Rose knew Gary Riggs, a vile child who sneaked on Hazel and took money from her purse.
‘We saw a play today, Mummy,’ Hazel said, because she had to say something.
‘You never told me,’ her mother said sharply. ‘You’re so secretive. What was it?’
‘Here Today. They did unmentionable trivials.’ Hazel never got anything quite right.
‘Unmentionable?’ George Mollis threw back his head and laughed, with mashed biscuit on his tongue. ‘Schools have changed since my day.’
‘It can’t have been that.’ Hazel’s mother stared at her crossly. ‘Why do you always mispronounce so stupidly? The best thing I can think is that you might be deaf, and I suppose I should have your ears examined.’
‘Probably got wax in ’em.’ George put down his cup and took the last biscuit but one. ‘Well, I’ll be off. Got to drive out to the engineering plant to pick up some control switches they’re selling off cheap. Don’t sound too good, does it? I heard it said they’re laying off some workers, isn’t it a scandal?’
The engineering plant was where Mr Drew, the father of Rose’s American friend Abigail, was working. Rose tried to will Hazel to stay in the room to hear more, but Hazel took the last biscuit and went out, stomping up the stairs to her room, where she banged the door shut, lay down on the bed and burst into tears of rage and shame.
The door of another upstairs room opened on the sound of radio music, and a moment later Hazel’s brother Gary opened her bedroom door and stuck his crafty face round it, teeth first, because the two front tombstones stuck forward over his lower lip.
‘Mum’s calling you,’ he said in a nasty pious way. ‘Want me to go down and tell her you’re blubbering like a baby with your shoes on the bedspread?’
Hazel tugged off one of the blunt shoes and threw it at his face like a brick. He started downstairs, calling, ‘Mother, I want you – Mother!’ in his sneaking voice, and Hazel threw herself wretchedly on her front with her hot face in the pillow.
Chapter Three
Rose woke with her face pressed into the turf of the moor. She sat up and looked around. The great rock stood there imperviously. The copse of tangled trees was between her and Noah’s Bowl, but she knew the lake would be there now, not the valley.
Her eyes felt as if she had been crying, and the inside of one finger was sore. She opened her hand and saw a red mark, but by the time she was half way home, the redness was disappearing, and the pain.
The memory of the journey – to Hazel’s house of all places, and into the person of Hazel, of all people – must not disappear. On the way home, she went over and over what had happened and what had been talked about, so that she wouldn’t forget any of it. The horse didn’t take her anywhere for nothing. Somewhere in that scene was the clue that would tell her what the new adventure was about, and lead her on to finding out who was in trouble and what she had to do to help them.
It had been an ordinary enough scene, except for old Hazel breaking down like that. Nothing remarkable had been said, nothing threatening or sinister. But now she was remembering something else. Something she hadn’t been aware of when she was Hazel – an undercurrent of fear and danger that stayed with her now and made her look back twice, nervously, over her shoulder, as if the chill memory were following her.
She wished she had a sweater. She had run out so fast, thinking of nothing but answering the call of the horse, that she hadn’t felt cold. Through the sheep pasture and down the slope, she jogged to get warm, but she felt strangely tired, as she always did after one of the journeys with Favour. She felt as if she had expended tremendous mental and physical energy, although her watch showed her that no actual time had gone by between stepping down into the mist and waking on the moor. In the small wood, she slowed to a walk, stubbing her toe and stumbling over tree roots, as if she were still Hazel.
She didn’t see Toby and Chris and Marge and the others until the next day, although she heard them come in late on Saturday night after a performance because she was still awake with the light out, going over the events of the journey. Most of it had been talking, except when Hazel had thrown a shoe at her brother. Rose tried to take the things that had been said in order, by attaching them to what was going on. This was when the heating man was rubbing grease on the threads. That was when Mrs Riggs had chased Hazel out to the kitchen.
The park being bulldozed to build flats had come up while George Mollis was still straining at the rusted screw. So what might she be supposed to do about that? Save the environment? Lie down in front of the bulldozers? Make Councillor Garland see sense? It didn’t sound likely. Perhaps someone was going to be poisoned in the Paradise Café. Or the rancid fat was going to catch fire. The café would either be burned out or closed down as insanitary. The owners would be ruined, a jolly, fat couple you could melt a few hunks of fat off for French fries without them missing it.
