World's End in Winter Read online

  ’Where is everybody?’ Carrie knew this window. Once when Lester had whistled under her bedroom to come down and watch rabbits dance on the moonlit hill, her father had locked up before she got back. From the tool shed, she got the old knife with which her mother pried out weeds round the front steps, and slipped the thin blade under the window catch. Pip moved just in time as the catch gave and the window swung inwards, knocking the flower pot on to the floor.

  Carrie stood on the bottom of a bucket and heaved herself through the small window.

  ‘Tom! Liza! Where is everybody?’ They must be sleeping late. She let the dogs out, mopped up a puppy puddle, fed the hamster, gave milk to a nursing mother cat, and went upstairs.

  Tom’s room was empty, the bed unslept in. Liza’s room was empty, the bed unmade, but then it always was. Her old dog Dusty, asleep on the rumpled blankets, lifted his moulting head to identify Carrie with a rheumy eye, then went to sleep again.

  Carrie went down the passage and up the little crooked stairway to the small room which had once been a linen cupboard and was now Em’s room. The door was shut. Carrie went in.

  ‘I’ve told you not to come into my room without knocking.’

  The middle shelf had been taken out, to make a bed with a mattress on the wide bottom shelf. In this boxed-in space, Em was sitting with a pile of papers on her knees. She jumped up and shoved the papers under the mattress, though Carrie was not remotely interested in them.

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Mum and Dad went to the coast. Liza went off yesterday and never came back. Tom went to look for her and never came back. Please get out of my room.’ Em hated people in her room as much as a hibernating dormouse.

  ‘Did Mr Mismo tell you where we were?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ’We stayed at Brookside to look after Priscilla. Were you alone all night?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mind,’ Em said casually, although she had locked all the doors and windows and dragged a high-backed bench across the side door of what had been the ’Snug’ behind the bar when World’s End was an inn.

  ‘Why didn’t you feed the chickens, or Henry and Lucy, or poor Mother Hubbard, who’s feeding seven, or—’

  ‘Why do you always find fault?’

  Tom came back late that evening with Alec Harvey, the vet. He had searched everywhere Liza might have gone, and had wandered half the day in the local town, since she had started life as a city girl. Finally he had gone to the housing estates at Newtown to see if Mr Harvey knew anything.

  All Mr Harvey knew was that Liza had been getting more careless and clumsy, rude to touchy customers with pampered lapdogs, muddling telephone messages and even medicines, mixing up labels on the cat cages and the kennels, and finally starting a big shouting match with him, telling him he could keep his rotten job, and walking out.

  ‘With my spare set of keys in her pocket. And I hate to say this, Tom,’ he had admitted, ’but after she’d gone, I found I’d lost more than my keys.’

  ‘Not money. Liza wouldn’t take money.’

  ‘How do you know? In the kind of life she’s lived, brought up on the streets, having to fight for anything she got, if you see money, you take it. And disappear.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Twenty pounds. Mrs Cavendish had finally paid me. I knew it was too good to be true.’

  At World’s End, Alec told them about the shouting match, and how he had shouted back at Liza.

  ‘A man can only take so much,’ he said. ’That girl gets away with murder, because she’s had rough luck and because I like her and I know she has the touch with animals, if she’ll only let herself learn some techniques. When she yelled at me, “One day I’ll walk out on you!”, I told her to walk and keep on walking.’

  ‘You can’t say that to Liza,’ Carrie said. ’She’s had a hard life.’

  ‘So have I.’ Mr Harvey was tired and hungry. Em had given him some bread and milk, with brown sugar and the crusts on. ’I’m busier than ever with distemper and cat flu and road accidents and people going off skiing and leaving their dogs in the kennels. I don’t know what I’ll do if old Red doesn’t come back.’ He called Liza that, because of her hair and the bicycle she rode.

  ‘She won’t,’ Tom said. ’For a while. Perhaps never.’ Tom knew Liza better than anyone. He did not always understand her. But he knew. ’Look - I could help you out for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘But Tom, you’ve got—’ Em was going to say, ’You’ve got a holiday’, but Tom shut her up with a look and went on, ’We’re not so busy at the zoo. Jan could spare me.’

