Spring Comes to World's End

by Monica Dickens

  She trod on his toe, and he cursed her - ‘Watch where you’re going!’ and slouched off down the hill.

  It was not until she got home to World’s End that Carrie’s mind began to work properly again. Rudolf had said nothing about the letter, and she could not ask him. He had read it at breakfast with an unchanging face, put it in his pocket, and gone off to the factory without a word.

  Would he understand? Would he consider waiting? Would he even answer the letter? What would he make of that unfamiliar ‘Please?’ Dad never begged anyone, least of all his brother. ‘Please, Rudy?’ He never called him by the nickname of their childhood.

  ‘Don’t tell the kids.’

  And Carrie couldn’t either. They were still so optimistic, collecting money wherever they could for the red crock, still counting on Dad and Mother’s rich return before the end of summer, refusing to believe that it might be too late.

  How could Carrie tell them, ‘It is already too late’?

  ‘I’ll do that, somehow.’

  Somehow, Dad would find some way to tell his family. Meanwhile, Carrie had this terrible burden. The burden of knowledge, which can be worse than a burden of guilt. Knowledge of disaster, which she could not share with anyone.

  Not with Tom; working long hours, travelling long miles, sleeping in the horse box when they visited distant schools. Tom who had said, last time he came home, weary and bleary, to hand over a pay cheque, ‘Dad and Mother have never let the family down, and we won’t either.’

  Not with Liza, who was washing glasses at the pub in Newtown on Saturday nights, to add to her wages from Alec Harvey and the transport café.

  Not with Em, who had put all Paul’s television money into the red crock, although she was desperate to buy a dress. The school had given them uniforms, but that was all she had, except for Liza’s cut down skirt and jeans, and shorts outgrown by Carrie.

  Not with Michael, hatching out chickens who might never lay for him, and setting out vegetable plants that he might never harvest.

  Not even with Rodge, who was adding to his church organ money by playing the piano on Saturday nights for Old Tyme Syngynge (his worst musical hate) in the pub where Liza washed glasses.

  Rodge, like Liza and all the animals, had found a home here. Carrie could not tell him. He was too happy here. Everyone was happy here. Everyone except Carrie, with her lonely burden of dreadful knowledge.

  She told it to Lester. She told him everything. It was like telling it to herself.

  Twenty-Six

  How could they lose all this?

  With bitter irony, this spring, which might be the last spring, was the best ever at World’s End.

  The lower curve of the hill pasture was golden with buttercups. Higher up, white flowers starred the turf where the horses grazed in their thinner, shinier summery coats. There was blossom everywhere. Great waves of it hit your nose as you rounded the corner of the hawthorn hedge. The apple trees foamed. Under the cherry tree, you stood on thickly fallen petals and looked through a cloud of soapy pink fragrance into a sky that was blue day after day.

  Grass, flowers, weeds, green sprouting hedges, baby animals - everything grew so eagerly that you could almost see it happen.

  Michael measured one of Rubella’s chicks, and sat for several hours to watch it growing, as he watched Liza’s bread dough rising in the bowl at the back of the stove.

  When all the chicks and ducklings were hatched, and two saucy kids born to the Nubian goat Lucy, Michael wrote a sign and hung it on the horseshoe knocker on the back door:

  THEIR ARE NOUGH 199 LEGGS IN THIS ETABLEMENT.

  The days were so warm now that Roy let down his creaky joints to lie flat out to the sun in the field by the barn. Mrs Potter saw him from the road, and stopped her car to run into the yard calling out that the poor old horse had kicked the bucket at last.

  Michael made another sign and hung it on the gate between the field and the road:

  THIS HOURSE IS NOT DED BUT SLEPETH.

  How could they lose all this?

  Every time Carrie went riding over this green and friendly countryside, the thought came, ‘It could be the last time.’

  Wherever they went, she would have John, even if she had to smuggle him into a back yard in some awful slummy town. But she would not have the curving grass track where she cantered with Lester round the shoulder of the hill. The plunge into the cool wet woods, trotting on fallen leaves. The scramble over the crumbling wall to gallop across the wide stretch where the old airfield had been - clacketty over the broken concrete runways, muffled drums on the grass - as John raced Peter for the far corner.

