The Lubetkin Legacy (14 page)

‘It not my Lily! It fake!' cried Inna.

The dead man's false teeth had popped out and were grinning up at her from the mud. His face looked partly shaven with some ghastly cuts in the skin.

‘Nonsense! Look, we've got the death certificate!' Miss Wrest flourished a soggy piece of paper, which did indeed bear my mother's name.

The thin bowler-hatted man looked about him in surprise. ‘Is thish not Mrs O'Reilly's funeral?'

‘No,' replied Miss Wrest. ‘She's with the Council up at St Pancras. They undercut us.' She glanced at her watch. ‘It'll all be over by now.'

‘Could you tell me, will there be a wake after thish funeral?'

‘No,' I snapped. ‘Now piss off.'

‘I'm very shorry,' he slurred, ‘I think I made a mishtake.' He crawled towards the solid ground of the path and staggered off on his muddy way.

Inna was struggling to get up, but couldn't find her footing. Her glasses were down in the mud beside the false teeth. I reached down to offer her a hand, lost my balance, slipped,
and crashed. A piercing pain shot through my left eye. When I put my hand to my face, it was covered in blood.

Then I blacked out.

When I came round I was in the back of an ambulance woo-wooing through the streets of London. A male paramedic was pressing a blood-soaked pad to my face and the world was half dark. Miss Wrest was sitting beside me holding my hand. She had lost her top hat, and her long mousy hair was damp and tangled over her face. Most of the panstick make-up had washed off too, so that I could see her features, which were pudgy and babyish but not unattractive – as far as I could tell with my remaining eye.

‘What happened?' I asked.

‘You stabbed yourself in the eye with the spoke of your umbrella,' Miss Wrest answered calmly. ‘You were extremely distressed.'

The memory of the ghastly scene flooded back to me and I struggled to sit up, but the paramedic pushed me back gently but firmly on to the stretcher.

‘Lie still.'

‘Mother! What happened to my mother?'

Miss Wrest squeezed my hand reassuringly. ‘Don't worry.'

By one of those weird backflips of fate to which life is prone, I found myself lying in a hospital bed with a cardboard bowl beside me while Inna perched next to me with a bunch of grapes in a paper bag. My head was throbbing horribly and I felt nauseous from the after-effects of the anaesthetic. The cardboard bowl was full of soggy and bloodstained bits of gauze.

‘Oy! You all right, Mister Bertie?' She gazed down into my injured face with a look of undisguised horror in her beady eyes. Of course I could not see what she saw, but it must have included a dramatic gauze bandage over one eye, and maybe a bit of dry blood. ‘You going to be one-eye blind?'

‘Could be,' I shrugged, not wishing to put an end to the flow of sympathy, though the pretty young doctor had reassured me that the injury had been superficial, the emergency treatment had been successful and my sight would be unaffected.

Inna crossed herself and sighed. ‘When you come home I make golabki kobaski slatki. We drink vodka.'

‘Lovely. Can't wait.' Though I had resolved to go easy on the slatki. Just in case. ‘It's my birthday on the sixth of May. And we can invite our new next-door neighbour.'

‘Blackie?'

‘Violet. You'd better check that she's not vegetarian.'

I wondered whether she would be filled with revulsion at the sight of my eyepatch, or whether tender-hearted sympathy would prevail. Women are so unpredictable.

After Inna had gone, I managed to snooze for a while. I was awoken by a voice calling my name. Carefully I opened my good eye. I can't have been asleep for long, for it was still light, and the ward was full of clatter and voices. An elderly woman with white hair and red lipstick was leaning over me, but the image was somehow split, like in a mirror, so she appeared to be on both sides of my bed at once.

‘Hello? Bertie?' said the one on my left.

‘Hello? Bertie?' echoed the one on my right.

My headache had intensified and everything around me seemed fragmented and unreal. Can one have double vision, I wondered, with only one eye?

‘Jenny,' said the one on my left. ‘Margaret,' said the one on my right.

