Eli was put to work on rough labouring jobs in the woods and kitchen gardens. The post came with some basic accommodation, a converted outhouse on the estate, and although the wages were pitiful there were perks: produce was thrown in, vegetables and eggs and all the firewood he needed. The electrics ran off the meters in the big house, so there were few expenses to meet. For the first time in years, amid grass and leaves and birds and people who were by and large indifferent to him, Eli felt something like happiness.
One day, walking in the woods, he met a young boy, the grandson of the owners of the house. The boy was a late child of a late marriage, and his birth, as such births often are, was felt as something of a miracle – a godsend, anyway. The boy, an only child, was bored and maybe a little lonely. He took to visiting Eli in his shabby home whenever he came to visit his grandparents. One evening, when Eli was showing him how to carve and was crouched down with his arms round the boy’s shoulders to guide the knife he had lent him, the boy’s mother burst in, snatched at her son and hurried him out, shooting a threatening backward glance at Eli as she went.
Three days later he was given his notice.
‘Been told to cut down on extra staff, I’m sorry,’ the estate manager said, not meeting Eli’s eyes. ‘Last in first out it is, see.’
He was a decent man and sent Eli off with his next month’s pay and some old tools for which the estate had duplicates.
By the time he had turned sixty, Eli was a pretty well-hardened vagrant. He walked the roads, sticking to Wales, which he felt was closer to a home than anywhere else, seeking occasional employment mending small household items and, during the warmer months, sleeping rough outside. Often he chatted aloud, ignoring the looks he prompted. Sometimes he chatted to his mother or to his gran.
Once, recalling a holiday as a child with his gran in Bexhill, he made his way circuitously down to an unfashionable seaside resort near Aberdovey. It was out of season and there were only a handful of people on the windy esplanade to patronize the slot-machine arcades. He walked past these, and the trashy shops selling plastic buckets and spades, and down some concrete steps, festooned with dampish bladder-wrack, on to the pebbly sand. The tide was out, and he took off his shoes and walked towards the far-away margin of the sea.
The sand grew wetter and began to fill his footprints, till he reached the water itself and stood bearing the sharp cold of its salt bracelets around his ankles with something akin to pleasure.
A poem, memorized long ago at the school where Mr Lynch had taught, half came to his mind.
It was towards evening and the first star was puncturing the greening sky. As he stood observing the splinter of light let through by the star, he imagined a tremendous bank of light feeding it, beyond the visible sky. A light where he would feel at home, maybe, at last. Twisting stiffly round, he saw that a wobbly string of multicoloured lights had come on, decking the esplanade, and, turning outward again, he observed the few gold lights of small fishing craft dusting the horizon. The immenseness of the sea unrolled before him as the green and rose sky bled into the bruised violet-blue of its waters. A wave broke over his shins and drew back, sucking his feet down into the fine stones with a hiss, and a few uncertain lines of the long-forgotten poem filtered back.
… the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back
… and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
All of a sudden an acute sense of the terrible beauty of the world flooded through him and he felt mortally afraid. Unused to such fear in himself – though all too familiar with it in others – he hurried back up the unpeopled beach, panting now, to collect his shoes and made his way, still barefoot, to the bus shelter, where he caught a bus to the nearest village.
Thereafter he stayed inland.
As more years passed it became only the winters that he dreaded. One bitterly cold late February afternoon he came to a run-down, out-of-the-way hamlet. At its outskirts, he found a few surviving walls, the remnants of an old chapel, with an ancient yew tree growing close by. He had with him his sleeping bag, his waterproof tarpaulin, a supply of biscuits, the heel of a cheese and two cans of beer. He was tired and near perished; his feet were frozen and hurt him. The aged tree looked a fair-enough shelter for an ageing man.
He had eaten some biscuits, a portion of cheese and drunk the cans of beer, wrapped himself up and laid his head on a knot of root covered with a sack, when a touch on his shoulder disturbed him.
