The House at World's End (10 page)

Carrie did not know what to do. Tom had got a few days work with the beet harvest. Michael had gone to the crossroads to wait for the travelling fish van, and try to beg some cods’ heads and bits of eel for the cats and dogs.
Em had gone to a churchyard with Lester to read epitaphs on old graves.

Emmie, who was part cat, might have known what to do. Panting and heaving, Pip stared up at Carrie. I am dying, she said.

‘No you’re not.’ Carrie picked her up and carried her down to the stable. She laid her in the manger while she saddled John, then with the cat inside her shirt, mounted and rode as smoothly as she could down the lane to Mr Mismo.

He was out. Tyre tracks in the mud, but no car.

She turned and rode back past the house, round the corner and into the deep wood where the leafy branches met high overhead, and John’s hooves made a thicker, muffled sound as they trotted on.

The vet was four miles away, in the new housing estates. Carrie thought Pip might die before they got there, but at least she was doing something. Better than standing by wringing her hands.

When she came out of the shelter of the wood, it was raining. Riding with one hand, she held her other arm across her shirt and leaned forward to shelter the cat. The rain drove down like pebbles. John put his ears back and shook his head, but he trotted on. Carrie cantered him on the grassy side of the road, walked a little while to rest him, then trotted on again, his feet clopping hollow on the streaming road. His coat was soaked with sweat and rain. Her hair hung like seaweed, in her eyes, in her mouth. Her clothes were plastered to her. Her bare feet clung by the big toe to the stirrups, blue and yellow with cold.

She did not know where the vet was. In pelting rain, she came into the beginning of the streets of new houses.
No one about. A man in a car swerved, as John swerved round a deep puddle.

‘Look out!’ he yelled.

‘Where’s the vet?’

He stared at her like an idiot and drove on.

‘Where’s the vet?’ There was a man in a sou’wester and oilskins at the petrol station on the corner. He stared too, as if Carrie were the headless horseman. As if he had never seen a soaked girl on a soaking horse with a dying cat inside her shirt

‘Please! Do you know where the vet lives?’

He shook his head. Rain cascaded off the brim of his yellow sou’wester.

‘It’s an emergency!’

‘Oh well.’ That seemed to jog his memory. ‘Go up to the crossroads. Turn left, turn right, go past the school. You’ll see a sign.’

Carrie clattered away down the hard black roads, turned left, turned right, passed the new school, all glass windows like a hot house for forcing children’s brains, charged up the path at the side of the vet’s house, got off and pounded on the door.

Nobody came. She banged the horseshoe knocker, then rang the bell beside a board which said: ‘Surgery Hours: 9-11 and 4.30-6.30.’

At last a man in old clothes spattered with paint, and a brush in one hand, opened the door.

‘Surgery’s not till four-thirty,’ he said.

‘M-my c-cat is dying.’ Carrie’s teeth were chattering so with cold and wet and crisis that she could hardly speak.

‘Come inside.’ The man was quite young, with a smooth tanned face and a mouth ready to curve into a smile. Too young to be a vet It must be his son. It was - it was the
man who rode the bay thoroughbred in the water meadows. She had not recognized him at first without his cap.

‘I know you, don’t I?’ His smile spread, as he remembered too, looking at John. ‘Come on in.’

‘My horse—’

‘There’s a shed at the back, behind the kennels. You can put him in there. Here, give puss to me.’

Carrie handed over the damp body, struggling with the life of the kittens inside. She went past a row of kennels with dog runs, put John in the shed, and ran back to the house.

As she went into the waiting-room, the young man came in through the inner door, wearing a white apron over his painting clothes.

‘Oh,’ Carrie said. ‘Are you the vet?’

‘Yes. Alec Harvey. It’s my first practice. Do you trust me? I want to operate at once. A Caesarian. She may be all right.’

A Caesarian operation meant the way Julius Caesar was born, by cutting open his mother. ‘You’ll have to help me with the ether,’ Alec Harvey said. ‘I’ve no one else here.’

Still shivering from the cold rain, Carrie held the bottle and dropped ether, as he told her, on to the gauze pad over Pip’s face of a miniature lion. Her hand was shaking so much that the ether went all over the place and made her feel extraordinarily dizzy.

