Sure and Certain Death (20 page)

The medium narrowed her eyes. ‘Happen?’

‘Like if her wrists got cut or . . .’ I sometimes wish that we could talk openly about suicide in this country. I know it’s a crime, but it happens. It happens, in my experience, quite a lot.

‘Well, Rosemary couldn’t come over, could she?’ Mrs Darling said. ‘Not from Canada, not now.’

The days when civilians could still travel across the Atlantic are well past. I knew that.

‘But she would be devastated,’ the medium continued. ‘They’re twins, Rosemary and Esme, so there’s a psychic bond between them. If one died the other would know, you mark my words! If one died it would be as if the other had lost part of herself. It would be torture.’

The psychic bond aside, that was what I had thought. If Esme died, then Rosemary would be punished too. Two for the price of one provided Esme took her own life, which seemed, from what Mrs Darling had said, a probability at least. And all achieved via the death of one rather hypocritical and boring man. If indeed I was correct. I hoped sincerely that I wasn’t.

Chapter Sixteen

W
hen Mrs Darling finally left me, it was to get a bus up to Forest Gate and the home of Esme Robinson. She made some play of trying to reward me for listening to her by saying that she’d try to secure Neville Robinson’s funeral for our firm. I told her she didn’t have to do that, but she didn’t appear to want to hear. To tell the truth, I didn’t particularly want the Robinson business. Where Neville had been found and the fact that Hannah had been one of those who had discovered him didn’t sit well. She had by her own admission worked the night Robinson had died. I didn’t want to know any more about it than that, and that included burying his body.

That afternoon I spent doing bookwork with Doris. It’s not my favourite occupation as it often involves geeing up bereaved relatives for payment. I freely admit that without Doris, Hancock’s would be bankrupt. I don’t like asking for money, which means that I’m not very good at it. But it has to be done, and so after a good telling-off from Doris, I did trawl around to a couple of poor addresses and share tea and sometimes a drop of ginger wine too with people still in heavy mourning. I got a bit of money, here and there. When I returned, Doris had gone home but Nancy had returned, with visitors. Sitting up very straight in our parlour was a tall, average-looking Jewish bloke and a lady of breathtaking beauty. The woman, whose long blonde hair hung down her back in a thick, straight sheet, did not smile when she saw me come into the room. Black eyes in a face as pale as the moon regarded me steadily but without any sort of emotion. Nan and my mother, who were, it seemed, sharing tea with these people, both put their cups down when I entered the room.

‘This is my brother Frank,’ Nan said to the amazing blonde woman. ‘Frank, this is my old friend Fernanda.’

Very often beautiful women know that they’re beautiful to the extent that it interferes with the way they are with ordinary mortals. Fernanda Abrahams was one such lady. She was pleasant enough and very far from rude, but there was a superiority about her that seemed to preclude any sort of facial movement. Every time she spoke, she looked down her perfect nose at the world and most people, I imagined, that were in it. Her husband Edward, on the other hand, was, or seemed to be, a very easy-going and natural person.

‘I’ve a cousin, Dave, who keeps me abreast of family matters,’ Edward Abrahams said. ‘Told me about poor Marie and Uncle Nathan.’

‘David never had a problem with our marriage, unlike everyone else,’ Fernanda said from a face as cold and unmoving as that of an idol. Faces like that I’d seen in my parents’ photographs of Calcutta’s many Hindu temples. But then India was or had been Fernanda’s country too.

‘As it happened, poor old Nathan found us suddenly fetching up out of the blue a bit too much,’ Edward Abrahams said as he offered me a fag and then took one for himself.

‘Old Mr Abrahams screamed the place down,’ Nan put in.

‘Screamed?’

‘He’s lost his wits,’ Fernanda said. ‘But then a parent don’t expect to lose its child, do it?’

She was also trying, I now noticed, to be posh. An affected accent together with ropy grammar is always a dead giveaway. But then for Fernanda Mascarenhas, as was, even Clapham North, where she and Edward lived in a flat ‘overlooking the Common’, was a step up from Canning Town. Even without asking, I knew she was not going to go back there. Plaistow was one thing, she’d tolerate our slightly better part of West Ham, but Canning Town was, I felt, a step too far.

‘Nancy was helping out on the ward, and when we come in the two girls recognised each other,’ Edward Abrahams said good-naturedly. ‘She’d just turned up and so had we, and so when Uncle Nathan was brought in we were all together. Nancy tried to introduce us, but . . .’

