‘No, no, no, you’re wonderful.’
Mrs Ardis and Philip maintained a low-grade warfare at the best of times. If it exploded into full battle, all was lost.
‘Then do your work, Miss Rose,’ Mrs Ardis said grandly, ‘and I shall do mine. You can start by removing that tray off my polished sideboard.’
In the hall, Rose’s father called to her to carry a sample case upstairs for a newly arrived salesman.
‘I’ll just put the tray in the kitchen.’
‘Put it down now.’ Philip looked flustered, fumbling about with papers. ‘Take this gentleman up to number fourteen – er, let’s see, yes, fourteen.’
‘I thought you said fifteen,’ the salesman said.
‘Did I? Yes, well – no, let’s see, where’s the key? You’ll have a view over the dunes to the sea.’
‘Jolly good,’ the man said. ‘Pity I’m only here for one night.’
‘Are you? I thought you were booked for a week. Rose, where did you put the key of number fourteen?’
‘It’s occupied.’
‘Fifteen, I said.’ He recovered himself quickly. ‘The key of fifteen, let’s see …’
‘On the hook,’ the salesman said.
‘Ah yes, of course. Excuse me. Terribly busy …’
Although she hated paper work, Rose thought perhaps she should run the office and let her father carry the trays and bags.
Abigail made the gravy. They didn’t have gravy with everything in Chicago, so she was especially drawn to it as a way to feel British.
When she melted the beef dripping, it smelled of the strong hamburgers on Newcome beach, and Rose was Ruth again for a dizzy moment, caught half-way between two worlds, as if the people on the beach were calling her to come back.
When Abigail asked, ‘Where’s the flour?’ Rose answered vaguely, ‘Oh – somewhere,’ as if she were Ruth, before she came to herself and said, ‘There, by the wooden spoons.’
Lunch was a success. Rose and Abigail and Dilys served more than twenty people smoothly, in spite of Philip hovering anxiously behind the serving hatch and going round the tables, bending from the waist to ask, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be all right, Philip?’ Ben’s father boomed.
The Mumfords, bent over their plates like dormice, looked up in alarm. Toni, the assistant to the bearded photographer, giggled and whispered to him.
The Yorkshire pudding rose like a crisp-roofed cathedral. Abigail’s gravy was rich velvet, and Hilda’s beef and roast potatoes were superb.
‘Nothing to it,’ Philip said afterwards, stretched out in a chair upstairs, exhausted from doing nothing. ‘Can’t see why your mother makes such a production of it.’
While Rose was living her hectic practical life, part of her was still in that other life, which was even more urgent. Constantly in her mind were the clear images of the scene on the beach. Ruth, Georgie, the mother, the donkey man with the limp, the hush … hush sound of the sea, breaking gently on the shingle, the baby’s cries, Brian’s confident shouts, music from the old pier, the little donkey’s rusty brays. The details of dreams don’t stay with you, but she never forgot anything about the scenes to which the Great Grey Horse took her.
When Abigail went out to get Crackers from the little fenced yard Jim had made for him next to the shed, Rose went with her, and walked on into the wood when Abigail rode off. She stood and listened. The tops of the trees jostled and gossiped to each other far over her head, and the fresh green pine needles assailed her with the tarry scent of spring. And what else? A hint of scorched meat from the long-ago beach snack bar.
If the horse called her now to find him on the moor, she would only just have time to run along the sheep track to the valley and get back in time to serve teas.
Rubbish, Rose – what are you thinking about? To be a messenger is all. The horse comes first. Teas come nowhere. But someone has to do them. Like Mollie, she was torn between two claims on her. When the treetops brought her no hint of the tune with which Favour often called her, she didn’t know whether she was disappointed or relieved.
The successful Sunday ran itself into the ground at supper time.
The cold buffet was far below its usual standard. There wasn’t enough beef. The salami was hard. The potato salad had too much vinegar. The French bread hadn’t been heated in the oven. The lettuce was sad. The jelly collapsed. There were no hot dishes.
‘Even if it was only baked beans, one would have thought …’ The Miss Mumfords expected everything to be exactly as it was when Mollie was here.
