World's End in Winter Read online

  It wouldn’t go very fast, but the engine was so noisy and the frame so clacketty that it felt like speeding. Michael made himself a pair of goggles out of the rims of jar lids and blue cellophane from a bar of soap, and put an enamel bowl inside his hood to make it a crash helmet.

  Carrie rode crouched over the handlebars like a jockey. When the petrol ran out, which it usually did on the way home because the tank leaked, she hung on to the shaft of the trap and let John pull her and the bicycle along.

  Em rode with her father’s old beret jammed on her curls and refused to get off when it was the end of her turn.

  It actually took longer than before to get to school, because they had to keep stopping and changing places and fighting about whose turn it was. Their names were often written in the Late Book and Mrs Reeper, who was producing the Christmas play, told Em that if she was late for one more rehearsal, she might miss her chance to play the angel.

  One morning when there was an early rehearsal, they were later than ever. Everything at home had held them up. A cat had a piece of broken glass in its foot, growling neurotically and needing two people to hold it and one with the tweezers. One of Michael’s boots totally vanished. Another cat stole the bacon, and the last of the milk was spilled. The ribbon snake which Tom was foster-mothering escaped up a drainpipe. Liza had one of her fits in which anything a grown up said was provoking, even Good Morning.

  ‘It’s not good,’ she sulked, eating round the crusts of her toast like a child. ’It’s pouring rain. It’s not morning either. It’s the middle of the night.’

  It was one of those dark grey winter mornings when the sun has not bothered to come up since it will soon be time to go down again.

  ‘What a rotten life. Being dragged out of bed to get that stinking bus to that lousy job.’

  ‘I thought you liked working for Mr Harvey.’ Mother was at the sink, scraping toast over the front of her white school overall.

  ‘Work’s a dirty word to me.’

  ‘Yes dear,’ Mother said, not really listening.

  But Liza snapped, ’You calling me lazy? All right, I’ll go.’ World’s End was her home, but she and her mother had spent so many years shouting abuse at each other that Liza sometimes had to exercise her tongue muscles, like a horse bucking and kicking when you turn it out. ’Been here too long anyway, me and Dusty.’

  ‘Don’t talk to Alice like that.’ Jerome Fielding appeared in pyjamas and a fisherman’s jersey.

  ‘Oh, don’t you get into it,’ Liza said, as rudely as if she were his own daughter.

  She banged out, and he asked mildly, ’Did I smell bacon, Alice?’

  Carrie was late getting John into the trap, because a buckle broke and had to be mended with a leather shoelace. Mother couldn’t get Spider Monkey to start until the trap had pulled her a few hundred yards down the lane, hanging on to the end of a halter rope like a water skier.

  When they were past the yellow brick house where Constable Dunstable lived, Mother got off the bicycle and Em jumped out of the trap.

  ‘It’s not your turn.’ Michael got down, adjusting his jarlid goggles.

  ‘Mrs Reeper said if I was late again I couldn’t be in the play.’

  Em had the important part of the angel on top of the Christmas tree, who saves the toys from a burglar by stabbing him with her wand. Everyone was coming to watch it, even Dad. He had never been to the school, and people said the Fieldings had made him up. But he was coming to watch Em be the star of the play.

  ‘I’m going to ride ahead.’ Em got on to the bicycle seat and tried to pry Michael’s fingers off the handlebars. Chug-chug went the little motor on the back wheel. Em suddenly put it in gear, opened the throttle and knocked Michael sprawling in the road.

  ‘Watch the brakes!’ Mum called after her, but Em had her head down to the rain and the beret jammed over her ears, putta-putta-putting noisily up the hill with a cloud of blue smoke behind her.

  Spider Monkey slowed going up the curves of the hill, but picked up again as they went through the fir wood at the top, with the trees not sheltering, but chucking windblown branchfuls of water down Em’s back. She was soaked through. When she got to the warm gym where they rehearsed, she would steam.