A child. A girl child, slight, with fair hair, was standing looking him over.
‘Come quickly,’ she said. ‘Please, mister. It’s my gran.’
Eli hauled himself up off the ground with difficulty and followed after the girl, stumbling a little, for his feet were numb and his knees stiff, to a stone cottage, set back from the road alongside the ruined chapel. The odd little creature pushed open the door of the cottage and hurried inside.
It was dark as they crossed the threshold but to Eli’s frozen limbs it felt wonderfully warm, a warmth which emanated, he could see, from a coal fire in what he presumed was the parlour. The girl, however, did not stop but took him up some stairs and into a bedroom.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘I brought him. I brought the man you said was here.’
Eli gazed at a bed in which an old woman lay, her head covered in a grubby, once white, woollen baby’s shawl. Her papery eyelids were closed, but as Eli approached, shoved forward by the little girl with a violence that seemed disproportionate to her size, the old woman opened her eyes and looked into his. The eyes, a bright blue, were surpassingly clear for a woman of, he would guess, well over eighty years.
But the voice, when she spoke, sounded to his ear as old as time. ‘You have the gift.’
Eli, gazing into her eyes, saw something unusual. An image. A tiny image of a boy. Surely it was …? But the papery lids quivered and closed again.
The girl pulled at his sleeve. ‘You can go downstairs now.’
Obedient to his small summoner, Eli descended and, not knowing what he should do, went into the fire-lit parlour. It was certainly very snug. Whatever they wanted of him, he was glad to be detained even a little while from the heartless February night.
Eli sat down in one of the floral-covered armchairs and looked into the blue and coral flames licking the coals. The image of the boy he had seen in the old woman’s eyes came back to him. All at once, he recognized it: an image of himself before … before the gift that had cursed his life was known, to himself – or to anyone. If only he could go back to that time. ‘If wishes were horses beggars would ride’, his gran had used to say. His poor gran, sent away because of him. Thank God that was one death he had not been there to foresee.
After some time he heard the girl come down the stairs. He felt rather than heard her enter the parlour. She spoke close to his ear and her voice was soft.
‘It’s mortal chill out there. Will you take a drink before you go?’
So, now I am supposed to go, thought Eli. He wouldn’t mind staying here, with the fire and the old lady and the odd child. And the thought of his own lost gran.
A profound love for his grandmother welled up inside him. She knew me, he thought to himself. She knew. And he recalled a certain look in her watery blue eyes.
Aloud he said, ‘I should be on my way.’
‘Ah, not yet,’ said the girl. ‘Take a drop before I see you out.’
It was generally agreed that that February night was so cold – eleven below freezing, they said – it was hardly surprising that a vagrant had died in his sleep, on the ground, within the remains of the old chapel. Nothing could be found among his effects to identify him, though it is true not much effort was made.
A local woman, a recluse, also with no known relatives, had died in a neighbouring cottage the same night. But a letter of wishes was found, with money for her funeral, requesting that any person in the parish dying the same night as she did be buried beside her in the church
yard.
There were no dissenters to this suggestion. And the only mourners at the joint funeral were a young couple, merely passing by, they said, with their daughter, a pretty, fair-haired child who had, the parish priest observed later to his wife, remarkable blue eyes.
Rescue
‘Of course death is exciting,’ Verity Lichfield pronounced. She helped herself to another cucumber sandwich. A table had been laid by Desmond Davies’s sister for those who had come to condole for the sudden, and shocking, death of his wife, Rosa.
‘But it’s awful.’ Her companion, Eleanor Bishop, tried, not for the first time, to repress the thought that Verity’s name had apparently committed her to a life’s mission of making challenging observations. Not succeeding, she inquired, ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Look around you.’ Verity was vetting the plate of sandwiches, searching past the egg and ham for more cucumber on white. She had been, given the circumstances, tactlessly vocal, Eleanor thought, about ‘the health squad’s obsession’ with brown bread. Thwarted in her quest for cucumber, Verity fell back on the less substantial nourishment of causing disturbance.
