Ballad of Favour

by Monica Dickens

  She was on the opposite side of the line now, and she looked very carefully as they pulled out of the city station, straining her eyes through the dusk for shabby streets that ended at the railway, until the train gathered speed and the streets and rows of houses began to wheel by too fast.

  She went back into the carriage and sat down.

  ‘Had a good time?’ her father asked.

  ‘Lovely. Thanks.’

  She had liked being among the crowd at the Fair, and seeing all the different exhibits, and tasting the food and weird fizzy drinks and cocoa made without chocolate.

  When she was demonstrating Eezeeduzzit, and answering questions and hearing people say things like, ‘Look, Harold, that’s a lot better than that rusty old thing we’ve got,’ she had felt part of the bustling world of commerce. It was all very real and practical.

  She settled down to go through her bag of samples and pamphlets, and compare them with her father’s bag. They chatted away like colleagues, discussing lists of ingredients and extravagant claims for this and that – ‘Never scrub a saucepan again!’, taking critical bites of each other’s health food bars, worrying what Mollie would think of their gifts for her. Now that she was an official demonstrator for Eezeeduzzit, Rose took a professional interest in the varying merits and uselessness of the gadgets.

  When they were near Newcome, she did not want to have to go into the corridor again, to study the streets on this side of the line. She did not want to have to keep worrying about Davey Morgan, whoever he was. She wanted just to be ordinary Rose Wood, returning from an afternoon out with her father.

  The train slowed, then stopped. A woman in the carriage stood up and began to pull bags down from the rack. A jerk forward, and she sat down again with a bump. The train hooted, a sad wail, and at the point where the noise of the hooter began to trail off into the night sky, the crying of the child moved in to take its place, and remind Rose that she could not be ordinary any more.

  As she followed her father’s long stride out to the car park, she saw that they were passing a line of posters that advertised, FUN FAIR! FUN FAIR! FUN FAIR!

  Chapter Eleven

  The day before the wedding, everything looked promising. The bridegroom’s parents, a jolly, square couple from the North, arrived and were thrilled with everything. They called Mollie ‘My dear’ and Rose ‘Love’, and made their own beds and cleaned the bath, and made friends with all the other guests, and did not seem to notice that the Crabbes, the bride’s aunt and uncle, were not making friends with them.

  Their daughter Alice, who was about Rose’s age, was to be one of the bridesmaids. Her long flowered cotton voile dress was on a hanger in her room, with a pair of white sandals standing neatly beneath it.

  The night before the wedding, Rose was woken by the sound of hurrying feet along an upper corridor. A door banged. A telephone rang. Someone ran down the stairs. A car door shut, the engine started, and gravel scattered as it was pulled fast out of the car park.

  Early on the wedding morning, the news was all over the hotel. Not only was it raining, but the bridegroom’s sister Alice had been taken ill and was now in the hospital, minus her appendix.

  Mrs King came back to the hotel and wept, because she had had a bad night and could not bear to think either of her Alice recovering from the operation in the hospital, nor of the lovely flowered dress she had made herself with such care, hanging forlornly above the politely waiting sandals.

  The bride was upset about the spoiling of her plans. She could not come to the hotel, because George was there comforting his parents, and it was bad luck to see him before she walked up the aisle to him in church. Her mother came, in paint-stained jeans and an old sweater, her long grey hair tied back with a rubber band, as if it wasn’t only a few hours before she would be Mother of the Bride – elegantly dressed, Mrs Crabbe hoped – in the left front pew.

  ‘Happy the bride the sun shines on,’ she said with an ironic grimace, shaking rain out of her hair. ‘Jeannie is terribly upset, poor darling. I mean–’ she nodded at the Kings – ‘she’s sorry for poor Alice, of course, but it does seem a shame, when she planned it all so carefully.’

  Rose brought her a cup of coffee, and Mr King, who normally kept quiet while the women talked, suddenly cried, ‘Got it!’

  ‘Got what?’ Mrs Crabbe asked suspiciously.

  ‘Rose, of course. Just the ticket, aren’t you, love? Let her understudy for our Alice. There’s your bridesmaid.’

