Summer at World's End Read online

  On the wall of the stable yard, a row of whiskered cats waited for Em. As they turned in at the gate - the wheel hub missing the post by half an inch, the way John and Carrie liked to judge it - puppies bounded from everywhere, and Michael jumped down into a foaming sea of tongues and yelps and waving tails.

  From the hen house, Diane and Currier called boring news about eggs they had laid, or could have laid, or might yet lay if the fancy took them. The goat looked up from the rubbish heap, necklaced with shredded plastic bags. Leonora let out a terrible bray that sent the birds circling up to the tops of the trees. Peter and Oliver Twist greeted John from the meadow, and John sent back a trumpet call, usually in Carrie’s ear, as she was backing him into the cart shed.

  Em and the cats went off to start cooking something. Michael and the puppies went off to invent something (they were working on furniture made out of old horseshoes). Carrie fed John, and turned him out to roll in the muddiest place he could find. When it had been raining, he came up plastered solid like a plated dinosaur.

  Before she turned John out, Carrie brought Peter in, or she would never have caught him. Peter was difficult to catch, among the other things that were difficult to do with him.

  He was, as Mr Mismo said, ‘a chancy ride.’ You never knew what would happen. He was very quick and responsive, sometimes unexpectedly so. He might stand like a rock, pretending to stare at something on the horizon. Suddenly at the slightest pressure of legs, he would be over the top of the hill with you before you could shorten your reins.

  He had once been well schooled, but the hard-handed treatment of Mr Novak’s mad devil daughter had made him nervous and jumpy.

  ‘He’s unsure,’ Mr Mismo said, after Peter had shied at nothing, right across the road, and dumped Carrie in a thorn hedge.

  ‘Not half as unsure as I am.’ She picked out the larger thorns, and remounted, Peter circling wildly, and bumping into Princess Margaret Rose, who bit him. Even Mr Mismo’s steady old cob was touchy when she was out with Peter.

  Carrie rode him in John’s snaffle bridle. It was the only one they had, except for Oliver’s small bridle which Michael had paid for by selling manure round the housing estates.

  ‘Get him collected!’ Mr Mismo shouted after her, as Peter trotted off fast. ‘Bring him back to you and use your legs to get him on the bit!’ She did all the correct things, that worked with John, but Peter chucked the bit up into the corners of his mouth, or yawed down with it, pulling her half out of the saddle, and finally shied at a nonexistent bogey in a cabbage field and put Carrie on the ground again.

  ‘You could pull out all his eyelashes,’ Mr Mismo said helpfully. ‘That’s the old Indian trick with a shying —’

  Getting on, Carrie had kicked Peter by mistake, and was away into the middle distance before Mr Mismo could finish his sentence, and gather up his reins to follow at Princess Margaret’s rolling, beer barrel canter.

  The odd thing was - not odd to Lester, but odd to Carrie - that Lester had more success with Peter than she did. He rode all wrong, sloppily, on a loose rein, uncollected, dreamy. Peter went quietly and did not shy. Lester rode him like an Indian, like a Roman, like an Arab in the desert, bareback, fingers twined in the mane, relaxed and at one with his horse, as Carrie was only able to be in the waking dream of her own invention when she galloped with John up to the Star where the horses of history grazed.

  One night when she could not sleep, she rode Peter up to the Star to show him off.

  Some of the horses were a bit huffy at first. They preferred to see a plain horse like John, who was no threat to their pride. Peter moved among them like a king, showing off, picking up his feet prettily, head up, neck flexed at the perfect point behind the ears.

  Carrie sat him easily, like Lester, fingers in his golden mane, legs close to the warm strength of him. There were no saddles or bridles on the Star. No fences. No gates, except the one at the edge, for people who had died to lean on and chew grass while they waited for their own horse to come galloping over the Elysian Fields.

  She saw an old lady there in a long, old-fashioned riding habit, top hat and veil, bunch of violets in her buttonhole, and saw her old hunter canter stiffly up and drop his nose into her small blue-veined hand. The old lady stood on the gate and mounted, side saddle without a saddle, and they moved off as they had once moved off after hounds to the first covert, going on together - where? Carrie would not find that out until she had died herself.