‘Hold on,’ said the vet, ‘or you’ll have the three of us out for the count’

He shaved the hair from Pip’s stomach, and swabbed it with antiseptic. Carrie was afraid at first and wouldn’t look. Then Mr Harvey said, ‘Look, here’s the first kitten!’ and as she watched his hands in rubber gloves working so
surely and swiftly, she wasn’t afraid at all. The kitten gave a sort of moan, a first feeble try at a miaow. It was the most marvellous thing - like a miracle. Life being taken from life.

‘Take it,’ the vet said. ‘In that towel.’

Carrie held out the towel and he put the tiny wet body into it, and while he was getting out the other kitten, he told her what to do: wipe the nose and mouth, rub gently to dry it and help the breathing, and - the kitten began to cry properly, getting the air its lungs needed.

She put it in a box and worked the same way with the other kitten, until it cried too, and when Pip, neatly stitched, began to stir and wake, she turned her head at once towards the box full of mewing. The vet put her in with her kittens. Blindly, they crawled to find the milk, and Pip began to work them over with her rough tongue.

‘She’s even starting to purr.’ Carrie’s voice was shaky. Now that the crisis was over, her knees felt so weak that she had to sit down on the enamel stool.

‘People are the only ones who have surgical shock and take weeks to recover,’ Alec Harvey said. ‘That’s why I like being an animal doctor.’

‘It was exciting,’ Carrie said. She would never forget how she had held the new-born life in her hands, and helped it to cry and breathe.

‘Wasn’t it?’ Alec Harvey grinned. ‘I never get over the thrill.’

He would keep Pip and her kittens with him for the night. He gave Carrie some cocoa, and lent her a jersey, which hung on her like a jacket, and she went out to get John.

‘I’m afraid I can’t pay you,’ she said at the door.

‘That’s all right.’ He thought she meant she had come without money. ‘Any time will do.’

The rain was almost over. Half-way home, it stopped and the sun came feebly and damply out. They jogged home, steaming gently, clouds of aromatic smoke rising from John.

‘Where on earth have you been?’ Tom came into the yard as he heard her ride in.

‘Pip’s had two kittens. Julius and Caesar. At the vet’s.’ Carrie was so tired, she fell off into Tom’s arms.

Next day, Tom took the bus from the village to the housing estate, with a shopping basket on his arm. In his pocket, he had the only watch in the family, taken down from the nail in the kitchen to offer to the vet instead of payment.

When he came back with the basket full of mewing, he was grinning all over his face.

‘What’s the joke?’ Carrie looked into the basket Caesar was tortoiseshell, an extra toe on each paw. Julius looked like a grey mole. Pip was smiling.

‘Life is the joke.’ Tom gave the basket to Em, who had Paul riding her shoulder like a mountain goat, furious about the kittens. ‘Guess what?’

‘You tell.’ Tom looked happier than Carrie had seen him for weeks.

‘I’ve got a job. I started to tell Mr Harvey we couldn’t pay him yet. “Until I find work -” I began to say, but before I could give him the watch, he grabbed my arm so hard I nearly dropped the kittens. “You’ve found it,” he said. “I’m desperate for a boy to help me here.”’

Tom caught the early bus every morning, and came back in the evening with marvellous tales of setting bones and pulling teeth and diagnosing the diseases of patients who could not talk about their symptoms. The money wasn’t much, but he loved the job, even typing out Alec Harvey’s bills with one finger and hosing down the dog runs.

Carrie and Em and Michael also went off every morning. They walked to the school in the next village but one, a low rambling old place on the edge of a cricket field, with scarred-up desks and two doors into the playground which said ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’; relic of long-ago days when they had to be kept separate.

Every afternoon, Carrie rushed home by the short cut across the fields. She stepped out of her only skirt and into her jeans, and leaving skirt and school books and everything else that had accumulated, like tidal seaweed, on her bedroom floor, ran to the stable to start the real business of the day.

She was training John to jump. Mr Mismo was right Led by Lucy the goat and followed by Henry, weighted with autumn wool, John was going over barrels and tyres and boxes and bits of old prams that Carrie dragged back from the village dump to make jumps of.

