Ballad of Favour

by Monica Dickens

  As she was waiting for the kettle to boil, she heard the bride’s mother talking about the wedding. What else? It would be talked to death before it ever happened. Too bad if Jean changed her mind at the last minute.

  ‘A group,’ she said. ‘Wave Breaks, they call themselves. Everybody has them. Dr Bolger told me he heard them at Lady Rowan’s charity affair, and they were superb.’

  When she carried the tray to the lounge, Rose said bluntly, for it was the only way to say a thing that had to be said, ‘About the music for the wedding.’

  ‘It’s all arranged. Wave Breaks. The Wood Briar Hotel will really swing.’

  ‘I thought you’d asked Mr Vingo to play.’

  ‘Oh well, that was just a vague idea. We never settled it. I mean,’ she explained to the Crabbes, ‘the man’s a genius in his way, but people want something they can dance to.’

  Rose put down the tray, pretending not to hear Mrs Crabbe say, ‘You forgot the sugar.’

  ‘None of us take it, Muriel.’

  ‘I like to see a tray properly laid.’

  Rose went to the kitchen and out of the back door and along the path across the two gardens and into the hotel. She went up the back stairs and tramped up the spiral stair and opened the door of the turret room.

  ‘Where you been? We want you to hear us.’

  ‘Guess what,’ Rose said heavily. She hated to wipe the smile off Mr Vingo’s face, but when you’ve got to say something, you’ve got to say it.

  ‘The wedding’s off?’ Abigail asked.

  ‘They’ve hired some outfit called Wave Breaks. They’re going to have the dining-room tables moved out, and open the doors to the lounge, and have dancing.’

  ‘Oh good,’ Abigail said. ‘Can we dance too, in our frilly aprons?’

  ‘You don’t get the point. They don’t want Mr Vingo to play.’

  ‘I hate them,’ Abigail said.

  ‘No, no.’ Mr Vingo went on smiling. ‘I was getting cold feet anyway, weren’t you, Abigail?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Rose minded more than they did.

  ‘Listen up,’ Abigail said. ‘We’ll do you “Jeannie”. Special performance. Last time on any stage.’

  ‘And then will you play me –’ Rose gave Mr Vingo a special look – ‘that other tune?’

  He must help her. She must get back to the horse and find out more about Gwen’s birthday, and whether it really was the clue, and if so, what it meant.

  ‘There’s no other tune,’ Abigail objected. ‘“Jeannie” is the only one we’ve been practising.’

  ‘The tune,’ Rose said firmly to Mr Vingo.

  He pretended not to understand, but as he turned back to the piano she heard him murmur, ‘Let’s see, let’s see. I might vary the accompaniment just a fraction of an infinitesimal fragment …’

  ‘Don’t throw me off my stroke,’ Abigail warned.

  ‘You won’t even notice.’

  And she didn’t. As they played, Mr Vingo wove a few notes of Favour’s tune skilfully into the piano music, and at the same time, from below the turret room, came an unmistakable sound: the snort of a horse.

  Behind the backs of the musicians, Rose went to the window. There below, waiting for her on the very patch of grass Jim Fisher had cut only a minute or two ago with the lawn mower, was the shimmering, miraculous horse.

  The window was open. She was quickly through and on to the sloping roof below. She slid to the edge and from there she dangled on the gutter until her feet touched the verandah rail and she could push off from it straight on to Favour’s back. As they rose in that strong, bounding take-off, Rose, clutching the mane with both hands, looked back and saw Jim and the mower at the far end of the lawn, already far below, and totally unaware that a miracle had happened within a few yards of him.

  ‘Hold the door! Here, give us a chance, Fred. This thing’s got a wonky wheel. It’s a brute to turn.’

  Whoever she was now, Rose could hear the man’s querulous voice right by her head, but she could not see him. She could not see anything but the ceiling, in fact, for she was lying on her back on a very flat moving surface that felt suspiciously like a hospital trolley. She had ridden on one once when she had her tonsils and adenoids out.

  A jerk, which hurt her left leg, then, ‘Oops, dearie,’ as the ceiling changed to the lighted roof of a large lift. ‘You all right, Beverly?’

