Summer at World's End (8 page)

‘Come to tea at the weekend. She’d love to see you.’ Now that
was
a lie.

‘I’d be delighted.’ So was that.

There was no telephone at World’s End. Before the end of the week, Arthur, the boy who helped the old lady in the sweet shop post office, sped down the lane on his sleek racing-bicycle, which was like a greyhound compared to lumbering Old Red. He banged the horseshoe knocker as hard as he could, although several people were outside the house, and he could see them.

‘No need to knock the house down.’ Mother got up from the flower bed where she was planting some nasturtiums and china blue asters to see them through the summer.

‘Urgent telegram.’

‘How do you know it’s urgent?’ Everyone knew that Arthur read everything that came in and out of the post
office. Bessie Munce, the postmistress, steamed open letters over the ketde in her back parlour, and read all the postcards from people on holiday. Sometimes they added a message at the bottom of the card: ‘Hullo, Bessie’, because they knew she would see it.

‘Because it says, “Urgent and confidential. Report for duty at once”.’ Arthur knew that everyone knew he knew. If Bessie Munce sealed down the telegram envelope with her mauve tongue, Arthur would stop on the way and work it open with a special paper knife he carried for the purpose.

‘It’s from Dad!’

Mother’s shout brought everybody running. Carrie from the stable. Michael from up a tree. Em from the hammock, with a book and a kitten. Any communication from their father was a rare and wonderful event.

‘“URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL.’” Mother read it out, her hands earthy, her slacks torn at the knee, grass and twigs in her hair. She could not do gardening, or anything else, without getting in a mess.

‘“URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL. THE LADY ALICE IS READY TO SAIL ON A SHORT TRIAL CRUISE STOP CREW IS ORDERED TO REPORT FOR DUTY AT ONCE STOP WITH LOVE FROM THE CAPTAIN.’”

‘I’d like to show him how to write a telegram,’ Arthur said. ‘He doesn’t want to waste money putting in all those extra words.’

‘Money is no object. Em gave him one of her looks, with a monkey jaw and narrowed blue eyes.

‘I’ll have to go.’ Mother looked round at them, half pleased at being needed on the boat, half worried about being needed here too. ‘Do you mind, my dears?’

‘Of course not.’ Carrie had not told her yet about Miss
McDrane, because it would have spoiled her week, fussing and worrying and saying, ‘I wish we didn’t have to have that woman to tea - will she expect cake?’

Arthur looked from one to the other of the family, his ears pricked to be able to report the conversation back to Bessie Munce at headquarters.

‘Want me to draft you out a reply?’ He whipped a pad of telegram forms out of his jacket pocket, took pencil from behind his ear and licked the point. He was a sharp boy, who would go far in the post office.

While he was composing a message for Mother, Michael took Carrie behind the corner of the house.

‘Shouldn’t we tell her about Miss McDrane coming to tea?’ he asked, too loud.

‘No.’ Carrie put her hand over his mouth and pulled him into the ivy at the angle of the chimney. ‘Because then she might not go. She doesn’t really want to anyway.’

‘She told Dad she did. Your hand smells of horse.’

‘Lucky you. They don’t always mean what they say, you know.’

‘Mm.’ Michael considered that. ‘Would marriage be easier if they did, or more difficult?’

‘I don’t know. We might find out one day.’

‘Would you marry me, Carrie?’ Michael proposed charmingly.

‘Any day.’

‘Before Sunday?
That
would give Miss McGutter something to run down her drainpipe. What are we going to do? If she finds us here alone, she might send down the Nutshell again, and then we’re sunk.’

The Nutshell was a Social Worker called Miss Nutti-shall, who had once threatened - as grown-ups sometimes do when they see a good thing going - to put a stop to their wonderful life, alone here with the animals.

‘We’ll ask Mrs Figg to come.’ Mrs Figg, Lester’s mother, had helped them before, cleaning up the house before the Dreaded Nutshell came. They would have her at World’s End on Sunday, motherly in her rose-patterned overall at the stove, broad in the beam, flour to the elbows, Carrie could see it now, even smell the baking scones.

Their mother left them that evening after Tom came home, waving out of the back window of Mr Peasly’s loose-sprung taxi, her bell of fair hair bouncing over the ruts.

Lester went for a ride on Peter. Carrie was sitting in the high open doorway of the hay loft over the barn, waiting for him to come back, her eyes closed against the evening sun, when she heard a car stop in the lane.

