Summer at World's End (7 page)

They hopped through the gap in the hedge at the top of the hill, and on to the huge flat expanse of grass that had once been a Fighter airfield, long ago in the War. Peter took hold. She pulled him in. As soon as he felt the curb, he started to back again. He backed into the hedge and stopped, trampling, nervous and excited, between desire to gallop, and fear of the bit.

‘Come on, Pete!’ Carrie used her legs and slackened the reins. With a jet-propelled thrust of his quarters, he was off with her, over the broken macadam of the old runway, past the tumbledown Air Force sheds, across another
runway, galloping much too fast over the long uneven grass.

Carrie had once ridden a racehorse, and found out there was no way to stop. If you pulled, the racehorse went faster, leaning against your hands. The same thing was happening with Peter. The more she pulled, the more he pulled against the hated bit, fighting away from the pain, setting his jaw and his neck so that she couldn’t even turn him in a circle.

At the top of the airfield, there was a narrow track under trees to the common. Carrie leaned forward under the clutching branches. Peter went faster. He burst out on to the common, swerving round gorse bushes, jumping them, floundering through a boggy place and out on to firm ground on the broad track that led to the road. Carrie pulled. She prayed. She begged Peter. To her shame, she realized afterwards, she had shouted and wept.

Being run away with is a black madness of despair. The horse is your fate, and your fate is out of control. Galloping crazily, Peter dashed her under a tree at the edge of the common, slid down a bank, landed on the road to the roar of a motor cycle and stumbled and fell as the motor cycle swerved, just missing, and roared on.

Peter scrambled up at once. A few yards away, Carrie got up slowly, shaken and battered, and shook her fist after the dwindling motor cyclist. It wasn’t his fault. But he might have stopped. But she was glad he hadn’t. One side of her face was scorched and grazed. The eye was closing. Dirt was in her mouth. Her teeth felt loose, and her brain felt looser. Her legs felt as if she had been in bed for a week.

She would have to lead Peter home. She limped over to him and reached for the reins. He flung up his head and cantered off down the road, stirrups bumping and flying.

She walked for a long time. When anyone came by, she turned away her face and stood still, so that they would not see her limp. She felt that she must look as dreadful as she felt. They would rush her off to the hospital. Doctors would prod her bones. They would pull down the blinds and say she had concussion. It would all be more than she could bear.

Trudging along with her head down and aching, her knee hurting so badly that she began to be sure that she would never run, or even walk again, she thought dark and bitter thoughts, while low clouds swirled up the valley and began to spread downwards in fine misty rain. She would be a cripple for life. She would be in a wheel chair, her shoulders powerful as a man from turning the wheels. She would be like that lady who went on riding after a crippling fall in a point-to-point. They would have to dig a pit for John to walk into, so that she could slide on to his back from her wheel chair. Would she get a medal? What for? She had been a fool, not a heroine.

She heard the sound of hoofs without looking up. Who cared? Other people went riding. Other people had horses. Quiet, well-mannered horses who couldn’t canter a hundred yards without blowing and slowing, let alone gallop against a curb for miles and miles.

The hoof beats came nearer, came round a corner. Carrie turned and began to walk in the other direction, so that they would not see her grazed and swollen face.

‘Carrie!’

She turned. It was Michael on Oliver. Lester was with him, riding Peter bareback, in a rope halter.

‘You’re going the wrong way.’ Michael said with interest. ‘Were you knocked silly?’

Carrie hung her damp hair, but Lester got off and came to her, leading Peter, and put her hair gently back behind her ears to see her face.

‘You really did it this time.’ His dark eyes searched the damage.

‘What does it look like?’

‘As bad as it feels.’

Michael was chattering away, asking a hundred questions, whistling at her mashed face, predicting that she had broken her knee, lost the sight of her eye, would catch murder from Tom, would have to wear a veil for the rest of her life, like that old lady at the Golden Age Home who had fallen into the fire…

Lester did not say anything. He gave Carrie a leg up on to Peter’s short strong back, and hopped up in front of her. Clinging round his thin waist, she was too weak and dizzy to ask him if he thought it was safe to ride double on Peter.

