She told him which bus to take into the country, and where to get off. She knew by now that she need not offer to meet him at the bus stop.
She said, ‘You turn left, walk about half a mile down a lane through a wood like a tunnel, that drips on you - rain and caterpillars - and when you come out, it’s the first house on the left at the bend in the lane. There’s a gate. Follow the smell of horses, and I’ll be in the stable.’
The bus came.
‘Bring your holey socks too!’ Carrie shouted above the traffic and the bulldozer. ‘Em will darn them!’
Six
He brought six pairs of socks wrapped in a shirt that needed buttons. He came walking fast round the bend of the lane, with Wendy moving steadily ahead, not getting sidetracked by smells and movements in the hedge. She was the first dog to come down that lane, on or off a lead, without making a lunge and a yelping scrabble at the rabbit burrow under the corner oak.
Carrie saw them from the stableyard, where she was wheeling a loaded barrow out to the manure heap.
Mr Wilson stopped with his head up, like a dog getting the scent. Then he said something to Wendy, and she turned left across the lane. He spoke to her all the time. ‘Inside, Wendy,’ he was telling her. ‘Inside.’
She led him off the lane, looking back at him to see if she was right, and stopped by the gate.
‘Good girl.’ He felt his way along it until he found the latch, opened it, came through, and Wendy stopped as he turned back to shut it. Carrie called, and they came more slowly across the uneven ground of the yard, stepping neatly round the hollows where the chickens took dust baths, and the mounting block which Michael had made from the top of a broken stepladder, because his pony was too broad to jump on bareback.
Carrie brought out John, well groomed, so that he would feel clean and silky. Roger Wilson went all over him with his gentle musician’s hands, and laid his bearded face against John’s neck to breathe in the smell of him with great pleasure.
He kept talking to Wendy, so that she would not be jealous, and Carrie talked to Charlie, so that he wouldn’t mind a strange dog in his stable yard.
He had barked from the top of the wall as they approached, but Wendy paid no attention, because she was on duty. Charlie jumped down to inspect her harness carefully, then watched with interest while she and the man, who seemed to be part of each other, worked their way among the obstacles in the yard. Charlie had been a professional television star, famous for dog biscuit commercials; but here was a branch of business he didn’t know.
While Mr Wilson was stroking John, Wendy sat in front of the horse grinning, with the handle of her harness on her back, and her ears pricked as far as labrador ears will go. Dogs and horses don’t often talk together, except by unseen thoughts, but John dropped his nose, Wendy raised hers, and they exchanged some kind of message.
Charlie went back to the top of the wall with some of the cats to watch the lane for the travelling fish van, whose driver threw out a package of free cods’ heads on Saturdays without even slowing down.
When Carrie had shown Mr Wilson the other animals, she took him into the house. Henry the ram, who thought he was a dog, almost knocked him down shouldering past him through the door. Before he could get thrown out again, the ram lay down with a grunt in front of the stove, tucking his hard little hoofs under him.
Liza was kneading dough on a piece of cupboard door which Tom had cut up for a bread board.
‘Hullo, Rodge,’ she said, as if she had seen him yesterday.
‘Hullo, Li-Li—’ He stood smiling shyly by the door, and Wendy waited by his legs to see which way they would go across the floor, where Henry was a mound of grubby wool, and Carrie’s saddle sat over a stool, and the sofa was upside down, because someone had been looking for a mislaid kitten among the springs and torn stuffing. ‘I got the socks. Red, to go with your hair.’
‘My hair ain’t purple.’ Liza threw down the satiny ball of dough and came over, as he took the socks out of his pocket. ‘If they sold you those as red, you’ve been had, Rodge.’ She knelt to Wendy. ‘How’s the leg, girl? The scar looks good.’
‘It was a wonderful job,’ Roger Wilson said.
‘Well.’ Liza tucked back her thick red hair and left a strand of dough in it. ‘Look who done it.’
They had tea and Liza’s brandysnaps, rolled into cones round a carrot, and Rodge carved his initials on the big round table which was their visitors’ book, feeling along the letters with his fingers. They all called him Rodge, as if he was not a teacher.
