The Mumfords did not visit in the summer, except once a month when Mollie and Hilda and Mollie’s friend Samson, who gave cooking lessons in the village, put on a big buffet for Sunday lunch. Extra tables were put out on the porch, and it was advertised in the paper, so outside people came as well as the hotel guests. The Mumfords came, with greedy eyes, making two or three trips back to the buffet to get their money’s worth.
‘Probably don’t eat for a week afterwards,’ Philip Wood said. He helped with the lunches, pouring wine and beer and being quite debonair, so that Rose and Mollie hoped that he might in the end take to the hotel business, but he always disappeared before Sam brought out the fruit and cheese and the pastries he had made, and if he enjoyed it, he never let on.
Sometimes Rose wanted to take him and shake him and tell him, ‘Love life!’ But she had other things on her mind just now. She wanted to talk to the Mumfords.
She cornered them in the hall as they were going out to their car.
‘Remember what you said about the annexe,’ she said, standing between them and the open front door.
‘Having trouble with it, are you?’ one of them asked hopefully. They were no taller than Rose, although she was still short for her age.
‘No, it’s a great success. People love it.’
‘That’s good,’ the other Miss Mumford said glumly, and belched a little. She patted her mouth. ‘Was that a different brand of pickle?’
‘Remember when you said about the birthday party?’
‘What birthday party?’ the one with the shaky head asked. ‘We haven’t celebrated our birthday for years, ha ha. When you get to our age, dear, you’ll find out –’
Rose could not hang around while they went through all that ‘Wait till you’re my age,’ and ‘In my day …’, which passed for conversation with some old people. ‘You cried,’ she said to shaky-head, ‘when you were playing hide and seek.’
‘Who said we played hide and seek?’ the other Mumford asked suspiciously.
‘Well, I mean, they always play hide and seek at birthday parties.’
‘I dare say.’ They closed their faces. What would they say if Rose addressed them as Audrey and Angela?
‘Did you hide in a cupboard?’
‘My dear child, don’t keep prattling on like this when we want to go. We don’t remember a thing about it, and that’s that. When you get to our age …’
She let them go. They drove away like toy figures, upright in a small sky-blue car. The one who did not shake drove, her head hardly high enough to see over the wheel.
‘They said they couldn’t remember,’ she told Mr Vingo.
‘Just as well. You mustn’t try to tell people your secrets.’
‘I wasn’t. I wanted to find out whether any of it really happened, or whether it was a dream, or my imagination.’
‘Do you seriously doubt?’
‘It’s all too weird. Things like this don’t happen. Not to me, they don’t. I’m ordinary.’
‘You’re special.’ He sighed. ‘When will you get that through your stubborn head, Rose of all the world?’
They were in his room because he had offered to help her with her piano practice, but he was sitting on the piano stool, not Rose. He swung round and played the melody from the ballet Spectre de la Rose, and forced his voice to sing about the rose that the girl wears to her first ball, which comes back in the night to dance with her: ‘Je suis la spectre de la ro-ose, que tu-u po-or-tai-ais hier au bal.’ His voice cracked. ‘But that girl was asleep during her strange experience. You weren’t.’
‘I wasn’t last night, I know that. I was awake all night, worrying about what it all means.’
‘You’re a hard worker. You shouldn’t be daunted by a job.’
‘Except I don’t know what the job is.’
‘To find the way back. Where there is unhappiness and unrest, your mission as a messenger of the Great Grey Horse is to follow the threads back and back and back to whatever tragedy of the past has left this haunting legacy.’
‘And then do what?’
‘Resolve it.’
‘Golly.’ Rose digested this. She frowned. ‘How do you know?’
R. V. Vingo gave a little modest laugh. ‘I was a messenger once.’
‘You!’
‘I was your age once, incredible though it may seem. As a matter of fact –’ he looked at his hands, plump under the fingertips from playing the piano – ‘I still feel your age. That’s one of the nice things, you’ll find, about getting old.’
‘Who else was a messenger?’
