The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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 on parade 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, laid 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 bowl that I realised was a hand basin, set into a small wooden table. There was a fluffy black kitten on the foot of the bed. It opened its eyes as I sat 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 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. 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 tail. There were brown trousers that stopped at the knees, long white stockings, and a chestnut-coloured jacket with a V cut into in 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 maybe. 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 piece 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 home-made 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: 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 I swapped 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 on to 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: doll’s 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 spiralled and turned. Lettie dropped it into the shopping bag, with the broken toys. The kitten slept, and ignored us entirely.

Lettie said, ‘You don’t have to come with me, 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-blue eyes and stared at us disinterestedly as we left.

There were 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 aren’t people,’ I said.

‘Are too.’

I shook my head. ‘I bet you don’t actually look like that,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

Lettie shrugged. ‘Nobody 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’rhaps. 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. ‘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 truthis, 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 books. The kind with no pictures or conversations.

‘I love my ocean,’ Lettie said, in the end.

‘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-coloured 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 pyjamas 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 tracks, while adults take roads and official paths. We went off the road, took a short cut that Lettie knew that led us through some fields, then into the extensive abandoned gardens of a rich man’s crumbling house, and then back on to 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.’

We started up the drive. I said, ‘Are you going to make a spell and send her away?’

‘We don’t do spells,’ she said. She sounded a little disappointed to admit it. ‘We’ll do recipes sometimes. But no spells or cantrips. Gran doesn’t hold with none of that. She says it’s common.’

‘So what’s the stuff in the shopping bag for, then?’

‘It’s to stop things travelling when you don’t want them to. Mark boundaries.’

In the morning sunlight, my house looked so welcoming and friendly. Warm red bricks, and a red tile roof. Lettie reached into the shopping bag. She took a marble from it, pushed it into the still-damp soil. Then, instead of going into the house, she turned left, walking the edge of the property. By Mr Wollery’s vegetable patch we stopped and she took something else from her shopping bag: a headless, legless pink doll-body, with badly chewed hands. She buried it beside the pea plants.

We picked some pea pods, opened them and ate the peas inside. Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and put them in tins, and make them revolting.

Lettie placed a toy wolf, the small plastic kind you would find in a children’s zoo, or an ark, in the coal shed, beneath a large lump of coal. The coal shed smelled of damp and blackness and of old, crushed forests.

‘Will these things make her go away?’

‘No.’

‘Then what are they for?’

‘To stop her going away.’

‘But we want her to go away.’

‘No. We want her to go home.’

I stared at her: at her short brown hair, her snub nose, her freckles. She looked three or four years older than me. She might have been three or four thousand years older, or a thousand times again. I would have trusted her to the gates of Hell and back. But still …

‘I wish you’d explain properly,’ I said. ‘You talk in mysteries all the time.’