Dilys knocked over an open jar of pickled beetroot on to Philip’s shoes, and when he called her a clumsly clot, she gave her notice.
‘All my life, I’ve been bullied by men. First my father, then Steve, Arturo, Hans, Oliver—’ She tore off her apron and stamped on it, and ran sobbing out to her car and never came back.
Later, Rose went to the annexe house next door where the Kellys had their rooms, and played Scrabble with Ben to soothe her nerves, and they made sandwiches and cocoa in the annexe kitchen.
On her way to bed, she took a mug of cocoa up to Mr Vingo. As she climbed the turret stair, she could hear the soft sound of his piano, playing a sad little tune. It was the melodic lament, ‘Death of a Hero’, which he had composed for the last part of The Ballad of the Great Grey Horse. This was his musical version of the legend of Favour. In one of his earthly incarnations, Favour had once been the favourite charger of the wicked Lord of the Moor, and had galloped to his death to save the people of the valley from drowning in a long-ago flood.
In her room in her nightdress, Rose could still hear the music wandering out of Mr Vingo’s window. She took the hamster, Dougal, out of his cage and lay wearily on the bed with him to listen, letting him run over her hands and up and down her sleeves, and try a little mountain scramble up the pillow.
Would the piano music change, as it sometimes did, to the beckoning note of Favour’s tune? Not this time. When it stopped, she just had enough energy to put Dougal away before flopping down and drifting towards sleep. Dougal took a few rattling turns on the plastic wheel at the side of his cage, then went into his little house and was still.
Although she had gone to bed exhausted, Rose woke very early, still tired, when it was just getting light. The hamster was on his wheel again, whirring it noisily round and round on his endless journey to nowhere.
‘Cut it out.’ As Rose lay and grumbled at him, the rattling purr of the wheel went spiralling upwards away from the cage into the alluring summons of Favour’s tune.
‘Thanks, Doog.’
Rose’s tiredness left her in an instant. She got up and pulled on some clothes, and went quietly downstairs and out of the back door.
The wood was dripping, and the turf of the moor was wet and springy. The new day’s air was glorious, as the sun came up over the distant hills and inspected the land before it went into the clouds. Rose ran fast along the narrow, twisting sheep track, which meandered across the moor, making loops and zigzags for no reason, except that sheep had gone this way for generations. Across the muddy riding track, round the corner of the broken stone wall, and there it was – the huge grey upright rock that waited for her, the same shape as Mr Vingo when he waited in his long wet raincoat for a bus.
She patted its cool damp shoulder and plunged into the thicket. In normal life, the trees and undergrowth ended at the gravelly shore of the lake, which was called Noah’s Bowl, because it had been formed centuries ago when the swollen river flooded the valley. But now the lake was gone and the valley was full of a swirling mist, through which Rose must grope her way to reach the horse.
It was always frightening to have to drop down the steep side of the valley without being able to see her feet. Rose was feeling her way cautiously down with her hands in front of her, when her right hand was gripped by cold, hard fingers that squeezed her like a vice. The pain was agonizing. Just when she thought the bones of her
fingers would break, the crushing steel grip let go.
A mocking laugh. The Lord of the Moor! The mist cleared to show him standing very close, a black cloak wrapped round his spidery, crooked body, his eyes darting like snakes, his cruel mouth leering at her.
‘We meet onth again.’ His whispered lisp was more terrifying than a shout. ‘Hathn’t the methenger had enough?’ His brown weasel was curled round the back of his neck, its head on his shoulder, teeth bared to strike at Rose.
‘Get out of my way.’ Rose tried to make her voice sound firm and unafraid.
‘I hate you.’ The Lord of the Moor was the enemy of the noble grey horse and all the things he stood for. When the Lord was alive and a tyrant over all this country, it was said that he feasted on blood, and conjured black magic out of dead men’s souls.
‘I hate you too,’ Rose started to say, but a soft fistful of mist filled her mouth, and she choked and gasped. From somewhere behind the Lord she heard the crude, brutal laughter of his soldiers, stamping about with the sound of boots on cobbles, and the clank and jangle of metal chains. They drew nearer. She heard curses and rough breathing, smelled the stench of sweat and stale wine, saw a soldier’s face loom out of the mist at her, the eyes long and flat, as if there was no life behind them. If they surrounded her, she would be lost in the evil of despair.