Dust and spiders in the children’s ward might cause a small patient to have an infected wound, and Rose would have to suck the poison out of it like explorers in the tropics when their mate was bitten by a rattlesnake. It was long after midnight, and Rose’s mind was taking flight. She heard the Here Today minibus crunch on to the gravel of the car park at the side of the hotel. Its wide side door slid open, then slid shut. The driver’s door banged and someone said, ‘Be quiet!’, louder than the noise of the door. Ilona giggled. Toby laughed. Frank said something in his deep husky voice that Rose couldn’t hear, and Chris said irritably, ‘Key, what key? Of course I haven’t got the key.’
Rose was just getting out of bed to go down and let them in, when Toby said, ‘In the flower pot, you idiot,’ which was where Mollie hid the back door key for guests coming home late, stuck into the earth of the potted bay tree they used for seasoning.
Rose thought she heard them messing about in the kitchen, and hoped they wouldn’t leave anything for Hilda to find when she came in to do early teas and cook breakfasts. Hilda out of temper meant flat Yorkshire pudding and a hard time coping with all the Sunday lunchers they were getting.
Back to the hospital: ‘A mystery,’ George had said, but that was the way he talked. His form of gossip could make a mystery out of a slice of bread and butter.
What about the woman who had her wrong leg cut off? If it had already happened – and Rose could hardly believe it, any more than the dirty sinks where the surgeons scrubbed up – there was nothing she could do about it. But the poor one-legged victim – was Rose going to be involved in her fight for justice? Or was she to save the engineering plant where Abigail’s father worked when he wasn’t at its parent company in Chicago?
Whatever it was, it looked like a very tall order. The horse, as usual, had given her a sideways indication instead of a direct challenge, and Rose couldn’t see what she was going to do. Perhaps it was nothing to do with George’s gossip. Perhaps it was much simpler and closer to home. One thing Rose had found out for certain in the Riggs’ concrete castle was that Hazel was even shyer than she had realised, more jealous of her brother, and more at the mercy of her mother’s cruel sarcasm, which Rose had never heard before when she was there.
So was Hazel to be rescued? Rose groaned and put her face into the pillow and tried to remember what it had felt like to be Hazel. This put her to sleep. She half woke when Chris and Ilona’s window went up farther along the back of the hotel, and Chris said, ‘You’re mad, it’s freezing,’ and the window shut again as Rose dropped off the edge of consciousness.
When the alarm went off early the next morning, she seemed to have slept about half an hour. But it was her riding morning, and her jodhpurs were on the chair with the green sweatshirt saying ‘Moorside Riding School’, which everyone wore who rode at Joyce’s stables, so she jumped out of bed as if she’d had eight hours sleep.
‘Off to play gee gees as usual, while I do all the work,’ Hilda grumbled when Rose stopped in the kitchen for a quick snack, although Rose never did early teas or breakfasts on Sundays.
Except when it was snowing or raining so hard that even weatherproof Joyce wouldn’t take the horses out, she rode the gaunt, cream-coloured horse Moonlight every week. She would never be a great rider, but the exhilaration of those flying gallops with the magic horse had improved her confidence, and she was allowed to join Joyce’s special dressage class.
It was a mixed lot, ranging from excellent riders like Abigail on her smart pony Crackers, through medium people like Robert Foley, who only rode because his mother wanted to get the fat off him, to duffers like Rose and Moonlight, who was always a few paces too far ahead or behind, and stuck out his neck to grab at the bales of straw that were used for arena markers.
It was drizzling this morning, but they were all out in the big muddy field, Joyce in the middle in her shirtsleeves with a lunge whip. Abigail had ridden over from the farmhouse where she lived nearby. She and Rose were riding as a pair, but when Moonlight stubbonly refused to canter, and Crackers slipped in the mud and nearly fell, Abigail got fed up and said she was going home.
‘You can’t,’ Joyce told her.
‘Sure I can. I have a cold.’