‘Oh. Hello.' I tried to move my head to look from one to the other, but my neck had seized up. ‘Thank you for coming.'

‘We got these for you,' said Margaret.

Jenny slapped down a box of chocolates on the bedside table. ‘The nurse said you were doing well. They'll be sending you home soon.'

‘I hope so. I can't wait to get back to my flat.'

They exchanged glances.

‘The thing is, Bertie …' said Margaret.

‘There's something we need to talk about,' added Jenny. ‘You see, it's not really your flat.'

‘Not mine? What d'you mean? Who else's could it be?'

‘Actually, it's ours. Our dad left the tenancy to us in his will.'

‘ “To my darling daughters, Jenny and Margaret, the tenancy of my flat.” That's what he said,' Margaret added in an irritating faux-naive bleat.

While she was talking, Jenny had reached for the box of chocolates and stripped off the cellophane film.

‘Aren't you going to eat these, Bertie? They were quite expensive.'

‘Oh, by all means. Help yourselves.'

‘But no rush,' said Margaret, selecting a chocolate, popping it in her mouth and licking her fingers. ‘Stay until you find somewhere that suits you.'

‘But now we're widows, we've been looking for a nice two-bedroom flat where we could live together.' Jenny took the box and mirrored her sister's action. ‘We don't want to chuck you out, Bertie, but with house prices in London the way they are, there's not much in our price range.'

‘But I'm not planning on moving anywhere. The tenancy was my mum's and now it's mine.' Mother's death-bed words echoed in my brain. I had assumed she was talking about the Council, or one of her exes, but maybe it was the twins she had been warning me against. ‘She succeeded to the tenancy automatically when your dad, Ted Madeley, died. That's the rule. And she passed it on to me.' I could feel my face going red. My bad eye began to throb. The twin faces started to spin, frizzy white hair framing vampire-red lips. I wished they would just go away.

‘The thing is, Bertie,' Jenny pursued, ‘we didn't want to tell you this, but you'd have to find out eventually. Ted, our dad, and your mother weren't actually married. They never tied the knot legally, so your mother never actually inherited the tenancy. They were going to get married, but after Lily lost the baby –'

‘What baby?'

‘Your mother was three months gone when they moved into the flat. He promised to marry her.'

‘It broke our mother's heart.' If there was a hard-cop, soft-cop act, Jenny was the hard one.

‘But she lost the baby at twenty-two weeks.'

‘They must have got married. I've got the wedding certificate. I can show you,' I said.

They exchanged significant glances.

Jenny spoke first. ‘You see, our mum and dad were never actually divorced. He may have married Lily, but it wasn't …'

‘… legal.'

‘And once they moved in together Ted's health went downhill. He was forty years older than her, remember. He …'

‘… wasn't up to it.' She lowered her eyes and whispered, ‘Sex!'

‘His heart attack happened while they were …' Margaret offered me the box of chocolates but I shook my head. I was beginning to feel sick.

‘I still don't see how that makes it your flat,' I said.

‘The tenancy was our mother's by law, and we have the right to inherit it,' Jenny snapped.

‘Dad promised it to us,' said Margaret. ‘But he said Lily could stay there until she died, and we respected his wishes.' She crammed two more chocolates into her mouth. One of them must have been caramel, for it stuck to her teeth as she said, ‘Glbut now she's tragbiclly passed away … glb … it's time … glb.'

‘Anyway,' Jenny's eyes hovered between the two chocolates left in the nearly empty chocolate box. She made her selection and pounced, ‘The Council won't transfer it to you now because you're on your own, and it's a two-bedroom flat.'

Margaret added in a little-girl bleat, ‘It's our childhood home, Bertie. It's where we grew up.' Her watery blue eyes seemed to have filled up with tears. ‘Don't turn us out on the street!'

I knew this was nonsense; they had stayed with their mother when Ted moved in with Lily, and could hardly have set foot
in the place. For all I knew, they had made the whole thing up, even down to the dead baby.

