World's End in Winter Read online

  ‘I’ll leave. I’ll go to college and come out a better vet than Jan is. Then she’ll be sorry.’

  ‘Surprised, more like.’ Liza giggled.

  Tearing at the loaf, Tom shouted at her to shut up and leave him alone. Charlie got up and went to lie somewhere else. The marmoset blinked and drew its head back inside Tom’s shirt. Caesar the five-toed tortoiseshell cat jumped off the table and made a dignified exit through the hole in the back door, which had a swinging rubber flap made from the mudguard of a lorry.

  Carrie took a snaffle bit and a pair of stirrups out of the saucepan where they had been soaking and went off to polish them in another room.

  Even Liza, who did not care what she said to anyone, did not shout back at Tom to shut up himself and stop mutilating the bread. She whispered to Michael, ’Don’t tell him about the window now.’

  Echoes of Mother. ’Don’t tell your father till he’s had his dinner.’

  Even Tom and Liza, even at their age, were already catching the grown-up disease of when to tell what.

  When a thing had to be said, it had to be said.

  Michael said it, but with his back turned to Tom, looking out of the window and fiddling with a thread in the curtain, toes turned in so far that one shoe was over the other, a draughty gap of skin between his shrunk jersey and sagging trousers, woollen hood jammed down tight over his ears so that he could not hear Tom being angry.

  After a while, when he had frayed the curtain enough to poke a finger through, he turned and saw that Tom was not being angry. Tom was not being anything. Tom was not even in the room. Nor was Liza. Nor were any of the dogs. Only Michael’s mother was suddenly standing in the door-way with her arms held out.

  ’Have you got two pounds?’ Michael asked her.

  ‘Of course not.’ Mother laughed. She hugged him. Nothing mattered.

  Three

  Their father had come home to start his book, Sailor of the Seven Seas, although he had not even completely sailed the first sea yet.

  Six times he and Mother had set bravely forth in the Lady Alice. Six times they had been forced back by freak storms, a split spinnaker, leaking water tanks, a seized-up dynamo...

  The first time they left to sail round the world, the Daily Amazer, which was going to print the story, had sent down a reporter and a photographer. The local band played ’Hearts of Oak’, and the mayor came out on the quay with his chain clinking in the breeze to wish them ’Godspeed’.

  The second time, the Lady Alice was cheered away by two boy scouts with trumpets, playing ’For Those in Peril on the Sea’.

  The last time, there was no one at all, except a fisherman who cast the stern line off the bollard, and the town drunk who owed Dad some money and wanted to be sure he got away.

  That was the voyage on which the generator seized up and the torch batteries fell overboard and the matches were pooped by a soaking stern wave. They sailed blind through a starless night and ended up on a millionaire’s private beach in the Cape Verde Islands. The millionaire’s gunmen had shot away half the storm jib before Dad could shout.

  ‘Too late to start out again till next spring, so what I’m going to do’ - in the lamplight, the gold ring in Dad’s ear glittered against his curly black beard, his eyes glittered with the excitement of a new scheme - ’is hole up here and start the book and we’ll soon be rich and famous.’

  ‘So can I have two pounds?’ Tom and Carrie and Em had forgotten tiresome daily details in the drama of the sea story, but Michael hung on to things like a puppy with a laundry line.

  ‘Right away.’ Dad tipped his chair on to its back legs to fish in the pocket of his faded, sea-shrunk trousers.

  ‘Jerry—’ Mother put out her thin brown hand, but he pulled out some coins and poured them from a height into Michael’s cupped palms as if they were doubloons.

  ‘How much is that?’ Michael could not count any better than he could spell.

  ’Two pounds and nine pence,’ Em said.

  ‘Keep the change, my good man.’ Dad closed Michael’s fingers round the money.

  ‘Jerry—’ Mother said again, and he pulled his pocket inside out to show her that there was nothing left in it but a fishing float and a stub of pencil and a piece of caulking compound.