‘Dozens of people all down through history; some good, some not so hot. Take the famous Blanche Orlando, for instance. She was said to have raised a man from the dead, but she let herself be exploited for money, as a medium on the Victorian stage, and lost her powers, and enraged Favour. Take silly Hugh, the village idiot, a man of fifty with a child’s mind. He broke the spell of the Blind Baron, who lured maidens to his ghastly underground retreat, where they plucked out their eyes for him, in terror of what they saw. Take Leo of Pilot Rock. Wherever they are, in place or time, the horse finds ’em.’
‘Suppose they don’t want to be found?’
‘Tough luck. They can’t avoid it. You can’t avoid it, Rose of all roses, by trying to make out it’s all dreams or imagination.’
He swivelled his wide haunches round on the stool and began to play the lilting tune, and Rose thought, Oh my God, not now please, I’m too tired. Not ready. Afraid.
Mr Vingo laughed, and switched to playing the march from his musical epic, the call to arms that roused the soldiers of the Lord of the Moor to ride out to join the king’s army, with the proud grey horse at their head. He bent over the piano and breathed heavily at the part where the swing of it slowed to the monotonous drum, drum, drum of the night march home with the bodies they carried secretly back to the castle for the Lord to use in his ghastly experiments with the souls of dead men.
When Rose went up with tea next morning, he was gone. His bed was unmade and everything was strewn about as usual – his patent medicines and boxes of biscuits and mustard and cress in a saucer of blotting paper on the window sill.
They had got used to Mr Vingo as a fixture, and departing summer guests had begun to say to him, ‘See you next year.’ But today he was gone again in his mysterious way, and Rose’s father began to speculate that R. V. Vingo was an enemy agent.
He had left a note for Mrs Ardis to lock his door and leave the key at the front desk, because last time his custard cream biscuits had gone while he was away.
Mrs Ardis puffed out the front of her flowered overall, blew upwards at a bit of hair that was hanging in her eyes and said, ‘I have never been accused of anything like this, Mrs Wood, never.’
‘He wasn’t accusing you. But the hotel is full and there are a lot of children.’
Mrs Ardis said, ‘Custard creams are bad for you. I eat only wheatmeal.’
She locked Mr Vingo’s room but left the key in the door, as a sign of something or other.
Running on the beach, Ben said to Rose one morning, ‘I didn’t know you could play the piano so well.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I heard you playing last night.’ When they talked while they were running, they talked ahead, not looking at each other.
‘When?’
‘After I went to bed.’
‘Where?’
‘There’s only one piano. In Mr Vingo’s room.’
‘Not me. He must be back.’
‘Mm-mm.’ Ben shook his brown head and raced ahead of her, his feet making clean tracks in the damp sand of last night’s high tide.
Later that day, Rose was in the garden, picking zinnias and larkspur for the dining-room. Bare feet thudded along the boards, and Ben appeared on the side verandah and jumped over the rail and said to Rose, ‘Listen.’
She straightened up and put her head on one side.
‘Mr Vingo’s piano.’
She heard it. ‘He must be back.’
‘He’s not, I tell you. Let’s go up and see who it is.’
‘No.’ Rose felt afraid.
‘What’s the matter, little girl?’
When Ben called her that, she wanted to punch him. Instead she followed him up the back stairs and along the empty corridor. As they reached the end by the winding stair to the turret, Rose stopped.
Someone was playing that tune on the marmalade piano.
‘Come on.’ Ben turned and saw her face. ‘What’s up?’
‘That tune.’
‘What tune? Whoever it is, they’re playing scales.’
‘No, that tune. Mr Vingo played it at the concert. You heard it, like a flute, just before I left. Listen. There it is again.’
Ben looked blank. He had not heard the tune before. He could not hear it now.
Step by step, Rose was drawn forward, going past Ben to climb the stairs ahead of him to the turret room. The music had stopped. The door was locked. The key was on the outside.
Ben put out his hand. ‘Let’s go in,’ he said, but he did not turn the key. Rose could not have gone into that room. Nor could Ben.
As they went down the stairs backwards, to keep an eye on the door and the steps above them, the piano started and Rose heard the clear notes of the tune again.
‘Ben,’ she said, ‘there’s a place I’ve got to go to. I want you to come with me.’
