Summer at World's End (2 page)

Michael counted that there were a hundred and ten legs at World’s End.

‘If I could have kept that chestnut horse,’ Carrie said, ‘it would have been a hundred and fourteen.’

‘If you could have
stolen
it, you mean.’ Her father was sitting with his elbows on the kitchen table and his bare brown sailor’s feet on Charlie’s rough back, stretching his mouth round a huge sandwich filled with everything he could find in the larder. Joey, the little black monkey, sat on his shoulder and picked crumbs out of his beard.

‘Saving a life isn’t stealing.’ Carrie looked at her friend Lester, who was sitting on the floor with the three puppies, Dog Tom (to be different from Boy Tom), Dick and Harry. Lester and Carrie had stolen the brown horse John last year, on his way to the slaughterhouse. They didn’t wink or grin at each other, or make mystery signs like Em and her friend did to put you outside their secrets. Carrie and Lester looked straight at each other with a blank expression that said everything.

‘The chestnut must have been ill-treated.’ Carrie sat opposite her father at the big round table that could have fed twelve or fourteen, if they ever had that much food. It was scarred with the initials of everyone who had lived here. Her brother Michael had carved W.F., with his first initial upside down. Her father had gouged a deep J.F. and a triangular sail. ‘It’s natural to a horse to like people, you know, after living with them for such hundreds of years.’

‘There have always been rogues and bad lots.’ Her father did not share her life’s passion.

‘But they didn’t breed from those. They bred from the best and gentlest. That’s why we can ride them, although they’re much stronger than us. They
want
to be told what to do. Years and years ago, you see, when horses ran in herds, they had to follow the stallion leader, for safety, and so—’

Her father put his free hand over his ear, which had a gold ring through it.

‘I’m only telling you.’ It was surprising that grown-ups did not want to learn. ‘I’m only telling you why I know that chestnut horse is in trouble. Lester and I are going to try and track his hoof prints today and find out where he is.’

‘You’re not, you know.’ Her father spoke through the last chunk of bread and tomato and sausage and pickle and cold baked beans and stood up. Joey took a flying dive to the top of the dresser and sat there, picking his teeth with a match. He had to be top monkey. He always had to be higher than the tallest person in the room. Once when Carrie’s father was up on a stepladder hanging a picture, Joey had jumped for the washing-line under the kitchen ceiling, and teetered there like a tightrope walker.

‘You’ll track no horses today, Carrie. You’re coming
up to London with me. Your Uncle Rudolf won’t lend me any money, so I’m going to try and get a newspaper to buy me a boat.’

‘
The Lady Alice?’
Carrie’s father already had a blue seaman’s jersey with the name of his new boat across the chest, although he hadn’t yet got the boat ‘Why should they?’

‘So they can print the story I’ll write. “Sailor of the Seven Seas.” It will make our fortune.’ He had been predicting that for as long as anyone could remember. ‘College for Tom. Horses for you, Carrie. Thoroughbreds, horses to race—’

‘She’d never do that.’ Lester got up from the writhing mass of puppies. ‘Don’t you know that racehorses only race because the jockeys excite them to panic?’

‘Nonsense, boy. They love it.’

‘Yes.’ Lester said darkly. ‘Like a fox loves being hunted.’

‘Don’t look at me. It’s not my fault.’

Lester made Carrie’s father a bit nervous. He was a quick, extraordinary boy with a pointed goblin face and a forelock of hair over dark, bright eyes. He did things that no one else did, or would believe, if they were grown-ups. He knew things that no one else knew, like where the birds went when it snowed, and what it felt like to be an elephant, and what happened to you after you were dead. Very surprising. Very extraordinary.

When Carrie was with him, she sometimes felt that she went downstairs without touching the steps. He came with them to London, and in the Underground Carrie got separated by the crowd and thought she flew down the escalator between the framed advertisements.

They went to the offices of the
Daily Amazer
on the bank of the River Thames, a tall glass building which flashed back the sun to the beautiful day. Carrie’s father was so sure that everything was going to go beautifully, to match the day, that he put off going into the office and took Carrie and Lester for a boat trip on the river.

