The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Read online

  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 away 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.

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bsp; 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 Lettie 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.

  VII.

  The next day was bad.

  My parents had both left the house before I woke.

  It had turned cold, and the sky was a bleak and charmless gray. I went through my parents’ bedroom to the balcony that ran along the length of their bedroom and my-sister’s-and-mine, and I stood on the long balcony and I prayed to the sky that Ursula Monkton would have tired of this game, and that I would not see her again.

  Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs when I went down.

  “Same rules as yesterday, little pitcher,” she said. “You can’t leave the property. If you try, I will lock you in your bedroom for the rest of the day, and when your parents come home I will tell them you did something disgusting.”

  “They won’t believe you.”

  She smiled sweetly. “Are you sure? If I tell them you pulled out your little willy and widdled all over the kitchen floor, and I had to mop it up and disinfect it? I think they’ll believe me. I’ll be very convincing.”

  I went out of the house and down to my laboratory. I ate all the fruit that I had hidden there the day before. I read Sandie Sees It Through, another of my mother’s books. Sandie was a plucky but poor schoolgirl who was accidentally sent to a posh school, where everybody hated her. In the end she exposed the Geography Teacher as an International Bolshevik, who had tied the real Geography Teacher up. The climax was in the school assembly, when Sandie bravely got up and made a speech which began, “I know I should not have been sent here. It was only an error in paperwork that sent me here and sent Sandy spelled with a Y to the town grammar school. But I thank Providence that I came here. Because Miss Streebling is not who she claims to be.”

  In the end Sandie was embraced by the people who had hated her.

  My father came home early from work—earlier than I remembered seeing him home in years.

  I wanted to talk to him, but he was never alone.

  I watched them from the branch of my beech tree.

  First he showed Ursula Monkton around the gardens, proudly showing her the rosebushes and the blackcurrant bushes and the cherry trees and the azaleas as if he had had anything to do with them, as if they had not been put in place and tended by Mr. Wollery for fifty years before ever we had bought the house.

  She laughed at all his jokes. I could not hear what he was saying, but I could see the crooked smile he had when he knew he was saying something funny.

  She was standing too close to him. Sometimes he would rest his hand on her shoulder, in a friendly sort of way. It worried me that he was standing so close to her. He didn’t know what she was. She was a monster, and he just thought she was a normal person, and he was being nice to her. She was wearing different clothes today: a gray skirt, of the kind they called a midi, and a pink blouse.

  On any other day if I had seen my father walking around the garden, I would have run over to him. But not that day. I was scared that he would be angry, or that Ursula Monkton would say something to make him angry with me.

  I became terrified of him when he was angry. His face (angular and usually affable) would grow red, and he would shout, shout so loudly and furiously that it would, literally, paralyze me. I would not be able to think.

  He never hit me. He did not believe in hitting. He would tell us how his father had hit him, how his mother had chased him with a broom, how he was better than that. When he got angry enough to shout at me he would occasionally remind me that he did not hit me, as if to make me grateful. In the school stories I read, misbehavior often resulted in a caning, or the slipper, and then was forgiven and done, and I would sometimes envy those fictional children the cleanness of their lives.

  I did not want to approach Ursula Monkton: I did not want to risk making my father angry with me.

  I wondered if this would be a good time to try to leave the property, to head down the lane, but I was certain that if I did I would look up to see my father’s angry face beside Ursula Monkton’s, all pretty and smug.

  So I simply watched them from the huge branch of the beech tree. When they walked out of sight, behind the azalea bushes, I clambered down the rope ladder, went up into the house, up to the balcony, and I watched them from there. It was a gray day, but there were butter-yellow daffodils everywhere, and narcissi in profusion, with their pale outer petals and their dark orange trumpets. My father picked a handful of narcissi and gave them to Ursula Monkton, who laughed, and said something, then made a curtsey. He bowed in return, and said something that made her laugh. I thought he must have proclaimed himself her Knight in Shining Armor, or something like that.

  I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not. I just stood on the balcony and watched, and they did not look up and they did not see me.

  My book of Greek myths had told me that the narcissi were named after a beautiful young man, so lovely that he had fallen in love with himself. He saw his reflection in a pool of water, and would not leave it, and, eventually, he died, so that the gods were forced to transform him into a flower. In my mind, when I had read this, I had imagined that a narcissus must be the most beautiful flower in the world. I was disappointed when I learned that it was just a less impressive daffodil.

  My sister came out of the house and went over to them. My father picked her up and swung h
er in the air. They all walked inside together, my father with my sister holding on to his neck, and Ursula Monkton, her arms filled with yellow and white flowers. I watched them. I watched as my father’s free hand, the one not holding my sister, went down and rested, casually, proprietarily, on the swell of Ursula Monkton’s midi skirted bottom.

  I would react differently to that now. At the time, I do not believe I thought anything of it at all. I was seven.

  I climbed up into my bedroom window, easy to reach from the balcony, and down onto my bed, where I read a book about a girl who stayed in the Channel Islands and defied the Nazis because she would not abandon her pony.

  And while I read, I thought, Ursula Monkton cannot keep me here forever. Soon enough—in a few days at the most—someone will take me into town, or away from here, and then I will go to the farm at the bottom of the lane, and I will tell Lettie Hempstock what I did.

  Then I thought, Suppose Ursula Monkton only needs a couple of days. And that scared me.

  Ursula Monkton made meatloaf for dinner that evening, and I would not eat it. I was determined not to eat anything she had made or cooked or touched. My father was not amused.

  “But I don’t want it,” I told him. “I’m not hungry.”

  It was Wednesday, and my mother was attending her meeting, to raise money so that people in Africa who needed water could drill wells, in the village hall of the next village down the road. She had posters that she would put up, diagrams of wells, and photographs of smiling people. At the dinner table were my sister, my father, Ursula Monkton, and me.

  “It’s good, it’s good for you, and it’s tasty,” said my father. “And we do not waste food in this house.”

  “I said I wasn’t hungry.”

  I had lied. I was so hungry it hurt.

  “Then just try a little nibble,” he said. “It’s your favorite. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy. You love them.”