‘If we get good enough to put on a display at the Newcome Show next year, you won’t be able to miss team practice just because you’ve got a cold.’
‘Shan’t be here anyway,’ Abigail retorted. She was normally polite and much more sophisticated than Rose, but she could be rude back to anyone who was rude to her. ‘We’ll be back in the States.’
‘Ab – you didn’t tell me.’ Rose rode with her to the gate.
‘Well, we only just heard. There’s a bit of a shake up at the plant here and someone else is coming out for a bit, so Dad’s recalled for a while.’
Recalled. Rose remembered George Mollis: ‘Selling off stuff cheap. Don’t look too good.’ Had Mr Drew … Suppose ‘recalled’ meant ‘sacked’? Well, Abigail would tell her. They told each other everything.
‘No big deal.’ Abigail was trying to turn up her collar with one hand and hold Crackers still and open the gate with the other. ‘This damn climate. Why is it always raining?’
‘Doesn’t it ever rain in Chicago?’ Rose asked, but Abigail called, ‘See ya!’ and sloshed off through the muddy gateway, and Joyce yelled at Rose to, ‘Get that mule back into formation!’
After a rotten ride and a wet bike trip home, Rose was glad to hear music from the back lounge when she went in at the scullery door and kicked off her boots, which were heavy with a mixture of mud and Moonlight’s dirty bedding.
The actors were rehearsing a new song and dance number, with Mr Vingo and Marge playing the accompaniment as a duet on the jangling piano that Mollie had bought at an auction. Ilona was tap dancing, making up the step sequences as she went along and showing them to Tina, who was supposed to be dancing with her, but was just shuffling through the motions and hadn’t bothered to put on her tap shoes. Chris and Toby and Frank were in a line behind them, singing a song about a woman who was dominated by her kitchen appliances. She was running the dishwasher, washing machine, drier, toaster, electric kettle, mixer all at once, and the house took off and sailed through the skies under its own power, front steps first, with exhaust smoke coming out of the kitchen window at the back. Each man was a different machine, ordering the woman about, and Ilona and Tina were the noise of the motors.
Marge was laughing and tossing her thick red hair about as she always did when she played the piano. Mr Vingo was taking it dead seriously, with his thick black eyebrows down and level, and his lower lip stuck out over the top one. They played faster and faster, the song was gabbled, Ilona’s legs in black tights went a mile a minute, and Tina dropped to the floor and just lay there, resting her head on her hand and fishing in the back pocket of her jeans for a cigarette.
‘Take a break!’
Marge’s fingers ran off the top of the keyboard, and Mr Vingo crashed a final chord and slumped, panting for breath.
Mrs Ardis came in with the laces of her grey canvas shoes undone, dragging the heavy downstairs vacuum cleaner behind her.
‘Don’t stop because of me,’ she said. Although she still complained about the actors, she was quite intrigued by them, and since they had come she had started wearing make-up again. Her sparse grey eyebrows were pencilled in in the wrong place, one higher than the other. Blusher spread on each cheek like a rash. A bow of vermilion lipstick brought her top lip almost into her wide nostrils.
‘If she starts using green eye shadow,’ Philip Wood had said, ‘I’m leaving home.’
‘Pardon me for disturbing you,’ Mrs Ardis said in her throaty stage voice. She had many voices, for all occasions and moods. ‘I didn’t know this lounge was being used.’
‘Working on Sunday?’ Marge asked her sympathetically. ‘The hotel business must be worse than the theatre.’
‘Oh, you’ve hit the nail. Weekends off – you can forget them when you’re in this profession.’ Mrs Ardis caught sight of Rose, who had been listening from a chair in the corner, and changed the subject, since Rose knew she chose to work on Sundays so she wouldn’t be home if the daughter-in-law she didn’t like came to visit her. Her son was dead, but she would never talk about him.
‘Excuse me.’ She left the vacuum cleaner and came forward to Toby, smiling – not at his face, but over his right shoulder. ‘Well, good morning, my dear.’
‘What?’ Toby’s face dropped blankly.
‘That tiny little old lady in black is behind you again.’
He whirled round, and saw nothing.
