The House at World's End (11 page)

Mrs Loomis sighed. ‘All right, Michael, you go back to your classroom now, and try to be a gentleman.’

‘Yes, Miss Bloomers.’

‘Mrs Loomis.’

’Yes,’ said Michael, as if that was what he had said.

When he had gone, the headmistress asked Carrie, ‘Things are all right, are they, at home?’ She fiddled with a paper knife. When she wanted to know something, she asked it casually. When she wanted to say, for instance, ‘Who threw that boot through the window of the gym?’ she only remarked vaguely in Morning Assembly, ‘By the way, people, there’s a left boot unclaimed.’

‘Marvellous,’ Carrie said, and it was true. They were poor as mice and living mostly on baked beans and the flat sticky bread that Em had discovered how to make. But they were together. And they had animals. And an exhausted swallow had dropped in yesterday, as if it was a hotel on his way south. And Tom had cut enough logs from the wood for the fire. And only one room upstairs still let the water in.

‘I mean, if you need anything, there are people who can help—’

Mrs Loomis was looking at Carrie’s shoes. She stood one foot on top of the other to hide the battered toe, and only succeeded in showing the hole underneath.

‘Until your mother comes back, perhaps the Social Worker—’

Miss Nuttishall. ‘Come peeking and peering into my cottage as if she had a search warrant,’ Carrie had heard one woman tell another in the grocery. No thank you. None of that at World’s End.

‘Everything’s marvellous.’ Carrie tried to pull down the sleeves of the jersey that had fitted her before Em had shrunk it. ‘My uncle and aunt are very nice to us. They buy us clothes and food and all that.’

‘Very nice,’ said Mrs Loomis, looking over her half glasses at the un-get-outable stain on Carrie’s only skirt.

And it was almost true. Uncle Rudolf was giving them an allowance, a lot of which went on food for animals, and he and Valentina were trying to be nice, in as much as they had invited all four of them up to London for the weekend.

‘Don’t let’s go,’ Em said, when the letter came.

‘We must. and they took turns in it’

‘They think they “must” ask us,’ Em said, ‘so why can’t two Musts make a Needn’t?’

They tried to give themselves several excuses. Tom couldn’t get away. But Mr Harvey gave him the whole weekend off for good work. They couldn’t leave the animals. But Lester was longing to be left in charge of all of them. He was longing to ride John, but he wouldn’t when Carrie was there, because she rode better than he did. Michael had nothing to wear. But Mrs Mismo came down the lane with a bag full of things her grandson had grown out of, so Michael was better dressed than anyone.

There was no telephone at World’s End. Valentina sent them a telegram: ‘RUDE NOT ANSWER. EXPECTING YOU.’

A boy called Arthur brought it out from the village on a fleet post office bicycle.

‘It says, “Rude not to answer”,’ he said, although the telegram was in a sealed envelope. The old lady at the post office, who read all the postcards and steamed open interesting-looking letters, knew everybody’s business and passed it on. ‘So answer me this,’ Arthur went on. ‘What is white, has raisins and is terribly dangerous?’

‘A shark-infested rice pudding.’ Emmie stuck out her tongue and slammed the door.

The weekend was as boring as they had expected. And it reminded them of one or two things that they had got used to doing without.

Hot baths.

At World’s End, there was a tin bath hanging on the wall in the scullery. It was used for many things. Shampooing dogs. Mixing potting soil for the hyacinth bulbs which one of Em’s baby-sitting mothers had given her. Storing dirty clothes until someone felt like washing them or putting them on again still dirty. When it was not in use, and when there was enough hot water, the bath was put in front of the sitting-room fire and they took turns in it.

Warmth.

Everyone wore two jerseys at World’s End in the winter, in bed and out. To get up in the morning, you had to have the willpower of a crusading saint. It was only John’s breakfast neigh, or a dog asking to get out or a cat asking to come in that made you leap from bed to the cold boards and dash down to dress in the kitchen, where they banked up the stove to keep it going all night

Food.

Roast turkey. Grilled steak. Fruit salad. Chocolate ice. As if to point up the contrast between her life and
theirs, Valentina gave them all their favourite kinds of rich and costly food.

‘Serve you right if we moved back in,’ Tom said with his mouth full at lunch on Sunday.

