Summer at World's End (12 page)

They all got into his car, which had a wire screen across the back so that he could carry strange dogs without them jumping on to his neck while he was driving. He drove a car in the same way that he had ridden the bay thoroughbred in a point-to-point last spring: easily, casually, nipping in and out of the traffic as he had nipped through the field of tired horses to lead over the last fence and pound alone down the straight, with Tom, Lester, Carrie, Em and Michael screaming like maniacs at the winning-post.

A policeman pulled up beside him at a red light.

‘What’s the hurry then?’

‘It’s a matter of life and death!’ Carrie poked her head out of the window.

‘Going to the hospital?’ The policeman saw the blanketed bundle on Liza’s lap and thought it was a baby. ‘O.K. Good luck.’

The lights changed and Alec Harvey let the policeman pull ahead, so that he wouldn’t see them turning, not to the people’s hospital, but the zoo hospital.

In a building full of squeals and whistles and grunts and
howls and growls and monkey chatter, they found Janet Lynch, with a stained white coat and very short hair and a blunt, square face. Her words were blunt and short too, never more than one syllable.

“Lo kids,’ she greeted them. “Lo Al. Let’s see the monk.’

She checked Joey quickly and put him at once into a cage with a thick sealed glass door through which oxygen was piped in. He sat with his tattered blanket round his shoulders, blinking at Carrie and, as she watched him, already beginning to breathe better.

‘Stay a bit,’ Jan Lynch said, ‘so he can see you. Here I’m short of help. You kids can feed the babes.’

She sat them on a bench at the other end of the room and brought small bottles of milk, and gave Em and Michael tiny monkeys, and Liza a lion cub, and Carrie a bear only a week old - animals whose mothers had died or wouldn’t feed them.

‘Pretty cosy,’ Alec said. He was playing with two young chimpanzees in a child’s play pen.

‘Ought to come more,’ Jan said. ‘Vets should learn from zoos. Mad fad now to keep odd wild pets at home. See ‘em on T.V. “I want it!” Walk it on leash. Wear it round neck. Cubs in the kids’ room. Snake in the back yard. Monk in the bed. Get sick in the end and no one knows what’s up.’

‘I’d like to learn,’ Alec said, ‘if I wasn’t so busy. I wish my boy Tom could come for a while - these kids’ brother. Be useful to me if he could learn something here about exotic pets.’

‘Wish he could, Al,’ Jan said. ‘Boy just left. I need help.’ ‘So do I,’ Alec said.

‘I’d work for you, Mr Harvey!’ Carrie looked up eagerly from the baby bear. ‘I could do everything that Tom does.
I could… Oh yes.’ Her face dropped. ‘I know. Don’t say it. School. School, school, always rotten, stinking school. The best years of my life going to waste on algebra and the chief mineral products of Central Uganda.’

‘I could work for you, Alec’ Liza stood up and put the little monkey back in its cage.

‘I thought your mother wanted you at home.’

‘I don’t care.’ She shook back her red hair and put on her lawless face. ‘They can’t make me.’

‘They could send you back to Mount Pleasant,’ Alec said, ‘and that wouldn’t be much help to me.’

‘You mean, I
could
work for you?’

‘If Jan wants Tom here, and he wants to come.’

‘Lucky swine.’ Carrie grumbled, holding up the little bear and patting his soft furry back to make him belch ‘Lucky Liza. Lucky Tom. Won’t I ever be old enough to do
anything?’

‘I thought you wanted to stay being a child.’ Em looked at her.

‘I do. I want everything. I want - oh, I don’t know what I want.’

‘I want a towel,’ Michael said. ‘The milk has gone in one end of this monkey and right out the other.’

On the way home, Liza asked Carrie rather roughly, ‘Is it - I mean, is it all right then, with you lot, if I —’

‘Stay at World’s End? We thought you were.’

They had got used to Liza. She was wild and unpredictable and noisy and clumsy, but they had got used to her, like a new animal.

Before they got home, she telephoned her mother’s shop from a call box, to say she wanted to stay at World’s End and work for Alec Harvey. Through the glass, Carrie could hear the voice on the other end of the line, quacking
like an infuriated duck, while Liza opened her mouth and waved her free hand and made fierce faces and couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

She came out stamping her feet like Em when she was angry in boots, and tugging at her hair as if it was a bell rope.

‘What did she say?’

‘She’s coming to see me.’

‘What else?’ The voice had quacked on for a full five minutes.

‘Nothing else. She’s coming.’

