The Messenger Page 8

  The lights were turned on. The grown-ups were babbling. ‘What happened? Is someone hurt? I never trust Hide and Seek.’ Children frightened by the noise came down from upstairs and hid their faces in their mothers’ clothes.

  Out of the dining-room was carried one of the Mumford twins, not screaming now, but white as suet, sobbing and trembling and unable to talk.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Mrs Mumford didn’t know. The other twin didn’t know. She had been made to go and hide upstairs while her sister stayed down.

  Sonny said, ‘She was hiding in the cupboard. I knew she was there, but I didn’t go to look, cos it’s not fair to find the babies too soon.’ (He was a year older.)

  ‘What frightened her?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘There’s nothing in there – look!’ The jolly uncle waltzed in and out of the deep dining-room cupboard where the shelves were full of plates, with his false nose on the back of his head, but the petrified Mumford twin would not be reanimated. Even a spoonful of brandy did not revive her. She dribbled it back down her mother’s front, and had to be wrapped in a blanket and taken home.

  The party began to break up. Mothers and nannies gathered up their children and dressed them in coats and outdoor shoes and put their party slippers into shoe bags. Everyone said, ‘I had a lovely time, thank you.’

  The birthday boy was disappointed. His mother said, ‘People always go home too early,’ and the father looked at her rather nastily and said, ‘Whose fault, I wonder?’

  While Daphne and Jack were looking for their cracker prizes, Sylvia, who was inquisitive because she was going to be a writer, went to try to see what had frightened the Mumford twin. Rose, who had to go with her, kept saying, ‘Don’t! Don’t!’, screaming at her silently not to go into the cupboard, but Sylvia opened the door and went inside.

  ‘Don’t shut the door!’

  But she pulled the door shut and stepped into a blackness of fear that dropped Rose down and down, falling into a bottomless black pit in which there was no end of falling.

  With a jerk that made her heart lurch, Rose opened her eyes to find herself spreadeagled on the turf of the moor, flat on her back, as if she had been dropped there from a great height. Above her the sky, and something else. Something moved near her hand, and she pulled it away just before Moonlight trod on it. His square white nose and pink lips came down to check her over. She jumped up and hugged him for not leaving her and going back to the stable.

  He had put his foot through one of the reins and broken it. Rose tied the broken end to the bit, and he found his way back to the path and took her back to the stable, with her head aching and a taste of orange jelly in her mouth.

  ‘I told you not to let him put his head down,’ Joyce fussed at her.

  ‘I’ll pay to have it mended.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘Sorry I’ve been so long.’

  ‘You haven’t. I didn’t expect you to be back so soon, but I suppose this cunning old devil –’ she slapped Moonlight so hard that he staggered – ‘said to himself, “Enough’s enough”.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Are you all right? You didn’t fall off or anything, did you?’

  ‘No,’ Rose said, like a child leaving a party. ‘I had a lovely time. Thank you.’

  What was she supposed to do now? Favour was so mighty that Rose hardly dared to think about him in her real life, but she could not help wishing he would be a bit more definite about what he wanted. A messenger, Mr Vingo said. Messenger of the grey horse. But to carry what messages where?

  Clues, Mr Vingo said. This time, the clue was obvious. She had needed to puzzle out that the Felicity episode showed that there was something in the house that brought out the worst in people’s natures; but the significance of the birthday party was easy. There was something wrong with that cupboard. Well, she knew that before she went all those years back in time, to Sonny’s birthday. She had never really believed those comfortable explanations for why the cupboard door would not stay shut: it was damp, the floor wasn’t level.

  Brings out the worst in people … Jake and Julie. Rose had never known them to quarrel before. They had been back to the hotel once, since the time she found Julie crying in bed in the annexe, and they had stayed in their favourite Room Four in the hotel and been their old selves.

  The annexe did not affect everybody, however. It seemed to have its ups and downs. At the moment it housed two families with children, who were friends. They made their own breakfasts and picnic lunches, and said that it was as good as having their own holiday house.

