The downpour played an urgent marching-band beat on the old moss-covered corrugated roof, first building to a chaotic symphony of thunderous rhythms, and then as it slowed again I heard a trickle from the drainpipe by the back corner, broken halfway down, and the patter of droplets in the peat-coloured puddle that gathered below it.
I tried to read one of Dulcie’s books by candlelight, but a draught that penetrated the shack blew the flames near-horizontal and, parched from a day of too much sun and wine, I instead took sips of rainwater from a tin cup that I filled from the drainpipe.
I awoke once in the deepest part of the night to the sound of snorting and something of a reasonable size rubbing up against the shed, but I did not stir, and instead lay in my sleeping bag as still as a bandaged mummy, and listened as its footsteps retreated, rustling off through the long grass.
By early morning the storm had abated to slacken the sky’s tension. The ashen sea roared in the distance like a football stadium witnessing an extra-time injustice, a turbulent commotion that echoed up the hillside. From the grimy window of the shack I could just see out beyond the bay, across to the ragged promontory three or four miles south. Here lay the remains of a philanthropist’s long-abandoned attempt to build a clifftop spa resort. All that was left were the unused sewers, the markings of streets never built and a large solitary hotel perched high atop a cliff too vertical for the sea ever to be easily reachable for its residents. The building was a dark speck in the distance, just one more imaginative man’s doomed end-of-empire folly.
The sun rose lazily over the meadow, pale and wan at first, but then gaining in strength and luminescent power, and as it began to blaze a golden morning across the streaming meadow, a deer appeared in the overgrown edges to sniff the warming air.
It took several steps forward on legs that looked impossibly thin, stood for a few long moments during which I dared not move, even at some distance away in the shack. Evidently it heard something imperceptible for it turned tail and ran into the trees, but I stayed unmoving, my unwashed face reflected in the mottled glass.
A fug of flying insects gathered as bees and wasps and moths and butterflies and dragonflies took flight. I carried my sleeping bag outside and shook away the dust of decades.
Breakfast was light: a boiled egg and an apple each, plus nettle tea.
‘The second-best thing for hangovers, after another dash of the sauce that got you sick in the first place,’ explained Dulcie. ‘But seeing as this is low-level, the eggs should do it. Protein.’
We drank more tea and I felt myself coming back to life.
‘Did you sleep?’
‘Very well.’
‘I expect you’ll be on your way, then.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll just clear away yesterday’s trimmings. I’m sure I’ve stayed long enough.’
We sat silently finishing our breakfast, and then Dulcie spoke.
‘That wasn’t a hint. If I had tired of your company you’d know about it. Life is too short for hints. Plain speaking and direct action, those are my favoured modes of communication. Those who are easily offended are surely not worth knowing for any length of time. Would you agree?’
Again, I wasn’t sure what I thought so I just nodded, and thought about how so many people I knew back in the village preferred to say nothing rather than suffer the embarrassment of speaking the truth. Only in these passive silences was the truth to be found.
A final half-hour of toil passed as I raked grass trimmings and pulled a passage of weeds and wild grass, stopping only when I noticed that my wrists and forearms had come up with a rash of white welts and red, irritated skin. I walked back to the cottage, scratching away at them. Dulcie saw me.
‘Let me see.’
I held out my arms to her. She shook her head.
‘I’d wager hogweed. Nasty business, but you’re lucky. People can go blind.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Heracleum mantegazzianum: hogweed of the giant variety. It can burn like billy-o, by all accounts. An invasive, pugnacious bugger. Come, that needs rinsing before it blisters or scars. Soap and cold water, straight away.’
She led me to an outside spout and turned it on, just as my skin was beginning to feel like it was burning. Dulcie fetched a bar of soap and I got a good lather going. When I finished, my wrists and forearms looked redder than before, and my hands were slightly swollen, as if they had been struck by hammers.
Tutting, Dulcie turned them one way and then the other.
