World's End in Winter

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Indoor equitation school. Very posh.’ The cats sat in a row at the edge of the hayloft and stared down at the strange affair. ’Whoa there, lady.’ Alec had a special jokey voice for the lessons. ’Bit wobbly today, aren’t you? You seasick, Pris? You had a drop too much?’ Smiling at the safe, feeble jokes, riding a pony like any other child, Priscilla began to work at strengthening her muscles, without knowing that it was work.

  Fifteen

  One morning before Christmas, everyone in the house woke to a strange light. Something had happened outside. There was a pale no-colour in the window, a flat white glare that led you in a leap from bed to the frost-flowered glass.

  The world was full of snow.

  The dogs plunged out, rolling in it, biting it, flinging white spray over their shoulders, haring off to pattern the trackless expanse of the meadow. Perpetua’s last two puppies, Fanny and Jake, floundered behind, falling into drifts and coming up with white blobs for noses.

  The cats didn’t want to go out. In bad weather, they preferred the ashes in the fireplace. Last time Aunt Val and Uncle Rudolf, who actually owned this house, had come visiting after three days of rain, Aunt Val had said, when the fire was lit, ’What an extraordinary smell! Is it camphor wood?’ To show she had been to Japan.

  Em, who was tough with the cats because she understood them, pushed them all out and put a box against the flap in the back door so they couldn’t come in. They stalked high-footed, very affronted, shaking their paws at each step. Some of them stayed on the doorstep, complaining that Em was cruel. Some went under bushes. Five-toed Caesar went into a tunnel in the woodpile where he was monitoring a squirrel burrow. Julius sat staring on top of the snow’s crust, fluffed out, mortally offended at what had happened to his world overnight.

  Oliver could sometimes open his stable door, if Michael forgot the bottom bolt. He had chosen last night to open it. When Carrie came to the gate, he was lying in the yard like a cake, mounded white.

  ‘Why didn’t you shelter, silly mountain pony? If you could get out, you could get back in.’ She sat in the snow by his folded knees to play Which-hand-is-it with a lump of sugar. He was the only horse who would let you catch him lying down.

  When she turned the others out, they raced off like mad broncos, bucking and kicking and tearing up at each other. John lay down to roll in the snow and Peter charged him. Peter pawed delicately, turned round and round with his tail lashing, sagged at the knees and flopped to roll, and John charged him. Oliver rolled when they weren’t looking, and then all three charged off up the hill and stood at the top to stare into the dazzling view across the valley. Just as the donkey caught up, they turned and galloped down through flying white powder, skidded to a stop and began to paw away the snow to graze.

  Michael came out to hang up a Miss Etty-type bird feeder on the oak tree. Em threw a snowball at him. Carrie jumped from the henhouse roof into a big drift, and they were all rolling in the glorious icy wet warmth. Blood sang. Cheeks caught fire. They were drunk on snow.

  When Tom opened a window to call them for breakfast, Carrie threw a lump of snow straight into his face. He came out yelling, tripped over something buried, and fell with his long arms flung out, grabbing Carrie’s scarf and dragging her down to wrestle in the way he used to do when he was half his height and Carrie was a baby.

  He sat up suddenly, pushed Carrie away and shook snow from his wild hair like Charlie coming out of a pond.

  ‘What’s the matter, Tom?’

  ‘I wish Liza was here.’ He threw a lump of snow - splat! - at the goat shed door.

  ‘Play with me!’ Carrie pounced, but he pushed her off again and got up.

  ’I wish she was here too.’ Carrie stumbled behind him up the invisible path. ’She’d love this snow. Won’t she ever come back?’

  ‘I think she’ll stay away,’ he muttered.

  ‘Why? Has she done something?’

  ‘Of course not. Shut up, kid.’

  ‘Then why—?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ Tom was grown up again. The yelling, wrestling boy was gone.

  Breakfast was snow pancakes, Mother’s invention, using two tablespoons of snow instead of each egg. It melted quickly in bubbles. The pancakes were thin and lacy. You rolled them round a blob of jam and ate as many as you liked, since snow was free.

