We go outside, I want to show her the cliff.
‘You’re not a grasshopper at all,’ she says. ‘You’re a storyteller on a square in Marrakesh.’
I feel ashamed. I’ve been bending her ear with my life story, a madman who grabs you by the arm on the street and walks along as he relates his gruesome history. Then, when it’s all over, he asks you to buy him a gravy roll.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I let myself get carried away.’
The desire to tell her about my parents, the things that happened only so recently, confuses me. So much floating around inside me, all that debris in orbit. The reason for my confession, as far as I can tell, lies in the desire to impose order, something that overcomes me sometimes at restaurant tables when I pile up the dirty dishes after the meal, the knives with the knives, forks with the forks. It’s hard to refrain from doing that, even though I’ve noticed that in some circles the piling up of dishes is not viewed as a sign of good upbringing.
‘How far along are we in the story?’ Linny asks.
‘Halfway, more or less.’
‘Your story was a dream, last night. I couldn’t remember my own life anymore.’
‘I don’t know what got into me.’
‘It was hard for me to let it go. You are going to tell me more, aren’t you?’
‘You fell asleep.’
‘I was so tired. I couldn’t keep my eyes open.’
‘You stuck it out amazingly long in that madhouse.’
Her bright laugh. Her voice would be perfect for telemarketing.
‘A madhouse, yes, it is that a bit.’
We walk up onto the esplanade. I point out to her House Avalon, along the walkway. A deep front garden, from the drawing room the inhabitants can see the sea.
‘English eclectic,’ Linny says. ‘I’m awfully fond of that.’
I know the white house from the inside. In front of the low hedge was a bench. Misty season, the inscription read. We look at the house behind its white picket fence. The memory splinters behind my eyes.
Selwyn, the rugby player, lived here. He became my friend. A boy who sailed along this coast as in a painting by Hopper. His father was a physician, his mother played cello with the Norwich Philharmonic Orchestra. There was a Blüthner in the drawing room; the first time I visited them I did my very best on a couple of Chopin waltzes. I liked Selwyn’s mother. She was mildly eccentric. A chocolate fondue fountain after a dinner could move her into a state of disquieting rapture. Selwyn had an older brother as well, who came home sometimes at the weekend. They didn’t look much alike.
Linny and I head towards the pier. She has pretty hair, I notice that as she walks in front of me, down the steps to the beach. It’s very soft, when it’s just been washed she might say it sticks out all over the place. I feel like laying my hand on it.
At Kings Ness she stares at the crumbly earthen barrier, the remains of Warren’s sea wall.
‘I’ve read about it,’ she says, ‘about how the coast is eroding, but I had never imagined it this way. So. . romantic.’
I ask what she means by that.
‘It reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich. Maybe because of what you’ve already told me about it.’
Involuntarily, the image arises of her as an art-loving single girl. Perhaps she even uses the word unattached. Perhaps she goes on group tours to ruined cities in Jordan and cloisters in Georgia, exchanges photos and reminiscences on the Internet for a time afterwards, then she’s alone again and no one thinks about her anymore.
I tell her about Warren Feldman and how he, when the district council decided not to extend the concrete seawall from Alburgh to Kings Ness, took things into his own hands. He wrote to construction companies and road builders, offering them the opportunity to dump their rubble along his cliff for half the price they would pay elsewhere. In that way he obtained both income and the material he could use to protect Kings Ness against the sea. At the time, fourteen houses were still standing there. During the war there had been twice as many.
Warren Feldman had powerful opponents. The most grief was given him by Natural England. According to their particular conservationist doctrine, the sea was to be given free play on the coast around Alburgh; the huge quantity of fossils that appeared from the cliffs after heavy storms was purportedly a topographical novelty. The cliff was put on the list of SSSIs, Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
‘First people, then fossils,’ Warren said, and commenced a struggle that would last the rest of his life.
It started with ninety thousand tons of peat from the South Lowestoft Relief Road. That was the basis for his seawall. It had to be spread out along the entire foot of Kings Ness, over a length of almost a kilometer. Trucks carrying sand, clay and stones dumped their loads on the cliff, a dragline pulled the debris from all those building projects out across the seawall and piled it into a grim barrier. Chunks of stone protruded from it, boulders of reinforced concrete, sometimes an old shoe. I remembered Warren up there, on the cliff, overseeing the work on the wall down below. The wind blew tears in his eyes and crumbs from his beard, which served as the archive of many meals. He leaned on his walking stick, a thin raincoat flapping around his upper body — he never bothered to zip it shut. He had a mysterious preference for wearing layers of two or three T-shirts, with two sweaters over that. He never wore anything but outdoor sandals. In the summertime his unusually big toes stuck out of them.
King Knut, they called him, based on a legend that is usually misconstrued. It was long ago that Catherine had told me the story of Knut, who ruled over England and Scandinavia sometime around the eleventh century. It started with the courtiers flattering their king, telling him how all the world would bow to his will.
‘The sea as well?’ Knut asked.
‘The sea as well,’ the nobles echoed.
Upon which Knut had his throne carried down to the beach and waited for the tide to come in. The water approached. Knut ordered the sea to withdraw. The water rushed in around his ankles, and again he called on the waves to obey him. The courtiers retreated to safety, and only when Knut was up to his knees in the water did he stand up and wade to the beach. Throwing his crown onto the sand, he said to his followers, ‘There is only one King worthy of the name, and that is He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws. Reserve your praise for Him.’
I remember finding that a strange, Christian ending to a story about a Viking king and the sea, but Catherine — serious-minded Catholic that she was — was taken aback by my skepticism.
‘If you were my child, oh, oh, oh. .’
Later I learned that a wading bird, calidris canutus, otherwise known as the red knot, takes his name from this same legend.
A couple is walking towards us down the beach. Hand in hand, both wearing orange body warmers. I once walked with someone hand in hand, on Venice Beach, after I had left Kings Ness. I don’t know how I would react if Linny would suddenly take my hand, as one of my own sort in search of warmth.
I show her the place where the broken pipes which once led to our house were now sticking out of the cliff. Erosion having continued unabated, we might even be standing where the house once stood. She looks at the surf, you can hear gravel rolling in the undertow.
‘So here England disappears foot by foot,’ she says.
We walk on and climb Kings Ness from the north. Dull yellow light is filtered in downy spots across the water. On the horizon we can see a mirage, a flat, glistening surface, as though an ice floe were sliding in this direction.
‘Oh, yuck,’ Linny says when we get to Flint Road.