Monika peered out of the window. ‘We’ll be there soon.’
‘But where? Where’s there?’ Melvyn was almost crying now.
‘Where we are going,’ Monika said calmly. ‘And there we will make babies.’
‘But you have a boyfriend, you said.’
‘He does not want any babies.’
‘I don’t want any babies either.’
‘This is not important. When I have the babies you can go.’
The ambulance had left and Nan was gathering together Matt’s things to follow after it to the hospital. The sight of his violently flushed face and stertorous breathing when she had gone up to bed had frankly alarmed her. She had put wet flannels on his face and chest but from the feel of his skin his temperature had risen so high that finally, braving his probably future protests, she had rung the emergency services. It was an hour and forty minutes, and felt like a fortnight, before they arrived.
‘Apologies, Mrs er, we got sent to the wrong post code. They get these Eastern Europeans on the desk. Can’t tell their w’s from their v’s.’
‘Suppose my husband had died while we were waiting for you?’
‘I can’t say it doesn’t happen but it wouldn’t be us to blame. It’d be the migrants they hire that can’t speak the Queen’s English.’
Oh, great, Nan thought. Matt could be dead of racial prejudice. Dolefully, she packed pyjamas, underpants, socks and Matt’s washing things, wondering as she did so when he had begun to wear pyjamas. For some years now, she supposed. In the beginning they had always slept naked. Please don’t die, Matt, she thought. I’m sorry if I’ve ever found you annoying.
But any potential tragedy has an element of excitement about it. Driving back from the hospital, where Matt had been set up with an antibiotic drip, she found herself unwilling to return home and veered off towards the park. Too bad if Peter Randall turned up at the house.
She had been in the park at night many times and had relished the lively hush and the pleasing smell of damp vegetation. Parking the car by Cumberland Lodge (where she had attended an art history course when they first moved to Windsor), she stepped into the November night.
Somewhere a creature yowled and there were sounds of nocturnal birds and scurrying movements in the trees above. The moon was out, and stars punctured the high skies with a clarity which seemed to Nan to signal an existence free from mortal care. A kind of exultation began to fizzle through her body. Wrung through with anxiety as she was, she none the less felt unusually alive.
So when a piece of the low-lying bush detached itself and began to pace towards her, she was not afraid. Her bones had told her what it was. The wolf, her wolf. Nan stood there, in its path, making no sound.
The wolf stopped in front of her, leaving a space of about a metre between them. Then it turned and walked back down the path.
Nan followed at a slight distance. The moon, lacking the stars’ exquisite brilliance, was shrouded in a gauze of luminous mist, and across its veiled face a tracery of cloud was scudding making the trees’ long shadows flicker and dance wantonly beside her. Suddenly she remembered her godmother telling her that that phenomenon was known as ‘a wind on the moon’ and whatever you did that night you were doomed to repeat for a whole year. She was not afraid but a strangeness clung about her heart, as if some fate that had lain always in wait for her was about to be revealed.
Overnight, Matt Maitland found himself in an underground cave. Stalactites hung from the cave’s roof and beneath his feet crunched shale of many-coloured minerals. His old professor, Malcolm Hertford, from University College, greeted him and advised him that he was being awarded the Nobel Prize.
‘But for what?’
‘They wanted to give it to you jointly with me, but I persuaded them that the younger man should have it. Youth before wisdom. Youth before wisdom. Besides, I’m dead, you know.’
‘Did I come to your funeral?’ Matt felt some anxiety. He had a bad feeling that he’d neglected to go.
‘You came with Lily,’ his professor said, smiling.
‘You mean, Nan?’
‘Not at all. Your assistant, Lily.’
Did I have an assistant named Lily? Matt wondered. Perhaps she was the redhead he’d rather fancied. But surely she was called Veronica. Nan had been jealous of her and he had lied in describing her as ugly and then felt guilty for the lie.
Pondering this, he noticed that he seemed to have acquired evening dress and patent leather shoes. Never in his life had he worn patent leather.
