The Messenger

by Monica Dickens

  On Moonlight, there were always two moving parts, her and the five-legged horse, and they never meshed to move in unison. With this horse she was part of him, and he of her. It went on for ever. The wind roared by, and the sensation of speed and rhythmic power put her into a kind of trance, through which she became aware of a voice, echoing far away at first, then closer and sharper.

  ‘Felicity! Fe-li-ci-tee! Help me! Help – Police!’

  Her hand was on the latch of a small iron gate, a latch that felt familiar to her thumb as she pushed it down and opened the front gate of the annexe house. Was it the annexe house? The front garden was nothing but rank grass and overgrown bushes. The tangled ivy was pulling away from the walls and straggling across the window where the old woman poked out her grey, disordered head and shouted, ‘Help! He’s killing me!’

  ‘She’s at it again.’ A stout woman came through the gate behind Rose in a square fur coat and round fur hat, and shouted up at the window, ‘Take it easy, Mum – it’s only Joan and Felicity!’

  The old woman shrieked like a seagull and disappeared suddenly from the window, as if someone had pulled her.

  The stout woman was Rose’s mother. She knew that. Just as she knew that she was not Rose, but Felicity, with long silky hair that hung in front of her leather jacket, and the kind of tight black trousers and shiny pointed boots that Rose would never wear. Curious. She was Rose and Felicity at the same time. Felicity was walking and talking. Rose was observing.

  The upper window banged shut. ‘Nothing changes,’ Felicity’s mother sighed. ‘Oh well. Better get in and get it over with.’

  Felicity walked up the weed-choked path to the peeling brown front door, but it was Rose who observed with surprise that the big blue and white sign – ‘Wood Briar Hotel’ – was gone from next door, and the old black and gold sign – ‘The Cavendish’ – was back, slightly lopsided, along the front edge of the verandah roof.

  After a long time, the door was opened by a thickset old man with humped shoulders, his lower lip pushed up above the top one to reach his broad nose in a sniff.

  ‘Hullo, Dad,’ his daughter Joan said, falsely bright.

  He grunted, and Felicity said, ‘Hullo, Grandpa,’ with natural cheerfulness, because for some reason she quite liked the old man and felt sorry for him.

  He did not answer this either, but turned and shuffled, with his brown cardigan humped up short at the back, through the hall to a dark panelled room with a sulking fire in the small grate.

  He sat down in a sunken leather armchair. Joan sat down without taking off her coat or her pale fur hat, and rubbed her hands. She had short thick brindle curls like a poodle, over a face that was broad like the old man’s, but flushed with crimson veins from the cold, while his was pale and grey, as if he lived under a stone.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ she said, still trying to jolly him along.

  ‘And about time too,’ he grumbled.

  ‘That’s what you always say when we do come. No wonder …’ She bit her lip. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Where’s your brother Mark?’

  ‘You know he’s in Venezuela. Really Dad.’ She bit her lip and tried again. ‘How’s Mum?’

  ‘Mad as a hatter.’ He chuckled in a grisly way. ‘You’ll see. I forbade her to come down.’

  ‘Shall we go up to her?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said in a sneering way. ‘She’ll come down, worse luck.’

  Felicity knelt on the worn carpet in front of the fire, carefully, because of the crease in her trousers, and poked at the sluggish fire. It needed wood to rekindle it, and more coal, so she took the empty scuttle and went out through the kitchen to the coal shed.

  The kitchen was dark, with dark wood cabinets and the terrible marbled linoleum, like the cover of an exercise book, that Rose remembered the decorators tearing up to put down the bright mosaic tiles. Outside, the bare grey apple trees had broken branches, and long coarse grass and weeds struggling up their trunks like fetters. A tree had blown down and lay on the grass, with an upper branch poking a ragged hole in the coal shed.

  The door of the shed had lost a hinge. Beyond the small pile of coal, the accumulation of years of tools and broken mowers and old crusted paint pots were cluttered up and draped with cobwebs.

