Spring Comes to World's End

by Monica Dickens

  Four

  Michael, the youngest of the Fielding family, made a little money for the flour crock by selling inventions and constructions. But most of the local people who were willing to buy his trivets and stools and shopping baskets and bird-houses had already bought them.

  He tried to get repeat sales.

  ‘You’ve got two cars, Mrs Wassername. Why not be a two-birdhouse family?’

  Or: ‘If you bought another stool, Mr Beastly, you could put it on the other side of the fireplace and make conversation.’

  ‘The first one broke,’ Mr Peasly said, ‘and we put it on the fire.’

  ‘Well then, you need another.’

  ‘No ta, Michael.’

  He was currently working on an ingenious method for making trays out of old picture frames, or picture frames out of trays, whichever the public wanted.

  ‘Would you like one?’ He took it out to the lane when Mrs Potter came to collect Em for baby-sitting.

  ‘One what, dear?’

  ‘One afternoon tea tray.’

  ‘It looks like a picture frame.’

  ‘It was, but—’

  The middle Potter child, who had a face like Man before he evolved from the apes, reached through the car window, snatched up the tray and banged it down over Michael’s head. The middle fell out, and it was a frame again, with Michael’s head as the picture.

  When the warmer weather came, Miss Cordelia Chattaway would pay him small amounts to take her for rides in the rickety wicker carriage, drawn by his pony Oliver, and to push her to church in her wheelchair, and find the hymns for her, and prod her awake if she snored during the sermon.

  Until then, he earned the money doing her shopping, and reading aloud to her in the evenings by the feeble light of one of the dim-watted bulbs which were as much as her watery old eyes could stand in her cottage.

  She paid him out of a biscuit tin in penny and two pence pieces. Bessie Munce at the Post Office was very irritable about changing them into silver, so Michael was saving them up until he got up enough nerve to take them to the Post Office.

  No teacher had ever been able to make Michael read like other people. No one could understand him when he read aloud, but Miss Chattaway couldn’t understand much anyway, so it didn’t matter.

  Michael was reading Shakespeare to her. She had said, ‘Just take a book down from the shelf dear, any book will do.’ Michael had taken down Julius Caesar, because it had a red leather binding with gold on the edges of the paper. When you opened it, you dropped your nose into a marvellous old smell like stored apples, and mushrooms, and attics on rainy days.

  ‘Fiends, Roomans, cutterymen, lend me your hears;

  I come to buy Kassar, not to prize him.

  The level that men do life after them;

  The good is soft untired wit three boons;

  So let it be wit Kassar.’

  ‘That’s very lovely.’ Miss Chattaway sighed, and dabbed at her weak eyes. ‘It reminds me of those good old days at Bournemouth when we had the garden parties and the dear Bishop sang.’

  She remembered things at random, not for any reason. Little doors in the back of her mind opened, and out came Bournemouth, or the dear Bishop.

  Her chow dog Lancelot slept on her feet, twitching and giving out little senile yelps. Presently Miss Chattaway slept too, the tissue paper folds of her chin dropped on to the lace modesty vest she pinned inside the neck of her dress.

  ‘When that the paw have crid, Kassar hat weeped;

  Amption sold be mad of strainer stoof.’

  Michael read doggedly on, until the church clock struck eight-thirty.

  ‘My health is in the coughing there wit Kassar,

  And I must puze till it come bike to me.’

  Michael shut the book with a bang which released some mildewy dust. Miss Chattaway woke.

  ‘Ah, the Bible, the good word.’ She had no idea what he had been reading. The food of the soul.’

  She and Michael had sugared milk and gingerbread, and then he ran home down the lane under the cold stars, with bony, bounding Gilbert to protect him.

  Em could always make a bit of money baby-sitting. She had a good local reputation, because she washed up, as well as watching television, so she could pick and choose who she would go to. But in this crisis, she went to the people who paid her the most, which was the people with the nastiest children.

  Mrs Potter paid her danger money whenever the youngest child bit her hard enough to draw blood. Mrs Riley, who had run through every baby-sitter in the neighbourhood, paid Em double rates if she would feed her two-year-old, which threw spoons and plates all over the room, and emptied dishes of spinach on its head.

