The card said:
Michael understood the message at once. He could read hieroglyphics better than proper words.
‘It says, “Not home for some time.”’ He took the postcard to Tom. ‘Will that be too late for Uncle Rhubarb?’
‘I’m going to write to them,’ Carrie said. The day had started well, with a fine mist rising from the cobwebbed grass, and the postman’s van stopping at World’s End, but now she felt depressed.
It was marvellous living on their own, free and independent; but it was marvellous when Mother and Dad were here too.
‘I’m going to write and tell them to come home soon.’ Carrie gouged moodily at Dad’s broad initials on the table, scraping out the crumbs.
‘No,’ Tom said. ‘Our only hope is for them, and all of us, to get as much money as we can. Write them that.’
So Carrie tore a page off the R.S.P.C.A. calendar and wrote on the back of it:
Your postcard was divinely funny.
Glad you’re making lots of money.
We’re all working at this end,
To fill the crock to save World’s End.
She could only write letters in poetry.
Eighteen
It was sordid to have to think of money all the time, but that was what Uncle Rudolf thought about, and you had to fight the enemy with his own weapon.
The zoo hospital was less busy as the baby animals grew older, so Tom signed up to work with the travelling zoo, which went to parks and schools all over the country. The work was harder, and the hours longer, but it meant more pay.
Wildflowers were spreading colour in the fields and woods. Michael picked fistfuls of buttercups and bluebells, and sat with them at the side of the road.
He had painted a sign on a piece of board:
‘BAUTFUL WIDFOWRS
STOP HEAR & BY A BUNC.’
Nobody stopped. After a few hours, the buttercups were shedding their bright petals, and the bluebells were dropping limply towards death.
‘You killed them.’ Carrie came out to where Michael sat in the shallow grass ditch at the edge of the lawn.
‘They died because nobody bought them,’ he said.
‘Why should anybody buy, when they can pick them for nothing, you silly child?’
Carrie was cross because she missed Lester, who had to stay at home with his arm in a plaster cast. Michael stuck out his tongue at her, and walked off to bury the sad flowers.
Next morning, he went out very early, before Carrie was up. In the dripping silence of the wood, he picked armfuls of bluebells. They smelled sharp and clean. The long white stalks came out of the ground cool and waxy. Michael wrapped them in newspaper, and took them into Town on the early bus. All morning, he stood in the gutter, holding out bluebell bunches that drooped in a sticky curve. Nobody stopped, except Lester’s mother, who put him in her car and brought him home.
Two wasted days of the Easter holiday. Michael went back to Miss Chattaway, and the musty books, and the pennies she gave him to put in the red flour crock.
The last handful of pennies was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The string gave way. The crock fell into the guineapig’s box on the kitchen table - thud on the straw.
‘Treacle!’ It was Em’s guineapig. At the noise of the crock falling, she rushed into the room with a stricken face.
The crock lay on its side in the straw, with coins and notes spilling out of it. Treacle was somewhere underneath. He must be crushed to death.
Em and Michael exchanged a sick look. Neither of them wanted to lift the crock. Expecting to see something ghastly is even worse than seeing it.
They looked at the crock again, and began to cry.
‘What’s happened?’ Rodge came in from the front room, where he had been playing hymns on the jangly piano that had mushrooms growing on the mildewed felts, and would only play hymn tunes.
‘The crock fell on Treacle,’ Em sobbed. ‘He’s dead. I can’t pick it up and look.’
‘Sh-sh-shall I?’ Rodge rubbed his hands nervously, as if he could feel the blood and the delicate crushed bones already. He wasn’t any braver than Em or Michael.
When he put out his hands to feel the table, then the box, then the rounded side of the crock, they were trembling.
Were you looking for something? Charlie strolled in with Treacle in his mouth, soaking with spit, but intact. He was supposed to leave the guineapig alone, but he had an uncontrollable passion for carrying small creatures about.
In gratitude for a life spared, Michael sorted out all the pennies into a brown paper bag, and took them down to the Post Office in the village to change them.
He took them in a wheelbarrow, because the bag was too heavy to carry. It was raining. He left Gilbert on guard by the barrow, and went into the Post Office to ask Bessie Munce if she would change two hundred and eighty-seven pennies into pound notes and silver.
The postmistress was very busy. Everyone in the world wanted stamps or postal orders, and Mrs Morgan from the bakery was sending a parcel to her son in Australia. Bessie Munce weighed it three times on different scales, checked the postage twice in different ledgers, and dropped her glasses in the waste paper bin.
Michael had to wait in line. When he reached the counter, Bessie Munce couldn’t see him, and said, ‘Yes, dear?’ over his head to the next person in line.
Michael stood on tiptoe, and put his fingers, black from counting coppers, over the edge of the counter.
‘Would you like to change two hundred and eighty-seven pence?’
‘No, Michael. I would not like to.’ Bessie Munce put on her glasses and looked at him through the grille.
‘But will you?’
‘Oh dear, I suppose I’ll have to.’
Michael went out, and staggered in with the bulging bag. Bessie Munce raised her eyes in a prayer for patience. Michael put the bag on the counter. The wet paper gave way. The bag burst. The pennies spilled out, and rolled merrily all over the Post Office.
Mrs Morgan helped Michael to gather the coins into her shopping bag. Three wet pennies had gone under the radiator for good. Bessie Munce was fuming, so Michael dragged out the shopping bag, and took it home in the wheelbarrow. He stored the coins under his bed, and put a note into the flour crock, re-hung with stronger string:
Nineteen
Rodge was collecting money too. The organist at the church was taken ill, and the Vicar was paying Rodge to play for the services. He could have used the extra money himself, but he put it all into the World’s End fund.
One evening when he went to practise for a wedding, Carrie went to the church with him.
She was still at a loose end without Lester, after the outdoor things of the day were done. She liked to sit quietly in a shadowy pew, and listen to Rodge’s hands bring out of the organ splendid, triumphant music, or sweet tunes like a woman’s voice.
When Carrie turned round and looked up, she could just see Rodge’s head and shoulders in the lighted organ loft. Since he did not have to look at the keys and stops, he played with his head held high, which gave him a rapt, inspired look. The lights over the organ glowed like a halo round his soft fair hair. He was no longer just Rodge, with his shirt buttoned up wrong, who blushed, and could not say ‘Liza’, and was afraid of strangers.
By the time he had finished practising, and switched off the organ and the lights and locked the church, it was quite dark.
Wendy had lain with him in the organ loft, and before he put on the harness and lead, he let her run loose with Charlie in the churchyard.
Carrie and Rodge heard them barking at something in the far corner. Rodge whistled, but Wendy did not come at once. They still heard her deep double bark, and Charlie’s silly shouting yelps, which he hoped would petrify rabbits and squirrels.
They went through the dark churchyard to find them. Carrie stumbled over graves and flowerpots, but the dark made no difference to Rodge, feeling his way among the tombstones.
The
y found Charlie and Wendy scrabbling at the entrance to a burrow, where rabbits, if any, were probably far inside, and laughing at them.
Rodge scolded Wendy quite sternly.
‘Don’t,’ Carrie said. ‘It was Charlie’s fault.’
‘Charlie’s not a working dog,’ Rodge said. ‘Wendy is. She can make mistakes by mistake. She’s a dog, after all. But she can’t make mistakes on purpose, because she’s a guide dog.’
When Wendy heard that the scolding was finished, she put up her ears and tail again, and stood alert and eager as Rodge buckled on the harness. He took hold of the handle and lead, and felt around him with the other hand to see where he was. His hand found the weeping stone angel which kept guard over the child’s tomb where he used to sit to watch Carrie practise her bareback riding. It was at the edge of the graveyard. The headstone was part of the wall at this corner.
Rodge ran his fingers over the sad curves of the angel’s robes and drooping wings, and down over the headstone.
‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘I never noticed that. Come and look.’
‘What at?’
It was a moonless, darkly clouded night. Carrie could see nothing except the vague silhouette of the angel, curving over the curved stone.
‘The name. In undying memory of our beloved little daughter,’ Rodge’s fingers read the deeply carved words slowly. ‘Charlotte Fraser. Born 1796. Died 1808. Aged 12 years.’
‘Charlotte Fraser. C.F.’ Carrie’s fingers went to the chain round her neck. ‘The silver locket Lester found in the attic. Perhaps it was the same girl. Look - C.F. 1808. They must have given it to her the year she died. And then she lost it. And she lost her luck.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘It doesn’t open.’
Carrie would not take it off, but as Rodge felt the engraving on the silver heart, his sensitive fingers found the hidden catch, and it sprang open.
‘What’s in it?’ Carrie was whispering, because it was mysterious standing here in the dark, with Charlotte Fraser’s grave in front of her, and what she was now sure was Charlotte Fraser’s locket round her neck.
‘Is it a picture?’
‘I can’t tell,’ Rodge said. ‘But I think there’s a lock of hair.’
When they got home, the blind man and his dog going even faster than Carrie down the dark path and over the broken stableyard wall, they took the locket under the lamp, and Rodge showed Carrie how to open it.
There were no pictures. Just a small coil of light, sandy hair. Charlotte Fraser’s hair? If so, it was about the same colour as Carrie’s, unchanged through all the years, because hair doesn’t die.
Carrie cut out a silhouette of John’s head from a photograph Dad had taken, and fitted it into one side of the locket. It was difficult to do without taking it off. But she had vowed she would never take it off, and she had the feeling that if she did, she might lose the luck, as poor Charlotte had lost it.
She would have liked to put Lester in the other side, because he had found the silver heart, and it had brought them luck at the circus. But she had no picture of Lester. Carrie could not remember ever seeing a photograph of him.
Twenty
It was Em who had the greatest luck of all in getting money for the World’s End fund.
The makers of Chewitt dog biscuits, for whom Charlie had made television commercials last winter, were branching out into tinned dog and cat food.
They would need some new commercials. The producer telephoned Mr Mismo to ask him to tell Em, when he went by the house to bring in his cows, to ring the producer back. This was the only way he knew to get hold of Em, who was Charlie’s handler and manager.
Em and Charlie went back to the farm with Mr Mismo and the cows, and Mr Mismo put through the reverse charge call for her, shouting into the telephone, as he always did. The farther away the call, the louder he shouted. Once after his nephew had rung him from America, he had been hoarse for days.
‘Esmeralda?’ The producer sounded really glad to hear her. Em lifted herself on tiptoe to the wall telephone, and her heart lifted too. She had missed the excitement of the studio, and the filming, and Charlie being recognized in the street as ‘Catchem Charlie,’ and the television people smiling at her deep blue eyes and saying she would be more famous than Charlie some day.
‘Will that crazy Charlie dog of yours eat tinned dog food out of a bowl?’
Not if anyone was watching him, Em knew. Catching dog biscuits was fun to him, but he would never drop his head and eat if anyone was looking. He could hardly make a television commercial alone in a dark passage, which was how he liked to eat his dinner at home.
But Em was a good businesswoman, and so she said, ‘Of course he will,’ and hoped that it would be, as Mrs Reeper used to say about the school plays, ‘all right on the day.’
It wasn’t all right. Em went with Charlie to London, first class on the train, with Mr Peasly’s taxi at one end and a London taxi the other - all expenses paid, including lunch.
In the film studio, they put down a red and white bowl that said ‘CHEWITT’ on the side nearest the camera, and was filled with dog food that looked good enough to eat. In fact, Em and the others at World’s End had eaten much worse looking stuff when times were thin.
It even smelled good. But Charlie dropped his ears and rolled his eyes, and backed away, looking everywhere but at the red and white bowl. He did not even lick his lips.
‘He doesn’t like it,’ groaned one of the Chewitt people. ‘I may as well shoot myself.’
‘I could hand feed him.’ Em squatted down. ‘Come on, Charlie, it’s good.’ She held out a handful of dog food, but he turned his shaggy head away in deep embarrassment.
‘Dogs don’t have to be hand fed with Chewitt dog food,’ the director said. ‘They’re supposed to go at it like ravening tigers.’
‘We could put in some liver sausage.’ Em looked up from where she knelt by the bowl. ‘He’d go ravening for that.’
‘My dear Esmeralda.’ The director put a shocked finger to his lips, and glanced quickly round the studio. ‘Television commercials are honest these days, haven’t you heard?’
‘You mean that woman’s husband really bought her a washing machine after she sweetened her breath with chewing gum?’ Em sometimes watched the big colour television set that dominated the Mismos’ sitting room.
‘But of course.’ The director did not seem to think it strange. ‘And when viewers see Charlie wolfing that mess in the bowl, they’re going to know it’s Chewitt dog food.’
Em was cleverer than him, although he was a film director, and she was only an author of unpublished books and unproduced plays. Knowing Charlie, she had brought a chunk of liver sausage in her pocket. When no one was looking, she poked it into the middle of the bowl of dog food.
Charlie sniffed, and his ears went up a bit.
‘He’ll do it now.’ Em got up and stood back.
They started the camera. Charlie advanced rather slowly across the floor, which was made up to look like kitchen tiles, put his nose into the bowl, picked out the liver sausage daintily, and backed away.
‘Cut!’ The director clutched his hair in anguish and yelled. Charlie dropped the liver sausage apologetically on the fake kitchen floor, and crawled under a table.
Em took him home. London taxi, train, and Mr Peasly’s taxi.
‘You let me down,’ she sorrowed to Charlie, when they were safe in the kitchen at home again. But where was safe these days, with the fatal threat hanging over World’s End? ‘You let us all down.’
Charlie grinned with his lip lifted, and wagged his tail, and dropped his head to a bucket of garbage, which was far less attractive than Chewitt dog food.
Em felt very low. The glamour had gone out of life.
But not the action. As she was sitting gloomily wondering how to tell the others her story of failure without making it sound like failure, there was a furious squawk and chatter from the garden.
Em ran out. A baby bird had dropped out of the nest. Paul, the black and white half Siamese, had it in his mouth. The mother was flying about in great agitation, swooping down to dive bomb the cat, and squawking her distress.
Em made a lunge at Paul, and caught him just as he went under a bush. She dragged him out. He was growling and lashing his tail. The tiny bird, just covered with downy new feathers, lay as still as death in his needle-sharp jaws.
‘Murderer,’ Em said, not angrily, because she knew he could not help it. A cat was a cat, and he had done what a cat has to do.
Holding him with her elbows pressed into his sides, she managed to pry open his jaws. The bird fluttered out, unharmed. It flopped about on the grass, with the mother still swooping and squawking. It was not strong enough to take off from the ground, so Em put it on a branch, and it flew away higher into the tree.
Em fished in her pocket, and gave Paul the remains of the liver sausage to compensate.
It compensated so well that the next day, he caught another bird, a full grown robin this time, and brought it in through the open window to Em. She freed it, and sent it flying away through the window, and cut a nice piece of the Sunday beef for Paul.
He was so clever. He was surely the cleverest cat ever to be born since the Russian cat Ivanovitch, who married a fox and was king over all the forest animals.
He was clever enough to keep his eye on the Sunday beef. On Monday, Em sharpened the carving knife on the back step, and cut slices of cold meat for supper. She put the dish on the table while she mashed potatoes with the end of a sawn-off broom handle.
While she was at the draining board, she saw out of the side of her eye Paul jump on to a chair, pat with his front paws on the table edge, and reach his whiskered face out to the dish of cold beef.
‘Get off that chair!’ Em banged the side of the saucepan with the broom handle.
Paul jumped down, but as soon as Em turned her back to reach for the salt, he was up on to the chair - a flash of swift white paw, and he had hooked down a piece of meat and was growling over it under the table.
Spring Comes to World's End Page 8