After that, he came quite often to World’s End. He was not so shy when he was there, and he didn’t stammer. He still could not say ‘Liza’, so he gave it up and called her Girl.
When he had learned his way about the house and garden and the stables and barn, he did odd jobs. He dug the vegetable patch, and put in some cabbage seedlings. He mended a broken cane chair with glue and string. He cleaned horses and tack with Carrie. He swept floors with Em, and made scones. He helped Michael to build a triangular chicken coop, which somehow came out with four sides.
Wendy lay close to him, to be there when he needed her, and he talked to her a lot, because a Guide Dog must never be an independent dog on its own. The partnership must always stay close. But often, because she was a dog as well as a guide dog, Rodge let her go free with the others, running and tracking all over the hill field and the thicket, but coming back at once to his whistle.
He brought his guitar and taught Liza some chords.
‘You’ve got natural hands for it, girl,’ he told her.
‘Knock it off.’ Liza fiercely rejected praise. ‘I got natural hands for work, that’s all.’ She looked at them. The nails were only clean because the part that got dirty was bitten off. ‘Good thing you can’t see ’em, Rodge. These hands done everything but murder.’
Rodge did not much like his cramped flat in Newtown, where his landlady did not bother about him, except to call up the stairs, ‘Everything all right, Mr W.?’ just when he had gone to sleep.
She cooked for him occasionally, when she was at home, which was not often, because she was in Politics. Rodge seemed to exist mostly on hardboiled eggs and baked beans and frozen dinners. He read Braille, and listened to radio music and talking books on a tape recorder. He did not seem to have many friends. Because of Wendy, he said he wasn’t lonely, but they thought he was.
Sometimes he stayed the night at World’s End. He caught the afternoon bus home with them, and the early one to school next morning, walking so fast with Wendy that he could start out almost as late as whoever was riding the bicycle.
It was fun at school, calling him Mr Wilson with a straight face, hiding the secret of being his friend, because it wasn’t done to be too chummy with the teachers.
The school claimed Wendy as ‘their’ dog. She figured as mascot in all the class and team photographs, and everyone was saving milk bottle tops for the guide dog fund.
But at World’s End, she was just one of the dogs. She lay under the kitchen table with Charlie, his shaggy head hanging over a cross bar, her golden muzzle on Rodge’s sock, while he played the guitar and sang after supper. Rodge could not make music with his shoes on.
And upstairs in the room where a tree’s budding twigs tapped at the window, Rodge slept on the good mattress they had bought for Mother when her back was bad, and Wendy slept on John’s folded winter rug, which Carrie had made from oat sacks and an old khaki blanket from Mr Mismo’s army days.
Seven
One weekend, Jan Lynch, Tom’s boss at the zoo, took home the baby kinkajou, and Tom brought home a month-old black leopard, whose fickle mother had deserted her last cub, and couldn’t be trusted with this one.
He had finished work on the bungalow love nest, after painting the front door five times in different colours, and the chemist and his finicky bride got married. Tom was invited to the wedding, but he couldn’t go, because he had nothing to wear. He was on another job anyway, h
elping a man to build a garage.
Em had wanted to stand outside the church with the other village women who had not been invited, and say, ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ (or worse things) as the spliced couple came out. But Mrs Potter was one of the guests, and so Em had to go up to Orchards to look after her three children.
Liza was doing house calls with Alec Harvey. Michael was off with the Mismos, who had gone to a relation in the Isle of Wight, so that no one would know they had not been invited to the wedding.
Carrie’s friend Lester came over to help her with Irma, the leopard cub.
He arrived, as he often did, unexpectedly, and by a surprise route. Carrie was in her bedroom with Irma in a play pen lent by Mrs Potter (who was off babies for good, after little Jocelyn), asleep on a blanket over a hot water bottle. Charlie leaned his chin on the top rail and whined, and the cats were affronted, stalking about on shelves and the top of the cupboard.
Carrie was working on her Book of Horses. John had galloped at thirty-three miles an hour yesterday, timed by the laundry man, driving along the road by a big grass field. Carrie was writing a poem about it.
