After the Mourning (11 page)

‘You haven’t?’ Ernie asked, disbelief in his voice.

‘Ever since Rosie died she has talked almost only to the Head,’ the Gypsy replied.

‘I heard her talking to a man in the forest a few days back,’ I said. ‘If that was Williams . . .’

‘My daughter, whatever is happening to her, won’t go with no
gaujo
,’ Mr Lee responded gravely. ‘You talk about religion, but religion is nothing. The
romanipe
, our way of life, our beliefs and our people, that is everything.’

‘So you’ve warned Sergeant Williams off?’

‘Lily has,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t want him. He and the others came just before my other daughter died, looking for bad people in the forest. Lily told him then she wouldn’t look at no
gaujo
. She tells him now. When he goes he will forget her.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’ I asked. ‘Lily is quite the famous girl at the moment, Mr Lee.’

‘It will pass,’ he replied, with what I felt was a lot of confidence. ‘Lily is Romany. She will move on and be forgotten.’

Both Ernie and I felt that what he was saying, in a roundabout way, was that he didn’t believe in Lily’s visions. Not that he had in any way colluded with his daughter to trick people. That his wife and some of the other Gypsy women were selling fortunes and other goods to the hordes of religious
gauje
in their midst was neither here nor there. Gypsies, like most travelling folk, take advantage of opportunities as and when they come along, whatever those opportunities might be.

‘You know that if Lily continues to see things and the Military Policemen try to keep the people from her there could be a riot?’ Ernie told the Gypsy as he sucked hard at his bottle of beer.

‘Why would they try, the policemen, to do that?’ Mr Lee asked.

‘Because they have it in their heads that you know where this German Stojka is,’ I said. ‘They may try to withhold Lily to put pressure on you to give this man up. You’re the only group of Gypsies in the forest . . .’

‘I tell you, we don’t know such a man from Germany. He, Williams, he’s punishing my daughter for not going with him,’ Mr Lee said gravely. ‘
Gaujo
men always think bad things about our women.’

‘Be that as it may,’ I replied. ‘But if Lily starts seeing whatever it is she sees and the MPs stop people going to her, there’ll be trouble. People might get hurt. The reverend and I are here to see what we can do to stop that.’

‘Well, you’d better speak to Williams and his boss, then,’ Mr Lee replied. ‘It is all out of my hands.’

Ernie Sutton shook his head. ‘But, Mr Lee,’ he said, ‘senior churchmen will come up here to see your daughter. They have to reach some sort of, well, decision about what . . .’

‘They can come and they can see,’ Mr Lee replied. ‘Ain’t stoppin’ ’em.’

‘Mr Lee, they’ll come to see whether they think Lily’s visions are genuine. If they think they’re not, then . . .’

‘They entitled to theirs opinion,’ Mr Lee said, in a philosophical manner. ‘Mind, who can say what is or is not in the world unseen do have to be a better man than me.’

I for one didn’t know about that. Father Burton at least, if he deigned to come at all, was not inclined to an open mind.

‘And Lily,’ I said, ‘she’s the one, after all . . .’

‘Oh, Lily is far away in the forest now,’ Mr Lee said. ‘What the soldiers done, it upset her.’

‘On her own? But it’s getting dark,’ I said.

Mr Lee relit his roll-up. ‘She’s got the Head with her. She’ll come to no harm.’

Hannah hadn’t seen Lily Lee any more than anyone else had. But like the good listener I knew her to be, she’d kept her ear to the ground among the confused crowd of people who were being held back from the Gypsy camp by the straight-faced MPs.

‘She just disappeared,’ Hannah told me, as soon as Ernie and I caught up with her in what was becoming a very dark night indeed.

‘So no one saw her go?’

‘A lot of people saw the MPs knock her tent down,’ Hannah said. ‘But Lily weren’t in it. I don’t think this lot,’ she nodded at the huge crowd of people beyond the Gypsy camp, ‘would be as calm as they are if she had been. They all believe bleedin’ mad stuff here – begging your pardon, Reverend,’ she said to Ernie. ‘Apparently, according to some, the Virgin Mary’s due to battle the Luftwaffe in the skies above the forest tonight. I didn’t hear whether Jesus and God were also involved but . . .’ She changed the subject. ‘The officer in charge here, Mansard he’s called, I think I’ve seen him before, H.’

