Summer at World's End (6 page)

Carrie and Lester were looking at each other without expression, seeing back to all that had happened. The spying, the planning, the electric shock, the painting, the turpentine, the Black Rage, the fear with which they had watched the top of Mr Novak’s hat from the attic window. Worst of all, the moment of violent anger when they had faced each other by the abandoned cowshed. They had almost lost their friendship.

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it began. The sun came out and the horses began to steam.

‘Take care of him,’ Mr No Thanks said, as he closed his umbrella and turned away. ‘
She
never did.’

School started. There was no escape. Like the rising and setting of the sun, the ebb and flow of the tide, no human power could prevent the summer term.

Every morning, Carrie drove Em and Michael behind John in the brown and yellow trap, with Charlie and Moses running underneath (Perpetua was too near to having her puppies).

The dogs stayed outside the school all day, investigating the neighbourhood smells, calling in for snacks at back doors where they were known. If school was late coming out, they looked in at Michael’s ground floor classroom, paws on the windowsill, tongues lolling, heads on one side, the tufts on Charlie’s ears sticking out, until the class giggled itself into an uproar, and Miss McDrane lashed out right and left with a rolled up map of Australia.

Sometimes the goat and the ram followed the trap. Lucy usually turned off at the rubbish tip, but Henry sometimes came all the way. His mild, chewing face would appear at the window. ‘Mary!’ the class would shout at Michael. ‘Mary had a little lamb…’

‘Shut up! Shut up!’ He jammed his thumbs into his ears and screamed.

‘Quiet, everybody! Qui-utt!’ Miss McDrane shrieked louder than anyone.

John spent the day in the bakery stable, next to the school. The baker was a cousin of Mrs Croker, the English
teacher. He let Carrie use his stable while his horse and van were out on the bread rounds. It was very convenient. Carrie fought a girl called Hazel Oddie for a desk by the window. Beyond the mustard and cress that grew in saucers of wet flannel on the sill, she could hear John blowing at hay and stamping at flies, while Mrs Croker recited poetry.

They were doing Tennyson. Mrs Croker was a mad, enthusiastic woman with wild china blue eyes and iron grey hair which she cut herself round a pudding basin upside down on her head. The blunt chopped ends flew out as she declaimed:

‘
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle, answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.’

She waved her short arms and whirled about the room, striding between the desks, touching people on top of the head with electric fingers.

‘
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath…’

When Mrs Croker recited that poem, ‘Maud’, she got so worked up that Beryl Fitch, who sat at the back, kept one hand on the fire extinguisher.

‘
Birds in the high Hall garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.’

With each wail of ‘Maud’, she closed her eyes and put her hands to her mouth like a trumpet. The two back rows were in fits. Gloria Sweet stuffed the end of her
pigtail into her mouth, went blue in the face and had to be thumped on the back by Mrs Croker.

‘
Birds in the high Hall garden
(thump)
Were crying and calling to her
(thump)
Where is Maud
(thump),
Maud
(thump),
Maud
(thump)?
One is come to woo her
(THUMP!)’

English class was the best part of school.

But school was only a half life. The real thing began when they drove home.

Up the white hill road. Through the cool fir wood at the top. Down into their own village and through the main street, with friends looking out of windows and shop doors at the sound of John’s hoofs. Out past Mr Mismo’s dairy farm, where he usually ‘happened’ to be at the gate to call out, ‘Why don’t
you
run underneath and let the dogs drive?’ or, ‘That nag is lame in all five legs!’ or any of his favourite, familiar, feeble jokes.

On the wall of the stable yard, a row of whiskered cats waited for Em. As they turned in at the gate - the wheel hub missing the post by half an inch, the way John and Carrie liked to judge it - puppies bounded from everywhere, and Michael jumped down into a foaming sea of tongues and yelps and waving tails.

From the hen house, Diane and Currier called boring news about eggs they had laid, or could have laid, or might yet lay if the fancy took them. The goat looked up from the rubbish heap, necklaced with shredded plastic bags. Leonora let out a terrible bray that sent the birds circling up to the tops of the trees. Peter and Oliver Twist greeted John from the meadow, and John sent back a trumpet call, usually in Carrie’s ear, as she was backing him into the cart shed.

