The Messenger Page 10

  ‘Come on, Mum.’ Ben’s young brother Harry pulled Mrs Kelly towards the door. She was wearing an alarmingly pink swimsuit with a brief skirt over it.

  ‘But Rose needs help anyone can see that.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Rose said. ‘I’ll wash it.’

  ‘These things turn septic you know I knew a woman whose son tore his fingernail and before he knew it they had his hand off.’

  ‘Give the girl a break,’ Ben’s father said. ‘You’ll give her a headache, if she hasn’t got one already.’

  Mr Kelly was a big, slow-moving man in square shorts and a beach jacket like a tent, who viewed his tearaway wife with amused tolerance.

  ‘All of you don’t care going off to the beach without a care in the world while poor Rose gets lockjaw because she does after all have a working mother not that I’m anti-feminist and we can’t go into that argument about whether women should or shouldn’t work when they have children.’

  ‘Listen to her,’ Mr Kelly said to nobody or anybody. ‘She’s bonkers.’

  Rose went through the arch to the kitchen and the back stairs, keeping on the side of Hilda’s dud eye. She washed her forehead in the bathroom upstairs and found a substantial cut. It bled again as she washed it. She thought of Mr Carter’s terrible leg. She had never seen anything like that before.

  She rolled Ben’s bloodied shirt up into a ball and put it in a drawer. Her mother must have found it, because it was gone the next day. It was raining, so she did not know whether Ben would have asked her to run on the beach. He was staying away from her. She was too childish for him. Folding laundry with Cindy and only half listening to horror tales about the drug centre, she saw Cindy fold the shirt and put it on the ironing pile. Pity. It would have been nice to keep the shirt with her blood on it, after Ben was gone.

  An old gentleman was staying in the hotel with a younger wife who was always off in the car, looking at the shops. Rose found him reading in the upstairs lounge and asked him, ‘Excuse me. What was the Somme?’

  ‘The worst battle of the First War.’ His faded blue eyes looked up at her and blinked. ‘A million men were killed on both sides.’

  ‘I met a young man whose father was blown to pieces at the Somme,’ Rose said.

  ‘His great-grandfather, perhaps. If it was his father, he wouldn’t be young now. He’d be as old as me.’

  The television was on, because Gloria automatically flipped on the switch when she was not in the room, and left it on whether anyone was watching or not. The sound was turned low, so the old gentleman could not hear it as he read his book. It was a silly quiz show. A prattling host with big teeth like Evie’s mother, but a fake smile and hard, glittering eyes, was giving away prizes to people who answered feeble questions, and squealed and jumped in the air and kissed the man with the teeth.

  Rose watched for a few minutes in awful fascination. The camera zoomed in on the host, and he came right forward as if he were coming out of the set, and said with his synthetic smile, ‘You failed.’

  Rose looked to see which competitor was flouncing off the stage, pretending not to mind, but the man was talking to her.

  ‘You failed.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she whispered, glancing at the old gentleman, who went on reading.

  ‘You failed him.’

  ‘Evie did.’ Rose knew what he meant. ‘She was tired.’

  ‘You were tired.’ He had a metallic, nasal voice, with a touch of phoney American. ‘And cowardly. You thought she’d done enough.’

  ‘I saw things I’ve never seen. I couldn’t stand to see those men – the dreadful wound in that man’s leg.’

  He made a sound like ‘phoo’, and said, ‘You didn’t want to listen.’

  ‘It was Evie who wouldn’t let him talk about the dream,’ Rose said breathlessly, feeling the same helpless panic she had felt by Michael’s bed.

  ‘You wouldn’t listen to it.’

  ‘I couldn’t control what she did. Or Felicity. Or Sylvia.’

  ‘Don’t whine. Maybe you could. Wise up,’ he said in his fake American. ‘This is what it’s all about.’

  Rose could not speak.

  ‘So what did you learn?’ His teeth filled half the screen. His eyes glittered.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She could not look away. As she watched, his eyes became the dark grey eyes of the horse, glistening and sparkling with points of light, and his huge head filled the screen in a movement of flowing whiteness, and in his eyes she saw two of herself mirrored, with two arms up, as if to ward off a blow.

