All The Days of My Life

by Hilary Bailey

  “What do you mean?” asked Mrs Gates. Mary felt the grip tighten on her hand.

  Impatiently, the gypsy said, “Not soon. You will both die peacefully, in your beds, in old age. Can you ask more than that? Go home.”

  A small child with a brown face, curly black hair and, Mary noticed, small gold rings in her ears, ran up to the woman, clasped at her skirts and began to chatter in what sounded like a foreign language. The woman bent down to talk to her, then straightened up and stood there looking at them. Behind her the sun was descending behind a landscape of hills and rolling fields.

  “Come and kiss me, child,” she said to Mary. Mary looked at Mrs Gates, who gave her a secret push in the side. She ran forward obediently and put her face up to the old woman, who bent down and brushed her cheek with dry lips. Looking into Mary’s eyes she said, “Aha.” Mary ran back to Mrs Gates. “Goodbye,” she shouted. The woman and the gypsy child watched their backs as they walked off, through the bustle of the closing down of the fair, the small knots of youngsters standing about and giggling, and to the edge of the hill. On the way down, sliding on the dry earth and stones of the steep path, Mrs Gates was silent. Once in the lane leading past Twining’s farm and so to the track across the fields to Allaun Towers, she began to talk. “Well, well,” she said, “to think of all that. And she never took any money for it, either. She told you your fortune for nothing.”

  “What’s a fortune?” Mary asked.

  “What’s going to happen to you,” Mrs Gates told her.

  “Is it magic?” Mary asked.

  “Like magic,” said Mrs Gates. Mary brushed her hand along the lower leaves of the bushes and remarked, “You said there was no such thing.”

  Mrs Gates said wonderingly, “To think I’d see the day when a gypsy would tell a fortune and not charge a penny for it – and the things she said – enough to make your hair curl – three husbands you’re to have, Mary. I wonder if there’s any truth in it. Oh, my.”

  Mary had been startled by the shifting relationship between Mrs Gates and the gypsy woman. At one minute Mrs Gates had been demanding and disrespectful, rather like Lady Allaun in shops, and, on the other hand, she was plainly flattered and impressed by the gypsy’s attention. For her part, Mary was vaguely disturbed by the whole thing. If the magic was really true, she was not sure she liked the sound of it all. She concentrated on making a mixed bouquet of daisies, buttercups and trailing weeds on the way home. So they walked in silence until they were cutting back over the fields beyond the lake. Then Mrs Gates said suddenly, “I think that woman was Urania Heron.”

  “Who’s Urany Heron?” asked Mary.

  “She’s the Queen of the Gypsies,” Mrs Gates said solemnly. “That’s who she is.”

  “Can she do spells?” asked Mary.

  “I expect so,” said Mrs Gates.

  They passed by the edges of the lake, where ducks quacked and began to settle for the night. Mary thought that she would try to forget all about the gypsy. And, as it happened, there was a shock for them when they got back to the Towers, so she never, after that, remembered the fortune-telling episode very clearly.

  There was this red-faced man in a major’s uniform, stick and all, and he was standing on the Turkish rug in front of the fireplace in the drawing room when we were called in there. When he saw me he just picked me up, spun me round and put me back on the mat. He said, “Well, you can see there’s something special here, whatever it is.” Then he put his hand in his pocket and gave me a little silver filigree necklace. He must have bought it specially for me in India. There was his hat, too, with the brass on it, lying on the sofa. He let me wear it.

  Sir Frederick was nice and funny that weekend. He borrowed a horse and let me ride on it with him. He told me stories. He was so kind –I think I took to him so much because he reminded me a lot of Sid, my dad. That was the last time I saw him happy though, Sir Frederick. It was rotten, really, what happened. It was the times took it out of him, I think. First the war and then the peace. Towards the end of the war Sir Frederick came home for good. They let him out early, I think, because he wasn’t well. They must have spotted he’d gone a bit funny.

