The House at World's End

  Monica Dickens

  THE HOUSE AT WORLD’S END

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  1

  ‘There’s a cat in your bed!’

  ‘No, no-how could there be? No, Aunt Val, please!’ Carrie tried to hold the kitten quiet with her toes, but when Aunt Valentina thumped her fat hand on the covers, the kitten pounced. A tiny curved claw stuck up through the blanket, and Aunt Val pulled back her hand with a shriek like a train whistle.

  ‘It’s disgusting. A cat in a bed. I never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘Then you never heard of cats.’

  ‘You’re quite rude.’ Valentina herself, who was only an aunt by marriage, was always quite rude to Carrie. That was different.

  ‘I’m only telling you.’ Carrie Fielding had still not stopped trying to give grown-ups bits of information they did not want. ‘Ages ago, cats lived in caves. They always look for a cave. That’s why they go into brown paper bags, and in the drawers.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know!’ Valentina turned up her eyes and put her hand where she thought her heart was - too low down, nearer where her supper was. ‘It’s too much. The four of you here - well, that’s my duty, with your father gone off like a pirate and your poor mother so badly hurt in the fire. But all these animals … this private zoo …’ She moved about the room in her tight snakeskin boots, tweaking, muttering, making a face at Carrie’s underwear.

  The white cat, Maud, stared at her from the top of the chest of drawers, with all her paws folded underneath and her furred hips sticking out

  ‘Get off there, you fat spoiled beast!’ Aunt Val shook her finger, with all the flashy rings.

  ‘She can’t hear you, you know.’

  ‘It hears all right.’

  ‘Don’t you know a white cat with blue eyes is always deaf?’

  ‘Blue, green, purple - I won’t have it on my runners.’ She took a swipe at Maud, who only had to open her mouth and hiss lazily to make Valentina jump back as if she had met a jungle lion.

  To cheer her up, Carrie said from the bed, ‘Lucky for you I haven’t saved up enough for my horse yet.’ Her horse money was tied into a sock and hidden inside a leaking teddy bear, one of the few things she had saved from the fire. ‘A horse could have lived in your toolshed though. We could have cut the door, you see, so that the top half—’

  ‘It’s too much.’ Valentina said this every day. ‘I’m going mad.’ She spun towards the door on her tightly-booted legs for which two pythons had shed their skins, tripped over a dog that looked like a shaggy rug and stumbled out, calling to Carrie’s Uncle Rudolf, ‘I am going mad - mad I say!’

  ‘How can she go when she’s gone already?’ Carrie’s brother Tom came in, with a bowl full of bored fish.

  ‘Why did Uncle Rudolf marry her?’

  ‘No one else would.’ Tom was sixteen. He could make his voice very deep and gloomy. ‘And he had to marry someone so he wouldn’t have to leave his money to poor relations like us.’

  ‘I can do without his money.’ Carrie sat up in bed and hugged her knees, hiding under a curtain of long sand-coloured hair. But she could have done with just a bit of it So far, the sock inside the teddy bear had only enough for one leg of a horse - from the knee down.

  ‘I can do without living in his house.’ Tom kicked the bed, and the kitten made a small earthquake under the covers.

  ‘Write to Dad.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Let’s tell Mum.’

  ‘She’s too ill. Be patient’ Tom strode about the room, knocking into things. He was tall and thin, with impatient arms and legs that could not keep still. ‘We must be patient’

  Their younger sister Em came in from the bathroom, with her thick dark hair slicked down wet, carrying a large black cat in front of her like a tray.

  ‘Don’t carry Paul like that’ Carrie put back her hair to criticize.

  ‘He likes it.’ In a sentimental fit, Em had been christened Esmeralda, but she had called herself Em as soon as she found out what her name was. ‘He likes everything I do. He sits on the edge of my bath and drinks the water. Yesterday, he fell in.’ Em laughed. She had different ideas about animals. More tough and casual. But the cats understood her. She dropped the black cat from a height and he landed neatly on his four white feet and walked off with his tail up and his eyes round and green.

