The Black Tide

I remember thinking — it will always be empty like this now. But there was movement on the far side, under the table. I lit the lamp and in its bright flame I saw five of the cardboard boxes they’d given us to carry the oil-soaked birds when driving them to the cleansing centre. It hit me then. It hit me so hard that I just sat down, a sort of strangled cry coming from inside me, tears falling. I was remembering that scene down in the cove with her holding the wretched bird out to me. If only her tongue could be scolding at me again. Anything rather than this deadly quiet.

And that night, lying alone in the big untidy bed, my eyes wide and staring into the dark, the loneliness of it unbearable. Without Karen what was there to life? She was all I had, all I’d ever had. She was this cottage, Balkaer, the life we’d been leading. It was her idea — the way we lived, everything. Without her it had no meaning. I was back to the nothingness of my existence before we met. Ever since I’d stowed away on that dhow in Dubai, got myself across to Gwadar and up to Peshawar by way of Quetta, ever since then I’d been tramping the world, living out of suitcases, owning nothing, belonging nowhere — no one belonging to me. Only Karen had ever belonged…

The wind was rising. In the end I couldn’t stand it, lying there staring into the dark, listening to the wind and seeing her figure moving along the sloping deck of that tanker, the flickering flame held out in

front of her, and then the flash of the explosion, the roaring holocaust that had followed. Poor darling! Poor wonderful, adorable, emotional darling! If only I’d gone down into the cove, instead of waving and climbing the path and leaving her there. She must have tried to ignite the slick with that garden flame-thrower right after I had left. And when she’d failed, she’d motored across the bay to Sennen to wait with Rose to hear the result of the meeting. I should have known. If I hadn’t been so angry… God! If — if — if… I flung off the bedclothes and got the bottle of Armagnac I kept for emergencies at the back of the kitchen cupboard. It was the last of the bottles I had brought with me when I had finally come ashore to become self-employed instead of a salaried ship’s officer. There wasn’t much of it left, but it was over the remains of that bottle, sitting in the rocking chair with two oiled-up cormorants and three razorbills in boxes under the table beside me, listening to the roar of the wind outside, the crash of the rollers in the cove below, sensing the movement of the stone walls round me in the gusts, that I began to come to terms with what had happened. Times like this we’d have had each other — talking together, working together, going to bed together, making love; one way and another we’d always kept the gales at bay, locking ourselves into our own little world and shutting out tbe wind.

But now there was only myself. And with Karen gone I was intensely conscious of every battering blast of wind, so that the cottage seemed no longer a

protection, the wind entering it and the waves beating at its foundations. And my love out there by the Kettle’s Bottom. Tomorrow or the next day, a week, a fortnight maybe, somewhere along the coast they’d find the charred remains of her floating in the sea, or smashed up on the rocks — and I’d be expected to identify her. Or would that rounded, full-breasted form have been reduced to ashes? If it had been cremated beyond recognition … I could see her still, sitting in the wing chair on the opposite side of the chimney piece. We had bought that chair in a gale, junk from a nearby homestead that had gone for nothing, no dealers there, and she had laboriously recovered it with material from an old Welsh cardden that had belonged to her mother.

I could see her now, sitting there like a ghost with one hand propping her chin, the other holding a book, or sitting staring intently at the fire as I read aloud to her what I had written during the day. She was doing the typing for me, of course — she was a trained typist — but I think it was my reading to her that developed her interest in books. She had never been much of a reader before, but then she started borrowing from the travelling library, always wildlife books or stories about animals. Sometimes she would borrow a book about Wales, but mostly it was wildlife, and because much of what I was writing was about the birds and seals that visited our coast, she became in a sense my sounding box, our relationship deeper, more intimate, so that now, for the moment, I could still see her, sitting there in that empty chair.

That was really the start of it, that was when I saw the pattern of my life, how it all added up — so that what had been without purpose before suddenly became purposeful.