The Boy Who Could See Death

by Salley Vickers

  That was the sum of notice that Peggy Robinson had attracted in the family until the content of Robin Stanbridge’s will was made known.

  ‘What is it exactly he’s left her, anyway?’ Ginny asked. Of the two girls she was the more put out by her father’s financial treachery. She owned a small flat in Brixton, but for the last nine years had let it and had come to think of the flat in Bloomsbury Square as her own.

  ‘It seems to be a London freehold with a couple of leaseholds. Not terribly valuable, only bringing in a hundred or so a year, but still.’

  ‘What was Daddy doing with that?’

  ‘Presumably he thought it was an investment.’ She should, Eileen thought angrily, have been keeping an eye on all this.

  ‘A bloody nerve, isn’t it, not leaving it to you, Mummy, or us? Especially with all he hasn’t left us.’

  Eileen Stanbridge thought so too and had inquired from the solicitor as to the exact nature of the title. It appeared to have been purchased twenty years earlier and held the leases of two properties, a shop and a two-bedroom flat overhead. Both leases had over a hundred years to run.

  ‘Why has he left it to her? Daddy hadn’t gone bonkers, had he?’

  Eileen had also made inquiries on that score. There had been other wills, which she had known of and indeed believed she had been party to. This one was of fairly recent date: a mere two years before the fatal episode.

  ‘Was she in the earlier wills?’ Eileen had asked. David Saxby, their long-standing solicitor, affirmed that this particular legacy was, he believed, of some duration. Other beneficiaries of past wills, Cousin Olive and her two sons, for example, had, from his recollection, been removed from the list of beneficiaries but not, in the final analysis, it would seem, Mrs Robinson.

  Eileen didn’t waste any time feeling grateful for the jettisoning of Cousin Olive.

  ‘I don’t believe she was “Mrs” or has a husband at all!’ She was aware that her solicitor was wordlessly advising her that any challenge to the will would be legally unsustainable.

  So now there was the question of what to do with ‘Mrs’ Robinson with the will read and her new, and incomprehensible, position known. Should they keep her on to help dismantle the house? It was hardly possible to envisage managing the task without her. And yet, to ask a legatee, one who had been promised a regular if slender income when their own position was so perilous, seemed to them mortifying.

  In the end, the question was left unaddressed. Peggy Robinson came as usual three times a week to help prepare for the move. Nothing was said on either side about the legacy. Nor did either Eileen or Ginny ask about her future plans.

  Tessa alone touched on the subject, asking if Mrs Robinson was likely to move away, as she, Tessa, knew of some people looking for a reliable ‘help’. Among the family, she had loved the dead man best and had tried to suggest that if the stock market had failed he could not be held solely to blame. Her loyalty had been slapped down by her mother and her sister. But she also held a vague fondness for Mrs Robinson.

  Peggy Robinson’s answer was also vague. ‘I’m considering my options.’

  ‘So, have you been to see the shop and the flat?’ Tessa risked.

  Peggy Robinson was kneeling on the floor by the elm chest that had belonged to Cousin Olive, from which she was sorting out linen. She looked up at Tessa, who had forgotten how her eyes were so very blue. Without a word, their ‘help’ looked down into the chest and continued sorting.

  The first time that Robin Stanbridge kissed Peggy Robinson was almost by accident.

  He had damaged a toe playing golf with an ill-fitting shoe. The toe had flared up, and hobbling into the kitchen one Saturday he had encountered Peggy, who had come in to clear after a dinner party the evening before.

  Robin had taken a modest pride in having been the one who had led to their employing their ‘help’ in the first place. If he had consciously forgotten her smile on that occasion, the effect of it had made a small imprint on his memory. He explained to her the reason for the hobbling and she suggested he soak the toe in a bowl of boiled water and boric acid. ‘You don’t want it going septic. I’ve done a first-aid course,’ she explained. ‘I passed with distinction.’ This, which in another woman might have been taken for a mild boast, was purely to reassure him.