  Jim Fisher had wrenched his shoulder, so Ben, who was working his body hard and wanted to be outdoors all the time, was mowing the back lawn for Mollie.

  Crossing the garden on her way to the annexe, Rose was not going to talk to him, because if he stopped the motor of the mower it could be hard to start, but he yelled at her over the noise, and she went over.

  ‘When’s lunch?’

  ‘Not for ages.’

  ‘Damn.’

  He moved away from her. Rose realized that she was standing somewhere near the place where Sylvia had hidden in the summer house. There had never been a summer house in Rose’s time, and the flowering shrubs were gone, and the cramped little gravel paths and box hedges, but, as far as she could tell, this was about the place where Sylvia had slid in to hide from Daphne and Peter. Now there was only sweet-smelling mown grass, a bit flatter than usual because Ben had been rolling it.

  If there had never been a summer house, then perhaps it was all a dream, and Mr Vingo was deranged.

  She went into the annexe to collect towels and tidy up a bit. Opening the front door to shake out the mat, she remembered how nice the front garden had looked when Sylvia, ‘gentle sister, little mother,’ came up the path in her patent leather shoes – mauve and white rhododendrons and deep pink roses. Must talk to Mollie about planting roses for next year. Rose would buy her a rose bush for her birthday. And plant it. And bring a bucket of manure from Moonlight’s stable to nourish it.

  In the kitchen, she found that the families had tidied up after themselves, instead of, like some guests, leaving dirty breakfast things all over the place, and flies getting into the milk, which bore out Mrs Ardis’s prophecy that they would all live to regret the day that they let the gorillas loose with food. Mrs Ardis thought of the paying customers as if they came from a zoo, and always expected the worst.

  The refrigerator did not have any messy scraps of butter or hard ends of cheese or souring mugs of milk the baby wouldn’t drink. There was some bread and ham and some mustard, so Rose slapped together a sandwich for Ben and went to the fence and waved it at him.

  He stopped the mower and ran into the annexe, his forehead under the short curls glistening with sweat. His long legs and arms were very brown this year.

  ‘Snack time.’ Rose poured him a glass of lemonade and he sat down at the table with the sandwich, and she stood over him like a woman in a television commercial, watching her husband eat margarine that tasted like butter.

  ‘Sit down,’ Ben said. ‘Take the weight off your feet. You work too hard.’

  ‘There’s a lot to do. I like it.’

  ‘What do you do for fun?’

  ‘Well – you know. I ride. Go on the beach.’ She did not say, ‘I run with you,’ because perhaps that was supposed to be serious.

  ‘They work you too hard.’ He bit into the sandwich, wrinkling his damp forehead. ‘Child labour, it used to be called.’

  ‘But Ben, I love it. Plus I get money. It’s my life, but it can’t be for ever. My mother and I, we have a sort of pact between us that when I get sick of it, I’ll say so, and she’ll hire three other people to do what I do.’

  ‘Child labour. She could be prosecuted.’

  ‘Don’t talk about my mother like that.’ Rose was not angry, but sad that he did not understand the partnership between her and Mollie.
/>   ‘Sorry. I just felt – sort of bloody-minded.’

  ‘It’s because you got too hot out there, and you’re eating too fast.’

  ‘Yes, mother.’

  Rinsing his glass at the sink, she laughed, because she thought he was joking, but when she turned round he looked angry.

  ‘I didn’t mean …’ She had said the wrong thing again.

  He got up, wiped his mouth with the back of an oily hand, and went out.

  She heard him trying to start the mower half a dozen times, which must be making him even angrier. She listened until the engine caught and roared, then picked up her laundry bag of towels and went back to the hotel. As she was going in at the back door, she heard a sudden loud clunk, and the mower stopped, and then Ben swore and kicked angrily at something in the grass at the edge of the lawn. Rose put down the bag and went over to him. His face was flushed, as he squatted by the mower with a piece of the blade in his hand.

  ‘Broke it right off. I never saw the thing.’

  The corner of a chunk of buried stone was sticking up under the grass. It was one of the red tiles from the floor of Sylvia’s summer house.

