The Ocean at the End of the Lane(51)

I only remembered that Ocean had grown into a cat, and that I had adored her for years. I wondered what had happened to her, and then I thought, it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.

A door opened in the farmhouse, and I heard feet on the path. Soon the old woman sat down beside me. ‘I brung you a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘And a cheese and tomato sandwich. You’ve been out here for quite a while. I thought you’d probably fallen in.’

‘I sort of did,’ I told her. And, ‘Thank you.’ It had become dusk, without my noticing, while I had been sitting there.

I took the tea, and sipped it, and I looked at the woman, more carefully this time. I compared her to my memories of forty years ago. I said, ‘You aren’t Lettie’s mother. You’re her grandmother, aren’t you? You’re Old Mrs Hempstock.’

‘That’s right,’ she said, unperturbed. ‘Eat your sandwich.’

I took a bite of my sandwich. It was good, really good. Freshly baked bread, sharp, salty cheese, the kind of tomatoes that actually taste like something.

I was awash in memory, and I wanted to know what it meant, what it all meant. I said, ‘Is it true?’ and felt foolish. Of all the questions I could have asked, I had asked that.

Old Mrs Hempstock shrugged. ‘What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and they could be continents away for all it means anything.’

There was another question I needed answered. I said, ‘Why did I come here?’

She looked at me as if it were a trick question. ‘The funeral,’ she said. ‘You wanted to get away from everyone and be on your own. So first of all you drove back to the place you’d lived in as a boy, and when that didn’t give you what you missed, you came here, like you always do.’

‘Like I always do?’ I drank some more tea. It was still hot, and strong enough: a perfect cup of builder’s tea. You could stand a spoon straight up in it, as my father always said of a cup of tea of which he approved.

‘Like you always do,’ she repeated.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been here since, well, since Lettie went to Australia. Her going-away party.’ And then I said, ‘Which never happened. You know what I mean.’

‘You come back sometimes,’ she said. ‘You were here once when you were twenty-four, I remember. You had two young children, and you were so scared. You came here before you left these parts; you were, what, in your thirties then? I fed you a good meal in the kitchen, and you told me about your dreams and the art you were making.’

‘I don’t remember.’

She pushed the hair from her eyes. ‘It’s easier that way.’

I sipped my tea, and finished the sandwich. The mug was white, and so was the plate. The endless summer evening was coming to an end.

I asked her again, ‘Why did I come here?’

‘Lettie wanted you to,’ said somebody.

The person who said that was walking around the pond: a woman in a brown coat, wearing wellington boots. I looked at her in confusion. She looked younger than I was now. I remembered her as vast, as adult, but now I saw she was only in her late thirties. I remembered her as stout, but she was buxom, and attractive in an apple-cheeked sort of a way. She was still Ginnie Hempstock, Lettie’s mother, and she looked, I was certain, just as she had looked forty-something years ago.

She sat down on the bench on the other side of me, so I was flanked by Hempstock women. She said, ‘I think Lettie just wants to know if it was worth it.’

‘If what was worth it?’

‘You,’ said the old woman, tartly.

‘Lettie did a very big thing for you,’ said Ginnie. ‘I think she mostly wants to find out what happened next, and whether it was worth everything she did.’

‘She … sacrificed herself for me.’

‘After a fashion, dear,’ said Ginnie. ‘The hunger birds tore out your heart. You screamed so piteously as you died. She couldn’t abide that. She had to do something.’

I tried to remember this. I said, ‘That isn’t how I remember it.’

The old lady sniffed. ‘Didn’t I just say you’ll never get any two people to remember anything the same?’ she asked.

‘Can I talk to her?’

‘She’s sleeping,’ said Lettie’s mother. ‘She’s healing. She’s not talking yet.’

‘Not until she’s done where she is,’ said Lettie’s grandmother, gesturing, but I could not tell if she was pointing to the duckpond or to the sky.

‘When will that be?’

‘When she’s good and ready,’ said the old woman, as her daughter said, ‘Soon.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘If she brought me here to look at me, let her look at me,’ and as I said it, I knew that it had already happened. How long had I been sitting on that bench? As I had been remembering her, she had been examining me. ‘Oh. She did already, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘And did I pass?’

The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, ‘You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.’