‘I’m certain.’ Mason smiled encouragingly. ‘Thanks for keeping watch over me.’
‘I’ll sit up tonight as well.’ She held up her hand. ‘I insist. I feel all right after last night, and I want to drive this thing away, once and for all.’ She frowned over the coffee cups. ‘It’s strange, but once or twice I think I heard the sea too. It sounded very old and blind, like something waking again after millions of years.’
On his way to the library, Mason made a detour towards the chalk outcropping, and parked the car where he had seen the moonlit figure of the white-haired woman watching the sea. The sunlight fell on the pale turf, illuminating the mouth of the mine-shaft, around which the same desultory activity was taking place.
For the next fifteen minutes Mason drove in and out of the tree-lined avenues, peering over the hedges at the kitchen windows. Almost certainly she would live in one of the nearby houses, still wearing her black robe beneath a housecoat.
Later, at the library, he recognized a car he had seen on the headland. The driver, an elderly tweed-suited man, was examining the display cases of local geological finds.
‘Who was that?’ he asked Fellowes, the keeper of antiquities, as the car drove off. ‘I’ve seen him on the cliffs.’
‘Professor Goodhart, one of the party of paleontologists. Apparently they’ve uncovered an interesting bone-bed.’ Fellowes gestured at the collection of femurs and jaw-bone fragments. ‘With luck we may get a few pieces from them.’
Mason stared at the bones, aware of a sudden closing of the parallax within his mind.
Each night, as the sea emerged from the dark streets and the waves rolled farther towards the Masons’ home, he would wake beside his sleeping wife and go, out into the surging air, wading through the deep water towards the headland. There he would see the white-haired woman on the cliff’s edge, her face raised above the roaring spray. Always he failed to reach her before the tide turned, and would kneel exhausted on the wet pavements as the drowned streets rose around him.
Once a police patrol car found him in its headlights, slumped against a gate-post in an open drive. On another night he forgot to close the front door when he returned. All through breakfast Miriam watched him with her old wariness, noticing the shadows which encircled his eyes like manacles.
‘Richard, I think you should stop going to the library. You look worn out. It isn’t that sea dream again?’
Mason shook his head, forcing a tired smile. ‘No, that’s finished with. Perhaps I’ve been over-working.’
Miriam held his hands. ‘Did you fall over yesterday?’ She examined Mason’s palms. ‘Darling, they’re still raw! You must have grazed them only a few hours ago. Can’t you remember?’
Abstracted, Mason invented some tale to satisfy her, then carried his coffee into the study and stared at the morning haze which lay across the rooftops, a soft lake of opacity that followed the same contours as the midnight sea. The mist dissolved in the sunlight, and for a moment the diminishing reality of the normal world reasserted itself, filling him with a poignant nostalgia.
Without thinking, he reached out to the fossil conch on the bookshelf, but involuntarily his hand withdrew before touching it.
Miriam stood beside him. ‘Hateful thing,’ she commented. ‘Tell me, Richard, what do you think caused your dream?’
Mason shrugged. ‘Perhaps it was a sort of memory…’ He wondered whether to tell Miriam of the waves which he still heard in his sleep, and of the white-haired woman on the cliff’s edge who seemed to beckon to him. But like all women Miriam believed that there was room for only one enigma in her husband’s life. By an inversion of logic he felt that his dependence on his wife’s private income, and the loss of self-respect, gave him the right to withhold something of himself from her.
‘Richard, what’s the matter?’
In his mind the spray opened like a diaphanous fan and the enchantress of the waves turned towards him.
Waist-high, the sea pounded across the lawn in a whirlpool. Mason pulled off his jacket and flung it into the water, and then waded out into the street. Higher than ever before, the waves had at last reached his house, breaking over the doorstep, but Mason had forgotten his wife. His attention was fixed upon the headland, which was lashed by a continuous storm of spray, almost obscuring the figure standing on its crest.
As Mason pressed on, sometimes sinking to his shoulders, shoals of luminous algae swarmed in the water around him. His eyes smarted in the saline air. He reached the lower slopes of the headland almost exhausted, and fell to his knees.
