The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The bedroom door opened, and my sister came in to get the nightdress from under her pillow. She said, ‘You’ve been so naughty that I’m not even allowed to be in the room with you. I get to sleep in Mummy and Daddy’s bed tonight. And Daddy says I can watch the television.’

There was an old television in a brown wooden cabinet in the corner of my parents’ bedroom that was almost never turned on. The vertical hold was unreliable, and the fuzzy black and white picture had a tendency to stream, in a slow ribbon: people’s heads vanished off the bottom of the screen as their feet descended, in a stately fashion, from the top.

‘I don’t care,’ I told her.

‘Daddy said you ruined his tie. And he’s all wet,’ said my sister, with satisfaction in her voice.

Ursula Monkton was at the bedroom door. ‘We don’t talk to him,’ she told my sister. ‘We won’t talk to him again until he’s allowed to rejoin the family.’

My sister slipped out, heading to the next room, my parents’ room. ‘You aren’t in my family,’ I told Ursula Monkton. ‘When Mummy comes back, I’ll tell her what Daddy did.’

‘She won’t be home for another two hours,’ said Ursula Monkton. ‘And what can you say to her that will make any difference? She backs up your father in everything, doesn’t she?’

She did. They always presented a perfectly united front.

‘Don’t cross me,’ said Ursula Monkton. ‘I have things to do here, and you are getting in my way. Next time it will be so much worse. Next time, I lock you in the attic.’

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ I told her. I was afraid of her, more afraid than I had ever been of anything.

‘It’s hot in here,’ she told me, and smiled. She walked over to the gas fire, reached down, turned it off, took the matches from the mantel.

I said, ‘You’re still just a flea.’

She stopped smiling. She reached up to the lintel above the door, higher than any child could reach, and she pulled down the key that rested there. She walked out of the room, and closed the door. I heard the key turn, heard the lock engage and click.

I could hear television voices coming from the room next door. I heard the hallway door close, cutting off the two bedrooms from the rest of the house, and I knew that Ursula Monkton was going downstairs. I went over to the lock, and squinted through it. I had learned from a book that I could use a pencil to push a key through a keyhole on to a sheet of paper beneath, and free myself that way … but the keyhole was empty.

I cried then, cold and still damp, in that bedroom, cried with pain and anger and terror, cried safely in the knowledge that no one would come in and see me, that no one would tease me for crying, as they teased any boys at my school who were unwise enough to give way to tears.

I heard the gentle patter of raindrops against the glass of my bedroom window, and even that brought me no joy.

I cried until I was all cried out. Then I breathed in huge gulps of air, and I thought, Ursula Monkton, flapping canvas monster, worm and flea, would get me if I tried to leave the property. I knew that.

But Ursula Monkton had locked me in. She would not expect me to leave now.

And perhaps, if I was lucky, she might be distracted.

I opened the bedroom window, and listened to the night. The gentle rain made a noise that was almost a rustling. It was a cold night, and I was already chilled. My sister was in the room next door, watching something on the television. She would not hear me.

I went over to the door, and turned off the light.

I walked through the dark bedroom, and climbed back on the bed.

I’m in my bed, I thought. I’m lying in my bed, thinking about how upset I am. Soon, I’ll fall asleep. I’m in my bed, and I know she’s won, and if she checks up on me I’m in my bed, asleep.

I’m in my bed, and it’s time for me to sleep now … I can’t even keep my eyes open. I’m fast asleep. Fast asleep in my bed …

I stood on the bed, and climbed out of the window. I hung for a moment, then let myself drop, as quietly as I could, on to the balcony. That was the easy bit.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers. In books, boys climbed trees, so I climbed trees, sometimes very high, always scared of falling. In books, people climbed up and down drainpipes to get in and out of houses, so I climbed up and down drainpipes too. They were the heavy iron drainpipes of old, clamped to the brick, not today’s lightweight plastic affairs.

I had never climbed down a drainpipe in the dark, or in the rain, but I knew where the footholds were. I knew also that the biggest challenge would not be falling, a twenty-foot tumble down into the wet flower bed; it was that the drainpipe I was climbing down went past the television room, downstairs, in which, I had no doubt, Ursula Monkton and my father would be watching television.

I tried not to think.

I climbed over the brick wall that edged the balcony, reached out until I felt the iron drainpipe, cold and slick with rain. I held on to it, then took one large step towards it, letting my bare feet come to rest on the metal clamp that encircled the drainpipe, fixing it sturdily to the brick.

I went down, a step at a time, imagining myself Batman, imagining myself a hundred heroes and heroines of school romances, then, remembering myself, I imagined that I was a drop of rain on the wall, a brick, a tree. I am on my bed, I thought. I was not here, with the light of the TV room, uncurtained, spilling out below me, making the rain that fell past the window into a series of glittering lines and streaks.

Don’t look at me, I thought. Don’t look out of the window.

I inched down. Usually I would have stepped from the drainpipe over to the TV room’s outer window ledge, but that was out of the question. Warily, I lowered myself another few inches, leaned further back into the shadows and away from the light, and stole a terrified glance into the room, expecting to see my father and Ursula Monkton staring back at me.

The room was empty.

The lights were on, the television was on as well, but nobody was sitting on the sofa and the door to the downstairs hallway was open.

I took an easy step down on to the window ledge, hoping against all hope that neither of them would come back in and see me, then I let myself drop from the ledge into the flower bed. The wet earth was soft against my feet.

I was going to run, just run, but there was a light on in the drawing room, where we children never went, the oak-panelled room kept only for best and for special occasions.

The curtains were drawn. They were green velvet, lined with white, and the light that escaped them, where they had not been closed all the way, was golden and soft.

I walked over to the window. The curtains were not completely closed. I could see into the room, see what was immediately in front of me.

I was not sure what I was looking at. My father had Ursula Monkton pressed up against the side of the big fireplace in the far wall. He had his back to me. She did too, her hands pressed against the huge high mantelpiece. He was hugging her from behind. Her midi skirt was hiked up around her waist.

I did not know exactly what they were doing, and I did not really care, not at that moment. All that mattered was that Ursula Monkton had her attention on something that was not me, and I turned away from the gap in the curtains and the light and the house, and fled, barefoot, into the rainy dark.

It was not pitch-black. It was the kind of cloudy night where the clouds seem to gather up light from distant street lights and houses below, and throw it back at the earth. I could see enough, once my eyes adjusted. I made it to the bottom of the garden, past the compost heap and the grass cuttings, then down the hill to the lane. Brambles and thorns stuck my feet and pricked my legs, but I kept running.