World's End in Winter (2 page)

As the weather got colder, they went round the house stuffing newspaper into window gaps, and then they went to the Church Jumble Sale and bought some jerseys and scarves and rubber boots and a white woollen hood for Michael.

It framed his cheerful face and sticky chin like a Crusader’s chain mail. He wore it constantly, sometimes in bed. It was the best thing that had happened to him so far this winter.

The first morning when he wore the hood to school, a crude boy called Gregory Ferris fell on him with hoots and yells.

‘E’s wearing my old ’ood! ’Ere look, Walter, look at poor old Mike, got to wear me old clothes. My mum wasn’t even going to give it to the Jumble, because she didn’t think it would fetch nothing.’

Michael stood with his fists clenched, his cheeks red from rage and from the chilly ride behind John in the dogcart, with the hood cuddling his ears.

‘Didn’t ought to be allowed, did it?’ Gregory’s toady friend tutted and pursed his mouth, like women gossiping in the village. ’All those poor children living on their own in that ruin. Not right, is it?’

He was quoting his mother. Most of the local children envied the Fieldings living with their animals at World’s End, with no one more grown up than their brother Tom, and Liza who was often more childish than anyone.

After the last spot of trouble with Mrs Loomis, the headmistress, Tom had made Michael promise not to fight any more, so he stuck out his tongue far enough to lick the drop off his nose and turned to go into school.

But behind him, the crude voice of Gregory Ferris sneered, ’You’re right, it’s not right. Where’s his dad then, that’s what they say.’

‘I told you.’ Michael swung round. ’He’s sailing round the world with my mother.’

‘Ha bloody ha,’ jeered Gregory, and Michael was into the fight with arms and legs and head, the two of them
scrabbling on the gritty cement playground, Walter hopping round like a referee.

Michael was winning. He usually won fights. That was why he started them. But as Gregory scrambled up to run away - creeps like him never fought to a finish - he grabbed at Michael’s hood and it turned right round on his head and muffled him. He hit out blindly, not at Gregory, but at the glass pane of the school door.

It did not shatter, because it was reinforced with wire, but it broke right across with the same rifle crack as the window at Brookside (two broken windows was sure to mean a third).

‘That will cost you two pounds, little boy.’ Mrs Loomis, who never could remember names, even of people like
Michael who were constantly on the carpet of her office, lifted the hood off his head and dangled it like a tea cosy. The small soft moustache along her upper lip stood out like cat’s fur when it was cold.

Michael snatched his white hood from her and ran out across the playground.

He did not go into school. He spent the morning sitting in the hollow of John’s brown back in the shed where the baker let Carrie keep the horse while his van was on the bread rounds.

‘What are you doing, Mike?’ At dinnertime, Carrie came out with carrots for John from the school cook.

‘I owe Mrs Bloomers two pounds.’

Carrie understood why he was with John, brooding in his hood. He might as well have said twenty pounds.

Tom had a job at the zoo hospital, where many of the animals were wintered when the zoo was closed. Liza was working for Alec Harvey the vet, who was as poor as they were, since he was always treating animals free for people who were even poorer.

He kept promising Liza a rise. ’That’ll be the day,’ she told him, on hands and knees sweeping up the rack of expensive test tubes she had just broken.

Carrie and John earned a bit of money taking horse manure round to the gardeners of the housing estates at Newtown, but all the gardeners were indoors these days with their shoes off, watching television. She helped Mr Mismo with his pigs and cows, and Mrs Mismo, who thought food was more important than money (which it was), paid her in sausage rolls and big currant biscuits called Fat Rascals.

Em, using her business name of Esmeralda, did babysitting for local mothers. If they were decent children, she was decent to them. If they were vile, she was vile back. Mrs Potter gave her a bonus if little Jocelyn, who bit, actually drew blood.

Michael sold inventions where he could. Fireplace trivets
and flowerpot holders made from horseshoes. Stools made out of broomsticks and upside-down cake tins. Potato mashers made of wire coathangers. Floor polishers made of bricks covered with felt. You tied them round your feet and skated. He also did shopping errands for a crippled old lady called Miss Cordelia Chattaway, and she gave him ten pence every Sunday for wheeling her to church and finding the hymns.