She stood up and looked down. It was Mrs Figg’s little blue car with a plastic flower on top of the aerial. Carrie went down the loft steps, through the ancient litter and dust and mealy smells of the barn, and out to the car.

Mrs Figg had a girl with her. It was Liza, the girl at Mount Pleasant, who had climbed over the wall and held John while Carrie talked to Lester in the boiler room of the greenhouse.

‘Hullo.’ She grinned sourly at Carrie. She was wearing a skirt. Her dark red hair was brushed back. She had a lot of pale lipstick and an enormous amount of eye make-up.

‘Where are you going?’ Carrie bent her knees to talk through the window of the small car. ‘To a party?’

‘It’s to annoy my mum.’ Liza blinked her loaded lashes at Carrie. ‘She says I make myself look cheap.’

‘Now that’s enough, Liza. You know your mother thinks the world of you,’ Mrs Figg said comfortably. ‘Liza is going home,’ she told Carrie.

‘Oh-I’m glad.’

Liza made a face.

‘We’re early for the train, so I thought I’d drive by and pick up that boy of mine,’ Mrs Figg said. She didn’t have to ask, ‘Is he here?’ He almost always was.

She and Liza sat on the ricketty bench outside the house, where the old men had once sat and talked country gossip over mugs of beer in the old days when this was Wood’s End Inn. Carrie tried to think of the right way to ask Mrs Figg about tea on Sunday.

Tom came out and sat on the grass near Liza. He talked about his job with the vet, and about some of the things he and Alec Harvey had done.

He used to say, ‘Mr Harvey repaired a fractured femur’, or, ‘Mr Harvey spotted the trouble and saved the cat.’ Now it was, ‘Mr Harvey and I had to operate’, or, ‘Mr Harvey and I gave the old dog a few more years of life.’

‘I’ve got an old dog at home,’ Liza said. ‘He’s the only reason I want to go back.’

‘Oh come along now Liza,’ began Mrs Figg in her comfortable, Mount Pleasant matron voice. ‘You know that’s — ‘

But Liza paid no attention. ‘Can you imagine anyone who likes Mount Putrid better than home?’ she asked Tom. ‘That’s what mine’s like.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. He sat with his long arms round his bony knees. He and Liza looked at each other sadly.

Cantering along the grass verge of the road, like a loose-sitting cowboy in a Western film, came …

‘What is that?’ Mrs Figg stood up.

‘It’s Lester. Your son,’ Carrie added helpfully.

‘But what’s that thing he’s riding?’

‘A horse.’

‘I can see that, dear,’ Mrs Figg said patiently, as if
Carrie were an especially stupid Mount Pleasant girl. ‘Where did he get it?’

‘He’s part Arab, part thoroughbred, part New Forest, the most beautiful action you —’

‘I said, where did he get it?’

‘It was given to us.’

‘Don’t try me, Carrie. I’ve had a hard day at work.’

Lester hopped Peter over the shallow dry ditch and came towards them over the lawn. What with Henry and Lucy and the dabbling ducks, and Oliver getting out of the meadow, or drawing the bolt of his loose box, the lawn was a disaster anyway. But daisies came up all over it, and tufts of tiny yellow flowers, like microscopic stars.

‘That’s a nice horse, son.’ Mrs Figg folded her strong arms and pursed her mouth and nodded horsily, although she knew nothing about horses.

‘The best.’ Peter put his head down to the grass and Lester slid down to the ground over his tail.

‘Where did you get him?’

‘Well, once upon a time, there was this man called Mr No Thanks. And he had this evil daughter, you see …’ Lester began to tell the adventure, telling it well, acting it out, putting on different voices, making a good story out of it, to entertain his mother and Liza.

Liza was entertained. Her eyes lit up behind the defiantly heavy make-up. Her pale mouth lifted at the corners.

Mrs Figg was not entertained. When Lester had finished with the scene in which Mr Novak had said he’d be glad if they kept the horse, she said in a voice that was quiet, but loaded, ‘I thought you promised me you’d make up no more tales.’ Many of the things that Lester told her were too fantastic for her to believe.

‘It’s true.’ He looked surprised. He had not thought of her doubting this story.

‘What would you do with such a boy?’ Mrs Figg turned in exasperation to Tom, who was nearest in age to being on her side. ‘He must think I’m soft in the head, the tales he spins. Talked to a spider… Saw a city at the bottom of the pond … Rich man gives him a valuable horse … I don’t know what’s to be done with him, I swear.’

‘It is true though,’ Tom said. ‘Mr Novak did —’

‘You’re all in league against reason.’ Mrs Figg threw up her hands. ‘Come along Liza, or we’ll miss that train.’

