The Ocean at the End of the Lane (11 page)

“There's clothes already set out for you to put on
in the morning,” said Lettie. “I'll be asleep in the room next door if you want
me—just shout or knock if you need anything, and I'll come in. Gran said for you
to use the inside lavatory, but it's a long way through the house, and you might
get lost, so if you need to do your business there's a chamber pot under the
bed, same as there's always been.”

I blew out my candle, which left the room
illuminated by the fire in the hearth, and I pushed through the curtains and
climbed up into the bed.

The room was warm, but the sheets were cold as I
got inside them. The bed shook as something landed on it, and then small feet
padded up the blankets, and a warm, furry presence pushed itself into my face
and the kitten began, softly, to purr.

There was still a monster in my house, and, in a
fragment of time that had, perhaps, been snipped out of reality, my father had
pushed me down into the water of the bath and tried, perhaps, to drown me. I had
run for miles through the dark. I had seen my father kissing and touching the
thing that called itself Ursula Monkton. The dread had not left my soul.

But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was
purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I
slept.

X.

I
had
strange dreams in that house, that night. I woke myself in the darkness, and I
knew only that a dream had scared me so badly that I had to wake up or die, and
yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was
haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my
head, simultaneously there and not there.

I missed my father and I missed my mother, and I
missed my bed in my house, only a mile or so away. I missed yesterday, before
Ursula Monkton, before my father's anger, before the bathtub. I wanted that
yesterday back again, and I wanted it so badly.

I tried to pull the dream that had upset me so to
the front of my mind, but it would not come. There had been betrayal in it, I
knew, and loss, and time. The dream had left me scared to go back to sleep: the
fireplace was almost dark now, with only the deep red glow of embers in the
hearth to mark that it had once been burning, once had given light.

I climbed down from the four-poster bed, and felt
beneath it until I found the heavy china chamber pot. I hitched up my nightgown
and I used it. Then I walked to the window and looked out. The moon was still
full, but now it was low in the sky, and a dark orange: what my mother called a
harvest moon. But things were harvested in autumn, I knew, not in spring.

In the orange moonlight I could see an old woman—I
was almost certain it was Old Mrs. Hempstock, although it was hard to see her
face properly—walking up and down. She had a big long stick she was leaning on
as she walked, like a staff. She reminded me of the soldiers I had seen on a
trip to London, outside Buckingham Palace, as they marched backwards and
forwards on parade.

I watched her, and I was comforted.

I climbed back into my bed in the dark, lay my head
on the empty pillow, and thought,
I'll never go back to sleep, not now,
and then
I opened my eyes and saw that it was morning.

There were clothes I had never seen before on a
chair by the bed. There were two china jugs of water—one steaming hot, one
cold—beside a white china bowl that I realized was a handbasin, set into a small
wooden table. The fluffy black kitten had returned to the foot of the bed. It
opened its eyes as I got up: they were a vivid blue-green, unnatural and odd,
like the sea in summer, and it mewed a high-pitched questioning noise. I stroked
it, then I got out of bed.

I mixed the hot water and the cold in the basin,
and I washed my face and my hands. I cleaned my teeth with the cold water. There
was no toothpaste, but there was a small round tin box on which was written
Max
Melton's Remarkably Efficacious Tooth Powder,
in old-fashioned letters. I put
some of the white powder on my green toothbrush, and cleaned my teeth with it.
It tasted minty and lemony in my mouth.

I examined the clothes that had been left out for
me. They were unlike anything I had ever worn before. There were no underpants.
There was a white undershirt, with no buttons but with a long shirttail. There
were brown trousers that stopped at the knees, a pair of long white stockings,
and a chestnut-colored jacket with a V cut into the back, like a swallow's tail.
The light brown socks were more like stockings. I put the clothes on as best I
could, wishing there were zips or clasps, rather than hooks and buttons and
stiff, unyielding buttonholes.

The shoes had silver buckles in the front, but the
shoes were too big and did not fit me, so I went out of the room in my
stockinged feet, and the kitten followed me.

To reach my room the night before I had walked
upstairs and, at the top of the stairs, turned left. Now I turned right, and
walked past Lettie's bedroom (the door was ajar, the room was empty) and made
for the stairs. But the stairs were not where I remembered them. The corridor
ended in a blank wall, and a window that looked out over woodland and
fields.

The black kitten with the blue-green eyes mewed,
loudly, as if to attract my attention, and turned back down the corridor in a
self-important strut, tail held high. It led me down the hall, round a corner
and down a passage I had never seen before, to a staircase. The kitten bounced
amiably down the stairs, and I followed.

Ginnie Hempstock was standing at the foot of the
stairs. “You slept long and well,” she said. “We've already milked the cows.
Your breakfast is on the table, and there's a saucer of cream by the fireplace
for your friend.”

“Where's Lettie, Mrs. Hempstock?”

“Off on an errand, getting stuff she may need. It
has to go, the thing at your house, or there will be trouble, and worse will
follow. She's already bound it once, and it slipped the bounds, so she needs to
send it home.”

“I just want Ursula Monkton to go away,” I said. “I
hate her.”

Ginnie Hempstock put out a finger, ran it across my
jacket. “It's not what anyone else hereabouts is wearing these days,” she said.
“But my mam put a little glamour on it, so it's not as if anyone will notice.
You can walk around in it all you want, and not a soul will think there's
anything odd about it. No shoes?”

“They didn't fit.”

“I'll leave something that will fit you by the back
door, then.”

“Thank you.”

She said, “I don't hate her. She does what she
does, according to her nature. She was asleep, she woke up, she's trying to give
everyone what they want.”

