The House at World's End (2 page)

If he sent a damp splinter of wood or a shred of sailcloth, as he sometimes did, to prove disaster had struck. he drew. And once it was when he ran aground in the delta of the Ganges.

Uncle Rudolf had married late in life this foolish woman Valentina, who invited people to lunch or tea or cocktails every day, so as to have someone to listen to her complaints. Uncle Rudolf had stopped listening long ago, and the children had never begun.

After the others had gone to their rooms, Carrie lay in bed with the striped kitten curled on the pillow. It was
called Nobody, because it would not take any of the names they tried. Valentina was banging about on the piano downstairs to prove that she could have been a concert pianist if only it had not been her duty to marry a plumber with four homeless nephews and nieces.

Carrie pulled the kitten closer to her ear, to drown out the piano with the purr which shook its small body. It had not yet grown up to the size of its motor.

She closed her eyes and waited to hear the movement of wind outside her window and the hollow beat of hooves on the road down from the stars.

Every night since she could remember, she had lain in bed wherever she was - in the house with the boat in the kitchen, in the Army hut, in this dark bedroom at Uncle Rudolfs that never got a smell of sun - and called, ‘Penny-come-quick!’ And he had come to her.

Penny-come-quick was a silver-grey Arab whose picture she had once cut out of a newspaper, galloping into the wind with his mane and tail floating as if he was flying. The picture had been lost long ago (Carrie lost everything, even her treasures), but the horse remained. Every night he came to her window, wherever she was, and although her body lay in bed, her real self slid on to his white satin back and he turned and galloped away with her.

Tonight he arched his neck, strong and warm under her hands, then threw up his head as the wind lifted his mane. and pawed at the night.

‘Come on, Penny!’ She felt his muscles gather beneath her, and he bounded away. Up and away to the star where all the famous horses of history grazed in the Elysian Fields, and all the horses and ponies that had been very much loved on earth waited for their own people to die, and come to call them at the gate.

Next day after school, Carrie and Tom went to see their mother. The two younger ones were not allowed to visit the hospital.

‘As if being young was an infectious disease,’ Em grumbled. Her dark hair was made of curl springs. To tame it, she wore a sock tied round her forehead like an Indian, and grumbled from under that.

They all hated the school where they had to go now. Before the fire, they had gone to the small local school where everybody knew everybody and the teachers called you Dearie. But Uncle Rudolf, Prince of Plumbers, sent them to the grand new school at the top of the hill, with glass walls and shapeless statues and announcements booming out of loudspeakers instead of pinned up on a bulletin board. They did not know anybody and the work was different.

‘Too difficult for you?’ Aunt Valentina asked with glee.

‘No. Different.’

At first, people at the new school had stared and asked questions and said, ‘That’s a lie,’ to the answers. Then they only stared. Now they did not even stare. Tom, Carrie, Em and Michael were swallowed up in the great clattering mob of Londoners, and some of the teachers had not even learned their names.

Michael had hardly said a word since he had been
there. He couldn’t read aloud - at least, not the same words as other people - but was not going to let them know it. He wore his right hand in a sling, pretending it was sprained. He couldn’t spell, but was not going to let them know it

Tom waited for Carrie in the playground among the ugly statues that had holes in them, like gorgonzola cheese. They stuffed their ugly green uniform cap and beret into the pockets of their ugly green blazers and went on a bus to the hospital, which was in the town near where they had lived in the old Army hut. After the first time they had been allowed to visit their mother, Carrie had dreamed about it for nights, and even Penny could not gallop her away from the frightening dreams. Now she and Tom were getting used to seeing their mother in her white plaster cast like a mummy case, with her thick fair hair tied back with a bit of bandage.

They waited in the corridor with the husbands and relations and friends of the other women in the ward until the swing doors opened at exactly six o’clock.

‘Your mother is sleeping.’ The Staff Nurse saw Tom and Carrie come in. She did not need to put out a hand to stop them. Her voice did it for her.

‘Can we just go and look at her?’ When Tom wanted his voice to be deep and grown up, it always came out cracked and high.

‘Don’t wake her.’ Perhaps the nurse smiled at home, but she was not going to risk it at the hospital. ‘She’s been very difficult today.’ This nurse was the one who said, ‘Brace up now, Mrs Fielding. There’s no reason for tears.’

The other one, who wasn’t here today, the small fat one with the little teeth like pearl barley, said, ‘Oh, poor Tom
and Carrie. Oh, poor Mrs Fielding. I’m
so
sorry for you. It’s not fair to have to suffer after you were so brave.’

Tom and Carrie stood on either side of the bed and looked down at their pale, sleeping mother. Her face looked smaller and the mouth that smiled and laughed and made jokes out of mistakes and disappointments was drawn thin and without colour.

‘Difficult!’ Carrie whispered. ‘You can see she’s been in pain.’

Huge warm tears came up from nowhere and flooded her eyes. She hung her head so that her hair swung forward, because the curious woman in the next bed was making her husband look, and saying, ‘Ah, the poor kids. Ah, it’s a rotten shame.’

The tears ran in through the small holes in the corner of Carrie’s eyes and came down her nose. She wiped it on the back of her hand.

‘She saved Mike’s life, you know,’ Tom said. He kept on saying this about their mother, as if he could not get over it.

Whether Charlie had bitten through the wire or not, it was his barking that woke them to the fumes of smoke and the crackle of flames. They had all run out of the house into what they called the garden. Michael had fallen.

