World's End in Winter Page 6

  Jane’s room had more team pictures, and shelves of silver cups and trophies. Priscilla’s room was in the turret. The round room was frilly pink and white, with juvenile pictures and cuddly dolls and animals, too young for her, as if she had not been given anything since the accident. By the curved window was a small chintz armchair with a footstool, where she could sit like a little old lady and look at the tops of the shrubbery trees and roofs of the houses in the village where the world began.

  A pink and white prison, with frills and chintz and a rug woven with tumbling teddy bears. It was only as she went downstairs that Carrie remembered it was the spooky room, and wondered if she ought to have felt scared.

  They changed their clothes in the kitchen, so as not to get another room wet. Carrie dressed Priscilla. It was a strange feeling, like dressing a big doll. She would let you do anything, but would not do anything for herself.

  She sat at the table, with the bowl of soup steaming in front of her, and her hands in her lap.

  ‘Eat your soup.’

  She put on a spoiled whine. ’I don’t want it.’

  Opposite her, Michael picked up a spoonful of soup, opened his mouth like a cavern and plunged in the spoon, clacking it with his teeth.

  ‘Yum, Bristler. Just what the doctor ordered for drownding.’

  Priscilla stared at him, and presently the tip of her tongue came out and she licked her pale lips. Her hand crept out of her lap, picked up the spoon and dipped it into the soup. She began to eat, holding the spoon in her fist like a young child, staring at Michael.

  She was a bit older than him, but she seemed much younger.

  Eleven

  When Carrie had moved the horses to fresh patches of grass, she went down the road to the telephone box outside the Lord Nelson.

  There was no telephone at World’s End, so she rang Mr Mismo.

  ‘Who’s that? What? What’s up?’ He always shouted into the telephone, as if it was an instrument used only for crisis.

  ‘Could you please tell my mother that Michael and I are staying the night with friends? Say it’s an emergency and they need us. She’ll understand that.’

  ‘No doubt she would, old chump, if she was there, but she’s gone away with the Captain.’ That was what he called Carrie’s father. ’The Captain took a fit to go and look at his boat, and your Ma stopped by to tell the wife she wouldn’t be going to the Bring and Buy Sale. Neither bring nor buy.’

  ‘Will you tell Tom or Liza then?’

  ‘I might.’ Mr Mismo was eating. She could hear it through the telephone.

  ‘I’m sorry if I got you up from lunch. But will you?’

  ‘What makes you think they worry where you are?’ Mr Mismo said triumphantly and rang off.

  Carrie rang Lester’s Mother, Mrs Figg, who was working today.

  ‘Mount Pleasant, Matron speaking,’ she began Mount Pleasantly, but when Carrie started to explain, she said, ’You tell that boy to get on home if he doesn’t want a tanning.’

  Carrie begged. ’Just one night. It’s very important.’

  From the other end of the line came the howl and thud and clatter of someone fighting on the stairs.

  ‘All right, he can stay,’ Mrs Figg said hurriedly. ’But I’ll tan his hide when he does get back.’

  She never laid a finger on Lester, nor did her mild husband, but she threatened him with fates.

  ‘She’ll tan your hide tomorrow,’ Carrie reported to Lester. ’I hope it’s worth it.’

  ‘To spend the night at Brookside?’ He grinned at her. It was an adventure. Most people only realize they have had an adventure after its over. With Lester, you were always aware of living an adventure while it was going on.

  The sun was out all afternoon, so they put jerseys on Priscilla and three pairs of socks to fill up an oversize pair of boots which must be Jane’s, and pushed her in a wheelbarrow to where the horses were grazing.

  The wheelchair was still floating upside down in the pool like an abandoned paddle-wheel steamer.

  ‘She hates it.’ Michael spat into the blue water as they went by.

  ’It gets her about.’

  ‘Pushed in front. I remember when I’d had that operation on my leg, I hated being pushed in front of people. Into a shop, everyone staring. Off the kerb into the traffic. If I had Bristler,’ Michael said, ’I’d pull her behind me and let her see where’s she’s been.’

  Lester pushed Priscilla up to each horse in turn, and she stroked them and smiled and seemed content.

