The Messenger Page 9

  Ben put out his hand. ‘Let’s go in,’ he said, but he did not turn the key. Rose could not have gone into that room. Nor could Ben.

  As they went down the stairs backwards, to keep an eye on the door and the steps above them, the piano started and Rose heard the clear notes of the tune again.

  ‘Ben,’ she said, ‘there’s a place I’ve got to go to. I want you to come with me.’

  She did not want to go alone this time, and she wanted him to know. He thought she was the same Rose she’d always been. She wanted him to know that she was special, wanted him, if it was possible, to see what she had seen. Even though he had not heard the tune, he had heard the ghost of the piano.

  ‘Come up to the moor?’ she asked, her breath catching in her throat.

  ‘Not for long. I’ve got tennis. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Me too.’ He glanced back at the stairway. ‘I’m afraid we’re schizo. We’ve been hearing things. No piano now,’ he said.

  But there was. Its notes were in her ears and head.

  ‘Come and run.’ She turned and sped down the back stairs and out into the garden and through the wood, with Ben’s feet pacing just behind her.

  He said once, ‘Is this a race?’ and laughed, but then they ran in silence, steadily, across the pasture and over the wall, up and down small hills, zigzagging on the sheep track. Rose’s breath was gasping and sobbing.

  ‘Far enough,’ Ben said. ‘Turn back and slow down. Walk a bit.’

  But they were coming to the huge grey rock that stood sentinel to the trees. Rose stopped. ‘This is the place,’ she gasped. Panting, she turned her face to breathe into the wind, as Ben had taught her. Breathing easily, he leaned against the rock and crossed his legs. Leaning on the rock seemed to Rose somehow disrespectful, like leaning against the bulk of Mr Vingo.

  When she could speak, she said, ‘Come on,’ and led him beyond the rock to the path through the trees and the mists of the valley. There was no valley there. Only the quiet waters of the little lake, ringed by bushes and trees that dipped their heavy summer branches towards the water.

  ‘So what?’ Ben said. ‘Noah’s Bowl.’

  ‘There used to be a valley here, ages ago. A flood filled it in.’ Rose spoke fast to keep his attraction. ‘Over there – you can’t see it now – it drops down past farms and cottages to a tiny little fishing village. And you – and you see, the valley is here sometimes, I’ve seen it, and it’s all misty and shapes moving about, because once long ago there was this wonderful horse who –’

  ‘A horse. You’ve got this neurotic thing about horses. Thank God boys don’t go through that stage.’

  ‘But I saw him, Ben.’ She had to make him understand. ‘The horse.’

  ‘Hears a piano. Sees a horse,’ he grumbled. ‘Brings me all this way. Your imagination’s gone beserk, Rosie.’

  ‘You heard the piano.’

  ‘It must have been someone’s radio.’

  ‘We heard it.’

  ‘Give it a rest, little girl,’ he said in that fifteen-year-old way that made her want to hit him. ‘You’ll grow out of it. It’s all nonsense.’

  It was easier to agree with him than to be angry. ‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is.’

  She took a step back, away from him, and, with a thunderous roar as the water receded, the ground rumbled and shook and parted into the cleft of the valley. The mist swirled in, and she stumbled down the slope to where it should have cleared to brightness, but it was dark at the bottom of the valley, as if the sun had gone down, the bridge in shadow, the river surging swollen and sluggish round the stones. Only the horse above her on the other side was a dazzle of light, shaking off sparks of cold fire as he raged at her and stamped and shook his head, his curved ears laid back.

  Behind and around her in the clinging mist was the murmur of voices, the coarse laughter and the chink of steel and rasp of a boot on stone.

  ‘Help me!’ But she had denied the horse, and he turned away his head and stared down the valley. He had called her, but she did not obey, and so he would not protect her, a crab without its shell. She tried to move towards him, but cold fingers plucked her back. Her feet were lead. A soldier laughed in her face with a stench of foul breath, and she swayed and fell, and her senses reeled into blackness.

  She woke with the roaring of water in her ears, lying on her back on the wet grass at the edge of the lake. Her clothes were wet and her hair straggled over her face. Ben was leaning over her.

