Summer at World's End Page 2

  ‘I’m a married man!’ Carrie’s father stood up. His black beard wagged in outrage. He put his finger through his gold ear-ring and tugged it. Sign of outrage.

  ‘What does your wife look like?’ The editor looked up at him, with his eyes twinkled almost out of sight.

  ‘Now you’re talking.’ Carrie’s father let go of his earring, and his white teeth came through the beard in a slow, broadening grin. He took out his wallet. He had an old picture of Carrie’s mother that had been a quarter: of the way round the world with him. It had been taken years ago when she was on the stage, a glowing girl with a cloud of bright golden hair.

  ‘Whee-ew!’ The editor whistled. ‘Would she go?’

  Oh poor Mum - no! Carrie thought, but her father said proudly, ‘She’ll go anywhere with me.’

  ‘Take her with you and a good camera,’ the editor said, ‘and we’ll buy you a boat at least.’

  ‘And buy my story?’ The fortune of Jerome Fielding spilled through his imagination like gold doubloons of pirate treasure.

  ‘To be perfectly honest… perhaps. Can you write?’

  ‘My dear good chap.’ There was no more calling him Sir. ‘I can do anything.’

  With The Lady Alice swelling on his chest, he ran with Carrie and Lester down six flights of stairs, because he was too excited to wait for the lift. Out on to the Thames Embankment where he ran among the pigeons, startling old ladies with toy dogs on leads. Secretaries sitting on the benches looked up from magazines and smiled. A Pomeranian dog broke away from its lady and ran with him, yapping its applause.

  Just before they went into the station to catch their train home, they saw a big blue plumbing van belonging to his rich brother Uncle Rudolf. On the side was Uncle Rudolf’s crest, a crown and crossed water pipes, and his Latin motto, ‘Princeps Plumbarium’, the Prince of Plumbers.

  Carrie’s father ran ahead of the van to a crossing, and stepped out into the street with his hand raised. He swaggered across, to show the van driver, or himself, or someone, that he didn’t need any money from the Prince of Plumbers.

  Oh poor Mum! Carrie kept thinking. ‘Oh, poor Mum, she won’t want to go.’ At World’s End, she and Lester told the others what had happened in London, with Lester acting out the parts of the editor of the Daily Amazer and Carrie’s father and even the old ladies with toy dogs. ‘Oh poor Mother, she’s not strong enough yet. Oh poor Dad.’

  ‘Stop being sorry for everyone.’ Tom said. ‘It’s insulting. Let them work it out somehow by themselves.’

  ‘That’s what I heard Dad say to Mother when I took Dog Tom into school and he ate the exam questions and Mrs Bloomers rang the police,’ Michael said wonderingly. ‘What’s the point of being a grown-up if people are still going to talk about you as if you were a child?’

  ‘None,’ Em said.

  Mother was shopping in the village when they got back from London. When Carrie was in the stable yard, she saw her coming down the lane. She was not the golden girl in the photograph any more. She was almost twenty years older than that, and paler and thinner and more tired. The readers of the Daily Amazer would not see a glowing girl over their tea and kippers. They would see Carrie’s mother.

  As she came past the barn, her father ran down the front path, which was made of flat millstones set into the grass, jumping from stone to stone, the way the children did. He leaped the grassy ditch at the edge of the road instead of stepping on the stone bridge.

  ‘I’m going to make my fortune!’ he shouted. ‘You’re going to sail round the world with me!’

  Mother had opened her mouth to say, ‘Oh no!’ Then she looked at his eager, grinning face, and spread her startled mouth into a smile. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go with you.’

  4

  So they were on their own again. Their father and mother went to live on the coast where the new boat was being fitted for the voyage. Tom, Carrie, Em and Michael were alone again with the animals.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ Mother had asked, but only because she was looking for an excuse not to sail round the world. She knew they loved to live like this. No grown-ups. Just animals. Everyone equal, with an equal right to live their own kind of way. Tom as head of the house, because every herd must have a leader.

  ‘Are you sure I should go? Michael’s so young…’

  ‘It is your duty,’ Michael said, as if he were years older than her. ‘By your hustbin’s side.’

