Summer at World's End (14 page)

‘Leave it here till you come back,’ Carrie suggested.

‘Government property, Miss Fielding.’ Usually, he
called her Cathy or Girl, but he was on official business now. He wheeled on, squelching in loamy mud up to the hubs and ankles.

They tethered the horses at the edge of the airfield. The constable tethered his motor bike with a chain and padlock. Lester wanted to approach the hut crawling on their stomachs through the long grass, but the policeman refused, and they marched together across the wide field to the group of derelict huts.

‘Are you sure this was the one?’ Carrie was puzzled. The bar was across the door of the hut, but there was no barking, no scrabbling or whining from inside.

‘Look at our hoofprints. This is where the dogs were,’ Lester told the policeman, who banged on the door with the flat of his hand.

Nothing.

‘Open in the name of the Law!’ he shouted. His voice carried away over the empty airfield.

The dogs had gone. Vanished like the face of the young pilot Carrie had thought she had seen. But the dogs had been real. There was the hoof-trampled ground where they had discussed what to do. There were the scratches on the faded paint where the dogs outside had scrabbled and yipped at the dogs inside.

‘They’re gone,’ she said flatly.

‘Very funny,’ said Constable Dunstable bitterly. ‘Ve-ry comical. Leading a person up the garden path, or as we say in my profession, Misrepresentation of Facts. Not a chargeable offence, but a minor misdemeanour, which I can
not
forgive. Or forget,’ he added darkly, and turned away to tramp back through the uncut ungrazed grass to his bicycle. John and Peter lifted their heads to watch him make twelve angry tries to turn the key in the padlock. John curled back his top lip, showing his teeth and gums.
He had eaten a bitter root, but it looked as if he was sneering at Constable Dunstable.

Michael wait off that evening to take Miss Cordelia Chattaway and her chow dog for their chariot ride. He came back too soon, riding Oliver at a trot so fast you could hardly see the pony’s legs, the wicker chair bouncing over the ruts and potholes.

‘It’s happened!’ He jumped off and ran, shouting for Carrie. ‘Miss Chattaway’s dog - it’s gone!’

‘Dead?’ The dog was at least twelve, and bronchial to boot.

‘Stolen. She let him out last night and that’s the last she saw. She has abandoned hope and gone into deep mourning. The lady next door baked her a chocolate cake.’

‘Has she told the policeman?’

‘I did, on the way home. He said, “If I get any more lip from you kids, I’ll arrest you for vagrancy.”’

They were having supper when Lester came. He tapped so gently on the window of the saloon bar that no one but Carrie heard anything more than a twig.

It was bread pudding. Liza had got the measurements wrong and baked six times as many loaves as they needed. She had taken them from door to door in a basket, but the baker had caught her and threatened to report her for trading without a licence, because her bread was better than his. So now everything had to be made with bread, and even Rosie, Redruth and Rubella, who were bullied away from the grain by the other hens, were refusing it.

Carrie picked up her pudding plate and headed for the kitchen.

‘Finish it!’ Liza was sometimes jokey with them, sometimes suddenly rough. You didn’t always know if she meant it.

‘I have.’

By the door, she slid the lump of pudding inside her shirt and turned round to show the empty plate. Outside, waiting for Lester to show where he was, she held out the waist of her shorts and sucked in her stomach to let the lump of pudding fall to the ground. Charlie sniffed at it suspiciously and backed off.

‘They’d need best steak to steal
him
away,’ Lester said.

‘But you know who they
have
stolen?’ Carrie went in under the weeping willow, where Lester was squatting under the tent of feathery falling branches. As she told him about Miss Cordelia Chattaway’s chow dog, she could see his mind beginning to work just as clearly as if lights were flashing in his head and bells ringing.

It was a thrilling and hazardous plan.

‘If there’s only room for one, who will it be?’ Carrie whispered, although she could hear the others on the other side of the house, sailing the duck pond on a raft made out of a door.

‘Me.’

‘Who says?’

‘You muffed it once.’

‘When?’
Carrie glared.

‘Asking that question about the collie. He knows we know. That’s why he moved the dogs from Bottle Dump.’

‘And from the airfield. I suppose some of those hoof marks weren’t made by
your
horse?’

‘I’m the eldest.’

‘You’re not.’ She could never find out exactly how old he was. When she asked his mother, Mrs Figg had said, ‘As old as his tongue and a little older than his teeth,’ which was so perfectly infuriating that Carrie had not asked again. ‘We’ll toss.’

Lester had everything in his pockets but money, so he took two smooth yellow willow twigs of different lengths and held them in a fist, staring at Carrie to try and make her choose the wrong one.

She picked the longest twig. ‘I won.’

‘Shortest wins’

‘It’s always the longest! That’s cheating.’

He laughed. ‘Just seeing if I could get away with it.’ One of the things about Lester was that if he lost a toss or a contest, he didn’t argue or lose interest. The plan was just as exciting as when he thought he was going to be the one who hid in the boot of the Poacher’s car.

He had the little hairbrush in his pocket. He and Carrie banged it on the backs of their hands, whirled them about to make the blood start, and then pressed them together, mingling vows in blood to seal the secret.

‘I swear.’

Miss Cordelia Chattaway’s chow dog was called Lancelot.

‘That
was
his name,’ she told Carrie sorrowfully. ‘Not
is
. I am certain that he has met his death, and can only hope that it was swift and painless.’ She sat in her garden in a high-backed basket chair like a sentry box, with a rug over her crippled legs. ‘Good afternoon, Vicar!’ She nodded to a crow which had landed on the bird bath. ‘I’m afraid you find me in sad heart.’ She was a little dotty.

