World's End in Winter

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Even his wife had deserted him. Jealous of the dogs, so the story goes. But there was one thing old Diller wanted in life, and that was a child. A child who would remember him, and look after his dogs when he was gone.

  ‘There was a woman had a baby and she didn’t want it, which is one of the worst things that can happen to a baby, so don’t try it next time you’re born. She used to keep it in the wash house because she couldn’t stand it crying, and one night, daft Diller stole it away, all bundled up and probably crying to raise the dead, but the mother snored on with her nightcap over her ears.

  ‘Diller put it into the cart with him, gave his team the order and away they went. They were coming across the fields there, back of where Brookside is now, heading for the only bridge there was in those days, to cross the stream. There must have been a rabbit ran into the spinney, because those big dogs went after it, dashing old Diller and his wagon and his baby in among the trees.’

  Miss Etty paused, heaving and wheezing.

  ‘Go on.’

  But she could only flap a pudgy hand at Michael, trying to get her breath. Em went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of vinegar which she held under Miss Etty’s nose, and she sniffed it mightily.

  ‘Thank you.’ Her chest stopped heaving. Her wobbling cheeks and chins grew still. Her eyes cleared. Theo, who had been roving restlessly in her hair during the commotion, settled down again.

  ‘It was the crying of the baby that led them to find him. Daft Diller was dead, his skull bashed against a tree. One of his dogs was dead too, choked itself trying to struggle free of the harness. The other two had bitten through the leather straps and gone. The baby was lying bundled up among the splinters of the wagon.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘No one knew. The only thing they did know was that sometimes after that, people going by the spinney would hear a wailing. They began to cut down the trees to try and put a stop to it. But one of the woodmen heard the barking of dogs. Dogs that weren’t there. And the other - the other, when he struck his axe into a young tree, it sobbed like an infant. They ran, both of them.’

  ‘So would I.’

  ‘It wasn’t till many years afterwards when the land was sold and that house Brookside was to be built, that the trees were cut down by machinery saws, too loud to hear the baby or the dogs.’

  ’We heard them’

  ‘I told you.’ Miss Etty nodded at Lester. ’I told you, didn’t I? You can change the scenery all you want, build a house, tear down a monastery, to the dead it stays the same. There’s a house in Rutland where they raised the floor to put in heating pipes, and the ghost of the grey lady walks through on her knees, because she’s walking where the old floor was.’

  ‘When we were in the turret room ...’ Carrie remembered how Lester had listened to the wind. ’But we thought it was dogs barking.’

  ’We thought it was Bristler crying,’ Michael said.

  ‘There’s some people hear ghosts,’ Miss Etty said, ’and some that don’t.’

  Nine

  There was no question where they should go on Saturday.

  It was an unexpectedly warm day - hooray for Mr Agnew and his Old Boys’ rugger - so they would ride over to Brookside, and take halters to tie up the horses.

  ‘Why don’t you go in the trap so I can come?’ Em asked.

  ‘Why don’t you ride Leonora?’

  ‘She goes in circles, Carrie, you know she does.’

  ‘Only because you don’t know how to ride donkeys. Why don’t you learn to ride properly?’

  ‘Why should I? Lester doesn’t.’

  ‘Lester rides by instinct.’ Carrie had given up trying to teach him the correct way. And if you rode Peter in a saddle and bridle, collected, using the aids of hands and legs, his old bad experiences came back to him and he went berserk.

  ‘Ride Old Red then,’ Carrie suggested.

  Old Red was the clanking conglomeration of crimson-painted iron on which Liza rode to catch the bus every morning. It was so old, it still had a net skirt-guard on the back wheel from the days when ladies wore long skirts. Now that they did again, Liza rode the bicycle in her long hooded maxi-coat over her blue jeans, pedalling into the misted morning beechwoods like a witch.

  ‘Liza’s gone off on the bike,’ Em said. ’She’s got a boyfriend.’

  ‘She hasn’t.’ Liza was so rude to boys, she never had a boyfriend. She had promised to marry Michael.

