The teashop at the entrance to the pier was open, the bookmaker’s and souvenir shops closed and, according to a note on the door, remaining that way until Saturday, 21 March.
On the parking lot at the pier the beach cabins were in winter storage. An introspective ghost town. In May, when the storms were past, they were arranged in a long, colorful ribbon along Alburgh beach.
I went down a flight of steps in the concrete seawall to the beach, where the tide was making its advances. Along the narrow strip between cliff and sea I walked to the northern end of Kings Ness. The cliff here was brittle and sandy, not like the chalky walls of Sussex. There was wind erosion as well — on summer days with a brisk east wind, tons of sand and pebbles would sometimes stream down onto the beach. The sand martins that built their nests just below the edge damaged the cliff that bit more.
The seawall had not been worked on for some time; huge chunks had been bitten from it. The layer of cloud above the sea opened up, a sinkhole in the gray dome of the heavens; the sparkles on the waves far offshore made it look as though silver dolphins were breaking the surface there. Suddenly I knew how I had once believed in phantom ships of light that plied the horizon, and the old, shell-encrusted sea god who rose up off the coast. Overpowered by the memory I stood there and saw how the hole in the clouds closed again, how everything was reduced to the gray of a spring that would not come.
This was where our house has stood, ten meters above sea level. I could tell by the broken pipes sticking from the cliff up there, the mains that had provided us with gas, water and light. Rusty pipes: antiaircraft guns, trained on an empty sea.
I headed on. The bed of pebbles creaked beneath my feet. Anyone bothering to walk for hours with head bent, staring at the beach, could find here million-year-old amber from northern European forests.
The Ambrose family’s fence was still dangling from two posts. One gentle push of a foot and the whole thing would come tumbling down. Somewhere up on the cliff was a dog that barked hoarsely and without stopping.
I had reached the end of the seawall, where the hill of Kings Ness ran down and sank a little further into a labyrinthine landscape of creeks and swaying reeds, a place where only thatch cutters and barking Chinese water deer found their way. I climbed the hill, back in the direction of Alburgh. Long ago, someone had planted a post here with a sign on it: UNSTABLE CLIFF. DANGER OF COLLAPSE. Upon the cliff itself I experienced the spaciousness of sky and water, here the world crumbled and disappeared into the waves without a trace. Higher up, Terry Mud’s caravan still stood, a few meters from the edge. You could move right into it, at least if you could tolerate the hot-pink velour curtains, the enormous floral armchairs, the imitation wood paneling and the mordant dieffenbachia in the window. The whole caravan could have been embedded in a Perspex cube, like Damien Hirst’s shark, and saved as a time capsule for future generations: looking through the windows, they would be able to see the 1970s. At a single glance they could take in the style and the mentality of those years, and thank their lucky stars that they were gone for good.
I walked past the Ambrose house. A woman in a turquoise bathrobe was leaning over the fence, calling her dog.
‘Ruffles! Ru-ffles!’
Behind her, in the doorway, stood a stark-naked girl. Her face bore the signs of Down’s syndrome. She stood there pale and shivering, her watery eyes followed me in vacant curiosity. She had a prominent pubic mound. I didn’t recognize the woman in the bathrobe, she couldn’t have been Emma Ambrose. Caught by surprise, she greeted me with a scowl.
I turned up the way to Warren and Catherine’s house, along the same potholed road I had taken the night before. There were flattened rabbits everywhere. The road surface was a worn blanket of steamrolled rabbit fur. In the distance, a rifle cracked. A cock pheasant flew cackling into the bushes.
You could tell the sick rabbits in the field by their listlessness. The disease caused the animals’ eyes to swell, they developed lumps, went blind and died a slow, painful death. A weasel undulated along the side of the road, diving into the brown ferns and brambles for protection when he noticed me.
In dreary fields, crows hopped through the soaked corn stubble. Amid the hills to the west the occasional old, truncated steeple stuck out here and there above stands of oak. The crows and the steeples, as well as the rabbit plague at my feet — the Middle Ages had never ended here.
Catherine was hanging out the washing behind the house, I could see her through the kitchen window. Black garments flapped in the sea breeze. I walked out through the pantry. She took a clothes-peg from between her lips and clamped a sock onto the line. She brushed a few locks of hair from her face.
‘Only a couple of weeks ago I washed and ironed his good shirt for Mrs. Hendricks’ funeral.’
The cold was seeping up through my socks. In Warren, Catherine had lost the love of her life. I knew the story of how they had met, Warren was the one who had told me, it was very romantic. It made your heart writhe just to think about it. We went inside, Catherine said it was time for her shot. She opened the drawer and took out the little case containing her arsenal against roller-coasting blood sugar levels.
‘I don’t understand his system completely,’ she said as she opened the little notebook containing his insulin schedule. ‘What are these red and green squares? Even my illness is in his hands. Even that. Help me, would you?’
She handed me the needle and pulled up her sweater. I saw the old, white skin and shuddered in spite of myself.
‘Where do you want it?’
She pointed to a spot close to her spleen, an island of pinpricks. The needle was pointed straight at the skin, Catherine clucked soothingly. The tip jabbed through the resistance of epidermis and slid into the subcutaneous layer of fat. The shiver passed down to my scrotum, it was an unbearable intimacy. I pressed the plunger all the way down and withdrew the needle.
‘Let’s go now,’ she said.
Warren’s study, the war room in his struggle against the politicians and the bureaucracy. Before we went in, Catherine asked if I’d be willing to play something at the funeral service on Monday.
‘Have they got a piano?’
She nodded.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘At Marthe’s cremation I played Beethoven’s “Funeral March”. Well known, lovely.’
‘Fine. Please, do that.’
Dark and cold the room, the windows were open behind the curtains. Big candles burned at both ends of the bier, the wicks had eaten their way deep into the candle-grease. Catherine leaned over the man in the coffin and stroked his cheek. In the dusky darkness it looked like my own father lying there. It took a moment until the dead man and the one in my memory clicked together to form a single image, that of Warren Feldman. Catherine was whispering to him. All the color had left his beard, he looked wilder than before. Why was he still wearing his glasses? It was a pathetic sight. I wanted a little Viking ship for him, the king on a bier of kerosene-soaked wood, his fingers folded around the hilt of his sword, to launch the ship with the wind from offshore and then set it aflame with a burning arrow — but times were different now.