  Down the long white hill into the small town where the school was, the bicycle went as fast as flying. With the wind and the rain, Em could hardly see. When the yellow tractor loomed suddenly ahead, dragging a lifted rake, she jammed on the feeble brakes, then turned the handlebars just in time before she crashed into the iron teeth of the rake.

  Spider Monkey skidded on the wet chalky surface, the wheels slid sideways and Em sprawled into the grass at the side of the road with her books spilled out of her satchel into the ditch.

  The tractor made more noise than the bicycle. Having heard nothing, the driver went his dignified way down the hill.

  Em got up. She could not let the others come trotting.out of the trees at the top of the hill and find her like this. The front of the bicycle frame was jammed, but if she ran across the fields, she might just get to school before the end of the rehearsal.

  She stuffed her books back into her satchel, dragged Spider Monkey through a gateway and behind a hedge so that the others would not see, and set off running across a meadow where a dozen cows were lying down to keep a bit of grass dry to eat when the rain stopped. Chewing cuds, they didn’t even look round to watch her go by.

  Through the fence at the other end, splashing across a track pitted with puddles, Em skirted round the back of a house, and a dog flew out of a kennel to bite her leg. She swerved. The dog was brought up short by a chain and his jaws snapped air.

  A window at the back of the house went up and a head in pink rollers yelled, ’Get out of there!’

  Em got. Over a wall, down an alley, running across a timber yard, limping out into the High Street after she knocked her ankle on the corner edge of a plank.

  The church clock said eight thirty-five. Rehearsals started at eight-thirty. Em ran on down the street, but her breath was rasping and her legs felt as if they were going in slow motion, like a dream when you can only run on the same spot.

  A woman with an umbrella grabbed her by the pillar box.

  ‘Esmeralda!’ It was Mrs Nixon, for whom she had babysat. ’Where are you going in such a state?’

  ‘I—I—’ Em started wildly, but had no breath to speak.

  ‘You’re early for school anyway. Come inside and dry off. You’re all wet and muddy. I’ll lend you one of Tommy’s jackets. Whatever happened?’ She took Em inside her house and into the kitchen.

  ‘I fell off my mother’s bike.’

  ‘That noisy thing that smells up the street? You shouldn’t be riding that anyway at your age.’

  She went out of the kitchen. Was she going to tell the police?

  Em went through what she thought was the back door, remembering too late that it wasn’t, and found herself in a dark pantry, just as Mrs. Nixon came back into the kitchen saying, ’Esmeralda, here’s a warm— Gone. Well, how do you like that? That’s the way they are these days, the young people.’

  She muttered round the kitchen, while Em crouched beside a pickle crock under a shelf and heard a kettle whistle, clatter of china, and the radio, as Mrs Nixon sat herself down to a cup of tea.

  In the dark under the pantry shelf, Em saw in the eye of her mind the stage of the gym lit with coloured lights, herself on the stepladder behind the tree, holding her wand with the star, a gold ribbon round her hair and her face angelic, her father in the audience grinning round proudly to make sure everybody knew she was his daughter.

  ’Now while the children sleep on Christmas Eve, The toys are wide awake, you must believe. Now while the white Frost King rides through the night...’

  The larder window was very narrow, but Em was a narrow person. Somehow she managed to climb on to the top shelf and open the lock and squeeze herself through. She tore her anorak and the beret fell into a lidless dustbin, but
Em was free.

  She raced down the street, across the playground and down the passage to the gym.

  ‘Walk, don’t run, dear.’ Miss de Witt passed with her silly smile and her head on one side from draughts in the art studio.

  Em slowed round a corner, then ran again and burst into the gym.

  They were all on the stage. Three small ones who played the children were crosslegged on the floor. The toys were in a heap, scrapping and giggling. The candles were standing straight and bored with their hands at their sides. On the stepladder, ugly, ugly with that hair like frayed rope—

  ‘Oh there you are, Em. You look as if you’d swum here.’ Mrs Reeper, who acted with the local Drama Society, gave her tinkly stage laugh.

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’ Em stared at Sonia Jenks on the stepladder.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I was going to tell you anyway, Mrs Loomis wants more music, so we’ve had to make the angel into a solo singing part.’

