World's End in Winter (8 page)

‘How did you pay?’ Carrie asked.

‘My credit is good.’

‘Did you steal it?’

‘Would I?’

‘Yes. No.’ You never knew with Lester.

The Nurse was right when she said Mrs Agnew had left enough food for an army. They spent most of the evening eating. Priscilla stuffed veal and ham pie into her mouth and Charlie caught crumbs as they fell into her lap. Once, Michael thought she was going to laugh.

‘Go on. Laugh. Charlie’s funny.’

Michael laughed into her face, but she closed it and drew back.

‘She’s afraid.’

‘What of?’ Priscilla was withdrawn into her own world again.

‘Does she hear something?’

Brookside was not a bit haunted during the day, but as night dropped quickly down, it was different. Turning on lights only made the outside world grow darker.

A dog barked, and Charlie sat up and growled.

Michael said, ’I want to go home.’

‘Shut up.’ Lester was listening.

‘I want to go home,’ Michael repeated, and fell asleep,
exhausted from drowning. Carrie pushed him up the stairs, grumbling and yawning, and put him into Victor’s bed. He was too tired to realize he was not in his own room.

Lester wanted to sleep in the turret room.

‘Rather you than me.’ Carrie took Priscilla into the bed in Jane’s room. It was an odd feeling to share a bed with someone who didn’t kick and thresh about. When she had to share a bed with Em when they lived with Uncle Rudolf and Aunt Valentina, Em used to whirl like a top, drag off the blankets and kick Carrie on to the floor.

Priscilla lay so still that Carrie could not tell if she was asleep or awake.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘Yes,’ Priscilla whispered with her eyes shut.

Carrie dozed, and woke in a panic. Where was she? Who was in the bed? She put out a hand and felt a soft wool nightgown. Priscilla had been lying on her back with her legs straight. Now she was on her side, with her legs drawn up as if, in sleep, some power came to them.

Carrie could not sleep. She turned on the bedside lamp by whose light Jane Agnew read
Your Advantage: How to Win at Tennis, and Judy Barnard, Olympic Medallist.
She listened to the night. Silence sang in her ears. In a shadowed corner, a tree seemed to grow up through the room. She thought of daft Diller crashing through the spinney behind the dogs.

She wanted to wake Lester, because he was not afraid. But it was because he was not afraid that she could not wake him, and admit that she was.

She thought of all the food that was still in the big refrigerator in the kitchen. She got up, called Charlie to go ahead of her, and went downstairs. A lamp was lit in the drawing-room. On the sofa, under the blind eyes of the flat-topped marble ladies, Lester was sleeping, rolled up in an eiderdown.

A board creaked under Carrie’s bare foot, and he woke and sat up.

‘What’s the matter?’

’I’m hungry. You want something?’

‘A piece of that treacle tart. With cream.’

‘Did you come down because it was scary up there?’

‘No. But the room’s too girly. The bed’s too short. Yes ... it was scary. There’s a sort of - I don’t know. Not a noise, but a feeling. I felt there were trees. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘How can Priscilla sleep alone there?’

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

At breakfast on Sunday, Carrie said, ’Priscilla turned over in bed when she was asleep. Why does her mother say it’s hopeless?’

‘Her mother is a bag of old lard,’ Michael said, just as Mrs Agnew walked into the kitchen.

She was too upset to hear. ’What’s going on? What’s Priskie doing?’

Priscilla was eating treacle tart with her fingers and wiping them on the front of a ribboned party dress she had wanted to wear. As soon as she saw her mother, she put on that high baby wail. Mrs Agnew lifted her out of the chair and held her, patting her back while the child wailed and dribbled treacle tart down her back.

‘She can’t digest pastry.’

‘Last night she digested veal and ham pie.’ The others had been put off their food, but Michael went on eating cake.

‘What are you all doing here anyway? Where’s Mrs Fassett?’

‘In the hospital.’

‘What happened to her? Oh, I knew it. I knew something
was wrong. You see, Brian.’ Her husband had come into the kitchen in a sheepskin coat and Old Boys’ muffler. ’When I tried to ring up yesterday and the phone was out of order, I was right to say we must come back early.’

‘You were right, my dear’ (as if he was used to that). ’Here, give me Priskie.’ He put her down on the settee, where she sat like a dressed-up doll, her eyes gone blank. ’Where’s her chair?’

