World's End in Winter (11 page)

The vet gave the old dog an injection, and he rallied a little, but was still very ill with pneumonia. He lay on Tom’s bed and could only move his tail feebly when anyone came in with warm milk or broth, or just a pat and a comforting word. Alec Harvey said his chances were about forty-sixty.

‘Sixty he lives?’ Carrie asked.

Alec shook his head. The other way round, I’m afraid.’

’If he could just live till Christmas ...’

’Why that day?’

‘I think Liza might come back for Christmas.’

‘Forty-sixty chance?’Alec smiled.

‘Sixty she
will.’

Some people think that if you want a thing to happen, you have to keep saying it won’t. Carrie believed that you had to keep saying it would.

The barn roof was going to cost an enormous amount of money to repair. A local man would do it, but only with a down payment in advance.

‘Don’t you trust us?’ Dad protested. ’We’ve got the money.’

’If so, it won’t hurt to pay a bit of it then, will it?’

They did not like the man, or his style of reasoning, but he was the only builder who would tackle the old structure, and thatch it as well. Somehow, the money must be found.

The soup can bird feeders were going fairly well, selling door-to-door, but soon they had exhausted all the local doors. It took time to range farther afield, and was even more discouraging to have doors slammed in your face after you had trekked down a long muddy lane to a lonely farm.

Feed the birds? The farmer said to Em in disgust. ’I try to keep the wretched things away from my winter cabbages, not invite them.’

He banged the door. Em made her prehistoric ape face at it and trudged back down the lane.

Spider Monkey was in use again - Mother was using it to get to a holiday job at a hotel - but only half paid for. Every time Em went past Dick Peasly’s garage, he looked at her sadly through the window.of his repair shop, as if she was depriving his small children of their Christmas presents. Em had to make detours to get into the village another way.

Christmas was going to be a problem anyway. There would be no money for presents this year. Because they needed the barn for Priscilla’s riding lessons, everything had to go into the red flour crock in the larder, labelled ’Raising the Roof.

‘Why the larder?’ Mr Mismo asked when he came to put in his contribution, a five pound note and an old War Bond Certificate dating from no one knew which war. ’Burglars always want food.’

‘Then they wouldn’t come here.’ Mother laughed, but she tied a string round the neck of the flour crock and hung it from the hook in the kitchen rafter, where hams and pheasants and sides of bacon used to hang in the old days. The crock hung.over the heads of the family at the round table, reminding them of Priscilla.

Once, tilting his chair back after a meal and blinking
through the smoke of his pipe at the hanging crock, Dad said, ’Why don’t we touch the Agnews for a little cash? It’s their child, after all.’

Everyone said, ’No!’ without even considering it.

‘They only let her come here,’ Em said, ’because it gets her out of their hair twice a week.’

‘I thought it was because I charmed the mother.’ Her father let down his chair. ’If not, why am I going to her blasted committee meetings?’

‘They don’t really want her to ride,’ Carrie said. ’They think it’s dangerous. They think it’s no use.’

’They think Bristler is a lost cause,’ Michael said.

‘If she can’t be perfect, like the others,’ Lester said, ’she’d better be shut away. Helpless.’

‘Don’t be bitter, young Figg,’ Dad said, but Mother said, ’Lester could be right. That’s why Priscilla wouldn’t make any effort with exercises, at the hospital.’

‘She knew Mrs Agony had given up.’ Michael was gouging deep into the initials P.A. that Priscilla had scratched on the round table last time she was here. ’Well,
we haven’t.
The penknife slipped on a knot and nicked his finger. He rubbed the blood into the A. ’Sweared in blood, Bristler. I won’t give up.’

Lester and Carrie looked at each other, remembering the time when they had sworn in blood to save John from the slaughterhouse. They had banged the backs of their hands with a hairbrush, whirled their arms to make the blood start, and pressed the back of their hands together. Exchanging a message, as they were able to, without words, they both got up and went outside.

They had long had a dream of buying the pasture across the lane for hay and extra grazing. They would pull out the ragged hedge to make it part of World’s End, and put gates across the lane, so that people coming this way would have to pay toll to get through.

