World's End in Winter (3 page)

Her father had put two big logs on the fire and was sitting on the last bone of his spine in the sagging armchair, with his bottom almost on the floor and his feet on the fireplace bricks, reading
Tabby Tinker’s Teatime Tales for the Littlest Folk.

‘How’s he getting on?’ Her mother was making Alice’s All-purpose Soup with anything she could find - chicken wings, three stewed plums, half a corned beef sandwich, a cup of tea, a wilted lettuce - stewed up in a pot with barley.

‘Working away like mad,’ Em said.

‘You’d better take his lunch in there.’

Em took a bowl of soup and some bread and cheese and knocked on the sitting room door.

‘Go away, I’m busy.’

T brought your lunch.’

‘Thank God.’ She heard his feet scrape down from the fireplace. ’Come in,’ he grunted. ’Push the door hard.’

She pushed it open and stepped in over the footstool with the baking sheet she was using for a tray. He was sitting at the table, pencil going swiftly over the paper, the other hand raking through the thick curly hair that made Em forget to fuss with flattening her own curls when he was at home.

‘How’s it going?’ She put down the baking sheet at the
other end of the table. She had put one of the last chrysanthemums in an eggcup of water, like the man in the film
Ladykiller,
who had brought his wife one perfect rose on her breakfast tray and then stabbed her with the butter knife.

‘Marvellous.’ He leaned his arm on the paper so that she could not see, and pulled the soup towards him with the other hand. ’Smells good. You make it, Emmy?’

‘Yes.’ Em had the habit of telling lies for not much reason. She was trying to cure herself of pointless ones, so that people would believe the ones that mattered.

’Stick to cooking. Never try this lark.’

A kitten that had sneaked in with Em was playing football with the crumpled papers on the floor. Em picked up the kitten and some of the papers with it. After lunch, she went into the hayloft over the barn and smoothed out the papers, which had only a few scrawled words on one side, and began to write a play.

Lester came in the afternoon.

Carrie had gone up to the meadow to catch John. He usually came when she whistled, but today he stood staring at nothing with his ears lopped sideways, as if he were blind and deaf, and made her come to him.

From the wood, a squirrel chittered. It wasn’t a squirrel. It was Lester. He climbed over the brass bedstead which mended one of the gaps in the hedge.

‘Look what I found.’

It was a perfect round pink stone, like a wren’s egg. He unscrewed the knob of the bedstead, put the egg into the hollow place and screwed it up again. He was storing things
here for posterity. Thousands of years hence, a traveller from the planet Uranus would unscrew the knob with the strange instruments which were his hands, and marvel at these treasures which spoke to him through the centuries. The stone egg, an old farthing, a gold filling from Lester’s mother’s tooth, a dog’s dew claw, a piece of Liza’s red hair tied with cooked spaghetti gone hard again, and a twist of paper with a two-line poem by Carrie:

When the last car on earth has crashed and the last plane has fallen from the skies and the last rocket satellite has run its course,

There will still be the galloping wonder of beauty. There will still be a horse.

They walked up the hill to where John was dreaming. Lester said quietly, ’Peter’, and instantly the lovely chestnut head with the white star that was shaped like an onion or like the dome of the Taj Mahal, according to how you saw it, swung up from behind the blackberry bushes.

They walked down the hill with a hand on their horses’ necks.

‘My mother and father are home,’ Carrie said.

‘I know.’

‘How?’

‘I heard his old car.’

’He’s writing a book.’

’I know.’

’How?’

‘Bessie Munce at the shop told me there’d been an emergency call for paper.’

As they came down to the gate, Lester said casually, ’Someone else has come too. The moving van is at Brookside. Those people.’

They looked at each other without needing to raise an eyebrow, or smile, or say, ’Let’s ride over there.’ Their eyes met and the plan was made.

Michael was in the stable putting the saddle on Oliver. In
the summer, the small Welsh pony was neat and glossy, with elegant legs and delicate seahorse head. Half-way into his winter shag, he was already taking on his giant panda look, legs stumpy, mane sticking out on both sides because his neck was too thickly furred for it to lie down.

Those people are moving into Brookside.’ Carrie looked over the half door. ’We’re going to ride over there and you can confess about the window.’

