World's End in Winter (6 page)

You threaded string through the top, with long ends to hang it far enough from a branch to be safe from cats, wrapped it in red cellophane, tied it with a bow made from a bright piece in the rag bag, and Lo, you had a Christmas gift you could sell house-to-house and make almost a hundred per cent profit.

While they were knotting nets round the cans, Miss Etty sat with a bird in her hair and another on her huge thumb pulling ends of string out of her fist. A bird called outside and Theo the thrush in her hair lifted his head and answered, ’Cheerily, cheerily.’

Em said, ’He’s saying, “This room is mine.”’

’The other one’s saying. “Then stay out of my tree,”’ Carrie said.

‘He’s calling “Danger from cats,”’ Michael said. ’I saw Caesar following us in the long grass.’

‘He’s saying, “I’m Lester Figg, trying to sound like a robin.”’ Miss Etty found some cake in the pocket of a tooth and chumped her comfortable dewlaps. ’He can fool Theo, but he doesn’t fool me.’

‘How did you know we were here?’ Carrie opened the wide back door. Lester wasn’t there.

‘I am the All-seeing Eye.’ He was in the branches of the tree where it grew out of the roof.

‘You asked at my house.’

‘I haven’t been there.’ He jumped down. ’I’ve been at Brookside. Keeping watch.’

When there was an interesting situation, Lester kept watch silently, like an Indian. Most of what he knew he had learned by watching and listening. He had once overheard three men behind a hoarding plotting to rob a bank. Instead of telling the police or the bank manager, he had hidden in a dustbin all one freezing night and got pneumonia. But the bank was not robbed, which proved either that he had foiled the three men, or imagined them.

‘How’s Bristler?’ Michael tightened the last knot with his teeth and drew out the soup tin.

‘Abandoned.’

‘To her fate?’ Michael leaned across the table with his eyes bulging and his jaw open. The sparrow who was pecking at the string flew on to his shoulder and very delicately picked a lardy cake crumb from the corner of his mouth.

‘Not quite. She’s been left with a keeper. The Agnews have gone to Old Boys’ weekend at Victor’s school. Mr Agnew is playing rugger for the Old Boys.’

‘He would,’ Carrie said.

‘Don’t be narrow,’ Miss Etty said sharply. ’Everyone can’t have your advantages. Have you heard the ghost yet?’ she asked Lester.

‘We’ve heard ... things.’

’A baby?’ Her shrewd black eyes looked at him sideways over the hills of her cheeks.

‘Perhaps.’ Miss Etty loved mysteries, so he didn’t tell her it could have been Priscilla.

‘The poor little baby ... yes ... yes ...’ Miss Etty nodded, as if she were remembering. ’A hundred years ago or more, it must have been. My grandmother told me. Our family used to live in that village, you know, in the mill cottage, until the damp of the stream got to my grandmother. Then my mother. I was the first one had the sense to move.’

‘What did your grandmother tell you?’ They had stopped working to watch her. Theo went to sleep in her hair. Lester picked up the crippled crow and perched on the table round the tree trunk, stroking him with one finger.

‘Long, long ago, it was. Long before Brookside was built. They didn’t know about old Diller, or they’d never have built that fancy house there where the spinney used to be.’

‘Who was old Diller?’ Michael hardly dared ask it. He loved horror stories and dreaded them at the same time.

‘He was a batty old character, had to do everything different from other people. In those days, it was horses and carts, but Diller had three big dogs and he harnessed them to a home-made wagon. Three abreast, the dogs used to dash him along the highway. Horses would shy and coachmen used to give him the horn. Daft Diller, they called him. At the inns, they wouldn’t serve him, or feed the dogs.’

‘Poor Diller,’ Em said.

‘Even his wife had deserted him. Jealous of the dogs, so the story goes. But there was one thing old Diller wanted in life, and that was a child. A child who would remember him, and look after his dogs when he was gone.

‘There was a woman had a baby and she didn’t want it, which is one of the worst things that can happen to a baby, so don’t try it next time you’re born. She used to keep it in the wash house because she couldn’t stand it crying, and one night, daft Diller stole it away, all bundled up and
probably crying to raise the dead, but the mother snored on with her nightcap over her ears.

‘Diller put it into the cart with him, gave his team the order and away they went. They were coming across the fields there, back of where Brookside is now, heading for the only bridge there was in those days, to cross the stream. There must have been a rabbit ran into the spinney, because those big dogs went after it, dashing old Diller and his wagon and his baby in among the trees.’

