Spring Comes to World's End Read online

  Monica Dickens

  Spring comes to World’s End

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  One

  When the postcard came from the Mediterranean, Carrie and Michael rode down the lane to show it to Mr Mismo.

  He was out in the pigsties behind his barn, leaning over the low wall, in silent communion with an enormous sow.

  ‘Howdy.’ Mr Mismo had been watching Westerns on television this winter. Tall off and stay awhile.’

  Carrie got off John and joined him by the wall. ‘What’s wrong with Pygmalia?’

  ‘Same as usual.’ The enormous sow, famous for motherhood, lay on her side panting gently, bristly lids closed over small eyes. You could see the babies heaving about inside her. ‘Any day now.’

  Mr Mismo turned his head to inspect Carrie’s brown horse John from under the brim of his green hat, then travelled his shrewd horsey gaze to Oliver Twist, who was lipping up scattered chicken feed and shedding white winter hairs all over Michael’s blue jeans. ‘That pony’s shedding out too quick. He’ll take a cough one of these sharp nights if you don’t watch out.’

  ‘It’s not me,’ Michael said. ‘It’s Nature tells them when to change clothes.’

  ‘Nature can be wrong.’ Mr Mismo always knew better than anyone, even people like God and Nature. ‘Look at Pygmalia here. Dropped her last litter when I was at the Agricultural Banquet, and the old fool rolled over and crushed four piglets.’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’ Carrie had come down to feed the farm animals for Mr Mismo, and found the dreadful holocaust. ‘Look, we got a card from Mother and Dad.’

  Elbows on the brick wall, Mr Mismo pushed out his lip and puzzled over the postcard. He was no good at hieroglyphics. Even when Carrie explained the pictures, he still said, ‘A bottle of wine, eh? I thought it was always beer with your father.’

  ‘It means fine, not wine,’ Michael said. ‘It’s higlo-phobics.’

  ‘And that’s Mother, see.’ Carrie pointed. ‘She’s First Mate - well, she cooks actually, and Dad is the Captain. It’s a charter yacht in the Mediterranean, I told you. Millionaires hire it by the week and have great parties and fall overboard.’

  ‘Because of the wine bottle.’ Mr Mismo, who knew everything known about horses, and many things not known, because he made them up, would never understand the postcard. ‘But I’d not have thought a free soul like your Dad would hire himself out to anybody, let alone a millionaire.’

  ‘But this is a crisis, you know it is. If we can’t raise the money to buy World’s End, Uncle Rudolf will sell the house and land to a developer, and turn us out. That’s why Dad took this job.’

  ‘He’ll never stick it.’

  Having settled that, Mr Mismo turned back to the pig, and scratched her heaving side gently with the end of his stick.

  Uncle Rudolf said the same thing when he stopped in at World’s End a few days later.

  ‘We heard from Dad,’ Carrie told him. ‘They love the job on the yacht.’

  ‘For how long?’ Uncle Rudolf always raised his thin eyebrows and dropped his pouty lower lip when he spoke of his brother. ‘He’ll never stick it.’

  ‘He’s got to,’ Carrie said grimly, ‘to buy World’s End from you.’

  ‘Listen, child,’ Uncle Rudolf said, ‘if I waited for your father to raise the money, I’d die of old age.’

  ‘Then you could leave us the house in your will, Uncle Rhubarb,’ Michael said brightly.

  ‘Don’t call me that. I’ve just seen the estate agent. He tells me the property may turn out to be worth a good bit more than I thought.’

  We always knew that.

  When Uncle Rudolf let Tom and Carrie and Em and Michael move into World’s End, he thought it was a useless ruin. But they had always known, even before they patched it up and made it liveable, that it was a priceless treasure.

  ‘That’s why Mother and Dad are working so hard,’ Carrie said.

  ‘Hard work and your father,’ Uncle Rudolf smiled coldly, with his mouth, not his eyes, ‘are like two parallel lines. They never come together.’

