To Run Across the Sea Read Free Page A

young had been enticed away to the discos in the towns, but most of the middle-aged hoped to stay on. It was a pleasant place, amazingly reminiscent of a village in unspoiled England, perhaps in the Cotswolds, with an ancient church on the green, merino sheep cropping the grass, and cottages with flower gardens. When the talk of wolves came up, Jaime Martinez, owner of the bar, was philosophical. ‘You see one now and again,’ he said, ‘but they don’t really trouble us. They’re something you can cope with. It’s the wild boars that bother us. They root up everything in the gardens. You could even say the wolves are useful in a way. At least they keep the boars down.’

IN ESSEX
    E SSEX IS THE UGLIEST county. I only went there to be able to work in peace and quiet and to get away from the settlers from London south of the river. It was flat and untidy and full of water with the Colne and the Crouch and the Blackwater and all their tributaries fingering up from the sea and spreading vinous tendrils of water into the flat land. For half the year, the wind blew in from the east, over shingle, mud-flats, saltings and marshes, and even twenty miles inland, where I first set up house, gulls drove the crows out of the fields.
    I found an empty farmhouse called Charmers End in the village of Long Crendon, took a three-year lease on it and settled in. Many of the farms and villages had odd and even poetic names, Crab’s Green, Sweet Dew, Blythe Easter, Fan-tail and Honey Wood, which I suspected of being part of a process of self-deception, for on the whole the more fanciful the name the more dismal the place. There were black-and-white cows in a shining field at the bottom of the garden when I first moved in. They were largely responsible for my choice. Otherwise, this part of Essex reminded me of the southern tip of South America where the trees are deformed, a cold wind combs the grass, and glum Indians, reserved and off-hand like the country people of Essex, are muffled in their clothes against the grey weather.
    The farmer who had lived here before had grown old alone and sold his land. One day, hauling himself to the top of the tallest tree in the garden, he had drunk a quarter of a bottle of Lysol, put the barrel of a German pistol collected in the war into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. This man had liked cows, just as I liked them, but the new owner did not especially, so they disappeared soon after. The old farmer had left the place in a terrible mess. He had thrown everything that was left of his possessions out of the window but had left an old broken rocking-horse with a bunch of flowers tied to it in the kitchen. For some reason the agent who showed me the place had decided to leave this where it was. The house was surrounded by a great moat—giving some indication of the security problems of the past—and all along its banks stood big white leafless trees which, stripped of their bark and dying, would eventually fall in. It was like the Amazon. Some of the trees in the water had lost their branches, and little remained but their trunks, turned grey and slimy like submerged alligators, showing only the tips of their snouts above the surface. Those still standing provided an annual crop of an uncommon oyster fungus, collected by an Italian from Chelmsford. He called with a present of a bottle of Asti Spumante soon after I was installed.
    The Post Office found me a woman to clean up four days a week. She arrived on a horse, charging up the lane and across the moat, black hair streaming in the wind, again contributing to the Latin American aspect of this corner of Essex. With her fine, aquiline features and almond eyes she could easily have been an Indian of the plains under the eastern slope of the Andes, where the natives are tall and slender.
    This was Dorothea, aged 37, handsome if not quite beautiful, with a semi-disabled husband and a pretty daughter of 12.
    Dorothea took control. She persuaded the pump