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Authors: Barbara Nadel

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BOOK: After the Mourning
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‘OK.’
‘Anyway, I might, if I’m lucky, see that military copper your Aggie was so sweet on,’ Hannah said mischievously. I’d told her about that and we’d laughed together just before we’d had our little bit of passion. ‘He sounded lovely.’
‘Mmm.’ I hung my head in the way I am inclined to do when I’m upset, even though I knew Hannah was only pulling my leg. Looking the way I do, I sometimes find big, fair, younger blokes intimidating. They can so easily look down their noses at a ‘wog’ like me – and I can’t retaliate. I have nothing to look down my nose at them for.
Hannah smiled. ‘Oh, don’t get down in the dumps, H,’ she said. ‘I’d rather have you than some bloke who spends his time out hunting for innocent people to bang up in some filthy camp. And, anyway, the military don’t do nothing for me. I’ve been with soldiers, you know.’
I tried to smile at her but I couldn’t. Even the mention of other men in her life upsets me and she knows it. Hannah realised she’d gone too far and came over to kiss me. Then, without another word, she made me a cup of tea, which I drank in silence. It isn’t easy loving a woman in her line of business.
Lily Lee, it was said the next morning, had left her tent in the middle of a raid at just after midnight. Dressed in red she stood in front of ‘her’ tree and began to talk. Some said she sobbed a little, too. She was seen first, before it all went mad, by a small boy called Eric. He said the Gypsy girl was saying how sorry she was to thin air, asking it to forgive her if it could.
Of course, Eric’s mum, once she discovered that her boy was missing, got up and went to find him. What she, a worn-out mother of twelve from Silvertown, saw was Lily Lee communing with the Virgin Mary in front of her six-year-old son. Eric, his mother later told the
Evening News
, was ‘holding his hands up like he was praying’. That woman woke everyone else, screaming, ‘She’s come back! The Virgin Mary ain’t given up on us!’
Mayhem followed, apparently, the still mourning Gypsies screaming, over-tired kids running all over the place, causing mischief, and East-Enders not being at all like the people who went to see Bernadette at Lourdes. Nobby Clarke told me about it the next day: ‘All they wanted to know, kept on asking, was about the war. You had geezers shouting, “Tell us when the fucking war’s gonna end!” and “Ask God to send us some fags!” Went raving mad, some of them.’
What was missing from all the accounts of that second ‘vision’ was anything about Lily herself. She didn’t, or so it seemed, speak to ‘Our Lady’ after Eric had inadvertently blown the whistle on her. But, then, until Sergeant Williams and his lads arrived to intervene, she was a bit too busy beating off women who wanted scraps of her clothing. In the
Daily Sketch
the following morning, the reporter, who hadn’t been anywhere near the event, described it as ‘Outrageous. Those people who lost control of themselves should be ashamed.’ He went on to talk about how unBritish it all was and how maybe Mr Churchill would like to put a stop to it personally. But Mr Churchill, as we all know, is cleverer than most and that article got no reaction from Downing Street. After all, whatever else she might be doing, the Virgin of the Pond, as Lily’s experiences were coming to be known, was giving people hope. Because as well as the madness that attended the girl’s visions there was also contentment. I saw it for myself when I took the Duchess and Nan to the pond the following afternoon.
Chapter Five

O
h, I think that the fact that they're singing, and hymns too, is quite delightful,’ the Duchess said, as Betty Lee led her and me towards Lily’s tent.
Betty surveyed the massed hordes in the forest with a rather more jaundiced eye. ‘Makes you
dinilo
all day and all night long.’
‘But everyone looks so happy,’ the Duchess continued. And she wasn’t wrong. Everyone we met had a smile on his or her face. Nan said it was the grace of the Virgin entering their souls. Although how she could say that and then refuse to meet the presumed channel through which Our Lady communicated – Lily Lee – I still don’t know. The Head and all the ‘mumbo-jumbo’, as Nan called it, aside, I would have thought she’d be curious at the very least. But she wasn’t, so the Duchess and I left her sitting with another spinster she knows from church, Miss h, I think that the fact that they’re singing, and O’Dowd, and took Betty up on her offer to see Lily’s Head.