  Coming out with the coal, Rose saw the back of the hotel next door. Through a broken slat of the fence, she could see a prim garden with gravel paths leading nowhere, and signs that said, ‘GUESTS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO … etc.’ A cross-looking waiter in a black tail coat and bow tie came out of the back door and lit a cigarette. On the doors and windows was the ugly yellow-green paintwork that Rose’s father had said looked like vomit when they bought The Cavendish four years ago.

  Was it more than four years ago now? Was that it? Had she gone back in time? Rose was puzzled, but not afraid, that was the most puzzling thing about it. She felt quite at home being Felicity, neat and slim in her pointed boots, carrying the coal into the depressing kitchen with its sink and wooden draining board full of dirty china and saucepans. Yet she was still Rose, noting from a grease-smeared calendar stuck to the wall with a safety pin, that yes, it was five years ago.

  Because she was Felicity, she knew that her grandfather had once been a successful political cartoonist, until he dropped out of style and had to take jobs he hated to support his family. He had grown more bitter, and now seemed to have holed himself up in his study at the back of the house, with the dusty curtains drawn across the French windows because his eyes could not stand the light. Bits of his clothing, outer and underwear, were strewn about. The desk was cluttered with papers and books and medicine bottles and filthy ashtrays and cups half full of cold tea. Piles of newspapers were on all the chairs. There was nowhere for Felicity to sit, so she sat on the floor by the resuscitated fire, which her grandfather complained was baking him.

  He went through a string of complaints and criticisms against the house, the hotel next door, the government, the weather, and various members of his family, with particular reference to Joan’s husband. Her face got redder as she got more annoyed. His only pleasure seemed to be to goad her. But when Felicity said, ‘Come off it, Grandpa. Just because Daddy beat you at golf twenty years ago – ,’ her mother snapped at her, ‘Don’t laugh at him!’ and they all sat and scowled at each other.

  Felicity fidgeted and sulked and flipped her long hair back and forth and finally got up with an impatient snort and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. She made some toast, and burned it under the awkward grill of the old gas stove. While she was scraping it at the sink, she suddenly felt very sad and hopeless. Holding on to the edge of the sink, in the same spot where Rose had wept over the broken yellow cups, she had to keep her eyes stretched wide open so as not to let tears wash away her eye make-up.

  I’m so stupid. But she shook back her head and flipped her hair behind her shoulders and then smoothed it forward again in her habitual preening gesture, and went back to the study.

  ‘Shall I bring the tray in here?’

  ‘No, no, no.’ The old man’s chin went up and down. ‘I don’t want crockery all over my books,’ although there were smeared glasses and dirty cups with teaspoons in them on every flat surface, which is why Felicity had not been able to find any spoons in the kitchen.

  She picked up the tin tray with its scarred picture of an ancient regiment in India, which she remembered since she was tiny, and carried it across the hall to the dining-room. As she kicked open the door, she almost dropped everything.

  Her grandmother was sitting at the table wearing a green satin dress with ruffles, and a large pink artificial flower pinned into the nest of her hair.

  ‘Give you a surprise, eh dear?’ she said quite normally.

  Felicity put down the regimental tray and bent to kiss the air an inch away from the patchily powdered face, which had scarlet lipstick on one side of the mouth only. The other side was mauve, and the knotted hands were blue with cold. The old lady sm
elt of stale scent and vinegar and damp underwear.

  ‘Waiting for my tea like a good girl, eh?’ She smiled childishly up at Felicity and then winced the smile into fear and drew back, as the old man shambled into the room and asked her, ‘What the hell are you rigged out like that for? You look like a clown at a funeral.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I get dressed up when my dear ones come? Hullo, Joan dear. How you’ve grown.’

  ‘At fifty, Mum, I’ve stopped growing,’ Joan said, ‘unless you mean sideways.’

  The old lady behaved quite well, chattering in what sounded a normal way, except that the words did not make sense. When her husband said, ‘Shut up,’ and threw the only teaspoon at her, she shut up, and began to eat stale biscuits very fast, licking her long blue fingers to pick up the crumbs. Her fingers were so thin that a ring with a heavy carved green stone swivelled loosely.

