When Mother had finished darning clothes and pruning fruit trees and painting Liza’s bedstead bright orange daisies on the corners, she went chatting round the villages to see what was doing.
‘What was doing?’ When she came home, Carrie and Michael were washing a horse rug in the sink, and Dad had some of the dogs lined up like sailors on pay day to catch dog biscuits.
Moses caught them in his long speckled jaws like an alligator. Liza’s old dog Dusty would not open his mouth at all. The biscuit bumped off his faded nose and he had to track it short-sightedly over the floor. Harry, silly half-brother of Moses, snapped wildly, jumping too high and slavering. Charlie didn’t bother to open his mouth until the last minute, then he caught the biscuit neatly and casually over his shoulder.
‘What was doing, Alice?’
‘The assistant cook at the school is leaving to have a baby. I may get the job.’
‘Now look here, Alice.’ Someone’s puppy flopped on to Dad’s foot and he flipped it off upside down, its legs bicycling round its fat stomach. ’I’m not going to have you breaking your back.’
‘I’ve done that once and it mended.’ Mother laughed and swung her yellow bell of hair, excited by the future. She lived in the expectation that something marvellous was just round the corner. Anything new, even boiling up carrots and jam roll for a hundred and fifty messy, grumbling children, was an adventure. ’Let me do this, just till you get some money for the book.’
‘Ah - and then you shall live like a lady. Jewels. Furs. Exotic perfumes. Champagne ...’
‘I don’t want to live like a lady.’ Mother kicked off her shoes and sat on the draining board to wash her feet in the horse rug water.
‘She’d give the jewels to the poor,’ Michael said.
‘And furs come from endangered species,’ Carrie said.
‘And exoct pre-fumes are made from the insides of cats,’ Michael said.
‘What about champagne then?’
They were stumped for a moment, then Carrie grinned and shouted, ’Picking the grapes is cruel to the birds!’ and Charlie shouted with her.
By opening his mouth wide and using a lot of breath, he could make sounds like loud talking, as long as you didn’t want consonants.
Dad threw him a biscuit, which he caught back and sideways with a flick of his head.
‘Well fielded, sir!’
‘If the balls weren’t so hard,’ Michael said, ’he could play for England.’
Actually, Charlie was not much good at balls. If you threw one for him, he either looked the wrong way, or took it under a bush and demolished it. When he went with Carrie and Lester and Michael on a further Brookside reconnaissance at half term, a tennis ball came sailing over the garden hedge as they were riding at the edge of the field behind the house. Charlie pounced on it and ran into the bushes.
Michael got off his pony and crawled in after him. Charlie’s jaws were clamped round a brand new ball. Michael got it out by putting a finger inside and tickling the roof of his mouth. He stood up to throw the ball over the hedge, but it went behind his head into the field. After two more tries, he turned round and lobbed it backwards over the hedge and into the Brookside garden.
Crash - clatter - tinkle. Yells from beyond the hedge. Michael dropped to hands and knees and peered through.
‘Straight into a cold frame.’ He backed out of the hedge with the shoulder of his jacket half torn away. ’What did I tell you? Two broken windows always means a third.’
They went round to the back gate. A hefty boy and girl in shorts much too cold for this weather were jumping about on the tennis court waving racquets and shouting, ’Thanks for the ball!’
They did not seem to mind about the cold frame. But Michael would not go in alone, so Carrie went with him while Lester held the horses.
The boy and girl were as strong and healthy as their parents, with brown limbs, thick shiny hair, red lips over big white teeth and large rubber-soled feet. They looked like the super-young of a new vitamin-stuffed race. Very different from the little girl who sat bundled in a cape and hood in the doorway of the round summerhouse, her skinny legs dangling into boots that hung uselessly.
She sat in her own world. When Michael waved to her, she did not smile, but slid her eyes round to where the boy and girl were hanging like apes against the wire fence of the tennis court.
‘I’m Victor Agnew.’ The boy grinned, sure of himself and of being liked. ’And this is Jane. Who are you?’
