World's End in Winter Read online

  WORLD’S END IN WINTER

  MONICA DICKENS

  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

  One

  It was going to be a cold one.

  Even before September was out, Oliver’s skewbald pony coat had begun to grow as busily as if he were going to spend the winter on his native Welsh hills.

  The swallows left the barn, and neither head, legs nor tail of the tortoise had been seen for two weeks. Brown and yellow leaves whirled before the wind, as hedges and trees closed the tips of their twigs over next spring’s buds. Henry the ram was wool walking without legs. Leonora rolled a good insulation of mud into her grey donkey coat, and lay down if you tried to brush her. Charlie got a squint from trying to see through shaggy hair. He had to be trimmed with hedge clippers because Michael had dropped the scissors into the pond, trying to cut grass under water. The fish had disappeared to wherever fish go.

  The chickens went to roost earlier every evening, and the cats and dogs spent more time in front of the stove. Soon it would be too dark to ride after school, so Carrie and Michael and their friend Lester took the horses out as much as they could before the bitter dark days closed down.

  One clear afternoon which might almost have been spring, if it had not smelled of autumn, they cantered across the big stubble field where the wheat was cut, jumping the few straw bales that had been left. John and Peter took them in their stride. When these were two together, Oliver hopped on and off, changing legs on top as if he were taking a bank at the Dublin Horse Show.

  At the far end of the field, they turned into the narrow, high-banked road that led into the village where a stream ran alongside the street. The cottages here were like castles, with a moat outside the garden, and a bridge to cross to the front path.

  On the outskirts of the village was the big red brick house that had stood empty long enough for people to say it was haunted. Its bridge was the end of a wide asphalt drive. The padlocked white gate had a sign saying Brookside, with a board nailed underneath, TOR SALE. KEEP OUT’, like a ’Don’t Touch’ notice in a china shop.

  ‘If I lived there,’ Carrie said, ’I’d have a drawbridge across the stream, and pull it up when I saw certain people coming.’

  ‘If you lived there, you’d be glad to see anybody,’ Lester said. They had stopped their horses in the lane to look at the house beyond the weed-grown drive. It looked back at them with blank windows that no one had looked out of for two years.

  ‘Is it really haunted?’ Carrie whispered, as if the windows were listening as well as watching.

  ‘Yes.’ Lester knew everything that went on over a large area of this countryside. What he didn’t know he invented, but it usually turned out to be true anyway.

  ’What by?’

  ‘Voices. Sighs. Phantom hounds. A baby crying. Miss Etty told me.’ Miss Etty was the lady who had built a brand new bungalow round a tree rather than cut it down. It grew diagonally through a corner of her sitting room, and her birds sat in it. ’Want to go round and see what we can hear?’

  Michael said, ’No,’ but the others had turned back, following the stream for a place to cross, so he pulled his pony’s head up from the grass and went with them.

  John and Peter jumped the narrow stream quite easily. Oliver slithered halfway down the bank, trampled his feet like a cat, leaped straight up into the air, landed with all four feet together and scrambled up the opposite bank. Michael picked himself up from the edge of the stream and climbed after him.

  ’You should hang on to the mane,’ Carrie said in her Riding Instructor voice, which annoyed Michael, and usually made Em get off whichever horse she was riding and go indoors.

  ‘I did.’ Michael held up a muddy handful of Oliver’s mane.

  They rode round the tall hedge that surrounded Brookside’s garden, and got in through a gate at the back with a broken latch. There was a tennis court, a small neglected swimming pool, a round thatched summer house like a beehive, and a stone terrace with french windows into the drawing room. They tied their horses to the wire fence round the tennis court and stood with their ears pressed against the long windows, to see what they could hear.

  When you press your ear to a window pane, you can hear the sea wind in it, like a conch shell, and the whisper and creak of your own hair growing.

  No ghosts. No wails or sighs. The house held its breath to see what they would do.

  The long drawing-room was empty of furniture, with a bare floor and the top halves of two brooding ladies holding up the mantelpiece on either side of the brass grate.. They were brooding about the weight of the mantelpiece, which had flattened the tops of their heads, like the back of a baby’s head if nobody ever turns it in its cot.