  Snow was delicious.

  Too delicious to waste by staying indoors.

  ‘Going to work, Jerry?’ Mother asked.

  ‘Work - with all that marvellous stuff outdoors? My dear woman, you must be mad.’

  Lester came over with a tin tray and they all went up the hill with dustbin lids and the ancient sled that had been hanging in the bam when they first came here. The lids couldn’t be steered, the tray spun round and spilled you off backwards. One runner came off the sled, and it tipped Carrie through the thin ice of the duckpond mud. She washed her face and hands with snow, and the sled settled quietly down on to the bottom ooze.

  Michael had warped tennis racquets tied on his feet for snowshoes. He limped into the powdery snow instead of on top of it, disappearing up to his hood in a drift by the hedge. Tom had tried to make skis out of slats of wood, but they didn’t work. Nothing worked.

  At Brookside, Priscilla would be indoors looking out, while Victor and Jane would be skimming over the countryside on their painted skis. Mr Agnew would skate on the swimming pool. Mrs Agnew would drag her long red-cushioned toboggan up the hill above the village and rally the squealing children into an organized team.

  But at World’s End, nothing worked. Until Mr Mismo puffed across the fields like a snow plough, dragging the big wooden sled he had had as a boy. It was a monster heavy thing, with wooden runners, and ropes to steer it. There was room for Carrie, Lester, Em and Michael to cling behind Mr Mismo, who steered at the front, because it was his sled. Down the bare top slope, zigzag between two trees, putting on speed on the steep straight, quick swerve round the mound where a Roman soldier was supposed to be burried, Mr Mismo with a yell straightening out just in time to run head on into the snow buffer by the fence.

  ‘Haven’t had so much fun for years.’

  His broad face was as red as one of his own fine tomatoes. His breath clouded the air. He shook Em and Carrie from on top of him and picked himself out of the snow and started up the hill again, pulling Michael on the sled.

  ‘Come back, you old fool - you’ll have a stroke!’ Mrs Mismo had come to fetch him in the car. He pretended not to hear.

  Later it grew grey and cold and the wind got up and blew blizzards off the trees. Tomorrow was Priscilla’s day to ride, so Carrie and Lester and Michael warmed up by shovelling a path from the stable to the barn, and cleared off the milk churn platform which they used as a mounting block. It had a sloping ramp at one end, up which they could push the wheelchair, and Oliver had learned to stand very still while Priscilla slid over into the saddle.

  Before they reached the barn, it was snowing again heavily, and blowing up for a big storm. The beginning of their path was already white again. After all the animals were fed and shut up, and Oliver bolted top and bottom, they went indoors.

  Their mother had lit fires in all the fireplaces and heated bricks in the oven to warm everybody’s bed. The storm rattled at windows, howled down chimneys and tore off some corner tiles with a clatter. It was going to be a rough night.

  When everybody had gone up, Tom let the dogs out into the whirling snow. They all came in quickly, except slow old Dusty. He was used to bad weather, having been with Liza when she was living rough, on the road.

  Was she on the road now? Her restless spirit could never settle long in one place. Calling to Dusty, Tom stared into the wild dark night, as if he might see Liza running down the vanished path with her long witch’s cloak and her red hair streaming.

  She would not come, of course. Because of the money. She had walked into World’s End and out of it into another chunk of her life.

  Upstairs, Tom
heard the staircase window blow open. He went up to fix it, stuffing back the newspaper which kept out draughts. In the corner room, light showed under Carrie’s door. She was sitting up in bed in three jerseys with her Horse Book propped against a dog. A puppy was keeping her feet warm.

  ‘Can I see?’

  She had been writing about Priscilla:

  ’If we who are free to run and jump find such great glory on a horse, what must it be for a prisoner in a chair?’

  ‘Better blow out the candle,’ Tom said, ’If you’re going to get up early and shovel out the barn again.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that barn,’ Carrie said. ’Pris would die if she couldn’t ride.’