  Em couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Everyone knew that. When there was a solo it was always Sonia, with that freak high voice from blocked sinuses.

  ‘You’ll still be in the play, of course,’ Mrs Reeper said. ’I want you to be one of my good red candles.’

  A candle. The dopes and dodos were candles.

  ‘You can have the costume my mother made,’ Sonia said in that voice as if she had a clothes peg on the top of her nose.

  ‘I won’t be here.’

  ’Now Em, just because you can’t have the main part.

  It‘s the show that matters, you know.

  The play’s the thing.’

  I‘m going away with my father.’

  ‘Whereto?’ ’Switzerland.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Mrs Reeper said in her flutey acting voice that did not show whether she believed it or not.

  Nobody understood the size of the disaster.

  Mother said, ’What a shame. But I’d have been proud of you as a candle anyway, especially if I didn’t have to make the costume.’ It was all right for her. She’d had her day on the stage before Dad took her off it to the altar.

  Carrie said, ’That stupid play, you’re well out of that.’ It was all right for her. She’d almost won the jumping at the horse show, and she’d saved the stolen dogs and been a heroine. Got almost killed too. If Em got completely killed, then they would pay attention. We never appreciated her. She could see the funeral.

  Her father said, ’Thank God, now I shan’t have to go to the school.’

  Michael said, ’Silly old Sonia. Silly old Mrs Creeper.’ He wasn’t even angry with Em for pushing him into the road. ’Em’s like that,’ he said.

  I’m not. She wrote the whole thing into her play, with a character like Sonia Jenks having the accident, and the heroine, who was her understudy, becoming a star overnight.

  When the play was produced, when she was famous, then they’d all be sorry.

  Eight

  Spider Monkey would cost about £5 to repair.

  “I”ll pay,’ Em said, after she and her mother had left the bicycle at Dick Peasly’s garage.

  ‘You needn’t.’

  ‘Let me.’

  ‘All right.’ Mother knew when it was all right to take your money, and when it wasn’t.

  Em had a bit of cash in her bank, which was a hole hollowed out of the plaster behind a torn patch of wallpaper in her room. And she would make bird feeders and sell them as Christmas presents. Miss Etty, in the bungalow built round the tree, had a special way of making cat-proof feeders. Although cats came first with Em and she always sided with them, even after a slaughter, she compensated by making places for the birds to feed in safety.

  Carrie and Michael said they would help, to get Spider Monkey back on the road, so they all went to tea with Miss Etty.

  She gave them lardy cake made of a fatty dough with currants and crystals of sugar. It was the last sort of food she needed, mountainous as she was, but the birds liked it. She always baked things that birds especially liked.

  Perched among the bare branches of the tree that grew slantwise through a corner of her living-room were a moth-eaten old starling that had lived with her for as long as she could remember, some sparrows, and a thrush that was wintering here instead of farther south. On the circular table built round the tree trunk, was a crow that Miss Etty had found with two broken legs. She had kept him propped in a box of dry grass, and though the bones had never mended strongly, he had grown callouses on his elbows, so he could hop or sit on them with his claws in the air. His name was Albert and he was clever, like all crows. A scarecrow is fooling itself if it thinks it can fool a crow.

  He could mimic sounds, including the winter wheezing of Miss Etty’s jumbo chest. They say that people get to look like their animals, but Miss Etty wasn’t anything like a bird. She was as big as two people, and always sat on the couch, since she overlapped the chairs. Lester said they had built the bungalow round her as well as the tree, and then had to widen the doorways because she couldn’t get out.

  She wore long skirts made of curtains, so that you could only guess from an occasional glimpse of a massive ankle at the size of her legs. Her round chins were uncountable, and her cushiony hands were short-fingered, like paws.

  But she used them skilfully. When they had finished the cake, and the thrush and sparrows had polished off the currants and crumbs, including the ones on Michael’s chin, she showed them how to take an empty soup tin and knot odd ends of string to make a net round it. You then slipped out the tin and kept it by your kitchen sink and put into it every bit of bacon grease and rind, fat off plates, vegetable scraps, breadcrumbs, potato, damp dog biscuit. You mixed in peanut butter and oatmeal and sunflower seeds as you went along and when it was full and the fat congealed, you cut out the other end and pushed the cylinder of bird food out into the tin-sized net.

