The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

of stairs, and then up some steps, and we passed an open window.
    Moonlight spilled onto the stairs, brighter than our candle flames. I glanced up through the window and I saw the full moon. The cloudless sky was splashed with stars beyond all counting.
    “That’s the moon,” I said.
    “Gran likes it like that,” said Lettie Hempstock.
    “But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.”
    “Gran always likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,” said Lettie. “And it means you don’t trip on the stairs.”
    The kitten followed us up the stairs in a sequence of bounces. It made me smile.
    At the top of the house was Lettie’s room, and beside it, another room, and it was this room that we entered. A fire blazed in the hearth, illuminating the room with oranges and yellows. The room was warm and inviting. The bed had posts at each corner, and it had its own curtains. I had seen something like it in cartoons, but never in real life.
    “There’s clothes already set out for you to put on in the morning,” said Lettie. “I’ll be asleep in the room next door if you want me—just shout or knock if you need anything, and I’ll come in. Gran said for you to use the inside lavatory, but it’s a long way through the house, and you might get lost, so if you need to do your business there’s a chamber pot under the bed, same as there’s always been.”
    I blew out my candle, which left the room illuminated by the fire in the hearth, and I pushed through the curtains and climbed up into the bed.
    The room was warm, but the sheets were cold as I got inside them. The bed shook as something landed on it, and then small feet padded up the blankets, and a warm, furry presence pushed itself into my face and the kitten began, softly, to purr.
    There was still a monster in my house, and, in a fragment of time that had, perhaps, been snipped out of reality, my father had pushed me down into the water of the bath and tried, perhaps, to drown me. I had run for miles through the dark. I had seen my father kissing and touching the thing that called itself Ursula Monkton. The dread had not left my soul.
    But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.

X.
    I had strange dreams in that house, that night. I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly that I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.
    I missed my father and I missed my mother, and I missed my bed in my house, only a mile or so away. I missed yesterday, before Ursula Monkton, before my father’s anger, before the bathtub. I wanted that yesterday back again, and I wanted it so badly.
    I tried to pull the dream that had upset me so to the front of my mind, but it would not come. There had been betrayal in it, I knew, and loss, and time. The dream had left me scared to go back to sleep: the fireplace was almost dark now, with only the deep red glow of embers in the hearth to mark that it had once been burning, once had given light.
    I climbed down from the four-poster bed, and felt beneath it until I found the heavy china chamber pot. I hitched up my nightgown and I used it. Then I walked to the window and looked out. The moon was still full, but now it was low in the sky, and a dark orange: what my mother called a harvest moon. But things were harvested in autumn, I knew, not in spring.
    In the orange moonlight I could see an old woman—I was almost certain it was Old Mrs. Hempstock, although it was hard to see her face properly—walking up and down. She had a big long stick she was leaning on as she walked, like a staff. She reminded me of the soldiers I had seen on a trip to London, outside Buckingham Palace, as they marched backwards and forwards on parade.
    I watched her, and I was comforted.
    I climbed back into my bed in the dark, lay my head on the empty pillow, and thought, I’ll never go back to sleep, not now, and then I opened my eyes and saw that it was morning.
    There were clothes I had never seen before on a chair by the bed. There were two china jugs of water—one steaming hot, one cold—beside a