World's End in Winter

by Monica Dickens

  They had long had a dream of buying the pasture across the lane for hay and extra grazing. They would pull out the ragged hedge to make it part of World’s End, and put gates across the lane, so that people coming this way would have to pay toll to get through.

  They couldn’t buy the field, and they couldn’t shut off the lane - but they took John and Peter, and Michael’s toy pistols and an empty tin can, and waited on the horses at either side of the lane. Carrie was wearing a black stocking over her head with holes for eyes, nose and mouth. Lester was wearing the big bush hat Jerome Fielding had brought back from Australia, turned up on one side with the brim pulled over his face.

  When a car or a van or a motorbike or a bicycle came by, they pushed the horses out to block the road, pointed the pistols and yelled, ’Your money or your life!’

  The first thing that came was the Post Office van.

  ‘Thanks for stopping.’ Carrie lowered the gun and her highwayman voice. She had been afraid no one would stop.

  ‘Got a parcel for you.’ The postman handed her up a box. It was a Christmas present from the fat little nurse with the pearl barley teeth who had looked after Mother when she was hurt in the fire. He drove on before they could get back to the subject of money.

  The next three cars gave them something. One willingly. One grumbling. One saying, ’I think it’s wonderful what you children do. Is it for the Cruelty to Animals?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carrie said, and held out the soup tin. And afterwards, though she did not need to justify it to Lester, ’Well, Priscilla is a small animal, isn’t she?’

  They waited in the lane all afternoon. The horses got cold and restless, and Carrie and Lester got cold and bored. Very little traffic came by. Some of it did not even stop, but drove on through, hooting them out of the way. A bicycle yielded a few pennies. Grandad Barker on his old-fashioned tricycle that was said to have fought at the Battle of Hastings, dismounted creaking and groaning, took off two layers of clothes, searched through the rest for a pocket, turned it inside out to show it was empty, and climbed back into the outer layers and on to the trembling tricycle. Meanwhile a sports car and a plumbing van had got by, and Mrs Potter from Orchards, who shouted ’Is it an accident?’ and drove quickly on in case it was.

  They had made about thirty pence.

  ‘Let’s come out early tomorrow,’ Lester said, ’and get people on the way to work.’

  Before they went in, they stopped a yellow cement mixer truck going home. The driver stopped his rotating drum behind the cab to hear what they were saying.

  ‘Money or your life!’

  ‘What’s that? What’s that about my wife?’

  Carrie pushed John nearer, though he did not like the truck. ’It’s for the handicapped—’ she began, but the man said, ’We gave to that last week,’ and threw the mixing drum into gear with a rattle and a crunch. John leaped backwards into the dry ditch between the lawn and the road. Carrie fell off. The man said, ’Kids!’ and drove on.

  John went off towards the stable. Carrie lay on the cold hard ground, waiting for her head to clear.

  ‘Let’s not come out tomorrow,’ she said.

  Her father knew where the money must come from to save the barn for Priscilla.

  He shut himself into the front parlour with the foot-stool against the door and wrote steadily for three days and most of three nights. He staggered out with his manuscript, croaking, ’I’ve finished it. It’s finished me. But I’ve finished it. Daily Amazer, here it comes.’

  ‘Will they pay you?’ Michael asked anxiously.

  ‘As soon as they see it. Let’s go down to the Post Office and give Bessie Munce the thrill of stamping the Best Seller of the Age.’

  Bessie Munce was not in the least thrilled. She weighed the package as if it were no more than a bundle of shoes left behind by somebody’s visiting niece.

  ‘That’s a heavy parcel.’ She looked over her spectacles through the fireguard on the counter that protected her from bandits. ’Cost you quite a bit, that will.’ She sucked in what would have been her teeth if she had had them in. She always behaved as if Parcel Post was reckless extravagance.

  ‘It can go book rate,’ Michael’s father said proudly.

  ‘Printed matter?’ Bessie asked sharply.

  ‘It’s typed. It’s my book. I wrote it.’ He could not resist raising his voice. There were two people in the other part of the shop which sold sweets and cigarettes and newspapers. They did not look round. Bessie Munce did not look up. She stamped the package, gave the change and threw Sailor of the Seven Seas over her shoulder into the canvas mail-bag.

