Nothing changed. That was the deceptive thing. One day Rose’s life was in a turmoil, and the next, everything was back to normal.
Her mother and father were the same as always. Her mother working like a demon, with damp tendrils of hair on her flushed cheeks, hurtling in and out of crisis when the fishmonger didn’t deliver or the plumbing got stopped up, but always smiling for the guests. Her father returning from work sometimes early, sometimes late, sometimes cheerful and wanting to swim or take the little boat out, sometimes bitter about his job and his boss at the laboratory who was stupider than he.
School was the same, limping towards the end of term as if it would never get there. Rose was the same. She rode in the late afternoon now that it was lighter, out on to the moor with a string of riders, and Moonlight put his foot in a rabbit hole that everyone else avoided. The moor was the same.
They rode past the flat-topped hill on the other side of the lake, and Rose asked Joyce if she knew any legends about the old ruins up there.
‘Did hear something once. Shorten your reins, Rose, and don’t let that beggar snatch at trees. Bunch of rubbish though.’
‘What did you hear?’ Rose kicked Moonlight to catch up with Joyce’s long-legged, striding horse.
‘Can’t remember. Fairies and goblins or some such rot. All right, everybody! Stop loafing about and let’s see if we can get these nags into a ter-rot!’
The moor was the same. With Mr Vingo gone, it was easier to try to put off thinking about what he had told her. Everything was the same.
Some of the same people were turning up at the hotel. Spring visitors who liked to come before the summer tourists. Fishermen who went out in Jim Fisher’s brother’s boat, and got Mollie to fry their fish for them. Rose was as glad to see people come back as Mollie was. It tied your life to the safe cycle of the year, like knowing that the birds would come and go, and that even as the leaves fell off the trees in autumn, they were being pushed by the embryo growth of next year’s buds.
One of the welcome events was Martin and Leonora turning up in their van for lunch, as they did every spring when he had to go to the hospital for a check-up. Rose helped Leonora and Jim to tug the wheelchair up the shallow front steps. Martin was strong and healthy from the waist up, but his legs had been paralysed after a crushing steeplechase fall two years ago. Rose was fascinated by him, because he seemed as relaxed and happy as if nothing were wrong, and was more interested in other people than in himself. She wanted to talk to him about horses, but perhaps this was a forbidden subject now.
Leonora, who had given up a ballet career to look after him, was the kind of woman Rose would love to grow up to be: slender and graceful, with long straight black hair and gentle, shining eyes in a lovely pale face. Some hope. Several new people were arriving too. A family of four and a half (one was a baby) were staying for a month until their new house was ready. The car people began to turn up every evening demanding rooms without reservations and taking off next morning without even seeing the sea, leaving beds, beds, beds to change for Gloria and Mrs Ardis and a flighty young girl called Cindy from the drug treatment centre, who told Rose that going to gaol couldn’t have been worse than cleaning bathrooms.
They were using the annexe now, and everyone loved it. When Jake and Julie came the next weekend, Mollie offered them the best front bedroom as a favour.
Rose did not see much of them. They did not seek her out. After lunch, Jake went off somewhere in the car, and she saw Julie crossing the road towards the dunes alone, with the dog. She could not find them after dinner when she looked for them to play Scrabble, so she took care of the baby while the family of four – husband and wife, grandmother and divorced daughter – went to the cinema. That night, from the baby’s room at the back of the hotel, a full moon night, a night for dogs to howl for no reason, Rose heard Jake and Julie’s dog whining and barking from the kennel.
Julie did not come to the dining-room for the big Sunday breakfast – choice of kippers or sausage and bacon and egg, or both. Jake usually had both. This morning, he just wanted toast. Gloria was waiting on him, but he stopped Rose as she went by his table.
‘I know you don’t do room service,’ he said, ‘but could you possibly take something over to Julie when you’ve got a moment – coffee and toast?’
‘You can make that for her in the annexe kitchen,’ Rose said.
‘I offered.’ Jake’s long thin face was mournful. ‘She wouldn’t let me get her anything. But if you just take a tray over …’
Rose knocked at the bedroom door and went in. Julie was in bed in a dim light, so she put down the tray and pulled back the curtains.
‘Look – it’s a lovely day. Don’t you feel well?’
‘I’m all right,’ Julie said, not looking up. She pushed herself up against the pillows and tried to smile. ‘Thanks, Rose, but I don’t want anything.’
‘You must have breakfast.’ Rose put the tray on her lap. She had picked a rose from the garden as she came through and put it in a glass, but Julie didn’t notice.