  Chapter Nine

  The Mumfords did not visit in the summer, except once a month when Mollie and Hilda and Mollie’s friend Samson, who gave cooking lessons in the village, put on a big buffet for Sunday lunch. Extra tables were put out on the porch, and it was advertised in the paper, so outside people came as well as the hotel guests. The Mumfords came, with greedy eyes, making two or three trips back to the buffet to get their money’s worth.

  ‘Probably don’t eat for a week afterwards,’ Philip Wood said. He helped with the lunches, pouring wine and beer and being quite debonair, so that Rose and Mollie hoped that he might in the end take to the hotel business, but he always disappeared before Sam brought out the fruit and cheese and the pastries he had made, and if he enjoyed it, he never let on.

  Sometimes Rose wanted to take him and shake him and tell him, ‘Love life!’ But she had other things on her mind just now. She wanted to talk to the Mumfords.

  She cornered them in the hall as they were going out to their car.

  ‘Remember what you said about the annexe,’ she said, standing between them and the open front door.

  ‘Having trouble with it, are you?’ one of them asked hopefully. They were no taller than Rose, although she was still short for her age.

  ‘No, it’s a great success. People love it.’

  ‘That’s good,’ the other Miss Mumford said glumly, and belched a little. She patted her mouth. ‘Was that a different brand of pickle?’

  ‘Remember when you said about the birthday party?’

  ‘What birthday party?’ the one with the shaky head asked. ‘We haven’t celebrated our birthday for years, ha ha. When you get to our age, dear, you’ll find out –’

  Rose could not hang around while they went through all that ‘Wait till you’re my age,’ and ‘In my day …’, which passed for conversation with some old people. ‘You cried,’ she said to shaky-head, ‘when you were playing hide and seek.’

  ‘Who said we played hide and seek?’ the other Mumford asked suspiciously.

  ‘Well, I mean, they always play hide and seek at birthday parties.’

  ‘I dare say.’ They closed their faces. What would they say if Rose addressed them as Audrey and Angela?

  ‘Did you hide in a cupboard?’

  ‘My dear child, don’t keep prattling on like this when we want to go. We don’t remember a thing about it, and that’s that. When you get to our age …’

  She let them go. They drove away like toy figures, upright in a small sky-blue car. The one who did not shake drove, her head hardly high enough to see over the wheel.

  ‘They said they couldn’t remember,’ she told Mr Vingo.

  ‘Just as well. You mustn’t try to tell people your secrets.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I wanted to find out whether any of it really happened, or whether it was a dream, or my imagination.’

  ‘Do you seriously doubt?’

  ‘It’s all too weird. Things like this don’t happen. Not to me, they don’t. I’m ordinary.’

  ‘You’re special.’ He sighed. ‘When will you get that through your stubborn head, Rose of all the world?’

  They were in his room because he had offered to help her with her piano practice, but he was sitting on the piano stool, not Rose. He swung round and played the melody from the ballet Spectre de la Rose, and forced his voice to sing about the rose that the girl wears to her first ball, which comes back in the night to dance with her: ‘Je suis la spectre de la ro-ose, que tu-u po-or-tai-ais hier au bal.’ His voice cracked. ‘But that girl was asleep during her strange experience. You weren’t.’

  ‘I wasn’t last night, I know that. I was awake all night, worrying about what it all means.’

  ‘You’re a hard worker. You shouldn’t be daunted by a job.’

  ‘Except I don’t know what the job is.’

  ‘To find the way back. Where there is unhappiness and unrest, your mission as a messenger of the Great Grey Horse is to follow the threads back and back and back to whatever tragedy of the past has left this haunting legacy.’

  ‘And then do what?’

  ‘Resolve it.’

  ‘Golly.’ Rose digested this. She frowned. ‘How do you know?’

  R. V. Vingo gave a little modest laugh. ‘I was a messenger once.’

  ‘You!’

  ‘I was your age once, incredible though it may seem. As a matter of fact –’ he looked at his hands, plump under the fingertips from playing the piano – ‘I still feel your age. That’s one of the nice things, you’ll find, about getting old.’