  ‘That’s cruel,’ Carrie said.

  Em pushed out the bottom half of her face into a terrible insulting shape.

  ‘She’s getting very difficult, that child.’ Tom creased his forehead like a worried mother. He carried the fish through into the expensive tiled and carpeted bathroom and tipped them into Em’s bathwater for a swim.

  Last week, a pair of guppies had gone down the overflow. The sewers of London would become populated with guppies, and they would come flopping into the sink when you turned on a tap. In New York, there were alligators thrashing about under the city. People bought tiny baby ones in Woolworths. When they began to grow, the people panicked and flushed them down the drains and the alligators went on growing in the sewers.

  Michael, who was the youngest, came in like a bishop in a long towel bathrobe meant for a man. They had lost everything when their house caught fire, and although their aunt and uncle had bought clothes for them, Valentina’s patience had run out before she finished outfitting Michael.

  ‘Excuse me.’ He stirred the dog Charlie with a towelled toe. ‘She says you must go down to the cellar.’ Charlie thumped his tail without opening his eyes. He was a part poodle, part golden retriever, part hearthrug, who liked people better than dogs. ‘It is your duty,’ Michael told him. That was one of Valentina’s favourite sayings.

  ‘It’s worst for him,’ Carrie said. ‘She kicks him under the table.’

  ‘I kick her back,’ said Michael. ‘That’s my duty.’

  ‘When we’re at school,’ Carrie said, ‘I think She ties him up, and the cats laugh at him.’

  ‘I don’t blame them.’ Em always sided with the cats. ‘They think he bit through that old electric wire and burned down our house.’

  ‘After the fire…’ Carrie said, looking through the wall at nothing. ‘Do you remember? There was just the spine of the chimney and bits of burned framework, like ribs, and our rubbish heap. I did a picture at school of the black broken ribs and the tin cans. Miss Peake called it morbid. I called it “After the Fire”.’

  2

  After the fire, after they had stood on the potato patch in the rain and watched the firemen finish off with axes and hoses the bits of their home that the flames had not destroyed, the Fielding children had been taken to Uncle Rudolf’s house in London.

  Tom was not a child. The others, Carrie, Em and Michael, did not feel like children that night. They had stood shivering in the mud, with the dog and the cats and the fish and the box of the hibernating turtle. And nobody else. Their mother had been taken away to hospital in the ambulance, because a falling beam had broken her back. Their father was sailing round the world in a homemade bo
at. They did not know how far he had got. He had not come home for nearly a year. Now there was no home for him to come to.

  Uncle Rudolf was his elder brother who had made good and made money and made his name in plumbing. ‘The Prince of Plumbers’, he was called in the trade. His brother Jerome, the children’s father, called him The Baron of Bathwater. He called the children’s father a Salted Seanut who had never provided for his wife and family. ‘And don’t come to me begging for a loan.’

  When the house (which was only a glorified Army hut) had gone up in smoke, and Mum had been rushed off to hospital, and Tom, Carrie, Em and Michael and the animals were standing in the mud of the potato patch, the people who had come to see the marvellous spectacle of someone else’s home going up in smoke began to say, ‘What’s to be done with the children? Where are the children to go?’ Looking at each other to see if someone else would say, ‘I’ll take them in.’

  There were so many of them… and all those pets … and the little boy seemed to have something wrong with his leg. He walked up and down, as if he had one foot on the pavement and one in the gutter.

  ‘Where are your relations?’ one of the policemen asked Tom.

  ‘Haven’t got any.’ They hadn’t really, except miles away in America, some unknown cousins. Uncle Rudolf didn’t count. He had washed his hands of them when their father built the boat in the kitchen of the house where they used to live, and sailed away from Bristol. He had washed his hands again when their mother sold what was left of the house after knocking down walls to get the boat out, and moved the family to the old Army hut, and went out to work cooking and cleaning.