  Sir Herbert, who has passed through the confusing streets of London, reaches the peace of his own quiet home in Kensington. Again he comments on Mary’s story:

  Curiously enough Mary Waterhouse’s accidental encounter with the gypsy, Urania Heron, crops up in one of Lady Allaun’s letters to the Ministry of Home Affairs, which passed the correspondence on to my father. These letters were chiefly about Mary’s health, which was always good, and about her progress at school. But oddly enough, in one of them, written in 1942, Lady Allaun actually records what she had gathered from Mrs Gates about the gypsy’s prophecies. There was no comment from my father at the time, but in 1952, when Mary’s husband, Jim Flanders, was hanged and the course of her life began to look worrying he must have recollected Lady Allaun’s letter. I do not believe for a moment that my father was superstitious, but the old woman’s remarks, though vague, must have made him stop and think. Short and unlucky, she had said, of Mary’s marriage. No one would have disputed that. At any rate it was his duty to look into the thing and so he did. He gave the mission to me. He sent me off in search of the gypsy. Of course, he explained almost nothing. He said only that there were reasons why the girl, Mary Waterhouse, had to be watched and that her future, which had in part, perhaps, been predicted by the gypsy, was of such concern that it was worthwhile trying to find the woman again, to find out what she knew, if anything, and, perhaps more importantly, how she knew it. He naturally passed the gypsy-hunt off fairly lightly and as far as I was concerned it was just a piece of good luck for a boy of seventeen (the chance of a chase through England during a long, dull summer holiday). I set off for Kent with my schoolfriend, Allan Pimm, in his little black Morris Minor. The trail led us into Dorset and, after a fortnight, back to the south of England again, to Rye, where we had heard the gypsies were camping on the flats near the sea. It was early spring and a dull, grey day when we arrived there. A strong wind was coming off a dark, turbulent sea. The wind tossed the reeds and long grass about as we walked about a mile from the car, which we had parked by the roadside, to where the caravans were sited between the road and the sea. I could not imagine why they had picked this wilderness to use as a camp. Later I learned that the local councils were at this time forever harassing the gypsies in order to prevent them from coming into rapidly suburbanizing neighbourhoods. The gypsies, once part of the normal pattern of rural life, useful and mistrusted at the same time, salesmen of scarce goods and extra hands at times when help was needed on the land, had lost their role. Now they were always on the move, evading the police and local authorities.

  The camp looked very tiny as we advanced over these raw flats. Small horses cropped apathetically at the tough and salty grass. As we got closer we saw two women, in flapping skirts, making their way up from the beach, laden with big bundles of driftwood. The caravans, close to, looked less trim than they must once have done. The eccentric red, black and yellow decorations seemed worn and the varnish was cracking on the wooden panels. Two of the horses were in bad condition. I looked at my friend, Allan, and could see that, standing in this flat, grey spot, he felt as depressed as I did. We had reached the caravan site at about the same time as the two women who had been fighting up against the wind from the other direction. They instantly assumed smiles both wary and propitiatory. I went up to them and said, politely I hope, “We are looking for an old lady, Urania Heron. Is she here? We should like to see her.”

  Both the women looked us over quickly. In retrospect I realize that neither Allan nor I came into that class of girls, or women in middle age, or men with bad nerves and shaky prospects who would normally be seeking out a gypsy in this God-forsaken spot, so as to get their fortunes told. We were a pair of fresh-faced schoolboys, silly, innocent and well-meaning as only schoolboys of that era could be, if the system had not alread
y bruised and corrupted them. Allan and I, new from the playing fields and the study, must have been a mystifying pair. One of the women, still clutching her bundle of driftwood said, “What would your business be with her?”

  “My father would like to see her,” I said, which was in the circumstances probably the best answer I could have given. At least they could not think, then, that I was from the local authority or the Inland Revenue, come to worry and harass them.

  “Give me your name, then,” said the woman, “and I’ll ask her if she’ll see you so you can tell her your father’s business with her. She may refuse you – she’s old and ill.” A sharp gust of salt wind hit us. I looked at Allan who was standing a little further off and bending my head towards the woman, so that he could not hear, I said, “My name is Precious. In connection with Miss Mary Waterhouse.”