  ‘I sometimes wish my husband’s side would stay on dry land,’ she sighed. ‘But you can’t change men.’

  She wrote from the coast that to get her fit for the Seven Seas, their father was going to make her walk two miles a day uphill.

  ‘How will she get down?’ Michael asked Em, but she picked up her black cat like a tray, kicked open the door and stamped in boots, kicking the backs of the stairs, up to her room. She had started to flatten down her curly hair again with socks and woollen hats. She missed her father more than anyone.

  Carrie missed them both, when she thought about it, but she had things on her mind. The night they got back from London, a storm of rain had washed away any hoof print the chestnut horse might have made in the lane or in the fields. She and Lester had searched in vain. They rubbed a cloth in one of the hoof marks in the vegetable garden and held it to Perpetua’s nose.

  ‘Seek!’ they told her. She was supposed to be half pointer, but she didn’t point at anything. She was going to have puppies again. It was her life’s work.

  Carrie could not get the beautiful horse out of her mind. The delicate head with the half moon white star, the small nervous ears laid back – from fear, not vice. The strong short back and fine legs. He had some Arab in him, perhaps some New Forest. He looked well fed and well groomed. Kept right, but treated wrong. What were they doing to him now?

  One day before school started again, she went for a long ride with Mr Mismo. His name was Mr Mossman but Michael had called him Mismo, and it stuck.

  He was the dairy farmer down the lane at the edge of the village. He grazed his cows in the field on the other side of their hill, and he was their best friend. He had ‘lent’ them the goat and the ram, and never asked for them back. He had given Michael two chickens called Diane and Currier, and later, some fertile eggs to hatch. He gave Em a pair of yellow ducklings. He gave all of them a lot of advice about horses and dogs and cats and birds and everything you could think of. Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t.

  He told Carrie how to ride, although she actually rode better than he did. He sat on the back of his saddle with his legs stuck out and his elbows pumping, at the same time telling Carrie, ‘Ride into your knee… drop the hands… push him into the bit… legs, girl, legs!’

  He was shaped like one of his own milk churns, with a broad red face and a bush of grey hair on which a tweed hat rode unsteadily, turned up all round, with a blue jay’s feather in the band. When he rode, the hat was always falling off, or getting snatched off by twigs, and Carrie had to get off John and pick it up, because if Mr Mismo got off, he couldn’t get on again without a mounting block.

  His horse was about the same shape as he was, a porridge-coloured mare with a short fat tail and a stiff, hogged mane that Mr Mismo would neither grow out nor clip short. It stood straight up like a chariot horse, making her neck look thicker than it was already.

  At the end of the neck, she had a broad heavy head with a Roman nose like a moose. On the end of her solid legs she had huge flat feet that splayed mud out sideways. Mr Mismo said that she had been the greatest hunter across country of her day. He was very fond of her. Her name was Princess Margaret Rose, because he was very fond of the royal family too.

  Carrie rode behind him down a long track through a wood. He and his horse were both the same shape from the back. He cantered, splashing up mud and wet leaves. Squirrels scuttled up trees, rooks shouted the alarm from the treetops, and blue jays went into a frenzy of scolding.

  Carrie rode on a loose rein
, with a poem running in her head to the rhythm of John’s canter.

  Death - light of Spain - hurrah!

  Love - light - of Af-rica!

  Don - John - of Aus-tria

  Is ri-ding to - the sea.

  Don John of Austria had been John’s official name when she took him to a show, ‘Number fifty-two - Caroline Fielding riding Don John of Austria!’ The brush, the rails, the gate, the wall - she would never forget it.

  She cantered half in a dream. The back of John’s ears rose and fell, his mane flopped to the rhythm.

  He shakes - the pea-cock gar - dens as heri-ses- from -his ease.

  And - he strides - a - mong the tree - tops -

  Mr Mismo stopped suddenly, elbows out and up. John ran into Princess Margaret’s tail, and Mr Mismo gave Carrie a short lecture on keeping her distance.

  ‘You crowd like that at a show,’ he said, ‘and they’ll put you out of the ring.’

