The Haunting of Bellamy 4

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Someone called Marge something,’ she told Rose. ‘They want to come. Two doubles, two singles for two or three weeks.’

  ‘Normal rates?’ Philip Wood asked sharply.

  ‘Well … there’s six of them.’

  ‘I despair.’ He threw up his hands, slapped them on his knees and stood up. As he crossed the hall, Mrs Ardis the chambermaid came down the stairs with a load of rubbish. The staff were supposed to use the back stairs, but she didn’t.

  ‘We’re not running a hotel now, Mrs Ardis,’ he informed her. ‘It’s a charity home for broken-down actors.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Six.’

  She put down her plastic rubbish bags and breathed heavily. ‘That’s a bad number for group vibrations,’ she grumbled. ‘And actors have split psyches because they’re half themselves and half other people.’ She had a fad for parapsychology this autumn, and was expecting to find a ghost any day at Wood Briar.

  Here Today moved in two days later. Marge, the red-haired woman, was married to bald Frank, who was younger than he looked. Chris was married to Ilona, who was older than she looked, which was not much older than Rose, except for the fantastic earrings. Toby and Tina, the sulky-faced girl who played the guitar, had the single rooms. Dilys, a romantic whose own romances always went wrong, thought they were in love, but Tina was so crabby and touchy and looked so drab without her make-up that no one could be in love with her, least of all Toby.

  The week after Rose saw the show, the school spoiled it by passing out test papers with questions to answer, like, ‘In the sketch “Mystery Tour”, how did the character of the bus driver remind you of Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’” ‘In the moonlight scene, describe the relation between piano, banjo and the dancers. Which set the mood? Which opposed it? What deliberate mistakes did the pianist make?’

  How could anyone answer that? It was the music that counted, and the bodies in movement in and out of the white spotlights. Rose brought her paper home and showed it to the actors after lunch on Saturday, as they were sitting over their coffee after everyone else had left the dining-room.

  Toby groaned. ‘Is that why they let us go to the schools? I didn’t know we were educational.’

  ‘That’s why we got the Arts Council grant to take the show round, you jerk.’ Tina scowled at him. Her forehead had some permanent frown lines. She ought to wear a fringe over it, instead of pulling her lifeless hair back into a rubber band. ‘Even you must know that.’

  ‘I thought it was because we were starving out-of-work geniuses. What’s this mean, Rose?’ Toby read out one of the questions in a French accent. ‘“Dee-scr-r-ribe une scene in each of zees categorees: drama, comedie, zatire.”’ He threw the papers over his shoulder. ‘They’re mad, these people, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad!’

  He jumped up, grabbed Rose’s hands, although she was holding a bundle of napkins, and whirled her round among the tables. ‘Mad, dum dum, mad, dum dum—’ Singing in a high, clear, laughing voice, he charged round with her, nimbly avoiding chairs, switching her away from table corners just in time, turning her laughter to a dizzy bewilderment because now he was singing the sweet lilting notes of the magical tune which was the clarion call of the grey horse Favour.

  His call for her, unexpected as always, cut through her enjoyment of the fun and excitement of having the actors here. It was demanding, inescapable.

  Rose tried to tug her hands free. ‘Let me go, I—’

  ‘Had enough? So have I.’ With one of his lightning switches of mood, Toby dropped into a chair and let her go so suddenly that she staggered.

  ‘You’ve made her dizzy,’ Ilona said, as Rose ran from the room, through the serving pantry and the laundry room, where she dumped the napkins in the basket and tore off her short blue check apron. She opened the back door and ran out over the lawn, through the long grass to the back gate, and pounded down the soft damp path through the little wood with the tune in her head and all her energy reaching forward to him. Favour!

  He wasn’t done with her. He needed her again. Hotel, parents, work, actors, school evaporated. The horse was all that mattered. This was what her life was all about.

  At the end of the wood, not yet breathless, she climbed quickly among the bushes on the slope up to the sheep pasture. She seemed to be able to move faster than usual, and her legs and lungs worked better. Was it all the running she had been doing with her friend Ben when he was training here on the beach, or was it that the power of the horse drew her towards him?

