‘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.’
‘Yes. It’s amazing.’
Apart from Nan and Miss O’Dowd, we all chatted companionably until the Duchess suggested that perhaps Hannah and I might like to walk around while she sat with ‘the girls’. ‘You know that Lily’s father has a dancing bear,’ she said to me, as I bent down to bid her goodbye. ‘There’s plenty of card-reading and perhaps Miss Jacobs would like to see the Head.’
‘Yes, Duchess. We’ll see. Don’t get too cold out here, will you?’
‘Francis, please don’t fuss,’ she said as she waved us on our way.
I noticed that Hannah had frowned at my mention of the Head but I rolled my eyes to the sky and indicated that we should set off quickly while we could.
Once we were out of sight of my family I took one of Hannah’s hands.
‘Had your pocket picked yet, have you?’ she said.
I smiled. ‘No.’
‘How much they fleece you for a butcher’s at the dancing bear?’
‘Nothing,’ I sai
d. ‘I haven’t seen him – this time. But I have spoken to Lily Lee.’
‘The Gyppo gifted with visions.’
‘If you want to put it like that, yes.’
‘She’s a fake,’ Hannah said. ‘And?’
I put my hand into my pocket and took out my fags. ‘I want to say yes,’ I said, ‘but not because of the visions. She just did a dreadful parlour trick for the Duchess and myself, a head on a table . . .’
‘Oh, the Egyptian Head. I know the bloke who does that,’ Hannah said dismissively.
‘Do you?’
‘David Green, calls himself the Wazir of the Pharaohs. His family lived next door to my auntie Esther in the Montefiore Buildings on Canon Street Road. Me and David was quite close as kids. Slimy thing when he grew up, mind. Been doing the halls with his magic act for years.’
Magicians are close about the secrets of their trade so I knew that if I asked, and even though I was a mate of Hannah’s, this Green bloke wouldn’t tell me how the Head trick worked. But I felt I’d like to see another version of it so that I had something to compare with what Lily was doing.
‘Do you know where David Green is playing at the moment?’ I asked.
‘No, but I can find out,’ Hannah said. ‘He ain’t no oil painting, though, David Green. You have been warned. Short, fat, bald and sweaty.’ She pulled a face. ‘Weird, he is, not in a nice way.’
She seemed disturbed, but then she said, ‘Not like you.’
It wasn’t easy getting away from the hordes in the clearing around the pond – there were even people camped among the trees. But after stepping over whole families of knitting women, not to mention numberless dirty-faced kids, we eventually came to a spot where we could be relatively private. I put my arms around Hannah and kissed her.
‘You know I charge extra for doing it out of doors, don’t you?’ she said, once I’d disengaged myself. ‘You get leaves and twigs in your clothes and up your wotsit.’
I laughed. I hadn’t paid Hannah in the accepted sense for years. I take her out, get her some coal, slip her the odd coupon when I can, and I’ve paid her rent on a couple of occasions when she couldn’t. But I never pay to sleep with her. I give her what I can and I’d do that whether she slept with me or not. I love her.
‘Oh, I don’t want to do anything, love,’ I said, as I cleared some grass for us to sit on under an oak tree. ‘Just being alone with you is nice.’
Hannah brushed away a few stray leaves before she sat down, pouting her red lips with distaste. She’s a proper city girl and not too fond of the countryside. But once we’d sat down and lit our fags, Hannah settled, and even sighed contentedly when I moved her head on to my shoulder. I was about to close my eyes for a few minutes when something caught my attention further and deeper into the forest. It started as a flash of red. It might have been anything – a bird, a discarded blanket blowing through the trees – but it was a person, wearing something red, and as it and the other less distinct body beside it moved closer, I saw that the red thing was Lily Lee’s dress.
‘Leave me be!’ I heard her say, followed by the low, if indistinct, rumble of a man’s voice in reply.
‘That’s the girl who has the visions,’ I murmured to Hannah.
Hannah looked in the direction of the voices, then turned back to me. ‘Who’s she with?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’
Closer to us now, I heard Lily again: ‘I’m saying nothing because there’s nothing to say! I can’t help you, leave me be!’
‘Lily!’ The voice was loud but it wasn’t unpleasant.
‘No!’
‘Lily, no one’s going to get hurt. I promise!’
‘No!’
She ran straight past Hannah and me, but she didn’t see us. Her dress was pulled down at the neck and I looked at Hannah, who returned my gaze knowingly. ‘Someone up to something she shouldn’t,’ she said.
But I wasn’t sure. What Lily had said to the man struck me as more of a refusal to give aid rather than lack of desire for sexual relations. Not that the man appeared to follow her. Maybe he knew that Hannah and I were in the area. Or maybe he didn’t want to get involved in the great mass of people we could now see swarming towards and around the young woman in red – hundreds of them, trying to touch her, asking her, ‘Has Our Lady told you when it’s all going to end?’ or ‘Ask Our Lady about our Derek, please – will you, Lily, darling?’