  You threaded string through the top, with long ends to hang it far enough from a branch to be safe from cats, wrapped it in red cellophane, tied it with a bow made from a bright piece in the rag bag, and Lo, you had a Christmas gift you could sell house-to-house and make almost a hundred per cent profit.

  While they were knotting nets round the cans, Miss Etty sat with a bird in her hair and another on her huge thumb pulling ends of string out of her fist. A bird called outside and Theo the thrush in her hair lifted his head and answered, ’Cheerily, cheerily.’

  Em said, ’He’s saying, “This room is mine.”’

  ’The other one’s saying. “Then stay out of my tree,”’ Carrie said.

  ‘He’s calling “Danger from cats,”’ Michael said. ’I saw Caesar following us in the long grass.’

  ‘He’s saying, “I’m Lester Figg, trying to sound like a robin.”’ Miss Etty found some cake in the pocket of a tooth and chumped her comfortable dewlaps. ’He can fool Theo, but he doesn’t fool me.’

  ‘How did you know we were here?’ Carrie opened the wide back door. Lester wasn’t there.

  ‘I am the All-seeing Eye.’ He was in the branches of the tree where it grew out of the roof.

  ‘You asked at my house.’

  ‘I haven’t been there.’ He jumped down. ’I’ve been at Brookside. Keeping watch.’

  When there was an interesting situation, Lester kept watch silently, like an Indian. Most of what he knew he had learned by watching and listening. He had once overheard three men behind a hoarding plotting to rob a bank. Instead of telling the police or the bank manager, he had hidden in a dustbin all one freezing night and got pneumonia. But the bank was not robbed, which proved either that he had foiled the three men, or imagined them.

  ‘How’s Bristler?’ Michael tightened the last knot with his teeth and drew out the soup tin.

  ‘Abandoned.’

  ‘To her fate?’ Michael leaned across the table with his eyes bulging and his jaw open. The sparrow who was pecking at the string flew on to his shoulder and very delicately picked a lardy cake crumb from the corner of his mouth.

 
‘Not quite. She’s been left with a keeper. The Agnews have gone to Old Boys’ weekend at Victor’s school. Mr Agnew is playing rugger for the Old Boys.’

  ‘He would,’ Carrie said.

  ‘Don’t be narrow,’ Miss Etty said sharply. ’Everyone can’t have your advantages. Have you heard the ghost yet?’ she asked Lester.

  ‘We’ve heard ... things.’

  ’A baby?’ Her shrewd black eyes looked at him sideways over the hills of her cheeks.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Miss Etty loved mysteries, so he didn’t tell her it could have been Priscilla.

  ‘The poor little baby ... yes ... yes ...’ Miss Etty nodded, as if she were remembering. ’A hundred years ago or more, it must have been. My grandmother told me. Our family used to live in that village, you know, in the mill cottage, until the damp of the stream got to my grandmother. Then my mother. I was the first one had the sense to move.’

  ‘What did your grandmother tell you?’ They had stopped working to watch her. Theo went to sleep in her hair. Lester picked up the crippled crow and perched on the table round the tree trunk, stroking him with one finger.

  ‘Long, long ago, it was. Long before Brookside was built. They didn’t know about old Diller, or they’d never have built that fancy house there where the spinney used to be.’

  ‘Who was old Diller?’ Michael hardly dared ask it. He loved horror stories and dreaded them at the same time.

  ‘He was a batty old character, had to do everything different from other people. In those days, it was horses and carts, but Diller had three big dogs and he harnessed them to a home-made wagon. Three abreast, the dogs used to dash him along the highway. Horses would shy and coachmen used to give him the horn. Daft Diller, they called him. At the inns, they wouldn’t serve him, or feed the dogs.’

  ‘Poor Diller,’ Em said.