  ‘Listen to this,’ the old gentleman said behind her. ‘It says in this book …’

  She could not stay behind with him. She had to go with Favour. She had to go back with him, because she had failed him once, and this might be her last chance.

  She followed her mother into the hospital kitchen, carrying a bag of postcards and toffees and things the men had asked her to buy for them. She hung her knitted coat in the cloakroom under the stairs and put on her white cap. She was surprised to see in the mirror that Evie had red hair, like her mother. Rose had always wondered what it would feel like to have red hair. Evie had sandy eyebrows and eyelashes too. And freckles.

  Her mother reported for duty to the day nurse at her desk in the hall. She and Evie both wore stiff white cuffs, but as soon as the formalities were over, they took them off and set them on a shelf like inverted flower pots, and pulled oh their long linen cuffs to work in. Rose wondered why they didn’t roll up their sleeves, but this must be about seventy years ago, and so they didn’t.

  Evie went into the front room to give the sergeant his sentimental postcards, which he sent every day to his wife. On the chair by Michael’s bed, a young girl was sitting, with her feet tucked under the chair rungs and a bunch of flowers in her lap. She and Michael both looked glum, as if they had been quarrelling.

  ‘I’m just going,’ she told Evie. ‘I know it’s after visiting hours.’ She stood up, holding the flowers in a wrapping of newspaper. ‘I’m not changing my mind, Mike,’ she said, looking down at him with a face that was tender and determined at the same time. ‘Please trust me. You aren’t going to get rid of me.’

  ‘Don’t hang on, Clare,’ Michael muttered without looking at her. His thin young face looked sulky. ‘Go away, find someone else. I’ll never be any use to you.’

  ‘I’ll come tomorrow.’ She managed to smile at him. ‘Here, I brought these flowers for you. Chrysanthemums. They’re not very nice, I’m afraid. I stole them out of someone’s garden along the road.’

  She held them out to him, but he said, ‘I don’t want them. I can’t stand the smell.’

  ‘I know they’re a bit past their prime, but –’

  ‘They smell rotten.’ He made a face. ‘Sour. Take them away.’

  ‘All right. Goodbye then, dear.’ She bent to kiss him, but he turned his face aside. As she went out, Evie saw that she was trying not to cry. One of the yellow flowers dropped out of the newspaper and was left behind on the floor.

  After lights out, when the white counterpanes were off and the red blankets tucked in, Evie asked her mother if she could stay in the room with Michael.

  ‘I’m worried about him.’

  ‘So am I, but I don’t think you need to do that.’

  ‘I think it’s what I have to do,’ Rose said in Evie’s voice.

  ‘All right, but do all the other jobs first. There are eleven men in this house, you know.’ That was always the cry, even from Evie’s mother, of tired, overworked nurses who suspected the men of playing for special attention.

  When Michael fell restlessly asleep, Evie and Rose sat on the hard chair by his bed and listened to the sergeant snoring and the other man moaning in his sleep, and watched tense, fitful expressions alter Michael’s face. He ground his teeth, and she saw his eyes move rapidly back and forth under the closed lids. He flung out an arm, and as Evie bent forward to calm him as he heaved and rolled over sideways wit
h his head flung back and his mouth open, staring at the cupboard door on the other side of the bed.

  His body went rigid and he screamed and opened his eyes. ‘Look!’ The outflung hand pointed at the closed door. ‘Oh my God, my God …’

  Evie turned on the light and tried to roll him back before he hurt his wounded arm. ‘It’s all right, Michael, it’s all right. I’m here.’

  He flung himself on his back and lay staring up at her, panting and gasping, the cords in his neck standing out.

  ‘Another nightmare. Poor Michael. There. Quiet now.’ But tonight she did not say, ‘It’s only a dream.’ She said, ‘Tell me what it was.’

  ‘In the cupboard.’ He slid his eyes towards it. ‘The man in black. He was hanging there. I had to go inside and it was all dark and I bumped into him and felt him swinging, and saw – I saw his face.’

  So that was it. The cupboard. Rose had her answer. She could go back to her own time now, but there was Michael to be taken care of first.