  Carrie handed him up his hat, which had fallen off when he stopped, and got back on John. ‘I’m not going to any more shows.’

  At the show they had been to, where John was Don John of Austria, people had laughed, because he didn’t look like the other grand expensive horses. They stopped laughing when he jumped - the brush, the rails, the gate, the wall - all the huge jumps. He would have had a clear round if Carrie had not lost her head and her balance at the last jump and fallen off and wrecked everything, including the triple bar.

  ‘Broke three bars in one go,’ Mr Mismo chuckled. ‘They’ll be glad not to see you again, old dear.’

  ‘It’s not that. John’s had a hard life. He was almost dead when I found him.’ She looked sideways at Mr Mismo as they came out of the wood and trotted down a cart track. She still did not know how much he knew, or guessed, about the kidnapping of John. ‘It’s not fair to ask him to jump those awful jumps just because I want to win.’

  ‘You credit a horse with too much feeling,’ Mr Mismo said, slapping Princess on her broad oatmeal rump. ‘Always have.’

  ‘If a horse is turned out in a field where there are jumps,’ Carrie said, ‘have you ever seen him jump them on his own?’

  ‘Too stupid.’

  ‘Too clever.’

  ‘Well, I hope they’re cleverer than we are,’ Mr Mismo said. They had jogged twice round the edge of a large ploughed field without finding a way out. The only gate was padlocked. They could not even find the place where they came in, plunging through a thicket, Princess breaking through like a tank.

  Because Mr Mismo did not want to say he had come the wrong way, he had to find a way out. They jogged round the field again until they found the easiest place, a gap in the hedge, with a hurdle across.

  ‘Think you and that five-legged nag can lep that?’ he asked.

  Mr Mismo had given Carrie plenty of jumping advice, but she had never seen him jump. If they met a fallen log in the woods, Princess trotted over it, lifting her large feet high, as if she were trotting in the sea. If there was a proper jump across the track, Mr Mismo would say, ‘Ladies first’, and pull behind, so that Carrie wouldn’t see him ride round the jump.

  If Princess Margaret had really been the finest crosscountry horse of her day, the gap in the hedge would be nothing to her, but she and John, having put their noses to the hurdle, had now put their noses together to discuss whether it was all right for Mr Mismo.

  ‘They’re talking about us,’ Carrie said. ‘They’re talking about the way we ride.’

  ‘Oh stow it, chump.’ Mr Mismo was nervous about the jump. ‘Horses don’t talk about us.’ He never liked it when Carrie said they did, although it was often obvious, after a ride, that John and Princess Margaret Rose were swapping notes.

  ‘Who’s going first?’

  ‘I’ll show you the way,’ said Mr Mismo gallantly. Red in the face, his hat tipped forward and his arms working like pistons, he wheeled Princess round, gave her a whack with his whip, and charged through the plough at the low hurdle, growling as if it were a dangerous enemy.

  ‘Hup!’ he grunted, a moment after Margaret Rose had already taken off. She went hup and over. Mr Mismo leaned far back in the saddle. One hand flew up off the reins as if he were calling a cab. His hat fell off. Princess landed on the edge of a blind ditch, stumbled, recovered with a heave like an elephant coming out of a mud bath, and trotted quietly off across the next field with her stirrups swinging and her reins in loops. Mr Mismo was sitting in the ditch with his grey hair on end and his crimson cheeks blown out.

  ‘Always hang on to your reins, old chump,’ he had told Carrie every time she fell off. ‘Break a leg, break your neck, whatever you want, but always hang on to your reins.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ she called across the hedge.

  ‘Go after my horse!’ he shouted in answer.

  He scrambled out of the way. Carrie gave John three strides and he jumped the hurdle, stretched himself cleverly to land clear of the ditch, and cantered after Princess without breaking stride. Carrie looked back and saw Mr Mismo sitting on the ground with his enormous boots stuck out in front of him and his whip in his hand, beating the ground in rage.

