Текст книги "The ocean at the end of the lane"

Автор книги: Neil Gaiman

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

I had never felt so alone.

I wondered if the Hempstocks had a telephone. It seemed unlikely, but not impossible—perhaps it had been Mrs. Hempstock who had reported the abandoned Mini to the police in the first place. The phone book was downstairs, but I knew the number to call Directory Enquiries, and I only had to ask for anybody named Hempstock living at Hempstock Farm. There was a phone in my parents’ bedroom.

I got off the bed, went to the doorway, looked out. The upstairs hallway was empty. As quickly, as quietly as I could, I walked into the bedroom next to mine. The walls were pale pink, my parents’ bed covered with a bedspread covered in its turn with huge printed roses. There were French windows to the balcony that ran along that side of the house. There was a cream-colored telephone on the cream-and-gilt nightstand beside the bed. I picked it up, heard the dull whirring noise of the dial tone, and dialed Directory Enquiries, my finger pulling the holes in the dial down, a one, a nine, a two, and I waited for the operator to come on the line, and tell me the number of the Hempstocks’ farm. I had a pencil with me, and I was ready to write the telephone number down in the back of a blue cloth-bound book called Pansy Saves the School.

The operator did not come on. The dialing tone continued, and over it, I heard Ursula Monkton’s voice saying, “Properly brought-up young people would not even think about sneaking off to use the telephone, would they?”

I did not say anything, although I have no doubt she could hear me breathing. I put the handset down on the cradle, and went back into the bedroom I shared with my sister.

I sat on my bed, and stared out of the window.

My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the windows open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open my windows and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown onto my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat.

But now it was not raining, and it was not night. All I could see through the window were trees, and clouds, and the distant purple of horizon.

I had emergency chocolate supplies hidden beneath the large plastic Batman figurine I had acquired on my birthday, and I ate them, and as I ate them I thought of how I had let go of Lettie Hempstock’s hand to grab the ball of rotting cloth, and I remembered the stabbing pain in my foot that had followed.

I brought her here, I thought, and I knew that it was true.

Ursula Monkton wasn’t real. She was a cardboard mask for the thing that had traveled inside me as a worm, that had flapped and gusted in the open country under that orange sky.

I went back to reading Pansy Saves the School. The secret plans to the airbase next door to the school were being smuggled out to the enemy by spies who were teachers working on the school vegetable allotment: the plans were concealed inside hollowed-out vegetable marrows.

“Great heavens!” said Inspector Davidson of Scotland Yard’s renowned Smugglers and Secret Spies Division (the SSSD). “That is literally the last place we would have looked!”

“We owe you an apology, Pansy,” said the stern headmistress, with an uncharacteristically warm smile, and a twinkle in her eyes that made Pansy think perhaps she had misjudged the woman all this term. “You have saved the reputation of the school! Now, before you get too full of yourself—aren’t there some French verbs you ought to be conjugating for Madame?”

I could be happy with Pansy, in some part of my head, even while the rest of my head was filled with fear. I waited for my parents to come home. I would tell them what was happening. I would tell them. They would believe me.

At that time my father worked in an office an hour’s drive away. I was not certain what he did. He had a very nice, pretty secretary, with a toy poodle, and whenever she knew we children would be coming in to see our father she would bring the poodle in from home, and we would play with it. Sometimes we would pass buildings and my father would say, “That’s one of ours.” But I did not care about buildings, so never asked how it was one of ours, or even who we were.

I lay on my bed, reading book after book, until Ursula Monkton appeared in the doorway of the room and said, “You can come down now.”

My sister was watching television downstairs, in the television room. She was watching a program called How, a pop-science-and-how-things-work show, which opened with the hosts in Native American headdresses saying, “How?” and doing embarrassing war whoops.

I wanted to turn over to the BBC, but my sister looked at me triumphantly and said, “Ursula says it can stay on whatever I want to watch and you aren’t allowed to change it.”

I sat with her for a minute, as an old man with a moustache showed all the children of England how to tie fishing flies.

I said, “She’s not nice.”

“I like her. She’s pretty.”

