Cry of a Seagull (7 page)

Across the river, the sun had set, and lights were coming on all over the town. Ahead on Rose's side she could see one of the marinas that had been built for yacht people all along the estuary: small jetties sticking out from a main dock, and moored boats rocking gently to the clink, clink, clink of halyards against metal masts.

Rose was on a motor yacht, an expensive affair like a miniature trawler, with a wide deck and steps leading down to a lighted cabin with curtained windows. She had never been on such a grand boat before, but the girl leaning on the rail, whose body Rose was temporarily inhabiting, was calm and matter-of-fact, as if the
Princess Vicky
were a second home. Rose could see the boat's name on a white lifebelt hanging on the deck rail.

They eased alongside the dock. There was a car park with some closed-up sheds and small boats stored on trestles; farther along the bank beyond the jetties, the lights of a riverside pub, with tables out in the garden. It was a pretty little marina, unspoilt, with two or three white cottages, their gardens displaying the same spring flowers that were in the garden now at Wood Briar, so it must be the same time of year. Might even be the same year. As well as taking her backwards and forwards in time, Rose's journeys sometimes took her sideways, to her own time, but a different place. One of the cottages had a donkey in a fenced paddock, neat and tiny as a child's toy farm. A dark shadow in the dusk, the donkey grazed quietly, close to the fence.

‘Look sharp there, Vicky!' the girl's father called from the wheelhouse. ‘Stand by to make fast!'

The boat, obviously named after the girl, was coming alongside the dock. Vicky swung a practised leg over the rail, stood her toe on the outside edge of the deck, swung over the other leg and stepped across the narrowing gap of water to the shore. Her mother, in a blue seaman's sweater and white trousers, threw a rope over the stern rail, and Vicky and Rose had to make it fast round an iron bollard.

‘Look alive!' The voice from the wheelhouse was pitched as if it had an army of sailors to order about. The mother ran to the bow of the boat, and Vicky ran to the forward bollard and tied the other mooring rope round that.

‘None of your granny knots.' The father came out on deck in a yachting cap. ‘Let's see a proper round turn fore and aft, and two half hitches.'

Vicky did some complicated things with the ropes that Rose tried to remember, to impress Ben when – if – he took her out in his boat.

‘I'm starving,' Vicky called from the dock. ‘Let's go and find a place for supper.'

‘Hold hard.' The father talked to both his daughter and his wife as if they were sailors. ‘Get back on board and finish up your jobs. And put some shoes on, for God's sake. A barefoot crew is a sloppy crew.'

‘Yes,
sir
!' Vicky gave her father a salute, as Rose did to Philip when he was overdoing being The General.

Back on board by way of the gangplank which her father had put out, she had to tidy the roomy, comfortable cabin, stack away books and papers, and wash up coffee mugs in the galley sink. Then she went down more steps to the sleeping cabins, which had bunks and portholes and little basins that closed up like cupboards. When her father came down to inspect, he nagged and fretted, because her bunk was untidy and there were clothes lying about in her cabin.

She had made it like a girl's bedroom, with ornaments and a poster, furry animals on the pillows and wedged up anywhere there was a strut or a ledge. Rose took a quick look
at the photographs. Vicky's mother in a summer wedding hat, her father being given a silver cup for something or other, girls in school uniform grouped outside an imposing school like a brick castle, and a picture of a boy who looked a bit of a creep, with a chin running into a long skinny neck, and eyes that were vague, behind glasses.

‘Place looks like a ruddy boudoir.' Vicky's large father moved about in the narrow cabin like a bull in a tea shop. ‘You'll have to get all this nonsense stowed away and the place made shipshape. China cats, snapshots – one good wave on the port side and they'll all go for six.' He picked up some of the photographs and put them in a drawer.

‘Don't, Dad.' Rose took the picture of the vague boy away from him. Rupert was hers. Everyone in her year at boarding school had a boy friend, or pretended to. Rupert was the best Vicky could do. He was quiet and amiable, did what she wanted to do, went where she wanted to go, asked her advice. Sometimes she felt he was her child.