  Staring at their blind marble eyes, Michael leaned hard against the window. A pane of glass cracked like a rifle shot, and tinkled into the silence of their held breath.

  Lester put his hand carefully through the jagged glass and turned the lock and they went in.

  They went all over the house, listening. It was a prosperous but dull kind of house. Rooms and cupboards and staircases in predictable places. Flowered wallpaper upstairs. Modern tiled kitchen and bathroom. Prosperous but dull people had lived tidily here. Not restless haunters. No voices murmured of old tragedies on the stairs. On the upper landing under the attic trap door, there was not even the whisper of mouse feet. In the round turret room at the corner, there was no hint of lavender where a betrayed girl had once fluttered her handkerchief. Not even her sigh.

  Michael stopped holding on to Carrie’s sleeve, and his eyes went back to their normal size under his ragged fringe. They were turning to go, when Lester suddenly stopped in the middle of the bare boards of the turret room. Outside, a wind was getting up. It rattled the long leaves of the laurel shrubbery, breathed deeply through the garden firs, and ran along the gutter like a flute. Dogs barked, chasing something. Overhead, a jet plane churned, high up. There was no other sound, but Lester stood with his pointed ears pricked, eyes wide, mouth open, nose flared, fingers feeling the air, listening with all his senses.

  ’Hear it?’

  An army of ants crept up Carrie’s spine. She shook her head.

  ‘Listen.’

  There it was - a faint, thin wailing.

  A banished spirit trying to get in?

  A nun bricked up in the walls?

  ‘The baby,’ Lester whispered. ’The baby that cries.’

  Michael pressed against Carrie and stuffed both hands into his mouth to keep from shrieking.

  Then they heard the voices. Lester stood at the side of the window and glanced down like a sniper. The tall shrubbery hid the gate and the front drive. The wailing again, and then in a pause of the wind, a man’s voice.

  ’Damn thing’s stuck.’

  Someone was trying to get into the house.

  Moving as one, Carrie, Lester and Michael fled out of the room and down the passage. At a window over the front door, they slowed just long enough to look down. A man in a check cap was fighting with the lock. Behind him, a well-dressed woman and a tall man carrying a child with thin legs dangling in red tights. He had turned back to say something to the woman, and the child’s pale face, flopped sideways on his shoulder, was turned up
to the window with dark, uncaring eyes that looked, but did not seem to see.

  They ran down the stairs and out through the broken french door, untied the horses and got away through the back gate. They jumped the stream farther down where a banked corner hid them from the house - no trouble with Oliver jumping towards home - three strides across the road and into the stubble field, spreading out to gallop each their own line, hair and manes and tails streaming with the wind.

  ‘Did that child see us?’ Carrie bent to wipe her wet eyes and nose on John’s mane as they waited at the end of the field for Michael to catch up.

  ‘Who knows?’ Lester rode bareback with a halter, loose and easy, riding all wrong, but riding Peter just right. ’She looked drugged.’

  ‘Kidnapped? She was too big to be carried.’

  ‘Or to cry like a baby. // that was her crying’

  The ants again, crawling up the back of Carrie’s neck into her wind-lifted hair.

  ‘She looked not there.’ Michael came up, and turned Oliver’s head into the wind to help him get back his breath, although he was panting more than the pony. ’Do you think she was dead?’

  By the time they had trotted through the wood and along the edge of the beanfield and round the flank of the darkening hill into their own lane, they could almost wonder if they had imagined her.

  Mr Mismo was out in his barnyard, lagging a standpipe with straw and sacking and baling twine.

  They stopped to tell him that they had seen the house agent showing Brookside to someone. A house changing hands was quite an event in this quiet countryside where nothing much happened except birth and death and marriage, and not much of those.

  ‘I wonder if they’ll buy it.’ Carrie shivered and turned her polo neck up round her chin. With the sun gone down, there was no exhilaration in the wind.