He stirred restlessly as a nurse adjusted the drip in his arm.
‘I don’t deserve it,’ he murmured.
‘It will pass,’ the nurse reassured him. She was one of the older generations of nurses, trained to offer solicitude as well as drugs. ‘It’ll all seem better by morning.’
‘But I’ve done nothing. Nothing,’ Matt protested.
‘I know, my love. Life isn’t fair,’ the nurse soothed. Her own daughter had died as an infant from meningitis and her husband had for years been disabled with Parkinson’s. She was an old hand at fielding life’s knocks.
Meantime, Professor Hertford was pinning medals on to Matt’s unwilling chest. A pin stuck into him and he moaned louder.
‘Be a man about it,’ the Professor advised. ‘Put your shoulders back. Look sharp.’
‘But it hurts,’ Matt moaned.
‘There, there,’ the nurse consoled. She stroked her patient’s forehead, sticky with sweat. It was nearing dawn and soon she would leave the poor man with the day staff. Years of dealing with the disadvantages of a Caribbean lineage had not immured her against her own brand of prejudice. She was frankly mistrustful of the new breed of foreign nurse.
At Cumberland Lodge there was consternation over what appeared to be a night raid on the kitchens. The fridge had been emptied of the venison steaks that were thawing there, ready for a dinner that evening at which the Minister for Science and Education was due to speak on government policy on genetic engineering. Moreover, the remains of the carcass and the tines of a young stag’s antlers were found by an abandoned car near the lodge gates. The car’s owner, a Mrs Nancy Maitland, was nowhere to be found, and police inquiry revealed that her next of kin was dangerously ill in Wexham Park Hospital.
And rumours began to spread that two of the royal park keepers had sighted animals resembling wolves. ‘Not so much “resembling” I should say,’ a senior keeper asserted to a younger colleague. ‘Those were wolves they were, or I’m Lady Gaga.’
‘Going gaga, more like,’ joked his colleague, who in truth was feeling alarm and sought to abate it by having a bit of a go at old John.
Dr Matt Maitland was being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
‘But I don’t write,’ he was protesting.
‘This is the only way we can award you the prize.’ The official nodded towards Professor Hertford, who beamed and nodded back, silently clapping his hands.
‘It will save the world,’ his professor explained. ‘Reason must go underground. The philistines are upon us. All for one and one for all.’
‘God help us!’ Matt groaned.
‘We should call his wife,’ the night nurse was saying. ‘He’s been crying out like that all night.’
‘Raving?’ asked the day nurse.
The night nurse pursed her lips. ‘It’s not a word I’d like to use, poor soul.’
Before leaving the room she kissed her crucifix. She was a natural intuitive and recognized when a patient was not long for this world.
Nan was taken by Peter Randall (if that is who it was) to meet those who had decided that Britain must be, roots upwards, reformed. She never actually saw them, for, he intimated, these were powers which disdained the vulgarity of assuming mortal shape. But she understood that the British Isles were about to undergo a radical restructuring: an ecological experiment, a test case, in short, for further global developments. A major reformation through reforestation was already
in progress, and wild life, in all its time-honoured, ancient forms, would be taking over the cities and towns.
Quite why she had been chosen to escape the consequences of centuries of human mismanagement she never discovered. Judging by the poor young man in tow with the voluptuous Polish beauty, and the elderly Jamaican nurse, who were also present at the meeting, it seemed likely it was mere random chance. But perhaps this was part of the new order – a different way of evaluating people. The human race, she understood, was anyway being demoted. And why shouldn’t the governance of the world be run on random lines after all?
She did ask about her husband and was told only that he had been chosen to introduce a fatal virus into the community. From the manner in which this news was conveyed to her, she gathered it was considered to be something of an honour.
Mown Grass
All flesh is grass …
– Isaiah 40:6
‘But,’ said Eileen Stanbridge, ‘there remains the question of Robinson.’
She was with her two daughters, in the well-shelved library of the family country home that, after long wranglings, she had decided (though God knew it would probably kill her) had to be sold. They had agonized over the sale, she and her daughters, Tessa and Ginny, but, in the end, it really seemed the only option.
