The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘You come back sometimes,’ she said. ‘You were here once when you were twenty-four, I remember. You had two young children, and you were so scared. You came here before you left these parts; you were, what, in your thirties then? I fed you a good meal in the kitchen, and you told me about your dreams and the art you were making.’

‘I don’t remember.’

She pushed the hair from her eyes. ‘It’s easier that way.’

I sipped my tea, and finished the sandwich. The mug was white, and so was the plate. The endless summer evening was coming to an end.

I asked her again, ‘Why did I come here?’

‘Lettie wanted you to,’ said somebody.

The person who said that was walking around the pond: a woman in a brown coat, wearing wellington boots. I looked at her in confusion. She looked younger than I was now. I remembered her as vast, as adult, but now I saw she was only in her late thirties. I remembered her as stout, but she was buxom, and attractive in an apple-cheeked sort of a way. She was still Ginnie Hempstock, Lettie’s mother, and she looked, I was certain, just as she had looked forty-something years ago.

She sat down on the bench on the other side of me, so I was flanked by Hempstock women. She said, ‘I think Lettie just wants to know if it was worth it.’

‘If what was worth it?’

‘You,’ said the old woman, tartly.

‘Lettie did a very big thing for you,’ said Ginnie. ‘I think she mostly wants to find out what happened next, and whether it was worth everything she did.’

‘She … sacrificed herself for me.’

‘After a fashion, dear,’ said Ginnie. ‘The hunger birds tore out your heart. You screamed so piteously as you died. She couldn’t abide that. She had to do something.’

I tried to remember this. I said, ‘That isn’t how I remember it.’

The old lady sniffed. ‘Didn’t I just say you’ll never get any two people to remember anything the same?’ she asked.

‘Can I talk to her?’

‘She’s sleeping,’ said Lettie’s mother. ‘She’s healing. She’s not talking yet.’

‘Not until she’s done where she is,’ said Lettie’s grandmother, gesturing, but I could not tell if she was pointing to the duckpond or to the sky.

‘When will that be?’

‘When she’s good and ready,’ said the old woman, as her daughter said, ‘Soon.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘If she brought me here to look at me, let her look at me,’ and as I said it, I knew that it had already happened. How long had I been sitting on that bench? As I had been remembering her, she had been examining me. ‘Oh. She did already, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘And did I pass?’

The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, ‘You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.’

I put the empty cup and plate down on the ground.

Ginnie Hempstock said, ‘I think you’re doing better than you were the last time we saw you. You’re growing a new heart, for a start.’

In my memory she was a mountain, this woman, and I had sobbed and shivered on her bosom. Now she was smaller than I was, and I could not imagine her comforting me, not in that way.

The moon was full, in the sky above the pond. I could not for the life of me remember what phase the moon had been in the last time I had noticed it. I could not actually remember the last time I had done more than glance at the moon.

‘So what will happen now?’

‘Same thing as happens every other time you’ve come here,’ said the old woman. ‘You go home.’

‘I don’t know where that is any more,’ I told them.

‘You always say that,’ said Ginnie.

In my memory Lettie Hempstock was still a full head taller than I was. She was eleven, after all. I wondered what I would see – who I would see – if she stood before me now.

The moon in the duckpond was full as well, and I found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones who went fishing in a lake for the moon, with nets, convinced that the reflection in the water was nearer and easier to catch than the globe that hung in the sky.

And, of course, it is.

I got up and walked a few steps to the edge of the pond. ‘Lettie,’ I said, trying to ignore the two women behind me. ‘Thank you for saving my life.’

‘She should never’ve taken you with her in the first place, when she went off to find the start of it all,’ sniffed Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘Nothing to stop her sorting it all out on her own. Didn’t need to take you along for company, silly thing. Well, that’ll learn her for next time.’

I turned and looked at Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘Do you really remember when the moon was made?’ I asked.

‘I remember lots of things,’ she said.

‘Will I come back here again?’ I asked.

‘That’s not for you to know,’ said the old woman.

‘Get along now,’ said Ginnie Hempstock, gently. ‘There’s people who are wondering where you’ve got to.’

And when she mentioned them, I realised, with an awkward horror, that my sister, her husband, her children and my own, all the well-wishers and mourners and visitors, would be puzzling over what had become of me. Still, if there was a day that they would find my absent ways easy to forgive, it was today. It had been a long day and a hard one. I was glad that it was over.

I said, ‘I hope that I haven’t been a bother.’

‘No, dear,’ said the old woman. ‘No bother at all.’

I heard a cat miaow. A moment later, it sauntered out of the shadows and into a patch of bright moonlight. It approached me confidently, pushed its head against my shoe.

I crouched beside it and scratched its forehead, stroked its back. It was a beautiful cat, black, or so I imagined, the moonlight having swallowed the colour of things. It had a white spot over one ear.

I said, ‘I used to have a cat like this. She was beautiful. I don’t actually remember what happened to her.’

‘You brought her back to us,’ said Ginnie Hempstock. And then she touched my shoulder with her hand, squeezing it for a heartbeat, and she walked away.

I picked up my plate and my mug, and I carried them along the path with me as we made our way back to the house, the old woman and I.

‘The moon does shine as bright as day,’ I said. ‘Like in the song.’

‘It’s good to have a full moon,’ she agreed.

I said, ‘It’s funny. For a moment, I thought there were two of you. Isn’t that odd?’

‘It’s just me,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s only ever just me.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Of course it is.’

I was going to take the plate and mug into the kitchen, but she stopped me at the farmhouse door. ‘You ought to get back to your family now,’ she said. ‘They’ll be sending out a search party.’

‘They’ll forgive me,’ I said. I hoped that they would. My sister would be concerned, and there would be people I barely knew disappointed not to have told me how very, very sorry they were for my loss. ‘You’ve been so kind. Letting me sit and think here. By the pond. I’m very grateful.’

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she said. ‘Nothing kind about it.’

‘Next time Lettie writes from Australia,’ I said, ‘please tell her I said hello.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘She’ll be glad you thought of her.’

I got into the car and started the engine. The old woman stood in the doorway, watching me, politely, until I had turned the car around and was on my way up the lane.

I looked back at the farmhouse in my rear-view mirror, and a trick of the light made it seem as if two moons hung in the sky above it, like a pair of eyes watching me from above: one moon perfectly full and round, the other, its twin on the other side of the sky, a half-moon.

Curiously I turned in my seat and looked back: a single half-moon hung over the farmhouse, peaceful and pale and perfect.

I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an after-image, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.