Everyone helped to make money, but there was never more than just enough to feed all the two-legged and four-legged mouths.

‘Dogs can eat table scraps,’ Aunt Valentina had said when Em asked for a case of dog food for her birthday. But at World’s End, there never were any scraps.

‘A horse can keep fat on good old Doctor Green,’ Mr Mismo said. But John and Peter and Oliver worked hard and needed oats as well as grass. Soon there would be no goodness in the winter grazing, and there would be hay to buy.

The roof needed patching where autumn gales had blown some corner tiles off. The rainwater pump needed a new valve. Everyone needed new shoes except the horses, since the blacksmith was more important than the shoe shop, and the old black cooking stove was cracked right across and would be lucky if it hung on till spring.

‘Money doesn’t matter,’ Mother always said. And that was true. As long as you had some.

‘When my book is published,’ their father had said, ’we shall all be rich and famous.’ The book was
Sailor of the Seven Seas,
with photographs of Mother in the rigging. He had not written it yet.

Meanwhile, there was two pounds to pay Mrs Loomis for the broken glass. And if those people with the strange pale child did buy Brookside and guessed from the hoof-marks who might have broken the drawing-room window, would that be two pounds too?

On the evening of Michael’s fight with Gregory Ferris, Tom came home from the zoo tired and cross. A ferret had
died of pneumonia. Jan Lynch, Tom’s boss, had said in her clipped voice that did not show if she was annoyed, angry or furious, ’Might have lived if you’d kept its front end propped.’

‘How can you keep a blasted ferret propped up?’ Tom raged, slumped at the kitchen table, legs stuck out on Charlie’s shaggy back, tearing great chunks off the crust of a new loaf. ’How can I do
everything!
It’s always my fault. I’m fed up. I’m going to tell that woman... Yesterday she told me to get my hair cut. I ask you. Just because it got singed in a bunsen burner in the lab.’ He dragged his long, knuckly hand through his flopping hair, leaving crumbs in it. ’I’m fed up. Life’s too short...’ etc, etc. When Tom was tired and cross, he smouldered with frustrated fires, flinging his long arms and legs and hair about, kicking furniture. The cats went up to a safer level of counter and shelves and watched. A runty marmoset he had brought home from work stuck its round eyes and tufted ears out of the front of his shirt to see what was going on.

‘I’ll leave. I’ll go to college and come out a better vet than Jan is. Then she’ll be sorry.’

‘Surprised, more like.’ Liza giggled.

Tearing at the loaf, Tom shouted at her to shut up and leave him alone. Charlie got up and went to lie somewhere else. The marmoset blinked and drew its head back inside Tom’s shirt. Caesar the five-toed tortoiseshell cat jumped off the table and made a dignified exit through the hole in the back door, which had a swinging rubber flap made from the mudguard of a lorry.

Carrie took a snaffle bit and a pair of stirrups out of the saucepan where they had been soaking and went off to polish them in another room.

Even Liza, who did not care what she said to anyone, did not shout back at Tom to shut up himself and stop mutilating the bread. She whispered to Michael, ’Don’t tell him about the window now.’

Echoes of Mother.
’Don’t tell your father till he’s had his dinner.’

Even Tom and Liza, even at their age, were already catching the grown-up disease of when to tell what.

When a thing had to be said, it had to be said.

Michael said it, but with his back turned to Tom, looking out of the window and fiddling with a thread in the curtain, toes turned in so far that one shoe was over the other, a draughty gap of skin between his shrunk jersey and sagging trousers, woollen hood jammed down tight over his ears so that he could not hear Tom being angry.

After a while, when he had frayed the curtain enough to poke a finger through, he turned and saw that Tom was not being angry. Tom was not being anything. Tom was not even in the room. Nor was Liza. Nor were any of the dogs. Only Michael’s mother was suddenly standing in the door-way with her arms held out.

’Have you got two pounds?’ Michael asked her.

‘Of course not.’ Mother laughed. She hugged him. Nothing mattered.

Their father had come home to start his book,
Sailor of the Seven Seas,
although he had not even completely sailed the first sea yet.

