There had been one time she’d gone into the room on her own. For a reason Flora could no longer remember, she had climbed out of her bedroom window one night. Nan was in the kitchen; she wasn’t sure where her mother was. It was raining, a thick, warm rain that soaked through her pyjamas as soon as she jumped down onto the flower bed. She ran along the gravel paths in between the lawns, thinking her father might be writing, but although the light was on and the door unlocked, his room was empty. Flora stood on the threshold for a minute, and even though she understood it wasn’t allowed, she stepped inside. The place smelled of her father—musky, rich, otter brown. The bedcovers were thrown back, as if her father had just got up. She would have liked to crawl under them but was distracted by his typewriter and a curl of paper that rolled out from the top. “I ran my hand over the downy curves of her buttocks,” she read. Flora wasn’t sure what “buttocks” meant, and she leaned in closer to read the next line. Her wet hair dripped onto the ink, the letters spreading one into the other.
She hurried from the room, across the garden, running out to the lane, and took the uphill footpath through the small beech wood, the trees stained by streaks of copper where the rain dripped in slippery runnels. She slapped their trunks with the palm of her hand as she passed, as if she were whacking the meaty rumps of giant horses. By the time she emerged from the trees she was warm and panting and the rain had stopped. The path came out on the rising slope of Barrow Down, where the grass was cropped short by rabbits and the land rolled in undulating waves. In a burst of energy, Flora ran up to the highest point. The footpath continued rightwards along the coast to Hadleigh; to her left the shorn grass fell away to the cliff at the end of the beach, while in front of her the ground was level, facing out to sea. She spread her arms wide and ran into the wind and across the grassy slope towards the cliff top. The edge here had been eroded into a narrow spit—two feet wide and twelve feet long—that pointed accusingly out to sea at Old Smoker, the column of chalk to which, hundreds of years ago, the land must have been attached. The forty-foot-high sea stack rose straight up out of the water like the funnel from an oversized and sunken ocean liner, and once upon a time Old Smoker’s Wife, a smaller rock, had hunkered low beside him. Along the middle of the finger of land, a track had been worn through the grass by daredevil teenagers and reckless adults. Flora and Nan, and all the children they knew, had been forbidden to walk out along this peninsula, had been forbidden, Flora suddenly remembered, from walking on the Downs unaccompanied. She took one step onto the track, the width of a shoe, and then another—one foot in front of the other, heel to toe—until she could no longer see the land hulking behind her. Below on either side was the pitchy shifting mass of the sea, which Flora couldn’t look at for fear of tipping, so she stared straight ahead at the clouds scudding across the moon and at the immensity of Old Smoker rising like a beaconless lighthouse from the water. Flora held her arms out and the wind lifted her hair. She took another step, sweat breaking out on her fingertips, and another step until she was at the very end of the spit. If she were to take one more, there would be nothing under her foot, only empty air and a long fall, tumbling through space to the water and the rocks below. A gust came, strong from behind her, willing her to step out, the force of it pushing her forwards. She dropped to her knees, clutching on to the tufts of muddy grass at the edge, and when she was calmer, shuffled backwards up the path, using the grass either side to pull herself to safety.
Flora met the search party as she was going down through the trees: torchlights moving amongst the branches and people calling her name: her father, Martin, and some other neighbours. Gil picked her up and hugged her and the small crowd gathered around. She was never sure if the next part was true memory or nightmarish imagination, because Flora recalled a white wraith flowing out from under the tree shadow, its skin luminous in the moonlight, and her father stepping forwards to strike it so that the creature turned and fled, before her father carried her home.
The autumn after her mother had disappeared, Flora went again to the narrow track leading out to sea, and, lying on her stomach with her head over the edge of the cliff, she let fall one of Annie’s teeth. The small white nugget was in her fingers, and the next moment it was gone, too tiny, too insignificant to be seen. She imagined it spinning downwards and passing through the surface of the water without a disturbance, then carried along by the tide, deeper and deeper and farther out to sea, until it settled amongst the weed and the rocks.
“You can’t draw on my hand,” Richard said, snatching it away and leaving a snaking black line down to his middle finger. Flora looked up, surprised her model had moved. “I will have to return to work soon.”
Flora had forgotten Richard had a job, that there were places of business where people took money and sold things from nine to five thirty on the other side of the ferry crossing. The sea, the land, the Swimming Pavilion often did that to her; made her forget that the rest of the world existed. “Well, if the bookshop is more important to you than having your limbs and appendages in full working order and staying in bed with me . . .” she said, and went to jump off him, but he caught her by the arm and pulled her back to bed.