She did not want to go alone this time, and she wanted him to know. He thought she was the same Rose she’d always been. She wanted him to know that she was special, wanted him, if it was possible, to see what she had seen. Even though he had not heard the tune, he had heard the ghost of the piano.
‘Come up to the moor?’ she asked, her breath catching in her throat.
‘Not for long. I’ve got tennis. What’s the matter?’
‘I’m afraid.’
‘Me too.’ He glanced back at the stairway. ‘I’m afraid we’re schizo. We’ve been hearing things. No piano now,’ he said.
But there was. Its notes were in her ears and head.
‘Come and run.’ She turned and sped down the back stairs and out into the garden and through the wood, with Ben’s feet pacing just behind her.
He said once, ‘Is this a race?’ and laughed, but then they ran in silence, steadily, across the pasture and over the wall, up and down small hills, zigzagging on the sheep track. Rose’s breath was gasping and sobbing.
‘Far enough,’ Ben said. ‘Turn back and slow down. Walk a bit.’
But they were coming to the huge grey rock that stood sentinel to the trees. Rose stopped. ‘This is the place,’ she gasped. Panting, she turned her face to breathe into the wind, as Ben had taught her. Breathing easily, he leaned against the rock and crossed his legs. Leaning on the rock seemed to Rose somehow disrespectful, like leaning against the bulk of Mr Vingo.
When she could speak, she said, ‘Come on,’ and led him beyond the rock to the path through the trees and the mists of the valley. There was no valley there. Only the quiet waters of the little lake, ringed by bushes and trees that dipped their heavy summer branches towards the water.
‘So what?’ Ben said. ‘Noah’s Bowl.’
‘There used to be a valley here, ages ago. A flood filled it in.’ Rose spoke fast to keep his attraction. ‘Over there – you can’t see it now – it drops down past farms and cottages to a tiny little fishing village. And you – and you see, the valley is here sometimes, I’ve seen it, and it’s all misty and shapes moving about, because once long ago there was this wonderful horse who –’
‘A horse. You’ve got this neurotic thing about horses. Thank God boys don’t go through that stage.’
‘But I saw him, Ben.’ She had to make him understand. ‘The horse.’
‘Hears a piano. Sees a horse,’ he grumbled. ‘Brings me all this way. Your imagination’s gone beserk, Rosie.’
‘You heard the piano.’
‘It must have been someone’s radio.’
‘We heard it.’
‘Give it a rest, little girl,’ he said in that fifteen-year-old way that made her want to hit him. ‘You’ll grow out of it. It’s all nonsense.’
It was easier to agree with him than to be angry. ‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is.’
She took a step back, away from him, and, with a thunderous roar as the water receded, the ground rumbled and shook and parted into the cleft of the valley. The mist swirled in, and she stumbled down the slope to where it should have cleared to brightness, but it was dark at the bottom of the valley, as if the sun had gone down, the bridge in shadow, the river surging swollen and sluggish round the stones. Only the horse above her on the other side was a dazzle of light, shaking off sparks of cold fire as he raged at her and stamped and shook his head, his curved ears laid back.
Behind and around her in the clinging mist was the murmur of voices, the coarse laughter and the chink of steel and rasp of a boot on stone.
‘Help me!’ But she had denied the horse, and he turned away his head and stared down the valley. He had called her, but she did not obey, and so he would not protect her, a crab without its shell. She tried to move towards him, but cold fingers plucked her back. Her feet were lead. A soldier laughed in her face with a stench of foul breath, and she swayed and fell, and her senses reeled into blackness.
She woke with the roaring of water in her ears, lying on her back on the wet grass at the edge of the lake. Her clothes were wet and her hair straggled over her face. Ben was leaning over her.
‘What . . ?’
‘You stumbled and fell into the water. I had to pull you out.’
‘I saw you with your head in the air, not looking where you were going. As usual.’
‘Couldn’t you see, in the mist . . ?’
‘What mist? Your eyes want examining.’ The hair on his bare arms was golden in the sunlight. ‘You trip over a stone like a clot, and now look at you.’
