The Boy Who Could See Death

by Salley Vickers

  ‘I know it’s Fluffy. Fluffy was my robin.’ Clara, red-faced, was furious. ‘Are you saying you wouldn’t know me if it was me dead?’

  ‘Mum’d probably be relieved if it was you dead, cry baby.’

  ‘Mummy!’

  ‘James! That was horrible. Don’t hit him, Clara, darling. Hitting never did any good.’

  ‘In the olden days he would have been whipped on his bare bottom and sent to bed without his supper,’ Clara said. ‘And Fran would’ve been our nurse and looked after us properly. I wish she was here with Ho Chi Minh, and you and Daddy had gone to Majorca like Daddy said he wanted.’

  ‘Darling, that was just Daddy being funny.’

  ‘It wasn’t funny. You said it wasn’t. You said, “Shhh, Peter, the children might hear you,” and we did.’

  On the day of their departure, the cases packed, the sand shaken from shoes and duly swept from the kitchen floor (‘because we don’t want Mrs Bramling’s help complaining about the mess we left behind’) and under the carpet in the hall (because ‘she won’t notice it there’), Peter began to replace the portable ornaments.

  ‘Kay, you haven’t seen the fox, have you?’

  ‘What fox?’ Kay was on her stomach fishing out a sock from under James’s bed. ‘Heavens, James, I think this must be one you left last year. It’s positively stiff.’

  ‘You know, the little silver fox which always sits on the coffee table in the sitting room. I tidied it away from Francesca.’

  ‘Perhaps she took it.’

  ‘She can’t have done. I hid any last thing she could pocket before she came.’

  ‘Maybe she found your hoard.’

  ‘I locked everything in my suitcase.’

  ‘Anyone can open your suitcase when it’s locked, Daddy,’ Judith said. ‘It’s simple. You just use a fork.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We did it when you confiscated our Easter eggs when we had that fight. You didn’t notice?’

  ‘No. I did not. That’s appalling. I suppose Cousin Francesca put you up to that?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘That means she’s only gone and bloody well nicked a very valuable item while you were stuffing your greedy little faces with chocolate. You realize that’s done it as far as Mrs Bramling goes. I happen to know that fox was given her by her husband.’

  This, one of those lies invented to make the hearer feel worse about a situation, was water off a duck’s back to Judith. ‘He’s been dead for ever.’

  ‘That’s hardly the point, Judith. And very callous of you, by the way. If I died, don’t you think Mummy would want to keep the things I’d given her?’

  ‘She might want to sell them.’

  ‘Judith!’

  ‘Well, she might. What would it matter if you were dead?’

  ‘Judith!’

  ‘I would never sell anything that Daddy gave me,’ Kay soothingly interposed.

  ‘So why’s the thingy over here, then, if it’s so precious?’

  ‘It’s a fox. Not a “thingy”. And it isn’t over here, that’s the point.’

  ‘Daddy, you’re not being rational.’

  Hearing his own frequently repeated words to his children mirrored back at him, Peter finally lost his rag. ‘For Christ’s fucking sake, if she thinks we nick her things she’ll never let us stay here again.’

  Kay said, ‘Peter! Really!’

  Judith stuck her tongue out at her father and the two younger girls began to chant, ‘Daddy said the “f” word. Daddy said the “f” word.’ Laughing hysterically, they rolled about the sofa until Clara fell off and hit her head on the edge of the coffee table and began to cry.

  ‘Calm down, girls, Daddy’s just a bit worked up.’

  Freddie began to chant, ‘Daddy’s got his knickers in a knot.’

  ‘I don’t wear knickers,’ Peter snapped.

  ‘Daddy doesn’t wear knickers. Daddy doesn’t wear knickers,’ Clara joined in. ‘Have you got a bare bum, Daddy?’

  Kay said, ‘Stop it, girls. And don’t say “bum”, please.’

  ‘Why not? Fran says it’s in Shakespeare. And she isn’t lying ’cos she showed us.’

  ‘Girls, you’re being complete pests. Darling, let’s ring her and find out.’

  ‘Who? Mrs Bramling?’

  ‘No, Francesca.’

  ‘She’s not going to admit to anything. Cow.’

