The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The great wave came, and the world rumbled, and I looked up as it reached us: it was taller than trees, than houses, than mind or eyes could hold, than heart could follow.

Only when it reached Lettie Hempstock’s floating body did the enormous wave crash down. I expected to be soaked, or worse, to be swept away by the angry ocean water, and I raised my arm to cover my face.

There was no splash of breakers, no deafening crash, and when I lowered my arm I could see nothing but the still black water of a pond in the night, and nothing on the surface of the pond but a smattering of lily pads and the thoughtful, incomplete reflection of the moon.

Old Mrs Hempstock was gone too. I had thought that she was standing beside me, but only Ginnie stood there, next to me, staring down silently into the dark mirror of the little pond.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you home.’

Chapter 15

There was a Land Rover parked behind the cowshed. The doors were open and the ignition key was in the lock. I sat on the newspaper-covered passenger seat and watched Ginnie Hempstock turn the key. The engine sputtered a few times before it started.

I had not imagined any of the Hempstocks driving. I said, ‘I didn’t know you had a car.’

‘Lots of things you don’t know,’ said Mrs Hempstock, tartly. Then she glanced at me more gently and said, ‘You can’t know everything.’ She backed the Land Rover up and it bumped its way forward across the ruts and the puddles of the back of the farmyard.

There was something on my mind.

‘Old Mrs Hempstock says that Lettie isn’t dead,’ I said. ‘But she looked dead. I think she is actually dead. I don’t think it’s true that she’s not dead.’

Ginnie looked like she was going to say something about the nature of truth, but all she said was, ‘She’s hurt. Very badly hurt. The ocean has taken her. Honestly, I don’t know if it will ever give her back. But we can hope, can’t we?’

‘Yes.’ I squeezed my hands into fists, and I hoped as hard as I knew how.

We bumped and jolted up the lane at fifteen miles per hour.

I said, ‘Was she – is she – really your daughter?’ I didn’t know, I still don’t know, why I asked her that. Perhaps I just wanted to know more about the girl who had saved my life, who had rescued me more than once. I didn’t know anything about her.

‘More or less,’ said Ginnie. ‘The men Hempstocks, my brothers, they went out into the world, and they had babies who’ve had babies. There are Hempstock women out there in your world, and I’ll wager each of them is a wonder in her own way. But only Gran and me and Lettie are the pure thing.’

‘She didn’t have a daddy?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Did you have a daddy?’

‘You’re all questions, aren’t you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men.’

I said, ‘You don’t have to take me home. I could stay with you. I could wait until Lettie comes back from the ocean. I could work on your farm, and carry stuff, and learn to drive a tractor.’

She said, ‘No,’ but she said it kindly. ‘You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.’

A flash of resentment. It’s hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having, if not died, then having given up her life. It wasn’t fair.

‘Life’s not fair,’ said Ginnie, as if I had spoken aloud.

She turned into our driveway, pulled up outside the front door. I got out and she did too.

‘Better make it easier for you to go home,’ she said.

Mrs Hempstock rang the doorbell, although the door was never locked, and industriously scraped the soles of her wellington boots on the doormat until my mother opened the door. She was dressed for bed, and wearing her quilted pink dressing gown.

‘Here he is,’ said Ginnie. ‘Safe and sound, the soldier back from the wars. He had a lovely time at our Lettie’s going-away party, but now it’s time for this young man to get his rest.’

My mother looked blank – almost confused – and then the confusion was replaced by a smile, as if the world had just reconfigured itself into a form that made sense.

‘Oh, you didn’t have to bring him back,’ said my mother. ‘One of us would have come and picked him up.’ Then she looked down at me. ‘What do you say to Mrs Hempstock, darling?’

I said it automatically. ‘Thank-you-for-having-me.’

My mother said, ‘Very good, dear.’ Then, ‘Lettie’s going away?’

‘To Australia,’ said Ginnie. ‘To be with her father. We’ll miss having this little fellow over to play, but, well, we’ll let you know when Lettie comes back. He can come and play then.’

I was getting tired. The party had been fun, although I could not remember much about it. I knew that I would not visit the Hempstock farm again, though. Not unless Lettie was there.

Australia was a long, long way away. I wondered how long it would be until she came back from Australia with her father. Years, I supposed. Australia was on the other side of the world, across the ocean …

A small part of my mind remembered an alternative pattern of events, and then lost it, as if I had woken from a comfortable sleep, and looked around, pulled the bedclothes over me and returned to my dream.

Mrs Hempstock got back into her ancient Land Rover, so bespattered with mud (I could now see, in the light above the front door) that there was almost no trace of the original paintwork visible, and she backed it up, down the drive, towards the lane.

My mother seemed unbothered that I had returned home in fancy dress clothes at almost eleven at night. She said, ‘I have some bad news, dear.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Ursula’s had to leave. Family matters. Pressing family matters. She’s already left. I know how much you children liked her.’