‘Why?’

‘It will give us an excuse to investigate.’

‘Not me.’ Michael led Oliver out and got on quickly to ride off somewhere else. Oliver had let go his breath. The saddle slipped round under his stomach and Michael stepped off into a squawk of chickens. Oliver put down his head, trod on his rein, jerked up his head and broke the buckle end of the rein.

By the time Michael had been back to the house for a skewer and string to mend the rein, the others were ready, so he had to ride off with them, because Oliver would not go in a different direction from John and Peter.

The moving van in the drive of Brookside was too wide to get past, so they drew twigs and Carrie lost, and stayed with the horses while the others walked up to the house. Furniture and rolled carpets were going in. They walked behind an oversized sofa into the hall and through into the room where Michael had broken the window. The glass had been mended.

A man and a woman were standing at the end of the room by the flat-skulled ladies who held up the mantelpiece arguing where the sofa should go. The moving men set it down, picked it up again, went sideways with it like a crab with a heavy shell, set it down where the man pointed, dusted off their hands, and then had to bend and lift it and sidle off again to where the woman was standing.

‘It was better over here.’ He was a big ruddy man, losing his hair and waist and the veins in his nose.

‘Nonsense, Brian.’ The woman was tall and athletic, with squared-off shoulders and shining teeth and eyes, crackling
with health and energy. ’Come on, boys, let’s try it sideways to the fireplace.’

She grinned, thinking the men liked her, but behind her back, they made terrible faces at each other as they picked up the awkward sofa.

When it was down, she turned coolly to Lester and Michael, as if she had seen them in the doorway all along and meant to make them wait.

‘Is it the newspapers?’ she asked in her voice for talking to tradespeople, high and clear, as if they must be deaf or stupid. ’Or groceries? Do you deliver?’

‘Yes, Madam.’ Lester picked up a piece of packing straw and stuck it behind his ear like a pencil.

‘It’s the window.’ Michael frowned under his white hood.

‘They’ve been cleaned thank you.’

‘But you see, I—’ As Michael moved to the french door, he saw that a small wheelchair stood on the terrace in a patch of late sun. In the chair, bundled in scarves and mittens and fur boots, was the child with the blank dark eyes.

She looked at him, but would not smile. He tapped on the glass and waggled his fingers in an experimental wave.

‘Don’t tease Priscilla, there’s a good boy,’ the woman said.

‘She’s cold.’ Michael turned round.

‘Nonsense. Spot of fresh air never hurt anybody. Now run along, kids. We’re very busy here.’

‘I broke your window.’ Michael clenched his fists by his waist, elbows out, defensively.

‘Oh well, never mind.’ She tossed aside his confession breezily. ’Off you go.’

Michael held his ground. ’What’s wrong with your little girl?’ He gave her his honest, innocent stare, which usually got results.

‘She had an accident.’

‘Can’t she smile?’

‘She can smile when she wants to.’

‘Can’t she walk then?’

Stepping between Michael and the window, the father said, ’It’s just that Priscilla isn’t as strong as our other
children.’ And added unnecessarily, They’re
both
in their school teams for
everything.’

He pushed Michael towards the door. ’What’s wrong with your leg?’

‘Nothing,’ Lester answered for him.

‘Then why’s he limping?’

‘It’s shorter than the other.’

‘Can’t it be seen to?’ the woman asked, as if Michael was a torn blind or a dripping tap.

‘Not without cutting a bit off the other one,’ Lester explained reasonably, and Michael turned in the doorway and asked, ’Why can’t Bristler be seen to?’

’Bristler?’

‘He can’t say Priscilla.’ Lester again explained the obvious.

’We’ve done all we can,’ the mother said curtly.

Outside in the wheelchair, the little girl sat with her mittened hands limp on the rug over her knees, staring without expression into the room.

Before they crossed the road into the stubble field, Carrie, Lester and Michael rode round the high garden hedge to the back gate for one more look at Priscilla.

The father had gone out to bring her in. He had turned the chair round to pull it backwards over the door sill. John, who was anxious to get home, tossed his brown head over the gate. Oliver stuck his furry nose through the bars to bite at a bush. It tasted bitter, and he snorted smoky breath into the cold air.