‘I hope we bloomin’ do,’ Liza said sulkily.

‘When I was a girl, we didn’t talk to our elders like that. I don’t know what young people are coming to.’ Mrs Figg was quite huffed. ‘You come along home with me, young Lester Figg,’ she said.

‘I’ll just put Peter away.’ Lester stood astride Peter’s bent neck, and the horse lifted his head and slid him down on to his back.

‘You’ll do no such thing.’ His mother caught his bare leg and pulled him off again. ‘Carrie can take the horse. You’re coming home with me and tidy your room. It looks like a battlefield. And if you don’t get rid of those caterpillars before your dad gets home…’

She grumbled him away. Carrie ran after them. ‘Could you come to tea on Sunday, Mrs Figg?’ No time to explain.

‘I’ll be busy.’

‘Couldn’t you —’

‘I’m sorry.’

She got Lester and Liza into the car. Tom and Carrie stood at the edge of the ditch and watched them drive away. Liza’s white face looked back wistfully. Lester was on the floor.

There was no time to worry about what would happen on Sunday if Miss McDrane found no motherly woman at World’s End.

Joey, the black woolly monkey, was in trouble. Bad trouble.

Not that trouble was a new thing with him. He was supposed to be in his big cage if there was no one with him. But everyone hated to see him in there, and everyone was always taking him out.

And then forgetting him.

By the time they remembered, or came back from school, or woke in the morning, the room would look as if a horde of desperadoes had rampaged through it, searching for buried treasure.

Books hurled from the bookcase. Pages torn out and scattered all over the floor. Em’s knitting wool wound in a maze round table legs and chairs. Michael’s invention for draining spaghetti smashed into matchsticks on the kitchen flagstones. Drawers open and ransacked. Towels draped on the pictures and over the cracked bust of Queen Victoria without a nose, which Lester had found at the dump and brought as an Easter present. Cup handles broken off and stuffed down the sink. Saucers slid under the dresser. Joey himself swinging in Carrie’s bridle which hung on a door knob, black eyes gleaming from a face plastered white with scouring powder.

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ Mother had said, snatching away
an aspirin bottle, which Joey had found in the bathroom, ‘whether this darling creature is a suitable pet for you.’

‘He’s not our pet,’ Carrie said. ‘He’s our friend.’

‘Well … ‘ Mother could not deny that, since it was she who had taught them, years ago, to treat animals as equals, not possessions. ‘But it’s the wrong kind of life for a jungle animal.’

‘But it’s a life. He’d have died in the awful pet shop. And if he’d gone for research —’

‘He’ll die if he eats all the aspirin, you can tell him from me.’

Medicine bottles of any kind were Joey’s passion. When Mrs Figg had been sitting outside the house, she had put her handbag on the ground. Joey had opened it while she was talking to Lester, and found the bottle of slimming pills, which she carried about like a good luck charm, but never actually took, because they were supposed to take away your appetite, and being slim wasn’t worth that.

They found Joey next morning in his chair by the stove, with the empty bottle in his limp hand.

‘Dead!’ shrieked Michael, who had come down first.

Carrie came running. ‘He’s passed out.’

They wrapped him in a rug, and Em ran down the lane to get Mr Peasly’s taxi. He rushed them through the country roads, leaning hard over, like a racing driver, to corner on two screaming wheels. Carrie had been slapping Joey to keep him awake. In the taxi, Mr Peasly’s driving did it for her.

Alec Harvey, the vet, was a cheerful young man who was not surprised at anything that came through his surgery door. Local children brought him frogs and fish and birds with broken wings. If they couldn’t pay, he helped them anyway. A mother from the new housing estate, which was called Newtown, had brought her
screaming baby once, because the doctor wouldn’t come and she couldn’t get to the hospital. Alec Harvey had taken a green and white marble out of the baby’s ear. He had it displayed in a jar on a shelf, and had stuck a medicine bottle label on the frame of his vet’s certificate: ‘Also Baby Doctor.’

‘A monkey on slimming pills.’ He scratched his curly brown head. ‘They didn’t teach us
that
in college.’

He and Tom gave Joey a double dose of ipecacuana, to make him throw up the pills. Nothing happened, except that Joey looked more uncomfortable than before, and began to cry a litle, rounding his mouth to say, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ in Carrie’s lap.

‘Now listen here, you beggar,’ Mr Harvey said through clenched teeth. ‘You’re not going to die.’ He gave him another dose, and took him away from Carrie just in time.