The House at World's End (7 page)

Michael would wait hidden in the hollow tree. As soon as the van went through, he would nip out and setup the
detour sign behind it in the road, so that other cars would go off through Wareham and not see what was up.

‘What will be up?’

‘Carrie and I. Except she’ll be down. She’ll be lying in the road. Old One-Eye will stop and get out to see if she’s dead. I’ll open the tail gate of the van, grab the horse, shut the gate and away with him through the hedge and into the field while your sister is screaming her silly head off to cover the noise. Perfect, eh?’

Telling the beautiful Plan, he had begun to jump about in the road, acting it out, casting himself down, toddling and peering like One-Eyed Jake, opening an imaginary tail gate and pulling on an invisible halter rope.

Michael folded his arms. ‘All but one thing,’ he said. ‘What about cars coming the other way?’

‘I told you he was clever,’ Carrie said. ‘At our last school they called him stupid, because he spells his name differently every time.’

‘He’s a genius,’ Lester said. ‘But so am I. We’re going to put up a detour sign on the other side of the bridge, at the side of the road so that Jake will drive on past it and off to the docks with his empty van. They’ve taken away that sign, but my friend Garroway, who’s a sign painter, is making me another. I told him it was for a play. “All this play-acting,” he said. “It’s not right on a Sunday.” So I said it was for a noble cause, which it is.’

‘Noble.’ Carrie thought about the poor thin brown horse, so very different from Penny-Come-Quick and all the marvellous horses she had imagined bringing home to her whitewashed stable under the thatch. But he was noble too, because he was a horse.

Before they went home, Lester said to Carrie and Michael, ‘You swear you won’t tell?’

‘We swear.’

‘But you must swear on blood.’

Out of his pocket - it was surprising how he managed to look so thin and neat and yet carry on him thousands of essential things like chocolate, a screwdriver, putty, the mouth organ - he produced a small hairbrush. They each banged the back of their hands with the bristles, then whirled their arms round and round like windmills until pricks of blood started up. Then they pressed the backs of their hands together to mingle the blood, shut their eyes and groaned, deep in their throats. ‘I swear.’

When Carrie opened her eyes, Lester was gone. She licked the blood off the back of her hand. Michael wiped his in his hair. As they went down the road to World’s End, they heard, far away across a hay field, a few curly notes of the mouth organ, like squiggles on the air.

On Sunday, they were so excited, they could hardly get through the morning. Michael was so careful not to break the blood oath that he hardly breathed. When Tom asked him at breakfast, ‘What are you going to do today?’ Carrie thought he would burst, sitting up at the high counter, looking at himself in the glass behind the bar with his mouth tight shut and his eyes popping out above his puffed red cheeks.

‘What’s the matter? Has he got the mumps?’ None of them had been ill since they had been at World’s End, although Valentina’s friend Rose Arbuckle had predicted with gloomy glee that they would all get chesty. They did not want ever to have to go to a doctor, in case he told their mother they should not live alone.

‘He’s allergic to sour milk,’ Carrie said.

‘Then he should learn to put it on the stone slab in the larder and not leave it by the stove.’

‘I did.’ Michael let out his breath. ‘And Pip got at it.’

Nobody said, as they would have at Aunt Valentina’s or in almost any other household, ‘Drat that thieving cat.’ Pip was going to be a mother. She needed the milk.

‘What
are you
going to do, Carrie?’

‘I might go for a walk this afternoon.’ She swung her long hair forward, because her face was getting red.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Em said. Usually she hated walks.

‘Oh. Well - look, you don’t have to.’

‘Don’t think I want to.’ Em fired up. ‘I was only being kind.’

‘I’d rather go by myself,’ Carrie mumbled.

‘Why?’ Em lifted one side of Carrie’s hair and put her high-cheeked kitten face close, to see what she was up to.

‘I want to make up poetry.’ Carrie could not look at her.

‘Oh spare us. Oh excuse
me.’
Em climbed off the stool and clumped out of the room in Wellington boots, thumping her feet like a drum horse. ‘I’m sorry I bothered your genius.’

Carrie and Michael were going to slip away at one-thirty. The whole morning pointed to that hour. The only watch in the family, which was hung on a nail in the kitchen because they had no clock, dragged as if time were running down to a standstill.

Eleven-thirty. Eleven-forty-five. Not long now. The hands of the watch went fester, and then at eleven-fifty-four as Carrie passed through the kitchen to check one more time, sounds of disaster came from the lane.

