The Ocean at the End of the Lane Page 6

  My sister came out into the garden.

  “I like her so much,” she told me. “She’s my friend. Do you want to see what she gave me?” She produced a small gray purse, the kind my mother kept in her handbag for her coins, that fastened with a metal butterfly clip. It looked like it was made of leather. I wondered if it was mouse skin. She opened the purse, put her fingers into the opening, came out with a large silver coin: half a crown.

  “Look!” she said. “Look what I got!”

  I wanted a half a crown. No, I wanted what I could buy with half a crown—magic tricks and plastic joke-toys, and books, and, oh, so many things. But I did not want a little gray purse with a half a crown in it.

  “I don’t like her,” I told my sister.

  “That’s only because I saw her first,” said my sister. “She’s my friend.”

  I did not think that Ursula Monkton was anybody’s friend. I wanted to go and warn Lettie Hempstock about her—but what could I say? That the new housekeeper-nanny wore gray and pink? That she looked at me oddly?

  I wished I had never let go of Lettie’s hand. Ursula Monkton was my fault, I was certain of it, and I would not be able to get rid of her by flushing her down a plug hole, or putting frogs in her bed.

  I should have left then, should have run away, fled down the lane the mile or so to the Hempstocks’ farm, but I didn’t, and then a taxi took my mother away to Dicksons Opticians, where she would show people letters through lenses, and help them see more clearly, and I was left there with Ursula Monkton.

  She came out into the garden with a plate of sandwiches.

  “I’ve spoken to your mother,” she said, a sweet smile beneath the pale lipstick, “and while I’m here, you children need to limit your travels. You can be anywhere in the house or in the garden, or I will walk with you to your friends’, but you may not leave the property and simply go wandering.”

  “Of course,” said my sister.

  I did not say anything.

  My sister ate a peanut butter sandwich.

  I was starving. I wondered whether the sandwiches were dangerous or not. I did not know. I was scared that I would eat one and it would turn into worms in my stomach, and that they would wriggle through me, colonizing my body, until they pushed out of my skin.

  I went back into the house. I pushed the kitchen door open. Ursula Monkton was not there. I stuffed my pockets with fruit, with apples and oranges and hard brown pears. I took three bananas and stuffed them down my jumper, and fled to my laboratory.

  My laboratory—that was what I called it—was a green-painted shed as far away from the house as you could get, built up against the side of the house’s huge old garage. A fig tree grew beside the shed, although we had never tasted ripe fruit from the tree, only seen the huge leaves and the green fruits. I called the shed my laboratory because I kept my chemistry set in there: the chemistry set, a perennial birthday present, had been banished from the house by my father, after I had made something in a test tube. I had randomly mixed things together, and then heated them, until they had erupted and turned black, with an ammoniac stench that refused to fade. My father had said that he did not mind my doing experiments (although neither of us knew what I could possibly have been experimenting on, but that did not matter; my mother had been given chemistry sets for her birthday, and see how well that had turned out?) but he did not want them within smelling range of the house.

  I ate a banana and a pear, then hid the rest of the fruit beneath the wooden table.

  Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive. I decided that I would creep out of the laboratory shed, along the wall to the edge of the lawn and then into the azaleas and bay laurels that bordered the garden there. From the laurels, I would slip down the hill and over the rusting metal fence that ran along the side of the lane.

  Nobody was looking. I ran and I crept and got through the laurels, and I went down the hill, pushing through the brambles and the nettle patches that had sprung up since the last time I went that way.

  Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of the hill, just in front of the rusting metal fence. There was no way she could have got there without my seeing her, but she was there. She folded her arms and looked at me, and her gray and pink dress flapped in a gust of wind.

  “I believe I said that you were not to leave the property.”

  “I’m not,” I told her, with a cockiness I knew I did not feel, not even a little. “I’m still on the property. I’m just exploring.”

  “You’re sneaking around,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “I think you should be in your bedroom, where I can keep an eye on you. It’s time for your nap.”

  I was too old for naps, but I knew that I was too young to argue, or to win the argument if I did.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Don’t say ‘okay,’ ” she said. “Say ‘Yes, Miss Monkton.’ Or ‘Ma’am.’ Say ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ” She looked down at me with her blue-gray eyes, which put me in mind of holes rotted in canvas, and which did not look pretty at that moment.

  I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and hated myself for saying it.

  We walked together up the hill.