He had taken off his shirt to dab a cut on her forehead. ‘Look.’ He showed her the blood. ‘You must have hit your head on something under the water. You were knocked out for a minute. Too bad you came round. I was going to practise my resuscitation techniques on you. I’ve been longing to save someone.’
Rose stood up. ‘I’m all right.’
‘Are you sure? Listen, we’ve got to get back. I’ll be late. Come on.’
She jogged a little way with him, deliberately going slowly, so that when he told her to keep up, she could say, ‘You go on ahead. I’ll be all right.’
He peered at her, dabbed at her forehead again, and left the shirt with her. ‘Take it easy.’
When he was out of sight, she turned and ran back to the valley, which she knew would be there, waiting for her.
This time as she plunged down into the hateful mist, the cloaked figures were more distant and shadowy, and she knew that once she was out into the bright light within sight of Favour and on to the bridge, she was safe. A bridge between evil and good. She ran across the slippery planks, watching the horse carefully. He still seemed wrathful at her treachery, so she approached him this time with more dread, but there was no holding back. She had to climb up to where he was, and although his hoof stamped sparks out of the flinty rock, she clambered on to his back and clung desperately to his mane as he took off like a rocket.
The flight was faster and rougher than before, and less exhilarating, like an uncoordinated ride on any wayward horse, which showed that the horse, for all he was a mighty hero, was still a horse. A man’s voice began to vibrate through the rush of the swift air. Nervous of who it was and where she was going, Rose began to stutter to Favour, ‘Wherever it – it – it is, I will do well for you!’
He was no longer there. The man’s voice clarified, and she was hurrying across a polished floor, in a long skirt and felt slippers, because the voice sounded urgent. ‘Sister! Sister!’
It was a young man’s voice, hoarse and weak. In the front room, a dim lamp showed two other beds with sleeping men, and the young man who was calling, his head moving restlessly from side to side, his hands plucking at the red blanket.
‘Sister? Oh, it’s Evie. Hullo.’ He gave an anxious smile. His face was terribly thin and pale, with a stubble of beard and dark shadows round his eyes.
‘What do you want, Michael?’ Evie put a hand on his hot forehead. She was wearing a grey cotton dress with a long white cuff over the sleeve. ‘I’m not a real nurse yet, you know, but I can get Sister.’
‘No – no don’t. I just want to know someone’s there.’ He took her hand and held it. The other arm was bandaged. A humped frame under the bedclothes kept their weight off the stump where his leg had been amputated.
One of the men in another bed stirred and woke, groaned and rolled on to his back, and put up a hand for the large pocket watch which hung on a string from the bed rail. He held it to his eyes. ‘After ten. She’s late with my sleeping medicine.’
‘You were asleep.’
‘How could I be if I haven’t had my medicine? Go and hurry her up, Evie, there’s a dear good girl.’
Evie got her hand away from Michael’s with difficulty and padded across the hall to the kitchen, where her mother, in a nurse’s uniform, was heating milk on an old gas stove that Rose had never seen before.
‘The sergeant wants his sleeping draught.’
Evie’s mother laughed. She had big teeth and a puff of light red hair under her white cap. ‘Doctor Bond has reduced it to almost nothing, but it will send him off like a baby.’ She measured a meagre amount of brown liquid from a large bottle on a shelf and gave the small glass to Evie. ‘Fill it up with water.’
Evie gave the sergeant his medicine. He swallowed it with a heave of his Adam’s apple, said, ‘Gaw bless yer’ and went back to sleep. Evie went to Michael’s bed and asked him, ‘Are you all right?’ He nodded, but when she took the glass out to rinse he followed her with his feverish eyes.
The kitchen was fitted up as if it was part of an old-fashioned hospital. The floor was scrubbed wood. Where the dark cabinets had been, there were shelves of bottles and pill boxes, rolled bandages, enamel bowls, big jars of ointment. Charts hung on a long nail. A big three-level trolley by the wall held metal trays and piles of china and cutlery.