‘Jake’s worried about you.’
‘I doubt it.’ Julie set her mouth.
‘Julie!’ If this marriage went wrong, nothing was secure.
‘This has been a horrid weekend, for some reason. Jake’s moody. I’m in a bad temper. Yesterday, he took that – that girl – the one with the baby – off to the art museum because she’d never been before.’
‘But you’ve been there.’
‘Yes,’ Julie said, meaning, ‘You don’t understand.’ She picked up the cup and began to weep into the coffee, trying to sob and drink coffee at the same time.
Later that day. Rose went over to the annexe to collect towels, and heard Julie weeping again. But their red car was not in the hotel car park, and her mother told her that they had left.
It was only a matter of time. Mr Vingo did not return, but the haunting little tune drifted through her head at odd times, and she knew she could not avoid the horse for ever.
Once, she heard the ascending flute notes of the tune through the roar and rush of the dishwasher in the scullery. Once, the low, reverberating notes, like a horse snorting into the wind, were revolving in the engine of her father’s noisy old car. When she and Hazel went to an afternoon pop concert on Newcome Pier, Rose heard the melody again, weaving its way through the jagged rock music of a local group in pirate hats and pink running shorts.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she shouted urgently at Hazel, through the noise. Hazel picked up Rose’s wrist to peer at her watch. ‘It’s not half over.’ Her words were blotted out in a crash of electronic sound, but her lips were obviously protesting, ‘We’ve paid.’
Hazel shrugged, and continued to move her large knee solemnly up and down, slightly off beat. Rose clambered over her, pushed her way past several elderly holiday-makers who were being deafened by the music if they weren’t deaf already, and ran back down the pier to get her bicycle. She rode through back streets, and full tilt out towards the moor.
She came on to it up the road that led to the stables, turning along the edge of the wood and hurling the bicycle in the bushes, to run up to the wall and across the pasture, not thinking, not afraid, drawn forward by some force far stronger than herself.
This time, as she rounded the rock with her heart pounding, and groped her way down through the mist, she became aware that somewhere around her in the valley, shadowy, undefined figures were moving. The blood that drummed in her head had become the murmur of rough voices. She heard an oath, a sound like the rattle of chains, in front of her a man’s laugh, so close that she stopped and turned to go back, but there was someone else behind her. She couldn’t see him, but there was an acrid smell of sweat, and she could hear his breathing.
The horse … She had got to keep going, and break out into the sunlight to reach the horse. She took one or two timid steps down, with her hands out to feel her way, when a patch of mist drifted away, and for a clear moment before the vapour closed in, she saw a huge figure in a cloak right in front of her. His face was masked from nose to chin, and his eyes were slits of steel.
Rose stumbled sideways, and as she plunged on down beyond him, a hand brushed her shirt, and she heard the laugh again. Suddenly she was out of the mist and running down the last slope to the river, and the horse plunged out on to the rock with a great surge and clatter, his pearly coat a blaze of silver light.
‘I’m coming!’ she called. He tossed his beautiful head, and she thought, ‘If I go to him, I’ll never get back. I can’t go back through that dreadful mist.’
On the bridge, she stopped and turned with a hand on the rickety rail, to risk a look behind her. There was no mist. No cloaked shapes, no threatening murmur of voices, no clink of steel or creak of leather. Only the slope of the valley, studded with rocks and bushes, a lark singing high in the sky at the top.
She crossed the bridge and climbed up the other side, her eyes fixed ardently on the shining horse who stood waiting on the rock above her.
She climbed round over the jumbled stones and stepped out on to a rock just above him on the other side, with a steep drop on one side, a rock wall at her back, and the great horse confronting her. As he turned his head, she saw herself, small and afraid, a tiny creature in the deep, wise grey eyes, and before she knew it, she was on his back. His bright, glowing skin did not burn. It was at the same time warm and cool, his back unbelievably soft, yet firm and safe. He rose, and with his long grey mane blowing like a pennant in her face, they were away – galloping, flying – she could ride!
On Moonlight, there were always two moving parts, her and the five-legged horse, and they never meshed to move in unison. With this horse she was part of him, and he of her. It went on for ever. The wind roared by, and the sensation of speed and rhythmic power put her into a kind of trance, through which she became aware of a voice, echoing far away at first, then closer and sharper.
‘Felicity! Fe-li-ci-tee! Help me! Help – Police!’