Em and the cats went off to start cooking something. Michael and the puppies went off to invent something (they were working on furniture made out of old horseshoes). Carrie fed John, and turned him out to roll in the muddiest place he could find. When it had been raining, he came up plastered solid like a plated dinosaur.

Before she turned John out, Carrie brought Peter in, or she would never have caught him. Peter was difficult to catch, among the other things that were difficult to do with him.

He was, as Mr Mismo said, ‘a chancy ride.’ You never knew what would happen. He was very quick and responsive, sometimes unexpectedly so. He might stand like a rock, pretending to stare at something on the horizon. Suddenly at the slightest pressure of legs, he would be over the top of the hill with you before you could shorten your reins.

He had once been well schooled, but the hard-handed treatment of Mr Novak’s mad devil daughter had made him nervous and jumpy.

‘He’s unsure,’ Mr Mismo said, after Peter had shied at nothing, right across the road, and dumped Carrie in a thorn hedge.

‘Not half as unsure as I am.’ She picked out the larger thorns, and remounted, Peter circling wildly, and bumping into Princess Margaret Rose, who bit him. Even Mr Mismo’s steady old cob was touchy when she was out with Peter.

Carrie rode him in John’s snaffle bridle. It was the only one they had, except for Oliver’s small bridle which Michael had paid for by selling manure round the housing estates.

‘Get him collected!’ Mr Mismo shouted after her, as
Peter trotted off fast. ‘Bring him back to you and use your legs to get him on the bit!’ She did all the correct things, that worked with John, but Peter chucked the bit up into the corners of his mouth, or yawed down with it, pulling her half out of the saddle, and finally shied at a nonexistent bogey in a cabbage field and put Carrie on the ground again.

‘You could pull out all his eyelashes,’ Mr Mismo said helpfully. ‘That’s the old Indian trick with a shying —’

Getting on, Carrie had kicked Peter by mistake, and was away into the middle distance before Mr Mismo could finish his sentence, and gather up his reins to follow at Princess Margaret’s rolling, beer barrel canter.

The odd thing was - not odd to Lester, but odd to Carrie - that Lester had more success with Peter than she did. He rode all wrong, sloppily, on a loose rein, uncollected, dreamy. Peter went quietly and did not shy. Lester rode him like an Indian, like a Roman, like an Arab in the desert, bareback, fingers twined in the mane, relaxed and at one with his horse, as Carrie was only able to be in the waking dream of her own invention when she galloped with John up to the Star where the horses of history grazed.

One night when she could not sleep, she rode Peter up to the Star to show him off.

Some of the horses were a bit huffy at first. They preferred to see a plain horse like John, who was no threat to their pride. Peter moved among them like a king, showing off, picking up his feet prettily, head up, neck flexed at the perfect point behind the ears.

Carrie sat him easily, like Lester, fingers in his golden mane, legs close to the warm strength of him. There were no saddles or bridles on the Star. No fences. No gates, except the one at the edge, for people who had died to lean
on and chew grass while they waited for their own horse to come galloping over the Elysian Fields.

She saw an old lady there in a long, old-fashioned riding habit, top hat and veil, bunch of violets in her buttonhole, and saw her old hunter canter stiffly up and drop his nose into her small blue-veined hand. The old lady stood on the gate and mounted, side saddle without a saddle, and they moved off as they had once moved off after hounds to the first covert, going on together - where? Carrie would not find that out until she had died herself.

She saw a young man who had been killed in a war, somewhere on earth. He was waiting for the pony he had ridden when he was a boy. The pony was a blue roan with a broad speckled face. It was too small for him now, so they walked away, the young man with an arm thrown over the pony’s thick mane which flopped on both sides from years of waiting, head down to the sweet grass, until his friend arrived.

‘I know that chestnut.’ Some horses were talking about Peter. ‘Didn’t I see you once at the Pony Club Combined Event?’ a Thoroughbred asked. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Peter.’

Peter. I called him, and he took the name

And made it his…

Carrie and he were not going to let on that he had ever been called Pretty Prancer.

