The Ocean at the End of the Lane(23)

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.

I went over the low metal fence, into the lane. I was off our property and it felt as if a headache I had not known that I had had suddenly lifted. I whispered, urgently, ‘Lettie? Lettie Hempstock?’ and I thought, I’m in bed. I’m dreaming all this. Such vivid dreams. I am in my bed, but I did not believe that Ursula Monkton was thinking about me just then.

As I ran, I thought of my father, his arms around the housekeeper-who-wasn’t, kissing her neck, and then I saw his face through the chilly bathwater as he held me under, and now I was no longer scared by what had happened in the bathroom; now I was scared by what it meant that my father was kissing the neck of Ursula Monkton, that his hands had lifted her midi skirt above her waist.

My parents were a unit, inviolate. The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen; the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and was coming down the lane with me, then.

The flints of the lane hurt my feet as I ran, but I did not care. Soon enough, I was certain, the thing that was Ursula Monkton would be done with my father. Perhaps they would go upstairs to check on me together. She would find that I was gone and she would come after me.

I thought, if they come after me, they will be in a car. I looked for a gap in the hedgerow on either side of the lane. I spotted a wooden stile and clambered over it, and kept running across the meadow, heart pounding like the biggest, loudest drum there was or had ever been, barefoot, with my pyjamas and my dressing gown all soaked below the knee and clinging. I ran, not caring about the cow pats. The meadow was easier on my feet than the flint lane had been. I was happier, and I felt more real, running on the grass.