  Over the wall, across the deserted pasture that was muddied and rough after the September rains, easily up on to the top of the high far wall, to stand for a moment with the wind in her face, the wide undulating moor stretching away into its shifting afternoon hues of browns and greys and a distant purple where the sun was already behind the high, distant hills.

  Then she plunged down and along the familiar track in the turf, over the broad well-travelled path that took horses and hikers across the moor, past the pointing arm of the dead tree, to follow the meandering single file sheep track. The cone-shaped hill in front of her disappeared to the left, and suddenly round the corner of a broken wall, close up, was the rock. The huge, dark grey rock was bigger than a man, and about the same shape as Mr Vingo. Its sloping shoulders always seemed to glisten with damp, like a seal, even on a dry day.

  Rose patted it as she went past. ‘Hullo again!’ The rock stood sentinel to what was so strange and yet so familiar, the undergrowth and brambles of thicket through which she must push to reach the shore of the lake called Noah’s Bowl, which she knew was there, but yet would not be there.

  She had dashed out without a jacket or sweater. Her bare arms and her legs under her waitress skirt were scratched and grazed by the spiky dead brushwood of this sunless grove. She struggled out into the open, and the lake wasn’t there. Only the swirling mist in the valley that used to be here before the great flood filled it up into a lake. She put out a foot, felt space beneath it and stepped down – always a long drop, the first step, which brought your stomach and heart to a rendezvous in your throat, until your foot found the stony slope with a thud, and you caught your breath again and went on down.

  This was where the spirits of the evil Lord of the Moor and his brutal soldiers hung about in wait for her, pitting themselves against the horse, terrifying his messenger and trying to pull her back from her shining goal into the murk of corruption and cruelty. The mist through which Rose groped her way down was not so thick this time, but she couldn’t see the vague shapes of the men, nor hear their rough voices or the iron feet of their horses on the stones.

  ‘Where are you?’ she called boldly, and when no answer came to the echo of her voice, she added a shout that started like, ‘Yah-ah-ah!’ and ended up sounding tame and silly as she broke out of the mist and into the dazzling light of the lower valley. There was the bridge over the river that she had to cross, the bridge between her life as Rose Wood and her life as the horse’s messenger.

  On the other side of the valley, the flat rock jutted out, but Favour wasn’t there. Had she mistaken the call? Had she been too eager? But if she hadn’t really heard the tune in Toby’s song, then the lake would still be here, not the valley, nor the mist, nor the bridge and the river. None of that was there in everyday life.

  Better go on. She crossed the worn and slippery planks of the bridge and began to climb the other side uncertainly, looking up at the jutting rock. A crackle of light, a rush of air, a clatter of hoofs, and he was there above her, magnificent on the rock, with his delicate Arab head high on his crested neck, and his grey coat aglow, pulsing from bright to dark, like the coals at the bottom of a well-burned fire. Standing with his feet close under him and his mane and tail blowing like trails of cloud, he stared down the valley to the tiny white fishing shacks and the small boats at anchor.

  He did not look at Rose, but as she scrambled obediently over the pile of rocks beyond and slightly above him, he
turned his head, and she saw herself reflected in his deep liquid eye, with her arms outstretched for the leap on to his back.

  It was thrilling to feel his muscles tensing as he sprang into the air. She leaned forward and twisted her hands in his strong mane and shouted as the flying gallop carried her away to … where? Sometimes he took her to a scene in the past, to inhabit the body and mind of a bygone person. Sometimes she became someone else in her own time; sometimes she lived through a scene of the future that hadn’t happened yet.

  She did not shout, ‘Where are we going?’ She never talked to the horse in words, as she talked to poor old Moonlight at the riding stables, and Favour never talked to her, because although he was a magic being, he was still a horse, which was why he needed humans to do his crusading work on earth.

  There was no need for words anyway. They were one spirit in flight. No need to ask where they were going, because there was no turning back, no saying, ‘No, I don’t want to go there.’ Even if he was transporting her back to the nightmare of the train crash, she had no choice.

  He was there above her…

  ‘It’s what I always say.’ The rush of air in Rose’s ears faded and the woman’s voice grew clear, coming through a half open window, and something went ‘clang’ from inside. Rose was pushing a bicycle up a concrete front path from the street, wearing what felt like a book bag on her back.

