‘Wait,’ Mr Vingo would say, if she threw all this impatiently at him. ‘Wait, Messenger Rose, and all shall be revealed.’
But she couldn’t wait. She must have been given those long-ago glimpses into the bitter lives of Eric and his aunt because they had the power to affect someone today. Sister Maddox of Bellamy Ward … If looks could kill … Room 4 …
‘I hate this room,’ the sick girl in the hospital had said. Something was wrong. The danger was still here.
Mr Vingo was a great one for letting the Great Grey Horse move to his own timing, but Rose was so wrought up by her experience as Eileen that she looked for the horse everywhere. She scanned the television screen for a sight of him lurking inside a scene, as he had done before. She listened for his tune through Hilda’s kitchen radio, and the howl of the wind raking through the wood, and the roar and rattle of her father’s old car, as he drove her home from school.
He had fetched her because it was stormy, and tied her bike on the roof rack. He did things like that unexpectedly, turning up at the end of the day looking shy amid the onrush of blue uniforms, and Rose would feel a little guilty for being so surprised.
From the back door of the hotel, her father called to her as she put the bicycle away. ‘Bolt the shed door. It’s blowing up for a storm.’
‘I know.’
He went inside, whistling ‘Stormy Weather’, not knowing that he was also whistling Favour’s tune. Rose turned the other way and ran through the long grass at the end of the garden, through the gate and into the trees, which were swaying and creaking over her head as the rising wind attacked them. The tune was faint, but there was never any mistaking it. It wasn’t only the sound. It was the thrill it sent through her, the electric charge that powered her limbs and spirit towards the magnet of the horse.
Even though she didn’t know what she would have to face from the Lord – and he seemed to be intensifying his hatred as Rose became caught up in the hatred in Eric’s life – she had to throw herself down into the valley and the precarious mists, because of what waited for her on the other side.
She didn’t reach the valley this time. When she went over the crest of a hill and the wind and rain hit her smack in the face, she opened her stinging eyes and gasped as a big dark grey seagull wheeled screaming past her head. His strong curved beak was like a weapon. She could see his leathery feet tucked tightly back, and the stretched white bones of his huge wing span. A gust of wind spun him upwards. He turned to dive. She ducked, but when he came at her, he was the horse, sweeping by to take her up and carry her away above the storm.
Howling children. Wailing babies. Toddlers squabbling over toys. ‘Upsadaisy, that’s my baby, there’s my good little man, don’t cry,’ and other sundry cluckings and cooings from a mother bending over a cot that stood in a row of cots and small beds under tall windows on a highly polished wood floor.
Rose was a bored girl, standing by the window near this cot, wishing her mother needn’t spend so long on the ward with the baby who wasn’t very ill, and anyway there were plenty of nurses to look after him. And plenty more little ones at home, which was why this girl wasn’t too interested in Little Man’s croup. She had been made to come for visiting hours because her mother suffered from ‘nerves’, and didn’t like going on the bus alone. Sharing the girl’s feelings, Rose was doubly glad of her own mother, who had no hang-ups or fanciful fears.
With the girl, she looked out of the window at the tree-lined terraces of thin houses snaking their way down the hill, which Rose recognized as some of the tree-less streets she knew below the hospital in Newcome. Instead of the tower blocks of flats beyond them, there were fields and cricket pitches.
Little Man went on wailing hoarsely, and threatening to choke. A larger baby next to him stood up in a vest and nappy and rattled the bars of his cot in a fury.
Hard heels clacked on the wooden floor.
‘Nurse Jones!’ It was the voice of Sister Maddox, nasal, metallic, edged with threat. ‘I’ve told you to keep these children quiet. ‘I’ll not have Bellamy turned into Bedlam.’
‘Yes, Sister.’ A scraggly nurse in a long grey striped dress and white apron, all red bony elbows and big feet, scuttled away to flap her hands at the children.
‘Do something about your baby, Mrs – er, Sister said, straightening a cot sheet, not looking at the bored girl’s mother. ‘If I’ve got to have my ward full of mothers twice a week (there were only a few), they may as well be some use. Please hush him. There are sick children here.’