Miss Etty paused, heaving and wheezing.

‘Go on.’

But she could only flap a pudgy hand at Michael, trying to get her breath. Em went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of vinegar which she held under Miss Etty’s nose, and she sniffed it mightily.

‘Thank you.’ Her chest stopped heaving. Her wobbling cheeks and chins grew still. Her eyes cleared. Theo, who had been roving restlessly in her hair during the commotion, settled down again.

‘It was the crying of the baby that led them to find him. Daft Diller was dead, his skull bashed against a tree. One of his dogs was dead too, choked itself trying to struggle free of the harness. The other two had bitten through the leather straps and gone. The baby was lying bundled up among the splinters of the wagon.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘No one knew. The only thing they did know was that sometimes after that, people going by the spinney would hear a wailing. They began to cut down the trees to try and put a stop to it. But one of the woodmen heard the barking of dogs. Dogs that weren’t there. And the other - the other, when he struck his axe into a young tree, it sobbed like an infant. They ran, both of them.’

‘So would I.’

‘It wasn’t till many years afterwards when the land was sold and that house Brookside was to be built, that the trees were cut down by machinery saws, too loud to hear the baby or the dogs.’

’We heard them’

‘I told you.’ Miss Etty nodded at Lester. ’I told you, didn’t I? You can change the scenery all you want, build a house, tear down a monastery, to the dead it stays the same. There’s a house in Rutland where they raised the floor to put in heating pipes, and the ghost of the grey lady walks through on her knees, because she’s walking where the old floor was.’

‘When we were in the turret room ...’ Carrie remembered how Lester had listened to the wind. ’But we thought it was dogs barking.’

’We thought it was Bristler crying,’ Michael said.

‘There’s some people hear ghosts,’ Miss Etty said, ’and some that don’t.’

There was no question where they should go on Saturday.

It was an unexpectedly warm day - hooray for Mr Agnew and his Old Boys’ rugger - so they would ride over to Brookside, and take halters to tie up the horses.

‘Why don’t you go in the trap so I can come?’ Em asked.

‘Why don’t you ride Leonora?’

‘She goes in circles, Carrie, you know she does.’

‘Only because you don’t know how to ride donkeys. Why don’t you learn to ride properly?’

‘Why should I? Lester doesn’t.’

‘Lester rides by instinct.’ Carrie had given up trying to teach him the correct way. And if you rode Peter in a saddle and bridle, collected, using the aids of hands and legs, his old bad experiences came back to him and he went berserk.

‘Ride Old Red then,’ Carrie suggested.

Old Red was the clanking conglomeration of crimson-painted iron on which Liza rode to catch the bus every morning. It was so old, it still had a net skirt-guard on the back wheel from the days when ladies wore long skirts. Now that they did again, Liza rode the bicycle in her long hooded maxi-coat over her blue jeans, pedalling into the misted morning beechwoods like a witch.

‘Liza’s gone off on the bike,’ Em said. ’She’s got a boyfriend.’

‘She hasn’t.’ Liza was so rude to boys, she never had a boyfriend. She had promised to marry Michael.

‘When I asked her where she was going, she yelled at me to mind my own business,’ Em said. ’So it must be a boy. I don’t want to come anyway,’ she added, since Carrie and Lester didn’t want her. They only took Michael because he was part of the riding thing.

She sat by the stove and unravelled a scarf to make knitting wool. When her father, coming in for coffee with a pencil stuck through his beard, asked, ’Why didn’t you go out with the others on this good day?’ she said, ’I didn’t want to.’

Priscilla was in the garden in her chair on the summerhouse step, staring listlessly at the cold blue wàter of the swimming pool.

Her keeper, a middle-aged woman in the hat and dark blue uniform of a District Nurse, sat on a bench nearby, reading a book with gloves on.

Carrie, Lester and Michael came through the back gate.

‘Who are you?’ The nurse looked up, narrowing her eyes shortsightedly over a thin red nose and chapped lips.

‘We’re friends of the family.’ Boldness was best.

‘We heard they were away,’ Michael said, ’so we came to keep Bristler company.’

‘Priscilla?’ The nurse frowned and glanced towards the child in the wheelchair.

‘I’ll push her round the garden a bit. Give her a change of scene.’

Michael started towards Priscilla, but the nurse reached forward and grabbed him. ’No one is to bother her. I’ve had strict orders.’

