The House at World's End Read Online Free Page B

Rudolf was very fond of his money. He did not like other people to talk about it. He got up behind the desk angrily, but Em licked a finger to flatten a curl on her cheek and said calmly, ‘Isn’t it worth your while to pay us to keep out of your way? A business deal.’
    Worth his while… Business deal… That was the sort of talk the Prince of Plumbers understood.
    Aunt Valentina, of course, was delighted, although she pretended that she would miss them.
    ‘You can come and visit us,’ Michael said kindly.
    ‘I shall do that, of course. It will be my duty.’
    Their father was still somewhere at sea, or holed up in a café in some fishing port he had taken a fancy to, from where he would eventually send them a postcard: ‘Paradise on earth. All fly out next plane.’ But with no address and no mention of who would pay the fare.
    There remained only their mother. Tom and Carrie stood on either side of her high hospital bed, while the curious woman in the next bed tried to hear what theywere saying, and their mother moved her eyes restlessly back and forth, since she could not toss in her plaster cast, nor even turn her head, which was wedged with sandbags.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she worried. ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Yes you do. You know we’ll be all right. Haven’t we always been all right? Weren’t we all right the night the storm blew the roof off when you were out washing up at the railwaymen’s banquet? Weren’t we all right when the burglar came and we locked him in the cellar?’
    ‘He was the gas meter man, not a burglar.’
    ‘But if he had been. Don’t you trust us? Oh Mum, it’s such a Place. The World’s End… But there’s a school in the next village but one, a small school that looks like the kind of place where you can get sums wrong without being told your life is a total disaster. And when you get out of hospital you can come and live there.’
    ‘I won’t be able to walk or do anything for ages.’ Poor active, lively Mum, who never used to sit down all day until she fell exhausted into bed. Why didn’t broken backs happen to people like Rose Arbuckle, who would enjoy the excuse to do nothing?
    ‘We’ll put your bed under a window that looks out on the meadow, and you can watch the horses.’
    ‘Will there be horses?’ She looked at Carrie.
    ‘There will if it kills me.’
    That night, Carrie lay in bed and heard Aunt Val playing tinkly piano music - she was happy now - and heard the stir of wind and the sound of his galloping hooves. The grey Arab trod the air outside her window, his large dark eye like liquid velvet. She rose in her waking dream and slid on to his back.
    ‘Soon.’ She stroked the flat arch of his neck. ‘Soon,Penny, I’ll call you from the World’s End. Will you come to me there?’
    He blew warm breath into the night, wanting to go.
    ‘There’s a stable there. I’ll clean it out and whitewash it and put down fresh straw. Even if I never do get a horse, I can be with you there. At the end of the world.’
    Aunt Val began to sing, gargling the high notes. Michael cried out in his sleep, and somewhere on some garden wall, some cat howled like a wolf. Penny-Come-Quick turned and galloped away into the sky.
    In the Elysian Fields that night, Carrie met Bucephalus, the battle charger of Alexander the Great. ‘I never let anyone else ride me.’ He had been telling his proud story for two thousand years. ‘Only the conqueror of the world.’
    ‘Wasn’t much of a world in those days.’ Clever Hans, the Talking Horse who had once made a living doing arithmetic problems, was bored by war horses. ‘If they sailed out of the Mediterranean Sea, they thought they’d drop off the edge.’
    Penny wandered about, nodding to friends, nibbling a neck as he passed, dropping his delicate head to graze on the sweetest grass in the Universe. Sitting loosely on his back, her fingers twined in his silken mane, Carrie met a Derby winner, and Black Bess, who had carried