Her hand was on the latch of a small iron gate, a latch that felt familiar to her thumb as she pushed it down and opened the front gate of the annexe house. Was it the annexe house? The front garden was nothing but rank grass and overgrown bushes. The tangled ivy was pulling away from the walls and straggling across the window where the old woman poked out her grey, disordered head and shouted, ‘Help! He’s killing me!’
‘She’s at it again.’ A stout woman came through the gate behind Rose in a square fur coat and round fur hat, and shouted up at the window, ‘Take it easy, Mum – it’s only Joan and Felicity!’
The old woman shrieked like a seagull and disappeared suddenly from the window, as if someone had pulled her.
The stout woman was Rose’s mother. She knew that. Just as she knew that she was not Rose, but Felicity, with long silky hair that hung in front of her leather jacket, and the kind of tight black trousers and shiny pointed boots that Rose would never wear. Curious. She was Rose and Felicity at the same time. Felicity was walking and talking. Rose was observing.
The upper window banged shut. ‘Nothing changes,’ Felicity’s mother sighed. ‘Oh well. Better get in and get it over with.’
Felicity walked up the weed-choked path to the peeling brown front door, but it was Rose who observed with surprise that the big blue and white sign – ‘Wood Briar Hotel’ – was gone from next door, and the old black and gold sign – ‘The Cavendish’ – was back, slightly lopsided, along the front edge of the verandah roof.
After a long time, the door was opened by a thickset old man with humped shoulders, his lower lip pushed up above the top one to reach his broad nose in a sniff.
‘Hullo, Dad,’ his daughter Joan said, falsely bright.
He grunted, and Felicity said, ‘Hullo, Grandpa,’ with natural cheerfulness, because for some reason she quite liked the old man and felt sorry for him.
He did not answer this either, but turned and shuffled, with his brown cardigan humped up short at the back, through the hall to a dark panelled room with a sulking fire in the small grate.
He sat down in a sunken leather armchair. Joan sat down without taking off her coat or her pale fur hat, and rubbed her hands. She had short thick brindle curls like a poodle, over a face that was broad like the old man’s, but flushed with crimson veins from the cold, while his was pale and grey, as if he lived under a stone.
‘Well, here we are,’ she said, still trying to jolly him along.
‘And about time too,’ he grumbled.
‘That’s what you always say when we do come. No wonder …’ She bit her lip. ‘Never mind.’
‘Where’s your brother Mark?’
‘You know he’s in Venezuela. Really Dad.’ She bit her lip and tried again. ‘How’s Mum?’
‘Mad as a hatter.’ He chuckled in a grisly way. ‘You’ll see. I forbade her to come down.’
‘Shall we go up to her?’
‘Nah,’ he said in a sneering way. ‘She’ll come down, worse luck.’
Felicity knelt on the worn carpet in front of the fire, carefully, because of the crease in her trousers, and poked at the sluggish fire. It needed wood to rekindle it, and more coal, so she took the empty scuttle and went out through the kitchen to the coal shed.
The kitchen was dark, with dark wood cabinets and the terrible marbled linoleum, like the cover of an exercise book, that Rose remembered the decorators tearing up to put down the bright mosaic tiles. Outside, the bare grey apple trees had broken branches, and long coarse grass and weeds struggling up their trunks like fetters. A tree had blown down and lay on the grass, with an upper branch poking a ragged hole in the coal shed.
The door of the shed had lost a hinge. Beyond the small pile of coal, the accumulation of years of tools and broken mowers and old crusted paint pots were cluttered up and draped with cobwebs.
Coming out with the coal, Rose saw the back of the hotel next door. Through a broken slat of the fence, she could see a prim garden with gravel paths leading nowhere, and signs that said, ‘GUESTS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO … etc.’ A cross-looking waiter in a black tail coat and bow tie came out of the back door and lit a cigarette. On the doors and windows was the ugly yellow-green paintwork that Rose’s father had said looked like vomit when they bought The Cavendish four years ago.
Was it more than four years ago now? Was that it? Had she gone back in time? Rose was puzzled, but not afraid, that was the most puzzling thing about it. She felt quite at home being Felicity, neat and slim in her pointed boots, carrying the coal into the depressing kitchen with its sink and wooden draining board full of dirty china and saucepans. Yet she was still Rose, noting from a grease-smeared calendar stuck to the wall with a safety pin, that yes, it was five years ago.
