After the Mourning

by Barbara Nadel

  I didn’t remember any smog that morning but I’d been rather far away and busy dying at the time. Things came into my head now in what felt like a jumble.

  ‘The men who shot me, the MPs,’ I said, ‘they were making for the coast.’

  ‘And why were they doing that?’ Richards asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I think they were going to carry on with whatever plan Mansard was following. Maybe they were meeting other traitors . . . Mansard was going to take the Nail to Germany, which I suppose would make sense of wanting to go to the coast.’

  Richards nodded. ‘You don’t know where on the coast, do you, Mr Hancock?’

  I knew how important this question was so I racked my brains to find an answer for him, but I couldn’t. We’re told the coast, particularly here in the south, is very well defended by a string of heavy gun emplacements, pillboxes and anti-aircraft batteries. If a boat or a plane had been coming from Germany with the intention of picking Mansard up, its pilot would have had to know what he was doing. Then again, maybe Mansard had meant to deliver the Nail to someone else, another Nazi, who perhaps lived near the coast. I didn’t know, and as time was going on I was feeling more and more tired and in pain. Richards, who had been, I think, largely oblivious to anything outside his investigation now gave me a strange look.

  ‘I’ll call the matron,’ he said, got up quickly and moved towards the door.

  ‘What?’ The room was spinning now in a queasy fashion.

  ‘Matron!’ I heard him call down the corridor.

  Then he rushed back to me and took one of my hands in his. ‘Mr Hancock?’

  A thought occurred to me. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘if some Gypsies stopped my hearse in the first place, they might know where Hannah is.’ I felt very, very sick and there was blood again, although I couldn’t tell whose it was.

  ‘He’s talking gibberish,’ I heard Richards say to someone. ‘God, I hope I didn’t put too much strain on the poor chap!’

  I couldn’t make out the reply to this, except that the voice was female, elderly and quite cross.

  I went to sleep then and dreamt of the old crone drabalo Mary, and how, just after she’d taken the bullet out of me, a great gang of Gypsies had gone off somewhere.

  For what I later discovered was almost another whole day, the doctors at Whipps Cross tried to stop the bleeding from my side but couldn’t. As quickly as they transfused blood into me – on one occasion from my sister Aggie – it just poured out again. There was a raid that night so I was moved with a glass bottle of blood to the cellars. Not that I remember anything about that, thank Christ. A nice young nurse told me about it later. I don’t even remember my dreams except that they were not about Hannah, my family or anything of importance in my life.

  Everyone came to see me. My mother, my sisters, Arthur and Walter, even poor Doris. Then they called Father Burton. He was on his way to give me the Last Rites when drabalo Mary’s grandson Joe bade farewell to Hannah at the front of the hospital and she asked one of the nurses where I was. She was dirty and damp, as if she’d been sleeping in the open, but the copper still stationed outside my room let her come in to see me. I remember her calling and crying, leaning on the bed to shout into my face.

  ‘H! H! For Gawd’s sake, fight!’

  I can only imagine how scandalised the Duchess and Nan must have been by such behaviour. And even though Hannah’s reappearance marked a turning point in my condition I didn’t know about any of it until some time later, when Father Burton had visited and been sent on his way by a doctor who hoped he was right that I seemed to be recovering. To me it was a dream until early that evening when I opened my eyes to see my family and Hannah ranged around my bed with grey, concerned faces.

  I would have liked to come to calmly, for their sakes as much as my own, but I was rocketed back into my life with a single thought. I gripped Hannah’s arm and said, ‘The Gypsies! I’ve got to tell the coppers! The Gypsies were going somewhere when drabalo Mary took the bullet out of me!’

  ‘Sssh!’ Hannah smoothed her hand across my brow. ‘Don’t worry about that now, eh?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘H, don’t go worrying about no Gypsies now. You just get yourself well again.’

  ‘Hannah,’ I said, ‘how did you get out of the car? My car with the corpses and . . .’ I tried to pull myself up in the bed but the pain in my side was still so great that I slumped back on to my pillows.