Her mother wore a long grey dress with a stiff stand-up collar and a long apron with a starched white belt and a red cross on the bib. On her red hair, she wore a white cap with a turned-up brim. She and Evie were wearing felt slippers because they were on night duty. Evie was wearing a small version of the same uniform. She hooked a finger inside her stiff collar to ease it, and put her hands up to poke a pin back into the bun of long fluffy hair under her cap.
She looked round to see what she could do, because there was always something to do, and picked a bandage to roll out of the laundry basket, rolling it up in a practised way and smoothing it neatly against the front of her apron bib.
‘I can’t wait till you’re old enough to be a nurse,’ the mother said. ‘If this endless war goes on through nineteen seventeen, and eighteen, and nineteen, and for ever, you will be.’
‘I am a nurse, Mother,’ Evie said.
‘As good as. You’re a great help now that they’ve taken so many nurses out of the convalescent hospitals to go to France. And I’d much rather have you here with me when I’m on night duty, than alone at the cottage.’
‘Michael’s not up to much tonight,’ Evie said. ‘Not up to much’ was a favourite expression of the Sister in Charge for any man who was very ill or in pain.
‘His wounds are mending.’ Her mother looked sad. ‘But his spirit is not.’ The wide mouth that was always smiling round her big teeth was drawn in thoughtfully. ‘They call it shell shock, and they say he’ll get over it in time, but I don’t know. His regiment was wiped out at the Battle of the Somme.’ She looked at Evie sadly. ‘You’re so young to have to hear this, Evie, but you’re part of this war. Thousands of men were killed in those few days of fighting. Uselessly killed, just to gain a few yards of land. Sent out from the trenches into the mud and shell holes and barbed wire of No Man’s Land to be torn to bits by the German guns. That was where Michael got his leg wound, running forward, screaming at the guns. He had just seen his father blown to pieces.’
Evie was silent. Rose wondered how she could hear those things without crying. Her mother went out of the kitchen with a tray of medicines.
Evie stepped out into the garden to get some air. There was a smell of autumn, dampness and dead leaves, apples on the grass. Rose saw that many lights were on in the big house next door. The two houses were evidently part of the same hospital. There was a paved path between them, and no fence. At the end of the garden, she thought she saw out of the corner of her eye something white moving behind the trees. Favour? When she looked again, there was only darkness there.
She picked up an apple, looked at it for worms and bit into it, standing on the wet grass in her slippers and long blowing white apron. She thought about Michael seeing his father blown apart, and how you would never get that image out of your mind, and about her own father, who was somewhere at sea. They didn’t know where. There was no news coming through. His last letter had been from Scotland, but that was weeks ago.
Evie was very tired. It was difficult to sleep in the day time, because she still had to go to school, which was senseless, with the War to End All Wars going on. She was supposed to sleep part of the night in a chair by the fire in the hall, but the house was full of the noises of the men: coughing and moans and voices calling, someone talking in his sleep, the rustle of her mother’s feet and skirts going to and fro, Sister from the main hospital tap-tapping over the floors as she did her rounds (not in slippers), a convalescent man who could not sleep getting up for a cigarette, or to make tea in the kitchen.
She went indoors and laid up the trays on the trolley for breakfast: knife, fork, spoon, mug, plate, porridge bowl, salt, pepper. She cut mounds of bread and butter to help the day nurses, covered it with a damp cloth, and put the porridge on to stew for the rest of the night in the double boiler that could never be quite cleaned of its crust. Then her mother wanted her upstairs to hold Mr Carter’s leg while she changed the dressing.
The lamp was lit over the bed. The rest of the room was in darkness. They were like people on a stage, a tableau of pain. The soldier had his head back and his teeth clenched, holding on to the rail of the bed. Evie held her breath and stuck out the tip of her tongue as she carefully supported the heavy leg, which was bleeding again, oozing dark blood from the swollen and discoloured skin. Her mother bent over, with fiercely intent eyes, quick, deft, catching her breath when she had hurt him.
‘It’s better, eh?’ he asked her, without looking at the leg.
‘I hope so, Mr Carter.’ It was much worse, but she was not allowed to say so. She was only a V.A.D. – it stood for ‘Voluntary Aid Detachment’ – not a qualified nurse, and would never be allowed to change dressings if they were not so short of staff, in this most merciless year of the war, when the casualties came back from France in thousands.
