Barry Maitland: The Marx Sisters

‘A hundred years later, in the period after the Second World War, Jerusalem Lane was largely unchanged, and was still providing shelter to refugees from European upheavals, as waves of Latvians, East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and Poles made their way westward. For most it was, as for the Marxes, a temporary stage on their route to prosperity in the suburbs of the Home Counties, but others stayed, setting up small businesses in the buildings which had once housed the Russian-Jewish clog maker, butcher and lace trader. The key to the success of these small businesses (and I would count my father’s practice among them) was Jerusalem Lane itself, which provided a short cut for people travelling from the tube station at its north end to the northern parts of Holborn and to the hospital of Great Ormond Street. Each day the ebb and flow of these travellers have irrigated the cash registers of Witz’s Cameras, Kowalski’s Old and New Books, Brunhilde’s Flower Shop and all the rest, while the Balaton Cafe and Boll’s Coffee and Chocolates have tempted people to linger before moving on to the noise and traffic of the surrounding streets, where a somewhat greyer style of trading-office supplies, photocopy services and travel agencies-has taken over.

‘However, none of the children of these refugees of the 40s and 50s have remained in the Lane; they have moved out to the suburbs, returning occasionally to visit their now ageing parents, still living above the shop, still without cars (for there is nowhere to put them), and still performing their good-natured, if sometimes fiery and increasingly eccentric, revue of Central European politics of a generation ago.’

Brock roused himself. ‘Mrs Winterbottom had children?’

‘A son, yes.’ But Mr Hepple hadn’t quite finished the broad picture. ‘The Winterbottoms didn’t really fit this pattern. They weren’t refugees, unless from Australia,’ and he gave a self-deprecating little laugh to avoid the possibility of offence. ‘They weren’t Central Europeans or Jews. They were simply Londoners returning almost by accident to this area. But they became, and Meredith especially, the linchpins of the place.’

‘I met the son yesterday evening, sir,’ Kathy said. ‘Terry Winter. Lives in South London. Eleanor phoned him and he came to the house.’

‘Winter?’ Brock queried.

‘Yes, he was particular about that.’

‘He dropped the “bottom”,’ the solicitor interjected, anxious to resume his role as principal storyteller. ‘Meredith was rather annoyed when he did it. Quite disgusted in fact. I rather gathered it was his wife who was behind it, so to speak.’ They all showed their appreciation of his little joke.

‘No other children, then?’ Brock asked.

The solicitor shook his head.

‘And the sisters? How do they go in ages?’

‘Now, let me see. Meredith was the oldest certainly, and would have been in her mid-seventies. Peg was next and Eleanor youngest. There are only a couple of years between each of them, so Eleanor must be sixty-nine or seventy, although I must say she doesn’t look it, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Have they all been living there since 1967?’

‘No, no. In those days Peg was a buyer for one of the big department stores-I’m not sure which one-and Eleanor was an assistant librarian at the British Museum. They were both single ladies, and had their own flats somewhere.’

‘Wasn’t Peg married?’ Kathy asked.

‘Only briefly. She was widowed before Meredith and Frank returned to England.’

‘So, they came back.’

‘Yes, and lived together at number 22 for ten or twelve years. In those days it was an ironmonger who rented the ground-floor shop. Terry only lived with them for a year or so, because he was nineteen or twenty at that stage and went off to technical college or something, and got a place of his own.

‘Then Frank died. Cancer of the bowel. That would have been about ten years ago. By this stage Peg had retired, and Eleanor was coming up to it as well, and so Meredith had the alterations done to the top floor and made them their own flats for them to come and live at 22 with her. I must say that I was very doubtful about it. They’re so different the three of them, I thought they’d never get on living together.’

‘In what ways different?’

‘Well, in every way. Their personalities, their tastes, and above all in their politics.’

‘Politics?’

‘Oh dear me yes. Meredith, well she didn’t really have any politics; I mean she might have voted Tory, but there again it might have been Liberal or Labour if it suited. She was a business woman, like Frank. They rented the newsagent’s on the corner next door-what’s now Stwosz’s-just for something to occupy Frank when he wasn’t doing business with his stockbroker. And they made a real go of it, too. Special pipe tobaccos and cigars ordered for individual customers, special deliveries of the foreign financial papers to the offices around here, you know. They were really entrepreneurs-what the other two sisters would call petite bourgeoisie, I dare say.’

‘They were of a pinker persuasion, I take it?’ Brock said.

‘Pink? Oh dear me no. Red! And very red at that. Eleanor is what she calls a “scientific socialist”, which I think is some form of extreme Marxist, and Peg is a Stalinist.’

‘Stalinist?’ Brock and Kathy gaped at the solicitor, trying to reconcile this information with the vision of the Queen Mother they had met at number 22.

‘Indeed!’ Mr Hepple beamed, delighted at the effect of this titbit. ‘Staunch member of the Party. Used to go every summer to East Germany and other delightful parts of the workers’ paradise, at the invitation of the comrades. And still believes in it all. Quite unyielding. She was telling me only the other day. “They’ve lost all sense of discipline,” she said. “You’ll see what a mess there’ll be now they’ve abandoned the Party.” And I said, “You must be the very last Stalinist left in Europe,” and she said yes, she thought she might donate her body to the British Museum to be stuffed and displayed as the last member of an extinct species, when they decided to do away with her.’

The smile slowly faded from his chubby pink cheeks as he registered his own words. ‘Oh dear,’ he murmured, ‘oh dear, oh dear.’

‘Mr Hepple,’ Brock said, taking advantage of his moment of confusion, ‘I wonder if you would be able to help us in the matter of Mrs Winterbottom’s will.’

‘Well, I am her sole executor, so I don’t see why not, under the circumstances. She made it out some time ago, but I can recall the gist.’

‘She didn’t alter it recently, or talk of doing so?’

‘No, no. In fact I hadn’t really seen her for a while. As I say, I don’t get up here so often now. The main beneficiary of Mrs Winterbottom is her son, with small legacies for his two daughters-some pieces of jewellery and a little cash. Unless her circumstances changed substantially in the last year or so, her estate really amounts to some shares and other savings left by her husband, which she had been gradually eating into for her income over the past ten years, together with the property, number 22. However, she had me establish a trust to administer the property after her death for the period that either or both of her sisters survive her, to allow them to continue to remain there for as long as they wished, rent-free. Once they leave or pass away, the property reverts unobstructed to the son.’

‘Could he challenge that?’ Kathy asked.

The solicitor examined his fingernails. ‘No, I think that’s unlikely.’ From his tone Kathy felt he had considered this possibility quite carefully. She suddenly wondered if he was more devious than he looked.