  ‘When I asked her where she was going, she yelled at me to mind my own business,’ Em said. ’So it must be a boy. I don’t want to come anyway,’ she added, since Carrie and Lester didn’t want her. They only took Michael because he was part of the riding thing.

  She sat by the stove and unravelled a scarf to make knitting wool. When her father, coming in for coffee with a pencil stuck through his beard, asked, ’Why didn’t you go out with the others on this good day?’ she said, ’I didn’t want to.’

  Priscilla was in the garden in her chair on the summerhouse step, staring listlessly at the cold blue wàter of the swimming pool.

  Her keeper, a middle-aged woman in the hat and dark blue uniform of a District Nurse, sat on a bench nearby, reading a book with gloves on.

  Carrie, Lester and Michael came through the back gate.

  ‘Who are you?’ The nurse looked up, narrowing her eyes shortsightedly over a thin red nose and chapped lips.

  ‘We’re friends of the family.’ Boldness was best.

  ‘We heard they were away,’ Michael said, ’so we came to keep Bristler company.’

  ‘Priscilla?’ The nurse frowned and glanced towards the child in the wheelchair.

  ‘I’ll push her round the garden a bit. Give her a change of scene.’

  Michael started towards Priscilla, but the nurse reached forward and grabbed him. ’No one is to bother her. I’ve had strict orders.’

  ‘She’s lonely.’ Michael sat on the bench and swung his feet.

  ‘I daresay she is, poor little soul, but that’s what her mother wants, and I’m paid to follow orders, not think for myself.’

  She must be very limited as a nurse. What would she do alone with a life-or-death patient, and no one there to do the thinking?

  Lester sat down on the other side of her. ’Why don’t you go in out of the cold? We’ll watch Priscilla.’ ’I’m to stay with her.’

  ‘Let’s take her into the house then. I’ll wheel her.’ Lester was dying to get back into the turret room.

  ‘She’s to stay outside for exactly two hours.’ The nurse pushed back her glove to look at her watch. ’Another forty minutes.’

  Michael tried again. ’She’s tired of looking at all that ugly cold water.’

  ‘A swimming pool is nice,’ the nurse said vaguely.

  ‘If you can swim in it. Drusilla can’t. I can’t either. I nearly drowned once,’ Michael began chattily, but the nurse was picking chapped skin off her lips, not interested.

  It was Carrie’s turn to try. ’Coming through the village,’ she said, T heard people saying there was a woman going to have a baby. We could stay with Priscilla if you want to go and check.’

  ‘Nurse Duggan will be sent for. I’m retired now, you see.’ The sun travelled cheerfully out of a cloud and when she looked up at it, they saw that her cold dry skin was cracked into elderly lines. ’I still wear the uniform though. It makes me feel more workmanlike.’

  ‘Doesn’t it make Priscilla feel like a patient?’ Lester asked.

  ‘Well, she is a patient, isn’t she?’ The nurse had shut the book, quite glad of a chance to talk instead of read.

  ’But perhaps she just feels like an ordinary child.’

  ’How can she?’ She turned her head to Michael. ’She’s handicapped.’

  The nurse spoke quite loudly, and when Carrie, Lester and Michael looked to see if Priscilla had heard, she said, ’Oh, don’t worry. She’s quite retarded too, I think.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’
>
  She looked at Michael and tapped her forehead. ’Why?’Lester asked.

  ‘She hardly speaks.’ The nurse had to keep swivelling from Michael to Lester and back again. ’Or takes notice of you. Then the infantile way she cries. I heard her last night, but when I went to her room, there was nothing wrong.’

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t her crying,’ Lester said softly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ The nurse looked behind her, as if her spine had just crept away. ’There’s no one else in the house.’

  ‘Except the ghost.’

  ‘Ghost, what ghost?’ She fidgeted. ’Don’t be ridiculous, there’s no such thing as ghosts.’ She suddenly let out a small shriek, as if she had seen one. ’Get away from there, you brute!’

  Charlie had finished blazing the trail of a lifted leg all over the Agnews’ garden, and wandered over to investigate Priscilla. He was usually shy of new people, but he put his rough head on the rug that covered her knees. Slowly and jerkily, she brought a hand out from under the rug and buried it in his long hair. He sat down and leaned against the chair.

