The House at World's End (13 page)

‘Yoo-hoo, Esmeralda, what’s wrong?’ Em had a stocking tied round her head to flatten her curls. ‘Have you got a headache?’

‘I have now,’ Em turned her back on Valentina, and grabbed the postcard.

Carrie had read it quickly. ‘He’s coming home’. He had drawn

forgetting that Tom was taller than Mother.

‘Where from?’

The postmark was rubbed out by Val’s thumbs. The picture was called ‘Sunset Beach at Harakarawa’, but it had been posted months ago. Em took it into the house.

‘Oh, Carrie.’ Her mother smiled and held out her hand She didn’t say: Why didn’t he write to
me?
‘How exciting. He’s coming home.’

‘And about time.’ Valentina did not care to see people too happy. ‘About time he came home and took care of his family.’

‘He would have.’ Mother flared up. She could not sit up in the sagging hammock, so she had to flare lying down. ‘He didn’t know what had happened to us.’

‘About time he came home to find out. These children -like savages. I was ashamed to sit at table with them. Look at that girl’s hair!’ Carrie took a piece of it out of her mouth and shook it back. ‘Made a proper pigsty of this place, if you ask me. Like some wretched zoo.’ She kicked out at Lucy, who had come to sample her shoe buckle, long silky brown ears hanging like a girl’s hair.

‘I think they’ve managed wonderfully,’ Carrie’s mother said. ‘I’m proud of them.’

Valentina bent to wipe her shoe with a handkerchief. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you would be.’

They were heading into a full-scale fight, and Carrie watched with interest, holding John’s reins while he put his head down to eat. If two people you loved had a fight, it made you want to be sick. If someone you loved fought someone you hated, then it was exhilarating - if the one you loved was winning.

But Valentina was winning. She had all the ammunition.

‘All right then, if he’s such a wonderful husband and father, there’s nothing to worry about, is there? Rudolf can certainly use his money for a more worthwhile cause. There are people at the home for the Widows of Disabled Plumbers who will be
very
grateful, I can assure you. And don’t forget, my dear Alice,’ Valentina said lightly, but her eyes were hard as stones, ‘whose house this is, after all. We wouldn’t turn you out into the street, I suppose, but there might be a little question of rent…’

Mother went pale. She lay in the hammock like a washed-up fish.

‘When your sailor man comes rolling home, I’m sure he’ll be glad to discuss
that
with his brother Rudolf!’

Having spoiled everyone’s day, Valentina felt better. She wanted to see all the children and give them a sixpence, which was more insulting than giving nothing. She even wanted to see all the animals, probably to report back to Uncle Rudolf that the place was a stinking menagerie.

‘A donkey!’ she cried when she saw Leonora taking a nap under the twisted old apple tree. ‘A little Hee-haw. Oh, memories of my youth! Donkey rides on the beach when I was a little girl…’

Centuries ago. Valentina was as old as made no matter, but she flattered herself she looked young for her age.
When they lived with her, she used to pretend that people took her and Tom for sister and brother, instead of aunt and nephew. It was disgusting.

‘Have a go now,’ suggested Michael.

‘Should I?’ She giggled. ‘Oh thrills. It would be just like the gay old times. Put me up someone. Wait - Tom, get my camera out of my bag.’ She always had to have pictures taken of herself. ‘It will have to be side saddle, my skirt is too tight’

Michael held Leonora’s patient head. Her ears lolled back and forth like furred radar, one forward, one back, which meant she was not sure how she felt.

Valentina bent her leg at the knee. Carrie put both hands under it and gave her a tremendous heave which shot her straight over Leonora’s narrow back and into a mud wallow on the other side, just as Tom clicked the camera.

That was the last they heard of Valentina for some time -except for a bill for cleaning the tight pink skirt

It was also the last they heard of any money from Uncle Rudolf. ‘Who cares?’ Mother said. ‘Money doesn’t matter, after all.’

‘Good thing it doesn’t,’ Em said, ‘since we’ve never had any.’