  ‘Want to ride?’ Michael asked.

  ‘No Mike, she can’t,’ Carrie said.

  ‘Why not? She can sit, can’t she? Want to ride Oliver Twist?’

  ‘Yes.’ Priscilla clenched her teeth. She gripped the sides of the wheelbarrow as if she could jump out.

  Michael put the bridle on his pony and held him tightly while Lester and Carrie, standing on a bank, managed to lift Priscilla to sit in the saddle. She was afraid and excited at the same time, but as Michael led Oliver slowly forward down the grass track, with Carrie and Lester holding her knees on each side, the excitement was outweighing the fear. They had put her hands on the reins. Stiffly at first, but then she bent her fingers and flexed her wrists and lifted the reins to hold them in the right position. Her legs hung awkwardly, with the toes down. When they tried to put her feet in the stirrups, there was no strength in them, and they slipped out.

  Her head usually sagged sadly on one side, as if life was not worth confronting. But now her head was up and straight. Her eyes looked at the place where the pony’s thick mane flopped between his ears. They took her round a muddy pond and through some pine trees to the edge of a slope, where she stared and stared at a pattern of fields and hedges and smoking cottage chimneys she had never seen before. As they turned and walked back towards the other horses, and Oliver whinnied as if he had been away for hours, something almost like a grin lifted her face.

  But when Lester reached up to get her back into the wheelbarrow, the grin fell back to desolation and she put on that high baby wailing they had heard when her mother had snatched her away from the back gate.

  ’You can ride tomorrow.’

  Priscilla wailed on. She was so babyish and spoiled. Somehow her mother had managed to give in to her, without actually giving her anything.

  At the bottom of the garden was a building which had once been a stable. It now housed a lawnmower and roller and a clutter of toboggans, skis, skin-diving equipment, wheelbarrows, tools. They moved it all out and put the horses inside, Peter and John in one loose box and Oliver in a stall.

  At dusk, Lester walked through the village to a house where there was a pony, and came back with a small sack of horse nuts on his back.

  ‘How did you pay?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘My credit is good.’

  ‘Did you steal it?’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘Yes. No.’ You never knew with Lester.

  The Nurse was right when she said Mrs Agnew had left enough food for an army. They spent most of the evening eating. Priscilla stuffed veal and ham pie into her mouth and Charlie caught crumbs as they fell into her lap. Once, Michael thought she was going to laugh.

  ‘Go on. Laugh. Charlie’s funny.’

  Michael laughed into her face, but she closed it and drew back.

  ‘She’s afraid.’

  ‘What of?’ Priscilla was withdrawn into her own world again.

  ‘Does she hear something?’

  Brookside was not a bit haunted during the day, but as night dropped quickly down, it was different. Turning on lights only made the outside world grow darker.

  A dog barked, and Charlie sat up and growled.

  Michael said, ’I want to go home.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Lester was listening.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Michael repeated, and fell asleep, exhausted from drowning. Carrie pushed him up the stairs, grumbling and yawning, and put him into Victor’s bed. He was too tired to r
ealize he was not in his own room.

  Lester wanted to sleep in the turret room.

  ‘Rather you than me.’ Carrie took Priscilla into the bed in Jane’s room. It was an odd feeling to share a bed with someone who didn’t kick and thresh about. When she had to share a bed with Em when they lived with Uncle Rudolf and Aunt Valentina, Em used to whirl like a top, drag off the blankets and kick Carrie on to the floor.

  Priscilla lay so still that Carrie could not tell if she was asleep or awake.

  ‘Are you asleep?’

  ‘Yes,’ Priscilla whispered with her eyes shut.

  Carrie dozed, and woke in a panic. Where was she? Who was in the bed? She put out a hand and felt a soft wool nightgown. Priscilla had been lying on her back with her legs straight. Now she was on her side, with her legs drawn up as if, in sleep, some power came to them.

  Carrie could not sleep. She turned on the bedside lamp by whose light Jane Agnew read Your Advantage: How to Win at Tennis, and Judy Barnard, Olympic Medallist. She listened to the night. Silence sang in her ears. In a shadowed corner, a tree seemed to grow up through the room. She thought of daft Diller crashing through the spinney behind the dogs.