  Kay mouthed ‘Peter!’ Too late. Clara and Freddie began to moo loudly.

  ‘She might if we tell her what hangs on it. Let me do it. You’re in a state.’

  ‘We wondered,’ Kay suggested, ‘if maybe Ho Chi Minh had found it in Peter’s suitcase and taken it into his basket?’ But tact fell on stony ground. Cousin Francesca was icy and resolute. Ho Chi Minh would not be interested in silver. Nor had she any recollection of the ornament.

  ‘The thing is, Francesca’ – Peter, who had taken over the phone, was annoyed to hear his voice sounding wheedling – ‘if we don’t find it I doubt we’ll be allowed back.’

  ‘What I can’t understand, Peter,’ was the response, ‘is what it was doing in your suitcase in the first place.’

  ‘It’s a fair point,’ Kay said. ‘If you’d not cleared it away it might have been here still.’

  Sometimes there were few things more maddening than a fair-minded woman. ‘That’s so helpful, Kay. What am I going to tell old Ma Bramling?’

  ‘I don’t know. Say it vanished. Say the cat got it.’

  ‘We don’t have a cat. There was the dog. Perhaps we can suggest that wretched little Peke ate it.’

  ‘I thought you said she wouldn’t allow a dog here.’ This was Judith again. ‘You said we weren’t to say. You said –’

  ‘Shut up, Judith.’

  ‘You keep telling us to shut up. If we did that, you’d say we were being rude.’

  ‘Oh, go and play.’

  ‘I don’t play any more,’ Judith said. ‘Playing’s boring.’

  ‘Kay, I don’t s’pose we could find another?’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘We’d better try.’

  After further consultation with Kay, Peter rang Mrs Bramling and asked if they might stay on for a couple of days if no one else was coming to the cottage. Seemingly no one was – the children were delighted, and Peter and Kay set about a thorough-going search among the antique shops of west Dorset, while the children, untended, raided the biscuit tin, ate the crisps and Kit-Kats, and read the comics slipped to them by Cousin Francesca as parting offerings.

  Energetic inquiry produced all manner of silver creatures: hares, hens, dogs, ducks, rabbits, otters, even a silver crab which Kay said she was tempted to buy for herself. But not a fox in sight.

  ‘Does it mean we’ll never be allowed to come here again?’ Winifred wailed after her parents’ day trudging the antique shops had yielded nothing.

  ‘Shut up, Freddie. Yes, I expect it does and it’s all your fault, you children, for being greedy.’

  ‘Your fault for locking away our eggs,’ was James’s riposte.

  ‘You shut up too, James, or I’ll wallop you.’

  ‘You can’t. It’s illegal. I could get the p-p-police.’

  ‘Mum,’ Judith said, ‘you’d better come. Freddie’s stuck a berry up her nose. We’ve tried to get it out but it’s stuck and Toby says she’ll have to go to hospital and she’s scared.’

  ‘Tell her not to be so silly and to blow her nose hard. It’s me as’ll end up in hospital at this rate.’

  ‘Are you having a nervous breakdown?’ Judith asked hopefully. She could already see herself acquiring kudos with this exciting news at school.

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Judith. I’ve got a monstrous headache and the paracetamol’s packed away somewhere.’

  But very late on the last afternoon they struck lucky. A little silver fox, miraculously like the missing one, was located in a shop in Dorchester. The owner, observing the eager relief on Peter’s face, mentally bump
ed up the price by twenty pounds.

  ‘That’s ninety-five pounds, sir.’

  ‘Really? The hare we didn’t buy was only fifty.’

  ‘That’s hares. There’s more of them made than foxes. Silver’s pricey nowadays and it’s a lovely little model.’

  ‘Can he be right about hares?’ Peter asked in the car. ‘I would have thought hares were rarer.’

  ‘Oh, what does it matter if we’ve found the bloody animal? Now at least we can go home. I’m frankly exhausted. This was meant to be a holiday.’

