Jim Crace - Being Dead

He’d say, whenever they looked back — not often — or whenever they reminded each other how they’d met, a not entirely happy memory, that he had won her with that single wave, as open a display as any peacock tail, and irresistible. He had only to lift his hand, beyond the glass, and Celice would get up and follow him. The night before, when he was sitting in the common room, he’d sung only for her, not for the men or Festa. He’d heard her calling out, ‘Keep quiet!’ and then the silence of her eavesdropping. He’d sung the first verse loudly then dropped his voice, to make her hold her breath and listen. Singing was his greatest eloquence. It went through walls. How could the other men compete with such a voice? What was the benefit in being tall and handsome if they couldn’t be admired through wooden panels, or at night? ‘Attend my tide,’ he’d sung to her. ‘I’ll not be far from your bedside.’ He knew that she would join him on the shore. It was not arrogance. It was simply the self-regarding optimism of the young. This was life’s plan. The tide would make white chevrons round their boots.

So Joseph walked out from his hiding-place on to the open ground in front of the veranda. He stopped and stared through the windows at the women. He coughed and shuffled until he saw their heads align with his, and then he waved, a bit self-consciously, before climbing the tumbled garden wall and dropping out of sight.

Celice did not wave back at him. She had determined to be unsociable for the six remaining days. The men had kept their noise up through the night and even when, in the early hours, they’d finally retreated to their bunks, the timber study house had creaked so badly in the exchanging temperatures of night and day that Celice imagined, when she dozed, that she’d been abandoned in a sinking ship.

She should have waved, of course. She could hardly blame Joseph for her disrupted night. He was not drunk or germinating a venereal infection like his room-mates. Nor had he proved to be the icy castaway that she’d imagined. In fact, he was amusing. She’d heard the laughter from the common room. And he could sing. What were the words?

Mark well the harbour with your light.

For I’ll be steered across the bar

to you, by candlelight.

If only men were sentimental like their songs.

She really should have waved.

She really ought to get to work. That, at least, would be her good excuse for jumping up, stubbing out her half-smoked cigarette and rushing after him. She had her studies to pursue.

Celice got dressed without washing, not even splashing her lips and eyes at the sink. She collected her own wet-pad and her own surf boots as well as a field kit and some specibags, and followed Joseph, first round the building and then over the garden wall that he had inexplicably favoured above the yard gate for leaving the grounds of the study house. At least she’d not be there when the others stumbled from their bunks. She wouldn’t have to tolerate their belches or minister to their headaches. She’d not have to witness Festa and her makeup bag.

Joseph’s tracks through the snapped masts of the flute bushes and, later, in the mud and sand were easy to follow. It was exciting, dogging him, looking for the evidence of his big boots, and discovering for herself the layers and faces of the coast. He’d descended to a roughly surfaced farm lane, strewn with manac husks. It edged the backlands, skirting a line of freshwater ponds, to serve the few surviving wind-stripped summer cottages, mostly used by anglers. He’d then cut off towards the coast along a signposted path through forest pines and salt marshes before climbing the ridge of the inner, non-salty dunes. A first sight of the sea and the jutting foreland of Baritone Bay.

Celice could see Joseph now, going eastwards on the coastal track through flats and thickets towards the bay. She waved at his back. A late reply. He left the track and walked across the scrubshore on to the beach, still colourless and grainy in the residues of night. The dawn was low and milky, no hint, so far, of blue or green. What little light there was had spread to waterlog the sky.

Celice rested for a while on the dune ridge, sitting on an empty phosphate sack, regretting that she had not brought some fruit, a flask of coffee and a cigarette. Climbing the sand had been hard work and she was breathless. Clearly — and surprisingly — she was not as fit as Joseph, who was already knee deep, wading at the water’s edge. She wished she had binoculars.

When she finally reached the sand gully, which led down to Joseph on the beach, she did not turn to join him, as she had imagined, as she would have liked. She carried on along the track towards Baritone Bay. Was she embarrassed? Afraid of more rebuffs? Or cautious? She told herself it wasn’t rational to follow his every step like some schoolgirl. She’d frighten him. It would be subtler, sexier, simply to coincide with him by accident, preferably later in the morning when she had recovered from the lack of sleep and from the hurried walk. Besides, the period of resting on the ridge, alone, the views, the detail of the land, the sour ocean smell, the melancholy drama of being young and unattached and not quite warm enough, had reminded her how joyful it could be to have the landscape to herself. She put a Latin and a common name to all the plants and birds she saw. A family game. By naming them, she doubled their existence and her own. This was the pleasure of zoology, to be the lonely heroine of open skies and specibags. Science, romance, oxygen. A potent brew.

Of course, she was embarrassed by herself. What had she been thinking, to leap from her mattress at dawn and rush off in pursuit of this curmudgeon? Just because the other men preferred the village girls to her. Because she hadn’t waved at him. So what? Because he hadn’t snooped amongst her clothes. Because his voice was fine and, as she had discovered, climaxing. Because her heart and body told her to. Because there was an escalating and persuasive case for running to him through the surf like some starlet from the fifties. She was bewitched. She could imagine being old with him. His was her pillow face. But no, to join him on the beach at once would be unwise. Unsubtle, anyway. What would she say to him? What could a man who hadn’t even spoken to her yet reply?

By the time she’d overcome her agitation, by walking as quickly as she could away from Joseph, Celice had reached the eastern hem of Baritone Bay, which projected from the flatter coastline in a half-circle. A balcony of sand. She knew, from photographs and textbooks, about its celebrated cuspate forelands and its capes, its dunefield of crested peaks, which looked, from the coastal path at least, and in that demi-light, like the work of an obsessive architect who didn’t know when he should call a halt. Beyond the dunes, the surf was hitting rocks, making bursts of spray. This might be a good place for research. If there were rocks and currents, there might be seaweeds.

There were the usual thorns, a few tinder trees, a single juniper and some wind-wedged thickets of vomitoria , flagging their distorted branches on the land rim of the dunes. But once Celice had crossed into the dunefield proper, the sand was unenriched by any loam or soil. Most of the vegetation that she could see was low-growing. It hugged and stabilized the shifting dunes, stunted, stretched and cowering. This was a landscape built and moved by a wind that chased the sand up facing scarps and let it fall on leeward slopes.

Celice had started work already. She’d got her notebook out and was listing species. On the more protected landward side of the dunes, she noted broom sedge, spartina grass, redstem, firesel and cordony. But as she walked further out on to the bay the dunes began to concentrate — though not exclusively — on patchy beds of lissom grass, that misplaced lawn, suburban green most of the year, as spongy and as welcoming as moss. Its Latin name? Festuca mollis. In places she could see, exposed by fallen sand, its tangle of roots and rhizomes, half a metre deep and flourishing on salt and wind and on the gritty, spice-rack nutrients of sand.