  When you did manage to get some food down it, it waited in the high chair while you rinsed the bowl and mug, then sicked the whole meal up over you when you came to lift it down.

  The night when Em banged her head three times for the kinkajou’s three o’clock feed, she woke in the middle of a dream of fame, and came downstairs, with the applause still filling her ears, to see that it was exactly three o’clock. Tom was asleep on the sofa. The kinkajou was awake, and crying like a kitten.

  Its bottle was in a pan of warm water at the back of the stove. Em unfastened the netting, wrapped the tiny naked body in a towel, and cradled him on her lap while she fed him. He sucked quietly, grabbing the bottle with his tiny hands. Em went back to sleep, trying to pick up the dream where it had left off, with the single scarlet rose flung on to the stage at her feet.

  She woke with a start to find that she was holding the bottle and feeding nothing. The kinkajou had slipped off her lap. Charlie, who adored tiny things, had taken him out of the towel and carried him under the table, where he was licking him gently, with his eyes half closed.

  ‘Sorry, Charlie.’ Em took the kinkajou away from between his hairy paws, dried him, and took him upstairs in the box to her room at the top of the house.

  Tom did not open an eye. He slept like a dead soldier, one leg on the sofa and the other sprawled on the floor, his head tipped back on his long thin neck, and his Adam’s apple like a golf ball.

  At seven o’clock, he woke, and climbed the twisting stair to the linen cupboard where Em slept on a mattress on a shelf, to feed the kinkajou and take him to the zoo for the day.

  ‘Get up, Em.’

  She rolled over and kicked out at him. ‘Go away. There’s no school.’

  ‘Some people—’ Tom threw a towel over her head -’get all the luck.’

  Five

  But the luck did not last. They thought they would have a holiday until Easter at least, but an official told them cheerfully, as if it was good news, that they must go to the big glass-walled school at Newtown.

  It was too far to drive every day with John and the trap. They walked through the wood to the crossroads and caught the bus that Liza took to work at the vet’s.

  She usually rode to the bus stop on the ancient clanking bicycle, but now she let the others take turns on it and start a bit later. Not that it went much faster than walking, because the chain came off if you pedalled too hard.

  Michael could not reach the pedals, so he fastened blocks of wood to them with baling wire, the left block bigger, because his left leg was shorter than the right, or his right leg was longer than the left, whichever way you wanted to look at it.

  Em’s legs were short too, but Liza and Carrie had to ride with their knees up to their chins, pedalling lopsidedly up to the bus stop and flinging the bike behind the hedge just as the bus came round the corner, full of morning-faced people going to work in the factories outside Newtown.

  It was hard to change from the small, familiar school where life had gone slowly and you could be yourself, to this bustling new place full of strangers who did not know your name.

  Michael would not risk writing his, because he had ten different ways of spelling it, and all of them were wrong.

  Em went back to calling herself Esmeralda, her profes
sional baby-sitting name which she used to impress new customers.

  Carrie started herself off as Caroline, but since no one had ever called her that, she didn’t answer to it, and the teacher thought she was deaf.

  On the third day, a platoon of ants marched out of her duffle bag, which had been on a shelf in the kitchen, where ants were coming to life at the end of the winter.

  What was wrong with ants? They were clean and hardworking, which was more than you could say for most people. No one at the country school would have turned a hair, but this class of town-dwellers hooted and shrieked, and Mrs Flack told Carrie to scoop the ants off her desk and shake her bag out of the window into the rain.

  ‘Ants hate rain.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Mrs Flack was young and interested, with hair cut shorter than a boy, but Carrie could not say that her friend Lester knew, because he had been an insect in some earlier life.

  She had been laughed at once that morning, the laughter that is tongues of fire, shrivelling you to nothing.

  So she did not answer, and Mrs Flack still thought she was deaf.

  But on that third day, the last class was Music, and life looked up again and gave Carrie the nod.