‘Favour!’ she called, but her voice was deadened and swallowed by the mist. The Lord of the Moor took a step closer, his arm raised forward to bring the weasel’s venomous jaws towards Rose’s face. She ducked under the arm, punched through the folds of the heavy cloak and was free, stumbling down the stony slope and into the blessed sunlight that flooded the valley floor.
The swift river tumbled under the old stone bridge. As Rose crossed the slippery planks, a flash of light exploded above her, and the horse came out on to the flat rock. With his mane and tail blowing like sails, he stared down the valley to the scattered huts and houses and the tiny boats on the glinting water far below. His dappled coat was incandescent, glowing and shimmering, and his fine hoof, striped ivory and grey, struck white sparks from the rock as he swung his head round to Rose.
Hurry, hurry, his triumphant eye demanded.
She scrambled over rocks to reach the ledge above him, reached out to grasp his blowing mane and pulled herself on to his back. His muscles tensed, his great shoulders lifted. She was a part of him, feeling his stength and power as he bounded into the air and took her away into the roaring winds of space.
Chapter Four
Rose’s senses were numbed into a timeless oblivion, in which there was nothing but the soaring speed. Faintly through the rush of air, she became aware of an insistent sound, a few twanging musical notes. As her flight slowed and dropped, the monotonous notes grew louder and formed themselves into rude electronic bleeps.
‘Knock it off, Derek,’ Rose said. But it wasn’t Rose who said it. It was a different voice. As she went towards the small boy to take his irritating game away, she saw that her bare feet walking across the sand had painted toenails.
‘I like it,’ the boy protested in a nasal whine. ‘Leave me alone, Joanne.’
The game was ‘Macho Man’, which Rose remembered had been all the rage last summer. Nobody was playing it now, so she had probably come into a scene that had happened about a year ago.
She was on a beach, but it was not at all like Newcome beach. This was a narrow sheltered cove, bounded by rocks on each side and a high cliff which had steps leading to the top. The people were nothing like the Newcome beach family either. There didn’t seem to be any love between them, or enjoyment of each other’s company.
Rose’s girl Joanne was sulky and embittered. Derek was a sharp-faced little whiner. Their parents were an unattractive, dissatisfied pair whom Joanne despised. The grandmother was like a disapproving toad.
Why had they bothered to come to this small rocky beach, on which they found fault with everything? The sea was polluted. There were too many rocks, no shrimp in the pools, the stones hurt their feet. The day was too hot, too cold, nothing like last summer. Joanne had forgotten to bring her Walkman, with which she could isolate herself from the aggravation of her family. Gran’s beach chair was uncomfortable.
‘All right,’ Joanne told her. ‘I carried it down for you, but you can carry it back up those rotten steps yourself.’
‘Don’t talk to your gran like that,’ her father said. ‘What’s the matter with you? I’m working myself into the grave to give you kids the best of everything.’
‘Here we go.’ Joanne began to play an imaginary violin.
‘Give you a lovely holiday.’
‘In a leaky caravan, thanks for nothing. Gives me claustrophobia, shut up in there with you lot.’
Joanne sat down with her back to them and began to make sand castles moodily with Derek’s spade and bucket, tipping them out, smashing them, filling the bucket again.
Rose disliked the thoughts that were going through Joanne’s head, sour thoughts, burdened with self-pity, resentment against her family. Some of the thoughts were all too familiar: ‘No one understands me.’ ‘Everything I do is wrong, so why bother?’
Everyone had those occasionally, and Rose and Abigail had decided that if you didn’t, there was something abnormal about you. But you didn’t live permanently with all those ‘Nobody understands me’ thoughts. They came and went.
But Joanne seemed to be abnormal the other way. Her thoughts of hate were black and brooding. They were not just a reaction to something said or done. They were with her all the time, like sick background music acompanying her everywhere, and the worst part was that behind the dirge was something even worse: ‘I hate myself.’