  ‘Oh, but I …’ Rose stepped backwards in response to a strong urge to escape.

  ‘You mean, wear the flower wreath and the dress and everything?’ the bride’s mother asked. ‘She wouldn’t be the right size.’

  ‘Why not? All young girls are the same size,’ said Mr King, who was not very observant, and his wife said, ‘We’ll make it fit. That’s a wonderful idea. Would you, Rose love?’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Please do it, Rose.’ The bride’s mother smiled warmly at her, and held out her hands. ‘Jeannie will be so pleased. You’ll save the day.’

  Mollie was delighted. ‘If you want to do it, Rose.’

  ‘I do and I don’t. There’s a lot of work to do.’

  ‘We’ll manage. Come on, let’s go up and try on the dress.’

  It was a bit tight in the waist and shoulders, but Rose sucked in her stomach in front of the long mirror in her mother’s room, and had to admit that she looked all right.

  The florist had brought a wreath of real flowers for her hair, and she carried a small bouquet, which matched the pale yellow and tawny flowers on the white background of the dress.

  Abigail knelt to fasten the strap of the tight sandals, which would be giving her hell in a few hours, and put another hairpin in the wreath.

  ‘Gee.’ She stepped back and looked at Rose’s reflection, then turned her round so she could look at the real thing. ‘You … look … swell,’ she said, with deep satisfaction.

  Rose did all right at the church. She did not drop the bouquet. She did not trip over the bride’s train, or her own feet. When she walked back down the aisle on the arm of the best man, she could hear people whispering to each other, ‘Who is that? That’s not Alice. Who’s that?’

  Rose grinned at them. A woman of mystery.

  When Jean and George stepped out of the church doorway, the rain had stopped and the sun was out in a sky full of hurrying clouds. The wind blew her veil up high and she looked as if she were going to take off and fly into married life.

  At the hotel, Rose escaped to the kitchen and put an apron over the bridesmaid’s dress and started to help Hilda.

  ‘Where’s the bridesmaid? Where’s Rose?’

  She had to go out again for the photographs, just remembering in time to take off her apron. Then she went back to Hilda and Jim in the kitchen, which already looked as if a bomb had gone off in it.

  When Wave Breaks started to play, Rose took off her apron again and came through the hall to watch the new Mr and Mrs George King circle the floor alone in a waltz, before other dancers joined in.

  After the cutting of the magnificent cake, she was going to nip upstairs and change into her white blouse and skirt and frilly apron, so that she could help Abigail to hand round cake, and pack pieces of it in little silver boxes for people to take home. Wave Breaks were doing some Country and Western music. One of the guitarists had a fiddle, and he began to saw it upwards into the unmistakable phrasing, the light soaring notes, always strange each time, but always familiar. Rose knew that the horse was calling her.

  Not now. I’m at a wedding.

  Some people were dancing a kind of polka, kicking up their heels to the fiddler’s jig, but the fiddler persisted in sliding up into Favour’s tune at the end of each chorus. Rose had to turn away and move like a sleepwalker towards the back door by the boots and coats passage, where nobody would see her.

  Outside, she picked up her skirt and ran. Half way through the wood, she took off th
e slipping wreath and hung it on the branch of a tree. At the wall of the sheep pasture, she took off the sandals and left them on top of the stones and ran across the wet turf in her bare feet, which were still tough from going without shoes in the summer.

  It was hard to run in the long dress. She could not hold it up all the time. The bottom got soaked and muddy, and gorse bushes snatched at it. Going through the thicket at the edge of the lake, brambles made a grab for the sash and tore it away, as Rose hurried on.

  The lake was gone. The valley was there below her in the mist. The soldiers were there somewhere. She could hear them talking and laughing. Would the Lord of the Moor be there too? Oh God, if the Lord appeared in front of her, with the smell of evil coming from him like a deadly poison, she was afraid that she would turn and run.

  Which was she more afraid of – confronting the Lord, or turning back from the horse’s summons? Something slid across her bare foot. She screamed and stopped her sliding descent. If the weasel was there, the Lord was somewhere near. But the horse was ahead, and if she turned back now he might abandon her, and she would never see him again.