  ‘Stay with me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She and Evie sat by him and comforted him and held his hand, and, in the lamplight, saw the tattered golden flower lying on the polished floor. As a faint grey light began to hover outside the window shades, Evie’s eyes closed and she fell asleep.

  Rose woke to find herself sitting peacefully in a chair in the hotel lounge, with the feel of Michael’s thin hot hand still grasping hers.

  Both times when Favour had taken her away for a night, she had looked at her watch when she returned and seen that it was not only the same time as when she had left, but the same date.

  ‘… in this book it says,’ the old gentleman was saying, ‘that in the Antarctic Circle, the adelie penguin presents a stone to his mate when he wants her to make a nest.’

  Chapter Ten

  She was not going into that front room again. Doing beds in the annexe with Mrs Ardis, Rose ran upstairs and started on the top rooms, so that Mrs Ardis would start on the ground floor. But Mrs Ardis toiled up behind her. ‘I’m not doing that great football field of a bed on my own. You’ll have to help me.’

  When they finished upstairs, Rose made an excuse to go back to the hotel, but Mrs Ardis grabbed her in the hall and said, ‘One more bed to do, Miss Rose.’

  ‘I haven’t got time.’

  ‘Then make time. What’s the matter, Rose? You’re so pale. Are you ill?’

  Rose looked at the closed door of the front room and thought, Yes, I am ill, with fear for myself and anybody else in this house, because in that room there is some dreadful secret terror that destroys people.

  ‘Mrs Ardis –’ Because the chambermaid’s pouchy eyes were looking at her quite kindly under the wild grey hair, Rose broke down and whispered, ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid you’re going to be sick? Nonsense,’ said Mrs Ardis briskly. ‘Hold it in; it’s all in the mind. Come on, help me do that great ugly bed, and I’ll make you some herbal tea.’

  She opened the door of the front room and there was the bright bedroom, perfectly normal, swept and dusted for the next customers, a pile of clean sheets and towels on the bed.

  It was Monday, the day they were supposed to turn all the mattresses. They did try, ‘Because She expects us to.’ Mrs Ardis referred to Mollie and Philip Wood disparagingly as ‘She’ and ‘He’, even in front of Rose.

  ‘She is my mother.’ Rose’s fear made her irritable.

  ‘That’s your problem, Miss Rose, not mine.’

  They heaved and puffed and got the unwieldy mattress on its side, but it fell heavily back again on top of Mrs Ardis. She struggled out from underneath it, looking as if she had been through a wind tunnel.

  ‘A plague on it.’ They left it and made up the bed. Rose stayed on the side away from the cupboard, and kept her eye on it. That was where Michael’s bed had been. There was the sergeant’s bed with its head to the window and the big watch on a string. Where the bed was now, on the new carpet, was where poor Clare’s rejected flower had fallen on the polished floor.

  ‘Mrs Ardis.’ Rose tried again. ‘You’re psychic, aren’t you? Could you tell if a place was haunted?’

  ‘All places are haunted to me,’ Mrs Ardis said unhelpfully, ‘because I’m in tune with spirits from the past. They walk with me, converse with me, help me to bear a job like this which is so far beneath me.’

  She threw on the flowered bedspread like a bullfighter with a cape, and as Rose settled it and smoothed it down, she saw to her horror that where it hung down on the side, one of the golden chrysanthemums was not looking upwards to the sun, like all the other flowers. It was drooping downwards, its petals wilting and ragged, like the yellow flower that had fallen on the floor when Clare left Michael.

  What did that mean? Was that a sign for Rose? ‘What am I supposed to do?’ she cried silently to the horse. But he had never given her any answers. She was the messenger. She was supposed to find the answers.

  As she was tidying up in the annexe lounge, a car stopped outside, and Rose opened the door to two American women with suitcases and scarlet raincoats. Mollie had walked across the garden to meet them.

  ‘This is your room,’ she said. ‘Number 1A. Our very best.’

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ the thin woman said.

  ‘And this is my daughter Rose, who helps me.’

  ‘She’s lovely too.’ Rose blushed. She wasn’t. ‘Let’s stay for weeks and weeks. For a fortnight.’

  They both laughed. It amused Americans to discover that two weeks was called a fortnight.

