Summer at World's End (5 page)

All right. Carrie set her jaw. That was it then. The end of their friendship. That was the way life was. When you thought you had found someone for good, you lost them. She sat down on the ground and threw stones into an old rain barrel. Plonk, plonk, plonk. Each plonk sent up a jet of sour green water.

‘Nine out of ten. Not bad for a girl.’ Lester came up behind her. Carrie scrambled up and faced him. ‘What have you done with Peter?’

‘What have
you
done with him?’ Carrie was red with fury. Lester was white. They were both trembling.

‘You wanted him for yourself!’

‘
You
wanted him! Where is he?’

‘Wherever you’ve taken him.’

‘Where you took him!’

They hardly knew what they were saying. They stared in hate. Charlie was barking like a maniac. ‘Shut up,’ Carrie snapped at him. ‘It’s not your business.’

But he wasn’t barking at them. He was round the side of the shed, barking at Peter, who had broken the halter rope and was now caught by the end of it in a tangle of bushes, trapped and sweating.

When he had quietened down, they took him home to World’s End. He was less nervous today. Lester led him and Carrie walked on the other side of him, and after a while, she could put her hand on his neck. His skin was fine and thin, like thoroughbred skin. She ran her fingers up to the warmth beneath his silky red-gold mane.

Then she and Lester both said at exactly the same time, as if their minds were linked by the horse between them, ‘Sorry.’

Tom came home from work, tired but content. He had helped Mr Harvey with a long and difficult operation on a dog’s crushed leg. The owner, an old man with trembling hands, sat in the waiting-room and wept, because another vet had told him the dog would die.

After two hours, Tom showed him his dog, bandaged and splinted, alive and feebly thumping her tail. The joy of the old man’s face was still reflected in Tom’s smile when he came home.

Michael ran to meet him with his speedy up-and-down limp. Tom picked him up and swung him. ‘Guess what?’ It was too exciting for Michael to keep. *We’ve got another customer.’

‘Nice-looking horse.’ Tom hung the top of his long, loose body over the half door of the loose box. ‘Where did you get that one?’

Lester was sitting in the manger, holding Peter and soothing him while he stamped nervously. He said nothing. Tom was Carrie’s brother, not his.

Carrie was kneeling in the straw. She stood up quickly and turned round, hiding something. ‘We’re boarding him for someone.’ She put back her hair and made an honest face.

‘Anyone I know?’

‘I don’t think so. They live - oh, somewhere the other side of the brook.’ She waved a hand vaguely.

‘Good idea,’ Tom said, ‘if it helps to pay the feed bill. How much?’

‘Well actually, they’re not - I mean, I’m sorry for them, you see. They’ve had a lot of bad luck.’

‘Oh?’ Tom was smiling.

‘Their son had a - had a car crash, and their daughter ran away with the milkman, and the father lost his job. As a riveter. They filled in the river instead of building a bridge.’ If you told one lie, it led you into a million of them.

‘How sad,’ Tom said. ‘Is that why you’re painting their horse’s legs?’

She told him then about Peter and the mad devil girl and what she had done to him.

‘Oh Lord,’ Tom said, ‘there’s no end to it.’

‘But you’d have done the same as me! You said yourself, World’s End should be a refuge for animals that had suffered —’

‘That’s what I mean. No end to the suffering that people cause.’

‘Mr Novak may come here,’ Lester said from the manger, taking a bull’s eye out of his cheek and giving it to Peter. ‘He’ll remember that the horse was here before. But if he does, he won’t find a horse with two white socks and a half moon star. Peter will have no white socks. And look.’ He turned Peter’s head round to show the broad white blaze that they had painted down his nose with whitewash.

‘I hope I shan’t be here.’ Tom went off with Michael to work on their invention for brightening candle power with angled reflectors. There was no electricity at World’s End.

Bits of straw were sticking to the wet brown paint on Peter’s legs. Carrie had to pick them off and put on another
coat. They brought him out to inspect him in the light. The white blaze was not bad, but the legs would not have fooled an idiot, much less a glum, suspicious man like Mr No Thanks. They were the wrong colour, and the hair was matted and clinging as if Peter had been walking in a bog.

Em came across the yard with Maud, the deaf white cat, on her shoulder, and a few of Pip’s children and grandchildren behind her, stalking blown straws, crouching in a hoof print, wriggling and stamping for the pounce. One of Pip’s first two kittens, Julius and Caesar, had turned out to be a woman. She was now called Julia, and there were getting to be enough cats to satisfy even Em.