‘No, it wasn’t that.’ The Thoroughbred had a conceited, superior manner, flicking his tail in people’s faces and laying back his slender ears if a common horse came too close. ‘Something soppy. My Fairy Prince. Beauty of Basingstoke - One of those ghastly names those brats think up when Daddy buys them an expensive horse.’

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘It was. I remember your dressage. Very fine, in spite of a ham-fisted girl with a lead seat and legs like bowling-pins. I’ve got it - Pretty Prancer. Ugh!’ He made the kind of noise a horse would make if it could vomit.

Carrie and Peter jumped off the edge of the star and drifted back to World’s End, riding the night sky.

‘It’s the snaffle that’s wrong,’ she told Lester, after trying for half an hour to make Peter change leads in a figure of eight.

‘It feels all right to me.’ Lester was sitting on the fallen tree in the flat corner of the meadow. The monkey sat beside him, picking under the bark for wood lice.

‘He’s always on the wrong lead with you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It
does
matter.’

‘Why does it?’ Lester had made a daisy chain. He put it round Joey’s neck and the monkey tore it off and ate it.

‘It just does.’ Lester understood all things about life, but it was impossible to explain the finer points of riding to someone who did not care. ‘And anyway,’ she said, ‘I think he’s been schooled in a curb.’

‘If you’re going to put a curb on him,’ Lester stood up and the monkey jumped into his arms, not wanting to be left, ‘you’re not going to ride him.’

‘Who says?’

‘Ido.’

‘He’s half my horse.’

‘The back end.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since you said you want to put a curb in the front end.’

When Lester had gone home, Carrie went down the lane to Mr Mismo’s farmhouse and knocked on the back
door. He opened it with a napkin in one huge hand and his mouth full of kippers. He and Mrs Mismo were having their tea.

‘Just come at the right time. Come in, old dear, and sit down.’

‘Come in, Carrie, I’ve got some hot scones for you!’ Mrs Mismo called. She was sure they were starving at World’s End. She often came down with cakes and buns and home-made bread.

‘No thanks. I can’t stay. Em’s made cottage pie.’

‘Rather you than me.’ Mr Mismo made a face. Em had once made cottage pie with tinned dog food, because it looked so good.

‘Could I borrow that pelham?’ Mr Mismo had a collection of old bits decorating the walls of his back hall, instead of calendars or mottoes.

‘For Don John of Hoss-tria?’ Mr Mismo took down the steel pelham bit, burnished with sand and chain-cloth in the old grooms’ way before stainless steel. ‘He’s got a snaffle mouth, if nothing else.’

‘I want to try Peter in it.’

‘Go easy then. This is a might severe.’ He ran his broad red finger down the long cheek of the bit. ‘He’s touchy with his head. Been jabbed in the mouth too many times, if you ask me.’

‘You said I had good hands.’

‘I’ve seen better.’ He had always seen better. ‘I knew a lady once who rode a seventeen hand horse on a silk thread.’

Next day after school, Carrie hurried to put the pelham into John’s bridle and fit it on Peter. Michael was in the meadow with the pony, so she got on Peter in the yard and walked round, not touching his mouth. He fussed with the bit and shook his head, clinking the curb chain. When she
pulled him in gently, he resisted. She pulled a little harder. When he felt the pinch of the chain under his chin, he threw up his head and backed wildly, through the manure heap, knocking over a wheelbarrow, scattering chickens and pigeons, and missing by inches the sun-bathing tortoise.

Yesterday he would not back at all. Now he wouldn’t stop. He finally backed himself into the wall, crashing a pile of flowerpots, and Carrie got quickly off. What now?

Lester turned up at World’s End most afternoons, dropping casually out of a tree, or coming through a hedge from the wrong direction, or hopping down from the back of a passing lorry. He had said, ‘If you’re going to put a curb on him, you’re not going to ride him.’ So when Carrie heard the scolding of blue jays from the corner of the beech wood, which meant that Lester was coming through that way, she led Peter out of the gate and into the field across the lane, mounted, used her legs as hard as she dared, and rode off out of sight round the hill.

She rode Peter with a very light contact, hardly feeling his mouth. He flexed, stepped out, trotted beautifully, with his head steady and his fine ears forward. She was right! She rode in joy, singing.