‘I’ll apply a poultice, just to be safe.’
‘It’s fine, really. It’s just a bit of a reaction.’
Soon I had rolled away my blankets and tarpaulin, and had my kitbag ready. I was torn between resting a while longer, or at least until the scorched sensation that was spreading up my arms abated, and heading off before the lazier hours of afternoon beckoned and my departure would surely be further delayed.
I bent down and scratched behind the dog’s large ears one more time. They felt warm in my hand, like hot flannels from a radiator.
‘Thank you for feeding me,’ I said to Dulcie. ‘It’s beautiful here.’
Distractedly, she watched a butterfly alight upon a leaf.
‘It’s a different world come winter.’
‘I bet.’
‘Stop by again if you’re passing. Butters would love to see you again, I’m sure.’
The dog looked up at me.
‘Oh, I nearly forgot.’
She went into the cottage and then returned with a small brown paper package.
‘What is it?’
‘A dried sausage. Or rather a string of them. German. They call them Landjäger; they keep for months. Years, even. Cast your preconceptions aside and enjoy something to nibble on. I thought it might change your mind about our Teutonic cousins.’
‘Where did you get them from?’
Dulcie didn’t reply. Instead she simply said, ‘Goodbye, Robert’, and walked into the house. I was left standing in a silence that seemed to hang heavy with things unsaid and was, perhaps, beneath it all tinged with the faintest streak of regret.
The dog followed me to the end of the lane, and then he too turned back.
Above the bay, grand houses looked out as the sun threw copper shards of shrapnel shapes across the silk sheet of the sea.
Many of their gardens had been turned over and kept as vegetable patches, and several held chicken coops. One even had a pigpen and a run for the hogs, who grunted excitedly as they pressed themselves up against the fence when I passed. Further on there was a postal office, a general store and a row of guest houses, each with a VACANCIES sign in its window. I caught glimpses into neat parlours where everything was polished, buffed and ordered; rooms that held little-used tea services, armchairs forever covered with protective sheeting, parted crinoline nets like wisps of cloud that were washed twice monthly, and slothful cats overfed on the breakfast-plate scrapings of fried bread crusts, sausage nubs and grey strings of bacon rind, stretching and yawning from their afternoon-windowsill suntraps.
My wrists and forearms felt more inflamed than ever and as I walked I scratched at them to little satisfaction.
At the end of the row, positioned so that the curved windows of the dining room appeared to perch on the cliff edge like the prow of a pioneer’s galleon cutting through the vast unknown of waters not yet mapped, framing a panorama of the sea as it broadened out vertiginously, was an old red-brick hotel. The menu outside was held fast beneath glass and partly obscured by a greasy streak of seagull shit, and offered a mouth-watering selection that I could never hope to afford.
I couldn’t help but contemplate the meals that Dulcie made, and how much they might cost in such a restaurant were its chef even capable of sourcing the ingredients that she seemed to miraculously get her hands upon. My stomach growled a little as I thought of her wonderfully cluttered kitchen, and then the road ahead.
The challenge of feeding myself from ver
y little required both effort and imagination and sat before me like a giant question mark blocking the sun upon awaking each morning. And now that an insatiable appetite had been awakened, enlivened, briefly cultivated and almost certainly indulged, that challenge no longer felt quite as thrilling.
More than that was the unshakeable thought that Dulcie had seen me in a way entirely unprejudiced by familiarity, history or expectation. That is, she had taken me as she found me, and not only that, but had seen fit to treat me as someone worth bothering with – not quite an equal, for it was clear that she was a wise, worldly and original person and I was none of these. Yet in our brief time together I had begun to feel as if I was becoming someone else. I was approaching being myself, rather than the person I had been living as. Dulcie had seen me as I was, and not been bored or uninterested.
Yet still a stubbornness and an emerging sense of the curious self drove me away from Dulcie and her full larder and into an unknown future. As the road dropped downwards and my knees took the strain, I descended into a huddled cluster of streets of old fishermen’s cottages much smaller than the opulent Victorian abodes up top.