Last week they had given two away, but they kept coming back, and their new people were insulted and would not fetch them any more.

‘What do you think of Peter?’ Carrie asked Em hopefully.

‘I think he looked better before.’

‘But we’ve got to disguise him! How do you think he looks?’

‘Like a horse who’s had a blaze whitewashed on his face and his legs painted the wrong shade of brown.’

Em came closer. Peter put back his ears.

‘Watch him,’ Lester warned. ‘He’s still scared of girls.’

‘Not as scared as I am of him,’ Em said. But she stayed still, while Maud, who was too deaf and smug to be afraid of a horse, stood on her shoulder and stretched out her round fur head to Peter, touching noses with a little shock of cat electricity.

Peter was still jumpy and nervous, throwing up his head if you moved your hand quickly, as if he expected to be hit. But he was growing calmer all the time, more
sure of them, more like he must have been before the mad devil girl got at him.

‘It would be a tragedy if he had to go back there,’ Carrie said. ‘How else do people disguise a horse?’

‘Stick on a false tail?’ Em suggested.

‘That long hair piece Aunt Valentina used to wear,’ Carrie remembered. ‘That would have done it.’

‘Aunt Val…’ Em was thinking under the wide hair-band holding down her curls. ‘What was it she …? Remember she was going grey, only she thought no one knew, but I found the black stuff she put on her hair, that day you were such hours in the bath and I went into her bathroom.’

‘It wasn’t me. I wasn’t hours. It’s not me who reads in the bath with a cat sitting on the edge drinking the water.’

‘It was you that day. I beat and beat on the door, but all you did was turn the taps on. I remember it as if it was yesterday.’

‘I don’t remember it at all.’

‘Girls,’ said Lester,
’please!
That’s not the point. The point is your Aunt Valentina’s hair dye. What was it?’

‘Black something.’ Em tried to remember. ‘Black Diamond … Black Pepper … Black Beauty … something like that.’

‘
Black?’
said Carrie. ‘That’s it. We’ll dye his legs black and his mane and tail too, and then he won’t be a chestnut any more. He’ll be a bay.’

‘It’s genius,’ said Lester. ‘Go down to the village and get the stuff, and I’ll start washing off this paint. Thanks, Emmie.’

‘Think nothing of it.’ Em went on her way with the convoy of cats. ‘Any time.’ Carrie hesitated. ‘I haven’t got any money.’ ‘Tell the chemist I’ll pay on Friday,’ Lester said. ‘Mr
Evans is a friend of mine. I count pills for him.’ Lester had friends everywhere, always just the kind you needed.

‘For young Lester, is it?’ Mr Evans rubbed his blue chin, which looked as if he ought to sell himself some of his ‘Bristle-Begone’ shaving cream. ‘Poor lad. Is he going grey already?’

‘It’s for a play he’s getting up,’ Carrie said. ’For the old people.’ When she was nervous, she always had to invent more than necessary. ‘At the Golden Age Home.’

‘Well… black, you say? There’s tints and rinses. Let’s see …’ He looked along a shelf. ‘Blackberry … Slate Mate … Jet Set… Chocolate Sundae … Dark Secret … Black Rage…’

He was maddeningly slow. He mumbled among the bottles. Carrie fumed, imagining Mr No Thanks already driving up the lane with his eyes peeled.

‘Black Rage - please. May I have that?’ She grabbed the bottle before he could start fiddling with wrapping-paper and sealing-wax, ran out of the shop, and rode furiously home on Old Red, the bicycle that went ‘squee-clunk’ when the pedal hit the chain guard.

The brown paint would not wash off. They tried turpentine. Peter nearly went mad. They jumped out of the stable as the turpentine reached the skin, and he thrashed round the loose box, kicking, banging, lying down and rolling to try and get rid of the burning. Lester ran to get the hose, and they sluiced his legs with cold water until the pain stopped.

‘What are you doing?’ Michael asked, as they were forking out the soaked straw.

‘Playing the piano,’ Carrie said. The adventure was getting rather grim.

The Black Rage hair dye went on quite easily, although it was hard to get near Peter’s legs after the turpentine. He
did look quite different. He was a bright enough chestnut to look like a bay when his legs and mane were black.

‘Put a bit more on his tail.’ Lester was standing back with his head on one side, like an artist considering a picture.

