Ballad of Favour

by Monica Dickens

  ‘In a way,’ she told Mr Vingo, when she took his letters up the spiral stair to his room where he was practising, ‘Favour is like someone writing a detective story. You get clues, but you don’t know what they mean, and he expects you to be as clever as he is.’

  ‘That’s why you’re chosen.’ With his broad bottom spread over the round piano stool, Mr Vingo kept on playing with his back to her. He was practising the merry ‘Dancing Song of the Valley People’, that he was going to teach Abigail to play with him as a duet.

  ‘I’m not clever,’ Rose said, giving his back the dumb stare that she gave teachers at school who asked too much of her.

  ‘Yes, you are. Yes, you aah-haah-haah!’ Mr Vingo sang, wagging his head, so that the back of his hair, which always needed cutting, moved over the collar of his grey jacket.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’

  ‘There’s no law against it.’

  ‘I got a clue.’

  Rose thought he would swing round and look at her, pleased and excited, but he kept playing the same phrase over and over again, tutting and muttering and stabbing at the keys, as if they were trying to escape from the piano.

  ‘A child was crying.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It was bad. He might have been abandoned – he might have been hurt.’

  ‘I mean, good that you can do something about it.’

  ‘I don’t know how I can. I don’t know who it was or where it was or when it was. Some time in the present, but I don’t know if it was today, or yesterday, next week, next month. I wish you’d help.’

  He swung round then, with his stubby fingers in the air, and saw her pouting.

  ‘But it’s you who has to do it, Rose. You know that. Wait. Trust the horse. He’ll show you. Believe.’

  He swung back to the piano, the rusty screw of the stool shrieking in protest, and she knew he would not turn round again.

  One of the letters that had arrived in this morning’s post was from the Kelly family, to ask if they could come next weekend. The oldest son Ben was fifteen, and although he sometimes treated Rose like a child when he was being grown up or wanted to tease her, he was Rose’s hero, and they were friends.

  The Kellys liked to stay in the annexe next door to the hotel. Mollie had converted it from an ordinary house, and decorated it brightly, with a little snack kitchen where guests could make their own breakfast, and sandwiches if they wanted.

  A messy family who spilled things in the kitchen and trailed biscuit crumbs everywhere, including the stairs, moved out just before the weekend, and Mollie asked Rose to go in after school and help Mrs Ardis clean up.

  Rose was hoovering the big front bedroom for Mr and Mrs Kelly. Running a vacuum cleaner was boring work, but it was one of life’s necessitites, and at least it was moronic enough to give the mind a chance to roam free over its own thoughts. As so often now, when her mind was idling, the memory of a small child’s crying came back to trouble Rose.

  Favour had a reason for taking her into the body of that cowardly toady Linda. She had to experience the shabby street, and had to hear the wailing child. If only Favour could talk to her! But although he was all-wise and immortal, he was still a horse and could not do human things. He knew where trouble was, but he had to use people to put it right.

  People like Rose. Rose of all the world … to travel anywhere in the world with him, and to any time in history …

  She saw herself as she had once been as Lilian, in one of the journeys of the first mystery to which the horse had summoned her. She wore a long green dress with lace mittens and a bonnet and coy corkscrew ringlets, a hundred years ago, travelling and observing there within a space of no time in the present, since time was really only a matter of thought, and not a line running backwards and forwards.

  ‘Suck the pattern off the carpet, you will,’ Mrs Ardis, coming in with clean sheets, shouted over the motor, ‘if you keep running that machine on the same spot. How are we going to get this place cleaned up from those cannibals? You’re dreaming, girl, staring out of the window like that.’

  But of course Rose was staring. Across the road, in a gap between the swell of two sand dunes, she had seen a flash of movement, the flick of a grey tail, a scudding of sand kicked up, and through the roar of the ageing vacuum cleaner, which was as noisy as a car with a broken exhaust pipe, she clearly heard the flute-like notes of Favour’s tune.

