The House at World's End (5 page)

‘Of course we are.’

‘You
like
it out there?’

‘We love it!’

On the way into the village, they had walked in silence, one in front of the other, kicking pebbles sulkily. Now they raced home, swinging shopping bags, laughing, throwing jokes, and the sun raced with them down the lane, sweeping up cloud shadow, flooding the countryside with joy. Charlie ran back and forth like a maniac, travelling six times as far, leaping on and off banks with his legs thrown out like a steeplechaser, wriggling through hedges, leaving some of his wool behind like a sheep, galloping back to jump round them as they ran, his lip lifted in the famous giggly smile he inherited from his mother.

‘We can stay!’ Carrie and Em leaped the dry ditch at the edge of the lane and ran up the path of millstones, jumping from one to the other, and burst through the door with a shout. In the front room, Tom was rolling sleeping-bags and putting clothes back into cardboard boxes. He sat back on his heels while they told him about Mr Mossman. Slowly a grin spread over his face, and without a word, he stirred up the fire, unpacked the frying pan and began to cook breakfast.

They worked all day in the house, beginning the enormous task of cleaning and repairing. Tom oiled the squeaky inn sign, and Michael went up a ladder with half the rungs missing and painted the name on one side of the sign, and on the other side, a globe of the world with nothing on it but a little house with smoke going off into infinity.

World’s End.

That night they sat round the fire and listened. Crack, crack, crack. The old boards of the staircase shrank and settled. Not ghostly. Friendly and comfortable. How could they have been so afraid?

‘Let’s sleep upstairs,’ Tom said.

Em went ahead, carrying Paul like a tray, the fluffy white cat following with her trousers spread out like riding breeches. Michael was already asleep. Art work always wore him out.

Tom picked him up - ‘Not scared, Carrie?’

‘I shall never be frightened in this house again.’

Carrie’s room was at the corner. One window looked out to the slope of the meadow, the other to the stable yard. When she got her horse, she would be within sight of him, wherever he was.

Tonight when she called, and Penny-Come-Quick came to her broken window, his nostrils square to the heady night smells of fields and wood, they did not take off for the stars. They galloped up the meadow, jumped the fence at the top, plunged down the other side, hopping the tussocks, took the wide stream like flying, and cantered off to explore the silver water meadows and the patchwork countryside, a new land under the moon.

There was so much work to do.

Tom puttied new glass into the windows and set some new tiles into the roof and painted the doors and window frames, none of which were at quite the same angle. The whole house leaned slightly inward from the edges, like a fat man’s bed.

Em, who took after their mother in ways that had passed Carrie by, made an apron out of a feed sack and cleaned up the house, room by room. Tom said Carrie must help her, but Tom was out a lot, riding round the nearby villages and towns on an ancient fireman’s bicycle known as Old Red, looking for a job. So Carrie spent most of her time in the barn and the stables, sweeping out, slopping on whitewash, patching up the worst holes. Often she just sat in the dusty straw or folded herself into a corner manger, with a book, or a dream of horses. If anyone called from the house, she yelled back, ‘I’m busy!’

The thatched barn across the yard was full of marvellous wrecked things. A broken chaff-cutter like a giant’s mincing machine. Plough handles with no blades. Bits of wheelbarrows, wheels, harness, a pile of rusted horseshoes big enough for a Clydesdale. At one end of the barn, steep narrow steps led to an open hayloft under the thatch, with a big door opening into the air, through which they used to unload the high haycarts. There were still a few
mildewed bales of hay and straw, and a moulting cushion and some dishes and hard green lumps of bread, as if children had once played house up there.

Mr Mossman, the dairy farmer, grazed some of his cows in the tussocky field on the other side of the hill. He stopped in at World’s End sometimes, to see what everyone was doing and tell them how to do it. When he found Carrie cementing the broken paving outside the stable, he told her that all her horses would get blood poisoning from the cement, first scratch they got.

‘All my horses.’ Carrie cut her initials with the trowel in the wet cement: C.F. and the outline of a horse’s head, facing left, the only way she could draw them. ‘I’ll be lucky if I ever have
one.’

‘You’ll be lucky if you
only
have one,’ Mr Mossman said. ‘No such thing as one horse, you know, like with peanuts or potato crisps. I’ve had ‘em all. Shires, Shetlands, show jumpers, the lot. Every time the wife persuades me to give ’em up, someone comes along and begs me to take a pair of hunters for the season, or break a young’un, or school a polo pony.’

