Submergence Read Free

of the planet at a time when, up above, mankind was itself becoming a swarm and setting off in ever more artfully constructed but smaller and more mindless circles. She might have admitted that the perspective she sought to bring was too complicated and threatening to command a wide audience, but not there, on the railway platform, on the first day of her Christmas holidays.
    A horse and cart entered the gravel car park behind the platform. A young man jumped down and waved. She walked out to him. He took her luggage and helped her up and arranged a blanket over her knees. His breath was milky, his cheeks pocked. She could not remember him from last year.
    ‘We will journey slowly,’ he said. ‘Now. Off we go.’
    She breathed in the air. It was softer, earthier. ‘It’s good to be back.’
    ‘For someone else we would have sent a taxi, but the manager said, no, Madame Flinders will enjoy the cart. See, we even have the shopping in the back.’
    She turned and looked. There were pheasants, a boar, sacks of coaland post. They went out onto the main road. The young man held the reins loosely. She decided she knew him, she just could not remember his name. She was a regular guest at the Hotel Atlantic, arriving after the departmental Christmas party and returning to London by Eurostar on Christmas Eve. It was hardly past lunchtime, but the sky was dark. It began to sleet. A Renault with yellow headlights came at them, passed them, ploughing slush. Its wipers were moving too fast, she thought.
    They turned onto a frozen rutted track between fields. The furrows were filled with snow. After some long quiet way they crossed a metalled road and past a sign bearing the hotel’s name. Down they went, down a drive with sheep fenced into large meadows on either side in the English parkland style, and oaks and a drystone wall shooting into a wood like an arrow. A fog had closed in, obscuring the sea. She gave a hurrah when they came to the hotel. She got down, then hesitated. The first decision of the holiday was important. Everything in London was paid for in time, as well as money. She made do with showers in London. Here, her hands and face already numb with cold, she decided to walk to the beach. She would check in on her return, then go to her room and run a hot bath. No work. No, she said to herself. After the bath she would watch a film and take an early dinner in the dining room.
    ‘Would you take my bags in, Phillipe,’ she said, remembering his name. ‘I am going for a walk.’
    ‘Shall we light the fire in your room?’
    ‘Yes, thank you. And could I have tea’ – she looked at her watch – ‘in about an hour?’
    ‘Of course, madame. We will look for you returning.’
    She tied her scarf, zipped her black wax jacket to the collar and went down over the lawns to the pines. They were a spare stand of trees, prettier and more vulnerable than last year, with climate change, with storms, the salt on resin. She liked the sensation of the frost giving under her boots in the shadows. At the far side were towering dunesin shades of yellow. She scrambled up them and saw the beach stretching out of sight below. It was curved, tan. There was a dark slab of rock in the centre of it which she adored. She ran down and walked the length of it. She thought of it as an altar, or else the lips of the beach. The edges of it cut into her wellies. I forgot that, she said to herself. She had remembered the swirling around the rock, not its sharpness – the way it sliced and defined. She took a half-step into childhood and tried to see the rock pools through childlike eyes. She saw starfish and crabs and refused to name them. Her knowledge of marine life was such that she had to be careful to block out the details: the way the saltwater leeches articulated head over tail, or the colours indicating the numberless microbial lives undertaken in each fold of the rock.
    The sand thereabout was coarse sugar and the footsteps she made down