‘We broke your cold frame,’ Carrie said. Michael had pulled his hood down over his eyes which meant that he was not going to speak.
‘Oh that.’ The boy tossed back a lion’s mane of hair, as if cold frames came two a penny. ’What have you got out there-horses?’
‘Do you ride?’ Carrie asked eagerly. The boy looked her age, or a bit older. Lester was all the friend she needed, of course, but fantasy catapulted her forward into a dream of riding with this boy, dazzling him with how well John went for her.
The boy and girl dropped their monkey grins for a moment and shot a look at each other. Then the boy made a noise of contempt and pushed himself off the wire. ’Who wants a horse when they can go by car?’
‘We don’t have time to play about with ponies.’ The girl recovered her grin. ’Games is our thing. Want to come and knock up?’ She picked up her racquet and banged some balls across the net, hard enough to stop a train.
‘We don’t play.’
‘Don’t play tennis?’ Carrie might as well have said, ’We don’t eat.’
‘What’s going on out there, you kids? I said three sets before lunch if you want to win that tournament.’ The father bounced out of the house in swimming trunks with a towel round his broad bare shoulders.
Swimming in the winter! Carrie and Michael stared. They spent a lot of their winter trying to get warm or keep warm, not cooling off in cold water. The pool had been repaired and filled. There seemed to be a thin skin of ice in one corner.
Poised on the edge, the large red-faced man threw off the towel, flexed his muscles, did a few Tarzan knee bends, and plunged into the icy water. Carrie could feel the shock of it through all her nerves and up into her head, where it made her teeth ache.
The man did not reappear immediately. She almost expected to see him float to the top dead, with the red broken veins of his face congealed to blue, but he swam underwater and surfaced at the other end of the pool, flinging back his hair and jumping half out of the water as if he hoped to be thrown a herring. He swam several lengths in a powerful crawl, hauled himself easily out of the pool, wiped his hands over his eyes and saw Michael goggling at him.
‘You again,’ he said. ’What do you want?’
‘Oh, they’re our friends,’ Victor called out from the court, as if the whole world was his friend once it had spoken to him.
‘Make yourselves at home then.’ Mr Agnew slung the towel round his neck, put up his elbows and jogged across the terrace into the house. Carrie distinctly saw gooseflesh on the backs of his legs.
She tested the water in the pool and almost got frostbitten fingers. Victor and Jane had finished their game and were coming through the gate of the court.
‘Does your father swim all winter?’ she asked them.
‘Natch. Got to keep fit, you know, at his age, or you go to seed. He jogs two miles every day. So do we when we’re home from school. What’s your name?’
‘I’m Caroline,’ Carrie heard herself say, although she never used her full name. ’And my brother is Michael.’
The girl had run towards the house. Victor turned towards the summer-house.
‘Come on Priskie, old sport.’ He grabbed the handle at the back of the little girl’s chair and bumped her off the step on to the path so vigorously that she nearly fell out.
‘Can I push her?’ Michael walked beside him with the slight limp that made him look as if he had one foot on the pavement and one in the gutter.
‘Help yourself. I get
enough of it.’
‘What’s wrong with Priscilla?’ The boy was so cheerful and relaxed that Carrie was able to ask it.
‘Old Priskie? She’s all right.’
‘Why do you all say that?’ This boy seemed so direct and easygoing, and yet here he was, lying like his parents.
‘What do you want us to say - that she’s a hopeless cripple who’ll never walk again?’ He kept smiling, but he banged his tennis racquet savagely against a juniper bush.
‘Oh.’
‘Her spinal cord was injured. Her pony reared and fell back on top of her.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Carrie did not look at him either. ’I shouldn’t have asked you if you rode.’
‘Oh, we never did. Priskie was the horsy one. She’d have won at all the shows. That stinking pony cost the earth.’
‘Was it too much for such a small child?’
’Look - she was more than seven,’ Victor said scornfully, as if Carrie should have known that all Agnews were champs as soon as they could toddle.
‘How old is she now?’