  ‘What happens to messengers who don’t do their job?’ she had once asked Mr Vingo. He had shuddered and answered, ‘Don’t even ask me. I not only don’t know, but I can’t imagine anything so horrible.’

  Standing still, balancing on the slope, Rose strained her eyes into the mist, and listened with all her senses alert. Nothing. Faintly, like a scent brought on a gust of wind, then gone, the smell of unwashed men and burned meat and horses and manure of the castle courtyard. She moved on.

  ‘Save the people!’

  The Lord’s whisper stopped her heart. The touch of his chill fingers on the back of her neck sent her crashing forward, stumbling and slipping, her spine crawling with the fear that he would catch her. When she broke out into the sunlight at last, she felt that it was just in time.

  She was gasping for breath as she climbed up to the horse. He bent his neck to her, and his grey eye was mild, as if he was smiling. Of course she would never turn back! There was no choice. When she had climbed, rather awkwardly because of the dress, on to his back, the fear was gone. The other side of the valley, still tyrannized by the Lord and his men, was a world away. They could not reach or harm her. Nothing could touch her, because she was where she belonged on the back of this powerful spirit-horse, who bore her away joyfully into the sky.

  ‘And so I said to him, “Mr Tompkins,” I said, “promises is all very well, but promises won’t put a roof over my children’s heads, and broken promises from the Housing Department I don’t want to hear no more of. You’ll have to see my husband.’”

  Oh good. Rose was back at the Morgans. She was Carol again, in clothes that were too small for her, riding a very ancient bone-shaking bicycle with a flat back tyre. The loud voice came through an open window of the house where Linda and Susan had heard Davey crying. Carol turned her bicycle through the gateway whose gate had fallen off, and before she got off and went to the back door, Rose saw again the dark mouth of the pedestrian tunnel in the high brick wall. Why had she missed this street when she had looked so hard from the train?

  ‘What did he say?’ Mr Morgan was sitting with his wife at the kitchen table, with a pot of tea and a loaf of bread between them.

  “‘I’ll see your husband,” he said.’ Mrs Morgan had Davey on her lap and was feeding him spoonfuls of sugar, wetted with tea from her cup. ‘You’ll have to give it to him straight and strong, Joe.’

  Mr Morgan did not look as if he could give anything straight and strong to the Housing Department. He was smaller and weaker than his wife, almost bald, with a creased, gnome-like smile. Rose did not recognize him at first without his baggy green trousers and jacket and the square cotton hat. Then she realized. Joe. The other hospital porter had called him that.

  ‘Hullo Mum, hullo Dad, hullo my little Davey.’ Carol took a mug without a handle from the sink, rinsed it sketchily, sat down at the table on a chair with no back that could now be called a stool, and reached for the teapot.

  Her mother cut her a hunk of bread, and her father pushed the jampot over.

  ‘Where’s the butter?’

  ‘Where’s the butter, she wants to know,’ Mrs Morgan informed Davey, who said, ‘Where bu’er’ and beat a spoon on the table and threw it at one of the cats.

  ‘You’ve not seen butter in this house, girl, since your Dad got laid off at the printing works. Part time at that butcher’s shop hospital isn’t going to put even marge on the table, the way the price of everything is going up.’

  ‘Any biscuits?’ Carol asked cheerfully.

  ‘Any biscuits, she says.’ When she yelled hoarsely in his ear, Davey slid off her vast lap and waddled round the table to climb on Carol’s knee. She kissed the top of his head and he turned up a jammy, beaming face and said, ‘Davey love Carol.’

  She hugged him tightly, while her mother’s voice went on. ‘When you’re in work and bringing money home, then you can talk about butter and biscuits. Until then, do me a favour and shut up.’

  Although she talked roughly to all the family, including Joe, they understood that it was as normal as breathing to her. If she had ceased the non-stop harangue, they would have missed the secure familiarity of this noisy, energetic, powerfully loving mother.