  ‘Who else was a messenger?’

  ‘Dozens of people all down through history; some good, some not so hot. Take the famous Blanche Orlando, for instance. She was said to have raised a man from the dead, but she let herself be exploited for money, as a medium on the Victorian stage, and lost her powers, and enraged Favour. Take silly Hugh, the village idiot, a man of fifty with a child’s mind. He broke the spell of the Blind Baron, who lured maidens to his ghastly underground retreat, where they plucked out their eyes for him, in terror of what they saw. Take Leo of Pilot Rock. Wherever they are, in place or time, the horse finds ’em.’

  ‘Suppose they don’t want to be found?’

  ‘Tough luck. They can’t avoid it. You can’t avoid it, Rose of all roses, by trying to make out it’s all dreams or imagination.’

  He swivelled his wide haunches round on the stool and began to play the lilting tune, and Rose thought, Oh my God, not now please, I’m too tired. Not ready. Afraid.

  Mr Vingo laughed, and switched to playing the march from his musical epic, the call to arms that roused the soldiers of the Lord of the Moor to ride out to join the king’s army, with the proud grey horse at their head. He bent over the piano and breathed heavily at the part where the swing of it slowed to the monotonous drum, drum, drum of the night march home with the bodies they carried secretly back to the castle for the Lord to use in his ghastly experiments with the souls of dead men.

  When Rose went up with tea next morning, he was gone. His bed was unmade and everything was strewn about as usual – his patent medicines and boxes of biscuits and mustard and cress in a saucer of blotting paper on the window sill.

  They had got used to Mr Vingo as a fixture, and departing summer guests had begun to say to him, ‘See you next year.’ But today he was gone again in his mysterious way, and Rose’s father began to speculate that R. V. Vingo was an enemy agent.

  He had left a note for Mrs Ardis to lock his door and leave the key at the front desk, because last time his custard cream biscuits had gone while he was away.

  Mrs Ardis puffed out the front of her flowered overall, blew upwards at a bit of hair that was hanging in her eyes and said, ‘I have never been accused of anything like this, Mrs Wood, never.’

  ‘He wasn’t accusing
you. But the hotel is full and there are a lot of children.’

  Mrs Ardis said, ‘Custard creams are bad for you. I eat only wheatmeal.’

  She locked Mr Vingo’s room but left the key in the door, as a sign of something or other.

  Running on the beach, Ben said to Rose one morning, ‘I didn’t know you could play the piano so well.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I heard you playing last night.’ When they talked while they were running, they talked ahead, not looking at each other.

  ‘When?’

  ‘After I went to bed.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s only one piano. In Mr Vingo’s room.’

  ‘Not me. He must be back.’

  ‘Mm-mm.’ Ben shook his brown head and raced ahead of her, his feet making clean tracks in the damp sand of last night’s high tide.

  Later that day, Rose was in the garden, picking zinnias and larkspur for the dining-room. Bare feet thudded along the boards, and Ben appeared on the side verandah and jumped over the rail and said to Rose, ‘Listen.’

  She straightened up and put her head on one side.

  ‘Mr Vingo’s piano.’

  She heard it. ‘He must be back.’

  ‘He’s not, I tell you. Let’s go up and see who it is.’

  ‘No.’ Rose felt afraid.

  ‘What’s the matter, little girl?’

  When Ben called her that, she wanted to punch him. Instead she followed him up the back stairs and along the empty corridor. As they reached the end by the winding stair to the turret, Rose stopped.

  Someone was playing that tune on the marmalade piano.

  ‘Come on.’ Ben turned and saw her face. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘That tune.’

  ‘What tune? Whoever it is, they’re playing scales.’

  ‘No, that tune. Mr Vingo played it at the concert. You heard it, like a flute, just before I left. Listen. There it is again.’

  Ben looked blank. He had not heard the tune before. He could not hear it now.

  Step by step, Rose was drawn forward, going past Ben to climb the stairs ahead of him to the turret room. The music had stopped. The door was locked. The key was on the outside.