Free After the Mourning by Barbara Nadel

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