  In his parents’ room, his father was lying with his beard outside the blankets, reading bits of Sailor of the Seven Seas aloud to Mother:

  I knew that something was amiss. When I raised the hatch, my horrified eyes were greeted by an appalling mess of oil and broken pipes...’

  Mother was asleep.

  So was Michael. Em was awake in her shelf bed, shuffling the piles of paper she had been working on for so long.

  ’Is that Esmeralda’s Book of Cats?’

  ’No.’

  ’What is it then?’ Tom thought she wanted him to ask.

  ’Not telling,’

  ‘Don’t then. Who cares?’

  ’Nobody.’

  ‘They’re all writing. Everybody in this house is writing a book,’ Tom complained.

  ’Except you.’

  ’I could if I wanted to.’

  ’Do it then.’

  ’All right, I will.’

  ‘See if I care.’ You could never get the last word with Em.

  In his room, Tom took the jacket paper off a book to write on the blank inside. Besides Esmeralda’s Book of Cats, there was Carrie’s Horse Book and Michael’s Book of Dog Lores. This would be Tom’s Zoo Zayings.

  Anecdotes from his job:

  ’The skunk put its tail through the wire and it got bitten off by the kinkajou next door.

  When we put broomsticks in the Squirrel Monkey cage for perches, they tore them out and beat each other over the head with them.

  People say a zoo is good teaching for children. But all it teaches them is that it’s OK to put animals in cages.’

  Tom fell asleep.

  In the middle of the night, he woke with a jump of his heart. He had never brought Dusty in!

  He went downstairs and put on a coat and boots over his pyjamas. The wind was still blowing hard, rocking the old farmhouse like a boat at sea. The back door opened the wrong way, like most of the doors in this house. Tom could hardly push it out against the storm. Charlie slipped out with him and the door banged shut behind them, cutting off the light.

  Calling and whistling uselessly into the wind, Tom struggled round the side of the house and climbed the gate into the yard, because the snow was too thick to push it open. Dusty might be sheltering under the grain shed, which was raised on big stones like toadstools. He had once gone in there when he was ill, and Liza had spent hours on her stomach trying to get him out.

  ’Seek, Charlie!’

  Tom kicked away the snow in the gap between the shed and the ground, but Charlie would not look for Dusty. He was rushing in drunken circles, barking into the wind, jumping up at Tom as if they had fought their way out here for fun. The snow did not penetrate his heavy coat, but Tom was soaked and frozen. His hands and feet were numb. His face was so stiff that he could not whistle.

  ‘Dusty!’ Perhaps his lips would drop off. ’Dusty!’ The cracked sound of his voice was thrown back at him with a faceful of snow.

  The old dog could not live in this storm. ’I killed him,’ Tom would have to tell Liza. If Liza ever came back.

  Hopelessly he searched through the smothered yard among the strange thick shapes of familiar things blotted out with snow.

  ‘Dustee-ee-ee!’ His voice howled into the night. Charlie sent up a crescendo of hysterical barks as one end of the barn roof crashed in under a load of snow, the old thatch and timbers splintering in, snow falling steadily, stealthily through the gaping hole.

  By morning, the sun was up and the sky a fierce bright blue over the sparkling white. Almost half the barn roof was gone. The edges of the lathing and beams hung inward as if they had followed the drop of a bomb.

  Mr Mismo said, ’Might as well pull that whole great old ruin down as waste money to fix it.’

  But Michael set his jaw. ’We’ll fix it.’

  Tom came down from the ladder where he had been looking at the damage.

  ‘Pretty hopeless, Mike.’

  ‘Don’t say that to him,’ Carrie raged.

  ‘Sorry. Poor Mike.’

  ‘Poor Bristler. She won’t be able to ride.’ Michael pulled his hood down over his eyes and plodded through the snow to tell Oliver.

  Harry, yellow son of Perpetua and Charlie, who was a throwback to some famous hunting dog, was tracking something over the snow, tail doing double time. They followed him as he whined, and pushed between a wheelbarrow and a roller in the cart shed. At the far end, behind some trunks and under part of a rusted plough, Dusty was lying like an empty sack. Clouded eyes, all his limp bones showing, too ill even to shiver, he was just alive. Only just.