  5

  When Margaret Rose heard John behind her, she broke into a canter. She put on speed as he increased his, dodging among bushes so that Carrie could not get alongside to grab the flying reins. With any luck, the mare would put her foot through them and have to stop, or fall down. She did put her great flat foot through them, clear through, and galloped on with the rein round her elbow.

  If the field had been bigger, John would have caught her, but just as he was coming up on her left, she switched to the right, plunged into a wood and was gone among the trees, cracking dead branches, crashing through the undergrowth, tearing off her stirrups. With any luck, she’d get caught up, but the luck was all with Margaret Rose. Somehow she got through the wood, twisting and turning and boring her way through.

  Torn at by brambles, ducking under low brandies, swerving round trees, John and Carrie followed her. When they came out on the other side, with half the wood in their mane and hair, the mare had clattered across a road and into a field of turnips. A man in the turnip field shook his fist and yelled at her, and shook his fist and yelled at Carrie, pounding after.

  Princess went through someone’s back garden, dragging down a laundry line, jumped a garden seat, and clattered out on to a main road with a line of baby clothes trailing from her saddle. The mother of the baby ran out of her house, flapping her apron and screaming. A car came to a screeching halt. When Carrie and John came through a gate on to the road, cars were stopped in both directions. Princess was standing in the middle of the road. A man had got out of his car, waving his arms and shouting. She shied away from him. A car hooted at her. She kicked a dent in its front wing.

  Carrie jumped off and hooked John’s reins over the gate-post. ‘Never tie your horse up by the reins if you don’t want to walk home,’ chanted the remembered voice of Mr Mismo, far behind now and probably walking home himself.

  ‘Come on, Princess. Come here, old girl.’ Carrie held out her hand and whistled Mr Mismo’s whistle, the notes of a blackbird’s call. The mare stood still, pricked her ears as far forward as lop ears can prick, and started towards Carrie. Just before she was close enough to reach the reins, a helpful man got out of a car, banging the door like a shot gun. Princess jumped, spun round, squeezed between two cars and galloped away down the road with a drum-rattle of hoofs.

  John and Carrie went after her on the grass verge, with everyone shouting advice at them, and the mother of the baby weeping with her apron over her face, because half a week’s laundry had gone with Princess Margaret Rose.

  When Carrie at last caught up with her, it was strange country. She had never been on this road, never seen this square stucco house with the gravelled drive and the neat painted stable and pasture fence.

  Princess had stopped on the brow of a hill with her head up, watching a horse in the pasture. Carrie came beside he
r and caught her reins easily, then got off, while the two horses put their noses down to the grass as casually as if the whole chase had been an everyday game.

  There was a girl with the horse. A good-looking girl with smooth hair, clean yellow riding breeches and glossy boots. She was holding the horse on a halter and chain. He looked nervous, backing away from her, but she stroked his neck and petted him until he stood still and dropped his head, then she suddenly pulled back her arm and hit him hard behind the ears with the end of the chain.

  He reared and pulled away, but she hung on, wearing gloves, while he wheeled round her, his small ears laid back. It was the chestnut horse that Michael had found in the vegetable garden.

  Carrie led John and Princess up to the white paddock fence. The girl had taken sugar out of her pocket, and was holding it out towards the chestnut horse, talking to him, coaxing him. Was she going to do the same thing again -pet him and make much of him, and then suddenly hit him?

  ‘Hi!’ Carrie was younger than the girl, but she couldn’t stand there and say nothing. ‘Don’t treat that horse like that, you’ll ruin him!’ she called across the field.

  ‘That’s the whole idea,’ said the girl. She let go of the chain, throwing it across the horse’s neck hard, so that he shied away in terror. She came towards Carrie. She had a swaggering way of walking, strutting in her shiny boots as if she owned the world, her face a mixture of pride and bad temper.

  ‘You want to ruin him?’ Carrie stared. Perhaps the girl was mad. She had put one hand into the pocket of her riding breeches. Perhaps she would whip out a gun and drill Carrie and John and Princess Margaret Rose right between the eyes.

  The girl came up to the fence and looked at Carrie and the two horses with great contempt. ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ Her way of talking was just as conceited as her way of walking. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing. My friend’s horse got loose, and I had to catch her.’