  ‘Everybody has relations.’ The policeman chewed on his shiny black chin strap. ‘Haven’t you got even one?’

  ‘Well…’ Tom had looked at Carrie, squatting in the mud with the dog, her wet hair salty in her mouth. At Em, who was said to be ‘tough’, wearing a soaked cat on her shoulders like an old fur collar, trying to be tough, with her jaw stuck out like a chimpanzee and her hyacinth-blue eyes angry. At small Michael, who had given up, and was crying into the fish bowl. ‘Well … there is Uncle Rudolf.’

  Uncle Rudolf did not want them, but when the policeman rang him up in the middle of the night, he could not very well say, ‘I have washed my hands of them.’

  So they had been taken to the big red brick house in North London that Uncle Rudolf had bought when he made his money. A fitting palace for the Prince of Plumbers. He had painted all the gutters and drainpipes silver, to show them off. There were stained-glass windows and turrets and pinnacles and pillars twisted like barley sugar, and balconies that were forbidden to the children, and a garden as tidy as a public park that was forbidden to the animals after Charlie dug up a bed of Bleeding Heart.

  Uncle Rudolf was a tall cold man with marble fingers and a bald head and smooth face like the stone egg Dad had sent home from the Canary Islands.

  ‘If you can’t eat it, sit on it,’ Dad’s note had said. ‘You might hatch out a canary.’

  If he sent a damp splinter of wood or a shred of sailcloth, as he sometimes did, to prove disaster had struck. he drew. And once it was when he ran aground in the delta of the Ganges.

  Uncle Rudolf had married late in life this foolish woman Valentina, who invited people to lunch or tea or cocktails every day, so as to have someone to listen to her complaints. Uncle Rudolf had stopped listening long ago, and the children had never begun.

  After the others had gone to their rooms, Carrie lay in bed with the striped kitten curled on the pillow. It was called Nobody, because it would not take any of the names they tried. Valentina was banging about on the piano downstairs to prove that she could have been a concert pianist if only it had not been her duty to marry a plumber with four homeless nephews and nieces.

  Carrie pulled the kitten closer to her ear, to drown out the piano with the purr which shook its small body. It had not yet grown up to the size of its motor.

  She closed her eyes and waited to hear the movement of wind outside her window and the hollow beat of hooves on the road down from the stars.

  Every night since she could remember, she had lain in bed wherever she was - in the house with the boat in the kitchen, in the Army hut, in this dark bedroom at Uncle Rudolfs that never got a smell of sun - and called, ‘Penny-come-quick!’ And he had come to her.

  Penny-come-quick was a silver-grey Arab whose picture she had once cut out of a newspaper, galloping into the wind with his mane and tail floating as if he was flying. The picture had been lost long ago (Carrie lost everything, even her treasures), but the horse remained. Every night he came to her window, wherever she was, and although her body lay in bed, her real self slid on to his white satin back and he turned and galloped away with her.

  Tonight he arched his neck, strong and warm under her hands, then threw up his head as the wind lifted his mane. and pawed at the night.

  ‘Come on, Penny!’ She felt his muscles gather beneath her, and he bounded away. Up and away to the star where all the famous horses of history grazed in the Elysian Fields, and all the horses and ponies that had been very much loved on earth waited for their own people to die, and come to call them at the gate.

  3

  Next day after school, Carrie and Tom went to see their mother. The two younger ones were not allowed to visit the hospital.

  ‘As if being young was an infectious disease,’ Em grumbled. Her dark hair was made of curl springs. To tame it, she wore a sock tied round her forehead like an Indian, and grumbled from under that.

  They all hated the school where they had to go now. Before the fire, they had gone to the small local school where everybody knew everybody and the teachers called you Dearie. But Uncle Rudolf, Prince of Plumbers, sent them to the grand new school at the top of the hill, with glass walls and shapeless statues and announcements booming out of loudspeakers instead of pinned up on a bulletin board. They did not know anybody and the work was different.