  Felicity, who was on a diet, ate only half a piece of toast, which was disappointing to Rose. Her mother began to tap her foot, always a bad sign. The grandfather swilled tea noisily.

  ‘I suppose you’ll all be mobbing in here for Christmas,’ he said ungraciously.

  ‘Not this year, Dad.’ Joan had a way of shouting at him, although he was not deaf.

  ‘You always come at Christmas.’

  ‘That’s why we’re not coming this year.’

  The old man pushed up his lip. The old woman looked anxiously back and forth between him and Joan, the pink flower wobbling.

  ‘I’ll come,’ Felicity said impulsively. ‘I like the beach in winter.’

  ‘I have other plans,’ her mother said warningly.

  ‘I’ll come on my own.’

  ‘You know you don’t want to.’ Joan reddened under the fur hat, which had ridden up high on her thick springy hair, like a cheese soufflé. ‘You’re just trying to curry favour.’

  ‘I’m not!’ Felicity shouted and jumped up.

  The grandmother shrieked, and her chair tipped backwards against the wall, and her hands flew up, sending her cup flying with them.

  ‘Shut up, damn you!’ The grandfather cursed at her, as she went on shrieking, and the shrieks filled Rose’s head, dizzying her. She put her hands over her silken hair to cover her ears, and shut her eyes against her mother’s disgust and her grandfather’s anger, and the mad old woman’s fearful face with the eyes rolled back, and spun dizzily away, away …

  Rose opened her eyes to find herself lying on the ground with her hands over her short hair, a few yards away from the edge of the lake where the valley ought to be.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘You’re back early,’ her father said. When she put the bike away, he was at the other end of the shed, which he had rigged up as a summer work room.

  ‘I thought I was terribly late.’ Rose had run for home in a sort of daze, her legs navigating the moor by themselves, and had almost ridden all the nuts and bolts off her bicycle, jolting it headlong through the wood.

  ‘Concert no good?’

  ‘It was smashing.’ She had to say that, because he had prophesied that it would be a third-rate group of degenerate local yobbos, splitting the air like chain saws.

  ‘So you left early. Fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five.’ He was counting coloured wine gums out of a large jar.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she lied. On the way home, she had planned to explain her lateness by saying that the concert was long and she and Hazel had stopped to get something to eat.

  ‘It must have been mercifully short.’

  Rose looked at her watch. She had been at least three hours at her grandfather’s house – Felicity’s grandfather’s house. Her watch showed that it was only about an hour since she had left Hazel at the concert.

  ‘Dad.’ He knew all the answers. Perhaps he could explain this.

  ‘Sixty-two, sixty-four …’

  Rose hung about in the work room, looking at the scales and the lighted magnifying glass and the photographs of past triumphs, like a doughnut-shaped pillow, and a rocking-horse, and a chocolate bar, which his research had proved to be bad for you.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Eighty-five, eighty-six – got em!’

  ‘Got who?’

  ‘Total weight of contents: 440 grams. Weight of single piece: 4.54 grams. Calculate for me, Rose. How many wine gums should be in the jar to make the weight claimed on the label?’

  ‘Why not weigh them all together?’ Rose’s mind was far away from mathematics.

  ‘Because the weight of the mass differs, according to distribution and the space between each, from the multiplied weight of a single piece. What was it you wanted?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘But you had your fists clenched.’ He sometimes noticed more than you thought.

  She unclenched them and went into the hotel. Up in her room, she changed her jeans for her waitress skirt, and stood in front of the mirror to see if she looked anything like Felicity. How did she know what Felicity looked like? She didn’t, only what she felt like. Rose’s hair, which needed cutting, was at odds and ends, with a few bits of dead grass in it from the moor. She picked them out, then made Felicity’s flipping movements. Perhaps she would let her hair grow long. But then she would have to tie it back in the kitchen and the dining-room. Felicity would never have been allowed to flip her hair about over the food in this hotel.