  Over the common, hopping little gorse bushes. John shying, as a rabbit popped out just at the lip of the steep quarry. Carrie’s heart in her mouth at the thought of swerving right over the edge where they said the Headless Horseman still took his neck-breaking plunge when the moon was right.

  I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood…

  Carrie and Lester always chanted the poem as they passed this treacherous place.

  …the red-ribbed hedges drip with a silent horror of blood, And echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’.

  They slid down a chalk bank at the end of the common, and on to the road, to walk along by the side of the traffic among the mucky things people had chucked out of cars. Children stared at the horses out of the back windows, pale with envy.

  Soon they turned away across the ditch and into the flat wheatfield where the farmer had left a wide strip under the hedge when he ploughed.

  They cantered fast, not racing. John’s plain mealy nose level with Peter’s delicate chestnut head, the back of his long ears and his dark blowing mane the only view Carrie ever wanted to see for ever.

  They cantered easily, not talking, not thinking, into the spring wind, and reached the end of the stubble strip almost without knowing it, as the horses slowed. It was like … Carrie looked at Lester, bareback on Peter, his dark hair tumbled over his shining eyes. It was like …

  Sometimes they knew that they flew downstairs without touching the steps. They had never talked of it. If they talked about it, it would not happen. So they did not talk about this - that the canter had been like flying.

  At home, Lester swung off while Peter was still walking, and he went on into his stable, long chestnut tail swinging like a bell. Carrie dropped her reins, and John stopped.

  Beyond the wall, Tom, with a rare day off, was hammering an extra bedroom on to the goat shed, so that the ram could have some peace away from the knobby, butting foreheads of Lucy’s kids.

  Em and Liza were at the laundry line between the trees, hanging out tatter-washed curtains, and banging dusty mats with old tennis rackets buckled into the shapes of spoons.

  The healing sun had warmed away Roy’s lameness. In the yard, Michael had leaned the apple ladder against his wide ribs, to scale the heights of his back. When he was on, with his short legs sticking forward over the horse’s shoulders because they couldn’t get round his sides, he took Roy by the highest part of the wall, where Rodge was sitting. Rodge put out a foot to feel where the horse was, slid a leg over behind Michael, hung on to his waist and they ambled away, swaying to Roy’s rolling plod.

  The old horse opened the gate with a push of his nose and a shove of his broad grey chest. As they turned down the lane towards the village, with Wendy following close like a dog born to horses, they began to sing ‘King of the Road’:

  ‘Trai-ler for sale or rent,

  Rooms - to let, fifty cents …’

  Michael shrill, Rodge’s voice sweet and true.

  ‘I’m a man of means, by no means-

  King of the road.’

  John turned his head and nudged Carrie’s toe to ask if she was going to get off, or sit there all day.

  How could they lose all this?

  Twenty-Seven

  Carrie did not have to keep her lonely secret for long. Not long enough.

 
When Rudolf came down to see the developer who wanted the land, he told the others what Dad had written.

  He told Carrie too, and she had to look shocked, as if she did not know what was in her father’s letter.

  Rudolf told it very brutally, in the middle of Michael telling him how much money they had collected: ‘And with what Dad brings home, Uncle Rhubarb—’

  ‘Don’t call me that. And your Dad will bring home nothing. Nothing do you hear that, boy?’

  He told them about the letter. Carrie wished that she had done it herself days ago, so that she would not have to see their faces now, with Rudolf and Val looking on.

  No one spoke. After a while, Michael asked from the floor, where he sat with his arm round Gilbert’s shoulders, the hound’s head higher than his, ‘If we can’t stay here, where would we go, Uncle Rhubarb?’

  ‘You managed before, didn’t you? You’ll manage again. Live on a boat with that feckless father of yours. Camp out. Put up tents. Just your style of living.’

  ‘But the animals.’ Michael spoke for them all.

