After the Mourning (9 page)

She looked through rather than at me, so I went on, ‘Stella, it’s Frank. You know, your cousin Frank Hancock, Uncle Tom’s son.’

Still she didn’t speak. Her only reaction was the production of a thin trickle of water from her left eye. I squeezed her hand and said, ‘If you want you can come home with me, love, Auntie Mary, Nan and Aggie’ll be so pleased to see you.’

Stella made a squeaking sound in her throat, like a bird.

‘Stella?’

The little nurse shook her head sadly and mouthed, ‘Shocked.’

As if I didn’t know, but she was only a kid and she was doing her best.

‘I tell you what, Stel,’ I said, after a pause, ‘I need a couple of gas mantles for the flat, so what say I go next door to Bedwells, get them, and then come back for another chat in a couple of ticks?’

Still Stella failed to respond. But I got up and made my way out of the room with a promise to ‘see you in a mo’ on my lips. Bedwells, the general store next to the police station, was not, of course, my destination. Although I could see that Stella was going to be bad, probably for some considerable time, I didn’t want to give her over to Claybury without some more information, so I made my way back to the front desk and Sergeant Hill. When I got there, however, I found that he wasn’t alone. Three Military Policemen, all strangers to me, were with him.

‘Oh, well,’ I heard him say, ‘if that’s the law then that’s that, I suppose. I’ve always found him, and her, to be very respectable people.’

‘That’s the whole point about being a spy,’ a spotty young private said. ‘You’d never know.’

‘Private . . .’

‘They’re enemy foreigners,’ the young man responded curtly. ‘Who knows what they’re really doing here?’

‘Still,’ Sergeant Hill said dubiously, ‘Heinrich Feldman . . .’ Then, seeing me, he cleared his throat and said, ‘Ah, Mr Hancock . . .’

I, of course, knew a little about the search for Heinrich and Eva Feldman from my recent conversation with the ‘dishy’ Sergeant Williams. I’d denied all knowledge of the Feldmans to him. These MPs, who might or might not have been Williams’s boys, looked at me with ill-disguised disdain. But youngsters are not that keen on people in my profession.

‘Sergeant Hill,’ I said, ‘could I perhaps have a bit of a chat about Stella?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, and after first taking leave of the MPs he ushered me through into the back office where we talked together about our Stella.

‘I see ’em all the time,’ he said, as he sat down behind a big desk covered with candle stubs and lit his pipe. ‘Bomb ’appy, they wander about talking rubbish many of ’em. But your Stella, well, she’s always been a nervous woman, hasn’t she, Mr Hancock?’

‘Yes.’

‘So Claybury . . .’

‘I do know about places like that, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Not to point the finger, you understand, but I don’t always think that asylums are necessarily the best places for people with bad nerves.’

‘No.’ He looked up sharply at me, Hancock, the barmy bomb-happy old soldier always on the run from Hitler’s Luftwaffe. He’d seen me out and about when a raid was on and both he and I knew it. ‘No,’ he repeated, ‘not everything is as it seems, is it, Mr Hancock?’

He’d been in the first lot too, so I imagined that was what he had to be talking about. But then there was the Feldman couple, that nice old clock-repairer and his wife – the young MP had mentioned the word ‘spy’. ‘People can be surprising,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

Suddenly I’d made up my mind. ‘I’m going to take Stella back to our place, Sergeant,’ I said. I couldn’t think about Claybury. ‘Give her a chance. See how we all get on.’

He was uncertain, I could see, but he nodded.

‘I know she’s always been a bit barmy, but she isn’t generally loud or a problem,’ I said. ‘And even when people do have troubles they generally keep to their character, don’t they?’ He didn’t reply or respond in any way. ‘Sergeant Hill, have the Military Police caught up with Heinrich and Eva Feldman?’

‘You know I can’t say anything about that. Careless talk and—’

‘A Sergeant Williams came to see me the other day,’ I said. ‘He’s looking for deserters and others up in Epping Forest . . .’

‘Yes, I know.’ Then he frowned. ‘Why did he come to see you?’

I told him about my first visit to the Gypsy camp and my experience of the original ‘miracle’. ‘Sergeant Williams mentioned the Feldmans to me,’ I said. ‘He said I should keep an eye open for them if I visited the forest again.’

Sergeant Hill smiled. ‘I bet you didn’t, though, did you? I bet you didn’t even say you knew them.’