  ‘Good thing he doesn’t know about the school burning down,’ Michael said when Rudolf had driven off in his shiny black car which looked like a hearse. ‘He’d tell Mother and Dad, to make them worry about us.’

  ‘Hoping they’d chuck the job and come home,’ Carrie said, ‘to prove him right.’

  The school had caught fire last week in the middle of Assembly, cutting short one of Mrs Loomis’s lectures on vandalism of school property:

  ‘But some of you people don’t seem to know the meaning of the word consideration for—’

  ‘Fire!’

  All the bells went off. It was just like Fire Drill, except that everyone ran out instead of walking, and Miss McDrane had hysterics in the playground, and Michael dashed a bucket of water over her shoes. Carrie took John out of the baker’s stable next door, and led him off to the other side of the nail factory, where he could not smell the smoke.

  ‘The second fire in my lifetime.’ Michael wanted to tell about the night his first home had burned down to a skeleton of charred beams and chimney stack. But everyone was too excited to listen, thrilled and scared at the same time by the spurts of flame and the billowing smoke, as the fire ate into the familiar things of every day. When the roof over the Detention Room crashed in under a torrent of water, a great sound, half sigh, half groan, went up from the children watching in the cricket field, although everyone had hated the Detention Room and spent unhappy times there.

  But it was a part of my past, thought Carrie’s younger sister Em, sheltering the school cat under her jacket. A part of my childhood.

  Goodby to all that, said the other voice in her head, which talked back to her in dialogue, like in a play.

  She took the grey cat home, since no one looked for it. It had been named Silver at school, but Em called it Joan of Arc, because it would have been burned alive if she had not nipped down to the boiler room and rescued it.

  ‘That makes a hundred and thirty-five legs.’ Michael had chalked a long sum on the floor to count up the animals and people at World’s End, as they sat up late playing cards, because they would not have to go to school tomorrow. It was not a complete pack of cards. Nothing at World’s End was complete or unbroken. Everything was cracked, chipped, leaky, patched up, propped up, and tied together with string. But it was theirs.

  ‘No wait.’ Michael rubbed at the chalk with the frayed sleeve of his jersey. ‘A hundred and thirty nine legs, if Joan of Art stays.’

  ‘She stays.’ Em had the silver cat on her lap, because the other cats had not yet accepted her. ‘As long as we do. He couldn’t -I mean, he never would—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Tom said. They could not speak about Rudolf selling the house and turning them out. It was unspeakable.

  ‘But what would happen to all the animals if Uncle Rudolf—’

  ‘Shut up.’ Carr
ie clapped a hand over Em’s mouth, and Em bit it. ‘Don’t even talk about it.’

  Sucking the toothmarks out of her hand, Carrie saw an image of a long, sad trail of refugees … horses, dogs, cats, chickens, the goat, the donkey … animals who had found shelter here, turned out, wandering homeless.

  Two

  Everyone had a project to raise money for the house fund in the red flour crock, that hung from a rafter in the kitchen.

  When they had been saving to mend the barn roof, it had been labelled ‘RAISING THE ROOF‘. Now Michael had scrubbed that out, and painted ‘SAWING WORLD END‘.

  They all sat round the table under the crock with one hand on their chests and a lighted candle end in the other, and swore an oath:

  ‘I swear on the honour of this dear house and land that I will not touch this money for ordinary things’

  But if there was a crisis, like an oat bill, or the soles of someone’s last pair of shoes finally separated from the uppers, or the butcher saying, ‘No more credit’, someone would have to climb guiltily on to the kitchen table and fish for cash in the hanging crock. A hundred and thirty-nine legs was thirty-eight two-legged and four-legged mouths to feed. All too often there was a crisis.

  Tom, who was the eldest, worked in the zoo hospital, taking care of sick animals, and babies whose mothers had died or rejected them. The pay wasn’t much, because he was getting free training, so he took odd jobs in the evening.

