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FORTY-NINE
‘Ready?’ my mother asked.
I joined her in line at the post office where she was waiting to get airmail stamps. Royal Mail. When we’d first arrived in the UK, I was convinced it was the Queen’s personal postal service, set up so Joe Public could send letters to Her Majesty.
My mother suggested stopping off for crêpes on the way home.
‘That stand in Hampstead. . .’
I shook my head, told her I wasn’t hungry.
‘You hardly ate any lunch either. I do hope you’re not still dieting.’
She had strong views on how ‘growing kids’ shouldn’t cut back.
I wasn’t trying to lose weight though. I just couldn’t stomach food. I’d had no appetite ever since that day at the café. Everything wedged in my throat, tasted of cardboard.
She was launching into a speech about how I was beautiful just the way I was, when a rapidly blinking old lady tottered up behind us.
‘Amelia-Rose?’
Matty’s neighbour, Mrs ‘Matzo Ball Soup’, with a net shopping bag bulging with jars of purple horseradish and Mrs Elswood pickles.
My mother put on her polite smile, asked how she was. The old woman leaned in, lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.
‘I had a visit last night. . .’
‘What sort of visit?’
‘From the police,’ she said proudly. ‘Late, well after seven. I was already in my robe.’
‘What did they want?’ I said, folding my arms to hide my shaking hands.
‘They were asking about Matty.’
It was as though my intestines were being sliced open. I thought I might be sick. I don’t know how my mother felt, only that she’d gone very pale.
‘What sort of questions?’ she said.
Mrs Cohen set her bag down between her feet, opened her hands wide as if she was weighing fruit.
‘It makes no sense.’
‘What doesn’t?’
There was a note of impatience slipping into my mother’s voice, along with something else. Panic perhaps.
‘They asked if I’d noticed him coming home late the nights those poor women were killed.’ She shook her head, eyes closed. ‘Oy, what a business.’
My mother’s knuckles had turned white on the handle of her purse. A pulse beat hard at her temple.
‘They can’t think he. . .’
‘Matty? A mensch like that? No, of course not. They were just going through their files, they said. Checking up on men in Camden who live alone. Protocol, they called it.’
My mother had to clear her throat before she could speak.
‘And were you able to, um. . .’
