If possible, the following day was even hotter. The sky was blinding as steam, pierced by the sun. The tenements looked carved from chalk. In the distance, everything quivered; thin streams of water pretended to lie across the roads. Surely Karen was safe from her fears on a day like this-and yet something was wrong.

The teacher was nervous. Everything seemed to disturb her: muttering at the back of the cla.s.s where she couldn't see who it was, confused echoes of running in the corridor, the sleepy flapping of the paintings on the walls. Was she unnerved by the way Mary kept staring at her, or by the faint dead stench? Was the stench coming from the airline bag, or clinging to the room?

Perhaps she was nervous of something else entirely, for when they returned to cla.s.s that afternoon, a man was sitting at the back of the room.

Karen knew what he was. He was going to watch the teacher to see if she was any good. No wonder the teacher had been nervous, and she was growing worse. Standing stiffly in front of the blackboard and breaking pieces of chalk as she wrote, she addressed them as slowly and clearly as if they were deaf. Her smile dared them not to understand.

Of course she only made them nervous too. When she asked Karen a question, even though Karen knew the answer her mind immediately went blank. Her mouth gaped, her skin felt acrawl with chalk. The teacher was growing irritable; one of her fingers snapped, but it was a stick of chalk; she called the twins by each other's names, as though to get her own back for being called Miss. All at once her eyes gleamed rather desperately. "Mary," she said.

Mary must be her last hope-but Mary had been in an odd mood all day, virtually ignoring Karen and everyone else, pretending to work while she listened for something. Now she stared blankly at the teacher.

"Didn't you hear the question?"

"Yes." There was a further pause. "I don't know."

"Of course you do. It's simple. Don't tell me you of all people don't know." Her voice was threatening to shrill. "Just think, for heaven's sake," she said.

Couldn't she sense Mary's hatred? "I don't know," Mary said resentfully, and refused to say anything more.

The teacher was glaring as though Mary had deliberately betrayed her; she couldn't know how furious Mary was at having been shown up in front of the man.

After cla.s.s Karen hurried away before Mary could detain her. When she saw Mary loitering near the cloakrooms, waiting to sneak back into the cla.s.sroom, she knew she'd been right to do so.

At the gate of the yard she looked back. The man was talking to the teacher, who looked chastened, perhaps even ashamed. As Karen watched, they left the cla.s.sroom. When she reached the tenement balcony she glanced back again and saw Mary standing alone by the teacher's desk, head bowed over an object in her hands. Karen couldn't see much at that distance; even the paintings on the walls looked like blank paper.

That night she couldn't sleep. The heat was so oppressive that it felt solid. Whenever she closed her eyes, part of it came hobbling toward her. At last, despite the muttering and turning of her sisters, she slept intermittently, but felt as though she hadn't.

Morning brought no relief from the heat. The sky was a whitish blur in which the sun was indistinguishable, perhaps because the entire sky was white-hot. People trudged to work or to school, fanning themselves and blowing. On the way to school she met Mary, who looked uneasy but determined-to face what? She made Karen reluctant to go into the cla.s.sroom, not only because it felt like a greenhouse. The walls trapped the heat and reflected it back. They were bare. All the paintings were gone.

Had Mary torn them down last night, enraged that Karen wouldn't help her? Or had the teacher done so after she'd been told off by the man? Karen didn't think it could have been the teacher, for she seemed to have changed overnight for the better: she encouraged instead of demanding, she made a visible effort to get the twins' names right, when she repeated something and the children didn't understand she didn't grow irritable, only popped a capsule into her mouth and started again. Even though Karen realized she had to do what the man had told her, the teacher's behavior looked like an apology to the cla.s.s.

She was especially gentle with Mary. "This afternoon," she said, and though she meant all of them she was looking at Mary, "I want you to paint what you like. Show me what you like." The girl stared resentfully at her, then looked away.

Karen thought Mary was being unreasonable. The teacher was trying to be kind-why couldn't she give her a chance? Besides, Mary's sullen muteness had begun to annoy Karen. As soon as they reached the schoolyard at lunchtime she demanded, "Did you pull down all the paintings?"

"No. Don't be stupid." For a moment her feelings glared through. She wished Karen hadn't asked her that, hadn't reminded her of something she'd done that she regretted now. She started nervously at a glimpse of the four-year-olds dodging behind the school. That was who it must have been, for their faces were messily multicolored.

