The Messenger

by Monica Dickens

  She sank to her knees on the rock beside him. How dared she think of catching him, possessing him? She was possessed by him, humbled, afraid.

  Crawling backwards, she somehow managed to slide off the rock and drop down to the stony slope. She stumbled down the side of the valley to the bridge. After she crossed, slipping off at the end of the planks and soaking wet to the knees, she looked up once, with the cold water swirling round her legs, and saw him still standing there, immobile, aloof, his neck up and arched, head tilted, one ear forward and one back, a classic grey statue, with the top layer of his mane lifting like feathers in the light wind from the sea.

  As she neared home, her own world returned. The barbed wire caught her sweater, as always. The sheep did not even look up at her. The trees were just trees. She was exhausted, hardly able to think, dizzy and confused about what had happened to her on the familiar, friendly moor. Her friend Hazel always told her, ‘You’re mad!’ if she produced a difficult new idea, because Hazel’s mind moved slowly. Perhaps she was mad then. Perhaps she was losing her mind.

  Her mother was behind the registration desk, working on bills. Most grown ups, when you have been somewhere you don’t want to tell about, will greet you with, ‘Where have you been?’ One of the good things about Mollie was that she never asked, ‘Where have you been?’ until she saw that you wanted to tell her.

  She said, ‘Look at you, you’re exhausted. You’re doing too much. I’ll be glad when school is over.’

  ‘I’m OK.’ Rose looked down at her feet. Her shoes were muddy and the bottoms of her jeans were wet. ‘I’ll help with suppers.’

  ‘No, you won’t. Go and have a bath, and I’ll bring something up to your room. Before you go up, just run over to the annexe for me, like a love. I left the tape measure there.’

  ‘Won’t it do in the morning? I’ll get it before school.’

  ‘I need it tonight. Go on. The keys are on the hook by the back door.’

  Rose did not want to go to the annexe house in the gathering twilight. Instead of going out of the back door and across the two gardens to the other kitchen, she went out into the road under the street lamp to go in by the front of the house next door.

  It was a brick house, like Wood Briar, but covered with ivy that was squared off round the windows like a neatly clipped dog, with a steep roof overhanging like a frown. On either side of the front path, the small garden did its best with pansies and marigolds, and a few moth-eaten rhododendrons that would have to be replaced when there was time. The window trim and the front door, which Rose had always hurried past when the old man lived there, were now painted yellow. ‘Like an ice cream shop,’ Philip Wood said.

  Rose went through the gate in the brick wall and up the steps. After a moment’s hesitation, because there was something funny about this house, no matter what anyone said, she opened the door and quickly turned on the light in the hall. All right, house. I dare you.

  The hall was bright and welcoming. Her mother had put a bowl of flowers on the table, because any day now there could be a sudden surge of guests and they would have to put people here. The annexe was waiting for them, newly painted, new rugs on the polished boards, long flowered curtains at the French windows that looked out to the orchard where Rose could see the apple trees leaning about in the waning light.

  She liked the house again. Her father was right. She had been programmed by the Mumfords. Rose opened the door into the front bedroom. There it was, fresh and orange and yellow. The chrysanthemums rioted over the bedspread and curtains. Thank God to be back from the moor, to familiar things. Everything about the annexe reminded her happily of last winter: she and her mother working so hard in here, and the day the plumbers and carpenters were finished, and the man who rebuilt the fireplace, and they had had a small party.

  She took the tape measure back to her mother and told her, ‘I’ll do suppers.’

  ‘You don’t need to. There’s only seven. Mrs. Maddox has left already, taking her cat, thank God, and the Kellys have gone. They said to say goodbye.’

  So there it was. The only person she might have wanted to tell about the discovery of the valley and the marvellous, terrifying grey horse was Ben. They could have laughed about her losing her mind, because she knew that he sometimes imagined things too. He had told her that when he was winning the cross country race last term, his strides got longer and longer and his feet barely touched the ground and he knew that he was going to run off the edge of the world.