  ‘Uh, huh.’ She gritted her teeth. Her leg hurt quite a lot. It was fixed into some kind of strapped-down splint casing, and she could not move it.

  ‘What you got there then, Joe?’

  She turned her head. There was another man in the lift, dressed like a hospital porter in a loose green jacket and trousers, with a square green cotton cap perched high on his bushy hair.

  ‘Fracture of left tibia,’ the voice near her head announced importantly. ‘Going down to Mr McDonald for repair.’

  ‘Help! Let me out of here!’ Rose shouted silently. She knew that some of her journeys might be scary, but she had not bargained for an operation. Suppose the anaesthetic knocked Beverly out, but left Rose awake, and feeling everything?

  Beverly was afraid, but not panicking. Her mind and vision were a little hazy, and a small sore spot in the bend of her elbow showed Rose that she had been given some kind of a sedative injection.

  When she lifted her arm to look at it, Rose saw that the skin was very dark. How interesting. She had always wondered what it felt like to be black. Now she knew. It felt the same as being white.

  The lift went smoothly down.

  ‘How’s the family?’ Fred asked Joe.

  ‘The usual. The kids drive me out of my mind a lot of the time, but the wife says I’m out of it anyway.’

  ‘What can you do?’ Fred laughed, as if he knew kids. And wives.

  ‘They’re good little beggars really, all things considered. Going to take ’em to the fun fair when it gets here.’

  ‘That’ll cost you.’

  ‘The older ones can pay their way. That eldest boy of mine, he earns more after school than I do in this dump.’

  Beverly and Rose did not like to hear the place to which they had entrusted their broken leg described as a dump, but the lift had stopped and the door opened. They rolled down a corridor under strip fluorescent lighting, past many doors, before they were wheeled into a room where a nurse in a green cap and surgical mask came forward at once, smiling with her eyes.

  ‘Hullo, Beverly. Don’t be scared. Everything’s going to be just fine.’

  ‘I’ll say, “So long,” then.’ Joe came from the head of the trolley and patted Beverly’s shoulder. He was a small man with a creased expression of worry under the green cotton cap he wore low on his forehead. When he smiled at her, however, the loose skin and creases of his face rearranged themselves into the flexible grin of a comedian, and his eyes twinkled.

  ‘Just don’t go climbing out of no windows no more,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be all right.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Beverly said in a small scared voice, because she saw a white-clad doctor approaching. ‘Fell off my bike.’

  Why had Joe said, ‘climbing out of a window’? There was no way he could have known that Rose was an observer of this whole scene, nor how she had got here.

  Before she could puzzle out Joe’s involvement with the mysterious rearrangement of time and space which the horse had made possible, Joe was gone and the doctor was by her side, tying a rubber tube round her upper arm and telling her to make a fist.

  Beverly felt a bit weepy. The sedative had weakened her resolve to go through this ordeal with the heart of a lion, as she had promised her father.

  ‘Leg hurt you?’

  She nodded, licking at a tear.

  ‘We’ll fix that up in no time,’ the young doctor said cheerily. ‘When you wake up, you’ll be as good as new.’

  While he was talking, he had inserted the needle deftly into her vein without her feeling more than a prickle.

  �
�Now a luv-ver-ly sleep,’ he said softly. ‘I want you to count for me, Beverly, backwards from ten, can you do that, there’s a love. Come on, ten, nine …’

  ‘Eight, seven, si-six …’ Beverly’s voice faded away into nothing and she floated peacefully into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  ‘I’ll never play the flute for you again, never. So just try and ask me and see where it gets you.’

  Abigail was leaning out of the turret room window. Rose was sitting on the lawn by the corner verandah, wondering if she would be able to put weight on her left leg when she stood up.

  ‘Jim shouted.’ She had to think quickly.

  ‘Why? It had better be a good answer. That’s twice you’ve run out on me.’

  ‘He caught his finger in the throttle lever. I had to get to him quickly. He’s all right now.’

