The Ocean at the End of the Lane Page 7

  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 her 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.”

  There was a children’s table in the kitchen, where we ate when my parents had friends over, or would be eating late. But that night we were at the adult table. I preferred the ch
ildren’s table. I felt invisible there. Nobody watched me eat.

  Ursula Monkton sat next to my father and stared at me, with a tiny smile at the corner of her lips.

  I knew I should shut up, be silent, be sullen. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to tell my father why I did not want to eat.

  “I won’t eat anything she made,” I told him. “I don’t like her.”

  “You will eat your food,” said my father. “You will at least try it. And apologize to Miss Monkton.”

  “I won’t.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” said Ursula Monkton sympathetically, and she looked at me, and she smiled. I do not think that either of the other two people at the table noticed that she was smiling with amusement, or that there was nothing sympathetic in her expression, or her smile, or her rotting-cloth eyes.

  “I’m afraid he does,” said my father. His voice was just a little louder, and his face was just a little redder. “I won’t have him cheeking you like that.” Then, to me, “Give me one good reason, just one, why you won’t apologize and why you won’t eat the lovely food that Ursula prepared for us.”

  I did not lie well. I told him.

  “Because she’s not human,” I said. “She’s a monster. She’s a . . .” What had the Hempstocks called her kind of thing? “She’s a flea.”

  My father’s cheeks were burning red, now, and his lips were thin. He said, “Outside. Into the hall. This minute.”

  My heart sank inside me. I climbed down from my stool and followed him out into the corridor. It was dark in the hallway: the only light came from the kitchen, a sheet of clear glass above the door. He looked down at me. “You will go back into the kitchen. You will apologize to Miss Monkton. You will finish your plate of food, then, quietly and politely, you will go straight upstairs to bed.”

  “No,” I told him. “I won’t.”

  I bolted, ran down the hallway, round the corner, and I pounded up the stairs. My father, I had no doubt, would come after me. He was twice my size, and fast, but I did not have to keep going for long. There was only one room in that house that I could lock, and it was there that I was headed, left at the top of the stairs and along the hall to the end. I reached the bathroom ahead of my father. I slammed the door, and I pushed the little silver bolt closed.

  He had not chased me. Perhaps he thought it was beneath his dignity, chasing a child. But in a few moments I heard his fist slam, and then his voice saying, “Open this door.”

  I didn’t say anything. I sat on the plush toilet seat cover and I hated him almost as much as I hated Ursula Monkton.

  The door banged again, harder this time. “If you don’t open this door,” he said, loud enough to make sure I heard it through the door, “I’m breaking it down.”

  Could he do that? I didn’t know. The door was locked. Locked doors stopped people coming in. A locked door meant that you were in there, and when people wanted to come into the bathroom they would jiggle the door, and it wouldn’t open, and they would say “Sorry!” or shout “Are you going to be long?” and—

  The door exploded inward. The little silver bolt hung off the door frame, all bent and broken, and my father stood in the doorway, filling it, his eyes huge and white, his cheeks burning with fury.

  He said, “Right.”

  That was all he said, but his hand held my left upper arm in a grip I could never have broken. I wondered what he would do now. Would he, finally, hit me, or send me to my room, or shout at me so loudly that I would wish I were dead?

  He did none of those things.

  He pulled me over to the bathtub. He leaned over, pushed the white rubber plug into the plug hole. Then he turned on the cold tap. Water gushed out, splashing the white enamel, then, steadily and slowly, it filled the bath.

  The water ran noisily.

  My father turned to the open door. “I can deal with this,” he said to Ursula Monkton.

  She stood in the doorway, holding my sister’s hand, and she looked concerned and gentle, but there was triumph in her eyes.

  “Close the door,” said my father. My sister started whimpering, but Ursula Monkton closed the door, as best she could, for one of the hinges did not fit properly, and the broken bolt stopped the door closing all the way.

  It was just me and my father. His cheeks had gone from red to white, and his lips were pressed together, and I did not know what he was going to do, or why he was running a bath, but I was scared, so scared.

  “I’ll apologize,” I told him. “I’ll say sorry. I didn’t mean what I said. She’s not a monster. She’s . . . she’s pretty.”