  Seventeen

  Uncle Rudolf and Aunt Valentina had sent down a huge turkey - with instructions how to cook it, which didn’t please Mother, and a note to say they would come and help eat it, which didn’t please anybody.

  ‘Unless,’ Dad said, ’we could get Rudolf to help pay for the barn... Who’ll ask him?’

  ’You.’

  ‘He doesn’t like me.’

  ’He’s your brother.’

  ’That’s why.’

  ‘Will Tom hate me when he’s old and bald like Uncle Rhubarb?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Probably,’ Tom said. ’I’m going to give my presents early tomorrow before they come. They won’t approve of any of them.’

  Tom gave animals to everybody.

  A kitten for Mother. ’Just what I need!’ Two cats jumped off her lap as she got up to see the white half-Persian in the basket.

  An Ant Farm for his father, which Tom had made from the glass tank whose goldfish had kicked the bucket long ago, in spite of Mr Mismo’s brandy administered with an eye-dropper. Tom had replaced the ends of the tank with strips of wood, so that the glass sides were quite close together. Filled with sand, you could see the ants’ tunnels and burrows and underground store rooms.

  Dad put it on the dresser, and one of the cats, leaping away from the new kitten, which had mobilized itself into a puffball of aggressive white fur, knocked the Ant Farm over.

  Earthquake in the ant world. But ants are used to the natural calamities of feet and spades and broom-happy housewives. Patiently, they started to tunnel and build all over again.

  Someone gave Michael a ball. He threw it for Jake, and knocked the Ant Farm over again.

  ‘My deep personal sympathy in your disaster.’ Lester, who might have been some kind of insect in an earlier life, put the glass tank on a high shelf of the dresser, where the black ants sorted themselves out of the chaos and got to work once more. ’The very best of luck.’

  Tom gave Em a guinea pig which Jan Lynch had given him. He had been keeping it in his room with poor ailing Dusty while he was on holiday from the zoo. It had a face like the man at the grocery: the forehead, nose and chin all in one stodgy line. So Em called it Treacle, because the grocer was always trying to sell you big cans of treacle he had bought too much of.

  When she picked him up, he clung sleepily, nosing her chin and quivering.

  ‘He loves me.’ She looked over the top of his sandy grocer’s head.

  ‘He has to,’ Tom said. ’Guinea pigs can’t hate because they don’t have anything to fight with. That’s why they wake when it’s dark, so they can run away.’

  Charlie, who loved small animals, and would follow a terrified fieldmouse with his nose down right across the yard, was very much moved by Treacle. He stood over his box, wagging his tail and whining. When no one was looking, he picked him out and carried him round for a while. Em put him back, but Charlie took him out again. Poor Treacle’s fate was to be always soaking wet.

  Tom gave Michael a Dutch rabbit, white in front and grey behind, divided evenly round the middle. It was a male, but Michael called it Phillis, because he wanted it to have babies.

  For Carrie, a puppy which someone had dumped on Alec Harvey. A car had come into the vet’s drive, a door opened, an arm threw the pup out sprawling on to the gravel, the door slammed and the car drove off before Alec co
uld run out.

  It was some kind of spaniel, brown and white and silky, with elephant ears and enormous feet. His name was Dump. He had come to the right place. World’s End was a dumping ground for unwanted animals.

  When Carrie put him down to meet the others, Perpetua sighed and got up - one more, was there no end to it? - and began to lick him expertly.

  Tom gave Lester a cage of Peking robins which he had seen in a shop in the town, with a holly-decorated sign, ’GIVE A YULETIDE REDBREAST.’

  Caught wild, the birds had been flown from China in their thousands, crammed into tiny cages, shoulder to shoulder on the perch.

  ‘GIVE A YULETIDE REDBREAST. THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS.’

  Tortured birds - to celebrate the birthday of Christ?

  Everybody went outside and watched while Lester took the cage to the edge of the beech wood and opened the door. One by one, the frightened birds hopped into the doorway, stretched their cramped wings, looked round to make sure they were not being tricked once more, and flew off into the trees.

