Summer at World's End (4 page)

When he was on board, he said rather stiffly, ‘I owe you many thanks.’

He was embarrassed to say it, so Carrie changed the subject. ‘You see,’ she said, because John and Princess had their heads together as they moved off, ‘they
are
talking about us.’

‘Yes.’ This time Mr Mismo did not deny it. ‘They’re saying, “Silly fat old fool”,’ he said glumly

Lester’s mother, whose name was Mrs Figg, worked at a place where they sent lawless girls who were neither quite old enough nor quite bad enough to go to prison. The place was called Mount Pleasant. The girls called it Mount Putrid.

In the Easter holidays, Lester worked there in the garden every day. Carrie could not wait until the evening to tell him about the chestnut horse and the girl who was a mad devil, so the next morning, she rode over to Mount Pleasant on John.

Charlie came too, his thick curly mat of pale hair bouncing, his trousers fluffed out under the plume of his tail as he trotted ahead.

If you think very hard about a dog, he will eventually turn round and look at you. Carrie thought hard about Charlie. He stopped and looked round. She did it twice more, and it worked. That proved it. But when she stopped thinking about Charlie, he still turned and looked back about every hundred yards, which proved something else. Either that you couldn’t make a dog do something by thinking about it. Or that you could only make him do it if he wanted to anyway.

Some of the Mount Pleasant girls were in the garden, planting cabbages. Carrie looked over the wall from John’s back, and the nearest girl looked up and grinned and waved. People in the village made up terrible things about
these girls, and locked their doors at night, but all the ones that Carrie had met had been friendlier than most of the girls in the village.

‘Hullo, kid!’ the girl said. ‘Come to join the club? What did you do - steal the horse?’ It was a girl called Liza, whom Carrie had met once before, going to town in Mrs Figg’s car. She had a bold face and reckless eyes, with a mane of wild red hair tied with a green scarf.

‘I’m looking for Lester Figg,’ Carrie said.

‘I think he’s on the other side of the house. I’ll yell.’

‘No,’ Carrie said. ‘It’s secret.’

‘I got you.’ Liza understood, but without begging to know the secret. ‘Here, I’ll hold that Derby winner and you can scout round and find him.’

She wiped her earthy hands on the seat of her jeans, jumped, caught the top of the wall, pulled herself up and swung easily over.

‘They ought to have broken glass on top of that wall,’ people in the village said, tut-tutting. ‘Or barbed wire.’ But the gates were not even locked. Any of the Mount Pleasant girls could run away, but the ones who did were always brought back.

Liza put John’s reins over her arm. ‘Don’t hurry back.’ She lit a cigarette and sat down by the wall. Charlie sat down beside her and she threw her arm over his woolly back.

Carrie clambered from the saddle to the top of the wall, jumped down on the other side and scouted round, keeping in the cover of trees and bushes, until she saw Lester washing flowerpots under the greenhouse tap. She put a broad blade of grass between her thumbs and blew gently, like a cautious owl. He looted round at once and saw her, although she was hidden behind a bush. Without
making a sign, he went to the back of the greenhouse, knowing she would follow.

Carrie took a deep breath, then ran as if there were snipers in the trees, and nipped into the tiny boiler room of the greenhouse, where Lester was sitting on a pile of seed-boxes.

Carrie told him about the mad devil girl and the chestnut horse. ‘She’s trying to ruin him for anyone else. I think she hates her father, so she’s taking it out on the horse. We’ve
got
to save him.’

Lester listened closely, his bright eyes moving from side to side, as if her face were the page of a book. When she was finished, he didn’t say, ‘How dreadful!’ He said, ‘How marvellous!’ Something like this was a challenging adventure to him, the very stuff of life.

There were two things that might happen:

1. The nervous horse might get bought by someone who would ill-treat him because they were as afraid of him as he was of them.

2. No one would buy him, and he would still be there for the mad devil to ill-treat when she came home from the hell-hole school.

‘
Pretty Prancer,’
Lester said with disgust ‘‘I bet
she
named him.’

There were four things that Lester and Carrie might do:

1. They could buy the horse. ‘With what?’

2. They could tell the R.S.P.C.A. Man.

‘But if there’s no mark on the horse, there’s nothing he can do.’