She and Evie made their slippered rounds of the wards with the torch held low. Then they made cocoa and Evie dozed and woke and dozed in the chair, while her mother sat by the fire and mended pillowcases. The house was quiet. The clock ticked more loudly. The hall was in shadow beyond the circle of lamp and firelight. It was so strange to be the only ones awake, with all the sleeping men around them. It made you feel you were the hub of their world, totally responsible for them, because they were patients here, and the people in their lives outside, wives, parents, children, friends, had no connection with them.
We are their world …
The scream from the front room brought Evie awake in an instant. She jumped out of the chair and followed her mother to Michael’s bed. He was leaning on his good elbow, staring and babbling, sweating and trembling with fear. As her mother tried to calm him, the upstairs buzzer shrilled. The men rang it for an emergency, so she had to go upstairs and leave Rose trying to push Michael’s chest down, to keep him in the bed.
The sergeant came to her help. He got Michael to lie back and told him roughly, but kindly enough, to put a sock in it and let a bloke sleep.
‘He had a nightmare, see,’ he said to Evie, and went back to bed and pulled a blanket over his head.
Her mother came back looking anxious. ‘Mr Carter’s leg wound has broken down. I’ll have to go over to the hospital and get the doctor. Can you manage? Evie will stay with you. Calm down, Mr Hunt.’ As a nurse, she had to call him that. Only Evie could call him Michael to his face.
Evie sat on a hard upright chair by the bed. She heard the back door open and shut, and the voices of the doctor and the Scottish Sister, and their feet going upstairs.
‘I dreamed of that man,’ Michael kept whispering, ‘that man, that man,’ over and over, with his troubled eyes fixed on hers.
‘A German?’
‘I don’t know. All in black, he was, he was …’
‘Hush, it’s all right. Don’t talk about it,’ Evie said, and Rose was glad, because his fear had made her afraid, and she wanted him to take his nightmare visions away from them, and go back to sleep. ‘It’s over now,’ Evie told him. ‘You’re not at the war. Hush, Michael.’ Sometimes she felt a hundred years old, and wondered where her youth had gone. ‘It’s only a dream.’
‘Why do I have these terrible dreams?’
‘It’s the shell shock, isn’t it? That’s what they say. You’ll be better soon, Michael. Go back to sleep.’
‘Stay with me.’
‘All right.’ Evie turned her head away, so he would not see her yawn. She sat on the hard chair until he stopped gasping and shuddering and his grip on her hand loosened and his breathing grew more regular. It was cold. The window was open, and a damp sea smell was coming in. She yawned again and her legs moved restlessly because she was so tired. Rose had never felt so tired in her life – or anybody else’s. She wanted to be out of this room of sickness and fear. Evie had done enough for Michael, surely. She and Rose – instead of only observing Evie, Rose felt very much a part of her – they could go back to the fire and be comfortable, and forget about all this.
The fire had died down, and she was too tired to fetch more coal. She put her mother’s cape round her shoulders and picked up the sewing. With her mother still busy upstairs, Evie must stay awake and on guard. Rose thought she deserved a rest. She nodded and woke, listened for Michael, nodded and woke. After a while, the needle dropped and she could not find it in her skirt. The torn pillowcase dropped off her lap. She fell into a stupefied sleep, and Rose woke with a headache on the moor, trudging along the sheep track in a daze, trailing Ben’s shirt behind her.
‘Oh look at your head oh look at her head there’s blood all over your forehead Rose we must get you cleaned up immediately Harry go and see where Mrs Wood is hurry Harry.’
‘Come on, Mum.’ Ben’s young brother Harry pulled Mrs Kelly towards the door. She was wearing an alarmingly pink swimsuit with a brief skirt over it.
‘But Rose needs help anyone can see that.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Rose said. ‘I’ll wash it.’
‘These things turn septic you know I knew a woman whose son tore his fingernail and before he knew it they had his hand off.’
‘Give the girl a break,’ Ben’s father said. ‘You’ll give her a headache, if she hasn’t got one already.’