Heat-haze seemed to coat Karen's gla.s.ses. She felt too limp to join in any of the games. She was glad when lunchtime was over; at least she would have to do something in cla.s.s. Mary was still nervous, for she drew back from the cla.s.sroom door, staring at the hand with which she'd opened it. Someone who'd forgotten to wash their hands after painting must have touched the k.n.o.b.

The teacher had brought them some special paints, in tubes which she took from her bag. Karen painted the sun in a white sky over green fields, and tried to make the trees luminous too, b.a.l.l.s of fire instead of foliage. "That's very good, Karen," the teacher said, sounding surprised. Somewhere in the school Mr. Waddicar was hobbling.

Was someone hobbling alongside him, or were they echoes?

Mary painted someone running. Karen couldn't tell if the figure was meant to be chasing someone or running away; its face was a pink blob, as though Mary didn't want to fill it in. The teacher seemed puzzled too, but impressed. "That's very expressive, Mary." It couldn't be Mr. Waddicar in the corridors, for the footsteps were too numerous. It must be children, hobbling worse than him.

The sky was darkening. Unbroken clouds pressed heat into the room. When the teacher switched on the fluorescent lights, the paints glared, uncomfortably vivid. Karen felt trapped by colors. Without warning, Mary, who had begun to tremble, dug her brush into a well of black paint and blotted out her picture. What would the teacher say to her? Nothing: before she'd returned to the front of the cla.s.s and Mary's desk, the bell rang.

"I'll see you all on Monday," the teacher said, hurrying away. Mary seemed about to run after her-to tell her something, or to walk along with her? Perhaps she was afraid to do either. Through the window Karen could just make out the gang of four-year-olds lying in wait beyond the railings. Distance and haze obscured their messy faces.

When she emerged from the school, they'd gone. The sky was withholding its rain. She watched the teacher hurrying alone beside the tenements, which looked harsh as lime. Karen felt irritable; she was growing as bad as Mary, glancing at the balconies and entries. Why should the glimpses of colors worry her? Her mother was always saying that the estate needed brightening up. It was only that the dark sky made them look ominous, and that Karen couldn't quite catch sight of them directly.

All at once it began to rain, drops large as gobs of spit. She would never reach the tenements without getting drenched. She sheltered in the school doorway, and wished she was standing with someone other than Mary.

The teacher had dodged into the tenements. For a moment Karen felt resentfully nervous: where did she think she was going? Of course, she was going to make her way across the estate under cover. A minute later she reappeared on a first-floor balcony. Only the top half of her body was visible, and she resembled a moving target on a shooting gallery.

Mary was watching with a kind of agonized fascination. Karen thought she knew what Mary was waiting for-she refused to believe it could be anything else-and she wished they'd get it over with. Oblivious, the teacher hurried along the chalky balconies beneath the leaden sky.

She'd crossed three balconies when they appeared from a dark stairway. Karen could just see their small heads, pouncing from the darkness. Yes, they were the gang of four-year-olds, for she could see how blotchily multicolored their faces were. It must be the rain on her gla.s.ses which made their movements look so jerky, and their faces appear to be running, spreading, dripping.

She had only just noticed how silent they were when the teacher screamed and all at once was gone. Then she could only stand in the school doorway, unable to think what to do until Mary began to trudge toward the tenements.

That was almost the end of the summer term, and the holidays gave Karen a chance to forget. The new motherly teacher, Mrs. Castell, was clearly anxious to help her. But she hadn't seen anything very horrible, only the teacher lying at the foot of the tenement stairs; it hadn't been apparent that her neck was broken. The walls had been covered with fresh paint, no doubt by vandals, and the teacher's face had been smeared with colors like messy kisses. They must have come from the tubes of paint in her bag.

Was Mary unable to forget? She was still very nervous, though Mrs. Castell knew to make a fuss of her. She was shivering at a noise in the corridor. "It's all right," Karen said. "It's only Mr. Waddicar."

Mrs. Castell looked dismayed, angry with herself for not having spoken sooner. "I'm sorry, Karen, Mr. Waddicar died during the holidays."

Now Mary was shivering in earnest, and Karen felt in danger of doing so too. The nights were growing darker, the corridor was very long, and far down its length something was hobbling, hobbling.