  ‘Too difficult for you?’ Aunt Valentina asked with glee.

  ‘No. Different.’

  At first, people at the new school had stared and asked questions and said, ‘That’s a lie,’ to the answers. Then they only stared. Now they did not even stare. Tom, Carrie, Em and Michael were swallowed up in the great clattering mob of Londoners, and some of the teachers had not even learned their names.

  Michael had hardly said a word since he had been there. He couldn’t read aloud - at least, not the same words as other people - but was not going to let them know it. He wore his right hand in a sling, pretending it was sprained. He couldn’t spell, but was not going to let them know it

  Tom waited for Carrie in the playground among the ugly statues that had holes in them, like gorgonzola cheese. They stuffed their ugly green uniform cap and beret into the pockets of their ugly green blazers and went on a bus to the hospital, which was in the town near where they had lived in the old Army hut. After the first time they had been allowed to visit their mother, Carrie had dreamed about it for nights, and even Penny could not gallop her away from the frightening dreams. Now she and Tom were getting used to seeing their mother in her white plaster cast like a mummy case, with her thick fair hair tied back with a bit of bandage.

  They waited in the corridor with the husbands and relations and friends of the other women in the ward until the swing doors opened at exactly six o’clock.

  ‘Your mother is sleeping.’ The Staff Nurse saw Tom and Carrie come in. She did not need to put out a hand to stop them. Her voice did it for her.

  ‘Can we just go and look at her?’ When Tom wanted his voice to be deep and grown up, it always came out cracked and high.

  ‘Don’t wake her.’ Perhaps the nurse smiled at home, but she was not going to risk it at the hospital. ‘She’s been very difficult today.’ This nurse was the one who said, ‘Brace up now, Mrs Fielding. There’s no reason for tears.’

  The other one, who wasn’t here today, the small fat one with the little teeth like p
earl barley, said, ‘Oh, poor Tom and Carrie. Oh, poor Mrs Fielding. I’m so sorry for you. It’s not fair to have to suffer after you were so brave.’

  Tom and Carrie stood on either side of the bed and looked down at their pale, sleeping mother. Her face looked smaller and the mouth that smiled and laughed and made jokes out of mistakes and disappointments was drawn thin and without colour.

  ‘Difficult!’ Carrie whispered. ‘You can see she’s been in pain.’

  Huge warm tears came up from nowhere and flooded her eyes. She hung her head so that her hair swung forward, because the curious woman in the next bed was making her husband look, and saying, ‘Ah, the poor kids. Ah, it’s a rotten shame.’

  The tears ran in through the small holes in the corner of Carrie’s eyes and came down her nose. She wiped it on the back of her hand.

  ‘She saved Mike’s life, you know,’ Tom said. He kept on saying this about their mother, as if he could not get over it.

  Whether Charlie had bitten through the wire or not, it was his barking that woke them to the fumes of smoke and the crackle of flames. They had all run out of the house into what they called the garden. Michael had fallen.

  ‘Where’s Mike?’

  They heard him scream inside the house. The doorway where they had run out leaped into a frame of fire. Their mother smashed a window with a stone, climbed through into a room full of smoke, and pushed Michael out of the window. As she came through herself, with glowing smoke reaching out hands to clutch her, the window frame and part of the wall collapsed on her, and when Tom and Carrie dragged her out on to the trodden mud, she was unconscious.

  They would never forget it. ‘She saved Mike’s life,’ Tom kept saying, though not any more in front of Valentina, because she replied, ‘And look where it’s got her.’

  ‘What - what?’ Their mother’s eyes moved like marbles under the closed lids, then she blinked and woke up. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You saved Mike’s life.’

  ‘Did I?’ She was doped and hazy. She was no more surprised to see her children than if they had been there when she fell asleep. Her burned hands lay outside the bedclothes in huge padded bandages, like white boxing gloves.