‘Mine is one of them.’
‘Croup is nothing to get excited about,’ Sister Maddox said, and clacked away to demolish a red-cheeked young nurse who dared to sit on a low chair and waste time bouncing a happy toddler on her lap.
Rose’s girl yawned. ‘What a monster,’ she said, carelessly loud.
‘Hush, Mavis.’ Her mother twisted her brows anxiously. ‘We don’t want to get on the wrong side of her. Hushabye, who’s a dear little man then? Come on, for Mummy, let’s see a big big smile.’ She glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘Do you think she’ll mind if I pick him up?’
‘For heaven’s sake, whose baby is it?’ Mavis was fed up with this dithering. She left her mother holding the baby, but still leaning over the cot so she could drop him back on the mattress if Sister turned up, and wandered out of the ward, running her finger along the bars of all the cots to stir up the inhabitants.
She went through the swing doors into the corridor, which was the same one Rose knew, but dingier and less hygenic now. Idly, she looked through the little windows in the doors of Rooms 1 and 2, and saw-children and parents, and into Room 3, which was empty. She was going to look into Room 4 on the other side, when she saw Sister Maddox’s blue dress and high starched cap beyond the glass of the ward doors, and nipped into the empty room as the swing doors swished, so as not to be accused of loitering or prying.
The door of Room 4 opened, and she heard Sister Maddox say to someone inside, ‘Come along now, Nurse. It’s taken you much too long to change Eric’s bed. There’s other patients on the ward who need you more.’
‘Sorry, Sister.’ From where they stood behind the half open door of Room 3, Rose and Mavis saw a flustered, fat nurse come out with an armful of bedclothes, and hurry off down the corridor.
‘Wetting the bed, eh?’ Eric’s aunt said. ‘I thought I’d whipped that out of you years ago.’
‘I didn’t.’ Eric’s voice was muffled, as if his face was under the bedclothes.
‘Ho, I suppose Nurse Martin changed the sheets just for fun, then? Sit up, Eric, and stop sulking.’
‘My head hurts.’ His voice was clearer, but feeble.
‘I’m not surprised, after what you did. You’re lucky it isn’t worse than concussion.’
‘It’s really bad, Aunt. Can’t I have a tablet?’
‘Doctor hasn’t ordered it.’
‘But it hurts!’
‘Then I’ll have to ask Sir Geoffrey Peebles to open it up and have a look inside, won’t I?’
‘No Aunt, no! You beast!’
‘We’ll have to see. Put that leg back in the bed, and don’t you dare try to get out.’
A portly doctor in a dark suit came down the corridor, and the Aunt’s grim voice changed, as she came out of the room, to a fluting, ‘Ah, Sir Geoffrey, talk of the angels!’
‘No, no, Sister,’ the doctor chortled. ‘You flatter me.’
Swish, swish, they went through the doors into the ward, and Mavis stepped across the corridor and took a peep through the window of the door of Room 4, which had the curtains drawn and a shaded light. She was going to withdraw at once from the window, but Eric was raging and cursing and sobbing so blindly that he didn’t see her. A turban of white bandages above his distorted face made his head top-heavy. His small eyes looked naked without his glasses. He beat his fists on his knees and sobbed, ‘I hate you! I detest you! Burn in hell, you hellish aunt. Don’t tell him to cut my head open �
� I’ll get you – I’ll kill you!’
Mavis backed away against the opposite wall as Eric, groping blindly without his glasses, pushed off the blanket and swung his thin legs over the side of the bed.
There was a thud and a crash and the sound of breaking glass, then silence.
Open the door – help him! Rose urged Mavis, although she had learned on other journeys that she could hardly ever influence the people she became. Go in there.
Should I? Mavis had the same thought, or had picked up Rose’s. She put out a hand, and pushed the door of Room 4 open quickly.
Eric was on the floor, trying to crawl towards the door. His hands were like claws, scrabbling feebly on the polished boards. Below the bandage, on which a scarlet stain was spreading, his face was contorted, the lips drawn back in a snarl. Behind him, the bed table he had pulled over lay on its side in a puddle of water and broken glass.