  When Mother and Dad came back, Liza was still gone. Jerome Fielding was upset. Liza amused and attracted him. He liked having her about with her fiery swinging hair and temper, and the bold, comic way she did not care what she said to anyone. She had been helping him with the first chapters of Sailor of the Seven Seas, which were finished, more or less, with the author biting his nails down to the quick and swearing he would rather make a living pumping cesspools. He had won an old typewriter off a man in a darts game, and Liza, who had learned a bit at Mount Pleasant, had been typing out his unreadable handwriting.

  ‘She’s let me down.’ He drew a mug of beer from the cask he kept behind the bar - the dogs licked up the drips from the spigot - and sat down to hunt and peck with two fingers on the stammering typewriter.

  ‘She’ll come back,’ Mother said. She did not know about the money. No one did, except Tom.

  ‘She won’t.’ Tom showed her a letter that had come with a far-off postmark, nowhere near where Liza had ever been.

  ’Got the jitters. Nothing to do with any of you. Got to get off on my own and find out who I am’

  ‘She knows who she is,’ Michael objected. ’She’s Liza Jones. And she’s a swine to leave Dusty.’

  ‘She knows he’s all right,’ Tom said. ’She wants to be free and alone. Not depend on other people. Even a dog.’

  ‘For ever?’ Michael took the torn pamphlet, on the back of which Liza had scrawled her letter, and held it up to the light to detect invisible ink. ’GNIMRAF YROTCAF POTS,’ he read, seeing the print of the pamphlet backwards.

  ‘Not alone for ever,’ Tom said. ’But you can only live with people if you’ve first found out how to live with yourself.’

  ‘Have you?

  ‘Not yet. One day, I’ll take off and find out who I am. So will you, Mike.’

  ‘How will Bristler ever find out?’ Michael wondered. ’She is a prisoner in that family.’

  He had been over to Brookside, leaving Oliver tethered on a school friend’s lawn, and walking the rest of the way.

  It was not a success. Priscilla asked at once, ’Where’s Oliver?’ and then fell into blank disappointment.

  Victor and Jane were at home, thundering through the house like Niagara. As they got noisier, Priscilla grew quieter. She wouldn’t talk to Michael, or play the games he thought up. And when he went back for his pony, his friend had got on him and been bucked off on to his head, and Oliver had eaten all next year’s hollyhocks.

  So next time, Michael’s father took him over in the groggy car, which sounded like a racer, even at fifteen miles an hour.

  Mrs Agnew was charmed with Jerome. She had read of his sailing adventures in a yachting magazine. ’I like people who do things. I like people who get up and go instead of sitting at home talking about what they would do if they had the time. I’m going to cross the North Sea in a canoe, like the Norsemen, one day when I get time.’ She was fighting with the Council about levelling the banked corner, trying to organize her village into a carol-singing parade, and trying to teach the local housewives to shop once a week instead of every day. People were beginning to wish she had never bought Brookside.

  Dad was quite charmed with her too, because she had read about him, and seemed to know her stuff about boats. He promised to take her for a wild winter sail when the Lady Alice was out of the boatyard (good let-off for Mother),
and Mrs Agnew was so delighted that she let him take Priscilla back to World’s End.

  The child had a folding canvas chair to take in cars. As soon as they got home, Michael wheeled her to the stable yard.

  Oliver was too small to be able to look comfortably over his half door, so he was standing on his back legs, with his front feet hanging over the door like a dog. Michael pushed Priscilla near, and she put out a wondering hand and touched his hoof. Then she stroked the rounded fetlock with its soft winter plume, then felt the hard little hoof again. She seemed to be very interested in the feel of things. Oliver dropped his head and she put her fingers into his warm wet nostril, beaded with hairs like dew on mown grass.

  ‘He’ll nip.’ Brought up a sailor. Michael’s father was never at his ease with the horses.

  ‘Not if you don’t think he will,’ Michael said.

  ‘Some put their trust in chariots,’ his father quoted, cand some in horses. That poor little kid is not afraid.’

  ‘Of course not.’ When his father had gone indoors, Michael asked Priscilla, ’You want to ride?’

  ‘No, Mike,’ Carrie called from John’s loose box, where she was sitting in the manger. ’Her mother would be furious.’