3. They could threaten the devil girl that they would tell her father what she was up to.

‘She wouldn’t care. And if her father’s anything like her, he wouldn’t either.’

4. They could steal the horse.

‘Ah,’ said Lester. ‘Now you’re talking.’

It was a week before the girl went away to school. Carrie thought about the chestnut horse all that week.
Pretty Prancer
. What a degrading name for a horse! She could not think of him as that. Pretty Prancer. Peter Piper. Pickled Pepper. Peter Pan? Peter. He should be called Peter.

She wrote a poem on the inside of a cornflakes packet:

Peter. I called him, and he took the name And made it his. And though he looked the same, Nervous and proud, ears quick, legs clean and fine, His heart and life were new - for he was mine
.

She would be very quiet and patient with him, win his confidence, remember that he had been taught to fear people. He must be taught again to like them. To like Carrie. A one-man horse. A one-girl horse, who nobody else could ride, like Bucephalus, the battle charger of Alexander the Great, who never let anyone else ride him. Only the conqueror of the world.

Carrie’s brother Tom found her cleaning out the end loose box. ‘Got another horse coming?’ he asked casually.

Carrie banged at the rafters with a broom. Lester, who believed that people and animals were the same, because they were born again after death as each other, would never sweep away a beetle or a spider which was only doing its job. ‘He might be your great-uncle Ebenezer,’ he said, when his mother dratted and swatted at a spider
who had thought of wintering in a ceiling corner. But dusty stable cobwebs made horses cough. So Carrie swept.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, not looking at Tom.

He did not look at her either. ‘A rescue?’ He chewed a stalk of hay.

‘Perhaps. Oh listen, Tom, there’s a —’

She wanted so much to tell him about the devil girl and the horse, but he said, ‘Don’t tell me. Then I won’t know.’ With their father gone, Tom was man of the house, although he was still a boy. It was better if he didn’t know some things until after they were done.

Lester and Carrie went to spy round the stucco house with the neat painted stable. They went across country, as the crow flies, over railway lines, through gorse commons and gaps in hedges, down narrow lanes and overgrown paths that Carrie never knew existed. When you travelled with Lester, he seemed to make up the countryside as he went along.

They saw the devil girl sulk off to school, with as much luggage as if she were the Queen going on a state visit. A dealer came to try Peter, but was so put off by the horse’s nervous looks that he got back into his car without touching him. From the top of an elm on a windy day that threatened to blow them down in a shower of broken branches, Lester and Carrie watched a leathery woman ride Peter in the field.

Paper blew up. Peter shied. The woman, who did not ride as well as she thought she did, lost her temper and whipped him hard down the shoulder. He reared up and she slid off backwards and sat on the ground, still wearing the stirrups, which had slid off with her.

The girl’s father called from the gate. ‘No harm in him - he’s just a bit fresh!’

‘Fresh, my foot.’ The leathery woman got up. ‘He’s a pig, Mr Novak. How can you - What kind of a - I’ll have the law!’ — She came shouting towards him. He put his coat collar up round his lined, glum face and turned away.

‘Mr Novak,’ Lester said in the tree. ‘Mr No Thanks.’

After the leathery woman had driven away, honking her horn all down the road to annoy the neighbours, a gardener caught the horse and took off the saddle and bridle and left him in the paddock. ‘Peter’s not so afraid of him,’ Lester said. ‘He’s probably better with men, because of that devil girl.’

They came down from the tree and went to the gate at the top corner of the field, away from the house. The horse watched them, head up, alert for trouble. He was a coppery ches tout, very bright, with the dazzling white crescent star and a red-gold mane and tail.

‘I’m going in to get him.’

Carrie put up her hand to the gate, but Lester pulled back her arm. ‘He doesn’t like girls,’ he said bossily. ‘I’ll go.’

Fury raged through Carrie like a flame. The fiercest anger is between friends.

A thin strand of wire ran round the top rail of the fence, two ends twisted together at the gate. Lester put up his hand to climb over, touched the wire, yelled, jumped in the air, spun round and fell on his back as if he had been electrocuted.

He had. ‘What a shock.’ He propped himself on his elbows.

Carrie had been going to say nastily, ‘Serve you right,’ but when he grinned up at her and asked, ‘Did my eyes light up?’ she laughed instead.