My mother arrived home five minutes later, called hello from the corridor, then went into the kitchen to see Ursula Monkton. She reappeared. “Dinner will be ready as soon as Daddy gets home. Wash your hands.”

My sister went upstairs and washed her hands.

I said to my mother, “I don’t like her. Will you make her go away?”

My mother sighed. “It is not going to be Gertruda all over again, dear. Ursula’s a very nice girl, from a very good family. And she positively adores the two of you.”

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 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.

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 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 smile he had when he knew he was saying something funny.

She was standing too close to him. Sometimes he would rest his hand on her shoulder, in a friendly sort of way. It worried me that he was standing so close to her. He didn’t know what she was. She was a monster, and he just thought she was a normal person, and he was being nice to her. She was wearing different clothes today: a gray skirt, of the kind they called a midi, and a pink blouse.

On any other day if I had seen my father walking around the garden, I would have run over to him. But not that day. I was scared that he would be angry, or that Ursula Monkton would say something to make him angry with me.

I became terrified of him when he was angry. His face (angular and usually affable) would grow red, and he would shout, shout so loudly and furiously that it would, literally, paralyze me. I would not be able to think.

He never hit me. He did not believe in hitting. He would tell us how his father had hit him, how his mother had chased him with a broom, how he was better than that. When he got angry enough to shout at me he would occasionally remind me that he did not hit me, as if to make me grateful. In the school stories I read, misbehavior often resulted in a caning, or the slipper, and then was forgiven and done, and I would sometimes envy those fictional children the cleanness of their lives.

I did not want to approach Ursula Monkton: I did not want to risk making my father angry with me.

I wondered if this would be a good time to try to leave the property, to head down the lane, but I was certain that if I did I would look up to see my father’s angry face beside Ursula Monkton’s, all pretty and smug.

So I simply watched them from the huge branch of the beech tree. When they walked out of sight, behind the azalea bushes, I clambered down the rope ladder, went up into the house, up to the balcony, and I watched them from there. It was a gray day, but there were butter-yellow daffodils everywhere, and narcissi in profusion, with their pale outer petals and their dark orange trumpets. My father picked a handful of narcissi and gave them to Ursula Monkton, who laughed, and said something, then made a curtsey. He bowed in return, and said something that made her laugh. I thought he must have proclaimed himself her Knight in Shining Armor, or something like that.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not. I just stood on the balcony and watched, and they did not look up and they did not see me.

My book of Greek myths had told me that the narcissi were named after a beautiful young man, so lovely that he had fallen in love with himself. He saw his reflection in a pool of water, and would not leave it, and, eventually, he died, so that the gods were forced to transform him into a flower. In my mind, when I had read this, I had imagined that a narcissus must be the most beautiful flower in the world. I was disappointed when I learned that it was just a less impressive daffodil.

My sister came out of the house and went over to them. My father picked her up and swung her in the air. They all walked inside together, my father with my sister holding on to his neck, and Ursula Monkton, her arms filled with yellow and white flowers. I watched them. I watched as my father’s free hand, the one not holding my sister, went down and rested, casually, proprietarily, on the swell of Ursula Monkton’s midi skirted bottom.

I would react differently to that now. At the time, I do not believe I thought anything of it at all. I was seven.

I climbed up into my bedroom window, easy to reach from the balcony, and down onto my bed, where I read a book about a girl who stayed in the Channel Islands and defied the Nazis because she would not abandon her pony.

And while I read, I thought, Ursula Monkton cannot keep me here forever. Soon enough—in a few days at the most—someone will take me into town, or away from here, and then I will go to the farm at the bottom of the lane, and I will tell Lettie Hempstock what I did.

Then I thought, Suppose Ursula Monkton only needs a couple of days. And that scared me.

Ursula Monkton made meatloaf for dinner that evening, and I would not eat it. I was determined not to eat anything she had made or cooked or touched. My father was not amused.

“But I don’t want it,” I told him. “I’m not hungry.”