  Jim was mowing the lawn in parallel strips of light and dark, the grass bending different ways as he changed direction. Last year, he did once catch his finger in the throttle, and had to be rescued by Philip Wood, so it was not quite a lie.

  ‘Neat way to come down.’ Abigail waved goodbye to Mr Vingo and climbed out of the window and down the roof, and dropped to the rail and then the ground, one-handed, carrying her flute case.

  ‘By the way,’ Rose asked Abigail before she went home, ‘When is the fun fair coming?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is it?’

  ‘It’s supposed to. Shall we go?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Hearing Joe mention the fun fair might have been a clue, and the reason for Rose being Beverly in the hospital and almost having an operation. But so might broken legs, bicycles, low pay for hospital porters. How were any of these tied up with danger to little Davey?

  Mr Vingo’s head appeared above, blocking the whole window opening.

  ‘Sorry you had to leave.’ He smiled down at Rose, his cheeks pouchy, his treble chins resting like bolsters on the window sill. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You got his finger free,’ Abigail said.

  ‘I hope it won’t happen again. It’s tricky.’ Rose tilted her head up to Mr Vingo.

  ‘I know.’ He chuckled. ‘But with stubborn patience, you’ll meet the challenge.’

  ‘Buying a new lawn mower would be better,’ Abigail said.

  Chapter Ten

  Rose loved her father and he loved her.

  If he and Mollie were only to have one child, he would have liked a boy. Rose understood that. When she was small, she followed him about with a pocketful of nails, banging away with a small hammer and learning things about carpentry and measuring and painting, and helping him in his workshop.

  Now she more often worked with Mollie in the hotel, and although the love and the good strong memories of her childhood were still there between her and her father, neither of them could find ways to express it.

  Lately it seemed, if one of them reached out – ‘Want to come up to the stables and see me ride in the gymkhana, Dad?’ or, ‘Come down to the lab with me some time, and I’ll show you why tea bags are a peril to the human stomach’ – the other one perversely would not respond.

  ‘Too busy,’ or, ‘Another time,’ or, ‘You do it then tell me about it,’ or, ‘I can’t, Dad, I’ve got oodles to do.’

  Rose often kicked herself when she turned him down, or got angry at one of his rotten jokes, and she wondered if he kicked himself too, when he was sarcastic or indifferent to her. If so, they were a pair of fools, because it would have been easier to be nice to each other, as Mollie sometimes reminded them.

  So when her father asked her if she would like to go to the Kitchen and Catering Fair with him, Rose was going to say, ‘It’s too near the wedding, I won’t have time,’ but she quickly switched to, ‘Thanks, I’d love it.’

  ‘Wear something decent, for God’s sake. I’ll have clients there.’

  Philip Wood was going to the Kitchen Fair to look at new gadgets. His job was quality testing for small manufacturers and for a consumer magazine that told its readers which appliances and food and cosmetics were the best to buy, and which were second rate, or were actually bad for you.

  Being a rather negative person, the kind who would say a money box was half empty, instead of half full, he did not mind telling people that things they liked would do them no good. It did not seem to make much difference anyway. They went on ruining themselves in their own way.

  Hot dogs were one way. As part of the magazine’s campaign against junk food, Philip Wood and an analyst had proved without a doubt that the skin in some brands was highly questionable, and that the filling had been known to contain items that you would not normally buy for food. Yet you could not go to any public place where people were gathered without seeing them selling – like hot dogs.

  They were selling them in a snack bar at the Kitchen Fair, although many of the exhibits were for gourmet cooking, or were health foods. Rose left her father talking to people at the stand for growing lettuces in water, and dodged aside to the snack bar and bought herself a savoury dog, slathered with fiery hot mustard. She walked off in the opposite direction, so that he would not have the pain of seeing her eat it.

  Kitchen Fair … Fun Fair. Who was that hospital porter? Or was it Beverly who could provide the clue? Rose walked thoughtfully along the crowded aisle between the exhibits. How could she get the horse to take her back to the Morgan family, so that she could get a better idea of where their house might be?