  At the moment, he was painting the inside of a bungalow for a couple who were going to be married. He went off to the village after supper, and came back late, with paint in his long thick hair. The bride-to-be was very fussy. She was marrying late in life, and the love nest had to be perfect now that she had finally got it. If Tom made streaks or dribbles, she made him paint the whole wall again.

  ‘No wonder she had such a hard time getting a husband,’ Tom grumbled to Carrie, who had stayed up late to make tea and muffins for him, and to feed the baby kinkajou. ‘Who’d marry her?’

  ‘Only Mr Evans.’ The bridegroom was the pernickety chemist, who sniggered at his own rotten jokes and counted pills twice, to make sure he didn’t give you one too many. ‘And who would marry him?’

  ‘They’re welcome to each other,’ Tom groaned. ‘Them and their aquamarine boudoir.’

  ‘Who will you marry?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Not even Liza?’

  ‘God, no.’ Tom stretched out on the sagging sofa. The white cat Maud jumped on to his stomach and kneaded it, like bread dough. ‘Liza and I know each other too well.’ Paul, the black half-Siamese, dropped down from the dresser shelf and settled in Tom’s paint-matted hair on the arm of the sofa. The shaggy dog Charlie came over and licked muffin butter off his chin.

  The baby kinkajou was in a box on the kitchen table, with a toy rabbit for company. Carrie had just given him his feed, and he was asleep between the rabbit’s woolly paws with his tiny pink hands curled, and his long tail coiled like the inside of a conch shell.

  His mother had been ill and had no milk, and since there was no one in the zoo hospital to give four-hourly feeds at night, Tom brought him home after work.

  ‘Who’ll do the three o’clock feed?’ Tom mumbled, almost asleep.

  ‘Em said she would. She banged her head three times on the pillow.’

  The only clock at World’s End was a turnip watch that hung on a nail in the kitchen. The morning alarm was the rooster, Eric the Red, or John calling Carrie from the stable or field, or a dog barking to get out or in, or a cat jumping on to your face.

  A motor bike roared down the lane, extra loud in the stillness of the night, and stopped. Voices shouted. Liza’s boots ran up the front path which was made of millstones, jumping from stone to stone, crunched round the side gravel path, kicked open the back door and brought her in, with her wild red hair like a bramble bush.

  ‘My feet are murdering me.’ She dropped down on the floor where she was, and began to unlace her long boots. They were cracked and split, the leather on the toes worn away, but she wore them every day because she loved them. Good thing she did, since they were the only shoes she had. With Liza, it was boots or barefoot.

  Liza Jones lived with them at World’s End and worked for Alec Harvey, the vet in Newtown, except when she was in a mood to wander.

  Born to trouble, as some people are born to paint in oils or play the violin, Liza went off into a rage or into the blue without warning, broke things, threw things, and insulted fussy customers with toy dogs. Not the dogs, because it was not their fault they had been degraded into ribboned playthings, fed on chicken breast and chocolates.

  Alec Harvey was always threatening to sack her, but he never did. Last time she disappeared, he got really fed up, but she turned up from nowhere in the nick of time to sew up a cut artery, and save the life of a blind man’s Guide Dog.

  To help the fund in the red crock, she worked some nights at the Transport Café on the main road. It was the cook who had brought her home on his motor bike.

  ‘He’s getting very fresh,’ Liza said, ‘but it’s better than hitch-hiking, and he’s not as bad as some of them longdistance drivers.’ She whistled. ‘Language!’

  ‘What do they say?’ Carrie did not know much language, except what Liza used.

  ‘Nothing that I can’t handle, ducky.’ Liza took some folded notes out of her boot. ‘Pay night. Put this in the bank.’

  Carrie stood on the table and reached up to drop the notes into the flour crock. There was too long a drop until they hit bottom.

  ‘Will it ever be full?’ She crouched to tickle the full stomach of the kinkajou, who yawned his pink gums like a miniature baby. The black cat Paul jumped up with a questioning mew, and she fixed the piece of netting over the box. Paul was interested, not in the baby, but in his bowl of cereal in a corner of the box. If no one was looking, he would hang a paw over the side and scoop it up, like a cat fishing in a stream. ‘Will the crock ever be full, Liza?’