  She knew the house. It was at the top of a steep street, a dull, unpromising modern rectangle made of concrete blocks, with a slate roof and regularly spaced flat windows – no bays or gables. It was Hazel’s house, made out of concrete blocks by her father who was a builder. Hazel’s mother had hung flowered curtains and put trellises for roses on the concrete walls, and there were tubs in the concrete front yard with the ugly ginger chrysanthemums Rose had seen last week, but it wasn’t enough to make the house look like anything but a small fortress, spoiling the view of the sea for the house behind, which was a brick cottage, much older and prettier.

  Why had the horse bothered to bring Rose here? She could come here any time, although she didn’t come often, because it was boring. She preferred to be with Hazel at the hotel, where they could do jobs together, and Rose need only hear part of Hazel’s uninspiring conversation while emptying the dishwasher or going back and forth in the dining-room, laying tables.

  Whoever she had become in this scene had walked the bike round to the iron shed at the back of the house before Rose recognized her blunt-toed shoes and the broad dark blue skirt and the yellow anorak.

  Good grief, she was Hazel!

  What a rum affair. She had always wondered what really made Hazel tick, and now she knew that one of the things that motivated Hazel to push her bike up the last steep part of Seaview Street in Newcome Hollow and round to the back of the concrete stockade, and to hurry up the back steps into the kitchen was the expectation of food.

  Hazel was starving. Although Rose could observe the scene as herself, she was also a part of Hazel, and could feel her stomach rumbling like a tube train. Rose wasn’t really hungry, because she had downed a plateful of shepherd’s pie and sprouts while the actors were having their coffee, but it was always nice when one of the characters she became on her journeys had something to eat.

  Hazel wiped the blunt shoes on the mat, took off her book bag and jacket and hung them on a peg, and went like a homing pigeon to the cake tin. She took off the Christmas scene lid and grabbed two cupcakes, one orange, one chocolate. She had finished them before she got through to the front sitting-room, where her mother (Hullo, Mrs Riggs) said ‘Hullo, Hazel, don’t eat anything before tea.’

  Mrs Riggs was the same shape as Hazel, with thick-lensed glasses that made her look as if she were staring. She was wearing the brown and white knitted suit that she had bought marked down at Henley’s sale and had just had her hair permed. It looked stiff and uncomfortable, as if it would rise off her head if it weren’t stuck down by hair spray. Rose knew about the marked down suit and the perm because it was the sort of thing Hazel talked about, which was why her conversation wasn’t exhilarating; but she also knew about it because she was Hazel, and knew that her mother wasn’t happy with the perm and wanted to go back to ‘Ocean Waves’ and ask for a refund, and that Hazel wished she would stop carrying on about it.

  It was strange being someone she knew. That had never happened to Rose on any of the journeys, either in the present time or into the past, on which the horse had taken her to find the clues that would lead her forward step by step on her rescue mission.

  ‘Whose van outside?’ Hazel asked, although the grey van in the road had been marked, ‘George Mollis, Central Heating Engineer’, and George himself was on the floor by the radiator under the front window, trying to knock off the rusted drainage screw.

  ‘How goes it, Hazel?’ George asked, but Hazel turned away to stroke the fat white cat and didn’t say anything. Rose was always on at her to answer people. Now she understood that sometimes she physically couldn’t. She knew Hazel was shy, but had never guessed at the paralysis of shyness that gripped her throat so hard her eyes watered.

  George Mollis didn’t notice, because he was grunting with pliers over the screw and keeping up a running fire of chatter as he worked. Mrs Riggs was sitting on a hard chair watching him, not doing anything. If Rose’s mother had to wait for more than two minutes, she would be reading the paper, or mending pillowcases, or setting up the ironing board to do two or three quick shirts.

  ‘It’s what I always say,’ Hazel’s mother said again. (That was one of the things she always said.) ‘People are funny.’

  ‘You’re right at that,’ George Mollis said. ‘Look what’s going on in this town, right under our very noses. The people want a park with flowers and putting greens, but they don’t want it paid for out of the rates. So Councillor Garland, he says, bulldoze the park and build sheltered housing for the old folk, and now they’re after his blood.’

