The Ocean at the End of the Lane(6)

‘That’s why he came down here,’ she told me. ‘The end of the road. Nobody’s going to find him and stop him around here, three o’ clock in the morning. And the mud there is wet and easy to mould.’

‘Do you think he killed himself?’

‘Yes. Do you like milk? Gran’s milking Bessie now.’

I said, ‘You mean, real milk from a cow?’ and then felt foolish, but she nodded, reassuringly.

I thought about this. I’d never had milk that didn’t come from a bottle. ‘I think I’d like that.’

We stopped at a small barn where an old woman, much older than my parents, with long grey hair, like cobwebs, and a thin face, was standing beside a cow. Long black tubes were attached to each of the cow’s teats. ‘We used to milk them by hand,’ she told me. ‘But this is easier.’

She showed me how the milk went from the cow down the black tubes and into the machine, through a cooler and into huge metal churns. The churns were left on a heavy wooden platform outside the barn, where they would be collected each day by a lorry.

The old lady gave me a cup of creamy milk from Bessie the cow, the fresh milk before it had gone through the cooler. Nothing I had drunk had ever tasted like that before: rich and warm and perfectly happy in my mouth. I remembered that milk after I had forgotten everything else.

‘There’s more of them up the lane,’ said the old woman, suddenly. ‘All sorts coming down with lights flashing and all. Such a palaver. You should get the boy into the kitchen. He’s hungry, and a cup of milk won’t do a growing boy.’

The girl said, ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Just a piece of toast. It was burned.’

She said, ‘My name’s Lettie. Lettie Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. Come on.’ She took me in through the front door, and into their enormous kitchen, sat me down at a huge wooden table, so stained and patterned that it looked as if faces were staring up at me from the old wood.

‘We have breakfast here early,’ she said. ‘Milking starts at first light. But there’s porridge in the saucepan, and jam to put in it.’

She gave me a china bowl filled with warm porridge from the stove top, with a lump of home-made blackberry jam, my favourite, in the middle of the porridge, then she poured cream on it. I swished it around with my spoon before I ate it, swirling it into a purple mess, and was as happy as I have ever been about anything. It tasted perfect.

A stocky woman came in. Her red-brown hair was streaked with grey, and cut short. She had apple cheeks, a dark green skirt that went to her knees, and wellington boots. She said, ‘This must be the boy from the top of the lane. Such a business going on with that car. There’ll be five of them needing tea soon.’

Lettie filled a huge copper kettle from the tap. She lit a gas hob with a match and put the kettle on the flame. Then she took down five chipped mugs from a cupboard, and hesitated, looking at the woman. The woman said, ‘You’re right. Six. The doctor will be here too.’

Then the woman pursed her lips and made a tchutch! noise. ‘They’ve missed the note,’ she said. ‘He wrote it so carefully too, folded it and put it in his breast pocket, and they haven’t looked there yet.’

‘What does it say?’ asked Lettie.

‘Read it yourself,’ said the woman. I thought she was Lettie’s mother. She seemed like she was somebody’s mother. Then she said, ‘It says that he took all the money that his friends had given him to smuggle out of South Africa and bank for them in England, along with all the money he’d made over the years mining for opals, and he went to the casino in Brighton, to gamble, but he only meant to gamble with his own money. And then he only meant to dip into the money his friends had given him until he had made back the money he had lost.

‘And then he didn’t have anything,’ said the woman, ‘and all was dark.’

‘That’s not what he wrote, though,’ said Lettie, squinting her eyes. ‘What he wrote was,

“To all my friends,

Am so sorry it was not like I meant to and hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me for I cannot forgive myself.”’

‘Same thing,’ said the older woman. She turned to me. ‘I’m Lettie’s ma,’ she said. ‘You’ll have met my mother already, in the milking shed. I’m Mrs Hempstock, but she was Mrs Hempstock before me, so she’s Old Mrs Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. It’s the oldest farm hereabouts. It’s in the Domesday Book.’

I wondered why they were all called Hempstock, those women, but I did not ask, any more than I dared to ask how they knew about the suicide note or what the opal miner had thought as he died. They were perfectly matter-of-fact about it.

Lettie said, ‘I nudged him to look in the breast pocket. He’ll think he thought of it himself.’

‘There’s a good girl,’ said Mrs Hempstock. ‘They’ll be in here when the kettle boils to ask if I’ve seen anything unusual and to have their tea. Why don’t you take the boy down to the pond?’

‘It’s not a pond,’ said Lettie. ‘It’s my ocean.’ She turned to me and said, ‘Come on.’ She led me out of the house the way we had come.

The day was still grey.

We walked around the house, down the cow path.