Last Rights by Barbara Nadel Read Free Book Online Page B

that girl’s even
     ’is!’
    I didn’t know how to carry on, to be honest. It was all said with such spite.
    ‘Anyway, you get our Kevin over to Cox’s,’ she said, ‘so we can get on. I’ve got a wake to organise and it ain’t easy with
     all his little ’uns, his wage gone and a war on.’
    And with that she stomped off into Murkoff’s. No doubt soothing her soul with mint humbugs and Five Boys chocolate bars –
     provided they had them, of course. She had the look of a person who ate her way out of misery.
    I went back to the shop with a heavy heart. In three months’ time it would be Christmas. Still a way off, butthere was so much talk about how London could ‘take it’ these days. I wondered how we’d all shape up with half the borough
     flat to the ground and all the food so ‘rotten’, as Aggie would say. Just keeping decent-looking was a problem for me. Climbing
     over tons of bricks and mortar every time you leave the shop plays havoc with your boots and, war or no war, an undertaker
     needs to be smart. The families expect it. And yet how much worse to be poor young Mrs Dooley! Out on her ear with a little
     ’un to look after, separated from her other kids with autumn upon us and soon to be winter. An orphan, she probably didn’t
     have family, leastways not close. Even though I knew I couldn’t do anything I wondered where she was and hoped that she was
     all right.
    But then what if she had spiked her own husband? I didn’t know what Kevin Dooley had been like as a person. But if he’d been
     anything like his mother he must’ve been difficult to live with. Maybe he’d been violent to her and then maybe she’d hit out
     at him in the way she’d learned to do – or, rather, heard tell of if Hannah was to be believed – when she was on the game,
     if indeed that was true. That fiery night Kevin had never said who ‘she’, his ‘whore’, was, only that she’d stabbed him.
    ‘Frank!’
    I’d walked in and half-way up the stairs without even noticing. Nan, above me on the landing, burning candle in her hand,
     looked like something out of that Bela Lugosi picture.
    ‘Nan!’ I put a hand on my chest. ‘Give me a turn!’
    ‘Where have you been?’ she said. Her face, lit frombeneath by the candle, looked even darker and more lined than it usually does.
    ‘I went down to Canning Town, to Albert Cox,’ I said. It was partly true. ‘Why? What’s the matter?’
    ‘Mum’s been took bad.’ Nan leaned forward and lowered her voice: ‘Dr O’Grady’s in with her.’
    ‘Oh.’
    The Duchess always has pain, but from time to time it gets very bad. Then she can’t eat or sleep. All she does is push her
     rosary beads through her crippled fingers, every ‘Hail Mary’ a dart of pain. There isn’t anything anyone can do, including
     Dr O’Grady.
    ‘I’ve given her quinine,’ he said, when he finally came out into the parlour. ‘The stairs are a problem, Frank.’
    ‘I know.’ Every time there’s a raid she has to get down them to the shelter. Sometimes hours in there, cramped up, the damp
     earth all round, and then out again, up the stairs back into her cold bedroom. I wish she’d have a fire in there sometimes,
     like she used to, but she’s too worried now, like everyone else, about the coal running out.
    Nan asked Dr O’Grady whether he wanted a cup of tea. He said he’d like that and so, while I paid him for his visit, she went
     off to make it.
    ‘So how are things, then, Frank?’ Dr O’Grady asked, as he lit up his pipe. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t our doctor.
     Always straight round when Dad was taken bad with what he called his Indian fever. Malaria – horrible disease – but Dad, God
     bless him, always said it was a small price to pay for meeting the Duchess, the loveof his life. It was the malaria that eventually killed the old man.
    ‘Can’t complain, Doctor,’ I said. ‘At least, no more nor less than anyone else. A fellow rarely