  Because she could not face the crowd in the playground, she went early into the small school theatre. The teacher was sitting on the edge of the stage, with his shoes off and his bearded chin in his hands, singing softly to himself and looking at nothing.

  Carrie came in and stood by the door, not wanting to disturb him.

  ‘Who-who’s that?’ he asked. He had a slight stammer.

  ‘Carrie Fielding.’ She was not going to call herself Caroline, and risk being thought deaf in a singing class. ‘I’m new.’

  ‘Wel-wel—’

  He screwed up his mouth and eyes. They were ordinary looking eyes. But then Carrie saw the big yellow labrador asleep on a folded rug by the piano on stage. It was the guide dog whose life Liza had saved by stitching up the cut leg herself, at night.

  ‘Wendy!’ she said, and the blind man finally got out, ‘Welcome!’ at the same time, and they both laughed. He had an odd gasping laugh, mostly inside himself, as if he were not used to laughing out loud with someone else.

  ‘I saw your dog when she was at the vet’s.’ Carrie climbed on stage and knelt to stroke the heavy, loose-skinned dog, who opened one amber eye, thumped her tail twice, licked her lips three times, swallowed and went back to sleep. The long scar on her front leg had healed, but the silky hair was still shorter where Liza had shaved round the wound.

  ‘I’m Roger Wil-Wilson.’

  He seemed rather shy of Carrie. A grown-up shy of a child? Carrie had thought that one of the few decent things about growing up would be losing shyness.

  ‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘at the vet’s, a girl called Li-Li—?’

  ‘Liza? She’s our friend.’

  ‘Oh then, I - then will you—’

  The class came pouring in like water. Mr Wilson got up and took refuge on the piano stool, as the girls swarmed on stage and smothered Wendy with cries of love and admiration, pushing Carrie out of the way. The boys went to the last rows of the theatre and read comics, with their feet on the backs of the seats in front.

  Roger Wilson did not mind what they did, as long as they either sang or kept quiet. Three of the boys played cards on a brief case on their laps. Some of the girls sat on the floor of the stage and searched their long hair for split ends.

  Mr Wilson’s fingers went quickly over a large sheet of music on the piano. It was Braille, with raised dots for the music and the words. As his fingers moved, he hummed, as if he were reading the music. He was. His fingers were his eyes.

  Then he played the piano while the class sang, still lounging about, as if they were at a party.

  Carrie didn’t sing at first, but then she joined in the last sad verse of the folk song.

  ‘I once had a doggie

  To walk on by my side,

  But a dog catcher got ahold of him,

  And he ain’t no more mine.’

  At the end, Roger Wilson looked in Carrie’s direction and said uncertainly, ‘Was someone a bit flat?’

  He sang the end of the song:

  ‘Now I am a-living,

  But someday I will die,

  Some kind soul will bury me,

  Put flowers by my side.’

  He had the kind of voice which sends little shivers up your spine, like a finger rubbed round the top of a glass. He didn’t stammer when he sang.

  Then he played the piano for them, and some of the girls danced, jerking about in one spot. It wasn’t like a lesson at all. He sat on the floor with Wendy and played the guitar and sang, ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’

  Afterwards when the others had rushed out, leaving the theatre like an empty rain barrel, he told Carrie, ‘I’m glad you are a friend of Li-Li—’

  ‘Liza.’ When people stammered, did they want you to help them or not?

  ‘When I’m glad, I like sad songs.’

  ‘Me too.’ Carrie lived gladly, of course, like everyone at World’s End, rubbing along somehow without grown-ups or ever enough money or food; but with horses, cats, dogs, a goat and a sheep, chickens, ducks, rabbits, a donkey, a guineapig, and wild mice in the feed shed who made jokes about the cats.

  But if World’s End was sold to someone else, if they lost it all … Carrie knew that she would never be glad about anything again.

  Roger Wilson sat down to put on his shoes, and Wendy got up, shook herself and jumped down from the stage, waving her tail.

  ‘You’ve got a hole in your sock,’ Carrie said, not critically, because socks with holes were the only kind she had, but helpfully, in case he didn’t know.