The Voice Of The Beach (1982).

I.

I met Neal at the station.

Of course I can describe it, I have only to go up the road and look, but there is no need. That isn't what I have to get out of me. It isn't me, it's out there, it can be described. I need all my energy for that, all my concentration, but perhaps it will help if I can remember before that, when everything looked manageable, expressible, familiar enough-when I could bear to look out of the window.

Neal was standing alone on the small platform, and now I see that I dare not go up the road after all, or out of the house. It doesn't matter, my memories are clear, they will help me hold on. Neal must have rebuffed the station-master, who was happy to chat to anyone. He was gazing at the bare tracks, sharpened by June light, as they cut their way through the forest- gazing at them as a suicide might gaze at a razor. He saw me and swept his hair back from his face, over his shoulders. Suffering had pared his face down, stretched the skin tighter and paler over the skull. I can remember exactly how he looked before "I thought I'd missed the station," he said, though surely the station's name was visible enough, despite the flowers that scaled the board. If only he had! "I had to make so many changes. Never mind. Christ, it's good to see you. You look marvellous. I expect you can thank the sea for that." His eyes had brightened, and he sounded so full of life that it was spilling out of him in a tumble of words, but his handshake felt like cold bone.

I hurried him along the road that led home and to the He was beginning to screw up his eyes at the sunlight, and I thought I should get him inside; presumably headaches were among his symptoms. At first the road is gravel, fragments of which always succeed in working their way into your shoes. Where the trees fade out as though stifled by sand, a concrete path turns aside. Sand sifts over the gravel; you can hear the gritty conflict underfoot, and the musing of the sea. Beyond the path stands this crescent of bungalows. Surely all this is still true. But I remember now that the bungalows looked unreal against the burning blue sky and the dunes like embryo hills; they looked like a dream set down in the piercing light of June.

"You must be doing well to afford this." Neal sounded listless, envious only because he felt it was expected. If only he had stayed that way! But once inside the bungalow he seemed pleased by everything-the view, my books on show in the living-room bookcase, my typewriter displaying a token page that bore a token phrase, the Breughel prints that used to remind me of humanity. Abruptly, with a moody eagerness that I hardly remarked at the time, he said "Shall we have a look at the beach?"

There, I've written the word. I can describe the beach, I must describe it, it is all that's in my head. I have my notebook which I took with me that day. Neal led the way along the gravel path. Beyond the concrete turn-off to the bungalows the gravel was engulfed almost at once by sand, despite the thick ranks of low bushes that had been planted to keep back the sand. We squeezed between the bushes, which were determined to close their ranks across the gravel.

Once through, we felt the breeze whose waves pa.s.sed through the marram gra.s.s that spiked the dunes. Neal's hair streamed back, pale as the gra.s.s. The trudged dunes were slowing him down, eager as he was. We slithered down to the beach, and the sound of the unfurling sea leapt closer, as though we'd awakened it from dreaming. The wind fluttered trapped in my ears, leafed through my notebook as I scribbled the image of wakening and thought with an appalling innocence: perhaps I can use that image. Now we were walled off from the rest of the world by the dunes, faceless mounds with unkempt green wigs, mounds almost as white as the sun.

Even then I felt that the beach was somehow separate from its surroundings: introverted, I remember thinking. I put it down to the shifting haze which hovered above the sea, the haze which I could never focus, whose distance I could never quite judge. From the self-contained stage of the beach the bungalows looked absurdly intrusive, anachronisms rejected by the geomorphological time of sand and sea. Even the skeletal car and the other debris, half engulfed by the beach near the coast road, looked less alien. These are my memories, the most stable things left to me, and I must go on. I found today that I cannot go back any further.

Neal was staring, eyes narrowed against the glare, along the waste of beach that stretched in the opposite direction from the coast road and curved out of sight. "Doesn't anyone come down here? There's no pollution, is there?"

"It depends on who you believe." Often the beach seemed to give me a headache, even when there was no glare-and then there was the way the beach looked at night. "Still, I think most folk go up the coast to the resorts. That's the only reason I can think of."

