Mason ran along the pavement, losing sight of her as the road curved and the houses intervened. The water slackened and he caught a last glimpse of the woman’s icy-white profile through the spray. Turning, the tide began to ebb and fade, and the sea shrank away between the houses, draining the night of its light and motion.
As the last bubbles dissolved on the damp pavement, Mason searched the headland, but the luminous figure had gone. His damp clothes dried themselves as he walked back through the empty streets. A last tang of brine was carried away off the hedges on the midnight air.
The next morning he told Miriam: ‘It was a dream, after all. I think the sea has gone now. Anyway, I saw nothing last night.’
‘Thank heavens, Richard. Are you sure?’
‘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.
High above, he could hear the spray singing as it cut through the coigns of the cliff’s edge, the deep base of the breakers overlaid by the treble of the keening air. Carried by the music, Mason climbed the flank of the headland, a thousand reflections of the moon in the breaking sea. As he reached the crest, the black robe hid the woman’s face, but he could see her tall erect carriage and slender hips. Suddenly, without any apparent motion of her limbs, she moved away along the parapet.
‘Wait!’
His shout was lost on the air. Mason ran forwards, and the figure turned and stared back at him. Her white hair swirled around her face like a spume of silver steam and then parted to reveal a face with empty eyes and notched mouth. A hand like a bundle of white sticks clawed towards him, and the figure rose through the whirling darkness like a gigantic bird.
Unaware whether the scream came from his own mouth or from this spectre, Mason stumbled back. Before he could catch himself he tripped over the wooden railing, and in a cackle of chains and pulleys fell backwards into the shaft, the sounds of the sea booming in its hurtling darkness.
After listening to the policeman’s description, Professor Goodhart shook his head.
‘I’m afraid not, sergeant. We’ve been working on the bed all week. No one’s fallen down the shaft.’ One of the flimsy wooden rails was swinging loosely in the crisp air. ‘But thank you for warning me. I suppose we must build a heavier railing, if this fellow is wandering around in his sleep.’
‘I don’t think he’ll bother to come up here,’ the sergeant said. ‘It’s quite a climb.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Down at the library where he works they said you’d found a couple of skeletons in the shaft yesterday. I know it’s only two days since he disappeared, but one of them couldn’t possibly be his?’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘If there was some natural acid, say..
Professor Goodhart drove his heel into the chalky turf. ‘Pure calcium carbonate, about a mile thick, laid down during the Triassic Period 200 million years ago when there was a large inland sea here. The skeletons we found yesterday, a man’s and a woman’s, belong to two Cro-Magnon fisher people who lived on the shore just before it dried up. I wish I could oblige you — it’s quite a problem to understand how these Cro-Magnon relics found their way into the bone-bed. This shaft wasn’t sunk until about thirty years ago. Still, that’s my problem, not yours.’