‘She’s lonely.’ Michael sat on the bench and swung his feet.

‘I daresay she is, poor little soul, but that’s what her mother wants, and I’m paid to follow orders, not think for myself.’

She must be very limited as a nurse. What would she do alone with a life-or-death patient, and no one there to do the thinking?

Lester sat down on the other side of her. ’Why don’t you go in out of the cold? We’ll watch Priscilla.’ ’I’m to stay with her.’

‘Let’s take her into the house then. I’ll wheel her.’ Lester was dying to get back into the turret room.

‘She’s to stay outside for exactly two hours.’ The nurse pushed back her glove to look at her watch. ’Another forty minutes.’

Michael tried again. ’She’s tired of looking at all that ugly cold water.’

‘A swimming pool is nice,’ the nurse said vaguely.

‘If you can swim in it. Drusilla can’t. I can’t either. I nearly drowned once,’ Michael began chattily, but the nurse was picking chapped skin off her lips, not interested.

It was Carrie’s turn to try. ’Coming through the village,’ she said, T heard people saying there was a woman going to have a baby. We could stay with Priscilla if you want to go and check.’

‘Nurse Duggan will be sent for. I’m retired now, you see.’ The sun travelled cheerfully out of a cloud and when she looked up at it, they saw that her cold dry skin was cracked into elderly lines. ’I still wear the uniform though. It makes me feel more workmanlike.’

‘Doesn’t it make Priscilla feel like a patient?’ Lester asked.

‘Well, she is a patient, isn’t she?’ The nurse had shut the book, quite glad of a chance to talk instead of read.

’But perhaps she just feels like an ordinary child.’

’How can she?’ She turned her head to Michael. ’She’s handicapped.’

The nurse spoke quite loudly, and when Carrie, Lester and Michael looked to see if Priscilla had heard, she said, ’Oh, don’t worry. She’s quite retarded too, I think.’

‘What’s that mean?’

She looked at Michael and tapped her forehead. ’Why?’Lester asked.

‘She hardly speaks.’ The nurse had to keep swivelling from Michael to Lester and back again. ’Or takes notice of you. Then the infantile way she cries. I heard her last night, but when I went to her room, there was nothing wrong.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t her crying,’
Lester said softly.

‘What do you mean?’ The nurse looked behind her, as if her spine had just crept away. ’There’s no one else in the house.’

‘Except the ghost.’

‘Ghost, what ghost?’ She fidgeted. ’Don’t be ridiculous, there’s no such thing as ghosts.’ She suddenly let out a small shriek, as if she had seen one. ’Get away from there, you brute!’

Charlie had finished blazing the trail of a lifted leg all over the Agnews’ garden, and wandered over to investigate Priscilla. He was usually shy of new people, but he put his rough head on the rug that covered her knees. Slowly and jerkily, she brought a hand out from under the rug and buried it in his long hair. He sat down and leaned against the chair.

‘You see,’ Carrie said. ’It’s all right.’

‘The Agnews don’t like animals.’

‘Oh well, Charlie doesn’t mind.’

Lester began to tell the nurse the story of old Diller: ’Daft Diller they called him, and he stole this woman’s baby.’ But she opened her book again and said, ’Don’t bother me.’

‘The baby has been heard,’ Lester said. ’And the barking of the dogs too.’

As if he heard them, Charlie stood up and lifted his tufted ears square to his head. His tail was curled on to his back in the mongrel giveaway that would have sent his golden retriever father into sixty fits.

‘What do you hear? Seek!’ Carrie hissed at him. He would chase off anywhere if you excited him, even if there was nothing there. He ran a few yards, bounced stiffly on the spot, looked back at Carrie.

‘Seek!’

He barked sharply and ran off round the side of the house.

Priscilla watched him go without surprise or regret, as if she was used to being left behind.

‘What did he hear?’ the nurse asked uneasily.

‘Diller’s dogs,’ Lester said.

‘Do you really believe that story?’

‘Everybody does.’

‘I’ve not been long in these parts. I didn’t know. Last night... Oh, my God, I wonder. I wonder if I heard...’ She shut the book and got up. ’If it wasn’t for that poor helpless child, I’d not stay another night under this roof. As it is, I’m going to phone my sister and get her over to stay the night with me. Mrs Agnew’s veal and ham pie will do for the two of us. She left me enough for an army.’