World's End in Winter (7 page)

She went along the path and up the step to the summer-house, where she bent over Priscilla and talked loudly.

‘You stay there’ (as if she could do anything else) ’and I’ll be back in a jiffy.’

She went into the house and was out again quite soon. ’The phone’s out of order,’ she called from the terrace. ’Oh dear. Now I
know
I can’t stay alone. Watch Priscilla a minute, there’s good children, while I run down the road to the call box outside the Lord Nelson. Oh dear.’

Carrie went with her to the front of the house, because they were going to take Priscilla to the horses as soon as she was safely out of the gate.

When she was on the drive, there was an unearthly noise
of Charlie being chased by two or three dogs on the other side of the hedge. He was barking shrilly. They were baying after him in a pack.

‘The dogs!’ With a yelp of fear, the nurse jammed on her hat with one hand and scuttled out into the road, where she was hit by a car coming round the corner.

Carrie saw it and heard it. She shouted for Lester, and ran out to the road.

The nurse was lying in front of the car. Carrie didn’t want to look. She had never seen a dead body.

The driver was out of the car and kneeling beside the nurse. She rolled over and said, ’Oh, my God,’ so Carrie went closer and looked.

Her chill red face was redder still with grazes oozing blood. Her hat was off and her grey hair was lying about in wisps and strands. She lay on her back, staring at Carrie and the driver with one eye open and one swollen shut, murmuring, ’Oh, my God, my God, my God.’

‘Are you all right?’ The driver was a youngish man, with a dark suit and a row of pens in his breast pocket. ’Are you all right?’ He bent his head and shouted, as if the accident had knocked the nurse silly, as perhaps it had.

‘All right. Help me up.’

‘You’re not supposed to touch an injured person.’ Carrie had been in the Guides for a term before they threw her out for having the wrong spirit. But he took hold of the nurse’s arm and pulled her up to sit against the bumper of the car, rolling her eyes.

‘What happened?’ Lester ran out of the white gate and across the stream. He had grabbed a towel on the way, and
he squatted and began to dab carefully at the nurse’s poor grazed face.

The driver stood up. ‘Fool woman.’ Now that he saw she was all right, he was beginning to be quite cross which was not fair, since it was partly his fault for going too fast round a blind corner. ’She ran right out. Right in front of me.’

‘She was frightened,’ Lester said.

‘What of?’ the driver asked the nurse, but she shook her head. She could not remember. She closed her eyes and began to pass out, so Lester and Carrie and the driver got her up and into the front seat of the car.

‘Who is she?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘I’d better take her to the hospital,’ the driver said.

‘To the hospital...’ The nurse seemed to have forgotten about Priscilla.

‘We’ll send flowers.’

‘You do that.’ The driver got into the car and took the nurse away.

Lester and Carrie ran back to the house. If they had not run, if they had walked up the drive discussing whether it was their fault, Priscilla would have drowned, and perhaps Michael too.

As they came through the hall into the drawing-room, they heard him scream. The summerhouse step was empty. For a moment as they dashed out, they could not see Priscilla, and then they saw that she and Michael were in the swimming pool.

Priscilla was thrashing weakly with her arms, her white face appearing and disappearing in the churning water. Michael was going under, and coming up to scream and choke, and going under again in terror.

Lester seemed to jump right from the terrace into the pool. Carrie fell off the terrace, tumbled across the grass and dropped by the edge of the water, clutching for Michael’s clothes. The back of his jacket floated up on an air bubble. She grabbed it and pulled. He was heavily waterlogged. Somehow she managed to drag him to the side and
get his hands on the rail. Frozen, they slipped off. She grabbed his wrists and hung on. His face was a bluish white. He stared at Carrie with eyes that had seen death.

Wriggling backwards, she managed to haul him up over the side, and he fell on to the grass, coughing and heaving up gallons of water.

Lester was still in the pool. He had one arm round Priscilla, and with the other hand was clinging to the wheelchair, which was bobbing upside down on the water.

‘Help me!’

Under the diving board was a long pole with a net used for skimming leaves. Carrie thrust it out. Lester let go of the chair and grabbed it, and she was able to pull him to the side.