‘Thirty-three miles an hour!
O the speed, and O the power.
John’s flying hoofs are drum beats on the turf.
His neck and shoulders surge and plunge like surf.
Away! Away! The wind roars in my ears.
Is it the wind - or joy that brings the tears?’
Crash! Thump! The trapdoor to the attic banged down, and Lester landed lightly as a cat in the passage outside Carrie’s door.
‘How did you get in?’ Carrie had learned not to be scared by his sudden appearances.
‘Through the skylight. Guess what I found in the attic’
Carrie thought she and Em and Michael had explored all the abondoned relics of the family who once lived here, but Lester could always find something different.
He held out his closed fist. ‘I was crawling under that low beam. It was between the floor boards.’
He opened his hand and showed her a chain with a silver locket in the shape of a heart.
‘It doesn’t open.’
Carrie tried, but there was no catch, or else the locket was stuck tight with age. It was blackened and tarnished, but you could make out the engraved letters, and a date: C.F. 1808.
‘My own initials.’ Carrie looked at Lester. ‘I wonder who—?’
‘You have been here before.’ Lester put the chain over her head, and she tucked the silver heart inside her shirt. It was cold on her skin.
‘Do you think that was why - when I first saw this house …’ When Carrie first saw World’s End, the house and the dusty great barn and the cobwebbed stable, redolent of horse, had called to her like an old friend.
‘How’s Irma?’ Lester dropped the subject abruptly, as he often did when you got close to mysterious truths.
The black cub, faintly spotted with her future markings, was yawning and stretching in the play pen. She lay on her back with her paws in the air, opened her kitten mouth in a mewing cry, then rolled over and nuzzled into the blanket searching.
‘You want your Mum.’ Carrie bent over and lifted her out. ‘But you’ll have to make do with me.’ She washed the cub over with a piece of damp towel, to imitate her faithless mother’s tongue. ‘Abandoned,’ she said, ‘like that baby the vicar found in a shopping bag in the church porch. I’d never do that to you, Irma.’
‘You might if you were a wild animal in captivity.’ Lester got inside the play pen and squatted there, rattling the bars like a caged gorilla. ‘If you couldn’t find a proper den, and hunt for bedding and stuff in your own natural way, you wouldn’t be ready to be a mother.’
‘I never shall be,’ Carrie said. Em was going to have ten babies. Carrie was going to stay with animals.
‘Want to know something?’ Lester licked the paint of Mrs Potter’s play pen to see if he would get lead poisoning. ‘There’s a circus over at Wareham.’
‘Are you going?’
‘I don’t want to. But I want to. The animals - it’s like when people were in the stocks, or executed on Tower Hill. Most of the crowd were there to jeer, but a few were there for sympathy.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Carrie said. ‘Oh - but I can’t leave Irma. I wonder—’
A dog barked somewhere, quite far off. Perpetua, asleep on Carrie’s bed, lifted her head and raised her tattered ears. Charlie ran out of the room with the silly womanish yelp he used when he was excited, and his nails skittered down the uncarpeted stairs.
The dog barked again, a deep, two-syllable bark, basso-profundo, Rodge called it. Wendy hardly ever barked, but he had taught her to speak a kind of Thank You when he was out with her helping the guide dog fund.
‘Wendy.’
Lester got out of the play pen. Carrie put Irma back into it and followed him downstairs.
Out in the lane, they saw nothing. Charlie had disapppared. They called, and Rodge’s voice answered, faint and muffled.
‘He’s in the wood.’
They ran round the corner. The lane was empty under the tunnel of greening branches.
‘Where are you?’
‘If I knew,’ his voice was nearer, ‘I wouldn’t be here. Wendy won’t move. I - ouch!’
They plunged into the wood, and searched through the undergrowth in the direction of his voice. Ducking under a fallen tree, they found him sitting on the ground with his jacket torn, holding his head. He was hemmed in by bracken and bramble bushes. In front of him, Charlie and Wendy sat by the fallen tree into which he had just crashed.
