Summer at World's End Page 9

  ‘Well, someone has.’ The R.S.P.C.A. Man stood up and brushed straw from the knees of his blue uniform. ‘There’s a big dog gone from a farmer near my place. And a lady rang me up this morning to say her dog had simply disappeared. Never runs off, but it’s been gone four days. And Pine Tree Kennels, they lost two last week before they put padlocks on the runs.’

  ‘What sort of dogs?’

  ‘Two setters. Nice ones. The lady’s was a sort of collie cross, it sounded like, though she didn’t know how to describe it. Silky fur, pretty white face, plumy tail - you know how they carry on. They never say mongrel.’

  ‘Why would anyone steal a dog, unless it’s valuable?’

  ‘I hate to tell you, Carrie.’ The R.S.P.C.A. Man looked at her sadly, the smile crinkles round his mouth and eyes straightened out into white lines in his tanned face. ‘They’re short of research dogs at the University. Especially biggish ones. They’re paying good money for them, and some of the dealers - well, they don’t ask where they come from.’

  ‘Come with me,’ Carrie said.

  They drove to Bottle Dump. Vile Bernie knew Carrie, and the R.S.P.C.A. Man’s uniform would make him suspicious, so they took Liza. They hid in the back of the van while she went boldly up to the shack with the excuse of asking the way.

  ‘I’ll put on a foreign accent,’ she said, ‘so he’ll think I’m a lost stranger.’

  They heard her knocking on the door, and shouting, ‘Plees mister! I am lost girl, ‘oo need ‘elp from ze kind Eengleeshman!’

  No roar from Vile Bernie. No barking.

  ‘Nobody home.’ Liza came back to the van. While she watched the road, Carrie and the R.S.P.C.A. Man searched round the shacks and dumps, but there was no sign of the brown and white collie. Where was it? Even the barrel and chain were gone.

  That evening, Liza and Em went unhopefully into the larder to see what they could cook for supper. There wasn’t much. A lot of their food money had gone to buy some more chickens. They could sell eggs to people who like to get them from hens that were running free, not caged like criminals.

  ‘Got to spend money to make money’ was a good business motto, but it would be some time before they would make any money out of the new Rhode Island Red hens, Rosie, Redruth and Rubella. They sat funkily under a gooseberry bush, like new girls at school and would not lay, while Dianne and Currier and their five conceited daughters patrolled with their feet picked up high, and dared them to come out.

  Michael had sold some of his home-made stools at the church fete, but one of them had come back after it collapsed under a stout lady and she fell into the grate. Michael would have to sell another stool to pay her back her money.

  Or sell some more stable manure to the fertilizer-hungry gardeners at the housing estates. But Carrie would not let him drive John in the muck cart with the sign he had written on the back: ‘FINE FARM FERTILER. WE DELVER.’ He was trying to build a small cart for Oliver Twist out of a wheelbarrow body and old pram wheels, but when he tried it out, Oliver trotted off with the broomstick shafts, the axle collapsed, and Michael was left sitting on the ground in the barrow.

  Carrie should have driven the fertilizer over to the housing estates herself, but when they came back from school, John was tired … No, he wasn’t, but it was more fun to ride him with Lester than to drive him in the muck cart…

  ‘So you see,’ Em told Liza, ‘there’s only a few odd bits of this and that —’

  Liza poked about the slate shelves among the sad little saucers of left-overs, and said, ‘I’ll make Putrid Pie. That’s what we had on Sundays at Mount P. Everything bunged into a pan and stirred up - different every time.’

  She bunged and stirred, with the handle of a screwdriver, since she couldn’t find a big spoon.

  ‘Is that the chicken food?’ Michael came into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s your supper,’ Em said, ‘so go and wash your hands.’

  ‘What for?’ He had not washed before meals since they lived with Aunt Val and she used to drag him shrieking to the basin.

  ‘Do it,’ Em said sternly. It was to get him turned away to the sink, so that he wouldn’t see Liza bunging in the remains of Em’s short crust pastry that no one would eat.

  ‘What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve over,’ Liza muttered, rotating the screwdriver, and indeed, when they were all in the dining-room which used to be the saloon bar when World’s End was an inn, everyone said the Putrid Pie was the best supper they had had for ages.