  Robin responded positively to any reassurance, which for most of his life had been in short supply. He sat down, took off his sock and rolled up his trousers. As their ‘help’ rose from setting the bowl of water down by his feet, their heads somehow collided, so that he found himself seizing her face in his two hands to see that she wasn’t hurt.

  The gesture ended in a kiss which embarrassed them both. Nothing at all was said at the time, but Robin Stanbridge found himself wanting to repeat the accident.

  Some weeks later, Eileen took the girls up to town to see The Sound of Music for Ginny’s eleventh birthday. At Eileen’s request, Mrs Robinson had come in, in her employer’s absence, to give the dog hair in her bedroom ‘a good going over’. Robin, having been advised of this scheme by his wife, quite deliberately entered her bedroom, and, finding their ‘help’ stooped to vacuum under the bed, clasped her firmly round the hips.

  She did not resist the embrace. Her hipbones, in Robin’s grip, felt to him pleasingly bony. They retired to his bedroom and both were surprised by the passion they shared.

  Peggy at that time was thirty-two. She was not in fact married, nor had she ever been. She had been engaged for a time to a soldier who got a casual encounter pregnant and was dragooned by her family into marrying the girl.

  Her soldier’s dereliction hurt Peggy and had left her cautious over love affairs. But the real loss was the soldier’s, because, of the two women, Peggy was the more ardent.

  It was an ardour which, with no other outlet, had gathered momentum over time and it sparked Robin Standbridge’s own unignited passion. The two found themselves in the lucky position of making a natural erotic fit. Further sessions of love-making swiftly followed the first. Once, one late June evening – it became a kind of legendary joke between them – in the middle of the rolling lawn, newly cut by Robin, they had made passionate love, an occasion given spice by the fact that Eileen was expected back any minute from London. Lying back with her face in his neck, shreds of grass in his still-thick hair, Robin had said, ‘Peg, this can’t go on. I want to make love to you in the grass any time I like.’

  But, with the inevitable fading of the splendour in the grass, Robin lacked the moral courage to desert his wife. And Peggy was too unassuming to demand that he try.

  However, they continued to delight each other. Sometimes he gave her little gifts, which she took a sly pleasure in flaunting as she cleaned at the Stanbridges’: the figured enamelled brooch, a speedwell, ‘blue like your eyes’, he told her; the silver bracelet; and, more daringly, as bolstered by her desire for him Robin acquired confidence, silk underwear. The last she sometimes wore beneath her demure work overalls, coming into his study to give him a tantalizing glimpse.

  There came a point when Robin felt he wanted more control over his affair than his wife’s capricious timetable allowed. Passing an estate agent’s office in Marylebone High Street, after a routine check-up with his cardiologist, he saw in their window EXCELLENT INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY. FREEHOLD OF MARYLEBONE HIGH STREET SHOP WITH LEASEHOLD FLAT ABOVE.

  He investigated the shop, which proved to sell scents based on natural products. On a rare impulse, he bought for Peggy one of their products, a scent called ‘New Mown Grass’, a memory of their daring lawn encounter.

  The scent, in his imagination, bestowed on the shop an erotic aura. Inquiry revealed that it was leased for a hundred and twenty-five years but that the lease of the flat above had only forty to run. The price of the freehold at the time was comparatively cheap, and Robin’s role as family financier gave him unimpeded control.

  He bought the freehold and rented the flat from the leaseholder, who was frankly glad to have i
t off his hands. The flat became a meeting place with Peggy, where they spent weekends, when Robin was supposedly on business trips, making love, or, increasingly with the years, watching DVDs and companionably doing the crossword.

  Peggy by this time had revealed some surprising talents. She was, it appeared, a first-rate bridge player; she also, with her nephew, played chess. Because she was interested, and no one in his family was, Robin introduced her to the stock market and the games one could play with stocks and shares.

  After one successful stock market gamble, one he had discussed in depth with Peggy, he bought out the leaseholder and put the flat in her name.