Michael jogged beside them on Oliver’s short spry legs, trotting when they walked fast, rising very high and quick in the saddle like an animated toy, asking questions which Carrie only half heard, drowsily, with her head lolling to the rhythm of Peter’s long walk.

When they were almost home, she heard a voice which must be her own, thick out of a swollen mouth.

‘If Peter goes so well for you in a halter,’ she said to the

back of Lester’s dark alert head, ‘it won’t matter only

having one bridle. We can ride together now.’

*        *        *

When Tom came home, he went to the village for the doctor. They had tried to stay clear of him. They were afraid that he might say they were undernourished or neglected, like Mrs Loomis and Miss McDrane at the school, who were always suspicious of what went on at World’s End.

But the doctor was easy. Fairly young, small and thin with round spectacles and a pale tired face. If anyone was undernourished, he was.

He didn’t say anything about neglect, or too many animals and too little house-cleaning. He looked at Carrie and murmured, and felt her knee gently, and drew the curtains and told them to let him know if she threw up.

When he went away, he must have telephoned their mother, because Carrie woke from a confused sleep to find her sitting by the bed.

‘How funny,’ Carrie said. ‘I used to sit by your bed when you were in the hospital, and watch you sleeping. Your eyes moved under the lids like marbles.’

‘Did they?’ Her mother laughed. She looked brown and healthy. ‘How unattractive.’

‘No. I was glad, because then I knew you weren’t dead.’

Living on their own was very fine. But having Mother there was fine too.

Em and Michael took care of the horses, and Carrie lay under the window with the curtains blowing, and nothing to do but pick bits of gravel out of the graze on her face. When she asked her mother for a mirror, her eye was black and blue and green and her cheek was like a squashed tomato, so she didn’t ask for the mirror again.

Her mother read horse books and poetry to her. She read ‘Reynard the Fox’, and ‘Right Royal’:

…
And a voice said, ‘No,
Not for Right Royal.’

And I looked, and, lo!

There was Right Royal, speaking, at my side.
The horse’s very self, and yet his hide
Was like, what shall I say? like pearls on fire,
A white soft glow of burning that did twire
Like soft white-heat with every breath he drew
.

…
And I was made aware
That, being a horse, his mind could only say
Few things to me. He said, ‘It is my day,
My day, today; I shall not have another.’

And as he spoke he seemed a younger brother
Most near, and yet a horse, and then he grinned
And tossed his crest and crinier to the wind,
And looked down to the Water with an eye
All fire of soul to gallop dreadfully
.

Michael read to her from an old book called
Bunny Brothers
, which he had found in the attic among musty clothes and sagging tennis racquets.

‘Mrs Bunny had lad the bake fast, and now she saw very busy tiring the podridge over the fire to keep it form bunning.’

Em came up the stairs to bring her a few cats for bed company, and to read her a piece out of the local newspaper. It said that a lady called Miss Christabel May-berry, who lived on the gorse common, had seen the ghost of the famous Headless Horseman, who was supposed to have broken his neck hundreds of years ago, riding over the edge of the quarry. Miss Mayberry thought
it was a disaster warning against sending men to the moon.

At night, Carrie rode John up the star and took the piece out of the newspaper, to show that she and Peter were famous.

An old bag of bones called Gunpowder started to tell a long-winded story of how he and his rider, Ichabod Crane, had been chased by a goblin on a black steed, carrying its head in front of it on the saddle.

‘And when we came to the bridge …’ The old horse’s eyes bulged. He swung his bony head from side to side. ‘It threw - it threw its head at us!’

‘Oh, come on now, Gun.’ Marocco, the famous trick horse from Elizabethan times, had heard Gunpowder’s hair-raising story too often. ‘You know the goblin was only a man with a cloak over his head, carrying a pumpkin.’

‘You spoiled my story.’ Gunpowder grumbled away, mumbling at the grass with his long yellow teeth.

Carrie talked to Marocco about the strangeness of Peter going so well with Lester, and without a bit.

‘It’s not so strange,’ Marocco said. ‘All this ironmongery they put in your mouth … Often, the less you put on a horse, the better he’ll go for you. The American Indians knew that.’