  ‘It’s not a bad resemblance, is it?’ Peter asked his wife. The fox had resumed its position on the coffee table beside The Life of the Weasel and the Homes & Gardens magazines of 1998, and they were preparing to leave at last. ‘I mean, she can’t have looked closely at it for years. Any small differences won’t be noticed, d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kay said. ‘To be frank it’s just always been there on the coffee table when we’ve come. I’ve never examined it closely. I rather agree with Judith. If it’s so hugely valuable, what’s it doing in her rented cottage?’

  ‘Well, you know she makes a thing about only taking special clients. Let’s hope for the best. But I’m going to say this now: Francesca is never coming away with us again.’

  ‘Daddy!’ The two smaller girls began to cry noisily.

  ‘You’re mean,’ Tobias said.

  ‘You’re a tyrant,’ was Judith’s verdict. ‘Worse than Peter the Great. Much worse,’ she added darkly. ‘At least Peter the Great didn’t pretend to be a loving father.’

  Two days after the family returned home to London, Peter received a letter.

  Thank you so much for the gift of the little fox. There was really no need. Fond as I was of the other one, I sold it to a nice man who runs an antique shop in Dorchester along with a few other trinkets. With Time’s winged chariot on the horizon I’m trying to clear the decks a little in readiness for the Great Adventure. But since you’ve been so kind as to give me this one I shall put it in my own house and treasure it.

  Kindest Regards,

  May Bramling

  PS Please tell your delightful cousin that it is tansy I was trying to remember for worming the dear little doggy. Such a poppet.

  PPS I have invoiced you for the three extra days, as requested.

  The Train That Left When It Was Not Supposed To

  Is anything sadder than a train

  That leaves when it’s supposed to …?

  – Primo Levi

  The first sign that something was amiss was the train that left when it was not supposed to. The would-be passengers were standing – variously eager, impatient, bored or resentful – beneath the illuminated ‘Departures’ notices at King’s Cross. Quite clearly, the sign for the train to York read 11.25 ON TIME. No notice was given of the platform number. And then, at 11.12 a.m. precisely, with no further notice, the board in rapid succession read NOW BOARDING and then almost immediately TRAIN DEPARTED.

  Two other odd things happened that day. The visitors to Stonehenge, who had queued patiently to see the ancient stone circle, were attacked by a swarm of apparently violently angry bees, and several people with allergic reactions to the stings were hospitalized. And there was more than one report of a creature resembling a wolf sighted in Windsor Great Park.

  ‘But there’ve been no wolves in England since Tudor times,’ Nan Maitland observed as her husband turned off the TV.

  ‘Well, it’s sheer nonsense of course.’ Matthew Maitland was a scientist. He loved his wife but had never come to terms with her readiness to be beguiled by the weird or strange.

  ‘Do you think it escaped from a zoo?’

  ‘If it exists.’ Her husband had already left her realm of speculation and was reabsorbed in a paper he was refereeing for Nature concerning the ethics of animal experimentation.

  Nan was an artist. When she met Matt she was working as a waitress in a modest restaurant, more of a glamorized snack bar, really, near the Medical Research Council where Matt held a position at the time. He had taken the then Minister for Science and Education to the restaurant in order, as he later confided to Nan, ‘to take the arsehole down a peg’. Nan had spilled water on the arsehole’s trousers, causing embarrassment to the Minister and mirth to Matt, who had left so large a tip that she had thanked him the next time he came to the restaurant to eat alone. He had asked her out to eat in a definitely superior restaurant near his flat in Camden Town and at the end of the evening asked if she would like to come back to his place for coffee. It was maybe the only time they had really understood each other.

  But good marriages are not always based on mutual understanding. Matt had gone on to head a major clinical research unit near Swindon, and Nan had been able to abandon waitressing and simply paint. This, it turned out, she had a talent for. A gallery in Windsor courted her and she found an aesthetically dilapidated house with a perfect garden with a shed at the bottom, which she converted into a studio.

  The studio was not a refuge exactly. But it was her space, with an atmosphere distinct from the main house, with its own kitchen, bathroom and telephone and an array of objects that would have provoked questions from Matt. Perfectly benign questions; but any question has the potential to be felt as an irritant or goad. Stumps of wood, rolls of wire, a rusty part of a plough, a rudder, a balding toy horse on wheels, of the kind that children learn to walk with, would have provoked queries that she didn’t want to deal with. Often there are no answers to other people’s questions.