  She saw a young man who had been killed in a war, somewhere on earth. He was waiting for the pony he had ridden when he was a boy. The pony was a blue roan with a broad speckled face. It was too small for him now, so they walked away, the young man with an arm thrown over the pony’s thick mane which flopped on both sides from years of waiting, head down to the sweet grass, until his friend arrived.

  ‘I know that chestnut.’ Some horses were talking about Peter. ‘Didn’t I see you once at the Pony Club Combined Event?’ a Thoroughbred asked. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Peter.’

  Peter. I called him, and he took the name

  And made it his…

  Carrie and he were not going to let on that he had ever been called Pretty Prancer.

  ‘No, it wasn’t that.’ The Thoroughbred had a conceited, superior manner, flicking his tail in people’s faces and laying back his slender ears if a common horse came too close. ‘Something soppy. My Fairy Prince. Beauty of Basingstoke - One of those ghastly names those brats think up when Daddy buys them an expensive horse.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  ‘It was. I remember your dressage. Very fine, in spite of a ham-fisted girl with a lead seat and legs like bowling-pins. I’ve got it - Pretty Prancer. Ugh!’ He made the kind of noise a horse would make if it could vomit.

  Carrie and Peter jumped off the edge of the star and drifted back to World’s End, riding the night sky.

  10

  ‘It’s the snaffle that’s wrong,’ she told Lester, after trying for half an hour to make Peter change leads in a figure of eight.

  ‘It feels all right to me.’ Lester was sitting on the fallen tree in the flat corner of the meadow. The monkey sat beside him, picking under the bark for wood lice.

  ‘He’s always on the wrong lead with you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does matter.’

  ‘Why does it?’ Lester had made a daisy chain. He put it round Joey’s neck and the monkey tore it off and ate it.

  ‘It just does.’ Lester understood all things about life, but it was impossible to explain the finer points of riding to someone who did not care. ‘And anyway,’ she said, ‘I think he’s been schooled in a curb.’

  ‘If you’re going to put a curb on him,’ Lester stood up and the monkey jumped into his arms, not wanting to be left, ‘you’re not going to ride him.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Ido.’

  ‘He’s half my horse.’

  ‘The back end.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since you said you want to put a curb in the front end.’

  When Lester had gone home, Carrie went down the lane to Mr Mismo’s farmhouse and knocked on the back door. He opened it with a napkin in one huge hand and his mouth full of kippers. He and Mrs Mismo were having their tea.

  ‘Just come at the right time. Come in, old dear, and sit down.’

  ‘Come in, Carrie, I’ve got some hot scones for you!’ Mrs Mismo called. She was sure they were starving at World’s End. She often came down with cakes and buns and home-made bread.

  ‘No thanks. I can’t stay. Em’s made cottage pie.’

  ‘Rather you than me.’ Mr Mismo made a face. Em had once made cottage pie with tinned dog food, because it looked so good.

  ‘Could I borrow that pelham?’ Mr Mismo had a collection of old bits decorating the walls of his back hall, instead of calendars or mottoes.

  ‘For Don John of Hoss-tria?’ Mr Mismo took down the stee
l pelham bit, burnished with sand and chain-cloth in the old grooms’ way before stainless steel. ‘He’s got a snaffle mouth, if nothing else.’

  ‘I want to try Peter in it.’

  ‘Go easy then. This is a might severe.’ He ran his broad red finger down the long cheek of the bit. ‘He’s touchy with his head. Been jabbed in the mouth too many times, if you ask me.’

  ‘You said I had good hands.’

  ‘I’ve seen better.’ He had always seen better. ‘I knew a lady once who rode a seventeen hand horse on a silk thread.’

  Next day after school, Carrie hurried to put the pelham into John’s bridle and fit it on Peter. Michael was in the meadow with the pony, so she got on Peter in the yard and walked round, not touching his mouth. He fussed with the bit and shook his head, clinking the curb chain. When she pulled him in gently, he resisted. She pulled a little harder. When he felt the pinch of the chain under his chin, he threw up his head and backed wildly, through the manure heap, knocking over a wheelbarrow, scattering chickens and pigeons, and missing by inches the sun-bathing tortoise.