“She hasn't given me anything I want. She says she
wants to put me in the attic.”

“That's as may be. You were her way here, and it's
a dangerous thing to be a door.” She tapped my chest, above my heart, with her
forefinger. “And she was better off where she was. We would have sent her home
safely—done it before for her kind a dozen times. But she's headstrong, that
one. No teaching them. Right. Your breakfast is on the table. I'll be up in the
nine-acre field if anyone needs me.”

There was a bowl of porridge on the kitchen table
and beside it, a saucer with a lump of golden honeycomb on it, and a jug of rich
yellow cream.

I spooned up a lump of the honeycomb and mixed it
into the thick porridge, then I poured in the cream.

There was toast, too, cooked beneath the grill as
my father cooked it, with homemade blackberry jam. There was the best cup of tea
I have ever drunk. By the fireplace, the kitten lapped at a saucer of creamy
milk, and purred so loudly I could hear it across the room.

I wished I could purr too. I would have purred
then.

Lettie came in, carrying a shopping bag, the
old-fashioned kind you never seem to see anymore: elderly women used to carry
them to the shops, big woven bags that were almost baskets, raffia-work outside
and lined with cloth, with rope handles. This basket was almost full. Her cheek
had been scratched, and had bled, although the blood had dried. She looked
miserable.

“Hello,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Let me tell you, if you think
that was fun, that wasn't any fun, not one bit. Mandrakes are so loud when you
pull them up, and I didn't have earplugs, and once I'd got it I had to swap it
for a shadow-bottle, an old-fashioned one with lots of shadows dissolved in
vinegar . . .” She buttered some toast, then crushed a lump of golden
honeycomb onto it and started munching. “And that was just to get me to the
bazaar, and they aren't even meant to be open yet. But I got most of what I
needed there.”

“Can I look?”

“If you want to.”

I looked into the basket. It was filled with broken
toys: dolls' eyes and heads and hands, cars with no wheels, chipped cat's-eye
glass marbles. Lettie reached up and took down the jam jar from the window
ledge. Inside it, the silvery-translucent wormhole shifted and twisted and
spiraled and turned. Lettie dropped the jam jar into the shopping bag, with the
broken toys. The kitten slept, and ignored us entirely.

Lettie said, “You don't have to come with, for this
bit. You can stay here while I go and talk to her.”

I thought about it. “I'd feel safer with you,” I
told her.

She did not look happy at this. She said, “Let's go
down to the ocean.” The kitten opened its too-green and blue eyes and stared at
us disinterestedly as we left.

There was a pair of black leather boots, like
riding boots, waiting for me, by the back door. They looked old, but well cared
for, and were just my size. I put them on, although I felt more comfortable in
sandals. Together, Lettie and I walked down to her ocean, by which I mean, the
pond.

We sat on the old bench, and looked at the placid
brown surface of the pond, and the lily pads, and the scum of duckweed by the
water's edge.

“You Hempstocks aren't people,” I said.

“Are too.”

I shook my head. “I bet you don't actually even
look like that,” I said. “Not really.”

Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what
they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. People are much more
complicated than that. It's true of everybody.”

I said, “Are you a monster? Like Ursula
Monkton?”

Lettie threw a pebble into the pond. “I don't think
so,” she said. “Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things
people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used
to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be
scared of, but they aren't.”

I said, “People should be scared of Ursula
Monkton.”

“P'raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared
of?”

“Dunno. Why do you think she's scared of anything?
She's a grown-up, isn't she? Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of
things.”

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That's why
they're monsters. And as for grown-ups . . .” She stopped talking,
rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, “I'm going to tell you something
important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside,
they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside,
they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The
truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” She
thought for a moment. Then she smiled. “Except for Granny, of course.”

We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden
bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true:
if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books
hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or
conversations.

“I love my ocean,” Lettie said, and I knew our time
by the pond was done.

“It's just pretending, though,” I told her, feeling
like I was letting childhood down by admitting it. “Your pond. It's not an
ocean. It can't be. Oceans are bigger than seas. Your pond is just a pond.”

“It's as big as it needs to be,” said Lettie
Hempstock, nettled. She sighed. “We'd better get on with sending Ursula
whatsername back where she came from.” Then she said, “I do know what she's
scared of. And you know what? I'm scared of them too.”

The kitten was nowhere to be seen when we returned
to the kitchen, although the fog-colored cat was sitting on a windowsill,
staring out at the world. The breakfast things had all been tidied up and put
away, and my red pajamas and my dressing gown, neatly folded, were waiting for
me on the table, in a large brown-paper bag, along with my green toothbrush.

“You won't let her get me, will you?” I asked
Lettie.

She shook her head, and together we walked up the
winding flinty lane that led to my house and to the thing who called herself
Ursula Monkton. I carried the brown-paper bag with my nightwear in it, and
Lettie carried her too-big-for-her raffia shopping bag, filled with broken toys,
which she had obtained in exchange for a mandrake that screamed and shadows
dissolved in vinegar.

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden
paths, while adults take roads and official paths. We went off the road, took a
shortcut that Lettie knew that took us through some fields, then into the
extensive abandoned gardens of a rich man's crumbling house, and then back onto
the lane again. We came out just before the place where I had gone over the
metal fence.

Lettie sniffed the air. “No varmints yet,” she
said. “That's good.”

“What
are
varmints?”

She said only, “You'll know 'em when you see 'em.
And I hope you'll never see 'em.”

“Are we going to sneak in?”

“Why would we do that? We'll go up the drive and
through the front door, like gentry.”