by Emma Timpany

A morning in late winter. You do the usual morning things, get up at 6:45am, feed the cat, drink tea while reading in bed, then shower and dress. You collect the house rubbish into the main bin and take out the rubbish and recycling. Your husband is recovering from an operation and cannot do this as usual. You tidy the sofas, folding throws and bashing cushions, straighten the beds. Standing in the kitchen you make coffee, eat a slice of toast, take your tablets, put on makeup, brush your hair and teeth.

Your husband is off work for two weeks so that the wound in his stomach can heal. Today, you are going out together for some gentle exercise and a change of scene. While you gather your coats and bags, the bright sky of early morning clouds over and rain begins to fall.

The beach is half an hour’s drive from home. In summer, it costs four pounds to park at Stone Cove, but during the winter months there is no charge. The car park and a café sit on a raised plateau of sand above the reach of the tide. Behind the beach, a steep, wooded valley rises above swampy marshland. A row of flag poles stands at the back edge of the car park. Usually when you come here the flags are flying, pushed by wind blowing down the valley, but today the flags hang limp and damp against the poles.

Your husband, reading the news on his phone, says that the lunar new year of the water tiger begins today. He says that it is sometimes called the year of the black tiger because black is the color of water.

‘Is it?’ you say. ‘Is black the color of water?’

‘I don’t know,’ your husband says. ‘I’m just reading what’s written here.’

***

The last time you were at Stone Cove it was summer, and you swam with your grown-up daughters in the sheltered water. It’s a popular children’s beach because the sea is shallow and safe, though no one of any age is swimming today.

The tide is falling. As you climb out from the warmth of the car into the late winter cold, the soft umber sand stretches out before you. The sea is darker than the sky: indigo at the horizon, cloudy jade in the middle distance, ash gray at the shore where waves curl small white lips. A wide stream cuts through the wet sand.

As you cross the car park, the rain passes and it is sunny again. ‘Life’s a Beach’ is painted on the side of the café in blue, swirling letters.  You both order tomato and basil soup. As you wait, you take sips of hot brown tea sweetened with brown sugar, while your husband wraps his cold hands around a cup of coffee. Far out at sea, rain falls in gray funnels on the water’s surface.

Wet picnic tables stand in a rough semicircle. Your husband unfolds a picnic blanket with waterproof backing so that you can sit down without getting your backsides wet. Two young women and a toddler sit down at the picnic table next to you. The toddler, dressed in leggings, a woolen jumper and green woollen hat with a large pompom, gives you a shy, sweet smile. His mother, a small woman, wears a puffer coat with sodden shoulders. The other woman, her friend, wears a brown leather half-moon bag slung across a long navy woolen coat. The friend’s hair is cut into a black bob with a very short fringe.

A raft of croutons floats like golden pumice on top of the basil-rich soup. You prise open a slab of warm, floury ciabatta and push a pat of butter inside. At the next table, the toddler’s mother is talking. Her voice is the clear, carrying kind. The mother says, ‘He’s built with special technology.’

You look at the toddler, who does not look any different from any other toddler to you.

A crarr-kking noise sounds from the hillside above you. ‘That’s a raven,’ your husband says. ‘I saw it from the car. It’s sitting on a dead branch. We can’t see it from here, but it’s right above us.’

‘Another chip?’ the mother asks the toddler.

 Wagtails fly in parabolas, their feathers white and black and gray.

‘I love birds,’ the mother says. ‘They are so light to hold. You would think that they would be hard and heavy like bullets. They have hollows inside them, so that they can be light enough to fly. I know that they have air-filled pockets in their bones.’

The friend’s reply is very quiet, almost a mutter, as if the friend were embarrassed by the mother’s conversation. Or bored by it. Or both.

You are not bored by it. You are interested in the idea of birds being like bullets; they have that streamlined shape. The toddler toddles between the picnic table and the edge of the sand plateau. When he tries to talk to his mother and her friend, they ignore him completely. This makes you feel heavy and bullet-shaped, as if engineered to do harm.

 The mother says, ‘Soon, we’ll have to choose between peach parfait or orange mascarpone ice cream. A difficult decision.’

The friend’s reply is so quietly spoken that you cannot hear. You wonder why the mother and this woman are friends.

