The House at World's End Page 2

  ‘Are you all right, my dears?’ When she smiled up at them, the lines of pain spread and lifted into the mouth they knew.

  ‘Of course. Everything’s fine.’ They began to make up some good things to tell her about school, and Em and Mike and the animals.

  ‘Carrie’s been crying,’ their mother said when they finished.

  ‘I’m all right!’ Carrie said fiercely. ‘We’ve told you -we’re all right!’

  4

  But they were not all right, of course. They were all wrong. Unhappy, each in their different way, and Uncle Rudolf and Aunt Valentina were unhappy too.

  Fights sprang up all over the house. Angry shouts. Yells. Shriek of chair legs as someone jumped up from a meal and went off to sulk. Banging doors. ‘I’m going mad!’ And a crashing of bass thunder on the piano.

  Even the cats fought, up and down the stairs, in and out of the cupboards, along the tops of coat hangers and curtain rods, squalling and scattering lumps of white, black and tiger fur.

  How long could this go on? One Sunday at a breakfast of toast and jam, because Maud, the deaf white cat had stolen the butter, and Carrie had dropped the dish of scrambled eggs on the carpet, Uncle Rudolf said, ‘I think we all need a day out.’

  He spoke in his usual cold, careful voice, but his smooth egg face looked as if it might crack under the strain.

  ‘Outings cost money.’ Sunday was Valentina’s worst day. She always came back cross from church, as if the devil was angry with her for going.

  ‘Not this one. Remember those sunken baths I made, with the mermaid tiles and the silver taps like dolphins? The customer can’t pay the bill, so he’s given me an old place he has in the country. Used to be an inn, but they made a new road, so no one came that way any more.’

  After the usual commotion about whether the animals could come (they couldn’t), and whether Valentina should invite her sad friend Rose Arbuckle who never had any fun (she invited her), they all got into the car. After the usual argument about which way to go, they turned on to a new fast, wide road where everybody seemed to be out on this sunny summer Sunday. Valentina kept telling Uncle Rudolf how to drive.

  ‘Don’t pass. Watch that woman - she drives like a fool. Look out! Slow down. Go faster. Don’t go so fast…’

  ‘Stop breathing,’ Tom murmured, wedged in the back seat with his brother and sisters. In the front, half smothered by Valentina’s floating fox fur, poor Rose Arbuckle sat and sighed for the good old days and sniffed at the drop on the end of her long sad nose.

  ‘Turn now!’ Valentina, reading the map upside down, called out much too late. Uncle Rudolf cut across two lines of furious cars and they turned off the road and went round the edge of a hill where new red brick houses covered the slope like measles.

  ‘Now that’s what I like to see in the country.’ Valentina was pleased for the first time that day. ‘A little progress and civilization.’ She stopped looking out of the window when they left the housing estates and drove through some quiet old villages, forgotten or never known by the people who raced along the new road, staring straight ahead.

  ‘Uncle Rhubarb?’

  ‘Don’t call me that, Michael.’

  ‘Can I open the window?’ That meant Michael was going to be sick.

  ‘No.’ Valentina pulled the beautiful dead fox close round her neck at the mere thought of fresh air.

  ‘You’ll be sorry,’ Carrie said. Michael was already green. Or was it the reflection from the tunnel of green leaves they were going through? It was a tall wood, arching over the road. The trees had smooth cool trunks with initials and hearts carved in them, and flat grey branches shaped like horses’ necks.

  The road was rutted and puddled. ‘I hope we’re nearly there.’ Uncle Rudolf winced as his expensive car went in and out of a muddy hole. ‘This must be the wood. It used to be called Wood’s End Inn. When they built the new road, and no travellers came this way any more, the local people started to call it World’s End.’

  The end of the world … Coming out of the wood into sudden sunlight, the old road took a turn round an over-grown hedge full of wild roses, and there it was.

  It was a stone house with a tiled roof dipping in the middle and curling at the edges. It was very shabby, with damp green patches on the walls, broken windows, and rooks flying out of the chimneys. The path to the door was made of great flat millstones, grown over with grass and weeds, with half a millstone for the doorstep. There were two rotting, rickety benches where old men must have once sat outside with mugs of beer, and the old inn sign still swung, creaking and crooked, with all the paint peeled off.

