The Ocean at the End of the Lane(4)

I missed Fluffy. I knew you could not simply replace something alive, but I dared not grumble to my parents about it. They would have been baffled at my upset: after all, if my kitten had been killed, it had also been replaced. The damage had been made up.

It all came back, and even as it came back I knew it would not be for long: all the things I remembered, sitting on the green bench beside the little pond that Lettie Hempstock had once convinced me was an ocean.





I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

Our house was large and many-roomed, which was good when they bought it and my father had money, not good later.

My parents called me into their bedroom one afternoon, very formally. I thought I must have done something wrong and was there for a telling-off, but no: they told me only that they were no longer affluent, that we would all need to make sacrifices, and that what I would be sacrificing was my bedroom, the little room at the top of the stairs. I was sad: my bedroom had a tiny little yellow washbasin they had put in for me, just my size; the room was above the kitchen, and immediately up the stairs from the television room, so at night I could hear the comforting buzz of adult conversation up the stairs, through my half-open door, and I did not feel alone. Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, in the dim hallway light, if I needed to. I always needed to.

Exiled to my little sister’s huge bedroom, I was not heartbroken. There were already three beds in there, and I took the bed by the window. I loved that I could climb out of that bedroom window on to the long brick balcony, that I could sleep with the window open and feel the wind and the rain on my face. But we argued, my sister and I, argued about everything. She liked to sleep with the door to the hall closed, and the immediate arguments about whether the bedroom door should be open or shut were summarily resolved by my mother writing a chart that hung on the back of the door, showing that alternate nights were mine or my sister’s. Each night I was content or I was terrified, depending on whether the door was open or closed.

My former bedroom at the top of the stairs was let out, and a variety of people passed through it. I viewed them all with suspicion: they were sleeping in my bedroom, using my little yellow basin that was just the right size for me. There had been a fat Austrian lady who told us she could leave her head and walk around the ceiling; an architectural student from New Zealand; an American couple whom my mother, scandalised, made leave when she discovered they were not actually married; and now there was the opal miner.

He was a South African, although he had made his money mining for opals in Australia. He gave my sister and me an opal each, a rough black rock with green-blue-red fire in it. My sister liked him for this, and treasured her opal stone. I could not forgive him for the death of my kitten.

It was the first day of the spring holidays: three weeks of no school. I woke early, thrilled by the prospect of endless days to fill however I wished. I would read. I would explore.

I pulled on my shorts, my T-shirt, my sandals. I went downstairs to the kitchen. My father was cooking, while my mother slept in. He was wearing his dressing gown over his pyjamas. He always cooked breakfast on Saturdays. I said, ‘Dad! Where’s my comic?’ He normally bought me a copy of SMASH! before he drove home from work on Fridays, and I would read it on Saturday mornings.

‘In the back of the car. Do you want toast?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not burnt.’

My father did not like toasters. He toasted bread under the grill, and usually, he burnt it.

I went outside into the drive. I looked around. I went back into the house, pushed the kitchen door, went in. I liked the kitchen door. It swung both ways, in and out, so servants sixty years ago would be able to walk in or out with their arms laden with dishes empty or full.

‘Dad? Where’s the car?’

‘In the drive.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘What?’

The telephone rang, and my father went out into the hall, where the phone was, to answer it. I heard him talking to someone.

The toast began to smoke under the grill.

I got up on a chair and turned the grill off.

‘That was the police,’ my father said. ‘Someone’s reported seeing our car abandoned at the bottom of the lane. I said I hadn’t even reported it stolen yet. Right. We can head down now, meet them there. Toast!’

He pulled the pan out from beneath the grill. The toast was smoking and blackened on one side.

‘Is my comic there? Or did they steal it?’

‘I don’t know. The police didn’t mention your comic.’

My father put peanut butter on the burnt side of each piece of toast, replaced his dressing gown with a coat worn over his pyjamas, put on a pair of shoes, and we walked down the lane together. He munched his toast as we walked. I held my toast, and did not eat it.

We had walked for perhaps five minutes down the narrow lane, which ran through fields on each side, when a police car came up behind us. It slowed, and the driver greeted my father by name.

I hid my piece of burnt toast behind my back while my father talked to the policeman. I wished my family would buy normal sliced white bread, the kind that went into toasters, like every other family I knew. My father had found a local baker’s shop where they made thick loaves of heavy brown bread, and he insisted on buying them. He said they tasted better, which was, to my mind, nonsense. Proper bread was white, and pre-sliced, and tasted like almost nothing: that was the point.