‘He’s a horse in a million.’

‘He’s a fiddle-headed, five-legged star-gazer, with no
more sense than you,’ Mr Mismo said fondly, and gave her an old martingale to make John look at his jumps.

School was… school. Neither bad nor good. It wasn’t as good as the small friendly school where they went when they lived in the old Army hut, but it wasn’t as bad as the shrieking, high-powered school that Uncle Rudolf had sent them to in London, where no sum was less than seven figures wide, and you had to sit in a booth with earphones to learn what they said was French.

Carrie was all right. She didn’t care about anything except the English lessons, and for those she had a mad, enthusiastic teacher called Mrs Croker, with grey hair cut round a basin and a way of crying, ‘Oh curses! Why must we slog through these dreary textbooks when all the glorious poems are waiting for our delight?’

She recited poetry by the hour, waving her arms about and dribbling at the corners of the mouth, while Carrie dreamed to the enchantment of the words.

Hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill…

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door
!

And his horse in silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor…

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war…

It was exciting and soothing at the same time.

Em was all right. She was a person contained within herself. If people teased her, she kept silent, so they could not know whether she minded. If they pushed or punched,
she stepped aside, instead of hitting back. She didn’t like the feel of people, only of animals.

Michael was not so all right. His teacher, who wore a green knitted dress that showed her bulges fore and aft, did not understand about spelling. She was no good at teaching or keeping order, so she concentrated on unnecessary things like the difference between Because and Becuas, and Michael mixing up Of and For and From and Off, and spelling his name Micheal.

He worked quite hard, but Miss McDrane took a mark off for every spelling mistake, which gave him less than 0 out of 10. He was down into minus figures.

There was also the problem that if he forgot to shut up Henry, the sociable ram would follow him to the school building and wait outside, cropping the cricket field, until it was time to go home. So of course some bright boy nicknamed Michael ‘Mary’, and the others took it up.

One day, Miss McDrane, maddened beyond reason by a class who would not keep quiet when she was in the room, and tore it apart if she went out decided to read aloud Michael’s composition, titled, ‘What I Want For Christmas.’

‘Wat i want form crismus. i wold lik a babby gine pig i hope i get a pen nife form mi boter.’

It was a perfectly good composition. Any fool could have known what he meant. But Miss McDrane read it scornfully, pronouncing the words wrong as he had written them, while Michael, as he told Carrie afterwards, felt his ears sticking out like beacons, and wished he could go through the floor into the boiler-room, carved-up desk and all.

‘“i hop i get a pen nife form mi boter.” You see, everyone. Michael has invented a new language.’ Miss
McDrane laughed. The class laughed with her and chanted:

Mary had a little lamb.

Its fleece was grey as mud.

And everywhere that Mary went,

They said he was a dud!

Michael leaped from his seat with a yell and began lashing out wildly. Stupid as she was, Miss McDrane realized that she had gone too far. She rushed down the room in her tight knitted dress to stop the fight, and stopped a blow from Michael’s fist on the side of her chin.

‘Caroline Fielding is wanted in the Head’s Office.’ A stout girl who ran errands all the time to get out of lessons came into Carrie’s geography class.

Carrie jumped up. Mother? was her first thought. As she ran down the long corridor which smelled of shoes and school dinners, she thought, John?

It was only Michael. He was sitting in Mrs Loomis’s office sucking a peppermint and kicking the rungs of the chair.

‘We’ve had a spot of trouble with this little boy.’ Mrs Loomis talked to Carrie as if she were another grown-up. ‘Can you help me to find out what’s wrong?’

Carrie knew very well what was wrong. She knew about Miss McDrane, but you didn’t complain about teachers to other teachers. You tried to get the better of them by yourself. Not by sneaking.

‘I understand your parents—’

‘They’re away just now,’ Carrie said quickly. ‘My mother will be home soon.’

‘I’d like her to come and have a chat with me.’

Poor mother. She was still so weak that even when she did come home, Mrs Loomis would have to come to her, and probably to her bedroom, if she wanted a chat.

‘My brother Tom is head of the house.’

‘Perhaps I could talk to him—’

‘He’s working.’ Carrie was not going to tell her about Tom’s half day.