‘Me?’ Carrie thought Peter was sick of being messed about. His back was humped and his tail was clamped down.

‘Sorry, I forgot.’ Lester grinned happily. ‘He doesn’t like girls.’

Peter still was better with Lester than anyone else. Carrie was still jealous. But disguising him was all that mattered, not only for his sake, but for theirs. They had stolen a horse. If they were found out …

‘If it’s prison, I hope they send me to Mount Pleasant,’ Carrie said gloomily. ‘Your mother would be kind to me, at least.’

It was two days before Mr Novak arrived. He came in a very expensive car and walked up to the front door with a hat and a rolled umbrella, as if he were paying a formal call.

Nobody was at home but Carrie and Lester. When they saw the car stop, they ran upstairs into the attic and watched from the little window over the World’s End inn sign, which Michael had painted with a picture of a little house sitting on the edge of the globe.

Mr Novak kept knocking on the door with the handle of his umbrella. ‘Go down,’ Lester said.

Carrie knew that she would blush and stammer, and Mr Novak would take her off to the police station without even having to look at Peter. ‘I’m afraid.’

‘So am I.’

She had never heard Lester say that. She squeezed his
hand ‘Goodbye, Carrie,’ he said. ‘Tell them I died bravely.’

Bang, bang, on the front door. They saw the top of Mr Novak’s grey hat, with darkening spots on it. It was beginning to rain. He put up his umbrella and began to walk round the side of the house.

Lester and Carrie ran down the stairs and out through the back door, slowing to a casual walk as they saw Mr Novak under his umbrella, looking over the loose box doors. The horses were out in the meadow.

When they came up to him, he took off his hat and apologized for trespassing. They had expected an ogre, a monster, the hateful father of a hateful girl. He was rather nice. As he told them about losing the horse, they saw that the lines in his face were from worry, not bad temper.

They were able to tell him quite honestly that his horse had not run here a second time. Because he hadn’t run. He had been led.

Mr No Thanks nodded, and they thought he would go. But then he looked again at Carrie and said, ‘You’re the girl who jumped so well at the show. Have you still got that fantastic brown horse?’

‘Yes. John. Don John of Austria. He’s in the meadow.’

‘I’d love to see him.’

‘It’s raining awfully hard.’

It was coming down in sheets, but Mr Novak said, ‘I don’t mind if
you
don’t,’ and held his large umbrella up so that they could all three walk underneath it.

Carrie and Lester walked with their fingers crossed. But why be afraid? Mr Novak was looking for a chestnut with a half moon star. Peter was a bay with a long blaze.

Lester saw him first. ‘Tell them,’ he muttered, ‘that I died bravely.’

Mr Novak bent down his head. ‘What did you say?’

Lester said nothing. Carrie said nothing. Then Mr Novak looked ahead, and he said nothing.

John and Oliver and Leonora and Peter had come splashing down the hill when they heard them. They were all streaming wet, manes clinging, tails tucked in. Peter was not a bay any more. The rain had washed the Black Rage out of his legs and mane and tail, and most of the whitewash off his face.

They stood in silence under the umbrella while the two horses and the pony and the donkey pushed each other jealously away from the gate.

‘Is that my chestnut horse?’ Mr Novak said at last, in a conversational way, as if he were asking the time.

‘Some dye,’ Carrie said, not caring now if he heard.

‘You dyed him?’ He looked down at her curiously.

‘His legs and mane and tail. But it must have been a rinse, not a dye.’

‘You, er - ‘ Mr No Thanks cleared his throat. ‘You stole him then?’

They nodded. Lester put out his wrists for handcuffs.

‘You mean you - you
want
him?’

They stared. Something peculiar was happening to Mr Novak’s face. The long lines and folds that dropped heavily downward were struggling to lift themselves into a smile. His mouth worked. His jaw clenched. Cords stood out in his neck. He suddenly let out a bellow of laughter that scattered the horses and the donkey, kicking up their heels in the puddled mud by the gate.

He was as mad as his daughter. ‘It’s the funniest thing that ever happened to me! Don’t you see? I couldn’t
give
that tricky beast away. My daughter didn’t want him. Gone boy-mad. That’s why I sent her away to school. But no one would buy him at any price. I thought I was stuck with him.’

‘You mean— ?’

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I’m glad to be rid of him. You can keep him if you’re really sure you can handle him.’