‘She’s often there,’ said Mrs Ardis, nodding smugly. ‘She’s quite worried about you, aren’t you, Gran?’
Rose sat forward, with a prickling sensation of fear. For an instant, she glimpsed someone small behind Toby, hovering, out of focus. But it wasn’t a little old lady, it was a – was a – there was a quick gleam of spectacles too large for a child’s face, a sense of presence there, something she couldn’t quite see, but she felt the same chill dread that had seemed to follow her on the moor.
Then Toby laughed and said, ‘Stop this nonsense, Mrs A. One of my grandmothers is over six feet and still alive. The other one never worried about anyone except herself.’
‘When people are “on the other side”, as we call it, they learn to care.’
‘She’s not dead,’ Toby protested. ‘She lives in Bournemouth, in the best of health.’
‘Well, goodbye, dear.’ Mrs Ardis nodded to the invisible grandmother, as if she really saw her. ‘I’ll come back when you’ve finished with your little operetta,’ she told the group. ‘Ring the service bell when you’re done.’
They went through some bits of the song that hadn’t gone well, and then Tina said, ‘That’s it,’ and went over to the wall to ring the bell.
‘You rang, madam?’ Mrs Ardis put her head round the door, with the accent of a stage butler.
‘We’re done.’
‘Good, I thought it might be. that tiresome poltergeist again, ringing bells, slamming doors—’
‘What’s a poltergeist?’ Rose had got up to stand by the piano to watch Marge’s hands on the notes.
‘A mischievous spirit. It’s supposed to be associated with adolescent girls,’ Mrs Ardis said with heavy meaning.
‘Oh, stop fooling.’ Toby put an arm round Rose’s shoulders, which meant he had to sag at the knees, since he was so much taller. As the group broke up and Mrs Ardis set the vacuum cleaner roaring, he asked Rose, ‘Why did you run off after lunch?’
‘I felt sick.’
‘I thought it was my singing.’
‘What was that tune you sang, that went up like a spiral, with no proper words?’
Mr Vingo looked quickly at Rose. Toby said, ‘I wish I knew. I must have made it up.’
‘Sing it again.’ After her rough wet ride on Moonlight, Rose was longing to go with Favour again. He would take her somewhere where she could get another clue, and it would straighten out her confusion.
‘Can
’t.’ Toby looked down at her, wrinkling the loose skin of his brow like corrugated paper. ‘I’m not a composer, like Professor Vingo here.’
Rose was edgy, biting the skin round her nails and standing on one leg. Mr Vingo noticed. He put down the piano lid and said, ‘Come for a walk in the rain.’
‘No fear,’ Toby said.
‘I mean Rose. “O fragrant rose, thy petals washed with summer rain.” She likes it.’
‘That’s why her skin is so disgustingly fresh.’ Tina went to the big gilt mirror on the wall. ‘God, I look like a piece of grey crêpe paper. After it’s been crumpled into the dustbin.’
‘You’ll look better when you’re made up.’ Frank pushed her towards the door: ‘Come on, everyone, let’s get going. We’ve got a show at the university in two hours.’
Mr Vingo got his thick walking stick and put on his raincoat, and his blue rain hat with the brim turned up all round, and they crossed the road and plodded over the wet sand of the dunes to the deserted beach. The rain hissed on the sea and made patterns like a nutmeg grater. Rose took off her shoes and rolled up her jeans and walked in the cold water, to remind herself of the feel of summer.
‘You’ve, er—’ Mr Vingo cleared his throat – ‘been – what might I say – away from us?’
‘You might say. It was a bit of a riddle though. Why doesn’t Favour make it a bit easier for his poor old messengers?’
‘He’s only a horse, remember not a person with a mathematically organized brain. He has to do it in whatever way he can.’
As Rose splashed alongside him through the edge of the sea, she told him about some of the possibilities, the café, poor old Hazel, the woman’s leg. ‘Should I follow them all up?’
Mr Vingo only went, ‘Um,’ an annoying habit of his when he didn’t want to answer. He strode along, with his coat blowing open and his stomach stuck out, his turned-out feet making deep troughs in the sand.
The Haunting of Bellamy 4 Page 3