  His cheeks blushed between the fringe of soft beard which framed his mild face like brown animal fur. ‘I forgot to darn it.’

  ‘Do you live alone?’

  ‘No. With Wendy.’

  He put on the lead and harness and the dog stood alert, like a horse who may lounge about in his stable or field, but looks quite different tacked up for work in his saddle and bridle.

  Carrie opened the door, and the man and dog set off down the corridor so fast that she almost had to run to keep up with them.

  ‘Will you tell Li-Li—’ he said, ‘that I did buy her some socks.’

  The night the drunk had thrown the bottle that cut Wendy’s leg, Liza had ruined a sock by using it for a tourniquet.

  ‘Why didn’t you give them to her?’

  Carrie had heard Liza grumble to Em, ‘Men. They’re all the same, blind or not. Promise you a diamond necklace or a pair of socks, and that’s the last you hear of it.’

  ‘Cast you aside like a broken doll,’ Em had quoted from one of her own plays.

  ‘Wendy hates to go to the vet’s,’ Mr Wilson said, ‘and I didn’t know where Li-Li-Li—’ he gave up. ‘Where she lives.’

  ‘She lives with us. At World’s End.’

  ‘World’s what?’ They were at the big glass doors which led to outside.

  ‘End,’ Carrie said. ‘It’s an old inn. Well, it was once, but now it’s where we live, my brother Tom, he works at the zoo, and Liza, and Em and Michael who are in this school somewhere - I haven’t seen them since we came -and thousands of animals.’

  ‘Hor-horses?’ When Mr Wilson smiled, his small teeth glimmered very white through his soft brown beard.

  ‘You like them?’

  He nodded. ‘So does Wendy. She was a puppy at a place with horses.’

  ‘We’ve got three - well, one’s a pony. I wish we had more. We will some day. If you are a horse fool, they - sort of come to you. Like Peter did. He ran away from a wicked girl. And John. I rescued him from the slaughterhouse. You wouldn’t believe what he looked like then. He’s filled out so, and got a strong crest on his neck, and his quarters have really muscled up, because he uses his back properly when he jumps.’

  Mr Wilson listened with bot
h ears, not a quarter of one ear, as most people did when Carrie gave horse lectures. They walked together through the door and down the steps and across the car park, while she elaborated on the wonders of John.

  ‘Look out!’ A car backed out, and she put out a hand to grab the blind man, but Wendy had already halted, to stop him.

  ‘Stupid clot!’ Carrie made a face at the back of the departing car, which held the Assistant Headmaster, very upright, with a hat at dead centre.

  ‘No. I tell them not to watch out for me. Wendy might think all drivers would, and get careless. We watch out for them.’ He used words like ‘watch’ and ‘see’, as if he had working eyes. Carrie shouldn’t have grabbed him and yelled.

  At the busy main road, she said, ‘I go across here for my bus, if you’re all right.’

  Wrong again. If he wasn’t all right without Carrie, what would be the point of the guide dog?

  ‘I cross here too.’

  When most dogs sit, they bring their front feet back to their hindquarters. Wendy brought her quarters up to her front legs, to stay beside him. She sat at the edge of the kerb and watched and listened. Roger Wilson listened. They waited for quite a long time. Should Carrie offer help? She had never known a blind person before.

  She was just going to say, ‘It’s safe now,’ when he told the dog, ‘Forward!’ at just the right time, and they went across the busy road in a space between the traffic, stepped on to the pavement, and turned smartly left between a pram and a lamp post. Carrie ran after them and was nearly run down by a bicycle.

  Mr Wilson stopped at the bus shelter to say goodbye. The street was full of people and traffic noise. On a building site, huge drills chattered, and a bulldozer shovelled lumps of concrete.

  ‘Lucky you,’ he raised his voice, ‘going back to World’s Whatsit.’

  ‘Why don’t you come out some time?’ Carrie said impulsively. ‘You could bring Liza’s socks.’

  ‘Cou-could I?’ He looked at Carrie eagerly, as if he really could see her.

  ‘Come on Saturday. Liza’s making brandy snaps.’