‘He just screamed, Frank,’ my sister said. Then, shaking her head at the memory of it, she added, ‘It was horrible.’

‘It must’ve been,’ I said as I puffed on the Passing Cloud that Edward had just given me.

‘Never screamed before,’ Nan said.

‘Oh, I expect it was the shock of seeing us,’ Fernanda said. ‘Me and Edward, we have that effect on members of his family.’ Turning to my mother, she added, ‘You must know that effect, Mrs Hancock, don’t you? When one marries out . . .’

The Duchess smiled. ‘My dear, I pay no heed to the silly opinions of others, whoever they may be.’

Fernanda Abrahams sniffed. She knew that what my mother had just said was by way of a put-down. But then the Duchess, for all her natural fine manners, has never had any time for those who appear to put such things on for the benefit of others. Quite where Nan stood, I didn’t know, but I had the feeling that both the Duchess and myself were well and truly put off by this woman.

Smiling, Edward said, ‘So when Nancy here offered us tea, Frank, we took her up on it straight away.’ He frowned. ‘Poor Uncle Nathan. Shook me right up, the state of him, I can tell you. But then for our Marie to die like that . . . Nancy says you’ve been trying to find us.’

I told them what I knew – about Marie and Mrs Darling, about the White Feather girls. As I spoke, Nan put her head down in what I could see was shame. But Fernanda Abrahams was unmoved. Not in the silly, giggly way that Esme Robinson had been unmoved – it was much more measured and profound than that. Fernanda Abrahams I felt just didn’t care. She had experienced far too much suffering herself, or so she felt, to be bothered with the pain of others. When I reached the end of the story as I knew it, Edward Abrahams said, ‘Well, Frank, that’s quite a tale you tell and I am obliged to you for telling it. Of course I knew that Fernanda was a White Feather girl when she was young; it was how she met Marie.’ He held a finger up to silence any protestation I might make about this. ‘I never approved, of course,’ he added. ‘I was on the Somme and, well . . .’ He looked at me with the eyes everyone who was in that carnage has.

‘I don’t know that whoever is killing these people is doing it because of the White Feather connection,’ I said.

‘Police don’t say much these days,’ Abrahams said as he slowly and sadly nodded his head.

‘The coppers are treating each death as a separate incident unless they happen in the same division,’ I said. ‘There’s a bloke here in Plaistow who’s owned up to one of the killings. But only one, and whether he’s telling the truth, no one seems to know.’

‘They keep quiet about such things now because of the war,’ the Duchess said.

I looked at Edward Abrahams and said, ‘All I wanted to do was to warn you. Keep your wife safe.’

‘Oh, you can be sure I’ll do that, mate!’ Abrahams winked at his wife as he said it. She turned aside in what looked like disgust. He was still besotted with her, but she was more in love with the clothes and make-up that he obviously had to work hard to get for her. Edward Abrahams, he told me just before they left, was a tailor. He’d learned his trade in the sweatshops of Spitalfields; now he had his own shop on the Clapham High Street. He also did his turn as a fire-watcher down in Clapham.

‘I have to go out at night,’ he said to me when we found ourselves alone at the shop door for the few moments just before they left. ‘There’s our daughter, Phillipa, but she works, driving ambulances.’

‘Mr Abrahams,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if your wife is really in danger.’

They left. I was glad that I’d managed to get to speak to them, even if Fernanda Abrahams was an unpleasant character. When we were back up in the parlour again, Nan said, ‘You know, Frank I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw Fernanda at the hospital. She hadn’t changed a bit!’

‘What, the look of her or how she behaved?’ I said.

Nancy rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, she was always a madam,’ she said. She looked down at the floor and went on, ‘’Course she never wanted to be seen with
me
. Not standing next to me or nothing. She made a beeline for girls like Marie and the Harper twins because they was fair. You know, Frank, when I told Fernanda that Dolly had died, she never said a thing, not one thing. Blimey, I was so glad when I saw her and her husband up at Claybury! I was so relieved.’ She sighed. ‘Although why old Mr Abrahams screamed when he saw them I don’t know. He’d been quite calm when he talked to me about them. But then she was so cold, Fernanda, so very, very cold!’

