She was back where she had started. Instead of escaping to Favour, she had been flung by the Lord and his fellow devils on through the centuries, forward into her own time and place.
Her body was weak and her head ached. She felt dazed and shaky. Her legs were like jelly. She would never make it home.
Somehow she got herself down the track and managed to stagger along the road as far as Hazel’s house. She rang the bell and was leaning against the back door when Hazel opened it, so that she would have fallen on the kitchen floor if Hazel had not caught her.
‘Rose – what on earth?’
Hazel put her on to a chair at the table, where she had been reading a magazine and eating crisps.
‘Sorry, Hay. I came up to ask you – ask you something.’ What was it? ‘And then for some reason, I felt a bit faint.’
‘I hope you haven’t got flu.’ Hazel moved her chair farther away. ‘You look rotten.’
‘Working too hard I expect.’ Rose managed a weak smile.
‘That hotel will kill you,’ Hazel said placidly.
Hotel. Yes, of course. That was the excuse for being here. Rose told Hazel about the lunch, and Hazel agreed to come and be a waitress, if her mum would let her, and Mrs Riggs agreed that she could – if she was really any use to Wood Briar.
‘They like my work, Mummy.’
‘Glad someone does.’
‘Why do you always—’
‘Oh, please,’ Rose interrupted. The old familiar argument throbbed in her head like kettledrums. ‘Could you ring Dad and ask him to come and get me?’
Next day, Rose felt all right again, although terribly discouraged, and nobody suspected what she had been through. Nobody could have imagined such a nightmare anyway, except Mr Vingo. He was still away, alas, or he might have been able to help Rose to find Favour by playing the piano so that she could hear the enchanted tune.
Abigail came over to talk to him about the song they were going to perform together on Sunday, an old number especially chosen for Mr and Mrs Yardley’s Golden Wedding, the favourite tune of their courting days. Abigail had brought her guitar.
‘Well, why is he suddenly not here?’ Abigail was not as understanding as Rose about Mr Vingo’s mysterious disappearances. ‘If we’re gonna do a great job on ‘Me and My Girl’, I’ve got to work with him to organize my chords.’
‘Well, play it anyway,’ Rose said. Once before, when Abigail had played the flute, it had brought Favour’s tune with it. ‘Give me a run through and I’ll criticize.’
‘Like hell you will.’ Sitting on Rose’s bed, Abigail slung the brightly-coloured guitar strap over her shoulder. ‘You’ll listen in awe-struck silence.’
I’ll listen for Favour’s tune, Rose thought. Abigail tuned the guitar, strummed a few chords and began to sing.
‘The bells are ring – ing
For me and my girl.
The birds are sing – ing
For me and my girl.
Everybody’s been know – ing
To a wedding they’re go – ing …’
Abigail’s voice was not powerful, but true, and her American version of cockney added an unusual touch. But no hint of the seductive tune from the moor curled through the song. Rose kept expecting it to soar upwards through her head, but the song stayed on an earthly level, a popular ditty, brisk and disappointing.
When Abigail had attacked the final chords and finished with a flourish, Rose could not help saying, ‘It’s not right!’
‘It is so right. I took the chords and fingering out of the golden oldies book. It just needs a bit of co-ordination with the piano.’
‘Sing it again, Ab.’
‘Not on your life. You don’t appreciate great classical music.’
Everyone was caught up in the plans and preparation for the lunch, and they tried to get as much done as possible before Mollie came back. Even The General began to agree that perhaps – just perhaps – they might get away with it. They decorated the back lounge with streamers and helium balloons. Emerald green tablecloths, old Mrs Yardley’s favourite colour, were laid cornerwise over the white cloths. Silver and glasses were polished. Wine was cooling in the cellar. Hilda spent a whole day making trifles, and Samson Flite kept turning up with artistic and luscious mousses and aspics and pies to put in the spare refrigerator. Everyone was at a high pitch of excitement. Rose pretended to be caught up in it, but inside she was ravaged by nagging anxiety.