  Yesterday he would not back at all. Now he wouldn’t stop. He finally backed himself into the wall, crashing a pile of flowerpots, and Carrie got quickly off. What now?

  Lester turned up at World’s End most afternoons, dropping casually out of a tree, or coming through a hedge from the wrong direction, or hopping down from the back of a passing lorry. He had said, ‘If you’re going to put a curb on him, you’re not going to ride him.’ So when Carrie heard the scolding of blue jays from the corner of the beech wood, which meant that Lester was coming through that way, she led Peter out of the gate and into the field across the lane, mounted, used her legs as hard as she dared, and rode off out of sight round the hill.

  She rode Peter with a very light contact, hardly feeling his mouth. He flexed, stepped out, trotted beautifully, with his head steady and his fine ears forward. She was right! She rode in joy, singing.

  They hopped through the gap in the hedge at the top of the hill, and on to the huge flat expanse of grass that had once been a Fighter airfield, long ago in the War. Peter took hold. She pulled him in. As soon as he felt the curb, he started to back again. He backed into the hedge and stopped, trampling, nervous and excited, between desire to gallop, and fear of the bit.

  ‘Come on, Pete!’ Carrie used her legs and slackened the reins. With a jet-propelled thrust of his quarters, he was off with her, over the broken macadam of the old runway, past the tumbledown Air Force sheds, across another runway, galloping much too fast over the long uneven grass.

  Carrie had once ridden a racehorse, and found out there was no way to stop. If you pulled, the racehorse went faster, leaning against your hands. The same thing was happening with Peter. The more she pulled, the more he pulled against the hated bit, fighting away from the pain, setting his jaw and his neck so that she couldn’t even turn him in a circle.

  At the top of the airfield, there was a narrow track under trees to the common. Carrie leaned forward under the clutching branches. Peter went faster. He burst out on to the common, swerving round gorse bushes, jumping them, floundering through a boggy place and out on to firm ground on the broad track that led to the road. Carrie pulled. She prayed. She begged Peter. To her shame, she realized afterwards, she had shouted and wept.

  Being run away with is a black madness of despair. The horse is your fate, and your fate is out of control. Galloping crazily, Peter dashed her under a tree at the edge of the common, slid down a bank, landed on the road to the roar of a motor cycle and stumbled and fell as the motor cycle swerved, just missing, and roared on.

  Peter scrambled up at once. A few yards away, Carrie got up slowly, shaken and battered, and shook her fist after the dwindling motor cyclist. It wasn’t his fault. But he might have stopped. But she was glad he hadn’t. One side of her face was scorched and grazed. The eye was closing. Dirt was in her mouth. Her teeth felt loose, and her brain felt looser. Her legs felt as if she had been in bed for a week.

  She would have to lead Peter home. She limped over to him and reached for the reins. He flung up his head and cantered off down the road, stirrups bumping and flying.

  11

  She walked for a long time. When anyone came by, she turned away her face and stood still, so that they would not see her limp. She felt that she must look as dreadful as she felt. They would rush her off to the hospital. Doctors would prod her bones. They would pull down the blinds and say she had concussion. It would all be more than she could bear.

  Trudging along with her head down and aching, her knee hurting so badly that she began to be sure that she would never run, or even walk again, she thought dark and bitter thoughts, while low clouds swirled up the valley and began to spread downwards in fine misty rain. She would be a cripple for life. She would be in a wheel chair, her shoulders powerful as a man from turning the wheels. She would be like that lady who went on riding after a crippling fall in a point-to-point. They would have to dig a pit for John to walk into, so that she could slide on to his back from her wheel chair. Would she get a medal? What for? She had been a fool, not a heroine.

  She heard the sound of hoofs without looking up. Who cared? Other people went riding. Other people had horses. Quiet, well-mannered horses who couldn’t canter a hundred yards without blowing and slowing, let alone gallop against a curb for miles and miles.

  The hoof beats came nearer, came round a corner. Carrie turned and began to walk in the other direction, so that they would not see her grazed and swollen face.