  By the time Robin came to retire, he had reached a decision. He would leave Eileen after all. She could have the country house and the Bloomsbury flat, and he would retire with Peggy to the modest little flat in Marylebone High Street. It would entail a row – the biggest and most taxing of his life. But he was willing to undergo this for the promise of comfort in his last years. The prospect of living them out in the crampingly critical atmosphere of his marriage, unrelieved by absence at work, and the cover that work had given him, was sufficiently grim to bring on this late resolution. And, while Eileen would assuredly give him hell, there was enough money to make the parting ultimately not too disagreeable.

  Soon after Robin made this decision the world markets crashed and with them Robin’s prospect of a life of independence.

  David Saxby had been tactful over the details of the legacy to Peggy Robinson. An examination of the leasehold particulars would have revealed her name, Margaret Audrey Robinson, on the Marylebone High Street flat. But Eileen Stanbridge, having recognized that there was nothing to be gained by questioning her late husband’s soundness of mind, had let the matter drop, with no less inner disgust but without further investigation.

  Tessa, however, remained curious. With her father’s death, she found she wanted to know him better. One afternoon, months after probate had been granted, she took the Central line to Bond Street and walked up the Marylebone High Street.

  Halfway up, she found the shop, ‘Completely Natural’, which advertised in its window display NATURAL SCENTS FOR A MORE NATURAL YOU.

  The space inside the shop was small but smelt delicious. A number of tester sprays were available on the enticingly arranged shelves. Tessa examined the labels: ‘Honeysuckle’, ‘Violet’, ‘Meadow Sweet’, ‘New Mown Grass’.

  Once probate had been granted, Peggy put her house on the market and moved into the flat over ‘Completely Natural’. In the light of the stock market crash she had decided to put the proceeds of the house sale into preference shares, which, as she had learnt, provided an unfluctuating income.

  At the first opportunity, she presented herself at the shop, explaining to the owner, who knew her from the visits with Robin, that she was planning to live overhead permanently. She was, she said, looking for some local employment, and if by chance there was anything she could do to help below it would be most convenient.

  The owner, who was seeking to expand, was thrilled and soon Peggy was taken on as manager.

  She enjoyed running downstairs each morning into the sweetly scented atmosphere, the welcome air of opulence in her new environment and the customers who matched its style. Above all, she liked the feeling of being in charge.

  She missed Robin, but she would not have had things differently. Sometimes she saw his face, scarlet, puffy, his eyes mutely appealing as he collapsed on the kitchen floor that day he came home from playing golf as she was leaving his house for good.

  ‘I can’t go through with it, Peg,’ he had said to her, the night before. ‘You understand? We’ll stay in touch. I’m sorry, but I can’t afford it now.’

  And she did understand. She understood that bullying and criticism and greed would always trump kindness and tenderness and loyalty, in the end. Perhaps she might have saved him had she applied the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, had she thumped his heart as she had practised, all those years ago, at the first-aid class. Impossible to say. But even to try to save him for Eileen, for those monsters … she couldn’t afford it now.

  The Boy Who Could See Death

  Eli was not quite seven years old when he discovered that he was different. But perhaps ‘different’ was not at the time, at least, the right word. For at that time, in most ways, he was a quite ordinary child, with the common traits, good and bad, and many in between, that ordinary little boys will have.

  But in one important respect he differed from the ordinary.

  Eli discovered this when, one March day, he looked into the eyes of his friend Thomas Wilkes and said, ‘You are going to die on Tuesday.’

  This pronouncement, delivered with unusual solemnity, naturally upset Tommy Wilkes, who was found by his mother in the garden crying and saying goodbye to his treehouse. She had words with Eli’s mother, Mrs Faring, who took the complaint calmly. ‘I’m sorry if Tommy was upset but boys will be boys. I’m sure it was just Eli’s silly joke.’

  But when Eli’s mother spoke to her son about the matter, he looked at her in bewilderment. ‘But he is going to die,’ he said. ‘He’ll hit his head.’