It was almost dark by the time Vicky's father had finished fussing about the boat and coiling ropes and rubbing off seagull mess and checking gauges and locking doors, and in general carrying on as if they were leaving for months, instead of just for supper.

The tide was going out, and the level gangplank now sloped slightly upwards to the dock. The moon was up, and a fresh night breeze was blowing across the estuary. The car park was lighted. Vicky, who liked animals, live or stuffed, was going towards the donkey's paddock, but some teenagers with motorcycles were hanging about in that corner, and her father called out to her loudly, ‘Come on with us, Vicky. I'd stay away from that lot, if I were you.'

There were three boys in the group and three girls, all dressed in the same dark clothes, like a gang, leaning on the bikes, or just standing about smoking and shuffling their feet. They all turned round and looked at Vicky and her parents.

Her mother started to walk towards the path to the restaurant, but her father would not let it alone.

‘Pity they haven't got anything better to do,' he said, still too loudly. ‘Troublemakers, the lot of them. If I had my way, I'd shove 'em all in the Army.'

‘You and who else?' One of the boys took a step forward and spat on the ground between them.

‘Come on, Jack.' Vicky's mother took her husband's arm, but he shook her off.

‘By God, if I'd had you layabouts under my command in the Navy, you'd have been sorry.'

‘So would you, mister,' one of the other boys muttered, and the one in front, who seemed to be the leader, said, ‘The Navy's only for morons. Why don't you push off in your toy boat? This is our territory, see? No one comes here we don't like.'

Vicky's father had his fists clenched, and was red in the face under the peak of his cap.

‘Jack,
please
.' His wife urged him towards the path, and Vicky pulled at his other arm. ‘Leave them alone. They don't mean any harm.'

‘Don't they?' He stood his ground. ‘Drugs and booze – I know what goes on. This country's going to the dogs because of useless louts like these.'

As the gang leader took another step forward, Rose saw that he wore a black leather jacket weighted with metal studs. Well, so did all of them, but this one had a half-grown moustache and those leaden, almond-shaped eyes that seemed to have no lids. Was he the boy outside the corner pub?

One of the girls stepped forward with him. She was always just a pace behind, touching him, watching him. She might be Rose and Vicky's age, she might be ten years older. She was thickly made up, with a sulkily painted mouth and odd-coloured hair chopped into spikes at the front.

Vicky had seen how roughly the gang leader treated her, shoving her around, and jerking up an elbow to shut her up if she said anything. What would it be like to have a boy friend like that, instead of Rupert who was sick with shyness at the feeble school dances? For a moment, she was shaken with a
crazy jealousy of this girl and her wild, dangerous life, and Rose cried to her inwardly, ‘Don't be crazy!'

The boy took another step towards Vicky's father. ‘Don't mess with us,' he said threateningly.

Vicky's father faked a wide yawn. He was sick of it now and wanted to get in the last word and go and have his dinner.

‘Oh, grow up, for God's sake,' he said patronizingly. ‘You're like a little baby trying to scare someone by going, “Bogey, bogey”.'

He turned away in triumph. Someone in the gang guffawed. The leader swung round. At the same moment, the donkey, who had his white nose over the fence, let out a creaking bray, and one of the girls tittered. Because the leader had lost his grip, his girl went charging after Vicky's father.

‘You're all the same!' she shrieked. ‘Think you own the earth. You don't care nothing for no one else. I hope you rot in hell!'

Vicky wheeled round instinctively. ‘Don't you dare say that to my—' she began, but the Navy man put his large salt-smelling hand over her mouth and said, ‘You keep out of this.'

Vicky felt horribly deflated and utterly childish. As her father walked on, she looked back at the girl who had turned into a tiger to protect her boy friend, and the violent, unreasonable envy swept over her again.

Being Vicky, Rose could feel the fascination strongly, but being also still Rose, she felt revulsion and fear. He
was
the sinister boy on the street corner. Could he even be the one who had almost killed Mr Vingo?

One of the motorcycles had been moved round. Before Vicky turned away and went meekly after her parents, Rose saw the back of the white helmet balanced on the seat. On it was painted a huge staring yellow eye.