‘I’m going to find out where they switch off the current.’ Lester brushed himself down, pushed back his hair, which fell forward again, went on to the road and up the gravel drive to the door of the house.

Mr Novak opened it at once, as if he had been spying behind it to catch boys. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for work,’ Lester said. ‘Could you use a boy in the stable?’

‘Don’t bother me.’ As Mr No Thanks began to shut the door, Lester said quickly, ‘I’ll just look round to see if there’s any odd jobs, I —’

‘Buzz off,’ said Mr Novak, tall and thin and beaky, not even bothering to look down at him.

When he shut the door, Lester started down the drive, then doubled back towards the stable and garage. The door opened again. ‘Buzz off, I said.’ The door banged.

‘You try.’ Lester joined Carrie behind the dustbins.

She went to the back door. A girl in an apron opened it. ‘Ullo?’ she said. She sounded French.

‘Er - excuse - ex-er—excuse me, I um—,’ Carrie swung her hair forward, because stammering made her blush and blushing made her stammer. ‘I’ - um, I’m - er, well, it’s like this, you see. I’m from the Pony Club, you see. We’re taking a - er, a - er, a count is what it is, of all the horses round here and the stables and so can I look at yours?’ She ended in a rush.

The girl in the apron spread her hands. ‘No Engleesh.’ She had not understood a word.

They waited until the evening. The gardener came to the side door of the garage, reached in to flick a switch, then unhooked the wire on the bottom gate of the paddock. He held out a bowl of oats towards Peter, backing cautiously away until he got him into the stable, then bolted the door and snapped on a padlock. He mopped his brow with his arm and let out a sigh of relief that carried to the farmyard across the road, where Lester and Carrie were watching through the gate of an empty sty, disguised as pigs.

When they came back next day, there was a party on the
lawn. The Novaks must have waited until the devil girl had gone, so that she couldn’t insult the guests. People were standing about with glasses, high heels sinking into the grass, laughing and talking as if it was the finest thing in life to be standing and chattering in coats under a grey English sky. Peter was in the paddock, head and tail up, snorting at the commotion.

‘Pray for rain.’ Lester and Carrie went behind the dustbins. He clenched his fists and shut his eyes and screwed up his face. A few drops began to fall. ‘Lester the Rainmaker.’

He watched the guests scurrying into the house with small shrieks, clutching at paper napkins on their hair, then he ran round towards the top gate of the field, while Carrie ran across the yard to the garage door. She pressed a switch - wrong one, that was the light - pressed another, and waved to Lester, waiting by the top gate.

Suppose it was the wrong switch?
He trusted her. She saw him put up his hands to untwist the wire, and shut her eyes, not daring to look, waiting for a yell.

No yell. She looked. Lester had opened the gate and was in the paddock, walking slowly towards the horse with his hand out. Peter had a halter on, but he would not let Lester reach his head, so Lester stood still in the rain with his hand out and his hair plastered down. Carrie began to climb through the fence, but he muttered to her, ‘Get back. Leave him to me.’ And after a while, the horse moved cautiously towards him, dropping his head, sniffed, and took the carrot. Lester stood still while the horse licked his hand, then slowly, watching him, he brought a rope from behind his back and slid it through the halter.

Carrie had walked round the outside of the fence, biting her nails with jealousy.
It doesn’t matter who catches
him
, her outer self said. Her inner self whined,
I wanted it to be me
.

Lester led Peter through the gate and she went up to him. He backed away, and they would have lost him if Lester had not hung on, dragged across the grass like a fisherman who has hooked a whale.

‘I told you!’ he said angrily, after the horse stopped. ‘He doesn’t like
girls.’

He led Peter over the hill and down into a copse where they were hidden from the house and from the road. Carrie followed.

A one-girl horse! Carrie and Peter.
Nobody else could ride him
. Now she could not even lead him.

They didn’t take him straight to World’s End, in case Mr Novak remembered that he had run there before. They took him to an abandoned farm in a fold of the hills and left him in a cowshed for the night. Very early next morning, without waiting for Lester, Carrie went to the farm. The horse was gone. Lester had not waited for
her
. He had taken the horse away somewhere so that she couldn’t have him.