It was Wednesday, and my mother was attending her meeting, to raise money so that people in Africa who needed water could drill wells, in the village hall of the next village down the road. She had posters that she would put up, diagrams of wells, and photographs of smiling people. At the dinner table were my sister, my father, Ursula Monkton, and me.

“It’s good, it’s good for you, and it’s tasty,” said my father. “And we do not waste food in this house.”

“I said I wasn’t hungry.”

I had lied. I was so hungry it hurt.

“Then just try a little nibble,” he said. “It’s your favorite. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy. You love them.”

There was a children’s table in the kitchen, where we ate when my parents had friends over, or would be eating late. But that night we were at the adult table. I preferred the children’s table. I felt invisible there. Nobody watched me eat.

Ursula Monkton sat next to my father and stared at me, with a tiny smile at the corner of her lips.

I knew I should shut up, be silent, be sullen. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to tell my father why I did not want to eat.

“I won’t eat anything she made,” I told him. “I don’t like her.”

“You will eat your food,” said my father. “You will at least try it. And apologize to Miss Monkton.”

“I won’t.”

“He doesn’t have to,” said Ursula Monkton sympathetically, and she looked at me, and she smiled. I do not think that either of the other two people at the table noticed that she was smiling with amusement, or that there was nothing sympathetic in her expression, or her smile, or her rotting-cloth eyes.

“I’m afraid he does,” said my father. His voice was just a little louder, and his face was just a little redder. “I won’t have him cheeking you like that.” Then, to me, “Give me one good reason, just one, why you won’t apologize and why you won’t eat the lovely food that Ursula prepared for us.”

I did not lie well. I told him.

“Because she’s not human,” I said. “She’s a monster. She’s a . . .” What had the Hempstocks called her kind of thing? “She’s a flea.”

My father’s cheeks were burning red, now, and his lips were thin. He said, “Outside. Into the hall. This minute.”

My heart sank inside me. I climbed down from my stool and followed him out into the corridor. It was dark in the hallway: the only light came from the kitchen, a sheet of clear glass above the door. He looked down at me. “You will go back into the kitchen. You will apologize to Miss Monkton. You will finish your plate of food, then, quietly and politely, you will go straight upstairs to bed.”

“No,” I told him. “I won’t.”

I bolted, ran down the hallway, round the corner, and I pounded up the stairs. My father, I had no doubt, would come after me. He was twice my size, and fast, but I did not have to keep going for long. There was only one room in that house that I could lock, and it was there that I was headed, left at the top of the stairs and along the hall to the end. I reached the bathroom ahead of my father. I slammed the door, and I pushed the little silver bolt closed.

He had not chased me. Perhaps he thought it was beneath his dignity, chasing a child. But in a few moments I heard his fist slam, and then his voice saying, “Open this door.”

I didn’t say anything. I sat on the plush toilet seat cover and I hated him almost as much as I hated Ursula Monkton.

The door banged again, harder this time. “If you don’t open this door,” he said, loud enough to make sure I heard it through the door, “I’m breaking it down.”

Could he do that? I didn’t know. The door was locked. Locked doors stopped people coming in. A locked door meant that you were in there, and when people wanted to come into the bathroom they would jiggle the door, and it wouldn’t open, and they would say “Sorry!” or shout “Are you going to be long?” and—

The door exploded inward. The little silver bolt hung off the door frame, all bent and broken, and my father stood in the doorway, filling it, his eyes huge and white, his cheeks burning with fury.

He said, “Right.”

That was all he said, but his hand held my left upper arm in a grip I could never have broken. I wondered what he would do now. Would he, finally, hit me, or send me to my room, or shout at me so loudly that I would wish I were dead?

He did none of those things.

He pulled me over to the bathtub. He leaned over, pushed the white rubber plug into the plug hole. Then he turned on the cold tap. Water gushed out, splashing the white enamel, then, steadily and slowly, it filled the bath.

The water ran noisily.

My father turned to the open door. “I can deal with this,” he said to Ursula Monkton.

She stood in the doorway, holding my sister’s hand, and she looked concerned and gentle, but there was triumph in her eyes.