Robin Stanbridge, Eileen’s husband, had died days after his retirement from the family firm for which he had worked dutifully for over fifty years. Privately, he had detested the work. As a young man, he had excelled at golf and had nursed an ambition to become a professional. He had also possessed a fine baritone voice, for which, at university, he had been applauded in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, and had dreamt, at times, about the possibility of going on, after he graduated, to music school.
But the weight of family tradition, a certain faint-heartedness in his character and an inherited belief that he needed money to be happy had strapped him to the wheel of Stanbridge & Turnbull, an engineering firm that in recent years had specialized, very profitably, in road construction in the Third World.
Road construction, however uninspiring, had provided Robin Stanbridge with an income large enough to buy a substantial country house in Kent, along with a roomy London flat in a smart Bloomsbury square.
His daughters had been educated at one of the better, certainly more expensive boarding schools, and they had returned this investment by marrying young businessmen who could, as it seemed, keep them in the style of life they had grown to expect.
Events had routed that expectation. One of the sons-in-law, Jeremy, started a wine company that went bust and took irrevocably to drink himself (which, Eileen Stanbridge liked to intimate, had perhaps precipitated the crisis in the first place). At his father-in-law’s expense, he attended several rehab programmes, each time with a renewed but deceptive enthusiasm for personal reform. Finally, he retreated into perpetual alcoholic unemployment, leaving Robin to provide for his two children.
Robin’s other son-in-law, Tessa’s husband, Terence, belatedly came out, gave up his City job with an international finance firm and went off with his new partner to run an organic restaurant in Shropshire. Terence was punctilious about paying for the children but when times turned hard and the restaurant profits faltered, yet again Robin found himself the only stable financial resource for a daughter.
Robin loved his daughters, and their children, but he sometimes wondered how they had managed to select for their partners in life such unreliable providers. He came to resent, without ever giving voice to the fact, the burden imposed on him by the assumption that his only role in life was to be the family ‘money bags’.
This feeling unexpressed over the years gathered force. He began to give rein to his secret desire for insurrection by playing riskily on the stock exchange. When he died, after a strenuous game of golf, in which he was supposedly celebrating his new-found freedom from road construction, it was days after learning that there would be very little beyond his pension to provide for retirement. It was perhaps as well that the heart attack occurred before he could face explaining the situation to his wife.
Eileen Manning had been a tall, fair, handsome girl when Robin had married her. She had been a reliable doubles partner at tennis, with a strong serve which saw them winning their club mixed doubles, and had an extroverted manner at parties which he had mistaken for a larger good will. She seemed promisingly keen on sex until after the honeymoon. They had been home from Lemnos two weeks when she announced that she preferred to sleep alone, with her dogs.
Robin Stanbridge dealt with this blow as he dealt with most things, quietly. Having done what he suspected was his duty, in fathering Tessa and Virginia, he began to look for a woman, kind enough, and willing enough, to provide him with a measure of sexual happiness and relieve his wife of the nuisance of shooing the dogs from her bed in order to accommodate her husband. In all other respects, he was a loyal spouse – except for the matter of the gambling on the stock market.
The discovery of her husband’s perfidy in this department, the very one she had always counted on as most reliable, surmounted any shock Eileen had felt at his death. She called her daughters for a family council at their country home. All three women, who were otherwise inclined to quarrel, were united in damning Robin’s negligence. They had taken for granted a lifelong ride on the gravy train and felt that their resentment at its derailment was wholly justified.
After many expressions of anger and self-directed grief, they reached, or Eileen did, the painful decision. The house in Kent must be sold. Eileen would permanently relocate to the London flat. Ginny, the younger daughter, who had been perched in one of the flat’s rooms for nine years, would have to find other accommodation. The decision prompted renewed expressions of outrage. One source of outrage was a provision in Robin’s will. He had left, they were informed by his solicitor, a legacy to the woman who had seen to the Kent house for thirty-one years. A woman known generally as Mrs Robinson.