Gully might have found a little rainwater in the bucket, but how long could a donkey live without food? If that front leg was broken, the bone might come through the skin and turn septic. If the donkey was never found alive, what would happen to the old man, whose central focus and reason for living would be lost?
It was Rose’s job on Friday night to wind up all the hotel clocks that were not electric.
When Mrs Ardis found the hall clock stopped on Saturday morning, she announced, ‘I smell trouble.’
Rose could not be bothered to say, ‘I forgot.’ She took the flowered cloth off the table by the hall window seat and went outside into the fresh morning to shake it out on the front steps. Off the end of Sandy Neck the glass windscreen of a fishing boat caught the early sun and winked it cheerily back at her.
‘You know what they say,’ Mrs Ardis was droning when she came back. ‘A stopped clock can mean a stopped life.’ Gully? Old Arthur Reade?
‘What on earth are you talking about, Mrs A?’ Rose was in no mood to play up to Mrs Ardis’s psychic dramas.
‘I don’t want to worry you, but when someone in the family is gravely ill and a clock stops, it could mean bad news.’
The telephone rang.
‘There you are.’ Mrs Ardis nodded towards it.
It was Mollie. Rose’s heart jumped with fear.
‘Is – how’s Grandpa?’
‘All right.’
‘Oh, thank God.’
‘Don’t worry about him, darling. He’s fine. Complaining a mile a minute, and he was rude to the doctor. But the bad news is that neither Ted nor Di can come this weekend after all, so I can’t leave.’
‘Then we can’t have the lunch party.’ Rose’s father had picked up the extension phone.
‘You must go ahead with it, Philip. You can’t disappoint the Yardleys at the last minute.’
‘Can’t be done without you.’ Philip was firm, and for a moment Rose felt guiltily relieved, because she was so preoccupied with the plight of the donkey.
But when her mother pleaded, ‘Oh, Phil, surely you can manage,’ Rose cut in strongly with, ‘Of course we can. We must. They’ve paid a deposit. Everything’s almost ready anyway. Don’t go feeble on us now, Dad.’ She made her face into a smile, but she couldn’t make her voice smile. ‘We’ll be all right.’
And they were. The Golden Wedding lunch was a raving success. Even Rose’s father had to admit that. The food was wonderful. The waitresses in their frilly aprons made no mistakes – not even Smasher. Ben had gone away with his father for a couple of days, but Mr Vingo turned up just in time and put on a white shirt and a dark suit that Rose didn’t know he had, and performed as the wine waiter, breathing hard over the guests’ right shoulders as he filled their glasses. The elder Yardleys beamed with pleasure, and all their family and friends seemed relaxed and happy.
When the dessert plates were cleared away and coffee was poured, the speeches of congratulation began. Peter Yardley had promised to propose the health of the waitresses, so to avoid being embarrassed, Rose nipped out to the scullery to help with the monstrous pile of washing up.
From the lounge, she heard the opening notes of Mr Vingo at the piano, then Abigail’s guitar joined in, and in a moment, her voice, plunging jauntily into ‘Me and My Girl’, to cheers and applause.
But to Rose, it wasn’t ‘Me and My Girl’. It was Favour’s tune at last, sung sweetly in Abigail’s voice, with words that were no ordinary words, but instantly recognizable to Rose.
She tore off her l
ong kitchen apron, wiped her hands on it, and slipped out of the back door without anyone noticing. She was headed down the garden for the back gate to the wood, until she realized that the beckoning tune was behind her, not ahead.
She ran round the side of the hotel and across the road to the dunes. Favour might be among the sand hills. He might be galloping towards her along the beach, or surging up out of the sea.
Favour, oh, Favour. You are going to take me to where Gully is, so that I can save him.
From the top of a hillock, she plunged down to cross a hollow, tripped over something, or was tripped, and rolled down in the soft sand to the bottom of the hollow, and over and over to a deeper, darker place far below it, where she landed at the feet of the Lord of the Moor.
She saw the pointed toe of his high-heeled boot. A wickedly sharp spur was inches from her face.
‘So, you dared to come back for more.’ His voice was a cold fury. ‘We let you off latht time, but thith ith the end of it!’