  ‘What . . ?’

  ‘You stumbled and fell into the water. I had to pull you out.’

  ‘Did you see?’

  ‘I saw you with your head in the air, not looking where you were going. As usual.’

  ‘Couldn’t you see, in the mist . . ?’

  ‘What mist? Your eyes want examining.’ The hair on his bare arms was golden in the sunlight. ‘You trip over a stone like a clot, and now look at you.’

  He had taken off his shirt to dab a cut on her forehead. ‘Look.’ He showed her the blood. ‘You must have hit your head on something under the water. You were knocked out for a minute. Too bad you came round. I was going to practise my resuscitation techniques on you. I’ve been longing to save someone.’

  Rose stood up. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Are you sure? Listen, we’ve got to get back. I’ll be late. Come on.’

  She jogged a little way with him, deliberately going slowly, so that when he told her to keep up, she could say, ‘You go on ahead. I’ll be all right.’

  He peered at her, dabbed at her forehead again, and left the shirt with her. ‘Take it easy.’

  When he was out of sight, she turned and ran back to the valley, which she knew would be there, waiting for her.

  This time as she plunged down into the hateful mist, the cloaked figures were more distant and shadowy, and she knew that once she was out into the bright light within sight of Favour and on to the bridge, she was safe. A bridge between evil and good. She ran across the slippery planks, watching the horse carefully. He still seemed wrathful at her treachery, so she approached him this time with more dread, but there was no holding back. She had to climb up to where he was, and although his hoof stamped sparks out of the flinty rock, she clambered on to his back and clung desperately to his mane as he took off like a rocket.

  The flight was faster and rougher than before, and less exhilarating, like an uncoordinated ride on any wayward horse, which showed that the horse, for all he was a mighty hero, was still a horse. A man’s voice began to vibrate through the rush of the swift air. Nervous of who it was and where she was going, Rose began to stutter to Favour, ‘Wherever it – it – it is, I will do well for you!’

  He was no longer there. The man’s voice clarified, and she was hurrying across a polished floor, in a long skirt and felt slippers, because the voice sounded urgent. ‘Sister! Sister!’

  It was a young man’s voice, hoarse and weak. In the front room, a dim lamp showed two other beds with sleeping men, and the young man who was calling, his head moving restlessly from side to side, his hands plucking at the red blanket.

  ‘Sister? Oh, it’s Evie. Hullo.’ He gave an anxious smile. His face was terribly thin and pale, with a stubble of beard and dark shadows round his eyes.

  ‘What do you want, Michael?’ Evie put a hand on his hot forehead. She was wearing a grey cotton dress with a long white cuff over the sleeve. ‘I’m not a real nurse yet, you know, but I can get Sister.’

  ‘No – no don’t. I just want to know someone’s there.’ He took her hand and held it. The other arm was bandaged. A humped frame under the bedclothes kept their weight off the stump where his leg had been amputated.

  One of the men in another bed stirred and woke, groaned and rolled on to his back, and put up a hand for the large pocket watch which hung on a string from the bed rail. He held it to his eyes. ‘After ten. She’s late with my sleeping medicine.’


  ‘You were asleep.’

  ‘How could I be if I haven’t had my medicine? Go and hurry her up, Evie, there’s a dear good girl.’

  Evie got her hand away from Michael’s with difficulty and padded across the hall to the kitchen, where her mother, in a nurse’s uniform, was heating milk on an old gas stove that Rose had never seen before.

  ‘The sergeant wants his sleeping draught.’

  Evie’s mother laughed. She had big teeth and a puff of light red hair under her white cap. ‘Doctor Bond has reduced it to almost nothing, but it will send him off like a baby.’ She measured a meagre amount of brown liquid from a large bottle on a shelf and gave the small glass to Evie. ‘Fill it up with water.’

  Evie gave the sergeant his medicine. He swallowed it with a heave of his Adam’s apple, said, ‘Gaw bless yer’ and went back to sleep. Evie went to Michael’s bed and asked him, ‘Are you all right?’ He nodded, but when she took the glass out to rinse he followed her with his feverish eyes.