‘You don’t think he’s been stolen?’ Carrie sprawled by her tiny feet which did not reach the ground, and chewed grass.

‘Why would anyone want to steal Lancelot?’

Carrie did not tell her. The thought of the poor amiable old chow injected with some disease, operated on, put to some strain to see how much his groggy heart could stand…

‘Don’t give up hope, Miss Chattaway.’

‘I have.’ Under a big floppy hat with grey ribbons, the little face was set in grief. For three days now Carrie had waited in the bushes at Bottle Dump for a sight of the Poacher’s car. She was going back there this evening, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until she could find Lancelot and bring back Miss Chattaway’s smile.

There had been a postcard several days ago:

Great Cruise.

Will come and see you before we set out for the Roaring Forties.’

On the front, there was a photograph of a small ketch with a line of laundry in the rigging and a potted geranium on the main hatch, in a harbour full of bigger, grander boats. A woman in a brief swimsuit leaned against the mast with her fair hair blowing.

‘Looks a bit like your mum.’ Bessie Munce took her spectacles out of the stamp drawer and peered.

‘It is.’

‘In that bathing suit? Oh my.’ The postmistress handed the card over quickly, as if it were infected.

‘Soon’ could mean any old time. They had made up the bed in their mother’s room and spent two days’ food money on buying a big ham. Liza cooked it and hung it in a pillow-case from the hook in the rafter where Gabby’s
cage had hung. Partly because for centuries that had always been the place for hams in this house. Partly to keep it safe from the cats.

Late in the evening, when Carrie was back from a useless vigil at the quarry, their parents arrived after dark in a car with one headlight, a smoking radiator and no top.

‘What do you do when it rains?’ Michael asked.

‘Put on foul weather gear, and your mother bales out with the ashtray.’

He was brown and fit and grinning through his dark curly beard as he tried to hug everybody at once. Mother looked as if life at sea agreed with her after all. She wasn’t thin and pale any more. She stood up straight and there was wind and sun tan on her cheeks, instead of smudges of tiredness. Her hair was longer and lighter.

‘Did you bleach it for the photographs?’ Em asked.

‘The sun did. We sent that swimsuit picture to the
Daily Amazer
, and the editor sent back a view of St Pauls, and wrote on the back: “Whee-wheew!”’

While they were laughing and hugging and all talking at once, Liza waited in the background, looking don’t care-ish, so as not to look shy.

‘Who’s the gorgeous bird?’Dad asked.

‘Liza Jones. We wrote and told you.’

‘You said a new friend. I thought it was a cow, or an armadillo.’

‘Liza.’ Mother unwound her legs from Michael’s arms, and went to her and kissed her.

Liza was stiff at first, because she didn’t trust mothers, but when Dad hugged her, she relaxed. You had to, when he hugged, or get your ribs broken. They went into the house, and Michael stood on his father’s shoulders to get down the ham. The endless stale bread had finally been thrown to the ducks, so there was a fresh cottage loaf, like
a fat brown lady with a tiny head, and the tomato plants on the sunny wall had yielded up some small yellowish fruit. They all sat round the big table in the kitchen, with cats and dogs in a greedy outer ring.

Mother had brought a lot of food, some of which Dad recognized as stolen from the stores of
The Lady Alice
, which was sailing out for the Seven Seas next week.

‘We’ll starve to death before we hit the Horse Latitudes,’ he grumbled.

The word ‘horse’ triggered Carrie off. ‘Ships that took horses to the West Indies got becalmed there,’ she said, ‘and the horses died of thirst. Once there was a mare who was going to have a foal, and there was exactly six inches of rain-water in her bucket. Well, days went by, and the sailors were throwing the dead horses overboard…’

As Carrie started into a long-winded horse story, her father automatically put his hand over the ear with the gold ring in it, just as if he had never been away. Looking past her, his eyes became fixed in a stare of disbelief. What had he seen?

In the doorway, stout in one of the tent-shaped nightgowns Mrs Zlotkin had sent with him, hair standing up in spikes, fat pink mouth pulled down in sleepy sulks…

‘You woke me up!’ Hubert whined.

‘One, two, three, four.’ Jerome Fielding counted his children. ‘If we had a third son, Alice, would that be him?’

‘Come and have some cake, Hubie, old Boob.’ Tom got up and brought the blubbery figure to the table. ‘It’s Liza’s brother. See the likeness?’

Liza howled and threw an orange at him. Hubert wailed, ‘If I looked like
her
I’d shoot myself!’ The dogs barked, and Nobody, the striped cat on Em’s lap, put out a swift paw and hooked down a piece of ham.

*        *        *

Next day they all went to the zoo in the chancy car, which Dad had borrowed from ‘a man I rescued from drowning’. The starter switch was broken, so he had to lift the bonnet and connect the red starter wire to the black ground wire. The car leaped into life, Hubert lost his balance and knocked it into gear, and Dad had to run with it and hop in over the stuck door, as it moved off without him.

Hubert complained of the heat, the cold, the wind, the noise, the engine smell, and when Dad cornered on two wheels, he nearly fell out, and had to be clutched by the broad seat of his shorts.

‘I’m dizzy!’ he wailed. Being dizzy was one of his favourite illnesses. His mother took him to the special doctor, and then for a chocolate fudge sundae to make up for the doctor finding nothing wrong. ‘I’m dizzy!’

‘put a sock in it, brat,’ Dad said, and Em, who always echoed him, said, ‘Stop breathing, Boob.’