That night the fog put paid to any designs Hitler might have had on us. But the fire-watchers went up as usual, on the roof of the bank next door. Mr Deeks the bank manager and his boys scanned the skies as they always do, while my mother, Nan and cousin Stella sat in the parlour knitting and mending. Once I’d stabled the horses for the night I stood down in the yard with Aggie, smoking. Aggie more than any of us gets out and about: to work, shopping and socially in pubs. I wanted to know if she’d heard anything.

‘About the murders? Yeah, plenty,’ she said as she rolled herself a fag from my tin of tobacco. ‘They can censor what they like, people will always talk. Especially round here. Not that you’ll want to hear any of it, Frank.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because all they ever talk about is the Ripper,’ Aggie said. ‘All the Jews up Brick Lane are quaking in their boots thinking he’s come back again. Bleedin’ ghosts!’

‘But Jack the Ripper never attacked any Jewish women,’ I said.

‘I know that! But a lot of people blamed the Jews, thought he was one of them at the time.’

‘Yes, but that was nonsense.’

‘Was it?’ Aggie pulled her chin back and gave me a very wry look indeed. ‘Who told you that, your lady friend? Frank, no one knows who the Ripper was or is. He could be Jewish, he could be Irish, Welsh or sky blue pink. He could even be a she.’

‘Aggie, Jack the Ripper cut women open and then pulled their innards out,’ I said.

‘Women can do that,’ Aggie replied.

My younger sister has become a very different person from the girl who married and had children years ago. It’s partly the war and the opportunities it has certainly given women to work that has changed her. But the humiliation she suffered at the hands of her faithless old man played its part too. He just left her and her children for another woman, just disappeared off the face of the earth.

‘I’d never let a bloke get close enough to cut me up,’ Aggie said as she ground her fag butt into the mud beneath her feet.

‘But Aggie,’ I said, ‘don’t you want to feel . . .’

‘Frank, I go to the pub, I have a laugh and a sing-song, but that’s the finish of it as far as blokes are concerned,’ Aggie said. She crossed her arms over her chest and then muttered, ‘They can bloody sing for anything else.’

‘But Ag, everyone wants to be loved,’ I said.

‘Well you do because you’re as soft as butter!’ my sister said. ‘But you know, Frank, that when this war is over, things are going to be a lot different.’

‘Well, if Hitler . . .’

‘No, when,
when
we win, Frank, after that the world will change. Won’t be no more women doing as they’re told all the time. We’ve had some freedom and we like it! And you know what, too?’

‘What?’

‘There won’t be no more silly talk about ghosts and spirits when the war is over,’ Aggie said. ‘Because you know what? There’s no such things. No ghosts, no God, no Blessed Virgins and no resurrected Jack the Rippers!’

‘Well don’t let Nan hear you say that!’ I said.

Aggie’s face suddenly fell into something very serious. ‘You know that since Dolly’s death Nan’s been a different person too, Frank. Oh, she’s still devoted to God, the Virgin and all that, but she’s working for you and she’s putting her back into it. Time was when she’d barely leave the house. She’s changing, Frank. Even she’s changing.’

And I knew that Aggie was right. Nancy, albeit by degrees, was moving out into the world. Even a month before, I couldn’t have seen her grafting for me or doing good works up at a hospital, much less a hospital outside of West Ham. Maybe at last she was getting on top of the way she’d always felt about her colour and her looks. To be truthful, and as I had always known, deep down she was a strangely beautiful woman, especially when wearing the dark suit of our profession. Handsomer than Aggie in her way, Nancy was also, I thought, now somewhat more appealing than Fernanda Abrahams. Such chilliness in that woman! And yet she had a nice husband, a daughter who worked driving ambulances, a home – the Abrahams quite clearly had money.

But something rankled. A beautiful woman with beautiful white skin, she nevertheless knew where she came from, if no one else did. Both she and Edward had chosen to leave their pasts behind when they got together, and that included their families. But Edward, unlike Fernanda, had come from a white world. In spite of the fact that his family had disowned him, he was still a Jew, still who he had been before. But Fernanda . . . I didn’t know this for certain, but by the look of her I imagined that she lived her life as a white lady, as something she really was not. That had been her choice, but I wondered what she felt about it deep down inside. According to Nancy, Fernanda had always been a ‘madam’ and had avoided my sister because of the colour of her skin. But Fernanda’s parents and siblings had been brown, and however ambitious she might have been in the past, as the years went by she must have thought about them. Maybe it was a sense of being alone in the world, which she must have felt from time to time, that made her seem so hard and cold and without feeling? If indeed Fernanda Abrahams was really like that.