  ‘Her mother isn’t here,’ Michael said reasonably. ’You wait here, Bristler, while I get the tack.’ Although it was silly to say ’Wait here’ or ’Stay there’ to her, somehow it seemed less insulting than just walking off and leaving her stuck. Mother felt that way about plants. ’You wait there,’ she’d say to an autumn crocus knocked sideways by a running dog, ’till I get something to prop you.’

  When Michael had saddled Oliver and led him out, Carrie looked over John’s door and said, ’You’re mad. Like Mrs Agnew said.’

  ‘Bristler loves it. Look at her face.’

  ‘How do you know it won’t hurt her?’

  ‘Her legs are no good anyway,’ Michael said, ’so what difference can it make?’

  ‘You’re ma-ahd,’ Carrie said in Mrs Agnew’s upper-class voice for lower-class people.

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘We mustn’t go too far.’ No need to say Yes. He’d known she would. ’Mr Harvey is coming to look at John’s mane. I think he’s got fungus.’

  Fourteen

  When the vet arrived on the marvellous big bay thorough-bred he exercised for a friend, Carrie and Michael had Priscilla on Oliver in the meadow.

  It wasn’t going well. The pony kept putting his head down to tear at grass, and pulling the reins through the child’s weak fingers.

  Priscilla was fine when things were easy. Any difficulty upset her, and she grizzled.

  ‘For a great girl like you, you’re an awful baby,’ Michael said.

  ‘Don’t talk to her like that.’

  ‘It’s good for her. Get up, Ollie.’ Michael slapped the pony in his fat ribs. He moved forward with his head down, and Priscilla squealed.

  ‘Shut up, Bristler, and get your heels down.’

  Your head and your heart keep up,

  Your hands and your heels keep down.

  Your knees keep close to your horse’s side,

  And your elbows close to your—

  Get up, Oliver Twist.’ Legs braced, Michael struggled to pull up the pony’s stubborn head.

  ‘You need a grass rein,’ Alec Harvey called from the gate. ’Bring him in the yard.’

  He took two lengths of baling twine and tied one end of each to the ring of Oliver’s snaffle, above the reins. He passed the twine up through the loop of the browband and back to the D of the saddle. Oliver tried to get his head down to some spilled chicken feed, found he couldn’t reach, and gnashed his teeth.

  ‘Foiled!’ Mr Harvey laughed up at Priscilla. He was a cheerful young man with honest eyes that showed you himself. Priscilla stared solemnly down at him, her hands clutching the brown and white mane.

  ‘Is that hers?’ He saw the wheelchair abandoned by the manure heap where Carrie and Michael had managed with difficulty and some danger to heave Priscilla on board.

  ‘She can’t use her own legs,’ Michael said, ’so she uses Oliver’s.’ He grinned up at Priscilla, who gave him back her thin, uncertain smile, which did not quite reach her dark eyes. ’She likes to look down at people from a horse, instead of up from a chair.’

  ‘Who gave you this idea?’

  ‘She did. Why?’ Was Mr Harvey also going to say, ’You’re mad’?

  ‘It’s a good one. I’ve seen it do wonders for some handicapped kids I used to teach.’

  ‘Teach Bristler.’

  They went back into the meadow, and he showed Michael how to hold the leading rein behind the pony’s chin and not walk in front of him, and showed Carrie how to walk alongside, holding the child’s leg. Oliver moved steadily, flexing to the grass rein, his eye rolling back to check Priscilla.

  ’Is it sad to be a horse,’ Michael asked him, ’and have to walk on your own food? It would be sad if we had to walk on bread and butter.’

  They walked in a circle, and even jogged. A hint of pink showed in Priscilla’s cheeks.

  ‘Now she must do some exercises.’

  ‘She won’t.’ Carrie remembered what Victor Agnew had said.

  ‘Perhaps she will on a pony.’

  Sitting on the bay thoroughbred. Alec Harvey showed Priscilla how to turn her body, raise her arms, touch her toes. But she stared at him and would not try.

  ‘Come on, Bristler,’ Michael urged anxiously. ’Do you good.’

  ‘Try it,’ Carrie said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can.’

  Priscilla lifted her hands a few inches, then dropped them in a panic and wailed.

  ‘Be a man, Bristler,’ Michael said. ’It’s to help you.’

