The Messenger

by Monica Dickens

  While she rested, he taught her the warming-up exercises he did before a serious run, and some of the resuscitation techniques he had been learning at school, ‘in case we’re on a long distance run and some silly beggar passes out.’ He showed her how to breathe air into an unconscious person’s lungs, how to feel for a pulse in the carotid artery, and if there was none, how to press on the breast bone with both hands to make the heart pump the blood through the air in the lungs and out to the brain before it died from lack of oxygen.

  They practised the pressure on a round-bellied mound of sand, the same shape as Mr Vingo: pause to give two mouthfuls of air, fifteen presses. ‘You keep on doing it until help comes. You keep on and on. You never give up.’

  When they had saved the life of the pile of sand, and demolished it in the process, they jumped up from their knees and ran into the cold sea and swam about for a bit before they plunged to shore on a wave and shook out their hair, and Ben jumped the breakwater and ran on down the long beach, and Rose plodded back just in time to put a cotton dress over her swimsuit and take up some of the morning teas.

  The running was so good and cleansing, but still the anxiety ran with her, of a piece of knowledge just beyond her grasp, something that still had to be done.

  When Mr Vingo came back unexpectedly in the middle of a wet night, coming down to breakfast next morning as if he had never been away and the new guest at his table was an old acquaintance, Rose asked him straight out. No fooling about with it. No time to waste. He had hinted before that he knew more than he revealed. Now he must tell her.

  It was still raining mistily. The lounge and the verandah were full of squabbling children, and guests reading and doing jigsaw puzzles, so Rose and R. V. Vingo went for a walk in the wood, off the path among the trees, where it was drier.

  Rose told him. She had wondered how she would do it, but it was easy. She told him and he listened, as if she were describing a shopping trip to London.

  ‘Yes … yes.’ He stopped and leaned against a tree and turned down the brim of his blue hat, and looked down at Rose from under it with pride. ‘I told you it was time now. You didn’t want to believe it, but now you know.’

  ‘It’s all so confusing. What do I know?’

  ‘That you are chosen to be a messenger of the grey hero.’

  ‘The horse?’

  He nodded solemnly.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘That’s never really made quite clear.’ He shrugged. ‘Because of this time of your life, and because of something – something in you.’ He smiled at her. ‘Something special. It isn’t everyone.’

  ‘I wish it wasn’t me.’

  ‘Oh no, you don’t.’ He looked shocked.

  ‘I was scared, going down into the valley. The mist was so thick, and there were shapes of people moving, and voices. Men swearing and laughing.’

  ‘So they know about you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The soldiers of the Lord of the Moor.’

  ‘But they’re dead long ago.’

  ‘In the valley, you’re separated from time, exposed, like a crab without a shell. And where there’s a power for good, there will always be forces of evil, struggling to prevail. Whatever shapes they take, he’ll protect you from them, as long as you obey.’

  ‘I don’t know that I want to. I don’t know that I want to be – what you said – a messenger.’

  ‘You can’t choose.’ He had told her that before. ‘But even if you could, wouldn’t you choose glory?’

  ‘Glor-ee!’ Rose was excited. The memory of being on the horse’s back, of the power of his flight and the roaring of the wind sent her running ahead, winding in and out among the trees with her arms out, touching their branches to shake off the drops of mist, weaving back to run a circle round Mr Vingo as he walked slowly, prodding at soggy dead leaves with his thick walking stick, and to ask him, ‘Who is he then – the horse? Who is he?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘I don’t know what to call him.’

  ‘His name is Favour. Of all the horses at the castle, he was the strongest and swiftest and became the favourite of the Lord of the Moor.’

  ‘But listen.’ Rose stopped him. As they stood facing each other under the dripping trees, she put out her hands and held his arms through the damp grey coat. ‘Why is he here, on this moor, in that valley?’