“Close the door,” said my father. My sister started whimpering, but Ursula Monkton closed the door, as best she could, for one of the hinges did not fit properly, and the broken bolt stopped the door closing all the way.

It was just me and my father. His cheeks had gone from red to white, and his lips were pressed together, and I did not know what he was going to do, or why he was running a bath, but I was scared, so scared.

“I’ll apologize,” I told him. “I’ll say sorry. I didn’t mean what I said. She’s not a monster. She’s . . . she’s pretty.”

He didn’t say anything in response. The bath was full, and he turned the cold tap off.

Then, swiftly, he picked me up. He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.

I looked at him, at the intent expression on his face. He had taken off his jacket before he came upstairs. He was wearing a light blue shirt and a maroon paisley tie. He pulled off his watch on its expandable strap, dropped it onto the window ledge.

Then I realized what he was going to do, and I kicked out, and I flailed at him, neither of which actions had any effect of any kind as he plunged me down into the cold water.

I was horrified, but it was initially the horror of something happening against the established order of things. I was fully dressed. That was wrong. I had my sandals on. That was wrong. The bathwater was cold, so cold and so wrong. That was what I thought, initially, as he pushed me into the water, and then he pushed further, pushing my head and shoulders beneath the chilly water, and the horror changed its nature. I thought, I’m going to die.

And, thinking that, I was determined to live.

I flailed with my hands, trying to find something to hold on to, but there was nothing to grab, only the slippery sides of the bath I’d bathed in for the last two years. (I had read many books in that bath. It was one of my safe places. And now, I had no doubt, I was going to die there.)

I opened my eyes, beneath the water, and I saw it dangling there, in front of my face: my chance for life, and I clutched it with both hands: my father’s tie.

I held it tightly, pulled myself up as he pushed me down, gripping it for life itself, pulling my face up and out of that frigid water, holding on to his tie so tightly that he could no longer push my head and shoulders back into the bath without going in himself.

My face was now out of the water, and I clamped my teeth into his tie, just below the knot.

We struggled. I was soaked, took some small pleasure in the knowledge that he was soaked as well, his blue shirt clinging to his huge form.

Now he pushed me down again, but fear of death gives us strength: my hands and my teeth were clamped to his tie, and he could not break his grip on them without hitting me.

My father did not hit me.

He straightened up, and I was pulled up with him, soaked and spluttering and angry and crying and scared. I let go of his tie with my teeth, still held on with my hands.

He said, “You ruined my tie. Let go.” The tie knot had tightened to pea size, the lining of the tie was dangling damply outside of it. He said, “You should be glad that your mother isn’t here.”

I let go, dropped to the puddled bathroom lino. I took a step backward, toward the toilet. He looked down at me. Then he said, “Go to your bedroom. I don’t want to see you again tonight.”

I went to my room.

VIII.

I was shivering convulsively and I was wet through and I was cold, very cold. It felt like all my heat had been stolen. The wet clothes clung to my flesh and dripped cold water onto the floor. With every step I took my sandals made comical squelching noises, and water oozed from the little diamond-shaped holes on the top of the sandals.

I pulled all of my clothes off, and I left them in a sopping heap on the tiles by the fireplace, where they began to puddle. I took the box of matches from the mantelpiece, turned on the gas tap and lit the flame in the gas fire.

(I am staring at a pond, remembering things that are hard to believe. Why do I find the hardest thing for me to believe, looking back, is that a girl of five and a boy of seven had a gas fire in their bedroom?)

There were no towels in the room, and I stood there, wet, wondering how to dry myself off. I took the thin counterpane that covered my bed, wiped myself off with it, then put on my pajamas. They were red nylon, shiny and striped, with a black plasticized burn mark on the left sleeve, where I had leaned too close to the gas fire once, and the pajama arm caught alight, although by some miracle I had not burned my arm.

There was a dressing gown that I almost never used hanging on the back of the bedroom door, its shadow perfectly positioned to cast nightmare shadows on the wall when the hall light was on and the door was open. I put it on.