  ‘Look.’ Uncle Rudolf checked his watch. He had an appointment. ‘I didn’t ask you to have all these animals here. In fact, I asked you not to, if you remember.’

  He put on his hat and went out. He never went out without his hat, even in the car.

  They hated him.

  Carrie ran outside so that she should not see the others, and so that they should not see her crying. She ran up the hill. It was raining.

  ‘When I crept over the hill, broken with tears,

  When I crouched down on the grass, dumb in despair…’

  John was up there under the lone elm tree. She fell against him and cried into his wet mane. She wanted to stay up here for ever, not have to talk to anyone, ever again. ‘Dumb in despair’, like the girl in the poem. But she had to go back to the others.

  ‘As I went down the hill, I cried and I cried,

  The soft little hands of the rain stroking my cheek,

  The kind little feet of the rain ran by my side.’

  And Lester. He came through the hedge from the wood, and ran by her side, as he always did when she needed him.

  When the land was sold and World’s End pulled down, Uncle Rudolf was thinking of retiring from business and building a posh modern house with an all-electric kitchen and burglar alarms, to protect him from whoever it was who threatened him in London.

  He went to talk to a builder, while Valentina stayed at the house to do what she called her ‘grand tour of inspection’, as if she were the Queen Mother visiting a hospital.

  Liza had the day off, but she went to work at the zoo with Tom, to get out of the house. The others sat about without spirit, while Val racketted through the bedrooms, slamming cupboard doors and fighting squeaky drawers, opening windows to shake out mats, throwing clothes off beds into a huge pile, which she pitched down the stairs with a shout of, ‘Someone start washing all this!’

  Nobody moved. The clothes carpeted the stone flags of the front hall.

  ‘Who’s been sleeping in your mother’s room?’ Val came to the top of the stairs.

  ‘Goldilocks!’ Lester shouted back.

  ‘Rodge sleeps there.’ Carrie went through to the hall. At the top of the stairs, with her piled up hair and high boots, Val looked seven feet tall, towering over her like the Fates.

  ‘Does he live here too, as well as that bad, brazen girl?’ Valentina had never liked Liza. Although she sold flags for a prisoners’ aid society, she did not like anyone who had actually been in trouble with the police. She didn’t like Rodge either, because he had beaten her at Twenty Questions, and Wendy had been sick on her oriental prayer rug.

  ‘He often stays the night here.’ Carrie stood in the sea of dirty clothes.

  ‘Doesn’t he have anywhere to live?’ Val grumbled. ‘I knew this place was an asylum for broken-down animals, but I didn’t know it was a home for the handicapped as well.’

  ‘Don’t Aunt Val—’

  Rodge had come through the kitchen, and Carrie waded through the clothes to him.

  ‘I’m sticking out my tongue at her,’ she said. So Rodge stuck out his through his beard in the direction of Val’s voice, which was back in Mother’s room, still carrying on about mud and dog hairs and poor Alice would have a fit. Although Mother always slept with at least two dogs and a cat in her room. One night when John had colic, she had slept in the stable with Carrie, snuggled together in the straw with cocoa and ginger biscuits.

  When Carrie was back in the kitchen, there was a knock on the front door. Who on earth—?

  ‘I’ll go.’ Val put on a high flutey voice, hoping for a social visitor - a vain hope at World’s End, thank goodness - and tripped down the stairs. She opened the door, which had unstuck itself in the spring warmth, and they heard from the kitchen a man’s deep, rather husky voice. Someone they knew? The voice was vaguely familiar.

  ‘Mrs Fielding?’

  ‘Mrs Rudolf, or Mrs Jerome?’ It was amazing how Val could switch from yelling at the family to cooing at strangers.

  ‘Mrs Rudolf.’

  ‘This is she,’ Val fluted.

  ‘I’ve come to tell you …’ The man dropped his voice then, but in a moment, Val came flying into the kitchen, with her face all slipped, and her stiff beehive of hair toppling, as if the man had pushed it.

  ‘It’s Rudolf!’ she cried, and her voice broke on a hysterical sob. ‘He’s had an accident with the car. They think he had a heart attack, and he—’

  ‘Is he hurt?’ Carrie and Lester and Em and Michael and Rodge had all jumped up.