‘Oh, my God!’ Mavis backed away. Then she cried, ‘Nurse! Nurse!’ and flew to the ward screaming, and flung herself against the swing doors.
Rose woke face down on the moor with her arms flung out.
‘Nurse! Nurse!’ the seagulls cried, blown inland from the sea before the gathering storm.
Chapter Eight
Rose managed to get back to her room and change her wet clothes before anyone saw her, but next day she had a chill and a cough, and was glad when Mollie said she couldn’t go to school.
She lay in bed all morning, and wondered what it must have felt like to be Eric, crawling over the floor in that darkened hospital room, with his heart so full of misery and hate. What next? The aunt was a swine and a female devil incarnate, but Rose had a shuddery, feverish sense that Eric was the key to this whole drama, his wretched life seized upon by the Lord of the Moor to carry on his evil work. Aunt Sister Maddox was a treacherous element, but he was the doomed heart of the mystery. Remembering how he had raged and cursed, Rose heard again the sinister lisp of the Lord of the Moor – ‘I detetht you!’ – and shivered.
‘Got a temperature?’ Mrs Ardis came in to see how she was, and knocked over the model of a horse on Rose’s chest of drawers. ‘Drat, there’s that cheeky spirit again. I didn’t know he was in here as well.’
‘He’s not when you’re not.’ That was a politer way of saying, ‘You knocked it.’
‘You think I’m fooling.’ Mrs Ardis was very oddly dressed today, in a pair of wide grey trousers like elephant legs, with a flowered overall on top and a man’s thick sweater over that. ‘I’m not, you know.’ She dropped her voice two octaves. ‘I know.’
She righted the horse and was going out when she remembered. ‘By the way, how are you?’
‘Better, thanks.’
‘Better than me, I hope. My chest is wicked. There’s times I think I’m going to choke to death.’ She grabbed at the loose collar of the sweater and pulled it out and flapped it to let air in. ‘But I carry on regardless, or where would you all be? There’s some round here who have no sense of duty. I say nothing, but I see it all …’
Rose had heard it all before. She closed her eyes until the righteous voice stopped and Mrs Ardis said rather sweetly, ‘Happy dreams,’ and went out.
‘Did I wake you?’ Marge knocked and came in with some fruit. ‘Poor Rose, you look wan, to say the least.’
‘I’m all right.’ Rose hacked out a couple of throaty coughs. ‘I’m going to get up.’
‘Not a good idea.’ Marge and Frank had children, now grown up. She pulled up the blanket and rearranged the pillows and fussed round the room in a motherly way.
‘I’ve got things to do.’ Rose sat up.
‘The hotel won’t go out of business.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘What then?’
‘Oh – things.’ Rose dropped her head back on the pillows. ‘Marge?’
‘Mm?’ At the door, Marge turned her head. The thick red hair was drawn up into a smooth knot on top like a ballerina, making her look younger.
‘Sing me something?’
‘I sing of a girl I knew long ago …’ Marge sang in her full, clear voice.
Drowsy, Rose closed her eyes again. Marge started down the back stairs, still singing. The tune changed. Rose opened her eyes. She got up and went to the window where the horse had come to her, because she couldn’t go to him.
Since she was feverish, the flight made Rose’s head spin dizzily. Near the end, she thought they were flying round in circles, and when she was on her feet, she was going round in circles.
She was waltzing in a swooping, extravagant way she never could have managed as Rose, in the arms of a man with a paunch and a beery red face, and breath to match.
‘Well done – hooray! That’s the ticket.’
The big band on the stage of the dance hall crescendoed to a stop, and the beery man clapped and cried out, ‘Encore!’
The band took no notice. They were wiping their brows and shaking spit out of the end of trombones. The girl in mauve, who Rose was, started to walk off the floor.
‘Don’t want to dance with your old uncle, eh?’ He followed her, manoeuvering his paunch between the tables of people eating and drinking. ‘Well, I don’t blame you. I know what it’s like to be young, and I remember what it’s like to be in love, believe it or not, but you’re still a bit young for that, Josephine, thank goodness.’