  She wanted to wake Lester, because he was not afraid. But it was because he was not afraid that she could not wake him, and admit that she was.

  She thought of all the food that was still in the big refrigerator in the kitchen. She got up, called Charlie to go ahead of her, and went downstairs. A lamp was lit in the drawing-room. On the sofa, under the blind eyes of the flat-topped marble ladies, Lester was sleeping, rolled up in an eiderdown.

  A board creaked under Carrie’s bare foot, and he woke and sat up.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ’I’m hungry. You want something?’

  ‘A piece of that treacle tart. With cream.’

  ‘Did you come down because it was scary up there?’

  ‘No. But the room’s too girly. The bed’s too short. Yes ... it was scary. There’s a sort of - I don’t know. Not a noise, but a feeling. I felt there were trees. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘How can Priscilla sleep alone there?’

  ‘There’s some people hear ghosts,’ Lester quoted Miss Etty, ’and some that don’t.’

  Twelve

  At breakfast on Sunday, Carrie said, ’Priscilla turned over in bed when she was asleep. Why does her mother say it’s hopeless?’

  ‘Her mother is a bag of old lard,’ Michael said, just as Mrs Agnew walked into the kitchen.

  She was too upset to hear. ’What’s going on? What’s Priskie doing?’

  Priscilla was eating treacle tart with her fingers and wiping them on the front of a ribboned party dress she had wanted to wear. As soon as she saw her mother, she put on that high baby wail. Mrs Agnew lifted her out of the chair and held her, patting her back while the child wailed and dribbled treacle tart down her back.

  ‘She can’t digest pastry.’

  ‘Last night she digested veal and ham pie.’ The others had been put off their food, but Michael went on eating cake.

  ‘What are you all doing here anyway? Where’s Mrs Fassett?’

  ‘In the hospital.’

  ‘What happened to her? Oh, I knew it. I knew something was wrong. You see, Brian.’ Her husband had come into the kitchen in a sheepskin coat and Old Boys’ muffler. ’When I tried to ring up yesterday and the phone was out of order, I was right to say we must come back early.’

  ‘You were right, my dear’ (as if he was used to that). ’Here, give me Priskie.’ He put her down on the settee, where she sat like a dressed-up doll, her eyes gone blank. ’Where’s her chair?’

  ‘Outside,’ Carrie said.

  Mrs Agnew recognized her. ’You kids again! Why did Mrs Fassett let you in? What did you do to her? What have you done with Mrs Fassett?9

  ‘She got run over?’ Lester said it like a question, to make it sound not so bad.

  ‘What by?’

  ‘A car. She ran into the road.’ ’Why?’

  ‘She heard a ghost.’

  ‘Oh rubbish, she’s a fool.’

  ‘It wasn’t her fault. The car was going too fast round the corner.’

  ‘I’ll sue the driver.’

  ‘He couldn’t see round that high bank.’

  ‘I’ll sue the Rural District Council. They’ve been promising to level it ever since we came. I know you too.’ She levelled her healthy blue eyes at Lester. ’You’re the errand boy from the grocery.’

  ‘Yes, Madam.’ Lester did not bother to disillusion her. ’You’re out of marge. May I deliver?’

  ‘You may go. All of you. You’ve made enough trouble.’

  She didn’t know the half of it. They were not going to tell her about the drowning, but Mr Agnew called from the back door, ’What’s the wheelchair doing in the swimming pool?’

  ‘It fell in.’

  ‘With Bristler in it,’ Michael added honestly.

  ’Oh, my God.’

  ‘Michael fell in too,’ Carrie said.

  ’Was it his fault?’

  His fault, his fault. Why did accidents always have to be someone’s fault?

  To rescue Michael, Lester said, ’He saved her life, as a matter of fact.’

  Before Mrs Agnew could decide whether to be angry or grateful, Charlie came in from the back door, dripping wet from a morning’s stroll through the undergrowth.

  ‘Get that hideous brute out of here!’ When she raised her voice, Priscilla began to wail again. ’Priskie’s terrified of dogs.’

