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 the 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.
Would this night never end? Rose got up, turned on the light to make sure the cupboard door was still shut, and went to the window to look for the promise of dawn. The wind had risen. When she pulled back the curtain, silvery flashes of rain were blowing sideways across the light of the street lamp. The white flash of the dead man’s spirit, Miss Mumford had said, and for an instant, Rose thought she saw it, sweeping away with the rain.
She dropped the curtain, and crept back to the bed like a mole and burrowed under the sheets.
‘You’ve talked half the night, I might have known it.’
When her mother pulled the curtains back and woke her out of her first good sleep, Rose could not believe that it was light and the rain had stopped and the night was over. The yellow cupboard door was shut. Hazel was in the bathroom, running water. The room was its old bright self. She turned on her back and smiled up at Mollie, in a bright blue sweater and the first airing of her white summer skirt.
‘Rose, you look a wreck.’
Rose put a finger under her eye. No tears there, but her head ached. ‘I cried in the night,’ she said.
‘Why, darling?’
‘I was sad.’
‘What about?’
Rose shook her head on the pillow. ‘It was all so dreadfully sad.’
‘I know those dreams.’ Her mother bent to stroke her hair. ‘They seem to come out of some depths of our primeval past, don’t they, with the sadness of all the centuries.’
As soon as possible after the breakfasts were done and Hazel had bicycled away into the beginnings of a sunny day, with the rain steaming up off the road, Rose went to look for R. V. Vingo.
He was in the rocking chair on the triangular verandah under his room, which still held a sliver of the early morning sun. He was wearing an outfit Rose had not seen before, a tweed suit too heavy for the day, with a leather-buttoned waistcoat and a length of watch chain circumnavigating it.
‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ Rose stepped round the corner from the front verandah and shut the door.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Things are happening. Hazel and I slept in the annexe. They say I imagine things, and I know there’s nothing wrong with the house really, but there is.’
His black eyebrows went up and he nodded and kept his chin down on his crooked bow tie, looking up at her under the eyebrows.
‘There’s a door there that wants to open all the time. There were weird dreams. I woke up feeling cold when it wasn’t cold. Once I woke up and someone was crying, and it was me. Why? Has this got anything to do with that tune, and the grey horse I saw? Mr Vingo, you seem to know something. You must tell me.’
‘Yes, I must tell you.’ He lifted his head and sighed. ‘I thought we had time. But we haven’t. It’s beginning to happen now for you.’
‘What is?’
‘Sit down.’
She sat opposite him on the wicker stool. Over her shoulder, she glimpsed someone behind the glass top of the door, who looked at them, but went away.
‘The music I am writing,’ he began, and his fingers played the piano on his knees.
‘You said it was about an old legend.’
‘Strictly speaking, it’s history. Legends aren’t necessarily true. This one is, but it’s been long forgotten, and it can’t be told properly in words. Only in music, to be understood by those who are worthy to know.’
She wanted to ask, ‘Like me?’, because she had heard the tune, but did not want to sound conceited.
‘Hundreds of years ago – oh, almost four hundred years, let’s say, it doesn’t really matter – the people with money and position and power didn’t care much about all the others. In fact, they had no idea how the poorer people had to live. There were –’ He took a deep breath – ‘Well, there were nobles and dukes and things, and they gave money and soldiers to the king and got a lot of land and privileges in return. There were merchants, who made money off everybody, and there were the small farmers and insignificant peasants, who were totally dependent on the good will of the local high muck-a-muck to be able to survive. You’ve done history. You know all that.’
‘Sort of. What’s it got to do with –’
‘Peace.’ Mr Vingo held up a hand, plump pink palm outward. ‘Let’s get local. You know about the old castle on the moor?’
‘The old ruins? There’s only a few stones left.’
‘Fallen to ruin, as all evil edifices must do in the end. The man who lived there called himself the Lord of the Moor, though he had no right to the title. He was a cruel little weasel of a man, who kept a bloodthirsty weasel as a pet. He not only robbed the poor people of their common grazing land, but forced them to pay him for the doubtful privilege of living below his castle on the hill.’
‘How could they, if they were so poor?’
‘Cows, sheep, grain. The favourite daughters to slave in the castle as servants and marry his crude, rotten soldiers.’
For the first time, Mr Vingo was talking fast and easily, not wheezing and stammering as he usually did.
‘One beautiful daughter had a son, who … Enough of that, we haven’t got much time. This you must know, Rose. When that boy was about your age–’ he nodded at her solemnly – ‘the Lord over-reached himself in beastliness and all the people would have been killed, but they were saved by the bravery of the boy and of the grey horse who was the favourite charger of the Lord of the Moor.’
‘The Great Grey Horse,’ Rose said. ‘I heard you say that at the concert before I fell asleep.’
‘And the people idolized him as the noblest of all living creatures: courage and beauty and peaceable strength.’
‘A thirteen-year-old boy?’
Mr Vingo shook his head.
‘The horse?’
‘What else?’ He leaned forward over his tweed paunch, with his large prominent eyes fixed on Rose, crouched on the low stool at his feet.
‘His mission is to protect innocent people from evil and misery and violence.’
‘How?’
‘Can’t tell you now.’ Mr Vingo’s eyes were watering. He was running out of breath. ‘You’ll know later. Just know about …’ he paused. ‘The Great Grey Horse.’
‘I saw him,’ Rose whispered.
Mr Vingo nodded and began to breathe heavily.
‘You played the tune, and I had to go there. You knew. Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘Timing, timing, Rose. Timing is everything. I had to wait till you were ready. So did he. Now – now, when your life is travelling through that – that special age –’ He was losing breath – ‘When your mind and spirit are aroused to a state of tempestuous movement …’
‘You mean, being thirteen?’
‘Understand that you are one of the chosen, who can reach him, and respond and – and – and obey.’
Mr Vingo began to cough. Water streamed from his eyes. He pulled out a handkerchief and put it over his face, rocking backwards in the wicker chair, and plummeting down with his feet flat on the floor boards.
The spell was broken. Rose shook herself. ‘You made it up. People don’t obey horses. Horses obey people.’
Mr Vingo came up out of the handkerchief. ‘Not this one.’
‘You’re trying to frighten me. I wish I hadn’t told you about the annexe. You’re trying to make me more scared.’ Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of someone’s shadow beyond the glass door, watching them again. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘I’m sorry, Rose.’ Mr Vingo’s great chest went up and down, and he smiled sadly at her. ‘You have no choice.’
Later that day, he was gone. He had disappeared completely, leaving behind the piano and most of his clothes.
‘Did he pay his bill?’ Philip asked Mollie.
‘Not yet, but he will when he comes back.’
‘He’d better,’ Philip said grimly. ‘What were you talking to him about this afternoon, Rose?’
‘I don’t know … Things.’
‘I’m not sure I trust that character. For two pins, I’d get a van down and have the damn piano and all his stuff carted away.’
‘Oh, Phil,’ Mollie said soothingly.
‘I mean it. I don’t want you getting too friendly with him, Rose.’
‘I like him.’ She was not going to say, ‘He frightened me.’
‘I don’t like either of you being too chummy with any of the customers. I’ve told you that.’
‘But that’s part of the charm of Wood Briar,’ Mollie said.
‘It’s not professional.’
‘Yes, dear,’ Mollie said, and Rose said, ‘Yes, Daddy.’ They had heard this before.