Mr Kelly was a big, slow-moving man in square shorts and a beach jacket like a tent, who viewed his tearaway wife with amused tolerance.
‘All of you don’t care going off to the beach without a care in the world while poor Rose gets lockjaw because she does after all have a working mother not that I’m anti-feminist and we can’t go into that argument about whether women should or shouldn’t work when they have children.’
‘Listen to her,’ Mr Kelly said to nobody or anybody. ‘She’s bonkers.’
Rose went through the arch to the kitchen and the back stairs, keeping on the side of Hilda’s dud eye. She washed her forehead in the bathroom upstairs and found a substantial cut. It bled again as she washed it. She thought of Mr Carter’s terrible leg. She had never seen anything like that before.
She rolled Ben’s bloodied shirt up into a ball and put it in a drawer. Her mother must have found it, because it was gone the next day. It was raining, so she did not know whether Ben would have asked her to run on the beach. He was staying away from her. She was too childish for him. Folding laundry with Cindy and only half listening to horror tales about the drug centre, she saw Cindy fold the shirt and put it on the ironing pile. Pity. It would have been nice to keep the shirt with her blood on it, after Ben was gone.
An old gentleman was staying in the hotel with a younger wife who was always off in the car, looking at the shops. Rose found him reading in the upstairs lounge and asked him, ‘Excuse me. What was the Somme?’
‘The worst battle of the First War.’ His faded blue eyes looked up at her and blinked. ‘A million men were killed on both sides.’
‘I met a young man whose father was blown to pieces at the Somme,’ Rose said.
‘His great-grandfather, perhaps. If it was his father, he wouldn’t be young now. He’d be as old as me.’
The television was on, because Gloria automatically flipped on the switch when she was not in the room, and left it on whether anyone was watching or not. The sound was turned low, so the old gentleman could not hear it as he read his book. It was a silly quiz show. A prattling host with big teeth like Evie’s mother, but a fake smile and hard, glittering eyes, was giving away prizes to people who answered feeble questions, and squealed and jumped in the air and kissed the man with the teeth.
Rose watched for a few minutes in awful fascination. The camera zoomed in on the host, and he came right forward as if he were coming out of the set, and said with his synthetic smile, ‘You failed.’
Rose looked to see which competitor was flouncing off the stage, pretending not to mind, but the man was talking to her.
‘You failed.’
‘I didn’t,’ she whispered, glancing at the old gentleman, who went on reading.
‘You failed him.’
‘Evie did.’ Rose knew what he meant. ‘She was tired.’
‘You were tired.’ He had a metallic, nasal voice, with a touch of phoney American. ‘And cowardly. You thought she’d done enough.’
‘I saw things I’ve never seen. I couldn’t stand to see those men – the dreadful wound in that man’s leg.’
He made a sound like ‘phoo’, and said, ‘You didn’t want to listen.’
‘It was Evie who wouldn’t let him talk about the dream,’ Rose said breathlessly, feeling the same helpless panic she had felt by Michael’s bed.
‘You wouldn’t listen to it.’
‘I couldn’t control what she did. Or Felicity. Or Sylvia.’
‘Don’t whine. Maybe you could. Wise up,’ he said in his fake American. ‘This is what it’s all about.’
Rose could not speak.
‘So what did you learn?’ His teeth filled half the screen. His eyes glittered.
‘Nothing.’
She could not look away. As she watched, his eyes became the dark grey eyes of the horse, glistening and sparkling with points of light, and his huge head filled the screen in a movement of flowing whiteness, and in his eyes she saw two of herself mirrored, with two arms up, as if to ward off a blow.
‘Listen to this,’ the old gentleman said behind her. ‘It says in this book …’
She could not stay behind with him. She had to go with Favour. She had to go back with him, because she had failed him once, and this might be her last chance.
She followed her mother into the hospital kitchen, carrying a bag of postcards and toffees and things the men had asked her to buy for them. She hung her knitted coat in the cloakroom under the stairs and put on her white cap. She was surprised to see in the mirror that Evie had red hair, like her mother. Rose had always wondered what it would feel like to have red hair. Evie had sandy eyebrows and eyelashes too. And freckles.