  ‘I’ve told you not to be fanciful,’ said his mother sharply, but in truth she was a little disconcerted. She spoke to Eli’s father when he came home from work.

  ‘Boys fooling around,’ was his father’s verdict. He was tired and wanted his regular evening beer and to be left in peace to watch the news. But when, the following Tuesday, after school, Tommy Wilkes fell from his treehouse and broke his neck, it was inevitable that questions were asked.

  And it was just as inevitable that the distraught family of the dead boy should feel obliquely that Eli was somehow to blame. Although he had been nowhere near either Thomas or the treehouse when the accident occurred, it was suspected by the grieving family that the strange prediction must somehow have precipitated the tragedy.

  Eli’s parents questioned him themselves about the incident, but all Eli would say was, ‘I saw it in his eyes.’ Pressing him to expand on this proved useless. Eli had nothing to add.

  The Wilkes family, unable to come to terms with their loss, sought solace in spreading malicious gossip about Eli’s prophetic words. The atmosphere of recrimination became so marked that Eli was ostracized at school and his work began to suffer. Finally, he was discreetly moved to another school.

  The singular event remained just that until one day, watching the news on TV, Eli looked into the eyes of the newly elected President of the United States and pronounced, ‘That man is going to die.’ His father, who had dismissed the episode with Thomas as an unlucky coincidence, chose to ignore this. Mothers, however, are generally more in touch with their children and it was not mere curiosity but some more pressing sense that prompted Mrs Faring to ask, ‘When and how?’

  ‘He will be shot,’ Eli said, ‘on …’ and he named the exact day on which a shocked world learnt that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

  The news, when it came, was doubly shocking to the Farings, who were forced to conclude that, in the words of Mrs Faring’s mother, something was ‘going on’. In view of the previous trouble, they felt that their son’s bizarre prediction was best kept within the family. But they reckoned without Mrs Faring’s mother.

  ‘The boy has second sight.’ Mrs Faring’s mother made this pronouncement with a confidence born out of uncertainty in other areas of her life. She had only recently moved in with her daughter’s family and was unsure of her position in this new, and not always friendly, environment. Unlike her daughter, she was ready to be proud of her grandson’s gift, if he had one, and the news that he had foretold the death of the President of the United States was too good to overlook as a means of forging local alliances. Also, she wanted to get a bit of her own back on her son-in-law, who, she correctly guessed, had tried to veto her moving into the family home in the first place.

  The news leaked out from Mrs Faring’s mother’s new cronies and spread t
hrough the neighbourhood like wild fire. One of the cronies had a son-in-law who was a journalist with a national paper. In a short time, the story had sparked a larger interest. The Faring parents, overwhelmed by the growing invasion of the press, and seriously rattled, moved away from the area after putting Mrs Faring’s mother into a care home.

  By now, Eli himself had become more cautious, so that when he one day looked at the face of Mr Lynch, the metalwork teacher at his new school, and saw in it an image of its owner’s coming end, he said nothing but merely presented, on the morning of the day that was to be his teacher’s last, a bunch of gloriously scented sweet peas from the Farings’ garden.

  The odd gesture – for flowers were not the usual currency of twelve-year-old schoolboys – did not go unremarked. That evening, the very one on which he was to die of a brain aneurism, Clive Lynch passed the flowers to his wife with the comment, ‘Don’t know what got into the kid who gave me these but he looked as if he was seeing a ghost.’

  Maureen Lynch had been curious. ‘What’s the kid’s name, then?’

  At the funeral, Maureen Lynch spotted Eli with his parents and asked him if he might like to drop by sometime. Eli had been fond of his teacher and was experiencing the guilt which superior knowledge will often bring. So one afternoon, he showed up at their house, now woefully empty of Mr Lynch. ‘Did you perhaps guess my husband was going to die?’ his wife asked, when she had taken Eli into the kitchen and offered him milk and a chocolate digestive. ‘Only, he told me it was you’d given him those flowers.’

  Eli was a truthful boy. ‘Yes,’ he admitted and, sad and embarrassed, covered his face.