 ‘You know, I almost felt bad for asking for more cream on my cake,’ the mother says, ‘But then N said, one should always ask for more cream on one’s cake, not only on one’s birthday.’

You shouldn’t be eavesdropping so shamelessly, but you have not been out much recently. You have been looking after your husband. You have been worried about him. While he was having his operation you wandered around a nearby supermarket and bought five packets of chocolate biscuits without realizing what you were doing.

***

A silver shower of cold, fine rain brushes over the beach. Your husband finishes his soup, wipes his hands carefully on a napkin, and picks up his binoculars. You put the lid back on your half-finished tub. You and your husband stand up, fold up the blanket, and take the rubbish to the recycling point.

On the beach, lone women exercise dogs. You were almost a woman like them, a lone woman with a dog, but you refused the responsibility. You loved your two daughters, loved spending every moment you could with them. Sometimes, when they were little, you brought them to this beach to play and to swim because the water is so shallow and so safe.

On the left side of the beach, a tunnel is cut into the rock of the cliff. Water roars through its black door before widening and dispersing in a dark stream on the sand. Copper-red dulse wraps the foreshore rocks. An egret lifts from wet stone and flaps white wings, its black legs trailing low. A line of gulls hurries by, and the waves are so tiny they barely lift high enough to break. Above the castle, battleship-gray clouds lie at anchor and the green fields are luminous with sun.

You walk the strand. No sea potatoes today, though you have often found them here at low tide. Your husband says something that sounds like ‘stretch of rainbow.’ A man in a bright yellow sou’wester holds two mid-blue buckets balanced perfectly in each hand. Three dogs – one white, one black, one gry – chase each other in circles while a fourth dog stands uncertainly to the side.

The black stream is too deep to cross where it meets the sea, so you walk up its edge, past a young man digging ferociously with two spades. The mother, her friend, and the toddler walk towards you down the stream’s side. The mother holds the toddler by the hand and smiles at you as you pass, and the toddler smiles, and the friend looks down at the tips of her boots. You remember being a young mother with your daughters. You remember how much you loved your children, and yet how lonely you were in those years.

 You stand in front of the black door in the rock. Even here, at its narrowest point, the stream is too wide to step across.  Should you risk jumping it? You don’t want to get your feet wet, and your husband doesn’t want to pull his stitches open. You wonder what is worse – the opening of new wounds or the reopening of old ones.

You are nearly back at the café. The sand at the very top of the beach never gets wet except at the highest of tides. Here children build their holes, deep and wide and lasting. As you walk back to the car, you and your husband try not to fall into them, for there are many.

***

It is getting cold, but you do not want to go home yet. The light is utterly beautiful – slate gray, violet, pale gold. The clouds over the castle are gone. A cormorant rides and dives offshore. Your husband says, ‘The gulls are in their summer plumage,’ but you hear ‘girls.’ The girls are in their summer plumage. A man and woman dressed in serious walking clothes stop at the café. The man drinks coffee standing while woman sits and licks a pale brown ice cream cone slowly and appreciatively. A moment later, the small, soft rain begins to fall again.

You start the car, and as you drive away from Stone Cove you are thinking about the young mother with the toddler. You can still see the image of them, two women in blue coats on either side of a small, bright child. You think of the mother’s friend, who does not try to hide her boredom. You think of your own past efforts to impress people who remained resolutely unimpressed with you.

You remember the ache of loving your children, and yet how, in the early years of caring for them, you sometimes longed for adult company or an hour’s break. There on the beach you have met again the loneliness you felt as a young mother, and with it, all of your life’s loneliness, black and gray and white. You remember how, at the end of a long day with your young children, despite your love for them, you threw on your coat and boots the moment your husband returned home and walked in the dark and the rain to the beach, so tired and crazed that you saw the wild horses of Lascaux running in the rain puddles under the yellow streetlights and heard the owls by the railway line call your name.

Later, when your children were at school, you sometimes walked the coast path to Stone Cove. At the sea’s edge, you told the small waves about your love for your children, about your desire to spend every moment that you could with them. You told them of your loneliness and frustration. You told them your life as a girl and woman had always been about degrees of loneliness. You told them the things you had learnt with the most painful difficulty, true things which you then, just as painfully, hid from yourself again.

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