The Ocean at the End of the Lane(16)

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.