The bedroom door opened, and my sister came in to get the nightdress from under her pillow. She said, “You’ve been so naughty that I’m not even allowed to be in the room with you. I get to sleep in Mummy and Daddy’s bed tonight. And Daddy says I can watch the television.”

There was an old television in a brown wooden cabinet in the corner of my parents’ bedroom that was almost never turned on. The vertical hold was unreliable, and the fuzzy black-and-white picture had a tendency to stream, in a slow ribbon: people’s heads vanished off the bottom of the screen as their feet descended, in a stately fashion, from the top.

“I don’t care,” I told her.

“Daddy said you ruined his tie. And he’s all wet,” said my sister, with satisfaction in her voice.

Ursula Monkton was at the bedroom door. “We don’t talk to him,” she told my sister. “We won’t talk to him again until he’s allowed to rejoin the family.”

My sister slipped out, heading to the next room, my parents’ room. “You aren’t in my family,” I told Ursula Monkton. “When Mummy comes back, I’ll tell her what Daddy did.”

“She won’t be home for another two hours,” said Ursula Monkton. “And what can you say to her that will do anything? She backs up your father in everything, doesn’t she?”

She did. They always presented a perfectly united front.

“Don’t cross me,” said Ursula Monkton. “I have things to do here, and you are getting in my way. Next time it will be so much worse. Next time, I lock you in the attic.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” I told her. I was afraid of her, more afraid than I had ever been of anything.

“It’s hot in here,” she told me, and smiled. She walked over to the gas fire, reached down, turned it off, took the matches from the mantel.

I said, “You’re still just a flea.”

She stopped smiling. She reached up to the lintel above the door, higher than any child could reach, and she pulled down the key that rested there. She walked out of the room, and closed the door. I heard the key turn, heard the lock engage and click.

I could hear television voices coming from the room next door. I heard the hallway door close, cutting off the two bedrooms from the rest of the house, and I knew that Ursula Monkton was going downstairs. I went over to the lock, and squinted through it. I had learned from a book that I could use a pencil to push a key through a keyhole onto a sheet of paper beneath, and free myself that way . . . but the keyhole was empty.

I cried then, cold and still damp, in that bedroom, cried with pain and anger and terror, cried safely in the knowledge that no one would come in and see me, that no one would tease me for crying, as they teased any boys at my school who were unwise enough to give way to tears.

I heard the gentle patter of raindrops against the glass of my bedroom window, and even that brought me no joy.

I cried until I was all cried out. Then I breathed in huge gulps of air, and I thought, Ursula Monkton, flapping canvas monster, worm and flea, would get me if I tried to leave the property. I knew that.

But Ursula Monkton had locked me in. She would not expect me to leave now.

And, perhaps, if I was lucky, she might be distracted.

I opened the bedroom window, and listened to the night. The gentle rain made a noise that was almost a rustling. It was a cold night, and I was already chilled. My sister was in the room next door, watching something on the television. She would not hear me.

I went over to the door, and turned off the light.

I walked through the dark bedroom, and climbed back on the bed.

I’m in my bed, I thought. I’m lying in my bed, thinking about how upset I am. Soon, I’ll fall asleep. I’m in my bed, and I know she’s won, and if she checks up on me I’m in my bed, asleep.

I’m in my bed and it’s time for me to sleep now . . . I can’t even keep my eyes open. I’m fast asleep. Fast asleep in my bed . . .

I stood on the bed, and climbed out of the window. I hung for a moment, then let myself drop, as quietly as I could, onto the balcony. That was the easy bit.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisors. In books, boys climbed trees, so I climbed trees, sometimes very high, always scared of falling. In books, people climbed up and down drainpipes to get in and out of houses, so I climbed up and down drainpipes too. They were the heavy iron drainpipes of old, clamped to the brick, not today’s lightweight plastic affairs.

I had never climbed down a drainpipe in the dark, or in the rain, but I knew where the footholds were. I knew also that the biggest challenge would not be falling, a twenty-foot tumble down into the wet flower bed; it was that the drainpipe I was climbing down went past the television room, downstairs, in which, I had no doubt, Ursula Monkton and my father would be watching television.