They couldn’t buy the field, and they couldn’t shut off the lane - but they took John and Peter, and Michael’s toy pistols and an empty tin can, and waited on the horses at
either side of the lane. Carrie was wearing a black stocking over her head with holes for eyes, nose and mouth. Lester was wearing the big bush hat Jerome Fielding had brought back from Australia, turned up on one side with the brim pulled over his face.

When a car or a van or a motorbike or a bicycle came by, they pushed the horses out to block the road, pointed the pistols and yelled, ’Your money or your life!’

The first thing that came was the Post Office van.

‘Thanks for stopping.’ Carrie lowered the gun and her highwayman voice. She had been afraid no one would stop.

‘Got a parcel for you.’ The postman handed her up a box. It was a Christmas present from the fat little nurse with the pearl barley teeth who had looked after Mother when she was hurt in the fire. He drove on before they could get back to the subject of money.

The next three cars gave them something. One willingly. One grumbling. One saying, ’I think it’s wonderful what
you children do. Is it for the Cruelty to Animals?’

‘Yes,’ Carrie said, and held out the soup tin. And afterwards, though she did not need to justify it to Lester, ’Well, Priscilla is a small animal, isn’t she?’

They waited in the lane all afternoon. The horses got cold and restless, and Carrie and Lester got cold and bored. Very little traffic came by. Some of it did not even stop, but drove on through, hooting them out of the way. A bicycle yielded a few pennies. Grandad Barker on his old-fashioned tricycle that was said to have fought at the Battle of Hastings, dismounted creaking and groaning, took off two layers of clothes, searched through the rest for a pocket, turned it inside out to show it was empty, and climbed back into the outer layers and on to the trembling tricycle. Meanwhile a sports car and a plumbing van had got by, and Mrs Potter from Orchards, who shouted ’Is it an accident?’ and drove quickly on in case it was.

They had made about thirty pence.

‘Let’s come out early tomorrow,’ Lester said, ’and get people on the way to work.’

Before they went in, they stopped a yellow cement mixer truck going home. The driver stopped his rotating drum behind the cab to hear what they were saying.

‘Money or your life!’

‘What’s that? What’s that about my wife?’

Carrie pushed John nearer, though he did not like the truck. ’It’s for the handicapped—’ she began, but the man said, ’We gave to that last week,’ and threw the mixing drum into gear with a rattle and a crunch. John leaped backwards into the dry ditch between the lawn and the road. Carrie fell off. The man said, ’Kids!’ and drove on.

John went off towards the stable. Carrie lay on the cold hard ground, waiting for her head to clear.

‘Let’s not come out tomorrow,’ she said.

Her father knew where the money must come from to save the barn for Priscilla.

He shut himself into the front parlour with the foot-stool against the door and wrote steadily for three days and
most of three nights. He staggered out with his manuscript, croaking, ’I’ve finished it. It’s finished me. But I’ve finished it.
Daily Amazer,
here it comes.’

‘Will they pay you?’ Michael asked anxiously.

‘As soon as they see it. Let’s go down to the Post Office and give Bessie Munce the thrill of stamping the Best Seller of the Age.’

Bessie Munce was not in the least thrilled. She weighed the package as if it were no more than a bundle of shoes left behind by somebody’s visiting niece.

‘That’s a heavy parcel.’ She looked over her spectacles through the fireguard on the counter that protected her from bandits. ’Cost you quite a bit, that will.’ She sucked in what would have been her teeth if she had had them in. She always behaved as if Parcel Post was reckless extravagance.

‘It can go book rate,’ Michael’s father said proudly.

‘Printed matter?’ Bessie asked sharply.

‘It’s typed. It’s my book. I wrote it.’ He could not resist raising his voice. There were two people in the other part of the shop which sold sweets and cigarettes and newspapers. They did not look round. Bessie Munce did not look up. She stamped the package, gave the change and threw
Sailor of the Seven Seas
over her shoulder into the canvas mail-bag.

Uncle Rudolf and Aunt Valentina had sent down a huge turkey - with instructions how to cook it, which didn’t please Mother, and a note to say they would come and help eat it, which didn’t please anybody.

‘Unless,’ Dad said, ’we could get Rudolf to help pay for the barn... Who’ll ask him?’

’You.’

‘He doesn’t like me.’

’He’s your brother.’

’That’s why.’