Six times he and Mother had set bravely forth in the
Lady Alice.
Six times they had been forced back by freak storms, a split spinnaker, leaking water tanks, a seized-up dynamo...

The first time they left to sail round the world, the
Daily Amazer,
which was going to print the story, had sent down a reporter and a photographer. The local band played ’Hearts of Oak’, and the mayor came out on the quay with his chain clinking in the breeze to wish them ’Godspeed’.

The second time, the
Lady Alice
was cheered away by two boy scouts with trumpets, playing ’For Those in Peril on the Sea’.

The last time, there was no one at all, except a fisherman who cast the stern line off the bollard, and the town drunk who owed Dad some money and wanted to be sure he got away.

That was the voyage on which the generator seized up and the torch batteries fell overboard and the matches were pooped by a soaking stern wave. They sailed blind through a starless night and ended up on a millionaire’s private beach in the Cape Verde Islands. The millionaire’s gunmen had shot away half the storm jib before Dad could shout.

‘Too late to start out again till next spring, so what I’m going to do’ - in the lamplight, the gold ring in Dad’s ear glittered against his curly black beard, his eyes glittered with the excitement of a new scheme - ’is hole up here and start the book and we’ll soon be rich and famous.’

‘So can I have two pounds?’ Tom and Carrie and Em had forgotten tiresome daily details in the drama of the sea story, but Michael hung on to things like a puppy with a laundry line.

‘Right away.’ Dad tipped his chair on to its back legs to fish in the pocket of his faded, sea-shrunk trousers.

‘Jerry—’ Mother put out her thin brown hand, but he pulled out some coins and poured them from a height into Michael’s cupped palms as if they were doubloons.

‘How much is that?’ Michael could not count any better than he could spell.

’Two pounds and nine pence,’ Em said.

‘Keep the change, my good man.’ Dad closed Michael’s fingers round the money.

‘Jerry—’ Mother said again, and he pulled his pocket inside out to show her that there was nothing left in it but a fishing float and a stub of pencil and a piece of caulking compound.

The next morning, which was a Saturday, with everybody
home but Tom and Liza, he was in great energy, demanding four fried eggs for brain fuel, sending everyone off in different directions to equip him for his new career.

Mother had to hunt up his old plaid dressing gown because authors always wore old plaid dressing gowns. Michael rode Oliver to the village for paper and pencils, and supplied wood for the sitting-room fire by his patent method of rolling logs through the window and down a board into the rusted washtub which was the wood box.

Carrie swept the room and pushed the litter off the table on to the floor.

Em looked for cushions to cover the holes in the cane chair. All the cushions had cats on them, so she brought down two thick books from the trunk that had been left in the attic long ago by the family who once lived here. The musty mysterious smell of the pages was more fascinating than what was printed on them. Em read like eating and was always hard up for a book, but you had to be pretty desperate to get through either
Glimpses of Old Lapland
or
Tabby Tinker’s Teatime Tales for the Littlest Folk.

In his dressing gown and frayed rope shoes, his pipe between his teeth to make him look bookish, Dad said goodbye to his family as if he were going to prison for a month and went into the front room and shut the door. It swung open. Every door in this slightly crooked house either creaked open when you shut it, or shut when you wanted it open.

‘Shut that perishing door!’

No one did, since no one had opened it, so he banged it and kicked a footstool against it.

He opened it three times in the first half-hour, demanding tea, Michael to ride back to the village for pipe tobacco, Em and Mother to stop talking about childbirth on the stairs.

Mother always had her best conversations in odd places: kneeling in a cupboard looking for a sandal, halfway up a ladder, on the roof cleaning leaves out of the gutter. One of the best talks she and Em had ever had, about what dying
was, had been in the far corner of a room into which they had trapped themselves by starting to paint the floor from the doorway.

At last the door banged shut, the footstool scraped on the tiles, and they heard no more. Mother and Em, who were cleaning the house, went up and down stairs with their shoes off. Carrie moved Leonora off the front lawn in case she brayed. The red hen Rubella, who might boast for half an hour after she laid an egg, was taken down cackling from her perch by Michael and held in front of a whitewashed wall to hypnotize her into silence.

At lunchtime, Em went round to the front of the house and peered through the bare tangled branches of the jasmine to see how the book was going.