  ‘Oh thanks very much,’ Em said, huffed. But secretly, she was glad not to be stuck with all the cooking. Someone else’s food always tasted better, like sleeping in a bed you haven’t made yourself.

  Joey sat on the rung of Carrie’s high stool at the bar, and she passed him down interesting snacks she found in the pie. She was feeling especially warm about him. Her worry about the dogs going to the research laboratories had taken her back to those dangerous days when she and Lester had saved Joey in the nick of time from the same fate.

  That night, the little black monkey had indigestion. He rubbed his hairy stomach and groaned and rolled up his eyes like Charlie when he was playing dead.

  ‘It’s my fault.’ Liza was filling a hot water bottle to comfort him. ‘The Putrid Pie.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Em came from the front of the house. ‘He’s been at the pills again.’ She held out an empty bottle. ‘Dusty’s Digitalis. They were hidden in that blue jug on the mantelpiece, but he found them.’

  When Carrie went to Mr Evans, the village chemist, to get some more pills for the old dog, she told him about the monkey.

  ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Monkey tricks, eh?’ When you wanted something at the chemists, you had to wait through his feeble puns. ‘You know what they say - more trouble than a wagonload of monkeys? Well, I’ll fix his little wagon all right.’ His rimless glasses glittered. He sucked his teeth and snickered at his own wit. Carrie waited with a face like a boot for him to get down to business.

  He went down to the end of the counter where he mixed the medicines and stuck on labels with writing that no one could read.

  ‘Did this once for a man who had a pet pig,’ he told Carrie, while he fiddled about. ‘Greedy as a pig, it was’ (Snicker, snicker). ‘When there was nothing else to eat, it ate the wife’s sleeping tablets and fell asleep by the side of the road. Got picked up for dead by the rubbish cart and woke up in a pile of garbage half a mile off the coast. All at sea, you might say. So I made up some capsules with pepper inside. Laugh! The man left ‘em about, and when that pig got a taste of one, he sneezed so hard he blew the ring right out of his nose. There you are, my dear.’ He handed Carrie Dusty’s tablets and a box labelled, ‘Monkey Puzzle Pills’. That will be three pounds and seventy five pence, and I thank you.’

  ‘Will you put it on our bill?’ Carrie asked faintly. She hated having to say that as much as shopkeepers hated having to hear it.

  The capsules were a success. They put the box in the blue jug on the mantelpiece while Joey was watching with his ripe blackberry eyes, and then left him alone. Quite soon they heard a terrible racket. The sitting-room looked like an earthquake. Chairs were overturned, one curtain torn down, the poker stuck through the wastebasket, the tablecloth torn off and wrapped round the monkey, who was rolling about on the floor with streaming eyes, sneezing and sneezing.

  ‘That’s cruel,’ Michael said.

  ‘It’s to save his life. He’ll be all right in a - in a —’ Carrie clapped her hand over her face and exploded through it like a volcano. Joey had scattered the pepper all over the room.

  19

  But the woolly monkey was not all right. He went on sneezing. Then he began to cough and wheeze. Instead of jumping about, always trying to be higher than everyone and throwing nutshells at your head, he walked like a crab, feebly sideways, or sat in a corner with his blanket over his head and his mouth stretched in a shape of woe.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Michael cu
ddled him. ‘What’s the matter, poor woollen monkey?’ But Joey would only go, Oh…oh…’

  ‘Monkeys only talk to each other,’ Carrie said. ‘They’d never let people know if they could talk, in case they were made to work and pay taxes.’

  Because they thought it might still be the effects of the Monkey Puzzle Pills, they did not take him back to the vet for a while. But when they did, Mr Harvey took Joey’s temperature, shot up his curly eyebrows and brought them down again in a worried frown.

  ‘Hundred and four. Looks like pneumonia.’

  ‘What can you do?’ They looked at him; Carrie, Liza, Em and Michael, waiting.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that.’ The young vet spread his hands helplessly. ‘I’m not a monkey expert. It’s easy for a doctor. He has only one kind of animal to learn about -people. A vet knows dogs and cats and horses and cows and pigs, but he can’t know everything.’

  ‘It says, “Also Monkey Doctor”.’ Michael pointed trustingly to the label Mr Harvey had stuck on his veterinary certificate.

