My father came home, and dinner was served. A thick vegetable soup, then roast chicken and new potatoes with frozen peas. I loved all of the things on the table. I did not eat any of it.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I explained.
‘I’m not one for telling tales out of school,’ said Ursula Monkton, ‘but someone had chocolate on his hands and face when he came down from his bedroom.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t eat that rubbish,’ grumbled my father.
‘It’s just processed sugar. And it ruins your appetite and your teeth,’ said my mother.
I was scared they would force me to eat, but they didn’t. I sat there hungrily, while Ursula Monkton laughed at all my father’s jokes. It seemed to me that he was making special jokes, just for her.
After dinner we all watched Mission: Impossible. I usually liked Mission: Impossible, but this time it made me feel uneasy, as people kept pulling their faces off to reveal new faces beneath. They were wearing rubber masks, and it was always our heroes underneath, but I wondered what would happen if Ursula Monkton pulled off her face, what would be underneath that?
We went to bed. It was my sister’s night, and the bedroom door was closed. I missed the 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 would be able to 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 this evening to organise 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 make-up, 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.
Chapter 7
The 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 grey. 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 whom 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 pointing out the rose bushes and the blackcurrant bushes and the cherry trees and the azaleas as if he had had something to do with them, as if they had not been put in place and tended by Mr Wollery for fifty years before we had bought the house.