Free World's End in Winter by Monica Dickens Page B

nodding right and left to empty pews. She did not mind the chair. At the end of her life, she was glad of the rest. But Priscilla’s life had not even properly begun.

Thirteen
    When the horses were fed and turned out to join lonely braying Leonora, and Lester had gone home to get his hide tanned, Carrie went to the house.
    She couldn’t get in. The windows were shut. All the doors were locked. The ram and the goat were still in the shed, bumping their heads against the door. The chickens were still in the hen house, grumbling about late food service. Several dogs were inside the house, barking. Pip, the orange cat, was sitting in the side window with her tail curled round a flower pot and her whiskers spread against the glass.
    ’Where is everybody?’ Carrie knew this window. Once when Lester had whistled under her bedroom to come down and watch rabbits dance on the moonlit hill, her father had locked up before she got back. From the tool shed, she got the old knife with which her mother pried out weeds round the front steps, and slipped the thin blade under the window catch. Pip moved just in time as the catch gave and the window swung inwards, knocking the flower pot on to the floor.
    Carrie stood on the bottom of a bucket and heaved herself through the small window.
    ‘Tom! Liza! Where is everybody?’ They must be sleeping late. She let the dogs out, mopped up a puppy puddle, fed the hamster, gave milk to a nursing mother cat, and went upstairs.
    Tom’s room was empty, the bed unslept in. Liza’s room was empty, the bed unmade, but then it always was. Her old dog Dusty, asleep on the rumpled blankets, lifted his moulting head to identify Carrie with a rheumy eye, then went to sleep again.
    Carrie went down the passage and up the little crooked stairway to the small room which had once been a linen cupboard and was now Em’s room. The door was shut. Carrie went in.
    ‘I’ve told you not to come into my room without knocking.’
    The middle shelf had been taken out, to make a bed with a mattress on the wide bottom shelf. In this boxed-in space, Em was sitting with a pile of papers on her knees. She jumped up and shoved the papers under the mattress, though Carrie was not remotely interested in them.
    ‘Where is everybody?’
    ‘Mum and Dad went to the coast. Liza went off yesterday and never came back. Tom went to look for her and never came back. Please get out of my room.’ Em hated people in her room as much as a hibernating dormouse.
    ‘Did Mr Mismo tell you where we were?’
    ‘Sort of.’
    ’We stayed at Brookside to look after Priscilla. Were you alone all night?’
    ‘Oh, I didn’t mind,’ Em said casually, although she had locked all the doors and windows and dragged a high-backed bench across the side door of what had been the ’Snug’ behind the bar when World’s End was an inn.
    ‘Why didn’t you feed the chickens, or Henry and Lucy, or poor Mother Hubbard, who’s feeding seven, or—’
    ‘Why do you always find fault?’
    Tom came back late that evening with Alec Harvey, the vet. He had searched everywhere Liza might have gone, and had wandered half the day in the local town, since she had started life as a city girl. Finally he had gone to the housing estates at Newtown to see if Mr Harvey knew anything.
    All Mr Harvey knew was that Liza had been getting more careless and clumsy, rude to touchy customers with pampered lapdogs, muddling telephone messages and even medicines, mixing up labels on the cat cages and the kennels, and finally starting a big shouting match with him, telling him he could keep his rotten job, and walking out.
    ‘With my spare set of keys in her pocket. And I hate to say this, Tom,’ he had admitted, ’but after she’d gone, I found I’d lost more than my keys.’
    ‘Not money. Liza wouldn’t take money.’
    ‘How do you know? In the kind of life she’s lived, brought up on the streets, having to fight for anything she got, if you see money, you take