  When Mrs Ardis had dumped the sheets on the double bed as if they were lead, and plodded out with many sighs, and could be heard treading sufferingly about overhead, Rose left the vacuum cleaner running so Mrs Ardis could hear it, and darted like a swallow out of the front door. She went across the road and over the grassy top of a sand dune, straight on to the back of the grey horse who was waiting there for her, pawing gently at the soft sand.

  ‘Come and change the baby, Carol, there’s a love. I’m up to my eyes in suds.’

  The woman’s voice was hoarse but cheerful. Carol, who had been upstairs on her bed reading a comic, turned her head towards the stairs and yelled, ‘Coming!’ but did not move.

  Rose was Carol, in a school blouse and skirt, who would have been flat on her back, except that the bed was sagging, not flat. She held the comic up between her face and the damp, flaking ceiling. Her hands were rough, as Rose’s were from work, and even dirtier.

  The bedroom was small and cold. One pane of the window was stuffed with newspaper. The chest of drawers stood on three legs and a brick. The mirror on the wardrobe door was shattered in a thousand starred cracks, as if a wicked stepmother had looked into it. Clothes of children of various sizes and sexes hung on nails or were strewn on the floor among broken toys. Carol had a bag of toffees and a cat in the bed with her, and was content.

  The door of the room opened, and a small boy of about five came round it, hanging on to the edge.

  ‘I’m busy,’ Carol said.

  ‘She s- she s-says, if if if you don’t come dow- dow- down right away, she’ll c-come up and and and hit you with the –’ It was too awful to say. The child’s eyes were blue and white saucers. His rosy mouth was pursed in alarm. ‘With the –’

  ‘Belt or broom handle? Ha ha, funny joke. I’m taller than her. I got too big for the belt years ago. You’re not, though!’ Laughing, she made a lunge off the bed at the chubby little boy, and chased him down the stairs roaring, the child shrieking, half with fear, half with glee.

  Was this the child whom she had heard crying? Rose wondered, as she clattered down the bare stairs with Carol. No, too old. That had been a baby’s cry.

  ‘Knock it off, you two.’ The woman at the sink, pounding with massive red arms at the clothes in the suds, was as broad as she was high. Her scarlet face, shining on the cheeks and the little round upturned tip of her nose, was framed by brown hair cut like a child’s and caught up at one side with a Mickey Mouse slide. She coughed through a cigarette stuck on her lower lip.

  In spite of the threats and the husky voice that coughed in the smoke and steam, she was really quite easy going.

  ‘Change little Davey, there’s a love.’ She grinned gummily at Carol. She had taken her teeth out to do the washing. They were in a soup bowl on the dresser that filled one wall of the cramped and cluttered kitchen.

  Below her, a boy of about two with a running nose and cough was staggering about with a torn jersey on the top of him and nothing on the bottom except a sagging nappy which all too obviously needed changing.

  Was he the crying child? Was that why the horse had brought her here?

  While Carol and Rose changed him on the floor, with gentle words of love, and chuckles from the happy baby, a boy and girl of about fourteen and fifteen came in from school.

  Where did everybody sleep in this apparently small house? From the assortment of clothes and toys in Carol’s bedroom and the state of the bed, it looked as if she and little Davey and stammering Gregory were in there together.

  The older brother and sister were c
ontinuing a fight they had brought in from the street. Carol turned up the radio to drown them out. Gregory fell over the cat, which had a fish head on the floor, and it shrieked. Davey shrieked and clutched his mother round her stout legs, and she shrieked too, and swatted at him. It was a raucous, slap-happy family, quick to yell and hit out, but just as quick to laughter.

  Before the mother rinsed the clothes, she took two fistfuls of suds and smeared them round her cheeks and chin, and with the wet cigarette hanging out, she took a chopping knife and pretended to shave herself, for the amusement of Davey and Gregory.

  ‘Dadda! Dadda!’ Davey cried, and climbed on to the back of the lopsided sofa to look out of the window.

  ‘Not yet, duckie. He’s working an extra shift today, thank God.’ But everyone agreed that David Morgan was the cleverest two-year-old ever.