Little did he know. The silent girl in the mauve dress, which had layers of flounces that swung out as she walked, was desperately in love with a godlike young man who was none other than the son of her beery uncle.
When they got back to the family gathering at the large round table, Josephine’s aunt, who was as thin as her husband was fat, was drinking port and complaining to anyone who would listen that her son couldn’t even be on time for his mother’s birthday party.
‘Just because I’ve turned fifty,’ she said, ‘he thinks I don’t count any more.’
She wore her greying hair parted in the middle and wound over her ears in two round plaits, like headphones, that narrowed her cramped, discontented face. Josephine wondered how she could possibly have given birth to Edmund, who was so beautiful.
‘Hush, precious.’ The beery uncle leaned over to give her a smacking kiss, and she tutted and dabbed at the front of her dress, although he hadn’t spilled her port. ‘Eddie’s a medical student, God bless him. He can’t walk away from the hospital just because his mother is fifty, however fascinating the lady may be, ha ha.’ He bent to kiss her again, and she drew back as if his breath were a fist. ‘Medical students are always late. Wouldn’t be any good if they weren’t, ha, ha, what? Where are you off to, Josephine, me old Jo?’
‘To the ladies’ room.’
But outside the dance hall, she walked past the door that had a little silhouette of a woman in a crinoline, and went outside on to the pier. The dance hall was on the end of Newcome Pier, before they built the theatre and the Waterside Café and the amusement arcade.
Josephine walked to the railing and looked back at the lighted town, much smaller and dimmer than the way Rose knew it. She looked down at the dark sea, which carried oily reflections of the pier lights, dipping and sliding as the water sloshed against the tall pilings.
She felt romantic and tragic. She couldn’t bear to go back and sit with all those stupid people unless Edmund was there. She was quite conceited about herself. She took a little mirror out of her beaded purse and stared contentedly at her dark-eyed, soulful reflection, another new experience for Rose – peeping over her shoulder from inside, as it were – who looked in mirrors only when necessary.
‘A lovely sea sprite,’ Josephine murmured to herself in a rather sickly way. Tonight he would dance with her, and they would leave his dreary mother’s dreary birthday party, and go off somewhere in his two-seater – ‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot.’
‘What about his work at the hospital?’ Rose wanted to know, but Josephine was on a different plane, visionary, passionate. Although R
ose thought she was a bit out of touch, it was an exciting way to feel.
Josephine’s mother came looking for her, with a chiffon scarf over her stiffly ridged hair, in case of sea breezes.
‘Not being sick over the rail, I trust, ha ha.’ (She was the sister of the uncle.) ‘Like that time on the Channel steamer.’
‘No, Mother.’ Josephine turned a remote, long-suffering face.
‘Come back in, then, or they’ll think you’re not enjoying yourself.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Oh you. I’m not either, for that matter. Me feet hurt, but we all have to do our duty.’
She steered her daughter back to the dance hall and sat her down at the table with a lemonade and a piece of birthday cake. Rose was hungry, because she hadn’t eaten much in bed, but just as Josephine was cutting into the cloudy white angel cake, her fork dropped, and she sat staring transfixed at a young man who was threading his way through the tables.
The band was letting rip with, ‘Pack up all your cares and woe,’ and couples were jigging on the floor in a fast foxtrot, but Edmund’s face was full of unpacked cares and woes, and ghastly white.
‘There I go, swinging low. Bye bye, blackbird.’
‘Eddie!’ His mother held out her arms, and his father slapped him on the back and said, ‘Better late than never. What are you drinking, old son?’
Edmund shook his head, groped for a chair and sat down. His father put a glass in front of him, and he drank from it, his hand shaking.
‘Where somebody waits for me. Sugar’s sweet, so is she—’
‘Look at me,’ Josephine prayed silently, all her confidence gone at the sight of the young man’s face. ‘Just look at me.’
‘Bye, bye blackbird.’
Other members of the family came back to the table and someone said, ‘Glad to see you, Ed, even though you look like something the cat dragged in. What’s the matter?’
The Haunting of Bellamy 4 Page 8