  Chapter Five

  In the end, the only person she was able to tell was Mr Vingo.

  All week it rained, but by Friday the weather cleared and the hotel filled up for the weekend. There were some people from the town, some who were on trips, and a friendly couple in their thirties called Jake and Julie, who often came for summer weekends from their jobs and their flat in a large strident city seventy miles away. Jake even plunged into the cold surf with the maniac swimmers who forced themselves into the sea all the year round. One of them was an old man of eighty who was expected to die of it every winter, but never did.

  Dilys, one of the college students, came to be a waitress, her long hair pulled back into a thick plait down her back, which made her look not much older than Rose.

  Brisk, bustling Gloria was ‘on the rooms’, with Mrs Ardis huffing along in her wake, threatening to quit, as she did every month in the summer because there was too much work, and every month in the winter, because it was boring.

  Good old Hazel was coming from the village on Saturday afternoon to help in the kitchen and serving pantry, and stay for supper with Rose.

  Saturday was the kind of day that Rose liked. Time to go out in the morning and run on the beach with Jake and Julie and their dog, which they kept in the kennel behind the hotel. Too busy all the rest of the day to open any of the books she had brought from school.

  But all day she was like a shaken-up bottle of lemonade.

  During the week, she had asked her mother, ‘Are there any wild horses still on the moor?’

  ‘I doubt it. It’s become a tame sort of place now, with all the trekkers and trackers and diggers and joggers.’

  ‘I saw one …’ No. She realized at once that she couldn’t say that. ‘I dreamed I saw a beautiful grey one.’

  ‘You dream of horses every night, don’t you?’ Her mother hugged her. She still had to bend a bit to do it, though Rose expected to grow taller and narrower soon. Getting your upward growth late meant your energy had gone into your brain, her father had explained to her when he was in an optimistic mood.

  Out on the blustery beach with Jake and Julie, Rose kept thinking she saw the horse’s crest and his plunging hoofs in the surge of the surf, where the big waves soared and crashed and tumbled in to be sucked back into the sea. She ran like a mad thing down the beach, with the brown dog barking and jumping round her, swerving in and out of the frothing sea, trying to see the flying mane as the waves crested and broke.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ Jake and Julie laughed at her as she hurled herself back to where they were walking hand in hand.

  ‘I’ve gone mad!’ she shouted, and ran past them.

  The pressure of suspense was still fizzing in her, choking up against the top of her throat. She could not run away from it.

  After teas on the sunny verandah glassed in from the wind, Mr Vingo, who had sat like a buddha, smiling but silent with his teacup held on the mound of his stomach, got up, dusted off cake crumbs inefficiently and said to Rose, ‘Come up to my room when you have a moment.’

  Rose left the rest of the clearing to Dilys, who was in love and had been crying to Mollie in the scullery, and went upstairs in her blue and white check apron.

  He was sitting in the armchair, which was too small for him. Once in, he had a hard time getting up and out.

  ‘What did you want, Mr Vingo?’

  She had learned from her mother that ‘What do you want?’ was crude. ‘What did you want?’ was all right.


  ‘It’s what you want, Rose of all the world. Want to talk?’

  ‘What about?’ She did not know if she could trust him. He had played her tune, but she had been half asleep after all. He could have been playing something else, and she had dreamed her tune.

  He folded his hands across the cake crumbs and waited.

  ‘That little tune,’ she ventured. ‘The one that goes up like a fountain, and then drops.’

  He did not say anything, so she put it as a question. ‘That little tune? You must have thought I was a dope running out of the room like that.’

  ‘Not at all. You had somewhere to go?’

  ‘Out to the moor.’ She laughed without smiling. ‘Don’t ask me why, but I sort of had to. And then I saw … there’s this valley, you see, I never knew it was there. I got lost. I couldn’t find the lake, but there was this valley, running down to the coast, I’m not quite sure where, and there’s a lot of mist from the sea. And it was –’ she dug her toe at the carpet (‘Don’t dig at the carpet’: her father) – ‘it was there I saw the horse.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘A shining grey.’

