The Invisible Ones Read Online Free PDF Page A

earnestness about education. After learning to read in the POW camp, he seized every opportunity that came his way, subscribed to Reader’s Digest , and would look things up in a vast serial encyclopaedia called The Book of Knowledge , which had been published in the 1920s. Mum said that when he was younger, he used to read an entry a night, committing it to memory. Later, he became a devotee of television documentaries, although he increasingly disagreed with them, suspicious of any findings that departed from the Book.
    As a result he had some pretty funny ideas about things, but he wasn’t interested in any pure black blood. I remember Tata—my grandfather— referring to it. He was angry and, I belatedly realized, hurt, when Dad married out. He refused to speak to him and Mum for years—until my brother and I were both walking. Then, as children often do, we softened him. I knew I was his favorite because, as was made abundantly clear to me, I took after Dad and, by extension, him.
    “You’re a real Romany chavi ,” he would say to me—a real Gypsy boy. Unlike, by implication, my little brother, who took after Mum— tall, rosy-cheeked, with far-seeing gray eyes, Mum and Tom were built to stride over a grouse moor, although, born into the struggling lower-middle classes, that was never going to happen. Tom, aware of the favoritism, hated going to Tata’s. I loved it.
    Once Tata took me on his knee—I was probably seven—and said, “You have the pure black blood, Raymond, despite everything. You’re my father come back to life. Sometimes that happens. You have the pure blood in you.”
    Presumably we were alone at the time. I remember the deadly serious look on his face, and his fervent eyes; I remember my discomfort, even though I had no idea what he meant.
    “So he was wrong,” I say to Leon. “Your family aren’t pure Romany?”
    “Who is? But he seemed to think we were, and Rosie was willing enough. He was a good-looking boy, Ivo.”
    “I’ve never heard the name Janko—are they English?”
    “Yeah. Sort of. Tene claimed they’re Machwaya or something—that his father or grandfather came from Hungary or some bloody place—but I don’t know. They’re related to the Sussex Lees in some way. Cousins or some such. So maybe it’s all rubbish about Hungary.”
    “And how did you know them?”
    He shrugs.
    “You’d see them about. Knew people who knew them. You know how it is.”
    “So . . . after the wedding, you didn’t meet up with them at the fairs . . . they didn’t come to visit?”
    Leon stares down at his hands. Perhaps he is after all a little upset about the daughter he mislaid a handful of years ago.
    “The Jankos . . . kind of kept themselves to themselves. Used to go off on their own. Private like. Didn’t mix much.”
    His mouth clamps shut.
    “But still, your daughter . . . You’d want to see her, and your wife, presumably?”
    “When you travel . . . I wasn’t surprised she didn’t come back. She was a Janko after the wedding. Not a Wood anymore. But now . . . there’s certain things—I’m sure something bad happened to her. I’m sure of it.”
    “You mean you think the Jankos harmed her in some way?”
    “I suppose, yeah.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t trust them. There was always something not quite right . . . It’s hard to say exactly.”
    “Perhaps you could try.”
    “Like . . . Tene’s wife died, and no one knew what of. She was there and then she wasn’t there. And Tene had a sister what run away and left them. I think he had a brother what died, too . . . Unlucky. But too unlucky—you know what I mean?”
    “I’m not sure I do.”
    “Well, maybe it wasn’t all bad luck. People used to talk . . . All that bad luck . . . Well.”
    He shakes his head and hisses through his teeth.
    “That didn’t bother you when Rose got married?”
    Leon presses his lips together, as if I am trying his patience.
    “It was what she wanted. And to be honest, she