‘But
I
couldn’t hold Peter in a halter,’ Carrie said. ‘I think he’s really Lester’s horse.’ On the Star, you could say the truth, and it didn’t hurt.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Marocco. ‘For every person, there is one horse. For every horse, there is one person.’

John turned his head round and nudged his soft oatmeal nose at Carrie’s bare toe. ‘They just have to find each other,’ he said.

While she was in bed, Carrie wrote that down. Her mother brought her a notebook, and she began to write
down other things that she thought, or had found out about horses. She stuck a label on the front:

‘
Carrie’s Horse Book’

When Em found out about this, she got out a diary which she had stopped keeping after the first two weeks of January, and started her own book:

‘
Esmeralda’s Book of Cats.’

When Michael heard about that, he took a marbled exercise book from the store cupboard at school and began a book of laws and truths about dogs.

It was called: ‘
Micheal’s Dog Lores.’

‘Why do they make the summer term the longest, when summer is the best part of the year?’

Michael filled his chest full of warm new air and sighed deeply. They were driving to school on a glorious morning, the fields golden with buttercups, white flowers foaming in the hedges, the village gardens bright as the illustrations on seed packets.

It was a day to be outdoors. A day to be under the sky. Not under a low ceiling, freckled from hundreds of ink darts, crouched over a desk scarred with years of other people’s initials and rude sayings.

‘Only two more months.’ Carrie slapped the reins on John’s back. He turned one ear round to her, but kept his steady pace, the breeching flopping, right, left, as his quarters moved.

‘I don’t think I can last that long.’

‘What’s the matter - Miss McDrane been making trouble again?’

Michael nodded. ‘But don’t tell Mother,’ he added quickly.

Mother got very worked up about Miss McDrane. She called her, ‘That woman at the school - McGutter, McSewer, McCesspool - what’s her horrid name?’

Miss McDrane wrote on the bottom of Michael’s papers, ‘Facts: D. Spelling: Z. Grade - N’ in green, insulting ink.

In the alphabet which Mother and Michael had invented, with different and more useful letters, he could get Spelling: A. ‘I wish I could teach you myself,’ Mother often sighed.

As they turned into the street where the school was, and saw the corrugated tin roof of the cloakroom flashing silver in the sun, Michael made a finger against the evil eye. ‘Miss McDrane says I am allergic to learning. That’s a terrible thing to say to anyone.’

‘Do you know what it means?’

‘No.’

‘It means - like Lester can’t have pets because his father is allergic to anything with fur on it. It makes him ill.’

‘Well so does
She
make me ill,’ Michael said.

When they had unharnessed John and settled him in the bakery stable, Carrie said, ‘I’m going to talk to that woman.’ When their parents were away, they had got used to taking care of each other.

At break, she went to Michael’s classroom. Miss McDrane was sitting at her high desk, correcting papers. Outside, Charlie was lying in the sun. Aware of Carrie through the window, although it was closed (on such a day!), he sat up and lifted his tufted ears. She frowned and shook her head -
not now, Charlie
- and stood before the teacher’s desk, putting her hair behind her ears to show a serious, responsible face, still scarred, and with a slightly bloodshot eye.

‘What do you want? I’m busy.’ Miss McDrane was not correcting papers. She was reading a letter on blue airmail paper with an Australian stamp. From a man who had gone all the way to the bottom of the world to get away from her?

‘It’s about Michael. My brother.’ Although the school
was not very large, you could not be sure that people like Miss McDrane knew who you were.

‘What about him? He’s dropping down. Not that he was ever up, in my opinion. He’s neglected. It’s not right, the way you children live, like gipsies, on your own.’

‘My mother is there.’ Mother had stayed on for a while after Carrie was better.

‘Is she?’ Miss McDrane raised an eyebrow like a furry caterpillar.

‘I don’t tell lies,’ Carrie lied.

‘I didn’t say you did, my dear girl. Why are you so touchy?’

‘Because you don’t seem to trust us’ (And I am not your dear girl). ‘If you don’t believe my mother is at home, why don’t you come and see for yourself?’

‘Well, I —‘ The last, and only time Mother had met Miss McSewer, she had sent her packing with a flea in her ear.