The Messenger

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Why did you cry?’ Rose was sitting on the floor with her back to the television. Even though the sound was turned down, just the picture jabbering silently, because the sick man’s nurse could not exist without it, she was not going to risk that man with the beard suddenly coming after her again.

  ‘How should I know?’ shaky-head rebuked her. ‘I was frightened.’

  ‘What of?’ Rose looked up, her anger quickly replaced by curiosity.

  ‘Same thing that frightened the old lady. You could hear her throw up the window and scream for help. You could hear it from the village, they said.’

  ‘Hear what?’ The sick man woke up.

  ‘Her blood-curdling screams, dear.’ Miss Mumford quite liked the sick man, because he was powerless.

  ‘Oh, what nonsense,’ Rose’s mother said cheerfully. ‘I never heard a thing.’

  ‘That was all before your day. By the time you took over this hotel and changed everything round so no one could find anything, she was dying.’

  ‘He drove her to it. No one ever saw the old man after that, till he was carried out feet first,’ the other sister said. ‘The night he died – good riddance to him – there was a great thunderstorm. There’s people in the village who swear they heard the thunder of the devil’s hoofs, come to take him away, and saw in a streak of lightning the white flash of the dead man’s spirit.’

  Philip Wood laughed, and Mollie said, ‘I don’t remember a storm that night.’

  ‘I’m only telling you what I heard.’ Miss Mumford lowered her eyes.

  ‘Go on,’ Rose urged, but Miss Mumford pursed her lips as if there were a drawstring round them, and the other sister started to complain about the old man’s family.

  ‘Never bothered much about him, but those so-called daughters of his and that son from heaven-knows-where soon turned up once he’d gone, to see what they could get out of it.’

  ‘There were a lot of children who came with them when they packed up,’ Rose’s mother remembered. ‘I was surprised the family didn’t want to keep the house as a summer place.’

  The Miss Mumfords made blank eyes and sipped their wine like birds at a drinking fountain, and said no more.

  Next day, it was a relief to find them gone when Rose got back from school. They were a dead weight. Mrs Ardis, who pretended to be psychic to show that being a chambermaid was beneath her, had burned some sweet herbs in the grate behind the electric fire in their room, to get rid of the sour vibrations.

  Now the summer could begin.

  But it was still cold, with a driving rain, and the wind picking up off the sea. Rose and her mother put mackintoshes over their heads like capes and ran with the bedding and curtains across their back garden, through the gap they had made in the fence, and in through the back door of the annexe.

  The painters were just clearing up. The gloomy old kitchen had been converted into a little snack kitchen, with the rusty stove and low sink replaced by neat new fittings and a table and chairs, so that guests could keep food in the refrigerator and make their own breakfast and sandwiches.

  ‘Wrong, right there for a start,’ Philip Wood had warned his wife. ‘Meals are where your good money is. People have got to come to the dining-room.’

  ‘But sometimes it’s so nice not to have to. Remember when we were in that dear little Italian villa …’

  ‘Mosquitoes and tummy aches.’ He would not be romantic. ‘Get ’em into the dining-room for meals.’

  ‘… I want people to be happy.’

  She did. She wanted the painters to be happy with the beautiful job they had done. The bedroom walls were pale yellow, to make the house look sunnier, and the doors and woodwork were shining white. The dark panelled cupboards in the kitchen had been painted a brighter yellow, with orange knobs.

  But the head painter was not completely happy. ‘Three coats of marigold yellow, that wood panelling took, and it still dried up dingy. That’s a fourth coat it’s just had – keep your fingers off it, Rose! Let me know if it don’t dry right.’

  ‘Oh, it will.’

  ‘And about that stain on the floor tiles.’

  ‘I did that.’ Rose had dropped a tin of orange paint when she was helping with the knobs.

  ‘Can’t seem to get it off, even with the wire brush.’

  ‘We’ll keep trying. We can always put an orange mat over it.’ Rose’s mother wanted perfection so badly that she could make something seem perfect, even if it wasn’t.

