The Ocean at the End of the Lane(19)

I could not sleep. My sister was already asleep. She seemed able to go to sleep whenever she wanted to, a skill I envied and did not have.

I left my bedroom.

I loitered at the top of the stairs, listening to the noise of the television coming from downstairs. Then I crept barefoot-silent down the stairs and sat on the third step from the bottom. The door to the television room was half open, and if I went down another step, whoever was watching the television would be able to see me. So I waited there.

I could hear the television voices punctuated by staccato bursts of TV laughter.

And then, over the television voices, adults talking.

Ursula Monkton said, ‘So, is your wife away every evening?’

My father’s voice. ‘No. She’s gone this evening to organise tomorrow. But from tomorrow it will be weekly. She’s raising money for Africa, in the village hall. For drilling wells, and I believe for contraception.’

‘Well,’ said Ursula, ‘I already know all about that.’

She laughed, a high, tinkling laugh, which sounded friendly and true and real, and had no flapping rags in it. Then she said, ‘Little pitchers …’ and a moment later the door opened the whole way, and Ursula Monkton was looking straight at me. She had redone her make-up, her pale lipstick and her big eyelashes.

‘Go to bed,’ she said. ‘Now.’

‘I want to talk to my dad,’ I said, without hope. She said nothing, just smiled, with no warmth in it, and no love, and I went back up the stairs, and climbed into my bed, and lay in the darkened bedroom until I gave up on sleeping, and then sleep enveloped me when I was not expecting it, and I slept without comfort.





The next day was bad.

My parents had both left the house before I woke.

It had turned cold, and the sky was a bleak and charmless grey. I went through my parents’ bedroom to the balcony that ran along the length of their bedroom and my sister’s and mine, and I stood on the long balcony and I prayed to the sky that Ursula Monkton would have tired of this game, and that I would not see her again.

Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs when I went down.

‘Same rules as yesterday, little pitcher,’ she said. ‘You can’t leave the property. If you try, I will lock you in your bedroom for the rest of the day, and when your parents come home I will tell them you did something disgusting.’

‘They won’t believe you.’

She smiled sweetly. ‘Are you sure? If I tell them you pulled out your little willy and widdled all over the kitchen floor, and I had to mop it up and disinfect it? I think they’ll believe me. I’ll be very convincing.’

I went out of the house and down to my laboratory. I ate all the fruit that I had hidden there the day before. I read Sandie Sees it Through, another of my mother’s books. Sandie was a plucky but poor schoolgirl who was accidentally sent to a posh school, where everybody hated her. In the end she exposed the geography teacher as an International Bolshevik, who had tied the real geography teacher up. The climax was in the school assembly, when Sandie bravely got up and made a speech which began, ‘I know I should not have been sent here. It was only an error in paperwork that sent me here and sent Sandy spelled with a Y to the town grammar school. But I thank Providence that I came here. Because Miss Streebling is not whom she claims to be.’

In the end Sandie was embraced by the people who had hated her.

My father came home early from work – earlier than I remembered seeing him home in years.

I wanted to talk to him, but he was never alone.

I watched them from the branch of my beech tree.

First he showed Ursula Monkton around the gardens, proudly pointing out the rose bushes and the blackcurrant bushes and the cherry trees and the azaleas as if he had had something to do with them, as if they had not been put in place and tended by Mr Wollery for fifty years before we had bought the house.

She laughed at all his jokes. I could not hear what he was saying, but I could see the crooked smile he had when he knew he was saying something funny.

She was standing too close to him. Sometimes he would rest his hand on her shoulder, in a friendly sort of way. It worried me that he was standing so close to her. He didn’t know what she was. She was a monster, and he just thought she was a normal person, and he was being nice to her. She was wearing different clothes today: a grey skirt, of the kind they called a midi, and a pink blouse.

On any other day, if I had seen my father walking around the garden I would have run over to him. But not that day. I was scared that he would be angry, or that Ursula Monkton would say something to make him angry with me.

I was terrified of him when he was angry. His face (angular and usually affable) would grow red, and he would shout, shout so loudly and furiously that it would, literally, paralyse me. I would not be able to think.

He never hit me. He did not believe in hitting. He would tell us how his father had hit him, how his mother had chased him with a broom, how he was better than that. When he got angry enough to shout at me, he would occasionally remind me that he did not hit me, as if to make me grateful. In the school stories I read, misbehaviour often resulted in a caning, or the slipper, and then was forgiven and done, and I would sometimes envy those fictional children the cleanness of their lives.

I did not want to approach Ursula Monkton: I did not want to risk making my father angry with me.