Her mother reported for duty to the day nurse at her desk in the hall. She and Evie both wore stiff white cuffs, but as soon as the formalities were over, they took them off and set them on a shelf like inverted flower pots, and pulled oh their long linen cuffs to work in. Rose wondered why they didn’t roll up their sleeves, but this must be about seventy years ago, and so they didn’t.
Evie went into the front room to give the sergeant his sentimental postcards, which he sent every day to his wife. On the chair by Michael’s bed, a young girl was sitting, with her feet tucked under the chair rungs and a bunch of flowers in her lap. She and Michael both looked glum, as if they had been quarrelling.
‘I’m just going,’ she told Evie. ‘I know it’s after visiting hours.’ She stood up, holding the flowers in a wrapping of newspaper. ‘I’m not changing my mind, Mike,’ she said, looking down at him with a face that was tender and determined at the same time. ‘Please trust me. You aren’t going to get rid of me.’
‘Don’t hang on, Clare,’ Michael muttered without looking at her. His thin young face looked sulky. ‘Go away, find someone else. I’ll never be any use to you.’
‘I’ll come tomorrow.’ She managed to smile at him. ‘Here, I brought these flowers for you. Chrysanthemums. They’re not very nice, I’m afraid. I stole them out of someone’s garden along the road.’
She held them out to him, but he said, ‘I don’t want them. I can’t stand the smell.’
‘I know they’re a bit past their prime, but –’
‘They smell rotten.’ He made a face. ‘Sour. Take them away.’
‘All right. Goodbye then, dear.’ She bent to kiss him, but he turned his face aside. As she went out, Evie saw that she was trying not to cry. One of the yellow flowers dropped out of the newspaper and was left behind on the floor.
After lights out, when the white counterpanes were off and the red blankets tucked in, Evie asked her mother if she could stay in the room with Michael.
‘I’m worried about him.’
‘So am I, but I don’t think you need to do that.’
‘I think it’s what I have to do,’ Rose said in Evie’s voice.
‘All right, but do all the other jobs first. There are eleven men in this house, you know.’ That was always the cry, even from Evie’s mother, of tired, overworked nurses who suspected the men of playing for special attention.
When Michael fell restlessly asleep, Evie and Rose sat on the hard chair by his bed and listened to the sergeant snoring and the other man moaning in his sleep, and watched tense, fitful expressions alter Michael’s face. He ground his teeth, and she saw his eyes move rapidly back and forth under the closed lids. He flung out an arm, and as Evie bent forward to calm him as he heaved and rolled over sideways with his head flung back and his mouth open, staring at the cupboard door on the other side of the bed.
His body went rigid and he screamed and opened his eyes. ‘Look!’ The outflung hand pointed at the closed door. ‘Oh my God, my God …’
Evie turned on the light and tried to roll him back before he hurt his wounded arm. ‘It’s all right, Michael, it’s all right. I’m here.’
He flung himself on his back and lay staring up at her, panting and gasping, the cords in his neck standing out.
‘Another nightmare. Poor Michael. There. Quiet now.’ But tonight she did not say, ‘It’s only a dream.’ She said, ‘Tell me what it was.’
‘In the cupboard.’ He slid his eyes towards it. ‘The man in black. He was hanging there. I had to go inside and it was all dark and I bumped into him and felt him swinging, and saw – I saw his face.’
So that was it. The cupboard. Rose had her answer. She could go back to her own time now, but there was Michael to be taken care of first.
‘Stay with me.’
‘Of course.’
She and Evie sat by him and comforted him and held his hand, and, in the lamplight, saw the tattered golden flower lying on the polished floor. As a faint grey light began to hover outside the window shades, Evie’s eyes closed and she fell asleep.
Rose woke to find herself sitting peacefully in a chair in the hotel lounge, with the feel of Michael’s thin hot hand still grasping hers.
Both times when Favour had taken her away for a night, she had looked at her watch when she returned and seen that it was not only the same time as when she had left, but the same date.
‘… in this book it says,’ the old gentleman was saying, ‘that in the Antarctic Circle, the adelie penguin presents a stone to his mate when he wants her to make a nest.’