I smiled too. Both the sergeant and I are East-Enders: I didn’t have to explain anything to him. ‘Williams was also keen to find a Gypsy, another German,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ Sergeant Hill sucked thoughtfully on his pipe before he said, ‘Everything’s about spies at the moment. The Feldmans, this Gypsy. I don’t believe all of it, myself. It’s not Williams in charge up in the forest, it’s an officer, Mansard, a captain. It’s a bit of a mess up there in the forest if you ask me, what with the Gypsies, this “vision” business and the MPs going about their work. Captain Mansard wants that Gypsy particularly. We have to find him soon.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘Even if I did I couldn’t tell you, Mr Hancock, discreet as I know you are. I mean, blimey, if Heinrich Feldman or any other Jew for that matter can be a Nazi spy, who can an honest patriotic copper trust, eh? You tell me.’

As I stood up to go I said, ‘I don’t believe the Feldmans are spies, do you?’

‘People throw words around without thinking much of the time, especially the military.’

‘So you don’t think they’re spies, then?’ I said.

Sergeant Hill looked at me steadily, then said, ‘You want to take your Stella off now, then?’

‘Yes, I’ll take her,’ I said, with a sigh. ‘Don’t want her babbling nonsense where someone might hear and get the wrong idea, do we? I mean, if Jews can be spies, why not nutcases?’

Sergeant Hill, I knew, was aware of my views about internment. When our Doris’s father-in-law had been interned for six months, she had told Constable Fred Bryant all about it and about my useless efforts to stop it. Fred blabs so the whole station had to have known Doris’s and my business. But Sergeant Hill just shrugged his shoulders helplessly and let me leave without further comment. For my part I was saddened that the Feldmans had, or so it would seem, been caught and I knew that Hannah would be upset too. Eva Feldman, particularly, had suffered so much already under the Nazis. What, I wondered, as I made my way back to Stella, was the state of play with the Gypsy Martin Stojka?

Having Stella at home in our cramped flat wasn’t easy for the next few days. I was very busy and didn’t have to bear the brunt of it – that was done by the Duchess and my sisters. Poor Nan even had to share what few clothes she had with Stella, our cousin having lost the lot. Not that Stella seemed to care much, of course. To look at her face was like staring into an empty bucket. Towards the end of that week I came home one evening to find the Reverend Ernie Sutton in our parlour with the still silent Stella.

‘I met Ernie outside the Abbey Arms,’ Aggie said, grabbing hold of me just before I went into our dark and now very quiet parlour. ‘Nan and Mum keep going on about how our Stella’s a soul in torment, so I got her a priest.’

‘Wrong religion,’ I said, but smiled at my sister. ‘Well done anyway, Ag. Ernie’s a nice bloke.’

‘I just want somebody to get her to talk,’ Aggie said, as she walked towards the kitchen. ‘Gives me the heebie-jeebies, her just sitting there like two penn’orth of Gawd ’elp us. I’ve put your shirts in the copper. Christ knows if we’ll ever get them dry but—’

‘Thanks, Ag,’ I replied, as I went into the parlour.

We had finally managed to tell Stella that Uncle Percy had died the previous day. When the Duchess began to explain, however, Stella put her hands over her ears and screamed. I felt that the sooner I could arrange a funeral for Percy the better, although even I couldn’t do it with absolutely nothing – not yet. Any bit of flesh would have done or even a piece of clothing at a pinch, but so far the Auxiliary Fire boys had come up with nothing. Uncle Percy had vaporised and an ‘empty coffin’ do was, I knew, on the cards.

When I went into the parlour I found a calm, if still silent, Stella seemingly hanging on Ernie’s every word.

‘Your auntie Mary has said that you can stay here for as long as you like,’ I heard him say, in that gentle, low-toned way he has. ‘Your dear dad is with God, Stella, but you have your Auntie Mary and Nancy, Agnes and Frank. You’ve people, which is more than many folk have got.’

Her eyes were wide and unseeing like a lunatic’s. I must admit that even when Ernie eventually got Stella to acknowledge his existence, I had a moment or two of wishing I’d never taken her in. It’s something I wasn’t proud of then and I’m not now.

When Stella had had enough she got up and went to be on her own in Nan’s room. As we watched her leave, Ernie said, ‘She’s a long way to go, Frank. The shock has taken her very badly. I wish I could do more. I could come back . . .’