  She gave me a sharp look and said, “I’ll ask.” Then she crossed the flattened and soaking ground between the caravans and, her long black hair flying in the wind, went up some steps into a large van painted in gold and black. The other woman remained behind, to watch us, I suppose.

  The woman came back. She said, “You can come. He must stay outside.”

  “Sorry, Allan,” I told him. “I thought it might come to this. Why don’t you go back and wait in the car.” Staunch, stocky Allan said, “That’s all right. I’ll stay here.” He wanted to make sure I was all right. I left him standing philosophically on the grass and followed the woman up the steps of the caravan. I turned as I went in and he gave me a smile. He accepted without question that I was up to something he was not to know about. Poor Allan. He died four years later, of blood poisoning, on National Service in the Malayan jungle, one of the last defenders of the British Empire. As I went into the caravan then, though, I was relieved to have him at my back. I was not sure what I was going to find – a crone, mumbling, surrounded by bones and rags or a fat lady crouching over a crystal ball with a teacup of gin in her hand.

  The interior of the caravan proved reassuring. It was clean and cheerful, with snapshots hanging on the wall, a little table with a white cloth and a vase of flowers upon it, pots of herbs in sparkling jars on a little shelf and a bright, tiny fire crackling in a miniature fireplace on one wall. In a fairly large bed in one corner, propped up on three large pillows covered in white, lace-trimmed pillowcases, lay an old lady so thin and small that there seemed to be no body at all under the sheet and patchwork quilt covering her.

  The younger woman pulled a chair up beside the bed for me. I sat down. Then she went and stood with her back against the door, watching.

  The old lady – so old I could not even begin to guess her age – said in a low voice, “Give me your hand, young fellow.” She took my big, red hand in her little claw. The sensation was not unpleasant. Then, the weight of my hand being evidently too great for her, she lowered it gently on to the sheet in front of her. This meant that I had to bend towards her. I was not upset or alarmed, for suddenly she reminded me of my dearly loved grandmother who had died the year before.

  She looked at my hand and, somehow, seemed satisfied. I said, “My father wishes to speak to you about Mary Waterhouse. I believe you told her fortune many years ago at Framlingham. Some of what you said seems to be coming true. He has an interest in hearing the rest.”

  “I do not doubt it,” she said. “But your father will never speak to me now. I am very near my end.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, trying to reassure her, but she cut me off. “I have little strength now, for telling the future. One thing I do know – I shall never see your father. I know this also – he is watching the girl for a master. She has the power, the girl, to bring ruin to the master. Your father obeys, like a dog.”

  I nodded rather doubtfully at this. I did not know whether what she said was correct. I did not believe my father was the man to act merely at someone else’s bidding. However, I felt it would be wrong to burden this frail old woman with comments or questions, so I said nothing.

  She went on in a high, sing-song voice, which seemed to me like a thread which might break at any moment. She said, “He wants to know what will happen to the girl so that he can make his plans to prevent it. But that is nonsense. The future is the future – knowing it does not mean that you can make plans to change it. He thinks he will send her to another country – he will not be able to do that. Better for his master if the girl were dead, but she will not die. She will have a long life. Tell him this – tell your father this –” and at this point she broke off and closed her eyes for a moment, as if to gather her strength. “Tell him,” she said again, “that he cannot alter the course of things. If he acts, the results will not be what he wants but only what he fears. Tell him – nothing can be changed.”

  She was tired. She closed lids, fragile as brown rice paper, over her eyes. I felt I could not press her any further for information. In any case I had been sent to find her, not question her.

  “Come away,” the woman at the door said, in a low voice. So I took my hand from the sheet where it lay and stood up. The old woman, Urania, without opening her eyes, said, “You, boy, are the important person in this business. Do not forget it.” Then she added something else, of a personal nature, which shook me considerably. And, telling myself that it was foolish and primitive to have any belief in magic, fortune-telling and the like, I left the caravan.