  In the large front bedroom on the ground floor, they hung the colourful new curtains at the bay window and put the matching cover on the cushion of the narrow window seat. Rose had known as soon as she looked at the fabric catalogue that this was it. The flowers had yelled at her off the page: ‘Us!’

  The chrysanthemums were gorgeous shaggy splashes of scarlet and gold, all looking upwards, with climbing stems and ivy leaves and red berries, botanically insane, but a delight for the eyes of people who would wake in the big double bed, and realize that they were on holiday and did not have to get up.

  While they were making the bed, Rose jumped forward to pat out a crease in the middle, and thumped back on the floor so hard that the door of the cupboard in the wall opened.

  She kicked it shut – ‘Watch the paint!’ – but when she turned round to get the pillows, the door had swung open again.

  It was a very deep cupboard with shelves at the sides and a rail at the back, almost like a little room. Three or four people could go right into it and shut the door without suffocating. The painters had done it yellow also, but it was still dark at the back where it turned sideways into a space for suitcases.

  Rose went inside to check the handle from that side, shut the door and had a moment of panic in the dark when the handle would not turn.

  ‘It’s locked!’

  It seemed like an eternity before the door opened on her mother’s calmly smiling face. Rose pushed the door shut again and leaned on it, but the door leaned back and opened again as soon as she was across the room.

  ‘It’s an old house. The floor is crooked.’ Mollie took one of the wooden wedges that were in the windows to stop them rattling when the wind blew in from the sea, and pushed the thin edge tightly under the door. They laid the new bedspread on the bed like a ceremonial vestment, and Rose kicked off her shoes and jumped up to lie full length on it for a blissful moment, inhaling the fresh paint and crisp new fabric.

  Chapter Three

  Next day, the weather was worse. Rose and her friend Hazel rode home from school together as far as the village, heads down and shoulders hunched aganst the rain. At the corner of her street, Hazel, who hated emotion, fished a wet plastic package out of her bicycle basket and thrust it at Rose, and was blown away up the street by the wind in her rain cape like a spinnaker.

  The hotel lay at the end of a row of houses outside Newcome Hollow village on an open road where the driving rain, salty from the sea, pushed Rose sideways and plastered her hair into her right eye.

  Her mother leaned out of a window and shouted, ‘Come in by the front door!’ Rose never did, but anything could happen on a birthday. She dropped her bike under a bush, and as she ran up the wooden steps and opened the door, she saw a gigantic silver 13 hanging from the ceiling light in the middle of the hall.

  ‘Congratulations!’ Two salesmen and the sick man and an American couple looking for the English spring all smiled and praised Rose, as if she had done something clever. Even the sick man managed a slack smile from deep in his chair, and gave her five pounds.

  Mollie was giving the guests a buffet supper so that Rose would not have to be a waitress tonight, but before she dressed for the family dinner in their own rooms upstairs at the back of the hotel, Rose ran across the garden and the neglected orchard next door to feast her eyes once more on the elegant bedroom with the chrysanthemum curtains and spread.

  How quickly the smell of fresh paint and new fabric can fade! No one would ever know its tantalizing pristine ar
oma of yesterday. Two days of rain had made the room smell damp. The unwedged window was rattling in the gale. The cupboard was open again. The wedge was out on the floor. As Rose went round the bed to shut the door, she moved through a draught of cold air that must come from the loose window.

  Before she shut the infuriating door, she made herself look into the deep cupboard, and saw that there was already a small patch of damp on one of the yellow walls between the shelves. The cupboard smelled musty, like old shoes, with a faint trace of that rotting sea smell that you got when you went under the pier at low tide for mussels.

  Rose left the cupboard open to air it out, put the wedge in the rattling window, shrugged a shoulder against the draught that was still in that spot, and went through the kitchen to the back door. The painter was right. The marigold paint did dry to more of an ochre. Orange curtains were needed at the small window over the sink. She climbed on to the draining board to measure the length with her arm, and, stepping down, knocked two of the new yellow pottery cups on to the floor. Rose was used to breaking things. In the hotel kitchen or the pantry, nobody even looked round at the sound of breaking glass or china; but, unaccountably, the two smashed cups sent her into a storm of weeping.