This was hard to believe, since his ramshackle stable in the cow barn only housed a fat old porridge-coloured cob called Princess Margaret Rose, with a Roman nose and a back like a sofa.

‘Best horse across country in her day,’ Mr Mossman said. ‘The owner wouldn’t let no one else have the care of her. Horses come to you. They come to you, see, if you are a born horse fool.’

‘They don’t come to me.’ Carrie’s horses had all been in books, or in her head.

‘They will, old dear. You’re a horse fool. They’ll come to you.’

‘A grey Arab,’ Carrie dreamed. ‘Or a shining black thoroughbred with long sloping pasterns—’

‘He’ll go lame on you,’ Mr Mossman warned.

‘A bright bay with two white socks, a star, perhaps a narrow blaze, a little delicate head carried very high…’

‘Neck set on upside down?’ Mr Mossman asked suspiciously.

‘Oh no, he’ll have natural flexion. Like this.’ She curved her chin down, mouthing an imaginary bit.

‘You’re over-flexing him,’ Mr Mossman said sharply. He always had to know best, even about a dream horse.

When he came over the hill from his cow pasture one day and found Michael trying to cut the long grass behind the house with scissors, to make a place for a table and chairs, he said, ‘You come along with me, old chump, and I’ll loan you the world’s finest lawnmower.’

The world’s finest lawnmower turned out to be a brown Nubian goat on a chain, called Lucy, and a large sheep called Henry, who had been an orphan lamb, brought up as a pet. Reared on the bottle in Mr Mossman’s kitchen, he grew up to think he was a dog. He wore a collar, ate dog biscuits, lay by the fire, chased cats, swam in the duck pond and in short, as Mr Mossman said, did everything but bark.

In the days when the World’s End was an inn, Henry the ram used to follow Mr Mossman there, and push his way into the public bar for a taste of beer. So now when you went into the house, he was often behind you, shouldering his way through the door. Or if you opened the door to go outside, he would be standing there waiting to nip in before you could shut him out. He was as broad as a table, even when he was sheared. If he was standing still and
thinking, Michael could put a plate on his woolly back and eat off it.

One day, Michael came back from the village with two chickens in a basket.

‘Chicken stealing?’ Tom peered. ‘Where did you get those?’ The hens hooded their flat round eyes shyly and chuckled inside their telescopic necks.

‘Mr Mismo.’

‘Who?’

‘At the dairy, Mr Mismo.’

‘You mean Mossman.’

‘I call him Mismo.’

‘That means “the same” in Spanish.’

‘Well then, it’s the same as Mossman. I met him when I was buying shop eggs and he said if I didn’t eat new-laid eggs, I’d come all out in spots, so he gave me Diane and Currier.’

‘Why Currier?’

‘That’s her name.’

So Michael was very busy too, cleaning out the hen house and planting a small dead tree in there for perches. Diane and Currier watched him labour to set it up for them, and then wouldn’t sit in it. They perched on top of the laying boxes, and the orange cat, Pip, who had, after all, been found as a stray in this hen house, sat in the dead tree and stared at them.

With a bent hazel twig and a pencil, Michael fixed up the door of the old toolshed so that the goat could sleep in there, and also the ram, although Henry preferred the kitchen. Mr Mismo said they should be left out, ‘Under the stars, where they was born’, but Michael had heard footsteps on the cinder path one night, and seen footprints in the morning, and he was afraid of poachers.

Everyone was so busy in those first weeks at World’s End that they had no time to find out if it was Charlie, or the cats, or the poachers who were stealing food. The end of a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, a biscuit - things that were left out began to disappear. Then a piece of Sunday roast beef was suddenly gone. Too big for a cat to carry off, and Charlie had not had time to eat it or bury it.

He was lying under the round kitchen table, with his head hanging over a bar of the legs and his eyes turned up.

‘Where’s our lunch?’ Carrie asked him.

He got up with a sigh, went to the rubbish bin and politely brought back a rotten tomato, holding it as gently as a bird dog.

‘You see how clever? He could make his fortune on the stage. Now put it back, Charlie.’