‘Outside,’ Carrie said.

Mrs Agnew recognized her. ’You kids again! Why did Mrs Fassett let you in? What did you do to her?
What have you done with Mrs Fassett?
⁹

‘She got run over?’ Lester said it like a question, to make it sound not so bad.

‘What by?’

‘A car. She ran into the road.’ ’Why?’

‘She heard a ghost.’

‘Oh rubbish, she’s a fool.’

‘It wasn’t her fault. The car was going too fast round the corner.’

‘I’ll sue the driver.’

‘He couldn’t see round that high bank.’

‘I’ll sue the Rural District Council. They’ve been promising to level it ever since we came. I know you too.’ She levelled her healthy blue eyes at Lester. ’You’re the errand boy from the grocery.’

‘Yes, Madam.’ Lester did not bother to disillusion her. ’You’re out of marge. May I deliver?’

‘You may go. All of you. You’ve made enough trouble.’

She didn’t know the half of it. They were not going to tell her about the drowning, but Mr Agnew called from the back door, ’What’s the wheelchair doing in the swimming pool?’

‘It fell in.’

‘With Bristler in it,’ Michael added honestly.

’Oh, my God.’

‘Michael fell in too,’ Carrie said.

’Was it his fault?’

His fault, his fault. Why did accidents always have to be someone’s
fault?

To rescue Michael, Lester said, ’He saved her life, as a matter of fact.’

Before Mrs Agnew could decide whether to be angry or grateful, Charlie came in from the back door, dripping wet from a morning’s stroll through the undergrowth.

‘Get that hideous brute out of here!’ When she raised her voice, Priscilla began to wail again. ’Priskie’s terrified of dogs.’

’She likes Charlie,’ Michael said. ’She likes Oliver too.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Michael’s pony,’ Carrie said. ’Well, I mean, he doesn’t
own
him. You can’t own an animal, you see, any more than you can
own
a human being, since the days of slavery. An animal may live with you, but - well, it’s like if you call a person “my friend”, it doesn’t mean you own them, because—’

Mr Agnew, coming in again from the back door, cut short her sermon.

‘What are those horses doing in the shed?’

‘Well, we were just going to tell you...’

‘I won’t have horses here,’ Mrs Agnew said in horror. ’Priskie is terrified of horses.’

‘She rode Oliver.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘She liked it. It did her good.’

‘Oh, rubbish,’ Mrs Agnew said impatiently. ’It’s no use.’

Priskie’s given up,
Victor had said. But it was the mother who had given up, not the child.

‘It was an adventure,’ Carrie said. ’She went down the track and saw the ducks in the pond and splashed through a puddle and went up the hill through those pine trees and saw that view on the other side. She couldn’t go there in a wheelchair.’

‘She won’t go anywhere in that one,’ Mr Agnew said. ’It’s ruined.’

I’ll buy you another,’ Michael offered, without hope. ’I ought to make you.’

‘Brian.’ His wife grabbed his arm. ’Priskie was in the pool. The little boy saved her life.’

‘Did he, by Jove? Well now.’ He rubbed his large chin, which was already beginning to bristle again after a morning shave. ’Well now. That was very fine.’ He put his hand inside his coat and brought out his wallet.

‘I don’t want money,’ Michael said, perhaps for the first time since they had come to live at World’s End and never had enough. ’If you’ll just let me come back sometime and play with Bristler.’

‘You could knock me down.’ Mr Agnew stared at Michael, then slowly put his wallet back in his pocket. ’You could knock me down with a shuttlecock. I never heard a small boy refuse money before. Good chap, good chap.’ He slapped Michael so hard across the shoulders that he choked, and brought up the last drops of yesterday’s swimming pool water. ’All right then, you may come and play with Priskie.’

‘But don’t bring that horse.’ Mrs Agnew had to get in her two pennyworth.

Michael was just in time to get Miss Cordelia Chattaway to church. Carrie led Oliver home for him, and he puffed into Miss Chattaway’s cottage and found her sitting ready in the old-fashioned Bath chair, with her velvet winter hat and her gloves and her little white boots side by side like sugar mice on the footrest.

‘Good morrow, Sir Michael. Hast come to squire thy lady to the tourney?’ She was a bit dotty, but she did love going to church.

So did Charlie. It was cool on the old stones in there for a dog who was always too hot indoors. He trotted by the chair into the village and down the lane where a straggle of cars and walkers were headed for the church, which was a hundred times too big for the number of people who went there.

