‘I don’t understand,’ my mother said.
‘Two or three meters a year. All my land, all gone.’
‘So don’t buy it, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Ah!’
He raised his index finger and said we should follow him. We went outside. A surreal amount of rubbish was piled up around the house. Someone who couldn’t throw away a thing, who even saw an ice-cream truck in an old dairy van, with a few modifications here and there. That draughty dairy van, faded to old ivory, was the biggest of the objects that had ground to a halt there. For the rest it was cement mixers, rails, crossties, building materials. A hill of petrified sacks of cement and the overgrown remains of what looked like a crane.
‘It’s all going out,’ he said.
He waved his hand casually, as though those tons of scrap iron could be carried off by a magician’s sleight of hand. Amid the thorns and the old iron was a kind of goat path which took us to the edge of the cliff. My mother’s mantilla caught in the thorns, the bushes were taller than I was. Then, before us, opened the panorama of sea and sky.
‘Look,’ the man said.
My mother’s hand was resting on my shoulder; we peered over the edge, down where he was pointing.
‘I’m making a wall,’ he said. ‘To stop the sea.’
In the distance, a low, dark barrier had been thrown up against the foot of the cliff.
‘What the sea washes away during a storm, I put back the next day. If I didn’t, we’d soon be standing in the water here.’
He was talking to the horizon.
‘Not a meter of the cliff gets lost down there anymore. A soft seawall, made of building debris. A closed system.’
‘But. .’ my mother said.
She pointed to where his wall stopped, a few hundred meters to our right.
‘On its way,’ the man said. ‘By next winter, I’ll be here.’
He pointed to the spot below our feet.
‘Once the foundation’s been laid, it’s just a matter of keeping it filled. Every year I lose thirty-five to fifty tons of material. On a good day I can have a thousand tons added. At a pace of forty to fifty truck-loads a day. In two years, once the wall’s reached the northern end of the cliff, all I’ll have to do is keep it up.’
A utopian. It was seductive to listen to. We stepped back from the edge. The house was about fifteen meters from the cliff.
‘It’s lovely here,’ my mother said. ‘Does it all belong to you?’
He nodded.
‘And you really want to sell this?’
‘None of the children are using it. An empty house is an unpleasant thing to look out on, that’s what the wife and I think.’
His house was located back behind ours, further inland. It had white plastered walls and a pointed roof that stuck up above mountains of scrap and the wild growth of thorn bushes. The houses were thirty meters apart. He would be our neighbor. If he and his wife were nice, a path would be worn through the bushes; if they turned out to be bastards I knew my mother would start thinking about a fence. She was quite solitary, I had never seen her try her hardest to make contact with others. Vast towers of cloud parted, sunlight came gushing between them. We looked at the house.
‘Tudor,’ the man said.
His name was Warren Feldman, and he had just sold us a house.
*
A few weeks later we were able to move into the house, which was being eaten from the inside by wood-boring insects and threatened from the outside by erosion. These factors were accounted for in the price. It was not an expensive house. The taxi took us there slowly, the driver swerving around the potholes in the road. Warren Feldman was just coming out the front door, in overalls, a paintbrush in one hand and a blue jerrycan in the other.
‘Well folks,’ he said.
Then he fell to the ground. Boom, just like that. In the same taxi, we took him down to the doctor in Alburgh. Without ventilating the place, he had been slapping some poisonous substance on the beams to stop the woodworms and the long-horned beetles. He was sick for a week, and we couldn’t enter the house for a few days. We took a room at the Whaler.
‘At least he’s a man of his word,’ my mother said.
The scrap metal around the house was gone, it had been moved to his own backyard. March came, the gorse blossomed, before long we were a raft in a sea of yellow flowers. They smelled overpoweringly of coconut. The days turned warm after a cold winter, we slept on bare mattresses, happy refugees in our own house.
Then the crates arrived. At an invisible signal they had been loaded onto a vessel in the harbor of Alexandria, sailed across the sea and unloaded at Norwich. The house was flooded with the ten thousand things. I had watched them being packed with regret, now I watched them being unpacked with reluctance. This house was so much smaller than the other one, yet still everything fit in. I didn’t understand my own reluctance. Perhaps, having grown accustomed to temporary addresses, I had realized that it is no shame to live without a history. Since leaving Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerard we had stayed at hotels, we had seen Venice and spent a long time in London; it had been difficult for her to find a house that was suitable and not too expensive. Hotel rooms, I had noticed, can serve as an antidote to melancholy.
The house was now overrun by the past. The piano was in the living room. Pathways had been cleared between the cupboards of dark, heavy wood from Rajasthan, the glass chandeliers, between artworks by Bedouins from the Sinai, camel-hide lampshades, floor lamps of chased copper — a museum in which only she knew the origins of things. With the arrival of the crates, the light had been pressed out of the house. A tomb full of magic objects for a highly individual mystic religion.
I fled into the summer. Skylarks soared up to higher spheres and sang in religious ecstasy. Farm machinery growled through the rolling fields. I loved the flowing life on the beach. As soon as the weather even slightly allowed, the English tossed off their clothes and surrendered to the sun. How on earth could people be so white? I received mugs of tea from women sitting in front of their beach cabins. The cabins were smaller than the crates from Alexandria, and furnished with homemade cupboards full of glasses and a counter with a stove. The women sat in deckchairs all day, wearing their floral bathing suits and exchanging high, sing-song noises.
Usually I was alone. I didn’t mind being alone. Sorrow and happiness had a deeper hue then. Sometimes I looked up suddenly, at the edge of the cliff, and saw my mother there, gesturing to me. She never shouted. She waited until I could feel her eyes burning at the back of my neck.
She almost never went into the village, and the beach was a place she rarely visited. Sometimes she would go for a swim very early in the morning, or later, once the bathers had gone home. On very rare occasions she would sit in the shade of a windbreak, wearing her big Dior sunglasses and wiggling her toes in the sand. She established no bonds, exhibited no social behavior.
*
We found a housekeeper, Margareth. Her boyfriend, an unemployed Arsenal fan, brought her and fetched her again each day around noon. Margareth polished and dusted the objects in the house, slowly and carefully, and when she got to the end she started all over again. She did the shopping for us in Alburgh and prepared the evening meals.
I grew up in a world of women. I developed an unhealthy interest in bath oils. Sometimes my mother got the urge to cover me in makeup. I never put up a struggle. There was no masculine counterpressure, no male role model. Warren was too far away for that. I understood girls very well indeed, in fact I shared their interests and pursuits. I wrote in a diary with a little golden padlock and burned incense in my room. On my thirteenth birthday my mother gave me olive oil shampoo and a pot of Lancôme facial crème, and I was pleased. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. That’s not normal. It was a wonder that I wasn’t teased about it at school. It was perhaps only because there were girls who were in love with me that I avoided the suspicion of homosexuality. From my very first day at that school I was awash in excited whispers. That never stopped.