  Once when she got out of school early, she had bicycled into Newcome and had hunted again in likely places for the house in that dishevelled street. On the train journey up here with her father, she had stood in the corridor staring down at the terraces and blocks of flats and small factories and junk yards that they passed before the train drew away into the open country. Nothing looked anything like that derelict dead-end street.

  Perhaps it was not even in Newcome. Perhaps it was in this big city where she was roaming about in an exhibition hall full of strangers, eating a hot dog. Perhaps that was why she had not turned down her father’s invitation this time. The horse had ordained that she would accept nicely, and she would be rewarded.

  She turned round and went back for another hot dog. Thinking deeply always made her hungry.

  ‘Rose Wood, what are you doing?’

  It was a man with a motheaten beard and fanatical eyes: her father’s friend who had invented the newfangled tin opener.

  ‘I came with my father.’

  ‘No, I mean, with a hot dog. Your father would have a fit.’

  ‘He won’t know.’

  ‘Here he is.’ He turned her round, away from her father’s approach. ‘Listen Phil,’ he greeted Philip Wood, ‘it’s the greatest good luck finding Rose here. I’m having a bit of a problem with Eezeeduzzit. The woman the agency sent to demonstrate it has cut her finger, and –’

  ‘On the tin opener?’ Rose’s father looked amused.

  ‘No, no – well, in a way, I suppose, but it was her own fault. I sent her to First Aid, but it doesn’t look too good to have a tin opener with the slogan, “So Simple a Child Can Use It” demonstrated by a grown-up with a whopping great bandage on her finger with blood leaking through. Then I saw Rose.’ His inventive eyes gleamed. ‘And I realized, ha, ha, she’s saved the day! If Eezeeduzzit is so simple a child can use it – right, we’ll use a child to demonstrate it.’

  Rose did not know what to say. She looked at her father.

  ‘It would be against the law to employ a minor here,’ he said rather pompously.

  ‘Oh no, no, not for pay. I mean, not that Rose wouldn’t be worth it, but just for fun, and as a favour. Would you, Rose?’ He made his face very sad and his eyes lost their gleam. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m having a bit of trouble interesting people in my marvellous device. It’s hard to get sales, and what with the rent of the booths going up this year – oh dear.’ He sighed.

  ‘I’ll try, if you like,’ Rose sa
id. After all, if she had joined Favour in his crusade to help people in trouble, she couldn’t very well turn down other people who came her way under their own steam.

  ‘Can I, Dad?’ she remembered to ask.

  ‘Not if the damn thing’s going to cut your finger.’

  ‘It couldn’t,’ his friend said, ‘and listen, Phil, you’re not to write something terrible about Eezeeduzzit in that magazine of yours. The woman cut her finger on the tin, not on the opener.’

  It was a rather complicated electrical device. You needed to press a switch and two buttons in a certain order, but if you got it right, it whipped the lids off soup tins and baked beans, and even unscrewed jars.

  Rose felt rather foolish sitting at a table out in front of the booth with an Eezeeduzzit and a stack of tins. She was supposed to ask passers-by, ‘May I show you our magic opener?’ but after she had risked that with two or three people who had walked on as if she did not exist, she left the inventor to do the talking.

  Having mastered the knack of the Eezeeduzzit, Rose kept ripping off lids, but the back of the booth was piling up with opened tins – no one could possibly eat that many baked beans – and they were running out of new ones. She could only demonstrate the opener if someone stopped at her table.

  It was fun when people stopped. Rose enjoyed showing off her skill. And it did take some skill. Visitors who tried it for themselves almost always failed the first few times. A husband who was looking for a birthday present for his wife tried ten times, and only mangled the top of a tin of celery soup.

  ‘So simple, a child can use it,’ its inventor kept chanting to the uncaring crowds, and the husband thrust the humming device away from him and said bitterly, ‘It takes a child to use it.’

  ‘Perhaps your wife would rather not have something for the kitchen anyway,’ Rose said helpfully, ‘since it’s her birthday.’

  When they got into the train to go home, Rose left her bag of samples from the various stalls on the seat and went to stand in the corridor again, telling her father she was stiff from sitting in the table at the booth.