‘I can’t understand it. Robin hardly spoke to her. I don’t believe he even knew her first name.’
‘I don’t know it either,’ Ginny said.
‘It’s Margaret.’ Of the three, Tessa was the most democratic. Until recently, she had prided herself on a small rebellion against the family’s known political sympathies by voting Lib Dem. ‘But she calls herself Peggy.’
The mother of Eileen Stanbridge, who had risen in life to marry Henry Manning, Bart., had never forgiven her own mother for having been a lady’s maid. To establish her distance from that position, she had addressed all her staff by their surname. ‘Robinson’ was the way her mother would have addressed their ‘help’, and when speaking of her, if not to her face directly, Eileen unconsciously followed her mother’s example. But to everyone else in the household, from the day she arrived, she was ‘Mrs Robinson’.
The day she arrived, in answer to an advert in the local Post Office shop, was, as it happened, a day when Eileen Stanbridge was not at home. If Eileen no longer recalled this fact, it was because the arrival of Peggy Robinson was, as with everything about her, unassuming.
It was Robin Stanbridge who had received and interviewed her in his study one weekend when his wife had gone off to a dog show. And perhaps because he was alone, and relieved of the usual constraining effects of his wife’s presence, he found himself joking gently with the prospective ‘help’ about the slight congruence of their names.
‘I can’t really turn you down with a name like yours,’ he had said, with the humorous turn to his mouth which had once caused his wife to form the view that he was not unattractive. ‘Seeing my own name is Robin.’
Peggy Robinson also had an attractive smile, though few were privileged to see it.
‘What’s your name?’ Robin continued. He had enjoyed the smile. ‘Your first name, I mean?’
‘Margaret. But I’m known mostly as Peggy.’
‘Well, Peggy, I think you’ll suit us. D’you think we’ll suit you?’
Ei
leen Stanbridge had insisted, naturally, on seeing for herself the young woman whom Robin had believed they might employ. She did not ask her first name. But she read her references, which were positive, from the local family who were moving to France and regretted they therefore had to let her go. Nor could Eileen afford to be too fussy. Their previous ‘help’ had left after a row about cleaning up after the spaniels, and the house in her absence was becoming unmanageable.
As her husband had learnt, for Eileen Stanbridge finding fault was a source of daily energy, as regular and fortifying as her breakfast egg; but, even for her, it was hard to find any fault with Mrs Robinson. She arrived punctually, three mornings a week, in the early days in a pale blue Hillman (always meticulously clean), later in a small Toyota, stayed on, if requested, for dinner parties, and the clearing up afterwards, and was not apparently inconvenienced when Eileen’s elderly spaniel, Queenie, had diarrhoea while sleeping in her mistress’s bed.
Their ‘help’ presented her person uncontroversially too: always wearing some version of a flowered wraparound overall, her rather small feet clad unexceptionally, according to the weather and the seasons, either in moccasin slippers or sandals.
Her fine, wavy, hair was a dark shade of mouse, and even with increasing age showed no interpolating grey. She wore no distinguishable makeup other than an occasional slick of lipstick. Her only truly distinctive marks were her eyes, which were a peculiarly vivid blue, and the scent which at some unidentifiable point she began to wear. When Tessa once complimented her on it, Mrs Robinson replied that her nephew bought it for her from a shop in London, adding that she couldn’t remember the shop’s name.
It is not possible to be entirely ignorant of someone who comes into your household for many years on a thrice-weekly basis. It became known that Mrs Robinson lived in a modern yellow-brick house on a purpose-built estate in a nondescript village of no historical significance, ten miles from theirs. It was taken for granted she would spend her annual holidays with her sister in the Lake District and she had mentioned a friend in London whom she visited at weekends. If she had any strong attachment to another human soul it appeared to be to her sister’s son, who was apparently the source of the few items of luxury she occasionally displayed: a rather fine enamelled brooch, worked as a speedwell; a silver bracelet; and the unusual scent.
The Boy Who Could See Death Page 5