  Tom and Carrie and Em and Michael stared from the car. Michael did not feel sick any more.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’ Carrie got out on to the wet grass, staring at the house. The sweet air filled her head like a song. ‘Why don’t you come and live here, Uncle Rudolf?’

  ‘My dear child, you must be insane.’ He leaned a hand on her shoulder while he put on his galoshes. ‘In this dead place?’

  But the house was not dead. Only asleep.

  At one side, there was a gate that had once been white, off its hinges and leaning against the tilted gatepost Beyond it, a grass-grown yard and some outbuildings. A big thatched barn with holes in the boards and the black paint weathered to grey. An open cart shed. A low line of stables with half doors and a crooked straw roof. Everything old and worn and comfortable, as if it had never been built, but had grown up out of this soft ground, centuries ago.

  Moving like a sleepwalker, Carrie climbed over the gate and went across the yard, with her eyes on the stables. The top half of one door was open. She looked inside. There was still some old straw bedding on the uneven floor. A hay rack. An iron manger in the corner, everything draped with dust and cobwebs, everything long ago abandoned. But… she breathed in deeply and shut her eyes. The smell of a horse was still there.

  In the open shed, there was an old dog-cart, leaning down on its shafts, the lamp glass broken, the seat mildewed, and white with the droppings of swallows, who had made a whole village of dried mud nests in the rafters above.

  Hanging on the wall were some pieces of harness. Cracked reins, a rusted bit, a collar with the lining rotted and the straw coming out. Carrie put her face against it, and nodded. Yes. The smell of a horse was for ever.

  She took down the collar and hung it round her neck, and stepped between the shafts of the brown dog-cart and lifted them up.

  She might have stood there all day, ready to trot out, arching her neck to the imagined fed of the bit and reins, but they were yelling for her from the hill behind the house. She could see them going up through the long grass of the neglected meadow. Tom and Em carried the picnic basket, pulling it from side to side, as if they were arguing. Uncle Rudolf plodded with his galoshes and a stout stick, as if he were going up Mount Everest. Valentina and Rose Arbuckle staggered in tight skirts and silly town shoes, leaning on each other and giving out wails and complaints that Carrie could hear from the yard.

  She hung up the collar and raced round the back of the house, past some tumbledown hen houses and what might once have been a garden, with one six-foot sunflower growing out of the weeds. She caught up with the others on the grassy hill. Michael was limping more than usual on the rough ground.

  ‘Head up, boy!’ Uncle Rudolf called in the voice left over from his Army days. ‘Walk like a man.’

  ‘I am, Uncle Rhubarb.’

  ‘Don’t call me that’

  ‘He can’t help it,’ Tom said. Everyone knew that, but Uncle Rudolf, who did not often laugh, was always afraid that someone might laugh at him.

  ‘And stop limping,’ he grumbled.

  ‘He can’t help it,’ Tom said patiently. ‘One leg is shorter than the other.’

  ‘The doctors fixed that years ago,’ said Uncle Rudolf.

  ‘They did the wrong leg.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Uncle Rudolf said briskly. The limp has become a habit, that’s all.’

  ‘Playing for sympathy.’ Valentina panted up, dragging Rose Arbuckle, who wished she hadn’t come. ‘People who want sympathy never get it’

  ‘So I see,’ Tom said.

  Carrie said, ‘In case you’d like to know, the Queen’s great-grandmother, Queen Alexandra was her name, had a stiff knee from a child. But she limped so gracefully that all the fashionable ladies copied it. The Alexandra limp, they called it. In case you’d like to know.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Valentina said irritably. She didn’t know, but you could never tell her anything.

  ‘Let’s stop here.’

  ‘No, here.’

  ‘No, farther on.’

  ‘No, there under that tree.’