  Rose sighed, and tied her check apron round her waist, and went slowly down to help make sandwiches for tea (teatime was long over at the old man’s house), pondering as she trod on each step, trying to puzzle it out, as her father would if she gave the whole thing to him as a mathematical problem.

  By the next day, she had already forgotten some of it, which did not seem to be right. Obey the horse, Mr Vingo had said. So she had gone to the valley and braved her way through those dreadful shapes and voices in the mist – or had she imagined them because she was afraid? She had flown with the horse where he wanted, and, in some dreamlike way, he had travelled her five years back through time and deposited her in the house next door, among those – those awful people. They weren’t really awful though, as individuals. They were just awful together.

  The old man was dead now. So was the old woman – he drove her to it, the Miss Mumfords had said – her eyes permanently rolled back in her head, as Rose had last seen her. What had they got to do with Rose, or she with them? Was the old man haunting the annexe now, because Mollie had made his dingy study into a bright comfortable little lounge? Or was it the old woman, because he had made her so unhappy there? Was there something Rose had forgotten? If she could just remember more about it, she might understand.

  When the customers were out of the annexe rooms, she went across to help Gloria make the beds.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ Gloria called down from upstairs, as she heard Rose come in at the kitchen door.

  Rose yoo-hooed back, but did not go up at once. These yellow cupboard doors, where the paint had not come out bright enough, had been dark wood. The calendar was up here. She felt for the hole made by the safety pin, but it was painted over. This shining sink had replaced the old stone one that Felicity had hung on to and tried not to cry. The same place where Rose had cried when she broke the cups, back then in the spring before she was thirteen, when life already seemed difficult and complicated. But those were the good old easy days, compared to now.

  She went through to the hall. The door to the front bedroom was the door Felicity had kicked open, carrying the tin tray. The old woman had been so cold in there. Cold … so was Rose, when she slept there with Hazel. Here was where the old man’s study had been. This wide brick fireplace had been his cramped old iron grate. Beyond the open glass doors, she saw the flat stump of the tree that had fallen against his toolshed, rising above the mown grass.

  ‘Rowze!’

  ‘Coming!’

  Where was the horse? Was he only in her head, as Rose had been inside Felicity’s silken head, looking down at the sophisticated boots? What colour were those
tight trousers? Rose was forgetting. She must go back there. She must find the horse again. She walked out across the moor, following a track to the right, towards Noah’s Bowl, but she could not find the dark wet rock, or the valley. Had it all been just a single weird experience that would fade as she got older, and be mistaken for a dream? Would she never hear that tune any more, never again take that flying ride with the horse? She could not quite remember now how it had happened, how she had got on his back, how he had galloped through the air; only its intense and thrilling joy.

  She even went up the crooked stairs to Mr Vingo’s empty room, to try to pick out the tune on his piano. The door was locked on the outside, to foil any burglar who got in through the window. Mrs Ardis had made the bed up clean and tidied some of his things into piles of her own choosing. Books and a biscuit tin and his domino set and a hairbrush and a bottle of blackcurrant syrup. Shoes and a sweater and crumpled music pages scribbled over and crossed out, and a map and a pair of socks and a cheap white tin horse in mediaeval trappings, part of a set of toy knights, without his knight.

  The marmalade piano was shut. Tilting slightly on the uneven floor, it looked like a horse resting one back leg while it waited to be used again. Rose approached it carefully and opened the lid. Softly, she tried to find the tune with one finger. Da da dee – going up like that – no, that wasn’t right. She tried various combinations of black and white notes, but she could not recapture the tune.

  School was over. Ben came back to Wood Briar with his family, and started to teach Rose how to run. He was in training for the 5,000 metre county championships, and Rose was to pace him, running along the beach with him in the early morning, with the low sun pushing their gawky shadows along the sand before them. She could not keep up with him if he ran fast, but he taught her how to breathe and to place her feet and move her arms, and she could stay beside him as far as the stone breakwater.