The House at World's End Read Online Free

drumstick.
    ‘Br-r-r-r.’ Valentina swallowed beer and shuddered and pulled the fox fur closer round her neck, although it was a warm day and she was sweating under her thick make-up. ‘Spooky old end of nowhere.’
    As Carrie looked back at the house below them, hunching its shoulders, unwanted, a cloud of birds rose up above the chimneys like smoke, as if there
was
someone in there,stirring up the fire. Slitting her eyes to blur them out of focus, for a moment she could imagine she saw a phantom face at one of the windows, a ghostly hand raised to draw back the tattered curtain. She opened her eyes and the window was black and empty, the rags of curtains hanging still.
    ‘Sit down and don’t be so restless,’ Uncle Rudolf told her. ‘You’ll get indigestion.’
    ‘It’s better for your stomach to move about,’ Carrie said. ‘At Roman banquets, they used to run round the table between each course, and then be sick to make more room.’
    ‘Go away,’ Valentina said, and Rose Arbuckle moaned, ‘That’s done it I can’t eat another thing.’
    Carrie took her sandwich up to the fence, and she and Tom watched a man on a horse cantering through the water meadows on the other side of the stream. It was a big bay horse with the swinging stride of a thoroughbred, its hooves raising a fine silvery mist from the wet grass.
    ‘I stand and look at them long and long
…’ Tom said.
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘A poem.
I think,
it says,
I think I could turn and live with animals—’
    (‘Oh
so
could I!’ Carrie said.)
    ‘They are so placid and self contained.
    I stand and look at them long and long.
    They do not sweat and whine about their condition—’
    (‘Like some we could mention.’)
    ‘They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.’
    (‘I bet Rose Arbuckle does.’)
    ‘They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God…’
    ‘Yes. Aunt Val makes me sick,’ Carrie whispered. ‘Does she you?’
    ‘Hush.’ Tom smiled, watching the man and the horse jump over a ditch and splash a dark track away across the shining field. ‘She is very good to us. It is her duty.’
    It was Aunt Val’s duty to go back to London early, before anyone had had a chance to explore, or to see if they could get into the house. She was having what she called a Fork Supper, which meant that the guests had to stand about uncomfortably with a glass and a plate, wishing they had a third hand for the fork. Or had to put down the glass and poke at the food without being able to cut it. Or had to sit with the plate on their knee and try to keep the sauce out of their laps.
    Carrie and Em had to wear skirts and be waitresses. Em did not mind so much, since she quite liked to dress up and pretend to be somebody else, smiling her big white teeth at the guests and hearing them tell each other, ‘What a lovely child! Those eyes! Like an Italian sky’ (To show they’d been to Italy).
    Carrie’s eyes were the ordinary greenish-brown kind that go with sandy hair that gets mud-coloured if you don’t wash it. For the Fork Supper, she had to tie it back, which she hated, since it gave her face no protection from the guests, who either looked through her as if she were invisible, or asked pointless questions like ‘Do you like school?’ and turned away without waiting for an answer.
    She took a dish of creamed chicken out to the kitchen before the guests had a chance at seconds, and all the children fell on it with their fingers.
    Valentina caught them at it. ‘Oh, it’s too, too much! I’m going mad. I shall have to tell your uncle.’ She huffed to the door, lifting her lizard skin shoes over the bodies of Charlie and the three cats, who always lay in the middle of the kitchen floor to make sure of being noticed. In ashoebox on top of the refrigerator was a stray kitten they had found in the hen house at World’s End and brought home hidden inside Tom’s shirt. It was orange coloured, so they called it Pip.
    ‘Too