Chapter Nineteen

AFRIDAY NIGHT AWAY FROM THE ballroom was a rare luxury for Raymond de Guise – and, as he helped Nancy out of the taxicab onto the frosted paving stones of Whitechapel Road, he felt as light as the air.

Arm in arm, the two lovers walked on – until, some time later, they looked up at the face of one of the tumbledown red brick terraces. Lights were playing in the windows. There had been times, in the past, when approaching this house filled Raymond with a sense of regret. Now, as he looked up at the restored chimney stack – once turned to rubble and dust – and the new windows, where there had once been old boards, he felt the warmth of a homecoming. It was between these narrow walls that Raymond de Guise – then the roustabout Ray Cohen – had learned his first dance steps, standing on the feet of his departed father Stanley. Stanley Cohen, the devil of the dance halls. The whole terrace seemed to echo with his memory.

The door had opened, and there stood Raymond’s mother, Alma, with her apron patterned in gravy and blackberry jam.

‘Ray Cohen!’ she said, and then, ‘The future Mrs Cohen as well. Get inside, you two, it’s getting too nippy out there.’

It was ‘nippy’ inside the house too. Alma Cohen had inherited her frugality from her dear departed Stanley, who had refused to light a fire in the hearth until the first snow fell each year. Even now, nearly seven years after his death, his eccentric rules lived on.

‘I’m going to light it, Ma,’ said Raymond, as Alma showed them into the living room – where the table had been set for six, with all the best china and the silverware Stanley had brought home the Christmas after the Depression first bit, refusing to tell them all how he’d been able to afford it. ‘You’re not as young as you used to be. And Aunt May and Rebecca too .?.?.’

In a flash, Alma had whipped up a wooden spoon and rapped him over the back of the knuckles.

‘You’ll do no such thing. We’re hardier than you lot, up there in that Buckingham Hotel, and don’t forget it. You’ve got too coddled, Ray. I’ll bet there’s a servant bringing you a hot water bottle every night. Somebody checking in to put blankets on you while you sleep.’

Nancy herself couldn’t help but laugh at this.

‘Do you know, Alma,’ she said, ‘you’re almost right.’

‘And anyway,’ Alma went on, ‘my soup’ll warm you up as good as any fire. Now sit – sit! Artie’s on his way, and we’ve been cooking up a storm.’

*

The finest dinners of the Queen Mary restaurant could not compare to Friday night with the Cohens.

Somehow, nights like these had started to feel like home for Nancy too. The chicken was fat and crisp with butter and sage, and the potatoes were crisp but fluffy inside. There was nothing that made Nancy think of family, now, like a night with the Cohens.

They didn’t get the chance to come here often – once a month, perhaps twice, but that only served to keep it feeling special. Alma was a fierce sort of woman – as any woman who’d brought up two boys, with a husband in and out of a prison cell, had to be – and the fact that she looked after her two aunts was even more incredible to Nancy. May – a true Cohen woman, small and squat and with fire in her belly – was the only one related to Raymond by blood, being Stanley’s eldest cousin by birth; she’d met Rebecca – long and lean, with a sweep of silver hair – a generation ago, in the stalls at the Pavilion Theatre, and soon after they’d started living together, just down the road.

The other face around the table turned up late, as always he did. It used to be that Artie Cohen tumbled in late because he was playing dominoes in some public house – or else, Alma still feared, sizing up whatever railway yard he was planning on robbing next. These days, it was because he was standing guard outside the Daughters of Salvation. Tonight, he crashed in just as the chicken was being carved, and ruddy from the cold.

Rubbing his hands together with glee, he said, ‘I can smell it from down the road, Ma. My belly’s been crying out for this.’ He’d already whipped up a piece of hot chicken when he said, ‘How now, Ray. Looking smart, I see.’

‘Thank you, Artie.’

‘And the delightful Miss Nettleton. Still planning on marrying this one, are you?’