‘Yes – this is it!’ Rose knew that at last the climax of her adventure was near. ‘Let me through!’
She was scrambling to her feet when he knocked her down again and put his foot on the back of her neck.
‘Thith time there is no ethcape. It’s too late, Rose of all the world,’ he said softly, in a terrible parody of Mr Vingo’s name for her. ‘There is no world for you now.’
With the weight of his foot on her neck, Rose’s face was being ground into the sand. It was blocking her eyes, her nose and mouth. She could not breathe. Help me, Favour! She would die here in this deep place under the dunes, and no one would ever find her, because in their time and space, she would be under the drifted sand that had piled up higher and higher over the years.
With a despairing effort, she managed to turn her head just enough to get a gasp of air, and squirmed her body sideways, kicking and struggling. Her outstretched hand found a piece of driftwood and she raised it above her head and crashed it against the leg that held her down.
The Lord gave a piercing yell, a sort of whistling cry of anguish. He staggered, and his weight lifted just enough for Rose to pull herself free and roll away from him. Panting and sobbing and coughing up sand, she crawled away up a dark slope, and half fell, half ran down the other side, and into the blessed sunlight.
The horse was waiting for her on the beach. She hurled herself at him, and somehow managed to pull herself on to his back. He turned his head to nudge her foot, and his grey eye was full of light and moving colours and distant spaces. He swung his head round again, tossed it in the air and took off over the sea.
The movement of his flight became the rocking of a boat. Rose was on the sea, sitting on a lobster pot in the stern of a large fishing boat, behind an open wheelhouse in which a burly man in oilskins and heavy boots was steering.
The sun was in his face, and he shaded his eyes with a large brown hand.
‘When we get round the point, I’ll head in towards the bluff,’ he said.’
‘You’ll have to go forward, Jean, and see if you can spot any of our markers. If we miss any of the pots, I don’t trust some of those sharp newcomers not to haul ’em up.’
‘I’ll be there, Dad.’ Jean, who was also Rose, although she didn’t know it, was splicing the ends of two ropes together. She seemed younger than Rose, but she moved her small fingers in a deft and nimble way that Rose could never aspire to, although she had remembered the round turn and two half hitches from the Princess Vicky, and demonstrated this with modest pride to Ben and his father when they tied up the dinghy.
Jean wiped her nose on the back of her hand and looked up from her work towards the land. She always liked to see the hotel that stood there beyond the dunes, because it had twisted chimneys and bits of roof at different angles, and funny little gables and porches and balconies stuck on in odd places.
Jean lived with her divorced mother in a high rise block of flats near London, and when she came to stay with her father, she lived with him and her grown-up brother in a modern house of no beauty. Some day, she would live in the kind of funny old house that looked from a distance as if a child had built it out of blocks, and stuck bits on at random.
Someone came out of the front door of the hotel and shook out a cloth. Rose jumped up in amazement – at least, her spirit did. Her body, which was Jean’s, remained sitting on the lobster pot.
She was seeing herself! The tiny far-off figure that shook the cloth and went back indoors was Rose Wood. Jean must be on the fishing boat that Rose had seen yesterday, glinting in the early sun off Sandy Neck.
When the boat was round the point and past the marsh and approaching the bluff that rose from the sea to the higher cliff coastline beyond, Jean went to the forward well to stand in the bow like a figurehead and try to spot the green and blue striped polystyrene blocks that marked her father’s lobster pots. Only one more week of holidays and then back to the high rise and school and her mother, who now had a boy friend, Roger, whom Jean couldn’t stand. She and her mother fought a lot, but when Jean asked, ‘Why can’t I go and live with Dad, like Bobby does?’, her mother said, ‘Because I need you here, that’s why,’ although she was always nattering with Roger about what a nuisance Jean was.
Jean and Rose saw a green and blue block, and then another and another, quite close together. Jean gave a shout that was a mixture of ‘oy’, ‘ho’ and ‘whoa’.
