I said, I remembered that Reynolds murder. You know, Ruby looks the spit of her mother.’

  ‘And you trusted her? So you never told no one?’ Hannah said. ‘Not even when old Mr Kaplan was found dead?’

  ‘Look, darling,’ Bessie said, I felt a little savagely, ‘you might think I’m nothing but a gossipy old frummer, you with your goyim ways. But I believed Ruby and I trusted her. She fitted here, you know, with our life. She was a good girl, nice girl, worked to study the Torah – know what I mean? – even before old Shlomo ever whispered about marriage. So her mother, rest her soul, killed some horrible man? That wasn’t Ruby. She never killed no one. Biggest mistake she did was running off like that, me helping her, may I be forgiven. But she was so scared and we all know how the coppers are! And, anyway, when they come they did have her real name – knew her! How did they know her? I’ve thought maybe Shlomo’s son found out somehow, gave it to them. But, no, that don’t make sense. There’s no way Gerald could have found that out. No. If anyone told the coppers anything, if anyone has it in for Ruby, it has to be someone else. Ruby, I know you know, she told me, she thought that maybe someone from her mother’s time come to do revenge on her.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a woman. You saw her too, Ruby said, just before the air raid when Shlomo died. At the end of the street . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes. I told the coppers about that,’ Bessie said. ‘Ruby wondered if it was the man her mother murdered, his sister.’

  ‘It can’t have been,’ I said. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh. Poor soul. God love her.’

  ‘But, anyway, the person who come for Ruby at the synagogue was a man,’ Hannah said.

  ‘With maybe a note from some woman? This woman we both saw,’ Bessie said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The Commie boys told us Ruby said the note was from me.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head.

  ‘And yet if it’d been from the woman she suspected – or she thought it was fro
m her – maybe she lied about you writing it to get out of there to her, confront her maybe. But, no, she was scared, she wouldn’t’ve left the synagogue for anyone she didn’t trust.’

  ‘Then maybe she is with someone she can trust?’ Hannah said.

  ‘But Ruby doesn’t trust people,’ Bessie said thoughtfully, as she sucked hard on her fag. ‘But maybe . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Bessie shrugged. ‘Maybe trust didn’t come into it. Maybe it was someone beyond trust, someone she loved?’

  ‘But Shlomo . . .’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean like a lover,’ the old woman said. ‘Ruby never had none of them except Shlomo, as far as I know. No, I mean maybe a relative, someone from her past.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘The comrades up at the synagogue said that the boy who came with the note claimed to come from my shop. Ruby didn’t make anything up. She was lured out.’

  However, that didn’t mean that Bessie didn’t have a point. Although the Reynolds girls had split up after their time at the orphanage, Ruby at least had been concerned about Pearl, which was partly why she’d contacted me. People can find each other and information about each other when they need to. It was therefore possible that one or other of the remaining Reynolds girls had found where Ruby was and . . . But no, nobody outside the synagogue had known where Ruby was, except me. No one in the community knew about Ruby’s past, except Bessie Stern and the comrades. Not, of course, that you can trust anyone entirely. The ukulele music, which Bessie said was coming from one of their Yiddisher music halls, had started to get on my nerves by then so we left. Those wailing notes, they give me the shivers. I don’t know why: being what I am I should understand – Indian music is even stranger, if anything – but I don’t.