  ‘This is his place.’ Mr Vingo’s words were short, because he was short of breath. ‘And the legend happened here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Flood. Wicked Lord cut down trees for money. Nothing to hold river banks. Houses swept away. People would have gone with ’em, but Favour raced the flood waters to warn them.’

  ‘Where is the valley now?’

  ‘Under the lake.’

  ‘So it’s not really there.’

  ‘For you, it is.’

  ‘But I can’t find it now.’

  ‘You will.’ He winced because Rose was gripping his arms.

  ‘Sorry.’ She let go of him and stepped back, and he brought the handle of his ash plant up to the brim of his hat, and threw out his heaving chest.

  ‘I salute you, messenger of the grey horse.’

  Rose bowed.

  Either he was mad, or she was.

  Above them, at the tops of the trees, the rain seemed to have stopped, and Mr Vingo said it was time to go home. They walked slowly along the path. He was too out of breath to talk, so Rose told him some more about the old man and his poor crazed wife, and Felicity and her mother in the fur hat.

  ‘So what does it mean, a messenger? Am I supposed to take a message back to them? I wasn’t any help to them. I can’t change what became of their lives. It’s too late.’

  ‘Never too late to stop that happening to other people. You understand that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor can I really.’ He laughed.

  She opened the gate for him, and as they went through the back garden, she pulled him over to the fence to look across at the back of the annexe.

  ‘Looks nice, doesn’t it?’

  The sun was blinking through clouds in a watery way, and a child jumped down the steps from the glass doors and ran in circles, making silvery tracks on the wet grass.

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘I think it’s haunted.’

  ‘Who by?’ He rested his arms on top of the board fence and put his chins on his hands.

  ‘The two old people? They were so unhappy.’

  ‘They’re part of it perhaps. I don’t know. You have to find the clue.’

  ‘Clue to what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that. You know more than me.’

  ‘No,’ he pivoted his large head from side to side on his hands.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘I don’t – ’He looked at her guiltily, put his hands over his mouth and started to cough.

  ‘I can’t understand,’ said Rose. ‘They were quite ordinary, decent people, if you think about them, but something wouldn’t let them be like that. Something about the house – could that be it?’

  Mr Vingo was walking away from her back to the hotel, his shoulders hunched, his hands over his face, coughing.

  The house. She turned to frown at its lively back windows, gay with coloured curtains, a bright swimsuit on one of the sills, a young woman leaning out to call to the child.

  It seemed to bring out the worst in them.

  Chapter Eight

  The next time Rose heard the tune, she was trotting along on Moonlight.

  Her riding had improved. ‘Wonders will never cease!’ Joyce shouted in her flattering way. She was sitting more still and firmly. Moonlight was not falling over his large feet so often, because she was not losing her balance and tipping forward nervously.

  ‘Rose Wood!’ Joyce roared across the muddy field where they were jumping infinitesimal fences that most of the horses knocked down out of boredom. ‘I see h
ope for you at last!’

  Well, no wonder, after what had happened to Rose. Hadn’t she ridden Horse of all Horses in a flying gallop? Moonlight was tame stuff after that.

  Because Joyce was so mellow today, and was sporting a small diamond on her left hand to show that her young man had finally got up enough nerve to propose, she allowed Rose half an hour extra to take Moonlight up to the moor and see if she could make him canter. ‘And for God’s sake, don’t let him put his head down and eat grass.’

  Moonlight did not particularly want to canter. That was all right. His five-legged canter twisted you like a corkscrew. Rose was happy to trot steadily along, singing to the muffled drum beats of his hoofs on the turf. She sang, ‘Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry, when I take you out in the surrey,’ which was a good song for a trot. ‘When I take you out in the surrey with the fringe – on top.’ Her voice went up. ‘Ther wheels are yaller –’ Her voice squeaked. It would not come down.

  It had risen into the upward spiralling notes of that special tune. She was singing words she did not know, as the tune filled her head. She turned Moonlight with difficulty and kicked him into his ungainly canter, up a slope, recklessly down the other side and across a stony stretch, with her eyes fixed ahead to where she could see in the distant haze the grey rock, waiting like a sentinel.