Nancy said, ‘I’m afraid nothing’s changed there, Artie.’

‘And it oughtn’t,’ said Alma, battling her second-born son back into his chair with the threat of her carving knife. ‘You could do worse than think about finding a nice lady friend yourself, Artie. Somebody to straighten you out.’

‘Ma!’ Artie objected, with a grin. ‘I already been straightened!’

‘Oh, aye?’ interjected Aunt May, sharing a knowing look with Rebecca. ‘We was just saying – you’re spending so much time down with these Daughters of Salvation, it might be you’ve got a lady friend you’re not telling us about.’

‘You’re the only girl for me, Aunt May.’

‘Well, they’d better be paying you extra for all these shifts,’ said Alma. ‘That’s all I have to say. Now, sit! Dinner is served.’

There was only one topic of conversation in the Cohen house that night, and Nancy had been preparing for it all day. She’d barely taken a mouthful before the barrage of questions began. Had she found a dress yet? Had she chosen her bridesmaids? That much, at least, was easy.

‘Rosa and Ruth, who I work with at the Buckingham. I’d thought Miss Edgerton might, but—’

‘Artie’s Miss Edgerton?’

Artie started spluttering. A single piece of parsnip erupted from his mouth, landing in the gravy pooling on Alma’s plate. She glared at him.

‘And you’ll be asking Monsieur de la Motte,’ said Alma, rising to her toes to make an ostentatious bow, ‘to be your best man, of course.’

Raymond set down his knife and fork neatly, as a gentleman should, and looked around the table, inviting silence from all.

‘As a matter of fact, Georges won’t be my best man on the day.’

‘What?’ scoffed Artie, with a wolfish grin. ‘Can’t take time out of his busy California schedule to be at the wedding of his apprentice?’

‘Well, actually,’ said Raymond, ‘he’ll be sitting with the rest of my colleagues, as a humble guest.’

‘But—’

‘Because, Artie,’ Raymond pronounced, ‘I’m asking you, here and now, to be my best man.’

Knives and forks clattered onto plates. Artie himself was still. His face creased in bewilderment, he reached for the tablecloth, wiped his mouth of gravy – and Alma, who ordinarily scolded him for behaviour like this, said not a thing.

‘Me? Your ex-con of a little brother? Your ne’er-do-well layabout? Your—’

‘Brother in arms,’ said Raymond.

Nancy, who’d heard from Raymond only days before, turned to Artie and grinned.

‘You’ve been there throughout, Artie. Thick and thin. High and low.’

‘Inside and out.’ Artie laughed, thinking of his old Pentonville cell.

‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

In seconds, Artie was on his feet, sending his plate – and all its contents – sloshing across the table.

‘Come here, you old rascal!’ he said – and the Cohen brothers, still separated by Raymond’s future wife, put their arms around each other, making a pyramid above Nancy’s cringing head. ‘I’ll do you proud, Ray. Get you to the service on time. Sort your hair out, even, if you like!’ Artie was crowing with laughter now. ‘You and me, we’ll have to get some time in together, plan this thing to perfection. And an old Cohen-style celebration, too, to send you off into respectability.’ Artie looked him up and down. ‘As if you need any more of that!’ he guffawed.

Once the commotion had passed, and Artie had sunk back to his dinner (doing his best impression of a pig at its trough), Aunt Rebecca chipped in.

‘It’s just what Stanley would have wanted. The Cohens back together! I don’t suppose you’re thinking of moving back east after the ceremony?’

They’d have to find a place close to the Buckingham, Nancy said. That much was certain. And, though she decided not to tell them that she planned to keep on working – if the Buckingham would have her – she got the feeling that the Cohens wouldn’t bat an eyelid at such a thing. Women in the Cohen family always worked. They had done for generations.

‘No,’ Alma had once told her, ‘it’s not like the starlight world you all live in. Real folks have got to graft for a living.’