  The kitchen was fitted up as if it was part of an old-fashioned hospital. The floor was scrubbed wood. Where the dark cabinets had been, there were shelves of bottles and pill boxes, rolled bandages, enamel bowls, big jars of ointment. Charts hung on a long nail. A big three-level trolley by the wall held metal trays and piles of china and cutlery.

  Her mother wore a long grey dress with a stiff stand-up collar and a long apron with a starched white belt and a red cross on the bib. On her red hair, she wore a white cap with a turned-up brim. She and Evie were wearing felt slippers because they were on night duty. Evie was wearing a small version of the same uniform. She hooked a finger inside her stiff collar to ease it, and put her hands up to poke a pin back into the bun of long fluffy hair under her cap.

  She looked round to see what she could do, because there was always something to do, and picked a bandage to roll out of the laundry basket, rolling it up in a practised way and smoothing it neatly against the front of her apron bib.

  ‘I can’t wait till you’re old enough to be a nurse,’ the mother said. ‘If this endless war goes on through nineteen seventeen, and eighteen, and nineteen, and for ever, you will be.’

  ‘I am a nurse, Mother,’ Evie said.

  ‘As good as. You’re a great help now that they’ve taken so many nurses out of the convalescent hospitals to go to France. And I’d much rather have you here with me when I’m on night duty, than alone at the cottage.’

  ‘Michael’s not up to much tonight,’ Evie said. ‘Not up to much’ was a favourite expression of the Sister in Charge for any man who was very ill or in pain.

  ‘His wounds are mending.’ Her mother looked sad. ‘But his spirit is not.’ The wide mouth that was always smiling round her big teeth was drawn in thoughtfully. ‘They call it shell shock, and they say he’ll get over it in time, but I don’t know. His regiment was wiped out at the Battle of the Somme.’ She looked at Evie sadly. ‘You’re so young to have to hear this, Evie, but you’re part of this war. Thousands of men were killed in those few days of fighting. Uselessly killed, just to gain a few yards of land. Sent out from the trenches into the mud and shell holes and barbed wire of No Man’s Land to be torn to bits by the German guns. That was where Michael got his leg wound, running forward, screaming at the guns. He had just seen his father blown to pieces.’

  Evie was silent. Rose wondered how she could hear those things without crying. Her mother went out of the kitchen with a tray of medicines.

  Evie stepped out into the garden to get some air. There was a smell of autumn, dampness and dead leaves, apples on the grass. Rose saw that many lights were on in the big house next door. The two houses were evidently part of the same hospital. There was a paved path between them, and no fence. At the end of the garden, she thought she saw out of the corner of her eye something white moving behind the trees. Favour? When she looked again, there was only darkness there.

  She picked up an apple, looked at it for worms and bit into it, standing on the wet grass in her slippers and long blowing white apron. She thought about Michael seeing his father blown apart, and how you would never get that image out of your mind, and about her own father, who was somewhere at sea. They didn’t know where. There was no news coming through. His last letter had been from Scotland, but that was weeks ago.

  Evie was very tired. It was difficult to sleep in the day time, because she still had to go to school, which was senseless, with the War to End All Wars going on. She was supposed to sleep part of the night in a chair by the fire in the hall, but the house was full of the noises of the men: coughing and moans and voices calling, someone talking in his sleep, the rustle of her mother’s feet and skirts going to and fro, Sister from the main hospital tap-tapping over the floors as she did her rounds (not in slippers), a convalescent man who could not sleep getting up for a cigarette, or to make tea in the kitchen.

  She went indoors and laid up the trays on the trolley for breakfast: knife, fork, spoon, mug, plate, porridge bowl, salt, pepper. She cut mounds of bread and butter to help the day nurses, covered it with a damp cloth, and put the porridge on to stew for the rest of the night in the double boiler that could never be quite cleaned of its crust. Then her mother wanted her upstairs to hold Mr Carter’s leg while she changed the dressing.

  The lamp was lit over the bed. The rest of the room was in darkness. They were like people on a stage, a tableau of pain. The soldier had his head back and his teeth clenched, holding on to the rail of the bed. Evie held her breath and stuck out the tip of her tongue as she carefully supported the heavy leg, which was bleeding again, oozing dark blood from the swollen and discoloured skin. Her mother bent over, with fiercely intent eyes, quick, deft, catching her breath when she had hurt him.