We were walking. Beside us the edge of the glittering sea moved in several directions simultaneously. Moist sand, sleek as satin, displayed sh.e.l.ls which appeared to flash patterns, faster than my mind could grasp. Pinpoint mirrors of sand gleamed, rapid as Morse. My notes say this is how it seemed.

"Don't your neighbours ever come down?"

Neal's voice made me start. I had been engrossed in the designs of sh.e.l.l and sand. Momentarily I was unable to judge the width of the beach: a few paces or miles? I grasped my sense of perspective, but a headache was starting, a dull impalpable grip that encircled my cranium. Now I know what all this meant, but I want to remember how I felt before I knew.

"Very seldom," I said. "Some of them think there's quicksand." One old lady, sitting in her garden to glare at the dunes like Canute versus sand, had told me that warning notices kept sinking. I'd never encountered quicksand, but I always brought my stick to help me trudge.

"So I'll have the beach to myself."

I took that to be a hint. At least he would leave me alone if I wanted to work. "The bungalow people are mostly retired," I said. "Those who aren't in wheelchairs go driving. I imagine they've had enough of sand, even if they aren't past walking on it." Once, further up the beach, I'd encountered nudists censoring themselves with towels or straw hats as they ventured down to the sea, but Neal could find out about them for himself. I wonder now if I ever saw them at all, or simply felt that I should.

Was he listening? His head was c.o.c.ked, but not towards me. He'd slowed, and was staring at the ridges and furrows of the beach, at which the sea was lapping. All at once the ridges reminded me of convolutions of the brain, and I took out my notebook as the grip on my skull tightened. The beach as a subconscious, my notes say: the horizon as the imagination-sunlight set a ship ablaze on the edge of the world, an image that impressed me as vividly yet indefinably symbolic-the debris as memories, half-buried, halfcomprehensible. But then what were the bungalows, perched above the dunes like boxes carved of dazzling bone? I glanced up. A cloud had leaned towards me. No, it had been more as though the cloud were rushing at the beach from the horizon, dauntingly fast. Had it been a cloud? It had seemed more ma.s.sive than a ship. The sky was empty now, and I told myself that it had been an effect of the haze-the magnified shadow of a gull, perhaps.

My start had enlivened Neal, who began to chatter like a television wakened by a kick. "It'll be good for me to be alone here, to get used to being alone. Mary and the children found themselves another home, you see. He earns more money than I'll ever see, if that's what they want. He's the head-of-the-house type, if that's what they want. I couldn't be that now if I tried, not with the way my nerves are now." I can still hear everything he said, and I suppose that I knew what had been wrong with him. Now they are just words.

"That's why I'm talking so much," he said, and picked up a spiral sh.e.l.l, I thought to quiet himself.

"That's much too small. You'll never hear anything in that."

Minutes pa.s.sed before he took it away from his ear and handed it to me. "No?" he said.

I put it to my ear and wasn't sure what I was hearing. No, I didn't throw the sh.e.l.l away, I didn't crush it underfoot; in any case, how could I have done that to the rest of the beach? I was straining to hear, straining to make out how the sound differed from the usual whisper of a sh.e.l.l. Was it that it seemed to have a rhythm I couldn't define, or that it sounded shrunken by distance rather than cramped by the sh.e.l.l? I felt expectant, entranced- precisely the feeling I'd tried so often to communicate in my fiction, I believe. Something stooped towards me from the horizon. I jerked, and dropped the sh.e.l.l.

There was nothing but the dazzle of sunlight that leapt at me from the waves. The haze above the sea had darkened, staining the light, and I told myself that was what I'd seen. But when Neal picked up another sh.e.l.l I felt uneasy. The grip on my skull was very tight now. As I regarded the vistas of empty sea and sky and beach my expectancy grew oppressive, too imminent, no longer enjoyable.

"I think I'll head back now. Maybe you should as well," I said, rummaging for an uncontrived reason, "just in case there is quicksand."

"All right. It's in all of them," he said, displaying an even smaller sh.e.l.l to which he'd just listened. I remember thinking that his observation was so self-evident as to be meaningless.

As I turned towards the bungalows the glitter of the sea clung to my eyes. Afterimages crowded among the debris. They were moving; I strained to make out their shape. What did they resemble? Symbols-hieroglyphs? Limbs writhing rapidly, as if in a ritual dance? They made the debris appear to shift, to crumble. The herd of faceless dunes seemed to edge forward; an image leaned towards me out of the sky. I closed my eyes, to calm their antics, and wondered if I should take the warnings of pollution more seriously.