‘Well, we’d have loved to have you back in the old streets, Ray, but there’s more to worry about in the world this year,’ Alma said, as she tidied the chicken carcass away, and brought out the cake. ‘I was talking to Dot – you remember Dot, Ray? – at the grocer’s last week. She’s one of those fawning over Mr Chamberlain. Says he’s made the world a safer place. But what does she know? So Mr Hitler says he’s not going to march into anyone else’s country and turn it into his, does he? Well, what’s a promise from a snake like that? And, even if he keeps it, he can do whatever he wants inside his borders, can’t he? Six days it took him, since Mr Chamberlain’s speech, to snatch the passports off people like us, all over Germany, all over Austria-that-was. Maybe he’s said he won’t fight the English, but he’s already at war with the Jews. If we was over there, we’d have had our passports taken too. We’d not be citizens at all. Thank goodness we were born here.’

Artie, who had stood up on Cable Street two autumns before – and been beaten down for his impudence – muttered darkly, ‘Don’t matter where you’re born at all. There’s fascists right here, right now. Only difference is they don’t have power.’

‘Why, the king himself is one, I heard,’ Aunt Rebecca chipped in. ‘And the old King Edward, for certain.’

‘Wasn’t Miss Edgerton’s father one of those standing with the Union on Cable Street that day?’

‘Stepfather,’ Nancy interjected. ‘And hardly even that.’

‘Aye,’ muttered Artie, ‘it’s hardly Viv’s fault who her mother took up with.’

Viv?thought Nancy, barely able to suppress her surprise. Viv?

But she never got a chance to ask because, in that same moment, Alma reappeared from the kitchen, carrying a mountainous cake, teetering under the weight of its own layers. Icing positively cascaded down its sides – and, picked out in blackberries around its edge, were spelled the names NANCY AND RAYMOND.

‘Well, no doubt you’ll have some hoity-toity French patissier making a wedding cake for that reception in that ballroom of yours. So we thought we’d seize the chance while we had it. Tuck in, everyone! This is going to get messy.’

*

After the cake, while Artie dragged Raymond into the little yard out the back, Alma ushered Nancy upstairs, down the narrow landing, to the bedroom at the very end. The room was dominated by the bed Alma had once shared with Stanley. Apart from it and the wardrobe, there was only one other piece of furniture: an old trunk, which sat open at the bottom of the bed, spilling out bedspreads and old blankets, Stanley’s old fishing nets and tools.

‘Wait there,’ she said, and ferreted in the trunk’s oddments until she emerged with a little black box. This she placed into Nancy’s open palm, unfastening the clasp to reveal a single silver band. ‘It was my mother’s. Didn’t leave her finger until the day she died. Must have seen death coming, because she took it off and put it on her bedside for me to find. Always thought I might give it to a granddaughter, if ever I had one. But I’d rather give it to you now, Nancy. A little piece of Cohen family history, for your very own. Well, since you’re about to be one of us.’

Nancy lifted the ring from its box and laid it in the flat of her palm.

‘Alma, I don’t know what to say. I’ll always treasure it.’

‘See that you do. And, one day, if you’re blessed with a girl of your own, make it hers, and her children, for evermore. You’re one of the family, Nance.’

To Nancy, whose family extended to Frank alone, the world seemed suddenly so much larger. Just to hear it out loud stirred something deep within her.

‘I know I’ll be a “de Guise”,’ she said. ‘But, with this ring, I’ll know myself a Cohen as well.’

Alma closed her hand over the ring that still lay in Nancy’s palm and added, ‘Aye, but in your heart, you’ll always be Nancy, just like I never forget I’m Alma Stern. Your and Raymond’s souls might be entwined forever, but you don’t stop being you. Takes some women a lifetime to figure that out – but you, you’ve got it already. I can see. Love each other. Cherish each other. And you both will. But always be yourself, my girl. And that’s all the advice I’ll ever give – from one woman to another.’