I said I thought that might be a good idea, as long as Ernie didn’t mind providing comfort to someone outside his own flock. Just the idea of it made him smile. ‘We all do our bit wherever we’re needed, these days,’ he said. ‘I mean, look at you and me and those Gypsies.’ And then, suddenly, he frowned. ‘You were there when the girl had her vision, weren’t you, Frank?’

We hadn’t spoken since Rosie Lee’s funeral – there’s little time for anything apart from work, these days – so I now took the opportunity to unburden my soul, in part, to the Reverend Ernie Sutton. When I’d finished my story he said, ‘You know, I’ve had a conversation with Philip Burton about this and we’re both worried.’

‘Father Burton’s very anti-mystical,’ I said. ‘Always has been.’

‘And probably with good reason,’ Ernie said, as he offered me a Passing Cloud. ‘People get hysterical around such things. They build up expectations about what might be about to happen.’

‘Oh, I know it can’t be real,’ I said, as I took one of his fags and lit it. ‘But there are a lot of happy people up there in the forest at the moment.’

The gas in the pipes hissed as it made its way sluggishly towards the single mantle that we lit in our now completely boarded-up parlour.

‘What do you mean it can’t be real?’ Ernie asked. ‘Just because you’re an atheist?’

‘No.’ I told him of how Lily had originally denied that her vision was of the Blessed Virgin. I told him about how her brother-in-law had behaved and about how the look of the girl had puzzled and, in a way, frightened me too.

‘Well, it isn’t typical of this type of thing,’ Ernie said, when I had finished. ‘As Philip pointed out, the Virgin usually – at Lourdes and that place in Portugal, Fatima – speaks to the recipient. She asks the person to come back again or bring others. Sometimes there are prophesies and instructions. But with Lily Lee there was nothing.’

‘Because it isn’t the Virgin Mary,’ I said. ‘Lily’s seeing something, talking to something . . .’

‘But nothing divine?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But something isn’t right.’

‘All those people up there are expecting a miracle,’ Ernie said. ‘If it’s a hoax they’re going to be angry and disappointed.’

I puffed at my fag for a few moments. ‘I don’t think it’s a hoax exactly, Ernie.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘As I said, Lily is seeing something. But it’s difficult. On the one hand I feel she’s genuine but on the other I know she performs parlour tricks.’ I told him about the Head. ‘But anyway,’ I said, ‘there’s so many people up there now that if the coppers or anyone did try to go in and break it up to prove it was a fraud they wouldn’t have much luck.’

Ernie sighed. ‘But where is it going to end, Frank?’

‘I don’t know, mate,’ I said. ‘There’s so much going on in the forest, what with the MPs all over the shop searching for deserters and gangsters and foreigners . . .’

‘The Feldmans.’ Ernie shook his head. ‘I heard. A bad business. Poor Heinrich and Eva.’ He paused. ‘Frank,’ he said, ‘Father Burton, myself or someone in the Church needs to speak to this Lily Lee before all this goes too far. You’ve been up there a few times – you had Betty Lee here . . .’

‘Yes, we did. It was a strange time, I can tell you!’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Ernie said. ‘But I expect you got some sort of idea about what they’re like from having her here, didn’t you?’

‘A bit, I suppose, not enough to make me an expert but if you want me to go up to the forest with you I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘I can’t add anything to what I’ve already told you except that . . .’ I recalled the last frantic time I had seen Lily Lee, out of her tent and obviously afraid.

‘What?’ Ernie prompted. ‘Except what, Frank?’

‘Except there’s a man wants something from her,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who he is or what he wants. All I know is that she’s not letting him have whatever it is.’

And that was all I did know. As far as I could tell, Lily Lee lived – discounting the Head – alone and without obvious involvement with a boyfriend. Still grieving for her sister, she appeared to be quite distant from the rest of her family and, in fact, from the whole group. There was some awe among the Gypsies regarding her relationship with the Head that, considering it was a parlour trick, had to have been put on for my benefit. I began to wonder who the Head might be, whether I had seen him about the camp and if, in fact, it had been the Head with whom Lily had argued when I was in the forest with Hannah. If it was, Lily was more controlled by than controlling her parlour trick. The thought made me feel quite cold.

‘We should go and see the Gypsies soon,’ Ernie said, as he was leaving later on. ‘I’ll speak to Philip Burton and then I’ll get back to you, Frank.’

Chapter Seven