The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘You don’t have the money,’ I said. ‘You said you didn’t have any money.’

‘That’s why I’m taking the optometrist job,’ she said. ‘And Ursula’s looking after you for room and board. She needs to live locally for a few months. She phoned this morning. Her references are excellent.’

I hoped that she would be nice. The previous housekeeper, Gertruda, six months earlier, had not been nice: she had enjoyed playing practical jokes on my sister and me, of the apple-pie-bed variety, which left us baffled. Eventually we had marched outside the house with placards saying ‘We hate Gertruda’ and ‘We do not like Gertruda’s cooking’, and put tiny frogs in her bed, and she had gone back to Sweden.

I took a book and went out into the garden.

It was a warm spring day, and sunny, and I climbed up a rope ladder to the lowest branch of the big beech tree, sat on it, and read my book. I was not scared of anything when I read my book: I was far away, in ancient Egypt, learning about Hathor, and how she had stalked Egypt in the form of a lioness, and killed so many people that the sands of Egypt turned red, and how they had only defeated her by mixing beer and honey and sleeping draughts, and dying this concoction red, so she thought it was blood, and she drank it, and fell asleep. Ra, the father of the gods, made her the goddess of love after that, so the wounds she had inflicted on people would now only be wounds of the heart.

I wondered why the gods had done that. Why they hadn’t just killed her, when they had the chance.

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?

I was getting hungry. I climbed down from my tree, and went to the back of the house, past the laundry room that smelled of laundry soap and mildew, past the little coal and wood shed, past the outside toilet where the spiders hung and waited, wooden doors painted garden green. In through the back door, along the hallway and into the kitchen.

My mother was in there with a woman I had never seen before. When I saw her, my heart hurt. I mean that literally, not metaphorically: there was a momentary twinge in my chest, just a flash, and then it was gone.

My sister was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal.

The woman was very pretty. She had shortish honey-blond hair, huge grey-blue eyes, and pale lipstick. She seemed tall, even for an adult.

‘Darling? This is Ursula Monkton,’ said my mother. I said nothing. I just stared at her. My mother nudged me.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘He’s shy,’ said Ursula Monkton. ‘I am certain that once he warms up to me we shall be great friends.’ She reached out a hand and patted my sister’s mousy-brown hair. My sister smiled a gap-toothed smile.

‘I like you so much,’ my sister said. Then she said, to our mother and me, ‘When I grow up I want to be Ursula Monkton.’

My mother and Ursula laughed. ‘You little dear,’ said Ursula Monkton. Then she turned to me. ‘And what about us, eh? Are we friends as well?’

I just looked at her, all grown-up and blonde, in her grey and pink dress, and I was scared.

Her dress wasn’t ragged. It was just the fashion of the thing, I suppose, the kind of dress that it was. But when I looked at her, I imagined her dress flapping, in that windless kitchen, flapping like the mainsail of a ship, on a lonely ocean, under an orange sky.

I don’t know what I said in reply, or if I even said anything. But I went out of that kitchen, although I was hungry, without even an apple.

I took my book into the back garden, beneath the balcony, by the flower bed under the television-room window, and I read – forgetting my hunger in Egypt with animal-headed gods who cut each other up and then restored one another to life again.

My sister came out into the garden.

‘I like her so much,’ she told me. ‘She’s my friend. Do you want to see what she gave me?’ She produced a small grey purse, the kind my mother kept in her handbag for her coins, that fastened with a metal butterfly clip. It looked like it was made of leather. I wondered if it was mouse skin. She opened the purse, put her fingers into the opening, came out with a large silver coin: half a crown.

‘Look!’ she said. ‘Look what I got!’

I wanted a half a crown. No, I wanted what I could buy with half a crown – magic tricks and plastic joke toys, and books, and, oh, so many things. But I did not want a little grey purse with a half a crown in it.

‘I don’t like her,’ I told my sister.

‘That’s only because I saw her first,’ said my sister. ‘She’s my friend.’

I did not think that Ursula Monkton was anybody’s friend. I wanted to go and warn Lettie Hempstock about her – but what could I say? That the new housekeeper-nanny wore grey and pink? That she looked at me oddly?

I wished I had never let go of Lettie’s hand. Ursula Monkton was my fault, I was certain of it, and I would not be able to get rid of her by flushing her down a plughole, or putting frogs in her bed.

I should have left at that moment, should have run away, fled down the lane the mile or so to the Hempstocks’ farm, but I didn’t, and then a taxi took my mother away to Dicksons Opticians, where she would show people letters through lenses, and dispense things to help them see more clearly, and I was left there with Ursula Monkton.

She came out into the garden with a plate of sandwiches.

‘I’ve spoken to your mother,’ she said, a sweet smile beneath the pale lipstick, ‘and while I’m here, you children need to limit your travels. You can be anywhere in the house or in the garden, or I will walk with you to your friends’, but you may not leave the property and simply go wandering.’

‘Of course,’ said my sister.

I did not say anything.

My sister ate a peanut butter sandwich.

I was starving. I wondered whether the sandwiches were dangerous or not. I did not know. I was scared that I would eat one and it would turn into worms in my stomach, and that they would wriggle through me, colonising my body, until they forced their way out of my skin.