Until this point I’d never actually spoken to Lily Lee. But as I entered the shabby, patched tent, I removed my hat and said, ‘Good afternoon,’ to the stunningly beautiful young woman sitting on the floor in front of me. With more curly black hair than you usually see on three average women, Lily Lee was also far more rounded than most Gypsy girls, who are generally skinny. But, like the first time I’d seen her, it was Lily’s eyes that held me. Large and dreamy. Very good eyes indeed for a visionary.
‘The undertaker,’ Lily responded matter-of-factly.
‘And his mother,’ Betty said to her daughter, before slipping out into the open air.
‘Sit down,’ the girl ordered, and indicated that the Duchess and I should lower ourselves on to a damp, filthy blanket on the floor.
‘Miss, my mother has a cold—’
‘The Head won’t come if you don’t sit down,’ Lily said, which, to me, had to mean that the illusion was somehow based on what angle a person viewed it from.
‘Oh, well,’ the Duchess said, with a smile, ‘if we must sit, we must sit. Help me down, would you, please, Francis dear?’ She took off her small black pillbox hat and reached up towards me.
I picked her up, then lowered her down at my feet. She’s light as a feather, poor old girl. Not that Lily watched with anything that appeared to be compassion. Although lovely, her face also had a hard cast at times, like her voice, which could be as sweet as it was throaty. Once I’d settled the Duchess I sat down beside her and waited for something to happen. There wasn’t much in that tatty old tent – just a pile of rags that probably constituted Lily’s bed, a bowl for washing, animal bones and fur hanging from the ceiling and a little table surrounded on three sides by a black fabric screen.
Lily, who was still wearing the long red dress she’d been seen in the night before, shuffled over to one side of the table, just behind the black screen, lit a small clay pipe and said, ‘The Head is very ancient and knows all things. It speaks many languages, one of which is English. You mustn’t come near or the Head will disappear, although you can ask it questions. The Head is a man of our people who was a great magician. His name is Django.’
And then she called him. ‘
Django! Django, av!

There was a light that I can only assume came from a tear in the top of the tent, which illuminated the surface of the table. Beyond Lily’s pipe, there was no smoke, nothing to distract a person’s attention and no sound whatsoever. So how the head of a dark, moustachioed man appeared out of thin air on that table top I couldn’t then imagine. Slowly, slowly, as if coming skin by skin into being the Head materialised and blinked its black-rimmed eyes. During this process I glanced away for the merest second so the thought about how it might have been done took my breath away.
‘Django.’ Finally I saw Lily smile. She said something else to the Head then in their language and he replied, I think, ‘
Va
.’
Lily, who was obviously accustomed to chivvying along dumbstruck
gauje
from this to the next attraction, said, ‘Ask something of Django. He knows everything.’
I looked at the Duchess, who was, I could see, without a thought in her head, then cleared my throat and said, ‘Well, good afternoon, Django. It’s very nice to meet you.’
‘It is most pleasant to make your acquaintance too,’ the Head responded, in a rather high, sing-song voice with an accent I couldn’t pin down for the life of me. The moustache, I could now see, was not real but painted on to his face.
‘So, er, how old are you, Django?’ I said, feeling a bit of a fool to be talking to what had to be an illusion in that darkened, dirty tent.
‘I am nearly two thousand years old,’ the Head responded proudly. ‘I have seen the Romans rise, fall and disappear completely.’
‘Oh, that’s very interesting.’
‘I have seen Julius Caesar walking by the Nile river with Queen Cleopatra.’
‘Egypt.’
‘Yes,’ the Head replied. ‘Our people stayed in that country for a while.’
The Duchess, though religious, is not a stupid person and I could feel her shaking with some sort of emotion. The Head was aware of it too. ‘You, lady,’ it said, ‘I think that you want to ask Django some question.’
The Duchess coughed, looked at me and then at Lily before she addressed herself to the Head. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I wanted to know, Django, whether you ever went in your long travels to the land of Palestine.’
‘You are a Christian woman, lady?’
‘Oh, yes.’
The Head smiled. It was not a pleasant sight. Quite apart from the situation, which was eerie, Django seemed ugly, leering and had very blackened teeth, which, again, I felt at the time had been done to him with makeup. ‘I saw your Christ enter Jerusalem on a donkey and I saw Him die upon a cross,’ the Head said, with what appeared to be great seriousness.
‘Did you? Did you really?’
‘Yes.’ The makeup around his eyes creased and melted as he suddenly, unnervingly, smiled again. The look of it and what he, this actor, and presumably Lily Lee were doing made me sick. The Duchess is a sincerely religious woman and what they were feeding her here wasn’t nice.
