World's End in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

shiny hair, red lips over big white teeth and large rubber-soled feet. They looked like the super-young of a new vitamin-stuffed race. Very different from the little girl who sat bundled in a cape and hood in the doorway of the round summerhouse, her skinny legs dangling into boots that hung uselessly.
    She sat in her own world. When Michael waved to her, she did not smile, but slid her eyes round to where the boy and girl were hanging like apes against the wire fence of the tennis court.
    ‘I’m Victor Agnew.’ The boy grinned, sure of himself and of being liked. ’And this is Jane. Who are you?’
    ‘We broke your cold frame,’ Carrie said. Michael had pulled his hood down over his eyes which meant that he was not going to speak.
    ‘Oh that.’ The boy tossed back a lion’s mane of hair, as if cold frames came two a penny. ’What have you got out there-horses?’
    ‘Do you ride?’ Carrie asked eagerly. The boy looked her age, or a bit older. Lester was all the friend she needed, of course, but fantasy catapulted her forward into a dream of riding with this boy, dazzling him with how well John went for her.
    The boy and girl dropped their monkey grins for a moment and shot a look at each other. Then the boy made anoise of contempt and pushed himself off the wire. ’Who wants a horse when they can go by car?’
    ‘We don’t have time to play about with ponies.’ The girl recovered her grin. ’Games is our thing. Want to come and knock up?’ She picked up her racquet and banged some balls across the net, hard enough to stop a train.
    ‘We don’t play.’
    ‘Don’t play
tennis?’
Carrie might as well have said, ’We don’t eat.’
    ‘What’s going on out there, you kids? I said three sets before lunch if you want to win that tournament.’ The father bounced out of the house in swimming trunks with a towel round his broad bare shoulders.
    Swimming in the winter! Carrie and Michael stared. They spent a lot of their winter trying to get warm or keep warm, not cooling off in cold water. The pool had been repaired and filled. There seemed to be a thin skin of ice in one corner.
    Poised on the edge, the large red-faced man threw off the towel, flexed his muscles, did a few Tarzan knee bends, and plunged into the icy water. Carrie could feel the shock of it through all her nerves and up into her head, where it made her teeth ache.
    The man did not reappear immediately. She almost expected to see him float to the top dead, with the red broken veins of his face congealed to blue, but he swam underwater and surfaced at the other end of the pool, flinging back his hair and jumping half out of the water as if he hoped to be thrown a herring. He swam several lengths in a powerful crawl, hauled himself easily out of the pool, wiped his hands over his eyes and saw Michael goggling at him.
    ‘You again,’ he said. ’What do you want?’
    ‘Oh, they’re our friends,’ Victor called out from the court, as if the whole world was his friend once it had spoken to him.
    ‘Make yourselves at home then.’ Mr Agnew slung the towel round his neck, put up his elbows and jogged acrossthe terrace into the house. Carrie distinctly saw gooseflesh on the backs of his legs.
    She tested the water in the pool and almost got frostbitten fingers. Victor and Jane had finished their game and were coming through the gate of the court.
    ‘Does your father swim all winter?’ she asked them.
    ‘Natch. Got to keep fit, you know, at his age, or you go to seed. He jogs two miles every day. So do we when we’re home from school. What’s your name?’
    ‘I’m Caroline,’ Carrie heard herself say, although she never used her full name. ’And my brother is Michael.’
    The girl had run towards the house. Victor turned towards the summer-house.
    ‘Come on Priskie, old sport.’ He grabbed the handle at the back of the little girl’s chair and bumped her off the step on to the path so vigorously that she nearly fell out.
    ‘Can I