‘Have you?’ I wondered whether he was one of her customers, and my blood began to pound with anger. But I didn’t want to start a conversation about that with Ernie at my side. After all, he didn’t know, as far as I could tell, what Hannah did for a living and I was keen to keep it that way.

However, before I could say anything else, Hannah continued, ‘Yeah. I don’t know where but I’ve a feeling it might have been up home.’

‘Up home’ for Hannah is not Canning Town, where she lives now, but Spitalfields, where so many Jews have their homes and businesses.

‘Military types go all over the place,’ Ernie said, ‘especially these days.’

‘Yes.’

What sounded like many hundreds of gasps made us all glance up. There was nothing, as far as I could tell, to see.

‘Oh, there she is, Gawd bless her!’ a fat, tired-looking woman standing just in front of one of the motionless MPs said.

‘Where’s who?’ Hannah asked, as she peered into the darkness to where the woman was now pointing. ‘Lily?’

‘The Blessed Lily,’ the fat woman corrected. ‘Gawd love her.’

Ernie and I squinted into the darkness until I saw the lone, bedraggled figure of a young girl drag itself slowly towards us. People cheered, some sang – the MPs gazed upon the crowd with menace and fear, and at a barked order from somewhere they made their weapons ready to fire.

I turned to Ernie and said, ‘This is madness.’

‘Lily! Lily!’ the people chanted.

‘Here she comes!’

‘What the Virgin say to you, love?’ one old man asked, as the girl, her face and clothes covered with mud, made her way past the MPs and attempted to get to her people. ‘The war over, is it?’

She ignored him. As she pushed forward as quickly as she could, all I heard her say was, ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’

When she drew level with me, however, remembered what Mr Lee had said to Ernie and me about Lily when we were in his tent and I said, ‘Where’s the Head, Lily? Is he . . .’

‘He’s with me,’ she replied, and frowned. ‘He’s always with me. You just can’t see him.’

What she said and the way she stared at me made me feel cold. When the bombs are raining down and I’m out running away from the blood and the nightmares in my mind, I know I can’t always tell what’s real and what isn’t. Sometimes things appear that could be true of what is going on now and what went on in Flanders twenty-two years ago. But occasionally my ‘visions’ are not easy to interpret, even for me, and with the Gypsies’ seeming ambivalence to the Head and its reality, this was one of those moments. What on earth could Lily mean by saying that the Head was with her? Even I could see that she was alone. But before I could ask her to tell me more she had gone towards her mother and father, who had come out to wait for her in the wake of the commotion. Hannah, Ernie and I watched with the many thousands around us as Lily embraced her parents, then followed them into their tent. As she did so, Bruno the bear gave a contented growl from his place behind their canvas home.

‘Oh, well,’ a bright young girl, with a cup of steaming beef tea in her hands, said, as the crowd began to break up, ‘I suppose that’s all the miracles we’re going to get tonight. More tomorrow.’

The MPs on the perimeter of the camp seemed to relax, but not enough to want to talk to either Ernie or me. If senior churchmen wanted to verify Lily’s miracles then they, like any other citizens, could do so. The young privates we attempted to speak to made it clear that they’d deal with that eventuality as and when.

On the way back to the car I did look towards the bit of forest Lily had come from earlier, and I thought I saw a figure that could have been a military type sheltering there. Was it Sergeant Williams? Neither Hannah nor Ernie had seen whoever it was but later I remembered that I hadn’t seen Williams in or around the camp prior to that ‘appearance’. Had he, Lily and even the Head been out in the forest doing or saying things that they didn’t want others to hear? Was I going barmy even thinking that the Head was with them (or anyone else for that matter)?

Neither Hannah nor Ernie spoke to me about any of the things we had seen and done in the forest on our way home to the East End. All three of us were anxious to get back before the sirens went, as we all knew full well they would. Hannah and Ernie wanted to be near their own shelters when that happened and me, well, I just didn’t want to have to take responsibility for anyone other than myself. I didn’t want to have to make my girl and my mate safe before I took off, running away from the sounds and sights that torture me. When the bombs fall I have to be above the ground in a place I know I can look in the eye whatever might be about to kill me or make me go off my nut. It’s important for us old refugees from the mud of Flanders that we die above the ground.

As she got out of the car Hannah, said, as if remembering something, ‘Oh, H, tomorrow night you’re taking me out.’