  ‘Francis,’ I heard my mother say, ‘Miss Jacobs is right. You mustn’t worry about anything now.’

  I looked from Hannah to the Duchess and saw that my mother was weeping. I tried and failed to reach out to her.

  ‘Oh, rest, will you, please, Francis? You nearly died,’ the Duchess said, in a voice so broken it was painful to hear. ‘I called Father Burton. Francis, I nearly lost you!’

  She got to her feet, came over and kissed every inch of my face. I cried, I admit it. Then I realised something I’d often thought about before: I owed it to them to live. Sometimes I don’t want to carry on. Even with Hannah in my life, what I’ve done and what I’ve seen outweigh everything. But that isn’t the fault of my mother or my sisters, and they should never have to suffer because of me. So for the time being I didn’t ask any more questions, and didn’t get any more answers, until Hannah came to see me on her own the following day. This time she was her usual smart-as-a-pin self, complete with hair-do and perfume.

  ‘Listen, H,’ she said, as she sat down beside my bed and lit me a Passing Cloud, ‘you mustn’t say nothing to the coppers about the Gypsies.’

  This seemed to be worrying her considerably. I took the fag from her, drew in, then coughed, which made my side hurt like hell. I hadn’t smoked for a few days so I had to push through the pain to get used to it again. ‘But, Hannah,’ I said, once I could speak properly, ‘the coppers think the Gypsies may have had something to do with the death of Sarge and the others in the hearse. I heard them, the Gypsies, all go off somewhere when that girl took me back to the camp. It must’ve been about the same time as—’

  ‘Well, it can’t have been,’ Hannah said. ‘I never saw no Gypsies.’

  ‘So how did you get out of the car?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘They pulled over. Near here, it was. I opened the door and ran.’

  ‘Didn’t they run after you?’

  ‘For a bit, yes,’ she said.

  ‘And they didn’t catch you?’

  I couldn’t believe that three fit young MPs would allow a middle-aged woman like Hannah to get away from them. I could understand why, out of the forest, they wouldn’t want to shoot at her, but I was pretty sure they’d have been able to catch her.

  ‘No . . .’ Hannah turned away. My stomach churned sickeningly.

  ‘I know you’re lying,’ I said. She didn’t contradict me. ‘If you’d really got away, you would’ve come looking for me. But you didn’t turn up anywhere until yesterday. Why are you lying? We don’t have any secrets. What’s going on, Hannah?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She glanced down at her hands. ‘It’s the truth,’ she said. ‘I got away and I never come looking for you. Sorry. I’m not as good a friend as you like to believe sometimes.’

  I still wasn’t convinced and I told her so. The previous day she had been desperate to see me, worried sick. Now, suddenly, she wanted me to believe she didn’t care. I wondered, not for the first time, whether she’d met someone else. But when or how she could’ve done that, I couldn’t imagine. It didn’t make any sense.

  ‘The Gypsies saved you,’ Hannah said, as she got up to leave. ‘Remember that.’

  ‘How do you know the Gypsies saved me?’ I asked. ‘You and me, we haven’t spoken about that.’

  Hannah sighed. ‘You talked about some Gypsy Mary woman when you was in your fever. And, anyway, one of the nurses told me,’ she said, with more than a little impatience in her voice. And what she said was quite true: the nurses did know that the Gypsies ha
d saved me. ‘Look, H, if you want to say you heard some Gypsies going off somewhere when you was at their camp, you can do that. That’s up to you. But they never come after your hearse. You ain’t to say that they did, because that ain’t true. I don’t know how them horrible soldiers died, but it wasn’t anything to do with no Gypsies.’

  ‘Have you been to see the coppers?’ I asked. I knew they had been keen for her to contact them.

  ‘Well, of course I have!’ she said, again tetchily.

  ‘And you told them what you’ve told me about how you got away from the car and—’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘So did they ask you where you were between escaping from the hearse and turning up here yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was studying her hands again – so different now from the scruffy vision I had seen the day before. Unusually for Hannah, she had actually been dirty.