  ’She likes Charlie,’ Michael said. ’She likes Oliver too.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Michael’s pony,’ Carrie said. ’Well, I mean, he doesn’t own him. You can’t own an animal, you see, any more than you can own a human being, since the days of slavery. An animal may live with you, but - well, it’s like if you call a person “my friend”, it doesn’t mean you own them, because—’

  Mr Agnew, coming in again from the back door, cut short her sermon.

  ‘What are those horses doing in the shed?’

  ‘Well, we were just going to tell you...’

  ‘I won’t have horses here,’ Mrs Agnew said in horror. ’Priskie is terrified of horses.’

  ‘She rode Oliver.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘She liked it. It did her good.’

  ‘Oh, rubbish,’ Mrs Agnew said impatiently. ’It’s no use.’

  Priskie’s given up, Victor had said. But it was the mother who had given up, not the child.

  ‘It was an adventure,’ Carrie said. ’She went down the track and saw the ducks in the pond and splashed through a puddle and went up the hill through those pine trees and saw that view on the other side. She couldn’t go there in a wheelchair.’

  ‘She won’t go anywhere in that one,’ Mr Agnew said. ’It’s ruined.’

  I’ll buy you another,’ Michael offered, without hope. ’I ought to make you.’

  ‘Brian.’ His wife grabbed his arm. ’Priskie was in the pool. The little boy saved her life.’

  ‘Did he, by Jove? Well now.’ He rubbed his large chin, which was already beginning to bristle again after a morning shave. ’Well now. That was very fine.’ He put his hand inside his coat and brought out his wallet.

  ‘I don’t want money,’ Michael said, perhaps for the first time since they had come to live at World’s End and never had enough. ’If you’ll just let me come back sometime and play with Bristler.’

  ‘You could knock me down.’ Mr Agnew stared at Michael, then slowly put his wallet back in his pocket. ’You could knock me down with a shuttlecock. I never heard a small boy refuse money before. Good chap, good chap.’ He slapped Michael so hard across the shoulders that he choked, and brought up the last drops of yesterday’s swimming pool water. ’All right then, you may come and play with Priskie.’

  ‘But don’t bring that horse.’ Mrs Agnew had to get in her two pennyworth.

  Michael was ju
st in time to get Miss Cordelia Chattaway to church. Carrie led Oliver home for him, and he puffed into Miss Chattaway’s cottage and found her sitting ready in the old-fashioned Bath chair, with her velvet winter hat and her gloves and her little white boots side by side like sugar mice on the footrest.

  ‘Good morrow, Sir Michael. Hast come to squire thy lady to the tourney?’ She was a bit dotty, but she did love going to church.

  So did Charlie. It was cool on the old stones in there for a dog who was always too hot indoors. He trotted by the chair into the village and down the lane where a straggle of cars and walkers were headed for the church, which was a hundred times too big for the number of people who went there.

  So why shouldn’t Charlie go in and sit with Miss Cordelia and Michael? He was shouldering in, with his shaggy hair bouncing, but the verger stopped him in the porch.

  ‘Out,’ he said.

  ‘But, King—’ Michael stopped the chair to argue in a whisper under the fine swelling surge of the organ.

  ‘Yes, I know. King Charles carried his spaniel to church service, so ever since, they’ve been allowed in. My eyes may not be what they were, but that dog is not a King Charles Spaniel. Out.’

  Charlie lay down to wait by the grave of Martin Arbuckle. Farmer of this Parish. ’As ye sow, so shall ye reap’

  Michael pushed Miss Chattaway to the pew under the pulpit where she could nod and smile at the vicar, even though she couldn’t hear the sermon. She rode happily up the aisle, nodding right and left to empty pews. She did not mind the chair. At the end of her life, she was glad of the rest. But Priscilla’s life had not even properly begun.

  Thirteen

  When the horses were fed and turned out to join lonely braying Leonora, and Lester had gone home to get his hide tanned, Carrie went to the house.

  She couldn’t get in. The windows were shut. All the doors were locked. The ram and the goat were still in the shed, bumping their heads against the door. The chickens were still in the hen house, grumbling about late food service. Several dogs were inside the house, barking. Pip, the orange cat, was sitting in the side window with her tail curled round a flower pot and her whiskers spread against the glass.