  ‘You see,’ Carrie said. ’It’s all right.’

  ‘The Agnews don’t like animals.’

  ‘Oh well, Charlie doesn’t mind.’

  Lester began to tell the nurse the story of old Diller: ’Daft Diller they called him, and he stole this woman’s baby.’ But she opened her book again and said, ’Don’t bother me.’

  ‘The baby has been heard,’ Lester said. ’And the barking of the dogs too.’

  As if he heard them, Charlie stood up and lifted his tufted ears square to his head. His tail was curled on to his back in the mongrel giveaway that would have sent his golden retriever father into sixty fits.

  ‘What do you hear? Seek!’ Carrie hissed at him. He would chase off anywhere if you excited him, even if there was nothing there. He ran a few yards, bounced stiffly on the spot, looked back at Carrie.

  ‘Seek!’

  He barked sharply and ran off round the side of the house.

  Priscilla watched him go without surprise or regret, as if she was used to being left behind.

  ‘What did he hear?’ the nurse asked uneasily.

  ‘Diller’s dogs,’ Lester said.

  ‘Do you really believe that story?’

  ‘Everybody does.’

  ‘I’ve not been long in these parts. I didn’t know. Last night... Oh, my God, I wonder. I wonder if I heard...’ She shut the book and got up. ’If it wasn’t for that poor helpless child, I’d not stay another night under this roof. As it is, I’m going to phone my sister and get her over to stay the night with me. Mrs Agnew’s veal and ham pie will do for the two of us. She left me enough for an army.’

  She went along the path and up the step to the summer-house, where she bent over Priscilla and talked loudly.

  ‘You stay there’ (as if she could do anything else) ’and I’ll be back in a jiffy.’

  She went into the house and was out again quite soon. ’The phone’s out of order,’ she called from the terrace. ’Oh dear. Now I know I can’t stay alone. Watch Priscilla a minute, there’s good children, while I run down the road to the call box outside the Lord Nelson. Oh dear.’

  Carrie went with her to the front of the house, because they were going to take Priscilla to the horses as soon as she was safely out of the gate.

  When she was on the drive, there was an unearthly noise of Charlie being chased by two or three dogs on the other side of the hedge. He was barking shrilly. They were baying after him in a pack.

  ‘The dogs!’ With a yelp of fear, the nurse jammed on her hat with one hand and scuttled out into the road, where she was hit by a car coming round the corner.

  Ten

  Carrie saw it and heard it. She shouted for Lester, and ran out to the road.

  The nurse was lying in front of the car. Carrie didn’t want to look. She had never seen a dead body.

  The driver was out of the car and kneeling beside the nurse. She rolled over and said, ’Oh, my God,’ so Carrie went closer and looked.

  Her chill red face was redder still with grazes oozing blood. Her hat was off and her grey hair was lying about in wisps and strands. She lay on her back, staring at Carrie and the driver with one eye open and one swollen shut, murmuring, ’Oh, my God, my God, my God.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ The driver was a youngish man, with a dark suit and a row of pens in his breast pocket. ’Are you all right?’ He bent his head and shouted, as if the accident had knocked the nurse silly, as perhaps it had.

  ‘All right. Help me up.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to touch an injured person.’ Carrie had been in the Guides for a term before they threw her out for having the wrong spirit. But he took hold of the nurse’s arm and pulled her up to sit against the bumper of the car, rolling her eyes.

  ‘What happened?’ Lester ran out of the white gate and across the stream. He had grabbed a towel on the way, and he squatted and began to dab carefully at the nurse’s poor grazed face.

  The driver stood up. ‘Fool woman.’ Now that he saw she was all right, he was beginning to be quite cross which was not fair, since it was partly his fault for going too fast round a blind corner. ’She ran right out. Right in front of me.’

  ‘She was frightened,’ Lester said.

  ‘What of?’ the driver asked the nurse, but she shook her head. She could not remember. She closed her eyes and began to pass out, so Lester and Carrie and the driver got her up and into the front seat of the car.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘I’d better take her to the hospital,’ the driver said.

  ‘To the hospital...’ The nurse seemed to have forgotten about Priscilla.