  ‘And what did you say?’

  She looked me hard in the eyes before she replied. ‘I told them I was working,’ she said, ‘which I was.’

  ‘But you didn’t go home. They would have found you there if you had because I told them where you live,’ I said. ‘I was worried!’

  ‘Well, I was making meself a few bob up in the forest,’ Hannah said. ‘You were dead, as far as I knew, and I didn’t have a farthing on me to get home. Now that a lot of those religious people have gone there are plenty of sorts going about all types of business up there needing a little company among the trees.’

  I stubbed out my fag in the ashtray beside my bed. I was trembling with anger now. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘Going with gangsters up against trees? With me not even cold, as far as you knew? You couldn’t be so heartless. Did you tell the coppers about Mr Lee and Horatio and me getting shot?’

  ‘I was scared,’ Hannah said. ‘I went off and did what I do and hoped it might all go away!’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘That’s how it was, and if you don’t believe me, well – well, stuff you, Francis Hancock!’

  And with that she left. In tears and with a face as red as a tomato and me not knowing whether to feel hurt, confused or just plain angry. She had, after all, provided I did as she said, put me in a difficult position with the police. What she wanted me to do, while not actually lying, was leave out a detail they might find useful. The Gypsies had left to go somewhere in a hurry at just about the time that the hearse stopped on the first occasion. Someone on Whipps Cross Road had even seen some Gypsies around the car at the time. Yet Hannah wanted me to say I had no knowledge of this. Well, I did and so did she. I thought about these things a lot in the hours that followed, and it wasn’t comfortable. Being hurt in your mind or your heart is far more painful than being hurt in your body. This time was really the darkest period of the whole affair for me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was sent home from Whipps Cross the following day. I could hardly walk, so they laid on an ambulance to take me back to the shop. Like most people, these days, I wasn’t strong enough to leave hospital, but the nurses and doctors can’t cope with any more than the most serious cases. Every night brings new casualties so once you’re reasonably well they let you go. But, then, our family is lucky in that we have a doctor and the wherewithal to pay him. I’d only been home for half an hour at most before Dr O’Grady came to inspect my wound and talk to me about how it was to be cared for.

  ‘You will need to rest, Frank,’ he said, ‘and you will have to go down to your shelter.’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly, smiling as I did so because Dr O’Grady is a good man and always means well.

  ‘I’m going to tell Arthur to help you get down to the shelter before he leaves for the night,’ the doctor continued, ignoring me.

  ‘Doctor—’

  ‘Frank, for the love of God, will you think of your mother and sisters for once?’ the doctor roared. ‘Go down to the shelter for their sake!’

  I knew that he was aware of why I didn’t like going down the Anderson and that he had some sympathy with me. But Dr O’Grady, like everyone else, was tired. He left without another word while I tried not to think about going down the shelter, even though his words had convinced me that I had to try to do so.

  Against my instructions Doris had been allowed to come back to work and, a little after the doctor had left, she knocked on my bedroom door and brought in my appointments diary. Her face, though made up as it usually is, was as dry and white as a clean sheet of paper.

  ‘Mr Cox has been covering your bookings since you’ve been ill,’ she said. Albert Cox has an undertaking business down in Canning Town and, although he was getting paid what should have been my money for taking over, he was doing me a real favour.

  ‘Yes, he’s a good mate,’ I said. I noticed that Doris had lost still more weight. Poor sad girl, it didn’t do her any favours. ‘Doris . . .’

  ‘Mr H, if this firm don’t do no work, you and your family are going to go hungry.’ Her eyes filled with tears, as much, I felt, for her poor dead husband as for me and my family. ‘I can’t bear to think of Mrs H suffering.’ She wiped a hand across her eyes. ‘So I’ve been thinking and it seems to me that the best thing you can do is give Arthur the chance to do your job.’