Closely packed and with barely a straight vertical or horizontal line in sight, the squat homes of the lower bay were separated by wonky ginnels down which there were more cottages so close that their inhabitants could reach across from one dim living room to another. It was a cobbled, disorientating place of shadows, angles and caliginous corners pierced by sudden slits of morning sunlight penetrating the gaps between buildings; of small windows and steep slick steps that led down to gloomy cellars and secret passages once used for smuggling. It was said that stolen barrels of liquor could be transferred from the sea to the top of the village, and then off onto England’s black market, without ever seeing daylight. I was, as they say, down bay.
Out the front of these houses were old handmade lobster creels in various states of repair, coils of fraying rope, plant pots in which there grew herbs such as parsley, chives and thyme, pieces of driftwood sea-worn into weathered abstract lengths and lumps, and everywhere I turned there were more hand-blown glass floats, coloured pieces of glass shining in the sun, and stones through which there ran the patterned veins of prehistoric substrata or fossils of strange creatures from a time when all was cooling larval rock and sinking sediment. Stones whose pictures I had pored over in my lunch hour in the school library during dank and unforgiving days.
Strung between the houses were lines of drying items – children’s knitwear, rubber waders, sopping ganseys – or colourful clippy mats ready to have the dust beaten out of them, and below them galoshes upturned on wrought-iron racks. Out of curiosity I took one such alley, drawn perhaps by the lingering stench of kippers split and hung from racks in a smokehouse at the far edge of the village’s limit, before turning a corner and finding myself back on the road that led down to the narrowing jumble of the lower bay.
I passed several stout but not unfriendly locals, many of them women carrying baskets in the crooks of their arms, others passing time in idle conversation from which they paused to offer a greeting to this passing stranger who was a rare sight on a weekday before full summer had taken hold.
The road wound down, steep and curious. A fishmonger’s window held the catch of the day, while the greengrocer’s seemed rather bereft of anything green. At a bakery I bought two large, fresh floured rolls. I counted three snug pubs before the road ended abruptly at a stone slipway from which the fishing boats were launched daily and then hauled back up once again upon their return.
On the beach below, the tide had deposited large tangled banks of seaweed, gluey and bubbling, and receded enough to reveal the wooden groynes planted to create a corridor through which generations of boats had navigated a passage. Limpets and barnacles clung decoratively to the wet rocks, and fleshy red anemones too, so beautiful when submerged and in full bloom but deflated and melancholy looking gelatinous blobs when stranded at low tide.
I walked across sandbanks dotted with spiralling piles of lugworm residue as the sea receded to further reveal stone scaurs. I walked over shifting sheaves of bladderwrack, sea lettuce and red kelp that lay splayed across the rutted sands, patiently awaiting the next tidal turn to bring it back to life as a string puppet awaits the return of its master.
Along the beach the cliffs were in a perpetual state of reshaping, where chimneys and scarps and shelves periodically fell crumbling, and where time was marked not by years or decades or centuries, but by the re-emergence of those species trapped in the clay here: the ammonites, haematites and bracken fronds pressed flat between the pages of past epochs. Each was a bookmark placed in Britain’s ongoing story, and the land itself was a sculpture, a work in progress.
I looked out across the water as it rose in gentle berms and then curled and broke in waves of hissing white spume, shifting the shale beneath in a hypnotic percussive rattle of stone on stone.
The sea was an hourglass tipped and then tipped again with each turning tide. As I ascended at a sharp angle, overhead a gull offered a greeting.
I ate my roll and then stripped to my shorts and ran down to the water, hurling myself into the sea to cool my prickling skin and finally enjoy the first fully submerged wash in weeks.