  ‘Not a chance.’ Mr Mismo stood with his stumpy legs apart in boots as wide as sewer pipes, his arms behind his back to appraise the horses like a sergeant-major inspecting a drill squad. ’No money about these days.’ Having settled the fate of Brookside, he said sharply, ’Them horses been lathering up. You ride ’em too hard.’

  ‘It’s good for them to sweat.’ Carrie put on her instructive voice. ’It gets rid of the poisons of the system, you see, and regulates the temperature, so that—’

  ‘They’ll founder.’ Mr Mismo always saw disaster. ’Get them on home out of this perishing wind, or you’ll have a stableful of coughs before the winter’s half begun. It’s going to be a cold one.’

  Two

  Carrie’s younger sister Em, and Liza who had lived with them like an older sister since she left her unhappy home for good, went to the Church Jumble Sale to buy jerseys and scarves.

  Liza was a violent character with long smouldering red hair and extreme loves and hates. She sang strange rude songs that she had learned from the other lawless girls at Mount Pleasant, which was a place nearby where they sent girls who were too bad to go to school and too young to go to prison. She swore and threw things and would clout you and hug you all in the same movement, and make you laugh and cry at once.

  Em was the most domesticated of the family, more of a house person, like a cat, which was what she thought she had been in a former life. She and Liza did the cooking at World’s End. Sometimes it was marvellous. Sometimes even the dogs were doubtful. They also did the shopping, when there was any money in the blue and white striped sugar jar. Sugar was in the jar that said ’Tea’, and Tea was in ’Rice’.

  As the weather got colder, they went round the house stuffing newspaper into window gaps, and then they went to the Church Jumble Sale and bought some jerseys and scarves and rubber boots and a white woollen hood for Michael.

  It framed his cheerful face and sticky chin like a Crusader’s chain mail. He wore it constantly, sometimes in bed. It was the best thing that had happened to him so far this winter.

  The first morning when he wore the hood to school, a crude boy called Gregory Ferris fell on him with hoots and yells.

  ‘E’s wearing my old ’ood! ’Ere look, Walter, look at poor old Mike, got to wear me old clothes. My mum wasn’t even going to give it to the Jumble, because she didn’t think it would fetch nothing.’

  Michael stood with his fists clenched, his cheeks red from rage and from the chilly ride behind John in the dogcart, with the hood cuddling his ears.

  ‘Didn’t ought to be allowed, did it?’ Gregory’s toady friend tutted and pursed his mouth, like women gossiping in the village. ’All those poor children living on their own in that ruin. Not right, is it?’

  He was quoting his mother. Most of the local children envied the Fieldings living with their animals at World’s End, with no one more grown up than their brother Tom, and Liza who was often more childish than anyone.

  After the last spot of trouble with Mrs Loomis, the headmistress, Tom had made Michael promise not to fight any more, so he stuck out his tongue far enough to lick the drop off his nose and turned to go into school.

  But behind him, the crude voice of Gregory Ferris sneered, ’You’re right, it’s not right. Where’s his dad then, that’s what they say.’

  ‘I told you.’ Michael swung round. ’He’s sailing round the world with my mother.’

  ‘Ha bloody ha,’ jeered Gregory, and Michael was into the fight with arms and legs and head, the two of them scrabbling on the gritty cement playground, Walter hopping round like a referee.

  Michael was winning. He usually won fights. That was why he started them. But as Gregory scrambled up to run away - creeps like him never fought to a finish - he grabbed at Michael’s hood and it turned right round on his head and muffled him. He hit out blindly, not at Gregory, but at the glass pane of the school door.

  It did not shatter, because it was reinforced with wire, but it broke right across with the same rifle crack as the window at Brookside (two broken windows was sure to mean a third).

  ‘That will cost you two pounds, little boy.’ Mrs Loomis, who never could remember names, even of people like Michael who were constantly on the carpet of her office, lifted the hood off his head and dangled it like a tea cosy. The small soft moustache along her upper lip stood out like cat’s fur when it was cold.

  Michael snatched his white hood from her and ran out across the playground.