I went back into the house. I pushed the kitchen door open. Ursula Monkton was not there. I filled my pockets with fruit, with apples and oranges and hard brown pears. I took three bananas and stuffed them down my jumper, and fled to my laboratory.

My laboratory – that was what I called it – was a green-painted shed as far away from the house as you could get, built up against the side of the house’s huge old garage. A fig tree grew beside the shed, although we had never tasted ripe fruit from the tree, only seen the huge leaves and the green fruits. I called it my laboratory because I kept my chemistry set in there: the chemistry set, a perennial birthday present, had been banished from the house by my father, after I had made something in a test tube. I had randomly mixed things together, and then heated them, until they had erupted and turned black, with an ammoniac stench that refused to fade. My father had said that he did not mind me doing experiments (although neither of us knew what I could possibly have been experimenting on. That did not matter; my mother had been given chemistry sets for her birthday, and see how well that had turned out), but he did not want them within smelling range of the house.

I ate a banana and a pear, then hid the rest of the fruit beneath the wooden table.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, and I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive. I decided that I would creep out of the laboratory shed, along the wall to the edge of the lawn and then into the border of azaleas and bay laurels that bordered the garden there. From the laurels, I would slip down the hill and over the rusting metal fence that bordered the lane.

Nobody was looking. I ran and I crept and got through the laurels, and I went down the hill, pushing through the brambles and the nettle patches that had sprung up since the last time I went that way.

Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of the hill, just in front of the rusting metal fence. There was no way she could have got there without me seeing her, but she was there. She folded her arms and looked at me, and her grey and pink dress flapped in a gust of wind.

‘I believe I said that you were not to leave the property.’

‘I’m not,’ I told her, with a cockiness I knew I did not feel, not even a little. ‘I’m still on the property. I’m just exploring.’

‘You’re sneaking around,’ she said.

I said nothing.

‘I think you should be in your bedroom, where I can keep an eye on you. It’s time for your nap.’

I was too old for naps, but I knew that I was too young to argue, or to win the argument if I did.

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Don’t say “okay”,’ she said. ‘Say “Yes, Miss Monkton”. Or “ma’am”. Say “Yes, ma’am”.’ She looked down at me with her blue-grey eyes, which put me in mind of holes rotted in canvas, and which did not look pretty at that moment.

I said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and hated myself for saying it.

We walked together up the hill.

‘Your parents can no longer afford this place,’ said Ursula Monkton. ‘And they can’t afford to keep it up. Soon enough they’ll see that the way to solve their financial problems is to sell this house and its gardens to property developers. Then all of this –’ and this was the tangle of brambles, the unkempt world behind the lawn – ‘will become a dozen identical houses and gardens. And if you are lucky, you’ll get to live in one. And if not, you will just envy the people who do. Will you like that?’

I loved the house, and the garden. I loved the rambling shabbiness of it. I loved that place as if it was a part of me, and perhaps, in some ways, it was.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘Ursula Monkton. I’m your housekeeper.’

I said, ‘Who are you really? Why are you giving people money?’

‘Everybody wants money,’ she said, as if it were self-evident. ‘It makes them happy. It will make you happy, if you let it.’ We had come out by the heap of grass clippings, behind the circle of green grass that we called the fairy ring: sometimes, when the weather was wet, it filled with vivid yellow toadstools.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘Go to your room.’

I ran from her – ran as fast as I could, across the fairy ring, up the lawn, past the rose bushes, past the coal shed and into the house.

Ursula Monkton was standing just inside the back door of the house to welcome me in, although she could not have got past me. I would have seen. Her hair was perfect, and her lipstick seemed freshly applied.

‘I’ve been inside you,’ she said. ‘So a word to the wise. If you tell anybody anything, they won’t believe you. And because I’ve been inside you, I’ll know. And I can make it so you never say anything I don’t want you to say to anybody, not ever again.’

I went upstairs to the bedroom, and I lay on my bed. The place on the sole of my foot where the worm had been throbbed and ached, and now my chest hurt too. I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible. I pulled down a handful of my mother’s old books, from when she was a girl, and I read about schoolgirls having adventures in the 1930s and 1940s. Mostly they were up against smugglers or spies or fifth columnists, whatever they were, and the girls were always brave and they always knew exactly what to do. I was not brave and I had no idea what to do.

I had never felt so alone.

I wondered if the Hempstocks were on the telephone. It seemed unlikely, but not impossible – perhaps it had been Mrs Hempstock who had reported the abandoned Mini to the police in the first place. The phone book was downstairs, but I knew the number to call Directory Enquiries, and I only had to ask for anybody named Hempstock living at Hempstock Farm. There was a phone in my parents’ bedroom.

I got off the bed, went to the doorway, looked out. The upstairs hallway was empty. As quickly, as quietly as I could, I walked into the bedroom next to mine. The walls were pale pink, my parents’ bed covered with a bedspread covered in its turn with huge printed roses. There were French windows to the balcony that ran along that side of the house. There was a cream-coloured telephone on the cream-and-gilt nightstand beside the bed. I picked it up, heard the dull whirring noise of the dial tone, and dialled Directory Enquiries, my finger pulling the holes in the dial down, a one, a nine, a two. I waited for the operator to come on the line, and tell me the number of the Hempstocks’ farm. I had a pencil with me, and I was ready to write the telephone number down in the back of a blue cloth-bound book called Pansy Saves the School.