  ‘A broken leg, at least. He ran into a wall, and they’ve taken him to the hospital. A plainclothes policeman has come for me in a car. I’m to go at - go at—’ Suddenly unstrung, Val dropped in a chair, with her boots stuck out and her face crumpled. ‘Go at once.’

  ‘I’ll go with you.’ Michael put his hand on her knee.

  ‘No, me’ Carrie and Em said together. All at once, they liked Val better than they ever had in their lives, and felt pity for her, now that she was softened by tragedy.

  But she jumped up and snapped, ‘They don’t let children into hospitals.’ And when Rodge offered, ‘Wendy and I will come with you,’ she said quite rudely, ‘They don’t let dogs in either,’ snatched her coat off the hook under the stairs, and went out to the policeman.

  Same old Val after all.

  After she had gone, they did not know how to feel about Uncle Rudolf. Sorry for him, of course, but they still hated him for what he had said to them, and what he was going to do to them.

  Did you have to start liking people you hated just because they were smashed up? When he was mended, he would still be the same hateful Rudolf, and it would have been a waste of effort trying to like him.

  ‘Perhaps he will die—’

  Michael did not exactly say it. He suggested it casually to Gilbert, but the others jumped on him for saying what they thought themselves.

  Rodge was as nervous and upset as they were. He could not sit still. He walked about restlessly in his thick rubber soles, while Wendy turned her head from side to side to watch him, like a spectator at a tennis match. Then he felt his Braille watch and said, ‘Oh Lord, the church. I promised I’d go and try out Sunday’s music. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He called Wendy to him, and put on her harness and lead, fumbling with the buckle.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he told them with a very worried face, and went out, stumbling on the back step, which he had been up and down millions of times.

  Lester was supposed to go home, but he wouldn’t leave World’s End. Even he did not know what to do, what to think, how to feel. None of them knew. They stayed near the house in case Aunt Val came back with news.

  When a car stopped in the lane, they all ran out. It was the black car like a funeral hearse. In it was Uncle Rudolf, still wearing his hat dead centre, and with all four limbs intact.

  ‘You had an accident!’


  ‘You had a heart attack!’

  ‘You ran into a wall!’

  ‘You’re in the hospital with a broken leg!’

  They swarmed into the car all over him.

  ‘Pardon me.’ He pushed them away and got out. ‘I never felt better in my life.’

  ‘But the accident—’

  ‘What accident? I’ve not had an accident since I fell off my bicyle at school. My insurance man says I have the cleanest record—’

  ‘They said you had a heart attack and ran into a wall,’ Carrie said. ‘A policeman came and took Aunt Val with him to see you in the hospital.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Rudolf staggered backwards and leaned against the car, his face grey and sagging, as if the life were draining out of it. ‘So that’s what they were after. Those phone calls. They’re after money. They’ve kidnapped her.’

  Twenty-Eight

  Kidnapped! Their hatred and fear of Rudolf faded before the drama of the moment. Carrie’s stomach dropped like a stone in a well.

  ‘What shall we do?’ She stared at the beads of sweat which had broken out on the dome of Rudolf’s head.

  ‘I’m going to the police.’ He opened the car door, but Lester caught his sleeve and pulled him back.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Let me go, boy. My wife is in danger.’

  ‘That’s why you can’t bring in the police. Kidnappers are desperate men,’ Lester said, as if he had known dozens. ‘They’ll stop at nothing. Even murder. Remember the Billericay hatchet case? If the police hadn’t bungled the ambush, that woman would be alive today.’

  ‘I must tell them.’ Uncle Rudolf tried to pull away and get into the car.

  ‘You can’t: Carrie grabbed the other sleeve.

  ‘I must.’ But he was yielding.

  ‘You can’t.’ They took him into the house, and Em put on the kettle.

  ‘What shall I do?’ Uncle Rudolf took off his hat. ‘Oh God, I don’t know what to do.’ His face was creased and crooked with anxiety. He looked ten years older.