  I’m so stupid. She was plunged into sadness.

  Sad on your birthday? Was this what growing up was – minding about silly mistakes? Shut up, Rose. She shook herself like a dog, picked up the pieces, wiped her eyes and nose on the painters’ dirty roller towel and galloped away through the long wet grass shouting, ‘I’m thirteen! I’m grown up!’

  ‘Not quite.’ Her father, home from the laboratory, was coming from the garage. ‘But you’re in your teens at last.’ He gave her one of his stiff hugs, which she had had to teach him, since his mother had never hugged him.

  ‘I was in my teens three years ago, Dad.’

  ‘Not officially, until the actual word teen is in your age.’

  Philip Wood was a perfectionist too, but it had actually to be so. He couldn’t make it seem so, like Mollie.

  ‘Now that I’m in my teens,’ Rose said at supper, ‘I’m going to call you Mollie and Phil.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ Rose’s mother was only thirty-three, and looked younger.

  ‘I do.’ Her father was at his nicest tonight, quite funny and fatherly in his dry, tied-in-knots way. ‘I think I probably forbid it.’

  ‘Oh, Phil.’ Mollie laughed and winked at Rose. ‘It’s only a joke.’

  ‘Is it, Rose?’

  ‘I don’t know. A lot of people at school call their parents by their first names, especially the divorced fathers. “I’m going to stay with generous George,” they’ll say. Or, “I heard Robert and my mother talking about me on the extension phone.”’

  Her father gave four good reasons why this was a mistake: breakdown of nuclear family, child’s loss of parent figure, parent’s loss of responsibility, fallacy of the equality principle proved in various civilizations, etc., etc.

  Rose fidgeted and ate the last of the fried potatoes.

  Mollie went out to get the cake, and before they lit the candles they took it to the upstairs lounge to share with the guests.

  Rose had her hand on the switch to turn off the lights before her mother came in with the cake, but before she touched the switch, all the lights in the lounge went out by themselves.

  ‘Line must have come down in the wind.’ Mollie came in with the cake and birthday candles. The only light in the hotel.’

  As Rose blew them out, and everyone applauded in darkness, there was a crash from below and a scream, and then a loud banging and some shouts.

  Cigarette lighters were lit. Mollie found candles. Philip went for the big torch.

  In the hall, Jim Fisher, who was working in the kitchen this week, had dropped a tray of coffee cups. The front door was open, and a large person in a wet coat like a seal had blown in with the wind and rain.

  Everybody came down the stairs with candles and cigarette lighters. Someone went to shut the door against the wind. ‘Nice evening,’ the large man said from the shadows. He breathed heavily, as if he had been running. ‘I’d like a room, please.’

  ‘For the night?’ Phil came through the back of the house behind the wide beam of the torch, and ran it up and down the man, like a policeman.

  The man laughed, for some reason, and then coughed and wheezed and finally said: ‘And the next, and the next, and the next.’

  Rose’s father told Jim to get the luggage from the car, but the man said, ‘No car. No luggage. It’s here.’ He dropped a soft, bulky bag on the floor.’

  ‘You come in a cab?’

  ‘I got a lift a mile from the station.’

  ‘Hitching in this storm?’ the American man asked.

  ‘A very nice lady. She couldn’t see a thing.’

  Lights came on suddenly. The man stepped forward and made a small bow towards Rose on the stairs. His dark grey coat looked as if it had shrunk on him in the rain. His small hat was turned up in the front over a wide wet slab of face.

  ‘So this is the lady who is thirteen.’ He said it as if he were expecting it as a known fact, not something just discovered when the light came on, and the silver 13 was hanging there.

  ‘This is my daughter Rose,’ her father said, rather stiffly.

  ‘Rose of all roses,’ the man intoned in a high, quoting voice, ‘Rose of all the world. A birthday present for you,’ he said, but he did not give her anything.