Her father slowed the boat. As it came alongside a bobbing block, Jean hooked the line on the block over the drum of the winch and wound it up until the lobster pot came over the side, dripping seaweed, with some odd shelly creatures clinging to the outside of the slats, and a lobster and a few spider crabs inside.
Jean put on a heavy pair of gloves. Rose was terrified as she put her hand inside the wooden cage and fished out a lobster, but Jean knew how to hold it at the back of its head, so that the frenziedly waving claws would not nip her. She measured the length of its head with a metal caliper, grunted at it, slipped rubber bands over the pincers to keep them together, and threw the lobster into a tank of water. She dropped the crabs overboard and threw the lobster pot after them.
It was a lovely job. Rose was thrilled to be a part of it. When they were in the middle of their fishing ground, Jean’s father let the engine idle and he and she worked together, hardly speaking, but enjoying each other’s company, communicating with the odd word or grunt.
Some of the lobsters were too small and had to be thrown back in the sea, but after an hour they had a pretty good catch on board, and Jean’s monosyllabic father was moved to say, ‘Bring me luck, you do, girl.’
‘So why can’t I stay and live with you?’
‘And grow up to be a fisherman? You’ve got to do better than that.’
‘I won’t, if I stay with Mum.’
‘We’ve been into that.’ He threw a large blue-black lobster into the tank. ‘Don’t start on me, girl.’
His nice, rugged face looked unhappy. Jean knew that the Law had given her to her mother three years ago when they were divorced.
‘If I’m really bad,’ she speculated, ‘perhaps Mum will chuck me back at you.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Her father passed a hand over his face. ‘Just get on with the job.’
When they had hauled up all their lobster pots, they were quite a way beyond the bluff.
‘Have to move these pots soon,’ Jean’s father said. ‘The yacht club people will be putting their marker flag out again opposite Pebble Cove for the summer races.’
He turned the boat round, and when they were clear of the fishing ground he picked up speed and they went fast back towards the harbour with their catch.
Jean thought about the breakfast she would cook when the work was done, and the lobsters loaded into the lorry that would carry them to market. Rose thought of them as ‘poor lobsters’, but Jean didn’t, because she was a lobsterman’s daughter.
She sat on the aft deck and leaned against the side and
shut her eyes. She had got up at five.
‘Sleepy?’ Her father looked back at her and grinned.
‘No.’ She opened her eyes. If he wasn’t, she wasn’t. But her eyes closed again.
Rose woke sitting in the sand, leaning against a hump in a hollow of the dunes. What? It was always a shock to come back to her own world and her own self. Jean and the lobster boat – that was yesterday. This was today. She had flown with the horse to find the donkey, and what had she learned? Nothing. True, she had been at sea, but what had lobster pots to do with Gully?
She dusted herself off and shook out her hair and wiped a sleeve across her face. Had she imagined a fantasy of being nearly suffocated by the Lord of the Moor?
You don’t know what’s what any more, she told herself critically.
She ran back to the hotel and in through the back door to put on her apron again and join the scullery crew who were scrubbing baking tins and scraping plates and loading the dishwasher.
‘Where you bin?’ Abigail asked her.
‘Dad wanted me.’ Rose turned away, afraid that she would cry, because she had not found Gully. She put her fingers to her eyes and pressed them, which sometimes worked to force tears back. Her eyelashes were gritty, as if her face had been pushed into the sand.
At the sink, with her hands in greasy water, Rose looked up and saw that the brown donkey was beginning to appear in the steamy window. The steam cleared, and she saw him lying down, a dark mound among the dark rocks. His long ears drooped sideways. His eyes closed, white nose resting on the sand.
He couldn’t be dead – he mustn’t be dead – but how much longer could he survive? Even his desert origins could not keep him alive without water.
The window began to steam up again, but the sight of Gully in his terrible plight stirred her to a revelation.
‘The marker flag,’ Jean’s father had said, ‘for the summer racing.’
The Yacht Club people didn’t just stick a flag in the sea. It would have to be on a moored buoy. Could it be the buoy with the black and white flag that Joanne had watched from the shore? That had been last summer. The marker would have been out then.
Cry of a Seagull Page 11