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I don’t know what I said in reply, or if I even said anything. But I went out of that kitchen, although I was hungry, without even an apple.
I took my book into the back garden, beneath the balcony, by the flower bed that grew beneath the television room window, and I read—forgetting my hunger in Egypt with animal-headed gods who cut each other up and then restored one another to life again.
My sister came out into the garden.
“I like her so much,” she told me. “She’s my friend. Do you want to see what she gave me?” She produced a small gray purse, the kind my mother kept in her handbag for her coins, that fastened with a metal butterfly clip. It looked like it was made of leather. I wondered if it was mouse skin. She opened the purse, put her fingers into the opening, came out with a large silver coin: half a crown.
“Look!” she said. “Look what I got!”
I wanted a half a crown. No, I wanted what I could buy with half a crown—magic tricks and plastic joke-toys, and books, and, oh, so many things. But I did not want a little gray purse with a half a crown in it.
“I don’t like her,” I told my sister.
“That’s only because I saw her first,” said my sister. “She’s my friend.”
I did not think that Ursula Monkton was anybody’s friend. I wanted to go and warn Lettie Hempstock about her—but what could I say? That the new housekeeper-na
I wished I had never let go of Lettie’s hand. Ursula Monkton was my fault, I was certain of it, and I would not be able to get rid of her by flushing her down a plug hole, or putting frogs in her bed.
I should have left then, should have run away, fled down the lane the mile or so to the Hempstocks’ farm, but I didn’t, and then a taxi took my mother away to Dicksons Opticians, where she would show people letters through lenses, and help them see more clearly, and I was left there with Ursula Monkton.
She came out into the garden with a plate of sandwiches.
“I’ve spoken to your mother,” she said, a sweet smile beneath the pale lipstick, “and while I’m here, you children need to limit your travels. You can be anywhere in the house or in the garden, or I will walk with you to your friends’, but you may not leave the property and simply go wandering.”
“Of course,” said my sister.
I did not say anything.
My sister ate a peanut butter sandwich.
I was starving. I wondered whether the sandwiches were dangerous or not. I did not know. I was scared that I would eat one and it would turn into worms in my stomach, and that they would wriggle through me, colonizing my body, until they pushed out of my skin.
I went back into the house. I pushed the kitchen door open. Ursula Monkton was not there. I stuffed my pockets with fruit, with apples and oranges and hard brown pears. I took three bananas and stuffed them down my jumper, and fled to my laboratory.
My laboratory—that was what I called it—was a green-painted shed as far away from the house as you could get, built up against the side of the house’s huge old garage. A fig tree grew beside the shed, although we had never tasted ripe fruit from the tree, only seen the huge leaves and the green fruits. I called the shed my laboratory because I kept my chemistry set in there: the chemistry set, a pere
I ate a banana and a pear, then hid the rest of the fruit beneath the wooden table.
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive. I decided that I would creep out of the laboratory shed, along the wall to the edge of the lawn and then into the azaleas and bay laurels that bordered the garden there. From the laurels, I would slip down the hill and over the rusting metal fence that ran along the side of the lane.
Nobody was looking. I ran and I crept and got through the laurels, and I went down the hill, pushing through the brambles and the nettle patches that had sprung up since the last time I went that way.
Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of the hill, just in front of the rusting metal fence. There was no way she could have got there without my seeing her, but she was there. She folded her arms and looked at me, and her gray and pink dress flapped in a gust of wind.
“I believe I said that you were not to leave the property.”
“I’m not,” I told her, with a cockiness I knew I did not feel, not even a little. “I’m still on the property. I’m just exploring.”
“You’re sneaking around,” she said.
I said nothing.
“I think you should be in your bedroom, where I can keep an eye on you. It’s time for your nap.”
I was too old for naps, but I knew that I was too young to argue, or to win the argument if I did.
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t say ‘okay,’ ” she said. “Say ‘Yes, Miss Monkton.’ Or ‘Ma’am.’ Say ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ” She looked down at me with her blue-gray eyes, which put me in mind of holes rotted in canvas, and which did not look pretty at that moment.
I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and hated myself for saying it.
We walked together up the hill.
“Your parents can no longer afford this place,” said Ursula Monkton. “And they can’t afford to keep it up. Soon enough they’ll see that the way to solve their financial problems is to sell this house and its gardens to property developers. Then all of this”—and this was the tangle of brambles, the unkempt world behind the lawn—“will become a dozen identical houses and gardens. And if you are lucky, you’ll get to live in one. And if not, you will just envy the people who do. Will you like that?”
I loved the house, and the garden. I loved the rambling shabbiness of it. I loved that place as if it was a part of me, and perhaps, in some ways, it was.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Ursula Monkton. I’m your housekeeper.”
I said, “Who are you really? Why are you giving people money?”
“Everybody wants money,” she said, as if it were self-evident. “It makes them happy. It will make you happy, if you let it.” We had come out by the heap of grass clippings, behind the circle of green grass that we called the fairy ring: sometimes, when the weather was wet, it filled with vivid yellow toadstools.
“Now,” she said. “Go to your room.”
I ran from her—ran as fast as I could, across the fairy ring, up the lawn, past the rosebushes, past the coal shed and into the house.
Ursula Monkton was standing just inside the back door of the house to welcome me in, although she could not have got past me. I would have seen. Her hair was perfect, and her lipstick seemed freshly applied.
“I’ve been inside you,” she said. “So a word to the wise. If you tell anybody anything, they won’t believe you. And, because I’ve been inside you, I’ll know. And I can make it so you never say anything I don’t want you to say to anybody, not ever again.”
I went upstairs to the bedroom, and I lay on my bed. The place on the sole of my foot where the worm had been throbbed and ached, and now my chest hurt too. I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible. I pulled down a handful of my mother’s old books, from when she was a girl, and I read about schoolgirls having adventures in the 1930s and 1940s. Mostly they were up against smugglers or spies or fifth columnists, whatever they were, and the girls were always brave and they always knew exactly what to do. I was not brave and I had no idea what to do.