  He didn’t say anything in response. The bath was full, and he turned the cold tap off.

  Then, swiftly, he picked me up. He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.

  I looked at him, at the intent expression on his face. He had taken off his jacket before he came upstairs. He was wearing a light blue shirt and a maroon paisley tie. He pulled off his watch on its expandable strap, dropped it onto the window ledge.

  Then I realized what he was going to do, and I kicked out, and I flailed at him, neither of which actions had any effect of any kind as he plunged me down into the cold water.

  I was horrified, but it was initially the horror of something happening against the established order of things. I was fully dressed. That was wrong. I had my sandals on. That was wrong. The bathwater was cold, so cold and so wrong. That was what I thought, initially, as he pushed me into the water, and then he pushed further, pushing my head and shoulders beneath the chilly water, and the horror changed its nature. I thought, I’m going to die.

  And, thinking that, I was determined to live.

  I flailed with my hands, trying to find something to hold on to, but there was nothing to grab, only the slippery sides of the bath I’d bathed in for the last two years. (I had read many books in that bath. It was one of my safe places. And now, I had no doubt, I was going to die there.)

  I opened my eyes, beneath the water, and I saw it dangling there, in front of my face: my chance for life, and I clutched it with both hands: my father’s tie.

  I held it tightly, pulled myself up as he pushed me down, gripping it for life itself, pulling my face up and out of that frigid water, holding on to his tie so tightly that he could no longer push my head and shoulders back into the bath without going in himself.

  My face was now out of the water, and I clamped my teeth into his tie, just below the knot.

  We struggled. I was soaked, took some small pleasure in the knowledge that he was soaked as well, his blue shirt clinging to his huge form.

  Now he pushed me down again, but fear of death gives us strength: my hands and my teeth were clamped to his tie, and he could not break his grip on them without hitting me.

  My father did not hit me.

  He straightened up, and I was pulled up with him, soaked and spluttering and angry and crying and scared. I let go of his tie with my teeth, still held on with my hands.

  He said, “You ruined my tie. Let go.” The tie knot had tightened to pea size, the lining of the tie was dangling damply outside of it. He said, “You should be glad that your mother isn’t here.”

  I let go, dropped to the puddled bathroom lino. I took a step backward, toward the toilet. He looked down at me. Then he said, “Go to your bedroom. I don’t want to see you again tonight.”

  I went to my room.


  VIII.

  I was shivering convulsively and I was wet through and I was cold, very cold. It felt like all my heat had been stolen. The wet clothes clung to my flesh and dripped cold water onto the floor. With every step I took my sandals made comical squelching noises, and water oozed from the little diamond-shaped holes on the top of the sandals.

  I pulled all of my clothes off, and I left them in a sopping heap on the tiles by the fireplace, where they began to puddle. I took the box of matches from the mantelpiece, turned on the gas tap and lit the flame in the gas fire.

  (I am staring at a pond, remembering things that are hard to believe. Why do I find the hardest thing for me to believe, looking back, is that a girl of five and a boy of seven had a gas fire in their bedroom?)

  There were no towels in the room, and I stood there, wet, wondering how to dry myself off. I took the thin counterpane that covered my bed, wiped myself off with it, then put on my pajamas. They were red nylon, shiny and striped, with a black plasticized burn mark on the left sleeve, where I had leaned too close to the gas fire once, and the pajama arm caught alight, although by some miracle I had not burned my arm.

  There was a dressing gown that I almost never used hanging on the back of the bedroom door, its shadow perfectly positioned to cast nightmare shadows on the wall when the hall light was on and the door was open. I put it on.

  The bedroom door opened, and my sister came in to get the nightdress from under her pillow. She said, “You’ve been so naughty that I’m not even allowed to be in the room with you. I get to sleep in Mummy and Daddy’s bed tonight. And Daddy says I can watch the television.”

  There was an old television in a brown wooden cabinet in the corner of my parents’ bedroom that was almost never turned on. The vertical hold was unreliable, and the fuzzy black-and-white picture had a tendency to stream, in a slow ribbon: people’s heads vanished off the bottom of the screen as their feet descended, in a stately fashion, from the top.