We walked towards the confusion of footprints that climbed the dunes. Neal glanced about at the sparkling sand. Never before had the beach so impressed me as a complex of patterns, and perhaps that means it was already too late. Spotlighted by the sun, it looked so artificial that I came close to doubting how it felt underfoot.

The bungalows looked unconvincing too. Still, when we'd slumped in our chairs for a while, letting the relative dimness soothe our eyes while our bodies guzzled every hint of coolness, I forgot about the beach. We shared two litres of wine and talked about my work, about his lack of any since graduating.

Later I prepared melon, salads, water ices. Neal watched, obviously embarra.s.sed that he couldn't help. He seemed lost without Mary. One more reason not to marry, I thought, congratulating myself.

As we ate he kept staring out at the beach. A ship was caught in the amber sunset: a dream of escape. I felt the image less deeply than I'd experienced the metaphors of the beach; it was less oppressive. The band around my head had faded.

When it grew dark Neal pressed close to the pane. "What's that?" he demanded.

I switched out the light so that he could see. Beyond the dim humps of the dunes the beach was glowing, a dull pallor like moonlight stifled by fog. Do all beaches glow at night? "That's what makes people say there's pollution," I said.

"Not the light," he said impatiently. "The other things. What's moving?"

I squinted through the pane. For minutes I could see nothing but the m.u.f.fled glow. At last, when my eyes were smarting, I began to see forms thin and stiff as scarecrows jerking into various contorted poses. Gazing for so long was bound to produce something of the kind, and I took them to be afterimages of the tangle, barely visible, of bushes.

"I think I'll go and see."

"I shouldn't go down there at night," I said, having realised that I'd never gone to the beach at night and that I felt a definite, though irrational, aversion to doing so. Eventually he went to bed. Despite all his travelling, he'd needed to drink to make himself sleepy. I heard him open his bedroom window, which overlooked the beach. There is so much still to write, so much to struggle through, and what good can it do me now?

II.

I had taken the bungalow, one of the few entries in my diary says, to give myself the chance to write without being distracted by city life-the cries of the telephone, the tolling of the doorbell, the omnipresent clamour-only to discover, once I'd left it behind, that city life was my theme. But I was a compulsive writer: if I failed to write for more than a few days I became depressed. Writing was the way I overcame the depression of not writing. Now writing seems to be my only way of hanging on to what remains of myself, of delaying the end.

The day after Neal arrived, I typed a few lines of a sample chapter. It wasn't a technique I enjoyed-tearing a chapter out of the context of a novel that didn't yet exist. In any case, I was distracted by the beach, compelled to scribble notes about it, trying to define the images it suggested. I hoped these notes might build into a story. I was picking at the notes in search of their story when Neal said "Maybe I can lose myself for a bit in the countryside."

"Mm," I said curtly, not looking up.

"Didn't you say there was a deserted village?"

By the time I directed him I would have lost the thread of my thoughts. The thread had been frayed and tangled, anyway. As long as I was compelled to think about the beach I might just as well be down there. I can still write as if I don't know the end, it helps me not to think of "I'll come with you," I said.

The weather was nervous. Archipelagos of cloud floated low on the hazy sky, above the sea; great Rorschach blots rose from behind the slate hills, like dissolved stone. As we squeezed through the bushes, a shadow came hunching over the dunes to meet us. When my foot touched the beach a moist shadowy chill seized me, as though the sand disguised a lurking marsh. Then sunlight spilled over the beach, which leapt into clarity.

I strode, though Neal appeared to want to dawdle. I wasn't anxious to linger: after all, I told myself, it might rain. Glinting mosaics of grains of sand changed restlessly around me, never quite achieving a pattern. Patches of sand, flat shapeless elongated ghosts, glided over the beach and faltered, waiting for another breeze. Neal kept peering at them as though to make out their shapes.

Half a mile along the beach the dunes began to sag, to level out. The slate hills were closing in. Were they the source of the insidious chill? Perhaps I was feeling the damp; a penumbra of moisture welled up around each of my footprints. The large wet shapes seemed quite unrelated to my prints, an effect which I found unnerving. When I glanced back, it looked as though something enormous was imitating my walk.