  As I walked across the windy flats, I tried to explain to Allan how little I knew of this business. I did not want him to think I was deliberately keeping secrets from him.

  “Don’t worry,” said Allan, “and above all, don’t tell me anything you shouldn’t. Business is business, after all – and as far as I’m concerned we’ve had a good fortnight’s holiday at your father’s expense. I’m grateful for that.” He was a gentleman, Allan, if ever I met one. Perhaps it was better that he died in one of his country’s last colonial wars. He never had to discover that his standards were no longer useful or respected, the service he had been reared to give was not needed any longer.

  Over dinner that night I told my father of my meeting with Urania Heron. With some trepidation I told him what she had said about his only doing his master’s bidding, like a dog. When he heard this he put down the knife he had lifted in order to cut a piece of cheese on his plate, and stared ahead at the candles on the table, burning in their candelabra. And he muttered, “I wish she had not said that.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “No matter,” he told me. “What else?” I told him, leaving out the woman’s parting remark to me, which I felt was private. At the end of my account my father said, “As to never seeing her – she’s wrong. I most surely will see her. We’ll start early tomorrow. You can take me to the spot. I must admit, I never thought I’d be involved in running a mad old gypsy to ground in the Romney Marshes and, God knows, I’m not superstitious but perhaps for the first time in my life I’m beginning to wonder – the old woman appears to know something – perhaps more than I do. I want to see her. Get an early night, Bert. We’ll start at six tomorrow morning.”

  My mother, who I knew had invited guests for dinner, merely said, “Do you think you’ll be back by the evening?”

  “Certainly,” said my father, with assurance.

  And we were back for dinner the next night, but disappointed. To begin with, on the whole wide sweep of this spot in the misty and desolate marshes, we found no gypsies or caravans. We found where they had been. My father, approaching, was particularly appalled by the mess they had left behind. There was broken crockery, scattered, and splintered wood and, in the middle of what had been the campsite, a large fire still smoked. The fire had fallen apart untidily. Half-burned books, more charred pieces of wood – the leg of a table, the front of a drawer – and what looked like the back of a hairbrush, lay scattered in the smouldering ashes of the fire which had obviously been abandoned, and was going out.

  But, standing in the middle of all this confusion my father and I both saw plain
ly that this was no ordinary abandoned campsite. It was plain that whole sets of dishes had been deliberately smashed and the fragments lying about were only part of the general breakage. Then my father pointed towards the beach. Near where the sea lashed and roared there was a caravan, half-burnt, its metal struts poking up like the skeleton of a vast animal. A thin plume of smoke waved up still from it and was dispersed by the wind as it hit the pyre in great gusts, throwing up little clouds of ash. We stood together on the deserted campsite, hearing only the crying of the gulls and the sound of the tide, not knowing what to think about the scene. Then, “What’s that?” he said and moved beyond where the caravans had stood. I followed him. There, under a scrubby tree, was a plot of freshly dug earth. We both looked down at it. As we stared I heard voices on the wind and two small figures, holding their arms in mystifying positions, began to come towards us. As they approached through the foggy air we saw that they were two ordinary looking men in Wellingtons and corduroy trousers. They carried spades over their shoulders. They looked intently at us as they came up. “Good morning,” said my father.

  “Morning,” said one of them.

  “Do you know what all this is about?” asked my father. “This seems to be a grave. What’s happened to the caravan down there?” At this point I began to feel nervous. Some violence had been done, I thought, and here was my father, alone on these marshes, asking questions in his official-sounding voice. These two men might be the originators of whatever trouble had taken place.

  “What’s your interest in all this?” said the second man, who was middle-aged and unshaven.

  “I’m not from the police, the council or the Customs and Excise, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said my father, who plainly had a better grasp on the situation than I had. “We’re here to see one of the gypsies, on very private business. But when we arrived we found all this – and no gypsy camp. Do you know what has happened, or where they might have gone to?”