Free Last Rights by Barbara Nadel Page A

round Plaistow, round theback. I’d give Canning Town a miss, took it bad last night they did down there.’
    I knew that, I’d heard it myself, and from Albert Cox who was still, even after looking at the body, unconvinced that Kevin
     had been stabbed. In the night I’d even started to pray at one point for Hannah. To hell with the safety of Plaistow! And
     so, without another word to Doris, I set off with Pearl and Velma for Rathbone Street.
    The strain of enduring the previous night’s heavy raids was evident on Hannah’s face. But at least she was alive which was
     a big relief to me.
    Doris was right: Canning Town was a state. Bricks and rubble, some of it still smoking, everywhere. Firemen and wardens trying
     to move some of it out of the way, blokes standing staring up at houses that looked as if the slightest puff of wind would
     have them over. People’s belongings in the street . . . Tin baths, mattresses, mangles, fire irons, some old girl with a kiddy’s tricycle across her knees, gently stroking the handlebars with rough, swollen hands. Ordinary things take on importance when
     half your house has collapsed and you don’t know where you and your kids are going to sleep. For Hannah the most important
     things, she says, are her hats. She has about five, some with feathers, one made of some sort of shiny, stiff material, pleated
     into a kind of a fan shape. I like that one: it suits her. But this day she was tired so all we got was her plain black beret,
     which, nevertheless, looks very stylish.
    ‘I’ve seen that woman about in the market,’ Hannahwhispered to me, as we passed in front of Canning Town railway station.
    ‘What? Pearl Dooley?’
    ‘Yes. I’m sure she knows me, knows what I do,’ Hannah said. ‘She something to do with that bloke Dooley you was telling me
     about the other day?’
    I’d not gone into much detail when I’d introduced the two women. Pearl wouldn’t go inside Hannah’s place for some reason and
     my girl, for her part, was just someone who was going to help us find Pearl’s sister.
    ‘She’s his widow,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, well, maybe that’s why she’s like that,’ Hannah said. ‘I mean, if I’ve seen her she must’ve seen me and if she knows
     somehow what I do . . . A lot of the “decent” women, especially them with husbands, hate us. See the way she’s looking at
     me!’
    Pearl Dooley did, it was true, give Hannah the odd ‘old-fashioned’ look. ‘Have you asked her whether her old man went out
     with tarts?’ Hannah whispered.
    ‘No, of course not!’ I whispered back. ‘I’ve told her you’re a friend. I said we need someone as speaks Yiddish so that’s
     what we’ve got. A friend who speaks Yiddish.’
    ‘Woman who lives down Rathbone on her own in one room. Yeah. Funny bleedin’ friends you’ve got, Francis Hancock!’ Hannah said.
    It made me smile. She wasn’t wrong there. We carried on walking.
    My dad, who’d known London well, always used to say that Spitalfields was a magical place. As a nipper I could never see it.
     Full of sweat shops, kids with dark eyes likemy own, except bigger, hungrier and more suspicious. It always seemed dirtier and more closed in on itself than our manor.
     But Dad had a different take, which I suppose was helped by the fact that he could speak a bit of Yiddish. Where he learned
     it, I don’t know, but he was good with languages. I remember him speaking to the Duchess in Hindi when I was a kid. Having
     said that, it wasn’t only the language as helped him. In our profession people talk to you about big things, about life and
     death and what those words might really mean.
    Dad’s sister Eva worked up on Fashion Street years ago and sometimes he’d go over there to meet her. Somehow one day he got
     talking to a rabbi who then became a friend. Like Dad, he’s dead now. But when Dad was alive he used to tell me about this
     old bloke, stories that thrilled and made you shiver at the same