Because she was Felicity, she knew that her grandfather had once been a successful political cartoonist, until he dropped out of style and had to take jobs he hated to support his family. He had grown more bitter, and now seemed to have holed himself up in his study at the back of the house, with the dusty curtains drawn across the French windows because his eyes could not stand the light. Bits of his clothing, outer and underwear, were strewn about. The desk was cluttered with papers and books and medicine bottles and filthy ashtrays and cups half full of cold tea. Piles of newspapers were on all the chairs. There was nowhere for Felicity to sit, so she sat on the floor by the resuscitated fire, which her grandfather complained was baking him.
He went through a string of complaints and criticisms against the house, the hotel next door, the government, the weather, and various members of his family, with particular reference to Joan’s husband. Her face got redder as she got more annoyed. His only pleasure seemed to be to goad her. But when Felicity said, ‘Come off it, Grandpa. Just because Daddy beat you at golf twenty years ago – ,’ her mother snapped at her, ‘Don’t laugh at him!’ and they all sat and scowled at each other.
Felicity fidgeted and sulked and flipped her long hair back and forth and finally got up with an impatient snort and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. She made some toast, and burned it under the awkward grill of the old gas stove. While she was scraping it at the sink, she suddenly felt very sad and hopeless. Holding on to the edge of the sink, in the same spot where Rose had wept over the broken yellow cups, she had to keep her eyes stretched wide open so as not to let tears wash away her eye make-up.
I’m so stupid. But she shook back her head and flipped her hair behind her shoulders and then smoothed it forward again in her habitual preening gesture, and went back to the study.
‘Shall I bring the tray in here?’
‘No, no, no.’ The old man’s chin went up and down. ‘I don’t want crockery all over my books,’ although there were smeared glasses and dirty cups with teaspoons in them on every flat surface, which is why Felicity had not been able to find any spoons in the kitchen.
She picked up the tin tray with its scarred picture of an ancient regiment in India, which she remembered since she was tiny, and carried it across the hall to the dining-room. As she kicked open the door, she almost dropped everything.
Her grandmother was sitting at the table wearing a green satin dress with ruffles, and a large pink artificial flower pinned into the nest of her hair.
‘Give you a surprise, eh dear?’ she said quite normally.
Felicity put down the regimental tray and bent to kiss the air an inch away from the patchily powdered face, which had scarlet lipstick on one side of the mouth only. The other side was mauve, and the knotted hands were blue with cold. The old lady smelt of stale scent and vinegar and damp underwear.
‘Waiting for my tea like a good girl, eh?’ She smiled childishly up at Felicity and then winced the smile into fear and drew back, as the old man shambled into the room and asked her, ‘What the hell are you rigged out like that for? You look like a clown at a funeral.’
‘Why shouldn’t I get dressed up when my dear ones come? Hullo, Joan dear. How you’ve grown.’
‘At fifty, Mum, I’ve stopped growing,’ Joan said, ‘unless you mean sideways.’
The old lady behaved quite well, chattering in what sounded a normal way, except that the words did not make sense. When her husband said, ‘Shut up,’ and threw the only teaspoon at her, she shut up, and began to eat stale biscuits very fast, licking her long blue fingers to pick up the crumbs. Her fingers were so thin that a ring with a heavy carved green stone swivelled loosely.
Felicity, who was on a diet, ate only half a piece of toast, which was disappointing to Rose. Her mother began to tap her foot, always a bad sign. The grandfather swilled tea noisily.
‘I suppose you’ll all be mobbing in here for Christmas,’ he said ungraciously.
‘Not this year, Dad.’ Joan had a way of shouting at him, although he was not deaf.
‘You always come at Christmas.’
‘That’s why we’re not coming this year.’
The old man pushed up his lip. The old woman looked anxiously back and forth between him and Joan, the pink flower wobbling.
‘I’ll come,’ Felicity said impulsively. ‘I like the beach in winter.’
‘I have other plans,’ her mother said warningly.
‘I’ll come on my own.’
‘You know you don’t want to.’ Joan reddened under the fur hat, which had ridden up high on her thick springy hair, like a cheese soufflé. ‘You’re just trying to curry favour.’
‘I’m not!’ Felicity shouted and jumped up.
The grandmother shrieked, and her chair tipped backwards against the wall, and her hands flew up, sending her cup flying with them.
‘Shut up, damn you!’ The grandfather cursed at her, as she went on shrieking, and the shrieks filled Rose’s head, dizzying her. She put her hands over her silken hair to cover her ears, and shut her eyes against her mother’s disgust and her grandfather’s anger, and the mad old woman’s fearful face with the eyes rolled back, and spun dizzily away, away …
Rose opened her eyes to find herself lying on the ground with her hands over her short hair, a few yards away from the edge of the lake where the valley ought to be.