‘Where’s Mike?’

They heard him scream inside the house. The doorway where they had run out leaped into a frame of fire. Their mother smashed a window with a stone, climbed through into a room full of smoke, and pushed Michael out of the window. As she came through herself, with glowing smoke reaching out hands to clutch her, the window frame and part of the wall collapsed on her, and when Tom and
Carrie dragged her out on to the trodden mud, she was unconscious.

They would never forget it. ‘She saved Mike’s life,’ Tom kept saying, though not any more in front of Valentina, because she replied, ‘And look where it’s got her.’

‘What - what?’ Their mother’s eyes moved like marbles under the closed lids, then she blinked and woke up. ‘What’s that?’

‘You saved Mike’s life.’

‘Did I?’ She was doped and hazy. She was no more surprised to see her children than if they had been there when she fell asleep. Her burned hands lay outside the bedclothes in huge padded bandages, like white boxing gloves.

‘Are you all right, my dears?’ When she smiled up at them, the lines of pain spread and lifted into the mouth they knew.

‘Of course. Everything’s fine.’ They began to make up some good things to tell her about school, and Em and Mike and the animals.

‘Carrie’s been crying,’ their mother said when they finished.

‘I’m all
right!’
Carrie said fiercely. ‘We’ve told you -we’re all
right!’

But they were not all right, of course. They were all wrong. Unhappy, each in their different way, and Uncle Rudolf and Aunt Valentina were unhappy too.

Fights sprang up all over the house. Angry shouts. Yells. Shriek of chair legs as someone jumped up from a meal and went off to sulk. Banging doors. ‘I’m going mad!’ And a crashing of bass thunder on the piano.

Even the cats fought, up and down the stairs, in and out of the cupboards, along the tops of coat hangers and curtain rods, squalling and scattering lumps of white, black and tiger fur.

How long could this go on? One Sunday at a breakfast of toast and jam, because Maud, the deaf white cat had stolen the butter, and Carrie had dropped the dish of scrambled eggs on the carpet, Uncle Rudolf said, ‘I think we all need a day out.’

He spoke in his usual cold, careful voice, but his smooth egg face looked as if it might crack under the strain.

‘Outings cost money.’ Sunday was Valentina’s worst day. She always came back cross from church, as if the devil was angry with her for going.

‘Not this one. Remember those sunken baths I made, with the mermaid tiles and the silver taps like dolphins? The customer can’t pay the bill, so he’s given me an old place he has in the country. Used to be an inn,
but they made a new road, so no one came that way any more.’

After the usual commotion about whether the animals could come (they couldn’t), and whether Valentina should invite her sad friend Rose Arbuckle who never had any fun (she invited her), they all got into the car. After the usual argument about which way to go, they turned on to a new fast, wide road where everybody seemed to be out on this sunny summer Sunday. Valentina kept telling Uncle Rudolf how to drive.

‘Don’t pass. Watch that woman - she drives like a fool. Look out! Slow down. Go faster. Don’t go so fast…’

‘Stop breathing,’ Tom murmured, wedged in the back seat with his brother and sisters. In the front, half smothered by Valentina’s floating fox fur, poor Rose Arbuckle sat and sighed for the good old days and sniffed at the drop on the end of her long sad nose.

‘Turn now!’ Valentina, reading the map upside down, called out much too late. Uncle Rudolf cut across two lines of furious cars and they turned off the road and went round the edge of a hill where new red brick houses covered the slope like measles.

‘Now that’s what I like to see in the country.’ Valentina was pleased for the first time that day. ‘A little progress and civilization.’ She stopped looking out of the window when they left the housing estates and drove through some quiet old villages, forgotten or never known by the people who raced along the new road, staring straight ahead.

‘Uncle Rhubarb?’

‘Don’t call me that, Michael.’

‘Can I open the window?’ That meant Michael was going to be sick.

‘No.’ Valentina pulled the beautiful dead fox close round her neck at the mere thought of fresh air.

‘You’ll be sorry,’ Carrie said. Michael was already green. Or was it the reflection from the tunnel of green leaves they were going through? It was a tall wood, arching over the road. The trees had smooth cool trunks with initials and hearts carved in them, and flat grey branches shaped like horses’ necks.

The road was rutted and puddled. ‘I hope we’re nearly there.’ Uncle Rudolf winced as his expensive car went in and out of a muddy hole. ‘This must be the wood. It used to be called Wood’s End Inn. When they built the new road, and no travellers came this way any more, the local people started to call it World’s End.’

The end of the world … Coming out of the wood into sudden sunlight, the old road took a turn round an over-grown hedge full of wild roses, and there it was.

It was a stone house with a tiled roof dipping in the middle and curling at the edges. It was very shabby, with damp green patches on the walls, broken windows, and rooks flying out of the chimneys. The path to the door was made of great flat millstones, grown over with grass and weeds, with half a millstone for the doorstep. There were two rotting, rickety benches where old men must have once sat outside with mugs of beer, and the old inn sign still swung, creaking and crooked, with all the paint peeled off.

Tom and Carrie and Em and Michael stared from the car. Michael did not feel sick any more.

‘It’s beautiful.’ Carrie got out on to the wet grass, staring at the house. The sweet air filled her head like a song. ‘Why don’t you come and live here, Uncle Rudolf?’

‘My dear child, you must be insane.’ He leaned a hand
on her shoulder while he put on his galoshes. ‘In this dead place?’