They ate their sandwiches and threw the crusts to the gulls that had come screaming up-river from the sea. A man began to play a mouth organ, so Lester took his mouth organ out of his pocket and joined in. They played
Tipperary
and
All Through the Night
, and the man’s little boy, who had been stuffing chocolate while the man was lost in a dream of melody, was sick over the rail of the steamer.

When the boat docked again, the sun was going down and it was now or never for the
Daily Amazer
.

‘Are you afraid?’ Carrie asked her father, as they went up in the lift.

‘Jerome Fielding fears nothing and nobody.’ He threw out his chest. He was wearing his jersey with
The Lady Alice
across it to show he was a genuine sailor. Two model girls in the lift with make-up cases and three-inch false eyelashes stared at the gold ring in his ear.

‘To be perfectly honest with you…’ The editor of the
Daily Amazer
was a bald pink man like an overgrown baby. ‘To be perfectly honest with you… ‘

He paused and looked at Carrie’s father over his rosy finger-tips. Carrie and Lester sat on the edge of their chairs. Carrie was biting what was left of her finger-nails. Her father had none to bite, because he had pruned them down with a jack knife, but he was nervous enough to blurt out, ‘Will you buy me a boat?’

‘To be perfectly honest…’ The editor paused again, watching like a cat with a mouse. ‘No.’

‘But look here, sir!’ That was a bad sign. When Carrie’s father started to call people Sir, he was either hurt or angry. ‘I’ve come all the way from the Falkland Isles —’

‘And I’d like to see you go back there.’ The editor smiled and made his eyes twinkle, as if he had practised on his grandchild. ‘But not alone.’

‘But look here, sir, I don’t want a crew. I’m a lone sailor.’

‘Lone sailors don’t make very pretty pictures, Mr Fielding. And there’s too many of ’em. Penny a dozen, if you ask me, luffing round the world in a beard and a pair of torn shorts, most boring thing you ever saw. But girls … girls are what our readers want to see over the breakfast kippers. Now if you were to take a pretty girl with you through the Seven Seas—’

‘I’m a married man!’ Carrie’s father stood up. His black beard wagged in outrage. He put his finger through his gold ear-ring and tugged it. Sign of outrage.

‘What does your wife look like?’ The editor looked up at him, with his eyes twinkled almost out of sight.

‘Now you’re talking.’ Carrie’s father let go of his earring, and his white teeth came through the beard in a slow, broadening grin. He took out his wallet. He had an old picture of Carrie’s mother that had been a quarter:
of the way round the world with him. It had been taken years ago when she was on the stage, a glowing girl with a cloud of bright golden hair.

‘Whee-ew!’ The editor whistled. ‘Would she go?’

Oh poor Mum - no!
Carrie thought, but her father said proudly, ‘She’ll go anywhere with me.’

‘Take
her
with you and a good camera,’ the editor said, ‘and we’ll buy you a boat at least.’

‘And buy my story?’ The fortune of Jerome Fielding spilled through his imagination like gold doubloons of pirate treasure.

‘To be perfectly honest… perhaps. Can you write?’

‘My dear good chap.’ There was no more calling him Sir. ‘I can do anything.’

With
The Lady Alice
swelling on his chest, he ran with Carrie and Lester down six flights of stairs, because he was too excited to wait for the lift. Out on to the Thames Embankment where he ran among the pigeons, startling old ladies with toy dogs on leads. Secretaries sitting on the benches looked up from magazines and smiled. A Pomeranian dog broke away from its lady and ran with him, yapping its applause.

Just before they went into the station to catch their train home, they saw a big blue plumbing van belonging to his rich brother Uncle Rudolf. On the side was Uncle Rudolf’s crest, a crown and crossed water pipes, and his Latin motto, ‘Princeps Plumbarium’, the Prince of Plumbers.

Carrie’s father ran ahead of the van to a crossing, and stepped out into the street with his hand raised. He swaggered across, to show the van driver, or himself, or someone, that he didn’t need any money from the Prince of Plumbers.

Oh poor Mum!
Carrie kept thinking. ‘Oh, poor Mum,
she won’t want to go.’ At World’s End, she and Lester told the others what had happened in London, with Lester acting out the parts of the editor of the
Daily Amazer
and Carrie’s father and even the old ladies with toy dogs. ‘Oh poor Mother, she’s not strong enough yet. Oh poor Dad.’

