The Ocean at the End of the Lane (6 page)

“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.

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.

T
he 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 children'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.