  The chunky one sat down on the bed and started bouncing happily, her stocky legs over the wilted flower, as if nothing were amiss. Couldn’t she see? Couldn’t she feel? Why was it only Rose who knew something was wrong? ‘Perfect,’ the American said. ‘Mrs Wood, I don’t know how you do it for the money.’

  ‘Nor do I.’ Mollie laughed. Phil was always on at her to put the prices up as high as the other hotels, but she was afraid that people she liked might not come.

  ‘They love it.’ She came contentedly into the kitchen, where Rose was now sweeping out crumbs from under the table. This was the place where the big trolley had stood when it was a hospital, and she had laid up all the trays for the men’s breakfast. That stupid paint stain she had made annoyed her again. She gave it a bit more scouring powder, but nothing seemed to work.

  ‘Mother.’

  ‘Mother? Since when …?’

  Since Evie had called her mother that. Rose got up from her knees. ‘I don’t think you should put customers into that front room just now,’ she said tensely.

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Well, er – it’s still damp. They might – they might catch something.’

  ‘Oh Rose, do stop being so difficult. Do you still believe this house is haunted?’

  Rose was longing to say, ‘Yes, I know it is,’ but she knew she could not explain. She had to say, ‘Who knows? Who cares?’ and shut her mouth, like the shrugging, slapdash adolescent she was supposed to be. This was her secret. A messenger of the grey horse must never tell. That was the hardest part, when her mind was a turmoil of emotions and fears and uncertainty about what came next. She could only tell Mr Vingo, and he had left her. He had told her what her job was, and then abandoned her.

  I wish I was a child again,’ she told Ben.

  ‘You still are.’ He looked sideways down at her and laughed. He had asked her to run with him this morning (hooray), because it was his last day (hell).

  ‘I’m not.’ They were only jogging along the beach, so she was able to talk. ‘But there are things about growing up that I’m not sure I like.’

  ‘It gets better with the years,’ Ben said, as if he were thirty-five. ‘Come on, let’s swim. I won’t be here again till the end of the summer.’

  They ran into the water, and she dived through a cresting wave into the clean, invigorating, uncomplicated sea. With Ben, she felt two tons lighter, and life was fun again.

>   After Ben left, there was nothing to distract her from the anxieties and suspense of this strange new life that had turned her life upside down and inside out at thirteen. The only hope was to try to pretend she was normal old Rose, and do her work.

  Make beds. Fold towels. Slice string beans. Be nice to guests. Even to the Catchpole family, who talked and guffawed with their mouths full and called Rose ‘Rosie’ and behaved as if they owned the hotel. Lay tables. Wait at tables. Clear tables. A feeble job, compared to her glorious destiny as a messenger of the grey horse. But she did it as well as she could, and only spilled and dropped a few more things than usual.

  ‘There she goes!’ Two plates on the pantry floor, and a table full of Catchpoles greeting it like a chorus.

  ‘Why do they yell out, “There she goes?”’ Martin and Leonora were here for lunch, and he turned his wheelchair slightly so that he could frown at the Catchpoles, but they were eating pudding and didn’t notice it.

  ‘Because I’m clumsy.’ Rose blushed.

  ‘Don’t you mind?’

  ‘It’s only a joke.’ She could feel herself still blushing, because she did mind, and he knew it.

  Rose thought that if she were tied to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, she would be crabby and self-centred. But Martin was always nice to everybody and seemed to take more interest in other people than himself.

  After lunch, Martin got his chair out through the back door with the low doorstep, and he sat in the sun while Leonora, who had eaten too much steak and kidney pie, did some ballet exercises on the lawn. She was wearing a light skirt that flew out round her beautiful long pale legs. Her bare arms made graceful arcs and soft, enticing, flowing movements.

  ‘I wish I had her shape.’ Dilys looked out of the kitchen window. ‘I marvel that she gave up her career as a dancer to look after him. Now me, I wouldn’t do that for any man, because all you’re going to get in the end is L.E.F.T., left.’ Dilys should know. Her heart had been over the moon and then smashed in pieces twice in the last two weeks.

  Rose went out with their coffee. She asked Leonora, ‘Was it hard, having to give up being a dancer?’