  Rose stayed with Carol at the Morgans’ house for the rest of the day. She worried that the wedding would be over before she got back, until she remembered that in all her journeys, time in the real world stood still, and she returned at the same time as she had left, quicker even than the briefest dream. But there was the run to the lake and back. That took real time. She would have to get back to Wood Briar in time to throw the confetti when Jean and George left on their honeymoon.

  As Carol, she went upstairs to the unmade bed, which had a damp spot from Davey’s nap, and wrote an essay for her English teacher, entitled, ‘Winter in Newcome’.

  Rose was very excited when Carol wrote this at the top of the page. Now she knew for sure which town this street and this house were in. Carol got quite excited too, because she liked writing. Her imagination took off like a train, stringing words together and pulling them along. Rose, who wrote slowly and with difficulty, loved the feeling of Carol’s hand moving steadily across the paper, the words seeming to come by themselves. She liked the tension in Carol’s body as she leaned forward, cramped over the writing pad, with her hair falling in her eyes and her breath coming fast, oblivious to everything but the world of winter she was capturing on the page.

  When she had finished, she sighed deeply and said, ‘If you don’t like that, Miss Corcoran, I’ll kill you.’ Then she got off the bed and lifted a loose floorboard and took out of the space underneath a thin pile of papers. She took them back to the bed, because there was nowhere else to sit down, found an empty page and began to write a poem.

  When the people go away

  And the shops on the front are shuttered and cold

  And the sea lashes at the legs of the pier like ice dragons of fury

  And the snow falls at the sea’s edge and melts and becomes the sea

  And is drawn away into the cold ocean

  To break on the shores of warm lands far away,

  Then my heart is cold and shuttered too

  Because my love is gone.

  But the spring will unlock my despair and then

  My heart will fly away to join him in the warm lands.

  Carol wrote the whole poem without pausing. It just poured out of her. Rose was amazed and impressed. Now that she knew how it was done, she would write a poem to the Great Grey Horse, and Mr Vingo could set it to music and put it into the next bit of his Ballad of Favour.

  Carol went downstairs dreamily, and was shouted at by her mother for mooning about upstairs.

  ‘I was doing my homework,’ she said virtuously. ‘Like you said to do.’

  ‘Well, it can’t take you all night. I need you to peel spuds for th
e chips, and then you’ve got to go to the shop, if I can find where I put the mug with the cash.’

  ‘Why can’t Mavis peel spuds?’

  “Cos it’s not my job, it’s yours,’ Mavis shouted from the room across the passage.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘I do.’

  Carol leaped across the passage and pounced on Mavis, who was lying on the bed-settee watching television and filing her nails. They fought and struggled, until Mavis fell on to the floor, waving the nail file and crying, ‘I’ll stab you!’

  Carol pulled her ankle away just in time. Mr Morgan, who was trying to watch the News, pushed at Mavis with the toe of his small shoe and said feebly, ‘Be a good girl now.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. His children were beyond him.

  Carol stood the five-year-old boy Gregory on a chair by the sink to peel the potatoes with a blunt knife. Then she put little Davey into the push chair and walked to the off-licence and grocery a few streets away for a packet of soap powder and a bottle of beer for her father.

  ‘We don’t serve minors,’ the man behind the counter said, while at the same time leaning over to drop a bottle of beer in a brown paper bag into the torn carrier at the back of the push chair.

  In the streets, Rose kept looking at everything to see if she could find a landmark. There were no church steeples or high buildings, but she did see, several streets away, the back of a large hoarding, just the legs and struts. She could not see what it advertised, but it might help.

  As they came back to the house, a small shunting engine passed very slowly across the viaduct above the brick wall.

  ‘Look, Davey!’ Carol picked him out of the chair and held him up to see the top of the engine passing along above the wall. ‘Choo choo train.’

  ‘Saw choo choo.’ He ran into the kitchen and grabbed the leg of his mother, who was frying chips.

  ‘Did you, my angel? There’s a clever boy.’

  ‘He couldn’t have. There’s been none on that branch line for years,’ Arthur said. ‘What have you been putting into his head, Carol?’