  ‘Will they be all right?’ Carrie asked. ’Mightn’t they die?’

  ‘A few,’ Lester said. ’But they’ll die free.’

  Tom also had a present for Liza. He had bought it before she ran off, a tartan collar for Dusty. Now Liza was gone and Dusty might die. He had lived to see Christmas, but he was still very weak. Tom’s room was too cold, so he lay wrapped in a rug in the warm corner behind the stove. They fed him warm milk and sugar and water from a spoon. His breathing was difficult and his body sank in as the life slowly left it.

  Bending over him to try and make him look at the tartan collar, Michael said, T think he’s dying.’

  ‘Then don’t watch him,’ Tom said. ’Dying is private. You do it alone.’

  Michael hung the collar on the Christmas tree. Even if Liza did come home today, she might be too late for Dusty.

  Carrie and Em and Michael had made a present for Priscilla. It was a little dolls’ schoolroom, because she couldn’t go to school, fitted into three sides of a wooden box. It had matchbox desks, a blackboard and sliver of chalk, toothpick pens which dipped into a thimble of real ink, maps rolled round a pencil, tiny pictures made from stamps, a teacher doll with a bit of Carrie’s hair wound round her head, pupils dressed by Em in scraps of her old gym tunic.

  Their father drove them over with it to Brookside. Lester went home, because his mother had threatened him with the business end of the drumstick over his ear if he was late for turkey dinner. Also he did not like Victor Agnew.

  They found the family in the drawing-room in a sea of wrapping paper and ribbon. The sofa where Lester and Carrie had eaten treacle tart in the middle of the night and listened for old Diller and the baby was covered with books and games and new clothes. The marble ladies under the mantelpiece wore necklaces of holly, but looked no jollier. In the French window was a huge tree hung with costly shining ornaments, and lights that flashed on and off in changing colours.

  The tree at World’s End was a small scrub pine dug out of the back of the hill, and decorated with strings of popcorn and nuts, painted fir cones, and real candles fixed on with clothes pegs.

  Victor took Carrie outside in the snow to watch him hit the new tennis trainer game with his new aluminium racquet.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she said after admiring him for a while. ’Have a go then.’

  She swiped and swatted, but she could not even get near the swinging ball.

  Victor took back the racquet. ’You’ve got no eye.’ Carrie went into the house.

  While the grown ups had eggnog with rum and nutmeg, Jane made Em play a game with dice. Em did not much like dice games, or any other kind, because it made her sulk if she lost. She lost. She sulked. Jane said she was a bad sport. In this house, that was like saying you were a murderer.

  Neither Victor nor Jane had looked at the doll’s schoolroom since Michael carried it in with his stomach and tongue stuck out, but Priscilla was delighted. She sat smiling by the table, and Michael pointed out to her its charms, like a house agent.

  ‘She is better, isn’t she?’ Mother was drinking eggnog with Mrs Agnew while the men talked sailing in special gruff voices.

  ’She’s all right.’ Sometimes she talked as if there was nothing wrong, sometimes as if it was hopeless. Which did she really believe?

  ‘The riding is doing her so much good.’

  ‘I don’t see any difference,’ Mrs Agnew said in her clear, carrying voice. ’She can’t ride anyway, with the barn gone.’

  Michael looked round at her small note of triumph. She did not want anyone else to help Priscilla.

  ‘I always thought it was too dangerous anyway,’ she said. ’Quite mad.’

  Eighteen

  ’I am going mad.’ Aunt Valentina fell into a chair, shot up as a cat yowled and escaped, sank down again with her doeskin boots stuck out. ’It’s too much. I am going mad.’

  Poor Val. She did have bad luck. When she and Rudolf came to World’s End, which was only just often enough to remind everybody whose house it was, she was either chased by the ram, butted by the goat, tipped off the donkey, or had her foot trodden on by a horse. Today when she arrived loaded with Christmas spirit and parcels, with miniature gold angels dangling from her ears, she ran full tilt into Tom carrying a dead dog, Carrie and Em and Michael behind him with candles, chanting.