  He did not go into school. He spent the morning sitting in the hollow of John’s brown back in the shed where the baker let Carrie keep the horse while his van was on the bread rounds.

  ‘What are you doing, Mike?’ At dinnertime, Carrie came out with carrots for John from the school cook.

  ‘I owe Mrs Bloomers two pounds.’

  Carrie understood why he was with John, brooding in his hood. He might as well have said twenty pounds.

  Tom had a job at the zoo hospital, where many of the animals were wintered when the zoo was closed. Liza was working for Alec Harvey the vet, who was as poor as they were, since he was always treating animals free for people who were even poorer.

  He kept promising Liza a rise. ’That’ll be the day,’ she told him, on hands and knees sweeping up the rack of expensive test tubes she had just broken.

  Carrie and John earned a bit of money taking horse manure round to the gardeners of the housing estates at Newtown, but all the gardeners were indoors these days with their shoes off, watching television. She helped Mr Mismo with his pigs and cows, and Mrs Mismo, who thought food was more important than money (which it was), paid her in sausage rolls and big currant biscuits called Fat Rascals.

  Em, using her business name of Esmeralda, did babysitting for local mothers. If they were decent children, she was decent to them. If they were vile, she was vile back. Mrs Potter gave her a bonus if little Jocelyn, who bit, actually drew blood.

  Michael sold inventions where he could. Fireplace trivets and flowerpot holders made from horseshoes. Stools made out of broomsticks and upside-down cake tins. Potato mashers made of wire coathangers. Floor polishers made of bricks covered with fe
lt. You tied them round your feet and skated. He also did shopping errands for a crippled old lady called Miss Cordelia Chattaway, and she gave him ten pence every Sunday for wheeling her to church and finding the hymns.

  Everyone helped to make money, but there was never more than just enough to feed all the two-legged and four-legged mouths.

  ‘Dogs can eat table scraps,’ Aunt Valentina had said when Em asked for a case of dog food for her birthday. But at World’s End, there never were any scraps.

  ‘A horse can keep fat on good old Doctor Green,’ Mr Mismo said. But John and Peter and Oliver worked hard and needed oats as well as grass. Soon there would be no goodness in the winter grazing, and there would be hay to buy.

  The roof needed patching where autumn gales had blown some corner tiles off. The rainwater pump needed a new valve. Everyone needed new shoes except the horses, since the blacksmith was more important than the shoe shop, and the old black cooking stove was cracked right across and would be lucky if it hung on till spring.

  ‘Money doesn’t matter,’ Mother always said. And that was true. As long as you had some.

  ‘When my book is published,’ their father had said, ’we shall all be rich and famous.’ The book was Sailor of the Seven Seas, with photographs of Mother in the rigging. He had not written it yet.

  Meanwhile, there was two pounds to pay Mrs Loomis for the broken glass. And if those people with the strange pale child did buy Brookside and guessed from the hoof-marks who might have broken the drawing-room window, would that be two pounds too?

  On the evening of Michael’s fight with Gregory Ferris, Tom came home from the zoo tired and cross. A ferret had died of pneumonia. Jan Lynch, Tom’s boss, had said in her clipped voice that did not show if she was annoyed, angry or furious, ’Might have lived if you’d kept its front end propped.’

  ‘How can you keep a blasted ferret propped up?’ Tom raged, slumped at the kitchen table, legs stuck out on Charlie’s shaggy back, tearing great chunks off the crust of a new loaf. ’How can I do everything! It’s always my fault. I’m fed up. I’m going to tell that woman... Yesterday she told me to get my hair cut. I ask you. Just because it got singed in a bunsen burner in the lab.’ He dragged his long, knuckly hand through his flopping hair, leaving crumbs in it. ’I’m fed up. Life’s too short...’ etc, etc. When Tom was tired and cross, he smouldered with frustrated fires, flinging his long arms and legs and hair about, kicking furniture. The cats went up to a safer level of counter and shelves and watched. A runty marmoset he had brought home from work stuck its round eyes and tufted ears out of the front of his shirt to see what was going on.