The Ocean at the End of the Lane (7 page)

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.

“I don't care,” I told her.

“Daddy said you ruined his tie. And he's all wet,”
said my sister, with satisfaction in her voice.

Ursula Monkton was at the bedroom door. “We don't
talk to him,” she told my sister. “We won't talk to him again until he's allowed
to rejoin the family.”

My sister slipped out, heading to the next room, my
parents' room. “You aren't in my family,” I told Ursula Monkton. “When Mummy
comes back, I'll tell her what Daddy did.”

“She won't be home for another two hours,” said
Ursula Monkton. “And what can you say to her that will do anything? She backs up
your father in everything, doesn't she?”

She did. They always presented a perfectly united
front.

“Don't cross me,” said Ursula Monkton. “I have
things to do here, and you are getting in my way. Next time it will be so much
worse. Next time, I lock you in the attic.”

“I'm not afraid of you,” I told her. I was afraid
of her, more afraid than I had ever been of anything.

“It's hot in here,” she told me, and smiled. She
walked over to the gas fire, reached down, turned it off, took the matches from
the mantel.

I said, “You're still just a flea.”

She stopped smiling. She reached up to the lintel
above the door, higher than any child could reach, and she pulled down the key
that rested there. She walked out of the room, and closed the door. I heard the
key turn, heard the lock engage and click.

I could hear television voices coming from the room
next door. I heard the hallway door close, cutting off the two bedrooms from the
rest of the house, and I knew that Ursula Monkton was going downstairs. I went
over to the lock, and squinted through it. I had learned from a book that I
could use a pencil to push a key through a keyhole onto a sheet of paper
beneath, and free myself that way . . . but the keyhole was empty.

I cried then, cold and still damp, in that bedroom,
cried with pain and anger and terror, cried safely in the knowledge that no one
would come in and see me, that no one would tease me for crying, as they teased
any boys at my school who were unwise enough to give way to tears.

I heard the gentle patter of raindrops against the
glass of my bedroom window, and even that brought me no joy.

I cried until I was all cried out. Then I breathed
in huge gulps of air, and I thought, Ursula Monkton, flapping canvas monster,
worm and flea, would get me if I tried to leave the property. I knew that.

But Ursula Monkton had locked me in. She would not
expect me to leave now.

And, perhaps, if I was lucky, she might be
distracted.

I opened the bedroom window, and listened to the
night. The gentle rain made a noise that was almost a rustling. It was a cold
night, and I was already chilled. My sister was in the room next door, watching
something on the television. She would not hear me.

I went over to the door, and turned off the
light.

I walked through the dark bedroom, and climbed back
on the bed.

I'm in my bed,
I thought.
I'm lying in my bed,
thinking about how upset I am. Soon, I'll fall asleep. I'm in my bed, and I know
she's won, and if she checks up on me I'm in my bed, asleep.

I'm in my bed and it's time for me to sleep now
. . . I can't even keep my eyes open. I'm fast asleep. Fast asleep in
my bed . . .

I stood on the bed, and climbed out of the window.
I hung for a moment, then let myself drop, as quietly as I could, onto the
balcony. That was the easy bit.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They
taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They
were my teachers and my advisors. In books, boys climbed trees, so I climbed
trees, sometimes very high, always scared of falling. In books, people climbed
up and down drainpipes to get in and out of houses, so I climbed up and down
drainpipes too. They were the heavy iron drainpipes of old, clamped to the
brick, not today's lightweight plastic affairs.

I had never climbed down a drainpipe in the dark,
or in the rain, but I knew where the footholds were. I knew also that the
biggest challenge would not be falling, a twenty-foot tumble down into the wet
flower bed; it was that the drainpipe I was climbing down went past the
television room, downstairs, in which, I had no doubt, Ursula Monkton and my
father would be watching television.

I tried not to think.

I climbed over the brick wall that edged the
balcony, reached out until I felt the iron drainpipe, cold and slick with rain.
I held on to it, then took one large step toward it, letting my bare feet come
to rest on the metal clamp that encircled the drainpipe, fixing it sturdily to
the brick.

I went down, a step at a time, imagining myself
Batman, imagining myself a hundred heroes and heroines of school romances, then,
remembering myself, I imagined that I was a drop of rain on the wall, a brick, a
tree.
I am on my bed,
I thought. I was not here, with the light of the TV room,
uncurtained, spilling out below me, making the rain that fell past the window
into a series of glittering lines and streaks.

Don't look at me,
I thought.
Don't look out of the
window.