‘Stop being sorry for everyone.’ Tom said. ‘It’s insulting. Let them work it out somehow by themselves.’

‘That’s what I heard Dad say to Mother when I took Dog Tom into school and he ate the exam questions and Mrs Bloomers rang the police,’ Michael said wonderingly. ‘What’s the point of being a grown-up if people are still going to talk about you as if you were a child?’

‘None,’ Em said.

Mother was shopping in the village when they got back from London. When Carrie was in the stable yard, she saw her coming down the lane. She was not the golden girl in the photograph any more. She was almost twenty years older than that, and paler and thinner and more tired. The readers of the
Daily Amazer
would not see a glowing girl over their tea and kippers. They would see Carrie’s mother.

As she came past the barn, her father ran down the front path, which was made of flat millstones set into the grass, jumping from stone to stone, the way the children did. He leaped the grassy ditch at the edge of the road instead of stepping on the stone bridge.

‘I’m going to make my fortune!’ he shouted. ‘You’re going to sail round the world with me!’

Mother had opened her mouth to say, ‘Oh no!’ Then she looked at his eager, grinning face, and spread her startled mouth into a smile. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go with you.’

So they were on their own again. Their father and mother went to live on the coast where the new boat was being fitted for the voyage. Tom, Carrie, Em and Michael were alone again with the animals.

‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ Mother had asked, but only because she was looking for an excuse not to sail round the world. She knew they loved to live like this. No grown-ups. Just animals. Everyone equal, with an equal right to live their own kind of way. Tom as head of the house, because every herd must have a leader.

‘Are you sure I should go? Michael’s so young…’

‘It is your duty,’ Michael said, as if he were years older than her. ‘By your hustbin’s side.’

‘I sometimes wish my husband’s side would stay on dry land,’ she sighed. ‘But you can’t change men.’

She wrote from the coast that to get her fit for the Seven Seas, their father was going to make her walk two miles a day uphill.

‘How will she get down?’ Michael asked Em, but she picked up her black cat like a tray, kicked open the door and stamped in boots, kicking the backs of the stairs, up to her room. She had started to flatten down her curly hair again with socks and woollen hats. She missed her father more than anyone.

Carrie missed them both, when she thought about it, but she had things on her mind. The night they got back from
London, a storm of rain had washed away any hoof print the chestnut horse might have made in the lane or in the fields. She and Lester had searched in vain. They rubbed a cloth in one of the hoof marks in the vegetable garden and held it to Perpetua’s nose.

‘Seek!’ they told her. She was supposed to be half pointer, but she didn’t point at anything. She was going to have puppies again. It was her life’s work.

Carrie could not get the beautiful horse out of her mind. The delicate head with the half moon white star, the small nervous ears laid back – from fear, not vice. The strong short back and fine legs. He had some Arab in him, perhaps some New Forest. He looked well fed and well groomed. Kept right, but treated wrong.
What were they doing to him now?

One day before school started again, she went for a long ride with Mr Mismo. His name was Mr Mossman but Michael had called him Mismo, and it stuck.

He was the dairy farmer down the lane at the edge of the village. He grazed his cows in the field on the other side of their hill, and he was their best friend. He had ‘lent’ them the goat and the ram, and never asked for them back. He had given Michael two chickens called Diane and Currier, and later, some fertile eggs to hatch. He gave Em a pair of yellow ducklings. He gave all of them a lot of advice about horses and dogs and cats and birds and everything you could think of. Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t.

He told Carrie how to ride, although she actually rode better than he did. He sat on the back of his saddle with his legs stuck out and his elbows pumping, at the same time telling Carrie, ‘Ride into your knee… drop the hands… push him into the bit… legs, girl, legs!’

He was shaped like one of his own milk churns, with a
broad red face and a bush of grey hair on which a tweed hat rode unsteadily, turned up all round, with a blue jay’s feather in the band. When he rode, the hat was always falling off, or getting snatched off by twigs, and Carrie had to get off John and pick it up, because if Mr Mismo got off, he couldn’t get on again without a mounting block.

His horse was about the same shape as he was, a porridge-coloured mare with a short fat tail and a stiff, hogged mane that Mr Mismo would neither grow out nor clip short. It stood straight up like a chariot horse, making her neck look thicker than it was already.