  ‘Oh Lord — ‘ he swung away and reached for the telephone. ‘There’s a girl I know at the zoo over near Nettle-field. I’m going to ask her. Zoo hospital? Miss Lynch please … Hullo - Jan? Alec Harvey. Look, I need your help.’

  When he put down the telephone, he unbuttoned his white surgery jacket. ‘She says bring the monkey to her at once. She’ll find out what bug he’s got, and put him in a special oxygen cage. I’ll drive you. Tom, you hang on here. Take the temperatures and give the medicines. Check the stitches on that dog’s leg. If anyone comes in, do first aid, or whatever. Ask them to come back.’

  They all got into his car, which had a wire screen across the back so that he could carry strange dogs without them jumping on to his neck while he was driving. He drove a car in the same way that he had ridden the bay thoroughbred in a point-to-point last spring: easily, casually, nipping in and out of the traffic as he had nipped through the field of tired horses to lead over the last fence and pound alone down the straight, with Tom, Lester, Carrie, Em and Michael screaming like maniacs at the winning-post.

  A policeman pulled up beside him at a red light.

  ‘What’s the hurry then?’

  ‘It’s a matter of life and death!’ Carrie poked her head out of the window.

  ‘Going to the hospital?’ The policeman saw the blanketed bundle on Liza’s lap and thought it was a baby. ‘O.K. Good luck.’

  The lights changed and Alec Harvey let the policeman pull ahead, so that he wouldn’t see them turning, not to the people’s hospital, but the zoo hospital.

  In a building full of squeals and whistles and grunts and howls and growls and monkey chatter, they found Janet Lynch, with a stained white coat and very short hair and a blunt, square face. Her words were blunt and short too, never more than one syllable.

  “Lo kids,’ she greeted them. “Lo Al. Let’s see the monk.’

  She checked Joey quickly and put him at once into a cage with a thick sealed glass door through which oxygen was piped in. He sat with his tattered blanket round his shoulders, blinking at Carrie and, as she watched him, already beginning to breathe better.

  ‘Stay a bit,’ Jan Lynch said, ‘so he can see you. Here I’m short of help. You kids can feed the babes.’

  She sat them on a bench at the other end of the room and brought small bottles of milk, and gave Em and Michael tiny monkeys, and Liza a lion cub, and Carrie a bear only a week old - animals whose mothers had died or wouldn’t feed them.

  ‘Pretty cosy,’ Alec said. He was playing with two young chimpanzees in a child’s play pen.

  ‘Ought to come more,’ Jan said. ‘Vets should learn from zoos. Mad fad now to keep odd wild pets at home. See ‘em on T.V. “I want it!” Walk it on leash. Wear it round neck. Cubs in the kids’ room. Snake in the back yard. Monk in the bed. Get sick in the end and no one knows what’s up.’

  ‘I’d like to learn,’ Alec said, ‘if I wasn’t so busy. I wish my boy Tom could come for a while - these kids’ brother. Be useful to me if he could learn something here about exotic pets.’

  ‘Wish he could, Al,’ Jan said. ‘Boy just left. I need help.’ ‘So do I,’ Alec said.

  ‘I’d work for you, Mr Harvey!’ Carrie looked up eagerly from the baby bear. ‘I could do everything that Tom does. I could… Oh yes.’ Her face dropped. ‘I know. Don’t say it. School. School, school, always rotten, stinking school. The best years of my life going to waste on algebra and the chief mineral products of Central Uganda.’

  ‘I could work for you, Alec’ Liza stood up and put the little monkey back in its cage.

  ‘I thought your mother wanted you at home.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ She shook back her red hair and put on her lawless face. ‘They can’t make me.’

  ‘They could send you back to Mount Pleasant,’ Alec said, ‘and that wouldn’t be much help to me.’

  ‘You mean, I could work for you?’

  ‘If Jan wants Tom here, and he wants to come.’

  ‘Lucky swine.’ Carrie grumbled, holding up the little bear and patting his soft furry back to make him belch ‘Lucky Liza. Lucky Tom. Won’t I ever be old enough to do anything?’

  ‘I thought you wanted to stay being a child.’ Em looked at her.

  ‘I do. I want everything. I want - oh, I don’t know what I want.’