  ‘Make something of himself, he will, one of these days,’ Mrs Morgan said, lifting up her apron to wipe the suds off her face. ‘Unlike the rest of you juvenile delinquents.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ Her oldest son Arthur slapped her on her mountainous behind, which wore trousers as wide as the ones they get two clowns into at the circus. ‘It’s a delicate subject.’

  Because Rose was inside Carol’s mind, she knew that Arthur was due to go to court for some small pilfering jobs. No one in the family thought badly of him for that. They weren’t in favour of pilfering; they were simply too loyal to believe he’d done it.

  ‘It’ll be a delicate subject for the police if I could get up in court and say what I thought of them.’ The mother mauled and pummelled laundry in the grey scummy rinse water as if it were Constable Hanratty. He had it in for them, because they continued to live in a condemned dwelling the bulldozers were panting to demolish, since the Council had not been able to find housing for the large family, and because they were poor but honest, unlike some people in this town, who were rich and dishonest.

  Which town? Rose had, of course, guessed by now that she might be in the house at the end of the dilapidated street, but was no wiser about where it was. When the wash was wrung out, she kept hoping that Carol would offer to take it out to the line in the back yard, so that Rose could get a good look round, but the mother dumped the basket on the older daughter, Mavis, who was making up her eyes at a tiny mirror tacked to the back of the door among the coats and scarves.

  ‘If you fancy you’re going out tonight with your fast friends,’ she told her, ‘think again. You’ve got three days homework to catch up with.’

  ‘It’s all done.’

  ‘Liar.’ Arthur knocked the eyeshadow brush out of her hand, and she bit his arm.

  ‘She’ll come to no good,’ the mother sighed. She lit the gas under a pan full of fat on the encrusted stove, with a roar and a small explosion. ‘Book learning is the only way to get yourself out of this hole. Look at me. I never had none, and I’m stuck. Stuck with you, my little darling angel boy.’ She threw a fistful of potatoes into the fat, and turned away from the backfire of spitting steam to pick up little Davey and hoist him high up into the air until he could put the palms of his grubby paws on to the low ceiling, to join the other many paw marks.

  Rose could not imagine her ever being cruel to this child, or leaving him alone. But when he slipped in her arms on the way down and nearly fell, he began to cry in fright, the same hoarse, wailing cry that Rose had been hearing off and on at the back of her mind ever since she was Linda with the awkward ankle strap. Or did all frightened babies with colds sound the same?

  Stuck, Carol was thinking. She’s stuck, like I’m not going to be. She went out of the kitchen and into the front room across the passage, where a bed with cushions against the wall doubled as a sofa, and knelt by the window sill with her elbows among the starving plants, and stared out past the edge of a torn blanket that was the curtain at the house across the street.

  It was the same street. The house opposite was the one where the cat had been huddled in the window box. Rose could see the brick railway wall with the dark opening of the tunnel like Mrs Morgan’s mouth without her teeth.

  But Carol dreamed of white palaces and thirty storey hotels on the edge of a clear blue ocean, and herself in gorgeous glittering clothes stepping down a wide curved staircase to where a group of beautiful people raised champagne glasses and applauded her, because she was a star.

  She got up and spread out her arms in the crumpled school blouse with frayed cuffs, and took a few waltzing turns in the small room. She pointed her toes and bent her neck with a radiant smile to the blank screen of the television set, as if it were an audience.

  Rose, who danced as if she were playing hockey, according to her father, liked the feeling of lightness, and the dizzying intoxication of whirling round and round with her arms out. The room spun round her. The bed, the broken gas fire, the television, the dry plants whizzed by and spun her like a flung pebble into a room full of noise, where she swayed and grabbed for the handle of the upright vacuum cleaner, which was roaring away as she had left it.

  She stared out of the window to where the horse had been, and Mrs Ardis came in with her ritzy voice to ask her, ‘Pray, why are you standing there with your mouth open? It’s not the fly-catching season any more, as far as I’ve been informed.’

  Chapter Five

  When the Kellys arrived, late on Friday afternoon, Rose was on the verandah collecting teacups and talking to Elisabeth Engel, who had become less shy as the good air of the ocean and the good friendly atmosphere of Wood Briar did their work. Rose made a quick excuse and left the tray and ducked into the hotel out of sight, as she usually did when Ben arrived.