  The next morning, which was a Saturday, with everybody home but Tom and Liza, he was in great energy, demanding four fried eggs for brain fuel, sending everyone off in different directions to equip him for his new career.

  Mother had to hunt up his old plaid dressing gown because authors always wore old plaid dressing gowns. Michael rode Oliver to the village for paper and pencils, and supplied wood for the sitting-room fire by his patent method of rolling logs through the window and down a board into the rusted washtub which was the wood box.

  Carrie swept the room and pushed the litter off the table on to the floor.

  Em looked for cushions to cover the holes in the cane chair. All the cushions had cats on them, so she brought down two thick books from the trunk that had been left in the attic long ago by the family who once lived here. The musty mysterious smell of the pages was more fascinating than what was printed on them. Em read like eating and was always hard up for a book, but you had to be pretty desperate to get through either Glimpses of Old Lapland or Tabby Tinker’s Teatime Tales for the Littlest Folk.

  In his dressing gown and frayed rope shoes, his pipe between his teeth to make him look bookish, Dad said goodbye to his family as if he were going to prison for a month and went into the front room and shut the door. It swung open. Every door in this slightly crooked house either creaked open when you shut it, or shut when you wanted it open.

  ‘Shut that perishing door!’

  No one did, since no one had opened it, so he banged it and kicked a footstool against it.

  He opened it three times in the first half-hour, demanding tea, Michael to ride back to the village for pipe tobacco, Em and Mother to stop talking about childbirth on the stairs.

  Mother always had her best conversations in odd places: kneeling in a cupboard looking for a sandal, halfway up a ladder, on the roof cleaning leaves out of the gutter. One of the best talks she and Em had ever had, about what dying was, had been in the far corner of a room into which they had trapped themselves by starting to paint the floor from the doorway.

  At last the door banged shut, the footstool scraped on the tiles, and they heard no more. Mother and Em, who were cleaning the house, went up and down stairs with their shoes off. Carrie moved Leonora off the front lawn in case she brayed. The red hen Rubella, who might boast for half an hour after she laid an egg, was taken down cackling from her perch by Michael and held in front of a whitewashed wall to hypnotize her into silence.

  At lunchtime, Em went round to the front of the house and peered through the bare tangled branches of the jasmine to see how the book was going.

  Her father had put two big logs on the fire and was sitting on the last bone of his spine in the sagging armchair, with his bottom almost on the floor and his feet on the fireplace bricks, reading Tabby Tinker’s Teatime Tales for the Littlest Folk.

  ‘How’s he getting on?’ Her mother was making Alice’s All-purpose Soup with anything she could find - chicken wings, three stewed plums, half a corned beef sandwich, a cup of tea, a wilted lettuce - stewed up in a pot with barley.

  ‘Working away like mad,’ Em said.

  ‘You’d better take his lunch in there.’

  Em took a bowl of soup and some bread and cheese and knocked on the sitting room door.

  ‘Go away, I’m busy.’

  T brought your lunch.’

  ‘Thank God.’ She heard his feet scrape down from the fireplace. ’Come in,’ he grunted. ’Push the door hard.’

  She pushed it open and stepped in over the footstool with the baking sheet she was using for a tray. He was sitting at the table, pencil going swiftly over the paper, the other hand raking through the thick curly hair that made Em forget to fuss with flat
tening her own curls when he was at home.

  ‘How’s it going?’ She put down the baking sheet at the other end of the table. She had put one of the last chrysanthemums in an eggcup of water, like the man in the film Ladykiller, who had brought his wife one perfect rose on her breakfast tray and then stabbed her with the butter knife.

  ‘Marvellous.’ He leaned his arm on the paper so that she could not see, and pulled the soup towards him with the other hand. ’Smells good. You make it, Emmy?’

  ‘Yes.’ Em had the habit of telling lies for not much reason. She was trying to cure herself of pointless ones, so that people would believe the ones that mattered.

