The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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.

The operator did not come on. The dialling tone continued, and over it, Ursula Monkton’s voice saying, ‘Properly brought-up young people would not even think about sneaking off to use the telephone, would they?’

I did not say anything, although I have no doubt she could hear me breathing. I put the handset down on the cradle, and went back into the bedroom I shared with my sister.

I sat on my bed, and stared out of the window.

My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the window open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open the window and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown on to my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat.