The House at World's End (12 page)

‘I like it the way it is.’

‘She
won’t.’

So now they had to look at the comfortable mess of their beloved home with the eyes of the Dreaded Nutshell. Books on the floor. Clothes hanging on the picture frames. Carrie’s saddle on the back of a chair. Old Red’s bicycle chain oiling in a vegetable dish. Michael’s pebble collection laid out in a maze on the bar. Ants drilling on the pantry shelves. Everything smelling slightly of dog, thick with white hairs, striped hairs, orange, black, tortoiseshell and grey hairs, the underneath of the best chair pulled out by the kittens, who had made a nest in the springs inside.

Now they had to see that Miss Nuttishall would see the
mounds of fluff under the beds, the mud tracks from the doors, the cobwebs. They saw that the windows were so dirty that you could hardly see out.

So what? They were out of doors most of the time anyway. But Miss Nuttishall would not see the daffodils and the primroses in the thicket at the edge of the wood, nor the fresh-painted trap with yellow lines like gold thread on its wheels, nor the clean stables where John and Leonora blew sweet hay breath. The dreaded Nutshell would be too busy poking her disapproving nose through the mess indoors.

‘We can never get it cleaned up in time! What are we going to do?’

They looked at each other. No one knew.

Except Lester. ‘I have an idea.’ He closed one eye.

‘Honestly?’

The day I’m out of ideas,’ he said, ‘prepare for the end of the world.’

Lester’s mother worked ‘for an organization’. He wouldn’t say what or where. He made it sound as mysterious as a spy ring.

But whatever it was his mother did, she had the weekend off from doing it, and she would come to World’s End and help them get it presentable for the eyes of the Dreaded Nutshell.

Lester brought her on Saturday morning, in a little black car like a beetle, with a plastic flower on top of the wireless aerial. She didn’t look a bit like a spy. When she struggled herself out of the tight fit of the car, she was a plump, pink-cheeked lady in a flowered overall, with a lot of soft brown hair shedding hairpins all over the place.

‘What shall I call her?’ Carrie whispered, as she and Lester followed her into the house. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

She had thought it would be something dashing, like Wildeblood or Fitz-Percy, but Lester said, ‘Figg. You can call her Mrs Figg.’

‘Is that your name?’

‘Why not?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You never asked.’

The sun shone that weekend, but they all worked with Lester’s mother inside the house.

‘Can’t I even ride?’ Carrie took a quick breather on the bench outside the front door, eating the marvellous sandwich that Mrs Figg had brought.

‘Work first, then play,’ Tom said like a grown-up. He was on a ladder, washing the outside of the windows.

‘Riding is work. John needs to exercise.’

Turn him out.’ They had finished the fence of the meadow at last. John pushed a bit of it down almost every day, but he never went farther than round to the front of the house to eat the grass there and stare in at the windows.

On Sunday it was Tom’s turn to go to the hospital. The ground floor was finished, and Lester’s mother said she could do the upstairs by herself.

‘All you kids … getting in my way.’ She pretended to grumble, shaking her mop at a cat, swishing her broom round the cobwebs that hung like grey curtains in the corners. ‘Get away, you dirty thing!’ She poked at a big round spider who sat in the middle of a perfect web he had built between a shelf and the top of a cupboard.

‘He’s only doing his job,’ Lester said. ‘Leave him alone.’

‘Oh this boy! He’ll be my death.’ She pretended to be persecuted by Lester. ‘And suppose the flies are only doing their job too? Why mustn’t he leave
them
alone?’

‘It’s his life’s work. It’s all he knows.’

Lester was very careful of anything that lived, even the smallest insect. He brushed flies away carefully from the donkey’s eyes. If there were ants following a grease track across a plate, he shook them gently out of the door, instead of rinsing them under the tap. Once when he and Carrie were digging a bed to plant potatoes, his spade had cut through a worm, and he had screamed, as if he was the
worm, and spent a long time persuading the two ends to join up again.

Now he put the spider into his thin brown hand and set it outside the window on the leaf of a creeper. ‘Sorry about the web,’ he said.

‘Talking to a spider! What’s to be done with such a boy?’ Mrs Figg swept up clouds of dust and blanket fluff from under Michael’s bed, and some chocolate papers and apple cores and a dirty cocoa mug as well. ‘Go and start a fire under all that rubbish outside, and don’t come back in until I call you for lunch.’

At the head of the wide old stairs, which they had once thought were haunted, Carrie paused and looked back to where Lester’s mother was bending over the bed, singing to herself as she tucked in the sheets she had washed. Then she shut her eyes, and with her body full of breath, she felt that she flew down the stairs behind Lester. Did he fed this too? She had never spoken of it, even to him. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to - whatever it was she did. It wasn’t exactly flying. It was more like - not walking. Not jumping. It was finding yourself at the bottom of the stairs without having touched a step.

By Sunday afternoon, the house at World’s End was still shabby, but it was clean.

Em and Carrie had hung the clean bleached curtains on the sparkling windows. Clothes had been washed and put away, and Miss Nuttishall would be able to eat her dinner off the floors, if she so desired.

‘You’ve saved our necks,’ Carrie told Mrs Figg.

‘They’ll have mine if I don’t get going. I’m on duty at four.’

It was only then that Carrie discovered that she was a
matron in a place called Mount Pleasant, where they put lawless girls who were too young to go to prison.

‘I thought you said your mother worked for a secret organization,’ she said to Lester.

‘Mount Pleasant is an organization. And it’s secret. She won’t tell me what the girls have done.’

Mrs Figg had brought a beef stew with barley and onions. She put it on to warm before she went home. After she had driven off with Lester, the battered little beetle car bouncing over the pot holes, they realized how comfortable it had been to have her moving so busily about the house, making endless pots of tea, singing old-fashioned songs, calling them for lunch, standing safely at the stove or sink when you came in from outdoors.

Suddenly the kitchen didn’t look like a proper kitchen any more. ‘I wish Mother was here,’ Michael said. He said it again, gloomily, when Tom came home.

‘She will be, old chap. You wait.’

‘Everyone else has a mother.’ Michael was in a misery fit, humped and ruffled like Currier when she went broody. He might be getting flu. That would be all they needed, for Michael to be ill with flu when Miss Nuttishall arrived!

‘Some people have fathers,’ Em said rather bitterly.

‘That’s because their stupid fathers haven’t got the guts to sail round the world,’ Tom said.

‘The time he’s gone, he could have sailed round the world twice, up and down
and
sideways,’ Carrie grumbled.

‘I thought you all liked being here on your own.’ Tom was in a funny, secret mood. When they asked about their mother, he had only said, ‘She’s all right’, and he had none of the usual messages from her. Sitting up at the bar, eating Mrs Figg’s stew, he was smiling at himself in the decorated
mirror. ‘I thought that was why you were so afraid of Miss Nuttishall.’

Next morning they made their beds before they went to school, in case she came today.

She did come. When they drove back from school, Tom was at home, which was odd. Had he known she was coming?

As Carrie crossed the yard after feeding John, she saw a strange car in the lane. A dark red saloon. Very clean and square and smug. A Social Working car. The Dreaded Nutshell was here!

She wanted to run and hide, but something made her go into the house, dragging her bare feet. Tom looked hard at them when she came in. ‘I left them in the stable,’ she mouthed silently. She only had one pair of shoes.

Miss Nuttishall wasn’t quite what they had expected. She was fairly young, with a pleated kilt and blue tights. ‘What a nice house,’ she said politely.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Proudly they showed her all over the ground floor, where everything was still beautifully clean and tidy. They hadn’t even eaten any breakfast for fear of messing up the kitchen. Let her find fault if she dared!

She dared. ‘It’s very nice,’ she said, ‘though it’s a bit too clean and tidy for my taste. I think it’s better for children to live in a bit of a mess.’

They looked at each other. After all that work!

‘Anyway,’ went on the Nutshell, not so dreaded now, but terribly, terribly disappointing. ‘It doesn’t matter. My Department thinks… I mean, it’s really not the thing for you to live here without your parents. Eh, little fellow?’ She put out a hand to tousle Michael’s hair, and he ducked away. Tom slipped out of the room, as if he couldn’t bear to hear any more.

‘So let’s discuss ways and means.’ Miss Nutshell sat on the chair with the broken springs, going down thump to the floor, but still smiling, because she had made up her mind to be like that. ‘Sit down, everybody.’ They stayed standing. ‘Until your mother comes home, since you really can’t stay here alone, let’s talk about where you—’

The door opened. In the doorway, pale, thin, groggy but upright, standing by herself, though Tom was close behind, smiling and holding out her hand as if Miss Nuttishall was a welcome guest—

‘Mother!’ They ran to her, the Dreaded Nutshell forgotten.

That had been Tom’s secret last night. He hadn’t been to work today. He had been to fetch his mother. She came home in the nick of time to save their necks. That was the story of it. In a nutshell.

Their mother could not really stand and walk as well as she pretended for Miss Nuttishall. As soon as the Social Worker had driven away - foiled! - in her smug red car, Mother went back upstairs to bed, and there she had to stay most of the time, except when Tom carried her down for supper, or to lie in the hammock that he had made from an old tennis net, strung between two elm trees.

Once long ago when World’s End had been Wood’s End Inn, with travellers staying here, and a family of boys growing up, before they went off to the war, there had been a tennis court in the corner of the meadow behind the house. That was the flat place where Carrie set up her odd collection of jumps made of what Mr Mismo called ‘the fag ends of nothing’.

‘If he’ll jump those heaps of junk,’ he said, ‘he’ll jump anything. You should take him to a show.’

‘Should I?’

His little hat rocked as he threw back his head to laugh, with his scattered teeth showing. ‘That five-legged joker? Don’t take everything so seriously, old chump.’

One fine spring afternoon, Mother was lying in the hammock, watching Carrie work with John. Lucy the goat went over the jumps behind them. Henry, who had been sheared and felt pounds lighter and years
younger, leaped over ahead of them with a flick of his shorn tail.

‘Yoo-hoo!’ Out of the kitchen door, mincing in a pink skirt too tight and much too short, her hair puffed out in a toppling black beehive, came Aunt Valentina.

Carrie took John quickly behind the corner of the house, but stopped there to listen.

‘My dear Alice.’ Valentina bent over the hammock to kiss Carrie’s mother, although she had never liked her much, because she had once been on the stage and now she did not approve of the way she lived. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m very well.’ She did look much better, her cheeks filling out and colouring, her thick fair hair bouncing again like a bell.

‘Well, you don’t look it. You’re as pale as a blindworm and as thin as a rail and what on earth happened to your hair?’ Aunt Val could make you feel terrible even if you were fighting fit

When Mother began to thank her for helping the children, Valentina said in that crowing voice which could knock ornaments off a shelf, ‘It was no more than my duty.’

‘Rudolf was kind to give them money…’

‘We’d have given them more.’ It was not her money, but she wasn’t going to let him get all the credit ‘But when we offered they were quite rude about it’

‘I’m sorry.’ Mother didn’t sound as if she believed it

‘Oh well.’ Carrie couldn’t see, but she could imagine Val tossing her beehive head. ‘They needn’t feel like beggars any more. While you were in the hospital was one thing, but now that you’re home…’

Awkward silence. Mother couldn’t work yet, but she would never ask for money.

‘Let’s have some cider,’ she said in that light, amused voice which could make something gay even out of being stuck with Valentina on a lovely spring day. ‘Carrie!’

She called without raising her voice. She knew Carrie was there, so Carrie came round from the corner of the house.

‘No, thanks. I just stopped in to see how you were, and the dear children. Carrie, my pet— ’ Scream! ‘Don’t bring that brute too near. What an extraordinary looking horse. Where did you get
that?’

‘I bought him.’ Only Lester and Carrie and her mother knew about the horsenapping.

‘Oh really?’ Valentina’s pencilled eyebrows went up into her beehive hair. ‘What with?’

You could see the way her mind was working.
If that
was what the children had been doing with the money…

‘A postcard came for you.’ Valentina opened her enormous handbag, for which the world’s dwindling population of alligators had been dwindled by one more. Two, if you counted her shoes.

‘Who from?’ Carrie got off her horse.

‘My dear, I don’t read other people’s postcards,’ Valentina said, although the card was crumpled as if she had read it many times and had been carrying it about in the alligator bag for weeks.

‘It’s from Dad!’

Carrie’s shout brought Em out of the back door, ‘Why didn’t he write to
me?