The father was turned to the door and did not see the horses. But in the moment before he pulled her after him, Priscilla came to life. The dark eyes brightened. The limp hands lifted to clutch the arms of the wheelchair and pull herself forward. Her still, pale face moved into a smile, just for a moment, before the chair was jerked inside and the door shut.

Every day in his plaid dressing gown, Jerome Fielding threw away the pages he had written the day before and started again. It was going to be a long time before they all became rich and famous.

Every evening, Em collected the crumpled paper from under the table, smoothed it out and wrote some more of her play in bed by the stub of a candle, wearing moth-eaten gloves with no fingers.

It was a play about herself as she would like to be, tall and willowy with a face like a lily, long straight cornsilk hair, and a beautiful singing voice, honest and courageous and adored. It was called
Life and Death of a Star.
Would it make anybody rich and famous? Perhaps she would never show it to anyone.

When Mother had finished darning clothes and pruning fruit trees and painting Liza’s bedstead bright orange daisies on the corners, she went chatting round the villages to see what was doing.

‘What
was
doing?’ When she came home, Carrie and Michael were washing a horse rug in the sink, and Dad had some of the dogs lined up like sailors on pay day to catch dog biscuits.

Moses caught them in his long speckled jaws like an alligator. Liza’s old dog Dusty would not open his mouth at all. The biscuit bumped off his faded nose and he had to track it short-sightedly over the floor. Harry, silly half-brother of Moses, snapped wildly, jumping too high and slavering. Charlie didn’t bother to open his mouth until the last minute, then he caught the biscuit neatly and casually over his shoulder.

‘What
was
doing, Alice?’

‘The assistant cook at the school is leaving to have a baby. I may get the job.’

‘Now look here, Alice.’ Someone’s puppy flopped on to Dad’s foot and he flipped it off upside down, its legs bicycling round its fat stomach. ’I’m not going to have you breaking your back.’

‘I’ve done that once and it mended.’ Mother laughed and swung her yellow bell of hair, excited by the future. She lived in the expectation that something marvellous was just round the corner. Anything new, even boiling up carrots and jam roll for a hundred and fifty messy, grumbling chil
dren, was an adventure. ’Let me do this, just till you get some money for the book.’

‘Ah - and then you shall live like a lady. Jewels. Furs. Exotic perfumes. Champagne ...’

‘I don’t want to live like a lady.’ Mother kicked off her shoes and sat on the draining board to wash her feet in the horse rug water.

‘She’d give the jewels to the poor,’ Michael said.

‘And furs come from endangered species,’ Carrie said.

‘And exoct pre-fumes are made from the insides of cats,’ Michael said.

‘What about champagne then?’

They were stumped for a moment, then Carrie grinned and shouted, ’Picking the grapes is cruel to the birds!’ and Charlie shouted with her.

By opening his mouth wide and using a lot of breath, he could make sounds like loud talking, as long as you didn’t want consonants.

Dad threw him a biscuit, which he caught back and sideways with a flick of his head.

‘Well fielded, sir!’

‘If the balls weren’t so hard,’ Michael said, ’he could play for England.’

Actually, Charlie was not much good at balls. If you threw one for him, he either looked the wrong way, or took it under a bush and demolished it. When he went with Carrie and Lester and Michael on a further Brookside reconnaissance at half term, a tennis ball came sailing over the garden hedge as they were riding at the edge of the field behind the house. Charlie pounced on it and ran into the bushes.

Michael got off his pony and crawled in after him. Charlie’s jaws were clamped round a brand new ball. Michael got it out by putting a finger inside and tickling the roof of his mouth. He stood up to throw the ball over the hedge, but it went behind his head into the field. After two more tries, he turned round and lobbed it backwards over the hedge and into the Brookside garden.

Crash - clatter - tinkle. Yells from beyond the hedge. Michael dropped to hands and knees and peered through.

‘Straight into a cold frame.’ He backed out of the hedge with the shoulder of his jacket half torn away. ’What did I tell you? Two broken windows always means a third.’

They went round to the back gate. A hefty boy and girl in shorts much too cold for this weather were jumping about on the tennis court waving racquets and shouting, ’Thanks for the ball!’