The Ocean at the End of the Lane(28)

While we ate, nothing was said about what had happened to me, or why I was there. The Hempstock ladies talked about the farm – there was the door to the milking shed needed a new coat of paint, a cow named Rhiannon who looked to be getting lame in her rear left leg, the path to be cleared on the way that led down to the reservoir.

‘Is it just the three of you?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t there any men?’

‘Men!’ hooted Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘I dunno what blessed good a man would be! Nothing a man could do around this farm that I can’t do twice as fast and five times as well.’

Lettie said, ‘We’ve had men here, sometimes. They come and they go. Right now, it’s just us.’

Her mother nodded. ‘They went off to seek their fate and fortune, mostly, the male Hempstocks. There’s never any keeping them here when the call comes. They get a distant look in their eyes and then we’ve lost them, good and proper. Next chance they gets they’re off to towns and even cities, and nothing but an occasional postcard to even show they were here at all.’

Old Mrs Hempstock said, ‘His parents are coming! They’re driving here. They just passed Parson’s elm tree. The badgers saw them.’

‘Is she with them?’ I asked. ‘Ursula Monkton?’

‘Her?’ said Old Mrs Hempstock, amused. ‘That thing? Not her.’

I thought about it for a moment. ‘They will make me go back with them, and then she’ll lock me in the attic and let my daddy kill me when she gets bored. She said so.’

‘She may have told you that, ducks,’ said Lettie’s mother, ‘but she en’t going to do it, or anything like it, or my name’s not Ginnie Hempstock.’

I liked the name Ginnie, but I did not believe her, and I was not reassured. Soon the door to the kitchen would open, and my father would shout at me, or he would wait until we got into the car, and he would shout at me then, and they would take me back up the lane to my house, and I would be lost.

‘Let’s see,’ said Ginnie Hempstock. ‘We could be away when they get here. They could arrive last Tuesday, when there’s nobody home.’

‘Out of the question,’ said the old woman. ‘Just complicates things, playing with time … We could turn the boy into something else, so they’d never find him, look how hard they might.’

I blinked. Was that even possible? I wanted to be turned into something. The kitten had finished its portion of meat scraps (indeed, it seemed to have eaten more than the house cat) and now it leapt into my lap, and began to wash itself.

Ginnie Hempstock got up and went out of the room. I wondered where she was going.

‘We can’t turn him into anything,’ said Lettie, clearing the table of the last of the plates and cutlery. ‘His parents will get frantic. And if they are being controlled by the flea, she’ll just feed the franticness. Next thing you know, we’ll have the police dragging the reservoir, looking for him. Or worse. The ocean.’

The kitten lay down and curled up, wrapping around itself until it was nothing more than a flattened circlet of fluffy black fur. It closed its vivid blue eyes, the colour of an ocean, and it slept, and it purred.

‘Well?’ said Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘What do you suggest, then?’

Lettie thought, pushing her lips together, moving them over to one side. Her head tipped, and I thought she was running through alternatives. Then her face brightened. ‘Snip and stitch?’ she said.

Old Mrs Hempstock sniffed. ‘You’re a good girl,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying you’re not. But snippage … well, you couldn’t do that. Not yet. You’d have to cut the edges out exactly, sew them back without the seam showing. And what would you cut out? The flea won’t let you snip her. She’s not in the fabric. She’s outside of it.’

Ginnie Hempstock returned. She was carrying my old dressing gown. ‘I put it through the mangle,’ she said. ‘But it’s still damp. That’ll make the edges harder to line up. You don’t want to do needlework when it’s still damp.’

She put the dressing gown down on the table, in front of Old Mrs Hempstock. Then she pulled out from the front pocket of her apron a pair of scissors, black and old, a long needle, and a spool of red thread.

‘Rowanberry and red thread, stop a witch in her speed,’ I recited. It was something I had read in a book.

‘That’d work, and work well,’ said Lettie, ‘if there was any witches involved in all this. But there’s not.’

Old Mrs Hempstock was examining my dressing gown. It was brown and faded, with a sort of sepia tartan across it. It had been a present from my father’s parents, my grandparents, several birthdays ago, when it had been comically big on me. ‘Probably …’ she said, as if she was talking to herself, ‘it would be best if your father was happy for you to stay the night here. But for that to happen, they couldn’t be angry with you, or even worried …’

The black scissors were in her hand and already snip-snip-snipping then, when I heard a knock on the front door, and Ginnie Hempstock got up to answer it.

‘Don’t let them take me,’ I said to Lettie.

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘I’m working here, while grandmother’s snipping. You just be sleepy, and at peace. Happy.’