  ‘No, at the top of the hill!’ Swinging the basket, the children ran ahead, away from the usual picnic argument, and stopped in a line by the fence at the top of the meadow. On the slope below, a herd of cows grazed on the sweet tufted grass, heads all pointed the same way, like a tidy child’s toys. The bramble thicket at the edge of the wood ran up the hill and down the other side to where the curve of a stream was marked by pollard willows. And beyond, the patchwork greens and browns and yellows of the summer fields of England.

  5

  ‘You shouldn’t have brought me.’ Rose Arbuckle was limping worse than Michael, her ankles turning at every step like a bad skater. ‘All my life I’ve been a drag on people.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Valentina let her fall at the top of the hill, gave one insulting glance at the splendid view and demanded, ‘Where’s the beer?’

  Where’s the beer! The grown-ups would not look at the view. They sat on a blanket and unpacked the lunch and complained because there was no salt for the hard-boiled eggs.

  Uncle Rudolf g
rumbled about the bad bargain he had got in exchange for his sunken baths with the mermaid tiles and dolphin taps.

  ‘No use to me. A white elephant of a place, this is. Never sell it World’s End is right. What a ruin. Haunted, I shouldn’t wonder.’ His big yellow tombstone teeth tore at a chicken drumstick.

  ‘Br-r-r-r.’ Valentina swallowed beer and shuddered and pulled the fox fur closer round her neck, although it was a warm day and she was sweating under her thick make-up. ‘Spooky old end of nowhere.’

  As Carrie looked back at the house below them, hunching its shoulders, unwanted, a cloud of birds rose up above the chimneys like smoke, as if there was someone in there, stirring up the fire. Slitting her eyes to blur them out of focus, for a moment she could imagine she saw a phantom face at one of the windows, a ghostly hand raised to draw back the tattered curtain. She opened her eyes and the window was black and empty, the rags of curtains hanging still.

  ‘Sit down and don’t be so restless,’ Uncle Rudolf told her. ‘You’ll get indigestion.’

  ‘It’s better for your stomach to move about,’ Carrie said. ‘At Roman banquets, they used to run round the table between each course, and then be sick to make more room.’

  ‘Go away,’ Valentina said, and Rose Arbuckle moaned, ‘That’s done it I can’t eat another thing.’

  Carrie took her sandwich up to the fence, and she and Tom watched a man on a horse cantering through the water meadows on the other side of the stream. It was a big bay horse with the swinging stride of a thoroughbred, its hooves raising a fine silvery mist from the wet grass.

  ‘I stand and look at them long and long…’ Tom said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A poem. I think, it says, I think I could turn and live with animals—’

  (‘Oh so could I!’ Carrie said.)

  ‘They are so placid and self contained.

  I stand and look at them long and long.

  They do not sweat and whine about their condition—’

  (‘Like some we could mention.’)

  ‘They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.’

  (‘I bet Rose Arbuckle does.’)

  ‘They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God…’

  ‘Yes. Aunt Val makes me sick,’ Carrie whispered. ‘Does she you?’

  ‘Hush.’ Tom smiled, watching the man and the horse jump over a ditch and splash a dark track away across the shining field. ‘She is very good to us. It is her duty.’

  It was Aunt Val’s duty to go back to London early, before anyone had had a chance to explore, or to see if they could get into the house. She was having what she called a Fork Supper, which meant that the guests had to stand about uncomfortably with a glass and a plate, wishing they had a third hand for the fork. Or had to put down the glass and poke at the food without being able to cut it. Or had to sit with the plate on their knee and try to keep the sauce out of their laps.

  Carrie and Em had to wear skirts and be waitresses. Em did not mind so much, since she quite liked to dress up and pretend to be somebody else, smiling her big white teeth at the guests and hearing them tell each other, ‘What a lovely child! Those eyes! Like an Italian sky’ (To show they’d been to Italy).

  Carrie’s eyes were the ordinary greenish-brown kind that go with sandy hair that gets mud-coloured if you don’t wash it. For the Fork Supper, she had to tie it back, which she hated, since it gave her face no protection from the guests, who either looked through her as if she were invisible, or asked pointless questions like ‘Do you like school?’ and turned away without waiting for an answer.

  She took a dish of creamed chicken out to the kitchen before the guests had a chance at seconds, and all the children fell on it with their fingers.