They got Priscilla out. Her long hair was streaked round her small peaked face. She was shaken with shivering and the chattering of her teeth, the skin shrunk away from her jaw like a skull.

‘Your jacket.’ Lester was shivering too, and gasping. He could hardly speak. He put Carrie’s jacket round Priscilla and sat on the ground and hugged her, trying to get her warm. ’Get blankets.’

Michael was staggering on his feet now, still coughing, his hair and clothes soaked and clinging.

‘Keep moving,’ Carrie called to him. ’Run, jump.’

Michael tried to jump up and down in his squelching boots. He fell and began to cry. But Charlie had come back through the hedge. As Carrie ran into the house, she saw him leap at Michael and the little boy flung his arms round his thick coat and buried his head in the warm tangled hair and clung there, sobbing and shaking.

Carrie tore blankets off the beds in the first room upstairs, and wrapped them round Michael and Priscilla. Wearing his blanket like a Bedouin, Lester picked up the cocoon of Priscilla and carried her to the house. Carrie picked up Michael, but he was too heavy. He struggled and she put him down. He brought up a bit more water, then
went with her into the house, trailing Mrs Agnew’s pink blanket.

Carrie had to cut his red rubber boots off his wet feet. ’My boots!’ Liza had bought them for him at the Jumble Sale.

Carrie hacked them off with a bread knife, and more water fell out of them on the kitchen floor.

Priscilla had not cried or made a sound the whole time. Lester had managed to pull off her fur boots, and she sat on the padded kitchen bench wrapped like a squaw, her wasted legs stuck out in front of her and her pale face solemn.

Tented in his blanket, Lester crouched in front of her and rubbed the narrow feet, which looked like pieces of white wood. Carrie rubbed Michael’s feet fiercely with a towel, until colour began to come back into them.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m all right, Carrie,’ he said hoarsely.

He got down from the chair and went to stand in front of Priscilla. The child looked at him, really looked for the first time. He grinned. She smiled.

‘How did she fall into the pool?’ Lester asked.

‘The chair started rolling.’

‘Did you move her off the step?’

Michael paused, then he gave a water hiccup. ’Yes. It got away from me.’

The kitchen was a comfortable warm room. Carrie opened tins of soup, and while it was heating, she went upstairs and found some things in Victor’s room that Lester and Michael could wear, and dry clothes for Priscilla.

Victor’s room had pictures of sports teams and bold prints of racing cars on the curtains and counterpane. On one wall hung an oar and a ski and an ice hockey stick and a squash racquet, all labelled with dates of famous victories.

Jane’s room had more team pictures, and shelves of silver cups and trophies. Priscilla’s room
was
in the turret. The round room was frilly pink and white, with juvenile
pictures and cuddly dolls and animals, too young for her, as if she had not been given anything since the accident. By the curved window was a small chintz armchair with a footstool, where she could sit like a little old lady and look at the tops of the shrubbery trees and roofs of the houses in the village where the world began.

A pink and white prison, with frills and chintz and a rug woven with tumbling teddy bears. It was only as she went downstairs that Carrie remembered it was the spooky room, and wondered if she ought to have felt scared.

They changed their clothes in the kitchen, so as not to get another room wet. Carrie dressed Priscilla. It was a strange feeling, like dressing a big doll. She would let you do anything, but would not do anything for herself.

She sat at the table, with the bowl of soup steaming in front of her, and her hands in her lap.

‘Eat your soup.’

She put on a spoiled whine. ’I don’t want it.’

Opposite her, Michael picked up a spoonful of soup, opened his mouth like a cavern and plunged in the spoon, clacking it with his teeth.

‘Yum, Bristler. Just what the doctor ordered for drownding.’

Priscilla stared at him, and presently the tip of her tongue came out and she licked her pale lips. Her hand crept out of her lap, picked up the spoon and dipped it into the soup. She began to eat, holding the spoon in her fist like a young child, staring at Michael.

She was a bit older than him, but she seemed much younger.

When Carrie had moved the horses to fresh patches of grass, she went down the road to the telephone box outside the Lord Nelson.

There was no telephone at World’s End, so she rang Mr Mismo.

‘Who’s that? What? What’s up?’ He always shouted into the telephone, as if it was an instrument used only for crisis.