  “Your parents can no longer afford this place,” said Ursula Monkton. “And they can’t afford to keep it up. Soon enough they’ll see that the way to solve their financial problems is to sell this house and its gardens to property developers. Then all of this”—and this was the tangle of brambles, the unkempt world behind the lawn—“will become a dozen identical houses and gardens. And if you are lucky, you’ll get to live in one. And if not, you will just envy the people who do. Will you like that?”

  I loved the house, and the garden. I loved the rambling shabbiness of it. I loved that place as if it was a part of me, and perhaps, in some ways, it was.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Ursula Monkton. I’m your housekeeper.”

  I said, “Who are you really? Why are you giving people money?”

  “Everybody wants money,” she said, as if it were self-evident. “It makes them happy. It will make you happy, if you let it.” We had come out by the heap of grass clippings, behind the circle of green grass that we called the fairy ring: sometimes, when the weather was wet, it filled with vivid yellow toadstools.

  “Now,” she said. “Go to your room.”

  I ran from her—ran as fast as I could, across the fairy ring, up the lawn, past the rosebushes, past the coal shed and into the house.

  Ursula Monkton was standing just inside the back door of the house to welcome me in, although she could not have got past me. I would have seen. Her hair was perfect, and her lipstick seemed freshly applied.

  “I’ve been inside you,” she said. “So a word to the wise. If you tell anybody anything, they won’t believe you. And, because I’ve been inside you, I’ll know. And I can make it so you never say anything I don’t want you to say to anybody, not ever again.”

  I went upstairs to the bedroom, and I lay on my bed. The place on the sole of my foot where the worm had been throbbed and ached, and now my chest hurt too. I went aw
ay in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible. I pulled down a handful of my mother’s old books, from when she was a girl, and I read about schoolgirls having adventures in the 1930s and 1940s. Mostly they were up against smugglers or spies or fifth columnists, whatever they were, and the girls were always brave and they always knew exactly what to do. I was not brave and I had no idea what to do.

  I had never felt so alone.

  I wondered if the Hempstocks had a telephone. It seemed unlikely, but not impossible—perhaps it had been Mrs. Hempstock who had reported the abandoned Mini to the police in the first place. The phone book was downstairs, but I knew the number to call Directory Enquiries, and I only had to ask for anybody named Hempstock living at Hempstock Farm. There was a phone in my parents’ bedroom.

  I got off the bed, went to the doorway, looked out. The upstairs hallway was empty. As quickly, as quietly as I could, I walked into the bedroom next to mine. The walls were pale pink, my parents’ bed covered with a bedspread covered in its turn with huge printed roses. There were French windows to the balcony that ran along that side of the house. There was a cream-colored telephone on the cream-and-gilt nightstand beside the bed. I picked it up, heard the dull whirring noise of the dial tone, and dialed Directory Enquiries, my finger pulling the holes in the dial down, a one, a nine, a two, and I waited for the operator to come on the line, and tell me the number of the Hempstocks’ farm. I had a pencil with me, and I was ready to write the telephone number down in the back of a blue cloth-bound book called Pansy Saves the School.

  The operator did not come on. The dialing tone continued, and over it, I heard Ursula Monkton’s voice saying, “Properly brought-up young people would not even think about sneaking off to use the telephone, would they?”

  I did not say anything, although I have no doubt she could hear me breathing. I put the handset down on the cradle, and went back into the bedroom I shared with my sister.

  I sat on my bed, and stared out of the window.

  My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the windows open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open my windows and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown onto my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat.

  But now it was not raining, and it was not night. All I could see through the window were trees, and clouds, and the distant purple of horizon.

  I had emergency chocolate supplies hidden beneath the large plastic Batman figurine I had acquired on my birthday, and I ate them, and as I ate them I thought of how I had let go of Lettie Hempstock’s hand to grab the ball of rotting cloth, and I remembered the stabbing pain in my foot that had followed.

  I brought her here, I thought, and I knew that it was true.

  Ursula Monkton wasn’t real. She was a cardboard mask for the thing that had traveled inside me as a worm, that had flapped and gusted in the open country under that orange sky.

  I went back to reading Pansy Saves the School. The secret plans to the airbase next door to the school were being smuggled out to the enemy by spies who were teachers working on the school vegetable allotment: the plans were concealed inside hollowed-out vegetable marrows.

  “Great heavens!” said Inspector Davidson of Scotland Yard’s renowned Smugglers and Secret Spies Division (the SSSD). “That is literally the last place we would have looked!”

  “We owe you an apology, Pansy,” said the stern headmistress, with an uncharacteristically warm smile, and a twinkle in her eyes that made Pansy think perhaps she had misjudged the woman all this term. “You have saved the reputation of the school! Now, before you get too full of yourself—aren’t there some French verbs you ought to be conjugating for Madame?”