  ’Stick to cooking. Never try this lark.’

  A kitten that had sneaked in with Em was playing football with the crumpled papers on the floor. Em picked up the kitten and some of the papers with it. After lunch, she went into the hayloft over the barn and smoothed out the papers, which had only a few scrawled words on one side, and began to write a play.

  Four

  Lester came in the afternoon.

  Carrie had gone up to the meadow to catch John. He usually came when she whistled, but today he stood staring at nothing with his ears lopped sideways, as if he were blind and deaf, and made her come to him.

  From the wood, a squirrel chittered. It wasn’t a squirrel. It was Lester. He climbed over the brass bedstead which mended one of the gaps in the hedge.

  ‘Look what I found.’

  It was a perfect round pink stone, like a wren’s egg. He unscrewed the knob of the bedstead, put the egg into the hollow place and screwed it up again. He was storing things here for posterity. Thousands of years hence, a traveller from the planet Uranus would unscrew the knob with the strange instruments which were his hands, and marvel at these treasures which spoke to him through the centuries. The stone egg, an old farthing, a gold filling from Lester’s mother’s tooth, a dog’s dew claw, a piece of Liza’s red hair tied with cooked spaghetti gone hard again, and a twist of paper with a two-line poem by Carrie:

  When the last car on earth has crashed and the last plane has fallen from the skies and the last rocket satellite has run its course,

  There will still be the galloping wonder of beauty. There will still be a horse.

  They walked up the hill to where John was dreaming. Lester said quietly, ’Peter’, and instantly the lovely chestnut head with the white star that was shaped like an onion or like the dome of the Taj Mahal, according to how you saw it, swung up from behind the blackberry bushes.

  They walked down the hill with a hand on their horses’ necks.

  ‘My mother and father are home,’ Carrie said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I heard his old car.’

  ’He’s writing a book.’

  ’I know.’

  ’How?’

  ‘Bessie Munce at the shop told me there’d been an emergency call for paper.’

  As they came down to the gate, Lester said casually, ’Someone else has come too. The moving van is at Brookside. Those people.’

  They looked at each other without needing to raise an eyebrow, or smile, or say, ’Let’s ride over there.’ Their eyes met and the plan was made.

  Michael was in the stable putting the saddle on Oliver. In the summer, the small Welsh pony was neat and glossy, with elegant legs and delicate seahorse head. Half-way into his winter shag, he was already taking on his giant panda look, legs stumpy, mane sticking out on both sides because his neck was too thickly furred for it to lie down.

  Those people are moving into Brookside.’ Carrie looked over the half door. ’We’re going to ride over there and you can confess about the window.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It will give us an excuse to investigate.’

  ‘Not me.’ Michael led Oliver out and got on quickly to ride off somewhere else. Oliver had let go his breath. The saddle slipped round under his stomach and Michael stepped off into a squawk of chickens. Oliver put down his head, trod on his rein, jerked up his head and broke the buckle end of the rein.

  By the time Michael had been back to the house for a skewer and string to mend the rein, the others were ready, so he had to ride off with them, because Oliver would not go in a different direction from John and Peter.

  The moving van in the drive of Brookside was too wide to get past, so they drew twigs and Carrie lost, and stayed with the horses while the others walked up to the house. Furniture and rolled carpets were going in. They walked behind an oversized sofa into the hall and through into the room where Michael had broken the window. The glass had been mended.

  A man and a woman were standing at the end of the room by the flat-skulled ladies who held up the mantelpiece arguing where the sofa should go. The moving men set it down, picked it up again, went sideways with it like a crab with a heavy shell, set it down where the man pointed, dusted off their hands, and then had to bend and lift it and sidle off again to where the woman was standing.

  ‘It was better over here.’ He was a big ruddy man, losing his hair and waist and the veins in his nose.