‘Could you please tell my mother that Michael and I are staying the night with friends? Say it’s an emergency and they need us. She’ll understand that.’

‘No doubt she would, old chump, if she was there, but she’s gone away with the Captain.’ That was what he called Carrie’s father. ’The Captain took a fit to go and look at his boat, and your Ma stopped by to tell the wife she wouldn’t be going to the Bring and Buy Sale. Neither bring nor buy.’

‘Will you tell Tom or Liza then?’

‘I might.’ Mr Mismo was eating. She could hear it through the telephone.

‘I’m sorry if I got you up from lunch. But will you?’

‘What makes you think they worry where you are?’ Mr Mismo said triumphantly and rang off.

Carrie rang Lester’s Mother, Mrs Figg, who was working today.

‘Mount Pleasant, Matron speaking,’ she began Mount Pleasantly, but when Carrie started to explain, she said, ’You tell that boy to get on home if he doesn’t want a tanning.’

Carrie begged. ’Just one night. It’s very important.’

From the other end of the line came the howl and thud and clatter of someone fighting on the stairs.

‘All right, he can stay,’ Mrs Figg said hurriedly. ’But I’ll tan his hide when he does get back.’

She never laid a finger on Lester, nor did her mild husband, but she threatened him with fates.

‘She’ll tan your hide tomorrow,’ Carrie reported to Lester. ’I hope it’s worth it.’

‘To spend the night at Brookside?’ He grinned at her. It was an adventure. Most people only realize they have had an adventure after its over. With Lester, you were always aware of living an adventure while it was going on.

The sun was out all afternoon, so they put jerseys on Priscilla and three pairs of socks to fill up an oversize pair of boots which must be Jane’s, and pushed her in a wheelbarrow to where the horses were grazing.

The wheelchair was still floating upside down in the pool like an abandoned paddle-wheel steamer.

‘She hates it.’ Michael spat into the blue water as they went by.

’It gets her about.’

‘Pushed in front. I remember when I’d had that operation on my leg, I hated being pushed in front of people. Into a shop, everyone staring. Off the kerb into the traffic. If I had Bristler,’ Michael said, ’I’d pull her behind me and let her see where’s she’s been.’

Lester pushed Priscilla up to each horse in turn, and she stroked them and smiled and seemed content.

‘Want to ride?’ Michael asked.

‘No Mike, she can’t,’ Carrie said.

‘Why not? She can sit, can’t she? Want to ride Oliver Twist?’

‘Yes.’ Priscilla clenched her teeth. She gripped the sides of the wheelbarrow as if she could jump out.

Michael put the bridle on his pony and held him tightly while Lester and Carrie, standing on a bank, managed to lift Priscilla to sit in the saddle. She was afraid and excited at the same time, but as Michael led Oliver slowly forward down the grass track, with Carrie and Lester holding her knees on each side, the excitement was outweighing the fear. They had put her hands on the reins. Stiffly at first, but then she bent her fingers and flexed her wrists and lifted
the reins to hold them in the right position. Her legs hung awkwardly, with the toes down. When they tried to put her feet in the stirrups, there was no strength in them, and they slipped out.

Her head usually sagged sadly on one side, as if life was not worth confronting. But now her head was up and straight. Her eyes looked at the place where the pony’s thick mane flopped between his ears. They took her round a muddy pond and through some pine trees to the edge of a slope, where she stared and stared at a pattern of fields and hedges and smoking cottage chimneys she had never seen before. As they turned and walked back towards the other horses, and Oliver whinnied as if he had been away for hours, something almost like a grin lifted her face.

But when Lester reached up to get her back into the wheelbarrow, the grin fell back to desolation and she put on that high baby wailing they had heard when her mother had snatched her away from the back gate.

’You can ride tomorrow.’

Priscilla wailed on. She was so babyish and spoiled. Somehow her mother had managed to give in to her, without actually giving her anything.

At the bottom of the garden was a building which had once been a stable. It now housed a lawnmower and roller and a clutter of toboggans, skis, skin-diving equipment, wheelbarrows, tools. They moved it all out and put the horses inside, Peter and John in one loose box and Oliver in a stall.

At dusk, Lester walked through the village to a house where there was a pony, and came back with a small sack of horse nuts on his back.