I read the letter twice and found no reassurance in it anywhere, nothing about replacement housing or compensation. We were caught between erosion on one side and official pragmatism on the other. My mother was sitting straight up in her chair. The memory of her, copulating.
‘What about the insurance?’ I asked.
She smiled grimly and shook her head.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on.’
‘You can’t insure yourself against things like this. I tried everywhere, almost every insurance company there is. Their argument was that we were aware of the risk when we moved in. We. . I. . accepted the risk.’
‘So what now?’
No reply came. I more or less understood what was looming over us: no house and no escape route either; family and friends were nonexistent. We were consigned to each other. She had bought this house with the proceeds from the house in Alexandria; we had been living off the remainder, and off her savings. Now her investment was crumbling quickly. The letter from the district council reduced the value of our property to a debt. I wasn’t sure she really saw the extent of the catastrophe. Her composure was outrageous. In the privacy of her bedroom, I suspected, she turned to her mentors for support; the bearded men with piercing eyes to whom she went for counsel. She was convinced that there was a higher plan behind everything. Events like this were learning moments. The assignment of meaning, favorable or not, provided comfort. The bitterest reality could be borne as long as you saw meaning in it. The primeval defense against the void. Her conviction had nothing to do with God, she said, but if you looked carefully you could make out his shadow on the floor.
I went upstairs and kicked my desk. Framed by my window was a kite, veering wildly. Behind it the glistening sea.
That evening I shoveled Margareth’s fish pasties into my mouth in huge chunks.
‘I’ve been thinking, Ludwig. .’
‘Hmm. .’
‘. . but we’re not leaving. We’re staying here. This is our house, and they can’t force us.’
I frowned in puzzlement.
‘Without gas? Water? Light?’
‘I showed the letter to Warren. He says it would be no trouble putting in a few pipes and cables between his house and ours. And we can buy bottled gas in the village. See it as a sort of camping. Warren will give us all the help we need.’
‘Yeah, because he feels guilty.’
It was around that same time that the first layer of sand and clay was dumped along the base of the cliff below our house. Pending the verdict of the court of appeals, Warren had resumed work. From the day the letters began arriving, we lived in limbo. There were letters from lawyers, from the power company, the waterworks, municipal summons — my mother used a clothes-peg to clamp them to the lamp above the table, thereby giving fate a festive touch.
It often takes a long time, but once the powers-that-be bundle their rays into a searchlight there is no escape. The linkage of information is a steel fence that slowly closes in. An all-encompassing authority, impersonal as a chemical process, had nestled in our life. The date was written on our lintel. The day would come — and distant as it seemed when the first letter came, just as quickly did 21 October arrive. It was a Saturday, however, so nothing happened. But on the very next working day the flame died in the geyser. The heating went off. A few weeks later, a van from Eastern Electricity pulled up and parked along the road. Then the lights were gone too. Water no longer rattled in the pipes. Warren dug a trench to our house. Switches and wall plugs suddenly became useless ornaments, the telephone stopped working. Within a few days Warren had seen to all these things, a strip of churned-up soil bound his house to ours. My bedroom window was now permanently misted over because of the paraffin stove I used to heat the room. Margareth cooked with bottle gas. But no matter how skillfully our lives skirted these obstacles, we were aware that — however you looked at it — these were the final days. That lent them a certain beauty and significance. Time possessed a degree of urgency for which I would later search in vain.
There were three storms that winter, none of them with the force of the legends of 1286, 1342, 1740 or 1953. Warren’s seawall was battered away at a few spots, it was only below our house that a piece of the cliff was actually lost. A severe chasm now extended inland. Grass sods hung over its edge. Things were starting to get personal. Whenever the water struck, when the shivers rang through the house, we sat bolt upright. Then the silence drifted in like the fog.
At the end of that next spring I finished secondary school. I was eighteen, older than most of the pupils in my class because of the year I’d missed after Alexandria. Despite the urging of my tutor and the headmaster, I refused to consider university. As I walked out the door of the latter’s office, he said to me, ‘You have a good mind, Ludwig, it would be a pity not to use it well.’
I played piano at the Whaler and earned a lot of money for a boy my age. I was one of the first to buy a cell phone, and I had a computer in my bedroom. For the rest, I played rugby. Whenever I put in my mouth guard the sand would crunch between my teeth; lying in my bed at night, after the match, the grains of sand grated beneath my eyelids. I enjoyed the armor of aching muscles that girded me up for days after a match, the satisfied frisson of the body sorely tested. Someday, far in the future, you’d pass a rugby field and feel the painful yearning for Vaseline on your eyebrows, sports tape around your vulnerable spots, the pre-match nerves in stomach and fingertips that caused even the best, most experienced players to pop off again to the loo beforehand — and you would ask yourself how in heaven’s name you had ever become locked up inside that old body, and when you saw the bodies out there smacking together and scrambling back to their feet as though they had merely tripped, you would shut your eyes.
My mother and I live together in elegant separation. There is no reason to go into things any deeper. Sometimes I am able to see her the way I used to; that is to say, without the things I know now. The fact that things are ambiguous, not clear-cut, has been peppered into me. My mother has led so many lives already, her life with me was merely one manifestation. That makes you unsure of yourself. You can imagine suddenly being all alone, all the rest falling from you like wilted leaves, the skin of an onion.
It is our last summer on the hill. I have been excused from the assignment of having to belong anywhere; my mother’s past has everything to do with that. Now I am a freak, and therefore free. I could walk around naked, my skin no longer a shield against heat or cold but a permeable membrane — my body glides through the mild outdoor air like a paraglider above fields of corn. Along the wooded banks, trees stand like congealed forest fires, the dust of Flint Road covers my shoes. Even though I’m amid the lush nature of Essex, the cedar-like crowns of the Scots pine in the distance still remind me of Africa, my image of the savanna, a sensation so powerful that I can let it roll on for minutes at a time. The farmer’s binder has been shuffling back and forth across the fields for days, spitting out black bales of straw. The undeveloped plots between the road and the cliff’s edge are choked with head-high thistles, tansy, poppies big as a fist and daisies radiant in their simplicity. Butterflies waver above the polyphonic buzz of a field of flowers. The telephone poles along the road breathe creosote vapors, sparrows and sand martins sitting on the wires like notes on a staff. The borders at Warren and Catherine’s are exploding with voluptuous blue hydrangeas and then, suddenly, seen from the corner of my eye, the sparrows fall from the lines as one and dissolve into the mulberry hedges at the side of the road.