Devices and Desires by P. D. James Page A

planning to sell, in which case he can risk a dinner party without being trapped into intimacy. But why not give him credit for a simple human weakness—the attraction of eating a good dinner which he hasn’t had to cook?”
    And it would balance her table, thought Mair, although that was hardly likely to have been a consideration. She despised the Noah’s Ark convention which decreed that a superfluous man, however unattractive or stupid, was acceptable; a superfluous woman, however witty and well informed, a social embarrassment.
    He said: “Am I expected to talk about his poetry?”
    “I imagine he’s come to Larksoken to get away from people who want to talk about his poetry. But it wouldn’t hurt you to take a look at it. I’ve got the most recent volume. And it is poetry, not prose rearranged on the page.”
    “With modern verse, can one tell the difference?”
    “Oh yes,” she said. “If it can be read as prose, then it is prose. It’s an infallible test.”
    “But not one, I imagine, that the English faculties would support. I’ll be leaving in ten minutes. I won’t forget the ducks.” He smiled as he replaced the receiver. His sister invariably had the power to restore him to good humour.

9
    Before leaving he stood for a moment at the door and let his eyes range round the room as if he were seeing it for the last time. He was ambitious for the new job, had cleverly planned and schemed to get it. And now, when it was almost his, he realized how much he would miss Larksoken, its remoteness, its bleak uncompromising strength. Nothing had been done to prettify the site as at Sizewell, on the Suffolk coast, or to produce the pleasantly laid-out grounds of smooth lawn, flowering trees and shrubs which so agreeably impressed him on his periodic visits to Winfrith in Dorset. A low, curving wall faced with flint had been built on the seaward boundary, behind whose shelter every spring a bright ribbon of daffodils strained and tossed in the March winds. Little else had been done to harmonize or soften the concrete’s grey immensity. But this was what he liked, the wide expanse of turbulent sea, browny-grey, white-laced under a limitless sky, windows which he could open so that, at a touch of his hand, the faint continuous boom like distant thunder would instantaneously pour into his office in a roar of crashing billows. He liked best thestormy winter evenings when, working late, he could see the lights of shipping prinking the horizon as they made their way down the coast to the Yarmouth lanes, and see the flashing light ships and the beam from Happisburgh Lighthouse which for generations had warned mariners of the treacherous offshore sands. Even on the darkest night, by the light which the sea seemed mysteriously to absorb and reflect, he could make out the splendid fifteenth-century West Tower of Happisburgh Church, that embattled symbol of man’s precarious defences against this most dangerous of seas. And it was a symbol of more than that. The tower must have been the last sight of land for hundreds of drowning mariners in peace and war. His mind, always tenacious of facts, could recall the details at will. The crew of HMS
Peggy
, driven ashore on 19 December 1770, the 119 members of HMS
Invincible
wrecked on the sands on 13 March 1801 when on her way to join Nelson’s fleet at Copenhagen, the crew of HMS
Hunter
, the revenue cutter lost in 1804, many of their crews buried under the grassy mounds in Happisburgh Churchyard. Built in an age of faith, the tower had stood as a symbol, too, of that final, unquenchable hope that even the sea would yield up her dead and that their God was God of the waters as He was of the land. But now mariners could see, dwarfing the tower, the huge rectangular bulk of Larksoken Power Station. For those who sought symbols in inanimate objects, its message was both simple and expedient, that man, by his own intelligence and his own efforts, could understand and master his