Liza’s mother came in a vulgar-looking purple van with

E. ZLOTKIN, GREENGROCER.

YOU WANT THE BEST? WE HAVE IT painted on the side. She brought her son Hubert.

‘Why did you have to bring that creep?’ Liza asked aggressively.

‘I knew you’d want to see dear little Hubert’

‘Only in hell,’ Liza said boldly. She did not care what she said to anyone. Her mother’s face swelled redder and her eyes bulged as if someone were blowing her up from inside. She was a loud, coarse woman, with a smell and a shine on her like bacon grease.

It was a very hot day when she came, one of the many of that glorious summer, with weeds and flowers and bramble vines running to jungle riot, and the horses and the donkey head to tail on the bare trampled ground under the wide chestnut tree, dedicating their days to the war of the flies.

Everyone was out at the back of the house, getting ready to give Liza’s mother lunch out of doors. They had dragged out the old weather-scarred table and strapped a piece of wood to its broken leg, and glued a sardine tin under one of the others, to make all four more or less the same length. Em and Liza were laying out knives and forks and plates, stepping round or over Henry and Lucy and various puppies and cats who were hanging about to see
what was going to happen. If eating was going to happen, they were going to be there. The goat was licking the sardine tin.

Michael was cutting grass with a collection of clacking old iron that he called a lawn mower. He pulled it behind him with a strap round his chest, like a horse pulling a harrow. The dull blades clanked round, flattening the grass, if not cutting it.

Carrie was in the torn tennis net hammock reading, ‘to improve her mind’ for social conversation with Liza’s mother. She was reading a library book called
Horses in my Life
.

‘… And then there was the corky little bay who carried me for more years than I care to remember, sound in wind and limb and mild of eye… ‘It was fantastically dull, droning on like the bees in the potato flowers.

Carrie shut her eyes. She opened them with a start as the clack of the mower stopped and a great hullabaloo sounded from the front of the house. She rolled the hammock over to tip herself on to the ground, which was the fastest way of getting out, and ran round the house.

Liza was ahead of her, shouting, Tut him down! Put him down, you rotten little beast!’ Her brother Hubert had Dusty struggling in his arms, and yelling as if he had been run over.

Hubert dropped him awkwardly, and the old dog limped off through the hedge and into the wood, howling as if the devil was tied to his tail.

‘Oh!’ Liza stamped both her bare feet. ‘Now look what you’ve done, you jerk!’

‘I only went to pick him up. What have I done now?’

‘You know he hates that. He’s old and stiff and he’s been ill—’

‘I only wanted to pet him. Mum-may!’ He ran to his
mother like a great baby. ‘She’s just as mean as ever.’

Darling little Hubert was a blubbery overgrown boy of about eleven, with eyes like currants in dough and a wet pink baby mouth.

Liza’s name was Jones. Her mother had gone back to her maiden name of Zlotkin when Mr Jones left her, which seemed a bad exchange for Jones. She sat at the table under the trees fanning herself with a plate, and stared at the animals as if they were wild beasts. Henry the ram, who had no tact, put his woolly head on her wide lap, and she pushed him off with her handbag and said, ‘Get away, bad dog Charlie.’

‘That’s Charlie.’ Michael politely pointed out the shaggy dog, spread out like a sheep’s fleece under the shade of a bush.

‘Twins, eh? Bit much, ain’t it?’

Mrs Zlotkin was surprised to see Liza wearing the bedroom curtain apron and handing round the bread she had made. Not pleased. She was never pleased. But surprised. ‘At least you learned something at that Mount Poison, or whatever they call it.’

‘I can do more than you think,’ Liza said. ‘I got a job.’

‘What sort of a job?’ her mother asked suspiciously.

‘With a vet.’

‘A vet - what’s all this?’

‘An animal doctor. The Fielding’s brother works for him, but he’s going to work at the zoo —’

‘What for?’ Mrs Zlotkin’s eyes bulged like hard-boiled eggs.

‘Because of the monkey.’

‘What monkey?’

‘Forget it.’

Liza had worked for two days cleaning houses in the village. Michael had washed a car, and Em had got extra money for baby-sitting ‘above and beyond the call of duty’ (getting bitten in the calf of the leg by Mrs Potter’s middle brat), so it was a pretty good lunch. Hubert ate everything he could lay hands and teeth on, sighed and threw himself on the ground, denting the turf. He lay with his stomach sticking up, panting gently.

‘It’s not bad here.’ It was the first time his mouth had been free to speak since the beginning of lunch.

‘That’s right, love.’ His mother always agreed with him.

‘So I can stay?’ Liza pounced.