  Sixteen

  The vet gave the old dog an injection, and he rallied a little, but was still very ill with pneumonia. He lay on Tom’s bed and could only move his tail feebly when anyone came in with warm milk or broth, or just a pat and a comforting word. Alec Harvey said his chances were about forty-sixty.

  ‘Sixty he lives?’ Carrie asked.

  Alec shook his head. The other way round, I’m afraid.’

  ’If he could just live till Christmas ...’

  ’Why that day?’

  ‘I think Liza might come back for Christmas.’

  ‘Forty-sixty chance?’Alec smiled.

  ‘Sixty she will.’

  Some people think that if you want a thing to happen, you have to keep saying it won’t. Carrie believed that you had to keep saying it would.

  The barn roof was going to cost an enormous amount of money to repair. A local man would do it, but only with a down payment in advance.

  ‘Don’t you trust us?’ Dad protested. ’We’ve got the money.’

  ’If so, it won’t hurt to pay a bit of it then, will it?’

  They did not like the man, or his style of reasoning, but he was the only builder who would tackle the old structure, and thatch it as well. Somehow, the money must be found.

  The soup can bird feeders were going fairly well, selling door-to-door, but soon they had exhausted all the local doors. It took time to range farther afield, and was even more discouraging to have doors slammed in your face after you had trekked down a long muddy lane to a lonely farm.

  Feed the birds? The farmer said to Em in disgust. ’I try to keep the wretched things away from my winter cabbages, not invite them.’

  He banged the door. Em made her prehistoric ape face at it and trudged back down the lane.

  Spider Monkey was in use again - Mother was using it to get to a holiday job at a hotel - but only half paid for. Every time Em went past Dick Peasly’s garage, he looked at her sadly through the window.of his repair shop, as if she was depriving his small children of their Christmas presents. Em had to make detours to get into the village another way.

  Christmas was going to be a problem anyway. There would be no money for presents this year. Because they needed the barn for Priscilla’s riding lessons, everything had to go into the red flour crock in the larder, labelled ’Raising the Roof.

  ‘Why the larder?’ Mr Mismo asked when he came to put in his contribution, a five pound note and an old War Bond Certificate dating from no one knew which war. ’Burglars always want food.’

  ‘Then they wouldn’t come here.’ Mother laughed, but she tied a string round the neck of the flour crock and hung it from the hook in the kitchen rafter, where hams and pheasa
nts and sides of bacon used to hang in the old days. The crock hung.over the heads of the family at the round table, reminding them of Priscilla.

  Once, tilting his chair back after a meal and blinking through the smoke of his pipe at the hanging crock, Dad said, ’Why don’t we touch the Agnews for a little cash? It’s their child, after all.’

  Everyone said, ’No!’ without even considering it.

  ‘They only let her come here,’ Em said, ’because it gets her out of their hair twice a week.’

  ‘I thought it was because I charmed the mother.’ Her father let down his chair. ’If not, why am I going to her blasted committee meetings?’

  ‘They don’t really want her to ride,’ Carrie said. ’They think it’s dangerous. They think it’s no use.’

  ’They think Bristler is a lost cause,’ Michael said.

  ‘If she can’t be perfect, like the others,’ Lester said, ’she’d better be shut away. Helpless.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter, young Figg,’ Dad said, but Mother said, ’Lester could be right. That’s why Priscilla wouldn’t make any effort with exercises, at the hospital.’

  ‘She knew Mrs Agony had given up.’ Michael was gouging deep into the initials P.A. that Priscilla had scratched on the round table last time she was here. ’Well, we haven’t. The penknife slipped on a knot and nicked his finger. He rubbed the blood into the A. ’Sweared in blood, Bristler. I won’t give up.’

  Lester and Carrie looked at each other, remembering the time when they had sworn in blood to save John from the slaughterhouse. They had banged the backs of their hands with a hairbrush, whirled their arms to make the blood start, and pressed the back of their hands together. Exchanging a message, as they were able to, without words, they both got up and went outside.