The Ocean at the End of the Lane(32)

‘There’s clothes already set out for you to put on in the morning,’ said Lettie. ‘I’ll be asleep in the room next door if you want me – just shout or knock if you need anything, and I’ll come in. Gran said for you to use the inside lavatory, but it’s a long way through the house, and you might get lost, so if you need to do your business, there’s a chamber pot under the bed, same as there’s always been.’

I blew out my candle, and pushed through the curtains into the bed.

The room was warm, but the sheets were cold. The bed shook as something landed on it, and then small feet padded up the blankets, and a warm, furry presence pushed itself into my face and the kitten began, softly, to purr.

There was still a monster in my house, and, in a fragment of time that had, perhaps, been snipped out of reality, my father had pushed me down into the water of the bath and tried, perhaps, to drown me. I had run for miles through the dark. I had seen my father kissing and touching the thing that called itself Ursula Monkton. The dread had not left my soul.

But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and very soon, I slept.





I had strange dreams in that house, that night. I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.

I missed my father and I missed my mother, and I missed my bed in my house, only a mile or so away. I missed yesterday, before Ursula Monkton, before my father’s anger, before the bathtub. I wanted that yesterday back again, and I wanted it so badly.

I tried to pull the dream that had upset me so to the front of my mind, but it would not come. There was betrayal in it, I knew, and loss, and time. The dream left me scared to go back to sleep: the fireplace was almost dark now, with only the deep red glow of embers in the hearth to mark that it had once been burning, once had given light.

I climbed down from the four-poster bed, and felt beneath it until I found the heavy china chamber pot. I hitched up my nightgown and I used it. Then I walked to the window and looked out. The moon was still full, but now it was low in the sky, and a dark orange: what my mother called a harvest moon. But things were harvested in autumn, I knew, not in spring.

In the orange moonlight I could see an old woman – I was almost certain it was Old Mrs Hempstock, although it was hard to see her face properly – walking up and down. She had a big long stick she was leaning on as she walked, like a staff. She reminded me of the soldiers on parade I had seen on a trip to London, outside Buckingham Palace, as they marched backwards and forwards on parade.

I watched her, and I was comforted.

I climbed back into my bed in the dark, laid my head on the empty pillow, and thought, I’ll never go back to sleep, not now, and then I opened my eyes and saw that it was morning.

There were clothes I had never seen before on a chair by the bed. There were two china jugs of water – one steaming hot, one cold – beside a bowl that I realised was a hand basin, set into a small wooden table. There was a fluffy black kitten on the foot of the bed. It opened its eyes as I sat up; they were a vivid blue-green, unnatural and odd, like the sea in summer, and it mewed a high-pitched, questioning noise. I stroked it, then I got out of bed.

I mixed the hot water and the cold in the basin, and I washed my face and hands. I cleaned my teeth with the cold water. There was no toothpaste, but there was a small round tin box on which was written Max Melton’s Remarkably Efficacious Tooth Powder, in old-fashioned letters. I put some of the white powder on my green toothbrush, and cleaned my teeth with it. It tasted minty and lemony in my mouth.

I examined the clothes. They were unlike anything I had ever worn before. There were no underpants. There was a white undershirt, with no buttons but with a long tail. There were brown trousers that stopped at the knees, long white stockings, and a chestnut-coloured jacket with a V cut into in the back, like a swallow’s tail. The light brown socks were more like stockings. I put the clothes on as best I could, wishing there were zips or clasps, rather than hooks and buttons and stiff, unyielding buttonholes.

The shoes had silver buckles in the front, but the shoes were too big and did not fit me, so I went out of the room in my stockinged feet, and the kitten followed me.

To reach my room the night before I had walked upstairs and, at the top of the stairs, turned left. Now I turned right, and walked past Lettie’s bedroom (the door was ajar, the room was empty) and made for the stairs. But the stairs were not where I remembered them. The corridor ended in a blank wall, and a window that looked out over woodland and fields.

The black kitten with the blue-green eyes mewed, loudly, as if to attract my attention, and turned back down the corridor in a self-important strut, tail held high. It led me down the hall, round a corner and down a passage I had never seen before, to a staircase. The kitten bounced amiably down the stairs, and I followed.

Ginnie Hempstock was standing at the foot of the stairs. ‘You slept long and well,’ she said, ‘We’ve already milked the cows. Your breakfast is on the table, and there’s a saucer of cream by the fireplace for your friend.’

‘Where’s Lettie, Mrs Hempstock?’

‘Off on an errand, getting stuff she may need. It has to go, the thing at your house, or there will be trouble, and worse will follow. She’s already bound it once, and it slipped the bounds, so she needs to send it home.’