The seabed was a jagged morass of pebbles and smashed shells swirling around my ankles. The water made my bones feel forged, indestructible, and as the brown brine turned to a fizzing foam a larger wave, the seventh in a set, took me by surprise and though I turned my back to it at the last moment and was still only chest-deep it walloped my neck, defiantly slapped my face, filled one ear to deafness and sent me stumbling into the gelid squall.
But the tentative totter of warm blood entering cold waters was over. My heart was below the waterline and my neck, the nerve centre through which all the body’s sensory messages pass, was wet too, so I pushed off and let the North Sea take my weight, my feet kicking a dark void as I swam out, each rising wave rising through me, lifting me up, the force of the moon exerting itself as the land disappeared from view between each undulation, everything on it obscured.
Soon my body was warm and I felt deliriously alive. The salt water soothed the hogweed burns and I floated on my back, thinking of nothing.
At the slipway a fisherman was tending to a knotted coil of blue rope as thick as my wrist. Beside him were a stack of creels and four baskets containing the best of that morning’s haul.
‘You’d not catch me in there,’ he said, rolling up the sleeves of his gansey as I passed.
I smiled. ‘It’s not so bad once you’re in. Refreshing.’
He sniffed. ‘Fishermen don’t swim.’
‘Why not?’
‘Most can’t. Still, there’s worse days for it, I suppose.’
He stooped and lifted from his basket a couple of mackerel. ‘Here you are. For the old dear.’
He said this not as a question, but a statement.
‘For – ?’
‘For Dulcie.’
For a moment I was confused as to how he knew who I was.
‘You are the lad that’s been stopping up there.’
‘Aye. But – ’
‘Well, you’ll save me the bother if you can fetch them back with you. I said I’d send something her way but I’ve got errands to run and these creels to fix. Best kept fresh if they’re not straight off to the smokehouse, are mackerel.’
‘You must be Mr Barton.’
He nodded. ‘Aye.’
‘Your lobster was smashing.’
‘Give it a month when they’ve fattened up and we’re in full season, then you’ll know what smashing is.’
‘That’s what Dulcie said but I’ll be long gone by then.’
Barton looked at me sideways.
He held out the brace of fish for me in a manner that was almost aggressive. A taunt of sorts. A challenge. They were close to my face, their lean flanks glistening. They smelled of nothing.
‘Here you are, then, lad.’
‘Off?’ said Barton, slightly affronted. ‘Where to?’
I nodded down the coast. ‘South.’
‘Well, what’s so bloody good down there?’
‘I don’t know. I thought I’d find out.’
The fish were still held close to my face. I looked into the ruined mirrors of their pupils and saw the deep green and magnesium striped pattern of their lean but muscular flanks, their bellies the colour of molten lead. A hint of obscene pink within the gills. Their metallic sheen.
‘It’ll not take you long,’ he said. ‘What’s an hour or two out of the rest of your life? I’ll square up with the old bird later.’
I moved from one foot to the other. Hours were precious and the bay, lovely as it was, appeared to be conspiring to keep me captive.
‘It’ll not kill you,’ said Barton.
‘Alright.’
I took the fish from him. He seemed to soften then.
‘She’s a fine cook, is Dulcie. Some folk down bay call her nutty but she’s just her own lady, that’s all. Lives the life she wants to lead.’
‘Did she never marry?’ I asked.
Barton crouched again and locked the straps on his basket. I was still holding the brace aloft.
‘You’d have to ask her, and even then she’d only tell you what she wanted to tell you.’ He stood again. ‘You’d best get them mackerel up there and into the pantry. The day’s warming nicely.’
He lifted a basket and hauled it over one shoulder.
‘How did you know I was me, Mr Barton?’
He looked away. He squinted out to sea.
‘Just did.’
Dulcie did not seem surprised to see me return to her cottage. Her tone, though, I noted, was curt. ‘Your hair is wet. Why?’
‘I’ve had a dip.’
‘In the sea?’
‘Yes. It was freezing.’
‘Of course it was. It’s the sea. It’s a terrible risk.’
‘I was quite safe.’
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