  There had been nights – not too many – when she had stayed in the studio, when Matt was ill, for example, or his sister Genevieve was staying, or they, she and Matt, not Matt and Genevieve, who were unnaturally polite to each other, were in the throes of a quarrel. But they didn’t quarrel often. Maybe not often enough.

  Matt was a man of habit. He left the house early and came home and worked. Very occasionally, they went out to dinner and even more occasionally drove in to London, to the theatre or a concert. Mostly, they let each other alone, which is the unsung secret of a good deal of human happiness, except in bed, where the only shadow over their ardour was the absence of children.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Nan had asked this only twice, a testament to her considerable self-control.

  The truth was that Matt didn’t mind. He liked not to be bothered too much so he could concentrate on work and he was clear-sighted enough to know that children are bothersome. Of course it was she who was the one who ‘minded’.

  Nan had chosen the house in Windsor because of its proximity to the gallery, but she had quickly discovered the charm of Windsor Great Park. Her speciality was painting light and light was a speciality of the park, which has retained, with its ancient royal protection, something of royalty’s ancient ambience. Nan walked there daily with her sketchbook, but now she walked looking for the wolf.

  ‘Wasn’t there some book?’ Matt asked a few nights later. Women Who Run with the Wolves. I hope you’re not becoming one of those.’

  ‘I might.’ Nan was reading A Short History of the Wolf in Britain. ‘I might in actuality be a werewolf and lope off at night and worry the royal deer.’

  ‘Aren’t werewolves always men?’ Matt suggested.

  ‘That was then. Times have changed.’ She grinned at him, showing off her admittedly beautiful canine teeth.

  Public speculation about the rebellious train was kept to a minimum at the behest of the newly appointed Minister for Roads and Rail while the authorities pursued their inquiries. But the mystery only deepened. It was established that there had been no passengers aboard, but at first it seemed obvious that the train driver must have been in position. Then there was speculation that the man who ran the buffet car and the girl who managed the buffet trolley may have been in place. Matters became more worrying when it was discovered that both driver and guard had called in sick, leaving, in human terms, only the buffet staff unaccounted for. The investigation naturally turned to
the question of a hijack but nothing sinister was reported and nothing untoward showed up on any CCTV footage.

  Suspicion now centred on the buffet staff, Melvyn Sparks and Monika Cackowski, clearly no relation, though a clandestine attachment was mooted, fuelled by the very human desire to add romance to any mystery.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Nan said, when she read the names in the Guardian (which was running this story as a comment on the mounting failure of the current government). ‘I know that name.’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Monika Cackowski. I’m trying to think how I know her.’

  ‘Probably a very common name in Poland.’

  But Nan didn’t think that was the explanation.

  It was while she was walking in the park, eyes sharpened in hope of a wolf sighting, that the association with Monika Cackowski came back to her.

  It was at the gallery. A man had come in and bought one of her paintings. She had been there bringing some canvases for her next show, and the man had seen them and recognized them as by the artist a sample of whose work he was engaged in buying at the time. He left his card with the gallery manager, and when Nan had asked if she could see it, the name Monika Cackowski – she was almost sure it was that – was handwritten on the back. The name printed on the card was so ordinary she hadn’t retained it. Peter someone or other, so far as she could recall, and an address in Primrose Hill.

  Nan always left her mobile in the car when she walked in the park, so it wasn’t till she was driving home that she rang the gallery, breaking the law as she did so. (‘There are so many nannying laws these days it seems almost a moral necessity to break them,’ she had complained recently to Matt.)

  ‘Austin, have you got the name of that man who bought one of my August Dawns?’

  ‘The one who was interested in the November Night?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘Half a mo. It’s – oh frack it where did I put it?’ Austin, a keen environmentalist, was attempting to introduce a new ‘f’ word.

  ‘Can you ring me back when you find it?’

  Nan returned to the studio and the seventh of the November Night canvases, the series she was engaged in painting. For this one, she was working in greys and whites with varying degrees of brown and black. Black was notoriously tricky. Only Manet really managed it well but it was good to experiment. She settled into the far right corner of the canvas, where the murk was gathering thickly. As she painted she found a shape seemed to be emerging. The phone rang.