I knew that I didn’t like her, but I said nothing.

There was now nobody sleeping in my bedroom at the top of the stairs. My mother asked if I would like my room back for a while. I said no, unsure of why I was saying no. I could not remember why I disliked Ursula Monkton so much – indeed, I felt faintly guilty for disliking her so absolutely and so irrationally – but I had no desire to return to that bedroom, despite the little yellow hand basin just my size, and I remained in the shared bedroom until our family moved out of that house half a decade later (we children protesting, the adults I think just relieved that their financial difficulties were over).

The house was demolished after we moved out. I would not go and see it standing empty, and refused to witness the demolition. There was too much of my life bound up in those bricks and tiles, those drainpipes and walls.

Years later, my sister, now an adult herself, confided in me that she believed that our mother had fired Ursula Monkton (whom she remembered, so fondly, as the nice one in a sequence of grumpy childminders) because our father was having an affair with her. It was possible, I agreed. Our parents were both still alive then, and I could have asked them, but I didn’t.

My father did not mention the events of those nights, not then, not later.

If I took anything from him and my childhood, it was the resolve not to shout at people, and especially not to shout at children.

I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.

I did not ever go down the lane all the way to the end. I did not think of the white Mini. When I thought of the opal miner, it was in the context of the two rough raw opal rocks that sat on our mantelpiece, and in my memory he always wore a checked shirt and jeans. His face and arms were tan, not the cherry-red of monoxide poisoning, and he had no bow tie.

Monster, the ginger tomcat the opal miner had left us, had wandered off to be fed by other families, and although we saw him, from time to time, prowling the ditches and trees at the end of the lane, he would not ever come when we called. I was relieved by this, I think. He had never been our cat. We knew it, and so did he.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. But I was seven when all of these things happened, and I was the same person at the end of it that I was at the beginning, wasn’t I? So was everyone else. People don’t change.

Some things changed, though.

A month or so after the events here, and five years before the ramshackle world I lived in was demolished and replaced by trim, squat, regular houses containing smart young people who worked in the City but lived in my town, who made money by moving money from place to place but who did not build or dig or farm or weave, and nine years before I would kiss smiling Callie Anders …

I came home from school. The month was May, or perhaps early June. She was waiting by the back door as if she knew precisely where she was and who she was looking for: a young black cat, larger than a kitten now, with a white splodge over one ear, and with eyes of an intense and unusual greenish-blue.

She followed me into the house.

I fed her with an unused can of Monster’s cat food, which I spooned into Monster’s dusty bowl.

My parents, who had never noticed the ginger tom’s disappearance, did not initially notice the arrival of the new kitten-cat, and by the time my father commented on her existence, she had been living with us for several weeks, exploring the garden until I came home from school, then staying near me while I read or played. At night she would wait beneath the bed until the lights were turned out, then she would accommodate herself on the pillow beside me, grooming my hair, and purring, so quietly as never to disturb my sister.

I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek.

She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.

Epilogue

I sat on the dilapidated green bench beside the duckpond, at the back of the red-brick farmhouse, and I thought about my kitten.

I only remembered that Ocean had grown into a cat, and that I had adored her for years. I wondered what had happened to her, and then I thought, it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.

A door opened in the farmhouse, and I heard feet on the path. Soon the old woman sat down beside me. ‘I brung you a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘And a cheese and tomato sandwich. You’ve been out here for quite a while. I thought you’d probably fallen in.’

‘I sort of did,’ I told her. And, ‘Thank you.’ It had become dusk, without my noticing, while I had been sitting there.

I took the tea, and sipped it, and I looked at the woman, more carefully this time. I compared her to my memories of forty years ago. I said, ‘You aren’t Lettie’s mother. You’re her grandmother, aren’t you? You’re Old Mrs Hempstock.’

‘That’s right,’ she said, unperturbed. ‘Eat your sandwich.’

I took a bite of my sandwich. It was good, really good. Freshly baked bread, sharp, salty cheese, the kind of tomatoes that actually taste like something.

I was awash in memory, and I wanted to know what it meant, what it all meant. I said, ‘Is it true?’ and felt foolish. Of all the questions I could have asked, I had asked that.

Old Mrs Hempstock shrugged. ‘What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and they could be continents away for all it means anything.’

There was another question I needed answered. I said, ‘Why did I come here?’

She looked at me as if it were a trick question. ‘The funeral,’ she said. ‘You wanted to get away from everyone and be on your own. So first of all you drove back to the place you’d lived in as a boy, and when that didn’t give you what you missed, you came here, like you always do.’

‘Like I always do?’ I drank some more tea. It was still hot, and strong enough: a perfect cup of builder’s tea. You could stand a spoon straight up in it, as my father always said of a cup of tea of which he approved.

‘Like you always do,’ she repeated.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been here since, well, since Lettie went to Australia. Her going-away party.’ And then I said, ‘Which never happened. You know what I mean.’