Free Summer at World's End by Monica Dickens

to have that woman to tea - will she expect cake?’
    Arthur looked from one to the other of the family, his ears pricked to be able to report the conversation back to Bessie Munce at headquarters.
    ‘Want me to draft you out a reply?’ He whipped a pad of telegram forms out of his jacket pocket, took pencil from behind his ear and licked the point. He was a sharp boy, who would go far in the post office.
    While he was composing a message for Mother, Michael took Carrie behind the corner of the house.
    ‘Shouldn’t we tell her about Miss McDrane coming to tea?’ he asked, too loud.
    ‘No.’ Carrie put her hand over his mouth and pulled him into the ivy at the angle of the chimney. ‘Because then she might not go. She doesn’t really want to anyway.’
    ‘She told Dad she did. Your hand smells of horse.’
    ‘Lucky you. They don’t always mean what they say, you know.’
    ‘Mm.’ Michael considered that. ‘Would marriage be easier if they did, or more difficult?’
    ‘I don’t know. We might find out one day.’
    ‘Would you marry me, Carrie?’ Michael proposed charmingly.
    ‘Any day.’
    ‘Before Sunday?
That
would give Miss McGutter something to run down her drainpipe. What are we going to do? If she finds us here alone, she might send down the Nutshell again, and then we’re sunk.’
    The Nutshell was a Social Worker called Miss Nutti-shall, who had once threatened - as grown-ups sometimes do when they see a good thing going - to put a stop to their wonderful life, alone here with the animals.
    ‘We’ll ask Mrs Figg to come.’ Mrs Figg, Lester’s mother, had helped them before, cleaning up the house before the Dreaded Nutshell came. They would have her at World’s End on Sunday, motherly in her rose-patterned overall at the stove, broad in the beam, flour to the elbows, Carrie could see it now, even smell the baking scones.

13
    Their mother left them that evening after Tom came home, waving out of the back window of Mr Peasly’s loose-sprung taxi, her bell of fair hair bouncing over the ruts.
    Lester went for a ride on Peter. Carrie was sitting in the high open doorway of the hay loft over the barn, waiting for him to come back, her eyes closed against the evening sun, when she heard a car stop in the lane.
    She stood up and looked down. It was Mrs Figg’s little blue car with a plastic flower on top of the aerial. Carrie went down the loft steps, through the ancient litter and dust and mealy smells of the barn, and out to the car.
    Mrs Figg had a girl with her. It was Liza, the girl at Mount Pleasant, who had climbed over the wall and held John while Carrie talked to Lester in the boiler room of the greenhouse.
    ‘Hullo.’ She grinned sourly at Carrie. She was wearing a skirt. Her dark red hair was brushed back. She had a lot of pale lipstick and an enormous amount of eye make-up.
    ‘Where are you going?’ Carrie bent her knees to talk through the window of the small car. ‘To a party?’
    ‘It’s to annoy my mum.’ Liza blinked her loaded lashes at Carrie. ‘She says I make myself look cheap.’
    ‘Now that’s enough, Liza. You know your mother thinks the world of you,’ Mrs Figg said comfortably. ‘Liza is going home,’ she told Carrie.
    ‘Oh-I’m glad.’
    Liza made a face.
    ‘We’re early for the train, so I thought I’d drive by and pick up that boy of mine,’ Mrs Figg said. She didn’t have to ask, ‘Is he here?’ He almost always was.
    She and Liza sat on the ricketty bench outside the house, where the old men had once sat and talked country gossip over mugs of beer in the old days when this was Wood’s End Inn. Carrie tried to think of the right way to ask Mrs Figg about tea on Sunday.
    Tom came out and sat on the grass near Liza. He talked about his job with the vet, and about some of the things he and Alec Harvey had done.
    He used to say, ‘Mr Harvey repaired a fractured femur’, or, ‘Mr Harvey spotted the trouble and saved the cat.’ Now it was, ‘Mr