  ‘It’s to help you ride the pony better,’ Mr Harvey said. A fleck of spirit came back into the child’s cautious eyes, and she tried feebly to copy the movements. Carrie kept one leg steady, but on the other side, her toes kept slipping down and back so that the stirrup knocked her ankle, and she cried.

  ‘But it shows she’s got some feeling there,’ Mr Harvey said. He got off his horse to lift Priscilla down, and Carrie said at once, ’May I?’

  ‘Five minutes.’ He looked at his watch. ’I’m due at Crow Farm. Just one slow canter.’

  Famous last words.

  Carrie climbed up the side of the tall thoroughbred, put her feet into the leathers, and did four fast circuits of the meadow before she could pull up. Charging up the hill, along the short turf at the top, with the view going by like a train window, plunging down the hill, over the fallen tree, skidding round the duck pond, turning the horse just in time before he jumped the fence, galloping over the flat bottom land where Mr Harvey shouted, Take it easy!’

  ‘If your horse won’t stop with a strong pull! the books said, ’try a lighter one.’

  She tried. The books didn’t always work. Finally a cat jumped out of a tree and the bay horse stopped dead and Carrie somersaulted on to her feet.

  ‘Very neat,’ Mr Harvey said, as he led back the horse, who was not breathing as hard as she was. ’But take note, Priscilla. Not the correct way to dismount.’

  Carrie went to tack up John to prove to herself that she really could ride with control. It was only when she was tidying his mane under the bridle that she realized that they had all been so interested in Priscilla, they had forgotten what Mr Harvey came for.

  On Saturday, Mother cleaned the vet’s house and surgery for him. She would not let him pay her. He was almost as poor as they were, because he would not send bills to people who had more animals than money. But he pushed a pound note secretly into her bag, where she found it later in the torn lining, couldn’t imagine where it came from, and used it for his Christmas present.

  Michael went with her to help.

  ‘How’s Priscilla?’ Mr Harvey came in and found him kneeling on a chair before a sink full of soapsuds and test tubes and bowls.

  ‘They won�
��t let her come again. They found white hairs on her trousers and guessed she’d been on Oliver.’

  ‘They’re mad.’ Good. So it was the Agnews who were mad, not the Fieldings. ’It could be a great chance for her. I’d love to go on with it. She might even get back some use of her legs, who knows? Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘Stranger still if Mrs Agony let her,’ Michael grumbled.

  ‘Any good you asking them?’

  ‘Perhaps if my father did...’ Michael made a diving bell with air in an upside-down beaker. ’She’s in love with him.’

  ‘Would he?’ Mr Harvey reached over to tip the beaker and let the air bubble glop out.

  ‘He might.’ Michael glanced at his mother on top of a stepladder with a towel round her head, and whispered, ’He finds her very faccinating.’

  ’What did she say?’

  When his father came back from Brookside, Michael was waiting down the road in the rain with a sack over his head, jumping up and down to keep warm.

  ‘She said No.’ His father reached over to bang open the car door. One door would not open from the outside. One would not open from the inside. One would not open at all. The other would not stay shut.

  ‘But then I gave her full helm,’ he went on, as Michael slumped into the deflated seat cushion dejectedly, ’and she began to come up into the wind. When I told her Alec used to play County cricket—’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘He could have, if he’d had time. She did agree to let him talk to the child’s doctor.’

  ‘Oh - luck’ Michael bounced on the springless seat.

  ‘Plus charm,’ Jerome Fielding admitted. ’She wants me to go to her committee meeting about getting a sports field.’

  ‘You go.’

  ‘I don’t want to, Mike,’ he wailed, as if he was the son and Michael the father.

  ‘You go,’ said Michael sternly. ’It’s in a good cause.’

  The good cause got under way. They did not want Mrs Agnew to bring Priscilla to World’s End, because she fussed and interfered and said that it was dangerous, and would do no good anyway. She protected the child too much, as if that could make up for her own guilt about the accident with the show pony. So Alec Harvey fetched her in his car twice a week, and with Michael leading and Carrie and Em on either side, Priscilla walked and jogged and learned to turn and stop the pony, and Oliver learned to stand as still as a Lifeguard’s horse while she did the exercises. When it was too wet or cold for outdoors, they went round the earth floor of the big old barn, cleared of its centuries of dusty junk.