‘People lead such dull lives that a spot of drama is thrilling. All that opportunity for bogus emotion and equally bogus recollections and then the fun of rewriting history. And, apart from the novelty value’ – she paused, having detected a cucumber sandwich concealed beneath a tuna mayonnaise – ‘there’s the thrill that they have so narrowly missed death themselves.’
‘Schadenfreude, you mean?’
‘If you must.’ Among Verity’s more annoying affectations, in Eleanor’s view, was a refusal to use foreign terms however embedded in common English speech. ‘I would simply call it the pleasure of a close shave. A dice with death is a wonderful tonic to the spirits.’ She turned smiling, showing perfect white teeth.
How can she have kept them so white? Eleanor wondered. She was the same age as Verity, almost a year younger, in fact, and her own teeth were showing the stained yellow of age. It seemed unlikely that Verity would have gone in for what she would surely dismiss as the ‘modern obsession’ with whitening.
As if to emphasize the superior whiteness of her teeth, Verity yawned. ‘For myself, I find death very tiring.’
It also makes you greedy, Eleanor thought, watching Verity’s large freckled hand work forensically through the remaining sandwiches. Having failed in her search, she started on a bowl of Twiglets.
‘I remember these,’ she said. ‘D’you remember? We always had them at parties. And sausages on toothpicks stuck in grapefruit.’
Why was it that grapefruit featured so often in medical images? Eleanor wondered. ‘Was it really grapefruit?’ Her mind flew back to the days when the three of them had worn party frocks with wide sashes and Alice bands in their hair. She, Verity and Rosa were all the children of committed socialists – Rosa named for Rosa Luxemburg and herself for Marx’s daughter. Their parents had been comrades in their student days and the youthful connection had held over time. The three girls had grown up together, stayed at each other’s houses so regularly that their parents had become virtually interchangeable, gone on peace marches together, camped in out-of-the-way, sometimes dangerous places. In more recent years they had supported each other when one by one their parents, whose care they had parcelled out to each other in much the same way that food had been parcelled out on the communal holidays, had fallen like ripe fruit off the tree of life to return to the earth, since there was never any question with them of any ethereal afterlife.
There were other children. But the three eldest girls, all born within a year, had remained the closest. And now Rosa had left them betimes. Never would Eleanor have predicted that Rosa would go first. She was so full of life. She smiled, realizing how Verity would scoff at such clichés.
‘What are you grinning about?’
‘I was thinking how she’d have enjoyed all the fuss and to-do.’
This, while not a strictly truthful answer to the question, would indubitably have been true of their departed friend.
‘She’d have loved it,’ Verity surprisingly – for in general she considered psychological observation to be strictly her own preserve – agreed. ‘All those people who barely knew her, weeping and wailing and rending their garments.’
‘And the stories,’ Eleanor prompted, grateful to have been left off the hook, for Verity’s tongue was as sharp as ever. Maybe more so; less constrained by the natural benevolence of youth. ‘All slightly embroidered to put themselves in a good light.’
She herself was not immune from this deception. She was recalling now how she had exaggerated the last conversation she had had with Rosa. The exchange had been a brief and businesslike consulting of diaries to sort out dates when they or their husbands were away or they might meet; not at all the right tone for their last conversation. But how could she, or anyone, have known?
The words of a hymn floated inward. ‘And live each day as if the last.’ Was that George Herbert? Soon she would have to consider what hymns should be sung at Rosa’s funeral, for, with the predictable reaction of an eldest born, Rosa had set her face against her parents’ atheism and embraced Christianity.
Eleanor herself, though more tamely, since everything she did was in a lower key than Rosa’s, had followed her in this. Only Verity, the single one of the three girls named not for a socialist icon but after a religious aunt, had held fast to the unfaith of their parents.
As if reading her mind, Verity remarked, ‘I suppose we’ll have to sort out the service.’