  Before she reached it, Moonlight stopped abruptly and put his head down to graze, and she slid off down his neck.

  It was all there, the mist, the ground dropping away, the vague moving shadows, but she shut her eyes and struck out to keep them away from her sliding, headlong descent to the stream – and Favour! He appeared in a dazzle of light and energy, waiting impatiently for her to climb up the other side to him.

  She did not hesitate. She had to go to him, but when he turned his head to look at her with a full and shining eye, she was afraid and had to look away. What was she doing? The valley dropped steeply below her. She tried to step back against the rock wall, but her feet moved forward, and she was on his back, and the soaring, incredible flight bore her away.

  ‘It’s time to go!’

  ‘Not ready!’

  As she ran upstairs, two at a time, away from the small child’s voice, she saw that her feet wore black patent leather shoes with straps, and her stockings were made of cotton.

  ‘Sylvia!’ The child’s voice from below, whining. ‘Sylvi-er! Me and Jack want to go to the party.’

  ‘You wait, you rotters,’ Sylvia called down over the bannisters, which Rose realized were the bannisters at Wood Briar: an oak rail, rounded to fit your hand, or your bottom if you were sliding down. Sylvia went on up into her room, one of the hotel bedrooms, but it did not have the neat, functional hotel furniture, with the chintz bedspreads Mollie had bought for all the rooms this year – this year, which year? where was she now? – nor the notice by the light switch about meals and departure time.

  Sylvia’s clothes were strewn about: a kilt, a school gym tunic, a green blazer with a gaudy badge on the pocket. On the bed were a crinoline doll and a harlequin and a pile of fluffy toy animals. Shoes and a tennis racquet spilled out of the open wardrobe door, on the back of which were tacked up pictures of horses from magazines, with jockeys on them and men standing about in silly tweed hats and knickerbockers, and flat-shaped women in hats like flowerpots, low over the eyes.

  In the mirror, Sylvia was rather flat too. She wore a restricting kind of garment that made her the same shape all the way down the front to the patent leather belt of her straight dress, worn very low, miles below the waist. The front of her bobbed hair was looped over to the side and held with a daisy clip. She was ready to take her younger brother and sister to the party next door, but she didn’t want to go.

  She did not dislike the family there. She hardly knew them, since they had not been there long. But she did not like anyone at the moment, because her mean, rotten parents would not let her have a pony, and everything here was done for those silly little ones, and there was nothing to do in this God-forsaken place to which her family had moved five years ago because Sylvia had had tuberculosis and the air was said to be salubrious.

  My fault again. Sylvia tugged the belt lower, until it was almost down to the hem. Always my fault.

  All this Rose knew as it passed through Sylvia’s head, while she hitched up the cotton stockings, which had bits of elastic tied round the top, and chewed at her lips to make them pinker, because her old-fashioned mother would not let her wear the orange lipstick that everyone at school had gone wild for.

  There was a battering on her door, and she jerked it open and made a terrible frightening face at Daphne and Jack, anxiously hopping about in their party clothes outside.

  ‘Come on, hurry up,’ she said. ‘Catch me if you can!’ She hurtled past them to the stairs, slid down the bannisters to land with a thump in the hall, and dodged out of the door to the verandah before they could see where she went.

  She ran along the echoing boards and climbed over a wicker screen to the side verandah, where she vaulted the rail and dropped into the garden. Crouching low, she scuttled among shrubs to the summer house and slid across its red tile floor to hide behind the folded deck chairs.

  The little ones had come out of the house and were mewing about on the lawn. ‘Sylvi-er! Silly Syl! We’ll tell our mother!’

  She waited until they were near the summer house and then pounced out, sending them into screams, which changed to shrieks and giggles as she rolled them over and tickled them, messing up their party clothes.