What little Rainy Day money they had was kept in a china Toby jug on the mantelpiece. Banks made Mother nervous, with their clean spectacled clerks doing complicated sums behind bars. She would never put money in a bank. Carrie still had her teddy bear under the floorboard with the savings tied into the sock, which would one day buy the most beautiful horse in the world.

Meanwhile, she had John. And all the other animals. More and more of them, as the word spread that World’s End was a good place to come to.

An old lady, who had to go and live with her daughter, brought her cat in a plastic shopping bag.

‘My daughter says I must have Beauty put to sleep.’ She was a tiny old lady, looking up at Em with clouded eyes.

‘Oh no!’ Better to have the daughter put to sleep than that

Beauty - they changed his name to Brutey - was an old
fighter, with half an ear and scars on his head. He chased Julius and Caesar up a tree, where they stayed all day pretending they couldn’t get down. But when Em got a ladder, they jumped down on one side of the tree as she climbed up the other.

A bird came from somewhere. A lovebird that had escaped from a cage and almost died, trying to live wild.

It flew through Tom’s window and flopped on the floor, exhausted. Tom made a cage of wire netting, only to keep the cats away. The door was always open and the bird spent most of his time on top of picture frames or riding about in people’s hair. He was a male, because he had blue round its beak instead of brown, so they called him Gabriel, nickname Gabby, because when he was stronger he started to talk.

He could call ‘Charlie!’ and imitate the dog whistle, which was very embarrassing for the dogs. He could do Mr Mismo’s: ‘Hullo old chump hullo old chump hullo old chump.’ You had to throw a towel over the cage to shut him up.

Perpetua had three puppies. Tom, Dick and Harry. Dog Tom, to be different from Boy Tom. They were sand-coloured and sandbag-shaped. When Perpetua was out of the box, Charlie got in and bathed them, like a father taking over the baby when the mother goes shopping.

A boy at school gave Michael a rabbit Mrs Croker the English teacher gave Carrie a hamster, which her son had got bored with soon after Christmas. The hamster was always soaking wet, because when Perpetua wouldn’t let him take care of the puppies, Charlie carried it round in his mouth.

‘I’ve counted up,’ Michael said one day. ‘Not counting
caterpillars and the things that aren’t family, there are ninety-six legs in this place.’

Everyone counted in their heads: people, birds, four-legged animals. ‘He’s right,’ Mother said. ‘Tell
that
to that woman at the school!’

By ‘That woman at the school’, she meant Miss Mc-Drane his teacher, whose name she could never remember, but whose visit she would not forget. Miss McDrane had said that Michael was backward, so Mother had informed her that Shakespeare couldn’t read until he was fifteen. She made that up, but it shook Miss McDrane.

‘Will Shakespeare could spell his own name though.’ Miss McDrane probably made that up too. ‘That’s more than Michael can.’

‘Why does he need to?’ Mother asked lightly, ‘since he knows what it is?’

Miss McDrane had gone away flummoxed. She had come to show Mother the exam papers on which Michael had made designs, but no writing, but Lester had taken her briefcase out of the car and set fire to it, so there was nothing to show.

‘Ninety-six? He’s wrong you know.’ Tom was looking out of the window. ‘There are exactly one hundred legs.’

The RSPCA van had come down the lane and stopped by the gate of the yard. Out of it was coming a small Welsh pony, with maps of unknown continents all over his body in black and white.

‘His child outgrew him,’ the RSPCA Man said, ‘and they asked me to find the best home I could.’

‘What’s his name?’ Michael stood with his brown scratched legs apart and his hands on his hips, sizing up the pony. It was just his size.

‘Oliver Twist. Because he’s always hungry. He always wants more.’

The pony could graze in the meadow. But between John and Leonora and Lucy and Henry and Mr Mismo’s cows which kept wandering in through the home-made fence, the turf was getting nibbled bare. Soon they would have to fence off some of the rough grass behind the stable yard. When summer was over, they would have to buy hay. Soon, very soon, said Michael’s eager face, alight with love as he stood with an arm thrown over Oliver’s back to show
This Is Mine,
soon they must get a saddle and bridle.