  Hazel found a chocolate bar behind a picture on the mantelpiece where she had hidden it from her younger brother. When George started on about the Paradise Café, she turned round. They had good chips there.

  ‘Stink?’ George was saying as he changed pliers and attacked the screw again. ‘They wanted me to do some work in their kitchen, but I value my health too much. The floor’s a bog. There’s pans of frying fat that haven’t been thrown out since my grandfather was alive.’

  ‘They make good chips though,’ Hazel said.

  ‘How do you know?’ her mother asked. ‘You’ve never been in there, have you?’

  Hazel and Rose occasionally stopped in at the Paradise for chips on the way home from school, but Rose knew Hazel would say, ‘No, but I heard.’ That was what she would have said herself.

  ‘Ought to close the place down.’ George strained at the screw, his arms bulging and his face scarlet. He was at bursting point, when suddenly – screech! The screw gave way and he sat quickly backwards on the floor as a hiss of hot air shot out of the radiator, followed by stutters of water and bubbles.

  ‘There’s your problem. Air in the pipes.’ He stuffed the pipe with a rag, and rubbed the screw with emery paper and then stroked it lovingly with grease.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s given you so much trouble.’ Mrs Riggs patted her stiff hair, and got up to stare at it in the mirror over the mantelpiece, making a dissatisfied face.

  ‘Nothing to the one I had yesterday. Real old marvel, that was, in Bellamy Ward, up at the hospital. Hadn’t been drained or even turned on for years. Between you and me, that hospital wants looking into.’

  ‘That’s what I always say.’ Mrs Riggs sat down again to watch him finish the job. Hazel flopped on to the floor with the cat. Although Rose was fairly solid, she was neat and springy, but when Hazel flopped, it was like dropping one of the concrete blocks of which this house was made. Rose thought they were going to go through the floor.

  ‘Cuts in the National Health,’ George grumbled on, ‘but you’d think in Bell
amy, the kiddie’s ward at least, they’d take some trouble, even if the rest of the place isn’t fit to have your adenoids out in. Talk about dust and spiders. Well, it’s true that old cast iron coil radiator was in Room 4 that’s been used for storage since they took the bed out. Why? It’s a mystery, but the whole hospital is a mystery, if you ask me. There’s sinks in the surgeons’ room where they scrub up before operations that I wouldn’t wash my pots and pans in. No wonder they took off that poor woman’s wrong leg.’ He pulled out the rag and replaced the screw and started to pack up his tools.

  ‘What woman?’ Mrs Riggs stared at him through her glasses which were as thick as the bottoms of milk bottles. ‘Hazel, stop tormenting that cat. Mr Mollis would like to have some tea now. What do you mean, wrong leg?’ she asked him in a lowered voice as Hazel and Rose went out.

  She doesn’t know I’m thirteen, Hazel thought. Not that I want to hear about the stupid woman’s stupid leg, but I don’t want to be shoved out of the room as if I was a baby.

  She loaded a tray clumsily, as she did when she helped Rose at Wood Briar, with the cups tilting on the saucers and the spoons on the wrong side and pointing in the wrong direction. She spilled some milk and picked up the cat, which had followed her, and plumped it down and shoved its face in the spill. She cut her finger slicing cake.

  ‘Damn and blast.’ Hazel wrapped a tissue round it, filled the teapot, crammed a piece of cake from the plate into her mouth, picked up the tray and took it to the front room. Some people gave workmen tea in the kitchen, because they didn’t want them messing up their living-room. Hazel’s mother wouldn’t give them tea in her kitchen, because once you let them get their legs under the table, you never get rid of them.

  As Hazel pushed open the door with her bulky hip, George was telling Mrs Riggs, ‘I know him personally. And it’s common knowlege that his wife – you know.’ He lifted his elbow to signify drinking, but dropped it when Hazel’s tray came rattling and chattering in.

  ‘How you doing at school then, Hazel?’ he asked, as Hazel poured, and Rose felt a blush creep round her jaw and up into her cheeks. ‘Going to be a genius like your brother? Your Mum tells me there’s no stopping him.’