He dropped the tomato in a squelchy mess on Carrie’s foot, then bowed and grinned, with his front legs stretched out and his eyes rolled up. Unlike most dogs, the brown colour of his eyes did not fill the whole space. It showed white all round it, like a person.

Later that day, Carrie went up to the hay loft in the barn. She opened the high loading door and made herself lean out and look down to get the lurching dizzy feeling, then lay down on a nest of dusty hay in the sun.

Who whined? Charlie would not climb the narrow steps since he had once slipped half-way up and fallen into a heap of chaff. Anyway he was out ram-watching. Beyond the roof of the house, Carrie could see him lying in the meadow with his head on his paws pointing to where Henry dozed under a tree, one as woolly as the other.

Another whine. It came from under the angle of the sloping roof. Carrie got up and went over. Behind a bale
of straw lay a skeleton-thin dog, one side of its head caked with dried blood, as if it had been hit with a stick. On the floor was what looked like - no, was - their Sunday beef.

‘So you took it, whoever you are.’ Poor feeble dog, part terrier, part pointer, with a ratty tail and a harsh, filthy coat A bitch, who looked as if she had recently had puppies to feed. Somehow she had dragged herself up the steps and then not even been able to eat the meat, only licked round it and chewed at the corners. She looked at Carrie without raising her head, her eye not trusting, but watching for the blow or the kick she had learned to expect from humans.

Carrie put her hand gently on the bony head. (‘Never touch a strange dog,’ Aunt Valentina’s voice yapped in her memory.) The tail thumped feebly on the boards, and her heart went out to the dog in an agony of pity. She picked her up and carried her down the steps and into the house.

‘She found us.’ They made a bed for the dog near the stove and called her Perpetua, because she was a persecuted mother, like the saint in one of the old books they had found in the attic. ‘She knew this was a refuge, so she came to us. And perhaps,’ Carrie said, feeding the dog tiny bits of beef by hand, while Charlie watched in wonder, ‘when she gets well, she’ll go out and spread the tale that any animal in trouble can find shelter here.’

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful,’ Tom said, ‘to have a - a sort of refuge, where animals could come that people had been cruel to.’

‘Or if they just didn’t like their people,’ Michael said. ‘Like us with Rhubarb and Valentina.’

‘All the stray cats would come,’ Em put in, ‘and the ones that got washed and combed every day and taken to cat shows.’

‘Horses,’ Carrie said, ‘who had been beaten or starved. Or kicked in the ribs and jerked in the mouth at the same time. Horses would come, from all over the country.’

‘From all over England,’ Tom said.

‘From all over the world!’ Michael cried, and Charlie gave a single bark, like laughter.

‘They would all come to us here at World’s End.’ Carrie sat on the stone floor with Perpetua’s weary, wounded head in her lap. ‘To the end of suffering. The End of the World’

That was a dream, but Perpetua was real, with her growing strength, and her flecked white coat growing softer and looser, and the light coming back into her beaten amber eyes.

She was very restless. As soon as she could stand, she wandered round the room, whining and scratching at the door. In the garden, she staggered a few steps, sniffing, then raised her head to howl, before her weak legs collapsed her on to the grass.

And sure enough, when she was strong enough to run, she did go off and tell another dog about World’s End. She brought it back with her. A puppy. Her own puppy. They found it in the hay loft, a thin, runty puppy with a blunt speckled head and legs too long for its body.

They called it Moses, after the baby in the Bible who was found in the bulrushes, which was not so different from being found in the hay.

‘Call it what you like,’ Mr Mismo said. ‘It’s got fleas.’ He had dropped in for a cup of tea, perched up at the high counter of what used to be the public bar, which they now used for a dining-room.

‘All puppies have fleas,’ Em said.

‘What you want to do’ - Mr Mismo drank tea out of his saucer, because his wife was waiting for him - ‘is to dust that pup with pastry flour. Self-raising, of course.’
He was an encyclopedia of weird remedies. Some of them worked. Some of them didn’t.

A horn sounded from the lane. Mrs Mismo, who would not get out of the car in her good shopping shoes, was waiting for him to drive her into Town.

That night, with Perpetua and the flea-ridden puppy on the end of her bed, and Charlie under it, to show that he was jealous, Carrie went to the window to call Penny-Come-Quick, and saw a moving light through the gaps in the high door of the hay loft.