  Why didn’t she hurry out to greet him, as she would have done if he were Abigail, or Jake and Julie, or Leonora and Martin, or any of her good friends?

  Because he was Ben, and each time he had been away, she wondered if he would be changed, or more grown up, or look different in some way.

  He looked just the same as when he had left in August, except that he was wearing a blue sweater instead of a blue shirt, and had lost some of his tan. His nut-brown curly hair was still short, to streamline him for running. He still laughed tolerantly at his garrulous mother when she started to carry on about the suitcases, and winked at his father.

  Rose, who had scuttled upstairs, observed him contentedly through a white lozenge of the round stained glass window over the front door, then walked fairly slowly down the stairs as the Kellys came into the hall.

  ‘Rose!’ Ben put down two bags and came to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Wow, it’s good to be back. How’s everything?’

  ‘All right.’ Rose stopped four steps above him.

  ‘Well Rose goodness gracious you look wonderful you’ve grown don’t say you haven’t because I can see you have what do you think Jack?’ Ben’s mother’s conversation ran on like water flowing from a tap.

  ‘If you say so, Marguerite.’ Her tall, amiable husband flapped his hand to indicate, ‘There she goes again.’

  ‘I hope you’re putting us in the annexe Rose dear you know how we love it and I’ve brought my own coffeepot this time because yours doesn’t quite get the flavour we’re accustomed to at home no offence but you know at Wood Briar we always feel so at home that’s why we come here Mollie my dear how are you a sight for sore eyes!’

  Rose’s mother came down the back stairs from their own rooms with a smile of welcome.

  ‘Back again. Can you stand it?’ Mr Kelly said.

  ‘Your family is one of the things that make it fun to run a hotel.’ Mollie hugged him. She was a great one for loving embraces. Rose’s father rebuked her for doing it to guests, however familiar. He said it was unprofessional.

  Next morning, Rose went out early with Ben, as she always did, to pace him on his training run along the beach. She was out of condition.

  ‘Why are you puffing?’ Ben asked sternly, breathing easily as his feet marked the sand, one two, one two, smoothly and evenly.

  ‘Well … I have
n’t been running every day, like you said.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too busy.’ She couldn’t say, ‘It’s no fun without you.’

  ‘Want to run on the moor later – jump some ditches?’ he asked, as she stopped at the breakwater.

  ‘I can’t. There’s something I’ve got to do.’

  ‘See you!’ He jumped the breakwater and ran on, Jake and Julie’s brown dog galloping behind him, and the seagulls rising before them in a clamour of wings and settling down again behind them to go on with their low tide scavenging.

  What Rose had to do was to go into Newcome to try to discover if this was the town where the Morgans lived, and to try to find their street. To save time, she took the bus into town, got off at the railway station and started to walk down some of the streets near the line in the hope of finding the high embankment wall and the tunnel.

  But these streets were not tumbledown. The houses and shops were small, and it was not a fancy neighbourhood, but the rows of terrace houses were all in fairly good repair, and occupied.

  An old man was digging in a garden at the side of his house. Rose stopped by the fence and admired his michaelmas daisies, which rioted in every shade of pink and mauve and blue and purple. When he stopped digging, and rested a foot on his spade to talk to her, she asked him, in the sham casual style she had learned since she had started her secret life as the grey horse’s messenger, ‘Know any really grotty, sort of deserted streets round here?’

  ‘Can’t say I do. Why?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a friend, someone I know at school, and I was trying to find her. She told me she lived in a house that was supposed to be condemned.’

  ‘If the house was condemned,’ the old man said, lowering his whiskery white eyebrows at Rose, ‘she’d not be living in it, no. The Council would never allow that, no.’

  ‘But if they couldn’t find a better house …’

  ‘There’s places enough for those that pay their way. There’s too many people today who think the world owes them a living, and want to live free off the rest of us decent citizens who’ve always worked hard and paid our taxes.’