‘Now I know why she couldn’t go a - go a - ‘ he felt for the top of his head to see if it was still there. ‘Ahead.’
‘Taking a short cut?’ Lester asked.
‘No fear. Blind men don’t go into woods. I was on the side of the road, and a car came by too fast, too near.’
‘Drunken revellers from the chemist’s wedding,’ Lester said.
‘I jum-jumped away.’ Rodge’s nervous mouth twitched. His hands were shaking. ‘I fell in the ditch and lost hold of Wendy. I got up and she came to me, but I must have gone the wrong way. I was - I was in the trees. We got stuck in the brambles, and then Wendy wouldn’t move. “Speak,” I told her. So she spo-spo-spoke.’
At home, Carrie bathed the lumpy bruise with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, and Lester made hot sweet tea in case of shock. Rodge was still a bit shaky, so Lester sloshed into the tea a swig of the brandy Mr Mismo had given them for emergencies, like birthdays, or dying goldfish.
‘Better.’ Rodge put down the cup, and patted his beard with a hand that was steadier. ‘You two go and ride, or something. Wendy and I will take care of Irma. I’ve got a lot of work to do.’ Rodge had to work much harder than the other teachers, because his fingers had to learn the music and songs in Braille before he could teach them.
‘Are you sure you’re all right, Rodge?’ Carrie worried. He looked frail, sitting there with the darkening bruise over one eye, and the strong, quiet dog at his feet.
‘Go away and don’t ba-ba-baby me,’ he said, quite irritably, so they went.
Eight
Tightening her girth in the stable, Carrie stopped, and John took the opportunity to blow himself out with air again.
‘I haven’t got any money,’ she called to Lester, who was already on Peter in the yard, riding bareback with a halter, the way he liked to ride, the way Peter liked to be ridden, but only by Lester.
‘I know how we can get in free,’ he said.
Lester’s mother pretended to pull her hair out in despairing grey handfuls, because he added on his fingers, and got bad marks at school, but he knew all the things in life worth knowing.
He knew all the people worth knowing too. He knew a man in Wareham, who had a boatyard by the river near the field where the circus had pitched its tents and caravans. The man moved out a punt and two skiffs, and let them tie John and Peter at one end of the long shed where his bo
ats had been stored for the winter.
It was almost time for the circus to start. A straggle of people were buying tickets from a woman in a booth. Lester and Carrie bent double to creep under her window, and stood by the opening of the tent to see if there was a chance to slip in.
Inside, the tiers of seats were only half full. Children shouted and fidgeted, and clattered up and down the wooden tiers and got slapped at. An elderly clown, big round tears painted on his white cheeks and a huge crimson mouth turned down to his chin at the corners, hopped round the barrier of the ring in a ludicrous dance. No one looked at him. Boys with pimples and dirty white caps carried round trays of popcorn and candy floss, chanting mournfully, ‘Get your popcorn ee-yer!’
The band was playing clash, tootle and oompah, but in spite of the music and the glaring lights and the rainbow swags of the tent roof, it was a fairly depressing scene.
The man who was taking the tickets had a villainous scar down one side of his face, and a heavy sharp ring that looked like a weapon.
When two teachers shepherded a bunch of labelled children into the tent, Lester and Carrie joined the end of the line. The man grabbed one of them in each hand, and spun them out again.
‘I been watching you,’ he said.
Lester did not bother to pretend that he was with the schoolchildren. He respected a man who couldn’t be fooled. The man respected Lester for trying. They winked at each other, and Lester took Carrie round to the back of the tent, where the performers were gathering for the opening parade.
A coach drawn by six Shetland ponies, with a stonefaced Cinderella inside smoking and reading a magazine. Three elephants, shifting their massive feet, brushing the ground with their trunks. Spangled acrobats with splits in the seams of their tights. Plumed Liberty horses. A man in white tie and tails with an armfull of small, excited dogs. A young man and a girl standing on a grey percheron rosinback. Behind them, a woman with frizzed hair and gold teeth, sitting sideways on another broad grey. At the back of the procession, half a dozen clowns were getting themselves underneath a dragon outfit made of cardboard and canvas.
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