  ‘Nonsense, Brian.’ The woman was tall and athletic, with squared-off shoulders and shining teeth and eyes, crackling with health and energy. ’Come on, boys, let’s try it sideways to the fireplace.’

  She grinned, thinking the men liked her, but behind her back, they made terrible faces at each other as they picked up the awkward sofa.

  When it was down, she turned coolly to Lester and Michael, as if she had seen them in the doorway all along and meant to make them wait.

  ‘Is it the newspapers?’ she asked in her voice for talking to tradespeople, high and clear, as if they must be deaf or stupid. ’Or groceries? Do you deliver?’

  ‘Yes, Madam.’ Lester picked up a piece of packing straw and stuck it behind his ear like a pencil.

  ‘It’s the window.’ Michael frowned under his white hood.

  ‘They’ve been cleaned thank you.’

  ‘But you see, I—’ As Michael moved to the french door, he saw that a small wheelchair stood on the terrace in a patch of late sun. In the chair, bundled in scarves and mittens and fur boots, was the child with the blank dark eyes.

  She looked at him, but would not smile. He tapped on the glass and waggled his fingers in an experimental wave.

  ‘Don’t tease Priscilla, there’s a good boy,’ the woman said.

  ‘She’s cold.’ Michael turned round.

  ‘Nonsense. Spot of fresh air never hurt anybody. Now run along, kids. We’re very busy here.’

  ‘I broke your window.’ Michael clenched his fists by his waist, elbows out, defensively.

  ‘Oh well, never mind.’ She tossed aside his confession breezily. ’Off you go.’

  Michael held his ground. ’What’s wrong with your little girl?’ He gave her his honest, innocent stare, which usually got results.

  ‘She had an accident.’

  ‘Can’t she smile?’

  ‘She can smile when she wants to.’

  ‘Can’t she walk then?’

  Stepping between Michael and the window, the father said, ’It’s just that Priscilla isn’t as strong as our other children.’ And added unnecessarily, They’re both in their school teams for everything.’

  He pushed Michael towards the door. ’What’s wrong with your leg?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lester answered for him.

  ‘Then why’s he limping?’

  ‘It’s shorter than the other.’

  ‘Can’t it be seen to?’ the woman asked, as if Michael was a torn blind or a dripping tap.

  ‘Not without cutting a bit off the other one,’ Lester explained reasonably, and Michael turned in the doorway and asked, ’Why can’t Bristler be seen to?’

  ’Bristler?’

  ‘He can’t say Priscilla.’ Lester again explained the obvious.

  ’We’ve done all we can,’ the mother said curtly.

  Outside in the wheelchair, the little gi
rl sat with her mittened hands limp on the rug over her knees, staring without expression into the room.

  Before they crossed the road into the stubble field, Carrie, Lester and Michael rode round the high garden hedge to the back gate for one more look at Priscilla.

  The father had gone out to bring her in. He had turned the chair round to pull it backwards over the door sill. John, who was anxious to get home, tossed his brown head over the gate. Oliver stuck his furry nose through the bars to bite at a bush. It tasted bitter, and he snorted smoky breath into the cold air.

  The father was turned to the door and did not see the horses. But in the moment before he pulled her after him, Priscilla came to life. The dark eyes brightened. The limp hands lifted to clutch the arms of the wheelchair and pull herself forward. Her still, pale face moved into a smile, just for a moment, before the chair was jerked inside and the door shut.

  Five

  Every day in his plaid dressing gown, Jerome Fielding threw away the pages he had written the day before and started again. It was going to be a long time before they all became rich and famous.

  Every evening, Em collected the crumpled paper from under the table, smoothed it out and wrote some more of her play in bed by the stub of a candle, wearing moth-eaten gloves with no fingers.

  It was a play about herself as she would like to be, tall and willowy with a face like a lily, long straight cornsilk hair, and a beautiful singing voice, honest and courageous and adored. It was called Life and Death of a Star. Would it make anybody rich and famous? Perhaps she would never show it to anyone.