  ‘Not till we fill it.’ Liza got the other boot off and flung it into the opposite corner from where she had flung the other one.

  ‘That’ll be never.’

  Three

  Carrie was the worst money maker of all. She was no good at anything profitable. All the things she was good at were things for which no one would pay you, like riding, and writing poems.

  She had tried to get weekend work mucking out at the Ups’ndowns riding stable at Newtown, but there were too many horse-mad girls who would do it for nothing to get free rides. Carrie wanted money. She didn’t want free rides on the sad, submissive horses who were broken-spirited from too much work and too little food and love.

  She got kicked out of the stable anyway, before she ever picked up a manure fork, for observing to the square-jawed owner, who was either a man or a woman, that the bay thoroughbred was gone over at the knees.

  At school, she had earned a bit of money staying late to clean up the lab with the chemistry teacher, but the school was closed now, what was left of it, and the lab blown up with its own exploding chemicals.

  She had sold horse manure round the Newtown housing estates, with John pulling the muck cart, and done a little business boarding cats and dogs when their owners went away.

  But the Newtown gardeners were finding out that they could get their fertilizer free from Squarejaw at Ups’ndowns, and a Persian cat which Carrie had boarded had stayed up a tree for two days, with Charlie and Perpetua and Moses and silly Harry taking turns to bark underneath.

  Mrs Loomis the headmistress had entrusted Carrie with her small white poodle, which wore a jewelled collar, slept on a foam rubber pillow, and ate mince and boiled fish, which Mrs Loomis brought over with little Snowflake.

  The back of her car had hardly disappeared round the corner of the hawthorn hedge when Paul had swiped the plaice on to the floor, and a crowd of cats were growling over it, and Jake ran off with the package of mince in his mouth, turning and twisting
in and out of rooms, round furniture and under and over beds, with Charlie and Harry after him.

  Carrie had fed Snowflake on ham gristle and new-laid eggs and the turnips no one would eat in Liza’s stew, and Mrs Loomis was ecstatic with how well the little dog looked. She recommended Carrie to a textbook salesman who was going to the Isle of Man for a business conference.

  The salesman brought a gaunt animal called Gilbert, part wolfhound, part Dane, and part greyhound, from the size of his slender waist. He ate everything he could lay his jaws on, including an arithmetic book, three shoes, Em’s knitting, and the only decent leather halter they had.

  The book salesman never collected him. Mrs Loomis found out from his firm that he had settled down with a rich widow in the Isle of Man, and was never coming back. So Gilbert stayed, and went on eating.

  A hundred and forty-three legs. Thirty-nine mouths.

  ‘I’d count up the teeth,’ Michael said, ‘if I could add in the thousands.’

  The trouble with Carrie was that when she took in money, it usually went out before it got to the red crock.

  She gave some riding lessons to a ham-fisted boy with legs like beer bottles - on his own pony, since she would never teach on John. She was on the table, reaching up to put the teaching money into the crock, when the Cruelty Man turned up with a scarred and wobbly little donkey he had found on a building site with a can tied to the tuft of his tail, and boys shooting bows and arrows at him.

  ‘Carrie, could you possibly—’

  ‘Oh, yes’

  Carrie called the donkey Sebastian, after the saint who was tied to a tree and martyred with arrows. She put him in the orchard with Leonora, the grey jenny who had also suffered at the hands of Man, before she found refuge at World’s End.

  Carrie had to buy a sickle to cut grass for Sebastian, because his front teeth were too bad to graze, and she spent almost all the teaching money on vitamins and bran for him, and zinc ointment for his sores.

  Now that there was no school to take up her time, she was making deliveries for the grocer, with John in the trap. So far she had earned nothing, because they owed the grocer money, and he was paying himself back out of Carrie’s wages.