The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

light in the hall. I lay in bed with the window open, wide awake, listening to the noises an old house makes at the end of a long day, and I wished as hard as I could, hoping my wishes could become real. I wished that my parents would send Ursula Monkton away, and then I would go down to the Hempstocks’ farm, and tell Lettie what I had done, and she would forgive me, and make everything all right.
    I could not sleep. My sister was already asleep. She seemed able to go to sleep whenever she wanted to, a skill I envied and did not have.
    I left my bedroom.
    I loitered at the top of the stairs, listening to the noise of the television coming from downstairs. Then I crept barefoot-silent down the stairs and sat on the third step from the bottom. The door to the television room was half-open, and if I went down another step whoever was watching the television could see me. So I waited there.
    I could hear the television voices punctuated by staccato bursts of TV laughter.
    And then, over the television voices, adults talking.
    Ursula Monkton said, “So, is your wife away every evening?”
    My father’s voice: “No. She’s gone back this evening to organize tomorrow. But from tomorrow it will be weekly. She’s raising money for Africa, in the village hall. For drilling wells, and I believe for contraception.”
    “Well,” said Ursula, “I already know all about that .”
    She laughed, a high, tinkling laugh, which sounded friendly and true and real, and had no flapping rags in it. Then she said, “Little pitchers… ,” and a moment later the door opened the whole way, and Ursula Monkton was looking straight at me. She had redone her makeup, her pale lipstick and her big eyelashes.
    “Go to bed,” she said. “Now.”
    “I want to talk to my dad,” I said, without hope. She said nothing, just smiled, with no warmth in it, and no love, and I went back up the stairs, and climbed into my bed, and lay in the darkened bedroom until I gave up on sleeping, and then sleep enveloped me when I was not expecting it, and I slept without comfort.

VII.
    T he next day was bad.
    My parents had both left the house before I woke.
    It had turned cold, and the sky was a bleak and charmless gray. I went through my parents’ bedroom to the balcony that ran along the length of their bedroom and my-sister’s-and-mine, and I stood on the long balcony and I prayed to the sky that Ursula Monkton would have tired of this game, and that I would not see her again.
    Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs when I went down.
    “Same rules as yesterday, little pitcher,” she said. “You can’t leave the property. If you try, I will lock you in your bedroom for the rest of the day, and when your parents come home I will tell them you did something disgusting.”
    “They won’t believe you.”
    She smiled sweetly. “Are you sure? If I tell them you pulled out your little willy and widdled all over the kitchen floor, and I had to mop it up and disinfect it? I think they’ll believe me. I’ll be very convincing.”
    I went out of the house and down to my laboratory. I ate all the fruit that I had hidden there the day before. I read Sandie Sees It Through, another of my mother’s books. Sandie was a plucky but poor schoolgirl who was accidentally sent to a posh school, where everybody hated her. In the end she exposed the Geography Teacher as an International Bolshevik, who had tied the real Geography Teacher up. The climax was in the school assembly, when Sandie bravely got up and made a speech which began, “I know I should not have been sent here. It was only an error in paperwork that sent me here and sent Sandy spelled with a Y to the town grammar school. But I thank Providence that I came here. Because Miss Streebling is not who she claims to be.”
    In the end Sandie was embraced by the people who had hated her.
    My father came home early from work—earlier than I remembered seeing him home in years.
    I wanted to talk to him, but he was never alone.
    I watched them from the branch of my beech tree.
    First he showed Ursula Monkton around the gardens, proudly showing her the rosebushes and the blackcurrant bushes and the cherry trees and the azaleas as if he had had anything to do with them, as if they had not been put in place and tended by Mr. Wollery for fifty years before ever we had bought the house.
    She laughed at all his jokes. I could not hear what he was saying, but I could see the crooked