To my surprise, I was being watched by a solitary figure on the limestone ledge twenty yards behind me, a tall ravenhaired woman in a sea-blue gown that reached to her feet. She stood motionlessly among the rock-pools, like a PreRaphaelite vision of the dark-eyed Madonna of some primitive fisher community, looking down at me with meditative eyes veiled by the drifting spray. Her dark hair, parted in the centre of her low forehead, fell like a shawl to her shoulders and enclosed her calm but somewhat melancholy face.
I stared at her soundlessly, and then made a tentative gesture with the seashell. The ragged cliffs and the steep sea and sky seemed to enclose us with a sense of absolute remoteness, as if the rocky beach and our chance encounter had been transported to the bleak shores of Tierra del Fuego on the far tip of the world’s end. Against the damp cliffs her blue robe glowed with an almost spectral vibrancy, matched only by the brilliant pearl of the shell in my hands. I assumed that she lived in an isolated house somewhere above the cliffs — the storm had ended only ten minutes earlier, and there appeared to be no other shelter and that a hidden pathway ran down among the fissures in the limestone.
I climbed up to the ledge and walked across to her. I had gone on holiday specifically to escape from other people, but after the storm and my walk along the abandoned coast, I was glad to talk to someone. Although she showed no response to my smile, the woman’s dark eyes watched me without hostility, as if she were waiting for me to approach her.
At our feet the sea hissed, the waves running like serpents between the rocks.
‘The storm certainly came up suddenly,’ I commented. ‘I managed to shelter in the cave.’ I pointed to the cliff top two hundred feet above us. ‘You must have a magnificent view of the sea. Do you live up there?’
Her white skin was like ancient pearl. ‘I live by the sea,’ she said. Her voice had a curiously deep timbre, as if heard under water. She was at least six inches taller than myself, although I am by no means a short man. ‘You have a beautiful shell,’ she remarked.
I weighed it in one hand. ‘Impressive, isn’t it? A fossil snail — far older than this limestone, you know. I’ll probably give it to my wife, though it should go to the Natural History Museum.’
‘Why not leave it on the beach where it belongs?’ she said. ‘The sea is its home.’
‘Not this sea,’ I rejoined. ‘The Cambrian oceans where this snail swam vanished millions of years ago.’ I detached a thread of fucus clinging to one of the spurs and let it fall away on the air. ‘I’m not sure why, but fossils fascinate me — they’re like time capsules; if only one could unwind this spiral it would probably play back to us a picture of all the landscapes it’s ever seen — the great oceans of the Carboniferous, the warm shallow seas of the Trias..
‘Would you like to go back to them?’ There was a note of curiosity in her voice, as if my comments had intrigued her. ‘Would you prefer them to this time?’
‘Hardly. I suppose it’s just the nostalgia of one’s unconscious memory. Perhaps you understand what I mean — the sea is like memory. However lost or forgotten, everything in its exists for ever…’ Her lips moved in what seemed to be the beginnings of a smile. ‘Or does the idea seem strange?’
‘Not at all.’
She watched me pensively. Her robe was woven from some bright thread of blue silver, almost like the hard brilliant scales of pelagic fish.
Her eyes turned to the sea. The tide had begun to come in, and already the pool where I found the shell was covered by the water. The first waves were breaking into the mouth of the cave, and the ledge we stood on would soon be surrounded. I glanced over my shoulder for any signs of the cliff path.
‘It’s getting stormy again,’ I said. ‘The Atlantic is rather bad-tempered and unpredictable — as you’d expect from an ancient sea. Once it was part of a great ocean called—’
‘Poseidon.’
I turned to look at her.
‘You knew?’
‘Of course.’ She regarded me tolerantly. ‘You’re a school-master. So this is what you teach your pupils, to remember the sea and go back to the past?’
I laughed at myself, amused at being caught out by her. ‘I’m sorry. One of the teacher’s occupational hazards is that he can never resist a chance to pass on knowledge.’
‘Memory and the sea?’ She shook her head sagely. ‘You deal in magic, not knowledge. Tell me about your shell.’
The water lifted towards us among the rocks. To my left a giant’s causeway of toppled pillars led to the safety of the upper beach. I debated whether to leave; the climb up the cliff face, even if the path were well cut, would take at least half an hour, especially if I had to assist my companion. Apparently indifferent to the sea, she watched the waves writhing at our feet, like reptiles in a pit. Around us the great cliffs seemed to sink downward into the water.