So Michael and Carrie went into business. They loaded the wheelbarrow with nicely rotted manure and wheeled it from door to door in the village. No one wanted to buy it. Everyone had chickens, cows, a pony, to fertilize their garden.

Mr Harvey the vet gave them a few pounds for helping Tom at Easter when the boarding kennels were full. But Mr Harvey was almost as poor as they were, because he was always treating animals free. They didn’t like to take his money.

‘You know what you could do.’ He and Tom and Carrie were walking back from the frying shop after work, eating fish and chips in the street. ‘You could sell your stuff here on the housing estates. There are no cows or horses here, and these people are mad for a bit of organic fertilizer. Aren’t you, Mr Mott?’ He called over a garden hedge to a glum old man who was weeding a flower bed.

‘What say?’ The old man couldn’t get up.

‘Wouldn’t you buy horse manure if you could get it?’

‘Would I?’
The old man’s glum face lit up. ‘Like gold dust that would be, to my dahlias.’

It was too far to wheel the barrow to the housing estates.
Lester knew a man who had an old muck cart for sale cheap.

‘Got to spend money to make money,’ he said. ‘That’s the principle of all big business.’

Mother lent them some money out of the china Toby jug, and Carrie rode John over with his harness on, sitting behind the pad With the long reins coiled round the hames, and brought the muck cart back.

‘That nag takes to it like a duck to water.’ Mr Mismo shouted rudely from his car as he passed Carrie and Michael going off to the housing estates in the loaded cart, with a shovel sticking up the back like a flag.

‘He understands big business!’ Carrie shouted as haughtily as it is possible to shout. Mr Mismo’s jokes sometimes got boring.

John didn’t mind anyway. He liked pulling in harness, and although Carrie drove him without blinkers, he didn’t care what came behind.

Michael put a notice on the back of the cart. ‘Fine Farm Furtiler. We delver.’ They began to make money. When they ran out of horse fertilizer, Mr Mismo let them load up his winter’s cow bedding. Soon they had put the cart money back in the Toby jug, and were saving in a willow-pattern vase for Michael’s saddle and bridle. They smelled all the time. Em would not sit in the room with them.

Michael rode bareback. Oliver was like a piebald sea horse, with a broad forehead tapering to a delicate square nose and triangular pricked-up ears. After a while, he didn’t buck Michael off any more, so Michael took him to the village fête and offered pony rides at sixpence a go.

Oliver hated it. Small girls with pinching fingers clambered on and off his back, sometimes two at once,
sometimes facing backwards. Michael clung on to his halter rope while his blue Welsh pony eye rolled and his little ears flicked back and forth.

‘Make him go!’ the little girls yelled. ‘I want to gallop!’ But when Michael clicked his tongue and trotted with Oliver and the girls began to jiggle and jounce, they yelled, ‘I want to get down!’

One of them smeared candy floss on the pony’s neck, and the flies swarmed. Oliver swished his thick tail and shivered his skin, but he could only scratch by reaching forward with his back hoof. When he did that, a child yelled, ‘He tried to kick me!’

Oliver was furious. Michael was red and puffing. He had only made two-and-six, because most of the girls ran off without paying. When he went to get a lemonade, a large rough boy untied Oliver’s rope, climbed on his back, whacked him with a stick and got bucked off into the bran tub full of Lucky Dips.

The Lucky Dip lady was decent about it. The boy was not.

‘I’ll sue you for having a dangerous beast!’ he shouted, brushing bran off his bottom. ‘I’ll have him shot!’

Michael began to cry, burying his face in Oliver’s black and white mane.

‘Unless you give me all the money you made.’

Michael handed over the two-and-six and took Oliver home.

That wasn’t fair,’ Carrie said, when Michael told her the story.

‘No. Those girls cheated, and that boy was bigger than me.’

‘I mean, it wasn’t fair to give rides on Oliver.’

‘I wanted money.’

‘Money doesn’t matter,’ Carrie said. ‘Not as much as your pony.’

But then something happened which made it seem different. ‘Money doesn’t matter,’ Mother said. But when something like this happened, it did - oh, it did.