The Ocean at the End of the Lane (9 page)

Ursula Monkton rose unsteadily, as if the air had
just become hot and was carrying her upwards. Then Lettie Hempstock whispered
old words into the world and the meadow exploded into a golden light. I saw
Ursula Monkton swept up and away, although I felt no wind, but there had to be a
wind, for she was flailing and tipping like a dead leaf in a gale. I watched her
tumble into the night, and then Ursula Monkton and her lightnings were gone.

“Come on,” said Lettie Hempstock. “We should get
you in front of a kitchen fire. And a hot bath. You'll catch your death.” She
let go of my hand, stopped hugging me, stepped back. The golden glow dimmed, so
slowly, and then it was gone, leaving only vanishing glimmers and twinkles in
the bushes, like the final moments of the fireworks on Bonfire Night.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then she'll come back. And you'll get in
trouble.”

“That's as may be,” said Lettie. “Are you
hungry?”

She asked me, and I knew that I was. I had
forgotten, somehow, but now I remembered. I was so hungry it hurt.

“Let's see . . .” Lettie was talking as
she led me through the fields. “You're wet through. We'll need to get you
something to wear. I'll have a look in the chest of drawers in the green
bedroom. I think Cousin Japeth left some of his clothes there when he went off
to fight in the Mouse Wars. He wasn't much bigger than you.”

The kitten was licking my fingers with a small,
rough tongue.

“I found a kitten,” I said.

“I can see that. She must have followed you back
from the fields where you pulled her up.”

“This is
that
kitten? The same one that I
picked?”

“Yup. Did she tell you her name, yet?”

“No. Do they do that?”

“Sometimes. If you listen.”

I saw the lights of the Hempstocks' farm in front
of us, welcoming, and I was cheered, although I could not understand how we had
got from the field we were in to the farmhouse so quickly.

“You were lucky,” said Lettie. “Fifteen feet
further back, and the field belongs to Colin Anders.”

“You would have come anyway,” I told her. “You
would have saved me.”

She squeezed my arm with her hand but she said
nothing.

I said, “Lettie. I don't want to go home.” That was
not true. I wanted to go home more than anything, just not to the place I had
fled that night. I wanted to go back to the home I had lived in before the opal
miner had killed himself in our little white Mini, or before he had run over my
kitten.

The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest,
and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not. The rain had become a
drizzle once again.

We splashed through deep puddles, Lettie in her
Wellington boots, my stinging feet bare. The smell of manure was sharp in the
air as we reached the farmyard, and then we walked through a side door and into
the huge farmhouse kitchen.

IX.

L
ettie's
mother was prodding the huge fireplace with a poker, pushing the burning logs
together.

Old Mrs. Hempstock was stirring a bulbous pot on
the stove with a large wooden spoon. She lifted the spoon to her mouth, blew on
it theatrically, sipped from it, pursed her lips, then added a pinch of
something and a fistful of something else to it. She turned down the flame. Then
she looked at me, from my wet hair to my bare feet, which were blue with cold.
As I stood there a puddle began to appear on the flagstone floor around me, and
the drips of water from my dressing gown splashed into it.

“Hot bath,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Or he'll
catch his death.”

“That was what I said,” said Lettie.

Lettie's mother was already hauling a tin bath from
beneath the kitchen table, and filling it with steaming water from the enormous
black kettle that hung above the fireplace. Pots of cold water were added until
she pronounced it the perfect temperature.

“Right. In you go,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock.
“Spit-spot.”

I looked at her, horrified. Was I going to have to
undress in front of people I didn't know?

“We'll wash your clothes, and dry them for you, and
mend that dressing gown,” said Lettie's mother, and she took the dressing gown
from me, and she took the kitten, which I had barely realized I was still
holding, and then she walked away.

As quickly as possible I shed my red nylon
pajamas—the bottoms were soaked and the legs were now ragged and ripped and
would never be whole again. I dipped my fingers into the water, then I climbed
in and sat down on the tin floor of the bath in that reassuring kitchen in front
of the huge fire, and I leaned back in the hot water. My feet began to throb as
they came back to life. I knew that
naked
was wrong, but the Hempstocks seemed
indifferent to my nakedness: Lettie was gone, and my pajamas and dressing gown
with her; her mother was getting out knives, forks, spoons, little jugs and
bigger jugs, carving knives and wooden trenchers, and arranging them about the
table.