  I could be happy with Pansy, in some part of my head, even while the rest of my head was filled with fear. I waited for my parents to come home. I would tell them what was happening. I would tell them. They would believe me.

  At that time my father worked in an office an hour’s drive away. I was not certain what he did. He had a very nice, pretty secretary, with a toy poodle, and whenever she knew we children would be coming in to see our father she would bring the poodle in from home, and we would play with it. Sometimes we would pass buildings and my father would say, “That’s one of ours.” But I did not care about buildings, so never asked how it was one of ours, or even who we were.

  I lay on my bed, reading book after book, until Ursula Monkton appeared in the doorway of the room and said, “You can come down now.”

  My sister was watching television downstairs, in the television room. She was watching a program called How, a pop-science-and-how-things-work show, which opened with the hosts in Native American headdresses saying, “How?” and doing embarrassing war whoops.

  I wanted to turn over to the BBC, but my sister looked at me triumphantly and said, “Ursula says it can stay on whatever I want to watch and you aren’t allowed to change it.”

  I sat with her for a minute, as an old man with a moustache showed all the children of England how to tie fishing flies.

  I said, “She’s not nice.”

  “I like her. She’s pretty.”

  My mother arrived home five minutes later, called hello from the corridor, then went into the kitchen to see Ursula Monkton. She reappeared. “Dinner will be ready as soon as Daddy gets home. Wash your hands.”

  My sister went upstairs and washed her hands.

  I said to my mother, “I don’t like her. Will you make her go away?”

  My mother sighed. “It is not going to be Gertruda all over again, dear. Ursula’s a very nice girl, from a very good family. And she positively adores the two of you.”

  My father came home, and dinner was served. A thick vegetable soup, then roast chicken and new potatoes with frozen peas. I loved all of the things on the table. I did not eat any of it.

  “I’m not hungry,” I explained.

  “I’m not one for telling tales out of school,” said Ursula Monkton, “but someone had chocolate on his hands and face when he came down from his bedroom.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t eat that rubbish,” grumbled my father.

  “It’s just processed sugar. And it ruins your appetite and your teeth,” said my mother.

  I was scared they would force me to eat, but they didn’t. I sat there hungrily, while Ursula Monkton laughed at all my father’s jokes. It seemed to me that he was making special jokes, just for her.

  After dinner we all watched Mission: Impossible. I usually liked Mission: Impossible, but this time it made me feel uneasy, as people kept pulling their faces off to reveal new faces beneath. They were wearing rubber masks, and it was always our heroes underneath, but I wondered what would happen if Ursula Monkton pulled off her face, what would be underneath that?

  We went to bed. It was my sister’s night, and the bedroom door was closed. I missed the light in the hall. I lay in bed with the window open, wide awake, listening to the noises an old house makes at the end of a long day, and I wished as hard as I could, hoping my wishes could become real. I wished that my parents would send Ursula Monkton away, and then I would go down to the Hempstocks’ farm, and tell Letti
e what I had done, and she would forgive me, and make everything all right.

  I could not sleep. My sister was already asleep. She seemed able to go to sleep whenever she wanted to, a skill I envied and did not have.

  I left my bedroom.

  I loitered at the top of the stairs, listening to the noise of the television coming from downstairs. Then I crept barefoot-silent down the stairs and sat on the third step from the bottom. The door to the television room was half-open, and if I went down another step whoever was watching the television could see me. So I waited there.

  I could hear the television voices punctuated by staccato bursts of TV laughter.

  And then, over the television voices, adults talking.

  Ursula Monkton said, “So, is your wife away every evening?”

  My father’s voice: “No. She’s gone back this evening to organize tomorrow. But from tomorrow it will be weekly. She’s raising money for Africa, in the village hall. For drilling wells, and I believe for contraception.”

  “Well,” said Ursula, “I already know all about that.”

  She laughed, a high, tinkling laugh, which sounded friendly and true and real, and had no flapping rags in it. Then she said, “Little pitchers . . . ,” and a moment later the door opened the whole way, and Ursula Monkton was looking straight at me. She had redone her makeup, her pale lipstick and her big eyelashes.

  “Go to bed,” she said. “Now.”

  “I want to talk to my dad,” I said, without hope. She said nothing, just smiled, with no warmth in it, and no love, and I went back up the stairs, and climbed into my bed, and lay in the darkened bedroom until I gave up on sleeping, and then sleep enveloped me when I was not expecting it, and I slept without comfort.