I inched down. Usually I would have stepped from
the drainpipe over to the TV room's outer window ledge, but that was out of the
question. Warily, I lowered myself another few inches, leaned further back into
the shadows and away from the light, and I stole a terrified glance into the
room, expecting to see my father and Ursula Monkton staring back at me.

The room was empty.

The lights were on, the television on as well, but
nobody was sitting on the sofa and the door to the downstairs hallway was
open.

I took an easy step down onto the window ledge,
hoping against all hope that neither of them would come back in and see me, then
I let myself drop from the ledge into the flower bed. The wet earth was soft
against my feet.

I was going to run, just run, but there was a light
on in the drawing room, where we children never went, the oak-paneled room kept
only for best and for special occasions.

The curtains were drawn. The curtains were green
velvet, lined with white, and the light that escaped them, where they had not
been closed all the way, was golden and soft.

I walked over to the window. The curtains were not
completely closed. I could see into the room, see what was immediately in front
of me.

I was not sure what I was looking at. My father had
Ursula Monkton pressed up against the side of the big fireplace in the far wall.
He had his back to me. She did too, her hands pressed against the huge, high
mantelpiece. He was hugging her from behind. Her midi skirt was hiked up around
her waist.

I did not know exactly what they were doing, and I
did not really care, not at that moment. All that mattered was that Ursula
Monkton had her attention on something that was not me, and I turned away from
the gap in the curtains and the light and the house, and I fled, barefoot, into
the rainy dark.

It was not pitch-black. It was the kind of cloudy
night where the clouds seem to gather up light from distant streetlights and
houses below, and throw it back at the earth. I could see enough, once my eyes
adjusted. I made it to the bottom of the garden, past the compost heap and the
grass cuttings, then down the hill to the lane. Brambles and thorns stuck my
feet and pricked my legs, but I kept running.

I went over the low metal fence, into the lane. I
was off our property and it felt as if a headache I had not known that I had had
suddenly lifted. I whispered, urgently, “Lettie? Lettie Hempstock?” and I
thought,
I'm in bed. I'm dreaming all this. Such vivid dreams. I am in my bed,
but I did not believe that Ursula Monkton was thinking about me just then.

As I ran, I thought of my father, his arms around
the housekeeper-who-wasn't, kissing her neck, and then I saw his face through
the chilly bathwater as he held me under, and now I was no longer scared by what
had happened in the bathroom; now I was scared by what it meant that my father
was kissing the neck of Ursula Monkton, that his hands had lifted her midi skirt
above her waist.

My parents were a unit, inviolate. The future had
suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had
jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and was coming down the lane
with me, then.

The flints of the lane hurt my feet as I ran, but I
did not care. Soon enough, I was certain, the thing that was Ursula Monkton
would be done with my father. Perhaps they would go upstairs to check on me
together. She would find that I was gone and she would come after me.

I thought,
If they come after me, they will be in a
car.
I looked for a gap in the hedgerow on either side of the lane. I spotted a
wooden stile and clambered over it, and kept running across the meadow, heart
pounding like the biggest loudest drum there was or had ever been, barefoot,
with my pajamas and my dressing gown all soaked below the knee and clinging. I
ran, not caring about the cow-pats. The meadow was easier on my feet than the
flint lane had been. I was happier, and I felt more real, running on the
grass.

Thunder rumbled behind me, although I had seen no
lightning. I climbed a fence, and my feet sank into the soft earth of a freshly
plowed field. I stumbled across it, falling sometimes, but I kept going. Over a
stile and into the next field, this one unplowed, and I crossed it, keeping
close to the hedge, scared of being too far out in the open.

The lights of a car came down the lane, sudden and
blinding. I froze where I was, closed my eyes, imagined myself asleep in my bed.
The car drove past without slowing, and I caught a glimpse of its rear red
lights as it moved away from me: a white van, that I thought belonged to the
Anders family.

Still, it made the lane seem less safe, and now I
cut away across the meadow. I reached the next field, saw it was only divided
from the one I was in by thin lengths of wire, easy to duck beneath, not even
barbed wire, so I reached out my arm and pushed a bare wire up to make room to
squeeze under, and—

It was as if I had been thumped, and thumped hard,
in the chest. My arm, where it had grasped the wire of the fence, was convulsed,
and my palm was burning as if I had just slammed my funny bone into a wall.

I let go of the electric fence and stumbled back. I
could not run any longer, but I hurried in the wind and the rain and the
darkness along the side of the fence, careful now not to touch it, until I
reached a five-bar gate. I went over the gate, and across the field, heading to
the deeper darkness at the far end—trees, I thought, and woodland—and I did not
go too close to the edge of the field in case there was another electric fence
waiting for me.