‘I didn’t say that. Minnie Boggs asked me to go to Clacton in their caravan. I’ll need you at home to look after my little Hubert.’

‘You want
me
to take care of
him?’

‘Kind Liza take care of poor Hubie.’ He blinked up, laughing at her, his face pink and glistening from the juices of what he had put into it.

‘I’ll be —’

Liza was working herself up to explode with rage, but Mrs Zlotkin was having an idea, her face bursting with the effort. ‘I might let him come here, though.’ (No one had invited him.) ‘Put roses in his cheeks, that would.’ (They were crimson already with overeating.) ‘All right, girl. If you want to stay, he comes too.’

‘Always a snag to everything,’ Liza muttered, and Em picked up a tray and grumbled into the kitchen, ‘Hubert …Hube the Boob…What a summer.’

Carrie said nothing, torn between wanting Liza and not wanting dear little Hubie, so Michael put his brown, grubby fingers on the edge of the table and leaned forward as politely as a head waiter and said, ‘Of course, Mrs Slotmachine, we’d love to have him.’

Mrs Zlotkin belched.

‘Thanks for nothing.’ Hubert lay on his back chewing grass, with Maud, the deaf white cat, on his stomach. He picked her off all wrong, pulling a hind leg, and she squealed and struck out and ran up a tree.

‘Mum-may!’ He sat up and held out his podgy hand, trying to force tears. ‘It scratched me!’

Squawking about blood poisoning, Mrs Zlotkin took him into the kitchen to wash the tiny scratch. Em was getting out cups for coffee, and Gabby was cackling from his cage, ‘Cuppa tea cuppa tea cuppa tea’, as he always did when he heard the rattle of china.

‘Pretty Polly,’ Hubert said. He stood on a chair to reach the cage, which hung from a ceiling hook that had once been used for curing bacon.

‘He’s not a parrot, and don’t open his cage when the back door’s open,’ Em warned, but Hubert was not in the habit of listening to instructions. He opened the cage door and put in his fat finger with Mrs Zlotkin’s handkerchief tied round it. Gabby, who had learned to trust human fingers, hopped on to it.

‘Look, Mum-may, see the pretty polly!’ Getting down from the chair as clumsily as he did everything else, Hubert stumbled and fell. The love-bird flew away. Hubert grabbed for him, missed, grabbed again. He tore out half the tail feathers and the bird flew drunkenly out of the back door. Gabby was never a good flier, even with a whole tail. He floundered into a tree, and the white cat got him.

Wails and shrieks. Liza swore.

‘What have I done
now?
Hubert wanted to know. ‘It was the mean old cat.’

‘Of course it was, my love.’ Mrs Zlotkin put her fat arms round him.

Her face went blank with surprise when Em rounded on her, ‘Don’t blame the cat - blame that stupid Boob!’

Mrs Zlotkin had not come here to be talked to like
that
, thank you very much. After she and the Boob had flounced off in the purple van, Liza went into the wood to call Dusty from where he was hiding. He didn’t come. Liza began to worry. ‘He doesn’t know his way round here, and he don’t see so well.’

‘He’ll turn up at supper-time,’ Michael said. ‘Let’s have a bird funeral to take your mind off it’

‘Only if no one is going to say anything against Maud,’ Em said.

She went upstairs to get their father’s long black oilskin, which she wore for funerals of mice, and frozen hedgehogs, and the kitten that had drowned in the duck pond, learning to fish for newts. They put the love-bird into a biscuit packet and buried it under the tree ‘where he died so bravely’. Em read some verses from a poem they had found in a musty exercise book in what might once have been a children’s nursery, long, long ago. The writing was brown and faint. Between the pages was a dried flower, and a small bird’s feather.

Found in the garden, dead in his beauty -
O, that a linnet should die in the spring!
Bury him, comrades, in pitiful duty.
Muffle the dinner-bell. Solemnly ring
.

Bury him nobly, next to the donkey.
Fetch the old banner, and wave it about.
Bury him deeply. Think of the monkey.
Shallow his grave, and the dogs got him out
.

Bury him softly, white wool around him …

Carrie’s thoughts drifted away to the child who had written that poem more than a hundred years ago. A house full of animals then, just like now. A house made for animals, Wood’s End, World’s End…

Sleepy after the big lunch, she stood with her back to the road, her face lifted in pleasure to the sun. In the commotion of Gabby’s death, Lucy had put her bearded face into the hammock and torn off the cover of
Horses in my Life
to get at the glue in the backing. Carrie would have to pay the library for it. How? … Somehow… Not bother now …