  She was soon sick of it. ‘Small pleasures of life are fleeting and trivial,’ she quoted to herself from one of her own poems, retied Daphne’s sash, brushed down Jack and wiped his disgusting nose, and took them firmly in each hand. ‘O, gentle sister, little mother.’

  They walked round to the front and primly along the road to the house next door, and primly up the brick walk of the garden, newly planted with roses and flowering rhododendrons. Doris, the maid, opened the door and smiled at them, which was unusual. When she visited the maids at Sylvia’s house, she depressed the kitchen with her grumblings about the ‘dreadful hole’ of her situation. The house looked gayer than usual, because it was Sonny’s birthday party. There were balloons and paper streamers and fairy lights, and a jolly uncle in a paper hat and false nose, and an aunt who banged on the piano for musical bumps, and the dining-room table was spread with sandwiches and cakes and crackers and little paper cups of jelly.

  Sonny’s parents told Sylvia to leave her present in the study at the back. The father was supposed to be something to do with newspapers. There were some framed cartoons on the wall with grotesque black and white people with huge noses and endless legs, saying things in balloons. Rose saw that he was a short, square man, and his wife was tall, with long thin fingers on which a heavy carved ring …

  My God! Rose metaphorically clapped a hand to her head, although she had no head or hand except those belonging to Sylvia, who was turning over the presents to see how theirs compared. My God, the ring! This was the old cartoonist and his wife at a much earlier age – fifty – sixty years ago.

  Before the afternoon got cold, there was a treasure hunt in the orchard where the apple blossom lay under the trees as if they had stepped out of pink and white petticoats, Sylvia thought. The ornamental cherry was still full out, and she went and lay under it and looked up through a foam of fragrant pink, as if she were seeing the sky through soap. She did not know, as Rose did, that in fifty or sixty years the tree would be fallen and dead.

  Sylvia was the oldest one here, except for the grown-ups. She had only come to bring Jack and Daphne, because her mother was in the hospital, having another baby, for some reason. Other people’s mothers were here and some nannies, uniformed and clucking in a bunch together, or bending over the pram of the baby of the house, Joan, crooning and saying, ‘Isn’t she a darling!’, to cover their professional criticism of clothes, make and probable cost of pram, colour of cheeks, size f
or her age, etc.

  The Mumford twins were also objects of attention, although heaven knew they left a lot to be desired, but they took advantage of being twins. They were identical five-year-olds, dressed alike, and rather blank and pudding-faced. When Sylvia asked them who was who, for something to say, they slid their small eyes sideways at each other under their thick lids and said, ‘I’m Angela,’ and, ‘I’m Audrey,’ in a way that made you think they were not.

  At tea, the twins were not allowed to sit together, because their mother had been reading a new book which said that twins had to be independent. One of them pretended to see a white cow outside the window and screamed.

  ‘Strong imagination,’ her mother said.

  ‘Playing for attention,’ the nannies muttered.

  The twin at the end of the table pressed her lips together and made a scared face, and behaved rather strangely, and would not eat.

  The mothers and nannies standing round the room behind the children clucked, and discussed in whispers whether Mrs Mumford was wrong or right.

  Sylvia stood against the wall too, refusing to be classed as a child, and pretended not to be hungry. She would be having supper with Daddy after the babies were in bed. Actually she ate quite a lot, which was nice for Rose, but she had to go home to fetch a cardigan, because Daphne was cold in the dining-room, and by the time she came back, tea was over.

  After the meal, the party flagged a bit, as parties do, so the jolly uncle called for Hide and Seek, and switched the false nose round on its elastic to the back of his head, to make people laugh.

  The lights went out. The children scattered. The birthday boy went into the study with the grown-ups and hid his face in the leather armchair and began to count to fifty.

  Sylvia went into the kitchen to talk to Doris. The kitchen had been done up, with new wood cabinets and a fancy floor of marbled linoleum. Sylvia finished the left over orange jellies and dried some plates for Doris, and dropped one with a crash as there was a terrible screaming from somewhere in the house, and the sound of running feet.