‘But Berthold Lubetkin promised …!' I tried to sit up, but a searing pain in my eye forced me to fall back on to the pillows again.

‘Lubetkin?' snorted Jenny. ‘He had some funny ideas, according to our dad, but it was nothing to do with him. He was just the architect. And anyway, he's been dead for years.'

Pain is exhausting, as well as being unpleasant in other ways. I must have let out a groan between my clenched teeth, for Margaret laid a hand on my arm, ‘Don't stress yourself, Bertie.'

‘Nurse! Nurse!' I called in a feeble voice, ‘Please can I have some more painkillers?'

‘I think he needs to rest,' ordered the nurse, the same almond-eyed beauty who had given my mum her final catheter. She flapped my visitors away with slender hands and handed me two white caplets and a cup of water.

As I surrendered to sweet oblivion, the twins merged into one, dwindled as though caught in the wrong end of a telescope, turned into a speck, and disappeared.

Later, after the dinner trolley with its remnants of reheated beef and congealing custard had rattled away, I wondered whether this visit had really taken place or whether those images were an effect of imagination combined with medication.

Next morning, before I was declared fit to return home, I had two more bedside visitors: Jimmy the Dog and Mousy Miss Wrest. Although they were wearing their day clothes, not their funereals, they came into the ward solemnly side by side, with downcast eyes – anyone could spot they were undertakers. Jimmy was holding a large parcel wrapped in black tissue paper. Miss Wrest was holding a wreath of white flowers,
which looked as though they might have been lifted from a hearse.

‘How are you, old pal? How's the eye?' asked Jimmy, peering into my bandaged face with more dramatic solicitude than Inna had been able to muster.

‘They think I've lost it,' I said, thinking I might as well milk it for all it was worth. ‘They're going to try and operate again later. They've got a top-notch Egyptian eye surgeon, but they're not holding out much hope.'

‘Oh God!' said Miss Wrest. ‘How awful! We brought these for you.'

She laid down the wreath reverentially on my lap as though I was a coffin, and muttered something in a low voice to Jimmy. I couldn't hear what she said, but I thought I caught the word ‘insurance'.

‘And these.' Jimmy handed me the tissue-wrapped parcel, which was surprisingly heavy.

‘What …?'

I unwrapped it. Beneath the tissue was a white cardboard box with the Wrest 'n' Piece insignia embossed in gold. Inside it was a chunky brass casket.

‘Your late mother's ashes,' said Jimmy, with a respectful nod of the head.

‘We offer our sincere apologies for the confusion,' added Miss Wrest.

‘Unfortunate mix-up,' murmured Jimmy. ‘They cremmed the wrong coffin.'

‘But the guy … the stiff …?'

‘It was supposed to be him that got cremmed.'

As the fog of incomprehension from the painkillers started to lift, the pain in my injured eye became more intense, but even I could see that there was something odd about this story.

‘But why was her body at the crematorium in the first place? I mean, did someone put the wrong body in the coffin?'

Jimmy looked shifty. ‘Mix-up at the funeral parlour.' His eye fell on the one remaining chocolate in the box the twins had brought, and he wolfed it down like a wolfhound.

‘Unfortunately we had to let our regular mortician go,' murmured Miss Wrest. ‘He'd been with us for forty years. Knew the trade inside out. But he was getting too demanding.'

‘Shame, though. These work experience placements – we try to help the unemployed of course, but they're unpaid, so what can you expect? Sometimes they lack … motivation,' he added.

‘Philip thought he was indispensable. We had to show him,' she said.

‘We all have to do our bit for austerity, Bertie.' Jimmy's voice was grave.

‘Still, cremation is usually regarded as a very desirable post-life option,' Miss Wrest asserted. ‘It can be more expensive than burial.'

‘Yes, but …' My brain still wasn't working properly.

‘You can still scatter the ashes at Green Glade, old pal,' said Jimmy.

‘At no additional cost,' added Miss Wrest.