Old Mrs. Hempstock passed me a mug, filled with
soup from the black pot on the stove. “Get that down you. Heat you up from the
inside, first.”

The soup was rich, and warming. I had never drunk
soup in the bath before. It was a perfectly new experience. When I finished the
mug I gave it back to her, and in return she passed me a large cake of white
soap and a face-flannel and said, “Now get scrubbin'. Rub the life and the
warmth back into your bones.”

She sat down in a rocking chair on the other side
of the fire, and rocked gently, not looking at me.

I felt safe. It was as if the essence of
grandmotherliness had been condensed into that one place, that one time. I was
not at all afraid of Ursula Monkton, whatever she was, not then. Not there.

Young Mrs. Hempstock opened an oven door and took
out a pie, its shiny crust brown and glistening, and put it on the window ledge
to cool.

I dried myself off with a towel they brought me,
the fire's heat drying me as much as the towel did, then Lettie Hempstock
returned and gave me a voluminous white thing, like a girl's nightdress but made
of white cotton, with long arms, and a skirt that draped to the floor, and a
white cap. I hesitated to put it on until I realized what it was: a nightgown. I
had seen pictures of them in books. Wee Willie Winkie ran through the town
wearing one in every book of nursery rhymes I had ever owned.

I slipped into it. The nightcap was too big for me,
and fell down over my face, and Lettie took it away once more.

Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef,
with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside,
buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have
been nettles, roasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I
liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one, but I was brave, and I tried
it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my
childhood). For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen
raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and
richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home.

The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire,
until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its
size in a meal of scraps of meat.

While we ate, nothing was said about what had
happened to me, or why I was there. The Hempstock ladies talked about the
farm—there was the door to the milking shed needed a new coat of paint, a cow
named Rhiannon who looked to be getting lame in her left hind leg, the path to
be cleared on the way that led down to the reservoir.

“Is it just the three of you?” I asked. “Aren't
there any men?”

“Men!” hooted Old Mrs. Hempstock. “I dunno what
blessed good a man would be! Nothing a man could do around this farm that I
can't do twice as fast and five times as well.”

Lettie said, “We've had men here, sometimes. They
come and they go. Right now, it's just us.”

Her mother nodded. “They went off to seek their
fate and fortune, mostly, the male Hempstocks. There's never any keeping them
here when the call comes. They get a distant look in their eyes and then we've
lost them, good and proper. Next chance they gets they're off to towns and even
cities, and nothing but an occasional postcard to even show they were here at
all.”

Old Mrs. Hempstock said, “His parents are coming!
They're driving here. They just passed Parson's elm tree. The badgers saw
them.”

“Is she with them?” I asked. “Ursula Monkton?”

“Her?”
said Old Mrs. Hempstock, amused. “That
thing? Not her.”

I thought about it for a moment. “They will make me
go back with them, and then she'll lock me in the attic and let my daddy kill me
when she gets bored. She said so.”

“She may have told you that, ducks,” said Lettie's
mother, “but she en't going to do it, or anything like it, or my name's not
Ginnie Hempstock.”

I liked the name Ginnie, but I did not believe her,
and I was not reassured. Soon the door to the kitchen would open, and my father
would shout at me, or he would wait until we got into the car, and he would
shout at me then, and they would take me back up the lane to my house, and I
would be lost.

“Let's see,” said Ginnie Hempstock. “We could be
away when they get here. They could arrive last Tuesday, when there's nobody
home.”

“Out of the question,” said the old woman. “Just
complicates things, playing with time . . . We could turn the boy into
something else, so they'd never find him, look how hard they might.”

I blinked. Was that even possible? I wanted to be
turned into something. The kitten had finished its portion of meat-scraps
(indeed, it seemed to have eaten more than the house cat) and now it leapt into
my lap, and began to wash itself.

Ginnie Hempstock got up and went out of the room. I
wondered where she was going.

“We can't turn him into anything,” said Lettie,
clearing the table of the last of the plates and cutlery. “His parents will get
frantic. And if they are being controlled by the flea, she'll just feed the
franticness. Next thing you know, we'll have the police dragging the reservoir,
looking for him. Or worse. The ocean.”

The kitten lay down on my lap and curled up,
wrapping around itself until it was nothing more than a flattened circlet of
fluffy black fur. It closed its vivid blue eyes, the color of an ocean, and it
slept, and it purred.

