Stalks swarmed on the wide deck of a wheat field, then marched to the brink, where fluting away from their roots were buttresses and cornices of quick-setting mud. Away in their dense ranks the parentheses inscribed by last winter’s tractors referenced the remaining rags of mist, and so seemed like earthy vapour trails scored in a green-gold sky.
Ten yards of beach hauled themselves clear from the long fetch of the waves — I longed to descend, yet feared being trapped between cliff and sea. But then a dead porpoise swam into view, and as there was a way to scrabble down nearby I took it, then knelt on the shingle to contemplate its gouged flanks and parched spiracle. It was too silly to impute all evils to the turbines — no sea creature could have leapt into their blades — but the wounds seemed to have been made by a boatman’s gaff and there were few fishermen abroad on the water — although plenty of contractors.
I scrabbled back up and the cliff went on. The dead porpoise had shaken me and to steady myself I consulted my notebook, which suggested I try this mental exercise: On my holiday I took with me a neurofibrillary tangle that was awkward to manoeuvre — like a large bunch of twisted wire — and when I reached a gate or a stile I would have to wrangle it over, often tearing my clothing as the loose ends caught in the loops of my wicking T-shirt. Then there were the UPVC windows, three of them framed in white plastic, 140cm × 260cm, far too unwieldy for a walking tour. Not forgetting the parish records of Hornsea Burton, Hornsea Beck and Southorpe — the soggy ledgers from which leaves kept dropping, each veined with the calligraphy of birth, death and marriage; they were God-fearing parishes, these, yet all were sucked upon by the sea’s salty mouth, rod after rod, until they were dissolute. Finally, there was the rubber figurine, which, if meant as a child’s toy, was scarcely fit for purpose, being — despite its three-inch stature — a bulky, imposing thing, garbed in a skin-tight Churchillian siren suit, and, most disturbing of all, with a pig’s head, not a man’s.
The North Cliff Boat Club stood fifty feet above the waves, its yard a jumble of fibreglass hulls trapped behind corrugated iron and barbed wire. To escape into the sea the craft would have to be manhandled over the fence, then dragged down a steep concrete slipway — and what pleasure could there be in that?
The path drew me capriciously along a choked alley between two caravan parks, bindweed caught then snapped between my ankles, my clothes snagged at brambles and snatched up burrs, my bare arms lunged at nettles — then I found myself on the long dusty road into Hornsea, sweating in the noonday sun, as some obese people gathered round a cake stall beside the fire station waddled towards me and then past.
A street of redbrick two-up, two-downs, the deeply conservative impasto of road markings in yellow and white, the Floral Hall with ‘1911’ worked into its pediment — I had hoped, devoutly, for the respite of the town, the smell of car exhaust in the tarshadow of Nonconformist chapels, string shopping bags dangling along the high street. Instead, Hornsea Mere appeared between Belle-Époque yews, and, while I saw that model boats were abroad on its sweet waters, I knew that below them lay the Cainozoic mush of drowned woodlands and impacted reed beds, all the ebb and flow of millennia.
Along the high street there were no string shopping bags, only people yanking money from the cash points and running the next relay leg to the shops. I paused by the window of a secondhand one: 35mm cameras, some Spode. Inside tweed jackets clubbed together on hangars. As soon as the door tinged shut I hid behind a freestanding bookcase stuffed with paperbacks — but the tall, potbellied man who supervised the place hadn’t noticed me; he was involved with a peer in a corduroy cap. The pair were unwrapping a series of objects swathed in green recycling bags. The shopkeeper’s sleeves were rolled up almost to his armpits and his arms disturbed me.
I took a book from the case at random; it was Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie. The cover depicted a seagull nesting at the edge of a cliff; between its legs were a speckled egg and a golf ball. Down below, a man in a two-piece suit was plunging, tie flapping, and with more gulls bothering his blank face. The illustrator, working in pen and wash, had placed a nasty black outcrop in the waters, waters he had also embellished with the black swirls of an impact that was yet to occur.
The sixth impression of a Fontana paperback published in 1972, I had read it in this very edition, concurrently with my father, when we were rained in during a Cornish walking tour. Can there ever have been anywhere more subdued than that parlour, with its carriage clock’s gold-balled gimbals slowrevolving on the mantelpiece, and the superfluity of Windsor and wing chairs? We had lingered over breakfast as long as we could, my father, as was his way, elaborately buttering a single, mouthful-sized section of toast, then anointing it with marmalade, before finally and reverently consuming it. The rain lulled outside gathering its strength, then gushed. My father went out to negotiate with the lady of the house — we were permitted to stay but confined to the parlour, where we sat all that long day, either side of an electric fire, its bars furry with summer dust, and read alternate chapters of the Christie, the contest being — with my father there always had to be competition — to see who could guess the murderer first.
Night fell with the rain. A flyer in the bus shelter promised a choral performance at the village hall. We sallied out along oilskin roads from Trebetherick to Rock. I was so bored by then that even the red-faced farmer’s wives belting out Handel pleased me, while as for my dad—
‘These might interest you.’
‘I’m sorry’.
‘These may interest you — these here.’
The Elastoplast he had wrapped around the bridge of his spectacles fitted precisely in the groove of his frown. His eyes — of an awesome mildness — held me as he leant forward over the counter. At the base of the triangle formed by his forearms, between the heels of his liver-spotted hands, were five wood carvings of etiolated human figures. They were perhaps a foot to eighteen inches long and lay in a pile like outsized spillikins. There was also a larger piece of wood: one end curved into a stern, while the prow had been whittled into a serpent’s streamlined head. There were also three discs that, if shields, were to scale with the figures. To one side lay a little heap of what looked like spare limbs — or possibly clubs.
The man wearing the corduroy cap had gone. Outside the lunchtime shoppers had evaporated, while in front of the newsagent opposite a handwritten shout for the Hornsea Echo lamented: THREE SISTERS DISAPPEAR IN BEWHOLME. ‘Pick one up,’ the shopkeeper ordered me. ‘D’you recognize it?’
Fragments of quartzite had been rammed into the figure’s roughly carved pinhead, a head reduced by bronze blade to its essential planes: a sharp chin, a triangular nose, the oval slot of a mouth. It lay on its back in my palm. The wood was warm to the touch, fine-fissured pine. I hefted the figurine — it was perfectly balanced, more like a tool than anything decorative. I guessed it must be very old, although the neoteny of the head, the armless shoulder sockets, the notched crotch and legs that tapered to a point also called to mind wavering aliens silhouetted in the molten light spilling from the cracked shell of a flying saucer.
I gingerly set the figure down on the counter and said, ‘I think I’d remember that.’