He was joking, but Valentina’s face fell like the blade of the guillotine.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Uncle Rudolf, catching her fear. ‘Perhaps I should give you a bit more money.’ They pricked up their ears. Carrie bought an imaginary new bridle. Emmie bought tins of salmon for the cats. Michael bought a pair of rabbits and a bag of barley sugar for Lucy. ‘But not,’ Uncle Rudolf added, as if he was a mind reader, ‘to be spent on that smelly menagerie you keep out there.’

Tom got a bit huffy. Having to take money from him was bad enough. Being told what to do with it was worse. ‘I am working, you know,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my job.’

Uncle Rudolf pushed out his lips in the shape of ‘Pooh’, without actually saying it ‘It can’t go far, what little you make.’

‘It’s enough.’ Tom snapped his mouth shut in a firm line. His eyes were very angry.

‘What for? My dear boy, even my youngest apprentice plumber earns twice what you do.’

The bridle faded, the tinned salmon and the rabbits. If he was going to insult Tom…

‘No thank you, Uncle Rhubarb.’ Michael spoke proudly for them all. ‘We can manage prefickly all right.’

Anxious to get away, they left too early for their bus, got on the wrong one, went miles out of their way and got home late. There was no electricity at World’s End, but a lamp was lit in a downstairs window. The door opened and animals poured out in a flood of welcome, streaming down the path. Lester was behind them in the doorway, holding a candle which made deep flickering shadows on his goblin face.

He had spent most of his weekend alone at World’s End with the animals. He could not have any at home. If his father went within five yards of anything with fur on it, his face swelled up like a streaming tomato.

‘Did you ride John?’ Carrie asked.

‘He bucked.’ He did not say whether he had fallen off.

‘He never bucks!’

‘I think he may have been a cowboy once, out in the Wild West He’s got those kind of knees…’

‘More likely you put the saddle on too far back,’ Em said. She was tired and cross. She looked as if she wanted to cry. Michael could bawl anywhere, and turn it off as suddenly as he turned it on. But Emmie had to go away, up a tree, in the attic, under the raised floor of the woodshed, among the mice and beetles.

It was marvellous to be home. The visit to London and
luxury had pointed up the difference between that life and this. The better difference.

What was the point of making a bed if you were going to sleep in it that night? Why brush your hair if you were going out into the wind? Why clean the top of the stove when it was going to get dirty again next time someone fried chips? Why fiddle with a knife and fork when a chicken drumstick tasted better from your fingers? (‘Savages,’ Aunt Val had moaned at the first meal in London, before they remembered they weren’t at home. ‘It’s taken away my appetite.’) Why hurry home from a ride, or from watching squirrels in the wood, or sliding on the frozen duckpond, just because it happened to be the time that ordinary dull people had their tea?

Clothes were the only problem. They had to go to school or go to prison, which even Michael admitted might be worse. But as the winter hardened into icy days, only Michael, in Mrs Mismo’s grandson’s anorak, had enough to wear.

‘Is that the only coat you’ve got?’ Mrs Croker, with a fur hat down over her eyes like a mad trapper, met Carrie outside the school.

‘I don’t feel the cold.’ Carrie hunched the thin jacket round her, keeping her blue hands in the pockets.

‘“That age is best, which is the first, when youth and blood are warmer”’
quoted Mrs Croker. ‘Isn’t there anyone at home with a car?’

‘We don’t need one. My horse is broken to harness. When I can get the trap mended, we can drive to school in that.’

Tom helped her to mend the floor and the seat of the brown and yellow trap she had found on the day of the picnic. A friend of Lester’s, who was a wheelwright, put
some new spokes in the wheels. She and Lester got between the shafts and trotted the light trap along to his workshop on the other side of the hill. On the way back, downhill, with the trap trying to go faster than them, Carrie could not feel her feet on the road, and she knew that they were flying.

They stuffed the broken horse collar with Henry’s wool. They mended the harness with string and Michael’s belt, which didn’t keep his trousers up anyway, and added a piece of clothes line to make the broken reins long enough.

Mrs Croker’s cousin, who was a baker, lived near the school. He agreed to let Carrie use his stable while his horse and cart were out on the bread rounds. She had been right about John. He put his head into the collar with his eyes shut and his ears bade, as if it was very familiar. He backed willingly between the shafts of the trap, stood to be hitched up, and trotted off happily with his ears cocked and his nostrils blowing square, with Carrie and Em and Michael singing behind him on the road to school.