I frowned. Of course, I always like taking Hannah out but I was alarmed as this arrangement had slipped my mind.

‘To the Hackney Empire,’ Hannah said, ‘to see my old mate David Green.’

‘David Green?’

‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘Brain like a sieve, you’ve got! The magician bloke with the Egyptian Head turn.’

‘Oh, yes.’

Now I remembered. The Egyptian Head. I’d wanted to know how like or unlike it was to Lily Lee’s attraction. Now I was going to find out.

Chapter Eight

I
’m not, in general, a great one for music-hall turns. If you get a girl or a fellow with a really good voice and a rousing set of songs, that’s nice. But a lot of the other acts can leave me cold. A case in point was the ‘Comedy Partnership of Bertie Rouse and his “Cheeky” Niece Harriet’. The joke in this case was that the ‘girl’ was actually a forty-five-year-old bloke in a blond wig and a dress, which might have been funny if either of them had known any jokes. But the Rouses, just like the three poor old buggers who did a bad turn of the Wilson, Keppel and Betty type, were useless and I realised early on that I should’ve been drunk before I set foot in the place. Outside the concert parties to entertain the troops there’s little new blood on the halls, these days. There’s little new blood out of a uniform.

Hannah and I had caught a bus up to Mare Street, Hackney, which is where the old Empire is, just after I shut up the shop at six. It had already been dark so our journey was gloomy – on account of the blackout – and very, very cold. October was turning into November, which, in my book, is winter.

‘All Hallows Eve tomorrow,’ I said to Hannah, as I buried one of my arms in the deep pile of her astrakhan jacket.

Hannah said, ‘What’s that mean?’

‘All aboard!’ the bus conductor yelled, to anyone who might still want to get on to a bus where, on account of the blackout light we have to put up with, everyone looked deceased.

‘All Hallows Eve is when the dead are supposed to come back to haunt the living,’ I said. ‘There’s all manner of customs and frightening stories about it.’

‘Sounds horrible,’ Hannah said, then lit a fag and changed the subject. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘I wonder if they’ve got one of them ventriloquists on the bill tonight. I like them.’

But Hannah was to be disappointed – if not as much as I was. She did find some of the entertainment funny and she did tell me off for being what she described as ‘so bloody miserable’. But by the time the interval came, bringing with it a shower of fag ash all over my trousers from the bloke sitting next to me, I wanted to see this David Green bloke do his stuff and go. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to wait long.

‘There you are,’ Hannah said, as a short, fat balding man walked on to the stage. ‘The Wazir of the Pharaohs as promised.’

It didn’t take me long, in common with most of the audience, to realise that the Wazir was as drunk as a lord. What should have been card tricks, easy for a skilled sober man, became acts of pathetic comedy in the Wazir’s trembling hands. People laughed, of course they did, and if the Wazir himself had not seemed so surprised and hurt, I would’ve thought that perhaps his act was meant to be funny.

‘Blimey, he’s gone down the pan,’ Hannah said, as she shook her head over the antics of her old friend David.

‘He’s drunk,’ I said.

‘I know. Never used to be, in spite of everything,’ she said. ‘Wonder why he’s so sloshed now.’

Some embarrassing nonsense with silk scarves followed, after which the Wazir, whose only concession to anything Oriental was an exotic scarf flung about his shoulders, said, ‘And now for the high point of my act – the amazing, astounding and magical Egyptian Head!’

One of the stagehands moved into the wings a screen I’d noticed earlier at the back of the stage. Behind it was a booth in which there stood an apparently empty table. The Wazir, who stood to one side of what was almost exactly the same arrangement as the one I’d seen in Lily’s tent, waved his magic wand dramatically in the air. Smoke appeared, as if it was coming out of the stage, covering the table and part of the booth.

Some wag in the audience shouted, ‘Them Egyptian fags ain’t ’arf strong, ain’t they?’

I laughed for the first time that evening. But all the time, as I watched the smoke clear around the Egyptian Head’s table, I was thinking. Anything could have been happening under all that smoke. Something obviously was. But with Lily’s Head the illusion had just appeared. No smoke, except that from the girl’s pipe and, except for the few moments I’d looked away from it to the Gypsy, the Head had just come into being before my eyes. And although Django, with his sinister made-up face, had been unnerving, he hadn’t been funny like this one.