A horn. Crunch of tyres on gravel. Voices. ‘Hullo, there! Anyone at home?’ Uncle Rudolf.

‘Yoo-hoo, children! Here we are!’ Valentina.

‘Oh! My ankle’s turned. Oh come and help me!’ Rot and darn it. Rose Arbuckle.

Torture! Had they come for lunch? Carrie did not dare to ask. She went out, dragging her feet. Valentina kissed her and said how thin she was, and that she would get lockjaw if she didn’t wear shoes. Uncle Rudolf waved his walking stick at Perpetua’s puppy Moses, who came through the hedge from the stable yard in joyous welcome. Rose Arbuckle tottered up the millstone path, leaning
heavily on Carrie’s shoulder, her long cold fingers pinching.

All the other children had disappeared - the rats! - so Carrie took the grown-ups inside and showed them round the ground floor. Not upstairs, because the beds were hardly ever made, and certainly not on Sunday, which was a day of rest from menial work.

The sitting-room, which had once been the lounge of the inn, was quite cosy, with some deck chairs they had found in the barn and an old velvet curtain over a trunk for a sofa, and the Clydesdale horseshoes tacked up round the fireplace. But Valentina looked round and said, ‘Isn’t there somewhere we can sit down?’

Carrie took them into the kitchen. Two of the cats were on the table, finishing up someone’s breakfast kippers. The sink was full of plates and cups, because they didn’t wash up until there was nothing left to use. A line of torn clothes, not much cleaner than before they were washed, hung across one corner of the ceiling, because Em thought it looked like rain.

‘My dear,’ Val said, not unhappily. ‘It’s a slum.’

‘Come into the dining-room. I’ll make some tea,’ Carrie heard herself saying, although she did not want to do anything that would make them stay. The watch on the nail already said after half-past twelve.

She was proud of the dining-room, with its polished mahogany bar, and its old pictures of Spanish ladies drinking glasses of port, and merry huntsmen with tankards, but Rose Arbuckle cried in the doorway, ‘My sakes! It looks like a public bar,’ and drew back, treading on Carrie’s bare toes with her sharp London heel.

She was finally persuaded that there was nothing to fear. Carrie got them onto the high stools at the bar - ‘Oh, my
poor ankle!’ - and dashed off to put on the kettle and call the others.

Em was very polite. ‘Won’t you stay for lunch?’ She wanted to show off that she could cook. Carrie could have killed her. If they didn’t leave soon, she and Michael would never get away in time. One-Eyed Jake’s van would come through before they got there and the whole plan would be wrecked, the horse doomed, and Lester would never speak to her again.

‘No, we just stopped in on our way to lunch with some friends across the river,’ Uncle Rudolf said. Carrie and Michael let out their breath on sighs of relief.

‘That boy sounds wheezy,’ Valentina said. ‘Are you sure you’re all right here on your own?’ Her painted face was twisted with the struggle between feeling she ought to say, ‘You must come back with us,’ and dreading they might say, ‘Yes.’

‘Everything’s fine,’ Tom said, very heartily, kicking a dirty plate under a chair and going to the door to shake his fist at Henry the ram, who was butting against it from outside, wanting to join the party.

Rose Arbuckle sat and stared at herself glumly in the carved, gold-framed mirror behind the bar, though why she should want to look at herself when she looked like that, no one knew.

Would they never go? Carrie could see Uncle Rudolf’s watch. His hand lay on the counter while he told a long and boring story about a strike at the plumbing factory. Money was tight. That was why he had had to cut down their allowance, although Carrie noticed that he had a new Princely pearl in his tiepin and that Valentina had a large new ring which might be a fake, but was more likely to be a diamond.

‘Well,’ she managed to say when he paused to think of a word bad enough to describe the strikers who wanted more money, ‘if you’ll excuse me, it’s time I—’

Tom frowned at her and shook his head, thinking she was only going for a walk to make up poetry.

Michael tried. ‘If you want to get to Beddington before two, Uncle Rhubarb, it’s quite a long way.’

‘Nonsense, it’s only just across the river.’

‘There’s been a flood,’ Michael invented, although there had been no rain for a week. ‘That bridge might be closed, and you’d have to cross much farther down, Uncle Rhubarb.’