“Well?” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “What do you
suggest, then?”

Lettie thought, pushing her lips together, moving
them over to one side. Her head tipped, and I thought she was running through
alternatives. Then her face brightened. “Snip and cut?” she said.

Old Mrs. Hempstock sniffed. “You're a good girl,”
she said. “I'm not saying you're not. But snippage . . . well,
you
couldn't do that. Not yet. You'd have to cut the edges out exactly, sew them
back without the seam showing. And what would you cut out? The flea won't let
you snip
her
. She's not in the fabric. She's outside of it.”

Ginnie Hempstock returned. She was carrying my old
dressing gown. “I put it through the mangle,” she said. “But it's still damp.
That'll make the edges harder to line up. You don't want to do needlework when
it's still damp.”

She put the dressing gown down on the table, in
front of Old Mrs. Hempstock. Then she pulled out from the front pocket of her
apron a pair of scissors, black and old, a long needle, and a spool of red
thread.

“Rowanberry and red thread, stop a witch in her
speed,”
I recited. It was something I had read in a book.

“That'd work, and work well,” said Lettie, “if
there was any witches involved in all this. But there's not.”

Old Mrs. Hempstock was examining my dressing gown.
It was brown and faded, with a sort of a sepia tartan across it. It had been a
present from my father's parents, my grandparents, several birthdays ago, when
it had been comically big on me. “Probably . . . ,” she said, as if
she was talking to herself, “it would be best if your father was happy for you
to stay the night here. But for that to happen they couldn't be angry with you,
or even worried . . .”

The black scissors were in her hand and already
snip-snip-snipping then, when I heard a knock on the front door, and Ginnie
Hempstock got up to answer it. She went into the hall and closed the door behind
her.

“Don't let them take me,” I said to Lettie.

“Hush,” she said. “I'm working here, while
Grandmother's snipping. You just be sleepy, and at peace. Happy.”

I was far from happy, and not in the slightest bit
sleepy. Lettie leaned across the table, and she took my hand. “Don't worry,” she
said.

And with that the door opened, and my father and my
mother were in the kitchen. I wanted to hide, but the kitten shifted
reassuringly, on my lap, and Lettie smiled at me, a reassuring smile.

“We are looking for our son,” my father was telling
Mrs. Hempstock, “and we have reason to believe . . .” And even as he
was saying that my mother was striding toward me. “
There
he is! Darling, we were
worried
silly
!”

“You're in a lot of trouble, young man,” said my
father.

Snip! Snip! Snip!
went the black scissors, and the
irregular section of fabric that Old Mrs. Hempstock had been cutting fell to the
table.

My parents froze. They stopped talking, stopped
moving. My father's mouth was still open, my mother stood on one leg, as
unmoving as if she were a shop-window dummy.

“What . . . what did you do to them?” I
was unsure whether or not I ought to be upset.

Ginnie Hempstock said, “They're fine. Just a little
snipping, then a little sewing and it'll all be good as gold.” She reached down
to the table, pointed to the scrap of faded dressing gown tartan resting upon
it. “
That's
your dad and you in the hallway, and
that's
the bathtub. She's
snipped that out. So without any of that, there's no reason for your daddy to be
angry with you.”

I had not told them about the bathtub. I did not
wonder how she knew.

Now the old woman was threading the needle with the
red thread. She sighed, theatrically. “Old eyes,” she said. “Old eyes.” But she
licked the tip of the thread and pushed it through the eye of the needle without
any apparent difficulty.

“Lettie. You'll need to know what his toothbrush
looks like,” said the old woman. She began to sew the edges of the dressing gown
together with tiny, careful stitches.

“What's your toothbrush look like?” asked Lettie.
“Quickly.”

“It's green,” I said. “Bright green. A sort of
appley green. It's not very big. Just a green toothbrush, my size.” I wasn't
describing it very well, I knew. I pictured it in my head, tried to find
something more about it that I could describe, to set it apart from all other
toothbrushes. No good. I imagined it, saw it in my mind's eye, with the other
toothbrushes in its red-and-white-spotted beaker above the bathroom sink.

“Got it!” said Lettie. “Nice job.”

“Very nearly done here,” said Old Mrs.
Hempstock.

Ginnie Hempstock smiled a huge smile, and it lit up
her ruddy round face. Old Mrs. Hempstock picked up the scissors and snipped a
final time, and a fragment of red thread fell to the tabletop.