‘Take that pullover off, Joanne, and get your fat body into the sea.’
‘You should talk.’
Joanne’s mother was standing in all the stout glory of a violently flowered swimsuit, out of which bits of her poked and bulged. ‘Come on, dear.’ She pulled her husband to his feet. He was as skinny as she was fat, with a hollow, hairless chest and swimming trunks that were too big for him. What a pair. Joanne sat hunched in the pullover that was boiling hot, but couldn’t take it off.
‘Come on, Joanne, I said.’
‘Not now.’
‘Don’t want to use the same bathwater as us? Derek!’ Waddling into the sea like a flowered pig, the mother turned and sent back a commanding shriek that echoed off the cliff and sent a large bird flapping out to sea.
‘Bleep-bleep.’ The child did not look up from where he lay on his stomach.
‘No use expecting him to do anything as healthy as swimming.’ The father stood with his bony white ankles in the water, thin arms wrapped round him, shivering. ‘Next year, let’s go to the Costa del Sol.’ (Some hope, Joanne thought to herself.) ‘Then I dare say he’ll want to spend all his time in the casino.’
‘Why doesn’t he make a sandcastle?’ The grandmother swung her toad face round to Derek and munched her toothless jaws. ‘Here I’ve bought him a lovely bucket and spade and he’s never touched it. And me a pensioner. I should have saved my money.’
‘And your breath.’ Joanne spun the spade over to her across the small patch of pebbly sand between the rocks. ‘Dig a grave and climb into it.’
Even Rose, who was always being told off for cheek, was shocked by that. Her own grandmother, her father’s mother, would have strode across the beach and clouted her. But in this family nobody turned a hair. The grandmother put half a Mars bar into her mouth and went to sleep. Joanne threw the red plastic bucket up among the rubbish at the foot of the cliffs. She wished she could really shock them, and wake them out of their awfulness. Pity she didn’t know that she had shocked Rose, at least.
When the parents came back from their swim and were eating buns and drinking beer, Joanne wandered down to the sea and sat on a rock and pretended to be a mermaid. She stretched out her legs, ankles crossed close together, and shook back her long hair, but she didn’t feel seduc
tive, even if there had been any sailors out at sea.
She stared unhappily at the endless expanse of ocean. To Rose’s horror, the thought came into Joanne’s head that she would walk far out into the water, and see if anybody cared. She would keep on walking into the sea, which was grey and featureless like her soul, a blank nothing. Even the boats had the sense to stay away from it. There was nothing between Joanne and the horizon but a large buoy with a black and white marker flag, and a grey gull that swerved, dropped, and landed on the buoy for a moment before he spread his powerful wings and went on out towards the horizon. All right for him. He was lightness and freedom. Joanne was lead.
‘Joanne – Joanne! What’s the matter, are you deaf? Give up that sulking and come back here.’
‘I’m not sulking.’ Joanne went slowly back up the beach to where her parents were packing up and tossing crumpled paper and plastic among the rocks. ‘I was observing the beauties of nature, which is more than you morons will ever do.’
‘Shut your mouth and carry this bag up the stairs. It’s going to rain.’
‘Carry it yourself,’ Joanne told her father. ‘I didn’t eat any of it, so why should I—’
‘All right, then you can help Gran up the steps. Get behind her, so she doesn’t fall. Come on, Gran. I’ll give you a hand from above.’
For the next few minutes, all Rose could see was the wide spread of Gran’s rear view toiling up the steps while the front end gasped and panted. From time to time, Joanne gave her a rough boost, which prompted, ‘Oh, my heart! Oh, let me rest!’ From the top of the cliff, the father put down his hand and pulled her up the last few steps.
‘Oh look.’ Gran turned to see how far she had climbed. ‘Derek’s left his bucket behind. Cost me three pound, that set did. Joanne, go down and fetch it.’
‘He left it, he can get it.’
‘Naow – I’m afraid,’ the child whined, although he had run up and down the steps shouting several times, when he had been told to keep quiet and not wake Gran.
‘Go down at once, Joanne.’ Her mother’s bulk blocked the skyline.
Cry of a Seagull Page 3