  Val’s Christmas spirit left her in a flash. ’I am going mad.’

  The procession went on out of the side door to the place under the weeping willow where dead animals rested, and where Michael had asked to be buried, ’when my time comes’. He had already made his own gravestone, the blade of a broken oar stuck into the ground and painted with the message, ’Micel Fidling. At Rest With His Friends’.

  At Dusty’s graveside, Carrie recited a short poem she had quickly run up when he died at noon:

  ’Here the good old friend of Liza Jones,

  A wanderer dog lays down his weary bones.

  He mustn’t be forgotten, must he?

  For all his name, he was not so dusty.’

  When they went back in, Valentina had recovered from the shock of having a dead body carried out as she came in, but she started up again when Dad lit the candles on the tree. The other lights were out, and it looked heavenly, the small pure flames like stars.

  But Val screamed, ’Fire! It will catch fire!’

  She lunged forward to blow out the candles, and knocked one off the tree. It set light to a piece of tissue paper on the floor.

  ‘Leave it alone, Val.’ Jerome Fielding put out the small fire with his foot. ’We’ll blow them out when they get lower.’

  ‘Go ahead, Jerry.’ Uncle Rudolf was genial enough today, though his marble head and stiff back were not made for it. ’The insurance money is worth more to me than the house.’

  Aunt Valentina, who hid a kindish heart under stupidity and narrow ideas, had brought presents for everyone.

  For Mother, a small gold box. ’Because you like unusual jewellery, having been on the stage.’

  ‘She doesn’t wear—’ Em began, but her mother shrieked as she opened the box.

  ‘It’s alive! Oh, my God, Val, it’s alive.’

  ‘Well, you like pets, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but - oh, my God’

  It was a beetle, about an inch long, with tiny coloured jewels stuck all over it. Round the edge of its body was a thin gold chain ending in a gold pin, to be fastened to—

  ‘You - you wear it?’ Mother put a hand on her blouse as if she could feel it there.

  ’Of course. It comes from South America. Living Brooch, they call it. It was very expensive.’

  ’Generous of you, but—’

  ’Don’t you like it?’

  ‘I hate it,’ Mother said in a small voice. She tucked back her hair behind her ears and looked as if she were going to cry.

  ‘I’d wear it,’ Valentina said. ’I once had earrings which were two little globes of wa
ter with tiny fish in them. I’m fond of Nature, you see.’

  Tom was trying to get the gold chain off, but it was embedded.

  ‘What can we do with it?’ Mother could hardly bear to look at the martyred beetle. ’We can’t turn it loose looking like that.’

  ‘I’ll take it to the zoo,’ Tom said.

  ‘When is that boy going to get his hair cut?’ Val wanted to know.

  After dinner, they sat round a big fire in the front room. Uncle Rudolf and Dad sang a brothers’ duet, in different keys. Michael sang in a tuneless drone, gasping for breath in the middle of words. Tom did three conjuring tricks and forgot how to finish the third.

  ‘Then I’ll have my money back,’ Valentina said. ’When is that boy going to get his hair cut?’

  Nobody wanted Em to sing, but she was persuaded to recite some of the angel’s part she had rehearsed for the school play.

  ’.. Now while the white Frost King rides through the night,

  With eyes of ice and hoary eyebrows white .. ’

  Someone laughed and Em stopped and sat down.

  When it was the first night of her own play, Life and Death of a Star, when the whole theatre rose and shouted, ’Author! Author!’ and she came on stage in a shimmering gown with an armful of roses as long as a baby ... then, no one would laugh.

  When it was her turn, Carrie launched into Masefield’s ’Right Royal’:

  ’An hour before the race they talked together,

  A pair of lovers in the mild March weather,

  Charles Cothill and the golden lady, Em.’

  ‘My sister?’ Michael interrupted.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ’Beautiful England’s hands had fashioned them.

  He was from Sleins, that manor up the Lithe,

  Riding the Downs had made his body blithe..’

  It went on for ever.

  ‘Does she know the whole thing?’ Uncle Rudolf asked nervously.

  ‘I can do you the whole of Reynard the Fox too, if you like,’ Carrie said.