  Arthur is sixteen years old, thin as a rail and full of spots, poor lad. I must have looked thunderstruck to say the least, but then Doris held up her hand to me. ‘Hear me out, Mr H,’ she said. ‘I know he looks like a plum duff and he ain’t always the brightest lad in the world, but he would like the chance. He’s seen you conduct a hundred times and he knows what to do.’

  He probably did. Whether he’d have the necessary gravity was another matter. I didn’t even have my wand to pass on to him! Without it, I felt sometimes that I lacked gravity. I was honest with Doris and told her my feelings.

  She said, ‘Look, Mr H, nothing’s right at the moment. You’re up here, and we’re . . . well, we’re several bearers down.’ She averted her eyes for a second, remembering, I had no doubt, the times when Alfie had occasionally done that job for me. ‘But I’ve spoke to my uncle Wolfie, who’s said he’ll come and do a turn bearing for you. We’ve only got the one hearse.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The coppers have still got the motor car,’ Doris said. ‘They still don’t know who killed them boys.’

  ‘No?’ I hadn’t said anything to her about what had happened to me, but I imagined that the Duchess and the girls would have told her what they knew.

  ‘No.’ But she had no more need to discuss what had happened up in the forest than I did. ‘So that just leaves us with the horse-drawn,’ Doris continued. ‘But we managed with the horses until very recently, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’ Except that until September 1940 death wasn’t as popular as it was by November, not even in this poor manor.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ Doris said. ‘I’ll go and speak to Uncle Wolfie tonight, and if you have a word with Arthur we can do the funeral that’s down for eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. Look.’

  She showed me the booking in her neat hand. It said, ‘Queenie Ramm, 11 a.m., Haig Road to East London C’try’. It didn’t look like a difficult job – I knew it wouldn’t be a big do. Queenie had died the previous week after a long struggle against TB. She’d been in her eighties and left only a widowed daughter, who was childless.

  ‘Well, all right, then,’ I said, after a bit. ‘Send Arthur up, and if you can speak to your uncle Wolfie . . .’

  ‘Smashing!’ She actually smiled. If nothing else came of this plan, it was all right by me if it made Doris smile. ‘I’ll go and tell him right now.’

  She went to take off downstairs like a rocket but I managed to stop her. ‘Doris!’

  She turned back, her face tense and grey again.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Thanks, Doris.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr H.’ And then she was gone. People react to tragedy in so many different ways it’s impossible to say what they will or will not do. Doris was dealing w
ith her loss by throwing herself into her job. She didn’t want to be at home and she didn’t want to talk about Alfie. That I had wanted to speak to her about him was more to do with me than her, and I was glad now that I hadn’t.

  I waited for Arthur to appear, all six foot odd of him, and lit up a Woodbine to pass the time. I still wondered about him. I looked into the little fire Nan had lit for me in my fireplace and found myself worrying again that I had no wand to give the boy. And this time it wasn’t a niggle as it had been before: it was a deep, superstitious worry that lack of the wand could only spell disaster for Hancocks. After all, ever since my grandfather, Francis, had started the business back in 1885, the wand had been with whoever had conducted. Just knowing it was no longer around made me feel naked. It was then that I began to think about the Nail the Gypsies prized and where it might have ended up. In a way the Nail and the wand were the same: relics with meaning and therefore power over those who believe in them. That the Nail had no significance for me didn’t mean I couldn’t feel something of it. I’d felt something when Lily had had her first vision; I’d felt terrible superstitious fear when Stojka had used his relic to murder Mansard. I just couldn’t connect any of that to God. Like my wand, such things should be free of any explanation or reason. That they just are is a mystery, and maybe that’s the whole point.

  But I was far from at peace with what had happened to me, and the whole affair was not to be put completely to rest just yet. Even with a war on, our police still have a duty to solve murders, and the Epping Forest Business, as I believe the thing is called these days in copper circles, had brought them a lot of dead bodies, eleven in total, that had not been killed by bombs. They took it very seriously indeed and, as I was soon to see for myself, just because I’d been shot it didn’t mean they wouldn’t come back to me for further explanation.