‘About nine.’ Didn’t people in wheelchairs have birthdays?
‘She doesn’t look it.’ ’She’s gone babyish.’ ’Who says she’ll never walk?’
‘Everyone. She might have. But she wouldn’t try. She won’t do exercises or anything. She’s given up.’
They had been walking towards the house, thinking that Michael was walking behind them with the rapt, careful face he had put on when he took charge of the wheelchair. But when they reached the terrace and Victor turned to help lift the chair up the steps, they saw that Michael had gone in the other direction, and had taken Priscilla to the back gate to see the horses.
He had opened the gate and pushed her through.
‘My mother will burst a blood vessel. Hey, Ma!’ Victor ran across the terrace, Carrie turned and ran to the gate, and the mother came hurtling out of the house behind her with a cry.
Outside the back gate, the chair was bogged in winter mud. Michael held Oliver close to it and had picked up Priscilla’s small hand and pulled it forward. The child showed no fear. Her grave eyes watched the pony’s full blue eye.
‘Let him smell you, Bristler.’ Michael pulled off the woollen mitten and held her hand against the soft twitching nose. Oliver liked the smell of people. He blew curious breaths into the tiny hand, white and fragile against Michael’s blunt brown workman’s fingers.
‘Horses smell by breathing out, not in,’ Michael instructed Priscilla chummily.
‘Yes.’ It was only a whisper, but it was the first word she had said.
Her mother had no breath to shout. With a sobbing gasp, she came through the gate and snatched the child up out of the chair and held her close, boots dangling at the end of the wrinkled red tights. Priscilla began to put on the high baby wailing they had heard before. Over her mother’s shoulder, her face was screwed up fretfully, but with no tears.
‘What are you trying to do?’ Mrs Agnew asked Michael angrily.
‘She likes the horses, really she does.’
‘She’s terrified of them.’ The mother had backed away to the gate, as if she were the one who was terrified. ’You must leave her alone. I told you.’
‘She’s lonely.’
‘She wants to be alone. She doesn’t like other children. Leave her alone – please!’ as Michael reached up to put the mitten on the dangling hand. ’Don’t upset her.’
Carrying the light weight of the child easily against her strong shoulder, she went through the gate. Carrie began to follow with the chair, but she said, ’Leave that. I’ll send Victor out for it.’
They watched her stride back with the wailing child across the garden and into the house and shut the door.
Six
The big stubble field had been ploughed now. They picked their way along the sticky outside furrow in single file, not talking. When they got on to the broad track through the wood, Lester rode up beside Carrie.
‘Victor,’ he said. ’How do you like that?’
Carrie shrugged her shoulders.
‘It means Conqueror.’ Lester’s mother had a book of names, which she consulted whenever a relation or friend was going to have a baby, and handed out advice which they never took.
‘Well, he seems to be always winning at games.’
‘All brawn and no brain. I know his sort.’
Lester was jealous, but Carrie was thinking about the little girl. ’He said it was an expensive show pony. Perhaps the mother bought something much too hot for her because the family always has to win.’
‘So that makes her think it’s her fault,’ Michael jogged alongside. Because he did not read or write what the school called properly, they said he was backward, but he was very shrewd for his age.
‘That’s why she babies Priscilla,’ Lester said. ’She didn’t start crying till Mrs Agnew came on the scene.’
‘Mrs Agony,’ Michael said. ’She’s made a prisoner of Bristler.’
Late that night, Carrie was thinking about Priscilla lying perhaps in that spooky round turret room at Brookside, and unable to go to the curved window and look out at the cold moon and the bare trees weaving changing designs on the night sky in the same breeze that blew the curtain into Carrie’s room, even though the window was shut.
Did she know that the house was haunted? The other Agnews did not look as if they would believe a ghost if they met one head on. If they should hear the phantom baby crying, they would think it was Priscilla’s desolate wail.
And was it Priscilla she and Lester had heard that day in the turret room? Or was it... ?