  Valentina caught them at it. ‘Oh, it’s too, too much! I’m going mad. I shall have to tell your uncle.’ She huffed to the door, lifting her lizard skin shoes over the bodies of Charlie and the three cats, who always lay in the middle of the kitchen floor to make sure of being noticed. In a shoebox on top of the refrigerator was a stray kitten they had found in the hen house at World’s End and brought home hidden inside Tom’s shirt. It was orange coloured, so they called it Pip.

  ‘Too many of these beastly animals—’ Valentina did not even know about Pip.

  ‘Not enough,’ Carrie said, licking her fingers. ‘If only we lived in the country, we’d have dozens and dozens.’

  ‘Oh! I can’t stand any more! Oh, it’s hard on me!’

  ‘They do not sweat and whine about their condition.’ Tom quoted the poem softly, as the kitchen door swung angrily behind her. ‘I think I could turn and live with animals…’

  6

  They had all had the same idea. They fought as much as any family, and screamed and punched and sometimes bit, and told Charlie, ‘Kill her! Attack!’ while he smiled and thumped his tail and rolled his mild eyes, but when there was a good idea about, they all grabbed it together.

  After school, they met in the playground among the gorgonzola statues, and went out by bus to the depressing grey suburb where Uncle Rudolf had his plumbing factory. It was no use trying to talk to him at home, with Valentina flouncing about in clothes made of dead animals and talking about herself.

  The factory was an old-fashioned building of dirty yellow brick, with spiked iron railings all round, like a prison. Over the great studded door, Uncle Rudolf had put a royal emblem of a huge crown and crossed water pipes, with a Latin motto: ‘Princeps Plumbarium.’ The Prince of Plumbers.

  Tom and Carrie and Em and Michael had been there before when Uncle Rudolf had given them a tour of the workshops where pipes were elbowed into strange angles, and baths beaten into shape with hollow clangs. He had hoped to interest one of them into coming into the plumbing business some day. That was before he had to have them living in his house. Now he would not have had them as a gift.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked irritably, as the four of them, having waited for his secretary to go and get her tea, charged into his office and stood on the carpet before his desk.

  ‘It’s a delegation,’ said Tom.

  ‘Well, I haven’t time.’ Uncle Rudolf had actually been reading a magazine when they came in, but he began to push papers and bits of broken pipe and strings of washers about, to look busy.

  ‘But this may be the happiest day of your life,’ Carrie said.

  ‘The happiest day of my life will be when I can get some peace to do my work.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tom, shifting his bony weight from one long leg to the other, like a horse. ‘That’s just it.’

  ‘We’ve had an idea,’ Carrie said.

  Em said nothing. She had learned from the cats to wait and be cautious.

  ‘A brilliant idea, Uncle Rhubarb.’ Michael stepped forward and put his chewed fingertips on the desk and his head on one side. He could look horrible when he was dirty, with his clothes sagging at the waist and falling off his shoulders and his hair like scarecrow straw, but he was still young enough to be able to turn on the charm like one of Uncle Rudolf’s taps. The innocent, babyish charm that the others had exchanged for growing years.

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ Uncle Rudolf said, but at least he listened to the idea. He listened, but he did not like it.

  ‘But you’ve got the house!’ they cried. ‘You said you couldn’t sell it, and it’s going to waste with nobody in it.’

  ‘It’s going to pieces.’

  ‘We could fix it up. We could live there.’

  ‘What on?’ Uncle Rudolf laughed without mirth.

  ‘I’m seventeen,’ Tom said. ‘Well - sixteen then. In my seventeenth year. I can leave school. I can get a job. I’m not a child.’

  ‘You talk like one.’ Uncle Rudolf pushed his lips in and out like a windy baby. ‘It’s impossible. You’d starve to death. I’d have the authorities on me for child neglect’ He seemed to care more about that than the starving.

  ‘If that’s what’s worrying you …’ Em had kept quiet, watching all the faces, the eager begging young ones and the cold, scoffing older one, set years ago in the shape of disapproval. ‘Why not give us the money it costs you to keep us now?’