The Ocean at the End of the Lane(48)

‘Don’t you worry,’ said an old voice, now familiar once more. ‘You’re safe as houses. Safer’n most houses I’ve seen. They’ve gone.’

‘They’ll come back again,’ I said. ‘They want my heart.’

‘They’d not come back to this world again for all the tea in China,’ said Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘Not that they’ve got any use for tea – or for China – no more than a carrion crow does.’

Why had I thought her dressed in silver? She wore a much-patched grey dressing gown over what had to have been a nightie, but a nightie of a kind that had not been fashionable for several hundred years.

The old woman put a hand on her granddaughter’s pale forehead, lifted it up, then let it go.

Lettie’s mother shook her head. ‘It’s over,’ she said.

I understood it then, at the last, and felt foolish for not understanding it sooner. The girl beside me, on her mother’s lap, at her mother’s breast, had given her life for mine.

‘They were meant to hurt me, not her,’ I said.

‘No reason they should’ve taken either of you,’ said the old lady, with a sniff. I felt guilt then, guilt beyond anything I had ever felt before.

‘We should get her to a hospital,’ I said, hopefully. ‘We can call a doctor. Maybe they can make her better.’

Ginnie shook her head.

‘Is she dead?’ I asked.

‘Dead?’ repeated the old woman in the dressing gown. She sounded offended. ‘Has hif,’ she said, grandly aspirating each aitch as if that were the only way to convey the gravity of her words. ‘Has hif han ’Empstock would hever do hanything so … common …’

‘She’s hurt,’ said Ginnie Hempstock, cuddling me close. ‘Hurt as badly as she can be hurt. She’s so close to death as makes no odds if we don’t do something about it, and quickly.’ A final hug, then, ‘Off with you, now.’ I clambered reluctantly from her lap, and stood up.

Ginnie Hempstock rose to her feet, her daughter’s body limp in her arms. Lettie lolled and was jogged like a rag doll as her mother got up, and I stared at her, shocked beyond measure.

I said, ‘It was my fault. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’

Old Mrs Hempstock said, ‘You meant well,’ but Ginnie Hempstock said nothing at all. She walked down the lane towards the farm, and then she turned off behind the milking shed. I thought that Lettie was too big to be carried, but Ginnie carried her as if she weighed no more than a kitten, her head and upper body resting on Ginnie’s shoulder, like a sleeping infant being taken upstairs to bed. Ginnie carried her down that path, and beside the hedge, and back, and back, until we reached the pond.

There were no breezes back there, and the night was perfectly still; our path was lit by moonlight and nothing more; the pond, when we got there, was just a pond. No golden, glimmering light. No magical full moon. It was black and dull, with the moon, the true moon, the quarter-moon, reflected in it.

I stopped at the edge of the pond, and Old Mrs Hempstock stopped beside me.

But Ginnie Hempstock kept walking.

She staggered down into the pond, until she was wading thigh deep, her coat and skirt floating on the water as she waded, breaking the reflected moon into dozens of tiny moons that scattered and re-formed around her.

At the centre of the pond, with the black water above her hips, she stopped. She took Lettie from her shoulder, so the girl’s body was supported at the head and at the knees by Ginnie Hempstock’s practical hands; then slowly, so very slowly, she laid Lettie down in the water.

The girl’s body floated on the surface of the pond.

Ginnie took a step back, and then another, never looking away from her daughter.

I heard a rushing noise, as if of an enormous wind coming towards us.

Lettie’s body shook.

There was no breeze, but now there were whitecaps on the surface of the pond. I saw waves, gentle, lapping waves at first, and then bigger waves that broke and slapped at the edge of the pond. One wave crested and crashed down close to me, splashing my clothes and face. I could taste the water’s wetness on my lips, and it was salt.

I whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Lettie.’

I should have been able to see the other side of the pond. I had seen it a few moments before. But the crashing waves had taken it away, and I could see nothing beyond Lettie’s floating body but the vastness of the lonely ocean, and the dark.

The waves grew bigger. The water began to glow in the moonlight, as it had glowed when it was in the bucket, a pale, perfect blue. The black shape on the surface of the water was the body of the girl who had saved my life.

Bony fingers rested on my shoulder. ‘What are you apologising for, boy? For killing her?’

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

‘She’s not dead. You didn’t kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She’s been given to her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.’

I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfish’s tail had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, ‘Will she be the same?’

The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe. ‘Nothing’s ever the same,’ she said. ‘Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.’