So why shouldn’t Charlie go in and sit with Miss Cordelia and Michael? He was shouldering in, with his shaggy hair bouncing, but the verger stopped him in the porch.

‘Out,’ he said.

‘But, King—’ Michael stopped the chair to argue in a whisper under the fine swelling surge of the organ.

‘Yes, I know. King Charles carried his spaniel to church service, so ever since, they’ve been allowed in. My eyes may not be what they were, but that dog is not a King Charles Spaniel. Out.’

Charlie lay down to wait by the grave of Martin Arbuckle. Farmer of this Parish.
’As ye sow, so shall ye reap’

Michael pushed Miss Chattaway to the pew under the pulpit where she could nod and smile at the vicar, even though she couldn’t hear the sermon. She rode happily up the aisle, nodding right and left to empty pews. She did not mind the chair. At the end of her life, she was glad of the rest. But Priscilla’s life had not even properly begun.

When the horses were fed and turned out to join lonely braying Leonora, and Lester had gone home to get his hide tanned, Carrie went to the house.

She couldn’t get in. The windows were shut. All the doors were locked. The ram and the goat were still in the shed, bumping their heads against the door. The chickens were still in the hen house, grumbling about late food service. Several dogs were inside the house, barking. Pip, the orange cat, was sitting in the side window with her tail curled round a flower pot and her whiskers spread against the glass.

’Where is everybody?’ Carrie knew this window. Once when Lester had whistled under her bedroom to come down and watch rabbits dance on the moonlit hill, her father had locked up before she got back. From the tool shed, she got the old knife with which her mother pried out weeds round the front steps, and slipped the thin blade under the window catch. Pip moved just in time as the catch gave and the window swung inwards, knocking the flower pot on to the floor.

Carrie stood on the bottom of a bucket and heaved herself through the small window.

‘Tom! Liza! Where is everybody?’ They must be sleeping late. She let the dogs out, mopped up a puppy puddle, fed the hamster, gave milk to a nursing mother cat, and went upstairs.

Tom’s room was empty, the bed unslept in. Liza’s room was empty, the bed unmade, but then it always was. Her old dog Dusty, asleep on the rumpled blankets, lifted his moulting head to identify Carrie with a rheumy eye, then went to sleep again.

Carrie went down the passage and up the little crooked stairway to the small room which had once been a linen cupboard and was now Em’s room. The door was shut. Carrie went in.

‘I’ve told you not to come into my room without knocking.’

The middle shelf had been taken out, to make a bed with a mattress on the wide bottom shelf. In this boxed-in space, Em was sitting with a pile of papers on her knees. She jumped up and shoved the papers under the mattress, though Carrie was not remotely interested in them.

‘Where is everybody?’

‘Mum and Dad went to the coast. Liza went off yesterday and never came back. Tom went to look for her and never came back. Please get out of my room.’ Em hated people in her room as much as a hibernating dormouse.

‘Did Mr Mismo tell you where we were?’

‘Sort of.’

’We stayed at Brookside to look after Priscilla. Were you alone all night?’

‘Oh, I didn’t mind,’ Em said casually, although she had locked all the doors and windows and dragged a high-backed bench across the side door of what had been the ’Snug’ behind the bar when World’s End was an inn.

‘Why didn’t you feed the chickens, or Henry and Lucy, or poor Mother Hubbard, who’s feeding seven, or—’

‘Why do you always find fault?’

Tom came back late that evening with Alec Harvey, the vet. He had searched everywhere Liza might have gone, and had wandered half the day in the local town, since she had started life as a city girl. Finally he had gone to the housing estates at Newtown to see if Mr Harvey knew anything.

All Mr Harvey knew was that Liza had been getting more careless and clumsy, rude to touchy customers with pampered lapdogs, muddling telephone messages and even medicines, mixing up labels on the cat cages and the kennels, and finally starting a big shouting match with him, telling him he could keep his rotten job, and walking out.

‘With my spare set of keys in her pocket. And I hate to say this, Tom,’ he had admitted, ’but after she’d gone, I found I’d lost more than my keys.’

‘Not money. Liza wouldn’t take money.’

‘How do you know? In the kind of life she’s lived, brought up on the streets, having to fight for anything she got, if you see money, you take it. And disappear.’