  His name was Mr Vingo. First name? When Mollie had asked him this for the hotel register, he lowered his head and wheezed a bit and mumbled something that might have been Harvey, but wasn’t, so Mollie wrote ‘R. V. Vingo.’

  He lived in the Mumfords’ room for two days. Then, as the clouds raced away and the sun came out in sudden steamy warmth, a lorry arrived and unloaded two suitcases for him and a small yellow upright piano on to the gravel car park at the side of the house.

  Mr R. V. Vingo was a composer. He was in the process of setting a long poetic legend to music. When his sister’s husband came home from abroad and threw Mr Vingo out, he had come here from London through the storm to stay and work.

  ‘How did you know about us?’ Rose asked.

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘We’re famous.’ Rose’s mother smiled complacently.

  Rose had meant, ‘How did you know that this would be the kind of place that would let you bring a little old piano with yellow keys and curly iron candle holders, and would have a turret room stuck off on its own where you could play without bothering anyone?’

  ‘That floor won’t hold,’ Philip Wood said when he came home and heard that Mr Vingo had moved into the round turret room.

  ‘Yes it will,’ Mollie said. ‘I asked the carpenter to look at the joists there when he was working in the annexe. It’s only the porch ceiling that sags. There’s a big space in between.’

  Nevertheless, after a few days, Dr Alice Pomeroy, who was here for her annual week of testing students in anatomy and physiology at the hospital nursing school, gathered up her working papers from the side verandah, from which she could hear Mr Vingo’s incessant piano, going over and over the same phrases, as composers do. ‘Sometimes he sings.’ She shook her head regretfully and took her papers into the small back lounge in the empty annexe, which had been the old gentleman’s study. On Friday, she picked up her papers and her briefcase and her low-grade opinions of nurses today, and left the hotel.

  ‘No wonder,’ Rose said. ‘I don’t know how she could work there. That’s the room where the old man died. Sitting at his desk, Miss Mumford said, counting the money he’d never spent on other people.’

  ‘Every old house has rooms people have died in,’ her mother said. ‘Dr Pomeroy left because her work was finished. I thought you loved the annexe, Rose, with what we’ve done there, and all the colours.’

  ‘I do and I don’t.’ Rose shrugged. She had felt like shrugging all day, out of temper for some reason. She did like the
annexe, but it still wasn’t quite right. Nothing seemed right.

  ‘She’s been programmed against it by those silly Mumfords,’ her father said.

  ‘Or my silly self?’ Rose invited him to quarrel, but he wouldn’t.

  She was a bit silly now, had been for weeks, restless, changeable, enjoying the increasing business at the hotel, with its promise of summer, then grumbling at the extra work. Wanting something without knowing what it was. Wanting another miracle? There were no such things. Feeling there was something she had to do. Not wanting to do anything.

  Odd things irritated her for no reason. Hazel’s thick legs, going round and round on her bicycle. Mrs Ardis, carrying things so slowly up the stairs, with a hand on her heart if anyone was looking. This morning, poor old Moonlight stood on her toe and she swore at him, which she never wanted to do, because everyone else did. Even Mr Vingo, whom she liked, had usurped Rose’s favourite turret room and driven a guest off the verandah, and the thought of Dr Pomeroy, moodily downgrading nursing student papers in the annexe lounge, still nagged at her.

  ‘I bet she saw the ghost of the old man,’ she nagged at her mother.

  ‘Oh rubbish.’

  ‘It could be haunted.’

  ‘Double rubbish.’

  ‘It’s cold and damp.’

  ‘Not any more, with this warmer weather. Even that wretched door stays shut now.’

  ‘Damp makes doors stick, not open.’

  ‘Well, the floor has settled, I expect.’ Rose’s mother was doing accounts at her desk, and only half listening.

  ‘No one will want to stay there.’ Her mother did not answer. ‘Mollie! I said, no one will want to stay there.’

  ‘Stop it, Rose.’ Her mother looked up, and her father said, ‘Don’t call your mother Mollie,’ and they were off into one of the quarrels she didn’t want, but had to start.

  You treat me like a child.… You behave like a child.… You don’t let me do anything I want.… What do you want?