  ‘Beauty and strength. Nobility without violence.’

  ‘Is that what you said at the concert? I was only half listening. Listen … Mr Vingo, about that tune you played when I ran out.’

  ‘Ah yes. That tune.’

  ‘You said you just made it up, but I’d heard it in my head before.’ She crossed her hands under her apron and held on to her stomach, as he was doing. ‘I don’t know, I mean – so am I psychic? Am I going mad or what?’

  ‘You are thirteen, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. It’s supposed to be the answer to everything. You know, the teens. End of childhood.’

  ‘Just a beginning?’ He smiled. Although his lips were thick and pale, they lifted at the corners into a very sweet, simple smile across the bottom of his broad face.

  ‘Beginning of what?’

  ‘Rose! Where are you?’

  Rose opened the door and yelled down, ‘I’m coming!’ and turned back to him. ‘Beginning of what? What’s happening to me? What do you know?’

  As he opened the smile to speak, Gloria yelled again, ‘Rowze!’

  ‘What?’ She and Gloria were not supposed to yell at each other when there were guests in the hotel.

  ‘Hazel’s here!’

  ‘You go down to your friend,’ Mr Vingo said comfortably.

  ‘She can wait. She’s too early.’ Hazel always timed things wrong.

  ‘No, no, we’ll talk again. There is plenty of time.’

  Hazel was not Rose’s best friend. She had no best friend now that Abigail had gone with her parents to America. There were several people she hung about with at school, two who rode at the same stable and one who had her own horse; but Hazel was the one she bicycled home with.

  They were not only friends because they lived close. They had drifted together in the turbulence of school society, because they were both rather ordinary. In their class this year, there was a fashion for extremes and dramas. People went in for the heights and depths of neurosis, depression, allergies, dieting, wars against parents, genius, passion. Rose and Hazel simply plodded on down the middle of the road and tried to stay out of trouble.

  Hazel was quite helpful at the hotel, fetching and carrying between the kitchen and the serving pantry, and dishing out, her glasses steaming up as she bent over the soup. She was slow and deliberate, while Rose was fast and careless. She always said afterwards, ‘I don’t know how you can do this kind of stuff all the time,’ whereas some people, like Abigail, envied Rose for being a hotel daughter.

  Afterwards, they had their own supper in a corner of the dining-room, with pork crackling Mollie had saved when she was carving, and mountains of potato because Hilda had chosen to mash mountains today, and the remains of Mollie’s famous trifle, which Rose had been worrying about when people started asking for seconds.

  They were going to take Jake and Julie’s dog for a walk, and scare themselves by creeping about among the low dunes in the dark, but it had begun to rain again.

  ‘Better get on your bike before it gets worse.’ Rose wanted Hazel to go home, so that she could continue talking to Mr. Vingo; but by the time Hazel had fiddled about and gone up and down stairs looking for her jacket, the rain was pelting down, so it was arranged that she would stay the night.

  The bed in Rose’s room was too small for both of them, and Hazel had been known to kick and swing out her fists in her sleep. There were no empty hotel rooms, so, as a treat, and if they would be angels and collect coffee cups and empty the ashtrays first, Rose’s mother said they could sleep in the annexe.

  ‘In the best bedroom?’ Hazel had been taken into the front room to admire the chrysanthemums.

  ‘You shall christen it.’

  They took some fruit and biscuits over in case they got hungry in the night, and Hazel ate most of it before she even undressed. After very carefully folding the bedspread and putting it on the window seat, she sat on the edge of the wide bed eating, with the top of Rose’s pyjamas tucked bunchily into the stretched elastic of the trousers. She wasn’t exactly fat. Hazel wasn’t exactly anything, neither clever nor stupid, pretty or ugly, gentle or violent. She was just solid.