The humidity was almost suffocating. My head felt clamped by tension. Wind blundered booming in my ears, even when I could feel no breeze. Its jerky rhythm was distracting because indefinable. Grey cloud had flooded the sky; together with the hills and the thickening haze above the sea, it caged the beach. At the edge of my eye the convolutions of the beach seemed to writhe, to struggle to form patterns. The insistent sparkling nagged at my mind.

I'd begun to wonder whether I had been blaming imagined pollution for the effects of heat and humidity-I was debating whether to turn back before I grew dizzy or nauseous-when Neal said "Is that it?"

I peered ahead, trying to squint the dazzle of waves from my eyes. A quarter of a mile away the hills ousted the dunes completely. Beneath the spiky slate a few uprights of rock protruded from the beach like standing stones. They glowed sullenly as copper through the haze; they were encrusted with sand. Surely that wasn't the village.

"Yes, that's it," Neal said, and strode forward.

I followed him, because the village must be further on. The veil of haze drew back, the vertical rocks gleamed un.o.bscured, and I halted bewildered. The rocks weren't encrusted at all; they were slate, grey as the table of rock on which they stood above the beach. Though the slate was jagged, some of its gaps were regular: windows, doorways. Here and there walls still formed corners. How could the haze have distorted my view so spectacularly?

Neal was climbing rough steps carved out of the slate table. Without warning, as I stood confused by my misperception, I felt utterly alone. A bowl of dull haze trapped me on the bare sand. Slate, or something more ma.s.sive and vague, loomed over me. The kaleidoscope of sh.e.l.ls was about to shift; the beach was ready to squirm, to reveal its pattern, shake off its artificiality. The ma.s.sive looming would reach down, and My start felt like a convulsive awakening. The table was deserted except for the fragments of buildings. I could hear only the wind, baying as though its mouth was vast and uncontrollable. "Neal," I called. Dismayed by the smallness of my voice, I shouted "Neal."

I heard what sounded like scales of armour chafing together-slate, of course. The grey walls shone lifelessly, cavitied as skulls; gaping windows displayed an absence of faces, of rooms. Then Neal's head poked out of half a wall. "Yes, come on," he said. "It's strange."

As I climbed the steps, sand gritted underfoot like sugar. Low drifts of sand were piled against the walls; patches glinted on the small plateau. Could that sand have made the whole place look encrusted and half-buried? I told myself that it had been an effect of the heat.

Broken walls surrounded me. They glared like storm clouds in lightning. They formed a maze whose centre was desertion. That image stirred another, too deep in my mind to be definable. The place was-not a maze, but a puzzle whose solution would clarify a pattern, a larger mystery. I realised that then; why couldn't I have fled?

I suppose I was held by the enigma of the village. I knew there were quarries in the hills above, but I'd never learned why the village had been abandoned. Perhaps its meagreness had killed it-I saw traces of less than a dozen buildings. It seemed further dwarfed by the beach; the sole visible trace of humanity, it dwindled beneath the gnawing of sand and the elements. I found it enervating, its lifelessness infectious. Should I stay with Neal, or risk leaving him there? Before I could decide, I heard him say amid a rattle of slate "This is interesting."

In what way? He was clambering about an exposed cellar, among shards of slate. Whatever the building had been, it had stood furthest from the sea. "I don't mean the cellar," Neal said. "I mean that."

Reluctantly I peered where he was pointing. In the cellar wall furthest from the beach, a rough alcove had been chipped out of the slate. It was perhaps a yard deep, but barely high enough to accommodate a huddled man. Neal was already crawling in. I heard slate crack beneath him; his feet protruded from the darkness. Of course they weren't about to jerk convulsively- but my nervousness made me back away when his m.u.f.fled voice said "What's this?"

He backed out like a terrier with his prize. It was an old notebook, its pages stuck together in a moist wad. "Someone covered it up with slate," he said, as though that should tempt my interest.

Before I could prevent him he was sitting at the edge of the beach and peeling the pages gingerly apart. Not that I was worried that he might be destroying a fragment of history-I simply wasn't sure that I wanted to read whatever had been hidden in the cellar. Why couldn't I have followed my instincts?

He disengaged the first page carefully, then frowned. "This begins in the middle of something. There must be another book."