And now, just when they thought it would be winter for ever, it began to get warmer. The animals began to shed their coats. The ground softened. Green daffodil noses grew an inch in a day. Emmie stopped coughing. Carrie’s chilblain healed. Michael’s nose only ran some of the time. The tortoise put its head out, sighed and took it back in again. The swallow, which had decided to stay here rather than bother to go on south, found another swallow and began to build a mud nest on a rafter of an empty loose box. Perpetua was going to have some more puppies. The kittens, Julius and Caesar were mad with the spring and with their youth. They sailed from tree to tree like
monkeys, and danced on the hill at night, stiff-legged under the moon.

A man from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was going round the neighbourhood, inspecting stables. He found John standing in deep clean straw, with Henry lying on one side of him and Lucy on the other, chewing their cuds. He stayed to lunch (hard-boiled eggs and tinned spaghetti and a jug of cider which he fetched from the Red Lion), and liked everything so much that he gave them a donkey which had run away from a ferocious junk man.

The donkey’s name was Leonora. She had a soft grey fringe and dark rings round her beautiful eyes. She had been beaten, but it had not spoiled her nature. She had stuck it out bravely with the junk man, pulling his heavy cart, kicking him when he kicked her, and hoping to be rescued.

One night, she had broken out of her horrid yard among the old iron and rag bags, tried to cross the main highway, been hit by a car and left for dead at the side of the road.

‘Heading this way,’ Carrie realized. ‘The word is getting out, you see. They know they can come here.’

Leonora had only been stunned. She was all right now, except for being blind in one of her beautiful eyes. The white cat roosted on her back like a pigeon, and one of the swallows laid some eggs in the nest above her.

‘No such thing as one horse,’ Mr Mismo had said. And a donkey was almost a horse. And the Cruelty Man knew of a pony that might want a good home…

Everything was wonderful.

Until one day when they drove home from school and found Lester waiting for them, perched on the roof of the
hen house, trying to talk some intelligence into the dim brains of Diane and Currier.

He went to a different school, somewhere in the other direction - Carrie still didn’t know where he lived - but he knew things that were going on in their school, even things they didn’t know themselves.

‘It’s trouble.’ He slid off the hen house roof and they all went into the kitchen and ate bread and jam like starving refugees, standing up with their coats on. They had not had butter, nor even margarine, since they were in London.

One of Lester’s many friends was Mrs Croker’s cousin, the baker. When his errand boy had taken the day off to have his tonsils out, Lester had taken a day off school to help with the bread round. Carrying the big baskets of loaves to the school on the edge of the cricket field, he had ‘happened’ to wander down the wrong corridor on his way out, and had overheard a startling conversation.

‘They’re worried about you,’ Lester said. ‘It looks like a case of neglect’

‘Oh, rot’

‘Not rot,’ Lester said. ‘You’ll be lucky if it’s only the Cruelty to Animals man that comes. They’ll send the Cruelty to Children man next, you’ll see. That woman is out for blood.’

‘What woman?’

‘I heard her. I was right there, outside the door.’

‘Was it a green door with a stupid-looking knocker made of
See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil?’
Carrie asked.

‘None other.’

Mrs Loomis’s door! No one but Lester could crouch
with two empty bread baskets outside the Head Mistress’s office and not get caught.

‘“It is our duty to investigate,” she said. “I think I should send over Miss Nuttishall.”’

‘Miss Nutshell,’ Michael said. ‘That’s torn it.’

Carrie glanced round the room, where dogs and cats lay all over the floor like mats. Everywhere she looked, even just in the kitchen, there was something for a Social Worker to object to. ‘When’s she coming?’

‘Soon, I think. But I saw a figure moving towards the keyhole and I had to vanish.’

Tom came home. They told him. ‘Could they make us leave here?’

‘They might.’

‘I wish Mother was here!’ Michael’s nose began to run. He was the one who missed his mother the most.

‘I wish Dad was,’ Em said. She was the one who missed her father the most.

‘Well, they’re not,’ Tom said, irritable because he was worried. ‘So we’d better start cleaning this place up.’