‘Will Tom hate me when he’s old and bald like Uncle Rhubarb?’ Michael asked.

‘Probably,’ Tom said. ’I’m going to give my presents early tomorrow before they come. They won’t approve of any of them.’

Tom gave animals to everybody.

A kitten for Mother. ’Just what I need!’ Two cats jumped off her lap as she got up to see the white half-Persian in the basket.

An Ant Farm for his father, which Tom had made from the glass tank whose goldfish had kicked the bucket long ago, in spite of Mr Mismo’s brandy administered with an eye-dropper. Tom had replaced the ends of the tank with strips of wood, so that the glass sides were quite close together. Filled with sand, you could see the ants’ tunnels and burrows and underground store rooms.

Dad put it on the dresser, and one of the cats, leaping away from the new kitten, which had mobilized itself into a puffball of aggressive white fur, knocked the Ant Farm over.

Earthquake in the ant world. But ants are used to the natural calamities of feet and spades and broom-happy housewives. Patiently, they started to tunnel and build all over again.

Someone gave Michael a ball. He threw it for Jake, and knocked the Ant Farm over again.

‘My deep personal sympathy in your disaster.’ Lester, who might have been some kind of insect in an earlier life, put the glass tank on a high shelf of the dresser, where the black ants sorted themselves out of the chaos and got to work once more. ’The very best of luck.’

Tom gave Em a guinea pig which Jan Lynch had given him. He had been keeping it in his room with poor ailing Dusty while he was on holiday from the zoo. It had a face
like the man at the grocery: the forehead, nose and chin all in one stodgy line. So Em called it Treacle, because the grocer was always trying to sell you big cans of treacle he had bought too much of.

When she picked him up, he clung sleepily, nosing her chin and quivering.

‘He loves me.’ She looked over the top of his sandy grocer’s head.

‘He has to,’ Tom said. ’Guinea pigs can’t hate because they don’t have anything to fight with. That’s why they wake when it’s dark, so they can run away.’

Charlie, who loved small animals, and would follow a terrified fieldmouse with his nose down right across the yard, was very much moved by Treacle. He stood over his box, wagging his tail and whining. When no one was looking, he picked him out and carried him round for a while. Em put him back, but Charlie took him out again. Poor Treacle’s fate was to be always soaking wet.

Tom gave Michael a Dutch rabbit, white in front and grey behind, divided evenly round the middle. It was a male, but Michael called it Phillis, because he wanted it to have babies.

For Carrie, a puppy which someone had dumped on Alec Harvey. A car had come into the vet’s drive, a door opened, an arm threw the pup out sprawling on to the gravel, the door slammed and the car drove off before Alec could run out.

It was some kind of spaniel, brown and white and silky, with elephant ears and enormous feet. His name was Dump. He had come to the right place. World’s End was a dumping ground for unwanted animals.

When Carrie put him down to meet the others, Perpetua sighed and got up - one more, was there no end to it? - and began to lick him expertly.

Tom gave Lester a cage of Peking robins which he had seen in a shop in the town, with a holly-decorated sign, ’GIVE A YULETIDE REDBREAST.’

Caught wild, the birds had been flown from China in
their thousands, crammed into tiny cages, shoulder to shoulder on the perch.

‘GIVE A YULETIDE REDBREAST. THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS.’

Tortured birds - to celebrate the birthday of Christ?

Everybody went outside and watched while Lester took the cage to the edge of the beech wood and opened the door. One by one, the frightened birds hopped into the doorway, stretched their cramped wings, looked round to make sure they were not being tricked once more, and flew off into the trees.

‘Will they be all right?’ Carrie asked. ’Mightn’t they die?’

‘A few,’ Lester said. ’But they’ll die free.’

Tom also had a present for Liza. He had bought it before she ran off, a tartan collar for Dusty. Now Liza was gone and Dusty might die. He had lived to see Christmas, but he was still very weak. Tom’s room was too cold, so he lay wrapped in a rug in the warm corner behind the stove. They fed him warm milk and sugar and water from a spoon. His breathing was difficult and his body sank in as the life slowly left it.

Bending over him to try and make him look at the tartan collar, Michael said, T think he’s dying.’

‘Then don’t watch him,’ Tom said. ’Dying is private. You do it alone.’