‘Don’t call me that.’ But they began to go at last. Michael went out to hold Henry, and they went down the path, agonizingly slow, going back for gloves, for a handbag, for Uncle Rudolf’s walking stick, while Carrie bustled behind them like a sheepdog, almost barking to get them into the car. It was after one-fifteen.

Maddeningly, Valentina stopped to show Uncle Rudolf a tall weed (there were no flowers). ‘Isn’t that Deadly Nightshade, dear?’

Rose Arbuckle side-stepped the weed with a faint scream. She was almost at the car when Henry, who loved new people, tore himself loose from Michael and bounded at her over the grass with his wool wobbling like a fat lady.

She made a dash for the car, tore open the back door and got in. But Henry was right behind her, shoving, and before she could shut the door, he had pushed in with her. Tom and Carrie and Em and Michael doubled up with laughter as the door on the opposite side flew open, and Rose Arbuckle fell out, with all her scarves flying, and Henry after her.

Surprisingly agile for one so frail, she jumped on to the bonnet of the car with her feet drawn up, screaming loud enough to be heard by all the people in the village who had not yet fallen asleep in front of the television.

Henry leaned thoughtfully against the front wheel and stared at her with love.

‘Help!’ cried Rose Arbuckle. ‘Save me!’

‘You’re scratching my paint,’ Uncle Rudolf said.

When Michael took Henry away, Rose Arbuckle wanted to go back into the house for a lie down to calm her nerves, but Carrie brushed her down and jollied her along and steered her into the car. She somehow got the others in, and stood back and began to wave even before Uncle Rudolf had started the engine.

At last they were gone.

‘You were a bit rude, Carrie,’ Tom said. ‘Rushing them off like that’

‘Sorry! Sorry!’ Carrie stood on tiptoe like a diver, took a deep breath and then ran. Round to the back of the house to meet Michael limping round from the other side, across the bottom of the meadow, into the wood, twisting among the great cool trees, and out on to the road out of sight of the house, running, running - why couldn’t she fly this time? - for the crossroads.

No sign of Lester. He hadn’t come! Or he was disgusted with them for being five minutes late, and had gone away.

‘What can we do?’ could Michael set up the detour sign behind Jake’s van and then run the half mile down the road in time to pull the horse out of the van while Jake was still stopped, looking at Carrie’s body? Could Carrie do that while Michael lay in the road? Impossible. They could not do it without Lester.

Carrie sat down on a heap of stones with her head in her hands. Michael began to walk home, exaggerating his limp.

The dry grass and twigs in the ditch stirred and heaved and became Lester, jumping up like a grinning jack-in-the-box.

‘Just trying out my camouflage,’ he said. ‘Come back, young Mike!’

Michael came back, limping less. ‘I knew you were there all the time.’

Carrie and Lester left him in the hollow tree and ran off down the road towards the bridge. They did not talk. They knew what they had to do. They stopped at the agreed place, just before the bridge, and Lester took a bottle of tomato ketchup out of his pocket

‘Blood,’ he said.

That’s overdoing it’

‘Just a little.’ Lester wanted blood. Carrie let him put a smear of ketchup on her chin and some up in the edge of her hair. ‘Hit in the head, you see. That’s why you blacked out.’

One or two cars came by. Carrie and Lester whistled and threw stones into the stream, as if they were just out for a walk. A boy and a girl pedalled towards them on a tandem bicycle, maddeningly slow, enjoying the scenery. If the van was close behind, it would catch up with them and they would see everything.

At the foot of the hump-backed bridge, the boy got off.

‘Lovers!
said Lester bitterly. Were they going to lean moonily over the edge of the bridge?

He made the sign of the evil eye at them with his fingers. But the boy had only got off to push the bicycle up the hump because the girl was heavy, with a rear view like a hay stack, toppling on the overloaded bicycle.

They were gone. Down the road in the distance came slowly … a car … or a van. Lester clutched Carrie’s arm and hissed,’
That’s it!’

He jumped into the ditch and burrowed under the grass and leaves he had collected. Carrie lay down in the road. She must not move. What if One-Eyed Jake’s one eye was so dim that he drove straight on over her? There would be more than ketchup on her face then.

The road began to vibrate slightly beneath her. With her eyes shut, she heard the engine, far away, coming nearer and nearer. Very near. The rattle and roar were right on top of her. She was just going to jump up and run, when there was a squeal of brakes and the van stopped. It must be a very old van. It panted slightly and let out a hiss like a steam engine.