  ‘Carrie!’

  She turned. It was Michael on Oliver. Lester was with him, riding Peter bareback, in a rope halter.

  ‘You’re going the wrong way.’ Michael said with interest. ‘Were you knocked silly?’

  Carrie hung her damp hair, but Lester got off and came to her, leading Peter, and put her hair gently back behind her ears to see her face.

  ‘You really did it this time.’ His dark eyes searched the damage.

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘As bad as it feels.’

  Michael was chattering away, asking a hundred questions, whistling at her mashed face, predicting that she had broken her knee, lost the sight of her eye, would catch murder from Tom, would have to wear a veil for the rest of her life, like that old lady at the Golden Age Home who had fallen into the fire…

  Lester did not say anything. He gave Carrie a leg up on to Peter’s short strong back, and hopped up in front of her. Clinging round his thin waist, she was too weak and dizzy to ask him if he thought it was safe to ride double on Peter.

  Michael jogged beside them on Oliver’s short spry legs, trotting when they walked fast, rising very high and quick in the saddle like an animated toy, asking questions which Carrie only half heard, drowsily, with her head lolling to the rhythm of Peter’s long walk.

  When they were almost home, she heard a voice which must be her own, thick out of a swollen mouth.

  ‘If Peter goes so well for you in a halter,’ she said to the

  back of Lester’s dark alert head, ‘it won’t matter only

  having one bridle. We can ride together now.’

  * * *

  When Tom came home, he went to the village for the doctor. They had tried to stay clear of him. They were afraid that he might say they were undernourished or neglected, like Mrs Loomis and Miss McDrane at the school, who were always suspicious of what went on at World’s End.

  But the doctor was easy. Fairly young, small and thin with round spectacles and a pale tired face. If anyone was undernourished, he was.

  He didn’t say anything about neglect, or too many animals and too little house-cleaning. He looked at Carrie and murmured, and felt her knee gently, and drew the curtains and told them to let him know if she threw up.

  When he went away, he must have telephoned their mother, because Carrie woke from a confused sleep to find her sitting by the bed.

  ‘How funny,’ Carrie said. ‘I u
sed to sit by your bed when you were in the hospital, and watch you sleeping. Your eyes moved under the lids like marbles.’

  ‘Did they?’ Her mother laughed. She looked brown and healthy. ‘How unattractive.’

  ‘No. I was glad, because then I knew you weren’t dead.’

  Living on their own was very fine. But having Mother there was fine too.

  Em and Michael took care of the horses, and Carrie lay under the window with the curtains blowing, and nothing to do but pick bits of gravel out of the graze on her face. When she asked her mother for a mirror, her eye was black and blue and green and her cheek was like a squashed tomato, so she didn’t ask for the mirror again.

  Her mother read horse books and poetry to her. She read ‘Reynard the Fox’, and ‘Right Royal’:

  … And a voice said, ‘No,

  Not for Right Royal.’

  And I looked, and, lo!

  There was Right Royal, speaking, at my side.

  The horse’s very self, and yet his hide

  Was like, what shall I say? like pearls on fire,

  A white soft glow of burning that did twire

  Like soft white-heat with every breath he drew.

  … And I was made aware

  That, being a horse, his mind could only say

  Few things to me. He said, ‘It is my day,

  My day, today; I shall not have another.’

  And as he spoke he seemed a younger brother

  Most near, and yet a horse, and then he grinned

  And tossed his crest and crinier to the wind,

  And looked down to the Water with an eye

  All fire of soul to gallop dreadfully.

  Michael read to her from an old book called Bunny Brothers, which he had found in the attic among musty clothes and sagging tennis racquets.

  ‘Mrs Bunny had lad the bake fast, and now she saw very busy tiring the podridge over the fire to keep it form bunning.’

  Em came up the stairs to bring her a few cats for bed company, and to read her a piece out of the local newspaper. It said that a lady called Miss Christabel May-berry, who lived on the gorse common, had seen the ghost of the famous Headless Horseman, who was supposed to have broken his neck hundreds of years ago, riding over the edge of the quarry. Miss Mayberry thought it was a disaster warning against sending men to the moon.