  ‘It’s better, eh?’ he asked her, without looking at the leg.

  ‘I hope so, Mr Carter.’ It was much worse, but she was not allowed to say so. She was only a V.A.D. – it stood for ‘Voluntary Aid Detachment’ – not a qualified nurse, and would never be allowed to change dressings if they were not so short of staff, in this most merciless year of the war, when the casualties came back from France in thousands.

  She and Evie made their slippered rounds of the wards with the torch held low. Then they made cocoa and Evie dozed and woke and dozed in the chair, while her mother sat by the fire and mended pillowcases. The house was quiet. The clock ticked more loudly. The hall was in shadow beyond the circle of lamp and firelight. It was so strange to be the only ones awake, with all the sleeping men around them. It made you feel you were the hub of their world, totally responsible for them, because they were patients here, and the people in their lives outside, wives, parents, children, friends, had no connection with them.

  We are their world …

  The scream from the front room brought Evie awake in an instant. She jumped out of the chair and followed her mother to Michael’s bed. He was leaning on his good elbow, staring and babbling, sweating and trembling with fear. As her mother tried to calm him, the upstairs buzzer shrilled. The men rang it for an emergency, so she had to go upstairs and leave Rose trying to push Michael’s chest down, to keep him in the bed.

  The sergeant came to her help. He got Michael to lie back and told him roughly, but kindly enough, to put a sock in it and let a bloke sleep.

  ‘He had a nightmare, see,’ he said to Evie, and went back to bed and pulled a blanket over his head.

  Her mother came back looking anxious. ‘Mr Carter’s leg wound has broken down. I’ll have to go over to the hospital and get the doctor. Can you manage? Evie will stay with you. Calm down, Mr Hunt.’ As a nurse, she had to call him that. Only Evie could call him Michael to his face.

  Evie sat on a hard upright chair by the bed. She heard the back door open and shut, and the voices of the doctor and the Scottish Sister, and their feet going upstairs.

  ‘I dreamed of that man,’ Michael kept whispering, ‘that man, that man,’ over and over, with his troubled eyes fixed on hers.

  ‘A
German?’

  ‘I don’t know. All in black, he was, he was …’

  ‘Hush, it’s all right. Don’t talk about it,’ Evie said, and Rose was glad, because his fear had made her afraid, and she wanted him to take his nightmare visions away from them, and go back to sleep. ‘It’s over now,’ Evie told him. ‘You’re not at the war. Hush, Michael.’ Sometimes she felt a hundred years old, and wondered where her youth had gone. ‘It’s only a dream.’

  ‘Why do I have these terrible dreams?’

  ‘It’s the shell shock, isn’t it? That’s what they say. You’ll be better soon, Michael. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘Stay with me.’

  ‘All right.’ Evie turned her head away, so he would not see her yawn. She sat on the hard chair until he stopped gasping and shuddering and his grip on her hand loosened and his breathing grew more regular. It was cold. The window was open, and a damp sea smell was coming in. She yawned again and her legs moved restlessly because she was so tired. Rose had never felt so tired in her life – or anybody else’s. She wanted to be out of this room of sickness and fear. Evie had done enough for Michael, surely. She and Rose – instead of only observing Evie, Rose felt very much a part of her – they could go back to the fire and be comfortable, and forget about all this.

  The fire had died down, and she was too tired to fetch more coal. She put her mother’s cape round her shoulders and picked up the sewing. With her mother still busy upstairs, Evie must stay awake and on guard. Rose thought she deserved a rest. She nodded and woke, listened for Michael, nodded and woke. After a while, the needle dropped and she could not find it in her skirt. The torn pillowcase dropped off her lap. She fell into a stupefied sleep, and Rose woke with a headache on the moor, trudging along the sheep track in a daze, trailing Ben’s shirt behind her.

  ‘Oh look at your head oh look at her head there’s blood all over your forehead Rose we must get you cleaned up immediately Harry go and see where Mrs Wood is hurry Harry.’