‘Christ, H, this is barmy,’ Hannah said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. But inside I recognised that I felt different. Apart from the blokes I knew who claimed to have seen things in the first lot, I, like millions of old soldiers, know the story of the Angel of Mons. Quite what was seen by the British troops in the skies above that battlefield in 1914 no one can know. Some said it was an angel, some a whole company of the things; others had seen St George and there were even blokes who claimed it was all down to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. But somehow the Hun were held back during that battle and thousands of our lads were spared. Whether it’s true or not hardly matters. The Angel of Mons gave people hope and, if you discount the enemy soldiers involved, it or they hadn’t hurt anyone. Lily’s Lady, Our Lady of the Pond or whatever people might choose to call her, seemed to me to be in the same category – or, rather, she was for the time being. A chill wind was sweeping into Epping Forest that wasn’t entirely due to winter coming on. Its origin, I felt, was in the uncertainty I’d experienced when I’d watched Lily having her first vision – the sense that I didn’t know what I was witnessing.
We left the forest at just before five. The light was beginning to go, and the Duchess and Nan were anxious not to be caught far away from home if or when the bombers came over. Neither of them had ever been inside a public shelter and they didn’t plan to do so now.
‘You can’t breathe in some of them places for the smell of, you know, the toilet,’ Miss O’Dowd said, to my scandalised sister, as we all made our way back to my car. ‘And there’s women down there no better than they should be, allowing men all sorts!’
Hannah and I, following the Duchess and the other two women, gripped each other, laughing silently. What Miss O’Dowd would have done had she known about Hannah I didn’t dare think about and as for my sister . . .
‘Oh, blimey, it’s a hearse!’ I heard Miss O’Dowd say, as we all turned into the Snaresbrook Road and she beheld the Lancia.
‘Well, you know our Frank’s an undertaker, Dolly,’ Nan said, in my defence.
‘I can’t get in no hearse! I thought you said your brother had a car!’
‘He does. It is a car,’ Nan said.
Miss O’Dowd crossed her arms across her chest and shook her curly red head in disapproval. ‘Oh, no, Nan,’ she said. ‘I can’t get in there. Hearses are for the dear departed. I’ll get the bus.’
‘It is getting dark, my dear,’ the Duchess said, as she tapped Miss O’Dowd’s arm. ‘I don’t think we should leave you here alone.’
‘I’ll be all right, Mrs Hancock,’ Miss O’Dowd replied, with only a tiny shudder at my mother’s foreign touch. ‘I’ve got me rosary and a St Christopher for journeys, and with Our Lady so close by, I can’t come to no harm, I don’t think.’
‘Not bothered that the visions might be part of that Gypsy magic the priests say come straight from the devil?’ I couldn’t resist asking.
Not that Dolly O’Dowd gave me an answer: she just stuck her nose in the air, told Nan she’d see her at Mass on Sunday, then headed off up towards the Eagle pub.
The Duchess shrugged, then turned to Hannah. ‘Well, you, I hope, will accept a lift, Miss Jacobs. It is so cold and damp now. If I recall correctly, you live in Canning Town, don’t you?’
Hannah accepted my mother’s offer so I drove back through Forest Gate, Leyton, through Stratford and back into the rubble and filth that is now the Royal Docklands. One other thing I noticed from that drive was that people get thinner the closer you come to the river. Further so
uth from Canning Town, right on the Thames, had to be home to people who were all but transparent, I thought.
Chapter Six
Stella Hancock is my dad’s older brother Percy’s girl. In her early fifties, like our Nan, Stella is a spinster who, until that terrible night for her in late October 1940, lived with Uncle Percy in New City Road, Plaistow. There’s a lot of women Stella’s age without husbands or children. Victims, you could say, of the Great War, although not all of them see themselves in that light. My cousin Stella is one who does, her single misery displaying itself as a propensity to ‘nerves’. It didn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to picture what the ARP found when they dug out the stair cupboard Stella had been hiding in when the house next door took a direct hit.
‘I’ve never seen nothing like it,’ the warden, a local tailor in his other life, said. ‘Stood up with her hands braced agin the ceiling of the cupboard, hair on end, pinny in shreds, her gob wide open like a bleedin’ cod.’
‘There’s no sign of anyone else, I suppose?’ I asked, as Doris came into the shop with tea for the warden, Johnny Webb.
‘You mean your Uncle Percy?’ The warden shook his head sadly. ‘No, sorry, Mr H. Just your Stella, I’m afraid. Barmy as a coot too, which is why she’s down the cop shop.’
I waited for Doris to go before I asked, ‘But why didn’t they bring her here? The police know our family.’
‘Coppers only managed to stop her screaming half an hour ago.’ Johnny moved his head close to mine. ‘Look, Mr H,’ he said, ‘it’s up to you. I’m just here to tell you because I think you should have the choice – you’re family. The coppers want to take your Stella up to Claybury. And we all know what that means.’ He sipped his tea noisily and appreciatively.
I breathed in deeply, then shuddered. Claybury is a grim Victorian asylum just to the north of Walthamstow. It’s where they take East-Enders when their minds break under the weight of the work and the poverty that follows almost everyone here from the cradle to the grave. With its ice-cold baths and the numerous other punishments available to the staff when patients fail to ‘behave’, Claybury is a place of nightmares for a madman like me. I know I could be put inside its walls within a heartbeat. Just one outburst in front of the wrong person would be enough. I felt myself sweat.
After the Mourning Page 6