  ‘I want a towel,’ Michael said. ‘The milk has gone in one end of this monkey and right out the other.’

  On the way home, Liza asked Carrie rather roughly, ‘Is it - I mean, is it all right then, with you lot, if I —’

  ‘Stay at World’s End? We thought you were.’

  They had got used to Liza. She was wild and unpredictable and noisy and clumsy, but they had got used to her, like a new animal.

  Before they got home, she telephoned her mother’s shop from a call box, to say she wanted to stay at World’s End and work for Alec Harvey. Through the glass, Carrie could hear the voice on the other end of the line, quacking like an infuriated duck, while Liza opened her mouth and waved her free hand and made fierce faces and couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

  She came out stamping her feet like Em when she was angry in boots, and tugging at her hair as if it was a bell rope.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She’s coming to see me.’

  ‘What else?’ The voice had quacked on for a full five minutes.

  ‘Nothing else. She’s coming.’

  20

  Liza’s mother came in a vulgar-looking purple van with

  E. ZLOTKIN, GREENGROCER.

  YOU WANT THE BEST? WE HAVE IT painted on the side. She brought her son Hubert.

  ‘Why did you have to bring that creep?’ Liza asked aggressively.

  ‘I knew you’d want to see dear little Hubert’

  ‘Only in hell,’ Liza said boldly. She did not care what she said to anyone. Her mother’s face swelled redder and her eyes bulged as if someone were blowing her up from inside. She was a loud, coarse woman, with a smell and a shine on her like bacon grease.

  It was a very hot day when she came, one of the many of that glorious summer, with weeds and flowers and bramble vines running to jungle riot, and the horses and the donkey head to tail on the bare trampled ground under the wide chestnut tree, dedicating their days to the war of the flies.

  Everyone was out at the back of the house, getting ready to give Liza’s mother lunch out of doors. They had dragged out the old weather-scarred table and strapped a piece of wood to its broken leg, and glued a sardine tin under one of the others, to make all four more or less the same length. Em and Liza were laying out knives and forks and plates, stepping round or over Henry and Lucy and various puppies and cats who were hanging about to see what was going to happen. If eating was going to happen, they were going to be there. The goat was licking the sardine tin.

  Michael was cutting grass with a collection of clacking old iron that he called a lawn mower. He pulled it behind him w
ith a strap round his chest, like a horse pulling a harrow. The dull blades clanked round, flattening the grass, if not cutting it.

  Carrie was in the torn tennis net hammock reading, ‘to improve her mind’ for social conversation with Liza’s mother. She was reading a library book called Horses in my Life.

  ‘… And then there was the corky little bay who carried me for more years than I care to remember, sound in wind and limb and mild of eye… ‘It was fantastically dull, droning on like the bees in the potato flowers.

  Carrie shut her eyes. She opened them with a start as the clack of the mower stopped and a great hullabaloo sounded from the front of the house. She rolled the hammock over to tip herself on to the ground, which was the fastest way of getting out, and ran round the house.

  Liza was ahead of her, shouting, Tut him down! Put him down, you rotten little beast!’ Her brother Hubert had Dusty struggling in his arms, and yelling as if he had been run over.

  Hubert dropped him awkwardly, and the old dog limped off through the hedge and into the wood, howling as if the devil was tied to his tail.

  ‘Oh!’ Liza stamped both her bare feet. ‘Now look what you’ve done, you jerk!’

  ‘I only went to pick him up. What have I done now?’

  ‘You know he hates that. He’s old and stiff and he’s been ill—’

  ‘I only wanted to pet him. Mum-may!’ He ran to his mother like a great baby. ‘She’s just as mean as ever.’

  Darling little Hubert was a blubbery overgrown boy of about eleven, with eyes like currants in dough and a wet pink baby mouth.

  Liza’s name was Jones. Her mother had gone back to her maiden name of Zlotkin when Mr Jones left her, which seemed a bad exchange for Jones. She sat at the table under the trees fanning herself with a plate, and stared at the animals as if they were wild beasts. Henry the ram, who had no tact, put his woolly head on her wide lap, and she pushed him off with her handbag and said, ‘Get away, bad dog Charlie.’

  ‘That’s Charlie.’ Michael politely pointed out the shaggy dog, spread out like a sheep’s fleece under the shade of a bush.