‘You know, lady, it was the Gypsies that made the nails that crucified your Christ. No one else would do it. So it is said. So people say.’
‘Django,’ Lily Lee’s face was troubled now and she’d put her pipe quickly to one side, ‘the lady don’t need to know—’
‘Everybody thinks there was three nails, to smash the hands and the feet together, but there was four.’
Lily Lee grabbed a battered cardboard box, then said something, in whispers, which sounded very hard, to the Head. He said something back and then, with genuine regret on his face, he said to me, ‘I am sorry, sir, for upsetting the lady. But I can see she wants to know everything about Christ. She is a seeker for the truth and a person of clean spirit.’
‘Yes, well, that’s as may be. But that sort of detail is not nice,’ I said, at the exact moment Lily Lee covered the Head with the cardboard box. For probably no more than a couple of seconds I heard it pleading and babbling in its box, and then it went silent.
‘The Head is gone,’ the girl said, before removing the box from the table to demonstrate this to us.
‘Probably for the best,’ I said, then couldn’t help adding, ‘Can’t have parlour tricks upsetting people’s beliefs, can we?’
Lily dropped her eyes to the ground.
‘Well, that was very interesting, my dear,’ the Duchess said to the girl, as I helped her to her feet. ‘Who do I pay? Is it you or—’
‘You buried my sister,’ Lily said to me. ‘You can both go free.’
‘Oh, how generous,’ the Duchess said, as she made her way out through the tent flap and into the open air. ‘And very interesting too. Francis, I will just stand outside for a little while . . .’
‘All right, Duchess,’ I said, as I glanced – fiercely, I imagined – at the Gypsy girl still leaning on the Head’s table.
‘It’s not a parlour trick,’ Lily Lee said to me, once my mother had gone. ‘The Head is real.’
‘Oh, in the same way that your “visions” are real?’ I said.
‘You were there the first time. You saw me see—’
‘I saw you see something, yes,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think it was the Virgin Mary and neither do you, do you, Miss Lee?’
‘I—’
‘I’m not saying that what you’re doing here is a bad thing,’ I continued. ‘Your visions have made a lot of people happy, given them hope. But I know you don’t believe it. I heard you deny it was the Virgin with my own ears. And this Head thing, well—’
‘Sssh, the Head will hear you!’
She had real fear in her eyes, but I told her I wasn’t fooled because I believed sincerely that I wasn’t. Smoke and mirrors was what I thought – smugly, I confess – as I left the tent Lily Lee shared with the Head. How was I to know there was any more to it than that?
‘Tell your mother to make a tea from coltsfoot for her cough,’ the Gypsy called, once I was in the open air. ‘’Tis very powerful for a bad chest.’
Nan was having a nice conversation with Miss O’Dowd, who is quite her equal in the spinsterhood stakes, when the Duchess and I found her again. I think it’s the bottle-bottom glasses on top of the tiny, disapproving eyes that disturb me most.
‘Have a good time with your Gypsies’ magic, did you?’ Miss O’Dowd said sourly, as we approached.
The Duchess smiled. ‘Very interesting,’ she said. ‘You know that Lily even offered a cure for my cough? Coltsfoot, apparently.’
‘Father Bowers, who is a friend of Father Burton, says that all types of magic and country ways come straight from the devil,’ Miss O’Dowd said, in that limp, almost apologetic way she has.
‘Oh, well, must be damned, then,’ I couldn’t resist responding.
‘Not you, surely,’ a sharp, familiar voice said behind me.
I turned and raised my hat. ‘Miss Hannah Jacobs.’
‘In the flesh.’ She was wearing an old if still stylish costume in cherry red. The skirt was short, as most women’s tend to be now, and it showed off her legs really well. Made up to the nines, as she always is when she goes out, Hannah had piled her hair up at the back of her head in a big French pleat, and topped it off with the fan-shaped hat I like so much. She looked a treat.
I heard Nan and the O’Dowd woman sniff disapprovingly in unison, but I ignored them and instead I reacquainted Hannah with the Duchess.
‘It’s very nice to see you, Miss Jacobs,’ the Duchess said, as she took Hannah’s hand and shook it between her own twisted, bony fingers. ‘You, like myself, must be curious about what is happening here in the forest.’
BOOK: After the Mourning
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