  ‘All solid muscle,’ Rose’s father described her, putting up an arm to ward off the thought of Hazel. ‘She ought to be a lady wrestler.’

  She looked nice and homey in Rose’s pyjamas, with her glasses off and her hair freed from its rubber band and brushed out over her shoulders. Rose sat on the other side of the bed and asked without looking at her, ‘Do you ever have that feeling, I mean – well, sort of – that there’s something you’ve got to do?’

  ‘I’ve done my homework.’ Hazel was eating an apple.

  ‘No, listen, Hay. Haven’t you ever felt, I mean, sort of – well …’ With her elbows on her knees, Rose put her hands into her short straight-cut hair and pushed it up above her ears, frowning. ‘Sort of – this is going to sound weird – as if you were called to higher things?’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Hazel fidgeted on the bed and scratched her leg with a sandpaper sound.

  Rose had told Hazel about the fire, though not about the bearded man on television, in case she had dreamed that, and Hazel had stared at Rose’s hand and listened to the story of the miracle in the kitchen without saying anything. If you told her you had seen God, she would only stare, and absorb the information like a sponge.

  ‘Do I look different to you?’ Rose turned round. Hazel turned round too with the apple in her hand, and considered her for a bit before she said, ‘No,’ and looked at the apple to see where she would bite it next.

  ‘Don’t get apple on the blanket,’ Rose said.

  When they got into bed and turned out the light, Rose still wanted to talk, but Hazel went to sleep, snorting and thrashing about for a while, and then settling down like a dropped log, deep into the pillow.

  Outside, the rain poured down. The street lamp showed streams of water on the window. Rose got up once to pull the curtains closer, and when she went back to bed she must have fallen asleep, because she woke suddenly from a dream she could not remember, and lay very still on her back, wondering what was different about the room.

  She could still hear the rain. Hazel was still heavily asleep. Out of the darkness, furniture gradually appeared, the mirror on the dressing-table, the bedspread folded on the window seat, chairs with clothes on them. Rose had not wanted to put them in the cupboard, in case the door would not shut again.

  It was not shut now.

  Rose lay with her head turned stiffly, watching the door while she groped out a hand for the switch of the bedside lamp. She knocked the lamp and it fell on the floor. Probably broke the bulb. Hazel did not stir. After a long time of straining her eyes at the cupboard door and the darkness behind it, and holding herself small and still, Rose made herself swing her legs out of t
he bed and get to the light switch.

  Even the bright overhead light did not wake Hazel. It showed the inside of the cupboard, harmlessly empty, and the door half open.

  Because of the damp again. Rose put her mother’s cheerful voice into her head.

  She shut the door and it stayed shut. She tiptoed away round the end of the bed, turning back quickly to catch it at its tricks, but it gave her a blank yellow face.

  She wished it wasn’t raining. She wished Hazel had not had to stay the night, and that she was in her own room high up at the back of Wood Briar; but she climbed into the wide bed which was as comfortable as a nest, and went back to sleep.

  She woke again in fear. The cupboard door was still shut, but her dream had been awful, one of those dreams where you can remember the mood, but not the details, and the mood was sorrow, and it was still with her.

  She tried to wake Hazel.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Let’s go back to the hotel and sleep in the lounge.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Hazel kicked her legs about and was asleep again.

  The night was endless. Rose did not know how much she slept, nor what was dreams and what was her own fear. Once, she thought the door was open again, and there was a hint of that damp sea smell in the room, but when she turned on the light, the door was shut. Once she woke to find that she was very cold. She groped towards Hazel for the bedclothes, and found that the blanket was still covering both of them. Once as she was struggling up out of another heavy dream of sadness, she heard someone weeping. Who? Who was weeping in the house? She came fully awake with her hair wet on the pillow. It was she herself who was crying.

  The dream was gone, but she could not stop desperately sobbing. Hazel half woke and grunted, ‘Shut up,’ and went back to sleep, and when Rose took a shuddering breath and gave a last gasping sob, Hazel hit out at her in her sleep.