To stop herself thinking about ghosts when everyone else was asleep in the quiet house, Carrie lit a candle and called Perpetua up on to the feed sacks stuifed with Henry’s last shearing, which was her quilt. Always having puppies was making Perpetua broader. Her back made a good prop for the notebook in which Carrie made her entries for Carrie’s Horse Book.
Remembering how Priscilla and Oliver had begun to communicate without words before the mother rushed up, she wrote:
A horse blows out to smell not by sniffing in.
If you let him blow into your hand, he will know you.
A horse talks with breath.
A horse brain weighs 1¼ lb. A human brain weighs 3 lb. If people have more brains, why don’t they try to understand what a horse says instead of expecting him to understand what they say?
’He understands every word I say. He’s almost human,’ they say.
He is not human. He is a horse.
But he is more intelligent because he understands Walk on, and Trot, and Canter, and Whoa, and knows his own name.
People don’t understand when he says, I’m frightened, and they don’t even want to know what name a horse calls them.
Carrie knew what John called her. He called her ’She’, using it as a name.
When the candle blew out in the draught and she lay with her book and pencil fallen to the floor and Perpetua a dead weight on her legs, the brown horse came to her window and called, ’She-ee-ee!’ in the soft high whinny no one else could hear.
She closed her eyes and together they galloped up to the Elysian Star where famous horses grazed, and horses who were waiting for their people to die and join them. A bow-legged Spanish gipsy was sitting on the gate watching a rickety old donkey weave its way through the grass to him, with hips like coat hangers and its ears sticking through holes in a straw hat.
Some of the thoroughbreds, who were pretty conceited, were calling to the gipsy, ’Get a horse!’ which was what carriage horses from the early days of motoring used to call out as they passed drivers whose cars had broken down.
One of the jokers was a very beautiful bay pony mare, nervous and quick. She went off like a rocket when the donkey suddenly let out a bray like a rusty opera singer being strangled on the high note.
It was the show pony that had reared backwards with Priscilla.
‘Don’t blame me,�
�� she said, flicking her delicate ears as the gipsy hung a necklace with bells on the donkey and led it through the gate. ’I was jittery as hell. They’d over-schooled and overfed me. Pep drugs too.’
‘You die of an overdose?’ John asked.
‘After the accident, they had me destroyed. Fair enough. The insurance money paid some of the doctors. I like it better up here anyway. No horse shows.’
The next day, Carrie met Victor Agnew in the ironmonger’s, where she had gone to try to barter ducks’ eggs for paraffin.
Victor was buying linseed oil for his hibernating cricket bat and dubbin for his football boots. His highly coloured health and loud clear voice filled the cluttered little shop which smelled of turpentine and firewood, and made the old ladies waiting for clothes pins and potato peelers look very small and grey.
When Carrie asked him if the show pony had been destroyed, he said, ’No fear. They sold it for more than they gave.’
So much for the Star.
Seven
Mother got the job as assistant cook at the school. She could usually get herself into any job by bluffing, though she couldn’t always hold it when they found out she didn’t know as much as she pretended.
When they asked her if she had had a lot of experience in cooking for large numbers, she said Yes, and went away and bought a book, Quantity Cooking for Institutions.
‘Quaintly Cooking of Instruments.’ Michael picked it up. ’School dinners will be weirder than ever.’
He left the book in the barn and Lucy the Nubian goat ate it, so Mother had to learn on the job.
Since there was no room for her to go to school in the trap behind John, she bought a spindly-looking bicycle called Spider Monkey, with spokes that got loose and gouged your ankles, and a little two-stroke motor that sounded like the first internal combustion engine ever built.
She bought it on credit from Mr Peasly’s son at the garage, so when Dad protested about the job, she was able to say she must stick to it until she had paid for the bicycle.
She had to be in the school kitchen early to get the vegetables peeled, so she went off with the others, putt-putting through the lanes alongside John’s steady clip-clip. They were quiet roads that took them to the school. As soon as they got through the village and past the policeman’s house, Mother would get into the trap and let Carrie or Em or Michael ride Spider Monkey.
World's End in Winter Page 3