  ‘We’ll send flowers.’

  ‘You do that.’ The driver got into the car and took the nurse away.

  Lester and Carrie ran back to the house. If they had not run, if they had walked up the drive discussing whether it was their fault, Priscilla would have drowned, and perhaps Michael too.

  As they came through the hall into the drawing-room, they heard him scream. The summerhouse step was empty. For a moment as they dashed out, they could not see Priscilla, and then they saw that she and Michael were in the swimming pool.

  Priscilla was thrashing weakly with her arms, her white face appearing and disappearing in the churning water. Michael was going under, and coming up to scream and choke, and going under again in terror.

  Lester seemed to jump right from the terrace into the pool. Carrie fell off the terrace, tumbled across the grass and dropped by the edge of the water, clutching for Michael’s clothes. The back of his jacket floated up on an air bubble. She grabbed it and pulled. He was heavily waterlogged. Somehow she managed to drag him to the side and get his hands on the rail. Frozen, they slipped off. She grabbed his wrists and hung on. His face was a bluish white. He stared at Carrie with eyes that had seen death.

  Wriggling backwards, she managed to haul him up over the side, and he fell on to the grass, coughing and heaving up gallons of water.

  Lester was still in the pool. He had one arm round Priscilla, and with the other hand was clinging to the wheelchair, which was bobbing upside down on the water.

  ‘Help me!’

  Under the diving board was a long pole with a net used for skimming leaves. Carrie thrust it out. Lester let go of the chair and grabbed it, and she was able to pull him to the side.

  They got Priscilla out. Her long hair was streaked round her small peaked face. She was shaken with shivering and the chattering of her teeth, the skin shrunk away from her jaw like a skull.

  ‘Your jacket.’ Lester was shivering too, and gasping. He could hardly speak. He put Carrie’s jacket round Priscilla and sat on the ground and hugged her, trying to get her warm. ’Get blankets.’

  Michael was staggering on his feet now, still coughing, his hair and clothes soaked and clinging.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Carrie called to him
. ’Run, jump.’

  Michael tried to jump up and down in his squelching boots. He fell and began to cry. But Charlie had come back through the hedge. As Carrie ran into the house, she saw him leap at Michael and the little boy flung his arms round his thick coat and buried his head in the warm tangled hair and clung there, sobbing and shaking.

  Carrie tore blankets off the beds in the first room upstairs, and wrapped them round Michael and Priscilla. Wearing his blanket like a Bedouin, Lester picked up the cocoon of Priscilla and carried her to the house. Carrie picked up Michael, but he was too heavy. He struggled and she put him down. He brought up a bit more water, then went with her into the house, trailing Mrs Agnew’s pink blanket.

  Carrie had to cut his red rubber boots off his wet feet. ’My boots!’ Liza had bought them for him at the Jumble Sale.

  Carrie hacked them off with a bread knife, and more water fell out of them on the kitchen floor.

  Priscilla had not cried or made a sound the whole time. Lester had managed to pull off her fur boots, and she sat on the padded kitchen bench wrapped like a squaw, her wasted legs stuck out in front of her and her pale face solemn.

  Tented in his blanket, Lester crouched in front of her and rubbed the narrow feet, which looked like pieces of white wood. Carrie rubbed Michael’s feet fiercely with a towel, until colour began to come back into them.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m all right, Carrie,’ he said hoarsely.

  He got down from the chair and went to stand in front of Priscilla. The child looked at him, really looked for the first time. He grinned. She smiled.

  ‘How did she fall into the pool?’ Lester asked.

  ‘The chair started rolling.’

  ‘Did you move her off the step?’

  Michael paused, then he gave a water hiccup. ’Yes. It got away from me.’

  The kitchen was a comfortable warm room. Carrie opened tins of soup, and while it was heating, she went upstairs and found some things in Victor’s room that Lester and Michael could wear, and dry clothes for Priscilla.

  Victor’s room had pictures of sports teams and bold prints of racing cars on the curtains and counterpane. On one wall hung an oar and a ski and an ice hockey stick and a squash racquet, all labelled with dates of famous victories.