‘I don’t think Desmond will be up to it.’
‘Desmond!’ It was daunting how fierce Verity could be.
‘He’s dreadfully cut up.’
‘He’s sorry for himself, that’s all. And he’s too self-obsessed to think about what she’d have wanted. No, it’s down to us. Or rather down to you. I haven’t a clue what she’d have wanted from the God department.’
‘“Awake, My Soul, and with the Sun”,’ Eleanor quoted suddenly.
‘What?’
‘It’s a hymn. I’ve been trying to remember where a line from it came.’
‘What was the line?’
Eleanor, certain her friend asked only to mock, said defensively, ‘“And live each day as if our last.”’
Perversely, Verity chose to approve. ‘Unusually sensible for a hymn. Are you going to suggest that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Eleanor said. ‘I don’t think so. I think she’d want Herbert and Bunyan.’
‘And Blake?’
‘I don’t know. I think maybe it’s too –’
‘Tired?’
‘I somehow associate “Jerusalem” nowadays with rugby. But Desmond may want it and we can hardly veto his choice. He’s very cut up,’ she said again.
‘He just can’t think how he’s going to cope without her,’ Verity said pitiless. ‘It’s all about him.’ She paused to note further examples of crocodile tears and histrionics among some newcomers who had come to condole. ‘I do wish Rosie were here to see all this. She’d simply roar with laughter.’
‘How strange,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’ve not heard you call her that for years.’
It was at the camp in the New Forest, where the families went for Whitsun, and they were playing hanky rescue. She’d never met anyone since who had played this game so maybe they’d made it up. One person was ‘It’ while the others hid. Once seen, you could be sent ‘home’ to a chosen point, a tree or bush, but from there you could be rescued by the sighting of a wave of a handkerchief. The art lay in concealing yourself in the right position to free the captives; positions that, among the adventurous older children, usually involved perilous tree climbs.
The game depended on honourable behaviour. You mayn’t escape until you truly saw the wave of a hanky. It was interesting, Eleanor mused, that no one ever seemed to cheat. Would that be so nowadays? she wondered.
One game in particular came to mind. Verity had been It
and Rosa had found a particularly cunning place to hide in the crotch of a vast oak. Her discreet waves had set any number of prisoners free, and when she was finally caught Verity had said, admiringly, ‘Rosie, you must have dryad blood in your veins. I looked up there a million times and couldn’t see you for the leaves.’
And Rosa had looked at Verity with her slightly slanted grey-green eyes so that she did indeed appear for a moment quite otherworldly.
That summer, when the three families had gone to Scotland, to stay in ‘yet another bloody damp house’, as Eleanor’s brother Tom put it, Eleanor had felt a little out of it. Verity and Rosa seemed to have a special understanding, and, though they apparently included her in everything as much as ever, she felt subtly excluded in a way that hurt and she didn’t comprehend. The feeling had passed but hearing Verity use her old childhood name for their friend brought it back. Then, that’s right, they had quarrelled, Verity and Rosa. Having appeared so close that summer, the next summer they had each turned to her, as if she were the special one and the other was cold-shouldered. Hardly realizing what she was saying, she asked, ‘Why did you and Rosa quarrel?’
‘Quarrel?’ Verity was scowling. She had thickened out over the years. Her once lean body was now burly, and she sat with her knees planted apart, as women do when they have given up hope of sex.
‘That summer after Galloway. The time we were in Wales, in Laugharne. You and Rosa weren’t speaking, or something. Something, anyway, was wrong. You must remember it.’
Verity’s face flushed dark red. ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re on about.’
She was in love with Rosa, Eleanor realized with a start. Of course that would explain it. The sly looks between the two of them, the unexpected closeness that had shut her out and then the following summer the strange coldness. But that was long ago. They had made it up since. Of course they had. The three of them had so often been together through the years. No one knew any one of them as thoroughly as they knew each other.
The Boy Who Could See Death Page 8