The eye grew to fill her vision, revolved and blurred like a spinning wheel. As Rose's whirling senses calmed and levelled, she was sitting on the stone horse again, and the
ironmonger was yelling through the gap in the boards, ‘I told you to get out of there!'

Rose scrambled down, retrieved the brushes and soap and the bucket and hurried with them back towards the library. Passing the church, she saw Jim Fisher and the van come round the corner, so they drove back to pick up Mr Vingo.

‘Find what you wanted?' Jim asked her.

‘Yes. Thanks. It was a useful bit of research.'

‘Looks more like a bucket to me.'

‘Oh, I – well, I like to bring back presents. I got this for Crasher.'

Jim nodded, unsurprised. ‘She can't smash that, anyway.'

In the office, Rose took another look at the picture of the white horse, which was now St George's horse again. The handsome young saint in armour was about to slay the dragon that threatened the maiden, and it suddenly came to Rose what the larger meaning of the picture was. There had probably never been such things as dragons, but the odious beast was a symbol of evil, the maiden was ordinary people, and the knight on the white horse was the power for good. The white horse was like Favour – perhaps had been Favour at that time, in one of his earthly incarnations, carrying St George to the rescue.

‘Guess what,' Rose said to Mr Vingo on the stairs. ‘I think St George was a messenger.'

‘Of course.' You couldn't surprise Mr Vingo. ‘Nobler than you or me, but definitely one of our glorious company.'

Mr Vingo guessed where she had been, but the bucket and brushes were a useful explanation to the librarian of why she had disappeared. At home, she put them in the storeroom where the cleaning things were kept and, in the passage, ran into Ben coming in from the back door.

He and his father had pulled their boat's dinghy up the beach and stowed the oars in the garage. He seemed his usual cheerful self. Rose had been worrying about how she
would make up with him, but she didn't need to. He asked her how Newcome had been and even said that if she had been with them she might have brought them better luck with the mackerel.

One of the marvellous things about Ben was that if he had been angry he behaved afterwards as if nothing had happened. Abigail, after a row, would ring up other friends and not be available to Rose for a bit, and with Hazel, you practically had to beg on your knees.

‘Come on, Hay, don't sulk. I didn't mean it really. I do like you, honest I do,' etc, etc,
ad nauseam
, while Hazel dragged out the sulks to wallow in the power she didn't know how to get in any other way.

But Ben's anger was like the sun going behind a tiny, very dark cloud. For a short while, everything was blotted out, and then – bingo! The land was bright again, and if you said, ‘Sorry,' he said ‘What for?' and genuinely seemed not to remember.

While Rose had been away, Smasher had broken five tea plates and the spout off one teapot and the handle off another. The Mumford twins had threatened to leave again because there was no lavender soap in the bathroom, and Professor Henry Watson actually
had
left, because he had indigestion and because he thought the photographer Bernard had cheated at backgammon. In the kitchen, Hilda was threatening a nervous breakdown.

For the first time since Mollie had bought Wood Briar Hotel, Rose wished she were an ordinary girl of the Hazel variety who lived in a home where nothing happened. She wanted desperately to go away by herself and think about the journey. The sense of threat and danger in the marina car park was still with her very strongly. Bits of the scene kept coming back to grab at her attention: the feel of the boat's deck under Vicky's bare feet, the naval father's red, blustery face, the tiger girl, the odd flat eyes of the gang leader, bleak and bitter; the donkey's ear-splitting bray that seemed somehow to connect this with Newcome beach and the donkey man's noisy foal.

Instead of being able to concentrate on all this, she had to go and find her father and tell him that Crasher had clogged up one of the sinks by pouring into it hot fat that had now set. Hilda was in tears.

‘What can
I
do?' Philip was in the garage, riding a stationary bicycle that was bolted to the floor, testing it for durability.

‘Go and calm her down. She likes you. Tell her one of your feeble jokes to buck her up.'

‘Can't go now. Very important job.' He pumped his legs round and round, going nowhere, like the hamster. ‘Got to complete this test by tomorrow. We're almost up to a hundred miles.'

He had not been on the stationary bike for days. Rose thought he was only pumping it so furiously to ride away from having to deal with Hilda and the clogged sink.